I beat Prey when it was released in 2017 and I liked it, but didn't love it even though it feels like a game tailor made for me. With this replay I absolutely loved it and remembered that my first time playing both Deus Ex & System Shock 2 I bounced off them and it wasn't until I returned to them years later that I enjoyed them so much more. For Prey something I realise now is that I took the cowards way out on my first play through but for good reason and that reason might also be why I didn't enjoy it as much the first time through. I'll get to what that is shortly.

Prey is a sci-fi FPS immersive sim about trust. Or a lack of trust. The game starts with you waking up in an apartment about to start your first of work for a new company with your brother. You get up, get dressed, look out over the skyline of the city and get a helicopter to your new office. Upon getting there you meet your brother, take a series of tests with what the testers see as odd results before an alien attacks one of the testers and you're knocked out. Then you wake up in an apartment but this time you don't get a call from your brother. You retrace your steps from the day before and the janitor form the day before lies in the hall dead with a wrench lying next to her. It's a game so you pick it up and wander around looking for somewhere to go but all the doors are locked, but your balcony door is made of glass so you can just smash the glass to get out. You smash the glass revealing the behind the scenes fo the facade you've been in. There is no city, it's been an image on a screen made possible with Looking Glass a technology that accurately simulates a 3D world on a screen. None of this is real and as you begin to explore you find the helicopter is nothing but a motion simulator with screens. In many games the theme of trust would be in the story but Prey takes it into the game mechanics as well. The first enemy you encounter is a mimic, an alien creature that can mimic any object in the game to hide in plain site. For the remainder of the game you will be weary of two identical objects sat next to one another. It's a brilliant start to a game that perfectly sets up the main theme that will persist throughout.

Once the game starts proper you find our you're on a space station that is overrun with aliens known as the Typhon who have the ability to not only mimic objects but also people along with various gnarly powers such as telekinesis and mind control. Catching you up on what's going on is January an AI Operator created by you for this exact situation, you find out that you were previously researching the Typhon but for some reason were reduced to a test subject by your brother. Also speaking to you is your brother. Then December, another AI operator created by you to tell you not to listen to January. Or was it? January shows you a video you recorded telling yourself to destroy the station. December shows you a video of you with your brother telling you to nullify the aliens. There's a chef who has locked himself in a kitchen who asks for help getting an item from his room. If you're observant you'll cop he neither looks or sounds like the person he claims to be in the logs you find. Or if you encounter another character before him they'll tell you he isn't who he says he is, but at that point can you trust her? I love how much the game is filled with these situations, even the fish tanks aren't real they're just Looking Glass screens! There's a pond in one location that on this play through I accidentality shot and it revealed the whole pond and waterfall are just an illusion, a Looking Glass screen.

Before I get to what I enjoy so much in terms of game play I want to touch on another way Prey integrates the fiction with the game play. In BioShock's story Rapture has gone to shit after the discovery of plasmids, a way for people to splice their genes to have super human powers such as shooting fire or lightning from your hands. You too can get these powers but the fiction never feels relevant. You come across people driven mad by plasmids, no longer fully human and desperately killing and looting to survive. I never really felt that as a player, getting plasmids never felt like there was a downside it was all upside. In Prey you can learn to harness the powers of the Aliens using Neuromods, a technology that allows humans to learn various skills(such as piano) that you learns the cause of this whole disaster was the research into infusing Alien abilities into these. The difference in Prey is that you're warned the use of these will turn the station's defences against you as the more you get the more you will be recognised as an Alien. For my first play through I never learned a single Alien ability which is essentially a voluntary hard mode. The Alien abilities are incredibly powerful especially when it comes to combat and the reason I took the aforementioned cowards ending, which is escaping on a private shuttle and just abandoning making any decision on the mess you created, was because of how difficult it was to survive an onslaught that occurs at that point in the game. I realised on this play through where I learned Alien abilities from the get go what a difference they make even beyond combat and I had a much better time having learned these abilities. I will argue that the punishment is pretty mild and it won't take you long to learn more abilities and strategies that nullify the punishment, I would have liked to see this pushed further. I do still like that the game lets you forgo them  with a good reason for why you would and Dishonored 2(another Arkane game, probably my favourite game there is) also allowed this with an explanation but in that case I saved doing so for a later play through.

Prey really shines once it comes to the actual game part of it, it allows a great level of freedom and never feels like the designers have spotted something and clocked up from doing it. To the contrary it feels like they've spent an enormous amount of time giving you choices and making sure they all work. Take the security stations you encounter in each area, within each one is a terminal that will give you a map of that area and access to the locations of people. Every one of these are the same design but how you get in changes; some are locked, some are just open, some you'll already have a key for or you will find the key on a body nearby. All of them have a small slot like you'd find at a teller in a bank and if you have the power to become any object you can just become a small object and you're in, I don't think I ever found one arbitrarily blocked. You get a small nerf gun that you can use to active the unlock door button inside rooms if you can get a shot at it. At one point there was a locked office I could not figure out how to get into, then I just smashed the glass window and walked in. Of course I can do that, this was just some offices that in every day life no one would do that but now it's a fair approach to take. They're not some how indestructible as a way to force you to find other solutions, sometimes the simple brute force approach is the one to take. You can set up explosives as traps for enemies, sneak past them ignoring them entirely or just run away from them. You're never forced into a way to play and while your choices might leave you in a pickle there is probably some way out of it. Even the power curve of the game is something it lets you abuse, save for a small roadblock you can manufacture as many upgrade items as you like so long as you have the resources allowing you to become absurdly powerful later in the game. I had an amazing moment where I was away from the starting area for hours and when I returned it felt familiar but I was no longer the same terrified Morgan sneaking around and running away, I was now near indestructible and that flip feels so satisfying. Rooms that filled me with dread before I now passed through without realising. IF I have one criticism of the game it's that the enemies never evolve much and the mimics turn into more of a nuisance than anything else, half way through you've seen almost all of what's on offer and shortly after you're so powerful that they pose little threat.

