My venerable old sticker-encrusted laptop finally died after ten years of faithful service through coffee shops, airports, office breakrooms et al. God rest its slimline DVD drive. It was an ugly beast and hardly top of the line when I got it, but it was a workhorse, with a decent keyboard, and all the ports you could possibly want.

(Well, it's no longer usable as a laptop anyway. Seems like its battery controller is knackered and it will only power up on mains with no battery connected at all. And yes, I've tried all the things.)

So I finally pulled the trigger and bought myself a new one. It came, as expected with Windows 11 pre-installed.

I dare say that you can figure out where this is going...

I've been using Linux as my daily driver on both my desktop and that old laptop for a while now, but I occasionally dual-boot into Win10 for the odd thing, mainly FLStudio since I've never gotten it to play nice with my audio interface when running in WINE.

Since I want to use this laptop for music stuff, amongst other things, I was considering either installing Linux in a dual-boot configuration (can be fiddly, and I'm lazy) or even just leaving Windows on it as-is. It can't be that bad, surely, I thought.

It's not like I'm a massive Linux nerd. The old laptop didn't meet the requirements for 11, and I peevishly didn't like the nagging to upgrade. But Win10 was fine. It worked. Hell, I even defended Windows 8. Win 8 had some nice improvements over 7, and the much-hated fullscreen launcher that everyone moaned about didn't bother me in the least. I could still hit the Windows key, type the first few letters of the application I wanted to launch, and hit return to launch it. It was barely ever on the screen for more than a few seconds.

I was willing to give 11 a chance, I really was, but the first time startup process was SO FUCKING ANNOYING. Gigabytes of updates to download, ads for Office 365, insistence that I sign in to an MS account, AI bullshit, cajoling to sign up for GamePass, asking me to turn on Recall (fuck. no.) etc etc. By the time I finally saw the desktop I was so pissed off that I almost immediately shut it off and began preparing a Linux install on a USB stick.

Which is where you find me now. I'm not even dual-booting. Fuck it. I'll fiddle with FLStudio some more and if I still can't get audio recording to work I'll look for an alternative. Bitwig looks nice,

I know it's been said a million times before but my god have Microsoft ever shat the bed.

I expect I could have persevered, disabled all the AI guff, ran de-bloat scripts and bullied it into something usable (at least until the next update turned all that shit on again) but I really can't be arsed.

Not that Mint is perfect. I had an issue with it freezing up which required a bit of searching and an adjustment to a configuration file. But at least it's not constantly trying to sell me shit I neither want nor need.

#technology #windows #linux #rant #ai

"You get more conservative as you get older" they say. Well politically I feel further to the left that I ever have, though the saying is true in one respect. When I was young I was wide-eyed and excited about technology and shook my head pityingly at the oldies who didn't get it. Now all I hear about are machines that catch us in addiction loops, harvest our data and feed us mindless AI slop and fascist propaganda, and I just want it all to stop and go back to CRTs and rotary dial phones.

I normally hate that kind of thinking. I'm always suspicious of "everything was better in the old days" style nostalgia, not least because it often ignores all the ways in which things were significantly worse for a lot of people, conveniently forgetting how advances in civil rights, healthcare, assistive technologies, etc etc have improved the lives of millions.

This isn't to rubbish nostalgia itself. As a retro-gaming enthusiast that would be massively hypocritical of me. It's natural to miss and wax lyrical about beautiful things that have passed, as all things must, and to take inspiration from them into the present.

But at the same time, progress is non-linear and not every great shift is necessarily a positive one, and the part of me that is nostalgic for an earlier time when my life was simpler goes into overdrive when I'm aggressively sold a shiny new technology which, after scratching the surface of novelty, appears to be actually making the world worse.

For the first time in my life, I am happy to be called a Luddite.

The term "Luddite", to mean an individual who is opposed to the adoption of new technology, originally referred to 19th century textile workers who, on being threated with reduced wages or outright unemployment, sabotaged the automated weaving machines brought in to replace them. (Nedd Ludd himself, whom the movement was named after, appears to be an aprocraphal character.)

