UCLan Alumni Selected As Part Of BAFTA Games Crew.

Super excited to announce that two of our Alumni, Steph McStea @TeaAndMonsters of Team 17

and Scott Swarbrick @Scott_Swarbrick of MilkyTea have been selected as part of the BAFTA Games Crew for 2019! 

http://www.bafta.org/supporting-talent/bafta-crew

Big Congratulations Scott and Steph!

More Reaper Bones 4 Minis

   More Reaper Bones 4 minis...

Thunderfoot Defender

Rear of same

Pack of Velociraptors.

Tech Book Face Off: Rails AntiPatterns Vs. The Rails 5 Way

It's been a while since I've cracked open a Ruby on Rails book, and there were still a couple of these books that I've been meaning to read. So far the Rails books I've read have been beginner's books and tutorials. With this latest pair of books, I wanted to go deeper into Rails and learn how to program fluently in the framework. The first book, Rails AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring by Chad Pytel and Tammer Saleh, was published way back in 2010 when Rails 2.3 was cutting edge. I took a chance that the book would focus more on timeless advice than version-specific tips and tricks. The opposing book, The Rails 5 Way by Obie Fernandez, was published much more recently at the end of 2017 and should be at less risk of being out-of-date. Although, it looks like Rails 6 will be out soon. One thing's for sure: technology doesn't stand still, but that shouldn't matter too much if the books take that into account. Let's see how they fare.

VS.

Rails AntiPatterns

Most programming books will tell you the right way to do things and give examples of how to implement that advice. This book takes a different tack and instead shows you what not to do, with examples of how to refactor those mistakes into clean Rails code. This change in approach is refreshing for the intermediate to advanced programmer because over time we develop certain habits as we try to discover how to do things in a language or a framework, and they're not always the best (or even very good) ways of doing those things. Having a book to help identify where our code has gone astray and how to fix it is a helpful tool indeed.

I was a bit worried about reading a book specifically about Rails that was written so many versions ago, being that Rails 2.3 was out at the time and we're now heading into Rails 6.0. I normally don't mind reading older books about programming in general, since those books have been filtered by time and tend to contain plenty of wisdom that has survived current fads. However, this is a book about a specific web framework, so if it is over eight years old, how could it possibly still be relevant? I needn't have worried. Most of the book focuses on general good programming practices within the context of the Rails environment. Such advice is still as valid in Rails 6.0 as it was in Rails 2.3, even if some of the implementation details have changed.

The structure of the book works well, with ten chapters each focusing on a different topic of the Rails framework. These topics range from the obvious models, views, and controllers on which the Rails architecture is based, to the related services, testing, and databases that are all a part of web application programming. Each topic covers a few antipatterns with descriptions of a common programming mistake and why it's wrong, followed by one or more solutions that fix up the antipattern into beautiful, DRY code. The obvious solutions—like that views should contain strictly display logic, controllers should be thin, and models should contain all of the business logic, but broken out into helpers and plain Ruby objects—are covered along with a number of less obvious antipatterns. Some of the more extended solutions are quite satisfying to follow as the refactorings morph an ugly hack into a pretty Rails implementation.

Throughout these refactored antipatterns the authors relate clear reasons for why things should be done a certain way and sound advice on how to choose between competing options. For example, when discussing whether or not to use scopes to create chainable filters on models, they say:

There are downsides to this approach, including problems with readability and simplicity, as well as abuse of the Law of Demeter. Whether you use this approach is a judgment call on your part. Will you use the added flexibility? Is it better than defining a handful of separate finders? Like many advanced refactorings, this one has no easy answer and depends greatly on your tastes.

I appreciate the honesty of this advice. In programming, as in most things in life, not all rules are hard and fast. Multiple good options can and do exist, and in these cases it comes down to a judgement call from the programmer, given the context of the specific situation. Experience and taste will develop into a programmer's style, and as long as they're not making a poor choice for the wrong reason, it's okay to prefer one viable option over another.

The authors aren't always so amenable to choice in correcting antipatterns. They do discourage attempts at divining the future, as in this example:

Developers new to the template pattern tend to want to err on the side of flexibility. This is a form of future-proofing, and it's a mistake—especially when working in a language as geared toward agile development and the refactoring cycle as Ruby.

It's almost always better to spend time fixing real problems in the here and now instead of trying to predict and head off future problems that may never happen.

The whole book was full of insights like these, and it was all packaged in easy-to-read prose and concise, relevant examples of how not to write Rails code, followed by how to fix it. I found it to be a quite enjoyable way to learn better Rails programming practices, and it reminded me of an old chess book that had followed a similar format: How Not to Play Chess. Seeing the mistakes that can be made and their consequences clearly laid out can prove quite helpful in identifying our own mistakes and seeing the path to correcting them. This teaching method was expertly executed in Rails AntiPatterns, and I highly recommend giving it a read if you do any programming in Rails.