The last aspect I want to talk about is the station itself and how well realised it is. I've already brushed on the realistic approach taken to the office spaces & security stations and unsurprisingly that extends to every aspect of the station. From developer interviews there's one aspect of the station that is faked when you're looking at it from the outside but otherwise it all fits together logically  and doors between areas are where they should be. Every crew member exists on(or just outside in a few cases) the station and can be found. These people who's bed you can find with emails you can read through to piece together what their life was like are all real people not something that's there for the sake of exposition. The crew works as a great device to flesh out the politics of the station, who knew what was really going on and who was oblivious. You'll discover bitter enemies and lovers, two people who couldn't stomach what they were working on any more and were in the midst of exposing the truth, a tabletop RPG group and their character sheets, colleagues trying to undermine one another to give themselves an advantage. It's all really well written and does a lot to make the station feel real. As does the architecture, there's a great variety and the sort of things you'd imagine would be there. Accommodation of various quality depending on your status within the company, a level that is a small garden area right down to a power plant area that is as massive as you'd imagine it to be. Every department has an office area complete with desks for the people who work there. Everything holds together incredibly well and the thought that went into creating something so cohesive is clear.

I'll touch briefly on the ending, I'm not sure what other people think of it but I like it. In the end you find out that you're not really Morgan or at least not Morgan living through the events. Some of the events have probably played out, it seems like Transtar doomed the Earth to be overtaken by the Typhon(or the Typhon did so independently) from their reckless research but Alex is looking to put things right by seeing if the Typhon can have empathy for humans by injection a Typon(you) with Morgan's memories. It's not super clear but it is one of those endings that gets away with being open to interpretation. Thematically it's a great fit, as I said at the start at no point can you trust what you're seeing including the entire story that has just played out.

If you want to know more

• The Making of PREY - Documentary
• How Prey's Mind-Bending Opening Level Was Designed | Noclip

So why was that my reaction? For me the biggest reason was how off the colour balance was, the photos looked nothing like how I remember the days I shot these photos on. From reading up on other people's experiences and my own experiments with developing a negative this does seem to be more down to the photo lab than just the film. With the files I have there's still plenty I can do with the colours so after about an hour I had gotten the photos into a shape that I thought looked good at least.

With the white balance improved the other thing with this film is how it's so high contract & vibrant. There are some shots I took with pretty stark differences in light and they look particularly bad, the shadows come out really muddy but the highlights tend to be OK. The vibrancy I don't mind as much although it's not my usual style but the cap on it for me is the film grain—it's just so noisy! Sometimes you want this and while my initial thought was I'll never shoot with this film again I think there are scenarios it would be useful. If you are going for a really industrial gritty look I think it works very well.

Another aspect of it is that it's very sensitive when it comes to exposure. As I've said before I shoot entirely in manual mode on my EOS-1 because the light sensor seems to be off so I under-expose my shots. (I need to see if I can offset that, I probably can) One of my friends wanted to get a photo with me in it so I set it to aperture priority figuring it wouldn't be too bad, but it was a bit of a side by side comparison of how different being a little off on exposure changes this. It was also a super high contrast shot and the tiniest bit of shadow didn't hold up well hence the photo that I'm in looks washed out so I could manage to get my other friend to be visible in it.

I also got a roll of Kodak Gold 200 back, I spent about an hour fixing up the Phoenix photos and maybe 5 minutes on the Kodak Gold photos for an idea of the work in getting something I thought was worth sharing.

I was a bit dramatic with my initial reaction, there are some shots I do really like and it's a type of film I'd like to give another go some time. I think the Fuji Film 200 photos are still my favourite and it seems to work really well in the sort of light we have currently with so many sunny days so I'll probably shoot another roll of that next.

Here's a gallery of some of the ones I liked, you can see them all on my Flickr.

I got into the NBA Finals this year! As a days long Nicks fan I was elated to see them win. Basketball is a really fun sport to watch, I've always enjoyed any documentaries about it I've seen and I will watch the NBA Finals again next year.

I've also been watching the World Cup as I usually do, it's been fun although I do miss lazing on the couch at 3pm watching a match. I like soccer when there's a focused tournament to watch over a few weeks. Same with Rugby, I decided a long time ago that F1 is the sport I will watch all year long and there simply isn't time for another. Something I've learned this year is that finger wagging is an important skill in soccer.

With the weather being very nice and also too hot at times it meant there was plenty of time to hang out with friends, I did loads of that this month and it was great. We should all be hanging out with our friends as much as possible it's the best. In fact, I'm going to do just that this evening!

I've been working on some code stuff for a friend's show and that's all I can say for now or he'll freak out(maybe). I'm on a bit of a break from Hivemind/game dev at the minute still so it's nice to have something to work on. I'm trying to get my motivation back for those other projects but the quietness in my day job is seeping into my life and I'm finding it hard to get motivated for much these days.

