My bro posted the original email I sent him instead of this one.. so here is part 2 for real!

January 19th – 9:43pm

We have been moving in circles the last few days trying to find a way though the ice, to little avail. Finally Rodney, the tour leader, decided to turn back and head down the coast. So instead of heading to the base and then moving along to coast to the sea and then turn north for home, we are going to head to the edge of the land mass and then move towards the base. The hope is that the ice will be passable that close to the landmass.

Little has changed with ship life. The tour guides have been doing a decent job of trying to keep us all entertained, through lectures and calling out special sights when seen from the wheel house. The occasional whale, penguin or seal. As well as showing films and documentaries.

Many of the passengers are starting to feel a little cramped. Most I have spoken to are in good spirits. No one is complaining but everyone has said they are looking forward to a ride in the Zodiac’s or a proper landing on the shore. So they can wander around and basically not be on the boat. I think this is also why people are spending a lot more time on deck in the fresh air.

This restlessness is seen at dinner. The stifled conversations are now loud and boisterous. Wine flows freely and people are calling out to others on the apposite side of the room. Bawdy jokes are common and I find it amusing how no matter ones age, we all act the same. I could be sitting with a bunch of my fellows in the primary school lunch hall. Dad would have loved these dinners, I really think he made the wrong decision in not coming on this trip, though of course if he didn’t then I probably wouldn’t have.

As for myself I am still ploughing though the books I brought with me and I spent a little time trimming the ends of the footage I shot on my cam corded in premier. Apart from that ship life has been pretty much the same as it was for the last week. I am enjoying it, there is a lot to see, though I feel like I am in prison in some ways. Sitting on my cot for hours a day, reading in my tiny room with a small portal to look out of. I am of course being mellow dramatic but the analogy dose hold I feel, although loosely.

With luck this new course will bring some much needed excitement to the coming days.

January 23rd

After days of trying to circumnavigate the ice we finally broke into the open ocean and made a speedy charge down to the Ross Sea. Out of the pack ice, we where once again assaulted by the rocking of the ocean. The dinner tables have been conspicuously empty recently as passengers lay sick in their rooms. Mum and I have not suffered from any of those problems, though in truth I find the gentle rocking motion to be mildly codling, like a rocking chair.

Today though was a gloriously sunny day as we sit at anchor in the harbour just a short Zodiac ride from the Antarctic coast. Mum and I where greatly looking forward to getting off the ship and walking about in the fresh air, just like everyone else.

The land was not how I imagined it. When I think of the Antarctic I think of ice and snow, but the truth is that the majority of the land is the result of volcanic activity. So the colour of the landscape was black. Pitch black.

The land was a mass of bulbous patterning, each hill or slope or mound was not as others but a series of pillow shapes fused into the rock. This patterning was formed during a bubbling process witch occurred while molten lava was being pushed out of the ground and flowed to covered the entire coast. Looking up we could still see the volcano of cause, graced in white, active but silent and awaiting a day to build the land anew. Some of the pillows where crushed down into a fine black sand, larger black pebbles or great round rocks, as loose and free like a great hand had tossed them as a handful of grain before it.

As you walked across the landscape you felt the flow of it, and saw the rock as the liquid it once was. The hike across the frozen lava flows that seamed so alien created a wavy sensation. Up, down, up down as we climbed over the loose harsh train of hills and small valleys. Tiny flecks of phelspare, a crystal born form extreme heat, was pulverised though the gravely floor and embedded into every rock. The phelspare reflected the light with a bright intensity giving the entire land a sparkling quality that shimmered and shone as your eye moved across it.

Then if you raised your eye from the ground, a difficult thing to do for the risk of stumbling on the loose rock, you saw a vista I have never seen in art or life; until today. A line of mountains 3 times higher than anything in Australia traversing the entire horizon line, apart form the small escape of the ocean though the bay. Anyone that has looked at snow covered mountains can attest to there innate beautify. Anyone that has stood in the desert can understand the sheer magnificence of an unbroken line of vision from horizon to horizon. This was both. The mountains lined the edge of the world in frozen white and deep grey shadow as far as one could see. Then if you lowered your gaze you met a deep almost startling saturation of blue from the ocean, and then to us. Standing on on the darken black earth thrown form the very soul of the planet. Black, Blue, White and then the havens.

January 25th

Today I slept long into the afternoon and was only roused when I heard we were going to sail past the Ross Ice Shelf. We were only going to sail by and to my dismay we never got close enough to really marvel at the size of it. The walls are 30 meters high and the top of the sheet is flat as a table top, large to be sure. Still from my vantage point on the deck it looked less impressive. Like looking at the harbour bridge. It is large and magnificent, but until you stand at the rocks and look at the base of one of its great supports the true scale of it alludes you. This is how it was for the ice shelf. My brain recognised it size and scale but I didn’t feel it.

Not to downplay the shelf. As we approached we saw ice bergs that had split form it as large as stadiums, floating like miniature islands. So large the wake of water pushed before them had a weight that created a nuisance for our small ship. Then there was the shelf itself. It reminded me of a giant frozen candy bar, like a violet crumble, with the end bitten off. The edge was a jagged fracture and behind it was a seminally endless and perfectly flat expanse of the bar. Ice, waiting to be pushed through the millennia to the edge and from its own weight to crack and break, falling as a new berg upon the sea.

January 29th 2:30am

Yesterday we were told that the ship would be unable to make it any further south through the ice. We spent nearly two days trying to find a path to our next scheduled landing and even though we have only missed this one there is an air of disappointment.

We are now heading home. In truth I am glad. While I have enjoyed this trip in many ways, I also believe I would have probably preferred to sit in a nice hotel and go to top class restaurants and see the shows of some exotic city. I think this trip will be the kind of experience I will grow it appreciate. The sights where of course, amazing and the landscape is endangered, possibly unrecognisable in years to come and the animals were unforgeable. So I can see this as something I will talk of to others. As time passes the long days stuck in my cabin will fade and only the good stuff will remain, yet at this very moment I feel a bit under whelmed and not a little sullen about the long trip home.

We have over a week before we see New Zealand again. There is one more stop about 4 days from now, and then another 5 or so days uninterrupted back home. What am I going to do for all that time? So far I have read Ilium, Odyssey, The Laundry trilogy, the Void Trilogy, 2013, the sprawl trilogy and now I’m starting on the motis books. Reading for 18 hours a day is not as exciting as you might think and with out any leisure activities on the boat I am spending nearly 24 hours a day in my cabin, in my bed, either reading or asleep.

