A New, New Begining

Have you ever dreamt of knowing what the writers of your favourite blog sound like? I can't help with that, but I can plug the brand new Walruscast available at your local Internet, just ask for spacewalrus.net.
Join Myke, Balai and Andy on a marvelous adventure through time and space. Who is this mysterious Andy? Figure it out.

Basically we have a new website, which features a podcast. I might edit a link to our iTunes store page into here when we get approved. Probably not though.

I leave you, this one final time (for reals this time), with a more links all to the same site, and one final song quote. Goodnight kiddies.

You were born into a strange world

A Post to End All Posts

We're a year old now. Can you believe that? I can't. In contrary to usual human policies, I'm going to be honest with you all for a bit. Here at Space Walrus I have many jobs, this I don't mind, because it means every couple of weeks I get to give myself a ridiculous new title - my current, and favorite, being 'Creative Director of Creativity and the Creation Thereof' - one of these jobs is to act as an outspoken prophet, bringing words of a divine nature to the populace at large. This is both my favorite and least favorite job, because it means that occasionally I have to make admissions like the following:
We have been here for just over a year now, and have basically nothing to show for it, and probably never will. All of us have long since moved on to new projects and ditched this one. All we have is some back end work and some (pages and pages and pages...) writing. If you were to compile and run Zombietopia it Will boot to a plain cornflower blue screen and will accept two inputs, the Esc key of the back button on a 360 controller. Both inputs close the window.

Consider this a confirmation that a Space Walrus Game will never happen. Very sorry for wasting your time. Any post following this will likely be a plug for one of the aforementioned other projects. Oh, and, happy holidays.

Thank god it's fatal

Of Deception and Addiction

Once again I have been deceived by forces unseen, but very real, the promised shipping of posts hasn't arrived. I spoke to the mail couriers this morning on the phone and they insist that no packages of a wordly nature have been handed to them. Despite this I will do my best to forge ahead.

The problem is that I know exactly why this situation has arisen. It is well documented that me trying to quit World of Warcraft is like throwing cold sausages at a ceiling. I may try and try, but it never sticks.
This time around, rather than venture into Azeroth alone I finally managed to coerce my compatriots into taking the plunge along with me. So now the entire Space Walrus team are hooked on the thing. I don't mind this, I for once actually have a number of people that I can group with on a regular basis, but it does mean that very few people are doing... well, anything. I'm not even sure that anyone other than me has logged into our wiki in about a month (this is, admittedly, not a departure from the norm, but it sounds bad to people who don't know that).

Thinking of you closing the bar down

Only What You Have Come to Expect

It's been quite a while, hasn't it? This feels odd, but as I construct a needlessly long sentence like this, and extend it further with a comma like that, well, I just have to admit that it's all coming back to me now.
I'm a criminal, I know.

According to powers that be, it is my sacred duty, and mine alone, to resurrect this blog after each of it's many hiatus hiatuses hiatii extended periods of outage. So here we are. I'm assured* that after this ritual has been performed the flood gates will open, Balai will release a barrage of posts that have been chambered for quite some time, and this blog will, once again**, become a vibrant and content rich place.

*Read: don't expect this to come to fruition
**I am willing to accept that this may be pushing it slightly

In a couple days I'll post something with meaning, I have some of the good old 'games as art' topics swirling around in my head. It might be nice to get those out in the open. As for now, this is your lot.

I want to push this beyond a peaceful protest

So little time

Well, I finally found time to post. Not that I blame anyone or thing (other than myself) but, on with what I've been up to.

I suppose I should start with something related to Space walrus games, so I will. Iced has the most recent version of the code currently but, this hasn't hindered me from tinkering with C# and XNA.

As far as I can tell most of the games that come out of XNA generally have a fairly short development cycle. I say this because it would seem that a lot of games that have come out of XNA seem to be primarily sprite based and while this isn't bad it makes for mostly 2D or simple graphics games. I have no particular problem with this but, I hope our game can use quite a lot more than the average stuff (whatever that may be).

Moving on.

I've also been playing many games as is my way. The short list includes the following:

X3:Terran conflict, Sword of the stars, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. shadow of Chernobyl and Clear sky, Bioshock, Shadowrun and Mass Effect.

There are of course more than that but, I cant be bothered to go through all of the games I play.

