Best Games - Metal Gear Solid V Imagine you are in a forest. It’s a pleasant day. You hear birds chirping in the treetops above you. Enough shade to be cool, enough sunlight to be warm. There is a shallow creek in your path that you would like to cross. What do you do?

​I have had a 3D printer for about 5 years. This is it. Right from the hop this thing never worked right. Turns out, after running the thing through all sorts of tests, the board that came with it had a counterfeit chip. Oh sure it could move around and print plastic bits, but it never really worked the way it was supposed to. I have had to recalibrate it several times and each time it would run well for months and then suddenly screw up a batch of prints. Then it would be time to recalibrate it again.

I’ve been doing some work over here. I try to write on it at least once a week, but I haven’t been posting them up because most of what I have been writing doesn’t directly follow what is already there. I have some holes in the story. Great wide gaping ones. Ones that would cause the whole thing not make a lot of sense if you tried to read it. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a story that would be much fun if you randomly came across it.

Best Games - Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back Action video games are all about feel. The feel of connection between your fingertips and flickering pools of light on a screen. Get that feel wrong and it won’t matter how clever your mechanics are or how inventive your puzzles or how engaging your story, no one will want to play it. Get that feel right and it won’t matter that every other aspect of the game comes up short.

I have played two games recently that only exist because of the terrible power of nostalgia. Ah nostalgia, come to bite us again have you? I’m glad these games exist because they are both good, but nostalgia did them no favours in a couple of different ways. I’ll get to that. First, the requisite old man recap.

I’ve been doing some editing on the last story I wrote. It’s pretty amazing what changing 100 or so words can do. The tone of a lot of sentences can change drastically with one or two small adjustments. And sometimes changing the setting or wording of an entire scene can change the story.

For both of these I tried to paint more like I would with regular paints. Laying down daubs of color and pushing and pulling them around on one layer rather than creating masks and layers like I would often do while painting digitally. Mostly I’m just trying to get better at painting.

Best Games - Trackmania You could learn how to race a car. You could study every minuscule technical detail that makes one car perform better than another. You could master aerodynamics and the physics of rubber on asphalt. You could steel your will and steady your hand when contending with other vehicles and drivers traveling down the same track at high speed. You could simulate all of this in a racing game.

This past weekend I participated in the Alberta Game Jam. Game creators from all over the province convened over Discord to put on this remote version of the game jam. While I usually find the fun of a game jam is working with a team, I opted to attempt this one solo. It wasn’t very successful.

Did some editing and rewriting over here. This story isn’t fully working yet, but it’s getting better. Probably needs another pass or two. and maybe some structure changes. and maybe some more eyes on it. If you know what’s broken here and have ideas on how to fix it, let me know.

I sort of want to talk about machine learning and intelligence. I spent a bunch of time over the last few weeks messing around with Unity’s machine learning tools. I won’t be putting together any kind of tutorial or forwarding any real actionable info here, because honestly I don’t think I am in any position to offer any. I have a better idea how ML works and what sort of problems it seems to be good at, but I think that there are some very harsh limits to what machine learning is capable of. I also think that there are a lot of people out there who are quick to overlook those limits. There is this commonly held belief that machine learning will be the thing that makes computers smarter than humans. Let me tell you, Skynet, this ain’t.

The wizard sits. The wizard reclines, luxuriating upon the fabric of the universe pulled taut. Seated on a product of their own will. The imposition of their desire on local space. A type of calm radiates through their form. A body of flesh and metal coalesced through technology and sorcery. All one and the same, at a fundamental level. The forces and the fabric. The knowledge and the tools. Blood and muscle and conduits and electrical load. The suppression of fear, hesitation. The intent to manipulate. All the same. All the same. At a fundamental level.

Best Games - Saints Row IV Let’s get this straight right off the jump. Saints Row: The Third is the best game in the Saints Row series. Volition made two games that could be fairly summed up as Grand Theft Auto clones with toilet humor before reworking the 3rd into a self aware comedy that was as much parody as it was forward looking. Saints Row: The Third raised the bar for what an open world character driven game could be and stood out as a truly wonderful experience all it’s own.