Although I am more of a casual gamer, I have always been a fan of indie game over large studio productions. Mostly because generally they are short, to the point and can take risks to try things professional games do not. I have written here about a few in the past, as well as a few of my own, so I am always happy to find another new title that perks my interest.
Braid is a strange game that focuses on change through time and forgiveness, and accomplishes this in that fact that you can not die, if you are killed, the game will sit and wait for you to rewind. This removes the dangers that other platformer games use to add challenge, so you may be left asking what is left to challenge the player? Instead they game uses a (some what cliche) search for puzzle pieces that come together to form the story. However to get to the pieces you will need to use your time warping powers, think 2D platformer now thrust into a 4D world, even though the lack of a Z plane makes it more of a different kind of 3D then ever seen before. Using the different abilities each world allows you will have to deal with time forgiveness, exclusion, branches and placement. Braid wonderfully pulls off using these separately and in a mix to give the player a rather unique challenge, which if you like solving puzzles that requires thought from different angles you will really enjoy this.
The story of the game itself is unique, you have Tim who is on a quest to save the princess from a horrible monster. This may sound familiar to Super Mario Bros and it is hard to not see that a lot of the game takes concepts from classic platformers. However it goes far deeper then the base story if you only look at the surface. What is reality? If you could warp the time that drives the reality that we see, could you truly say what we are seeing is real? The ending of Braid pulls this off with fighting perfection, which may leave some players rather confused. Combine this with wonderfully music and lush water color artwork and you have an amazing game.
I have always been annoyed with games in how you want to try things, but it would take too long when failures result in restarting, Braid removes this and pretty much can be described as one of the few games that always runs in sandbox mode. Of course some of the puzzles, and especially the hidden stars would be impossible with out this. Still I had fun playing through this a few times, one due to me poking at the game files and breaking it. Braid is available on xbox, PC and Mac, so there are a few ways to get it, but if you have a mac, support mac games and grab the mac copy!
For those who have played the game and want more depth on the story check out this article.
May 31, 2009
Braid for Mac
May 14, 2009
Epic Presentation
I was going through my files stored on the school server and found my Epic Game presentation. So I uploaded it to slide share so others can see it. Slide share messed up some text in my images, but other then that it is the same. Check it out...
May 12, 2009
Tech Support
I hate to call tech support, especially for anything electronic as I more then likely already know what is wrong, as well as far more about fixing it then the person answering the phone. The worst being the recent fairpoint (aka failpoint) issues we have had at home, which after returning from school will finally be fixed, by switch to RoadRunner instead. I had spent over a half hour trying to explain that there was an issue with their service on their end which I could prove, yet still had to be walked through their flow chart for fixing problems, only to have the representative on the phone finally say "oh it must be on our end"...
To be fair I have been on both sides of the call, so I try to be nice to phone operators, as it is never their fault and they are tying to help, however when I did phone support for my school their was no flow sheet, we actually knew what to do to fix things, or would google it on the fly. ITS Help Desk FTW! Below are two Dilbert videos I stumbled upon that fit both side perfectly.
Dealing with tech support...
Doing tech support...
Senior Projects
One of the final highlight to my final semester was the Computer Science Departments Senior Project Presentations. I have been working on my SN Project like a madman, and was very proud to present my work thus far to my friends, family, colleagues and professors that came to watch myself and five others fellow CS students show off their work. So on top of my SN Project BETA 4 that is available to try out, you can also check out the slides below. I may upload a version with audio in the future.
If the movie does not let you click to go to the next slide, give it a bit more time to load. Otherwise it will only loop the first two slides till it loads enough.
May 9, 2009
Finally bought AwardSpace hosting
With my time at college dwindling fast, I though it was about time that I broke down and bought a domain and hosting. I have been using the schools hosting for almost 4 years and have gotten very use to being able to easily have web project or files online, so with that ability ending I needed to get my own.
I had been using the free hosting on awardspace for a while, which is fantastic for a free service. No adds and access to php and MySQL! But there is limitations on bandwidth and you only get a subdomain, so after I graduate, I will require a bit more then that. Yet, the basic hosting is more then enough for me and only costs 47$ for a year with a free domain. The bandwidth is 1000GiB a month which is around 32GiB a day, way more then I will need right now.
