Today, thanks to thinking about games in the "Elite" series, I find myself listening to some classical music I haven't heard in a long time. Baba Yaga, part of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. It's a wonderfully crazy, chaotic piece, I like it a lot.
Here's someone playing it (well) on piano:
And here's a full orchestra:
I like it best on piano, played like the piano's giving off electric shocks. :)
I found myself wondering for the first time ever... the incredibly atmospheric, freaky "oh no something terrible's happened" music in the Nintendo DS game "9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors" (or 999).. I wonder if it was at all inspired by the hits at the start of Baba Yaga. According to this YouTube video, it's called "Trepidation". There's definitely call for trepidation in the scenes where it's used!
I'm just tying together some unrelated pieces of music I find impactful and evocative (but in completely different ways). :)
Friday 12 December 2014
Tuesday 9 December 2014
Sunday 7 December 2014
Elite Dangerous : First Impressions
Have I ever mentioned how much I like the Elite games? I started with the first one from 1984 on C64 - though I played it many years after it was first released. Then I played the sequels in the 1990s. They are great games, both in scope and freedom of play. They are also fun. :)
You can fly about the universe in your spaceship, and are free to play however you like - as a trader, hauling goods across the galaxy, as a pirate, ambushing the traders and stealing their goods and evading the police, as a bounty hunter, hunting down criminals, or following a military route, taking missions to gain military ranks.
Well, I was in the original Kickstarter for Elite Dangerous, but never paid for beta access, so I had to wait for gamma access, which is... now!
So I bought myself a ridiculously expensive controller - a Saitek X-55 Rhino HOTAS - which is actually far more sensible of a thing than its name implies... mostly because I heard this game has lots of buttons and so I wanted a controller with loads of buttons, I love the idea of having a cockpit with buttons and switches for everything.
Then I spent a day sorting out upgrading the PC's main SSD because it'd started developing bad sectors... then I moved my PC into the living room so I could use my big TV, then set things up so I have somewhere comfy to put the HOTAS (I am using a warm blanket and an ironing board, yay I'm a high-tech space traveller!)
I tell you, PC gaming is HARD WORK. Hahaha!
Then I started the game.
The first thing I tried to do was set my X55 as controller, and start a tutorial.
The second thing I did was exit and look up "what are all the buttons, actually?", because the tutorial will tell you something like "lower your landing gear" and you need to work out which button does that. I found a really useful website for that.
..then I went back in and tried following the tutorial. I crashed into things all the way through, and eventually landed. It congratulated me, and said I was now qualified to dock in any space station, which made me laugh out loud, because if my docking was good enough, the place must be chaos! I don't know whether I dare fly with pilots as bad as me being fully licensed!
Then there was a shooting tutorial - same process, start it up, then get myself a browser and look up the controls... then blunder my way through.
By the time I'd got to the tutorial for travelling between stars... I was lost enough I needed to watch a video on YouTube to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing.
During the "advanced" tutorial on dogfighting, I started playing with switching off flight assist during battles. This stops your craft from following Newtonian physics, and starts it using more realistic space physics. What this actually means is that you can use it to move in weird ways - deliberately fling your craft spinning off somewhere and realign yourself to aim at the enemy, then enable flight assist again to stabilise yourself enough to fire.
And then you *totally* feel like a 14 year old who just stole a mecha and is piloting it like someone who should never ever ever be allowed to pilot anything. And that's just mega-awesome!
At the end of the five basic tutorials, I had been congratulated five times, and felt like an utter noob.
So then I tried the first one - docking - again. And nailed it, smooth take off, smooth, exiting, smooth re-entering, and smooth landing. Like a pro. :D
Then I thought "huh, maybe these tutorials work after all".
So I started up the main game, and the first thing it does is a "pre-flight check" where you push each of the controls to make sure you know the mapping. And I was like... "why wasn't this the first thing in the tutorial??!"
So far I've travelled to two systems, I got inter-somethinged one time, and another ship blew me up, but luckily I had taken out insurance, so it popped me back in my ship with my 1000 credits ready to start again.
I'm now in a place called "Bean City" in a galaxy I can't remember the name of, a ship full of holes, a cargo hold of computer parts that sell for a little less than I paid for them, and 800-odd credits in my bank.
Fun! ^_^
One more thing - although I cannot normally play first-person games due to terrible simulator sickness, I have had no problems with Elite Dangerous, despite playing it all day and flinging myself into space and bouncing off space stations.
I think it's because the pilot is in a fixed position, and the gameplay movement is so unlike any that I would normally encounter in life, that my brain does not know how to go "hang on, this isn't what I expect" - because it has no experience of actual space flight to apply it to.
But it could also be that I started playing these games long before I ever started suffering simulator sickness, and somehow it's familiar enough to my brain to allow it to pass.