I shot another couple of rolls of film, one of them a stock I haven't used before. Should have the photos in a couple of weeks just need to drop them in to be developed.

I performed in a couple of Autocorrebt shows, both were as fun as they always are. One of them was part of Pretty Good Improv who are a great improv team you should check out.

From my blog

I got a new camera lens. Took some more films photos. Played some demos.

Some useful things I came across

A simple page to create a QR code
A peer to peer file sending thing that works from your browser

Some good things I read & watched & listened to

I'm not intentionally trying to find anti-AI stuff there's just so much of it!
📃 No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
📃 AI Economics for Dummies

This sounds like the plasmids in BioShock only you don't get to shoot out fire from your finger.
📃 The Billion-Dollar Peptides Gold Rush

The title oversells this, still an interesting read of an inevitable direction for reality TV in the age of online streaming.
📃 Interactive. Violent. Gross. Inside Fishtank, the Unhinged Future of Reality TV

Things aren't looking good for the environment
📃 If you aren't terrified by this heatwave, you should be

📃/🔊 A brief history of those weird Karaoke videos

An interesting video about the difficulties of making a online Star Wars game where people can't easily be a Jedi. Also some great stuff about our brains and how they work towards the end.
📼 The Story Behind Star Wars Galaxies' Notorious Jedi Problem - /noclip

The massive downside to not actually owning software anymore.
📼 Photoshop Now Monitors Your Career Choices

An interesting video on the history of the first person perspective in games & film
📼 Reality is a Camera Trick: Film, Bodycams, and the First-Person Shooter

Films

Dislosure Day

I liked this a lot more than most people. If you can have a mind set that it's early 2010s it helps go along with the plot that in present day is kinda absurd. Outside of that lots of fun action and a great performance by Emily Blunt.

Games

007 First Light

I finished this, it was fine! I mostly enjoyed my time with it, it went on a bit too long but on the whole I just felt with every gameplay area like I was playing a version of something that has been done better before.

Mina The Hollower

Overall this isn't a game I enjoyed. I got bored with it but went back to complete it during the heatwave because my PC makes my living room too hot. I found it to be bloated and poorly directed, absolutely teeming with ideas but no thought put into the order things should happen in from the order you complete areas in to when you get various upgrades. Like an album with 20 tracks and everyone has 10 different tracks that they like. The first 10 hours were fun but the rest not so much.

Theatre

The Whiteheaded Boy

A fun play on in the Abbey currently. The comedy gets a bit Mrs. Browns Boys for me at times but I was definitely in the minority thinking that the night I went. Excellent set and a great cast.

Dreamgun Film Reads: The Social Network!

The always funny Dreamgun's latest film read. If you're in Edinburgh make sure to catch them.

Music

Rilo Kiley in The Roundhouse

A band I had given up on ever seeing live. They essentially split up around 2008 and from various interviews seemed unlikely to get back together. They were always in heavy rotation during my time in college and my early 20s and still I listen to them plenty. When the reunited last year I was waiting eagerly for a date in Europe and eventually a show in The Roundhouse was announced and I got tickets in the presale. This was a great gig, it was just great to finally hear songs I've been listening to for 20 years live performed by te orignal line up surrounded by a load of other fans singing and dancing along!

David Byrne in St. Ann's Park

I already saw David Byrne in the 3Arena in March, the day after I bought tickets to the show in St. Ann's because it had been so good. The 3Arena show was seated so there wans't much dancing so entirely because of the ability to have a little dance out in a park the St. Ann's gig was sure to be better. It rained pretty much the entire time but I don't think anyone cared that much, David Byrne's shows are pure joy. If you ever have the opportunity to see him live you should go.

Death Cab for Cutie - I Built You A Tower

Probably the most distilled representation of DCFC in a single album there is. For a band that's been going for almost 30 years this feels like it's got a bit of every era as opposed to being entirely it's own thing like Transatlanticism, Codes & Keys and Thank You for Today were. I like this though, there isn't a bad track on it.

Modest Mouse - An Eraser And A Maze

I've only listened to this a few times but it's good. It's more Modest Mouse and that's no bad thing.

Olivia Rodrigo - you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

By far my favourite album of the year, I've been listening to it loads since it was released. My highlights are u + me = <3, the cure & expectations but picking favourites from this album is tough. The whole album is great.

Books

Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

I haven't read this in ages, it's still a great book. Full of themes around empathy, expectations of who we can be, who we are as we change, how that effects our relationships and how people see us. Also just a really sad book at times, it's a tough one to finish but worth it.

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang

This is a collection of short stories, I've read half of them so far. It's good, I really liked Tower of Babylon & Story of your Life which Arrival is based on. I think the short story works better than Arrival. One of the stories Understand was oddly like Flowers for Algernon but taken to an extreme.

I'm looking forward to heading out and using it with my EOS-1 soon.

This is an absolutely fantastic game, I was only playing demos for 20 - 30 minutes to get a feel for them and then waiting for the full release but I played this for over 90 minutes in total. I actually had to uninstall it to get away from it until the full game releases and I will probably cave and reinstall it still! It's a Vampire Survivors style auto-shooting game but plays as a side scrolling platformer and feels really well balanced with its weapons, upgrades and progression. There's a nice level of skill to the movement, the level layout is persistent and there's different characters that each have their own twist that will dictate your play style. Add to that Messhof's fantastic style with great weird graphics and excellent music and it's a game that's so difficult to put down. I'd turn it off after a couple of runs and be back 10 minutes later for more. Can't wait to lose an entire weekend playing this later in the year. It also makes me want to get some friends over for some Nidhogg.

p.s. A couple of days after writing this I did reinstall this and played for another 90 minutes.

