MONTHLY 5 - JANUARY 2020

We've got something for everyone in the first collection of mini-reviews of the new decade. Survive an alien game show in the 2D platformer Hunter Hunted (1996, Sierra On-Line). Mourn the loss of Terry Jones by playing the action platformer Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Computer Game (1991, Virgin Mastertronic). Spill blood in the ultra-gory fantasy action-RPG Moonstone: A Hard Day's Knight (1992, Mindscape). Want more blood? Then play Quarantine (1994, GameTek), an ultra-violent action/driving game. Lastly, save your planet in the sci-fi puzzle game Syyrah: The Warp Hunter (1997 Sunsoft). Enjoy!

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Game Boy Colorization Examples

In a previous blog entry discussed the various tools developers had when they sought to colorize Game Boy games.  http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/01/getting-out-digital-crayons-color-and.html  The two main hardware methods were the Super Game Boy and the Game Boy Color.  In a followup to that blog entry, this blog entry let's talk about and show examples of how each method was used.


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You say "obsessed" as if it is a bad thing.

Oceanhorn On PS4, Xbox One – Out Now!

Oceanhorn has fantastic voice actors!

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas is out now on PS4 and Xbox One. Do not miss this opportunity to play the entry to the Oceanhorn franchise on your favorite console! Get your copy from Playstation Store and Microsoft Marketplace ($14.99 / €14.95).

We hope that these new platforms will bring Oceanhorn many new fans. Initial responses to the game have been very positive all around! People appreciate the smooth gameplay and nice visuals, but also the bug free port (FDG Entertainment, Engine Software) and Oceanhorn's great soundtrack (Nobuo Uematsu, Kenji Ito, Kalle Ylitalo).

On top of that, I want to present you the fantastic voice cast of Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas!

Starring...
Ray Chase as Father. Ray has worked with us since Death Rally (2011) and his latest performance can be heard later this year in Final Fantasy 15 as the main character Noctis!

Co-starring...
Kevan Brighting as Hermit. Kevan is a remarkable and colorful voice actor of Stanley Parable fame.

And last but definitely not least...
Fryda Wolf as Princess Fin and Neeti. Fryda has done a lot of video game voice overs from Fallout 4 to Street Fighter V and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.

As the console versions are now out, the development team wants to thank everyone involved in Oceanhorn's story. Thank you for taking this amazing journey with us. We're looking forward to working with you all again in the future!

Knights of the Lost Realm awaits.

DE: Archon Bubbles And Vehicle Deployment

School's in session.  Listen or die!

Alright, I hope my crappy ass camera with Primsa edit made this a little viewable.  At least the table is the right size so things should be better in scale.

The point of this article is to show off a few tips here and there about deployment and about how to successfully wrap your powerful attack vehicles around your 6" Archon bubbles.  You would be surprised how easy it is to actually get your Archons into a good position so you can start utilizing these massive benefits.  While I completely get the frustration that certain players have that you can't use this aura while inside vehicles, or the fact that our Venoms are still stuck at a 5-man capacity, I'm here to tell you that everything is going to be OK.

It doesn't have to be this extreme.

First, I want to show off this deployment type.  It doesn't have to be exactly like this, and of course, this is a bare naked table with nothing on it, but I want to showcase the long and thin deployment.  Our vehicles are extremely thin and our threat range is extremely long.  Our most powerful weapons such as Dark Lances and Dissies both have 36" range and we have obscene movement on all of our vehicles.  With a 14" move on the Ravager, this gives us a combined threat range of 50" base without any Obsidian Rose or Flayed Skull buffs.

When you deploy, depending on where you set up and where your opponents set up, you will almost always have the ability to nullify a lot of their firepower if you deploy on the board's edge.  In Pitched Battles such as this one, deploying on the edge can give you some serious advantage when it comes to outranging their most powerful weapons.  Remember, the total vertical length of the table is 48", and distances will only increase once we start getting into diagnols.  Whenever I get to a table and look at the terrain, I go full rainman for what my opponent is fielding and where he puts them down so I can deny his every advantage.

Also, please note that the Archon was able to get out of the Raider and move 3"+8" for 11" total movement on the disembark.  Look how far he's able to make it up to the table when a Raider deployed behind the Ravagers in the middle/right of the table.  This is without him Advancing, so you can just imagine how well Dark Eldar can move on foot compared to others.  Learn this, remember this, and don't be afraid to Advance for some extra range just so you can get his bubble into play.  With enough experience, you will be able to move him first after doing a quick measure of your furthest vehicle, so you know that if you move that, everything close will be in range to move towards your Archon's buff.  Don't worry, this will come more natural the more you play.

Taste the salt.

Take a look at this picture here.  My friend is measuring distance for Hellblaster units behind his Land Raider.  The upset look on his face is when he realizes that I parked 37" away from his Plasma Incinerators.  Why does this upset him?  Because even with a 6" move and 30" range, no matter what he does, he will not be able to engage me with those guns.  This right here is what every experienced Dark Eldar player does since the old days of Night Shields (-6" to opponent's range), and why this is an exceptionally important skill for all new generals to learn.  The best form of denying damage is by giving them no chance to deal damage at all.  It sounds almost like a joke at first, but I'm absolutely serious when it comes to understanding your opponents' most lethal weapons, the ones capable of destroying your vehicles, and then countering them with attention to range detail (anti-threat).

