T w e n t y S i d e d

We have actually had, like most of Texas, a lot of heavy storms and flooding the past week. It honestly hasn’t been that bad, although the rain has been heavier and longer-lasting. There were worse “storms” last month. But randomly yesterday morning the power went out for about two seconds. I didn’t have anything open on my computer, but of course it was shut down because it’s not on a battery backup. I didn’t come back to it until last night for other reasons. It started right up, but shut down about five or ten minutes later. No glitches or freezes; it was like the power just got turned off. Over the next hour and a half I tried different things. At first it seemed like the problem was associated with internet usage or possibly the (new) video card, because twice the shut-down happened pretty quick after I had started a YouTube video. I was planning on going to bed before too long, so while the laptop did some updates I figured I would just watch YouTube on the main computer. After those shut-downs, I wondered if the problem was the latest Firefox update (I’ve mentioned that I have a problem with how often those updates are occurring lately) so I did a Timeshift rollback to a few days ago. After doing this the computer booted but shut-down again pretty quick after booting. I decided the installation may be corrupt and pulled out a Live USB to use to test the ability of the computer to stay on outside of a normal boot.

It didn’t work. The computer either shut-down on accessing the USB, or while trying to boot the Live USB. It was getting where just trying to boot the computer in ANY way was failing. So, I turned off the computer and let it sit. After a few minutes, I noticed the USB receiver for my controller was on, which was odd because the controller itself was NOT. Also two of my external hard drives were showing constant light activity. I, as carefully as I could, shut down the external USB hub. Because it’s powered externally, it took a few minutes for the USB drives to completely stop and power down. Later I turned the hub back on, and the USB receiver for the controller came on. That’s not too odd, actually; everything gets a shot of power when the hub comes on, but it stayed on. And the two (but not all three) USB hard drives started doing the light, constant activity again. So I shut it all down again, and left it overnight.

I’m old enough now, and have been through enough **** in my life, that when something suddenly goes south I just finish my water and sleep on it. This morning I had some other family issues to help with, so I didn’t get back to the computer until Sunday afternoon. I had been working on writing up Lara Croft Go, an interesting adaptation of the Tomb Raider/Lara Croft games for mobile devices (and PC’s through Steam). That’s the main reason I still had a controller plugged in. But, this time I left the controller’s receiver out; then booted up the computer. It went to the Linux Mint login, and I left it for an hour. It stayed running, so I logged in. And then left it for an hour. Then I started up Bitwarden…and left it for an hour. All good so far. Then I loaded ProtonVPN (I know I can do a VPN through the shell, I just like how Proton works, and I’m used to it) and thirty minutes later I loaded my USB input remapper program. It’s called InputRemapper (picture a mind being blown right now. You’ve seen the gif.) SO FAR, the computer still hasn’t shut down and has been running non-stop for around six hours. In just a bit I’ll load up Opera (it’s still installed on that PC, specifically because it does ONE thing better than Firefox) and start trying to browse the internet. If that works for an hour…I’ll try playing a video. I’ll update when I reach that point.

Oh, and you’re getting this instead of the Lara Croft Go post because A) broken computer has been on my mind all day; and B) the Lara Croft article is on the computer that’s “crashed” and I don’t want to introduce extraneous processes while I’m troubleshooting. So this is the update *for now*.

Paige Francis He/him

In late 2017, the (then, and now formerly) celebrated independent game publisher Fullbright released its second game, Tacoma. Riding high from the incredible success of their first game Gone Home, Tacoma was a well-received second effort. While Gone Home is set in a large, barely-understood house that tells many underlying stories in addition to the main narrative driven by notes left by the protagonist’s younger sister, Tacoma evolved into a somewhat simpler tale about a future in space with misbehaving companies and AI, and some minor underlying portraits of the characters involved, rather than stories; set on an Earth Lagrange Point space station recently abandoned due to a mysterious accident. Only a few months later a “small group of developers” called “The Station” published the game “The Station.” About a mystery on a satellite orbiting the Earth at some point in the future. There was some accident that caused the staff of the satellite station to shut down and possibly abandon ship. Both games advertised use of an “augmented reality” system to explore the environment and figure out what happened.

Other than that, neither title actually has anything to do with the other. No, really; they tell entirely different stories from different points-of-view. The augmented reality systems are different. In fact, The Station‘s AR is…kind of pointless, honestly? You could have done the entire game without even mentioning it was a feature, as it doesn’t use the “augmented reality” functionality for anything important. By contrast, exploring the augmented reality records of Tacoma is central to the gameplay.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Two Space Station Games of Christmas 2017”

Paige Francis He/him

Ok, I guess I answered the big question I posed previously. I want to talk about the story and compare it to the story of Lifeless Planet, but I should let you know what I found out after I finished the game. While Lifeless Moon was released a decade after Lifeless Planet, and by a different studio, it was written by the same creator. A short FAQ on the game’s website (that I could have looked at before I played the game, to be fair) made it clear that the story of Lifeless Moon is essentially the original idea for Lifeless Planet. It was that first game that was modified in the creation process. Unfortunately, *in my opinion*; Lifeless Planet is much better for those changes, and is a better game overall. I’m not going to claim Lifeless Planet is unique; everything is derivative in some way. The point at which a product differs enough from its collective inputs to make it sufficiently “new” is obviously a point of contention more often than not. So, Lifeless Moon is *not* a sequel *or* a prequel…it just takes some of the same elements of Lifeless Planet and uses them for something different. If you *want* the two games to be related, space is left for that, even if the nature of “portals” is different.

Lifeless Moon is not only shorter and easier, showing much closer adhesion to the “walking simulator” idea than Lifeless Planet; but the story is quite frankly something we see a lot in especially action movies that are trying to have a story underneath the action. Lifeless Planet is pretty good sci-fi; Lifeless Moon is a bare-bones melodrama used to flesh out a very simple game mechanic. It’s also poorly constructed (the story, that is, not the game) leaving one entire subplot effectively abandoned (not technically, but effectively) and basic questions with unclear answers.

TO BE CLEAR: this is a perfectly adequate walking simulator that only takes a few hours to experience. Price is subjective, but I would describe Lifeless Planet as giving you more than you pay for at its normal price of $9.99; while Lifeless Moon is worth half that at most. There just isn’t the same quality *or abundance* of content. But just to complete the circle…yes, Lifeless Moon has fantastic visuals. Very dramatic environments.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Finished Lifeless Moon: The Not-Sequel”

Paige Francis He/him