A game that's taking inspiration from System Shock 2 in setting but for gameplay feels closer to BioShock. This is really promising and the developers have already released an update addressing some initial feedback. I need to play this a bit more, but the atmosphere is great and the Fallout-ness of the corporation works well.

An interesting puzzle game where you're using an old cursed PC to uncover a mystery. Very much in the vein of The Roottrees Are Dead(a great way to spend a rainy evening) and a bit of Hypnospace Outlaw as well. I liked what I played.

A mix of survival and dungeon delving, I really liked the graphics and atmosphere of this. It being a hand made dungeon to explore appeals to me as well as opposed to something procedurally generated. Could definitely be a fun co-op game too.

Metal Gear Solid but you play the Colonel helping out Solid Snake. Interesting and wears that MGS influence on its sleeve. The writing was a bit too jokey at times, I think it's something that's better played straight but not so bad as to put me off just yet.

This was fun! Genuinely felt like playing a FPS from the 90s that I'd have bought when it was published by Sold Out a few years later and cost a fiver. The combat was fun, but the key hunting and repetitive level wasn't great and that's an aspect I wish these retro shooters didn't carry forward. I like the b-movie style of it though and will be keeping an eye on how it comes along.

A quick side note: 3 of the demos open with a fake BIOS screen. I'm getting a bit tired of this opening now!

I've also reactivated my Flickr to make it easier to share photos away from Instagram, you can go there for higher quality versions. I implore that you do for shots you like the look of, the embeds are very compressed.

Inchicore

These are all on Fuji Film 200. On a nice Saturday morning I had to leave a book back to the library so took the time to take photos while I was in the area. I love the bicycle shot, so satisfying for it to come out as I hoped it would when I took the photo weeks ago! I'll probably print that and frame it.

Misc Fuji Film 200 Favourites

I really like the Swan photo, nice contrast and depth of focus. There's a nice lightness to this film that looks great on a rainy day.

Kodak 200 Favourites

Love how the horse carriage shot could be from the 70s. The Acer against the blue sky is another that came out exactly how I wanted it to. So so satisfying when all I've learned about photography these past 20 years pays off.

Kodak 200 Portraits

A couple of nice portrait shots.

Conall

Mikey

At the start of May I was up with my family for my niece's confirmation, that was a fun day always nice to get to see may family and catch up. Also organised a nice day of pizzas in my garden with the weather being good, you have to make the most of it here. Hopefully that's not the last of the good weather.

I started running again in late March and after a few weeks of training got back to running 5K and beat my personal best time as well. I have a goal to get much more fit this year, after reading The Body by Bill Bryson it made me want to look after my body better. I'm also keeping up on weight training and it really does make you feel much better than sitting at a desk all day does. I forget that many years ago when I used to work in Woodies I was on my feet all day, lifting things and generally being active. These days I sit at a desk far too much so I really need to make the effort to be active.

I've been working more on a game, it's at that stage where lots of things are starting to take shape and come together after months trying things that went nowhere. I'll hopefully have something more interesting to share soon. It's a stealth game inspired by the early Thief games mainly. To help with this I am taking notes of ideas I have but also when playing games taking notes of what I like in those games that might work in mine as well. As you can see I even stuck with a game I wasn't really enjoying much just to see if there were at least ideas that would be interesting.

I've been shooting more photos on films, I have a couple of rolls that I need to drop off for development. I'm still enjoying shooting on film!

Formula 1 is finally back after being off during April. Miami was ok but Montreal was a really good race. Can't wait to see more of Russell & Antonelli battling it out later in the season and having Hamilton on form against Verstappen is always fun to watch. Hoping there are more races this good even if a Mercedes driver winning seems like a forgone conclusion already.

Dennis got in a fight(again!) and had a nasty infected bite on his cheek. He was kept home for 2 weeks and needed a cone for most of those 2 weeks. He got very grumpy by the end of the month but is back in good form now.

I got my garden in order, weeded it and topped up the bark. Then I had my friends over for a garden pizza aprty while we had some nice weather. There's still more to do on the garden, I have a goal to get it done by the end of summer.

I bought a Kodak Charmera and it's been kinda fun. I was just taking a lot of photos and videos as I went then wanted to created a montage of them. So I got some video editing software for that right? No! I looked up Python libraries for editing video clips and have started on a small script I can point to a folder, view and select clips/photos and then put them all together. It only took about an hour to have a simple version working, there are a few things I'd like to improve with it in the coming days.

Finally I have been thinking about Hivemind again. I have lots of ides in my head for Version 3 both for new games and a big change on the technical side that I think will help it run more smoothly and give the audience a better experience. I'm excited to explore some of those ides in June.

THat was a busier month than I thought! Roll on June.

Some good things I read

A few about AI being shit & awful:
AI and a world without migrants
Born in the wrong generation
Why is Ireland's Government cheerleading for privately owned AI?

One about queues ruining NYC. As someone who scoffs at the idea of queueing for Bambino(just go to the always empty one on Baggot St!) this resonated with me.
Stop the Madness

Films

Obsession

The best time I’ve had at the cinema in a while. Excellent characters and a fun premise that they get so much out of. I was laughing and then seconds later filled with dread never knowing what way things were going to go. Inde Navarrette is absolutely fantastic in this.

