reviews

2024 in Videogames

Duration 12:02

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My life affords me less time for videogames than it used to, and so my tastes have changed accordingly:

I appreciate games that I can drop at a moment’s notice and pick up again some other time, without losing lots of progress¹.
And if the game can remind me what it was I was trying to achieve when I come back… perhaps weeks or months later… that’s a bonus!
I’ve a reduced tolerance for dynamically-generated content (oh, you want me to fetch you another five nirnroot do you? – hard pass²): if I might only get to throw 20 hours total at a game, I’d much prefer to spend that time exploring content deliberately and thoughtfully authored by a human.
And, y’know, it has to be fun. I rarely buy games on impulse anymore, and usually wait weeks or months after release dates even for titles I’ve been anticipating, to see what the reviewers make of it.

That said, I’ve played three excellent videogames this year that I’d like to recommend to you (no spoilers):

Horizon: Forbidden West

I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. Even if this review persuades you that you should play its sequel, Forbidden West, you really oughta play Zero Dawn first³. There’s a direct continuation of plot going on there that you’ll appreciate better that way. Also: Zero Dawn stands alone as a great game in its own right.

Aloy, the protagonist of the Horizon games, wearing Mark of Pride face paint and red-stained Quen Deadeye armour, stands at sunset in a jungle environment. — *Horizon* gives a lot to love, from a rich world and story, immersive environments, near-seamless loading, excellent voice acting, and a rewarding difficulty curve. But perhaps all are second-place to what a kickass character the protagonist is.

The Horizon series tells the story of Aloy from her childhood onwards, growing up an outcast in a tribal society on a future Earth inhabited by robotic reimaginings of creatures familiar to us today (albeit some of them extinct). Once relatively docile, a mysterious event known as the derangement, shortly before Aloy’s birth, made these machines aggressive and dangerous, leading to a hostile world in which Aloy seeks to prove herself a worthy hunter to the tribe that cast her out.

All of which leads to a series of adventures that gradually explain the nature of the world and how it became that way, and provide a path by which Aloy can perhaps provide a brighter future for humankind. It’s well-written and clever and you’ll fight and die over and over as you learn your way around the countless permutations of weapons, tools, traps, and strategies that you’ll employ. But it’s the kind of learning curve that’s more rewarding than frustrating, and there are so many paths to victory that when I watch Ruth play she uses tactics that I’d never even conceived of.

Aloy aims a precision longbow at a Tremortusk, an elephant-like machine, in a sunny desert environment. — *Horizon: Forbidden West* is like *Zero Dawn* but… more. More quests, more exploration, more machines, more characters, and more of the same story, answering questions you might have found yourself thinking during the prequel. But it’s not just more-of-the-same.

Forbidden West is in some ways more-of-the-same, but it outgrows the mould of its predecessor, too. Faced with bigger challenges than she can take on by herself, Aloy comes to assemble a team of trusted party members, and when you’re not out fighting giant robots or spelunking underwater caves or exploring the ruins of ancient San Francisco you’re working alongside them, and that’s one of the places the game really shines. Your associates chatter to each other, grow and change, and each brings something special to the story that invites you to care for each of them as individuals.

The musical score – cinematic in its scope – has been revamped too, and shows off its ability to adapt dynamically to different situations. Face off against one of the terrifying new aquatic enemies and you’ll be treated to a nautical theme, for example. And the formulaic quests of the predecessor (get to the place, climb the thing…), which were already fine, are riddled with new quirks and complexities to keep you thinking.

And finally: I love the game’s commitment to demonstrating the diversity of humanity: both speaking and background characters express a rarely-seen mixture of races, genders, and sexualities, and the story sensitively and compassionately touches on issues of disability, neurodiversity, and transgender identity. It’s more presence than representation (“Hey look, it’s Sappho and her friend!”), but it’s still much better than I’m used to seeing in major video game releases.

Thank Goodness You’re Here!

If ever I need to explain to an American colleague why that one time they visited London does not give them an understanding of what life is like in the North of England… this is the videogame I’ll point them at.

A short, somewhat minigame-driven, absurd to the point of Monty Python-ism, wildly British comedy game, Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a gem. It’s not challenging by any stretch of the imagination, but that only serves to turn focus even more on the weird and wonderful game world of Barnsworth (itself clearly inspired by real-world Barnsley).

Playing a salesman sent to the town to meet the lord mayor, the player ends up stuck with nothing to do⁴, and takes on a couple of dozen odd-jobs for the inhabitants of the town, meeting a mixed bag of stereotypes and tropes as they go along.

Presented in a hand-drawn style that’s as distinctive and bizarre as it is an expression of the effort that must’ve gone into it, this game’s clearly a project of passion for Yorkshire-based developers Coal Supper (yes, that’s really what they call themselves). I particularly enjoyed a recurring joke in which the player is performing some chore (mowing grass for the park keeper, chopping spuds at the chippy) when the scene cuts to some typically-inanimate objects having a conversation (flowers, potatoes) while the player’s actions bring them closer and closer in the background. But it’s hard to pick out a very favourite part from this wonderful, crazy, self-aware slice of Northern life in game form.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Finally, I’ve got to sing the praises of Tactical Breach Wizards by Suspicious Developments (who for some reason don’t bother to list it on their website; the closest thing to an official page for the project other than its Steam entry might be this launch announcement!)⁵, the team behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature.

