Artemis Space Ship Bridge Simulator

Nerds of the Universe, rejoice . . . your Star Trek fantasies have finally come true.

http://artemis.eochu.com/index.php



Artemis Ship Bridge Simulator is a unique social multiplayer game. If you've ever watched Star Trek, you would have seen the ship's bridge . . . with either William Shatner or Patrick Stewart sitting in his chair in the middle, politely commanding his officers to to certain tasks, like helm (drive) the ship, or control weapons etc etc.

Artemis allows you to do that with a group of your friends. With a few people sitting around with laptops, you can play out ship to ship combat by each taking on a different role. Everyone can see the main screen, the view out the front of your ship, while each station has its own unique purpose. Engineering controls the balance of power between engines and weapons and shields while the Science officer reads out radar information etc. In the middle of all this, the Captain doesn't even get a computer, they just make decisions and asks people to "Make it so".

I'm trying to organise a weekend where a few of my nerd friends will come over and play it . . . I just need to find some spandex bodysuits . . .

Game Cafe, A Solution to Game Prices in Australia

Following up on my previous post about unfair pricing of games in Australia, particularly Steam (but the gripe with Aussie prices is just as relevant in regards to EB Games and Game, our two largest physical retailers), I've come across a really useful site, Game Cafe.

Game Cafe has a list of multiple sites that will sell games to Australia (including ozgameshop that I referred to earlier). It's basically a crawler that checks all these game sites and updates their prices (including shipping to Australia). You can search any game and platform combination and it'll give you a list of 50 or so of the retailers available to Australia ranked in order of their price.

It's going to be my new first stop when checking out game prices.

Racism in Australia

So I was walking down Oxford St last night when some random guy blurted out "Konichiwa" at me.

I instantly turned and shouted "Fuck you dickhead!" as he was walking away.

Now I'm really not sure whether this was the right thing to do or even helpful at all. I was allowing someone to get a rise out of me with just a simple, ignorant, off handed remark, and in my haste and anger I had a go at him. I got home fine, that was the end of the encounter, but what if he'd taken serious offense to that and I'd ended up bleeding in a gutter?

And if it's my aim to try to educate people that racial slurs etc are not acceptable in our society, yelling out swear words at people in the street surely isn't the right way to go about it. Is it just because I'm racially Chinese and I've grown up in Australia? Have I become over sensitive to racism because of Australian society's entrenched racism? (I can just point at the Liberal Party's abhorrent stance on the recent boat accidents and funerals, or point at any talk back radio fear mongering . . . or the fact that pretty much all mass market media in our country is 100% white dominated).

I'm not that sure what to think or what to do on this matter . . . A little vision on the back of my head remembers Inglourious Basterds, where a crazy American soldier carves swastikas into Nazis heads so that they'll never be able to live it down . . . but that's absolutely crazy. Surely people who are simply ignorant of the pain they cause can be educated . . . they can be shown that people are people . . . regardless of what they look like or where they came from. Surely . . .

Steam pricing in Australia?

This is quite a common grievance for Australian PC gamers who use Valve's online content delivery service, Steam. For some reason, games are priced differently in Australia than in the USA and Europe. This is particularly strange because the games in Australia are priced in US Dollars and we're still charged a currency conversion fee by our credit card companies when we purchase.

This isn't an issue for Valve unfortunately, their own software is always fairly priced regardless of region, but it's the distributors of other games, such as Activision and EA that are unfairly raising our prices. I'll cite an example but it's by no means the only example. Generally if a distributor has priced a game differently in the Australian market, they do it across the board.

Dawn of War 2: Retribution is coming out in a week or so. A lot of people are looking forward to this, as pretty much every previous game in this franchise has been a lot of fun to play. The steam price in the USA for this game is $29.99 USD. If you look at steam from an Australian IP address, or use a credit card that has an Australian billing address, the price is $59.99 USD. This money goes to the same place . . . it is not a matter of games being heavily taxed in Australia, it's just been listed at this price by Steam. Considering you can go into EB Games and purchase the boxed Collecter's Edition (which has a bunch of extra goodies) for $58, what's the incentive of buying a game as a digital download? The whole point was that you save the distributor a whole lot of money in manufacturing and shipping and they pass on the savings. If they're specifically not passing on the savings to Australian customers, but they are to US customers, it smells pretty bad . . .