Titanic

Absolutely stunning. I don't think I've watched this since my mother brought me to see it in the cinema when it was released and it's definitely something I can appreciate more today than when I was 10. I had a strong emotional reaction to the second half. The desperation to survive, the panic to escape, the guilt from the Captain and designer of the ship for failing these people, the remorse of the crew enforcing rules that no longer matter and are only killing people. The other members of the quartet returning to play was the moment that broke me. "Gentlemen, it's been a privilege playing with you tonight" 😭

TV

Hacks

The final season, I'm sad to see this go but glad they're wrapping things up before any sort of decline. A good final season.

Paradise

I got through both seasons of this in a couple of weeks, really compelling stuff. It does mystery very well with reveals feeling satisfying. It reminds me of how I felt watching LOST when it came out.

Games

No One Lives Forever

You can read all about this here.

Thief: The Dark Parade

A fan made set of 10 new missions for Thief with a full story and voice acting and everything. This is really good, great quality art and levels although they can be a bit labyrinthian. I'm on the 7th mission but as it's such a dark game the days are too long for it to be easy to play. I just can't get my office dark enough during the day.

Diablo IV

Reading Play Nice gave me a hankering for a Blizzard game and Diablo is a series that I find it very easy to jump into and kill time. Diablo 3 was my zone out game when I was in a funk, I think I racked up 150 hours in it.

007 First Light

I think I'm nearing the end of this, it's fun if a little inconsistent. None of the specific systems are great but they're not bad either. They all do the job. The story has been enjoyable if a tad generic but the characters are all well realised and enjoyable to spend time with. It's a good Bond game though, it's hitting all the notes and there's been some great moments where everything comes together. I hope we get more Bond form IO Interactive.

Mina The Hollower

I'm only at the start of this, it's good! I am playing with some of the modifiers which I think help sand of the edges for me. Things like not losing XP/Money on death which I always just find irritating and pointless in games that allow you to just go farm these things endlessly. I'm loving the art style and the amount of exploration there is.

Music

Maya Hawke - MAITREYA CORSO

This has been on a lot for the past month. As easy to listen to as Chaos Angel but with more depth to most of the songs and just more going on. Terms of Estrangement is probably my favourite song on the album and the way Maitreya and the Way Back changes half way in is my favourite moment on the album.

CMAT in St. Ann's Park

What a show. My fourth time seeing CMAT and everytime it's a bigger show than the last time. She and her band are incredible performers who you can tell are having a great time on stage. It's infectious and these are the most fun gigs there are.

Books

Venomous Lumpsucker - Ned Beauman

I really enjoyed this, a sci-fi adventure set in a near future following two people trying to save a species of fish for different reasons. An easy read with a light and funny tone.

Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment - Jason Schreier

An interesting history of the founding and life of Blizzard Entertainment. Goes into a lot of detail on the important people throughout the life of the company and the big events that steered it to where it is now. For anyone interested in learning more about the games industry. Other books I'd recommend are: Master of Doom, Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto & Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.

Theatre

The Bureau De Change Song Contest

This is always a fun night, a bunch of Irish comedians getting together to put on a spoof Eurovsion song contest. Don't miss it next year!

Mushroom filling

• 2 portobello mushrooms
• 1/2 yellow pepper
• 1/2 tsp chilli powder
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/2 tsp onion salt
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• Olive oil

Slice the mushrooms and pepper fairly thinly then mix with the seasonings & olive oil in a bowl. Bake for about 15 minutes at 200c.

Pineapple Salsa

• 1 pineapple slice
• half a green chilli
• 1 scallion

Slice them all thinly them mix together. Add or remove the chilli based on your preference. You could probably add some red onion too but I forgot to at the time.

Assembly

Get 2 tacos(flour or corn whatever you like) and add half of the filling to each, top with some of the salsa and add a bit of mango habanero hot sauce to it. Optionally crush some tortilla chips on top for a bit of crunch. 2 tacos is a nice light lunch for one person.

First impressions weren't good, the game is heavy on story but it's not a good or well told story with boring dialogue and voice acting that ranges form passable to awful. This was somewhat common at the time but in comparison to Max Payne which would be released about 6 months later this game is so far off in terms of storytelling. Once you get to the gameplay the opening mission has you wandering aimlessly until you get to where you need to be and are given your first combat encounter which is nothing but a shooting gallery followed by back tracking through where you've just come from.

Once you complete the first mission you'll be back at HQ for another boring briefing, a trip to the lab to get a new gadget and then off to the next mission. This is the pattern the game falls into and it gets irritating quickly. The briefings can go on for so long, I timed once and it clocked in at 6 minutes. 6 minutes of the camera swapping between the faces of characters standing in place delivering their lines with no music or action to spice things up. Incredibly tedious. The missions themselves have some great variety and set pieces but are often big mazes for you to wander around until you find the objectives, they reminded me a lot of Perfect Dark which I replayed a few years ago. You get a objection of "Disable the power" and that's it. Just wander around until you find the place where you can disable the power with there often being little to guide you towards that objective.