The game feels like a cross between XCOM/Xenonauts‘ turn-based tactical combat and Rainbow Six‘s special ops theme. Except instead of a squad of gun-toting body-armoured military/police types, your squad is a team of wizards in a world in which magical combat specialists work alongside conventionally-equipped soldiers on missions where their powers make all the difference.

By itself, that could be enough: there’s certainly sufficient differences between all of the powers that the magic users exploit that you’ll find all kinds of ways to combine them. How about having your teleport-capable medic blink themselves to a corner so your witch’s multi-step lightning bolt can use them as a channel to get around a corner and zap a target there? Or what about using the time-manipulation powers of your Navy Seer (yes, really) to give your siege cleric enough actions that they can shield-push your opponent within range of the turret you hacked? And so on.

But Tactical Breach Wizards, which stands somewhere between a tactical squad-based shooter and a deterministic positional puzzle game, goes beyond that by virtue of its storytelling. Despite the limitations of the format, the game manages to pack in a lot of background and personality for every one of your team and even many of the NPCs too (Steve Clark, Traffic Warlock is a riot). Oh, and much of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, to boot.

The writing’s great, to the extent that when I got to the epilogue – interactive segments during the credits where you can influence “what happens next” to each of the characters you’ve come to know – I genuinely flip-flopped on a few of them to give some of them a greater opportunity to continue to feature in one another’s lives. Even though the game was clearly over. It’s that compelling.

And puzzling out some of the tougher levels, especially if you’re going for the advanced (“Confidence”) challenges, too, is really fun. But with autosaves every turn, the opportunity to skip and return to levels that are too challenging, and a within-turn “undo” feature that lets you explore different strategies before you commit to one, this is a great game for someone who, like me, doesn’t have much time to dedicate to play.

So yeah: that’s what I’ve been up to in videogaming-time so far this year. Any suggestions for the autumn/winter?

Footnotes

¹ If a game loads quickly that’s a bonus. I still play a little of my favourite variant of the Sid Meier’s Civilization series – that is, Civilization V + Vox Populi (alongside a few quality-of-life mods) but I swear I’d play more of it if it didn’t take so long to load. Even after hacking around it to dodge the launcher, logos, and introduction, my 8P+4E-core i7 processor takes ~80 seconds from clicking to launch the game to having loaded my latest save, which if I’m only going to have time to play three turns is frustratingly long! Contrast Horizon: Forbidden West, which I also mention in this post, a game 13 years younger and with much higher hardware requirements, which takes ~17 seconds to achieve the same. Possibly I’m overanalysing this…

² This isn’t a criticism of the Elder Scrolls games specifically, but of the relatively-lazy writing that goes into some videogames that feel like they’re using Perchance to come up with their quests, in order to stretch the gameplay. I suppose a better example might have been the on-the-whole disappointment that was Starfield, but I figured an Elder Scrolls reference might be easier to identify at-a-glance. Fetch-questing 100 tonnes of Beryllium just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

³ In fact, if you’re trying to consume the Horizon story as thoroughly as possible and strictly in chronological order, you probably should read the graphic novel between one and the other, which covers some of the events that occur between the two.

⁴ Did you ever see the alternate ending to Far Cry 4, by the way? If you did, you might appreciate that a similar trick can be used to shortcut Thank Goodness You’re Here! too…

⁵ They’re also missing a trick by using the domain they’ve registered, wizards.cool, only to redirect to Steam.

ARCC

In the late ’70s, a shadowy group of British technologists concluded that nuclear war was inevitable and secretly started work on a cutting-edge system designed to help rebuild society. And thanks to Matt Round-and-friends at vole.wtf (who I might have mentioned before), the system they created – ARCC – can now be emulated in your browser.

3D rendering of an ARCC system, by HappyToast.

I’ve been playing with it on-and-off all year, and I’ve (finally) managed to finish exploring pretty-much everything the platform currently has to offer, which makes it pretty damn good value for money for the £6.52 I paid for my ticket (the price started at £2.56 and increases by 2p for every ticket sold). But you can get it cheaper than I did if you score 25+ on one of the emulated games.

Most of what I just told you is true. Everything… except the premise. There never was a secretive cabal of engineers who made this whackballs computer system. What vole.wtf emulates is an imaginary system, and playing with that system is like stepping into a bizarre alternate timeline or a weird world. Over several separate days of visits you’ll explore more and more of a beautifully-realised fiction that draws from retrocomputing, Cold War fearmongering, early multi-user networks with dumb terminal interfaces, and aesthetics that straddle the tripoint between VHS, Teletext, and BBS systems. Oh yeah, and it’s also a lot like being in a cult.

Needless to say, therefore, it presses all the right buttons for me.