I'm not really sure what to do about this situation. I considered taking it to the ACCC, but if this is an issue that is between different countries, would they have any jurisdiction? There are some workarounds possible to be able to buy games at their US or European prices . . . the easiest is having a friend who lives in the USA or elsewhere who can "gift" the games to you via Steam. 

Another way is to not buy games via steam and use another overseas game shop such as http://www.ozgameshop.com (this shop sells boxed editions of the games, so it depends if you really want your game on Steam or not).

Either way, this is a strange situation to be in, when those of us who wish to purchase computer games legally are being so obviously ripped off . . . especially when it's so amazingly easy to find these same games on Piratebay . . . and if someone's going to so blatantly steal from you, where's the incentive not to steal from them instead?

MyEars - Surround Sound in Headphones

An Australian company, which was commercialised from research from the Auditory Neroscience Lab at The University of Sydney, has come up with an amazing system for surround sound in headphones.

We actually use the shape of our ears and how they affect the sounds that reach us to determine the angle of the sound we can hear. Even though everyone's ears are subtly different, MyEars has come up with a way of altering the sound sent to us via a set of headphones to give quite good positional audio.

I tried it with my high quality Shure in-ear headphones and after spending a while in the calibration tool (and getting confused by it a bit), I managed to get a setup that gave me nearly perfect positioning in the 180 degrees around the back of my head. I still wasn't quite sure about in front of me . . . those sounds still sounded a bit like they were "inside" my head. I'm not sure if that was a calibration error on my part and I need to try that again, but even if it wasn't, the technology is showing an amazing capability to position audio sources using only headphones.

Check out their website at http://www.myears.net.au/ for more info. It includes a two week trial that you can check out without paying.

Cat Shit One

I just got bounced the first episode of a new CG anime that's been released called Cat Shit One (thanks to the recent father). It's based on PMCs in the Middle East, which is kinda blase now, but the hilarious thing is that they're cute bunnies . . . no really . . . I got the authority from my significant other who is an expert on whether rabbits are cute (it's an arbitrary judgement).

There's nothing funnier than watching an assault bunnie gunning down a series of anthropomorphic camels . . . let's not dig too deep into the underlying racism in making the different nationalities into different species of animals and just enjoy the awesome CG military action.

A warning for anyone who's keen on watching a lot of this, only the first episode is out so far, out of a planned 12, and there's no release date set on even the 2nd episode . . . so I wouldn't get too excited after you've watched the first free episode . . .

Dead Space and the New Playstation Gun

Back in 2008 a lot of us played a singularly awesome game called Dead Space.

It was a Sci fi thriller/horror game that played with hallucinations and psychic disturbances along with zombies rebuilt out of alien infected human flesh. You played as a member of a rescue team who basically only had powered tools to work with, mining lasers featuring prominently. To fit in with that, amputation was one of the main forms of killing zombies . . . head shots really weren't that useful, but if you cut the arms and legs off something, it'd be that much worse at chasing you down and impaling you on some kind of bone spike.

After Dead Space, there was the not so popular, yet critically successful Dead Space: Extraction. It's an on-rails shooter set as a prequel to Dead Space first on the Wii and now on the Playstation Network (it also comes free with the PS3 version of Dead Space 2). I played the demo of this last night and it was singularly awesome. Now all I need is the new Sony submachine gun accessory . . . that's not a joke, it looks like a sci fi version of an MP5, has a digitally attached trigger, pump action reloading and can also happily hold the Playstation Move Navigation Controller. It's coming out at the end of February to coincide with Killzone 3 and I'm pretty psyched to get one to play through Dead Space: Extraction.

This thing has a button on the bottom of the stock so you can slam it to reload your gun . . . or you can use the pump action slider underneath the barrel . . . too much fun!

After that of course, the main event will be Dead Space 2. I haven't got that yet, so I can't comment on it, but I'm certainly looking forward to it :)

Spy Wear the Board Game

About a year ago, I was part of a team that made a game in 48 hours, Spy Wear. It was for the Global Game Jam 2010. We won the Jammers' Choice award for our game, which was about Cold War spies trying to hide in plain sight while carrying on their agendas of building up dossiers of information or killing other spies.

