#small fiddly things which bug me

[trivorowo]

Man, as much as I'm trying to enjoy echoes of wisdom, the spectre of totk's problems of trying to mesh open design with a linear structure looms over it.

[karasbroken]

I'm still working, very slowly, on this canon-divergent story about Aeryn-amnesia and the pointlessness of Zhaan's sacrifice. But what I really like writing about is John fixing DRDs and giving them silly names. In this section I also indulged my inner poet (I consider myself a poet not a writer) and wandered off into a bit of imagery that isn't exactly sensible, logical, or even grammatical prose, but that pleases me because I know exactly the sensation of mind skipping from moment to moment that I mean, even if nobody else does (it's the Bondi Beach part). Anyway, say hello to Potato, my new OC DRD:

At the base of the central nerve cluster for this tier John found a small grouping of DRDs. Two were completely defunct, metallites still clinging where they had died from the flames. The little robots' innards, exposed by the bugs' attack, had completely melted. The third, shell blackened but intact, managed to blink the light on the less damaged of its wilted eyestalks.

"Hey, little guy," John soothed, gently picking it up, and surreptitiously shoving the other two into the refuse pile with his boot. Turning the poor robot over carefully, he thought it looked like a campfire potato. The flames had vaporized most of its yellow paint, leaving only blackened silver metal, wrinkled from heat distortion. But the rollers it used for movement were intact, and the underside not too badly scorched. "Let's see if I can get you back into action." Tucking the DRD under his arm like a football, John made his way to the closest ladder. He kept a workbench stocked on the next tier.

Though they were mostly self-repairing--helping each other out when the injury was awkwardly placed or severe--John had taken apart enough hopelessly damaged servitors out of curiosity to be able to fix one now. The heat had turned the wiring on one side to a goopy mess, but working with tweezers and a small torch, he carefully cleared away the slag, and started splicing new lines into place. It was fiddly work, and he dropped his welder right into the DRD when the nearby mini-clamshell suddenly flickered to life.

"Commander Crichton, is it true that you no longer remember Office Sun?" Pilot asked without preamble.

It took John a few seconds to figure out how to respond, particularly since Pilot looked and sounded… angry? "Yeah. Yes. Sort of." He flipped the DRD, already christened 'Potato', right-side up and shook it until the tool fell out of the hatch he'd been working through. The indignant waving of its eyestalks was a good sign. "I don't remember anything about Aeryn before a few arns ago, when she helped save us from the Scarran. I have memories of events when she must have been there. But it's like a shadow. Nothing comes clear when I think about her."

"I see." There was a pause long enough that John had resumed splicing circuits, by the time Pilot spoke again. "And have you forgotten anything else? Wormholes for example?"

How Pilot said the word was distinctly pointed, but it was a good question, one John had been deliberating avoiding. Surely the implant had sought that knowledge out, weaving tendrils into his ability to do advanced mathematics, and particle physics. How much scientific knowledge had he lost? "I'm not sure. I still have all my dogs, but I don't know what had to be cut out. I wouldn't, would I?" John could only vaguely recall the conversation with the diagnosan, he'd been a little distracted by the whole brain surgery and losing-his-ability-to-speak part of things. Which other bits he'd had to give up to be free of the implant hadn't seemed important. Not when he'd apparently started being possessed by the neural clone, and attacking people.

John delicately restored the last connection between Potato's motor cortex and the servos that powered its rollers. Watching the balls spin gave him a real answer to Pilot's question. Spinning. Roller coasters. Being picked up by a giant wave off Bondi Beach and being thrown every direction until his sense of up and down was lost and he thought he would drown. But some hidden sense, gravity? light? astronaut reflexes? told him to swim sideways until his head popped clear of the water, and the world suddenly righted.

"I do remember wormholes. Remember going through the one that brought me here. Remember starting one up at Dan-Ba-Da. Remember the Ancients and fake Earth… I can't be sure, but it all seems to be there." It was reassuring, skipping from event to event in his mind, to find all the details intact.

One of Potato's rollers was stuck. He filed a rough metal lump off, and squirted a little synthetic lutra oil in. The DRD gave a grateful burble, and spun it until it moved smoothly.

"Even your work to discover how to create them?" Pilot pressed.

John flipped Potato over again, pressing down with one hand so it didn't try to skitter off. "Hold on, I'm not done."

When he was sure the DRD would stay put, John picked up a grease pencil. "Grand theory of wormholes part twelve." He sketched the equation on the tabletop as he recited it. "The stability of a wormhole opening can be found by taking the function of the parabola that describes its shape, times the Planonic square with a coefficient of voken nine to the ninth power, divided by the approach vector six to one, then cubing the total nine by nine. Values less than devera forty-three point one are too unstable to navigate safely." John was honestly shocked at how easily the numbers and symbols--ones he had needed to learn from Relgarian multidimensional mathematics texts--flowed out of him. Whatever Scorpius had taken from him with his neural implant, it had left the wormhole knowledge untouched, clear as crystal.

"That sounds correct."

"Well, it's not, the equation is flawed, since by my calculations, the wormhole that brought me here was barely devera thirty-six. Even if I have the approach vector or the parabola wrong, the numbers don't line up with my model. But… it's exactly where I remember being stuck a few days ago." John scrubbed the equation out with an inner sigh, and got back to working on the DRD.

"When you asked me to validate your math?"

"That's right." Pilot hadn't been able to find an error, though John was never sure how seriously the alien took his periodic dives into gravitational calculations and displacement halos.

Finishing up, John pried off a few of Potato's upper panels. The heat-warped metal had trapped its arms inside. Doorless, the DRD would be more vulnerable to damage until John could replace the flaps, but the tools themselves looked intact and hopefully functional. "There you go," he congratulated it. "You're back in action. Fist bump." He knocked his knuckles against its extended clamping arm. " Why don't you start cleaning up, okay?" He set the robot down, and watched it scoot away, immediately heading for the ramp to the next tier.  

[togglesbloggle]

The Most Fundamental Identity

Like most artificial human categories, ‘animal’ is a grouping that gets a little fuzzy around the edges. You’ve got your really central examples- cows and lizards and birds and fish and such. Bugs, maybe a tiny bit less so, but they’re still basically animals. There’s that tier of things that are definitely animals but feel a little alien- clams, starfish, barnacles. And then there’s stuff like sea sponges where calling it an animal feels almost like a point of trivia, a technical definition that doesn’t really have much relevance to ‘animal’ as an active word in day to day life.

Everybody will have their own rankings here, and of course there’s no one right answer. As for me, I know there are a few things my instincts tend to weigh pretty heavily, like whether the organism has a visible head or face, whether it moves and shows agency, whether it’s symmetrical… stuff like that. These instincts tend to favor things closer to me on the evolutionary tree. Not always, but as a rule of thumb, my internal sense of animal-ness correlates well with how close the family relationships are.

Because these lines of common descent pick up evolutionary quirks along the way, this tends to create some odd ‘featherless biped’ moments where our sense of what ‘animal’ means matches up with seemingly-arbitrary attributes. For example, one of the few things that all animals have in common is the use of collagen to bind cells together- among other things, as scar tissue in humans, but it goes all the way back down to those sponges. We’re all descended from them, and they had it, so we all have it too. So you can kind of get away with defining animals as ‘multicellular organisms with collagen’, though that feels like it’s missing the point in some vague way. Chordates are among the most ‘animal-like animals’ for me personally (including all mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, etc.), and they all have a weird sort of double spine thing, a ‘notochord’ running parallel to the normal nerves. Is that double spine important to my conception of them? Not really, but it’s basically a defining feature.

It turns out that almost universally among any animals with complex organs (scientifically known as ‘coelomates’ or ‘the fiddly ones’), their earliest developmental stage always looks about the same: the first undifferentiated clump of cells develops a small pucker on one side, and that pucker lengthens to an internal tube and pokes through out the other end until you’ve got a hole right down the middle. That tube, in time, will mature into the full digestive tract, while the rest of the clump develops into other organs like kidneys, bones, or brains, and the outside becomes the skin. This is common to a huge variety of beings- squid, spiders, fish, clams, and of course humans.

But! This can work in one of two very different ways, and therein lies the problem. Because that little pucker, the one that’s destined to become the first opening of the digestive tract? It can be one of two things- the front, or the back. The mouth, or the anus. And that discrepancy divides the complex animals into two very distinct lineages. On the one side, you have insects, nematodes, squid, clams, and so on, called ‘protostomes’. On the other side, along with chordates like ourselves, are a few others like starfish (note how often you and the starfish both use the number five!). We’re ‘deuterostomes’.

Guess which one humans get to start with, the mouth or the anus. Go on, guess. I dare you.

But you already know the answer.

Sorry.

One of the qualities humans have is that we spend a lot of time wondering who we are. We speculate about ourselves endlessly, trying to find that essential thing that makes us, us. We construct rich tapestries of identity for ourselves- what race am I? What gender am I? What sexuality, what nationality, what subculture? We adore fiction that divides and describes and assigns us to Houses and Hives, we delight in Meyers-Briggs categories and star signs. But I am here to tell you the most fundamental thing about you, the deepest core of your being:

You’re an asshole. This is the first thing that differentiated you, that made you yourself, the first form that was imposed on the raw clay of cellular biology. You began life as a little ball of cells with an asshole in it.

As an asshole, you grew and learned, you gained manifold complexities and a transcendently unique beauty, and now at last you are an asshole who can think, and dream, and strive. You are an incredible asshole, proving every day that assholes are capable of amazing things and elevating our understanding of what an asshole can be. But you’re still an asshole.

And yes, this is deeply hilarious. The main reason I give this speech in class is because jokes can be a sneaky memory aid; it helps them memorize unwieldy terms like ‘deuterostome’ and it’s a fun way to raise their scores during exams. But I mean it, too, and I think it’s important. I hope I managed to get a laugh out of you, but either way give it another think. Really this time.

Everybody you’ve ever met is an asshole. Classmates, coworkers, the folks who cut you off in traffic, the friends you don’t see any more, the people you love most in the world, each of them is fundamentally just a little bundle of cells with a butt in it, improbably making its way through the world. Every CEO and every saint there ever was, every king and every revolutionary, every great poet and great inventor and great conqueror. Me, and you. Assholes, one and all.

Pity, is what I’m getting at. There’s this wonderful skill you can develop, where you look at the community around you and you can just see it. On your very worst days, when it feels like the nastiest elements of human nature are taking over and you’re surrounded by vanity and cruelty and petty turf wars, at some point you’re going to think: What an asshole. Next time that happens, I urge you to remind yourself that this feeling is completely and literally true, that whatever dignity they have is ripped from the jaws of nature against all expectation, and built on the most absurd foundations imaginable. Of course these assholes sometimes fall short of our ideals. How could they not? How could you not?

In this state of affairs, condemnation feels a little absurd, doesn’t it? If there’s anything sillier than an uplifted butt, it’s getting angry at an uplifted butt. To me, hope fits much better- hope that they and I can be more than just assholes, that the sphincter which begins our journey doesn’t have to define it, that the lowest things are capable of the greatest achievements. There’s a real and justified delight to be found in every step that we manage to take past that ridiculous origin, and a real and justified forbearance in remembering that we can never fully leave it behind.

[pixelgrotto]

The long process of making a king

I have like, no time for long video games anymore. My days of being able to play The Witcher 3 for ten hours straight are gone, and most of the time I’m lucky if I can get an hour or two at night. Enter Pathfinder: Kingmaker, a particularly long game which took me almost two years to finish. I started it in June 2020, back when the pandemic was still relatively new, and I finally finished it in April of 2022, after months of just playing here and there in the evenings and whenever I had some alone time on weekends. Oh, I took some long breaks as well, to play stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil Village, which is probably why this game became an unusual constant in my life. 

For a game that I played for nearly 24 months, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is sort of a mess. It’s an adaptation of the Kingmaker Adventure Path of the Pathfinder tabletop roleplaying game, which is a very nifty sandbox campaign where your ragged band of heroes free a region called the Stolen Lands from a bandit lord, become monarchs, and deal with all the business of setting up a new kingdom in a fantasy world - invasions of violent trolls, sabotage at the hands of a rival king and an angry fey lady who wants the world to burn. There’s possibly an argument of “Hrmm, this campaign kinda sounds like the player characters are doing some light colonization,” but since the plot takes pains to present the Stolen Lands as constantly suffering under the control of bad guys who are going to abuse the populace in your absence, I’ll avoid giving myself a headache by looking too close. Kingmaker’s a grand enough campaign that I decided to bank the Pathfinder 2e crowdfunded conversion, which was supposed to come out in 2020 but got hit with a ton of Slow spells and will hopefully release this year. 

But we’re not talking about tabletop stuff here, we’re talking about the video game made by smallish Russian developer Owlcat Games. Kingmaker was released in 2018 with a whole bundle of bugs, and even though most have been fixed by now, the game’s still kinda fiddly. The encounters feel like they were designed by min/maxers with the computer straight up seeming to cheat the farther you get, and there’s a ton of stuff that the game just doesn’t bother to explain to you, ranging from the intricacies of the Pathfinder 1e ruleset to the unexplained methods of romancing your comrades - some of which barely seem to have any internet info on them, three and a half years after release. Oh yeah, and I only somewhat understood the whole kingdom management system, which is a funny thing to make perplexing especially in a game named, err, Kingmaker.

For all these reasons, I don’t know if I can recommend Kingmaker to anyone who hasn’t played a computer RPG before, or D&D/Pathfinder on a table. It certainly doesn’t have the same sort of mainstream appeal as the Divinity: Original Sin games - but honestly, I like Kingmaker a lot more despite its messiness. The fact that I’m a fan of the Pathfinder setting certainly helps, but there’s a sort of enjoyable Eastern European jank that shows up a lot in computer RPGs which always feels like, “a small studio bit off way more than they could chew with this monster of a game, but they committed to releasing it, the mad lads.” I felt that way with The Witcher 1, for instance, and I feel that way with Kingmaker. Despite its annoyingly designed encounters and obfuscating mysteries, the game radiates quite a lot of charm and re-creates the modules it was based on with staggering accuracy. Owlcat also improved Nyrissa, originally the big villain of tabletop Kingmaker, by injecting her with way more personality than she ever had in the original campaign. They even listened to fan response throughout Kingmaker’s life, and when the people demanded a turn-based combat mode, they got the blessing of the dude behind a popular mod and stuck it in the game itself. Good form. 

