Looks Like battleMETAL Will Fill Some Mechwarrior 2 Nostalgia

Just came across this cool video and project which aims to implement a Mecha game and SDK on the Quake1 engine (Darkplaces specifically):



You can find more details on their website and the Github repository.

Art assets are apparently not available yet due to some non-free placeholders, but I hope this will be changed soon. Also no multiplayer, but that might be possible to fix.

Also really cool would be a Occulus Quest VR port via the already available and quite awesome Darkplaces VR port called QuakeQuest.

Leave a comment on our forums.

This post was retrieved from freegamer.blogspot.com.

Sanity Slips Away!

What's going on everyone!?

Today was a pretty rough day and I actually ended up hurting my back more than ever. It really sucks and is insanely painful but it's not like I knew I was going to hurt my back today any worse than it already is.

For the #2019gameaday challenge I played a game of Elder Sign: Omens and completely succumbed to the darkness. 

As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to stop and smell the meeples!  :)

-Tim

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot Review (PS4/Steam)

Written by Alexander O. Cuaycong and Anthony L. Cuaycong

Title: Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot
Developer: CyberConnect2
Publisher: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment
Genre: Action, RPG
Price: $59.99
Also Available On: Steam, XB1

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Dragon Ball has a rich, colorful history. From its humble beginnings as a fun, over-the-top anime series created by manga artist Akira Toriyama in 1984, it has evolved into a giant franchise pervading just about every book and cranny of popular culture. And even casual observers know and understand why: Its deceptively simple story of perseverance, heroism, and strength entertains and resonates among a loyal base of followers with otherwise-disparate tastes. It's filled to the brim with good-natured humor and fun, with epic tales about godly powers and all-too-human frailties. Notwithstanding the countless competition, it has remained a favorite of both the young and young once, and with reason.

The timeless virtue is what Dragon Ball's latest contribution to its vast videogame library realizes and brings to a brand-new audience. Developed for the personal computer and Sony PlayStation 4 by experienced developer CyberConnect2, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is an open-world role playing game cum brawler that seeks to translate the best parts of its source material. Providing bite-sized pieces digestible even to gamers with little to no knowledge of the intellectual property, it retells key parts of the manga's main story arcs. And, in so doing, it succeeds in presenting an exciting, adrenaline-fueled experience. It's more than just a tribute to its roots; even as it unabashedly pays homage to its source material, it takes more than enough liberties to keep longtime followers engaged.

In Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, gamers are thrust into the very heart of the Dragon Ball narrative. They get to play out the most important storybeats of the manga and anime; in the process, they're treated to a 50-hour jaunt that, pun aside, pulls no punches. Fighting is its bread and butter; lightning-fast kicks, knuckle sandwiches, ki strikes, and energy balls line encounters, with characters sparring and exchanging blows in the sky, on the ground, across environments encompassing the franchise's stories past. Really, there's something for everyone to take in, and, unlike other titles with similarly established canon and media, it doesn't blitz through tales or, conversely, spoonfeed all the details.

Instead, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot introduces plot elements and characters naturally and in keeping with the spirit of its lineage. Even for habitues who know series minutiae by heart, it comes off as surprisingly fresh. And it's comfortable in its own skin: It isn't afraid to cut out parts of the main story arcs that it feels aren't necessary to its purpose, but makes sure that it nails its presentation in any case. In this regard, it's certainly helped in no small measure by spot-on and extremely responsive fighting mechanics that underscore the efforts of CyberConnect2, hitherto noted for its work on the .hack and Naruto IPs.

Indeed, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot draws from its manga and anime inspirations in conveying the trademark frantic energy that envelops its battles; it manages to translate with utter faithfulness all the signature touches of its source material, bells and whistles intact. Very anime-esque cut-ins and callouts are triggered after special moves, with its distinctive personality — and flair — highlighted by the way characters react to, and communicate with (okay, shout at), one another. Better still, these fights are all translated in a manner that feels so natural, no small feat given its sheer scale.

Those from the outside looking in may find all the fighting, on air and on the surface, bordering on the ridiculous. Characters are able to fly at super speed, display super strength, and use super powers — and in over-the-top fashion to boot. Those steeped in the lore, however, will find the presentation faithful to the series. More importantly, gamers won't have any problems with control and execution; whether on the personal computer or on the PlayStation 4 Pro, feedback is swift and free of lags, and the action presented on screen sans any frame drops. And thanks to an intuitive interface that belies the depth of its gameplay, it manages to blend all its elements together. While making use of an uncomplicated combat system, it nonetheless offers a heady and healthy mix of offense and defense via well-crafted melee and ranged options.