'nyways ( What a weird way to start a sentence) I have quite little time and yet still have time to be bored. I was going to rant about something but, I've forgotten what now and couldn't care less about whatever it was now anyway.

I need a cup of coffee.

That is all for the now.

The Good Book

I've been reading Well Played 1.0: Video games, Value and Meaning. I'm about half way through the book and would recommend it to people interested in game design, and possibly games journalism (although them as much). It breaks down a huge range of games across multiple platforms, genres and levels of obscurity, including Super Mario, Portal and something called "Parrapa the Rapper". Anyway, it's all interesting stuff.
The good news is that this book comes in two delicious flavours: tangy lime and paperback, and zesty orange free PDF.

As you may have guessed I'm very tired, so this is all you get as far as posts this week. I'm very sorry.

And, by the way, if one day you happen to wake up

Blasting the Past

Lately, I've been playing some games, I'm running out of time to make a post this week, so lets talk about them, feel free to feign interest, it's all the same to me.

First off, I've been playing some of Freelancer's multiplayer, something I've mentioned in passing before. For those interested my server of choice is the void (look out for IcedInferno, as usual), not for any reason other than it was at the top of one of the server lists I looked at. The Void has a pretty cool sounding mod tied to it, although I haven't seen much of the new content. The only two things I've seen so far I encountered within minutes of play. Immediately after launching from the starting planet I was greeted by a giant space billboard welcoming me to the void, the second thing was a gargantuan warship, roughly the legnth of the average planets' radius, doing battle with a number of rogue ships. This ship, was player controlled, and I was sure as hell glad that it was on my side. I also found out that I could dock with it, essentially using another player as a resupply base, that is inherently cool.

The other game, which is simultaneously very old and a little old, is The Ur-Quan Masters, a port of Star Control 2 from Dos to modern operating systems. Star Control 2 is a game that does nothing to alleviate my belief that as time has passed the quality of story telling in games has gone down, and that only recently people have restarted making decent attempts at even narratively justifying the events in their games. Star Control 2 is really deep, the graphical quality may be exactly what you'd expect from something originally intended for Dos, but the hours and hours of recorded dialogue and heart and soul poured into the universe more than make up for that. You know what else? It is completely free, so you have no excuse not to try it.
The only caveat is that the game doesn't do a very good job (read: any) of filling you in on the controls. Oh, and also, it is as hard as balls.

That is all.

I just need a little therapy

What's this? Two posts in a row?

Golly gee whiz Mister, however did this happen?

The answer is: bacon and eggs. I sit here eating a lovely fry up at twenty to six, and I am not complaining.
Right, well away from the tangent that I inevitably (and confusingly) start on, I implore you all to send me your copies of Prototype.
It's not that I really want this game, it's just that LOVEFiLM has sent me Just Cause instead, which is not a bad thing per se but I was planning on writing a quick review for you all on how the game is. Because that's what my self proclaimed job is now, reviewer. Instead of some interactive mutant madness, I will instead leave you with a quick glance over Transformers.

It was shit.

I liked the first one, it was OK, not the best film in the world, but it did it's job at entertaining. Now, I'm not going to give you a complete run down of the events of the film, at risk of repeating already said material. Basically if you like explosions shoved down your throat every second, slow motion boob running and cheap testicle jokes, this film is for you. If you like a compelling storyline, twist and turns around every corner and the kind of humor only someone with a monocle can understand, stay away. Michael Bay seems to not understand that 'less is more' when it comes to things like explosions and closeup shots. I'm being serious, I do not think that the film has more than 10 minutes in it where there isn't a single explosion. The man went mad. I didn't stay behind after for the credits, but I'm pretty sure that the number of compositors working on the explosions alone must have doubled the crew list and then some.

Needless to say, this is more so something you should watch drunk and when it comes out on DVD in several years time when it's in the bargain bin.
Hey, I'm not saying don't watch it!

Also I would like to add that I would play D&D with inferno if he pays for the equipment and has truthfully come up with that world of sentient trees he mentioned.

Primetime < Clobberin' Time

What the hell are you doing here? You know there's a war on, right?

