Ads for games. Wow. Watching these is like watching any other ad on television — pointless.

DS Demos… of old or frankly boring-sounding games — Sight Training? *Yawn*

The game catalogue is potentially interesting, since it could prove to be a good way to track upcoming stuff or otherwise find interesting games you might have missed previously.

It’s got no hope of doing that in it’s current form. For starters the catalogue is anemic. It only holds a small proportion of recent releases. Additionally, the actual information on each game is limited and very dry. Marketing copy, bullet list for number of players etc. No screenshots, no videos.

So much more could have been done with this. For example I would like to be able to flag an upcoming release and have new information about it sent to me periodically and a message when it’s finally been released. I forget game release dates sometimes, so that would be useful.

But typical Nintendo, anything outside of making games — which they do very well — tends to be under-cooked. The interface is lovely and it has a lot of potential, but as of now it’s a waste of time.

>>= cs ->

A. Person in a boat?
B. A Fish!?
C. Some Haskell code

Silly, it’s some Haskell code of course.

Which brings me to Septicflesh. These guys get it. For one, the songs are nice and short. Only a few push five minutes long. The constraint of writing shorter songs seems to have made them focus on songwriting and it’s really paid off.

At the core, these songs are structured like most rock songs. Verse, bridge and chorus. No stupid orchestra only break downs, no martial marches, no weepy acoustic guitar solos. Just short, sharp and epic songs.

And the tiny things matter… one of my favorite moments is the introduction to Sangreal. The double-kicks roll for a bar, then for the next bar hit on the up-beat. It sounds off kilter and distinctly mechanical. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s just one of those little things that keeps me listening again and again.

I can foresee this one being on heavy rotation for awhile now.

I unfortunately have a complaint to make. Today I purchased a copy of Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry.

Tomorrow I’ll be returning it to the shop where I bought it. It was only when I arrived home that I discovered the disc uses copy control. This means that I cannot for example rip the CD and listen to it on my iPod — a perfectly legitimate use considering I _paid_ for the album.

I’m actually quite annoyed. I buy a good deal of music, going out of my way to find and purchase music I like. I don’t appreciate being treated like a criminal!

It amazes me, that at a time when record labels moan about losing money to piracy, you guys are actually going out of your way to stiff paying customers.

Here after I’ll be avoiding any releases from your label and I’ll suggest that everyone else I know does the same.

Regards,
Luke Sutton

Anyhow, this is a small note to say READ THESE GODDAMN BOOKS. They’re great.

alias lisp_for_great_victory=sbcl

Yes, I’ve installed the Steel Bank Common Lisp. Yes, I’m learning Lisp. God I just hope I don’t turn into a smug Lisp-wonk. Those guys are annoying.

Nor have I turned my back on Ruby, I just want to broaden my mind a wee bit. It’s Lisp or acid.

This means I’ll be posting on here a bit more often with my various thoughts about Lisp. I’m sure that’ll be riveting stuff *rolls eyes*.

(print "BOBOBOBOSELECTA!")

For a bit of background, Silent Hill 0rigins is the Sony PSP prequel to the Silent Hill series of games. It takes place before the first game and provides a lot of backstory to the events in that and later games in the series. It’s a classic survival horror game. Avoid getting eaten by monsters while simultaneously solving obtuse puzzles. The Silent Hill games are particularly good entries in the genre, with heavy focus on plot and character development. They also feature — in my opinion — some of the best environment, monster and sound design found in horror games. As a result most of the games in the series contain some delightful and terrifying mind-fucks.

Silent Hill 0rigins has our protagonist Travis nearly running over a girl with his truck as he passes through Silent Hill. He then later rescues the same girl — Alessa, for those of you who have played the other games — from a burning house and thus begins his journey through that rotten town, fighting monsters, solving puzzles and generally just trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

Despite my initial misgivings, SH0 actually pretty good. Still before I get to good bits, I do have a few complaints. Firstly, there are far too many monsters in the game. It reaches the point where the locations are predictable, you know that when you open that door a freaky mmmmmonster is gonna jump you. The problem is the predictability sucks the scares out. Monsters also respawn, which is an incredibly annoying mechanic and quickly becomes predictable as well — after key moments in the game, you can move to another room and know that the monsters will have respawned.

The return of the nurses is predictable and boring. Yes, yes the fans love them, but to me they made more sense in Silent Hill 2 where they are directly related to character’s state of mind. The inclusion in SH0 is obviously just fan-service.

Also, the combat still sucks. It’s always sucked in the Silent Hill games and 0rigins is the same. The problem is that combined with the plethora of monsters, combat quickly becomes a chore. I found myself doing everything I could to avoid a fight, not because it was scary, just boring. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the addition of single use melee weapons either, the bloody things just end up cluttering your inventory.

The pacing felt a little predictable. Move from one building full of puzzles to another, with very little in between. Silent Hill 2 is a better example of how to handle this — plenty of interesting things happen in order to break up gameplay and make it feel less linear or at least less predictable.

