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Let’s assume that the PD is maintaining the portals. It’s got a power source that can supply some finite level of power, and the PD itself is required to keep the portals open so that they are not self-sustaining. The technology is pretty magical, but we want to keep it from obviously and flagrantly violating physics.
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This is amazing:
And for comparison, here is the original.
And thanks to Shadow Wolf below, here is the creator’s homepage.
Once in a while you see a mistake in the news. Sometimes they spell the name of a city wrong, or misplace a comma in an amusing way. It’s funny to see when it happens, and sometimes good for a laugh.
But last night I saw this. The story hasn’t changed since I spotted it twelve hours ago, but I’ve saved the text in case they do:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Context-Free News”
Steven is writing about Ai Yori Aoshi. It’s very interesting to see his reactions to the series. (My own synopsis is here.)
Ai Yori Aoshi is the second anime I’d ever watched, right after Cowboy Bebop. I really enjoyed it, but as I took in more shows I looked back and wondered how much of the appeal wasn’t the newness of anime itself. The show has a slightly different premise than the standard harem comedy (in this case the lead character is fully committed to one female at the outset, instead of being some sad-sack who can’t make up his mind) but it still hits all the harem comedy tropes: You’ve got one guy surrounded by a few pretty and unaccountably single girls, you have your beach episode, the harvest festival, and many chances for the guy to fall into preposterous and compromising situations with the girls. All the girls dig him, although some do so more overtly than others. Then there a plot justification to keep him from just running off with his chosen girl. Add fan service and stir.
I still can’t be objective about the show. I’ll always view it through those rose-colored glasses that only a new otaku can wear. Now Steven is watching it, and he’s seen easily an order of magnitude more anime than I have. I’ve been eager for him to try the series, although I really expected him to stop somewhere on the first disc because he’d seen it a hundred times already. The fact that he’s sticking with it means the show probably isn’t the crap I feared it was. The fact that he’s not crazy about it probably means my own appreciation of the series is more than the show would normally merit.
Some of my old posts on the show:
Synopsis
Why I like Aoi Sakuraba
About Tina the American and her breast-grabbing
Widely regarded as one of the greatest strategy games ever, X-Com is a game with compelling gameplay and generous depth even by today’s standards, and was an amazing achievement given the technology available in 1993. IGN calls it the #1 PC game of all time.
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| The world map is astounding. It’s a real 3d world you can spin and view in real time, like Google Earth. No, you can’t zoom in and see things in detail, but you can see national borders and major cities. |
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| Unlike in the movies, the aliens aren’t just here to conquer New York or LA. |
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| Here one of my units has entered a room with a couple of filthy alien scum. You can tell they’re evil by how purple their funiture is. |
The game begins with the geoscape, a map of the Earth where you can see your bases and order your forces to move against any enemies you’ve managed to detect. There is a running day / night cycle, and you can plan missions to take place at day or night, depending on your preference. (Super-secret expert hint: It is dark at night.)
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| The base view screen. You can have up to eight bases anywhere on the globe. All of them are belong to us. |
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| Your soldiers gain experience and improve with each mission, assuming they survive. You can hire more soldiers whenever you like, but constantly marching into battle with a collection of pants-wetting noobs is not recommended. |
There is a lot here, and I’ve only scratched the surface. I can’t believe this game even fit into memory back then. (It only requires 2MB.) There are two or three strategy games layered together here, and all of them are compelling and fun. I went through the game last weekend in preparation for this post, and it was just as fun now as it was four years ago. The patched version is also easy to get running, without needing to fiddle with DOS emulators or slowing down your CPU. The graphics, while old, are still nice to look at.
If you’re running Windows, you can get a working version of the game from The Underdogs. It’s just a 3MB download, although that site is throtled back so much that it took me 15 minutes to get the file. If that site is too slow or you can’t get to it from where you are (I’m talking to YOU, people surfing the ‘net from work) then I have the file mirrored here. Just run the installer and then run xcom1fix.exe for Win 2000/ME/XP.
I notice my Google ads have gone nuts lately. Time to clean house again.
Since the ending of DMotR, this site has been pretty tightly dedicated to a couple of core subjects, so Google should have no problem figuring out what ads should be running here. But instead of better targeting, I’m getting ads for all kinds of stupid stuff. One of them is for some sort of “enviro-friendly waterless toilet. (Enviro-friendly? Is human waste no longer biodegradeable?) Whatever. It may or may not be something my readers might want, but Google seriously needs a checkbox labeled “NEVER EVER ADVERTISE PINK TOILETS ON MY SITE, EVEN IF IT’S A CHOICE BETWEEN THAT AND FURRY PORN.” Selling toilets on my website? Not in this lifetime.
