Atari
permanent marker on paper
22 1/2 x 30 inches
hbt10-p074
2010
Available for purchase HERE
Hi Resolution HERE
(Source: Flickr / hollisbrownthornton)
Super Mario All-Stars coming to Wii in Japan
The Super Mario series turned 25 years old this year and Nintendo plans to celebrate in Japan by re-releasing Super Mario All-Stars on the Wii.
If this doesn’t come out in Australia I am going to hurt somebody.
I have owned, at some point, 9 of the above. I currently only own 3 of the above. :(
(Source: sexdog)
Colour images from another planet
I’ve always been fascinated by pre-1950s colour photography (I think there’s already at least one post about it on this feeble excuse for a blog), and this morning I came across a post by Merlin Mann which sums up my feelings about it nicely:
When done well, these images help repudiate the implicit modern reading that pre-color photography realistically captured the simple but alien lives of people who were neither as complex, interesting, nor sophisticated as we CMYK people are.
The image that captured his attention is interesting, but more usefully he linked to several galleries of images I could probably waste my morning flicking through. The photos from Imperial Russia are particularly amazing.
Review: The Incident
(I hesitate to be labeling my badly structured, poorly thought-out ramblings about video games here as ‘reviews’, but expressing my opinions about a game and revealing what’s right or wrong with it does probably pass for at least a limited form of evaluation, so there we go. I didn’t expect my previous post about DOOM II RPG to be as long or as detailed as it was, but I knew it was going to be longer than the 140 characters I could fit into my Twitter feed, which is why I dumped it here. I expect further posts to be significantly briefer.)
The Incident is the latest in an increasingly large pile of bright, cute, pixel-arty toy games on the App Store. Good pixel art attracts me like outdoor lights attract moths, so on observing the gameplay to be not terribly dissimilar (at least in spirit) to the excellent Canabalt (buy it), and after reading a few largely positive blurbs about the game I barley hesitated in dropping $2.49AU and picking it up.
I have come to regret this decision. Where Canabalt was a tense, fast-paced affair that had me lurching involuntarily in my seat as I tore across the cityscape attempting to escape uncertain doom, The Incident is largely a dull, aimless and unrewarding plod. You control a small, charmingly drawn chap who is in an unlikely predicament — it has suddenly begun raining objects of all kinds (statues, doors, motor vehicles, and so on) and your job is to avoid the falling objects (by tilting your device, causing our little man to run side to side) and try not to be trapped by them in the process (by tapping the screen, causing him to jump).
And that’s it, really. The biggest problem I have with The Incident is that it doesn’t appear to end. Checkpoints are frequent, so you’re not forced to start from the first level each time you play, although given that the gameplay never really changes (aside from speeding up gradually as you make progress) it’s not clear why restarting would be a problem. In fact, the game would probably be significantly more entertaining if you were given only one life and no checkpoints, and were forced to make your way as far as you could before being bonked on the noggin by a bowling ball. You wouldn’t put checkpoints in, say, Tetris, would you? The only justification I can think of is that the developers wanted the gorgeous (and they are gorgeous) backdrops to be visible to the widest possible audience, rather than merely a dedicated few. Which is crap.
If it wasn’t so boring there’d be a lot to like about this game. The tilt controls work well, the pixel art is wonderful, the music is catchy and not all that annoying. But none of these are really worth wasting much space on, as it’s deeply flawed and you’re better off saving your coffee money for, uh, maybe a coffee. Or Canabalt, if you don’t already own it.
I should point out that the developer’s blurb on iTunes mentions a “B-Mode”. Because this sounds like the excellent “mode B” of the original Tetris, I originally thought it might be a faster-paced, more concise version of the main game, more suited to quick bursts of score-attack-style play. Unfortunately, it seems that “B-Mode” is merely a cute easter egg in which the game is identical aside from the main character sporting a beard. Clever.
So, what’s the point of all this? Don’t buy The Incident, I suppose.
