Tag: video games
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Roomscale VR Still Rocks
I'd promised the kids I'd dig up my (ten-year-old!) original HTC Vive VR gear and hook it up in the living room over Christmas. Roomscale VR, even running on decade-old kit, still rocks and is as immersive as ever!
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Egg and Dispatch
I don't get much time for videogames, so when I find the opportunity to complete not one but two games within a single month, you know my recommendation of them holds some weight! Let me tell you about 'Egg', and 'Dispatch'.
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Tom Forsyth recollects a bug that made Half-Life 2 unwinnable when built using a compiler to that supported SSE. A reminder of how weird the edge-cases in tech can be!
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DOCTYPE
I received my copy of DOCTYPE magazine, a genuine 'type this program in and run it'-style programming magazine but for a modern world, and enjoyed writing, debugging, playing, and then considering refining Stuart Langridge's puzzle The Nine Pyramids.
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Dogspinner
Dogspinner - by Lu Wilson and Flora Caulton - is the Monday morning distraction you didn't know you needed.
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Acai plays "Musical Transients" by Psynwav on Clone Hero
Turns out I'm not quite done obsessing over Musical Transients, and I found a video of YouTuber Acai playing the album on Clone Hero, which was a fun and enjoyable watch-along.
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A Castle Built From Random Rooms
A Twine-like choose-your-own-adventure, but with the rooms randomly shuffled each time, in sort-of a semi-rougelite way. Some imaginative work in this. And the art style is wonderful!
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DOGWALK
DOGWALK is a free, open-source Godot game for Windows, MacOS and Linux, produced and given to the world by Blender Studio as a way of showcasing some of their video lessons. And it's adorable.
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ChatGPT beats GeoGuessr
Given nothing more than a screenshot or two of my game screen, from the starting position only, ChatGPT plays GeoGuessr better than I ever could. Apart from cheating at GeoGuessr, what else could this mean? Is this going to be a scary new weapon in the toolkit of Internet stalkers?
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Made a little progress on the game idea I'd been experimenting with. The idea is to do find a series of orthogonal (like a rook in chess!) moves that land on every square exactly once each before returning to the start, dodging walls and jumping pits.
But the squares have arrows (limiting the direction you can move out of them) or numbers (specifying the distance you must travel from them).
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Four sample puzzles, one of them solved.
Every board is solvable, starting from any square. There'll be a playable version to use on your device (with helpful features like "undo") sometime soon, but for now you can give them a go by hand, if you like this kind of puzzle!
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Possibly I'm a little late for the "casual daily puzzle game" party. (Did Wordle already get invented in this timeline; I forget?)
I think there's something in an idea I've been toying with. Bring on the weekend, when I can throw some brainpower at the frontend code!
![Full image of A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2025/03/20250313_100059-scaled.jpg)
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A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.
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It's not cheating if you write the video game solver yourself
Robert Heaton wrote a solver to help him crack a puzzle in a video game, and I'm 100% behind this as a valid approach to playing single-player games, if it's more fun for you than the alternatives.
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It is as if you were on your phone
When you use your phone to play this game, it really does look indistinguishable from being on your phone. Weird!
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I've been playing Sean O'Connor's Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version, before I tried my hand at "rewilding" the game world.
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Hex-based videogame board, entirely owned by the yellow player, but with only a single solitary soldier standing alone. The rest of the island is heavily forested in pine and, along one coast, palm trees, with the exception of the far North beyond a line of castles.
The rules of the game make trees... a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a pleasant way to finish the round.
Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don't let anybody tell you there's a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How will you play?
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Queers make the world a safer place
Cat shares the experience of his friend who semi-independently discovered that queer-friendly online spaces are an antidote to patriarchal toxic masculinity. Because duh. A delightful tale.