Admittedly, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is far from perfect. Given how much depth there is in terms of look, feel, and flow of the story and the fighting mechanics, the open-world RPG elements feel vastly underutilized. At times, these wind up lacking any impact at all, as if simply tacked on to prolong the gameplay and artificially add value to the title. Granted, the optional exploration segments do offer variety by way of side quests and character exposition. Still, they come off as being rather redundant and unrewarding in light of the game's linear narrative.

On the whole, though, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot exceeds expectations as a brilliant entry to the franchise. Make no mistake; it's not without its quirks. For what it offers, however, it's well worth the time and money of gamers faces with countless alternatives.

---

THE GOOD:

• Properly conveys the series' over-the-top energy and frantic combat
• Tight fighting mechanics combined with responsive controls

THE BAD:

• RPG/open-world segments feel tacked on
• Sidequests come off as unrewarding
• Character progression far from seamless

---

RATING: 8.5/10

---

People Of Frictional: Gregor Panič

WHO AM I?

Hi there! I'm Gregor and I'm a designer and programmer at Frictional, which means I'm responsible for all the fun events in our levels. Okay, maybe they're fun just for us.

It's me! And the sign on our door, printed on an A4 and a little crumpled...

I'm a more recent recruit, having joined around September 2016. My job description, gameplay programmer / designer, is purposefully vague. While I mainly work on level scripting, I also spend time on AI, gameplay systems and level design. I also worked on our collaboration with the Tobii Eye Tracker, which I will talk about later. The great part about this is that my work never gets stale and almost none of my days feel the same.

I'm originally from a little known country called Slovenia, but I've recently moved to the land of the vikings to become one myself. Or, in other words: I moved to Malmö around two months ago and now work from our fairly new office.

My setup at work - right next to the fanart wall! No deskmate yet, though. :'(

I absolutely adore our office and go there pretty much every day to socialize with and get inspired by my co-workers. I'm also the one who nags everyone with occasional movie and gaming nights, where we usually grab some snacks, relax and watch a horror movie (obviously), or games like FIFA and Jackbox Party Pack!

BACKGROUND

I can't really remember the time when I first started playing games. I do know that around the late 90s my dad brought home an Intel 80186 PC one day, thinking he would use it for work. He was wrong. After he showed me a couple of MS-DOS games and I realized I could make things move by pressing buttons, I became glued to that PC. My parents didn't manage to pry me from it, so I've been playing games ever since. Not on the same machine, obviously.

I played a lot of games, but didn't touch the horror genre for the longest time. I still remember having vivid nightmares and being unable to sleep whenever I saw something remotely scary on television. When I was older, however, a friend of mine bought me Amnesia as a "gift". It was a dare, of course, but because I didn't want to disappoint my friend, I played through it. It was just as scary as everyone was telling me, perhaps even more so.

But while I was playing it I also realized that it was about more than just scaring the living hell out of me. It managed to fully immerse me in its world and story, which I had not experienced to this degree before. This is how I got introduced to the horror genre, and to Frictional, which would later impact my life more than I could have possibly imagined.

Making games has been my dream ever since I can remember. Given how much fun I had playing them, I thought it would be great if I could make my own – which is why I always liked messing around with settings, seeing what I could do with cheat codes, and figuring out damage formulas so I could get an advantage. It wasn't until I got sucked into a game called Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, however, that I actually made my first array into creating my own content. I made lightsaber hilts, maps, and even modified some scripts to make the game play like I wanted to.

Unfortunately, growing up in Slovenia there was no real game dev scene there, so I forgot about my dream. It simply never occured to me that I could make games for a living. However, since I was already using my computer so much, I thought it would be fun to work in IT. So I learned some basic C++ programming in high school, then went to a computer science university where I learned a lot more about programming and software in general.

For a long time I resigned myself to becoming a web developer, taking some summer jobs and part-time work in that field. The job became more and more mundane and boring, until I finally realized that I couldn't do it long term, and that I had to find something more fulfilling. That is when I remembered my dream of making games, how much fun they brought me and how great it would be to be able to help someone else have the same experience. I already had a lot of programming experience, so I became determined to join the games industry.

I immediately quit my part-time job and started working on my first small game. I wanted to do everything on my own so that I would learn all the intricacies of game development. A year or so of studying and work amounted to Welkin Road, a little puzzle platformer with grappling hooks.

In Welkin Road you use your two grappling hooks to solve movement-based puzzles.

While I was in the process of finishing Welkin Road, I started looking at potential studios I could join. That's when I saw a tweet from Frictional, mentioning that they were looking for a designer / programmer. I didn't think I was ready, but I figured this was my only chance to work with the company, so I sent my resume in anyway.

To my big surprise they offered me a work test, to see whether I was suitable for the role. I gave it my best, but after I sent in my project I tried to prepare myself for the inevitable let-down. Instead I got a positive reply and an invitation to an interview. The final decision came a couple of weeks later.