Home on the 8th February.

January 9th – Day 1 – 8:35 am

The boat has left the shore and we are now upon what mild adventure may be in store for us. The crew seam an experienced lot, having obviously done this trip many times. This is no voyage to be tal ked about in the coming years of their lives, though I myself feel expectant. A mild excitement courses though my body which gives me an energetic step while greeting the day and I think of things to come with glee.

The day is slightly mired by not knowing the fate of my cat, Alice. I left her with Dad so I could travel on this voyage and she disappeared not long after being let loose inside his house. It has been a day and a night and still no sign of her. I hope they find Alice soon and that she is simply hiding in some nook of the house for she is such a beautiful cat.

Mum has been a delight to travel with so far, we have always gotten on so well, once I out grew my adolescent coarseness. I think she misses Dad, especially when we were meeting the other passengers at dinner. Dad is a gifted social lubricant in such situations and my own tart personality coupled with hers leads us to really appreciate how much Dad affects the mood of a group around h im with is well meaning and friendly banter.

January 9th – Day 1 – 8:46 pm

So the first day is coming to a close and I sit with a mild bemusement from the fact that I’ll be stuck on this ship for another month. I worry that there might be problem with entertainment on this journey. Thus this diary itself. Already I have read over 150 pages of Ilium, and due to the sea sickness tablets slept for hours. I think the tablets themselves make you feel queasy, while if you are in fact sea sick this mild feeling is a improvement, though if you are not sea sick at all; you just feel nauseous. I plan to not partake in any more unless I absolutely need to.

The lunch meal was an atrocious mushroom soup, though at dinner I had a nice chicken curry. This was a great relief to myself and mother. As based on the performance of the cook’s lunch we were very worried about our future meals. If the food is of this quality for the rest of the trip I w ill be pleased, though Mum remains unconvinced. She feels further experimental tests are needed before a conclusion can be reached.

The entire ships crew are Russian and I’m learning a few words here and there like please and thank you. They do not speak much if any English and feel stand offish to the passengers. While the heritage expedition crew are friendly and approachable, the Russians seam to not wish to interact at all. They remind me of hotel staff, cleaning and doing chores about the place like appendages to the ship itself, part of the ship rather than travellers within it.

Tomorrow is the first big day. We will be taking a fancy dinghy called a Zodiac to a island chain called the Snares. It is a protected natural reserve and no one is allowed upon the soil so we will just be boating around the island and be peering from a distance. We hope to see a colony of crested penguins and two types of albatross that will be in egg laying season.

Breakfast is at 7am, departure soon after.

January 10th 2:25pm

We are now in the southern ocean. The ship is rocking so much no one can stand up and the entire ships compliment is hiding out in their beds waiting for calmer waters. During the night we learnt the meaning of the phrase “baton down”. Anything that was not secured in our room went flying and after a time the room looked like it was ransacked. It was impossible to sleep and once daylight came though our portal Mum saw the mess and switched into pick up mode. I was upset at her as I felt it was an unnecessary risk to move around while the ship was rocking so much. Only moments before I had been hurled into a wall on the other side of the cabin and I was scared such a fall would not go well for her. Still she stubbornly refused to take my advise and soon the room was stowed away. I still think it was a reckless risk for little gain. A gain that cost her two falls, a bruised ear and a scraped elbow, though I think that came from a trip to the loo.

It is hard to explain the rocking motion. I simply was not prepared for the force of it, impossible to stand up without bracing and there is a g-force on your body similar to a carnival ride. The entire ship is lined with hand rails down every corridor and you have to use them. You simply can hardly stand. I saw a Russian crew member making his way down a hall during the storm and he was nearly running using his own momentum to forestall the ships, each step timed to the rock and crashing shoulder first into each wall, left then right and off down the hall.

When lying in bed the rocking isn’t as bothersome as you are not fighting for your own balance so instead you rocking against the boat, you rock with it; as a cup on a table. Only on the occasional huge wave will you slide down the bed. The boat was set to a new course to reduce the rocking for breakfast and instead of eating I took the opportunity to grab a few hours, and finally fell asleep.

Obviously the boat ride around the island was cancelled. Mum went up top in the morning to look at the island from afar but I was as I said, asleep. They plan to come home via this place and see if the waters are calmer.

The Capitan just announced a course change to try and find smoother sea for lunch, but we can only hold it for an hour. Then it is back into the waves until around 3am when we will be in the calm of Port Ross.

January 11th 9:30pm

Spirits are high, among the entire expedition, though especially in me. Dad sent an email through to us via the company organising the trip to inform me that my cat, Alice has been found and is comfortably sleeping her little pussy cat self in the secured comfort. This is a huge weight of my mind and I feel extremely happy and light hearted for the first time since she disappeared.

We are now in Port Ross, known as Sarah’s Bosom. A nick name given to the place by various sailors as a way to describe coming to this sheltered port after the tumbling seas that thrashed their boats on the journey. The ship is anchored and the violent rocking is behind us, for now. While I never got sick and Mum only got a little queasy, many of the passengers were violently ill for the last few days. Also many had tumbles us included, but only one person needed medical attention. Still most people fell at least once and no one got any real sleep. It is hard to sleep when you are literally sliding up and down the bed.

Still this is behind us and we are now at anchor in a little bay and the boat is hardly rocking at all. We all got outside and did some bush walking and saw a lot of wild life. Everything is so unafraid of humans here. We walked right though hundreds of seal lions basking in the sun and barely got looked at apart form the occasional bark coming from a male now and then. We walked a small wooden path across the island and saw Albatross nesting, taking off and soaring with the strong winds. Not for the first time I wished I had brought my zoom lens. It saddens me that so much of what I see will not make it into decent photos.

The island had a terrific assortment of flora from lichen mounds to a small forest. It was terribly interesting walking across the island, up and over it to the cliffs on the other side which faced the Southern Ocean. The wind picked up and up as we ascended the hill and the vegetation got lower and lower to the ground. Seals gave way to nesting birds and finally we were faced with the ocean itself. A wild undulating mass of water that looked angry and to witch I now had a mild understanding. I feel a mild trepidation form knowing our coarse will take us in that direction once again. Only a few kilometres in the opposite direction, on the other side of the island nestled snugly in the bosom, the sea was like gla ss in comparison.

