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