I also found Kingmaker interesting because it marks the longest time I’ve spent with the Pathfinder 1e ruleset. I GM the second edition of the game every other week, but I’ve never actually played or run its predecessor or the D&D 3e/3.5e rules it was based on. I got my start with tabletop games relatively recently, in 2017 with D&D 5e, and even though I read the Pathfinder 1e books and hacked together versions of their systems for my D&D games, diving into Kingmaker was the first time I got to truly see the system for what it is. And man, that Pathfinder 1e ruleset is a beast, forever making me alternate between thinking “huzzah there’s SO MUCH crap here” and “oh GOD there is so much crap here.” Let it be said that on some of those nights when I only had two hours to play this darn game, I spent an hour and a half of that time just leveling up my characters. Also, I will never miss Arcane Spell Failure. 

At the end of the day, if I’d played or GMed Kingmaker when it came out as a tabletop adventure, it probably would’ve taken two years of real life to complete. In that sense, this game was hellacious accurate. Play it if you can tolerate overcomplicated systems or like min/maxing. If that’s not your style, just play it on Easy mode and install the Bag of Tricks mod, which lets you do everything from instantly teleporting your party across the screen to romancing characters you might’ve pissed off. Or check out Wrath of the Righteous instead, Owlcat’s other adaptation of a Pathfinder Adventure Path which seems to fix most of the problems of their first effort. I’m gonna start that one soon; if all goes well I should finish it in 2024. Yippee.

[mylittlemenandme]

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

So back at the end of May I set myself some modest targets to hit before August. Here is how it was looking at the halfway stage:

Get the Space Wolves up to the ‘details’ stage

Build Alarielle

Prep and send a pitch for an article on a hobby site(!)

So how are we looking now? *SPOILER ALERT*

But we didn’t stop there...

It turns out Alarielle isn’t just an intimidating model on the tabletop, she’s also pretty scary to put together. I’ve never built anything this big before, so I was interested with the thought process I went through as it went together - namely “should I leave this as a sub-assembly?” and “what colour could I paint this?”. The beetle is still split in the middle, and the face is also only tacked on. I ummed and ahhed about the soul amphorae on its back, and whether to glue them on or leave them. In the end they were so delicate it was impossible to blu-tac them on so they got glued, but I’d also left them to the last piece which meant actually fitting them around the rest of the beetle proved hellish. Alarielle is mostly glued, but plenty of blu-tac there as well (and her wings still separate, obviously). Oh, and also not glued to the beetle.

I’m looking forward(?!?) to painting this model - it’s going to be like nothing else I’ve done before but the thought of the finished model is spurring me on. But not yet! Plenty of time for that.

One thing that did come out of finishing the Alarielle build was the feeling that nothing else I attempt to build will be as complicated or huge or as big a job.

I picked up a Drycha model from eBay for a decent price, but unfortunately that was just prior to the amazing deal that was their Broken Realms battalion box.

So I got to work.

This was a great model to put together, but I haven’t committed to which bug swarm to have emerging out of their hives yet. They are also mostly glued. apart from the cover for the soul amphora in her log, and her body itself in order that I can pop it out to paint.

Then when I was finished with Drycha, I moved on to:

The two Sylvaneth Warhammer Underworlds warbands. Two very distinct sets of models; the Kurnothi are all action and motion, while the Revenants are extremely fiddly looking. These are mostly just pushed together while I try to work out the best way of approaching how to paint them.

I think I’ve said before about which Warhammer army I was considering for collection back in the ‘90s. It was Dwarfs that made the cut (albeit briefly) then, but it turns out it was Wood Elves that won out in the long run.

But it wasn’t just Alarielle’s tree-kin who were answering the call to war;

I’ve long thought about expanding out to a Living City Cities of Sigmar army, and this is the starting point - a Nomad Prince with his personal guard of Eternal Guard spearman, and some Sisters of the Watch archers, accompanied by what will be a Ghyran Guard Stormcast Knight-Questor.

These are still very much tacked together. I will be attaching shields to the spearmen but it was so fiddly to achieve for the picture, and I also need to work out the best angles for the heads of the Sisters. They look a little awkward currently.

I’d always wanted to use the “He-Man” head from the Space Wolves sprues on a Stormcast, and this one seemed a natural fit. The only change I still need to make is to swap his sword out for either a spare from the Tree-Revenants or one from the Kurnoth Hunters, depending one which fits best size-wise.

And I hadn’t finished there!

I’d had this as an idea for a while, and was able to complete it on the cheap thanks to the Mortal Realms magazines. This is a Grand Convocation battalion of Stormcast (a Lord-Arcanum on Gryph-Charger at the back, and then from l-r a Lord-Exorcist and two Knights-Incantor), who will be from the Hallowed Knights Stormhost because of their ties to the Living City and Ghyran as well as Alarielle herself. I liked the idea of a small army of daemonhunters consisting of this Battalion with some Sequitors and Castigators, and I managed to finish roughly putting these four together just this evening.

Now, I don’t actually have any plans to paint any of these any time soon! I will be moving back on to the Space Wolves for the time being, and working on finishing the Primaris and making a start on the rest of the army. These will be ready for when I need them.

And finally, I didn’t manage to tick off the final item on the list. It’s still very much an idea in the works, but when I’ve been struggling to stay in the right head space to do work, it took a bit of the shine off the thought of writing for fun. But I still plan to tick this one off in the near future.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #442

Top Ten Transformers Gimmicks

There was a time when I felt that this blog was pretty much wall-to-wall Robots in Disguise. Seems I couldn’t go more than two or three weeks without some list or another ranking my favourite Autobots, Decepticons, issues of the Marvel UK comic, issues of the IDW comic, my favourite artists, my favourite alternate modes, my favourite ways Optimus Prime came back from the dead… basically, what I’m saying is I used to write about Transformers quite a lot.

Recently, though? The last year or two? Not so much in the way of sentient mechanoids round these parts. I think partly this is a result of the ending of the original IDW continuity; whilst the rebooted Transformers comic is good, I must confess it hasn’t grabbed me the way the (for want of a better term) More Than Meets the Eye era did. I don’t think it possibly could; the interweaving continuity, the shared universe, the multi-layered world-building and puzzle-box writing, all combined to form a perfect storm around my most beloved of franchises. Did it go too deep, too dense? Occasionally. Did it end too soon, rushing into a climactic conclusion without the room to allow every plot twist and character death to sufficiently breathe? Yeah, a little. But on the whole it stuck the landing, not too shabby a feat for a galaxy-spanning epic that, under various creators, had managed to tell a more-or-less consistent story (papering over the cracks of several soft reboots) for over a decade at that point. As I’ve written before, I loved that Transformers so hard, it was almost inevitable that whatever came next would suffer by comparison, because by definition it could no longer be my Transformers.

So, yeah, that’s one reason. But another is, it’s been harder to think of things to write about. I’ve talked about favourite characters and stories; where else do I go but the increasingly obscure? However, I wanted to give it a try. Last weekend should have been TF Nation, the delightful Transformers convention held each year in Birmingham. I usually go; I gave last year a miss, but I’d been fully intending to make the trip again this year. And then 2020 happened, being all 2020 in our faces. This is a weekend where I might have shared my favourite moments from TFN! Pictures of cosplay! Of friends and creatives I admire! Of toys I can’t afford! But no; instead I’m watching my wife play Stardew Valley and writing this blog (which, I’ll be honest, is actually quite a pleasant way to spend the time, but let’s not get too deep into the weeds over here). Anyway, to celebrate TF Nation, and the stay-at-home “Big Broadcast of 2020” online show that they put on, I’m returning to the Nucleon Well once again with another Transformers-themed Top Ten.

This week: my favourite Transformers toy gimmicks!

Transformers, of course, are cars and whatnot that turn into robots or what-have-you, but across the years Hasbro has experimented with different modes and features to keep the toys fresh and unique, and also to sell a bunch of new ones to impressionable kids. Some of these are sublime; some, frankly, ridiculous. So this week I will explore my ten favourite ones; my ten favourite sub-brands of the franchise, so to speak. Some of these I think are genuinely fantastic as a concept; some, I just liked because it seemed cool, or was made cool by the fiction; and some are just daft crap that I enjoy. Make of it what you will! I’ve decided, incidentally, to focus on “gimmicks” here as being different modes of transformation, or other associated features, rather than define them by what they turn into. So there are no Insecticons or Dinobots, because whilst bugs and beasts are cool, really those are both normal types of Transformer that turn from one thing into another thing. Make sense?

Good. Now roll the eff out.

Combiners (1985): what’s better than one robot? How about, like, five or six, and they all clip together to form another massive robot? Clipping machines together to make bigger machines seems like a cornerstone of any sufficiently advanced civilisation, and whether we’re talking the complexity of OG combiner Devastator, the hot-swappable fun of the likes of the Aerialbots or Stunticons, or even Dreadwind and Darkwing combining in vehicle mode to form Dreadwing, it’s always great. Plus it makes you want to buy all the toys so you can make the big robot! Everyone’s a winner!

Headmasters (1987): robots whose heads – get this – come off and turn into little robots. What’s not to love? And the little robots (what are the heads) then can sit inside the big robots’ vehicle modes, and, like “drive” them and stuff. Although they had some plot gymnastics to perform to make sense of the fiction (quite why the heads had to be Nebulons and not just other Transformers I don’t know), but as a toy gimmick, they were fab. And that’s before you get to most-wanted Fortress Maximus, whose head turned into a robot whose head turned into a robot.

Pretenders (1988): man, I loved Pretenders, even if the concept outstripped the toys a lot of the time. Basically humanoid shells that hide Transformers, later iterations also allowed for animal shells, vehicle shells, even transforming shells; we got new versions of classic Transformers, and one of the all-time great villains in Thunderwing. All this despite the first lot of toys being bulky and awkward, and the whole idea of “disguising yourself as a thirty-foot human” being somewhat suspect in the first place.

Triple (and more!) Changers (1985): if a robot turning into a thing is cool, then turning into two things must be twice as cool, right? Right! Boggling the mind as to how this chunky figure could also be a car and a helicopter, Triple Changers were great, even if you ended up with a helicopter that really, really looked a lot like a car. Of course, they got bigger and better, with Six Changers, who turned into six different things that all looked a lot like each other.

Powermasters (1988): back to the “Masters” concept of little robots that interact with bigger robots (it’s such a shame Pretenders couldn’t have been “Disguise Masters” or something), the idea that the toys transformation – the big gimmick behind the whole range, remember – is unlocked by an “engine” robot is very cool, the smaller toy acting as a key. A tad clunkier than that, in real life, but still great fun, and of course it brought us one of the best toys of the eighties in Powermaster Optimus Prime.

Targetmasters (1987): robots turning into guns is quite cool, but for me the Targetmasters aren’t quite as successful as their other “Masters” siblings, probably because the guns aren’t quite that exciting to transform or play with. But the concept still rocks, and some of the toys were really good, and it was nice to see the Movie characters get folded into the line too.

Jumpstarters (1985): I loved the original Jumpstarters (Top Spin and Twintwist) because they were weird, with their sci-fi alien designs amidst a sea of Earth vehicles. But their gimmick was they transformed themselves. Pull ‘em back and they jump – literally – from vehicle to robot. Self-transforming Transformers are always cool, even if usually it means that their robot modes end up blocky and simple (Jumpstarters are the opposite, pretty cool robots with chunky and unreal vehicles). Also want to shout out other pull-back-and-go Transformers such as the Battlechargers (never had them, sadly) and the utterly, utterly fantastic Throttlebots. God, I love the Throttlebots. I had all six! How much did I rock.

Cities (1986): I guess now these guys are all called “Titans” aren’t they, and they have their own carved-out portion of the TF mythos. But back in the eighties, they were just big burly dudes, the biggest you could get; Transformers that turned into actual cities, playsets that the smaller Transformers could actually interact with. Metroplex was the OG city-bot, and we’d squint and pretend that he really was Autobot City from The Transformers: The Movie. Huge toys are always fun, of course, as are playsets for your other toys, so these ticket loads of boxes. Fortress Maximus, the later Autobot Headmaster base, was ginormous and never came out in the UK, giving him a mythic status few toys ever had; as I said above his head turned into a robot which had a head that turned into a robot, a sort of Babushka doll of robotic head-swapping. Shout-out too for any bot who had some kind of “base mode”, such as Powermaster Optimus Prime and his funky trailer.

Sparkabots/Firecons (1988): these were not necessarily the most fun toys to transform (the Sparkabots, anyway, I never had a Firecon), but their gimmick was cool – or rather hot. They breathed fire! Well, not really, of course; they sort of shot sparks, in what I thought was a slightly underwhelming fashion even as a seven-year-old. But having a Transformer that could, in some way, fire for real was a huge thrill. Also, Guzzle was always just legitimately cool.

Action Masters (1990): yep, I’m going there. What, did you think I’d have Micromasters on here?! Yeah, okay, the very concept of Transformers that don’t transform is inherently silly and counter-intuitive, but the toys themselves were cool, finally offering cartoon-accurate renditions of classic favourites, with nice articulation and fun vehicle playsets. There was definitely a sad sense of a brand in decline about them, but taken on their own, they were good, fun toys, full of character, and I’ve always thought they’d still be cool as a side-line to the main (actually transforming) toys.