If you enjoy any of those things, maybe you’d like this too. I can’t begin to explain the amount of work that’s gone into it. If you’re looking for anything more-specific in a recommendation, suffice to say: this is a piece of art worth seeing.

It Takes Two

Lately, Ruth and I have been learning to dance Argentine Tango.

In a church hall, its walls decorated with colourful cloths, Dan and Ruth stand in a large circle of people, watching a man and a woman preparing to demonstrate some tango steps. — Stand with both feet together on the floor? Sure, I can do that one.

Let me tell you everything I know about tango¹:

It takes two to tango.
I am not very good at tango.

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt and holding a glass of wine, looks sceptically at the camera as he stands in front of a television screen showing a couple dancing, with the title frame "La Caminata: Introduction to Walking in Tango (Core Steps)". — Our lessons started online, in our own living room, with videos from Tango Stream‘s “Tango Basics” series. It was a really good introduction and I’d recommend it, but it’s no substitute for practice!

This adventure began, in theory at least, on my birthday in January. I’ve long expressed an interest in taking a dance class together, and so when Ruth pitched me a few options for a birthday gift, I jumped on the opportunity to learn tango. My knowledge of the dance was basically limited to what I’d seen in films and television, but it had always looked like such an amazing dance: careful, controlled… synchronised, sexy.

After shopping around for a bit, Ruth decided that the best approach was for us to do a “beginners” video course in the comfort of our living room, and then take a weekend getaway to do an “improvers” class.

After all, we’d definitely have time to complete the beginners’ course and get a lot of practice in before we had to take to the dance floor with a group of other “improvers”, right?²

Dan and Ruth sat on opposite sides of a table on a train, with darkness outside the window behind, raising tumbler glasses full of prosecco and smiling. — By the time we were riding the train up to Edinburgh, we’d watched all the videos in our beginners’ course, and tried all of the steps in isolation… but we’d had barely any opportunity to combine them into an actual *dance*.

Okay, let me try again to enumerate you everything I actually know about tango³:

Essentials. A leader and follower⁴ hold one another’s upper torso closely enough that, with practice, each can intuit from body position where the other’s feet are without looking. While learning, you will not manage to do this, and you will tread on one another’s toes.
The embrace. In the embrace, one side – usually the leader’s left – is “open”, with the dancers’ hands held; the other side is “closed”, with the dancers holding one another’s bodies. Generally, you should be looking at one another or towards the open side. But stop looking at your feet: you should know where your own feet are by proprioception, and you know where your partners’ feet are by guesswork and prayer.
The walk. You walk together, (usually) with opposite feet moving in-sync so that you can be close and not tread on one another’s toes, typically forward (from the leader’s perspective) but sometimes sideways or even backwards (though not usually for long, because it increases the already-inevitable chance that you’ll collide embarrassingly with other couples).
Movement. Through ~~magic and telepathy~~ a good connection with one another, the pair will, under the leader’s direction, open opportunities to perform more advanced (but still apparently beginner-level) steps and therefore entirely new ways to mess things up. These steps include:
- Forward ochos. The follower stepping through a figure-eight (ocho) on the closed side, or possibly the open side, but they probably forget which way they were supposed to turn when they get there, come out on the wrong foot, and treat on the leader’s toes.
- Backwards ochos. The follower moves from side to side or in reverse through a series of ochos, until the leader gets confused which way they’re supposed to pivot to end the maneuver and both people become completely confused and unstuck.
- The cross. The leader walks alongside the follower, and when the leader steps back the follower chooses to assume that the leader intended for them to cross their legs, which opens the gateway to many other steps. If the follower guesses incorrectly, they probably fall over during that step. If the follower guesses correctly but forgets which way around their feet ought to be, they probably fall over on the very next step. Either way, the leader gets confused and does the wrong thing next.
- Giros. One or both partners perform a forwards step, then a sideways step, then a backwards step, then another sideways step, starting on the inside leg and pivoting up to 270° with each step such that the entire move rotates them some portion of a complete circle. In-sync with one another, of course.
- Sacadas. Because none of the above are hard enough to get right together, you should start putting your leg out between your partner’s leg and try and trip them up as they go. They ought to know you’re going to do this, because they’ve got perfect predictive capabilities about where your feet are going to end, remember? Also remember to use the correct leg, which might not be the one you expect, or you’ll make a mess of the step you’ll be doing in three beats’ time. Good luck!
- Barridas and mordidas. What, you finished the beginners’ course? Too smart to get tripped up by your partner’s sacada any more? Well now it’s time to start kicking your partner’s feet out from directly underneath them. That’ll show ’em.
Style. All of the above should be done gracefully, elegantly, with perfect synchronicity and in time with the music… oh, and did I mention you should be able to improve the whole thing on the fly, without pre-communication with your partner. 😅

Photograph of a small laminated instruction sheet on a golden tablecloth. Titled "Norteña Tango", it reads: Let's make this an amazing weekend. We are all here to dance, so let's look around us and try to make sure that everyone is dancing. We'd love it if you would follow the lines of dance by moving around the floor steadily, try using the cabeceo, leave space between you and the couple in front, make use of the corners of the dance floor, stay in the same lane where possible, take care when entering the dance floor, clear the floor and change partners during the cortinas. It would be great if you could avoid overtaking other couples on the floor, walking (other than when dancing) on the floor. — Just when you think you’ve worked out the basic rules of tango, you find a leaflet on your table with some rules of the dancefloor to learn, too!