The day was rather hot, in fact it was about 10 degrees. This lead to the myriad of small disasters for me. One, I got sunburnt. Two, I was so hot I removed my water proof jacket, and then on the ride home in the Zodiac I got drenched with freezing cold sea water and who knows how long it will take to for my warmest top to dry in the dark cabin. Then there is three. It turned out I forgot to pack a belt for my water proof pants, witch incidentally fall down to my ankles almost immediately with out one. I made a make shift belt form the camera case cord but it only lasted the day before it broke. Now I am using a glad wrap belt to hold up my pants. I have tried this before and twisted glad wrap is pretty strong, though tomorrow will tell. Then finally, four; I lost the lens cap to my camera. This could be a real problem, as now there is no way to protect the camera lens during the wet dinghy rides for the case itself is not water proof.

Ev en so it was great to get off the ship and walk about looking at the animals and plants. Everyone is in a happy mood, talking and chatting away about the things they saw and the experience of the storm we all shared.

We stay at anchor tonight so we are all looking forward to a full nights sleep and thinking of our loved ones whom are not with us.

January 12th 3:53pm

Today was very uneventful for me. I spent most of the day with a terrible headache and stayed in bed until lunch. This was just in time for us to eat and for me to witness us leave the comfort of Sara’s Bosom and head into the deep sea and our next destination. I really should start paying attention to the scheduled so I can give you the proper names. Still as I have slept so much today I feel that being awake all night during the the coming turmoil will not be as much of a problem as it usually is.

I have stowed away all the items in out cabin in prepar ation and as I write in the bar area the rocking is starting to get more and more and I think of what I missed today.

It was wet and cloudy. The planned rock climbing team to get to the albatross nesting on the cliffs was cancelled and that only left a Zodiac ride around the island. I felt my headache was in a winning position over a boat ride in the rain but as the day went on it cleared up and the Zodiac did go ashore. So I regret not going on it, as it would have been nice to walk about the island.

My sunburnt nose is red and angry, as well as my cheeks. Thankfully I have a very full beard at the moment so the rest of my face was protected. Yet another tick in the “beards are awesome” check list.

Mum and I are starting to relax more among the other passengers, lingering longer after lunch or in the bar area to chat and discuss the day or its coming. The conversations are rather superficial at the moment. The main topics are about th e rough seas and how each coped and why they are here in the fist place. Still the trip is young and I expect things to loosen up further as we go.

January 14th 10:46pm

Today was a very busy day. We had cruised though the ocean for a day and a bit to land at these Macquarie Islands. This is our last landing before the long leg through the southern ocean to Antarctica. The general consensus from the staff was that we had a blessed voyage to the islands with nearly flat seas the entire way. So apart from the occasional dip the ride was effortless and easy to sleep through as we passed over the great southern plateau, one of the deepest parts of the ocean floor.

The Islands is a rather spectacular place, apparently it is one of only three locations in the world where the crust of the ocean floor is pushed to the surface. So unlike a continent or a land mass “created” though volcanic activity, we are literally looking at the floor of the ocean, rocks as old as the earth itself.

Remembering my list of errors in my last landing I rugged up in full gear. Sporting a nice new belt made for me by one of the sailors from some red rope he had about the place, thermal underwear, sun screen, water proof coat; the works. I still had one error of note though. When you get on the Zodiac you are supposed to swing your feet in by moving towards the ocean, I did so towards the shore and clonked the guide lady on the head. She yelled at me. I think maybe as she is Russian and they have such a direct language she comes off much ruder than she means to, even Mum has had her problems with her being yelled at, for being late to a briefing witch are of course not compulsory.

Once ashore we were faced with literally thousands of Penguins from two different species. The King and the Royal. The King Penguin has the famous patterning that I believe most people see when imagining penguins. The fat bowling pin shape w ith the black coat, the long beak and yellowish orange trim witch can be seen as a bow tie. The Royals are are much smaller creature with a much darker black upon their back feathers and sporting spiffy long yellow feathers which give the appearance of eyebrows. I can not stress the numbers of these creatures, there was with out hyperbole many thousands of them. The colonies would stretch so far that I couldn’t focus on individuals any more and they became a white and black blob of noise. Small teams would split from the main colony and play follow the leader, walking about the island in little lines usually heading to the sea for a swim or back to the main colony, many others where spread out for no discernible reason. They were also extremely friendly and if you sat still would come up and poke at you with there beaks, not in a aggressive way, but in a obviously inquisitive investigation that seams charming to my eyes.

As well as the Penguins there were the elephant se als. Huge blubbery masses flopped at random all over the place. These creatures are massive. They are comprised from a collection of components that are traditionally ugly but they somehow look cute and friendly. It seams to be in the way they loll about looking so relaxed. They have very dewy brown eyes, large and limpet that reminded me of a friendly dog. They would peer at us, using what seamed a colossal effort to poke there head up to look across the other cigar like shapes towards us before sighing at the exhausting effort and dropping back down to doze. The seals just seamed so harmless and minding of their own lives that they became endearing. The occasional male would push at another and now and then you would hear a strange call sounding much like burbling expulsion of air, but apart from that they seamed even more placid than the penguins.

January 17th 8:34pm

We have been crossing the southern ocean for the last few days with little to d o on ship, so there has been little to write down. Today though we saw our first iceberg surrounded by two whales. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was nearly on the horizon line I would have been more excited. I do hope we will see many more icebergs much closer to the ship in the near future.

The passengers seam to be passing there time with various activities organised by the crew. Two sometimes three lectures a day on various topics form animal life to the history of the region are given in the “lecture hall”, a small room at the bottom of the ship containing a projector and a few rows of seats. They have also started showing a seven part documentary series that is the dramatisation of some famous explorer. I guess we will see a new episode each day. I haven’t attended many of these events myself.

Mum spends her time on the bridge gazing out at the sea and chatting to the people she finds there. She also attends the lectures as well as goes for walks out on deck for fresh air. For me though as I dislike the company of others have spent nearly every second apart from when dinner is called in the cabin. Mum also spends a lot of time sleeping, but she like the other passengers are starting to tire of their cabins and the bar is getting fuller earlier and the crowed getting more and more loud. I’m rather interested in how they will be in the long trip home.