Spoiler alert: I got the job.

Given that I was a big fan of Amnesia and SOMA, the decision to accept was a no-brainer. However, it took me quite a while to properly register that I had fulfilled my lifelong dream. A year and a half later I realize how lucky I am to be one of the few people who can wake up on Mondays with a smile on their face.

After joining, I immediately started working on my introductory tasks aimed at learning the new tools. I joined at the same time as Max, so we bonded over struggling to understand all the new stuff. When those tasks were done, I started working on my first real project: designing and implementing eye tracking features in SOMA, which I will talk about in more detail in the next section.

A while after I was brought on, the company started looking to set up a studio in Malmö. I already knew that if I wanted to make games, I would most likely have to move, so the decision to move to Malmö didn't take me long to make. Finding a place to stay took a while, but I eventually managed to find a nice apartment and settle in, in no small part thanks to my incredibly kind and welcoming co-workers.

The setup in my new home in Malmö!

FIRING LASERS (more commonly known as Eye Tracking)

As promised, I will now spend some time talking about my adventures in eye tracking. After receiving a unit from Tobii, I first tested it with a bunch of games that already had eye tracking support. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was a particularly useful use case study, since it had a robust implementation and used the eye tracker in interesting ways. I was initially very surprised at how well the eye tracker worked in that game, and how seamless and intuitive it was to use without putting any strain on my eyes. This gave me the confidence that we could use this to enhance SOMA.

Once I got a feel for what the technology was capable of, I read through Tobii's SDK documentation and code samples to figure out how it all worked. In simple terms, the Tobii eye tracker provides a continuous data stream of screen coordinates that represent the location on the screen the user is looking at. Think of it as firing 60+ laser beams per second from your eyes to your monitor. Bring it on, Cyclops!

After I was done feeling like a superhero, I looked into how we could use this in our own engine, HPL3. Since Tobii's SDK was easy to use, integrating it into HPL3 wasn't too difficult, especially with the help of our engine programmer Peter.

With the technical aspects more or less dealt with, I started thinking about the design of our eye tracking features, and how we could best make use of this technology to enhance the game. This included brainstorming sessions, quick prototyping and a lot of feedback from the rest of the team.

It quickly became clear that while controlling and moving stuff around on the screen with your eyes is fun, it becomes tiring and uncomfortable really fast. For a good experience, the player must never be actively thinking about using their eyes. Instead, the game should react to the player's natural eye movements and try to enhance the experience. A negative side effect of this design principle is that unfortunately quite a lot of features become very subtle and hard for the player to notice consciously, despite having an overall positive effect.

The white circle is where the player is looking.

Another interesting aspect of designing these features was how eye tracking could be used in a very immersive first person horror game. Horror games often rely on where the player is looking to trigger certain events, which always means a certain level of uncertainty about whether the player actually registered what was happening on the screen or not. With eye tracking, this uncertainty became very minimal, which meant that the timing of a lot of the events in SOMA naturally improved.

In the end, we ended up with a number of eye tracking features we were happy with. The most noticeable ones are extended view, which makes the viewport pan towards where the player is looking, and the ability to control the flashlight with your eyes. A number of enemies also react to the player's gaze, such as the flesher monster becoming aggressive when looked at and teleporting when the player blinks, or the deep sea diver stopping when the player maintains eye contact.

Other features are much more subtle and designed to enhance immersion and mood. For example, staring at creepy and gory scenes zooms the screen slightly, giving the impression that Simon is in a trance or shock-like state and can't look away. When the player looks at enemies, the screen distortion effect intensifies to further discourage players from looking at them.

Additionally there are some really secret ones, such as Ross' distorted computer messages appearing exactly when the player blinks, to further reinforce how Ross is inside Simon's head. My personal favorite, however, is a subtle reaction from K8, the incredibly friendly and helpful swimbot, which gives the player a small opportunity to communicate with it.

The developer showcase of eye tracking features.

In summary, working on eye tracking has been an incredibly fun and rewarding experience both because of the challenge, knowledge gained and the creative freedom. Besides, who doesn't enjoy firing lasers with their eyes? The end result hopefully enhances the SOMA experience, even if just a tiny little bit. So if you have the PC version on Windows and a Tobii eye tracker, consider giving an even more immersive version of SOMA a go!

The official trailer for eye tracking in SOMA.

Eye tracking is just a small part of my work at Frictional though, as I'm currently working on one of our next projects. I'm already really proud of what we're creating and I'm happier than ever with my choice to follow my dream of making games. We're all really excited to be able to share more of what we're doing, but until then we'll just keep doing our best. This also reminds me it is time for another gaming night, to keep our spirits up!

Quality Frictional Humour™ from a recent Jackbox Party night.

Wanna see who else works at Frictional? Check out the rest of the People of Frictional posts!