Measure twice, move once, that's the rule.  The same could be said about my Razorwings on the opposite sides of the table.  Aside from his Land Raider, there was nothing in his entire army that had the range to reach them.  I absolutely cannot stress this enough:  I don't care if you have to measure every single gun (within reason) from the other guy's army, ask them the weapon ranges (you will learn in time) so you can deny damage while planning to counter-attack on your turn.  This is why movement, weapon range, and thus effective shooting threat range is so important.  It's so you know how you can inflict the maximum amount of damage while taking little to no damage in return (by outranging, by denying LoS, or by gaining cover).  That's pretty much a mini-game in itself for Dark Eldar generals.

Now you see me..

Another deployment trick I like to do is isolate pockets of fire and line of sight.  I purposely pulled some tissues up to block the sail, but I wanted to show you the difference between deploying wider vs. narrow.  It's extremely important for Dark Eldar players to examine the terrain on the table in relation to their greatest threats.  Directly in front of the tissue box (immediate left of the Raider) is a unit of Devastators at ground level behind cover.  In this first picture, the Devastators can draw onto the Prow and the Aft of the Raider, just catching the rear sail.  It's important for you to analyze at all times exactly why you're seeking shelter and from what weapon specifically.  If there were bolters on the other side of this tissue box I might not care as much.

Now you don't.

When you straighten the Raider out, he can no longer see you at all unless he moves, and even then, only a few guns will be able to draw Line of Sight.  This is also hugely important for Dark Eldar players:  Force your opponents to MOVE their heavy weapons.  Unless they have some amazing rule that allows them to stabilize their weapons, they will suffer an aiming penalty.  We can move and fire most of our heaviest weapons for free for a reason, and that is a HUGE boon to our army compared to many others.  Not even our Eldar cousins have this luxury, and this should not be forgotten nor underestimated.

Look at that range!

Ignore the Dark Lance from the Ravager for a second and just look at how long 6" actually is.  For your reference, the Raider above the Archon in the middle is within 6" and so is the Raider on the bottom.  The only thing that is not in range is the Raider on the lower left.  Keep in mind that Raiders and Ravagers have the Hovering rule; which lets you measure the distance to and from the model's hull for the purposes of the bubble.  You don't count the gun (although some people argue against this), you only count the gun when you shoot, but since all of our vehicles are a mile long, you can get quite a bit of range if you fly your vehicles in a certain way.  You can literally fly them backwards if you want because 8th Ed. is designed to be.. immersive and engaging?

If your opponent ever gives you shit about Ravager's gun placement, show him this:

Please turn to Pg. 57 of your Codex for maximum salt.

And yes, I even bookmarked that shit for you (pg.57).  It's from your book and it's fluffy.  In case you're wondering, a Raider is about ~7" long from Prow to Aft depending on if you're counting the rear sail or not.  This allows you to be in bubble range and extend your weapon range out pretty long distances while still getting the benefits from the Archon's re-rolls.  Realistically, you can pull off some pretty ridiculous bubbles such as this one.

Look at everything in the army that gets Living Muse!

I literally fat-stacked my entire army into the range of the bubble except for that one Raider on the bottom left of the screen.  Oh, and that stupid Ravager that's still pointing his gun at the Archon threatening to kill him.

Real game example.

Here is another example of what this looks like in an actual game.  The red circle is the Living Muse and the yellow circle is another Archon.  At this point, all my Dissies are in range of the 6" of the Living Muse and only those two Raiders at the top of the picture are out (but within range of the other Archon).  When you have this much speed and maneuverability, you can pretty much do anything.  For the Razorwings especially, once you make this convergence on the first turn to benefit from Living Muse, they will fly away from the rest of the game pretty much.  That's fine really because the first turn when you converge should be the turn where you inflict the most damage.  This is especially true with flyers because you'll probably never get a second chance.  Your first turn should be your greatest opportunity to inflict a massive Alpha Strike with a shooty list.

Counter-deploy against cheeky assaults.

The last picture I want to show you guys is some flyer hacks and defensive deployment shenanigans used against those pesky alpha assault armies.  Some important numbers in here depending on who you're fighting.  Assuming that we're playing Pitched again (every mission/deployment is different), we're going to turtle up into the corner like this.  The reason for this is to outrange as many of their guns as possible on the opposite side of the table.  Next, we're going to concave our fighters around our ships as much as possible.  You do it just enough so that the distance from your closest Raider is outside max possible charge distance (12.1"), and then you give yourself some more distance with the Razorwings.  This pushes their deployment of 9" out further from your vehicles, making the only targets they can realistically charge the fighters.

If they don't have Fly, like in the case of Genestealers, they're screwed.  Against Flyrants or Blood Angels, you push out your Fighters more so even with pile-in and consolidate (7.1" total), they can't reach your Raiders.  If they do commit, make sure you punish the hell out of them.  What your opponents often don't realize is that closing in on all those Blasters and Poison shots is actually beneficial for you.  Don't forget that in massive counter-attacks against over-extended foes, it's almost always worthwhile to disembark with your Warriors and unload on them with Archon buffs active.

