A Mind @ Play

Left 4 Dead Review

On 8th May 2009

Left 4 Dead (PC)

For whatever reason, Valve deemed last weekend to be worthy of celebration, and in addition to offering a welcome discount, offered a free trial for their action-packed zombie fest Left 4 Dead. Never one to pass up on such offers, and having a few friends who’d already bought the game, I spent a fair few hours last weekend testing the game out, enough so to have convinced me to actually buy the thing!

Whilst Left 4 Dead sits firmly in the survival horror genre, it is without a doubt a shooter through and through. Whilst the genre may have its early origins with games like Alone in the Dark, Left 4 Dead is to that what 28 Days Later is to Night of the Living Dead. It’s a high-energy bloodbath, which is well and truly the game’s essence. Forget setting, plot or character development, the game boils down to an assault course for four, through levels strewn with zombies to some method of escape, with occasional safe points along the way.

That might not sound particularly novel, but the game’s central tenet is its co-operative side. Whilst there are plenty of games past that have featured zombies in one way or another, none have quite provided the experiences associated with the stereotypical zombie genre. Left 4 Dead clearly owes a lot to the zombie movie, from the opening intro to the closing credit sequences, and the gaming world has been truly aching for such a game. Mods such as Zombie Panic! or Zombie Master filled a gap, but Left 4 Dead has made full use of the Source engine to create a movie experience built for four.

The Repeatables

By Fips

On 6th May 2009

In Films, Reviews

This isn’t meant to be a list of classic films. In fact, many classics would find it difficult to creep on to this list. These films don’t have to have bemusing screenplays, flawless acting, blood-pumping soundtracks, or brilliant cinematography. But they are all linked by that special je ne sais quoi which makes me able to watch them time and time again. That isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of great movies that share this rather dubious accolade. I could and would watch many of them again, but the experience is always be somewhat diminished from that initial viewing.

The films on this list, however, have something special that gives them enduring longevity. It’s not the film itself but the film experience that counts. With the intricacies of the plot laid bare, the twists, turns, shocks and surprises all blunted by experience, what’s left is whatever ethos the film can conjure up. Which is precisely what some cult classics manage so successfully. Umberto Eco once wrote that “Casablanca became a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is “movies”.” ((Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, (London, 1986), p. 208.)) His point was that the film itself wasn’t any particular gem, but it encapsulated what movie-goers expected to see. The lines were famous before they were spoken, perhaps the most famous line of all being the one that wasn’t even in it (“Play it again, Sam”). But films that are able to do that go on to be remembered long after they’re made, irrespective of their individual merits and the quality of their cinematography, acting or screenplay.

This is simply a list of films that qualify merely on account of springing to mind first when considering what makes a film rewatchable. They’re mostly quite mainstream, with a heavy slant on the action side, no doubt in part because drama is a singularly poor trait for repeat value. But they are foremost a very personal example, and I doubt whether others will share even a portion of their number.

Reliving an Old Gaming Experience

By Fips

On 21st April 2009

In Technology

Classics of their medium, but which will have a harder time in the future?

In comparison to a medium like cinema, computer games suffer from a particularly poor level of longevity. The vast majority of films can still happily be viewed today, often in an updated format, though keeping to the original production. That isn’t to suggest that films do not become dated, nor that more than just distribution formats are updated in later productions. Only recently I had the privilege of watching a once lost silent Polish film, A Strong Man (Mocny Człowiek), rediscovered in 1997. As there were no hints as to what musical accompaniment was meant to be played with the film, the DVD was released with a modern ambient style, that took a short while to get used to, but actually fit the film’s plot and style rather beautifully. On the whole, however, a film produced fifty years ago can be viewed with much the same clarity today as on the day it was released.

Worms under DOSBox

By Fips

On 16th April 2009

In General

I recently had one of those urges to dig up an old classic and relive some memories when we had a guest over to stay. Worms was one of those games we’d both played when it was new and became instantly hooked. Amazing to think that it was released over a decade ago. At the time of its release, most games needed a bit of memory tinkering to work properly, and although I don’t remember now whether Worms was one of them, getting the game to run under a modern operating system was similarly tricky. To that end I thought I’d write a little guide showing how we managed it.

Longitude

By Fips

On 23rd March 2009

In Books, Reviews

Longitude is a short tale of an individual from an indistinct background and minimal education, striving to solve one of the most difficult conundrums of his day, through patience, diligence and a monumental attention to detail, combined with the exertions of half a century of labour. The story has plot twists and setbacks, rivals and allies, and if one wishes to stretch the imagination a little, even a villain. And of course, it’s all true.

In many ways, this book is little out of the ordinary, or at least its subject matter isn’t. Over the past few centuries this world has produced many remarkable personages: daring adventurers, shocking geniuses, revolutionary thinkers, and in this instance, plain hard-working pioneers. The age of discovery was perhaps particularly fertile in producing such remarkable characters, and a complete survey of the eighteenth century could easily fill a small library.

Which is precisely why Sobel’s book is so charming. In a period so active, a society so effervescent with ideas, Sobel has picked one lonely character, and one particular problem, and distilled a story that any layman can pick up and read. Despite the prominent cast of characters, the Isaac Newtons and Edmund Halleys, James Cooks and astronomers royal, the book in its entirety stretches to just 175 pages, and that in a fair spaced typeset. This brevity is precisely the book’s strength. The story needs no embellishment, it virtually tells itself, each iteration of John Harrison’s timepiece carried its own chapter heading in his life, each page a new development in the search for accurately keeping longitude at sea. Where many other books of this sort ramble on for a few hundred more pages about things entirely unpertinent to the theme, Sobel’s Longitude is concise and self-explanatory. What longitude is, how it proved such a problem to calculate, what rival solutions to the problem were being developed, and how John Harrison managed to essentially solve the riddle in one swoop, in a manner completely against the contemporary views of the time, all are clearly outlined and explained in this wonderfully distilled book.

A Mind @ Play

random thoughts to oil the mind

Left 4 Dead Review

The Repeatables

Reliving an Old Gaming Experience

Worms under DOSBox

Read More

Longitude