Rihards Unplugged

For my first guest blogging on Rihards Unplugged, I’ll be covering DINOSAURS! Ok not dinosaurs in general, but more specifically in ParaWorld. The game is a fairly standard RTS, for which it’s received quite a thrashing on various gaming sites but when you actually dive in I found it quite captivating. Admittedly I probably AM the target audience, my obsession with dinosaurs rears its many toothed head occasionally, but still the game is quite captivating.

The premise is quite simple, there is an alternate world adjacent to ours (parallel if you will), in which dinosaurs still exist and cohabit along side humans and electricity simply doesn’t exist. You play three modern day scientists, chucked into this world by an evil immortal genius (the very finest kind of evil genius no doubt) for discovering the evidence of this world existing. He of course has a nefarious plan and you will be inconveniently in the way of said plan. But that’s the single player story and its fairly standard fare admittedly, but the game’s experience itself is quite magical.

The landscapes you cross are majestic and detailed down to the fish you harvest for food being coelacanth-like fish. The light twists and lengthens as days pass in the game itself and you find yourself somewhere between Settlers and Starcraft. With dinosaurs. Of course. That’s not technically true as one faction sticks to mammals, woolly mammoths huge boars sabre toothed kittens and the like.

The world is full of life, from the different types of units which utilise or control dinosaurs, or those which simply inhabit the landscape some being peaceful happily wandering around your camps and lands, others happy to attack you on sight, some capable of wandering competently between land and sea. You deforest as you go, so it’s not entirely nature friendly, plus as one tribe you can eat the dinosaurs as easily as help them. But the experience of living alongside all these huge creatures is a very pleasant one and whilst not the most original or ground breaking game, its been made well and competently.

We’ve been well overdue a game involving dinosaurs and this is something between a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle classic and Jurassic Park. The music reminds me heavily of a mix of things, Jurassic Park being one of them and actually The Mummy being another, a heavy melodic but relaxed affair, it doesn’t jar and sets the feel of a period piece.

As a designer and a gamer, I appreciate the lush landscape, the forests, trees savannahs and waters. And the quirk that the traditional fog of war, really is a fog. All in all, I was expecting to be disappointed because well it’s a game about dinosaurs, and how often does that really work, but it’s very good, it won’t blow your mind, but you’ll enjoy being there, and smacking the crap out of a pirate with a Stegosaurus’ tail has to count for something.

The opening sequence has been the subject of CGSociety scrutiny too, the full thing is downloadable from Pendulum’s own site.

And all the pictures shown here (taken ingame by myself) and more can be found full size here on Rihards gallery.

Mark
Find me usually rambling and scribbling at scrapbook.sreski

Finished watching season four a few days ago already, but have had trouble choosing the best episodes, and for most of these I have gone with pure gut feel, and I’m sure that there will be those of you who won’t agree with some of the choices, but it’s my list, so without further ado, I present you, the best season four episodes.

The Field Where I Died, begins with an FBI raid on a doomsday cult mansion. In this episode Mulder and Scully meet a woman, Melissa, who claims to know Mulder from a previous life during the American Civil War. While Scully doesn’t believe her, as usually Mulder does and thinks that he himself does remember her as well. Her, and Scully too. It’s a very emotional episode, especially the end, so two thumbs up.

Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man, is one of those episodes which explains a lot about a mysterious character. While it does make him look less dangerous and mysterious in the end. It also tells us from where he comes, what he is like privately and where he is going. A very good episode which tells us a lot of things about the Cigarette-Smoking Man. For example, did you know that he is an aspiring “science fiction” writer?

One of the “humour” episodes. Small Potatoes, tells the story of a small town where the babies are being born with a tail. The women all share the same OB-GYN so he gets the initial blame, but then Mulder finds a man who can change his appearance at will. One thing leads to another and Mulder gets locked in a small room while the man takes his appearance and travels with Scully back to FBI headquarters.

One of the funniest bits is where AD Skinner asks Mulder and Scully about the report, specifically who wrote it. When Mulder(actually the man who has taken Mulder’s appearance) replies that he did, Skinner tells him that he misspelled ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation’ wrong. Mulder quickly replies that it’s a typo, and Skinner adds ‘twice’.

Gethsemane is the sort of episode that one would think is a season and series ender episode. If I watched this episode when they were on TV and there wouldn’t be any confirmation of season five, then I’d probably freak out. In this episode, Scully reports that UFOs are really a way of easily covering things up for the government. When Mulder argues with Scully about it, she says something which really upsets Mulder, and that is that the government gave her the incurable cancer so that he would believe.

Shortly there after we find out that Mulder has committed suicide and that Scully positively IDs his body. A sad ending, but we know that things will continue with Mulder in season five, so I can’t wait. Oh and for those of you who keep on googling for ‘the episode Mulder dies’, there have been two episodes so far. The first one is season 1 finale and season 2 opening episode, where he dies in the desert and is then brought back to life by the indians from the spirit world. And the second time he dies is in Gethsemane where he commits suicide.

One could of course argue as well that the first time he died was in American Civil War, but that was in his previous life, if such things exist anyway. So we won’t count that one.

Apparently SETI has phoned home and someone picked the phone up. Or so would Steven M. Greer have us believe. While he himself has nothing to do with the project itself, he still states that it’s true.

“On May 9, 2006 in Toronto, Steven M. Greer said that SETI had made contact with extraterrestrials, and that the signals were being jammed by either the NSA or NRO.”

Oh my, am I the only one who finds this funny, not only because SETI has said multiple times that there is no way that the information could get “jammed” by governmental interference. But also because SETI wouldn’t have a reason why they wouldn’t come out with the information themselves.

If you want to see this crazy man state the “facts”, then have a look at this google video.

I’m not a man of many words, so I’ll just get to the point. I wish you all Merry Christmas. I hope that Santa will be kind to most of you, and won’t bring you coal or worse things. I wish you all the best, and have a great time with your families.

As a little sidenote, the secret project has been progressing good. I finished a major feature for it today. Well in the end it won’t be such a major feature, but from the effort that was needed to add it, it’s one of the biggest ones.

Merry Christmas!