Sequences and Cells.

I had read a little bit about this game before I did this, but for the most part I tried to go in cold. So I played like 30 minutes and then started recording. I was expecting it to be a heck of a lot harder than it actually ended up being. For the most part you can figure stuff out just by trying random things and then just seeing how they pan out and from there see if any of those moves actually helped you to getting to the solution. The first 3 chapters you only need like 3 moves to solve so it's easy enough to do it but I expect this approach will become more and more useless as you get further into the game.

The thing I like most about Splice has to be the look and feel of the game, everything just feels so good. The controls are simple and the way that the cells snap and bounce to different parts on the level is great. The menus are worth noting because it's just fantastic, it obviously wouldn't work for everything, but for something that is as minimalistic as this game it just adds that nice touch.

Fluffy Dimension!

A game made by Airtight games, who made Dark Void, and Kim Swift, who was one of the main minds behind the original Portal. So it seems a little unfair to compare those two games directly but it's sort of inevitable. Both first person puzzle games where you have a narrator commenting as you play through the game.

That aside though I think they've actually managed to make a compelling puzzle game. Yes it doesn't always quite pan out and some of the humour falls flat and I realise that if you hate puns you're going to be tearing your hair out at some point. But the parts where you just have a giant room with a bunch of moving parts and you think through what you need to do and then just do it is awesome. The parts that are less awesome are the ones that are slightly more platforming based, that can end up being rather clunky and awkward at times, especially when it's asking you to use some of the worlds smaller items as platforms like the safes instead of the nice big couches.

In other news I finished Max Payne 3, I did not enjoy that game all that much. It feels very much like Rockstar has their fingers all over it which I'm sure some people really like and the darker I hate my life max certainly plays into that. I just don't like the way it plays. I played on the easiest difficulty setting and even then when you just wanted to do something cool like go into shoot dodge it was still stupidly likely to get you killed regardless of how awesome it looked. Also the fact that some of the enemies are ridiculous bullet sponges doesn't help. He also moves like I'm moving a truck that's missing a wheel.

Self indulgent vacation post! This was meant to come yesterday but I was too busy enjoying the staying indoors and not doing anything vibe. As opposed of course my usual thing of staying indoors and actually doing things. Anyways off topic. I had a two week vacation a bit over a week in Hong Kong and the rest in Penang, Malaysia.

I used to live in Hong Kong a good long while ago now, but it's where I grew up and I sort of never really did a whole lot of the touristy stuff. Well actually I did, I just don't remember most of it because I'm awful. The point is I haven't really done any of that touristy stuff at a time when I actually might care about doing all of that stuff and that was pretty much my plan for my week in Hong Kong, go round and see what I could. Links to photos!

Hong Kong Day 1
Hong Kong Day 2
Hong Kong Day 3
Hong Kong Day 4
Hong Kong Day 5
Hong Kong Day 6
Penang
Return Hong Kong Layover

Also I'm aware that 6 days is less than a week okay, I only had the 6 days to actually go round and take photos. I'm sort of a sucker for tall buildings of glass and steel and in that way Hong Kong has me being a very happy person, I ended up spending a decent amount of time just admiring the skyline which is something that well being in London I don't really get to do because well it's just not as cool. Can't wait till the Shard gets finished, cause that building seems to be pretty cool.

Hong Kong also has a Disneyland which I settled on going after reciving a couple of replies on Twitter. One of my friends basically said before I left when I asked him, don't go to Disneyland it sucks. In pretty much those exact words. The day I spent there, I had a ton of fun. That comes with some caveats in that is a lot smaller than other ones around the world (they do have 2 expansions in development set to open later this year and next year) and there's only really just about enough stuff to do to fill a day. But it's still Disneyland, if you are on board with that idea already then guess what you're probably going to have a good time.

I also spent a decent amount of time going to a lot of the museums around Hong Kong, didn't manage to make it to the coastal defence museum which is a shame but it's sort of off to the side by its lonesome so it was an easy one to get cut off my list. Hong Kong History museum, awesome, really great collection of stuff especially from the leadup to the Opium war and onwards. Space Museum, awful, seriously not worth anyones time, I remember some of the exhibits from when I was a child. This was probably one of my biggest disappointments because China has one of the most active space programs right now so in theory it should've been fantastic and instead turned out to be completely lame. Art museum, closed on Thursday, guess which day I was outside their building. I'm actually not that much of an art person so I probably wouldn't have appreciated it anyway. Science museum, some really great stuff, I need to go to the London science museum for a comparison but seeing the Kinect powered robot lady even if it was a super simple tech demo was so cool to see there. Maritime museum, neat if you're there, not sure I would recommend going out to Stanley just to see it. I think its more interesting in the history museum because you miss out on the context that makes it relevant. Correctional Services museum, I blame the existence of the game Prison Architect for me even going to this one. Facinating to learn a tiny sliver of how prison services are designed in Hong Kong, but keep both an open mind and a grain of salt, it's fairly non critical the whole way through and while it does do a great job it's a pretty one sided presentation.