So I am now the proud owner of www.efeion.com!
April 23, 2009
H2Overdrive = HydroThunder 2
Sadly I have been too busy to work on side project, hence the lack of update. So I am very happy to be able to report that finally a developer is making HydroThunder 2! Raw thrills has released H2Overdrive which has everything that hydro thunder had, from the boosts to the drops to even the 3..2..1..go go go. But also makes improvements such as 8 racer at once and mid air tricks! Though I must say that that I do not favor the futuristic boats, but I can live with one minor complaint. From what I can tell it is only in arcades right now, but we all know it is only so long till it is ported. I only hope it looks as good as the arcade this time, because the ports of hydro thunder sadly never looked as good as the arcade. So while I wait for the console version, I need to find the nearest arcade with H2Overdrive.
Check out the Kotaku post here which is oh so accurately titled "H2Overdrive in videoh my god."
Also check out the videos below for a drool worthy few minutes of awesome.
March 18, 2009
Snow Architecture
After building my latest snow fort, I came to the realization that there was a method to my madness. When building I use a snow scale method I have grown fond of, this involves packing the wet snow within an arms radius into a scale like brick. Snow scale describes the way the snow brick has a hard external top layer with a soft inside layer, this also causes it to have a convex form as well. This is important as the convex shape allows for a strong dome shape. The full design uses two layers of scales for walls with a simple arch for a door. After these are built you use a keystone (handful of snow) to prop two scales leaning inwards together and go from there until the next dome layer is finished, then you finish with a final curved in layer held up by a few scales as a final keystone.
The interesting thing about this building method is how it very closely resembles to the structure of Geodesic domes because of the way scales are interlocked with a series of keystones. This distributes the force of the snow down the walls of the structure. This is why I have been able to create forts with a radius well over five feet, with walls that are only seven or eight inches thick.
February 28, 2009
Applet ProgressBar Flickering Issue
I had recently taken the the time to convert my EpicGame Code from VB to java, so I could make an applet that could be played online. (I was lazy and did not want to make it flash based) However after finishing it and testing on the mac side I though I was finished. Yet, later I started hearing complaints of the game flickering, I was confused as it worked fine for me and as usual I had double buffering setup, which in theory would prevent any flickering. Still, for some reason Window's version Java would flicker uncontrollably. I spent several hours trying different graphics buffering setups and also drawing to separate panels, but with no success.
Luckily I randomly stumbled onto the problem, it was the JProgressBars that I was using. When you update a value in the progress bar it calls the update method that then calls paint, which would happen concurrently mid screen refresh and draw a blank white screen, which was the rouge flickering.
So on Windows do not use JProgressBars with animation as it messes it up, or you need to extend the class and override the setValue method so it does not update the UI. Oh, and of course on the Mac side it all works flawlessly from the start.
February 11, 2009
Samsung CLP 500 Network Driver
One really annoying issue I have run into while working at CADY is that older Samsung printers do not have much... or any support, namely the CLP 500 series that is in the office. As it was my first job to get it up and running it took me a while to even find a driver for it.
For my own convince and others I now have it saved here -> CLP-500Series_1.84.exe.
Please click my ads if you find this useful, as it was a huge pain to find!!!
The next issue is that it does not have any network support, well not documented at least. The printer does have a network card in it, so it must work on a network. I have just been spoiled by HP as their network printers do the network settings at setup. So,to get the CLP 500 printer working on a network you have to do a few extra steps.
1. Install the driver, this will put a generic printer in your list, however it is set up on the wrong port.
2. Open the printers/faxes window then right click on the printer and select properties.
3. Click on the ports tab and hit "Add Port", then select Standard TCP/IP port and hit "New Port".
4. Follow the wizard and enter your printers IP, found by printing the printer config page in the printer information menu, and a name if you desire. Hit next...