Today marks around the mid point of the holiday and soon we will be in site of Antarctica itself and then the days will change into a flurry of activity. For now though I spend nearly the entire day in my cabin reading my books. So far I have read Ilium a insanely convoluted space opera by Dan Simmons (615 pages), Name of the wind, book one of the Kingslayer Chronicles, a rather good fantasy book that follows the classic boy looses his family and fall on all sorts of bad luck but has a spark in him witch lands him enrolment in the wizard university (715 pages) , and Dreaming of the Void book one of the void trilogy by Peter F Hamilton, another crazy, imagination of steroids, space fantasy (518 pages). I would like to finish the void trilogy and read the squeal to ilium before the trip is done, and I have little worry that I’ll do this. I got about half way though the second Kingslasyer book but found it little boring after a while. Yeah, three days of reading for over 18 hours gets you though books fast.

So for me the trip hasn’t changed my lifestyle much at all. I’m still sitting in my room reading my books. I find it quite relaxing the swaying of the boat and the complete lack of pressure to do anything.

Anyway we expect to be in site of land in the next day or so. Then all that is going to change.

January 18th – 5:30pm

We are moving at a snails pace. The ship lumbering though cold waters at a lowly 3-5 knots, that is around 6-10 kilometres an hour. We are still heading t owards the landmass but the sea itself is starting to hinder us in the form of hundreds of broken ice blocks, witch the ship is now slowly pushing through. They are not what I imagine when I think of icebergs. Not like the one we saw yesterday which seemed so large, a seemingly massive frozen rock protruding from the water. A thing of postcards. These are more like broken bits from a continual ice sheet. They are little more than a few meters apart, almost flat and spaced out generously across the span. Here and there the occasional larger peace of ice breaks the pattern and in spite of all this, much of the ocean is still visible in testament to its vast size.

The sky is a deep, neutral grey enhanced by a fog witch seams to have settled across the entire ocean obscuring the horizon line behind a dense, white, impenetrable haze. The sea itself is reflecting this grey-white sky but the black of the deep pulls the colour down into a slightly deeper hue and of course the re is the dotting of pure white from the ice itself. The sea looks cold. It is a vision of cold, an archetypal view that all images of cold are drawn from, felt in our bones though our eyes and across our base animal nature. Just looking at it makes me shiver and be glad for my modern cave, warm and comfortable. This is the Antarctic, the one we saw in all the nature documentaries, the reason why we are here.

Agents of S.M.E.R.S.H

A STORYTELLING BOARD GAME SET IN THE 1970s COLD WAR ERA.

Agents of SMERSH is a cooperative Storytelling game that pits players as UN Secret Service Spies set in an alternate 1970s timeline against a newly formed and independent SMERSH. The game will be able to accommodate play with either The Encounter Book that contains over 1500 written encounters with a similar reaction matrix to Tales of the Arabian Nights – or played more simply with only encounter cards with shorter encounters and no matrix. Agents of SMERSH includes custom dice to determine success or failure of encounters, and more strategic play from what is typically expected of a Storytelling board game. There are plenty of James Bond gadgets, guns, cars, pop references and detailed artwork – not to mention a touch of humor. The game features the artwork of George Patsouras (The Resistance & Flash Point).

_____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____

This is a game by a unknown called Jason Maxwell, who has made nothing really but is working on a game that is sure to make it into my wish list and high on the BGG charts… Mythos Tales, and that game he is co-writing with the legendary designer Richard Launius, creator of Arkham Horror. These guys are apparently old friends.

So what is Agents of S.M.E.R.S.H? Well it is a co-op, story driven, thematic game set in a James Bond (Roger More Style) universe of spies and super villains. It shares many maniacs with Arkham Horror, encounters, success die tests, an abstract game board (rather than a representational game board, like say the map in smallworld) and character quest and goals kinda like an advanced version of the mission system in the Arkham Horror expansion, Dunwich Though unlike Touch of Evil witch is a direct copy of Arkham Horror, for all intense and purposes. This game is trying to add a rich story telling element kind of like Mansions of Madness. How rich exactly this will be remains to be seen.. but the game is described as a “choose your own adventure story book as a board game”. Tom Vassle equates it to Tales of the Arabian Nights, but I haven’t played this so I am not able to comment.

I had decided against buying any new games.. but when the Tom Vassle review came out I though it was a good time to check to see if anyone was selling their kickstarter packs.. as I missed it. What I have learnt if you are into collecting boardgames you can simply not ignore kickstarter as the included stuff is so worth it to collectors. While I couldn’t find any that had the full kickstarter package, as in the extra investigators and poker chip variant. I did find one that had the retail game and the extra encounter book. What is that you might ask? Well the encounter book is much like the encounter decks in Arkham Horror, though the kickstarter people also recived a book of extra encounters The book is the equivalent to having an extra 1600 encounter cards. When I found out the retail vesion would not include this book (much like the over sized villain cards and limited edition locations and heroes in Sentinels of the Multiverse) I thought I just had to grab it now while I had the chance.

So I did!!

Have fun and ROLL HIGH!!

Well I have decided to drop out of UNI. I know, I know.. I only lasted a year.. but I am not planning to stop working on the degree, I just wish to change schools. I was very unhappy with Qantm Collage. The course while seaming to be interesting was trivial and badly constructed. The tutorials consisted of literally being told to go to a public and free website and do there exercises there and the lectures were almost word for word taken form very famous books. Almost all the work I did was though my own on my own time and I just felt it was not worth the monetary outlay. I believe I could save the 7 grand a term and just use that to buy software and books and get a similar result.

So that is big… also I am going to merge my boardgame blog into this one and only have a single blog. I am not going to bother transferring all the data across but I will be making new posts here.

My plans for new year is to come back form Antarctica alive and then I will be doing some self guided learning in programming while I work out what I wish to do with my 1/2 finished degree. I plan to release 2 games next year for commercial gain and also loose 40kilos.

These are my new goals so lets see how it all gose!

-Steve

Ok… as you know Xmas is upon us.. this is always a great time for me as I play Secret Santa on BGG so I get a surprise game and most of my family just go strait to my BGG wishlist if they can not work out what to get me. Also with all the sales I often buy a few for myself :) So expect a few posts around now with new stuff as this is my main time for getting new titles… Anyway… while shopping I pickup up a copy of “Claustrophobia” and its expansion “Claustrophobia: De Profundis“.

Now this is one of three miniature games I have had my eye on for a while. I am a x-40K wargamer.. in fact 40k was the game that started me on the hobby back when I was a kid. I even still paint them and usually buy a model to paint a few times a year. Anyway, this obviously means I keep an eye on miniature style games, though I have defiantly moved form pure wargamming to wargamming boardgames . So while Dust Tactics and War Machine and stuff might not interest me as much anymore i am still pretty keen on directed scenario based miniature boardgames… much like Tanhouser, or Gears of War for example. It is similar to me not really being into rpgs but now really getting into rpgs style board games. If you are interested the other two games that are in this category and on my list they are Earth Reborn and the upcoming Kingdom Death: Monster.