I played in the very first UK edition of 1 vs 100 on Xbox Live primetime. I went in knowing that this, like PlayStation home, is a product intended for an audience who are the collective antithesis of myself, but like any good nerd, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to complain about something.
I'm not going to explain the fundamentals of the game, if you aren't in the know and would like to amend that status wikipedia is more than willing to fill you in. The game was fun enough for half an hour, but I couldn't bring myself to sit through all three hours, especially not with the Battlefield 1943 community challenge starting at the same time. There seemed to be some form of glitch when I was playing that caused me to be unable to hear the games' live host as I played with the exception of the first five minutes of play, after which he turned mute, and I was unable glean any information from my attempts at lip reading his avatar.
Also nine tenths of the questions require no knowledge whatsoever, and can be deduced by simple guess work. If I can answer a football question on your quiz correctly, your quiz is too easy. Finally I never got to be the one or part of the mob, this is 1 vs 100s' greatest folly, for which it cannot be forgiven.

A little while ago a made a not so subtle hint that I wanted to try Magic and D&D, it appears that a couple of people took this is a challenge and declared that if I could concoct a story set in a world ruled by trees then they would gladly play the latter. I haven't got round to asking if they would seriously do this, because my mind has managed to synthesize such a world, a world were mortal men such as you and I toil away in subservience to ever unpleasable sentient saplings. And a mind flayer. Minds must always be flayed, my brothers.

On my graph paper maps

Where the Time Went

Two of your flesh mortal months ago I mentioned that much of my time was being siphoned away by some delicious but unnameable force. It appears that recently that force has revealed itself to the world.

I am to Battlefield Heroes what a pig is to mud, the devout consumer. I've been sampling this game at regular intervals for months now, alone and friendless, but now we may all bask in its' glory together. The full release version of the game has been slightly nerfed from the beta version though, I especially missed the "Get cash items for free" feature, that was a personal favorite.

Really, I'd recommend everyone to try it out, remember to add IcedInferno* to your friends list. Hey, why not? It is free.
To make me seem like a little less of a fanboy I'll concede that there a few foibles here and there that I am contractually obliged to present:

• Purchased weapons and items last for either a week or a month, no permanent unlocks
• At least in Vista the games' launcher can be very temperamental
• The team I'm playing on generally starts losing when I join
• Royals always seem to lose (See point 3)

On the bright side Dice's latest trailer makes me happy.

*I'm not sure if the friends list goes on character or account names, if it is the former add Georgefrey instead

Run away with my heart

A Game of Cards

Sacred 2 arrived at my door a few days ago. In this post I had originally intended to inform all of you that I wasn't hooked on this game. It is good, do not misinterpret my words, but I could turn my console off without an intervention. Everything was cool, I was wandering around, a member of the nearly extinct race of cyborg Anubis tribute acts, fulfilling my destiny as a grisly envoy of the end with enthusiasm and vigor, but then it happened. A friend of mine, one of the ones who had touted this game as digital crack, encouraged me to create a new character so that we could play together, and do it from level one. From that moment onwards I started describing Sacred as addictive. Also, High Elves ftw.

The deeply intuitive among you may have tapped into the force and guessed that there is another heavily opinionated paragraph chambered and ready to fire. You may have also guessed that it is on a different subject. You may have guessed that it is about being able to play as Johnson in Halo ODST. If you guessed that last one, you guessed wrong.

Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers is a game targeted directly at me, in fact if I look north at any time, I become blinded by the laser sight trained upon me. I am the kind of person who seeks to become a nerd in every way possible. Magic, like Dungeons and Dragons, is a game that I would whole heartedly like to sample, but due to a lack of friends willing to take the plunge with me, I haven't been able to. Duels of the planeswalkers emulates the willing friend fairly well, its' tutorial did an excellent job of explaining the game to me (although admittedly I have played multiple similar card games before, so I do have an advantage over regular newbies) and has delivered a satisfying, yet upsettingly short, roster of foes. The only thing missing is the ability to weave your own decks out of whole cloth, rather than just editing pre-made ones.
Still, if you've ever been curious about Magic: The Gathering I'd recommend this, but expect to have your arse handed you the first few plays, experienced Magic players will probably be underwhelmed though. Not that I'm an expert on Magic players.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go get molested by the love child of a sea urchin and mighty Cthulhu.