You might call someone a luddite for not wanting to use a smartphone, for example, but unless it's because they are concerned about the effects of such devices on society and not just because they struggle to adapt to them and learn the necessary skills, then the term isn't really accurate. The original Luddites weren't simply against technology, but were fighting against how technology was used by the wealthy to disenfranchise the workers.

I am a software developer by trade. Developers are seeing a depreciation of their skill and being laid off en masse by CEOs, dazzled by AI hype, who are convinced that LLMs can do their job just as well, even though that has been proven time and time again to be false. And those of us still employed are under increased pressure to use these tools to generate code and show increased productivity as a result, even though we end up spending as much time reviewing and debugging what it spits out as it would take to write it ourselves, while failing to exercise those mental muscles involved in the act of creation.

I also work in the games industry, where artists are being similarly devalued, replaced by cut-and-pasted AI slop or assigned to clean up its mess without the opportunity to improve their creative skills in the process.

The big difference between the weaving machines of the past and the AI generators of today, is that even if the former produced a lesser quality product, they could produce more of a good-enough product that it drove prices down, which was at least good for the everyday wearer-of-clothes if not for the workers making them. But code is complex and requires genuine reasoning skills to work efficiently and without bugs or security holes - skills that LLMs do not posess, despite what the AI evangalists who bang on about AGI being just around the corner (it isn't) tell us.

And AI generated art? Well, that's a misnomer for a start. It's not art.

Ok, so the definition of art is one that has been argued over for centuries, but I'll tell you what I think it is. It's anything created by a sentient intelligence that is done for non-utilitarian reasons.

AI image generators are remix machines. They have no consciousness, no personal history or preferences, no - for want of a better word though it's one that I would have shunned in the past - soul. They do not generate for the joy of expression for they have nothing to express. They mash up pre-existing, stolen work of humans to make something to a given specification. Even an artist working at a game studio when tasked with modelling a gun for the latest installment of insert generic shooter here has some kind of personality or style that will bleed into the finished product, even if very subtly and sandpapered away by the demands of the medium. The most impressive piece of AI generated imagery has less artistic value than a toddler's crayon scribble. When I look at that scribble I have a tiny, momentary connection to the individual who created it. When I look at an AI generated image I feel nothing. Just sad.

And yes, I'm aware that a human has to prompt an AI to generate the image, but coming up with the idea is the least important part of the creative process. It is all the micro-decisions, mistakes, tangents and redirections that make it interesting and human. The idea that da Vinci decided to paint a portait of an italian noblewoman isn't what drives millions of visitors a year to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa.

Oh and don't get me started on the generic AI generated music that is flooding streaming platforms. Now any twat with access to the software can call themselves a "musician" by generating the blandest fucking gabage imaginable, tagging it with a generic genre, and publishing it on Spotify to parasitically soak up streaming revenue.

Making art of any kind is a fundamental and important part of the human experience. I genuinely believe that it's necessary for our mental health, and we're devaluing and debasing it and handing it over to machines to do while we spend our lives doing drudge work.

I am not denying that there are valid uses of machine learning for specific cases. It's good at things like image recognition, for example. I love that I can go into my photo library and search for all pictures of my cats. I have a friend who suffers from cognitive issues caused by a seizure disorder. He's an extremely intelligent and creative guy, but long periods of focused concentration can be painful and triggering for him. He uses LLMs and image generation to get his ideas out because it's otherwise an insurmountable struggle for him. He calls it his "cognitive prosthesis". It would be churlish of me to begrudge him that. No technology is inherently good or evil, only how it's used, and under capitalism that generally means using it to further enrich the wealthy and take from the rest of us. At no time in history has this been more true than with the AI boom, where every tech company under the sun is intent in jamming a chatbot into their products, whether anyone wanted them or not, just to ride the hype wave and inflate their stock prices while laying off actual skilled workers.