Anyway. Claustrophobia is a wave survival game at its heart. One person plays the demons and one player plays the humans. The humans and demons have varying objectives based on the scenario but the demons can respawn after death while the humans have 1 life. So basically it is the humans doing their thing as waves and waves of demons flood into the caverns and try and kill them. I am a huge lover of dice combat and dice assignment mechanics, and this game has both. Combat is based on proximity so no worries about using measuring tape and working out sight lines and stuff.. if your on the same tile you can attack. The combat system is pretty simple.. as in roll vs a >=defense value. Now this is pretty simple. A toons def can not get higher than 6 no matter what so no invincibles. What is interesting is the way dmg is assigned. Remember I talked about dice assignment.. well

The human player rolls his dice at the start of his turn and then picks a die for each toon and places them in the device. If you look at the image you can see the dice in the devices and next to it you can see a column with pictures of dice. These are the actions of the toons, witch you declare for your character by focusing the dice. When you are damaged you place a wound token on that row.. you can see the top left guys only has 2 rows with out wounds… this means that you are no longer able to active that row with a focus die. I just really like the idea of actions being a declared and known sum, allowing strategy and yet there is opportunity to screw this up though combat as well as power cards you can cast and stuff. I think it is a pretty neat mechanic and a really interesting way to handle handicapping for a miniature game. The demon player uses a similar way of declaring things as well. Though dice assignment.

On top of that the miniatures come pre-painted and look really good.. Much better than most pre-painted minis I have seen recently.. like in Mage Knight for example. they probably need a ink wash to make them pop a bit but I think they look really nice. In fact all the components for this game are superior quality.

I also got the expansion

Witch introduces new heros new demons and new scenarios and powers.

Have fun and ROLL HIGH!!

Well… it is assessment time at UNI and here is my new game!! Woot-a-loot-a-lot!!!

This is a Pac-Man Clone called NOM!…. hope you guys like it.. as before this is a windows binary but I will eventually make a Mac and Linux version as I have time.. I am in the middle of assessments at the moment so not much time unfortunately.

I’m pretty happy with this one there are some small problems still and it isn’t very memory efficient and lacks some polish but as a learning project I think it came out pretty well in the few weeks we had to work on it.

Big thanks again to the various people who hang in IRC and are foolish enough to speak tor me!

As with all our assignments we are required to make a “Rolling Demo” so here it is.. though They always look kinda lame to me..

Nom! V1.1 (Windows)

Source @ BitBucket – (Warning a fucking mess)

Ok I’m back… well I nvr left.. big thanks to the forum members as well as though foolish enough to respond when I spoke in IRC. I couldn’t have done this with out you all.

This is my 2nd ever program I have ever written and I think it came out really well considering. This is an assessment to hand in for marks, and I have 2 other assessments for other subjects due and just have to call it quits here bugs and all.

Still check it out and any comments would be welcome.

(windows) ArkBreaker (win) v1.2
(linux) ArkBreaker (ubuntu) v1.2

This should be cross platform and I plan to build a Unix (ubuntu) and a Mac version when I get time after my mid term assessments are all done.

Anyway.. bit thanks to those that helped and I’ll see you for Assessment 3… witch I already have been told what it will be… a Pac-Mac clone!

See ya!!

Hi there…. so collage is over for 3 weeks and I thought I would update my blog. So I am posting Assessment 2 and 3 in a single post as they are pretty much the same thing. Basically Assessment 2 was just a verbal presentation of what we intended to write about in Assessment 3.

Anyway here it is!! I was a little nervous about this topic as I am a middle class white male.. but I think I came of fair and not sounding like someone that should be stoned. I would just like to ad I do not consider myself racist in anyway. So here it is!

—————————————————————————————————————-

How individual reaction to bigoted cartoon imagery may change over time:
An explanation through semiotics

You may download the essay here in pdf!

The history of cartoons dates back as far as the early days of 1910. The social and political difference between then and modern times leads to a division in sensibilities in what is not and what is acceptable behaviour. This means that a great bulk of work has been lost to the general public, mainly due to its depiction of racial and sexual stereotypes now deemed offensive and unacceptable. While the content of these older cartoons is still reprehensible to many they are slowly getting excised from the ban lists and finding their way into mass distributed mediums like dvd. Through the use of semiotics and in particular the tools of diachronic analysis we can explain why these previously unacceptable cartoons are now able to be sold and even shown publicly, and yet still be considered as unacceptable. To focus this essay we will discuss the Warner Brothers (1918) cartoon Southern Fried Rabbit (Freleng, 1953)and use the methods of diachronic analysis to explain how the social impact of this cartoon has changed over time, leading to its censorship being lifted and becoming freely available with its original unedited content.

Cultural models form a framework in which individual lives are defined and enclosed by generally accepted ideologies. Ideology itself, as Marx postulated, is a nearly obtuse by-product of the separation of power, an “upside-down” (Gee, 2007, p. 28) representation of reality where things are not how they are but instead are an unreal prototype of how society will be. While this is unrelated to the current state of society, the future society is in fact a by-product extrapolated out of the constraints formed from these dominant social framings (Gee, 2007). Ideology has an immediate impact on how individuals conduct their lives. There is a constant negotiation and arguably a moral obligation for the individual to challenge how their perceptions are being filtered through the ideological framework that forms the society around them. This means that any given ideology is in itself an evolving process, a system of creation contemplation and modification (Gee, 2007). This evolution creates a separation in time, a separation where we as a society have moved past the predictions from the prototype that the ideology of the past implied. This forms an ideological fossil. A fixed set of values and beliefs that remains unchanged, static and immutable, unlike the constantly evolving ideologies that are framing the society of the present (Marcuse, 1964). So while ideology itself is a representation of a given cultural group’s aspiration of the future, whether that is change or stability through reinforcement, ideology from the past is a signpost signifying where society has come from, and what it has rejected or replaced.