Ultimately, it was entirely our own fault we felt out-of-our-depth up in Edinburgh at the weekend. We tried to run before we could walk, or – to put it another way – to milonga before we could caminar.

A somewhat-rushed video course and a little practice on carpet in your living room is not a substitute for a more-thorough práctica on a proper-sized dance floor, no matter how often you and your partner use any excuse of coming together (in the kitchen, in an elevator, etc.) to embrace and walk a couple of steps! Getting a hang of the fluid connections and movement of tango requires time, and practice, and discipline.

Photograph of paving slabs: a glyph of a walking person, signifying "walk here", has been painted onto the flagstones, but the stones have since been lifted and replaced in slightly different locations, making the person appear "scrambled". — Got the feeling that your body and your feet aren’t moving in the same direction? That’s tango!

But, not least because of our inexperience, we did learn a lot during our weekend’s deep-dive. We got to watch (and, briefly, partner with) some much better dancers and learned some advanced lessons that we’ll doubtless reflect back upon when we’re at the point of being ready for them. Because yes: we are continuing! Our next step is a Zoom-based lesson, and then we’re going to try to find a more-local group.

Also, we enjoyed the benefits of some one-on-one time with Jenny and Ricardo, the amazingly friendly and supportive teachers whose video course got us started and whose in-person event made us feel out of our depth (again: entirely our own fault).

If you’ve any interest whatsoever in learning to dance tango, I can wholeheartedly recommend Ricardo and Jenny Oria as teachers. They run courses in Edinburgh and occasionally elsewhere in the UK as well as providing online resources, and they’re the most amazingly supportive, friendly, and approachable pair imaginable!

Just… learn from my mistake and start with a beginner course if you’re a beginner, okay? 😬

Footnotes

¹ I’m exaggerating how little I know for effect. But it might not be as much of an exaggeration as you’d hope.

² We did not.

³ Still with a hint of sarcasm, though.

⁴ Tango’s progressive enough that it’s come to reject describing the roles in binary gendered terms, using “leader” and “follower” in place of what was once described as “man” and “woman”, respectively. This is great for improving access to pairs of dancers who don’t consist of a man and a woman, as well as those who simply don’t want to take dance roles imposed by their gender.

Incredible Doom

I just finished reading Incredible Doom volumes 1 and 2, by Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden, and man… that was a heartwarming and nostalgic tale!

Set in the early-to-mid-1990s world in which the BBS is still alive and kicking, and the Internet’s gaining traction but still lacks the “killer app” that will someday be the Web (which is still new and not widely-available), the story follows a handful of teenagers trying to find their place in the world. Meeting one another in the 90s explosion of cyberspace, they find online communities that provide connections that they’re unable to make out in meatspace.

A "Geek Code Block", printed in a dot-matrix style font, light-blue on black, reads: GU D-- -P+ C+L? U E M+ S-/+ N--- H-- F--(+) !G W++ T R? X? — I loved some of the contemporary nerdy references, like the fact that each chapter page sports the “Geek Code” of the character upon which that chapter focusses.¹

So yeah: the whole thing feels like a trip back into the naivety of the online world of the last millenium, where small, disparate (and often local) communities flourished and early netiquette found its feet. Reading Incredible Doom provides the same kind of nostalgia as, say, an afternoon spent on textfiles.com. But it’s got more than that, too.

Partial scan from a page of Incredible Doom, showing a character typing about "needing a solution", with fragments of an IRC chat room visible in background panels. — The user interfaces of IRC, Pine, ASCII-art-laden BBS menus etc. are all produced with a good eye for accuracy, but don’t be fooled: this is a story about humans, not computers. My 9-year-old loved it too, and she’s never even heard of IRC (I hope!).

It touches on experiences of 90s cyberspace that, for many of us, were very definitely real. And while my online “scene” at around the time that the story is set might have been different from that of the protagonists, there’s enough of an overlap that it felt startlingly real and believable. The online world in which I – like the characters in the story – hung out… but which occupied a strange limbo-space: both anonymous and separate from the real world but also interpersonal and authentic; a frontier in which we were still working out the rules but within which we still found common bonds and ideals.

A humorous comic scene from Incredible Doom in which a male character wearing glasses walks with a female character he's recently met and is somewhat intimidated by, playing-out in his mind the possibility that she might be about to stab him. Or kiss him. Or kiss him THEN stab him. — Having had times in the 90s that I met up offline with relative strangers whom I first met online, I can confirm that… yeah, the fear is real!

Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of saying that Incredible Doom is a lot of fun and if it sounds like your cup of tea, you should read it.