I'm going to go and calm down now. None of the above hasn't been said elsewhere by smarter people than me. Cory Doctorow in particular has written frequently and eloquently on the same subjects. But sometimes you gotta just get it off your chest, y'know?

But I do believe there's a silver lining. As the world fills with unimaginative AI slop, and the novelty starts to wear off, real human-created art will gain a certain value in contrast. Not a financial one, perhaps, but a quality that sets it apart from the machine-generated. It's already tempering some of my own tendancy towards snobbish criticism, where I can say "well, this isn't to my taste, but at least a person made it". That's got to be worth something.

#ai #technology #art #rant

I will get around to writing "Games I Love: Elite Dangerous" sooner or later, but in the meantime please enjoy this lovely video by Retro Games Look cinematically chronicling the evolution of the series.

I do wish they had listed all the versions used though, especially for the original game. The BBC version is obvious, and I'm pretty sure that I recognized shots from the Electron, NES, Atari ST/Amiga and Archimedes. There's one with a lot of colour artifacts that makes me think it's the Apple II but there's a few I'm not sure of at all. Definitely no Speccy version, sadly.

Anyway, it's a very loving tribute to some of my favourite games. Make sure you watch it to the end.

#elite

(Frontier/Gametek 1993. DOS)

Nine years passed between the release of the original Elite and that of its sequel, but we only had two years to wait for the next entry in the series. I had caned Frontier: Elite II on the Amiga, but now I was at college studying Software Engineering and had reluctantly acquired a PC, ostensibly to do coursework, but of course I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to explore the world of DOS gaming. My 486 SX 25, with its 4 meg of RAM and 120mb hard drive was hardly a powerhouse even by the standards of the day, but above running Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic for college it could do a respectable job with stuff like Wolfenstein 3D, and could just about cope with Doom, albeit with some slowdown and hard-drive thrashing.

When it was announced that the third game in the series, Frontier: First Encounters, would feature full texture-mapping of its 3d models, as well as planets with actual terrain instead of the smooth pool-balls of its predecessor, of course I was excited. That it would be a PC-only release was sad but not unexpected, these being the final days of the venerable Amiga. The requirement for a math-coprocessor was a bummer, though, as that was something the "SX" flavors of the 486 processor lacked. Still, I was living at home rent-free, so I set about raiding piggy banks for unspent birthday money and checking down the back of the sofa. (I was one of the last generations to receive a government grant to pursue higher-education in the UK, and while it was fairly paltry I can't honestly claim that none of it went towards this most noble of causes as well. But it was a long time ago and my memory is hazy.)

PC duly upgraded - fortunately it was a drop-in replacement for the CPU that was already there and didn't require a new motherboard - release day came and I breathlessly installed and launched Elite 3.

It was technically impressive all right. True enough, all the spaceships and stations now had textures applied to them, giving the impression of more detail, and the planets now featured mountains, coastlines, and valleys that you could pilot your ship down. That was cool. And it was more Elite! Sure, space was still that obnoxious shade of blue, but there were more mission types, more spaceships to pilot, and the return of the alien Thargoids, nominal antagonists of the first game that had been suspiciously absent, bar one well-hidden easter egg, in Elite II.

I dove in, and while I did play it for many hours, something niggled at me. Several somethings actually. Those texture maps and fractal landscapes I was so jazzed about? They might not have been possible on my Amiga, but man, were they ugly! Those nice clean polygons ruined by a smudgy low-resolution mess, like they had been badly vandalized, graffitied by a teenager with a spray can. I realized then that the previous game had a minimalist beauty that was perhaps less realistic but somehow felt more real.

On top of which, First Encounters was buggy. Crashes were all too common, of both your real-world computer and your in-game ship when entrusted to an autopilot that liked to slam it into the sides of space-stations. This being some years before digital distribution became commonplace, providing patches for the game post-release was a matter of offering them on floppy disks to affected customers, and I dimly remember my copy having one such disk in the box already. It would later transpire that publisher GameTek was on the verge of bankruptcy and forced Frontier to release the game in an unfinished state in a desperate attempt to bring in some revenue, much to the chagrin of David Braben and his team.