The Rails 5 Way

This was definitely the longest book on a programming language or framework that I've read in a while. Weighing in at over a thousand pages, it definitely achieves tome status, and strives to be a comprehensive map of the Rails 5 framework. The forwards and introduction recommend reading it straight through at least once to get the lay of the land and see everything that's available in Rails before using it as a reference.

I would agree that knowing what tools are available in any given language or framework is half the battle when attempting to develop solutions as efficiently as possible. If you know that something you want to do is possible and you know where to look to research how to do it, then you're already ahead of the game in reaching an optimal solution. However, I was not going to read all the way through this book, considering the last third of it is a pure reference listing of the Active Model and Active Support APIs. That's skim-worthy material at best.

At least another third of the non-appendix part of the book is also reference listings of various APIs in the Rails framework. The trouble with this reference material is that it is interspersed with actual guidance on how to use the different parts of Rails. That makes it much harder to skim through the boring, tedious method descriptions without missing tidbits of more useful information, so most of the book was kind of a slog.

Obie Fernandez took a slightly unconventional approach to covering Rails, and instead of starting with Active Record, he started at a high level by covering the Rails configuration and environments, then followed the flow of a request by going into routes, REST, resources, and controllers before getting to Active Record. After five chapters of the various aspects of Active Record, he continued with Action View, helpers, and Haml, followed up by an assortment of short chapters on session management, security, Action Mailer, caching, background processing, Ajax, Turbolinks, Action Cable, and testing with RSpec. Whew. Like I said, comprehensive, and even if some things couldn't be included in depth, they were at least mentioned so that the reader could be aware of them and do more research on their own.

Some chapters were quite useful and informative, like the main chapters on the MVC architecture of Rails. These chapters contained a fair amount of good advice and recommendations that can save developers a lot of trouble, such as:

Rails' schema definition provides the authoritative record of truth for the latest version of your database schema. If you need to recreate your database on another server, you should be using db:schema:load, not running all the migrations from scratch.

Anyone who's tried to run a long chain of migrations while setting up an application on a new machine can attest to the futile debugging situation you end up in when one of the migrations inevitably fails halfway through. Using the schema is definitely the way to go. I also found the chapters on security, caching, and Turbolinks to be quite helpful, and I learned a bunch of great things that will help me build better Rails applications.

On the other hand, there were large swaths of the book that were pure drudgery. Most of the helpers chapter was like this with page after page of very similar method descriptions:

11.3.1 asset_path(source, options = {})
Computes the path to asset in public directory. If :type options is set, a file extension will be appended and scoped to the corresponding public directory. All other asset *_path helpers delegate through this method.

<...code example...>

11.3.2 asset_url(source, options = {})
Computes the full URL to an asset in the public directory. This will use asset_path internally, so they behave the same way. If the :host option is set, it overrides the global config.action_controller.asset_host setting normally set in config/environments/production.rb.

asset_url "application.js", host: "http://cdn.example.com" # => http://cdn.example.com/assets/application.js

Also aliased as url_to_asset.

Ugh. This kind of stuff is much easier to search for in the online Rails documentation when you need to look it up, not by paging through a giant book. I was also surprised at how much of these method descriptions ended with comments about how useless they were. Maybe 20% of the methods would have a description of what they did with a code example, and then Fernandez would end it with saying he had never found a use for this method or you would never want to do things this way because some other method was much better. That got more than a little frustrating as the book dragged on.

It may sound a bit strange to criticize this book for including ways not to do things in Rails, having just praised a book whose entire structure was showing how not to do things and then showing the right way, but this is different. In Rails AntiPatterns, the author was showing common mistakes when programming in Rails and how to fix those mistakes by using Rails the right way. My complaint with The Rails 5 Way is that time is spent describing irrelevant methods that may have been included in the framework for completeness or for a specific, uncommon use case, but are hardly ever used in practice. When those things are included in a book whose title asserts that this is how things should be done, it muddies the waters.

Between the appendices, the long lists of method descriptions, and the inclusion of dozens of methods that are rarely used, this book is probably three to four times longer than it needs to be, all for the sake of being comprehensive. It was light enough on actual recommendations for how to use Rails, focusing more on every single thing that's available, that a more appropriate title would simple be The Rails 5 Documentation.


I much prefer reading programming books that directly address the 'how' and 'why' of programming, like these books I previously reviewed on how to use Rails. The Ruby on Rails Tutorial is especially good and the latest version is also up-to-date with Rails 5.  Even Rails AntiPatterns is still relevant nearly a decade later because it addresses the fundamentals of developing in Rails. I would rather leave the 'what' of programming to the online documentation where it is easily searchable and stays updated to the latest version of the tools. In that respect The Rails 5 Way falls flat. It would have been a much more compelling book if it had stripped out all of the drab documentation and focused on showing the right way to program in Rails and explaining why that was the best way to do it. As it is, reading through Rails AntiPatterns and referring to the online documentation is the more productive path.