It’s a kind of magic

Hello

In keeping with Inferno's once a week policy, I am here to make a post that has nothing to do with the game.

And to make it bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky bulky by copying and pasting.

:D oh, I really have nothing to say.

One Return, One Game, One Space Walrus

Rejoice my children! My time-table is no longer full of twisting, time devouring juggernauts. I shall make it my first order of business to return this sorry page to its' former glory, expect at least one post a week again - and let us get this straight, if there is only a single post in a week, it will be large enough to be easily viewed from space.

During our extended interlude I missed my chance to talk about many things that I would love to discuss in detail here, the death of the Duke, E3 and... well, those two are the main ones really. But both are sprawling subjects, and have both been discussed to death, as previously stated, I have missed my window of opportunity. Instead of dwelling on that, I decided that I would steer this post in a different direction, don't worry it will be completely unrelated to work being done here, as per usual.

Sacred 2 has been recommended to me by quite a few people whose opinions I trust, they admit that it is a really buggy game, that the occasional ability is useless, and that the restrictions on the Co-op that usually prevents you playing with your friends is annoying. But they still talk about it so enthusiastically, I look into the eyes of these men and I can tell that talking to me is hurting them, that every moment away from that game is like a punch in the eye. Every moment spent in the outside world is nothing but a test of strength for these people, the reward for passing being another slice of the drug that they crave so dearly.

Observing the effect on these people, people who are much less inclined to get hopelessly addicted to any single game, I concluded that I really shouldn't pick Sacred 2 up. None of these men even felt Word of Warcraft's terrible grip, they dipped their toes into the pool and managed to withdraw without an intervention, satisfied with the experience but not looking for more, whereas I start jonesing for a hit of it roughly every four months.

Having come to this conclusion it was obvious that I had but one choice, I made my peace with my deity of choice and ordered the unholy disc from Amazon. You can tell it hasn't arrived yet because I'm writing this post instead of slowly rocking to and fro.

This post could use even more tangents, lets create some.

I'm sure that admitting that I've never played any of the Diablo series, which Sacred is quite obviously imitating, is just another way of saying that I'm letting the side down in entirely unforgivable ways, but I have at least sampled a couple of its' tribute acts. An old Westwood studios game, Nox, is the first to come to mind.

Nox was great for many reasons, but the one I want to explore is its' multiplayer offerings, which were surprisingly robust considering the how old it is, and its' genre. You would expect it to feature only some form of half -arsed Co-op and maybe Deathmatch. It also boasted a few others though, my favorite being named oddball (Think football/soccer with more knights and hell demons), but Oddball isn't really what I want to talk about, I just wanted a chance to inform everyone of the following; remember the dick who summoned the carnivorous plants in front of the goal? Yeah, that was me.

What I really want to draw your attention to was the obligatory half-arsed Co-op, which was surprisingly not half-arsed. Nox Quest, as the hip kids called it, was an infinite dungeon of sorts, that up to sixteen players could band together to tackle, to balance out the huge number of potential players the difficulty ramps up pretty hard, by level twenty five the game had started populating the dungeon with obelisks which every thirty seconds spawned a copy of the single player campaign's final boss.

The coolest thing was the players in that game, In a safe zone once I mentioned to another player how I was saving up to buy a particular spell which was pretty expensive. The other player immediately informed me that he had a spare of that spell book and gave it to me, for free, bare in mind that this was a spell book he could trade for a fair bit of coin. This is a genre of game notorious for its' selfish players, who happily scoop up all of the loot on a level, regardless of whether their class can use it, but on multiple occasions on Nox I had people pull me aside and have conversations along the lines of: "Hey man, I notice you keep summoning stone golems, you may want to give this steel golem scroll a whirl, don't sweat it, just have it." (I played a Conjurer, because I don't like dying and the force of nature is the single greatest thing since time itself).

This happened to me so many times that it was a practice I got into once I started getting a fair bit of money or finding loot that I couldn't use, I would even buy extra lives for players running low occasionally, I'd give away any repeats of spell books I came across. The people I gave to, or at least quite a few of them, then started to do the same, then those who they gave to followed suit, etc, etc.