None of which is to say that I didn't enjoy my time with First Encounters. I did, but I was left wondering what could have been, with just a little more polish and some different creative direction. Still, it was a much beloved series of games, so surely Elite IV would be along soon, right?

#gamesilove #gamesidontlove #elite #frontier #frontierfirstencounters #msdos

It's been no secret for a long time that Amazon is a grossly unethical company but I'm as guilty as anyone for letting convenience guide my shopping instead of my conscience. Like many, Jeff Bezos choosing to kiss the ring of Donald Trump was the last straw for me, and I've set about something that I should have done years ago, by de-Amazoning my life as best as I can, cancelling Prime, refusing to order from them, and curtailing any grocery shopping I might have done at Whole Foods. (We don't have any Alexa devices, thankfully, though having another evil megacorporation listening in on us is probably just as bad and a discussion for another time.)

But a lot of people probably don't realize just how deeply entangled that company is into their everyday lives. At the time of writing, Amazon Web Services - their cloud hosting platform - accounts for about 30% of the total worldwide cloud infrastructure market share, with Microsoft's Azure lagging behind at about 21%. It's estimated that something like 74% of Amazon's total profits come from AWS.

Amazon's core business isn't about selling you crap and delivering it next day. That's just a fun little sideline. It's running the websites and services that you probably interact with multiple times a day, silently and invisibly.

There ain't a lot that any of us can do about that. If your banking app or favourite social network is running on AWS you'd probably never know it. But developers with any say in the matter can at least try to support alternative options.

One advantage of AWS is that it's relatively cheap, at least for small projects. I've used AWS a lot in my day job, so when I was setting up this site, determined that I neither wanted nor needed a heavy CMS like Wordpress and was happy with it being static HTML, I decided to throw it into an S3 bucket (Amazon's cloud-based file storage), point the domain at it, and bam, job's a good-un. It wound up costing me about seven bucks a month, which seemed reasonable at the time especially compared to some other hosts I had used in the past.

Anyway, even paying those seven bucks leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and after seeking recommendations on Mastodon I've moved this site over to Porkbun. It was fairly quick and easy and, even better, only costs about $30 for the whole year.

(This is not necessarily an endorsement of their service btw. I've only been a customer for a few days. It's been smooth sailing so far, but other options are available, do your own research, etc etc.)

Did I mention that I added the ability to upload to S3 to my SuperSimpleSiteGenerator? Well I don't know if I'll rip it out as a matter of principal or if anyone else would find it useful. I suppose it'll break eventually as a result of an API change and I won't have the desire to fix it. Anyway I'll probably be adding FTP support soon. Maybe you'd like to use it yourself, if you want a quick and lightweight way to spit out blog posts with little-to-no server-side shenanigans required. Alternatively here's a nice list of options curated by Alan W Smith.

#site #supersimplesitegenerator

(Gametek/Konami 1993. Played on Amiga.)

Ignoring rereleases such as Nintendo's continual repackaging of Super Mario Bros et al, few games saw as many official ports over such a long period as the original Elite. Released in 1984 on the BBC Micro, it lived well into the 16-bit era, with versions for the Acorn Archimedes, PC and NES all coming out in 1991. More powerful computers meant better framerates, solid 3D graphics and more custom missions, but the core of the game remained essentially unchanged. It wasn't until 1993 that a true sequel arrived in the form of Frontier.

By then I was rocking a newly acquired Amiga 1200, and Frontier was just the killer app to justify my defection from the Atari ST (which did get a port, but it ran slooooowly). As soon as the intro cinematic started, all rendered in-engine and including nothing that you couldn't actually do yourself in the course of the game, I knew I was in for a treat. Check it out:

I still think it looks cool today and really sets the scene for the kind of deep-space adventures that await you. (Though I don't know why the ships bob up-and-down like rowboats on the ocean.)