WOODEN BAR SET

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Tech Book Face Off: Seven Concurrency Models In Seven Weeks Vs. CUDA By Example

Concurrency and parallelism are becoming more important by the day, as processor cores are becoming more numerous per CPU and more widespread in every type of computing device, while single core performance is stagnating. Something that used to be barely accessible to the average programmer is now becoming ubiquitous, which makes it even more pertinent to learn how to utilize all of these supercomputers effectively. Besides, parallel processing is a fascinating topic, and I think it's great that it is now so easy to experiment at home with things that used to be reserved for huge companies and university research departments. In order to become more proficient at programming in this way, I started with the book Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks: When Threads Unravel by Paul Butcher for an overview of the current state of affairs in concurrent and parallel programming. Then I went for an introduction to CUDA programming for GPUs with CUDA by Example by Jason Sanders and Edward Kandrot. I've been looking forward to digging into these fascinating books for a while now, so let's see how they stack up.

VS.

Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

I had previously enjoyed reading three other Seven in Seven Weeks books so I figured this one was an obvious choice for a solid book on concurrency, and that hunch held true. Butcher gives an excellent tour of the current state of concurrency and parallelism in the software development world, and he does it with a compelling story that builds up from the foundations of concurrency to the modern state-of-the-art services available for Big Data processing, at least circa 2014.

The main rationale for paying more attention to concurrency and parallelism is that that is where the hardware is taking us. As Butcher argues in the introduction:

The primary driver behind this resurgence of interest is what's become known as the "multicore crisis." Moore's law continues to deliver more transistors per chip, but instead of those transistors being used to make a single CPU faster, we're seeing computers with more and more cores.

As Herb Sutter said, "The free lunch is over." You can no longer make your code run faster by simply waiting for faster hardware. These days if you need more performance, you need to exploit multiple cores, and that means exploiting parallelism.

So if we're going to take advantage of all of these multiplying cores, we'd better figure out how to handle doing multiple things at once in our programs.

Our concurrency story begins with the little things. The first week focuses on the fundamentals of concurrency: threads and locks. Each week is split into three days, each day building on the day before, with the intention of being able to learn and experiment with the chapter's contents over a weekend. This first week on threads and locks is not meant to show the reader how to do modern parallel programming with threads, but to give a foundation of understanding for the higher-level concepts that come later. Threads are notoriously difficult to use without corrupting program state and crashing programs, and locks are a necessary evil that can help solve those corruption problems but have problems of their own, like deadlocks and livelocks. These problems are especially insidious because they're most often invisible, as Butcher warns:

To my mind, what makes multithreaded programming difficult is not that writing it is hard, but that testing it is hard. It's not the pitfalls that you can fall into; it's the fact that you don't necessarily know whether you've fallen into one of them. 

The first concurrency model gives us a view into that abyss, but then pulls back and moves on to better alternatives right away. The first better model turns out to be an old programming paradigm that has recently become more and more popular: functional programming. One of the biggest problems with programming languages like C or Java is that they have mutable state. That means most of their data structures and variables can and do change by default. Functional languages, on the other hand, default to immutable data structures that don't have the same problems when sharing state across threads.

The next model goes into detail about how one functional language, Clojure, uses the basic advantages of immutable state by separating identity and state. The identity of a data structure is what that data structure is inherently, like a list of names. It doesn't change. The state, which specific names are in the list, can change over time, and a persistent data structure in Clojure will guarantee that if the state changes for one thread, it will not change for other threads unless that state is explicitly passed from one thread to another. This separation of identity and state is accomplished by atoms and agents, but we don't have time to get into the specifics here. It's in the book.

After Clojure, we move on to Elixir, another functional language that takes a different approach to parallelism. Instead of threads, Elixir has extremely lightweight processes that can be used to make highly reliable applications out of unreliable components. The perspective to take when programming in Elixir is to design the application so that individual processes are not critical and can fail. Then instead of trying to do thorough error checking, we can just let them crash and depend on the system to recover and restart them. This approach makes for incredibly reliable systems, and with Elixir running on the Erlang VM, it has a solid foundation for bulletproof systems.

With the next model, we come back to Clojure to explore communicating sequential processes (CSP). Instead of making the endpoints in a message the important thing, CSP concentrates on the communication channel between the endpoints. In Clojure this is implemented with Go Blocks, and it's an intriguing change to the normal way of thinking about message passing between threads or processes.

What are we at now, the sixth model? This model steps outside of the CPU and takes a look at the other supercomputer in your PC, the massively parallel GPU. This chapter was a little too short for the subject to get a great understanding of what was going on, but it does use OpenCL for some simple word-counting applications that run on the GPU. It was neat to see how it works, but it was a lot of boilerplate code that was pretty opaque to me. I'm hoping the other book in this face-off will shed much more light on how to do GPU programming.

The final model takes us into the stratosphere with serious Big Data processing using Hadoop and Storm, frameworks that enable massively parallel data processing on large compute clusters. It was surprising to see how little code was needed to get a program up and running on such an industrial strength framework. Granted, the program was a simple one, but thinking about what the framework accomplishes is pretty intense.

That brings us to the end of the tour of concurrency models. The breadth of topics covered was exceptional, and the book flowed quite nicely. Butcher's explanations were clear, and he did an excellent job covering a wide-ranging, complex topic in a concise 300 pages. If you're looking for an overview of what's out there today in the way of concurrent and parallel programming, this is definitely the book to start you on that journey.

