Tag Archives: nerd

Rage of Thrones

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So season three of Game of Thrones has started.

View on youtube
Actually, the adaption of Game of Thrones has been pretty great so far. In some ways it is even better than the books, mainly due to stuff actually happening in a timely manner. Also, instead of G.R.R.Martin’s vivid descriptions of breasts in every chapter, we actually get to see breasts. This behind the scenes look explains the creative process.

The books are crazily ambitious but the pace has been slowing with each successive novel. I suspect that the next book will cover in detail what each of the 85 characters did between the hours of 8:30am and 11:30am on a particular Tuesday morning, including what they had for breakfast, if anything scary made their bowels turn to water, and if they saw any nice breasts. It is these colourful threads that the novels’ rich tapestry is woven from.

(Axis of Awesome also have this unrelated but amusing song which is worth a look.)

Game Review – RoboRally

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RoboRally Box ArtRichard Garfield is justly (in)famous for creating Magic:The Gathering, a game so nerdy that groups have to meet in secret less a roving chess team find them and beat them up. But before that, Garfield made RoboRally – a game that makes Magic:The Gathering players look like cage fighters.

RoboRally is exactly want it sounds like; each player has a robot which they guide around a factory floor. The object is to win the race by touching numbered flags placed in strategic locations in turn – the first robot to touch the last flag wins.

Each turn players are dealt 9 program cards each specifying a simple instruction (“turn 90° clockwise”, or “move forward 2 squares”, etc). Before any of the robots move, players place 5 cards face down in front of them in “registers” and discard any cards left over. Then each player reveals the card in register 1 and moves their robot on the board accordingly. Then register 2 is revealed, and so on.

But things aren’t so simple. In addition to avoiding the other robots, the factory floor itself is littered with obstacles. There are conveyor belts that carry any robot on top of them, walls that block movement and worst of all, lasers. Each robot also carries a laser, so damage is inevitable. Damaged robots first receive less cards at the beginning of the turn. The damage quickly accumulates to a point where the registers themselves become faulty, locking a movement card in place for multiple turns.

Because you effectively program in 5 movements ahead of time a certain amount of forethought is required. Forethought that might go to waste, because other robots can interfere with your carefully laid plans. You never quite get the cards dealt to you that you need, and once the damage starts to bite your robot with be careening all over the board.

RoboRally board, showing positions part way through a game
RoboRally scales really well and is actually better with more players, so long as you don’t mind a certain amount of chaos. It sounds complex but the rules are very clear and each turn takes only a few minutes. It is certainly not a game of deep strategy as any plans you make will collapse hilariously, but it is not totally random either.

Fast paced, humorous, and nice to look at. Highly recommended.

Movie Review : Prometheus

The poster for PrometheusSometime hence, a scientific team in Scotland finds evidence that mankind was created by extraterrestrials who left clues to their location. So they do the only logical thing: mount an apparently secret expedition funded by a dying billionaire to a remote moon in another solar system, hoping to literally meet their makers. Of course it all ends in tears – in retrospect Prometheus was a stupid name for a spaceship.

Prometheus (the film) has had a very cunning marketing campaign that made the film look stylish and mysterious without giving away much of the plot, but I am going to spoil some of it’s secrets in this review, starting with the biggest feature right now : nothing in this film makes a goddamn lick of sense!

The characters act in totally mysterious ways – nobody seems very impressed that they have found the remains of an alien building. Personally I would be overjoyed to find anything alien, even if it appears to be dead, but they treat it like it is no big deal. Is the film’s universe filled with alien artifacts that everyone has become blasé? Who knows, the film never explains it. Several times character experience weird or frightening things yet never think to mention it to the others. Even when people start dying nobody seems very concerned or motivated to do anything about it.

Sequels and prequels often steal little plot points from previous films in the series, and Prometheus is no exception, but some of them are eye-rollingly unsubtle and inappropriately shoe-horned in. I was particularly annoyed by the antagonistic class distinctions among the crew. In Alien and Aliens this made sense, since the characters were either military grunts or basically blue collar workers during a tedious job. But this was a hand picked crew hired for this specific mission, you’d think HR would have screened out those with obvious personality defects. They don’t even seem to be good at their jobs.

While watching I found myself wondering if there is going to be a much longer directors cut of this film. There are lots of little scenes that seem to exist to establish a particular prop or plot point but the payoff never eventuates. For instance, the camera lingers at one point over some armoured spacesuits stowed in the ship. These are never used even though they would have come in really handy. Other plot points are carefully introduced with tedious exposition but really could have been cut – what was the point of the self-contained life capsule? Everything that occurred there could have happened on the main ship. And why was a 90 year old man played by Guy Pearce in bad, bad makeup? You never see that character as a younger man, so why not cast an old guy to begin with? So many odd choices…

Are there any good points? Well, other than the plot and the characters, Prometheus is well made. The acting is OK I guess, but nobody really stands out. The special effects and sets look pretty cool. The costumes were nice, the film was in focus, and the cinema was at a comfortable temperature. I don’t really know what to say here, all the little touches that made Alien and Aliens so great are missing. I wouldn’t even rate it against Aliens vs Predator.

Perplexing and a disappointment. Not really recommended.

Game Review : Wrath of Ashardalon

Things are not going well for the villagers that live near the dark volcano that dominates the landscape. The smoke and ash the billows from the inaccessible crater is only a minor problem, far worse are the horrible creatures that dwell in the crevices that split the mountain’s flanks. And lurking somewhere deep within the lava-fulled depths – Ashardalon awaits!