Gears 5 Free Download

Gears 5 Free Download PC Game setup in single direct link for Windows. It is an amazing action, adventure and indie game.

Gears 5 PC Game 2019 Overview

It's about time. Suit up with a WWE Superstar Batista skin for use in Gears 5 multiplayer. Play Gears 5 while online between Sept 15 (4:00pm PT) and October 27 (11:59pm PT) to get him in game for free.
From one of gaming's most acclaimed sagas, Gears is bigger than ever, with five thrilling modes and the deepest campaign yet.
Campaign: The world is crumbling. The Swarm has corrupted the Coalition's robot army and is descending upon human cities. With danger closing in, Kait Diaz breaks away to uncover her connection to the enemy and discovers the true danger to Sera – herself.
Escape: Outrun the bomb, outsmart the Swarm, and escape the Hive! Escape is a new, aggressive, high-stakes co-op mode featuring a three-player suicide squad that must work together to take out enemy hives from within.
Versus: May the best team win! Rack up points and trade up for superior weapons in Arcade, a frenetic playlist built for jump-in, over-the-top fun. With ten other game types plus new and classic maps, Versus rewards every competitive style, from casual to pro.
Horde: Can you and four friends endure waves of ever-stronger enemies and bosses? Survive using new hero abilities, building defenses, collecting power, leveling up your skills and working as a team.
Map Builder: Create custom Escape hive maps and experiences to share with and challenge your friends.
Features:
* Three-player Campaign Co-op: Battle alongside your friends in three-player online or split-screen co-op.
* Tours of Duty: Rank up from new recruit to four-star general in Gears Tours of Duty. Take on new and exciting challenges, earn awesome rewards, and show off your loot.
* Boot Camp: New to Gears or just a little rusty? Bootcamp is a fun way to learn the ropes, from the basics to advanced combat techniques.
* Play as Jack: Play as Jack, your personal flying support bot that can protect allies and damage enemies – perfect for players new to Gears.
* Visual Showcase: Play every mode in 4K and HDR at a smooth 60 frames per second on compatible machines

Xbox Profile Required. Sign in with your existing profile or create one for free.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: Frequent Violence or Gore, General Mature Content

Technical Specifications of This Release.

• Game Version :
• Interface Language: English
• Audio Language : English
• Uploader / Re packer Group:
• Game File Name : Gears_5.rar
• Game Download Size : 63 GB
• MD5SUM : d4a175b90286efbbec8ed0c0c9f89209

System Requirements of Gears 5

Before you start Gears 5 Free Download make sure your PC meets minimum system requirements.

Minimum:

* Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
* OS: Windows 7 SP1 64-bit, Windows 10 64-bit
* Processor: AMD FX-6000 series | Intel i3 Skylake
* Memory: 8 GB RAM
* Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 280 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 (Windows 10) | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (Windows 7)
* DirectX: Version 12
* Network: Broadband Internet connection
* Storage: 80 GB available space
* Sound Card: DirectX compatible

Recommended:

* Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
* OS: Windows 10 64-bit
* Processor: AMD Ryzen 3 | Intel i5 Skylake
* Memory: 8 GB RAM
* Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 570 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (Windows 10) | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660ti (Windows 7)
* DirectX: Version 12
* Network: Broadband Internet connection
* Storage: 80 GB available space
* Sound Card: DirectX compatible

2019 Microsoft. All rights reserved.

Gears 5 Free Download

Click on the below button to start Gears 5. It is full and complete game. Just download and start playing it. We have provided direct link full setup of the game.

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Tech Book Face Off: Python For Data Analysis Vs. Python Data Science Handbook

I'm starting to dabble in machine learning. (You know it's all the rage now.) As with anything new, I find it most effective to pick out a couple of books on the subject and start learning the landscape and the details straight away. Online resources are good for an introduction, or to find answers to specific questions on how to get a particular task done, but they don't hold a candle to the depth and focus that you can find from reading about a subject in a well-written book. Since I'd already had some general exposure to machine learning in college, I wanted to work through a couple of books that focused on how to do data analysis and machine learning in a practical sense with a real language and modern tools. Python with Pandas and Scikit-Learn has a huge community and plenty of active development right now, so that's the route I went with for this pair of books. I selected Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython by Wes McKinney to get the details of using the Pandas data analysis package from the author of the package himself. Then I chose Python Data Science Handbook: Essential Tools for Working with Data by Jake VanderPlas to get more coverage of Pandas from another perspective and expand into some of the Scikit-Learn tools available for machine learning. Let's see how these two books stack up for learning to make sense of large amounts of data.

VS.