CUDA by Example

CUDA used to be an acronym that stood for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but Nvidia, it's creator, rightly decided that such a definition was silly and stopped using it. Now CUDA is just CUDA, and it refers to a programming platform used to turn your Nvidia graphics card into a massively parallel supercomputer. This book takes the reader through how to write this code using the CUDA libraries for your very own graphics card. It does a fairly decent job at this task.

The first chapter starts out with a bit of history on the graphics processing unit (GPU) and why we would need a general-purpose platform such as CUDA for doing computations on it. The short answer is that the prior situation was dire. The longer answer is as follows:

The general approach in the early days of GPU computing was extraordinarily convoluted. Because standard graphics APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX were still the only way to interact with a GPU, any attempt to perform arbitrary computations on a GPU would still be subject to the constraints of programming within a graphics API. Because of this, researchers explored general-purpose computation through graphics APIs by trying to make their problems appear to the GPU to be traditional rendering.

Suffice it to say, people were not particularly satisfied shoehorning  their algorithms into the GPU through graphics programming, so CUDA and OpenCL were a welcome development.

The next chapter goes through how to get everything ready on your computer in order to start writing and running CUDA code, and the chapter after that finally unveils the first program to run on the GPU. It's not exciting, just the standard "Hello, World!" program, but this example does introduce some of the special syntax and keywords that are used in CUDA programming.

Chapter 4 is where the real fun begins. We get to run an honest-to-goodness parallel program on the GPU. It's still simple in that it's only summing two vectors together element by element, but it's doing the calculation with each pair of elements in its own thread. Each thread gets assigned to its own resource on the GPU, so theoretically, if the GPU had at least as many compute resources as there are pairs of elements, all of the additions would happen simultaneously. It may not seem quite right to use compute resources in this way since we're so used to programming on much more serial CPUs, but the GPU hardware is designed specifically to do thousands of small calculations in parallel in a highly efficient manner. It's definitely a programming paradigm shift.

After another more interesting example of calculating and displaying the Julia Set, a kind of fractal set of numbers, the next chapter follows up with how to synchronize these thousands of threads in calculations that aren't completely parallel. The example here is the dot product calculation, and this example ends up getting used multiple times throughout the rest of the book. So far the examples have been unique, but they'll start to get reused from here on, partly in order to not need to keep introducing more new algorithms for each example.

The next couple chapters discuss the different types of memory available in a GPU. A small amount of constant memory is there to hold values that are, well, constant, for fast access instead of needing to keep fetching those unchanging values from main memory or having them fill up the cache unnecessarily. Then there's texture memory available for optimized 2-D memory accesses, which are common in certain algorithms that operate on neighboring memory locations in two dimensions instead of the normal one dimension of vector calculations.

Chapter 8 discusses how to combine the use of the GPU as both a CUDA processor and a graphics processor without needing to copy buffers back and forth to the host memory. Actually, a lot of CUDA programming is optimized by thinking about how best to use the memory resources available. There are now at least three more memories to consider: the GPU main memory, constant memory, and texture memory, in addition to the normal system memory attached to the CPU we're used to thinking about. The options have multiplied, and it's important to use both the CPU and GPU efficiently to get the best performance.

We're nearing the end now, with chapters on using atomics to maintain memory consistency when multiple threads are accessing the same locations, using streams to more fully utilize a GPU's resources, and using multiple GPUs to their full potential, if your system is blessed with more than one GPU. By this point much of the content is starting to feel redundant, with incremental features being added to the mix and most of the examples and explanations of the code being copies of previous examples with minor tweaks for the new features.

The last chapter is a review of what was covered in the book, some recommendations of more resources to learn from, and a quick tour of the debugging tools available for CUDA. While overall this book was fairly good for learning how to do massively parallel programming with CUDA, and I certainly enjoyed coming up to speed with this exciting and powerful technology, the second half of the book especially felt drawn out and repetitive. The explanations got to be too verbose, and frankly, the cringe-worthy sense of humor couldn't carry the redundancy through. The book could have easily been half as long without losing much, although the pace was certainly easy to keep up with. I never struggled to understand anything, and that's always a plus. I've got a couple other CUDA books that may be better, but CUDA by Example is sufficient to learn the ropes in a pinch.


Of these two books, Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks was the more wide-ranging and enlightening book. It gave a wonderful overview of the landscape for concurrent and parallel programming, even though it couldn't go into enough depth on any one topic to do it justice or allow the reader to competently start working in that area. Like all of the Seven in Seven books, its purpose is not to make the reader an expert, but to provide enough information to give the reader a fighting chance at making their own decision on a path. Then, the reader can follow that path further with a more specialized book. CUDA by Example is one such specialized book, although it was somewhat light on the real details of GPU programming. As an introductory book, it was adequate, but I'm hoping the next couple of books I read on GPU programming will have more substance. In any case parallel programming is growing in importance, and it's exciting to be able to play around with it on consumer-grade hardware today.

Complex But Not Complicated

To me, the best games are the ones with rules that provide a structure for making moves towards victory, then get out of the way and let you play. I don't like games where an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules gives an advantage, and I can't stand games where it's possible to win on a technicality. The advantage should come with the ability to understand the consequences of making a particular play, like thinking several moves ahead in chess.