Nonsense And Other Observations About Dracula/Horror Of Dracula

As much as I love Dracula (1958)/Horror of Dracula, I find it has a lot of plot holes, ideas that don't make a lot of sense and other weirdness.  I started to write down certain observations as I was watching the film and eventually they became so long that I thought them worth putting them up in a blog post.  These observations as I have put them to type have been as timestamped to the times (roughly) in the film to which they most apply.  I am using the 2012 Hammer Restoration found on the 2013 Region B/2 Blu-ray/DVD from Lionsgate with altered color timing by a fan (which eliminates the overly-blue tint found on that disc).  Any DVD or Blu-ray release should be able to follow along without too much difficulty.

Read more »

You say "obsessed" as if it is a bad thing.

A Disease Of Invaders

Pandemic has taken Settlers of Catan's place as the foremost gateway into hobby gaming, and with its simple yet challenging design, engaging cooperative theme, and deep market penetration, it's earned it. In an effort to get the game to even more tables, Pandemic's publisher has re-skinned the game in a plethora of different flavors, changing the threat to a flood in Rising Tide or Lovecraftian horrors in Pandemic Cthulhu.

We've only played Pandemic once or twice, and never got around to buying a copy for our game library, so we decided to pick up the Fall of Rome version, which replaces spreading disease vectors with invading armies of barbarians intent on sacking ancient Rome. Since we have little experience with the original Pandemic we can't really compare the two, but that might be better as we can look at this version of the game on its own merits.

It's easy to see why Pandemic has been such a successful game. The rules are simple but allow for a good amount of meaningful decision making, and watching the board fill up with counters representing the barbarian hordes gives the game a great sense of drama. Players can command Roman legions to fight off the barbarians, but the real strategy is in collecting sets of cards that can be turned in to make peace with individual barbarian tribes. This doesn't stop them from attacking, but it makes it possible to convert barbarians into Roman soldiers to help fight off their former allies.

Players are also given a handful of special cards that offer great advantages in the game, but at a price. Each time one of these cards is spent for its more powerful effect, it moves the decline marker closer to the eventual collapse of Roman society from within, which gives the game another clock to race against.

The engaging game play is coupled with some terrific artwork that helps sell the idea that these are cultured Roman citizens fighting off invading armies and their own decline, rather than just colored cubes on a piece of cardboard.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A robust and well-designed game that we will play often, and it's usually an easy sell to our non-gamer friends and family too.

• Pandemic: Fall of Rome official website
• Pandemic: Fall of Rome on BoardGameGeek

The Dark Untold Story Of PUBG Sanhok Map

SANHOK, unlike other PUBG maps, is 4×4 km wide consisting of the jungles and mountains. But there is a dark story behind this jungle map. Many PUBG players have complained of seeing a ghost or spiritual activities in this horror map. The story behind this map is more terrifying.

    It was the ancient time when kings ruled their kingdoms. The island of Sanhok was ruled by a cruel king. As per their traditions and rituals the first daughter of the villagers, when reached the age of 14, would be sacrificed in the name of GOD. They were killed in a cave such that their blood was allowed to drop in the cave and then their dead bodies were buried in ruins. ( In the game both the cave and ruins are present. Also one can notice the water full of blood inside the cave)

               They kept doing it until one day the king had died suddenly. The reason was unknown. One of the king's man became the next king only to die the same way the earlier king had died.

                     The villagers believed that the ghost of the girls who were sacrificed was the reason behind the death of the kings. It was very terrifying for them.

                      They made dolls of the girls who were sacrificed because they hoped that the ghost would be stuck in the dolls and would not kill them. In the real game, the dolls can be found in many locations. Also, many horror sightings were seen by many players.

     Some images of horror sightings are given below :

       

          

               Having no king to rule, the civilians were divided into two groups. One supporting the ritual and the other one opposing the ritual. The ironic thing is that the supporting group thought that the paranormal activities are because GOD is angry with the opposing group and the opposing group thought that the paranormal activities are because of the supporting group.

      The role of PUBG players on this island is either the ritual supporting or the opposing group. Which group in your opinion is correct? Answer us by leaving a comment below. 

       

    Note : 

         ▪ The name 'Sanhok' has been derived from the combination of the Thai word for 'fun' pronounced as sah-nook and the Filipino word for chicken pronounced as 'mah-nook'.

       ▪ There is no strong proof that this story for Sanhok is true but according to many players and some evidence of horror, activities increases the trueness of this story.