First things first – Wrath of Ashardalon is an official Dungeons and Dragons game, played like you would a D&D adventure with simplified combat with the game mechanics taking the place of the DM. Still reading? Very well, let us continue…

Up to 5 adventures can play, each selecting a different pre-defined character but choosing a subset of the available abilities to start with. Each turn, the a player moves his character around the board and possibly attacks a monster if one is in range. At the start of the game, the board consists of a single 4*4 tile but if a player ends his move on an edge then pick a random tile and place it on the board, exposing a new part of the dungeon. At least one monster is placed on each new tile. Usually an encounter card is drawn as well, these have effects (almost always bad) ranging from the current player being hit by an arrow from the shadows to everyone taking damage from poison gas.

Then it is the monsters turn to move, the current player does that before ending his turn. The monsters all behave slightly differently, but the cards carefully explain what to do. Combat is very simple – roll a 20 sided dice and add the attack value to see if it meets the armour class of the defender. Most monsters can be dispatched with one or two hits so bookkeeping is kept to a minimum.

The ultimate goal changes depending on the scenario chosen at the start of the game. In our most recent game we had to fight our way through the random tunnels to find a special tile that opened into a large chamber filled with monsters led by a special “villain” monster with extra abilities. Our first attempt failed utterly but we got there in the end.

One word best describes Wrath of Ashardalon – hardcore! The box contains a vast amount of cards, tokens, thick cardboard map tiles, and 42 unpainted plastic figurines. The figurines are different from the normal D&D figures but detailed and suitable monstrous. The map tiles are very heavy card-stock and the art in nice throughout; full marks for presentation. The rulebook looks good but has a uphill battle trying to explain things, especially since many of the rules only apply during certain scenarios. It was only on our second game that we felt we were playing things correctly and even then we had problems.

The closest thing I could compare Wrath of Ashardalon to is the old Gauntlet arcade game from the 80s. The game forces you to move fast, uncovering the dungeon quickly to reach your goal. The clock is ticking since horrible events befall your party nearly every turn. Trying to mop up every single monster before continuing only leads to defeat; far better to keep moving and conserve your meagre resources as long as possible.

Wrath of Asgardalon certainly can be fun, but is really only for experienced players. The game balance is brutally stacked against the players, so everyone has to be making the most of their abilities all the time. Even then blind chance can completely screw you (and everyone else) over with no chance to counter it.

Recommended only if you have a group of friends who really like Dungeons and Dragons and Losing and Restarting.

Starting with Arduino

I have a new hobby – digital electronics! Last week I bought an Arduino Uno on a whim from JayCar. Being a typical programmer, I have very little idea how computers actually work on the physical level so this gives me an easy introduction to lower-level coding and electronics in general.

The Arduino is a small board with a fairly capable 8 bit microprocessor (an ATmega328 to be precise) with the IO pins hooked up to convenient headers ready for attaching external devices. The CPU has its own RAM and programmable flash memory, and it comes with a bootloader that can reprogram the flash via the handy USB connection (which can also power the whole board). It is hard to imagine a more plug-n-play device.

I decided that I would follow the well-worn path and create a persistence of vision device for my first project. Mine consists of 7 LEDs hooked up to IO 7 pins (via appropriate resistors), the idea is to make the LEDs blink in such a way that recognisable shapes appear as the LEDs are waved quickly in front of your eyes.

My prototype is a little rough, but works fine in a darkened room (I was too cheap to spring for super bright LEDs and the darkness hides my shoddy soldering job.) The breadboard is too fragile to wave around so the LEDs are mounted on cardboard and connected using a couple of metres of CAT5, which conveniently has 8 internal wires to supply the 7 LEDs with a common ground. The total cost is less than $10, excluding the breadboard and the Arduino itself.

The Arduino programming environment is pretty nifty. The language used is a limited form of C++ (no standard library or runtime support for much of anything) with some extra libraries for managing the CPU’s features. Compiling and flashing the CPU is as simple as pushing a button. Here is the code that generated the above picture:

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// Array holding the graphic to display
static char* text[] = {
" XX   X     X  XX     XXXX   XXXX  X     X     ",
"X  X  XX    X  X  X   X   X  X     X     X     ",
"X  X  X X   X  X   X  X   X  X     X     X     ",
"XXXX  X  X  X  X   X  XXXX   XXX   X  X  X     ",
"X  X  X   X X  X   X  X X    X     X  X  X     ",
"X  X  X    XX  X  X   X  X   X     X  X  X     ",
"X  X  X     X  XXX    X   X  XXXX   XX XX      " };
 
static int outputPins[] = { 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 };
static int graphicLength;
 
 
void setup()
{
	// setup the initial state of the pins
  for (int i = 6; i<=12; ++i)
  {
    pinMode(i, OUTPUT);     
  }
	// pin 13 is hardwired to the onboard LED, turn it off
  pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(13, LOW);
 
  graphicLength = 0;
  for (char* t = text[0]; *t!=0; ++t)
  {
    ++graphicLength;
  }  
}
 
void loop()
{
  while (1)
  {
    for (int i = 0; i < graphicLength; ++i )
    {
		// find out if the pin is supposed to be on (HIGH) or off (LOW)
      for (int pin = 0; pin < (sizeof( outputPins) / sizeof(outputPins[0])); ++pin )
      {
        if (text[pin][i] == ' ')
        {
          digitalWrite( outputPins[pin], LOW );
        }
        else
        {
          digitalWrite( outputPins[pin], HIGH );
        }
      }
      delay( 1 );
    }
  }
}

Not very efficient but simple enough to get going. I am already working on a more functional version which will have its own font and interrupt driven display.