Southern Fried Rabbit depicts Bugs Bunny as a Yankee and Yosemite Sam as a Confederate. The controversy surrounding this particular cartoon comes from a scene depicting Bugs Bunny, drawn as a coloured man grovelling on his knees begging Sam, who is in full Confederate uniform and holding a whip, to not beat him while using language like “massa”. This particular cartoon was one of the first to be removed from the ban list due to it being relatively mild in comparison to other cartoons from much early days (Smoodin, 1993). This is partly due to it being produced in the 1950s where it was free from what is now considered horrific depictions of race used to deliberately demonize the enemy during World War II. It also means that the social reforms sweeping American society during that period while still fledgling, where much closer to the way we perceive such things today. This gives this American cartoon a smaller gap to bridge between the then thinking and the now thinking, meaning that while still offensive, it is not as offensive as other cartoons made before the US civil rights movement had any traction at all and racial awareness was largely missing from the American social conscience. (Smoodin, 1993)

Diachronic analysis was popularised by Brugmann and Delbruck during its use in their masterwork the Outline of Comparative Grammar of the Indo European Languages (Hodge & Gunther, 1998). Diachronic by itself means something changing over time (Dictionary, 2010) and one of the fundamental precepts of diachronic analysis is that the signs are always in a state of flux and are dynamic in relation to the decoder’s position in history. This means that a sign can have the same meaning, unchanged though history, yet our personalised reactions to it can differ. The symbol’s meaning itself becomes a warped version of how someone in a different time would have seen it (Hodge & Gunther, 1998). A common everyday example of this is how a comedian may not make a joke about a given tragedy but after a respectful period of time the comedian is freed to make light of said event.

What is happening in the case of Southern Fried Rabbit is simular, as the distance in time from the when the original encoding occurred to now is creating a detached personalisation for the modern decoder (Hodge & Gunther, 1998). While we as modern decoders recognise the imagery and content as racist and most likely unacceptable, we feel less of a connection to the society that originally spawned the symbols. This detachment to the society that spawned the symbol at the time of the encoding means that the modern viewer is somewhat free from making a social comparison to their own society. The moral values of the past are perceived as separate and archaic and in no way a representation of the decoder’s society’s current conventions (Henry & Sears, 2002). When reading about the Romans feeding Christians to the lions at the colosseum few people find offence due to the passage of time detaching this act form the decoder. This, of course is an extreme example.

While most viewers still recognise the racism in Southern Fried Rabbit, many now find their personal reaction to it to be more focused on the history of racism in comparison to focusing on the current state of racism that they live with. This is in sync with how the movement to save the lost cartoons is structured. Many of the arguments to unban and restore these older cartoons are made from a preservation standpoint, much like the arguments that eventually led to the restoration, preservation, and publication of the Nazi anti-Jewish films form World War II. The detachment doesn’t mean condoning, nor does it mean a lack of realisation about the symbol’s meanings but instead the detachment blunts how the icons affect people on a personal level. (Thompson, 1985)

Southern Fried Rabbit was one of the first cartoons to be removed from the ban list as it has an extra method of blunting the signals of racial abuse, that is to say, a postmodern reflection of racism. Umberto Ecco spoke of a function called aberrant decoding. (Hodge & Gunther, 1998). This means that the decoder uses a different code to extract meaning from a sign than the code used to encode it in the first place. This is a facet of postmodernism, the rejection of objective truth to form a negotiated meaning (Eco, 1965, pp. 131-150). One of the most blatant forms of aberrant decoding is to encode a deliberately overt signal thus shifting the focus of meaning form the sign itself to what is associated with that sign. Southern Fried Rabbit is not trying to debase blacks; instead it is making fun of the Confederate values. The encoding is using racist signals; the decoder is using aberrant decoding to shift the meaning from the racism to a critical representation of racists. Sam is shocked and uncomfortable at Bugs’s behaviour. He looks at the whip in astonishment and then is embarrassed and tries to hide it when Bugs appears dressed as Lincoln. There is no approval, unconscious or otherwise. That is not to say that signals cannot be offensive despite their objective meaning. To a culture that only a few years later had to use the army upon its own populace to enforce the safety of children at mixed race schools, such loaded imagery regardless of the meaning is still contentious. It is only just recently through the depersonalisation of time that society can start to view this cartoon and others without the iconography overwhelming the encoded meaning. This is why Southern Fried Rabbit is among the first off the ban list for in addition to the blunting of the imagery by time, it also has the saving grace to be in line with much of the current thinking; as it is consciously disapproving.

Few would see Southern Fried Rabbit and not recognise the racist imagery and some, of course, will still be offended. For many though, the cartoon is disconnected to how they see themselves and their place in society. The aberrant decoding of the racist iconography creates a cushion of disapproval. This coupled with the depersonalisation of the ideology though time leaves the decoder with an understanding of content without the social commentary being a reflection of self. The discussion of whether this in itself is acceptable or not is out of the scope of this essay. Still, the diachronic and postmodernist processes show us how icons can still be recognised and understood to have the same meaning through time yet our reactions to them change over time, transforming a widely unacceptable cartoon to be accepted by many, while the signs inside it remain unchanged and are still perceived as unacceptable.

References

Dictionary, Oxford. (2010, April). diachronic. Retrieved April 27, 2012, from Oxford Univercity Press: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/diachronic

Eco, U. (1965). Towards a Semiotic Enquiry into the Television Message. Corner & Hawthorn (Edition 1980).

Freleng, F. (Director). (1953). Southern Fried Rabbit [Motion Picture].

Gee, J. P. (2007). Social Linguistics and the Literacies: Ideology in Discources. Taylor & Francis Group.

Henry, P. J., & Sears, D. O. (2002). The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale. Political Psychology, 253-283.

Hodge, R., & Gunther, K. (1998). Social Semiotics. Cornell.

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimentional Man: Studies of the ideology of Advanced Industrial Sociaty. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Smoodin, E. (1993). Animated Culture: Hollywood cartoons from the sound era. New Jersey: Rutgers Univercity Press.

Thompson, J. B. (1985). Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Univercity of California Pr.

Warner, J., Warner, H., Warner, A., & Warner, S. (1918). Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Warner Bros. Pictures / Warner Bros. America.

Original Presentation Slides

I recently picked up a MacBook Pro. It is a okish laptop, its main problem is that it is a Mac and that it doesn’t have a decent video resolution, it is like 1440×900. Still apart form that it is a fairly nice laptop. I mainly picked it up as when I joined Qantm Collage they had some deal with Apple and I was able to get this Laptop very cheap. So I thought… hey I’m doing programming this way I will in fact have a mac and therefore be able to develop Mac and iPhone/iPad applications.