Twilight Struggle is a good game for that reason. It gives players a relatively simple set of options on their turn, primarily by playing cards for one of two purposes: either to spread their influence on the board, or to enact a more specific game effect that targets a particular location or gives some other in-game advantage. Simple options, but a lot to think about and try to plan for.

In Twilight Struggle, two players vie for control of the world during the Cold War of 1945-1989. The board represents a map of the world, with players placing competing levels on influence in the various countries depicted with an eye towards controlling particular regions. Scoring cards are played at various points in the game, so the goal is to set up your influence to take advantage of the scoring cards you have, but also to anticipate what your opponent is trying to do based on where they are placing their influence.

Another option each turn is to spend cards to progress with the Space Race. Achieving space-based advances does give an advantage, especially to whichever player gets to each milestone first, so (much like in the real world at the time) it's something that can't just be ignored. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but in all of our plays we've found the space race to be an annoying distraction due to the amount of time a player needs to spend on it and the random, hard to predict results. I wonder if the military commanders of the time felt the same way?

There is also a Military Operations track which requires both players to engage in roughly the same amount of aggressive military action each turn, an interesting balancing mechanic that slyly represents the sabre-rattling and chest-thumping that often occurs between world powers. However, too much military action will advance the DefCon marker, and if it gets pushed too far nuclear war breaks out and the game immediately ends. This is where the real brilliance of this game lies, and where it perfectly reflects the world it takes place in, as the two players constantly need to look at how far they can push things without going too far.

Like the best strategy games, Twilight Struggle gives you a lot to think about during play, without bogging you down in complicated rules that need to constantly be referred to. The strategy and maneuvering

It's a great game design for what it is trying to do, and you could even argue that it's educational, sparking the imagination about this unique period in world history. Unfortunately the game's presentation is more textbook than Hollywood blockbuster, and the game's graphic design is very...utilitarian, which is what I think has held this game back from gaining a wider spotlight. On the other hand, it has been in print continuously for 15 years, so I suppose it's finding its audience.

Rating 4 (out of 5): It's a 2-player game that takes a while to play so it doesn't come out that often, but we always enjoy it in spite of its somewhat dry presentation.

• Twilight Struggle official website
• Twilight Struggle on BoardGameGeek

Beat The Price Increase

The new pricing structure takes effect on February 15th. We are offering up to a 30% discount our current off MSRP until that date.

Most items will see a 5% to 8% increase and a few specific items will be higher.

If you have an item or two that has been on your bucket list, this might be a good time to blow the dust off the list.

 (from prior post)

We started down the road to manufacturing plastic kits in 2012, a lot has happened since then. I have seen shipping prices nearly double, WGF has ceased to be our distributor and we have taken over that aspect of operations. We now purchase our kits from WGF China directly.

We recently place two restock orders to bring our stock levels back on par, the shipping costs have been an eye opener. In many cases shipping from China to the US was more than the actual cost to manufacture a kit. Some kits needed to be brought in line with their cost of production. This price increase was as minimal as we could make it most items will see an increase of 5% to 8% with some more drastic adjustments to kits that were selling into distribution at a lower than delivered cost to us.

To maintain the health of DreamForge-Games it has become clear that we will need to implement a price increase, effective February 15^th2016

 

 Mark Mondragon

DreamForge-Games

Ep 23: Campain Ribbin’ Is Live!

Ep 23: Campain Ribbin' is live!
We talk with Henry Hyde about his new book "Wargaming Campaigns" and running a wargame campaign.
https://soundcloud.com/user-989538417/e ... ign-ribbin
The Veteran Wargamer is brought to you by Kings Hobbies and Games
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Join the conversation at https://theveteranwargamer.blogspot.com, email theveteranwargamer@gmail.com, Twitter @veteranwargamer
Follow Henry at http://henrys-wargaming.co.uk/Twitter @battegames
Shot, Steel and Stone Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/shotsteelandstone/Wars of the Faltenian Succession E-Book: https://payhip.com/b/7he8The Wargaming Compendium: http://thewargamingcompendium.com/Gladius Publications: http://gladiuspublications.com/

Other companies we mentioned:
Tony Bath's Hyboria Campaign: http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2010/12 ... art-i.html
Schleich figures: https://www.schleich-s.com/en/US/eldrador.html
John Keegan - The Face of Battle: https://www.amazon.com/Face-Battle-Stud ... +of+battle
Cartographer's Guild: https://www.cartographersguild.com/content.php
GMT - 1960: The Making of a President https://www.gmtgames.com/p-574-1960-the ... ident.aspx
Katie Aidley (Katie's Game Corner) Twitter: @katiesgamecrner
GZG - "StarGrunt" Jon Tuffley: http://downloads.groundzerogames.co.uk/sgii.pdf
Martin Van Creveld - "Supplying War": https://www.amazon.com/Supplying-War-Lo ... 0521546575
Martin Van Creveld - "War Games": https://www.amazon.com/Wargames-Profess ... an+creveld
Games Workshop - Mighty Empires: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/52/mighty-empires
Bob Barnetson - aka Bob in Edmonton http://edmontonwargamer.blogspot.com/
Too Fat Lardies - Pint Sized Campaigns: http://toofatlardies.co.uk/product-cate ... f-command/
Music courtesy bensound.com. Recorded with zencastr.com. Edited with Audacity. Make your town beautiful; get a haircut.
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The Journeyman Project - Meeting On The Planet

Written by Reiko

Agent 5 Journal #3: "That Elliot Sinclair really seems to have gone nuts! I've now neutralized two of his assassin robots and retrieved more evidence that Sinclair is the one behind them. Meeting the second robot face to face was rather alarming, but once we left the planet behind, it was just a matter of time before it was in my crosshairs. The Morimoto Colony is now safe again."
Last time, I successfully saved the life of speaker Enrique Castillo in the year 2310, thwarting one-third of the malevolent plan to derail the Cyrollan offer to join the alien Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings. I also uncovered a video that appears to point to Elliot Sinclair, the inventor of the time machine, as the one behind this effort. I have two more time periods to investigate. Let's find out if the Morimoto Colony on Mars in 2185 is as dangerous a time as the other two. As I activate the time machine, I brace myself for another attack.