I feel bad for slagging off Micromasters up there. They were good, I suppose, but their small fiddly nature and basic transformation just wasn’t as fun as some other toys. Plus there were so many, and they usually came in sets, so I never really had that same bond with individual characters that I got from other Transformers; they were probably the first toys I owned whose names I forgot. And they felt, even at the time, like such a response to Micro Machines that it was almost embarrassing. Action Masters were probably a response to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but at least, y’know, Soundwave didn’t come with nunchucks and a skateboard.

Anyway, I think we can all agree, Transformers are cool, and I should write about them even more.

[sternerstufftoys]

Don’t Kickback In Anger

The year is 1985. England have somehow won the Ashes. Supergran has been unleashed on an unsuspecting nation. In the charts Dead or Alive are spinning right round right baby right round like a record baby. And the Decepticons got a little creepy crawly...

The Insecticons were always there. They were a stalwart, a reliable background troop of mooks for the baddies to fall back on when the big names weren't enough to carry the day. Much like the Constructicons (who debuted around the same time) Kickback and the gang never quite rose to A-list status despite a few notable appearances. For me, as always, it's the Marvel comic which has left the strongest impression, with them acting as enforcers for Straxus on Cybertron and getting all sneaky and bug-like when they arrived on earth. But mostly there were there to fill out the numbers, and the ability to clone themselves used in the cartoon was presumably considered a workaround for the perennial problem of the Decepticons being horribly outnumbered. Turns out good-guy toys sell better, who knew?

But then everything above could be said about any of the three Insecticons. What's Kickback got that the others don't? Bombshell can take control of your brains, Shrapnel can shoot lightning... these are some hefty superpowers right there. Kickback... kicks. I mean, he's good at kicking, don't get me wrong. But alongside Professor X and Thor, Eric Cantona is looking a little out of his league. He didn't even get the fun little speech quirk that Shrapnel got. Yeah, objectively Kickback is the least effective of the three Insecticons, which is something of a shame considering his bio makes him out to be a smooth-talking con artist that makes friends easily, even among humans. That would have been great to see! Ah well.

Luckily, in toy form Kickback has a lot going for him, especially in this Titans Return incarnation. The only one with translucent bits, the only one with a flip out chest/pilot seat and the most poseable of the bunch by a country mile. Despite his small size, Kickback has a striking figure, with well-proportioned limbs and a headsculpt that stands out for just how cool he appears, in a 1985-version-of-cool kind of way, of course. Wraparound shades will never go out of style (until 1986 when The Dark Knight Returns put them out of style forever). No accessories, which for the other two wouldn't have been such a problem, but makes it all the more important that Kickback Paddywhack gets in close to deliver a swift knee to the clangers of his enemy, otherwise he's not such an imposing presence on the battlefield. I kind of imagine him as more of a civilian liaison for the Decepticons, recruiting fresh cannon fodder on Cybertron and negotiating with various ne'er-do-wells on Earth, and only getting involved on the battlefield when he has to.

Transformation is a lot less fiddly than Bombshell and doesn't have the super-stiff joints of Shrapnel, and so long as you can get his arms to form the insect butt you're well away. He's not a bad little grasshopper all told, despite the cheeky cheat of having the robot head just snuggle down inside the insect head. While it's hardly a very poseable beastie this is probably for the best. Young'uns won't remember the days of Beast Wars bugs having ball joints at every opportunity, and inevitably buckling under the weight. A harrowing reminder that articulation doesn't always lend itself to poseability.

The translucent robot chest becomes more of a feature in this mode as well, flipping up like it did on the G1 toy to reveal a cockpit... which inevitably is far too small for titan masters to sit inside, and operates more like a saddle than a cockpit. Or, if you're feeling retro like me, plonk a Diaclone pilot in there. The Waruders are reborn! It would have been nice to have had a proper cockpit, as the rest of the legends size class could comfortably seat titan masters and close up after them, but it would have come at the expense of a big chonk of a robot belly, so we're probably better served this way.

Okay sure. Kickback may have been poorly served in the superpowers department, but he's definitely come out on top in terms of toy representation. Bombshell's colours and insect legs don't match up to his brethren, and Shrapnel's big solid yellow chest feels a bit lacklustre next to Kickback's gleaming transluscoguts. It would have been nice to have got an Energon cube to stash away in there though, something which has still eluded mainline transformers. It's just a little plastic cube. It's not the most complicated thing to manufacture, I'm sure. Oh well.

[tapwrites]

XP-Pen Artist 10S v2

Yeah... that’s a mouthful ain’t it?

I recently got myself a graphics tablet... with a SCREEN!! I’ve been wanting one of those since I knew they existed, but for the longest time only the insanely-priced Cintiqs were available.

In recent years, it turns out, other manufacturers have branched into screened graphics tablets also--slowly bringing down the price to an attainable level.

I got my Artist 10S for £199.99 from Amazon. Let me tell you how it went.

From the Top

I have done art before. I was half-decent at it when I was around 10 or so. But it’s been a while. I got myself a decent “dotted” sketchbook and started sketching things out in it to run my RPG sessions. That’s really what gave me the bug to get into drawing again. And to actually buy a tablet to do so!

I downloaded Krita, a free Photoshop-like application for artists. It’s super-powerful, once you figure out how it works. But there are plenty of tutorials online about that if you’re interested in checking it out.

...But anyway, Krita has some nice smoothing algorithms you can turn on for drawing with a pen tablet. The pen doesn’t have tilt and rotation detection, but pressure sensitivity works well with Krita and gives me plenty of expressiveness to get on with. And I was pretty instantly busting out some sweet curves!

It was a pretty amazing experience, really--getting to draw freehand while also having the capability of undo, erase, etc. I’m not saying it brought a tear to my eye, but it was a nice moment.  😂

Config

The tablet has 6 “Express Keys” along the side, which are configurable to key combinations. When you hold them down, that key is held down (this’ll become important later). I currently have them set to things like canvas pan/zoom/rotate, and a couple of other “hold to use” shortcuts.

The pen is somewhat triangular along the barrel, meaning it won’t roll around on your desk. But it’s smoothed out enough to feel just fine in your hand. It has two barrel buttons, though these are only configurable to mouse various clicks and a preset “brush/eraser” toggle (which didn’t work with Krita out of the box). There is no “eraser” button at the other end (like a pencil with an eraser at the other end)... but I’d find that too fiddly and time consuming to flip it around anyway.

The lack of options for the pen is a little disappointing. Things like this are insanely easy to implement in code--as demonstrated by the express key options. So there’s not really any excuse for it other than the company being small, and this product originally belonging to a different company XP-Pen... bought out or something? I dunno. We’ll get onto them in due course.

Oh, a little side note... the configuration app is only readily accessible from a system tray icon (in Windows). This is fine when you first install the drivers. (And then install the updated drivers so the tablet actually works.) But it has a habit of just... disappearing. After Hibernation or Sleep, that icon tends to wander off somewhere.

And all XP-Pen have to say on that score is to give instructions on how to make it appear again--which only works half the time and may require a restart anyway. I’ve since figured out where the config application itself is kept, and made a shortcut to it in my start menu. In case anyone else is having the same troubles as me, here’s the file path: “C:\Windows\SysWOW64\tabcfg.exe”

Screen

This tablet has a screen! Still getting over that XD

The screen is only 10.1″ corner to corner, which is a little smaller than the average screen tablet such as the Cintiqs. But it’s plenty big enough when it’s sitting right in front of your for actual drawing.

Another reason I pulled the trigger on buying one of these is to get a second screen. I often watch various Youtube videos in the background while I’m playing games and whatnot. I used to prop my Chromebook up next to my regular monitor. This worked fine, but pausing everything when someone came in to speak to me (just a politeness thing I like to employ; nothing sneaky going on)... was a bit of a hassle. And balancing the audio between devices had its own fiddliness (besides the piddly Chromebook speakers not being able to get loud enough for quieter videos).

But now, with two monitors hooked up to the same computer, everything’s a lot easier. I can move windows between screens easily enough. And pausing a video is as simple as moving the mouse over to the other screen and clicking.

Colour Calibration

However! I am having some trouble with the colours. I was drawing away just fine, a simple cartoon character to try out the shading tools and so on and get used to Krita. Then for whatever reason, I saw the picture on my main monitor. The skin tone was way off--too red for what I was actually going for. It seems the tablet screen likes to give everything a yellow tint--making picking colours pretty tricky.

I’ve tried keeping a preview window open on my main monitor so I can see the “true” colours, but this is really not conducive to a productive work space. Or something ^^

I spend a few days trying to configure the colour management side of things from Windows and NVIDIA (the tablet has back light brightness buttons and that’s it)... but it’s just darned fiddly! I can never quite be sure if it looks right or not--or if both screens at least look similar. All I want is a “click on a colour on the screen, and remove some yellowness from it.” You wouldn’t have thought it would be that hard to do, would you?

But instead I had to use gamma, brightness, and contrast sliders. I think I get brightness and contrast... and I thought I knew what gamma was. But it just never turns out quite how I expect. All I want is a step-by-step tutorial on “First, get your gamma correct across all colours. Here’s how you do that...” And so on and so forth.

There are plenty of test-card images out there, which are a good start. But nothing giving you a list of instructions.

See, if you fix the brightness and contrast, it doesn’t necessarily mean things look right. So then you mess with the gamma and nothing makes sense any more. It seems as though you need to adjust all 3 at the same time to be sure you’re actually making any progress.

I even had a Windows bug where my colours wouldn’t stick. I had to create a new user account (with all the headaches of setting things up all over again) just to fix that issue and make any progress whatsoever!

/sigh/

And this doesn’t even talk about the contrast issues it already has. No matter what I do, it’s too bright in some areas and too dark in others. And with my colours fixed the way they are now, they look closer to my main monitor but not perfect. And they make some things just look a tad awful, across the board.

I’m managing, though. Using it for art--at least black and white art--is great, and as long as I focus on the tablet itself, the colours work just fine.

I did contact XP-Pen, to see if they had a solution. Most companies allow you to download an .icc file--a colour profile so the computer can correct a monitor’s output perfectly--but they just straight-up don’t. After 3 workdays of waiting, they told me to use Windows’ built-in calibration tools--which of course I’d been bashing my head against for the past week.

In case anyone else is having similar colour problems, I’ll give you the settings I used to half-fix it. Note that this is far from perfect, but it certainly seems a lot better than it was before, to my eye.

As I have an NVIDIA graphics card, I used their control panel to change the settings to the following values:

Red: 85% Brightness, 25% Contrast, 0.69 Gamma.

Green: 62% Brightness, 25% Contrast, 0.89 Gamma.

Blue: 90% Brightness, 25% Contrast, 0.72 Gamma.

I think the “All channels” part is just an average of the 3 colours. But in case it’s not...

All channels: 77% Brightness, 25% Contrast, 0.76 Gamma.

XP-Pen

That brings me onto the company itself. From what I understand, they’re a small company out of China? Or maybe the US? Or both? It’s really hard to tell from their website.

But anyway... I can only assume they’re too small a company to really provide decent support for their products. The response time is way too high, considering the price tags attached to their products. And the “shrug” attitude instead of providing solutions didn’t go down well with me.

Now, there are devices out there that calibrate a screen for you. The cheapest I could find is £90, and comes with a single-computer license. And that’s fair enough; most people don’t need them, and the ones that really need them are photography professionals who have to be willing to shell out some cash or produce poor work. But I’d prefer not to have to get one just to use it once and never look at it again.

The thing is, with this calibration thing, XP-Pen saying something very telling to the customer. They aren’t willing to get a calibration tool themselves, use it on a tablet, and make the resulting .icc file available for all of their customers to use--at least as a good starting point. Instead, they insist that each individual customer buys one themselves if they want any hope of getting relatively accurate colours from their purchase.

I may contact them again, to point this out to them. I mean, it may be that my unit is simply faulty and should be replaced... but then it should be replaced.

/sigh again/

Overall

I am happy with using the tablet. The tech is amazing, for the price. But such a lack of support is really dragging down the experience.

I highly recommend getting a screen tablet. If not this one, then perhaps another. Maybe your Artist 10S won’t have this issue at all and it’ll be perfect right off the bat.

It’s so awesome to be able to draw on your screen, and has really helped me get back into art-ing. I can already see improvement in my skill over the past week, through drawing every day after such a long time not drawing at all!

[entergamingxp]

The Steam Game Festival 2020: Demo Impressions Lightning Round

June 26, 2020 4:00 PM EST

Having played the best, I now play the rest. Here are more demo impressions from The Steam Game Festival that didn’t leave the same mark.

The Steam Game Festival – Summer Edition’s first iteration has come and gone, and I feel like it was an overall success. Lots of up and coming games got fresh eyes on them to drum up interest and feedback. I took it upon myself to play huge swathes of them, and I’ve already covered the games that most stood out to me. But that’s only the 10 most impressive games of the 24 in total I played.

As before, I’ve written impressions and limited myself to two paragraphs per game. They aren’t as universally good quality this time around, but there’s still some potential gems buried away here. So, here’s the lightning round of my remaining demo impressions from The Steam Game Festival – Summer Edition.

Iron Harvest

A squad based RTS with steampunk mechs in an alternate history set a little after World War I. It’s set in the same world as the acclaimed board game Scythe. In practice, Iron Harvest plays a lot like Company of Heroes with a WWI skin featuring steampunk mechs. You build up your forces, take and hold resource points on the map, and try to beat the enemy before they beat you. I was looking forward to this game, but I honestly found myself quite underwhelmed.

The ability to pick up weapons from defeated enemies and change up your infantry armaments on the fly is neat, and the presentation is quite nice. But I just found that the gameplay is missing something. The cover system is very barren and requires you to build most of it, and units just don’t feel like they’re as effective as they should be. Unit control feels unresponsive, the mechs are visually impressive but clunky to move, and I just found myself failing to engage with it. It all felt very hollow and lacked any sort of punch or X factor when playing. I hope this can be improved before launch, but it ultimately feels like it’s too barren an experience as it stands.