Python for Data Analysis

This book covers all of the fundamentals of doing data analysis with Python using IPython, Jupyter Notebooks, Matplotlib graphing, and the main data analysis packages: NumPy and Pandas. It stops short of going into the other major data analysis and machine learning library, Scikit-Learn, because it had already filled over 500 pages with the intricate details of NumPy and Pandas. Wes McKinney is the original author of the Pandas library, so we're getting all of those details straight from the source.

The book starts out with the perfunctory chapters on installing Python and other packages, how to use IPython and Jupyter Notebooks, and running through the basic Python language features. It's filler chapters like these in nearly every programming book out there that makes me think that I no longer need to read introductory books on new languages. I can just go directly into books on applications of any given language, confident that they'll introduce me to the syntax and features I need to know anyway. It's not wrong, exactly, but the result is an awful lot of books with the same extra introductory material filling up pages that will mostly go unread.

Then there's a big chapter on using NumPy before moving on to Pandas for the rest of the book, with a chapter on the Matplotlib graphing library thrown in somewhere in the middle. The main focus is on Pandas, which is a huge library with tons of invaluable features for messing around with data. The book covers everything from reading and writing data, data cleaning, combining and merging data in various ways, doing complex calculations on the data with aggregation and groupby operations, and working with time series and categorical data.

The number and types of operations you can do on a data set with Pandas is pretty incredible, and that makes Pandas an excellent library to learn to use well. As McKinney says in the book,

During the course of doing data analysis and modeling, a significant amount of time is spent on data preparation: loading, cleaning, transforming, and rearranging. Such tasks are often reported to take up 80% or more of an analyst's time.

With all of that time spent on low-level data tasks, Pandas makes the life of a data scientist so much easier and more enjoyable. Data can be cleaned and transformed much more easily and reliably, and you can get down to making inferences about the data quickly.

Beyond covering all of the ins and outs of Pandas, McKinney sprinkles in a few good tips on other tools that can speed up your data analysis tasks. For instance,

If you work with large quantities of data locally, I would encourage you to explore PyTables and h5py to see how they can suit your needs. Since many data analysis problems are I/O-bound (rather than CPU-bound), using a tool like HDF5 can massively accelerate your applications.

Other than these scattered tips, the book is actually fairly dry and uninspiring. It reads a lot like the (excellent) online documentation for Pandas, but doesn't add too much more than that. Even most of the examples for different features are just drab randomly generated numbers with boring labels. You could just as easily read the online docs and get all of the same material. It may be a little nicer to have it all in book form so that you can sit down and focus on it, but that's a slight advantage. I was hoping for something more, that secret sauce that you sometimes find in books on software libraries, to make the book a greater value than just reading the online docs.

The book does have a chapter at the end that goes through some extended examples of data wrangling with publicly available data sets, which is a nice way of bringing everything together, but it's a small part of a large book. All in all, it's a no-nonsense, comprehensive exploration of the Pandas library, but not too much more than that. I wouldn't recommend it because there are better options out there that add something more than the online documentation can give you, like the next book.

Python Data Science Handbook

The Python Data Science Handbook covers most of what Python for Data Analysis does with somewhat less depth, but then goes much further into using Scikit-Learn to analyze data sets with machine learning techniques. The book is split into five large chapters, only the first of which delves into introductory minutiae by introducing the IPython interpreter. Thankfully, the book assumes you know Python already and doesn't bore the reader with another summary of lists, dicts, and comprehensions.

The next few chapters cover the use of NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib, and while the Pandas material is somewhat reduced from Python for Data Analysis, the Matplotlib material actually gets into the cartography drawing capabilities of this library. So, there are trade-offs in the number of topics covered in this book, as I would say the author gives more breadth while sacrificing some depth. The last chapter explores a good amount of Scikit-Learn with explanations and discussions of ten different machine learning models. This chapter added significantly to the book, grounding the features explored in the previous chapters with machine learning applications on real data sets of hand-written digits, bicycle traffic, and facial recognition. Seeing how different models performed better or worse in different applications was fascinating and enlightening.

The writing style of Jake VanderPlas was much more engaging as well. While reading the book, I felt like I was being guided by a mentor who wanted to make sure I understood the reasons behind different decisions, and why things should be done a certain way. While Python for Data Analysis focused on the "what" and "how" of programming with Pandas, the Python Data Science Handbook really addressed the "why" of data science programming, from explaining some of the reasons behind little decisions:

One guiding principle of Python code is that "explicit is better than implicit." The explicit nature of loc and iloc make them very useful in maintaining clean and readable code; especially in the case of integer indexes, I recommend using these both to make code easier to read and understand, and to prevent subtle bugs due to the mixed indexing/slicing convention.

To carefully describing the big issues with training machine learning models:

The general behavior we would expect from a learning curve is this: A model of a given complexity will overfit a small dataset: this means the training score will be relatively high, while the validation score will be relatively low. A model of a given complexity will underfit a large dataset: this means that the training score will decrease, but the validation score will increase. A model will never, except by chance, give a better score to the validation set than the training set: this means the curves should keep getting closer together but never cross.