Also: shortly after putting the second volume down, I ended up updating my Geek Code for the first time in… ooh, well over a decade. The standards have moved on a little (not entirely in a good way, I feel; also they’ve diverged somewhat), but here’s my attempt:

----- BEGIN GEEK CODE VERSION 6.0 -----
GCS^$/SS^/FS^>AT A++ B+:+:_:+:_ C-(--) D:+ CM+++ MW+++>++
ULD++ MC+ LRu+>++/js+/php+/sql+/bash/go/j/P/py-/!vb PGP++
G:Dan-Q E H+ PS++ PE++ TBG/FF+/RM+ RPG++ BK+>++ K!D/X+ R@ he/him!
----- END GEEK CODE VERSION 6.0 -----

Footnotes

¹ I was amazed to discover that I could still remember most of my Geek Code syntax and only had to look up a few components to refresh my memory.

Tick Tock

Looking for something with an “escape room” vibe for our date night this week, Ruth and I tried Tick Tock: A Tale for Two, a ~~multiplayer~~ simultaneous cooperative play game for two people, produced by Other Tales Interactive. It was amazing and I’d highly recommend it.

The game’s available on a variety of platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Nintendo Switch. We opted for the Android version because, thanks to Google Play Family Library, this meant we only had to buy one copy (you need it installed on both devices you’re playing it on, although both devices don’t have to be of the same type: you could use an iPhone and a Nintendo Switch for example).

The really clever bit from a technical perspective is that the two devices don’t communicate with one another. You could put your devices in flight mode and this game would still work just fine! Instead, the gameplay functions by, at any given time, giving you either (a) a puzzle for which the other person’s device will provide the solution, or (b) a puzzle that you both share, but for which each device only gives you half of the clues you need. By working as a team and communicating effectively (think Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes but without the time pressure), you and your partner will solve the puzzles and progress the plot.

(We’re purists for this kind of puzzle game so we didn’t look at one another’s screens, but I can see how it’d be tempting to “cheat” in this way, especially given that even the guys in the trailer do so!)

Nopepad showing handwritten notes including: "Ticket stub 00067", "Clock shop open 18th", and "Set clock 12". — You could probably play successfully without keeping notes, but we opted to grab a pad and pen at one point.

The puzzles start easy enough, to the extent that we were worried that the entire experience might not be challenging for us. But the second of the three acts proved us wrong and we had to step up our communication and coordination, and the final act had one puzzle that had us scratching our heads for some time! Quite an enjoyable difficulty curve, but still balanced to make sure that we got to a solution, together, in the end. That’s a hard thing to achieve in a game, and deserves praise.

The plot is a little abstract at times and it’s hard to work out exactly what role we, the protagonists, play until right at the end. That’s a bit of a shame, but not in itself a reason to reject this wonderful gem of a game. We spent 72 minutes playing it, although that includes a break in the middle to eat a delivery curry.

If you’re looking for something a bit different for a quiet night in with somebody special, it’s well worth a look.

Review for ProtonMail Encryption Status by Morgan Larosa

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Does what it says on the tin! Short and sweet codebase that’s easy enough to verify personally, and doesn’t ask for any crazy permissions.

Morgan Larosa

I probably needn’t care about this validation: when I wrote a Thunderbird plugin to enhance integration with ProtonMail, I wrote it principally for myself: scratching my own itch. It was nice to see that (at time of writing) a few hundred other people have made use of the extension too, but it wasn’t essential. I’d be maintaining it regardless because I use it every day.

But it still warmed my heart to see a five-star review come in alongside a clearly-expressed justification.

Film : Star Wars IX : The Rise of Skywalker

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

After 8 or 10 (depending on how you count them) films and hundreds of hours of TV, finally we have reached the end of the whole Star Wars saga. Hooray,…

Andrew Stephens

Exactly my thoughts on the latest Star Wars films, concisely expressed.

Retro-PESOSing my Reviews

When I arrived at this weekend’s IndieWebCamp I still wasn’t sure what it was that I would be working on. I’d worked recently to better understand the ecosystem surrounding DanQ.me and had a number of half-formed ideas about tightening it up. But instead, I ended up expanding the reach of my “personal web” considerably by adding reviews as a post type to my site and building tools to retroactively-reintegrate reviews I’d written on other silos.

Amazon customer review — The oldest surviving review I found was my grumbling about Windows XP Home edition being just a crippled version of Pro edition. And now it’s immortalised here.

Over the years, I’ve written reviews of products using Amazon and Steam and of places using Google Maps and TripAdvisor. These are silos and my content there is out of my control and could, for example, be deleted at a moment’s notice. This risk was particularly fresh in my mind as my friend Jen‘s Twitter account was suspended this weekend for allegedly violating the platform’s rules (though Twitter have so far proven unwilling to tell her which rules she’s broken or even when she did so, and she’s been left completely in the dark).

My mission for the weekend was to:

Come up with a mechanism for the (microformat-friendly) display of reviews on this site, and
Reintegrate my reviews from Amazon, Steam, Google Maps and TripAdvisor

Steam review for Hacknet — Steam reviews use a “thumbs up/thumbs down” rating system rather than a “5-star” style, but `h-review` is capable of expressing both and more.