The Survivalists

The Survivalists is a somewhat standard survival/simulation game. You’re a castaway on an island and have to scrounge for resources to survive, thrive, and eventually escape. In addition to the colourful pixel art, The Survivalists’ main gimmick are the friendly monkeys you can bring on your side. These can be trained to gather materials for you, mass produce basic crafting, or aid you in combat.

In practice however, I found the controls and UI to be fairly imprecise and unclear. Multiple times I thought I was teaching my monkey pal a new task and assigning him orders, only for it to do nothing or go completely awry. The system needs a little cleaning up, I think. Beyond this, The Survivalists is colourful, functional, and entertaining enough. It’s fairly generic survival stuff beyond the presentation at this early point, though. With that said, there did seem to be the promise of ancient ruins, pirate treasures, and other intriguing things to unearth from hints gleaned in the world. Hopefully there’s more spark and variety in the full thing.

Builders of Egypt

Back in 1999, Impressions Games released an Egyptian flavoured city builder called Pharaoh. This is a game that my teenage history nerd self played quite a lot of. Apparently, so did the makers of Builders of Egypt. This is effectively an attempt at making that classic game on a modern engine. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be anything on offer here that I couldn’t get from just replaying Pharaoh. And I don’t mean that to be a reflection of the early nature of development; it just seems like it will be a lesser game even when complete.

Pharaoh had real charm to its presentation, sound, and general design that I just don’t feel in Builders of Egypt. There’s a lack of colour and personality here that no amount of historical accuracy and high fidelity Unreal Engine lighting can replace. Now to be fair to Builders of Egypt, it’s a perfectly serviceable city builder with a solid theme. It’s possible that with enough time and effort, the mechanics and options for building cities here will really stand out. I just don’t see it currently, is all. It’s not a great feeling to want to go and replay a 20-year-old game after playing a new demo, unfortunately.

Stronghold: Warlords

After finishing this demo, I went to check who had developed this. I thought that this was someone trying to capitalise on the Stronghold name and legacy with a cheap knockoff, or else they’d managed to get their hands on the IP. To my surprise, it’s still the same developer that’s had the series since the original game. Sadly, that’s not the only thing that hasn’t changed since the first game, either.

Stronghold: Warlords is a city-builder/RTS with a focus on building and defending a castle or stronghold. Warlords is an eastern-themed one, and has a diplomacy feature by which you can bring the titular Warlords into your fold for bonuses. But the entire thing is ugly, slapdash, and controls awfully. Again, it feels like there hasn’t been any forward development or improvement from the very first Stronghold game(s) almost two decades ago. This will need a lot of work to make it even slightly comparable to those games. Given the poor reception Stronghold 3 got, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Occupy Mars

Another survival game, and this one just begging comparison to the book (and film adaptation of) The Martian. The aim of Occupy Mars is exactly what the title says. You’re an astronaut on Mars and you have to gather resources and build up the facilities needed for future colonisation prospects. The gimmick for this one is that it is intensely micro-management heavy. For example, let’s say you want to get ore from a rock. Generally, survival games will let you hit it twice with a pickaxe and then pick up the ore. In Occupy Mars, you’ll start by breaking up rocks into smaller chunks a few times until they’re small enough for your rover’s crane arm to load them. Then you’ll be manually moving and opening/closing the crane’s claw to load chunks of ore into your trailer.

That’s only the beginning of the tiny details you’ll need to control and pay attention to. How about manually setting power consumption, dragging power cables around and placing them in the right sockets? Or having separate oxygen metres for your spacesuit and interior structures? I generally don’t mind this genre of game, but Occupy Mars felt way too technical and fiddly for me to gel with it. That said, this is absolutely a dream for a small niche of players who crave that level of simulation. I respect its commitment to detail-oriented gameplay and wish it well, so check it out if this is your thing.

Haven

Haven’s a potentially interesting one, but the short demo didn’t give me a lot to go off. It starts with a gorgeously vivid animated cutscene full of life and colour. The actual gameplay can’t match those visuals, but it definitely tries to match the aesthetic. Said gameplay is very movement centric, as you control your character(s) and glide over the landscape to collect resources and investigate the world. At the tail end of the demo, it surprised me by becoming an RPG, featuring an ATB-esque battle system. You control two characters with their inputs mapped to each half of the controller, and you unleash their appropriate actions in combos or sequence as appropriate.

More than anything, Haven is aiming to be a story-driven experience. The two characters are young and in a relationship together, making that abundantly clear in their early actions and dialogue. It’s all set amidst a somewhat fantastical sci-fi backdrop, and there’s definitely enough threads that pique my curiosity. At the same time, it could very easily crash and burn hard based on execution, and there’s a couple red flags in the dialogue that make me worried about that. So I’ve got a curious eye on this one, and we’ll see if it pans out.

Learning Factory

I’m still not entirely sure what to make of Learning Factory. It’s not unlike Factorio, that delightfully complex game in which you build massive automated resource collection networks. The look, layout, and mechanics of Learning Factory are almost identical to that, but on a very simple level. Despite this, it’s got a very stylised appearance, and the machines are being built in order to sell goods to cats and satisfy their needs.

Just when I thought this was a kid’s first Factorio, that’s when it kicked off the learning machines and data analytics angle. You take the data from selling goods to cats and then refine it via these learning machines to perfect your algorithm and maximise your sales. There’s even a tutorial and links to educational sources for more about learning machines. By the looks of it, the developers Luden.io have a focus on making educational games, so on that front I could see this being a useful resource. It’s not something that I’d want to play over its contemporaries, but I nonetheless respect this approach and wish the devs all the best in this undertaking!

Ostranauts

Ostranauts is a top-down adventure/simulation where you get a derelict spaceship working and set off into space with it, hiring your crew and making life work out there. Unfortunately, that description ends up being far more alluring than the game is to play. It’s another case of having incredibly technical mechanics that end up being really esoteric in practice. There’s an audience for this, but it isn’t for me. Instead, I just found it very unclear how I was supposed to proceed with actions and tasks, and struggled to even begin doing so.

In fairness, this seemed to be one of the least ready-to-experience demos I played; so much of this could just be technical difficulties. Lots of trial and error was required to even really begin, only to find certain aspects clearly bugged and broken. This is a game in dire need of a manual, but that’s currently complete absent. I get the feeling that I’d be able to fly a real space shuttle easier than I could a ship in Ostranauts, at least until there’s actual documentation present. There’s not really a lot I can say about this one, unfortunately. Alas, I’m not interested in seeing more of it.

Mr. Prepper

Based on its appearance, I assumed Mr. Prepper was going to play something like Fallout Shelter. In practice, it’s much more a standard survival game with resource collection and crafting. Even so, the unique perspective and dystopian “hyper American Dream” setting and narrative makes for a fairly compelling time.

You have to manage your usual gauges for survival and scrounge what resources you can, but you’re also being watched by government agents. There will be routine inspections of your house, so you have to hide all evidence of your secret bunker and illicit activities. This means keeping your house above ground in complete order, covering up workbenches, putting bunker entrances under a rug, and so on. It’s an interesting little spin on things, and I have to say that I’m intrigued by Mr. Prepper. Will keep an eye on this one.

Grounded

I’m still surprised that this is made by Obsidian. But then, considering the systems are largely just adding more survival and crafting aspects to The Outer Worlds, it’s not all that unbelievable. Grounded is yet another survival game, but this plays with the Honey I Shrunk The Kids formula. You’re a child/teenager who has been shrunk to the size of a bug, and has to survive a suburban backyard amidst an assortment of now very large insects.

Like so many survival games, the general mechanics and crafting options on offer here are nothing new. The aesthetic and concept of your resources being chunks of grass stalks and bug parts is remarkably endearing, though. There’s also a lot of nods to the era of ’80s/’90s aesthetics and a general Weird Science feel to it all, though. I’m not sure how much content and variety this will feature, but Grounded definitely felt more charming than I expected. Worth a look at the very least.

Arietta of Spirits

At a glance, Arietta of Spirits ticks a lot of boxes for a somewhat generic indie game. Colourful pixel art, classic action/adventure mechanics that evoke memories of classic games — 2D Zelda titles in this case — and a story that promises to be emotional and personal? That’s all here, and there wasn’t anything in my time with Arietta of Spirits that I hadn’t experienced like that before. Still, that’s disingenuous of me to say. Something doesn’t have to be unique to be good, and Arietta’s demo was good.

It’s pretty, playable, charming and fairly well-written. The concept of the spirit realm bleeding into the physical has lots of potential to work with. Gameplay mechanics were somewhat bland though, with little in the way of unlocks or special moves beyond slash with sword and dodge roll. There’s nothing bad or out of place here, it just hasn’t really done much to elevate itself. I’d need to see how Arietta of Spirits plays in later parts before I can make a solid judgement call here.

Wild Terra 2: New Lands

Wild Terra 2: New Lands is another survival game, but this time it’s an MMORPG. You start in the wilderness and have to gather resources to survive, eventually building up a base and developing technology. Skills will increase through use, and some scavenged items will be higher quality than others. Once again, nothing that the genre hasn’t seen before, but it’s got some depth and a decent amount of options in its tech tree to entice players.

What killed the game for me, then, was the MMORPG aspect. As an Australian, I connected to the Asia Pacific server first, only to find that lag and rubber-banding was pretty extreme. I tested out the gameplay systems and found them enticing enough, but swapped to the US server to see if performance was better. Technically, the latency was improved, but in exchange? Everywhere I moved to in every direction was filled with the camps and huts of other players, and almost all usable resources were now impossible to find and respawning insanely slowly. For a new character, it was practically unplayable. If this isn’t fixed or addressed by launch, Wild Terra 2 is likely dead on arrival. Some potential here, but the current state is worrisome.

Earth From Another Sun

This is a lawsuit waiting to happen. I feel like Activision-Blizzard is going to smite me just for even speaking about the existence of this game. Still, here it goes: Earth From Another Sun is a blatant asset flip that shamelessly plunders visuals and designs from the likes of StarCraft. If the thumbnail wasn’t a dead giveaway, then the fact that I was fighting a slightly modified Hydralisk almost immediately was. Mechanically, it’s a horde-mode FPS that tasks you with killing enough units in a time limit to progress to the next wave, gathering pickups and loot along the way.

There is so much wrong with this game, quite frankly. It’s a visual mess; not just for the cheaply-designed or copied assets but also just in how readable the UI and systems are. Nothing describes trying to figure out what I was doing better than “trial by fire,” as I had no recourse but to wing everything. And yet? I couldn’t help but find the idea of the game enthralling. A fast-paced and frantic FPS with numerous progression and customisation elements? I could see myself playing that. Or hell, just make a StarCraft FPS. Anything that isn’t this much of a mess. Steer clear of this one, but do take note of the ideas in the process, developers!

EarthBreakers

Speaking of an FPS based on an RTS franchise, who else remembers Command and Conquer: Renegade? Petroglyph does, because that’s what they’re attempting to reimagine with EarthBreakers. It’s a team-based FPS where you use resources collected by harvesting or through kills on building up an RTS-style base. You can use money on upgrades for you and your team, eventually producing base defences and vehicles to deploy. Ultimately, the last base standing is the winner.

References to the original C&C Renegade notwithstanding, EarthBreakers is a decent proof of concept. It’s going to need a lot more work to really shine, though. Movement was very floaty, and weapons didn’t feel particularly satisfying to shoot or land. Hitboxes were an awkward affair, and currently the only vehicle on offer are tanks so there’s not a lot of variety. As much as I love the concept and really hope for it to be polished and delivered, I’m not sure that Petroglyph has the chops to land a strong FPS that feels solid to play. Let’s hope I’m proven wrong.

And that’s everything I played for the Summer Edition of The Steam Game Festival. The event is over now, but many of these games will be developed further and available in the future. Some are worth keeping an eye on, and some are less so. But overall, this was a good event, and the availability of demos is only a good for customers.

Here’s hoping the trend will continue, and I shall likely to do this again for future events. For now, if anything piques your interest, you can click the links on each game in the piece above to wishlist them on Steam.

June 26, 2020 4:00 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/the-steam-game-festival-2020-demo-impressions-lightning-round/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-steam-game-festival-2020-demo-impressions-lightning-round

[dramallamadingdang]

Reply time.

For @elfpuddle, @nimitwinklesims, @fuzzyspork, @penig, @clericalrodent, @0201-sims, and @pixelated-world.

elfpuddle replied to your photoset “Screwing around with a completely roadless neighborhood. Well, OK, it...”

Looking forward to seeing pics of invisible cars driving through your Amish 'hood at night on those invisible roads. ��Those creepy headlights will be just the thing they needed, I'm sure!��

LOL. Luckily for these “Amish,” I modded out neighborhood-view traffic in my main playing user account because it bugs me. So, no mysterious lights randomly zipping around the area.

nimitwinklesims replied to your photoset “Screwing around with a completely roadless neighborhood. Well, OK, it...”

Those winding roads look reallllly nice!

It’s a really nice set. Easy to place (not too fiddly, like I find a lot of small neighborhood deco to be), a good number of shapes to mix and match, AND they don’t float when viewed in lot view. Kudos to Criquette! :)  I kind of went all zen when I was “building” the roads. It was quite meditative and it was fun to create the shapes. I’m looking forward to building the “road network” as the neighborhood grows.

fuzzyspork replied to your photo “Yeah, you know, I’d be freaked out if I was looking through my...”