Anyway. I had such a terrible time getting my Mac setup and working that I thought I would make a short tutorial on how to get the Mac setup. Mainly so if I screw it up I can do it all again.

Some Basic Boot Tips

When getting your MacBook running smoothly there are some basic tips you might want to remember about how it boots. These will help you in future.

1. Hold down C during boot will force the MB to boot from the DvD drive
2. Hold down OPTION during boot will take you to the default MB partition loading menu
3. Hold down COMMAND + R to load into recovery mode. This one is important. If you screw up you can always reinstall the OS form the internet. The command will even load the boot partition from the internet, so if you (like I did a few times) delete or break your recovery partition you can still recover. This is a nice feature.
4. The mac OS I am using is called LION. Now I have always hated the yway OS guys name OSs. Even the uBuntu guys do this and it is fucking retarded. To this day I am not 100% sure what lion is.. but I am pretty sure it is MacOS 10.x or somthing. While logged in on your Mac you can clikc the apple icon and “about this mac” and it will show you the VERSION number.. then you will need to google to find out what your version is called. I couldn’t find any other way.

Ok lets get this started!!

STEP 01 – iREFit – Alternative Mac Boot Loader.

Ok we have a nice neat MB… first thing we want to do is replace the lame partition boot loader Apple uses with something a little more useful. We will be suing iREFit (iRefit) I could go into detail about how the Mac partitioning works.. but it is fucking retarded and really flaky. If you are interested in the more techy crap about this read this page and either cry or laugh.. both are valid responses to how Apple handles this

This is what we are going for, a triple boot of Lion (that is the Mac OS I am currently using), Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

Now, iREFit is easy to get working.. just go to the iREFit weboage and download the files onto your mac and follow the MANUAL install instructions. At this time iREFit 0.14 installer will not work, at least I couldn’t get it to.

So follow the Manual install instructions for iREFit and when you next boot you should be greeted with the iREFit boot menu.

IMPORTANT

You want to sync the partition information at this point. So form the iREFit menu simple highlight the Partition Tool icon and load it and it will auto sync for you and do much of the hellish fdisk commands for you to sync the automatically syncing the boot tables.

STEP 02 – Partitioning

The first thing we need to do is partition your Mac drive to allow you to install the other OSs. Now there is the Apple way of doing this and the correct way. Lets do the correct way so we will NOT be using bootcamp. So go to launch pad or w/e it is called and find DISK UTILITIES. Load it up and lets do it manually.

Now this is pretty strait forward. Simple click on the drive itself.. click on the Partition button and then click the + button until you have 4 drives. Format all the new drives as FAT (MSDOS) Resize them to what you would like. I only wanted to sue windows to get access to some apps I like (Visual Studio 2010) and possibly some games so I gave win7 a 150 GB partition. I gave Linux a 250GB partition and you also need to make a linux swap drive. This should be a minimum of 2 gigs but it is bets for it to be around the same your ram. I have 4 gig of ram so I made the swap drive 3.5GB. This left me with about 500GB for mac I think. Do not worry about this to much as when we are done each OS will be able to access the other drives anyway. Many people prefer to have small OS drives and then a single large shared data drive (5 partitions) but I just prefer my way .. so what .. wana fight about it?

Do not be scared this is a non destructive process. It is very simple.. click the + button 4 times. Set the new partitions to FAT(MSDos) and remember to NAME them.. mine are simple Mac, Windows, Ubuntu, UbuntuSwap. After you have done that.. make sure you take note of the partition IDs. it should be something like Disk2 – 6. To find these if you can not see on the left click on each disk and hit the INFO button. It isn’t hard to remember.. Mac Os on disk2, the boot information is on disk 1 (hidden by Apple) and disk 3 is the recovery partition (also hidden) so Windows is Disk 4 and Ubuntu will be disk5 and the swap will be disk6.

Ok that is it.. lets install this crap…

Oh wait b4 we do that.. grab a USB stick and pop it in the drive and then go to BOOTCAMP and use it to download onto the USB stick the apple drivers for windows 7. So just tick the 2nd option “Download Latest Windows 7 software form Apple” and follow the on-screen instructions to save it to your USB

Ok so that is all done. Lets install Windows!

STEP 03 – Installing Windows

Put in your windows 7 install disk and reboot your MB. Hold down “c” while it is booting and it should force it to load form the DvD drive. (OMG you know how long this took me to find out how to do!) The windows 7 install thing-o will pop up and choose “CUSTOM INSTALL”

You will be presented with windows lame way of displaying the the partition information by NOT showing the actual partition IDs. You might note that the OS is saying you can not install on ANY of these partitions.. that is fine. If your lucky and have the service pack version of the win7 installer you will see your volume names .. simply high light the one that you named WINDOWS.. if you are like 98% of the earth and have the original win7 installer this information will not be here and Microsfot hides the fucking disk IDs.. not to worry you should see the data type.. in this case we formatted the partition in the Mac OS as FAT. so you should see 3 partition you do nto want to fuck with then 3 fat partitions.. click the 1st one.. it should be the WINDOWS one we set up if you followed my instructions.

Click FORMAT and now you should be able to install. Simply follow the win7 install instructions and all should be good. Once you get into win7 make sure you remember to install the software you saved to that USB.

Now when you boot iREFit should now show you anew Icon for win7.. awesome! But for now boot back into Lion.

STEP 04 – Installing Ubuntu

For those of you that do not know, Ubuntu is a linux distribution and is a 100% open source and free OS. It is also a fantastic OS and arguable much better than the big guns MS and Apple produce. God forbid that a usre might want to install one of the most powerful and customisable OSs available.. Apple do not support this in anyway.. in fact they have added hidden features specificity designed to block people from installing this.. so ti is a little more complex. I love Ubuntu and it is my mainly used OS of choice nowdays, with the win8 debacle it might be time for ubuntu to finally get more of a mainstream user base.

Anyway from LION (yes there is a reason we do this on the Mac OS.. you can download on windows if you like but easier to do it on Mac) go to the ubuntu website and download the latest 64bit desktop installer.

Leave that in the downloads dir but rename it to ubuntu.iso. Not strictly speaking needed but makes it a lot easier. To burn the disk simple load Disk Utilities, click the burn button select the iso and insert a CDr…

Now the tricky stuff. We can not just install the OS now as once we boot into the linux OS the apple dvd drive will stop functioning for a small time due to how Apple handles disk access on a hardware level. The reason win7 can load is that Apple have a deal with them and have built the hardware for it. This is a way of trying to force the consumer to not use “unapproved” OSs.

