Sore Thumb Video Games in York

This is not a video game shop

Went to York today. Of course we took a picture of York Minster (see above). Of course we had a great meal at Zaap Thai. And of course we went to the Sore Thumb retro video game shop. This is an amazing place. Consoles and games jostle together on crammed shelves and they have at least one of everything. The even had a couple of GameBoy micros but not at prices I could ever afford. I made one small, silly purchase (of which more later) and they let me take some pictures of the place.

If you’re in York you really should go. If you’re near York you should go to York and then go there. A great place.

Have a go at Uno Flip

You’ve probably played Uno already. It’s a card game that goes back years. I can remember playing it with the kids back in the day. And we’ve found a new version, Uno Flip.

I’d love to have been at the product meeting where someone said: “You know how our cards have numbers and colours, and the aim is to match them. Well, why not put numbers and colours on the backs of the cards too, and then make the players flip between front and back?”.

Genius. So now you have extra cards that you can play to flip everyone to the other side and totally change the gameplay in the middle of a game. And the backs (also known as the dark side) have some really nasty new actions including one that makes someone pick up cards until they match the colour you’ve chosen. We played the game today and it was hilarious fun. The mark of a great game is one I enjoy even when I lose. Uno Flip is a great game.

Marvel Snap is fun

I’ve had a few good games of Marvel Snap today. You can play it for free and have fun, although to progress you’re probably going to end up parting with cash.

Dominion on the Steam Deck works rather well

The Dominion card game has kind of taken over our Tuesday game nights. The great thing about it is that by using different cards each week you can get a totally different game experience. I’ve started using my Steam Deck to play it (you can find the game on Steam). It works rather well. Probably overkill, but it works for me. I like having a Dominon game on the go when watching naff telly. Today I nearly managed beat the medium AI opponent, which was rather pleasing.

Saving money on Gran Turismo 7

If you’re trying to find the cheapest possible way of getting hold of the latest version of Gran Turismo you might like to know that Shopto.net are selling PlayStation network Gift Cards at around 12% off. This means that you can pick up a copy of the game for around 60 pounds rather than 70. This is of particular interest to people like me, who have the version of the PS5 without a disk drive.

Dominion Winner

I’m starting to really like the Dominion card game. Two reasons.

1. You can play it for free online

2. I won a game last night

Humble Bundles for Makers and Gamers

Talking of Discord, as we were, Grace on the Hull Makerspace posted that there is presently a great “Humble Bundle” for Maker books going at the moment. You can get a whole bunch of ebooks from Make magazine for around ten quid. Find out more here or click the image.

Simon (on another discord channel) also told me about a really good bundle of tabletop games that is also available. You can find that one here or click the image.

We’ve played quite a few of these and they all work well, particularly for network play.

Among Us is very annoying - and great fun

We played Among Us for a couple of hours tonight. It was hilarious. Everyone is trying to repair a spaceship. Except one person - the imposter. The Imposter can sabotage the ship and kill crew members. When a death is discovered the remaining crew get together and try to decide who to throw out of the airlock. Get it right and the crew win. Get it wrong and the game continues until the imposter runs out of crew to kill or the crew fix the ship. Dead players return as ghosts who can float around trying to complete their original tasks.

It works on loads of platforms and the graphics and gameplay are super smooth. I only got to be the imposter twice and managed to mess up both times, but I really enjoyed the hearty debate that followed the discovery of each dead person in the other games. If you are looking for a bit of networked anarchy you should find some friends and have a go. I used the iPad version which worked OK although I’ve never been a fan of touch screens. I think the way forward is to pay for it on Steam and then use a PC. The game works across all the platforms.

Quiplash Fun

Jackbox Games are great. I’ve got very fond memories of playing “You don’t know Jack” from CD way back in the day. Tonight we had a go at a bunch more JackBox games, including “QuipLash”. In Quip Lash you have to come up with quick quips which the rest of the players then vote on. My favourite of the night was when Simon was asked to write something you wouldn’t expect to find in a message in a bottle. He came up with “Please send another bottle”. Awesome stuff. We also played some Fibbage, and that was fun too.

Enigma on Netgames.io is great fun

I’ve mentioned netgames.io before. Its a tiny web site that lets you play multiplayer games. They’ve added another game to the site, Enigma. Opposing teams have to give clues to code words and pass messages without them being intercepted. You need at least four or five players and a means of having private chats (we used Discord) but the gameplay is brain bending fun. I was quite pleased to be on the winning team.