Dwarves: The Natural Choice For An Army Painting Sprint

The last meaningful work I did on my Warmaster Dwarves was seven years ago (nearly to the day). I'd been humming and hawing about a Warmaster army for awhile now, and settled on the Dwarves when I got back from Scotland a few weeks ago. Since then I've finished the silver and gold, and laid down the first layer for the wood. I have no idea if I'll get these to a usable state before Fall In! in November, but I'm trying.

ASOIAF: 40Pt Boltons With Ramsay

You know it's real when everyone else is in armor and you're naked.

I've been dying to write this piece.  Beknownst to some, while Tywin is my favorite character of all time, I also really like Roose Bolton.  I think of him as the Tywin of the North because they're so alike in a lot of ways.  In fact, when you dig down a little deeper into the origins of House Bolton, you will find many disturbing and interesting things about them.  Mechanically, I think they play very close to their book representation and that means a lot of death and terror.  For now, I think Boltons' are the strongest when paired with House Lannister because of a lot of their tactics cards and toolkits synergizes with Lannister control elements.

Let's jump straight into a list that I've been messing with lately.  Since I'm going to turn this into a 2-part show, let me start with something that I've had quite a bit of success with.  To say it's pretty freaking brutal is an understatement.

I mean, lol, look at this guy.

Faction: House Lannister
Commander: Ramsay Snow – The Bastard of Bolton
Points: 40 (20 Neutral)

Combat Units:
• House Clegane Mountain Men (6)
  with Ramsay Snow – The Bastard of Bolton (0)
  and Theon Greyjoy – Reek (0)
• House Clegane Mountain Men (6)
  with Dreadfort Captain (1)
• Bolton Cutthroats (5)
  with Assault Veteran (1)
• The Flayed Men (10)
  with Gregor Clegane – Mounted Behemoth (3)

Non-Combat Units:
• Tywin Lannister – The Great Lion (4)
• Lord Varys – The Spider (4)

Made with ASOIAFBuilder.com

Just so you guys know, I absolutely hated Ramsay in the show.  I still can't decide who I actually hated more, him or Joffrey, and that's an achievement in itself.  To make things short and sweet, Ramsay's a battlefield commander through and through.  He likes to get in there and chop people to bits to spread fear directly.  When he pops his Order to Flay Them All! after a unit fails a Panic test, another unit within Long Range has to take a Panic test.  This is a great mechanic to have in a unit of MM because of the Vicious inflicting a -2 modifier.  The affiliation to House Bolton is something we will talk about once we take a look at his Tactics Cards.  Before we forget, let's talk about poor Theon who Ramsay brings along with him.  Having Theon dragged around with you basically allows Ramsay to auto-panic an opponents' unit every turn, but the downside there is that if you roll a 5+, Theon dies.  Boohoo, I guess.

Everything is made for killing.

The biggest weakness to this list is the low activations and deploys, but outwitting the opponent isn't something I'm going after.  I'm looking to get in there and murder the enemy in every way possible.  When you look at cards like Our Blades are Sharp, you will see that's one of the most damaging tactics cards in the entire game.  If you attack a Panicked enemy, your attack gains +1 to hit and +2 dice on the attack.  If you're a House Bolton unit, the defender also becomes Vulnerable.  This is why I have 2 real House Bolton units in the game and a MM with the House Bolton affiliation.  Make no mistake:  This one card absolutely sky-rockets your units ability to deal damage.  With a plentiful amount of Critical Blows, Vicious, and 3s to hit across the entire army, you will have plenty of chances to inflict maximum hurt on the enemy.  Cruel Methods is activation cheating, simple as that.  You play this card at the start of the round, regardless of whose turn it is and you get an out-of-turn free attack action.  Sure, there are downsides to this card if you don't manage to destroy the enemy unit, but with 3 House Bolton units on the field using max dice and re-rolling misses, you better do some work.  An amazing target for this is your Bolton Cutthroats with Assault Veteran.  If you pop this on them and that unit is already engaged with something, you will be rolling 10 dice, hitting on 2s with re-rolls, making the Vulnerable, and they have to test Panic with Vicious.  If it's going to be your unit activation, you can just cap the Combat zone with Varys and go again if that unit is somehow still alive and your guys are still around.  I'm telling you, it's bananas.  Lastly, we have Sadistic Games, where at the start of a friendly turn, your opponent has to pick either to have 2 of his units to be Panicked or suffer D3+2 automatic hits.  If he understands Ramsay at all, he'll go for the extra hits because at least he has a chance to save them.  Having 2 units being Panicked just sets them up to be abused later by Our Blades are Sharp.

Madness.  Madness and Stupidity.

