First off, this game is the amazing love child of Skyrim and Ocarina of Time. It’s beautiful and peaceful. It allows you to creatively solve puzzles. It rewards off-the-beaten path exploration.
But I have one problem with it. Small spoilers below (although the game’s been out six months, and almost everything below is discernible from the trailers).
So I finally got around to beating Never Alone!! It was a good game overall, but as I was thinking how to review it, I had a hard time deciding whether to review it as a Native American, as a Linguist, or as a Gamer. So why not all three? (Warning: Spoilers in the “gamer” section) More »
So, you bought and installed a shiny new graphics card on your Linux machine. Congratulations! Now to make use of it by playing some video games! Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of games out there for Linux. Fortunately, there’s a thing called WINE, which is sort of like a Windows emulator, but not really. It’s basically a layer of code that makes (most) .exe (Windows-only) programs work (kinda) on Linux.
I know I promised to buy Never Alone on release day, but as it turns out, none of the gaming systems or computers I own can play it. Waiting for Black Friday sales to bulk up this thing.
In the meantime, Happy Wugsgiving!
In case you haven’t heard, Never Alone is a video game based on Alaskan Native mythology. So many video games are loosely based on Arthurian legends (don’t try to tell me there’s no resemblance between The Master Sword and Excalibur), Western history (there are several franchises dedicated to games about the World Wars), or modern Western life (GTA, anyone?). So I’m pretty excited that we’re getting some new storylines in video games, and these people have an international platform to share their culture and language! I plan to buy it on release day, and hopefully post a review here shortly thereafter! :)
In the meantime, watch the trailer here:
I started reading a book about artificial intelligence. It’s an older book, but only $4 and it came highly recommended as a starting point, since a lot of the basic concepts are still the same. Based on the things I was reading and this xkcd, I figured it might be within my capabilities to write a program that plays Tic Tac Toe. And I have. Sort of. You can play it here. Kinda.
See, the concepts of artificial intelligence and the basics of programming aren’t so hard. What’s hard is making it work in the “real world.” More »