Either way, I'm very glad of it. It would have been terrible to not be able to play this game. Especially after buying such a nice but incredibly expensive controller for it. Oh, and because Elite is one of my all time favourite game franchises. :)
You can fly about the universe in your spaceship, and are free to play however you like - as a trader, hauling goods across the galaxy, as a pirate, ambushing the traders and stealing their goods and evading the police, as a bounty hunter, hunting down criminals, or following a military route, taking missions to gain military ranks.
Well, I was in the original Kickstarter for Elite Dangerous, but never paid for beta access, so I had to wait for gamma access, which is... now!
So I bought myself a ridiculously expensive controller - a Saitek X-55 Rhino HOTAS - which is actually far more sensible of a thing than its name implies... mostly because I heard this game has lots of buttons and so I wanted a controller with loads of buttons, I love the idea of having a cockpit with buttons and switches for everything.
Then I spent a day sorting out upgrading the PC's main SSD because it'd started developing bad sectors... then I moved my PC into the living room so I could use my big TV, then set things up so I have somewhere comfy to put the HOTAS (I am using a warm blanket and an ironing board, yay I'm a high-tech space traveller!)
 |
| £1000 TV + £170 controller + £2000 (maybe) PC ... and an ironing board... |
I tell you, PC gaming is HARD WORK. Hahaha!
Then I started the game.
The first thing I tried to do was set my X55 as controller, and start a tutorial.
The second thing I did was exit and look up "what are all the buttons, actually?", because the tutorial will tell you something like "lower your landing gear" and you need to work out which button does that. I found a really useful website for that.
..then I went back in and tried following the tutorial. I crashed into things all the way through, and eventually landed. It congratulated me, and said I was now qualified to dock in any space station, which made me laugh out loud, because if my docking was good enough, the place must be chaos! I don't know whether I dare fly with pilots as bad as me being fully licensed!
Then there was a shooting tutorial - same process, start it up, then get myself a browser and look up the controls... then blunder my way through.
By the time I'd got to the tutorial for travelling between stars... I was lost enough I needed to watch a video on YouTube to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing.
During the "advanced" tutorial on dogfighting, I started playing with switching off flight assist during battles. This stops your craft from following Newtonian physics, and starts it using more realistic space physics. What this actually means is that you can use it to move in weird ways - deliberately fling your craft spinning off somewhere and realign yourself to aim at the enemy, then enable flight assist again to stabilise yourself enough to fire.
And then you *totally* feel like a 14 year old who just stole a mecha and is piloting it like someone who should never ever ever be allowed to pilot anything. And that's just mega-awesome!
At the end of the five basic tutorials, I had been congratulated five times, and felt like an utter noob.
So then I tried the first one - docking - again. And nailed it, smooth take off, smooth, exiting, smooth re-entering, and smooth landing. Like a pro. :D
Then I thought "huh, maybe these tutorials work after all".
So I started up the main game, and the first thing it does is a "pre-flight check" where you push each of the controls to make sure you know the mapping. And I was like... "why wasn't this the first thing in the tutorial??!"
So far I've travelled to two systems, I got inter-somethinged one time, and another ship blew me up, but luckily I had taken out insurance, so it popped me back in my ship with my 1000 credits ready to start again.
I'm now in a place called "Bean City" in a galaxy I can't remember the name of, a ship full of holes, a cargo hold of computer parts that sell for a little less than I paid for them, and 800-odd credits in my bank.
Fun! ^_^
One more thing - although I cannot normally play first-person games due to terrible simulator sickness, I have had no problems with Elite Dangerous, despite playing it all day and flinging myself into space and bouncing off space stations.
I think it's because the pilot is in a fixed position, and the gameplay movement is so unlike any that I would normally encounter in life, that my brain does not know how to go "hang on, this isn't what I expect" - because it has no experience of actual space flight to apply it to.
But it could also be that I started playing these games long before I ever started suffering simulator sickness, and somehow it's familiar enough to my brain to allow it to pass.
Either way, I'm very glad of it. It would have been terrible to not be able to play this game. Especially after buying such a nice but incredibly expensive controller for it. Oh, and because Elite is one of my all time favourite game franchises. :)
Sting's album "The Last Ship"
I've been doing something very uncharacteristic of me recently, and have been listening to Sting's album "The Last Ship", repeatedly. I happened to watch Dune on TV the other week (he's an awesome loony in that film), and heard on the news that the musical version of this wasn't doing too well on Broadway, so I decided to give it a go listening on Spotify 'cos it's free.
It's all in Geordie! And that's fantastic. :) More people should be singing in regional accents and dialects. I also like that it's telling little stories. It's all about people's lives, working on shipyards in Newcastle. Apparently the overall story of the musical is about a prodigal son leaving, then coming back later in his life to seek out a girl he knew, and find love.
I guess it's the curse of the expat - you leave an area for whatever reason, but once you're gone... after time, without realising you miss the place, you begin to cling to little things that link you to the place, and eventually, you end up cherishing the place.
But by the time that's happened, you've been gone so long that the place has completely changed. So even if you try going back, that place you remember doesn't exist anymore, and you spend your time spreading your memories all over the rest of the world. A tiny pocket of a lost culture that lives in your brain, preserved, stored in stasis. Perhaps exaggerated.
