This print was created to be used as a back cover illustration for Nonagon’s The Last Hydronaut EP. After incorporating the image into the layout I editioned the print to be given out as a freebie with the first fifty copies of the record.
While Invisible War was not without its merits, it really lacked the depth of the original Deus Ex. This third installment attempts to amend some of that and bring the series a little closer to its RPG, stealth-centric roots. For the most part it succeeds. The levels offer all sorts of play options and paths. Also, the third-person perspective stealth system works much better than the hiding in shadows ever did in the original game.
Personally, I think the original is a tad bit overrated. I attempted to play it a again before diving into Human Revolution and found it doesn’t really hold up. My God that Hong Kong level is unbearably tedious and boring. There’s a point in Human Revolution when the game frees you to start exploring a more open environment. I immediately started to get panicked flashback of my hours spent backtracking through the dull streets of Hong Kong, but. thankfully, there are quest arrows that guide lazy modern gamers back into the action.
The story as something to do with kidnapped scientists and anti-cyber augmentation zealots. Once the Illuminati were brought into the mix I tuned out the narrative and just concentrated on getting through the levels undetected. Tightly plotted and understandable narratives are not a hallmark of this series.
Being as it’s the same two people making music, My Pet Fish is a nice complement to Colin Newman’s, Bastard. Both records combine guitars with loops and electronics back with throbbing dub-style bass lines. Malka’s vocals play a much larger part here but the overall feel is the same.
This record doesn’t reach the level of greatness that was established on Orange. There’s a level of polish or, dare I say, professionalism on many of the tracks that just lose sight of what makes the Blues Explosion the raw and fun band it can be. They’ve been hanging out with Beck for too long.
This is a wrapper I created to launch promotional animations for Ajenda Interactive Media. The idea was that you could scroll through the dozens of animations we created and launch them from this page. Unfortunately, we only had one animation to feature at the time this was launched. Be sure to click everything you see.
The Ajenda Creativity Engine is a self-promotional Flash animation I did for Ajenda Interactive Media. It won first place (category: Entertainment/Games) in Chicago’s Association for Multimedia Communication’s first annual FlashFest.
You can view the animation using their incredible Flash emulator.
This is another game, like Dream Zone, that I owned for years (decades actually) and was never able to finish. Now, thanks to the Internet and instant walk-through availability, I finally was able to continue past the point where I was stuck nearly twenty years ago. I had originally bought this game thinking I was in for some intense, four-color, commie-killing run-and-gun action on my Apple ][+. Imagine my disappointment when I got home, popped in the disk, and discovered that this was the text adventure adaptation of the film. Having bought this game at a B. Dalton’s book store in the mall, I should have known better.
Although I am terrible at these games, I have since come to appreciate the interactive fiction genre much more. Rambo has some well written and very atmospheric room descriptions. You really get a feel for the jungle environments. However, the game itself is not that great. It suffers from the text equivalent of a problem with many modern games: great graphics and uninspired game-play. There are simply way too many “guess the verb” moments. For example, there is a fight near the end of the game where the correct response is to “flip” your opponent, then “kick” and finally “trip” him. There are no cues telling you this is how you should attack him. You are just supposed to know this. “Punch” or “hit” don’t work. The worst offense is an interrogation scene were you are reminded that you are never to co-operate with the enemy. As the torturers ramp up the pain you are only supposed to type, “Say my name is Lone Wolf.” You have to say that specific phrase otherwise you will die. No where in the manual or game preamble is this hinted. Again, you are just supposed to know it (or was it in the movie? I can’t remember).
The game is relatively short with a time limit that effects the final win condition if you are not fast enough. I think I needed hints for about forty percent of the game, but I’m just glad I finally made it through. Now I can take down my POW-MIA flag that has been hanging over my Imagewriter for all these years.
Okay, how about this: I just spent around a week updating this site and, in order to celebrate(?), I’m going to hold a little contest. I get a little trickle of traffic every day and I am always wondering if anyone actually reads this stuff. So here’s the plan, I will send an original print, The Politics of Against, to the first person to send me an email using my contact form with the subject “Send Me Free Art!” Make sure you leave a valid e-mail address on the form and I will contact you if you are the winner. Check back here and I will post in the comments if the prize has been claimed. This contest ends midnight CST on Sunday, Sept. 15. Ready… set… go!
The Tiny Bang Story is a small puzzle game that I think is designed more for younger players. Most of the game-play is in the vein of I Spy and other hidden object games. You look at a wonderfully illustrated setting and then click around trying to find a given number of similar items like apples, toy boats or gears. Once you have found enough objects a puzzle is unlocked. Complete all the puzzles and then you move on to the next setting.
I didn’t find the puzzles that difficult. Actually, the only parts of the game where I got stuck were a couple of the hidden image sets. Here’s a hint: click everywhere! Despite its simplicity, I did enjoy playing this. I found it to be a nice relaxing change of pace after carpal-tunneling my way through a couple of shooters over the last few weeks.
Well, I’ve finally decided to upgrade this site to the latest verison of Drupal. The actual process of migrating to version 7 wasn’t too bad. The majority of issues came from Views and fields not being named or typed the same way they were in Drupal 6. Changing all the views by hand was not that difficult and it allowed me to do a bit of how cleaning withing views. Views in Drupal 7 is sooooo much better!
The biggest challenge has been recreating the site’s theme. Although the general look and feel is more or less the same as before, I have made some visual tweaks here and there. The biggest change has been the fly-out menu and the switch to a responsive, mobile-friendly layout. I’m still working on getting that finished, but for the most part the site looks good on just about any size viewport.
The only downside to the switch to Drupal 7 is that my host, MediaTemple’s Gridserver, has performance issues with the new system. There are a couple of tweaks that help, mainly changing references within the database file from “Innodb” to “MyISAM.” I have no idea what this does, but it helps keep the database from freezing up and timing out on the Gridserver.