The game has a bunch of interesting gadgets that you barely get the chance to use. You'll get a few for getting past padlocks with different lock types needing a different gadget but these are always on the critical path and amount to holding a button to get past them so they don't feel very special. There was one gadget I got a tutorial on that I literally used once and gadgets like the spray for removing dead bodies are rarely useful due to the way the gameplay unfolds. There was one gadget I had to complete a tutorial for that I then used once and while you can replay missions with gadgets you wouldn't have had first time through the rewards just aren't really worth it. Gadgets like the one for disabling the camera are introduced quite late in the game too and again feel mandatory for certain missions and not something that would make you want to replay earlier missions. I thought the gadget for auto-cracking keypads was the most interesting and it's the most used. You put one on a keypad then have to wait for it to crack the code but there's never any tension to this you end up just stood beside it waiting. I imagined a patrolling guard where you have to find a gap to put it on and then hide until it's complete but nope, just more time wasting. It is again an essential gadget to the extent that later levels are littered with spares in case you've forgotten to retrieve it.

The stealth aspect of this game is completely pointless and the few missions where it's mandatory are insufferable. The big problem is that enemies will just randomly detect you for seemingly no reason or a camera will see you through a wall leading to an instant fail. You could argue this is a case of when it was released but games like Thief and Deus Ex were already out and doing stealth much better. In the missions where stealth is optional it can be fun to paly along with the charade until it inevitable falls apart and you resort to a shoot out, the combat isn't much more fun than the stealth but it's definitely less annoying. Enemies are prone to run along th exact same path for you to easily pick them off one by one and you'll probably die more to the odd bad platforming section.

I've been quite negative but there are things to like about this game. The art style is quite nice most of the time and as I said the levels have some great set pieces. Escaping a sinking ship, jumping out of an airplane and sky diving to safety are 2 stand outs. There are loads of great ideas too that games would later go on to do well and I can imagine it being a real inspiration at the time. Even now it was for me and there are a few things the game tries that I would like to implement in a game I'm working on. There are vehicle sections too! In an FPS from 2000! Good ideas though can't make up for a game that was just rarely fun to play. Perhaps if I was a fan of it at the time the rose tinted glasses would help but I wasn't and it's not something I'd recommend playing today.

A few weeks ago I got a whim to try out film photography. I didn't want to waste mooney on some old camera for the sake of it so after a bit of research I settled on an EOS-1 which can be found for about €100 and would work with a lot of the lenses I have already. It was a great camera for its time, taking inflation into account it would cost about €2500 so a total bargain. Even though I've been shooting photos for about 20 years the way people speak about film photography had me worried I'd fuck it up and I was just hoping some of the photos would come out well. I got a few rolls of Kodak Gold 200 as that seemed to be a good beginner film and it went really well!

Some of the photos are a bit overexposed but I think the light meter might be a bit off given how old the camera is, something that I can easily compensate for. This did lead me down a rabbit hole of looking into scanning negatives at home which was an enlightening experience. I was surprised how much variance there was from the way you "scan" them to what you use to process them on a computer. To scan negatives in the most basic way all you need is a bright light source and a camera, they'll come out pretty poor but technically you'll have them. I used my SAD lamp and a macro lens and shot them freehand, not even close to an ideal way but still fun to see how they come out. Below is the same photo scanned & processed three different ways. The first is from the photolab and the next two were done at home without any proper equipment.

So film photography ended up not being that tricky. Once you remember the basics of Aperture & Shutter Speed and keep your light meter in check it's just like taking photos digitally. I really like how well the camera presents information to the user as well, it's really simple and intuitive. What I enjoyed most though was how it makes you slow down when taking photos, you have 36 shots and you have no idea how it looks after you shoot so it makes you take your time to compose the shot and check that your settings are what you want. I have another roll of Kodak Gold 200 ready to be developed and I'm shooting a roll of Fuji Film 200. I'll share more photos when they're processed. Here's a few more from the first roll.

I had the stress of keeping Dennis housebound at the start of the month because he was getting into too many fights! That's all behind us now and things have calmed down, all the cats are in summer mode adn spending their time basking in the sun. I spent a good bit of it working on this website and getting it all online. I bought a film camera and shot my first roll of film, there will be a blog post about that soon. I have a Autocorrebt show this evening. May is already looking busy, but you'll have to wait until next month to hear about that.

Films

A quiet month for films, I didn't watch that many. I just haven't really been in the mood for films as of late.

Rose of Nevada 👍

A beautifully shot film that I really enjoyed but felt like I only half got what it was going for. Felt a bit scattershot in that regard.

Pizza Movie 👍

A really silly comedy with fun characters that’s full of jokes that had me laughing throughout. Would have loved to see this in a packed cinema.

The Drama 👍

Really funny but felt like it never quite landed on its tone.

Thrash 👎

Some really good visual effects for the storm! At least there was that. This just never hooked me in, there was never any real tension and I was bored most of the time.

TV

Lots of TV this month. A great mix of new, new to me & returning shows.

The Comeback 👍

I hadn't watched any of this before, it stars Lisa Kudrow as a former sitcom star making a comeback. The first season was in 2005 and the next in 2014 and there's another from this year that I haven't gotten to yet. I really enjoyed this, Lisa Kudrow is excellent in it and has some great dramatic moments while also embodying this character hilariously.

DTF St. Louis 👍

A very odd tone to this one but a tone I really liked. It tackles loneliness and feelings of inadequacy really well. It was subtly quite funny at times but also really sad. I loved all the people in this, it's a show of people doing their best and trying to be good to one another.

Paradise 👍

I've just started this, being told there is more to it than the initial premise piqued my interest. IT's good so far, really easy to watch and the plot had me coming back.