This conversationally instructive style was quite comfortable, and made the whole book an enjoyable read, even though the material was understandably complicated with a lot of different features and concerns to think about. VanderPlas helped it all go down easily. It was a lot to take in, but it was never overwhelming. He also had plenty of words of encouragement, knowing that when real problems with data arise, it could get discouraging:

Real-world datasets are noisy and heterogeneous, may have missing features, and may include data in a form that is difficult to map to a clean [n_samples, n_features] matrix. Before applying any of the methods discussed here, you must first extract these features from your data; there is no formula for how to do this that applies across all domains, and thus this is where you as a data scientist must exercise your own intuition and expertise.

It's easy to tell that I much preferred this book over Python for Data Analysis, and I would recommend anyone looking into data science and machine learning take a look at the Python Data Science Handbook. It's a great overview of the subject, and you'll be able to get up and running with Python quickly, experimenting with some real applications of machine learning, and learning some of the critical issues of feature engineering and model validation.

Only the Beginning

These two books, Python for Data Analysis and Python Data Science Handbook, clearly only scratch the surface of machine learning. They teach you how to use the main Python libraries for data analysis and machine learning, but they don't go much further than that. There's a ton more stuff to learn about how to do machine learning well and what goes on under the hood in all of these various models. I've got my eye on more machine learning books like Python Machine Learning by Sebastian Raschka, Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron, and The Elements of Statistical Learning by Trevor Hastie, et al, among many others. There's a vast amount of literature out there now on machine learning, covering everything from practical applications to the theoretical underpinnings of the models. Suffice it to say, this is only the beginning of the exploration.

2018-2019: A Playtesting Retrospective

Back in late 2017 I started formally tracking my weekly playtest sessions in a google doc. One up-side of this is that I can go back now and review what was played each week, by whom, and what aspect I was looking to test that day. It's also interesting to see how much time we dedicated to each game, or how much time passed in between playtests of a game.

I'd like to use this post as a sort of retrospective on the last two years (or 28 months) of playtesting. Let's take a little trip down memory lane...

2017

Late August 2017 was the first session I'd logged, and that day we were evaluating 3 games I'd brought home from GenCon for TMG: Margrave, by Stan Kordonskiy, which turned into Old West Empresario, Rolled West, by Daniel Newman, and Embark, by Philip duBarry. Not only did we end up signing each of these, but all three are on store shelves now!

In September of that year we continued evaluating games: Pixel Factory was a neat one, but ultimately TMG did not sign it. Back to Earth was also neat, and we did sign it, but due to unrelated circumstances we ended up releasing it later. Railways is a game by some British designer friends of mine, and I liked it, but it needed some work. We did suggest the new title: Railblazers. My understanding is that at this point it has improved greatly, but the main mechanism which I was interested in (like the Mancala-rondel in Crusaders) has changed completely.

October saw us switch gears a bit. We spent a lot of time playing my games: Eminent Domain Origins (a Terra Prime reboot) and Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (a dice game version of EmDo -- I should add those to the BGG database). This went on into November as well.

December was spent almost entirely on a dozen games of Embark, which had been signed by that point. I also see a lone play of Eminent Domain Origins at about Christmas time.

2018

We started off the new year with 2 more games of EDO, but then spent the rest of January, February, March, and half of April playing about 3 dozen (!) games of Old West Empresario, working on game balance and player powers. The only other playtests in those months were a few games of Harvest to test some potential expansion characters (unfortunately, we never did do an expansion to Harvest).

Late April through mid-May we tested the Crusaders: Divine Influence expansion, which was in pretty good shape to begin with, but we hammered out a few details. That one has now been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer in China and should be out later this year.

My son was born at the end of May, and my playtest sessions went on  hiatus. The only other testing that happened in 2018 was at Rincon -- Michael was in town and we played a game of Deities & Demigods (now Olympus on the Serengeti), and several games of Imminent Domain (now Sails & Sorcery, but that title might not be final either), which is the game Michael designed based on the deck learning of Eminent Domain and the area control of El Grande.

2019

After an extended hiatus, I finally got back to regular playtest sessions in February of 2019, and we spent that first month back playing Eminent Domain Origins some more, fine tuning some last details.

March was spent on Emperor's Choice. TMG is doing a Deluxified version of that game, and we developed a 2 player variant which went over well with Richard Ham of Rahdo Runs Through, who famously only plays games with his wife.

April and May were dedicated almost entirely to developing Sails & Sorcery, changing up the format so it would play better, but keeping the core ideas of the game.

June was spent working on a new design of mine, Apotheosis. We iterated through several big changes as we quickly honed in on what worked and what didn't.