Let's talk about the unit selection super quick:  Mountain's Men should be pretty straight forward.  You have Critical Blows and Vicious who works great with Ramsay's tactics cards.  Bolton Cutthroats with Assault Veteran is a match made in heaven, and having a Dreadfort Captain on the MMs help spread Panic whenever the opponent fails their Panic test (which should be often due to Vicious).  The giant elephant in the room is the fat-stack of The Mountain + Flayed Men.  Let's get one thing straight here:  This is 32.5% of your army and in most cases, can be considered a deathstar.  Now, I normally don't like to do this kind of thing, but I think Ser G + Flayed Men are one of the strongest units in the entire game by far, especially when you have them in damage amplifying list like this one.  For me, the best way to get value out of these guys is to take them in a list that will almost guarantee they make their points back.  If you think about in terms of points:  A 13-point unit better kill at least 13+ points to break even or be considered a unit well-spent.  This is, after all, 2 more units of Mountain's Men or even close to 3 units of Cutthroats or Lannister Guardsman.  It's a huge investment and I need people to realize that they do have weaknesses, that you can play around them quite easily, that mission objectives do matter, and there are plenty of tactics cards and combos out there that can stifle their damage or end them entirely.  I do not consider them over-performing at all, but they are nasty.

So why did I bring them?  Well, for one, Gregor applies free Panic that unlocks Our Blades are Sharp automatically and also automatically deal D3 wounds.  The fact that you can play Our Blades are Sharp on this unit is something out of this world, because now, on the charge you have 10 attack dice, hitting on 2s and re-rolling, Critical Blows + Vicious, Panic + Spread Fear, you make the unit Vulnerable, and you deal D3 extra wounds from The Mountain just because you can.  If that doesn't roll over many people, it will reduce them to almost combat ineffectiveness status and they will then try to retaliate against a unit with 2+ save.  If you wipe them out or start the round with Cruel Methods, you can then Overrun into another unit with a free Charge action to start the chaos all over again.  I don't know what to say, this unit with Ramsay is absolutely absurd considering how many extra, free combat rounds you can get from it, all the while spreading Panic tokens around because of Spread Fear and Vicious.

Yes, the unit above is ridiculously strong and I would say almost designed for Ramsay to take advantage of.  However, it's hugely expensive and that's why a unit like that doesn't perform well in objective-based game modes.  With only 4 combat units, one of which is a 13-point unit from hell, you can't possibly dedicate it to capturing points.  What you need to do if you're piloting this list is to use that unit to smash everything in its way to smithereens.  However, this will require you to have the right cards in hand which is something you should never build your strategy around.  Before I forget, that unit, as mighty as it is, has one giant flaw that needs to be called out:  It is hugely weak against anything that can blunt the initial assault.  A lot of the damage comes from the Abilities that the unit has attached to it so if you take those abilities *cough, Martial Supremacy, cough*, it's pretty much a declawed cat.  You can then trap the unit by engaging it from multiple sides (such as Grey Wind) and apply Greataxes to face.

Finally, I'd like to mention that Tywin as an NCU is still amazing.  In fact, I think he has one of the best once-a-game abilities in the game because it completely makes an enemy unit worthless for a round.  Funny enough, Tywin is also probably one of the best counters to something like the Gregor Flayed Train of Death.

Game 360: Quest For Power (1981)

Problem #1: Nothing Arthur or Galahad did was done "for power."

         

Quest for Power

United States

Crystalware (developer and original publisher); Epyx (later publisher)

Released in 1981 for Atari 800 and Apple II. Rereleased in 1982 as King Arthur's Heir

Date Started: 5 March 2020

Date Finished: 5 March 2020

Total Hours: 1

Difficulty: Very Easy (1/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

           

Quest for Power is another insulting game from Crystalware, a company that was either knowingly scamming its customers or so clueless about what made a good game that they must have never played one. I admit that their titles at least sound interesting--I was sucked in by the backstory of House of Usher (1980), for instance--but if anything they've gotten progressively worse as time passed, losing core elements that made them, if not "good," at least memorable. A commenter named Tronix recently posted some background on the company, and while we can't take an anonymous Internet comment as gospel, what he says makes sense given the quality of the games. I'm particularly disturbed about the part where they "skipped town" while still owing money to a lot of developers. I hope the developer of this game, Marc Benioff, managed to recover.

There isn't much to say about Quest for Power. Like the other Benioff/Crystalware collaboration, The Forgotten Island (1981), it's a short adventure with a few light RPG elements, recalling in structure the old Adventure for the Atari 2600 (1979). It takes about as long to play and win the game as to read the manual, and the lengths that Epyx went through to puff up the manual for the re-release (as King Arthur's Heir) are particularly absurd given the paucity of actual gameplay. 

           

You have to have several artifacts before you enter Canterbury.