SNL UK 👍/👎

As mixed as SNL US, some episodes have been really poor and other have been good. THere's been a few really fun sketches though and Weekend Update is hitting for me every episode.

Taskmaster 👍

So far so good, the line up is working well together and there's been some great tasks.

The Apprentice 👍/👎

It's more of the same, sometimes good sometimes dull. Felt predictable who would make it to the final 2 given how useless a lot of the people were.

Games

Max Payne 1 & 2 👍

I wrote about these 2 games here.

Dragon Quest VIII 👎

I wrote about this here.

Esoteric Ebb 👍

I wrote about this here.

No One Lives Forever 👍/👎

I've just started this, I'm a few levels in and there will be a blog post once I'm done with it. It's fine, some levels are really fun whole other are really frustrating. I think this is a game that's looked back on fondly but reality doesn't always line up with our memories.

Music

Only a couple of new albums I was listening to much this month but lots of new singles that have me excited for the albums. I'm an album guy though, so I'll cover them when the album is out.

Harry Styles - Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. 👍

Not landing with me as well as Harry’s House did, it's maybe not as upbeat and fun. Still an album I'm enjoying it's a nice chill listen.

Metric - Romanticize The Dive 👍

I've only listened a couple of times, it's more Metric and it's good. It's already growing on me.

The Big Star Quintet - Gig 👍

I didn't really know about Big Star, this was one of the founding members of the group and other musicians playing a bunch of their songs. My friend Sean had an extra ticket for the gig so I joined, it's always fun to go listen to a band a friend thinks you'll like without having heard them. They've been about since the 70s and it was one of those gigs where there's just so much experience on the stage to appreciate, they sounded great and had loads of songs I like. I'll be listening to them more. When we got there it turned out the tickets we had were for the show the night before 😬 but luckily the guy on the door was nice and let us in anyway. This meant that since I technically didn't use Sean's extra ticket I didn't have to pay him for it which is an extra €50 in my pocket. What a way to end the month.

Theatre

Did Daddy Laugh? 👍

This is a sketch comedy night run by Stephen Bradley and Ronan Carey. This is always really fun, they invite some of Dublin's best comedy people to create sketches for the night. Sign up to Stephen's newsletter so you don't miss the next one.

Adelphi '63 👍

Set in 1963 this follows two teenagers with plans to see The Beatles in the Adelphi Cinema in Dublin. The writing was really funny and the production was great, the way the cutaways were done was excellent and the soundscape was brilliant. It's on for another few days in Smock Alley.

The game starts out in a small town and I was given a number of quick quests to complete before being pointed to go find a crystal ball in a nearby cave by a waterfall. I was playing the PS2 version and the game uses random encounters for battles so once out of a town every few seconds you get into a battle with random enemies. Not my favourite type of system but I would soon come to understand why it's in place. My first time through the dungeon I got to the second encounter before getting destroyed, it was clear I was very under-leveled for this dungeon even though it's the first one! So that's where the random encounters come in, the game wants you exploring the World and getting into battles to level up, but it feels like you have to go out of your way to do this. The 3DS re-release changes this so you can see the enemies on the map but from what I've read doesn't change XP requirements so you still have to do it anyway. 🤷‍♂️

I got through that dungeon and boss after a bit of grinding and then things let up a bit. I visited a couple more towns, completed the next couple of dungeons on my first or second attempts and it seemed like I was over that initial hurdle... until I hit another one. I looked up a guide online to see how under-levelled I was and it was 3 levels at least, maybe 4, so it was going to be another 40-60 minutes of wandering around getting into battles to level up some more. I might have kept going if I enjoyed the combat in the game but I found that aspect to be frustratingly unpredictable due to the amount of randomisation it uses. From one battle to the next you will get a group of enemies that are a push over or a group that leaves you down to a few HP and possibly with a dead party member. Even the turn order has randomisation to it for every turn meaning you can't even get a grip on it once you're into a battle. This makes planning difficult but especially healing because you don't know if you will go first or last so you're constantly making sure you have enough HP to withstand as many attacks as there are enemies for each party member because that does happen, I've had someone go from full health to dead in one turn because of this. And that's just in some random battle on the map that I got some bad luck on. I think all of this made the combat not very interesting. There are mechanics to defend or power up but they feel pointless when there's no way to have a battle plan so you just end up wandering about using your best attack most of the time, it's rare that you need to employ any other tactics. It's all about the numbers in the end and success mostly comes down to grinding battles to have bigger numbers than the dungeon boss.

If the combat was more interesting I'd have stuck with this longer but put it down after about 7 hours. The game world looks great with vibrant colours and it has a real Breath of the Wild vibe to it, very peaceful and chill. I have to call out the really nice transitions between the times of day presented with a camera pan to the sky. Unfortunately not a game for me, I am still looking for something big to sink my teeth into though. I might have a look at something from the Persona series...

My favourite part of the game was how well it let me role play. I used to be really bad at playing a role in a game until I played some proper good sessions of D&D in real life and it clicked with me that you just pick who you are and go with it. Even if that's being the most evil bastard you can be, you have to trust the DM or game designer has created something to accommodate that. I choose to be a proud Cleric who asked everyone which way they were voting in the election mainly as a means to let them know I was voting Freestrider. A clever way the game encouraged me to stick with this was by giving me a increasing XP multiplier every time I said I was voting Freestrider so by the end I was getting 100+ XP every time I said it as opposed to 5 the first time. The loot system also helped with playing the character I wanted to because there's just so many items to modify your character's stats that my starting build didn't define me and even if it did I could just go absolutely all on one specific stat. Beyond those systems the dialogue options almost always had a silly choice to dig my heels in on or the opportunity to flirt in inappropriate situations and while these rarely rewarded me with something it just made things that bit more fun.

