Metapost: Just when I think I’m out…
Oh, it's you. Hi there. How's it going. What? Oh, you thought I was serious with that last metapost where I said goodbye to Games for Lunch after 500 posts? Oh, you're so gullible. Don't you know not to take what I write so seriously? Jeez, lighten UP!Read more »
Gaunt’s Ghosts: Traitor General by Dan Abnett
Gereon, a Chaos-held planet in the Sabbat Worlds that has been under total enemy occupation for years. The local resistance forces, their hopes for liberation ebbing, are overjoyed when Ibram Gaunt arrives on Gereon, but less so when it is revealed that he only has a dozen troopers with him, and their mission is not liberation, but the assassination of a traitor...
Over the course of the Gaunt's Ghosts series, Dan Abnett has toyed with and tested the limits of what he can do with these books several times, but has generally remained close to the core line that he must deliver a large-scale war story every time out. In Traitor General, the eighth book in the series and the opening of The Lost story arc (which spans four volumes), he goes for a somewhat different approach.
Gaunt and his team are deep undercover and must employ stealth, misdirection and hiding to achieve what they normally would using force. That wouldn't be so much of a problem except that the world they are operating on has been occupied by Chaos for years, with the result that the entire planet is tainted, a taint that starts seeping into Gaunt and his team. This causes increasingly odd behaviour as their perceptions of reality and what is right and wrong begin to change. This also means that the enemy forces on Gereon have some extremely powerful forces to call upon that normally would be not be able to manifest, such as the formidable and extremely weird wirehounds and glyfs, both concepts that feel like they've dropped out of a China Mieville novel. In short, Traitor General is where Abnett gets his weird freak on and pulls it off well.
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Serious Games for Healthcare: Building a Library for Clinicians and Educators
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Freeware Game Pick: L’Abbaye des Morts (Locomalito)
L' Abbaye des Morts (The Abbey of the Dead) is another excellent game from the creator of Hydorah and 8-Bit Killer, a 2D platformer that draws inspiration from classics such as Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. Here you play as Jean Raymond, a preacher who escapes to an abandoned church after being chased by a group of crusaders. Following the instructions on parchments left behind by past occupants of the building, Jean must seek out and collect the twelve cathar crosses before he can escape from his pursuers.
Each of the twenty-three rooms have a different name to label the location, and some of the short descriptive text may even provide clues on how to solve a puzzle or two. Jean does not carry a weapon nor will he acquire one during his adventure, and the cursor keys are the only controls you ever need to use in this game from start to end.
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Interview: Team Meat (Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes)
It's already been confirmed that Spelunky's main protagonist is a playable character in Super Meat Boy at PAX, but this interview is what caught my attention after first seeing a link to it on the official Twitter page for the game. Many indie game developers working as a team to create commercial projects can probably relate to these two guys (Bit Blot, 2D Boy, etc.), and the pain and suffering doesn't really end even weeks or months after the release of the game.
If you're planning to listen to the interview, do remember to lower the volume a bit because some parts of the video get extremely loud all of a sudden (and we wouldn't want anyone to get a heart attack).
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