           

The backstory casts you as Sir Galahad, son of Arthur's "good friend" Lancelot, who Arthur designates as his heir to the English throne if he can find and return the Scroll of Truth, which Merlin has hidden somewhere on the island. Good lord, that sentence alone manages to mangle the Arthurian legends in about a dozen different ways. The whole point of Galahad's story--in the few sources where he actually appears--is that he's too pure for the mortal world, and he is taken bodily into heaven at the end of the Grail Quest. Arthur and Lancelot are hardly "friends" by the end of Arthur's reign; Merlin should be long gone; and the realm wouldn't be known as "England" for over 400 years.

              

There are several places to buy necessities. This particular list makes it look like I'm about to murder someone and then dump the body off-shore.

            

Your little icon sets out from Camelot to explore the land, which I guess is roughly shaped like Britain except that for some reason it's surrounded by a wall. Your journey will take you to the Caves of Somerset, Hastings Mountain, Sunderland, Essex, the Castle of Skenfrith, the Black Forest, the Eagle Stone, Canterbury, Hillsborough by the Sea, and Leeds. (Of these, only Canterbury has any authentic Arthurian history. "Hastings Mountain" doesn't even exist.) The manual makes it sound like these are all exotic and interesting places to explore, but really they're just names written across the screen with maybe one NPC and a treasure item.

           

This would have made World War II a lot easier.

        

To win the game, you have to defeat a series of enemies (The Devil of Skenfrith Castle, the Black Wizard, Gogmagog--none of them appear in actual Arthuriana) and acquire a series of treasures. For instance, you explore the Caves of Somerset to find the key to Essex, where you find Moses's Rod (where's Kenny when you need him?), and so forth. The enemies named in those parentheses, plus a couple of dragons, are the only fights in the game.

             

Canonically, Galahad could probably do this.

          

Combat is a matter of random rolls. Each round, each fighter does 1-9 points of base damage against the enemy but each round, one of the two combatants gets 10 added to his roll. For instance, you might take 7 damage while doing 19 in the first round, but in the second the Black Wizard gets the bonus and does 15 damage to you versus your 3 damage to him.

                

Looks like I got lucky this round.

              

As you start off with only 3 hit points, the first combat--whoever you fight it with--is a risk. But if you can win, you'll gain enough power and extra hit points that further combats become much easier. After your second or third combat, you're basically invincible.

         

In battle against Gogmagog.

        

Gold chests pop up randomly as you explore, and there are a few places where you can spend your gold on an axe, a rope, and a boat. There are three NPCs (Ambrosius, Amadas, and some random guy in Essex Castle) who give you spectacularly unnecessary hints, and one of them must be bribed over 1,000 gold for his. 

    

I'm sure I would have found it on my own anyway.

      

Once you've found enough artifacts and have built up enough power from killing enemies, the guard Oberion (facepalm) will let you into Canterbury. There, you find the Ark of the Covenant. If you open it without the three major artifacts (Anselm's Staff, Solomon's Ring, and Moses's Rod), you'll be melted in the manner of the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. With the three artifacts, you find the Scroll of Truth.

Completing my quest.

Granted, I had the emulator speed cranked up to 250%, but it still only took me about 20 minutes to run around the map and do what I needed to do. The game minimizes its control scheme; the manual actually brags about this. All action is mapped to the joystick except for the (T)rade command. If you have certain items (torch, boat, rope), you're assumed to use them when the situation calls for it.

Returning the Scroll of Truth to Camelot wins the game. You get a picture of the throne room at Camelot and your score is displayed.

            

You can tell it's Camelot by the "C" on the banners.

           

But of course it doesn't end there. As with half of Crystalware's titles, there's supposedly a Great Mystery lurking beneath the surface, with players encouraged to solve it and send their solutions to the company, with promises of a $250 cash prize. (The Epyx re-release removes any mention of such a puzzle.) As usual, I not only didn't solve it, I don't even know what they're talking about. Is it something you're supposed to find in the game? A hidden message? Is it simply winning the game? 

                

Can anyone identify the source of the image Crystalware used? Reverse image searches were no help.

       

The manual says that to solve the mystery, you must a) read the entire manual, b) "go to each of the magical places and talk to all of the magical people." "It is then," the manual says, "you may understand the very neurotic mystery." Did the author not know what "neurotic" means, or is that a clue?

              

I wonder if they paid anyone.

          

The only three people to talk with in the game are Ambrosius, Amadas, and the guy at Essex. Amadas, at Hastings Mountain, says that "you must have Solomon's Ring and Anselm's Staff and Gogmagog to make it past Oberion!" (Once you defeat Gogmagog, his power "fuses" with you or something.)  Ambrosius is hanging out by something called the Eagle Stone, and he says, "Ah, son of Arthur [???], the staff is in the caves." Essex says, "The Ring of Solomon is in the Skenfrith Castle." I've looked for anagrams, initialisms, and other wordplay and can't find anything. Thus, I'll give a reward of $50 to whoever can solve the mystery, which is five times the value of the GIMLET I gave to Quest for Power. It's the first game so far with 1s straight across the board.