Now, the plot in the end was satisfying, but I do have a bit of a problem with certain aspects of it. I think the attempt to have it parallel Silent Hill 2 was a mistake. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t played either game, but I felt it took a bit away from story, viz. the bewildered protagonist getting information in drips and drabs. The problem is that it just wasn’t handled as well as SH2, which has a real emotional kick in comparison.

That said, the main character Travis is sympathetic and likable — a fair amount of effort has gone into his characterisation. The manipulations of Alessa add a lot of menace to the story, as her reasons and actions are ambiguous. Some of the interactions with other characters felt a bit tacked on — like those with Lisa, the nurse — and I think more of the plot advancement should have been handled via interactions with characters rather than fetch-quests. But still, the story was entertaining and satisfying in the end.

The puzzles; my absolute favourites in the series. I’m sure some of the hardcore crowd could point out that some of them are really obvious, but I don’t think that matters. For one thing none of them require you to accumulate seemingly unrelated items which can be combined in unlikely ways — SH2’s major flaw in my opinion. Instead they actually make a lot more sense. Very rarely was I left with the sense of not knowing where to go or what to do. Solving the puzzles themselves isn’t always simple — in fact some are quite tricky — but in the end they all felt less arbitrary, more integrated with game-world and hence more satisfying.

The graphics are top notch. Really impressive, especially considering it’s running on a hand-held. The lighting and mirror effects stand out in particular. In spots some of the textures where a bit low-res, but this was rarely a problem. All in all I think the developers should be proud.

So in conclusion, despite my criticisms, I came out liking the game. The plot is serviceable, the character of Travis is likable, great graphics, great puzzles and a few scares. If I was to make one last complaint, it’s that the game really doesn’t do anything different to the others in the series, but I can forgive it that considering it’s a prequel.

If you’re a Silent Hill fan just buy it all ready. The game was really made especially for you. For everyone else I suggest playing the other games first as the first three in the series are much better. Still if you find it cheap, grab it!

In the future we can look forward to playing Silent Hill 5 on the Xbox 360. Here’s hoping they can take the series beyond a retread of the previous games. As much as I love the series, I’m not interested in playing rehashes of the same game.

Obviously you can look forward to a review of that game when it comes out

Sass::Plugin.options[:always_update] = true

P.S. After being dubious for some time, I’ve now begun my romance with Haml and Sass. It’s sweet indeed. Terse, auto-formatting, variables. Oh my. Delicious.

For a bit of context; I don’t play a lot of RPGs, since I find the emphasis on histrionic drawn-out dialog, stupid characters, clichéd settings and crappy game mechanics to be totally annoying. Oh and random battles. OMG I hate random battles. Granted I’m making a lot of generalisations here and most of these criticisms are pointed at Japanese RPGs, but hey… that’s mainly what’s out there right now.

Mass Effect thankfully avoids those problems. The combat is real time, 3rd person and despite the dodgy squad AI, has turned out to be great fun — I didn’t think too much of it at first. The dialog system is flat out brilliant. Being able to shape the direction of a fully-voiced conversation is an excellent experience, and the choices given to you show a fair bit of subtlety — they aren’t just the set of good/bad/indifferent given in most other games. Often I found myself thinking carefully about what response to give. Fucking up a bit of espionage because I made the wrong choices was actually enjoyable, because it felt believable. For anyone complaining about sitting through lengthy dialog and having to skip it; YOU ARE PLAYING THE WRONG GAME. Seriously, Mass Effect is all about learning and interacting with characters in the game. If you have a problem with that, it’s not the game for you.

The dialog only works because of the great writing and a compelling plot. Yes, the plot isn’t entirely free from cliché, but in the context of a game it doesn’t need to be the most original or deep-thinking story ever. The fact that you are affecting the outcome of the story based on your choices is the part that makes it especially compelling.

The sense of a large galaxy waiting to be explored is fantastic. You get to rocket about looking at various planets and pursuing the various side quests. Slight criticism; the on-planet side quests are a bit hit and miss. They tend to be repetitive, with some pretty bland environments. Still, they’re a good chance to collect some money and level up, like a slightly more interesting version of grinding — c’mon at least you’re tooling about in stealth ship while you do it.

I loved reading the planet descriptions and poring over the Codex as I learnt more things about the game-world. The amount of work put into these is fantastic. Open a codex entry and a deep, velvety voice starts reading it out to you. Yes, I did spend a fair bit of time listening to the entires.

So aside from the graphical glitches and ropey frame-rate, Mass Effect has become one of my favourite games, despite my initial misgivings. The fact that this is the first entry in a trilogy gets me all giddy. I can’t wait for the next one to come out!

In the meantime, I might play the game again. This time around I’m going to be really, really mean…

Now, Merb 0.5 is out. You can install it via RubyGems. Ezra has release notes on his blog.

Well done to all the devs! Merb just keeps looking better and better as it goes along. Yay!