Microsoft Flight Sim is awesome

Very exciting day yesterday. Installed Microsoft Flight Sim. It only cost me one pound to get it. I’ve signed up for Xbox Game Pass for PC which will end up costing me four quid a month. Total bargain. Although I guess I should also factor in the cost of a larger SSD drive to hold all the games I’m now going to download….

The game itself took a while to download, what with it taking up over 120 Gbytes. Apparently you can buy it on 20 disks if you want a physical copy. It. Is. Awesome. The install process took ages and the game itself takes a while to get going. But once it is running it is fabulous. The views inside and outside the cockpit are very impressive. You can fly anywhere in the world, although it might not look quite as you remember. The Humber Bridge you can see above looks like it needs a bit of work. You can just see the shadows of the towers that should be there at the bottom of the screenshot above.

I’m not very good at flying the plane (the wings came off shortly after I took the picture) but I’m having great fun. I’m using a wired XBOX controller which gives me all the control I can handle just at the moment. We’re planning our first group flight soon, which should be fun.

If you are interested in flying, or just seeing the world, you should have a go.

Playstation Controller Back Buttons

Number one son is in town for the weekend. We went shopping today and he bought something rather interesting. Back buttons for the PlayStation 4 controller. They are a nifty moulding that fits underneath between the controller sides. By cunning use of a moving plug they wrap themselves around to make it look as if they are part of the controller. They provide two extra buttons that are really easy to press with those fingers that normally wrap around the controller to hold it. They are configured using a tiny OLED screen and a single button. You can get them to produce a button press that is mapped onto any of the other controls.

For example, you might replace things that are rather hard to do, like pressing in the thumbsticks, with rear button presses. And some actions, for example change up and down the gears in a driving game, are crying out to be put onto controls like these.

They work with all existing games because as far as the game is concerned there is nothing new happening. The game is getting the control inputs it is expecting, but they are being triggered in a different way.

I’ve been told (quite rightly) that I don’t play games at the stratospheric level for such add-ons to really pay off for me, but if you want to do things like shoot when jumping or easily change gears, they are worth a look. Apparently in the UK they are being sold exclusively by Game.

Project XCloud looks very good

When David came round last week he showed us some Xbox games running on his Samsung phone. Not directly of course, but via Project XCloud. This is presently in Preview and David had managed to join the preview program. Once he had connected to our WiFi and paired an Xbox controller with his phone we were able to see a perfect rendition of Forza Horizons running smoothly on his tiny device. It just worked. I had a quick go at driving and it seemed as responsive as the local version.

Of course we are quite lucky in Hull, what with our high performance fibre internet everywhere, but hopefully it will work as well in less well connected regions. It looked very good. It even inspired me to spend some more time in the Forza universe, which was great fun as usual. There’s nothing like going sideways down a frosty road at great speed in a top of the line BMW. I sat down for “a quick drive” and got up two hours later…..

Apple Arcade

I didn’t intend to get hooked on the Apple ecosystem but here we are. What can I say? The stuff just works.

The latest iPhones are very nice. They have almost caught up with my Lovely Lumia 1520 which I still have. I get it out every now and then, marvel at the design and the UI and then sadly put it back in the drawer.

I’ve just signed up for Apple Arcade. It costs around the same as a packet of cigarettes a month and I can share it with number one wife, who has found a bunch of nice casual games including one that lets you mess around with Jane Austen text.

I really like Assemble with Care, which has a bunch of beautifully built 3D models to play with.

And Speed Demons is great high sped fun. You can use your favourite XBOX or PS4 controller with your iPhone, which seems so wrong but actually works really well.

You can get a free month to see if you like it. If you have an Apple device it is worth playing with.

Zookeeper Success

I’ve been playing Zookeeper again. Today I achieved this. Go me.

Learning through games

I’ve got my two button game working now. It’s fun watching people play a game that you’ve made. They start doing things that you weren’t expecting. But sometimes you find out other things too.

The gameplay (press the red button if there are more red lights lit, blue if more blue) is simple, but I make the task more interesting by adding more colours and making the colours move around the lights. Then I thought I’d make the lights flash on for half a second and then off, so that the player has very little time to count them.

This actually makes the gameplay seem easier (at least for me). The brain seems to retain the information for a while so that you can work out the answer, even with a very brief look at them.

I think this is the basis of “flash cards” although I may be wrong. But it is a useful reminder of the way that you can start going down really interesting tracks when you start fiddling with games.

