I bought this game on-special on Steam over XMAS, but I had not played it yet. I had assumed it was going to be a tricky action-based game, and I never felt I quite had the patience for that before.

My bad.

The premise of the game is that the player and The Maw escape imprisonment on a space ship when it crash-lands in the opening sequence. Together they must try to make their way past their captors and the local wild-life to try and escape altogether.

Throughout the game the player must guide The Maw by an electronic leash that you find at the start of the first level. This gets hard at times when The Maw has his own idea of what he’d like to do.

The Maw is very expressive, which is quite an achievement considering he barely has any features at all. The styling and animation of this game has a very cartoony feel to it, which works perfectly with its sense of humour.

When The Maw gets excited he hops around on his one foot. When he gets hit he looks dazed. When he eats something delicious he gets a dreamy look in his eyes… uhm… eye.

Oh, I forgot to mention.

The Maw likes to eat things.

Anything really. Little of the indigenous fauna will be left standing when you complete each level. And as he eats, he will occasionally grow a size. And as he grows, he can eat larger food. And he will not leave you in any doubt as to what he’d like to eat next.

And that’s where the main twist comes in. Occasionally when eating an animal, The Maw will transform and gain an ability of said animal (no spoilers).

This adds a lot of variety to the game-play, because the strategy to tackle various levels changes depending on The Maw’s last meal.

Although a game with so much variety might otherwise risk becoming inaccessible to inexperienced gamers, The Maw manages to keep things flowing naturally by providing casual hints as you go along.

Early on, floating question marks draw attention to the next thing to try.

The level design seems to have been done very well to steer the line-of-sight of the player so that crucial elements of the level naturally come in view without feeling forced.

Additionally, the game controls are explained as you go along as well. At the start pop-up screens explain the main buttons to lead The Maw, move objects and throw them around.

And for the more action-based controls, small overlay balloons show you which button to use to for example do a Matrix-style dodge of an incoming shot.

And even if you react too late, nothing is lost. There are no “lives” in this game. You cannot die.

The only “down-side” of all this built-in assistance is that this is not a very challenging game. I managed to complete it in under 5 hours. And even if I try to finish all the achievements it probably would not add more than another 5 hours on top of that.

Having said that, nothing feels like “filler” in this game. New game elements are continuously introduced to the player and none of the levels involve excessive back-tracking in an attempt to make it feel like “you are getting your moneys’ worth“. It also doesn’t attempt to stretch the game by being fiddly; the controls are quite forgiving when trying to line up an action.

All up, it’s a lot of fun, and never really frustrating.

The only real criticism I have is that at times I wish I could have panned the camera up or down to get a better view of the level, but unfortunately you can only control it 360 degrees around. This is only a minor quibble though, because it never prevented me from seeing what I needed to see to keep going.

You can get the whole game on Steam with all the downloadable content for US$12, and that’s only if you’re not patient enough to wait for it to be on special sometime.

I turned my no-longer-needed-because-I-upgraded Samsung Galaxy S into a HD7850 (almost), via the alchemical process called eBay. I’ve long since gotten over wanting to hang on to bits of hardware “just in case I need it sometime“.

I never do.

And they end up gathering dust till they are obsolete.

The best way to go about this I’ve found is to let the item do all the work:

• List the most relevant specs
• Highlight the best features
• Mention any flaws, but don’t dwell on them
• List for as long as possible (10 days)
• Start at $0.99

And that last step is the scary part. So far every time I’ve sold for more than I expected, but it is always possible it ends up selling for $0.99 … I’d only stray from this tactic if I had to sell something to a niche market that might not spot the item within 10 days.

So finally, I’m back on a real graphics card. After my HD5870 died sometime last year and I settled for a HD5450 to tide me over, I can finally play Settlers 7 again!

I was originally looking at a HD7950 or a HD7870, but after some reflection I’m not the kind of gamer that needs the fastest possible card. I’ll drop the detail a fraction if I really cannot hit a decent framerate as-is.

And the media PC in the living room has a brand new silent (fan-less) HD5450 in the process.

Addendum (9pm): It feels great maxing out all those sliders! … That is all.

Front of the Box

Almost every Wednesday evening we have some friends over. It’s a long-standing weekly ritual. It involves having snacks and dinner and dessert together. Sometimes it involves nothing but talk. Sometimes we go out and watch a movie. But most of the time we play board games…

I may have to be a little bit more specific here, because the first mental image that “board games” conjures for most people are the bland mainstays of Monopoly or Risk. Little do they know there’s this whole ‘nuther world out there of somewhat geeky/nerdy (but don’t let that turn you off before you try!) games with a lot more depth and complexity than traditional board games. And it really isn’t as intimidating as it sounds.

