Mini-reviews

Lately I’ve been playing lots of games again, and I thought I should provide people with some recommendations. I’ll try to keep it short and to the point.

First off, some Indie games. I’ve been purchasing indie bundles for a while now, and most of those were ‘okay’. Some of them were unexpectedly good though. First off is Braid, kind of famous now but I only recently got to play it. It’s really weird to see interesting gameplay emerge from a type of game that has been around for so long, but Braid manages to do so, surprisingly. Took me a good three days to finish.

Then there was Cogs. One of those okay-ish puzzle games. I can’t really explain what’s wrong with it – the polish was pretty good, the puzzles were clever and ever increasing in complexity, but somehow it just didn’t grab my attention. I quit playing it after 2 days, with a *lot* of puzzles to go.

Revenge of the Titans was pretty good, nice artwork and original gameplay. Good gameplay too, although the game seems to adapt its difficulty to the skill of the player. Needless to say, the game became almost impossible to play when you’ve performed perfectly for the first XX missions. My habit of re-doing levels when I feel when I could be doing better actually backfired with this game. Other than the rebalancing, most of the gameplay decisions felt kind of old-school, which I approve. After a week of playing, I left it unfinished at ~75% of the game.

Finally, I’ve been playing The Binding of Isaac. Now that was an unexpected gem. It’s really twisted and has a pretty sick sense of humour, but the gameplay is very smooth and rewarding. I’ve been playing it for a month and I’m just about done with it. I’d probably have to persist for another couple of weeks to get all of the achievements, but then it’d become a chore instead of fun. And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?

Game Engine Tutorial Part 6

After a long period of inactivity, I’m continuing work on the Game Engine series. I’ve also fixed numerous typos in the source, you should actually be able to compile and run this one 😉

Check it out [here]

Moved my blog

I’ve moved! Both physically and virtually, really. After a really long time at the university campus I’ve moved to a little flat in Enschede. New surroundings, new roommates, lots of exciting, new stuff 🙂


And, as you can see, my little blog has been moved to www.grandmaster.nu

This means that the site is no longer locally hosted by my own workstation and I’m free to turn it off every once in a while 😉

Feel free to contact me with suggestions and such, as I’m probably forgetting lots of stuff.

On another note, I’ve been busy with a couple of things – I went to the STRP festival and saw the ISAM show, really amazing stuff. I also went ahead and did a ‘Leadership’ course, some interesting stuff was going on there as well. I’m not entirely sure it will pan out to anything concrete, but at least I had a good time there. And now I can put ‘Certified Leader’ on my resume 😉

I’m toying with the idea of building a boombox based around a Raspberry Pi, a couple of guys I know are willing to help and it seems like a great way to get to know the hardware. It’s been a while since I’ve done any soldering though… we’ll see how it goes.

Until next time! Stay sexy!

Not dead yet!

I do realize I’ve not been really updating my site lately, and that’s about to change! There are a lot of changes going on in my life and this site is definitely on the list of stuff that needs to change.

On another note I’ve switched to Linux on my old laptop, hoping that its sucky performance was purely a windows issue… it’s not purely a windows issue. So now I’ve ordered a shiny new SSD hard disk, which should both make it more robust, and a lot quicker. I just hope that I won’t need a lot of disk space 😛

Later this month I’m going to the STRP festival. I had a great time last year, and this time around there are performances of Amon Tobin and Aphex Twin. I don’t know many of the artists in the exposition, but Theo Jansens’ Strandbeest looks like a winner 🙂

Looking forward to the end of the year, when the Raspberry Pi should become available. The specs are impressive, very much so for the price; for that price it could become the basis for a lot of Arduino-like maker projects. And it seems easier to program for/with.

We’ll have to see what the future brings.

Grenswerk Festival

Last week I’ve been working as a volunteer at the Grenswerk Festival of the Arts (sorry, Dutch only). It’s been a wonderful festival, I’ve had a great time and even ended up in the newspaper a couple of times because of it. As an added bonus I got to hang out with Louke again, which always makes me happy 🙂

If you haven’t tried it before, try helping out at a local festival – meet interesting people, have loads of fun!

Previous Page · Next Page