Although keeping the same basic gameplay loop of flying around, trading between planets, fighting pirates and upgrading your spaceship, Elite II brought an unprecedented level of realism. Solar systems no longer consisted of a single star, planet and space-station, waiting patiently in space for you to visit. Now there were binary star systems, gas giants, icy moons and a variety of different orbital outposts, all of which moved through space according to some convincing orbital mechanics. Planets could be flown over and landed upon, whether or not they were populated with starports and cities. (That these were rendered as a handful of grey cubes didn't matter one jot.) One of the starting positions found you parked on the moon of a gas giant, and it was a joy to simply sit and watch it rise over the horizon while the wind howled around my cockpit.

Where once you were confined to a stock Cobra Mk. III, now with enough capital you could purchase a range of ships from tiny little shuttles without even room for a hyperdrive to enormous, lumbering space-freighters. As well as the trading, piracy, bounty-hunting and asteroid-mining of the original, a variety of mission types, from simple deliveries to risky assassinations, provided ample opportunities for a young commander to earn that cash.

It wasn't simply the planets that moved realistically. Your ship was now subject to proper Newtonian physics, whereby pointing in a direction and firing your engines would send you off in that direction until you applied the opposite force. No longer could you turn on a dime in pursuit of an enemy, and the joystick-focused control of the original game was out in favor of a mouse-and-keyboard approach to orienting your ship. This insistence on realism, while admirable, unfortunately turned dogfighting from a fun Star Wars-like affair, to a dull jousting match where you and your opponent lined up with each other, firing lasers and accelerating before flashing past one another in the blink of an eye, flipping over, thrusting, and repeating the process until one of you died. Later in the game, when you acquired larger, less agile ships with gun turrets that could be manned by AI crew members, combat became a matter of sussing out your opponent and deciding whether to flee, or wait for them to be automatically turned to space-dust by your defenses while you sat back and watched.

FTL travel was limited to flipping between star-systems. Travel across those systems to get to your destination occurred at realistic sunlight speeds, which in practice meant setting your autopilot and hitting the "fast-forward" button to accelerate time until you got there, sometimes passing in-game days or weeks in the blink of an eye.

To this day, then, it baffles me that a game which prides itself on its scientifically accurate portrayal of interplanetary travel would choose to render the omnipresent background of space as blue instead of black. Was the intention to suggest nebulae and the like that the platform didn't have the power to render in detail? Whatever the reasoning, it was a partly immersion-breaking choice for me, that bugs me to this day. In fact, I used to play it with the brightness on my Commodore monitor turned right down in order to get space as close to black as possible while still being playable.

I may not have put as many hours into Elite II as I did the various incarnations of its predecessor, and I can't honestly tell you if I made it to Elite combateer status, though I know I did own the largest ship in the game and was making bank hauling vast quantities of expensive cargo between star systens. For all its faults, though, it's still a formative, fondly remembered game that presented an immersive vision of space-exploration that to this day has rarely been beaten.

#gamesilove #elite #frontierelite2 #amiga

(Acornsoft / Firebird 1984. Played on ZX Spectrum and Atari ST)

Christmas 1985, I'm about to turn ten years old, and Father Christmas has left a 48k ZX Spectrum for me under the tree. I was delighted but a little surprised, as it wasn't something that I had asked for. Clearly it was a gift for my dad as much as me. He had bought a Spectrum over a year prior, but by getting me my own he would finally be able to use the thing without having to pry me off of it with a crowbar.

Alongside the Speccy was a large, black box with a bright yellow crest on the front and the word "Elite". This was a wonderfully tactile box of delights, containing the game on cassette, a thick manual, a novella that fleshed out the game's universe, a poster displaying all the different spaceships one might encounter, and a curious lump of plastic called a Lenslok.

Lenslok was a copy protection mechanism. When the game was loaded it would display a garbled mess of blocks and wait for an input. You would take the Lenslok and put it up to the screen. Looking through it would "unscramble" the image and allow you to read a code that, when entered, would start the actual game.