5. On the next page leave it as Standard and Generic Network Card, then hit next and hit finish.
6. Check to see the printer is now selected to use your new port, which it should be. Apply and/or close the window. You should now be all set.
I highly recommend setting a static IP for your printer, otherwise you will need to update the port every time the printer gets a new IP. (CADY Printer is 192.168.1.47)
UPDATE:
Win 7 steps...
1. Use the add a printer option.
2. Select Samsung instead of TCP/IP
3. Update Printer Drivers from Microsoft
4. Use the CLP 510 Driver
February 10, 2009
KavaTunes
Matt clued me into an interesting piece of software called KavaTunes last night. He found it on the Mac Heist website as one of their free software titles when you solve puzzles in one of their yearly heists. I was not interested at first, however after watching him for a bit, I quickly wanted a copy as well. What KavaTunes is, is a piece of software that builds a php page of your iTunes library, but to take it a step further, it even looks like your iTunes library! This may be the simplest way to get access to your music on a local network, and on the campus network it is a perfect solution.
Oh course my g4 server is my test bed for playing with things and has a custom apache and php setups, so unlike Matt I had quite a bit of extra trouble with the setup. (With Matt laughing at the issues I was having the whole time ^_^) First off was that KavaTunes always builds in ~/Library/Webserver/Documents/ however I have a custom webserv folder instead, so it took a while to figure out why it was not building in the right place, but a symbolic link fixed that. Then do not call your iTunes music folder iTunes as KavaTunes adds a another separate folder under this name with its required php files. And lastly do not mess up your symbolic links, as it just causes a general mess. After about 30 minutes of bug fixing, which would have been nice if it gave you some warning about these things, I was up and running. It even streams my movies and tv shows I have on iTunes.
If you are interested grab a copy from Mac Heist
February 7, 2009
Smallest CRT ever!
I was taking apart a Hi8 camera to start my next project of better night vision goggles. However after taking apart I was very amused to find that the small viewer was not an LCD, instead it was a tiny CRT! See picture above, with a quarter for size comparison. Yes that does mean that this has a flyback transformer that runs on 5v.
February 1, 2009
Behavioral engineering
It is always fascination to see how people will react to certain changes. In my case, it was people walking through the covered doorway to the apartment. Normally I would not be bothered, however there is a window there as well, so it is a huge loss of privacy. So my first attempt was to forge a side path, sadly it was nowhere near as convenient as the straight shot that was already there, so almost no one used it. Quite frankly I would not have either, so it was no surprise.
Thus, next was to cover the path to force them away. However I had to plan it carefully as if not done correctly it would simply be removed, or even worse get a large number of student angry. So step one was to change with out anyone noticing. This would leave the least impact and the confusion with the change would drive people away instead of taking action. Next was to make the pile just big enough that it would not be easy destroyed, but not large enough to show it was put there on purpose, physical plant was shoveling off roofs, and this would nicely blend in with that reality. So an early saturday morning shoveling some of the snow off the roof accomplished this nicely. Plus I made the side path the most visible choice to limit remembering that the other path was there.
All that was working against my carefully set changes was force of habit, which would be a big factor, people do not like change and depending on how I set this up, could get annoyed enough to remove the change, luckily I have laziness on my side, and with the side path available, I suspected that it would win out in the majority of people.
So my experiment was let to these possible and expected results...
1. People go the long way instead to avoid
2. People go the shot but not as convent side path I made.
3. People destroy the wall and go through anyways.
I expected 2 most of the time and eventually 3 to happen, however the worst that happened was simply a person climbing over it. I was quite surprised my wall survived, however it makes sense, as people are prone to laziness, so instead of taking time to destroy a large pile of snow and putting the effort in making the path again, resulting in the cost of wet and cold, people simple gave up and walked around. I was happy with the results and no one wrecked my wall, plus I rarely get a chance to test out social behavioral theories on so may people so I was excited either way.
It funny how with a little observing, planing and research you can easy change the way people will make decisions and shape how people interact around you.
UPDATE
Scratch that... two drunk girls destroyed my predictions, but lost a shoe! Argh.. outliers, that was not expected, I figured it would be guys.