Presented by aurynn shaw
About a year ago, I played through the entirety of Mass Effect. All three games, first time, no preconceptions.
I had been exposed to some unavoidable cultural contamination; nothing spoilery, and certainly nothing I understood. Flashes of Mass Effect 3 as my partner played, exposure rage online at the Mass Effect 3 ending.
continue reading...For those of you who remember What if Doom was a Roguelike, the game I referenced, Teleglitch, is now available through the majesty of the Steam Store.
You can pick it up here.
continue reading...So a game I’ve bought during Steam Sale that’s sucked up my time is Don’t Starve, an indie craft-o-matic roguelike sort of game with a strongly emergent set of mechanisms.
In a nutshell; you’re teleported to a hostile worldscape with only your wits and ability to assemble basic things. From those basic things, you can assemble bigger and better things, Minecraft or Terraria-esque. The key to the game is the name, Don’t Starve; in this environment you are expected to eat, craft, and defend yourself.
continue reading...So this thing happened last week, a conference on the direction of internet policy in New Zealand. We spoke of a great many things; from how high-speed fibre backhaul will change the lives of underprivileged people, how the recent GCSB activity in the news affects us, and more.
continue reading...A while back, I played Metro: 2033. It’s a dark, linear tunnel-crawly sort of game, set in a post-nuclear apocalypse in the Moscow Metro. It’s dark, life is cheap, and things are kind of scary.
I really enjoyed “Metro: 2033”, managing to earn the “good” ending. So much of it was skulking around amidst chaos, seeing brief slices of a ravaged world trying anything to survive and strange hallucinations in the darkness underground.
continue reading...I write code for a living. I enjoy doing it, and find a great deal of satisfaction in the process.
Part of my job is also writing test cases, documentation, and Puppet manifests. If your job is writing code, it likely follows similar lines. Code is only the first step; Done is when it’s documented, tested and shipped.
continue reading...For the last three months, I was doing something I hated.
You may have seen the bitching on Twitter; or been privy to my endless whining. I’d spent much of that time working on a legacy Perl program, difficult to understand or modify.
continue reading...I frequently rant on Twitter, about a great many things.
One of the most recent, prevalent irritations is how intensely frustrating I find email. As a child of the digital generation, I grew up with IRC and IM, realtime communication in short bursts.
continue reading...In my previous article about my Nexus 4, I remarked loudly on the lack of useful music sync on the Android platform.
Google Music has finally launched here; I can use the streaming and song-upload service if I felt so inclined. I don’t, for a variety of reasons. Other streaming services I’ve seen focus on their library, rather than my library; Spotify or Pandora, for example.
continue reading...I haven’t played Tomb Raider yet. I don’t intend to. This opinion started when I was reading an editorial1 of the new Tomb Raider game, written to cover the very controversial sexual assault scene shown during the E3 Demo.
I’ve read followup pieces; the rape scene wasn’t really a rape scene, just sexually charged. Lara struggles, and ends up strangled during the QTE.
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