I recently finished Braid, the Xbox Live game, and a comparison with Portal is helpful. From a screen shot Braid
looks like a normal 2D platformer, but that's like looking at a screen shot of Portal and saying its a first person shooter. While the scaffolding of the game-play may sort of fall into that
category, the games are actually about exploring the character's ability and solving puzzles. In Portal the ability is bending space and in Braid its bending time. However, whereas in Portal there
is one space bending mechanism, the portal gun, Braid's protagonist explores several different time bending techniques including, most prominently, reversing time, but also time dilation, multiple
time-lines, and other odd things.
Similar to the difference in game-play, while Portal has a strict simplicity to its visual style, Braid is much more ornate, like you're playing in an oil painting. Without seeing video of the game, or playing the demo (which is available for free on Xbox Live) its difficult to convey, but it is quite lovely and the animation adds quite a bit. Both games too are rather short leaving you just a bit hungry for more and have an interesting plot and an ending that I'd hate to spoil although Braid replaces Portal's humor with melancholy. If you enjoyed Portal and Twelve Monkeys then I'd recommend Braid.
I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center
Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing
this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.
To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.
My GPS was stolen last night or this morning and I'm missing it already. For instance when I drove to Novus glass repair to get my front passenger window replaced I drove down the wrong road for a while.
When I got out of my apartment this morning there was a police car sitting in my parking lot and the officer asked me: "David? ... What'd you leave in your car?". My face must have changed a lot when I had the following sequence of realizations: (a) a police officer is asking for me by name, (b) I'm not in trouble, (c) my car must have been burgled, and (d) my GPS must be stolen.
The officer was waiting outside my complex because someone had reported my car's broken window to the police in the morning. The officer was very courteous and upon taking my date of birth noted that we were born on exactly the same day. The window's safety glass was shattered and lying in tons of tiny pieces all over the passenger seat, my glove box was open and the middle armrest where I keep my CDs was open. Nothing appears to be missing other than the GPS, the GPS power cable, and the GPS dash mount. Adding insult to theft, the their scattered my CDs throughout my car and didn't take any of them, insulting my taste in music.
My car's window should be repaired now and hopefully the rain that came in through the broken window until I covered it with plastic bags (classy!) didn't do any permanent damage.
With the new features of IE8 there's several easy ways to integrate Gmail, Google's web mail service, for mail composition, searching, and monitoring that I enjoy using.
This post is about creating a server side z-code
interpreter that represents game progress in the URI. Try it with the game Lost
Pig.
I enjoy working on URIs and have the mug to prove it. Along those lines I've combined thoughts on URIs with interactive fiction. I have a limited amount of experience with Inform which generates Z-Code so I'll focus on pieces written in that. Of course we can already have URIs identifying the Z-Code files themselves, but I want URIs to identify my place in a piece of interactive fiction. The proper way to do this would be to give Z-Code its own mimetype and associate with that mimetype the format of a fragment that would contain the save state of user's interactive fiction session. A user would install a browser plugin that would generate URIs containing the appropriate fragment while you play the IF piece and be able to load URIs identifying Z-Code files and load the save state that appears in the fragment.
But all of that would be a lot of work, so I made a server side version that approximates this. On the Web Frotz Interpreter page, enter the URI of a Z-Code file to start a game. Enter your commands into the input text box at the bottom and you get a new URI after every command. For example, here's the beginning of Zork. I'm running a slightly modified version of the Unix version of Frotz. Baf's Guide to the IF Archive has lists of IF games to try out.
There are two issues with this thought, the first being the security issues with running arbitrary z-code and the second is the practical URI length limit of about 2K in IE. From the Z-Code standard and the Frotz source it looks like 'save' and 'restore' are the only commands that could do anything interesting outside of the Z-Code virtual machine. As for the length-limit on URIs I'm not sure that much can be done about that. I'm using a base64 encoded copy of the compressed input stream in the URI now. Switching to the actual save state might be smaller after enough user input.
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