Reason for playing it: Somebody mentioned it in a Making Light thread, and it sounded cool, and I wanted to have a go.

How it came into my hands: I went to download the demo, and discovered that it is only available through this weird framework called Steam. I'd heard mixed things about Steam, but I went and read all the small print carefully and decided it was a minor degree of evil that I could live with. I don't like DRM, but DRM for games makes some amount of sense, much more so than for music or texts.

The demo is extremely limited, letting you play only four games. I think an hour's play is reasonable, or a month with limitations on which game features you can access. Having an excessively restricted demo like that makes me reluctant to buy the full version; I was still getting the hang of the controls after four plays and couldn't tell if I was going to like the game or not. But it was on special offer of $5, (normal price $10), and that's impulse purchase money for me, so I just went ahead and bought it.

Verdict: Audiosurf is just the kind of addictive casual game I like.

( detailed review )

Anyway, yes, I confess myself thoroughly addicted! Between this and accidentally rediscovering the Distributed Proofreaders adjunct to Project Gutenberg, I'm having a hard time making progress on my grant application...

The kind of computer games I like are easy to learn, addictive and largely abstract. Preferably the action takes place in a single screen (though there may be multiple levels of increasing difficulty), and ideally the controls require no more than half a dozen keys. This means that there aren't really any modern games that I like as much as the old staples: Qix, Snake, Bubble Puzzle, and Donkey-Kong type games. And nothing from the past 20 years has lived up to Tetris!

( more gaming babble )

I think I need an icon for general geekery, (as opposed to talking about science or linguistics). I happened to stumble on a dollmaker that actually provides "long plait" as a hairstyle option, and has a reasonable amount of flexibility without being so over-complicated it's boring to use. So, behold, a vaguely manga-ish version of me!

I was surfing around on LJ today and I found something I've been looking for unsuccessfully for ages: an networked version of Settlers of Catan! (Yes, there is a Microsoft version, but it requires a subscription and generally has cooties.) Sea3D is written by one Jason Fugate, who describes himself as a game fanatic... uber-geek and is really properly thought out as well as being Open Source and free both as-in-speech and as-in-beer. Unlike a lot of OS by-geeks for-geeks software, it's incredibly easy to use. Setting up a networked game isn't at all a black art, and it handles a ladder tournament and all the systems to support the social side smoothly and comprehensively. And it has various options for custom rules and yay.

The only down side is that the interface is mildly awkward. You have to download a program, which is unfortunately Windows only. It's very Windows GUI in the way it's set up, which is fine; the activation barrier is very low if you're prepared to download and install it. But what's not so fine is that the board is 3-dimensional in a completely unnecessary way. I think the 3D part is partly because the Fugate is showing off his ability to handle 3D graphics, and partly to get round copyright issues. The fact is that the graphics don't work properly on my old computer (this is a known bug, apparently), so I have to rotate the board so that it appears horizontal (ie perpendicular to the plane of the screen!) in order to click on it. Which is a mild pain.

But I'm not in the least complaining, because yay networked Settlers! In the past I have also played Newman Settlers, which plays in Java embedded in the browser. That does have the advantage that it doesn't require a download, but it's basic rules only, and it's a pain to find opponents and it generally isn't nearly as complete as Sea3D.

I am in gamer heaven.

Short review: MSN Upwords sucks.

Why? The interface is ugly and slow, all special effects and no usability. The AI is dreadful, with no idea of strategic play even on the high levels; the only difference between low levels and high is that it's tuned so that the average AI score is higher as you go up. It's completely uncustomizable (other than the ability to set the AI level). It has no facility for human versus human play. You can't turn off the 'offensive words' filter; you can set it to 'lenient' rather than 'strict', but even the lenient version disallows such words as dork, popish and is generally annoying with its prissy little error messages. Oh, and it has a weird bug so that it quite often mis-calculates whether you have used up all your letters or not, and as Upwords penalizes very heavily for letters left in the rack at the end, this often makes the difference between loss and victory.

But the suckiest of sucky things about it is that it uses the Encarta dictionary. The Encarta dictionary is a second-rate dictionary to start with, and it's particularly bad for word games. It doesn't include most of the standard 2lws. And more to the point, because it is designed for looking words up, rather than word games, it doesn't have most variants of words listed as separate entries. So it can usually cope with plurals, but not with adding -er, -ed, re-, un- etc to even the most common words. And since prefixes, suffixes and 2lws comprise most of the strategic basis of Upwords, the game is nearly unplayable.

The reason I'm particularly annoyed with how bad this version is is that Microsoft, being Microsoft, have done a pretty thorough job of killing off every other online or downloadable version of Upwords on the whole internet. There used to be a good online verison at Game.com, and I miss that. Yes, I know Hasbro owns the licence to Upwords and they're entitled to restrict distribution of it to Microsoft if they want to. But I'm still very annoyed about the Hobson's choice between paying $20 for a really crap version of the game, and no game at all. And the only way to play networked games is via MSN messenger, same crappy version and requiring a fairly hefty monthly subscription. Grrr.

Oh, and from my last post, there seems to be a consensus in favour of the purple version of my journal, so it's purple for a while. The font is quite small but it's scalable if you don't like it.

Via hmw26's exceedingly funky blog, a discussion of extracts from a new book about Elite, published in the Gruaniad.

Having previously discovered that there are several people reading this who may be interested, I thought I'd pass this gem on.

To be honest, I think I'm not going to rush out and buy the book; I'd guess that anyone who's interested in this kind of thing is not going to find much novelty in the story of the making of Elite. What fascinates me about the article is the way it goes to such pains to explain that there was a world before the GUI.

Now, I was born a few days before 1979, and thus it occurs to me that I may actually be the youngest person in the world who remembers the 80s! It's a slightly scary concept that books are being marketed at an audience of people younger than me. Or perhaps it's simply that it's marketed at people my age who are *cough* somewhat less geeky than I am...