I opted not to set up an ongoing POSSE nor PESOS process at this point; I’ll do this manually in the short term (I don’t write reviews on third-party sites often). Also out of scope were some other sites on which I’ve found that I’ve posted reviews, for example BoardGameGeek. These can both be tasks for a future date.

I used Google Takeout to export my Google Maps reviews, which comprised the largest number of reviews of the sites I targetted and which is the least screen-scraper friendly. I wrote a bookmarklet-based screen-scraper to get the contents of my reviews on each of the other sites. Meanwhile, I edited by WordPress theme’s functions.php to extended the Post Kinds plugin with an extra type of post, Review, and designed a content template which wrapped reviews in appropriate microformat markup, using metadata attached to each review post to show e.g. a rating, embed a h-product (for products) or h-card (for places). I also leveraged my existing work from last summer’s effort to reintegrate my geo*ing logs to automatically add a map when I review a “place”. Finally, I threw together a quick WordPress plugin to import the data and create a stack of draft posts for proofing and publication.

My review of The Rusty Bicycle as it now appears on this site. — I was moderately unimpressed by Oxford pub The Rusty Bicycle. I originally said so on Google Maps, and now I can say so here, too!

So now you can read all of the reviews I’ve ever posted to any of those four sites, right here, alongside any other reviews I subsequently reintegrate and any I write directly to my blog in the future. The battle to own all of my own content after 25 years of scattering it throughout the Internet isn’t always easy, but it remains worthwhile.

(I haven’t open-sourced my work this time because it’s probably useful only to me and my very-specific set-up, but if anybody wants a copy they can get in touch.)

Logitech MX Master 2S

I’m a big believer in the idea that the hardware I lay my hands on all day, every day, needs to be the best for its purpose. On my primary desktop, I type on a Das Keyboard 4 Professional (with Cherry MX brown switches) because it looks, feels, and sounds spectacular. I use the Mac edition of the keyboard because it, coupled with a few tweaks, gives me the best combination of features and compatibility across all of the Windows, MacOS, and Linux (and occasionally other operating systems) I control with it. These things matter.

I also care about the mouse I use. Mice are, for the most part, for the Web and for gaming and not for use in most other applications (that’s what keyboard shortcuts are for!) but nonetheless I spend plenty of time holding one and so I want the tool that feels right to me. That’s why I was delighted when, in replacing my four year-old Logitech MX1000 in 2010 with my first Logitech Performance MX, I felt able to declare it the best mouse in the world. My Performance MX lived for about four years, too – that seems to be how long a mouse can stand the kind of use that I give it – before it started to fail and I opted to replace it with an identical make and model. I’d found “my” mouse, and I was sticking with it. It’s a great shape (if you’ve got larger hands), is full of features including highly-configurable buttons, vertical and horizontal scrolling (or whatever you want to map them to), and a cool “flywheel” mouse wheel that can be locked to regular operation or unlocked for controlled high-speed scrolling at the touch of a button: with practice, you can even use it as a speed control by gently depressing the switch like it was a brake pedal. Couple all of that with incredible accuracy on virtually any surface, long battery life, and charging “while you use” and you’ve a recipe for success, in my mind.

My second Performance MX stopped properly charging its battery this week, and it turns out that they don’t make them any more, so I bought its successor, the Logitech MX Master 2S.

The MX Master 2S is… different… from its predecessor. Mostly in good ways, sometimes less-good. Here’s the important differences:

Matte coating: only the buttons are made of smooth plastic; the body of the mouse is now a slightly coarser plastic: you’ll see in the photo above how much less light it reflects. It feels like it would dissipate heat less-well.
Horizontal wheel replaces rocker wheel: instead of the Performance MX’s “rocker” scroll wheel that can be pushed sideways for horizontal scroll, the MX Master 2S adds a dedicated horizontal scroll (or whatever you reconfigure it to) wheel in the thumb well. This is a welcome change: the rocker wheel in both my Performance MXes became less-effective over time and in older mice could even “jam on”, blocking the middle-click function. This seems like a far more-logical design.
New back/forward button shape: to accommodate the horizontal wheel, the “back” and “forward” buttons in the thumb well have been made smaller and pushed closer together. This is the single biggest failing of the MX Master 2S: it’s clearly a mouse designed for larger hands, and yet these new buttons are slightly, but noticeably, harder to accurately trigger with a large thumb! It’s tolerable, but slightly annoying.
Bluetooth support: one of my biggest gripes about the Performance MX was its dependence on Unifying, Logitech’s proprietary wireless protocol. The MX Master 2S supports Unifying but also supports Bluetooth, giving you the best of both worlds.
Digital flywheel: the most-noticable change when using the mouse is the new flywheel and braking mechanism, which is comparable to the change in contemporary cars from a mechanical to a digital handbrake. The flywheel “lock” switch is now digital, turning on or off the brake in a single stroke and so depriving you of the satisfaction of using it to gradually “slow down” a long spin-scroll through an enormous log or source code file. But in exchange comes an awesome feature called SmartShift, which dynamically turns on or off the brake (y’know, like an automatic handbrake!) depending on the speed with which you throw the wheel. That’s clever and intuitive and “just works” far better than I’d have imagined: I can choose to scroll slowly or quickly, with or without the traditional ratchet “clicks” of a wheel mouse, with nothing more than the way I flick my finger (and all fully-configurable, of course). And I’ve still got the button to manually “toggle” the brake if I need it. It took some getting used to, but this change is actually really cool! (I’m yet to get used to the sound of the digital brake kicking in automatically, but that’s true of my car too).
Basic KVM/multi-computing capability: with a button on the underside to toggle between different paired Unifying/Bluetooth transceivers and software support for seamless edge-of-desktop multi-computer operation, Logitech are clearly trying to target folks who, like me, routinely run multiple computers simultaneously from a single keyboard and mouse. But it’s a pointless addition in my case because I’ve been quite happy using Synergy to do this for the last 7+ years, which does it better. Still, it’s a harmless “bonus” feature and it might be of value to others, I suppose.