Anyway… we can get around it.. put a USB in your MB and in disk utilities erase it to MSDOS. Now, click on the USB drive itself.. NOT the partition and then click the INFO button. Take note of the disk identifier it will be like disk1 or 2 or w/e… either copy this to clipboard or write it down. Now click on the partition of the USB and click the unmount button.

now open a terminal and type in – dd if=~/Downloads/ubuntu.iso of=/dev/diskN bs=1m but replace diskN with the disk identifier you saw before. Use anything but disk0 as this is most likly your harddrive with the mac os and your windows installation on it. :)  Now what we are doing here is copying the ubuntu.iso from downloads to the USB in a way that it will make the USB identify as a CDdrive.

When you run the command the terminal will look like it has hung… this takes a while to do. Just give it time. If your USB has a light on it you should see it madly blinking. At the end it will print out a report on how much data was transferred.

Now we can reboot holding C to load from the ubuntu CD.. when the drive fails due the OS hardware, it will now automatically switch to the USB drive thinking it is in fact the CDdrive. Allowing the ubuntu install to continue. Neat!

STEP 05 – Ubuntu Installation

Now you should be seeing the “try ubuntu” or “install ubuntu” icons. Simply hit the install ubuntu select “SOMETHING ELSE” and follow the on screen instructions until you see a partition menu.

Now.. ubuntu like Lion dose show us the disk ids. So simply highlight /dev/sda5. You should see a lot of info here. I haven’t got screen shots.. but take some time to really look at the screen and you should see 2 MSdos partitions as windows has reformatted as NTFS. They are most likely after the  NTFS partition.. probably at 5 and 6. One small one bigger.

• Click on the larger one (5) and click CHANGE set it to EXT4, tick the format button and set the mount point to /
• Click the smaller one (6) and click on CHANGE set it to SWAP.

Probably silly thing to say.. but make sure you are not trying to install on the USB stick… I did this once and it was a pain to fix.. if you do.. reboot into the install and in the partition menu select the correct drives BUT make sure you delete the swap partition from the USB.

NOW ULTRA IMPORTANT OR YOU NEED TO START AGAIN You should see drop down at the bottom of the partition window concerning the about the “boot loader” YOU HAVE TO SET THIS TO THE SAME PARTITION YOU ARE INSTALLING IT ON. DO NOT LEAVE DEFAULT. if you do not see this, well you should but you can access this again latter at the overview b4 you commit by hitting the advanced button.

So just to restate.. make sure you set the BOOTLOADER to the same partition you are installing ubuntu on itself.

Ok.. that is it.. install and be happy!!

STEP 05 – Fix the Boot Partition (AGAIN!)

Right we are almost done!! You should be able to boot into mac, windows and linux.. though.. many people will find that selecting the linux icon will still boot them into windows. This is easy to fix.. so boot into your Mac and we will manually create the MBR booter ourselves.

• Install gDisk
• Load the mac terminal
• type: sudo gdisk /dev/disk0
• Press ‘r’ to repair and ‘o’ or ‘p’ to view the current partition information. What you should see is that the MBR is not matching the partitions we want to use… you may need to refer to these print outs.. so read them.
• press “h” to build a new one.
• Simply type in the disk numbers you wish to use for booting separated by a space.. nothing else no commas or anything. In my case it was “2 4 5″ Remember 1 is the boot partition itself, 2 is the mac os, 3 is the recovery disk. 4 is our windows install, 5 is ubuntu and 6 is the ubuntu swap. (assuming you followed my lame instructions)
• Accept the default/recommended placement of EFI. This will add another partition to the selected three; hMBR has a maximum of 4. You can add the recovery disk as well.. but it is not needed.. you can still boot off it regardless. though the command+r boot hotkey i mentioned at the start.
• Then for all the partitions but the ubuntu one.. select the defaults. For windows say YES to the BOOT question but for Mac say NO. If you added the recovery disk, say NO to that as well.. everything else default (just press enter)
• for the linux install instead of default.. type in “83″ and select YES for boot.
• ok your done.. hit “o” to verify and read it.. then “w” to write it out.

That is it.. you should now have a cool triple boot macbook running all the neat OSs on the market!!! Woot finally what  a cluster fuck… but worth it.. though I pretty much just use ubuntu it is cool having the other OSs.

STEP 06 – Ubuntu Fine Tuning

One problem for ubuntu with some users is that it is a little less friendly to setup, though once running it is sweet candy. You will notice some minor problems. like WIFI not working. This is fixable…1st just run the update manager and update everything

After reboot load a terminal and type these commands

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mpodroid/mactel
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer

Now we just want to edit a text file and we are done… so type
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

and add the line: blacklist ndiswrapper

Then type
sudo nano /etc/pm/config.d/modules

and it will edit or create a file and add: SUSPEND_MODULES=”b43 bcma”

reboot and wifi will be working! There is a number of other cool things you can do to tweak your ubuntu experience … see this info page..

I recommend the trackpad tweak to get the same functionality in the tarckpad as in LION.

That is it… everything should be funky… have fun

Well here is my MidTerm assessment project!!

It is a small game called Global Nuclear War. It is a very simple console game but I had a blast doing it and worked pretty hard on it.

There is still a occasional bug that crashes it but I feel that fixing this one bug is not a major concern for me as I’m not trying to produce anything, just learn. The project got a little out of hand for me and the once neat code block design degenerated into a real mess. I feel that if i trashed it all and started again I would do a lot better, including range checks on my vector accesses.. witch is the error here, and going though and putting them all in is not teaching me anything and is but an exercise.

I feel I will be better served by trying to incorporate my lessons learnt into a new project rather than “fix” up this one.

Still this might hurt my mark, but I am not really a “mark whore”. I could have done a super simple version of the game and gotten a better score… but chose to experiment. The only thing I am really upset about is that in the adding of all the fluff I never got to put in the CPU player option :(

Still I had a lot of fun and SFML once I got it kinda working, was a real nice way to add some spice to the game. I intend to keep using it for my next project witch will be a similar simple type of thing but this time I will use 2D gfx powered by SFML! Though I have a break coming form UNI and it is semester renewal time so I’ll try and do something during this time as well.

–== Download == –
Global Nuclear War v1.0 (PC ONLY)

If you get a DLL error you may need to install this:
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) / Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (64bit)