It mixed a couple of different ideas . . . hiding in plain sight and trying to appear as if you were just another member of the populace, while at the same time trying to watch everyone else and determine who was and who wasn't a spy.

A few weeks ago I had a couple of conversations with my workmates . . . one was thinking of getting into Game Jam and the other was talking about board games (in particular, Power Grid). Something sparked in my head and I decided that the ruleset for Spy Wear might actually turn into a really interesting board game.

So far I've incorporated the idea of hiding in plain sight . . . which is a lot harder in a board game where everyone can see which pieces everyone else is using, but I think I've got something worked out that will do a slow reveal of a person over a series of turns . . . the rules aren't really locked down yet, so I can't really elaborate on it. I kept the game mechanics of needing to visit locations to build up information dossiers, and also being able to lay bombs as booby traps for other spies.

It's all still up in the air . . . but I'll put up some information once I've got a playable version.

Echo Bazaar

A friend of mine pointed me towards this game recently.

http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com

It's a browser based game that's linked in to Twitter and Facebook, so I was initially skeptical of it, but it's turned out to be a whole lot of fun. In a way, it's a card game/RPG that's set in "Fallen London", a version of London that's sunk beneath the surface and is that much closer to hell. It's got a very Victorian tilt to it, and has reminded a few of us of Neverwhere (by Neil Gaiman) already.

I think the beauty of the game is in the storytelling. You're given a lot of choice for where you want to explore and what kind of abilities/contacts you want to pursue, but they're all a little bit dangerous and quirky. At the moment, I've been having terrible nightmares . . . reoccurring dreams that culminated in my character going completely insane . . . Right now I'm lost in a strange world of insanity. And in the outside world, my nemesis has appeared somewhere and the remembered death of an old love is driving me to revenge!

Well worth checking out . . . there's a side of the game that involves getting more actions by posting tidbits from it on facebook or twitter, which is a little bit annoying, but I haven't done any of that yet (maybe I will after this post just to show it). There's some limited interaction with facebook/twitter friends also.

Nerd Games (Board and Card Games)

A friend of mine has rekindled my love of boards, cards, dice and little wood or plastic figures :)

Dominion was the first thing that got a group of us hooked. It seems to have this universal appeal . . . I haven't been able to find anyone who didn't enjoy it, regardless of how skeptical they are of "Nerd Games".

It's a card game with a few simple principles . . . you play as a feudal lord trying to buy more land than the other lords around you. Every card you buy goes into your deck, which is continually cycled so you see the same cards come up over and over. There's a delicate balance between buying money, action cards (that let you either do wonderful and exciting things or stab the other players in the back during your turn) and victory cards. It has a nice timing feel to it . . . when is it good to build up a deck of actions, and when is it time to just start hoarding victory points for the fast approaching end of the game?

For more information, check out Board Game Geek.

Another beautiful game I just bought (at CanCon, Canberra's board games convention) is Dixit. This beautifully designed and illustrated game is all about aesthetic creativity rather than numbers.

It's a game of storytelling that's incredibly simple yet amazingly enjoyable. Everyone has a hand of cards that have cute little abstract pictures on them that could have many meanings. They choose one and tell a story about it . . . the trick is that if everyone or no one gets it, then the storyteller gets no points . . . you have to be obvious enough that someone gets it, but not obvious enough that everyone does. You end up with those classic "How could you not have guessed that?" moments :)

There's also info on Dixit at Board Game Geek.

I'll talk more about other games later . . .

Gong xi fa cai!

Happy Year of the Rabbit everyone!

May your next year be fluffy, slightly confused and have lots of sex :P

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I've been listening to a lot of audio books and one that I had a whole lot of fun with recently was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It maintains the original plot and characters from Pride and Prejudice, but it inserts a whole lot of zombie slaying/zombification into it.

It's a hilarious take on a classic novel . . . I guess you could think of it as a comedic literary remix. I looked past the idea that this might be a sacrilegious thing to do and just enjoyed myself with the arguments being settled by the edge of a katana and people bonding over the mutual slaying of the "unmentionables".

This novel seems to have spawned a whole range of follow ups . . . Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters for example. I'm not sure I'm going to delve any further than the first, however.

I'm getting a lot of mileage out of my Audible (Amazon's audio book service) account these days. I never could get through quite so many books on public transport (motion sickness anyone?) and it means I can listen to books even while I'm walking around etc.