It was certainly ingenious, though its flaws were obvious. Should you lose or break it, your game would be unplayable forever unless you could somehow source a replacement. Plus, although there was an option to adjust the size of the image to better align with the plastic lens, some sizes of screen were simply incompatible with it. It was only ever used for a handful of titles and many of those scrapped it in later re-releases.

When I finally loaded up Elite and got past the copy protection... Well, I hated it. I had no idea what to do. Up until now, games had presented fairly obvious and intuitive goals. Shoot all the aliens. Collect all the keys. Here I was presented with an impenetrable maze of menus and keyboard commands. I could launch my spaceship all right, turn around, crash into the space station, but the rest seemed beyond my grasp. I fiddled with it for ten minutes that first day before putting it down and playing something more accessible. We already had a load of (mostly pirated) games. My dad didn't care for them (except for Heathrow Air Traffic Control, which seemed interminably dull to me), so they all went in my room. I do remember loading Elite up again at least once just to play the "use the Lenslok to unscramble the code" game, then turning it off again straight away.

I don't know how long it was - weeks or months - before I decided to knuckle down, read the manual, and try to figure this game out. It wasn't long before the scales fell from my eyes and I realized what a wonder Elite was. Here was a game that dropped you into a spaceship with just a single laser and 100 measly credits to your name, gave you a pat on the back, and sent you out to make your fortune and reputation as an Elite space combateer by whatever means you chose. You were free to trade, smuggle, bounty-hunt and pirate. The spaceships, planets and stations were simple wireframes that moved at a single-digit framerate, but that was irrelevant. No game had ever felt so real. I wasn't controlling Miner Willy or Monty Mole. I was me. A much cooler, futuristic space-adventurer version of me.

As I played I began to get good at it. I was figuring out the best items to trade between neighboring planets of different economic types, using the profits to upgrade my ship with deadlier weapons and defensive capabilities, and honing my dogfighting skills against pirates and deadly alien Thargoids. And when I was having a shit time at school, I could run home and immerse myself in a world where I was competent, powerful, and (I imagined) respected. Even when I wasn't playing it, I would fantasize about waking up one morning to find a fueled-up Cobra Mk III conveniently parked in my back garden, waiting to take me to a new life among the stars.

I did, eventually, achieve Elite status, a feat requiring the player to defeat some 6400(!) enemies in combat. Then a few years later I upgraded to an Atari ST, and was excited to start the journey over again on my futuristic new 16-bit computer. The ST release of Elite featured solid 3D graphics and a framerate that was silky smooth compared to any of the 8-bit versions. I enjoyed the new docking and launch sequences that gave you a glimpse of a hanger inside the space station containing other parked ships, and the way the docking computer would actually fly your ship (accompanied by a chiptune rendition of Strauss The Blue Danube, a-la 2001: A Space Odyssey) rather than just teleporting you to your destination like the Speccy version. Some of the colour choices seemed a bit garish though, and I was disappointed that exploding ships seemed to just disintegrate into pieces. The Spectrum version used the simple but effective technique of drawing a solid red circle for a frame or two to simulate the flash of an explosion, which was far more satisfying. But these minor quibbles didn't stop the ST version from consuming many more hours of my teenage life, though not quite as many as the Spectrum one, and I'm not sure I ever made it to Elite.

Elite originated on the BBC Micro, but I didn't know anyone who had one of those at home. They were expensive, and seemed mainly fit for boring educational purposes, lining the walls of our high school computer lab. It received a ton of ports through the 80s and 90s though, including a surprisingly capable version for the NES. And there are the sequels, of course, but I'll come back to those. They add much but aren't as accessible as the original. If you want to try it today you can fire up an emulator for your 8- or 16-bit computer of choice and almost certainly find a port for it. (The Acorn Archimedes version is particularly well thought-of.) Or, if you prefer something with more modern graphics but the same classic gameplay, Oolite might be just the ticket. But the monochromatic slideshow of the Speccy version will always have a special place in my heart. A special place only accessible via application of an awkward, easily broken plastic lens.

