Death Squared

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The people who wrote Death Squared must have played quite a bit of Portal. (If you’ve not played Portal, where have you been? It’s a series of fiendish puzzles which are overseen by a nasty computer with a great line in one liners).

Death Squared uses a similar scenario (you have to perform a series of tests for some reason) but the actual tests themselves involve each player getting their coloured cube from the start position to the end position. Each level involves a lot of experimentation, and it works really well the more people you have. Two player is rather good, three player for us was hampered by the need for one player to control two cubes. The puzzles are nicely progressive and really encourage the players to work together. Nowhere near as frantic or silly as Overcooked (of which more later), but fun for thinkers who want some cooperative action. 

Perspex Pixelbots at c4di

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This is lovely. I've been pondering how to make Hull Pixelbots quickly (printing one takes around 8 hours or so) and then someone walks into the Hardware Meetup with a perspex pixelbot. 

Then Karl walks in with a laser cut chassis. He'd taken my stl files and converted them into flat components. Then he'd taken the designs to his work and got some prototypes cut out of perspex. The next step is to find out how much it will cost to get a bunch made. 

Snake Pass

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Snake Pass is a charming little game in which you have to steer Noodle the snake around a range of different locations, picking up points and and climbing around things. The biggest problem I have with the game is that the snake is a bit hard to control. Snake steering is not too tricky, but it can be hard to climb things. You’re supposed to be able to contract the snake to grip things, but I seem to lack the skills to grab things and climb up them. I found it a bit frustrating when I couldn’t reach high things and even more frustrating when I fell off the game world and plummeted to my doom.

Perhaps I should spend an evening practising climbing fence posts, but that sounds a bit too much like work to me. The environments are sumptuous and the snake is charming though. I'm going to have to put in some proper practice methinks. . 

Shephy

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Shephy is cheep. There. I’ve said the nice thing about it. It’s based on a card game, and for me it should have stayed as one. I’ve tried to like it but failed several times, and now I just don’t care. The aim of the game is to play different kinds of sheep card to assemble an impossibly large number of sheep on the screen. Every turn cruel fate gives you a bunch of horrible cards which take you further from your goal. The instructions on the cards are a bit hard to read, and its hard to remember what they all do.  

This might be a case of me getting upset with a game that I just don’t have the mental horsepower to play, but I challenge anyone to have a go and enjoy it. Best avoided. Would make a good Christmas present for someone you don’t like much. 

The Bridge

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The Bridge is a physics based game with a nice artwork style and a bunch of puzzles that are really brain bending but very satisfying when you figure out how to solve them. I bought it on the Nintendo Switch but it is available on lots of other platforms too.  

You have to navigate a nicely animated professorial type around a series of locations. You can rotate the world around your hero and make gravity your friend to avoid nasty adversaries and find keys. It works really well as a hand-held game, but the monochrome artwork looks very nice on the large screen too. 

For the price it represents good value. I’ve reached the point where I want to step back from the game for a while so that I don’t finish it too soon. 

Waking up Digby

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We've been trying to wake up Digby my Aibo from ages back. The Sony Aibo was a very ambitious project by Sony to make a robotic pet. I got one a while back just as the product was winding down. I've not played with Digby (as we call him) for a while, but once we'd given them a good charge, one of the Lithium Ion batteries got him going. 

Unfortunately there's something amiss with his head. When he moves to certain positions it seems to think that the joint is stuck and he falls down. Next step is a bit of micro surgery looking for noisy potentiometers and broken flexible circuit boards. 

But we'll get him sorted. 

Chair balancing for beginners

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One of the other neat things they have at States of Play is a bunch of balancing chairs. When I first saw them I had thoughts of steel pegs in the floor, or strings from the roof. 

Not so. The chairs really do balance like this. They have weights and a flat part to balance on. I had a go at balancing and it really is quite tricky. Which is code for "No, I couldn't do it..."

This would have been a film review

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The blog post editing interface for Squarespace, my blog host of choice, is deeply ropey, browser dependent and very annoying. But I've reached the point where I can smell when it is going to fail on me, and this time I managed to grab a screen capture just before it fell over completely. Sorry if it's a bit hard to read, but I'm darned if I'm going to type it all again just because someone can't write JavaScript properly. 

Curse you, Windows 10

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I tried something a while back and it worked when I didn't expect it to. Always a bad sign. Of course, today I wanted to do it again and it failed. Nothing much has changed in my system. Except, oh yes, Windows 10 Creators Update.  Not much use if what you want to create is printed pictures from your Polaroid Pogo printer. Used to work fine over Bluetooth. Now I get this masterpiece of an error message. Useless at pretty much every level. I've done some searching, but nothing so far has worked. It looks like my little printer and me might have reached the end of the line. 

Oh well, such is progress. 

Lensbaby at Castle Howard

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A while back I bought a LensBaby lens. It's great fun. To adjust the aperture you fit little metal disks with different sized holes in them. And you can move the entire lens about on the front of the camera to get strange focusing effects. 

We went to Castle Howard today. Lovely place. I decided to leave the LensBaby on the camera to see what kind of results I got. Quite fun.