My retro gaming journey continued as promised with a dive into the Red Faction series.
Right back to the beginning and Red Faction; what a great start to a game - you're dropped straight into the mines, Total Recall style, with a few explosives and just let rip. The game was ground breaking in being the first that allowed players to selectively destroy parts of the environment. For example you might be blocked by a locked door and are able to use explosives on the surrounding walls.
I played through the version of first Red Faction now available on Steam and was pleasantly surprised .. the gameplay was immediately engaging and the storyline flowed well .. up to a point. There is a significant level of repetition in terms of how the plotlines flow and the "bad guys" to be killed. For example, the pattern of a character appearing for a short section of the game, assisting you and then leaving at an odd juncture but not allowing you to come along. Instead the protagonist is repeatedly left on his own in bizarre places.
Red Faction II .. I'm going to be brief here. My first impressions of Red Faction II are:
Utterly dire integration with Steam; I had to download a new executable patched by a hacker to get it running. Let's repeat that: I had to download a hacked executable to get software I had just purchased to run on its target environment!!!
The opening levels were so annoying that I didn't even bother persisting. Appalling attempt at a storyline and worse, forced channels of play - you can't go where you want, you must go where you are told and do certain things.
Red Faction III .. as bad as Red Faction II - brevity.
Red Faction III is possibly the most annoying game purchase I have ever made. Integration with Steam is tenuous at best, this time compounded by compulsory connection to the Microsoft Live gaming network, which - should you happen to be on Windows 7 64 bit - is akin to attempting teleportation.
I'm not even going to discuss it further. I loved Red Faction, its younger siblings made me cry. Lazy integration with Steam and modern versions of Windows are probably more the issue than the games themselves.
My faith in retro gaming has not been rocked however; I have gone a little further back in time to Shining Force II for the SEGA Genesis/Megadrive; purchased as part of Sega Classic Packs 3 on Steam and at the same time I have returned to Arc: Light of the Spirits on the PS2. Both are positive gaming experiences and I'll post a bit more waffle about them later.
A few of us are going to be running (staggering in my case) the Simon Community Fun Run in a couple of weeks time, on Saturday 8th October, to help raise awareness of the homeless situation not just in Dublin but all around Ireland. If we can raise a few quid along the way it would be a good thing.
To that end the boss and I have a (rather empty at this time) sponsorship page on the Simon Community website and we'd be very grateful for any donations, small and large for this very worthy cause.
It's nothing short of insane that a country as small as Ireland has such a high level of homelessness.
I'll be the wheezing wreck at the finish line and herself will of course be ready for another run given how much fitter she is than me!
The day itself should be a bit of craic in the Phoenix Park so do come along. Even better, sign up yourself and participate - groups are welcome, kids can come along and join in too - costumes are optional!
The playability, intertwining storylines and the freedom for the player to choose any of several outcomes to the game (which gradually fall away as you make certain choices) make it a seriously compelling play even against the amazing competition now available within the same genre.
I entered the game straight from playing my way through the original so I fell into the JC Denton ending immediately not realising how much easier I was making things for myself.
I then went back and played for the Renegade ending (or Omar ending) which basically means blow the crap out of everyone, which was much more challenging.
What I didn't get to see because of my choices was either the Illuminati or Templar endings but others have uploaded all of them to YouTube.
As I mentioned in my original Winding Back to "Deus Ex" blog, there are some quirks that you need to be patient with in terms of the game being brought into the Steam environment. These are mostly based around the complete disappearance of the app while it loads the next map. It 95% of the cases it does come back but crashes every now and then to keep you on your toes; save often.
If you run Crystal Desktop, disable it before playing - it doesn't play nice with Deus Ex - Invisible War.
I strongly recommend this game for some serious high end retro gaming; it's easy to not consider it as highly as the original given Deus Ex's classic status but that's not judging the game on its own merits, which are:
good stories
great playability
lovely visuals (factor in the age obviously)
some pretty tough game play in places but nothing likely to send a laptop out the window.
One thing I didn't figure out is why NG Resonance and some of her staff are bought directly into the game, locked in the cargo area of the Arcology on the second visit to Cairo - I thought I must have skipped a chunk of plot with my choices at that point. However, having looked up the character on Wikipedia and seeing some similar confusion there, I'm wondering if the game makers cut a bit of unnecessary plot involving her.