We started out July with a quick couple tests of a 5/6 player expansion to Crusaders. This worked out well, and we've got art done, but this won't come out until October. Then it was back to Sails & Sorcery through August. Most of the game was pretty solid by that point, but we were trying to fix this one niggling dynamic that just didn't work right.

We switched gears again and spent September and half of October playing Alter Ego, my co-operative deck learning game. We played quite a few games considering that one of my main testers doesn't like co-op games!

We ended October and spent most of November working on expansion content for Pioneer Days that we got from the designers.

We revisited Alter Ego once in November and once in December, and spent the rest of December testing Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory, and another one of my games: Riders of the Pony Express. Riders was in pretty good shape, but was a bit fiddly. We fixed a couple of small issues, and brainstormed how to remove some of the process a little bit.

In addition, we played a few non-playtest games including Tapestry (which did not go over well), In the Year of the Dragon (my favorite Feld game), and we tested a game for one of my playtesters (we actually did this a couple of other times, but I hadn't recorded those). Also, I took my players out for an annual Playtester Appreciation Day to see the new Star Wars movie (we saw Solo last year, and Episode VIII the year before that) -- only one of them could make it though.

Finally, we capped off the year reviving my oldest game design that was any good: All For One! I initially got involved in that co-design 17 years ago, and it had been so long since the last playtest (2012?) that I didn't try any changes, we played straight from the rulebook. It was great to revive this old classic, and we started off 2020 with some significant changes to All For One, which worked well and felt great!

Game 361: Planet's Edge (1992)

Note that the game's title screen does not technically exclude the possibility of returning from this point.

         

Planet's Edge

United States

New World Computing (developer and publisher)

Released 1991 for DOS, 1993 for FM Towns and PC-98

Date Started: 5 March 2020
           
Because it took me so long to get Planet's Edge up and running, I had time to do more background research first--the kind of thing that I usually save for the "Summary and Rating" entry. I learned from Wikipedia that the game grew out of a desire to merge the boardgame Star Fleet Battles with an RPG. I learned from an RPG Codex interview that the developers wanted to put "Might and Magic in space." Nowhere did the authors report a direct influence from any other game, so it was a surprise when I fired it up and found myself looking at . . . Starflight. It has the same type of base where you enter different buildings to accomplish similar tasks, the same type of ship with commands arranged by "station," the same approach to galactic exploration, the same variety of weird alien races to meet, and the same take on combat. Sure, it does some things differently, but the core of the game was clearly cribbed from Starflight. Was it so hard for the developers just to admit "we wanted our own version of Starflight"?
    
There is some confusion about a couple of elements in the header. First, the title. My policy is that a game's "official" title is the best two out of three on the manual cover, box cover, and in-game title screen. If all three conflict, I go with the in-game title screen. In the case of Planet's Edge, the box includes a subtitle (The Point of No Return) that both the manual and in-game screen lack. Second, a while back, commenter shankao made a case for the game being released in 1992 instead of the official copyright date (and MobyGames date) of 1991. His argument is based on the fact that no reviews appeared for the game until comparatively late in 1992. I didn't find any conclusive evidence, but I decided to accept shankao's argument and move the game to 1992.
                 

Judging by the animate intro, the backstory is "some guy escapes a cruiser by shooting a guard and stealing a ship."

              
Planet's Edge is set in 2045. Humanity has colonized the Moon and has seeded Earth's orbit with various space stations, satellites, and other craft. The denizens of these orbiting habitats become humanity's only survivors when the rest of the planet is sucked into a "space-time warp." The warp is the result of an electro-magnetic burst fired from an extraterrestrial craft, although it is unknown whether it was accidental or deliberate (a Chinese space station had disobeyed U.N. orders and fired missiles at the craft just before the event). Either way, Earth's gravitational influence somehow remains, keeping the Moon and satellites in orbit.
             

The Luna Base commander gives orders.

            
Commander Mason Polk of Luna Base takes charge of humanity's remnant. Without Earth's resources, the base will run out of food and life support within a few years, so time is crucial. From the crashed alien spaceship, scientists recover the device that caused the disaster. They call it the "Centauri Device" and identify eight parts that they need to reconstruct it and possibly reverse its effects: a N.I.C.T.U. (but no K.L.A.A.T.U. or B.A.R.A.D.A.), an Algocam, a K-Beam, a Harmonic Resonator, a Mass Converter, a Gravitic Compressor, Krupp Shields, and Algiebian Crystals. How they came up with these names is left a bit vague. A ship dubbed the Ulysses is commissioned to scour the galaxy for these items and otherwise try to find out why the extraterrestrial ship visited and destroyed Earth. It's a little unclear how we suddenly have the ability to travel outside our solar system, or given that we have said ability, why there's a time limit on survival at Luna Base.
           