Doom II RPG
id software had a sale on all of their iPhone games recently, so I took the opportunity to pick up a few. DOOM II RPG was pretty much #1 on my buy-list. I’ve now sunk a few hours into it and I’m sad to report that it is, unfortunately, pretty rubbish.
For a platform that’s basically perfect for them, the iPhone has a pretty huge gap in its library when it comes to turn-based RPGs. There are certainly a few, but they’re either shallow or dull or shallow and dull. The weakest link in the iPhone gaming chain is almost certainly the reliance on touch controls, but you’d think a solid Dungeon Master or Dungeon Hack clone would be an excellent fit. The Quest is the nearest thing I can think of, but rather than being an addictive pick-up-and-play hack’n’slash romp, it’s a long, tedious, overblown, bad-story-driven pile of crap.
Unfortunately DOOM II RPG doesn’t fill this gap at all.
Here are some things I want from a turn based RPG:
Loot.
I want weapons with numbers on them, and I want to constantly be hunting for weapons with larger numbers on them. I want to be able to outfit myself with at least four different pieces of armour — preferably including bracers. I want fire resistance and poison and all of that good stuff.
DOOM II RPG completely fails to give me what I want. In terms of equipment, there is ONE piece I am able to upgrade: my trusty gun. The upgrade path is as linear as you’d expect from a traditional DOOM game — that is, you progress from pistol to shotgun to chaingun to plasma gun and so on. There’s only one pistol. There’s only one chaingun. Borderlands introduced us to a rich world of wildly different randomly generated gunloot, but you won’t find any of that in DOOM II RPG. You won’t be eagerly looting the corpse of everything you kill in the hopes of finding a juicy upgrade. You won’t be diving head first into caches of loot stashed in corners hoping for a new set of gloves. The only exciting piece of loot DOOM II RPG does give you are a kind of magic potions that give you temporary stat boosts and bonuses. Temporary stuff just doesn’t cut it, guys.
Progression.
I guess it’s true that you level up in DOOM II RPG. It doesn’t appear very meaningful — the game does tell me that a few numbers increase, which is nice, but I never really notice a difference. I certainly never look forward to a level increase. My character doesn’t gain any new skills, I don’t get an opportunity for customisation, and since there’s no gear to speak of I’m never thinking about when I can strap on that new chestpiece.
The grind.
Grinds in RPGs are almost always linked with negative connotations, but they’re there for a reason and, done properly, they work. Sometimes I want to kick back and just slay some monsters. Maybe I’m hoping for a fancy new gun with bigger numbers than my current gun. Maybe my little white experience bar has almost filled up to the point of the little number representing my level ticking over. Maybe I just gained a great new skill and I want to try it out on some poor, hapless beasties. Whatever. Alert readers may be aware that DOOM II RPG’s limited game mechanics have basically already killed the joy of the grind, but this doesn’t really matter since in DOOM II RPG monsters don’t respawn. Kill them and they stay dead, forever. No amount of backtracking to previous levels will bring them back, and there are no random dungeons to delve into in search of treasure and challenges.
So, is DOOM II RPG really an RPG at all? Nope, not really. It’s basically turn-based DOOM, which effectively takes everything that was great about DOOM and makes it a complete yawn-fest. I would say that you should do yourself a favour and just pick up DOOM Classic for the iPhone, but aside from being horrendously overpriced the afore-mentioned touch controls completely cripple it to the point of unplayability. Instead I point you towards to best thing to come out of the recent id software sale, DOOM Resurrection, which I picked up on a whim and didn’t expect to enjoy at all. But it’s brilliant. So there you go.
WSE3 and “Action for ultimate recipient is required but not present in the message.”
I’ve been trying to access a web service using WSE3 from various clients and have been running into this message. I couldn’t seem to make it go away, even though I clearly had an “action” element in my SOAP request. I finally wrote a small .NET application to access my web service and used Fiddler to intercept the traffic to see how on earth .NET managed to get around this issue itself. Turns out the answer is simple.
I had been setting up my WSA namespace like so:
xmlns:wsa="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing"
.NET much prefers I do this:
xmlns:wsa="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing"
I didn’t need to change anything else, this basically did the trick.
