Cool Half-Life 2 Mod: Barista 4…
I’ve always been a fan of surreal, self-contained and bizarre game ideas – everything from the Malkavians of Vampire: Bloodlines, to the ending of Half-Life 1. It’s no surprise that I’ve always been a fan of Brendon Chung either then, who’s link resides in my blogroll on the right.
Brendon first caught my eye with Barista 2, which is a standalone semi-game of his. I say semi-game, because Brendon rarely seems to ever finish a project completely and that’s actually what I like most about his mods; each one is a fragmentary, half-insight into something strangely compelling. Sometimes the games play with different themes or ideas – the singleweapon mechanic in Bugstompers, or the random map creation in The Veldt. Other times they just offer something uniquely beautiful, like with the empty caverns of Barista 2 and the fragments of plot left unresolvedly sitting around.
The Barista series is one of my favourite little distractions and each one is a small game seperate from the others that offers something weirdly broken. Barista 1 is a cool ZDoom mod. Barista 2 is a stand-alone game with a talking skull and dogs playing poker. Barista 3 is an insight into the life of a mechanic, made in Doom 3. And now Barista 4 is out.
It’s clear that the last two Barista games are made as Brendon plays with a new idea. Barista 3 is all about creating detail environments and UI’s. Barista 4 meanwhile is all about playing with the lip-sync and virtual actor tech in Half-Life 2, which Brendon has done by creating a three-staged…thing. The first part is an audition. The second part is shooting gallery. I don’t know what the third part is except that I like it and it’s about Pulp Fiction.
That’s the best way to sum up Brendon’s work I think: We don’t know what it is, but we like it.
You can download Barista 4 here, peruse the rest of Brendon’s work here and download some cool HTML games he has made here. When the games take ten minutes and can be downloaded and installed in less than that then there’s no excuse not to let yourself be bewildered by them.
Also, I’ve been watching Dexter recently.
Joe, Out.
Stalker: Clear Sky Review…
Stalker: Clear Sky Review on bit-tech. Enough said.
Quite simply, the game itself may be OK (though not exceptional) but the actual experience you are buying is just awful. It doesn’t work and if we’d have paid for it instead of just getting a review sample then we’d feel angry, cheated and disappointed.We’d take the game back and get a refund straight away because this product is broken, however we’re sure that a patch (or many) in the next few weeks to months to fix it into a playable state. The problem is, there’s absolutely no guarantee of this.
Are there going to be patches released later to correct these issues? Probably, and the fanboys out there (like Rich, ha!) will wait blindly for it, but even then there’s no guarantee and anyone who throws an argument like that up as a defence is missing the point. Patches are acceptable to correct certain issues, but this isn’t the case of a simple driver conflict affecting a minority of systems. We still found problems on a freshly created, clean system and under a variety of hardware configurations. These are constant, unpredictable and unavoidable errors in the code.
When you get right down to it our job is to tell people if this is something they might enjoy and should spend money on. Our experience with Clear Sky is that it rarely works and we wouldn’t spend money on it for exactly that reason, even if the game itself is OK. There are better games coming out to look forward to and splash the cash on, so look it up in a couple of months and see if the patches have arrived, but don’t touch it until then if you know what’s good for your sanity.
Such a shame.
Joe, Out.
Spore, Drinking, Vomit…
So, that not drinking thing kinda worked better than I thought on holiday. On the first day Hannah and I went to Rick Stein’s seafood restaurant and got drunk, ate oysters, crab and so on. Crab is a bastard of a dish to eat – they should supply an instruction manual or a slave to pre-chew it for you or something. Anyway, then we got drunk a little on the pier and went back to the B&B.
And from then on we didn’t drink at all because we were too ill. Hannah got food poisoning and spent most the night up-chucking the next day even though she didn’t have much to drink at all. Two days later, after eating at a different Rick Stein place, I got all sick in my stomach too. I see why the guy doesn’t have a Michelin star, but that’s all I’ll say.
Outrageous prices too. I’ve eaten at Gordon Ramsey’s for much, much less.
I’ve been playing Spore lately and have pretty much finished my review on that, though the embargo still lasts until Friday and unlike some I have enough integrity to at least commit to anything I agree to do. I’m blaming the German sites here, the basts.
So, since I can’t talk about Spore and the review and graphical analysis I’ve done for bit-tech.net I’ll instead post a TED video above where Will Wright talks about his motivation for making the game. Worth watching.
I also finished reading The Sentry the other day. The first debut comic in the series. Astounding stuff.
I’m going to go and continue being ill now,
Joe