Maybe she's looking into the past. :P I don't know what the criteria for the Spy On Guy is. Mine starts as the first sim to move into the 'hood, or the oldest one. Sometimes is changes before that sim is dead to one I've played more (with more memories/relationships? or maybe that reputation thing has something to do with it, idk)

Now that’d be a neat trick! Yet it also makes an odd kind of sense. Whenever a telescope is used to look at objects many light-years away in space, it’s seeing that thing as it was dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions of years ago, after all. Doesn’t quite work the same way when you’re just spying on your neighbors, of course, but...Details. Don’t bother me with details. :)

In any case, I think the Spy On Guy is determined by instance number, meaning the playable that was created first in the neighborhood is The One, initially. Which is why it’s always Mortimer Goth when you play Pleasantview or any subhood attached to it. For this neighborhood, since it has no premades, it was Goopy, who was a clone of the original townie. From there, I don’t know how the game determines who the next one will be. If it just goes down the list in order... Sandy was the second playable created, but she’s dead, too. Steven was the next...also dead. After that, it was Gwendolyn, so it SHOULD be her being spied on, but...apparently not!

penig replied to your photo “Owen made sparkly mac ‘n cheese (because Andrew wanted it)…and...”

Why not? It's in his house, therefore it is his food. He's very generous to share it with humans.

Indeed he is. :) They’re lucky he needs human servants or he very well might kick them all out. :)

penig replied to your photo “Yeah, you know, I’d be freaked out if I was looking through my...”

They normally do. In Drama Acres it was Peter Ottomas, but now that he and Sam are dead it's David. That's weird.

Yeah, after giving it further thought, I think it’s just in this neighborhood where it hasn’t switched to someone else. This neighborhood does have its odd quirks. I think it’s because it was originally made on my old Simming computer that got zapped. It does funky things on occasion.

clericalrodent replied to your post “Replies about skies and Halloween. :)”

Yup, two. Mardipäev in 10.nov and Kadripäev in 25. nov. They're kinda similar to Halloween, but have key differences. You dress up (as a dark man for Mart, light woman for Kadri), go around the town asking for entrance (in song), then entertain the family and bless their household in exchange for treats.

Ahhhh, so it’s kind of like Christmas caroling, then...which is also a dying/dead thing here in the US. (Sadly. It was one of my favorite things about Xmas when I was growing up. My family and some of their friends and all us kids used to do it as a group every year, and it was so much fun.) It’s cool that you get two occasions to do it! 

0201-sims replied to your post “Replies about skies and Halloween. :)”

Oh, and I don't mind teens trick-or-treating. I did as a teen because I didn't want to give up the fun, but they have to be in a proper costume. If they're just going around trying to mooch candy off people - no way! We don't give them any. ;D

I think there should be some kind of generally-accepted age cut-off for trick-or-treating. 14, maybe. After that, go to parties or parades or something in your costume, but leave the door-to-door candy-begging for the younger ones. :) I’ve seen older kids harassing younger ones out on Halloween, and it...irritates me. And I’ve been known to kick bully ass, so...yeah. :)

0201-sims replied to your post “Replies about skies and Halloween. :)”

Here in the Midwest trick-or-treating is very much alive! My family buys a few big bags of candy and we always run out before the night's over. My neighborhood is in a pretty blighted part of the city though it's managed to stay fairly safe and well-maintained so I think a lot of families come from nearby neighborhoods to trick-or-treat in my area! :D

I’m glad to hear it’s still going on there. In the area(s) where I live, it seems most people take their kids to malls to trick-or-treat these days...although since malls are dying, too, I’m not sure what they’ll do. ;) Or maybe it’s just not as big of thing out in the west? I dunno... When I was growing up in northeastern Indiana, it was definitely a thing, even though I lived in less-densely-populated farmland. I never went out, myself, but the local kids generally went into nearby towns, driven in in groups by parents who had trucks/vans/station wagons. But, y’know, that was like 45 years ago, so... :)

pixelated-world replied to your post “Sometimes I think I’m the only person in the world (or at least the...”

It's also creeping its way in France, which is weird because people don't really celebrate it, it's more about the supermarkets trying to sell candies and other stuff like house decorations... On the same way, I just hate that shops are now doing the Black Friday thing, because as I see it it's typically American (the day after Thanksgiving) and it should stay this way. But Autumn is awesome, best season ever !

Ohhhhh, don’t get me started on the commercialization of Christmas. It’s just...so, SO out of alignment with Jesus’s teachings that it makes my heart hurt. The Black Friday thing is just an outgrowth of that cancer, IMO. But I’ll stop there. :) I’m kind of surprised that Halloween isn’t generally celebrated in France, though, in that France was at one time an area populated by Celts, and the Halloween thing of costumes and trick-or-treating does have its roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and its mumming and such...although it, too, has been greatly bastardized and commercialized, of course. Perhaps that’s why it’s not so popular in France. French folks don’t strike me as people who appreciate American-style gross (in many senses of the word) consumerism and commercialization. :P 

[golshxd-blog]

We’re going to Paris! 

Well, next year, and probably in the Fall…so it’s a ways off. But we’re planning. What fun. ‘Trip of a lifetime’ to be sure. However, this will not be a photo-safari a la Pascal and his pals. I will not be photographing when and where I want, but will instead be led like a pack mule by my wife and young son. [That’s not fair, we’re going to be very relaxed and just immerse ourselves, but still…]

    This means that expectations from a photographic point of view will have to be dialed down a tad. Just the same, you know I’m already picking out my kit. Heck, this is half the fun…so let’s get started. We all know how a new lens can jump-start our photography, all I can say is ‘try a trip to Paris!’ This has me considering a complete overhaul. In fact, the changeover has already begun.

I started out asking myself the question ‘If price was no object, what would you take?’ This is a fun exercise, not because it’s true [it most definitely is not], but because it gets you to really evaluate your priorities. I realized that size and weight were the primary concerns here. Size not only because there will be lots of other stuff to haul around, but also since I don’t want to advertise to would-be thieves. And weight for obvious reasons. Image quality still important, but again, this will be mainly a snapshot trip, so it had to move down one peg on the list.

    First decision made. As surprising as it is to hear me say it, the gorgeous 5DS and bevy of L lenses will be staying home. My only other camera is a compact Leica D-Lux Typ 109. With size and weight as primary considerations I next turned to this camera for the trip, but immediately knew I wasn’t fully enamored of the choice. 

It’s a great camera which actually took three photos that won awards for me last year, as well as all the pics in this story. However I do find it fiddly to use with tiny, plastic controls; and my 60yr old eyes just don’t work well with the viewfinder. It also has only a 1mp m4/ sensor. A modern 0mp 4/ sensor may well offer resolution ‘as good as medium format film’ used to, as I often read, but this sensor is not quite there. 

    Having said that, the Typ 109 would no doubt do a fine job, but this is the trip of a lifetime so let’s look around. First thought was the new version of this same camera [‘better the devil you know…’]. The new D-Lux 7 sports 40% more pixels, which is huge. I also read that the zoom-by-wire functionality has been improved…one of those ‘fiddly’ things that bugged me. I don’t know that the viewfinder is any better, and the tiny, pointy, plasticy controls will not have changed, but I could more realistically get on board with this option now that the resolution is reasonable.

So decision made. With all the above in mind I listed the Typ 109 for sale. They still command a decent price, and whether it was to take on the trip or not, I could always upgrade to the new version if no other small cameras prove themselves to me first.

Meanwhile, decision made itself for me. You see, I realized that unless I was willing to travel with one fixed lens, say a Leica Q or some flavor of Sony RX, I was going to have to go with a smaller sensor size.

    The less than FF landscape is so jumbled and fragmented, at least to me, that I’ve avoided really looking into it. I just can’t get on board with APS-C. The DSLRs are almost as big, and expensive, as FF, and not worth the trade off to me. I do admit to concerns with how small 4/ is, but anything smaller is a no-go zone for me as well. I mean, honestly, the Leica Vario has a 1” sensor. For $,000. Are you kidding me? Absolutely not happening.

    Likewise the Sony A series and Fuji cameras. I just don’t feel them, as obviously competent as they may be. This is a good thing. Too many choices is exhausting. By eliminating these options I’m saved a lot of work.

I had long wondered about the Panasonic Lumix G series. My Typ 109 was really a re-badged Panasonic after all, so it’s not that much of a leap. I like that there is a full system of larger and smaller bodies, with lots of Leica glass available as primes, but also in my preferred zoom configuration. [I know what you’re saying ‘he values Leica glass but then buys (often plastic barreled) zoom versions?’ What can I say…juggling prime lenses ten times a day in dusty back alleys while keeping an eye on a kid and dodging pick-pockets?…just not my idea of a good time. Call me crazy. 

I read up on the Lumix series, and thought I’d pick up an old GX7 and a lens just to see what it was all about. Then I read Mike Johnston’s article where he switched over to the Lumix. Huh. Concept validated.

    I surfed over to Amazon to look for a used 7, and for not much more found an 85 bundled with two zooms. The lenses aren’t the Leica variants, but they were very well regarded, small and light, and practically free. Done and done. They’ll be here this week, and I have a year to learn the format and pick up some Leica glass well ahead of the trip if I like what I see [or the D-Lux 7 if I don’t!].

So there you have it. My ‘Camera for Paris’ journey in 5 minutes. I’m going to be surprised if a compact Lumix and a couple of Pana-Leica zooms don’t accompany me on the trip.

  Posted on DearSusan by Chris Stump.

[thatguysamaniac-blog]

Despite Pokémon Home's rough launch and mixed feature set, the launch of the app for mobile and game(?) for the Nintendo Switch now means we can view the fruits of our decades of monster collecting with the greates of ease and abandon. As soon as was feasible, launch week bugs be damned (don't save in Lumiose City), we shifted everything over to Home and basked in the glory of our work. It was complete. Or was it? Nestled within the innocuous pokédex feature on Pokémon Home is a search filter for 'unregistered'. Out of curiosity we ran a few searches on pokémon, moves and abilities to see BLANK ENTRIES. On top of that, the mobile app has a series of challenges that award next to pointless stickers for your profile for completion. The challenges range from making specific 'theme' trades but also for registering pokémon from different games, from different regions and forms etc. To our further shock and horror. We didn't have them all(tm). The Challenge Determined to not pay for a Pokémon Bank subscription beyond what we had left on our sub plus the bonus 'month' for the release of the app. we had just under 30 days to mine the DS and 3DS games for everything we needed. The ensuing challenge forming some kind of unique meta-game gaming toeing the line between playing and frantically logging in and out of games, joylessly transferring bits of code from handheld to handheld, cart to cart and over the Internet. Here is the story of that challenge. Forms There are many Pokémon which have different forms or appearances for example, the humble meowth comes in three regional forms, the meowth we know and love from the Kanto region, the blue fat face from Alola and the weird viking thing from the Galar region. Additionally, there's a Gigantamax form, a giveaway in Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. So in total there are five forms to register for meowth.  There's quite a few of the bastards and they can change with items, moves, on evolution or the specific game and locality that they were caught, evolved and hatched in. At the time of writing, there's 890 different species of Pokémon but a whopping 1250 different forms. We had a living pokédex (we owned one of every single species) but had been slightly remiss in making sure all the different forms were present and correct. After shifting over to Pokémon Home we had about 125 gaps. A hundred. and. twenty. five. Now some of these were forms of Alcremie, the cream pokémon, which has 64 forms depending on how you 'decorate' it and the time of day you spin it around but there were other gaps and worryingly gaps from older games. This is when the fear started to creep in. Because we'd shifted everything over and it was now stuck in Home, getting forms from older games would just be a case of transferring them back or breeding them in game because THERE WAS NO WAY BACK and not all of the 890 species are currently transferable to Sword and Shield. I'd resigned myself to the fact that I'd had to live with some blanks in the dex because there was no way of changing Hoopa into it's Unbound form or getting back the own tempo Rockruff that I'd evolved. Fortunately, after a bit of digging, and some help from Internet friends, I worked out that you didn't need to have those pokémon, merely connect a pokedex from Pokémon Alpha Sapphire, Pokémon Omega Ruby, Pokémon X, Pokémon Y, Pokémon Sun, Pokémon Moon, Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon that had the form registered to Pokémon Bank and then connect Pokémon Bank to Pokémon Home. Cue half an hour of extremely dull cartridge switching and voila! This still left a few older game gaps of forms I'd never seen including several colours of Flabebe, Floette and Florges. Two colours of Minior. Partner Hat Pikachu, Two forms of the seasonally changing pokémon Sawsbuck and three sizes of Pumkaboo and Gourgeist. The Missing 'Chu Several boring hours in the flower fields on Pokémon Y later I had all the Flabebe, Floette and Florges colours I needed. I went back to Ultra Moon's Mount Hokulani to painstakingly hunt down those two Minior colours because you see you can't see the colour of the Minior whilst it is in Shield Up mode and they have a habit of self destructing unless you're prepared. Partner hat Pikachu had me stumped because I'd thought I'd meticulously got all seven different hats of this special event only Pikachu. Again, after some digging, I'd missed a QR code event, separate to the internet distributions of the six regional hats, originally distributed at film screenings for the seventh and final hatachu. FORTUNATELY, the QR code was still floating around online and thankfully hadn't expired. I won't lie reader I whooped. I whooped out load. One scan and a chat to a man surrounded by Pikachu later, I'd filled the blank. Sawsbuck, however, was another issue as they change form with the season and I was missing Summer and Spring forms. I jumped back to the DS's Pokémon Black to stock up on as many winter Sawsbuck as possible and then spent an evening with one eye on the GTS trading with others globally until I had the two I needed. Watching the live stock market in Sawsbuck on the GTS was fascinating as there was a glut of the northern and southern hemisphere winter and summer forms as each timezone came online with spring and autumn in short supply. Fortunately, Pumpkaboo and Gourgeist are in Sword and Shield so that's just some time I need to spend rounding up different sized pumpkin 'mon with super size being the rarest form. Form hunting after some Alcremie spinning, Dex connecting and then down to the FINAL NINE. Balls Of the most trivial challenges in Pokémon Home are the ones for depositing pokémon caught in different pokéballs. Depending on the ball there's an award for depositing 5, 15 and 30 in each ball (1, 5 and 10 for the rare balls). Most of this triggered on initial transfer but I ended up with gaps for the higher number awards for fast ball, heavy ball, safari ball and sport ball? The first two were simple enough as you do get given a handful in Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield and more had been given away as mystery gifts (presumably anticipating this issue) and once used can then be proliferated through breeding. However, safari balls are only available from the safari zone in Pokémon Heart Gold, Pokémon Soul Silver, Pokémon Diamond & Pokémon Pearl. Lastly, I had to look up Sports balls because I didn't even remember them. These are only used in the bug catching contests on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays in Pokémon Soul Silver. What's worse is, you can't manipulate the time on the DS as all time sensitive events freeze for a period afterwards meaning I only had a few days to remember to catch the bug hunt. Much safari zoning and one Tuesday prize winning Nincada later it was the fiddly transfer of pokémon from game to bank later and much breeding that ticked these off (if you need a sport ball pokémon, I have a few Nincada spare). Abilities Although I very much did set the arbitrary rules of this stupid challenge, I'm not really in control of what my mind will consider acceptable or not. Pokémon Home will let you see which moves and abilities you have registered but for unknown reasons the 65/707 missing moves doesn't bother me but the 12/258 abilities did. With a notebook and serebii.net open I worked out that I needed to find five specific pokémon from older games, the rest were findable in Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield and one, the ability Libero, is currently not available at all... Through luck rather than judgement, these were the ones I'd not picked up! They were in alphabetical order, galvanize, grass pelt, power of alchemy, protean and toxic boost. All of these are hidden abilities, meaning that they're not findable on pokémon during normal play but require some extra effort to get. Grass pelt is a hidden ability on Skiddo, the mount pokémon, ONLY available through Pokémon X/Y friend safari an all but defunct feature where connected friends in that generation would randomly generate a small park with 2-3 pokémon with their hidden ability. I checked my Friend Safari on the off chance I'd left the game with a Skiddo park and I hadn't. FORTUNATELY, whilst complaining about this to a pokémon pal, they did have one open so I hope to get one from them (phew). Power of alchemy required SOS battling grimer in Pokémon Ultra Sun with a Gardevoir with the Trace ability. Protean required Dexnaving around Route 118 on Pokémon Alpha Sapphire for a hidden ability Kecleon. The easiest way to get a toxic boost Zangoose was engaging in horde battles on Route 8 in Pokémon Y and KOing the Seviper before they take down the Zangoose sporting this ability. The last one to get is galvanize. A hidden ability only found on self-destructing geodudes in Pokémon Moon. Thanks to the Internet memory this has never been an easy task as it's impossible to stop them from self destructing whilst checking if they have the hidden ability. I've got 7 days left to try... HOT OFF THE PRESS Three days of trying (not continuously you understand) and a few near misses, we got one! NO MORE SOS BATTLES EVER PLZ So there we have it. What a ridiculous thing to volunteer myself to under taking but I will say that chasing these all-but-arbitrary challenges and achievements has resulted in something of a victory lap tour around the older games and the events and mechanics that each introduced. I've got no doubt that the Galar expansions will bring new pokémon and abilities to track down but IF I get that geodude it'll be a satisfying way to say goodbye to the handheld pokémon generations and to round off the hundreds of hours of ""fun"" these games have given me. * yes, yes, not proper OCD, headline innit.

