The Temple of the Mighty Bague

Well, this one was a bit of a surprise! Eschalon is a turn based RPG in the style of Wizardry, Ultima, and so on. It’s an orthogonal / iso projected world, with loads of stats, loads of quests and pretty old-school graphics. And it’s shareware - can be had for $19 these days. 

Anyhoo, I’ve only just started a character and had a rummage through a  town and some ruins, and quickly noticed the difficulty. It’s kinda like Temple of Elemental Evil but without the party, if you see what I mean.

Either way, it’s worth downloading the trial for anyone with a passing interest in RPGs.

We’ve had a bit of a pirates of the caribbean weekend. All in, three cracking movies but dear god what’s with the utterly depressing ending? It’s a Disney movie for heaven’s sake! We expect HAPPY SHINY endings in our Disney movies, thankyouverymuch.

I wonder what was going through the developers’ heads when they were designing this game. After playing last night, I sat musing for a while, and I reckon the developer meetings must have sounded something like this:

“Hey, I have an idea! Let’s liberally spread instant death situations all over the place so that the only way to get through an area is by trial and error and memorizing hazards the can’t be seen before hand!”

“Nah, that wouldn’t be very fair. People would get really annoyed by having to go back to the save point.”

“No, we’ll not make them go all the way back. We’ll just put them back a minute or so, so it’s not a long haul. That way we can make them do the same thing over and over and over again and still have clear consciences.”

“Hrm, ok. But only if we can liberally scatter really really stupid obscure object puzzles around, just so we can show off the physics engine.”

“Ok, deal!”

I suspect Alone in the Dark will be getting traded in very soon.

Mrs Gubbins and the children saw this a while back and had a good old rave about it, but I only saw it for the first time last night. And, well, it’s fantastic! It’s basically a fairytale, but for modern times (yes, that old cliche), in that it has a sense of humour, a wide streak of darkness, and a gimpy hero character. It tells the story of a young lad who dashes off to recover a fallen star to impress some stuck-up strumpet who really only deserves a good slapping. The fallen star turns out, surprise surprise, to be a pretty girl instead of the expected mass of meteoric iron and rock. Hilarity ensues.

There are a whole ton of memorable moments - Robert De Niro camping it up as a pirate with a secret, for one. The wink he exchanges with one of the other characters at the end provoked an out-loud laugh from me - it spoke volumes. 

So, basically, not just for kids - 9/10.

I was speaking to Mr Daniels today and waxing lyrical, as is my wont, about the lovely messaging system in objective C. He commented that something I said was a really nice metaphor so I thought I’d post it here.

Objective C, as you might know, uses square braces (these []) as part of its syntax for sending messages. For example:

[myObject init];

Well, it occurred to me that those square brackets make the object and the message look like they’re in a wee box - so when you ask an object for an answer, the question just kinda falls out of the box. Like this:

theAnswer = [myObject whatsYourFavouriteColor];

That’s all it was - but he’s right enough - it helps to make things easy. You drop the question into the box beside the object and the answer falls out the other end