Getting Started with Micro Python on ESP32

I got my little game working on the Raspberry Pi yesterday, and today I got to thinking how I could make it work on something a bit, er, cheaper. It’s not so much that I begrudge paying the price for the Pi, more that I can think of more demanding things to do with the Pi than just run the game. My thoughts turned to the ultra-cheap ESP32 devices that I’ve been playing with. The only snag is that I’ve written the entire game in Python for the Raspberry Pi, and I don’t fancy re-writing it in the C++ that these devices normally run.

So, why not run Pyhon on an ESP 32 device?

This turns out to be really easy. If you’ve installed ESP32 devices as part of your Arduino development environment you will have a useful little program called esptool.py on your machine. To convert a device to Micro Python you just have to plug in one of those ultra-cheap devices, find out what serial port it is connected to (in my case com4) and then use the command below to program the chip with Micro Python.

esptool.py --chip esp32 --port com4 --baud 460800 write_flash -z 0x1000 micropython.bin

This loads the image in the file micropython.bin into the device. To get a Python image, go to the download site and look for ESP32 devices. I used the one in the file esp32-20190714-v1.11-146-g154062d9c.bin

Above you can see what happened when I ran the command.

When you restart your ESP32 you will be able to talk Python to it via a command prompt. That’s fine, but what you really want is an IDE that lets you write and deploy Python programs.

The best one I’ve found is called Thonny. It’s works with “normal” Python nicely enough, but it also has an option you can use to point it at an embedded device:

In the options menu above I’ve told Thonny to search for a device running MicroPython and connect to that. Now, when I run a program it is deployed into the device and executes from there.

The MicroPython installation provides a tiny filesystem that can hold python programs. When you run a program it is transferred into that filesystem and runs from there. There are two special program files on the device, boot.py and main.py. The program in the boot.py file is executed when the device powers up, followed by the one in main.py The Thonny program has an option (in the Device menu) to save the program you are editing one of these files. This makes it really easy to make your Python program run when the device is powered up. I made my game program the main.py one and now I have my original Python program running inside a device that only cost around a fiver.

It wasn’t quite as simple as just copying the files over. The api (application programmer interface) to use GPIO ports and Neopixels are different in the two devices and I discovered that MicroPython does not provide a random.shuffle method. This meant that I had to create my own shuffling function, which wasn’t too hard.

Anyhoo, I now have my program running in Python on a tiny embedded device. Which is rather nice. I’ll put the code up on GitHub later this week.

Hull Raspberry Jam with Two Buttons

Well, that was fun. I really should have taken some pictures of the jam, it was great fun. There were loads of machines set up and creativity going on all over the place. I took my “Two Button Box” along and developed the rest of the software. Thanks to Ben, Jon and Matt for advice and help on getting my Python program to run each time the box is powered on (this harks back to my Unix days of old - editing the rc.local file to run programs on boot up).

Players need to press the red button when there are more red lights lit, and the blue button when there are more blue lights lit. I’d taken a bit of care to make the gameplay progressive. The game starts simple, with just red and blue lights, but then other colours appear and then they all start to move around.

It’s always nice to see people playing a game that you made. I’m not sure it pushes back any frontiers or brings anything particularly new to gaming, but it is always nice to see someone enjoying playing with something you’ve made; particularly if you enjoyed making it.

You can see it in action here. Thanks to Jon for the video.

Reliant Regal in Forza Horizons 3

Forza Horizons is an awesome franchise. I have great memories of playing Forza Horizons 2 with the Storm Island add-on. Number one son has got Forza Horizons 3 and we were playing it this evening. The game has "Barn Finds", cars that you can unlock by, er,, finding them in barns dotted around the map.

We had a look for barn finds today and found a Reliant Regal three wheeler van in one barn. This was actually my very first car, although I don't remember it being painted in quite such a lush shade of green.

This is the vehicle made famous by the "Only Fools and Horses" sitcom, although people often refer to the one in that show as a "Reliant Robin", which it is not. The Regal is much less sophisticated than that. It has a fibreglass body over a steel chassis, with a 700cc engine sitting nearly in the passenger compartment. Nought to sixty in "You don't want to go there...".

Number one son had an experimental drive and noticed that it is surprisingly easy to tip it over. And slow. And noisy. But the exterior and the interior have both been lovingly recreated.I think this feature is probably worth the price of the game on it's own. If it had a Nissan Cube and a BMW i3 the game would be completely perfect.

Actually, the gameplay and the sheer depth of content make the game an absolutely fantastic buy anyway. I'm tempted to get it in the "dual" version so that I can play it on the PC and on the Xbox One.

Euro Truck Simulator 2

So today I had a go at Euro Truck Simulator 2. To be honest, it could have gone better.