#gamesilove #elite #zxspectrum #atarist

(Hidden Path Entertainment, 2008. Played on PC and XBox 360)

I'm not sure what this says about my personality. Possibly something unflattering. But while I like playing an active protagonist in a video game as much as the next guy, if I can find a way to say, trick a zombie into walking off a cliff rather than shoot it in the head, or lure an opposing army into an ambush rather than engage it in an all-out assault, I find it much more satisfying. For example, I always enjoyed building elaborate defenses for my settlements in Age of Empires and watching my opponents dash themselves against them, or carefully placing traps in Dungeon Keeper for the hapless heroes to bumble into.

Is it the abdication of responsibility that appeals to me? I can't be blamed for killing all of those soldiers - they did it to themselves by trying to attack me! Or does it just make me feel clever for having set up a mechanism that allows my victory to play itself out while I sit back, sip my drink and observe the carnage?

Whatever the reasons, the whole point of the tower defense genre is to satisfy that particular impulse. Waves of enemies march on your base, and it's your job to cleverly arrange the available defenses to ensure that the horde is destroyed before they can overwhelm it. It's a simple enough formula that depends on the careful balancing of enemy types, towers and their upgrades. For my money no other tower defense game has gotten this so right as Defense Grid. (Or Defense Grid: The Awakening if you're nasty.)

Set on a distant planet, far in the future, Defense Grid tasks you with fending off an invasion of aliens intent on absconding with the valuable "power cores" that are found on every level. When they enter the map they will follow the shortest available path to the power core housing, grab one (or more on later levels), and then make their way to the exit, either back the way they came or by a different route if the exit and entrances are not in the same place. If an alien is destroyed while carrying a power core, it is dropped and begins to slowly float back to the housing. Dropped cores can be snatched up again if they don't reach the housing in time, so allowing one to be carried even part way along the exit route can be fatal, as aliens can end up "relaying" it out the door. Resources with which to build or upgrade towers are earned by destroying enemies but also earn a kind of "interest" as long as they are not spent, and there are cores in the housing, so it is your best interest not to overspend but to find a setup that requires the least number of towers. (The amount of cash earned also affects your final ranking on each stage, so even if you manage to see the aliens off without losing a core, that elusive gold medal may still be out of reach if you were too much of a spendthrift.) Defense Grid encourages experimentation, allowing you to hit a button to rewind to an earlier checkpoint at any time should things go south.

The aliens come in numerous varieties that require the player to carefully plan their tower choices. Swarms of grunts are best taken out with inferno towers that can spray flame across the whole group. Shielded enemies are resistant to heat-based weapons like lasers and infernos but weak against projectiles, so machine guns and the slow-firing but destructive cannons are your friends. Some are cloaked and can't be fired upon at long range. Others are "carriers" that drop a gaggle of smaller enemies when destroyed. And some levels also feature flying enemies that follow their own path and can only be targeted by a small subset of towers.

It's not a game that will tax your 4090ti but its ruined bases and futuristic industrial zones have aged quite well, and the friendly AI that guides you through the early stages and provides running commentary on your battles never becomes annoying. But it's the pitch perfect balance of enemies, towers and interesting level design that make it a classic of the genre, and one that I enjoy coming back to over a decade and a half later just to try and mop up those last few challenge stages. And there's nothing more satisfying than getting your setup just right, sitting back, and watching the mutant alien scum fall one-by-one before your cunningly designed defenses.

(All of the above also applies to Defense Grid 2, by the way, which is basically the same but more so.)

#gamesilove #defensegrid #towerdefense

If you can read this (which you clearly are), it means that not only have I successfully installed Linux Mint on my main desktop machine, but I've also got a working C#/DotNet dev environment on it. Something that, I must admit, I assumed would be a lot harder than it actually was.

I've dabbled with Linux on-and-off for years and found the idea of using it as a daily driver appealing, but in the end always shied away from making the commitment for one big reason. My impression - and until very recently it was a correct one - was that Linux, while great for serious work, was not a great platform for gaming, with poor driver support and only a few titles shipping with Linux builds.