The biggest knock I have gainst the game is the combat which is all carried out in the dialogue tree. There just isn't a lot to it and failure meant reloading a save and hoping for dice rolls that went in my favour this time. Even at that dying was tough as I pretty much always survived the hit dice checks and carried on with 1 HP. While combat is influenced by your stats it's so infrequent that there's little point in building your character towards it. Beyond that there were a few times I felt a bit lost and it's a case of revisiting locations and conversations but sometimes waiting for something that happens at a specific time. These were just mild annoyances in a game that had me enthralled once its hooks go into me.

Esoteric Ebb is available on Steam and at the time of writing is 10% off. It took me about 20 hours to complete and it's a pretty easy game to get through. I was awash with various healing & spell recovery items by the end. I strongly recommend it especially for fans of D&D and Disco Elysium.

Max Payne

I love the tone of this game. Set in the slums of a gritty turn of the century New York exactly the way a European at the time would imagine them to be the set up of a man out to avenge his murdered family is a great pulpy setup. The dialog for Max is fantastic with the perfect amount of melodrama and dead pan jokes with James McCaffrey nailing the tone.

The gameplay is fun vut frustrating these days with a heavy reliance on memorising that there will be an enemy around the corner not to mention the broken adaptive difficulty system that you'll want to find a mod to disable. Without it the game just gets more and more difficult until you walk into a room and die from a single shot!

It really tails off in the third Chapter too with a bunch of repetitive levels full of copy & pasted areas the padding of an already short game is noticeable. Still overall it was fun to revisit this and the presentation more than makes up for a gameplay loop that becomes lackluster before you get to the end.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

At the time I remember this feeling like such a huge improvement over the first game in absolutely every aspect and I still feel like that today except for the level design which is better but has a habit of falling into the same pitfalls of the first game with a requirement to go into a room and be gunned down instantly only to run in shooting first once you reload. It does it less but still does it sometimes.

In terms of story and presentation this sequel is in another league. It takes some of the characters from the first game and gives them much more background while also introducing a few new people. The main story between Max & Mona works well with great performances and writing for both characters. The presentation of the graphic novel story parts is also a big upgrade not only in the art but the sound design used to punctuate certain moments. The casting of actual actors to portray the characters in these parts over members fo the development team pays off big time.

The New York this one is set in feels more representative of the NYC of the early 2000s, fewer slums and more high end apartments and a general feeling of cleanliness. It still works though, there are some grittier areas and the Autumn setting is captured well with rain drenched streets littered with orange leaves.

A big wow factor at the time was the physics system, this was one of the first games I played with so many active physics objects in the environment. It doesn't wow the way it once did but the novelty is still there with many areas set up specifically to show off this feature. With a big upgrade to the quality of 3D models & textures as well as the movement feeling much more smoother this is a far easier game to revisit than the first which despite being only 2 years older feels more like a game from the 90s.

So that's the first 2 Max Payne games, I think both are worth picking up cheap in a sale and playing through. Neither of them takes more than about 7 hours to complete. I considered going back to the third but despite some fun moments and excellent shooting I remember the story being a mess and it turning into a slog towards the end. As for the movie, I have no interest in ever watching that again. It's incredible how much they fumbled what should have been a fun pulpy action movie.

They are! But they're very easy to make and host these days and you own everything on it and can back it up and keep it. This one is hosted on Neocities and it's just a whole load of HTML generated using a Python script I wrote. I can keep everything on my own PC and also backed up online. That way I'm not concerned with some website going under or being abandoned because it's full of fascists. I can just upload the html somewhere else. I could have set up Wordpress somewhere but I don't really need that for the level of what I want from a website. Simple HTML does the job just fine. I think this doesn't display well on mobile but what site does anymore? That battle was lost a long time ago so just read this on a laptop or PC as the internet was intended to be browsed.

Another reason: I'm probably not the only person to have noticed how many friends have moved away from social media these days so I thought this would be a way for those people to keep up with what I'm up to and a way for me to share what I am doing without relying on those platforms. Those are my reasons and I will not be elaborating further on them.

There's still a few things to fix up. I have to write all the pages that have links at the top for a start and I'll probably be tweaking the layout and fonts etc. as I go.

What can you expect?

I will be sharing any upcoming shows I have like Auto-Correbt & Friends on May 1st and probably shows my friends have on that I think will be good. I'll share things I have been playing, watching & reading that I think are good too that'll probably be in a roundup every now and again.

A quick list of broader topics I want to write about...

Hivemind

A live show that's also a game I created with my friend Mark. I'll talk about how it works on a technical level and also what a nightmare some of it was to make.

Game Development w/ Godot

I'm currently working on a 3D Stealth game and really enjoying using Godot for it. I used it for Hivemind too so there's lots I've learned.

How I made this website

It's nothing too fancy or technically involved but an interesting mashing together of things to generate an entire static website that seems like it might have something proper behind it. Yes I know static site generators exist but sometimes it's fun to do something just for the fun of it even if a solution already exists.

Photography

I bought a film camera recently, my first one! I haven't even gotten through a roll of film yet but wanna talk about what that's been like for someone who learned how to shoot only digitally over the past 20 years.