I guess it isn't enough of an emergency yet.

To my relief, nothing happens. I materialize at the end of a long corridor facing an emergency exit. I can't go through the exit, so I turn around and start moving down the corridor. Along the right side are three shuttle exits. I'm not allowed to open numbers two and three ("Shuttle launch not authorized"), and number one won't open either because there's no shuttle there.

Near the end of the corridor as I approach an intersection, I halt because I hear something coming. There's nothing to do except watch as another robot travels along the crossing corridor, pauses in the middle, turns to look at me, then continues on its way. I'm pretty sure it saw me, but it doesn't do anything. I cautiously step out into the intersection and look around, but the robot is nowhere to be seen now.

Cameras are also forbidden, according to the Japanese text.

Side note here: I already knew by the name "Morimoto" that the Japanese would be involved with this colony, but it's made very clear by the way some of the signs are in both English and Japanese. The screenshot above is the only time I noticed any additional information in Japanese only, though. Later, all the signs are in English only.

Now I have three choices. I can see the end of the corridor ahead of me, so I go that way first. There's a welcome sign for the colony on the door, but then I hear voices and get a warning that interacting with humans is forbidden, so I guess that's the way into the main areas. (If I step forward, I'll get caught by security again.)

A useless airlock.

I turn around and take one of the cross-corridors, the direction that the robot came from. A few steps down the corridor, I find with a number 4, the "Ore Processing Machine Room." There's also a small side area that seems to just be a lookout point for the colony, with a large window. The door opens on a small airlock, but when I step in, I get a warning: "Atmosphere in this environment is not breathable." Well, that's bound to be a problem. I can click the Pressurize button and it lights up, but it doesn't seem to help. If I press Spin at this point, the airlock will turn around and I will die due to lack of oxygen.

The transport promised by the door.

Next I follow the robot's path down the cross-corridor the other way and, after a short turn, find another door labeled "Maintenance Transport". This one also has a 4 on it. Maybe the whole area is considered area 4. The other side of the door doesn't have a 4, but does have the Japanese characters for "exit". Through the door, I find what looks like a tiny train platform with a sort of open transport shuttle on the adjacent track.

Still no sign of the robot, but I suppose it could have taken the shuttle before me and sent it back. I step onto the shuttle. Nothing happens, but I look around and find some equipment in the back: wire cutters and a maintenance key. Hmm, those could be very useful. I grab the wire cutters first but almost miss the maintenance key as they are both near the bottom edge of the viewing screen.

Wire Cutters inventory item

Maintenance Key inventory item

I turn around and face the front of the transport. There's some kind of poster ("Queen of Outer Space") and a photograph of a boy taped up on one side of the narrow viewport. I wonder if that means that normally there's some sort of maintenance worker that operates this vehicle. When I trigger the handle, the transport starts making its way through a maintenance tunnel to a second platform.

We meet again...

Cautiously, I step into a T-shaped maintenance room with two visible panels of interest. I am right to be wary, because as I step further into the room and turn to see the body of the T, I'm alarmed to see the robot at the end of the corridor. This time it doesn't ignore me. It moves toward me and says, "Out of my way, human, or DIE." Yeah, that isn't threatening at all, right? I turn and continue further into the room to get out of its way.

I can't turn around while it's moving, but I can hear it clanking away. By the time I can move again, it's gone. It seems to have taken the maintenance transport, so I'm going to have to find another way if I need to get back to the original area. There's a button by the platform to summon it, but it says "Maintenance Transport Disabled". I guess the robot didn't realize I'd come after it, but now that I did once, it doesn't want me following it again.

How quickly would this be a health hazard without a shield?

I turn my attention to the door that was behind where the robot was standing. It's labeled "Shield Generator". When I open it and step in, I get a warning: "Excessive levels of radiation detected. BioSupport Suit attempting to compensate." I didn't notice initially, but later I realized that the Shield BioChip is automatically enabled here. I'm not sure whether this sequence can even be done without it, or whether the game just imposes a time limit on you before you keel over from radiation. The BioChip screen says "Energy Conserved," so maybe the suit's energy just drains faster while you're in the generator area, which would then impose a tighter time limit on the whole time period.

I check out the screen in front of me. It says: "Shield Generator Diagnostic/Repair, Platform 4" with a selectable link that says "Return to Last Position". When I touch that, the whole platform moves forward to a central pillar labeled "Shield Generator Panel 5".

Now the screen informs me: "Access panel cover must be unlocked before diagnostics can be initiated". I have the choice to lower the diagnostic screen or retract the platform, so I lower the screen, and then I can see that there's a sort of keyhole. I try the maintenance key that I found in the transport, and it fits perfectly.

