Random raves

On the time-wasting front, I bought myself Spore today. Now to see if it'll actually run on my lappie.

On the I Feel Like Some Body Stuff front, I got my tragus pierced. He did a good job, although I'm a little peeved about the lack of consultation about the jewellery. I actually want a ring, but I suppose a bar is easier to get in. This was at Freestyle Tattoo and Piercing in Civic. I want to scope out some of their tattoo options as well. Eee!

Darwinia is a game which has recently been released in the UK, and was developed by an independent software company (4 people working in some kind of garage equivalent). I've just downloaded the demo (a 10.8MB torrent file; you can also get it via HTTP from their website). And here's a fairly comprehensive review from Eurogamer.net.

It's FAB! It's all very retro in its styling, TRON-ish wire-framing, visible landscape polygons and laser shooty sounds like some kind of game I played in the 80s... Defender, maybe? But given that description, it's surprisingly attractive. Nice shiny colours. So, you've got a whole bunch of little Darwinians who do all the work, and a Clive Sinclair-ish type boss who gives you objectives. You can make entitities such as laser squads who kill all the nasties (viruses, centipedes and spiders that need to be taken out with rockets), engineers who activate machinery and recycle all the souls of things that die, and Darwinian leaders, who can herd the others around (since you can't control the Darwinians directly). All of these are represented by very simple icons.

Despite the retro-ness of the looks, it is not a retro game. It's 3-d, you can easily move around the landscape with the usual AWSD keypad manoeuvres and pan and zoom the camera with the mouse. To create a new entity, you get into a command-mode by hitting the ALT key, and you use mouse gestures, like those in the Opera and Mozilla browser plugins, to draw symbols. You can also use ALT-TAB in that view to get to the next entity (rather than just clicking on them on-screen, though that works well too), and CTRL-C to destroy an entity (since you only get a limited number to control at once). As an old DOS chick, I like the key strokes... But obviously, given the mouse gestures and the 3-d landscape, it's very mouse-driven as well.

It's not just shooting viruses and centipedes, however. The first level is you trying to get the Darwinians to start up a mine, and I suspect you'll need its proceeds in following levels. The various mine components are scattered over islands in the sea, and most of the entities cannot travel over water. One can, which is useful (I'm not going to spoiler it here), and there is another transportation method that took me a good hour to find (which turned out not to be essential for the demo, but would have been handy if I found it earlier). So, in that instance, there were two valid solutions to the puzzle of moving bods to the appropriate machinery - nice for a game to have that kind of flexibility from the start.

I'm going to purchase it shortly. Handy to have a UK credit card! Only bummer is that you can't download the entire thing from the web - they ship the CD *sigh*. Other than the fact it really doesn't have a kind of genre that you can describe (like Myst, when it first came out), I like the contradictions; the apparent simplicity overlying some pretty cool complexity. I'm looking forward to playing the whole game.

I'm just about going to set myself up with ADSL at home, thank god. I'd quite like to get into some online gaming, but I'm having real problems finding a game I'd like to play. Being pretty anti-capitalist in my outlook, games which consist of buying and selling and that kind of thing have no interest for me. Ditto the kind where you frag everything in sight. As for the sort where you have a nice heirarchical quasi-medieval society with "kings" and "lords" and the like, gag.

I've had a go with Anarchy Online, because I quite like the premise. There's a big corporation that "owns" the world, clans who are essentially rebels, and neutrals who are neither (no prizes for guessing which group I selected). I didn't play it enough or get into the social aspects due to limited time, but maybe I'll revisit it.

But I wonder if there are others around that would appeal?