http://www.thatguys.co.uk/2020/03/ocd-pokemon-home-and-race-against-time.html

[terryblount]

Days Gone – Review

From the makers of Syphon Filter and… Bubsy 3D, Bend Studio is now back with a new IP, Days Gone. On the surface, it seems like “that video game again”. As in, you’ve probably seen various elements of the game in other games before. Open world. Zombies (but not really). Survival elements. Crafting and upgrades. Three skill trees. Shooting and melee. Clearing outposts. You get the idea.

But Days Gone is better than the sum of its parts, though it barely held the parts together at times. Yet somehow, it’s still a hell of a ride from start to finish.

Note: Review based on version 1.02 and version 1.03 (pre-release, before the day-1 patch version 1.04), played on the base PS4

Presentation

Days Gone takes place in the wilderness of Oregon, USA, 2 years after “things went to shit” as it colloquially referred to. Society falls after an outbreak killed billions and turned many of them into Freakers.

The open world is gorgeous. There is a dynamic time and weather system that dramatically changes the environment as well as impacting gameplay. Heavy rain turns the side roads muddy and slippery while the night brings out most of the nasty Freaks.

If you like taking screenshots, there’s plenty of beautiful (and gross) sceneries. And the Photo Mode is decent.

The open world feels small but dense but over time, it becomes larger, with some changes reflective of the story.

The zombie-like but not-zombie Freakers look and sound gross. Blood and gore do spill, with body parts falling off the Freakers, or human enemies when heavy force is applied. Like shooting at the face with as shotgun.

Days Gone has plenty of cinematics with great performances by the actors. Though I find it jarring to see a few seconds of a loading screen, a cut-scene plays, and then another loading screen to go back to gameplay. It ruins the flow a bit, especially when the scenes are just a few seconds long.

It’s really enjoyable riding on the open road (when nothing is out to kill you). The excellent soundtrack kicks in slowly on the longer, uninterrupted journeys. That particular song, which starts and end dynamically, is emotionally charged, swooping and atmospheric as it is soulful and mellow. Perfect for a biker traveling the open roads.

When the faced with the horrifying Freakers however, tunes of dread and suspense pipes in. Whilst the tender, emotional moments are just heartwarming to hear. The overall soundtrack, including the choice of licensed music, is astoundingly well put together.

Unfortunately, the game is crippled with performance issues. The pre-release version I played through saw massive dips in framerate on the base PS4. Slowdowns, textures not loading in, and sometimes even assets not loading in will happen if you move fast enough. Especially while riding the bike.

You will definitely notice the slowdown. At worse, the game crashes.

I can’t tell whether the performance issues are due to the modified Unreal Engine they are using, or a sign we have reached the hardware limits of the PS4.

Gameplay

In Days Gone, you play as Deacon St. John, a former biker gang member (or for you Malaysians: an American Mat Rempit) who is now a Drifter. He does odd jobs for various encampments, either clearing up hideouts or finding lost people or taking out bounties. While the plan was to head out north, circumstances lead to Deacon losing his bike and having to keep doing jobs with the camps he wanted to get away from.

From there on, an overarching story of multiple threads will unravel, weaving various subplots in and out as you progress. You don’t have quest lines, you have storylines, where one mission may advance one or more storyline as it is being completed.

Though for the most part, it’s a story of a man still clinging to the past. Heck, the in-game day tracker counts starting from two years (more accurately, 734 days gone) since he last saw his wife.

The map is packed and there’s really not much downtime going to point A to point B. But the fact that the roads are all windy, filled with obstacles to avoid and danger lurking, you are really on your toes while riding the bike.

If you go on the road for too long, then you better start expecting trouble is coming, either a sniper ambush or swarms of Freakers.

Fiddly (By Design) Controls

You will need to spend some time getting the hang on Days Gone’s controls. R2 is for melee and you need to aim with L2 to use your gun, no blind fire. Grenades are tucked within the Survival Wheel, which requires holding L1, select the grenades category, wait a bit, then select the grenade of choice. Combat is not that fluid, but I guess it’s a deliberate design choice- it’s a survival game, after all.

Weapons are pretty inaccurate at the start, ammo is scarce, and powerful melee weapons break. You will need to use stealth and loot for resources, but you definitely can go gung-ho once you’ve got most of the skill upgrades and stat buffs.

Loot

If the survival elements sound dreadful, just take the solemn that Bend Studio took lessons from Red Dead Redemption II. Looting is quick and easy to do- some enemies like Freakers don’t even need a button prompt to loot.

Resources and melee weapons are scattered around the desolate buildings in the world. They are plentiful but don’t expect them to respawn immediately. Thankfully, gas cans and gas stations have infinite gas.

There’s a sense of permanence in Days Gone. I had a firefight in a small town but didn’t get to loot the area properly as I was locked in a story mission. Revisiting the area not long after (within the same in-game day) and all the bodies and missed crafting components are there as I remembered.

Some Bugs

Alongside the framerate drop and texture loading issues mentioned, the AI pathfinding also frequently bugged out. I’ve seen enemies stuck behind geometry, and even friendly NPCs during missions getting stuck because a Freaker body is in the way.

This game sure has some production values but moments when such issues pop up, coupled with the controls, make it feel like a janky, cobbled-up together game at times.

The Bike

The bike is the star of Days Gone’s gameplay. It’s your only mode of transport, and it needs to be taken care of. You need to keep it away from damage and make sure you have enough fuel or face some big issues. You don’t want to be on foot for too long with Freaks roaming around ready to maul you.

It really makes you consider your traveling plans. In the early game, you’ll have to stop by a gas station for fuel or find a gas can in one of those NERO checkpoints. I spent the first few hours lifting and coasting a lot to save fuel while driving very carefully not to hit anything. And I love that I have to do that.

But later on, you get to upgrade the bike with cosmetics and performance parts, either of which changes the bike’s look, You get to see the Engine III upgrade is a bigger engine block with a different, deeper engine tone. Even racing games don’t go that deep with customisations these days.

Welcome to the Freakshow

The Freakers come in various archetypes. From the little ki- I mean Newts, to Runners, infected wolves that will chase you down even when on a bike.

But the Horde is the big selling point for Days Gone. As those early trailers showed, they are indeed vicious and they are huge. The biggest Hordes have hundreds of these Freakers roaming together.

The early game is spent on avoiding the massive Hordes unless you have a death wish taking them on. But as you progress, Deacon will get more skill points, better weapons and also stat buffs that will allow you to mow them down. Yes, it’s a lot of just running around, then looking at the back taking pot shots but the areas you fight them in do have multiple routes and explosives to use to your advantage.

Crafting all the gear needed, stocking up ammo, and laying up all the traps before engaging the Horde is both the most exhilarating and the most cathartic experience in Days Gone. Nothing like mowing down hundreds of not-zombies after hours of just gasping looking the sheer size and wondering: “How the heck am I supposed to kill them all?”

Content

Days Gone is longer than you would expect. The game has about one hour worth of tutorial before opening up the world for you to explore. The fact the open world only opens up gradually means the size, and the number of side-missions available, will not overwhelm you as a result. Side-missions like clearing marauder camps each have a small reward, which can be tracked in the menus. And finding them is easy, just explore the map and it will mark the spot when you are close enough.

The story does feel cliche. “Sons Of Anarchy meets The Walking Dead” is a rather apt description, but the plot is more than just the biker life and post-apocalypse melodrama.

There are many interwoven subplots coming in and out of the main progression, all focusing on character interaction. Deacon is a dick, the name checks out, but a generic white-man protagonist he is not. Seeing him bouncing off with the rest of the cast, some with great chemistry, others with clashing personalities, is entertaining to see. And the poignant romance story, of how he is dealing with the loss of his wife, is gripping. With a great payoff.

Outside of the surprisingly good story, expect the same-old side missions and collectibles. It is an open world game, after all. Though taking down the Hordes is really fun to do by the end game.

It took me around 41 hours to finish Days Gone and see the credits. Though completionists will definitely spend more than that.

Personal Enjoyment

Days Gone sure sounds like just another open world game on paper with technical issues. But somehow, I really like it.

I am a stickler for games running at its intended framerate cap. So there’s a lot of moments where I just reel back and cringe seeing all the slowdowns. Despite that, the pros outweigh the cons. I enjoyed seeing Deacon’s story unfolded. The number of optional camps to clear is just enough- and with enough variety- to keep me engaged.

I enjoyed customising, upgrading and maintaining the bike. Plus, there’s enough wiggle room in the systems to see something dynamic happen. I tried taking down an ambush camp but forgot to put silencers on. That caught the attention of a nearby Horde and ravaged the camp for me while I cowardly hide in a bush. That’s neat!

Verdict

Days Gone is an ambitious open world survival game that is almost bursting at its seams. The dynamic open world is lovingly crafted to not only look good, but serve gameplay purposes. The customisable bike rivals those seen in racing games. The tension coming from facing the Freakers and managing your crafting resources won’t get old. The story is amazingly well told filled with great character moments.

Yet technical issues, from noticeable framerate drops to the various glitches and crashes are a letdown. It makes you think whether the PS4 is at its last legs… or the game is just too ambitious for its own good.

Whatever the case is, should you persist through the jankiness, Days Gone is the best open world biker survival game, that happens to have sort-of zombies, out there.

It’s a hell of a ride.

Review based on version 1.02 and version 1.03 (pre-release, before the day-1 patch version 1.04), played on the base PS4. Review copy provided by the publisher

Days Gone – Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[aquadeco]

Progress Update (6 October)

Hi everyone,

It's been a couple of days, but I here is what I've worked on for the past days. Most of those were me doing a lot of experiments, and a lot of fiddly work.. So not too much to show off, but I did learn a bunch!

So here are some successes and some fails;

I wanted to know how far I could go with the animations. So, instead of a simpler fish, I started working on a bigger one that would probably be a good measure for all that will follow. This was a shark, a fish that pretty much has to be included in my mod. It is an iconic fish and, if any, probably the one you'd find in a theme park in some shape or form.

The thing with sharks, in real life, is that they are always on the move, or they'll die. There are some exceptions, that are not always in forward motion, but those are not really exciting to watch - or what you'd expect from a (animated) shark asset.

The issue with this, is that there are limits with what is possible in a mod for a game. Animated assets in a mod are not the norm, and so I have to come up with ways to make it as good as it can be, with the systems presented. Anyway, to keep it short, I am currently not done with this:

Shark test (Reddit)

It's moving, in place, and this was just a test - and I am pretty ok with the result. The thing that bugs me now with this one is performance. But that is something I can work with, this is 100% not optimized, and I noticed with bigger sizes it dropped my frames. So there is a lot of tweaking to be done here. But nonetheless, it's a shark, and I like it.

How, and if, it will move (like in a circle or something) is something else I need to test a lot. Animated objects like this don't react to player input. So they all need a cube or object of some kind that is static, and that will be the object you can click to recolor/destroy/select etc.