Tonight was the first time we tried Forbidden Island, and it played a lot quicker than I would have expected. In the end we had enough time to play 6 rounds, although some were shockingly brief.

Back of the Box

What is somewhat special about this game is that you do not play against each other. All the players are adventurers stuck together on an island, filled with treasures, that is slowly sinking. Everybody plays with their cards open on the table. It is a cooperative game, and you either win or lose together. The game actively tries to kill you all.

Fun fact: there is one way to win the game – collect all the treasures while shoring up the island to keep it above water just long enough to all make it back to the helicopter pad and escape the island.

Second fun fact: there are three ways to lose the game – one of the players drowns, or a part of the island sinks that is critical to completing the mission, or the water level rises too high.

Let’s put it this way: the odds are slightly stacked against the players. We played six rounds in about three hours at the “Novice” level. The first attempt we lost the game without even completing a full round due to sheer bad luck.

Contents of the Box

All in all I think we won three out of six, but it was more of a struggle than it seemed it should have been. The good thing about the game is that the turns are all pretty quick, so nobody will have to sit around twiddling thumbs getting bored. And when you lose, there’s always time for another game.

The rules seem complex at first reading, but once you get to playing the game it’s really not that hard to wrap your head around. The most easily forgotten part is that each adventurer has a “profession” and a special ability that comes with it. It’s very easy to overlook your special abilities when in the heat of the moment you are trying to save the helipad from sinking into the abyss and rescuing the pilot from certain death.

I think it’ll be a while before we scale the fourth difficulty level, intimidatingly labelled “Legendary”.

About ten minutes into the storm tonight it occurred to me that I had access to a tripod and a good quality DSLR. The view out the front rooms has always been great for lightning; the house is on the raised side of the street and we have a rather good view out over the suburb here.

Lots of sky.

Unfortunately it turned out that most of the lightning was happening behind the cloud cover, so I got only a few single bolts, and lots of ho-hum shots with purple/blue clouds.

After a day of no driving (everything is closed on Sunday, so there wasn’t really anywhere to go) it seemed like everyone started driving along as soon as the rain started. Most of my shots have streaky headlights in the bottom. I kept a few of the better ones to show off how wet the weather was. Especially the last one shows off the bucketing rain in the headlights of a passing car.

Now… what was I doing before all this started happening?

Procrastination

I have wanted to re-style this site for quite some time. Looking at the free WordPress themes for inspiration I’d decided to get what I wanted I was going to have to put it together myself.

Alas, finding time to do it right has proven difficult.

Turns out that there was a much simpler way out. For about US$25 – US$35 the Theme Forest site has a very broad range of professional designs for WordPress. And plenty of them looking close enough to be good enough.

If you are looking to put together a personal blog this is an excellent place to get something slick. Just ask yourself, how much is your time worth to you? And how little of it would US$30 pay for?

Of course this means the theme isn’t completely exclusive to me, but there are plenty of knobs and levers to twiddle that it won’t look much like anyone else’s. Note that a lot of these themes use “Option Tree” which is a WordPress plugin that provides for very flexible configuration pages.

I wanted something a bit more than just a slick theme though; I wanted a responsive design that adjusts itself based on the dimensions of the window. As a result, if you look at this site on a mobile device or re-size the window it should adapt to any available space.

Responsive designs are not quite common yet, but more of them come out every day.

My Theme Choice

In the end I settled on the Apex Responsive Portfolio theme, which I tweaked and customised quite extensively to make it more my own.

The theme options allowed for most of the tweaks:

• Picking a blue shade for the highlight colour
• Adjusting the header fonts from the Google Web Font library
• Substituting a custom logo based on the same font and colour I already picked
• Setting up the front page slider with my own images
• Customising the header menus
• Tweaking the footer widgets

That didn’t quite get me where I wanted to be, so in the end I had to resort to some custom PHP hacking in the theme files. In no way do I recommend this. Few developers have the discipline to write maintainable PHP.

• By default the blog view truncates every post to the first 35-odd words; I like my blog to show the full post instead.
• Even where I didn’t want the full post to show, 35 words doesn’t seem like nearly enough. Although the word count was a parameter to the calls in the theme, it didn’t seem to accept values above 55, so… more tweaking.

There were many more minor tweaks that I won’t go into right now.

More interesting is the matter of plug-ins. It took me quite some time to find a compatible and functional set to address my needs. I’ll write about that process sometime soon, because I think I have a few useful suggestions for would-be WordPress users.