Now the screen comes back up with an operational menu: "General Shield Evaluation", "Measure Output Levels", or "Run Diagnostics". The first two just tell me this: "Atmospheric Energy Shield Generator is fully operational at this time." But when I try to run diagnostics, the screen says "Insert Access Card" (which I don't have) and then "Foreign Object Detected..."

That can't be good.

The screen shifts to what looks almost like an x-ray image of the inside of the panel, highlighting the foreign device inside. Then it informs me: "Analysis reveals timed detonation device wired to explosive charge". That must have been what the robot was up to back there. If it can trigger a bomb to destroy the atmospheric shield generator, then the whole colony will end up destroyed.

My options are to "Attempt Circuit Link to Detonator" or "Cancel". You can guess which one I picked. The screen informs me: "Circuit link reveals multi-level disarm code. To deactivate, complete the electrosynaptic connections by filling them in with the appropriate color nodes."

I win level 3 on the fifth guess.

I find my second mini-game here. It's a simple variant on Mastermind (or Codebreaker, depending on how you know it). I get up to five or maybe six guesses per level and must guess the correct sequence of three colors. For each guess, it will tell me how many of the three are correct. In regular Mastermind, each slot can be any of the colors, even if that means the same color is used more than once, but here each color can be used only once.

There's also a countdown timer on the far right side that counts down from seven minutes, so I have to be fairly quick. Level 1 offers only three colors, so it's trivial to determine the correct sequence. Level 2 offers four colors, and I get it on the third guess. Level 3 offers five colors, so it's a bit trickier, but I get it still with over four minutes on the timer. The screen assures me: "It is now safe to remove the explosive device".

Access Card Bomb inventory item

I grab the device from the open panel, retract the platform, and get out of the shield generator room. I seem to have thwarted this part of the plan, but I haven't fixed the temporal rip yet. There must be more to it than this. Maybe there's another bomb somewhere else, or maybe I have to chase down the robot and stop it somewhere else? I'd better keep looking around.

The label on that station is really hard to read.

Oxygen Mask inventory item

On the far side of the maintenance room, I find something labeled "Air Mask Station". There's also some sort of tank in a rack below some tubes. When I drag the tank thing to the gap between the tubes, the tank fills with oxygen, and then I get an oxygen mask. Oh hey, I'll be able to use the airlocks if I have this. And what do you know, there's another airlock on the wall behind me, just like the one in the first area. I wonder if they connect.

The description of the oxygen mask says it only holds 8 minutes worth of oxygen, but it also has a fully functional air filtration system. That might also be useful for me to withstand the sleeping gas I encountered in the first time period.

The ore basket is the only way out.

I trigger the oxygen mask and immediately pressurize and spin the airlock. On the other side, I find a maze of identical red corridors. I switch to the Mapping chip and systematically work my way through the maze until I find something unusual: a set of large baskets moving up a sturdy chain. This seems to be my ticket out of here. As soon as a new level comes into view, however, I have to be quick and move forward out of the basket, or I'll get crushed in the ore crusher. Apparently that was a maze of mining tunnels, and those baskets are how the Mars miners get ore up from the tunnels.

My earlier hunch is confirmed when the ore crusher exit takes me through another airlock, and I find myself back in the original area. (I also remove the oxygen mask.) When I move forward, I hear and see the robot cross my path again, heading back toward the shuttles. I follow it and hear an announcement about an unauthorized shuttle launch from shuttle bay 2.

Sunset over the canyons of Mars? Except we're facing south...

The only thing I can do now is head to shuttle bay 3. For some reason, this time the door opens and I can access the shuttle. Apparently the security systems are down in this region of the colony, so I can manually open the door. I hop in the shuttle and it automatically turns on and runs a startup sequence, then starts moving through the Martian canyons. It's on autopilot, heading to a launch tube to leave the surface of the planet. I also get some more chatter (over some kind of radio, maybe?) about the unauthorized launches of the two shuttles, and how they can't override or stop the launches due to the security breach.

Targeting shuttle 2.

I watch as the ship is launched through the launch tube into space. The planet must be behind me now, as all I see is a field of stars. The shuttle's computer announces that it detects the autopilot target. It also gives me an explanation of each of the available weapons. What follows is another minigame where I have to destroy or capture the robot's shuttle by shooting at it enough times before it gets to the alien ship.

The time limit on this is pretty generous. I'm told that shuttle 2 has targeted the alien ship and will reach it in five minutes. The real-time limit is even a bit more than that. What's really interesting is that, if you run out of time here, shuttle 2 will destroy the alien ship with no warning, and then the suit will warp you back to the present automatically. It's not a death or outright failure.

When I was waiting for it, this explosion startled me every time.

Instead, you can jump back to the colony a second time, follow the robot and go through the ore tunnels, trigger the shuttle launch, and try the minigame again. There's no apparent penalty except that it's a second visit to the same time period, so there will be some kind of score penalty at the end. It seems like a paradox to be able to redo the time period when I already have the access card bomb and everything, but time travel is inherently paradoxical, so I'll ignore that for now.