All in all, the MX Master 2S isn’t such an innovative leap forward over the Performance MX as the Performance MX was over the MX1000, but it’s still great that this spectacular series of heavyweight workhouse feature-rich mice continues to innovate and, for the most part, improve upon the formula. This mouse isn’t cheap, and it isn’t for everybody, but if you’re a big-handed power user with a need to fine-tune all your hands-on hardware to get it just right, it’s definitely worth a look.

AWOOOOO

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

AWOOOOO | The Obscuritory (The Obscuritory)

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…

Phil “Shadsy” Salvador (The Obscuritory)

After The Obsuritory – a blog providing reviews of old and less-well-known video games – published a review of 1994’s Wolf, they followed-up with this additional review… written for a wolf.

The Internet is weird and hilarious.

I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Once upon a time, long before I began selling my face by the acre for features on VICE dot com, I worked other jobs. There was one in particular that really had an impact on me: writing fake reviews on TripAdvisor. Restaurant owners would pay me £10 and I’d write a positive review of their place, despite never eating there. Over time, I became obsessed with monitoring the ratings of these businesses. Their fortunes would genuinely turn, and I was the catalyst.

This convinced me that TripAdvisor was a false reality – that the meals never took place; that the reviews were all written by other people like me. However, they’re not, of course – they’re almost all completely genuine. And there was one other factor that seemed impossible to fake: the restaurants themselves. So I moved on.

And then, one day, sitting in the shed I live in, I had a revelation: within the current climate of misinformation, and society’s willingness to believe absolute bullshit, maybe a fake restaurant is possible? Maybe it’s exactly the kind of place that could be a hit?

In that moment, it became my mission. With the help of fake reviews, mystique and nonsense, I was going to do it: turn my shed into London’s top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor.

…

Oobah Butler (Vice)

Daydream VR hands-on: Googles dumb VR headset is actually very clever

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Of all the products announced today at Google’s massive event, the Daydream View might be the best seller. At only $79, Daydream packs a “Good enough” controller and VR headset into a single box, allowing anyone with a brand new phone (for now only a brand new Google phone) to experience virtual reality. The Daydream opens up the Gear VR concept to the entire Android Ecosystem, with future Android devices expected to support the standard…

Ron Amadeo (Ars Technia)

Quake

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Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (Zero Punctuation)

Godzilla’s Family Vlog Review – Episode 15, 16, 17 – Secret Bonus Review

An interview conducted in the back of a moving car with Sarah, the true talent behind Godzilla Huntley’s Family Vlog. Supplements my review to episodes 15, 16 and 17.

Also available on YouTube.

The Ambassador’s Notebook (Murder Mystery)

Short version of the review: a few teething problems aside, we all had a wonderful time and we’d certainly consider a Daggerville game for our next murder mystery party. The characters were, on the whole, wonderful characters well-realised and fully-developed within the constraints of the genre, the twist was clever, there were moments of great hilarity (such as the point when we realised that there’d been a veritable conga-line of people stealthily following one another around the hotel), and the event built up to a fun and satisfying conclusion. I’d suggest that you all keep an eye on Daggerville in the future.

As implied earlier this week, this weekend Ruth, JTA and I had planned to host the latest in a long series of murder mystery party nights (a handful of which have been reviewed on this blog). Despite our earlier worries, we eventually filled the “missing” slots in our party with our friends Liz and Dean: exactly the couple we’d planned to fill it with in the first place, but they’d been painfully slow at RSVPing.

We’ve played a lot of murder mystery games over the years: we could probably be described as connoisseurs of the genre, and that might be worth bearing in mind when you read what we had to say about this particular event. To enumerate, there’s been:

The entire back catalogue of Paul Lamond‘s Murder a la Carte / Inspector McClue series
Several of D’Avekki Studios‘ Murder Mystery Party series
A game in which nobody was murdered by Freeform Games
And several murder mystery games that I’ve written: one in a “scripted” style, the rest in an “open” style

That said, this latest party really had the opportunity to cross the board, with Liz and Dean having never been to a murder mystery night before and (other) Liz and Simon having been to only a few. And to top it all off, we were working with a completely new game from a creator of whom we’d had no experience. What could be more exciting?