It is the same system as the latest special effect particles in the game. The static object will be "active" and visible in build mode (when the Deco window is open), same with the shark. So all animations can't stray too far from it's static base object, or else it will be a nightmare to find out which static object belongs to which animated one (especially if they move in an unpredictable manner).

This is all stuff I am figuring out, so it will take some time. In the meantime I will move on to the simpler fish, I now know how "bad" the most difficult one could be (more or less), so I can do the rest with more confidence.

Now then, before the shark looked like that I it looked like this:

Pretty much the same model, but with added metallic stripes, colored eyes and showing some teeth. I thought the metallic would add a nice effect if it would move, but it looks fake and more like a balloon..

Very big balloons..

Yeah the scale was a bit off with this one.. :D

But I will keep it in. You could use it as a fake shark decoration over an entrance, or perhaps a gigantic fish lure..

Will need to clean this one up (as with everything I have/will show up until the mod is done), but I hope you like it. It's just a big static shark object.

Next up, tunnels!

I started work on objects that can utilize the in-game underwater path tunnels.

The idea is something you can find in a lot of modern zoos; a glass tunnel with sharks, rays or other wildlife that swim over the guests in the tunnel.

Oceanium at Blijdorp Zoo

Of course Parkitect guests don't really care about the views while walking in a path tunnel, perhaps they will for some reason in the future. But until that ever happens, I thought it would be a neat compromise to add benches that you can place along the path in the tunnel. Similar to the small ridge in the picture above, it will be a "ledge" where guest can rest, and they'll automatically stare into the water of your aquarium. :)

Also those rocks along the floor with the small lights in them are neat, I want to add those too!

"Under water"

Here is a test I did, some objects are good, some need tweaking. At this point it's more about sizes and shapes, and combinations of those and others that might, or might not work.

Not tedious!

Results for now:

A basic straight tunnel piece with equal arches on a singular (one-way) path.

I played around with the custom color channel on top (see edges of arches meeting in lower left), but that resulted in z-fighting. And the ring of color made it less uniform, also could be added as a separate detail - or might work with a separate arch that I'm adding.

The row on top (the lighter ground) is the one

I also added a straight tunnel piece, like the one above, but with a slight taper. This one has a larger/thicker arch on one side (same thickness as the standard tunnel arches in the one above), and a smaller/thinner arch on the opposite.

This is a subtle one (still needs to "merge" as flush as possible with the underwater glass tunnel), and needs a clean up, but it can serve as some variation in the tunnel shape. You could make a more tree trunk-like tunnel, something with a "sawtooth" effect or a combination of both.

It's original purpose is/was to make the transition smoother between other tunnel blocks that may differ in shape. As you can see in the bottom right, on the darker ground, the two on the outer right show a bit of arch of the block tunnel piece. The other ones, which are all the same, overlap and hide the edge of the adjacent one.

This is just the first iteration, it is more about shapes and how it all fits. Next will be the the corner pieces and tunnels that go in multiple directions, then the details and such.

That's all for now, a good weekend to you all!

[smartecky]

If you’re looking for a good jacket or bag, you have your choice of materials: leather, heavy nylon, waterproof synthetic weaves like Gore-Tex… but for my money (and not a little of it either) the king of them all is waxed canvas. Pliant yet protective, wind and water-resistant but breathable, handsome to start but grows a character of its own, waxed canvas strikes, for me, the perfect balance of attributes. I drape myself in it, and in the case of bags, drape it from myself.

The main caveat is that it is not is cheap — sure, you can get a bag for $30 or $40 on Amazon, but if you want something that will live for years and years and get better with age, you’re going to be spending quite a bit more than that.

The bags here are expensive, but like leather the craftsmanship and material quality matter a great deal in whether you end up with an item that deteriorates steadily or comes into its own. Like so many things, you get what you pay for — up to a certain point, of course.

I’ve collected bags from a variety of producers and tried them all for the last few months during everyday use and trips out of town. I focused on the “fits a medium-size laptop with room for a couple of books and a camera” size, but many of these makers have plenty of variety to choose from.

Check the galleries under each bag to see examples of anything I pick out as nice or irritating. (The galleries are all really tall because of a bug in our system. Don’t worry about it.)

ONA Union Street ($299) and Brixton ($289)

Pros: Rigidity and padding, customizable dividers, nice snaps

Cons: Cheap-feeling interior, bulky, could be waxier

Ona’s bags, at least these, are aimed more at the laptop-camera combo than others, with extra padding and internal dividers for bodies and extra lenses.

I reviewed the Union Street years and years ago during a previous bag week and liked it so much that I decided to buy one. It’s the larger of these two bags, fitting a 15-inch laptop and a DSLR with an extra lens or two small ones.

Not only is the whole interior lined with padding, but the dividers are padded and the main flap itself has a sturdiness that has helped protect my gear against drops and kicks. The bottom, although it is also padded and feels soft, has lived through years of scooting around and placement on rough terrain.

I like the spring-powered self-locking snaps, though when I first got the bag I was convinced they’d be the first thing to fail. Seven years and thousands of snaps later, they’re still going strong, and when I was worried one was failing (it didn’t), Ona gladly sent me a replacement.

It was my standby for a long time, and I still have it. It has aged well in some ways, not so well in others — its waxed front has survived years of scratches and slides along the floor and is marvelously smooth and still water-resistant. I don’t know how they did it. On the other hand, some areas have worn holes and the magnet that holds the back flap shut (a smart idea) eventually burrowed its way out.

The newer one feels very lightly waxed, but I know it’s in there. That said, if you want the full waxy look and feel, it could use a bit more. It’s really a matter of taste.

The inside is the weakest link. The fuzzy plush interior feels cheap to me (though it’s undeniably protective), there are no internal pockets and repeated sticking and unsticking of the Velcro dividers wears the material down in places. Although being able to customize the interior space is invaluable for photographers specifically, a couple of strong decisions inside would make it a better all-purpose bag, in my opinion.

The Brixton is the Union Street’s smaller sibling, fitting a 13-inch laptop and a bit less camera-wise. They share many qualities, including price (only a $10 difference) and ultimately the decision is one of what you need rather than which is better.

For me it’s a toss-up. I like the open, separate pockets on the exterior of the Brixton for things like filters and cables, but the zippered front pocket of the Union Street is better for pens, phones and more valuable stuff. Personally I like the look of the Union Street better, with its riveted straps and uninterrupted waxed canvas flap.

If I had to choose, I’d go with the Union Street again, since it’s not so much larger that it becomes cumbrous, but the extra space may make the difference between having to pack a second bag or not.

Filson 24-Hour Tin Briefcase ($395)

Pros: Versatile, well made and guaranteed, spacious

Cons: Lighter material and wax, floppy handles, storm flap nitpick

Filson has been a Seattle standby for a century and more, with its signature waxed-canvas jackets covering the bodies of the hip, the outdoorsy and the tourists alike. Their most practical bag is this one, the 24-Hour Tin Briefcase, which as the name indicates is a little more on the overnight bag side of things.

This bag has a large main compartment with a padded laptop area that will hold a 15-incher easily, and a couple of pockets on the inside to isolate toothbrushes and pens and the like. On the outside is a pair of good-sized zippered pockets that open wide to allow access from either the top or side; inside those are organizer strips and sub-pockets for pens and so on.

This is definitely the best generalist out of the bags I tried — it’s equally at home as a daily driver or at the airport. Essentially it’s the perfect “personal item” carry-on. When I’m leaving for a trip I invariably grab this bag because it’s so adaptable. Although it looks a bit bulky it flattens down well when not full, but it doesn’t look weird when it’s packed tightly.

A bonus with Filson is that should it ever rip or fail — and I mean ever — you can take it in and they’ll fix or patch it for free. I’ve done this with my jackets and it’s 100 percent awesome. The scars where the tears were make for even more character.

On the other hand, unlike many Filson products, this one feels only lightly waxed. If you want more protection from rain you’ll want to add some wax yourself, not something everyone wants to do. You’ll eventually re-wax any of these bags, but this one just seemed to need it right off the bat. The material is a little lighter than some of the other bags, but that could be a plus or a minus. I wouldn’t mind if it was a bit more heavy-duty, like their “rugged twill.”

The handles are nicely made and thick, but tend to sort of flop around when not needed. And the storm flap that covers the top zipper, while welcome, feels like it has the snap on the wrong side — it makes attaching or detaching it a two-hand affair. When it isn’t full, the bag can be a bit shapeless — it’s not really boardroom ready. For that you want Croots or Ernest Alexander below.

Ernest Alexander Walker and Hudson – $385

Pros: Great texture and color, nice style details, low profile

Cons: Impractical closure on Hudson, Walker has limited space, looks compromise utility a bit

Note: I tried two bags from this maker and unfortunately in the meantime both have sold out. I’ve asked when they’ll be back on the market, but for now you can take this review as a general indicator of the quality of Ernest Alexander bags.

The one I took to from the start is the Walker; it has a pleasantly sleek, minimal look on the outside, the material a handsome chocolate color that has started to wear well. But open up the flap and you have this lovely blue fine canvas inside (there’s a reverse scheme as well). To me this was the most refined of all the bags in this roundup. I like that there are no snaps, clips or anything visible on the outside — just a wide expanse of that beautiful material.

It’s a slim bag but not restrictively so; if what you need to carry isn’t awkward or bulky, there’s room for a good amount in there. Books, a mirrorless with a pancake lens, laptop — sure. But you’re definitely not fitting a spare set of clothes or some groceries.

The small zippered exterior pocket is great for a phone or cables, while the deep interior and exterior pockets are easily accessed and relatively spacious. If you control your loadout, there’s room for lots of stuff in here.

Unfortunately, if you don’t control it, the bag gets bent out of shape easily. Because the top flap attaches to the bottom at the center, if it gets too full the whole thing bulges awkwardly and the tips flip out. And the carry strap, alas, tends to tug on the flap in a way that draws its sides up and away from the clip. And don’t even try to pick it up with the flap detached.

Placing the clip underneath the flap also makes for a fiddly procedure — you have to lift up one side to get at it, and because the loop flips down when not in use, it becomes a two-handed operation to put the two pieces together. A sturdier, more fixed loop would make this easier. But it’s all in the name of style, and the sleek exterior may make up for these fussy aspects.

The cross-body strap has a lot of extra material but I made it into a neat little knot. I think it works pretty well, actually.

The larger Hudson messenger I was prepared to like but ultimately just can’t recommend. Theoretically it’s fantastic, with magnetic pocket closures, tons of room, and a cross between the simplicity of the Walker and the versatility of the Filson bag. But the closure system is just too much of a hassle.

It’s two straps in a simple belt style, which are a huge pain to do over and over if you’re frequently opening and closing the bag. Compared to Ona closures, which combine speed with the flexibility of belt-style adjustment, it just takes forever to access the Hudson. If they make a revised version of this bag that addresses this, it will have my hearty recommendation.

Croots England Vintage Canvas Laptop – $500

Pros: Handsome, well padded, excellent craftsmanship and materials

Cons: Flappy handles, uneven wear, laptop compartment, expensive

Having encountered a Croots bag in the wild one time, I knew I had to include this long-time waxed canvas player in the roundup. Croots waxed canvas is less oily than Filson or ONA, more like a heavy sailcloth. It feels very strong and holds its shape well. It is, however, on the high end of the spectrum.

That said, because of its stiffness, the Vintage Canvas Laptop bag seems to want to wear prematurely in areas that stick out a bit, like corners or folds near stitching. The wear process shifts the material from the smooth, almost ballistic nylon texture to a rough fuzzy one that I’m not so sure about. The aging from just a couple of weeks of use already has me a little worried, but it’s also very thick canvas.

The design is a bit more busy than the Ernest Alexander bags, but very handsome and mostly practical. I love the olive color, which contrasts beautifully with the red backing for the zippers. It doesn’t look Christmas-y at all, don’t worry.

The straps are a standout feature. The thick leather handles are attached below the zipper and rear pocket to D-rings, which in turn attach to separate leather straps that go under the entire bag. First this means that the handles flip down easily out of the way, since the D-rings rotate in their loops. The riveted construction also means that there’s no stitching to worry about in the whole strap assembly. And the bottoms of the loops do a little basic protection of the canvas down there.

It also means that when you’re walking, the outside handle tends to flap rather ungracefully against the side; the inner one, up or down, will be rubbing against your flank or back. You can, however, stow them in the side pockets with a bit of effort, which is a thoughtful touch.

The interior is a lovely shade of red, with several large loose pockets and some stiff leather ones for notebooks and so on. Unfortunately the laptop pocket is poorly proportioned: it’s hugely spacious, enough for three or four laptops to slide in, but the button to snap it shut is so low that I can’t get it fastened over a single 13-inch MacBook Pro. The idea that it could hold a 15-inch is ludicrous.

There’s lots of padding, though, so I wasn’t worried about anything banging around. There’s also the option for a separate camera insert, though large SLR users will likely want to size up.

There isn’t a heck of a lot of room in there but this is definitely meant to be a daily driver briefcase and not an overnight bag — a “personal item” on the plane perhaps but I would take the Filson or ONA over it for space reasons. However as a bag to take to work the cafe, or the bookstore it’s a great option and a striking one. The Flight Bag is a slightly more expansive and unique option.

S-Zone – $30

Pros: Price, magnetic closures, leather edge details

Cons: Cheap-feeling interior and leather, little padding for laptop

To balance out the admittedly very expensive bags in this review I decided to grab a cheap one off Amazon as well. As I expected, it isn’t up to the quality level of the others, but for $30 it’s a bargain. If you want to experience how waxed canvas evolves and wears, an inexpensive bag like this is a great way to try it out.

The S-Zone’s fabric is a little thin but solid, rather stiff to begin with, but that’s fine — it’ll loosen up as you use the bag. The interior is a cheap-feeling synthetic, however — it’ll work, but you won’t feel like royalty using it.

There’s leather detailing all over, and in some places it feels solid, like the attachments for the shoulder strap and at the corners, where there are big patches that will scuff up nicely. But the handle feels like trouble waiting to happen.