I've noticed my mother telling me "this is the way Chinese do this" many times, when I know - they don't do anything like that anymore at all. She retains the ideas that were given to her by her elders - family who fled China a long time ago; before Mao, before cultural reformations, long before the newfound wealth it has nowadays. It's a little pocket of China that no longer exists. This is how it's been preserved.
This album has that quality too - wow, the North-East and its people have gone through some hard times in the past, and there was so much more hard physical labour work. The accents were stronger. The people were stronger. The money was scarcer. The prospects were unthinkable. He's done well to document it, and the spirit of the people in this work, in an entertaining and catchy way.
I bet the folks going to see it on Broadway can't understand a word of it, though. Poor things. Theatre productions don't come with subtitles, haha!
It's all in Geordie! And that's fantastic. :) More people should be singing in regional accents and dialects. I also like that it's telling little stories. It's all about people's lives, working on shipyards in Newcastle. Apparently the overall story of the musical is about a prodigal son leaving, then coming back later in his life to seek out a girl he knew, and find love.
I guess it's the curse of the expat - you leave an area for whatever reason, but once you're gone... after time, without realising you miss the place, you begin to cling to little things that link you to the place, and eventually, you end up cherishing the place.
But by the time that's happened, you've been gone so long that the place has completely changed. So even if you try going back, that place you remember doesn't exist anymore, and you spend your time spreading your memories all over the rest of the world. A tiny pocket of a lost culture that lives in your brain, preserved, stored in stasis. Perhaps exaggerated.
I've noticed my mother telling me "this is the way Chinese do this" many times, when I know - they don't do anything like that anymore at all. She retains the ideas that were given to her by her elders - family who fled China a long time ago; before Mao, before cultural reformations, long before the newfound wealth it has nowadays. It's a little pocket of China that no longer exists. This is how it's been preserved.
This album has that quality too - wow, the North-East and its people have gone through some hard times in the past, and there was so much more hard physical labour work. The accents were stronger. The people were stronger. The money was scarcer. The prospects were unthinkable. He's done well to document it, and the spirit of the people in this work, in an entertaining and catchy way.
I bet the folks going to see it on Broadway can't understand a word of it, though. Poor things. Theatre productions don't come with subtitles, haha!
Console of the year? PS Vita!
Ah, we're very definitely in the era of the PS4 and Xbox One, now. They've both been out a full year. The Wii U has been out 2 years now. The PS Vita nearly 3 years. The Nintendo 3DS over 3 and a half.
I think it's taking longer and longer for consoles to "find their feet" - it used to be that consoles would be launched with some decent titles, but usually not enough - so players would continue playing the games from the last generation on their new consoles while the new consoles established a good, solid library.
The PS3 was the first of the consoles to really end this. It's a great machine in its own right now, but when it was launched, there was limited backwards compatibility and you'd often see people on the internet saying "PS3 has no games!".
The 3DS did not suffer from this too much, but there was definitely a time of "Vita is dead!" and "Wii U is dead!" at the start of this year. But this year, Sony have turned the Vita into a nice little niche weird Japanese games console, and Nintendo have kept on plugging away at launching new versions of old games on the Wii U.
I got a Vita for Christmas last year, and it's been my main console this year. Here's a list of the games I've most enjoyed on it:
- TxK
- Danganronpa
- Akiba's Trip
- Luftrausers
- Disgaea 3 : Absence of Detention
- Spelunky
- Rogue Legacy
- No Heroes Allowed: No Puzzles Either!
- Hatsune Mike Project Diva f
- Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God
- Steamworld Dig
- Muramasa Rebirth
- Hyperdimension Neptunia : Producing Perfection
- Dynasty Warriors Next
I have also played many other games on it, and have more lined up to play. It's just very convenient and portable, has capacity for lots of games, and has a better screen and more processing power and a better accounts system than a 3DS.
I have also been playing much 3DS, but that got put on hold for a while as it managed to break itself and I had to send it in for repair, which was costly and wiped all my streetpass data. I do wish that Nintendo had as convenient an accounts system as either Sony, Microsoft or mobile platforms - so that in the case a device breaks, you can just log in and download your data and games to another device.
The PS3 is also fairly strong for me, and the Wii U ... I don't use that often, but when I do, I have fun enough with it. The PC ... I buy a lot more games for it than I actually play. I think it's because I work on a PC all day, so I am reluctant to finish work and continue using it.
The Xbox 360, which was about my main console of the previous generation - I've hardly switched on.
Perhaps I will get either an Xbox One or a PS4 in the future. I am far more inclined to get a PS4, because they keep giving me games for it on my PS+ subscription, and there is one game coming out for it that I am looking forward to: "No Man's Sky", a game about flying about in a procedurally-generated universe, exploring beautiful alien worlds.
Perhaps, in about a year or so, I will consider them worth getting.
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