An embarrassing note about my progression through the game is that I got to the second tour of Cairo before realising that you could move around bots that you have dominated!! .. talk about making the game more difficult for myself. That leads me to a tip for the Renegade ending; use a bot to kill the other Denton clones.
When you get to the Liberty Dock and meet Tracer Tong, don't kill him straight away - instead pretend to be still working for the Dentons
Repair Tracer's bots and get him to deploy them to the Statue of Liberty entrance
Now you can kill him and strip the area of any ammo, energy cells etc.
When you return the Statue of Liberty you'll find the three bots sitting outside
Before getting aggressive with the Dentons
Listen to what they have to say as far as them asking you to step into the Helios machine
Disable both ceiling turrets and the two flame thrower bots
Open both doors to the statue base so you can clearly see inside
Now you're ready to dominate one of the bots and let rip on the Dentons
Watch your health and you should be able to get rid of both Dentons before having to make a break for it; then you can restock your energy cells and pick of the remaining "Greys" one by one with the Magrail
Lastly destroy the link with Helios and you're done!
This is a tasty pork stir fry! (or chicken or turkey if you wish)
The only part of the recipe I claim is the glug of Irish Whiskey used to deglaze the pan before letting rip with the veggies. I've never seen anyone else using Irish Whiskey for this, although given the fundamentally asian recipe, that's hardly surprising, and I'm sure rice wine and various other local spirits are the norm in the appropriate countries!
These quantities are all "by touch" and serve two people with some seconds if you're little like me. The actual cooking time is just over 10 minutes, don't forget to put your rice or noodles on at the right time. If you're cooking rice put it into boiling water at the same time you start to brown the meat. If it's cooked a little earlier it will sit just fine while you finish the stir fry.
IMPORTANT: Don't do anything until you've got your meat prep'd and into the marinade. So, read the list of ingredients then go straight to prep the meat.
Ingredients
Enough pork for two.. this time round I used pork steak but you can use any of the cuts that suit high speed cooking. 1 large onion; coarsely chopped
2 medium cloves of garlic, very finely sliced
2 medium carrots; coarsely sliced (about 4mm)
1 chilli finely sliced; seeds are a personal choice; I taste a bit of the chilli and then gauge how many seeds should go in on how much I'm crying.
8-10 florets of broccolli
8 medium sized mushrooms, quartered or roughly sliced
About 10 black pepper corns (todo ferg check the picture)
About 10 coriander seeds
About 3 tablespoons of ordinary soy sauce
About 1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce
A splash of Nam Pla (Thai fish sauce)
A glug of Irish Whiskey (about a tablespoon)
Some fresh chives (straight from the freezer!)
Some fresh basil (also straight from the freezer!)
Some ground ginger
Some brown sugar
Some chicken stock; home made is best, shop bought fresh stock is second best, organic cubes third, regular cubes last. (Tangent - see Jamie Oliver's simple stock recipe if you want to see how easy it is to make and have a look at Ian Knauer's guide to jointing a chicken to see how easy that is - the two tasks go hand in hand.
However, they aren't strictly necessary for this one, in fact I used an organic chicken stock cube for the stir fry in the pics because I wanted to keep the frozen homemade stock that I had left in the freezer for making a soup)
Marinade
Heat a dry pan and add the pepper corns to it; move them around occasionally and pop them into a pestle once they've just started to smoke. Grind them finely.
Now do the same with the coriander.
1) Chuck the soy sauce into a large enough bowl to easily contain all of the meat
2) Add about a teaspoon of ground ginger
3) Add half the ground pepper
4) Add all the ground coriander
DON'T ADD THE SUGAR NOW!
5) Cube the pork into bite size pieces
6) Add the pork to the marinade in the bowl, use a couple of dessert spoons to gently turn it over until all the pieces are drenched in the yummy liquid. The tip here is simply that two spoons stop you from flicking the marinade all over the place.
7) Prep all of your veg as described in the ingredient list above.
Cooking
8) Brown the meat, get the oil good and hot for browning the meat; the surface should be lightly rippling but not quite smoking. Using a spatula push the meat out of the bowl facing away from you, this is going to hiss and spit like crazy so you're less likely to get splattered this way.
