NASA’s Great Moonbuggy Race is on this weekend Friday and Saturday the 1st and 2nd of April at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama USA. High School and College teams around the world compete for the best moonbuggy. Sounds like a fun way for education and innovation.
Basically it’s emulating a real moonbuggy. The buggy has to fit into a small size, be assembled, be carried and is pedal-powered by two of the builders of the buggy.
Time to assemble and time to complete the moon-emulated course matter so moonbuggy design and fitness is going to be pretty important.
It will hopefully be live here at 7.00am US central time
With the nuclear disaster in Japan it’s clear to all knowledge about nuclear power plants, radiation and meltdowns are not at all well understoof publicly. A lot of that is of course fear and secrecy from the nuclear heyday in the 50s.
Geoffrey Noles made a highly simplified nuclear plant simulator using Adobe flash. It can help to understand some of the most basic principles in the plant operation including…. you guessed it… meltdowns. What I do want to stress is that the real nuclear plants are run by experienced professionals and have redundant systems ensuring the chance of these sorts of disasters is very rare. That being said things like earthquakes and tsunamis interfere with operations quite drastically. You can give it a go here.
This is difficult for me. Here we have a very much innovative game which I feel has the hallmarks of being a positive game, albeit somewhat narrowly. Unfortunately it is very much not my type of game. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be your type of game.
Where to start? Well the first Winter Voices was released 30 Oct 2010 by Beyond the Pillars. There are three episodes available, bought cheaply but separately, which is a pricing model which has become more common to see these days. Winter voices is single player and merges light RPG elements with adventure.
Right from the outset you know this game is different. The game is couched very much as art. It opens with poetry. Instead of battling monsters, you battle emotions and memories, and the graphics are quite beautifully done. The music also has something to offer.
So yes art. As such reviewing this game is more troublesome. Art is a very subjective thing and is too easy to bash to bits or praise like it rained down from heaven. Some of you are going to love the art presented here and for you the game is going to shine past it’s misgivings. Others are going to loathe it and the game will be quite dreadful for them.
For me the art was good but over the top. It think I can confidently call the art cold and depressive. It is also cast in a severe style which I believe is what is going to put many of you in the dislike basket.
The game opens with you as a young women of a village, whose father has just died. From there you make your way through life fighting, but mostly running away from, your emotions and memories. You can pick one of three young women characters and customise it a bit. There seems little effect of your choice in game though. In each turn and tile based fight with your emotions, you use abilities similar to magic in other RPGs, usually in order to escape the battle. For example, you might push some enemies around. The battles are OK but terribly repetitive and it feels odd to fight mists, blobs and other formless things.
The really difficult part of the game is the pace. It’s molasses slow in many ways. Those who are not enjoying the story are likely to be bored stiff. There are also none of the puzzles which usually face adventure gamers. Winter Voices is more story focused.
As I have mentioned, this game is beautiful graphically both in game, and during the cut-scenes. The primary drawback is the resolution is limited. Those with modern widescreens will have to make do.
Winter Voices runs on Windows and the Mac. A demo version is available on their main site or on Steam. I highly recommend it to see if this game suits you before you buy it. Winter voices uses Adobe Air to run.
Winter Voices episodes are available for purchase on their main site or Steam for 4.49€ or your equivalent currency. There are also episode bundles available.
The latest addon recently released on 12th March 2011, is Time Travel. It offers a prehistoric Stone Age theme with new backgrounds and elements such as bones and a dinosaur in a treadmill. There are 50 new experiments to complete.
I found this addon to be a bit marginal in value due to its more light-hearted theme. I would recommend it but only to those who already enjoy Crazy Machines 2.
Liquid Force
Liquid Force offers interesting new physics via water flows modelled by the PhysX engine. Water flows down other elements as well as filling vessels and splitting flows. There are 20 new experiments to work with. The big drawback here is that liquids are demanding on PhysX and as a result the experiments lag horribly unless you have PhysX acceleration.
Overall this is not recommended unless you have that acceleration.
Back to the Shop
The best addon is this straightforward one which offers 60 new experiments and a good variety of new elements such as electrostatic fields. Recommended.
Australia is one of the few countries in the world to have a game classification system which excludes an adult rating for games. An adult R18+ rating does exist for movies.
There’s been a significant political push and a pushback to introduce an adult R18+ rating. It even entered politics during the federal election as political party Gamers4Croydon. Lately the legislation has been moved forward and this is near being enacted. Still very difficult to do because it needs support from multiple sections of the political machine.
As expected the Australian Christian Lobby, a force of Christian interference in politics, has led the pushback over fears it will encourage violence and sex. Interestingly enough, more mainstream Christians seem supportive. For example 90% of Australians support the R18+ rating and the Australian Catholic Bishops also support the move.
The most recent uproar relating to this is the banning of Mortal Kombat game in Australia. There’s been problems with this ratings issue with many other prominent games too, such as Fallout 3. Most of the larger game companies modify their games to make a slightly watered down Australian version so they can get into the MA15+ rating that does exist. Fallout 3 did this by changing drug references to make them generic. Smaller games with less of a budget for reworking usually dump the Australian market instead.
Realistically most banned games get through anyway via piracy or being available online. I believe parents of the children should be the deciders of what kids can have instead of government. The R18+ ratings as well as the other ratings will help them decide what their kids are allowed to access.
A deeper problem is this fear sex and violence are encouraged by gaming and other entertainment media. How games may influence people to become more violent or immoral and turn to crime including sexual crime. This is a complex and important topic for Positive Entertainment and Positive Gaming which I have no doubt I will need to address at some point.
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