The point I'm trying to make is that a friendly player base is self perpetuating, as a designer there isn't much you can do to keep the bad apples away, but there are things you can do to encourage the good ones. What started as a couple of guys handing out free spell books in Nox turned into an entire legion of players making sure that each of their allies is as good as they can possibly be, these are the people who are going to see the high-end content, the jerks never will, and the jerks will fall off the band wagon.

This was a long post. Possibly the longest ever made here. I went off on many tangents, then a tangent or two within those tangents, so to summarise:

• I'm back, but I can't speak for the others
• Sacred 2 could be the end of me
• Conjurers ftw
• Good player bases are self perpetuating

I'll come crawling on back to you

The O$hit Bunker

We really need a steady source of updates don't we?


Well I saw Wolverine, finally and I actually think it's pretty good. If you don't go in expecting something fantastically true to the source material that is. It is a brilliant action film, and for all those ladies out there, and the guys with the secret man crush on Hugh Jackman (guilty) there are some nice nude scenes in there.
Now, as a huge fan of Wolverine (him being my favourite comic book character of all time) I was sitting in the cinema picking out those little things they did wrong. But, as I kept reminding myself, I went in for a good time. I know that comic book adaptations, and book adaptations will never live up to the source material's level, so for all those I see I go in with an open mind, not expecting an amazing masterpeice, but merely going in for a good show. A good example is where the Harry Potter film franchise started going really wrong. Prisoner of Azkaban. I am putting aside the fact that they didn't bother to correct Daniel Radcliffe's eye colour (his being blue, and Harry's being green as Rowling made painstakingly clear and put huge emphasis on in the books) digitally.
Back to Wolverine. Brilliant film, worth seeing, but don't expect it to be a word for word adaptation of our favourite clawed hero's golden days in print.

Quite frankly my bowl of Cheerios was too... cheery.

Right, we do seem to be posting very little recently, and what we do post generally does not have anything to do with Zombietopia. I assure you we are all working very hard.

And this post follows the tradition of not giving any news on the homefront! I'm just here to remind you all (yes all 3 of you!) that we are, indeed, still alive and kicking.

That's al folks, until next time on the nail biting adventures of SPACE WALRUS GAMES DEV TEAM!

A console tards' lament

If you own the PC version of Teamfortress 2, it's celebration time! Both the Sniper and Spy packs have been released today, you also probably aren't reading this post, and are, in fact, already playing with your new weapons and attaining your new achievements. If you own the Xbox 360 version of Teamfortress 2, it is not celebration time, we still have nothing. If you own the PlayStation 3 version of the game, then I feel really sorry for you, you have been well and truly shafted.

I guess that this video will have to tide me over for now. Stupid, awesome Valve.

Those bods are being bad

Filler deprivation, you say?

I have, over the past few nights- nay months- nay years, been suffering from sleep deprivatoin. It is due to no fault of my own, I fear I may have a slight case of insomnia. BUT! As any sane person would do, I have decided to make this an experiment.

My findings are as follows: no sleep = me no happy.

Enjoy this filler.

A writers' tears

You may be surprised to hear that the hardest part of writing these posts, at least for me, is coming up with songs for the end of them. Especially if I plan on taking a couple of lines which through a convoluted form of alchemy, may be linked back to something earlier on in the post. My self-imposed limit which permits me to quote any given artist only once doesn't help. Especially considering that it is becoming more and more obvious that each and every one of my thoughts can be summed up by lines from MC Frontalot songs. Specifically that one about grues.

You may also be surprised to hear that this post doesn't actually contain any interesting content and is just filler, although that isn't very likely.

Whistle your favourite tune

A word of warning

For the last couple of weeks there haven't been many posts. This is a post to warn you guys that this dry period will probably last several more weeks. The blog and associated project aren't being abandoned, but this a busy time for everyone here right now, so please, bear with us.

Rest assured that soon we will be back to our old schedule and we (I) can talk about the new Wolverine film, what games we've (I've) been playing, that thing we've (Balai) been working on (Zombie hotel or something, right?), and how ashamed I am that I only saw Nerdcore Rising for the first time this weekend.

We'll carry on

Nice 'n quick

I haven't got long, but I can say that without doubt progress is being made.
No, I still have little to show you all but, hopefully that shall all change and we can all be one big happy family...
Maybe not.
Anyway like I say not got long so this is just the quick update to let you all know that SWG is still alive and flipping.