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.

The first draft of the new story is complete and up over here. There will be revisions, but it’s a story start to finish.

I was about nearing the end of this short story when I realized that the story isn’t actually about what I though it was about. I think this is probably a pretty common occurrence. Scripts often go through many rewrites, adjusting and molding the story the entire time. Short stories are the same. I have been going back over it and cutting out a lot of cruft. It feels similar to sculpting. cept with words. and mud. always there is mud.

So we were sitting around watching cartoons, like ya do, and I started messing around painting on the ipad. I took a bunch of disjointed ideas and sort of mashed them together. The result was this green and yellow, off kilter, poor anatomy, unplanned sketch.