*****

Let's talk about how we got so far down the list:

     

1. I'm having trouble with Planet's Edge (1991). The introductory application starts up okay, but every time I hit ESC to move on, DOSBox crashes with a "corrupt MCB chain" error. I've tried multiple versions. I've tried running INSTALL and configuring video and sound different ways. I've tried running it with LOADFIX. I have not tried another computer with a different configuration of DOSBox, which I will next week after I move.

2. Minotaur: Labyrinths of Crete (1992) turns out to be a two-player game. (You're supposed to connect over AppleTalk.) There's a "single-player mode," but it just lets you explore the dungeon, pick up items, and test them, not play in any meaningful way. It moves to the rejection list.

            

Wandering the Minotaur dungeon.

             

3. I thought I had a working copy of OrbQuest from reader Lance M., but I lost it or never downloaded it or something. I had to ask him for it again. He came through, but I had already half-drafted this entry by then. It'll be soon.

4. I'm moving this week, so I didn't have time to approach a game as complicated as Ultima VII.

     

Anyway, this means I need two more games to add to the "upcoming" list, replacing both Quest for Power and Minotaur. The earliest game on my list that I haven't played is Sands of Mars (1981), another Crystalware title. We have three more, in fact, and I think I'm going to try to cover them all in one entry, but we'll leave it as Sands of Mars for now. After that comes a random roll! It lands on Moraff's Dungeons of the Unforgiven (1993). For those worried that I'm going to get too far away from 1992 before playing Might and Magic IV/V, don't worry--we're going to have a discussion next week about designating "landmark" games that I should prioritize in a given year.

The Nuisance Of Link Surfing

Photo by mikael altemark. Some rights reserved. Source: Flickr

This essay's going to be rather short, so I'll just cut to the chase. An awful habit is developing among the essays, articles, blogs, op-eds, or whatever you want to call them, on the Internet. Allow me to explain. Say you are reading an article about the history of the peanut butter and banana sandwich, when the author of said piece, claims that the popular dish was invented by Elvis Presley. Instead of detailing where they found this fact, or giving us the passage, they hyperlink the statement to their source. Confronted with this, you can either click on the hyperlink to verify the truth of their claim, or you can trust them to be honest and not bother. Of course, no one on the Internet can be trusted these days, so you click, but when to click? Do you click immediately and interrupt the flow of the article or wait until you finish the article, while it dangles among the sentences, tantalizing you. Eventually, when you do click, 9 times out of 10, you reach another Internet source, and 9 times out of 10, they'll have numerous claims where the hyperlinks abound. This eventually becomes a rather time consuming and irritating game, chasing source after source in search of the original. It may take hours, and by the time you finish, you may have forgotten what the original article was about.



I like to call the cat-and-mouse that many news junkies are familiar with, "link-surfing." Unfortunately, I can't say that I coined the term, because Urban Dictionary thought of it first, "link surfing: Traversing the Web by clicking on links within web pages. This technique is often used on encyclopedia sites like Wikipedia" (Gunderson). If only this habit could be regulated to websites like Wikipedia, but alas, it has infected the annals of our best magazines and newspapers. Since people prefer to get their information for free (I sure do) I imagine that much of the press is gearing themselves towards an Internet audience. As such, they no longer bother with quotes or paraphrases. You're expected to either follow the link or take them at face value. This, with all due respect, comes off as lazy. This type of format certainly isn't admissible for college papers or non-fiction Pulitzer Prize winners. I've always believed that a text should be self-contained. All the relevant information necessary to understanding the point of your piece should all be within the text itself. Your sources should be appendices to your arguments. Following all those links to verify the correctness of your claims is simply too much work for the average reader to do in one sitting. Some of us have lives outside of the Internet. We can't be bothered to go link-surfing all day. I don't know if these Internet writers actually expect us to click on all of their links. In a way, their professionalism is appears as not much different from the rumor mill.

By the way, I often find that some of these links are ultimately useless. They may lead to magazine that requires a subscription, or an academic study that requires a subscription, or an Error 404, or a Wikipedia article. Some of you may wonder why I listed the Wikipedia article as useless. Well, to its credit, the free encyclopedia has plenty of information and sources listed. In my opinion, the website's entries are only useful insofar as you are able to check their sources. Some require that you go to the library, while others are dead links or uncheckable. Checking the links, again, takes up too much time, and knowing that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, its claims deserve the highest scrutiny. Will we really be able to verify each and every claim? In other words, not a very reliable source.

This may sound a bit old-fashioned, but I call for an appeal to the past. I realize that not every single claim made needs to be referenced or footnoted, but the big ones do. For those big ones, don't cheapen yourself by only linking the words to another site. Quote or paraphrase it, like you were taught. If you can't find it on the Internet, then fine, source a book if you must. I understand that Internet connection has made information a lot easier to find, and that's a good thing. However, save the rest of us some time, and muscle up your arguments inside of the text, instead of relying solely on links, that frankly, most of us won't even bother to click on. Also, don't source Wikipedia. That makes you look like a slacker.