Instead of a D-ring to allow it to flip down, the leather itself has been loosened up so that it’s extra bendy just above where it attaches. When it’s down, the thin rope around which the handle leather is wrapped is exposed; I can just see this getting soaked, bent, soaked again, bent, and getting weaker and weaker.

The front pockets are a little tight, but I like the little magnetic snaps — they make it easy to open and close them without looking. Just be careful not to stuff too much in there or the snaps won’t hold against the pressure. There’s a good deal of room inside, more than the Croots or Ernest Alexander, but less than the ONA or Filson.

But then there’s the curious design choice to put padding in the divider defining the laptop section, rather than on the outside. And the leather corner pieces stop just short of it! That means the only thing between the corner of your laptop and the ground is the nylon and canvas — and they don’t make for much of a cushion. Though the other bags don’t all have dedicated padding in this area, they do all seem to mitigate it better, and the S-Zone bag puts your laptop in the most danger of hitting the ground.

Hopefully the high prices of these won’t turn you off — watch for sales and you can get even these high-end options at huge discounts (it’s how I’ve been able to afford them myself).

Do you have any recommendations for more bags along these lines that we should check out for the next time we do Bag Week? Tell me in the comments!

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/review-waxed-canvas-bags-from-filson-ona-croots-and-more/

Bag Week 2018: Waxed canvas bags from Filson, Ona, Croots and more If you’re looking for a good jacket or bag, you have your choice of materials: leather, heavy nylon, waterproof synthetic weaves like Gore-Tex… but for my money (and not a little of it either) the king of them all is waxed canvas.

[gta-5-cheats]

Bag Week 2018: Waxed canvas bags from Filson, Ona, Croots and more

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/bag-week-2018-waxed-canvas-bags-from-filson-ona-croots-and-more/

Bag Week 2018: Waxed canvas bags from Filson, Ona, Croots and more

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If you’re looking for a good jacket or bag, you have your choice of materials: leather, heavy nylon, waterproof synthetic weaves like Gore-Tex… but for my money (and not a little of it either) the king of them all is waxed canvas. Pliant yet protective, wind and water–resistant but breathable, handsome to start but grows a character of its own, waxed canvas strikes, for me, the perfect balance of attributes. I drape myself in it, and in the case of bags, drape it from myself.

The main caveat is that it is not is cheap — sure, you can get a bag for $30 or $40 on Amazon, but if you want something that will live for years and years and get better with age, you’re going to be spending quite a bit more than that.

The bags here are expensive, but like leather the craftsmanship and material quality matter a great deal in whether you end up with an item that deteriorates steadily or comes into its own. Like so many things, you get what you pay for — up to a certain point, of course.

I’ve collected bags from a variety of producers and tried them all for the last few months during everyday use and trips out of town. I focused on the “fits a medium-size laptop with room for a couple books and a camera” size, but many of these makers have plenty of variety to choose from.

Check the galleries under each bag to see examples of anything I pick out as nice or irritating. (The galleries are all really tall because of a bug in our system. Don’t worry about it.)

ONA Union Street ($299) and Brixton ($289)

Pros: Rigidity and padding, customizable dividers, nice snaps

Cons: Cheap-feeling interior, bulky, could be waxier

Ona’s bags, at least these, are aimed more at the laptop-camera combo than others, with extra padding and internal dividers for bodies and extra lenses.

I reviewed the Union Street years and years ago during a previous bag week and liked it so much that I decided to buy one. It’s the larger of these two bags, fitting a 15-inch laptop and a DSLR with an extra lens or two small ones.

Not only is the whole interior lined with padding, but the dividers are padded and the main flap itself has a sturdiness that has helped protect my gear against drops and kicks. The bottom, although it is also padded and feels soft, has lived through years of scooting around and placement on rough terrain.

I like the spring-powered self-locking snaps, though when I first got the bag I was convinced they’d be the first thing to fail. Seven years and thousands of snaps later, they’re still going strong, and when I was worried one was failing (it didn’t), Ona gladly sent me a replacement.

It was my standby for a long time, and I still have it. It has aged well in some ways, not so well in others — its waxed front has survived years of scratches and slides along the floor and is marvelously smooth and still water resistant. I don’t know how they did it. On the other hand, some areas have worn holes and the magnet that holds the back flap shut (a smart idea) eventually burrowed its way out.

The newer one feels very lightly waxed, but I know it’s in there. That said, if you want the full waxy look and feel, it could use a bit more. It’s really a matter of taste.

The inside is the weakest link. The fuzzy plush interior feels cheap to me (though it’s undeniably protective), there are no internal pockets, and repeated sticking and unsticking of the Velcro dividers wears the material down in places. Although being able to customize the interior space is invaluable for photographers specifically, a couple strong decisions inside would make it a better all-purpose bag, in my opinion.

The Brixton is the Union Street’s smaller sibling, fitting a 13-inch laptop and a bit less camera-wise. They share many qualities, including price (only a $10 difference) and ultimately the decision is one of what you need rather than which is better.

For me it’s a toss-up. I like the open, separate pockets on the exterior of the Brixton for things like filters and cables, but the zippered front pocket of the Union Street is better for pens, phones, and more valuable stuff. Personally I like the look of the Union better, with its riveted straps and uninterrupted waxed canvas flap.

If I had to choose, I’d go with the Union Street again, since it’s not so much larger that it becomes cumbrous, but the extra space may make the difference between having to pack a second bag or not.

Filson 24-Hour Tin Briefcase ($395)

Pros: Versatile, well made and guaranteed, spacious

Cons: Lighter material and wax, floppy handles, storm flap nitpick

Filson has been a Seattle standby for a century and more, with its signature waxed-canvas jackets covering the bodies of the hip, the outdoorsy, and the tourists alike. Their most practical bag is this one, the 24-Hour Tin Briefcase, which as the name indicates is a little more on the overnight bag side of things.

This bag has a large main compartment with a padded laptop area that will hold a 15-incher easily, and a couple pockets on the inside to isolate toothbrushes and pens and the like. On the outside is a pair of good-size zippered pockets that open wide to allow access from either the top or side; inside those are organizer strips and sub-pockets for pens and so on.

This is definitely the best generalist out of the bags I tried — it’s equally at home as a daily driver or at the airport. Essentially it’s the perfect “personal item” carry-on. When I’m leaving for a trip I invariably grab this bag because it’s so adaptable. Although it looks a bit bulky it flattens down well when not full, but it doesn’t look weird when it’s packed tightly.

A bonus with Filson is that should it ever rip or fail — and I mean ever — you can take it in and they’ll fix or patch it for free. I’ve done this with my jackets and it’s 100% awesome. The scars where the tears were make for even more character.

On the other hand, unlike many Filson products this one feels only lightly waxed. If you want more protection from rain you’ll want to add some wax yourself, not something everyone wants to do. You’ll eventually re-wax any of these bags, but this one just seemed to need it right off the bat. The material is a little lighter than some of the other bags, but that could be a plus or a minus. I wouldn’t mind if it was a bit more heavy-duty, like their “rugged twill.”

The handles are nicely made and thick, but tend to sort of flop around when not needed. And the storm flap that covers the top zipper, while welcome, feels like it has the snap on the wrong side — it makes attaching or detaching it a two-hand affair. When it isn’t full, the bag can be a bit shapeless — it’s not really boardroom ready. For that you want Croots or Ernest Alexander below.

Ernest Alexander Walker and Hudson – $385

Pros: Great texture and color, nice style details, low-profile

Cons: Impractical closure on Hudson, Walker has limited space, looks compromise utility a bit

Note: I tried two bags from this maker and unfortunately in the meantime both have sold out. I’ve asked when they’ll be back on the market, but for now you can take this review as a general indicator of the quality of EN bags.

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The one I took to from the start is the Walker; it has a pleasantly sleek, minimal look on the outside, the material a handsome chocolate color that has started to wear well. But open up the flap and you have this lovely blue fine canvas inside (there’s a reverse scheme as well). To me this was the most refined of all the bags in this roundup. I like that there are no snaps, clips, or anything visible on the outside — just a wide expanse of that beautiful material.

It’s slim bag but not restrictively so; if what you need to carry isn’t awkward or bulky, there’s room for a good amount in there. Books, a mirrorless with a pancake lens, laptop — sure. But you’re definitely not fitting a spare set of clothes or some groceries.

The small zippered exterior pocket is great for a phone or cables, while the deep interior and exterior pockets are easily accessed and relatively spacious. If you control your loadout, there’s room for lots of stuff in here.

Unfortunately, if you don’t control it, the bag gets bent out of shape easily. Because the top flap attaches to the bottom at the center, if it gets too full the whole thing bulges awkwardly and the tips flip out. And the carry strap, alas, tends to tug on the flap in a way that draws its sides up and away from the clip. And don’t even try to pick it up with the flap detached.

Placing the clip underneath the flap also makes for a fiddly procedure — you have to lift up one side to get at it, and because the loop flips down when not in use, it becomes a two-handed operation to put the two pieces together. A sturdier, more fixed loop would make this easier. But it’s all in the name of style, and the sleek exterior may make up for these fussy aspects.

The cross-body strap has a lot of extra material but I made it into a neat little knot. I think it works pretty well, actually.

The larger Hudson messenger I was prepared to like but ultimately just can’t recommend. Theoretically it’s fantastic, with magnetic pocket closures, tons of room, and a cross between the simplicity of the Walker and the versatility of the Filson bag. But the closure system is just too much of a hassle.

It’s two straps in a simple belt style, which are a huge pain to do over and over if you’re frequently opening and closing the bag. Compared to Ona closures, which combine speed with the flexibility of belt-style adjustment, it just takes forever to access the Hudson. If they make a revised version of this bag that addresses this, it will have my hearty recommendation.

Croots England Vintage Canvas Laptop – $500

Pros: Handsome, well padded, excellent craftsmanship and materials

Cons: Flappy handles, uneven wear, laptop compartment, expensive

Having encountered a Croots bag in the wild one time, I knew I had to include this long-time waxed canvas player in the roundup. Croots waxed canvas is less oily than Filson or ONA, more like a heavy sailcloth. It feels very strong and holds its shape well. It is however on the high end of the spectrum.

That said, because of its stiffness, the Vintage Canvas Laptop bag seems to want to wear prematurely in areas that stick out a bit, like corners or folds near stitching. The wear process shifts the material from the smooth, almost ballistic nylon texture to a rough fuzzy one that I’m not so sure about. The aging from just a couple weeks of use already has me a little worried but it’s also very thick canvas.

The design is a bit more busy than the Ernest Alexander bags, but very handsome and mostly practical. I love the olive color, which contrasts beautifully with the red backing for the zippers. It doesn’t look Christmas-y at all, don’t worry.

The straps are a standout feature. The thick leather handles are attached below the zipper and rear pocket to D-rings, which in turn attach to separate leather straps that go under the entire bag. First this means that the handles flip down easily out of the way, since the D-rings rotate in their loops. The riveted construction also means that there’s no stitching to worry about in the whole strap assembly. And the bottoms of the loops do a little basic protection of the canvas down there.

It also means that when you’re walking, the outside handle tends to flap rather ungracefully against the side; the inner one, up or down, will be rubbing against your flank or back. You can however stow them in the side pockets with a bit of effort, which is a thoughtful touch.

The interior is a lovely shade of red, with several large loose pockets and some stiff leather ones for notebooks and so on. Unfortunately the laptop pocket is poorly proportioned: it’s hugely spacious, enough for three or four laptops to slide in, but the button to snap it shut is so low that I can’t get it fastened over a single 13-inch MacBook Pro. The idea that it could hold a 15-inch is ludicrous.

There’s lots of padding, though, so I wasn’t worried about anything banging around. There’s also the option for a separate camera insert, though large SLR users will likely want to size up.

There isn’t a heck of a lot of room in there but this is definitely meant to be a daily driver briefcase and not an overnight bag — a “personal item” on the plane perhaps but I would take the Filson or ONA over it for space reasons. However as a bag to take to work, the cafe, or the bookstore it’s a great option and a striking one. The Flight Bag is a slightly more expansive and unique option.

S-Zone – $30

Pros: Price, magnetic closures, leather edge details

Cons: Cheap-feeling interior and leather, little padding for laptop

To balance out the admittedly very expensive bags in this review I decided to grab a cheap one off Amazon as well. As I expected, it isn’t up to the quality level of the others, but for $30 it’s a bargain. If you want to experience how waxed canvas evolves and wears, an inexpensive bag like this is a great way to try it out.

The S-Zone’s fabric is a little thin but solid, rather stiff to begin with, but that’s fine — it’ll loosen up as you use the bag. The interior is a cheap-feeling synthetic, however — it’ll work, but you won’t feel like royalty using it.

There’s leather detailing all over, and in some places it feels solid, like the attachments for the shoulder strap and at the corners, where there are big patches that will scuff up nicely. But the handle feels like trouble waiting to happen.

Instead of a D-ring to allow it to flip down, the leather itself has been loosened up so that it’s extra bendy just above where it attaches. When it’s down, the thin rope around which the handle leather is wrapped is exposed; I can just see this getting soaked, bent, soaked again, bent, and getting weaker and weaker.

The front pockets are a little tight, but I like the little magnetic snaps — they make it easy to open and close them without looking. Just be careful not to stuff too much in there or the snaps won’t hold against the pressure. There’s a good deal of room inside, more than the Croots or Ernest Alexander, but less than the ONA or Filson.

But then there’s the curious design choice to put padding in the divider defining the laptop section, rather than on the outside. And the leather corner pieces stop just short of it! That means the only thing between the corner of your laptop and the ground is the nylon and canvas — and they don’t make for much of a cushion. Though the other bags don’t all have dedicated padding in this area, they do all seem to mitigate it better, and the S-Zone bag puts your laptop in the most danger of hitting the ground.

Hopefully the high prices of most of these items won’t turn