You see: I was contacted a little over two months ago, via my web form, by a Martin from Daggerville Games, a new murder mystery party provider of the “buy-and-download” variety. Upon visiting their website, I was immediately struck by some of the similarities between their signup form (which asks for player names to be associated with characters, genders to be chosen for characters whose gender can be selected based on the gender balance among the players, and email addresses to which invitations will be sent) and a prototype one of my own design, used in the construction of my upcoming games Murder at the Glam Rock Concert and Murder on the Social Network, the first of which we hope to host in about a year’s time. I mentioned this to Martin, in the hope that they won’t think I’m ripping them off if I eventually put some of my pieces online for the world to play, too.

The Daggerville folks, perhaps anticipating that I would be likely to blog about the event in hindsight and thus provide them with some free publicity, offered me a voucher for a free game of my choice, which I accepted. After a little discussion, we settled upon The Ambassador’s Notebook, a 7-player murder mystery set in a rural 1920s hotel and revolving around the untimely death of a Mr. Sullivan, presumably related to a valuable journal that was in his possession.

In order to keep the spoilers at the tail end of this blog post (there’ll be a nice big warning before you get to them, so you can refrain from reading them if you’re planning to someday play this game yourself), I’ll cut to the chase and first provide a summary of the night as a whole.

We all had a fun time: as usual for these gatherings, there was good wine, great company, and spectacular food (Ruth had, once again, put together a wonderfully thought-out and thematically-sound menu): honestly, under these conditions we’d be pretty-much guaranteed a good night no matter what. The murder mystery itself was a scripted affair similar to those you’ll find in any off-the-shelf kit, but with a few quirks. For a start, as hinted above, everybody gets their fragments of the script (along with dialogue entry and exit cues) very early on: it’s possible, permitted, and even encouraged that players read their script before they arrive for the event. Some of us were concerned that this might result in “spoilers”, and a few of those of us who did pre-read our scripts said that they regretted doing so, so be aware: it’s a spoiler-risk.

Unlike similar-styled games, though, players aren’t given additional information outside of the script, and we all felt that this made things challenging when it came to the discussion breaks. All that we had to go on for our deliberations was exactly what we’d all heard, just minutes before, tempered by our own speculation. Sometimes somebody would ask, or consider asking, a valid question after somebody’s whereabouts, alibi, or history, but no answer was forthcoming because all that we had, collectively, was the script. This caused additional confusion when, for example, Liz’s character mentioned JTA’s character by his first name, it was a surprise to everybody… even JTA, who had no idea to begin with that it was supposed to be his name!

None of the problems we experienced “broke” the game, and we found our way to a reasonably-satisfactory conclusion. A majority of us voted correctly, determining the identity of the murderer, and Ruth even managed to identify an important twist (albeit not based on anything more than speculation: the “flash” was a little subtle for us). There were a few anachronisms in the script, but they’re of the kind that only nerds like us would notice (the National Theatre is mentioned despite the fact that it won’t be founded for another four decades or so, and a character makes a reference to a frozen turkey, even though freezing of meat in the West wasn’t yet commonplace, for example). We’d have really liked to have each had a brief – even just half a page! – to tell us each more about our own characters (their names, for example, as well some of the secrets that they might be concealing and any established relationships they have with other characters), and if we knew that Daggerville were adding this feature, it’d make us far more-likely to buy their products in future.

The short review would be: a few teething problems aside, we all had a wonderful time and we’d certainly consider a Daggerville game for our next murder mystery party. The characters were, on the whole, wonderful characters well-realised and fully-developed within the constraints of the genre, the twist was clever, there were moments of great hilarity (such as the point when we realised that there’d been a veritable conga-line of people stealthily following one another around the hotel), and the event built up to a fun and satisfying conclusion. I’d suggest that you all keep an eye on Daggerville in the future.

[spb_message color=”alert-warning” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Spoiler warning: reading beyond here could result in seeing spoilers. Don’t read on if you’re likely to ever take part in a game of The Ambassador’s Notebook.[/spb_message]

Aside from the lack of character “introductions”, another thing we found difficult in this game were issues in the script. The script for “The Neighbour” ended up one-number out of sync in the middle of Scene 2, where her ‘line 42’ indicated that a different person should be talking to what the rest of the scripts said. On another occasion, the script for “The Proprietress” seemed to be missing a line (although other characters had the ‘tail end’ of that line). The character of “The Journalist” can be played by a man or a woman, and although I selected “male” when I filled in the form, some of the scripts referred to the character as a woman! At first I thought that this might be related to difficulties some of us had had receiving the emailed scripts (Martin at Daggerville was incredibly helpful at sending out fresh ones, though), but we found at least one instance in which one person flip-flopped between referring to “The Journalist” as female or male!

(there’s a video I’ve put together of some of the highlights of our evening, but there’s possible spoilers in it)

Personally, though, my favourite moment of the night came right at the start, as we all introduced our characters. One of the Liz’s, an American, had decided to play her character as an American, and introduced herself as such. “Oh,” said the other Liz, whom she’d just met, “Are you going to do an accent?”