That ad has been nixed, which means it should stop showing up in the next 24 hours or so. I’ve also killed some unwanted stuff for ringtones and that sort of thing. Still, I’d like to ask for your help in tracking down crap ads. Here are the sorts of ads I want to kill:
If you see one of the above appear, please drop the domain name of the site in the comments, here or in any other post. If you tell me “I see an ad for free ringtones” that doesn’t help me, because I don’t know where it goes so I have no way of blocking it. If you tell me, “I see an ad for ringtonespammers.com” then I can block the ad. Note that the URL should be listed underneath, so you shouldn’t have to click on the offending ad.
Also: I see on other sites they have great ads for videogames and nothing else. I’d hate to give up on my existing ads, which include RPG dice and other cool stuff, but if Google is going to continue behaving like this then I’m going to look elsewhere. An ad for videogames or dice enhances my site. An ad for toilets detracts from the value of the site in ways I can’t begin to calculate. This ain’t no Home Depot.
But where do you go to run those videogame ads? I Googled around for an hour (er… maybe “Googling” was a bad idea in this case) and couldn’t find anything except services that wanted to provide advertising FOR me. Maybe those ads are only available for “large” sites and they don’t want to deal with hobby blogs. Still, if anyone knows about who provides those ads and where I can go to check it out, please drop a link in the comments.
(Also: If you are using some sort of ad-blocking and never see the ads, you really don’t need to brag about it. It’s a free net and I don’t object at all to surfing on your own terms. But, I pay for bandwidth with this ad revenue, so this isn’t a case where I’m going to give you a high five for your efforts. I’m not going to join you in cheering, “YEAH! Stick it to The Man!” in cases where The Man is me.)
EDIT: The ads at Kotaku are what I’m looking for. Videogames and technology stuff. I wouldn’t use that many (and I don’t need to, since I’m a lot smaller than Kotaku) but one ad that is reliably relevant and technology / videogame focused would be perfect.
I’ve written before about the difficulties of learning to navigate a 3d world in first person. It’s daunting and slow, and usually means the player needs to learn how to walk and look around before they can begin learning the particulars of the given game. There is a certain overhead that must be dealt with before someone can play first person games. Because of this, the conventional wisdom is that first-person games are for hard-core players. As someone who probably falls into the “hard-core” demographic, I’m not really in any kind of position to assail that line of reasoning.
On the other hand, the conventional wisdom seems to be that hard-core players, (the kind which, if you see where I’m going with this, play first person games) have no interest in puzzle games. They want to shoot aliens, gun down Nazis, capture flags, and generally pwn n00bs and whatnot. I’m a good counter-example to this, although one noisy man on a website does not constitute a viable market. Until now, nobody has been willing to risk a couple of million bucks finding out if the hardcore players want puzzle-focused games. First person games are notoriously expensive to produce and doing so is a waste if players would be just as happy doing the same puzzle within the context of a lightweight 2d game. So the only way it could even make sense to consider a FPS puzzler is if the gameplay demanded that sort of perspective.
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| 9.8m/s2. I’m looking down from a ledge into a pair of portals on the floor. Looking down into the orange on I see the view looking up from the blue, and vice-versa. If I jump into the blue one I’ll come sailing out of the orange one feet-first. It’s disorienting, but fun. |
The game, like all great puzzles, is something which can be grasped in seconds and yet leads to challenges of fiendish complexity. In the game you have a “Portal Gun”. You can place portals onto any smooth flat surface large enough to hold one. Once you make two portals, they will be “linked” so that you can walk through one and come out the other. You can put them anywhere: Floors, ceilings, walls. You can look through the portal and see where it goes. Put the two portals facing one another and you’ll find yourself looking over your own shoulder into infinity, with infinite copies of yourself looking through the infinite portals. It’s like, deep, man.
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| The sparse environments do a great job of keeping things focused on the puzzles |
The game is short, and it’s clear they weren’t sure how far to push this. The game introduces the various types of puzzles, then layers them together with gradually increasing complexity, culminating in a timed situation where you must employ everything you’ve learned so far. Then it ends. It’s obvious that they have barely scratched the surface of what can be done with this gameplay. It seems they are hoping that the fan base will take these tools and expand the game via user-designed maps. I look forward to seeing where that goes.
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
T w e n t y S i d e d