9) Don't play with it too much, let it brown a bit and then shimmy the wok to brown another part. About halfway through the browning process, sprinkle over a teaspoon or two of brown sugar, this will sticky up the meat nicely.
10) Once browned pop the meat out into another bowl to rest - some useful juices will come out while we're cooking the veg, so don't forget about them
11) Deglaze the pan a couple of tablespoon of stock
12) Chuck in the heavier veg, we're talking the carrots and onions at this point - keep them moving and they'll soak up all of that stock and flavour from the pan.
13) Add a dash of whiskey, let the alcohol boil off - if you don't, it will taste bitter
14) Add the broccolli and mushrooms, fry them for about a minute then add the chilli
15) Sprinkle over the rest of the pepper
16) Add another few tablespoons of stock, put on a lid and steam the veg for about two minutes or so to make sure things are cooked properly
17) Scissor in the chives and basil, and gently stir them well through
18) Let the stock reduce a bit - if you like you can thicken it will a little paste made from a teaspoon of corn flour and a tablespoon of cold water
Gentles; noun. A soft maggot used as bait by anglers.
I am reading a book that I first read in my early teens; “A Poacher’s Tale” by Fred J Speakman and Alfred T Curtis.
Mr Curtis was a poacher and gamekeeper who lived his life immersed in the natural world from the perspective of having to feed his family, and Mr. Speakman, an author and natural historian who lived in Epping Forest.
The issue I have bought is the eight edition copy printed in 1979. It’s utterly pristine and I purchased it from Abe’s Books in the UK. My Dad has the 1960 first edition; it has been read many times and shows the wear. As much as I wanted to re-read the book, I couldn’t bring myself to borrow, and risk damaging, a volume with so much sentimental attachment for me. My version still has the same lovely dust cover with the drawing of a poacher’s hand holding up a ferret. I suspect Dad thinks I’m barking for having gone off and bought another copy.
I think it was worth every cent and I highly recommend this book as a window into the skilled and fascinating lifestyle of Mr Curtis and folk like him before, during and after WWII.
So I've been going old school with some gaming over the last few weeks, playing my way through the entirety of Deus Ex and now getting stuck into Deus Ex - Invisible War.
For some reason Deus Ex passed me by first time round, at that point I was embedded in the mayhem of Unreal and Half-life. Two amazing games, so worthy distractions.
Deus Ex still stands up. I played 35 hours of the first game and I'm a couple of hours into the sequel now.
They're quite different. Deus Ex still has that "constructed from blocks" feel, we associate with the early 3D games. Think the original Wolfenstein 3D and Doom for the extreme examples of what I mean. That doesn't take away from the fantastic gameplay, which is sufficiently non-linear to make the storyline feel dynamic and under the player's control. I love the system for building skills such as lock picking and computer hacking, that allow you to tailor how Denton develops as the game progresses.
Invisible War is heavier graphically and is encumbered with what appears to be some clunky re-work to get it to run happily through Valve's Steam. For example, returning to my Windows 7 desktop every time it loads a new scene and (damn it!) some random crashing - don't get me wrong though, they don't get in the way of the excellent gameplay, which even makes it worth the occasional restart. The game flows smoothly and it has a different feel to the original. To compare it with a modern game I'd go with something more like the Bioshock series or even Metro 2033. A minor complaint is that the controls are less intuitive than the original game. There are some unnecessary, rotational menu animations that I find myself willing to complete, as soon as they start. We'll see how I feel about it in a couple of weeks, I suspect I'll be just as hooked as I have been on Deus Ex.
I watched the Channel 4 adaptation of William Boyd's "Any Human Heart" over the last few weeks. Bloody brilliant. Screenplay adaptation by the man himself and excellently cast with particularly good performances from Matthew MacFadyen and Jim Broadbent.
I love the randomly dropped plot threads. For any would-be writer, it delivers something of a swift kick in the pants, a "no-one is going to do this for you" reminder to get on with it and just write.
I have taken the plunge. I had intended releasing the alpha version of Deckwriter before migrating to GWT 2 but as wonderful as GWT prior to version two is, there was one major thing dragging me down; the Firefox rich text cursor bug.