The minigame is kind of fun and not too difficult, although I never did figure out exactly when I could hit the target with the beam weapon and when I couldn't. Sometimes I appeared to be aiming correctly, and the line of fire would appear to go right through the ship, but it wouldn't be a hit. I figure at this point the graphics just aren't quite good enough to properly represent a 3D targeting problem on a 2D screen. The easiest and fastest way to win the game is to use the graviton cannon, which doesn't have to be targeted so precisely anyway. Just three shots of that will quickly destroy shuttle 2 and resolve the time rip.

Capturing the shuttle instead of destroying it.

But there's a better way to do it! I can use just two graviton shots to knock the ship's energy down, and then whittle down its energy with the energy damping beam. The beam is a lot harder to aim, but even so, the game allows enough time that I was able to destroy the shuttle with nothing but the beam. However, the point isn't to destroy the shuttle, but to get its energy low enough (the "target ship energy" gauge turns a slightly brighter red) that the tractor beam can capture the shuttle. If its energy is above 10%, it can break free of the tractor beam.

My nemesis, the robot.

Once the shuttle is captured, I can then use the close range transporter to jump over to it. This allows me one last confrontation with the robot, which has now been neutralized since the electrical systems of the shuttle are shutting down.

Trace BioChip item.

As with the one I faced in 2310, this one self-destructs, allowing me access to its chips. It has a duplicate Mapping chip, which I don't need, and a new Trace BioChip, which I might need. It also has another Optical Memory chip which uploads a new video to mine and also triggers the resolution of the time rip.

New "Poseidon objective" video.

I'm automatically returned to the present, just like the other time, and now only the Norad VI time period in 2112 is still available. The Optical Memory chip now has a new video, addressed to "Poseidon". What's really strange, though, is that in this video, Elliot Sinclair tells Poseidon he's sending him to Norad VI to fire the missile at Gorbastan. He doesn't mention anything about the Mars colony. Is this another bug? I don't see how I possibly could have done Norad VI first, so if I face a robot there, will its video tell me about Mars?

Beyond the enigma of its objective, this video is even more chilling than the other one. Sinclair goes on a bit of a rant about how his time machine wasn't used the way he intended, and then goes on to declare that he's got a high place on a skyscraper where he plans to assassinate the Cyrollan ambassador, and if anything goes wrong, he's also got a huge bomb set up that will destroy all of the floating city of Caldoria. What a crazy terrorist. Now I figure there will probably have to be an endgame level where I stop Sinclair directly after neutralizing all three robots. In fact, at least one of the ending screens had a "Finale" score item, which is probably the endgame.

BioChips: Interface, Mapping, Pegasus, Optical Memory, Shield, Trace
Other inventory: Transport Card, Journeyman Key, Tranquilizer Dart, Antidote, Stun Gun, Wire Cutters, Maintenance Key, Access Card Bomb, Oxygen Mask
Time travel trips: 3
Score: 60560
Session Time: 2 hr 30 min
Total Time: 5 hr 45 min

Deaths: 7 (total: 16)

Spinning the airlock makes it the same pressure as the environment on the other side...

#10: If I pressurize and spin the airlock without wearing a working oxygen mask, I die because I can't breathe, naturally. The ending is called "Suffocation": "Just a reminder: OXYGEN IS A NECESSARY PART OF LIFE." Yeah, I'll keep that in mind.

#11: If I move forward past the warning about interacting with humans, I get the "Caught by Security" ending again. So each time period has at least one place that triggers that ending.

"Be careful not to choke on your aspirations."

#12: Yeah, this one is only going to happen if you're trying to find silly deaths or if you forget how to move (paralyzed by fear?). The robot meant what it said. If I don't move aside, after some time, the robot attacks, and I get the "Didn't Move" ending: "What do you do when a seven-foot-tall robot tells you to get out of it's [sic] way? Go ahead. Take a wild guess."

The radiation eats through to my bones.

#13: If I let the bomb's timer run out, I would have thought the bomb would explode, but instead my shield gets overloaded and I get too much radiation. The ending is "Lethal Dose of Radiation": "A lethal dose of radiation in this situation would have been about 240 rads. However, the 4,700 rads of radiation eminating [sic] from the radon core of the shield generator had little trouble eating through your energy shield and disintegrating your flesh."

I probably fall off that maintenance platform, too.

#14: If I try to remove the bomb without analyzing it and doing the minigame to disable it, then the bomb explodes. I would have expected the same ending from letting the timer run out, but that kills me with radiation rather than an explosion. The ending here is called "Explosion" of course: "Had you been able to disable the source of the explosion, you might not have had your atoms scattered all over the martian landscape."

What a rocky end to my exploration.

#15: The ore crusher's scoop moves quickly, and if I don't jump out just at the right time, I'm crushed inside it. The "Ore Crusher" ending says, "He who hesitates is lost. The ore crusher is a not-so-subtle reminder of this fact." After I encountered this, I always made sure to save at the end of the maze just before jumping in, in case I failed to time the next move correctly.

Just as bad as being crushed.

#16: If you flail while it's dark inside the ore crusher and jump too early, you either run into the wall or fall out of the scoop and die. This would be an easy death to miss as long as you're precise about jumping out to safety. This ending is called "Shafted": "You really should look where you're walking - you've fallen down the shaft! Fortunately the fall didn't kill you. Unfortunately, the landing did."

Two time periods done, one to go. Let's see if I can survive sleeping gas and unravel the third robot's plans next time!

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!