The Clan of the Cave Bague

“One of them has a face like a bee-keeper’s apprentice, and the other one just looks shifty.”

Grace Dent on Robson and Jerome

I’m on the last hurdle of campaign mode, but it looks like it’s going to be a tough fight. Essentially, I’m surviving wave after wave of enemy attacks while trying to conquer the enemy base. His rate of production is quote extreme, due to the high number of barracks he has and, unlike in endless play mode, he doesn’t seem to require an economy of his own, so doing away infrastructure appears to have no effect. Still, I’m pretty sure that putting most of my resources into a full on assault is the best way to proceed, because otherwise he’ll be able to whittle away my cash reserves in a long campaign.

Once the campaign is done, of course, I can get on with  the REAL game, which is endless mode

I’ve clearly been lapse with updates cos I haven’t actually posted anything about this game. I’m currently at the start of Chapter 3 and really had to stop playing because I couldn’t read any more of the incredibly stupid dialogue without swallowing my own head with mirth. SPM is different from other Paper Mario titles inasmuch as it’s not a straight RPG but more of an adventure with RPG elements and a whole pile of jumping on things.

Basically, it’s a 2D mario platformer but with the ability to flip into 3D to solve puzzles and avoid bad guys. Like all Paper Mario titles, though, it’s utterly bonkers and makes very little sense…… like Bleck!

And the characters are all mad.

Should probably mentioned at the time. While the web interface provided by Jinzora is lovely, it can occasionally be a hammer to crack a nut. Fortunately, the mpd back end can be controlled by a myriad of client applications with only one small tweak.

Assuming your Ubuntu box is behind a firewall (and it should be), you can edit /etc/mpd.conf and amend the “Listens on” configuration variable to be “any” instead of “localhost”. This tells mpd to listen on all interfaces instead of just the loopback address, meaning it can be contacted from external machines directly, without going through Jinzora. You obviously won’t want to do this if your mpd box also happens to be your router (although, obviously, you could get it to listen on the internal interface).

Anyhoo, with this done, and a quick reload of the mpd service, you can download one of the myriad of clients which are currently available for almost every O/S under the sun. As my desktop is Ubuntu, I use Glurp! It’s small and functional and doesn’t have the overhead of a browser.

Oh my God! I never realised! It’s BORING lessons that kids skive off from, not INTERESTING ones!

In the name of all that’s holy, how much money was squandered on this research project? More to the point, what are they going to be “revealing” next? “Bread and Cheese linked to Cheese Toasties”? “Driving Cars linked to Getting Places Quicker”?

Guys – I think I may have mentioned this before, but, you know how the mid-atlantic current distributes heat around the northern hemisphere due to the fine balance of salinity in the ocean? Well, while you’re mucking about with pointless, obvious and irrelevant research projects, the Arctic ice pack is melting and dumping millions of gallons of fresh water right in the middle of it. Just thought I’d say.

BBC NEWS | Education | Boring lessons linked to truancy

ZOMG! I’ve hit a sweet spot! I’m on chapter 11 and have to find three parts of a treasure map. I need to trade with some Indians to get one part and they want Ostrich feathers. Only bloke with Ostrich farms is an enemy so I need to conquer his island. Which means I have to spend upwards of 18K gold on Academy upgrades. Fortunately, though, my civilisation has been engineered to a sweet spot so that the net profit I’m making is sitting pretty stably at 168 gold. So, barring any natural disasters, I should be able to just leave it sitting there for a couple of hours. So – it’s sitting in front of my dual monitors at work, and I save it every fifteen minutes or so. It occurs to me, though, that in the time it took me to build a stable economy I could probably have conquered the bad guy four times over. But that wouldn’t be as interesting.

I quite like this – it’s the usual quest-based RPG fare, but the addition of CPU henchmen means you don’t have to spend and time whatsoever with dribbling noobs. Especially handy as each of the AI henchmen seems to know how to play their class, which is more than can be said for the common classes of wetware who inhabit other MMOs. ACE (ish).

Desert dungeon complete! And what a beautiful piece of design it was too – not too long and quite episodic. The first section revolved around tracking down a series of Poes so much changing to and fro between Wolf and Human form (which I can do at will now, incidentally) was required. This led me to a hugely entertaining mini-boss bottle after which the dungeon’s obligatory boss-killing gadget was found – an awesome spinny spinning top bladed skateboard of doom! Not only can it skim across the surface of quick sand, but it can also do a spot of vertical rail-grinding along channels cut in the walls and do a spinny attack thing. A few of the platformed areas felt not unlike Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast (may it rest in peace).

Anyhoo, with new gadget in hand, it was on to the boss battle – one of the most entertaining Zelda bosses I’ve encountered. It was one of those set pieces where I didn’t want it to end. It came in multiple stages and I’m not going to say anything about it cos I don’t want to spoil it for others.

So, new heart get, and I now have to track down three mirror segments, indicating another three dungeons possibly? Either way, I’m thirty hours in.

Gaaaah! They weren’t joking when they said it was hard, were they? All five of us have had a go and Tristan, our in-house SMB expert has managed to get the furthest by almost getting out of world 1-2.

Umm. This is going to require some practice.