And obviously I can't not talk about food, which is for the most part lovely. Favourite meal was pretty early on because it's something I always have whenever I'm there, Day 1 La Mian and Xiao Long Bao, if you're ever in Hong Kong go to the restaurant Crystal Jade. It is a fairly inexpensive and fantastic meal. Also egg tarts from the Tai Cheong Bakery in Central. So good.

Penang was a family trip mostly so while I spent my time in Hong Kong solo, I was in Penang with my family. So for the most part I'm not going to say a huge amount here, but Penang has fantastic food. And generally we ate a lot at Hawker stalls (pretty much all the restaurant meals we had I didn't take photos of), so a typical bowl of noodle would cost somewhere between 3-5 MYR which is like a pound. My personal favourite is Hokkien Mee which can be seen because I had it like 3 times I think.

All in all, it was a good vacation, next time I go back to HK I need to con one of my friends to come with me. It was a bit of a short notice trip so it was sort of inevitable. It would definitely be a lot of fun with a couple of friends. Also because Dim Sum is super boring if you're eating by yourself. Anyway I shall get back to work now, and I shall have your not regularly scheduled game video coming up later this week.

Cubic extrusion.

This is another indie fund game and is a cool puzzle game. It's kind of impossible to talk about this game without making comparisons to portal (not portal 2). It just evokes the same sort of feel from the way the puzzle chambers are set out and very sort of minimal/spartan feel of the rooms. No it doesn't have a sociopathic AI taunting you and doesn't seem to have any dialogue at all, but it has a few of the same notes.

The puzzles feel good, I'm still fairly early goings but so far they're pretty smart. So long as they rely on you setting everything up with puzzles that have pretty loose timing then it'll be on the right track but there is a chance that it'll get more timing focused as the puzzles get more complicated and that would make for a real downer. Because I always feel that a puzzle game like this should really be about testing your mind and solving puzzles rather than reflexes.

There have been some puzzles that have required timing, but it's been forgiving enough that it hasn't bothered me so far. Anyway that's pretty much all I have to say for the moment, but this game is cool, I feel like I say that a lot maybe I should waste my time and show off a really awful game some time. Doing these once a week makes me feel like I should show off stuff that is cool or interesting, but maybe they deserve a counterpoint I don't know, something to think about.

Also I landed back in London pretty late last night so I'm still very much in catch up mode. In short vacation was pretty rad, but I've been itching to get back to it for a couple days now. I'll do a proper post about it in the next day or so after I've sifted through my photos and well gotten all this crap off my desk and finish unpacking everything to sensible parts of the house.

Waves and wobbling.

I will preface this by saying that I suck at playing this game. And the fact that it at least partly seems setup to be a leaderboard game makes it all the worse for me. But I think that this is a fun game despite my terribleness. It has some lovely music that is supposedly dynamic to some extent, but I haven't really played enough of the game to get a real good feel for that yet and it's good, it fits with the style of the game regardless.

Manipulating the wave is interesting, you just hold down the left mouse and then drag horizontally and vertically to adjust the frequency and amplitude of the wave. And you're trying to line that path up and to score as many points as you can. The main story levels all have 100% completion paths to them but at some points in playing it I do get totally and utterly lost and kind of have no real way of getting a particular group because I have messed up so badly. That's probably one of the more frustrating things that I've had to deal with while playing it, but the act of manipulating the wave feels good and probably more importantly pretty intuitive.

It's a game that I like but am probably not really good enough and won't be able to put the time into getting good enough at the game to continue with it. But I do like it quite a lot for what it does.

Sugar!

I think this game is adorable, just look at the sugar cube person with their overalls! Now with that out the way I'll talk about the game :). A 2010 IGF winner so I had pretty expectations going in, not for it to be a great game but that it was going to be really interesting. On the plus side it's both which is great. It's a puzzle platforming game where you flip the tiles that are behind your guy. So while the plane you're on might not have a platform on it, if you move over it and then move away there may be a new platform waiting for you, or a horrible spiky death.

On some levels there are lights that highlight what's behind the tile but on a lot of the maps that isn't the case and that can lead to a fair amount of trial and error if only just to see roughly what's on the map before actually solving the puzzle out and what you need to do. There have definitely been times where I'm on a map and then just not really quite managed to figure out what I needed to do without just blindly charging ahead and hoping for the best. So far that's worked out pretty well for me but it's definitely getting tougher and I expect that approach won't be valid for much longer.