In a nutshell when you create and then focus a RichTextArea class pre-GWT 2 in Firefox - the cursor remains invisible until the user leaves and then re-focuses the text area. Unfortunately that's a no go for a writing tool.
This means that I am delaying the alpha release - probably for at least a month but when the app does hit the ground it's going to be much further progressed than originally anticipated and running on Google's GWT latest platform.
In doing this migration I have also had to make the move to Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA 9, which means refactoring some of the architecture of the actual development project itself. Some things that were possible with the GWT 1.x plugin appear to not work with the version of the plugin supprting GWT 2. For example over riding servlet definitions within the various GWT module XML files to avoid having to launch the Spring framework. Perhaps a reader knows a way around that? .. why wait for Spring to launch when you don't necessarily need or want it to?
.. so why the title?
Well firstly the transition to GWT 2 with IDEA 9 is a logical progression and secondly, while writing this, I'm listening to One and Only from PFM on the Logical Progression - Level 1 anthology.
Over a month since my last post! - what has been going on to keep me from the blogosphere?
The Parisian
I have been aggressively re-editing The Parisian for release in the 2010 Sci Fi Almanac. This story will be illustrated by an old friend of mine and is the second in my Tales of the Stones series following The Gardener. More on that when I hear it.
As many of you know The Gardener was meant to be published as part of the "Maybe Tomorrow" anthology, originally due for release last year but had to be pushed back significantly by the publishers. They're back on track now and the current release estimate for that anthology is early autumn 2010.
Deckwriter
A project that I have been working on in the shadows for some time now, is Deckwriter. I'm getting close to the point (eta August) where it will be alpha tested by users, with the public beta to follow by the end of September.
The focus on writing multi-part documents, fiction, non-fiction or academic - books, scripts, papers and poetry - you name it. The bottom line is creating a tool that is transparent to use, that does not require training of any kind and does not tie the user to any particular way of working. Simplicity is key.
Please get in touch if you are interested in becoming an alpha tester.
HTML 5
Lastly, and as something of an aside; check out this excellent slideshow using the latest version of Chrome or Safari.
It demonstrates some of the new features arriving to the Web with HTML 5and showcases some of the great functionality that we will be able to bring to web applications.
There was a period of immense frustration when YouTube removed the shuffle facility from Playlists. I'm glad to see that it has returned. It's still a little awkward to get at.
I find the easiest way is to go first to your "Account" (rather than your "Channel"). Then select the Playlist of your choice from the "Video" option and click any video within the list. "Shuffle" should now appear as a toggle switch on the top right.
As you can see, the wonderful "Rocket" by Goldfrapp is my choice for the screenshot. This is a cracking tune that I first heard pumped out by Phantom (@phantom1052) a while back.
I just wanted to highlight one of the most succinct and useful examples imaginable for anyone needing to implement GWT code that is called from a third party JavaScript API.
You can define the JavaScript functions in native JavaScript, necessary to comply with whatever third party JavaScript API you are implementing and then point those functions straight back into your Java code for execution within your GWT application.
A much more detailed blog on this in an upcoming post.
I've been experimenting a little with some Mac OS dock clones for Windows over the last day or so.
At the moment I'm using ObjectDock on my little Alienware M11x (the screenshot to the right - and yes, that's my Mini), it's running Windows 7 and it seems very content with ObjectDock's integration. One little quirk is that you can't (at least I haven't found out how to) increase the autohide rate; I want it to vanish a little faster!
At the office I'm running XP SP3 - the ObjectDock installer repeatedly hung halfway through installation while copying the theme icons so I tried RocketDock instead and it's great! Really quick to setup - no instructions required and I've got a very functional top shifted task bar (auto-hiding) and RocketDock at the bottom. Here's a screenshot; note my rather large desktop - split with VirtualBox running on the right with Linux Mint and on the left we have the visible part of XP with RocketDock visible at the bottom and Balsamiq Mockups open with a prototype view from OpSource Cloud VIP management (load balancing is a very powerful feature of OpSource Cloud).
We'll see how they go - perhaps I'll try RocketDock on the M11x too, so that I'm using the same one in both places. For the newbie user, it "feels" a little more integrated with the OS than ObjectDockThe jury is out on this choice for now.
