It’s time for another retrospective post – the fourth one. The number four has some fun associations: it is an unlucky number in China, the number of horsemen of the apocalypse, and – as 0x04 – it is also the ASCII character for “End of Transmission”. All that made it very difficult to title this post in a way that didn’t make it seem like I was ending the blog, so you’ll have to forgive me for the rather weak pun I settled...
Spotify recently launched in South Africa, so I decided to try it out. I’ve been reasonably happy with Google Music up until this point, but with Spotify being the music streaming service, I felt it was worth seeing if I’d been missing out or not. So I signed up for the 30-day premium trial and made some comparisons to Google Music, culminating in this post. Spotify’s intended experience is clearly through the desktop application, of which versions exist for Windows, Mac and Linux. There’s also a web...
Here’s something I find software increasingly doing that irritates me a little bit: the startup project wizard. For an example, look at just modern programming IDEs like PyCharm, RAD gamedev tools like Unity and GameMaker Studio and even newer versions of the pentesting-focused HTTP proxy tool Burpsuite. Open any of these programs and you’ll be greeted by a project wizard. Before you can actually use the program to do any programming/gamedev/traffic interception/etc, you have to go through a bunch of menus to create a new project with...
A game I made for a certain kind of person. To hurt them. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy Steam store description There’s a scene in Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which protagonist Rick Deckard uses a VR device to experience the feeling of climbing up a mountain. Through this device, he and thousands of others see and hear what the climber sees and hears and more importantly, feel what the climber feels as he is hit by falling stones. This practice is a core ritual in...
Finding Paradise is the long-awaited sequel to 2011’s To The Moon, a game I reviewed previously and greatly enjoyed. Like its predecessor, Finding Paradise is a story about memory, love and regret, told through a sci-fi lens and presented as a low-res JRPG without any RPG elements. In both games, you play agents of Sigmund Corp, a company that offers a memory alteration service to elderly clients. People with regrets or unfulfilled dreams and aspirations tell Sigmund how they wish their life had gone, and Sigmund sends a couple of...