Bibliography

Gunderson, Bob. "link surfing." Urban Dictionary. May 1, 2007. Web. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=link%20surfing

Further Good News For UCLAN 3Rd Year Student, Peter Dimitrov.

Even more news regarding the Animal Shrine project!

We are so proud to see the work of our 3rd year Games Design student Peter Dimitrov at University of Central Lancashire, featured in 80lvl online.

Peter has had the opportunity to write an article for 80.lv about the making of his 'Feudal Japan' project !!
It's a high quality website and lots of people from the industry read it 😊

https://80.lv/articles/building-an-ancient-animal-shrine-in-ue4-001agt-004adk/

Building an Ancient Animal Shrine in UE4 - 80.lv

80 level is a great source of valuable information about the gaming industry and its recent trends.
You can see more of Peter's work over at the following channels:

Artstation

Instagram 

Twitter 

Facebook

LinkedIn

Normality (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Gremlin

|

Release Date:

1996

|

Systems:

DOS

---

This week on Super Adventures, I've reached my last proper game post of the year. I mean it's not the last thing I'll be writing for the site, there's another article coming next week, but this is the last time I'll be going through the first hour or so of one game, showing off screenshots along the way. Until next year anyway.

Oh, I'm playing Normality by the way, in case the title stamped up there didn't give it away. The logo jitters around in game and I was tempted to make my image animated to show it off, but then I realised I didn't need another ugly distracting GIF on my front page for weeks. I learned that lesson back when I did that Amiga Fighting Games article.

My GOG orders history page claims that I bought Normality two years ago and I'm sure it's probably right, though what it doesn't know is that I only got the game so that I could write about it here... and then I forgot. Until now! I've only got a vague idea of what the game even is, but the love I've seen it get online put it on my radar and I have a feeling that even if it pisses me off I'm going to get some good screenshots out of it.

The game has a story and puzzles, and if you keep reading you're going to find SPOILERS for the first couple of hours of both. Just so you know.

Read on »

PUBG Moblie 0.11.5 Update

After the 0.11.0 update, PUBG Corp. has planned to release the very next update i.e. 0.11.5. This post will introduce players with the new features available in this update.

Recently, the 0.11.0 update was launched in PUBG mobile. This update basically included the Survive till dawn or the PUBG Zombie mode. Some updates including Riot shield and others were also planned to release in this update but they were postponed as the 0.11.0 update had a big size (about 1.7 GB) and it was exerting a lot of pressure.

        So returning to topic, PUBG update 0.11.5 will include the following features. 

1. G36C (Gun) : 
                             
                           It is an assault rifle gun requiring 5.56 mm ammo. This gun was planned to release in Season 5 but unfortunately, it was skipped and now it is planned in the next update. You can watch the video to learn more about it.

G36C gun

2. Tukshai (Vehicle) :

                          The next PUBG update includes an auto-rickshaw, Auto-rickshaw is a vehicle mainly found in Asian countries. This vehicle will be available only in Sanhok map. It can carry up to 3 players. Click here to know more about it.

Tukshai

3. Canted Sight (Attachment) :

                         It is a secondary attachment that allows the player to quickly switch between the 1x Canted sight and the other scope used. It is already launched in PUBG PC, Xbox and PS4. To know more about Canted sight you can visit my post about it.

4. Skorpion (Gun) : 

                       It is a full-auto weapon pistol that works on 9mm ammo. Its capacity can be increased from default 20 rounds to 40 rounds using a standard extended magazine. It can be switched from single fire to full auto. The only disadvantage is that it has lower per bullet damage than other pistols.

Skorpion

5. Royale Pass Season 6 :

                      As we know the Season 5 of PUBG will end on 18 March 2019. This new season will bring new emodes. Also, many new outfits will be available including Joker and Harley quuen outfits. These two outfits were actually planned before the beginning of Season 4 but it was included in that season. So now there is a hope of getting it in Season 5. 
                                     Excluding these some more features may be added in the future. You can click here to know more PUBG upcoming updates.

RP Season 6

Release date : 

It is expected that this 0.11.5 update will be released between 18-20 March 2019. there is no strong proof that this date is accurate but since season 5 will end on 18 March so there is a chance of releasing season 6bor this PUBG update between the mentioned date.

It is expected that this 0.11.5 update will be released between 18-20 March 2019. Though it is not officially declared or announced but since Season 5 will end on 18 March, so the new season or season 5 release date comes out to be between 18-20 March 2019.

              
Which of the above features will be more interesting and enjoyable to play? Let us know in the comment section below.