All that changed when I bought myself a Steam Deck. By golly I love that thing. It plays almost everything I've ever thrown at it, and the few games that didn't work 100% right away were quickly fixable. It has freed my backlog from the desk that I spend far too much time sitting at during the week anyway. And underneath the game launcher interface that it boots into, it's actually a fully-fledged Linux PC shrunk into a handheld shell, which can run the vast majority of Windows games via a Valve-developed compatibility layer called Proton, which miraculously translates Windows API calls in real time with surprisingly little performance impact. In some cases, because it's using Vulkan as its graphics backend instead of Microsoft's DirectX (and Linux itself tends to use fewer resources than Windows), some games may even run better under Proton than they do natively. No, it's not entirely perfect. For example, Some online multiplayer games implement anti-cheat mechanisms that take offense to being made to run under Linux. But those sort of games aren't really in my wheelhouse anyway.

So with that final hurdle out of the way, Windows 10's end of life date approaching, and Windows 11 looking to be even more bloated and full of ads I decided it was time to make the leap. I've still got some work to do to move everything over, such as my Plex server, but so far it's all going much more smoothly than I anticipated. Yes, I'll be keeping Win10 around in a dual-boot setup for the time being. Linux is a little behind as far as VR support goes, but I look forward to the day I can nuke that partition for good.

So has The Year of Linux on the Desktop actually arrived? Distros like Ubuntu and Mint have done a lot of work to take the pain out of setting up a new installation, but I'd still say that it requires a tad more technical nous than Windows or MacOS. Then again, maybe TYOLOTD has already been and gone. My wife uses a Chromebook, and ChromeOS is essentially just Linux with a super-easy UI on top and tight Google integration. And due to its proliferation as an embedded OS for things like streaming devices, game consoles etc etc, most of us are already Linux users without even realizing it.

#linux #linuxmint #steamdeck

(1989, Maelstrom Games, played on Atari ST)

The first in a series of posts about my favourite virtual spaces.

I've been hunted from one end of this island to the other. I've been shot at, bombed, almost collapsed from exhaustion and just barely evaded capture in my mission to overthrow the dictator who has taken control of this frozen land. I've spent days in hiding, recuperating from my wounds before putting my skis on and heading back into the frigid wilderness. Now, arriving at a cable-car station, I am allowed a few precious minutes of solace. Nobody can touch me while the gondola makes its way slowly up the mountain. All that's required of me is to sit and watch the scenery, and the pylons that loom out of the fog then disappear behind me like friendly giants.

Midwinter wasn't the first game I played with solid 3d graphics, but instead of spaceships or abstract flat-walled mazes, this felt like a real-world environment. Setting the game on a frozen island was smart. Its undulating snowdrifts and craggy peaks could be convincingly rendered from just a handful of polygons and a limited palette, and the draw-distance-limiting fog was a technical necessity that only added to the sense of atmosphere. The sequel, "Flames of Freedom", was set on a lush tropical island but failed to pull it off as believably.

That the cable-car journey took a couple of minutes during which time you, the player, could do nothing other than look out the windows of the gondola... that it could, in fact, be quite boring... made it all the more real, and was something that I don't think I'd seen in a video game before. Something about the mundanity of taking what was effectively public transport from one part of a virtual world to another appealed to me, much like riding the bus around the cities of Mercenary III. (And the taxis in later Grand Theft Auto games, for that matter.)

I was never able to complete Midwinter the "correct" way, by traveling the island, hunting important characters, using your knowledge of their relationships, friendships, and feuds to recruit them to your cause. I did, however, discover a shortcut which could end the game without requiring you to ever have to talk to a single NPC. Simply make it to the top of a mountain, use the hang-glider to fly over the enemy's defenses and into the heart of their base, and blow it up with dynamite. But the best part was taking the cable car to get there.

#asenseofplace #midwinter #mikesingleton #atarist