Anyway I'm going on vacation for a few weeks so I'm going to try to get blog posts up, I've already done recordings :D which is great to have a buffer, but I sort of enjoyed not having one. Regardless I will hopefully get them put up to keep up a weekly sort of release schedule. Also first real vacation I've had in a good long while so I'm pretty excited.

Tank!

This game does indeed feature many tanks, but also turrets, men and mechs. This is the most recent game from@cliffski and follows up from his previous game Gratuitous Space Battles. This takes a lot of those customisation elements that were in that game and puts it into a tower defence game, where you can play as both the attackers and the defenders. What this leads to is a ridiculous number of turrets that you could make in order to defend your lanes and also a ridiculous amount of possible variation of enemies that can get sent at you. I haven't dived too much into the customisation yet but it looks like I probably should a bit more than I have, a lot of the parts are locked from the start so you need to play through the campaign to unlock new weapons and tools.

As seen in the video the game can be fairly hard even from very early on, that was just the 3rd mission and I expect that it will get even harder as time goes on, on the flip side it'll hopefully mean that I will have unlocked some choice parts that I would use for the future. I haven't played too much of the attackers so far, but it sort of plays how you would expect, you put down a creep on the tile and then it walks towards the exit. Almost all the units have weapons associated with them so it's important that you figure out what units are going to be the most cost effective way of destroying as many turrets as they can and also defending some of the more valuable Victory Point units to the end.

Strategy and Hexes.

Word play! Sorry I'm a bit too proud of that one. Back on topic I think this is a rather great strategy game. I'm not sure how much longevity it will have at the moment but I'm having lots of fun with it. The lack of multiplayer is a little bit jarring, but from what they've said they're working on it and it will be put in with a patch down the line which will be really good because the AI is good but not fantastic. In the later stages of the game it's pretty easy to steamroll them but early on they can be appropriately punishing you for you mistake.

The focus on combat is nice because I think that with the magic and the unit variety of having three separate races, general units that are related to one of the many gods and the resources on the map really make it pretty interesting. There are also plenty of neutral units which are no pushovers either, sending your scouts through the mystic portal and seeing a dragon that can kill your units in a single swipe is pretty awesome. The city management is super streamlined so that you build a new building every time your city increases in size and that's about it. No trade, no roads like in Civilisation. If you were a fan of the complexity that Civ offered on that front you're probably going to miss it an awful lot. I liked it for this game because it keeps your focus on the battlefield, but it makes peace time a fairly uninteresting affair.

The biggest knock I have against the game is the lack of an in game encyclopedia of some sort. There is definitely a tech tree associated with buildings and units and there is at least a loose sort of tech tree for magic research. It'll take you a good long while to figure out what you need to build to get what units and a lot of that could be side stepped just by having some sort of reference tool that you could look at.

Fluids.

More specifically water. Or at least I think it's supposed to be water. Also I apologise for getting stuck at that elevator like a muppet, totally got the wrong idea from step one :). But my stupidity aside, I like this game quite a lot. I feel sort of like I missed the boat on this one playing it a couple months after it came out, but ah well better late than never.

So far the puzzles are fairly simple, mostly to let me get used to all of the mechanics and I expect that it'll dole out more complicated stuff as I get further and it was pretty awesome to see the giant over elaborate spike machine of death at the end. I'm aware there are more gadgets to play around with beyond just the single magnety fluro maker thing that I have right now.

Tower defence in space.

This is a good tower defence game. I'm going to open saying that because I didn't really get into this game that much. The first tower defence game I played was back in the Warcraft 3 days which is like a decade old now. So I've played a lot of tower defence games and now days it really needs something special to draw me into it. Plants vs Zombies is just an adorable game with just a wonderful balance of strategy and accessible to pretty much everyone. This kind of doesn't have that kind of pull.

I love the fake terrible old sci-fi TV show look they have for the story stuff and to a large extent into the entire art style but for the most part it's a fairly standard tower defence game, you build towers and you upgrade them and you kill enemies. There are a couple of small twists in that the enemy path can change during the course of the game and you have limited satellites that you move around but it still ends up feeling just kind of the same.

If you aren't entirely sick of the genre then its worth a look but otherwise keep waiting for something else to come along, but to be honest despite the shear quantity of tower defence games being put out now days including on iOS and Android very few of them are actually anything special. The most recent one that actually caught my eye at all was probably Iron Brigade/Trenched and unfortunately it's one of a very small pack.