I wonder if K-beams glitter in the dark.

         
Gameplay begins at Luna Base, where the player can visit the shipyards (build and modify ships), the warehouse (offload cargo), the crew quarters (view and clone crewmembers), the research lab (check on progress with the Centauri Device), and the launchpad (head out into the universe). The items that you can build for your ship or characters depend on the resources that you bring back from other places--resources such as organics, heavy metals, alien isotopes, and rare elements.
           

Luna Base and its various buildings.

         
The crew consists of four fixed characters. The pilot is William Robert Dean from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Osai Lin Tsakafuchi from Tokyo is the ship's physician and chief scientist. Engineering duties are handled by Nelson T. Ngatadatu of Babaishanda, New Gwelo (a fictional place, but "Gwelo" is a place name in Zimbabwe). The combat specialist (both ground and flight) is Katya A. Mershova from Muntenia, Romania. Each character occupies one of the ship's four stations, some doing double duty if anyone dies. Each character has fixed attributes in body, intelligence, agility, and luck, as well as fixed skills like "Leadership," "Light Weapons," "First Aid," and "Computers." I don't know whether these attributes or skills are capable of developing, but I don't see any sign that they are. 
             

Attributes for my engineer.

         
Each character has a personal inventory, drawn from the supplies on Luna Base or found in the galaxy. The first thing I did was give them all flak jackets and weapons.

I found the ship modification process confusing enough that I decided to save it for later and just blasted off in the default ship. Once in space, commands are organized among four "consoles": navigation, weapons, engineering, and science. For instance, to communicate with another ship, you select the "Weapons" console (counterintuitively) and then "Communicate." To heal crewmembers, you select "Science" and then "Heal Crew." There are far less than 26 commands, so I don't understand why each couldn't have its own key. However, Planet's Edge does a little better than previous games using this structure by at least allowing you to hit single keys on the submenus rather than arrowing through them. Also, a few very common commands like Navigation | Starmap and Navigation | Enter Orbit can be called from the main view with individual keys, without having to go into the stations first.
           

I couldn't make heads or tails of this screen.

           
Moving around is a combination of elements seen in Starflight and Star Control II. As you fly away from a planet, the map's scale changes to show a larger area. As you enter a star system, it changes to show a smaller area. When you've locked onto a planet, you O)rbit it, at which point you can S)can it for information or B)eam down if it's appropriate. (There's no landing craft, just a transporter.) Making things a little difficult is that the planets continually whiz around their stars, unrealistically fast, so it's tough to identify which ones you've already approached.
          

Note how the navigator turns and looks at me while waiting for my order.

       
I guess the player is kind of an invisible "fifth" crewmember. I base this on the fact that, according to his mission directives, he's expressly forbidden to beam down with the rest of the crew. Also, when you're activating the consoles in the ship, each of the crewmembers turns and looks at you, as if you're sitting in a central chair. Despite this, you don't get to name yourself or anything.

A map accompanying the game shows Earth's solar system ("Sol") at the center of a galaxy occupying coordinates from -64 to 64 on two axes. Sol is the point of convergence of eight "sectors" which grow outwards from the center like irregular pie wedges: Alnasl, Ankaq, Zaurak, Alhena, Algieba, Caroli, Izar, and Kornephoros. (Most of these are actual stars). There are a handful of systems at the fringes of the map that occupy no sector. It's not really clear at the outset of the game whether the sector designations are geographic or political. Either way, note that the names of the missing parts suggest that we'll find one part per sector.

I had a few false starts as I got used to navigation. Alpha Centauri is so close that it's easy to blow past it on your way out of the solar system. I got killed three times in a row by hostile aliens who either attacked immediately or demanded cargo I didn't have. I haven't even begun to figure out ship combat. Since you can't save in space, I kept restarting on Luna Base and having to try again.
            

Meanwhile, my crew is saying, "Oh my god! It's an alien!"

           
On the fourth try, I took things more slowly and explored the solar system before leaving it, although it appears you cannot land on any of its planets (which makes sense).
       

Mars can be scanned but not visited.

        
I then carefully made my way to Centauri. The first planet, Centauri Prime, was too inhospitable to land. The second wasn't a planet but an "alien outpost." When I scanned it for information, the computer called it the "Omegan Outpost" and said that it was a "contact point for observers who were assisting with the failed Centauri Drive experiment." I guess we know all these things because of data recovered from the crashed alien ship.
            

Orbiting Centauri Prime. It's a nice looking planet, but we can't do anything there. I was hoping we'd meet Londo.

        
The four expendable crewmembers beamed down and were immediately attacked by robots firing laser guns. Combat in the game is turn-based and like nothing that New World has developed before. It is perhaps most like Ultima VI, occurring within the main exploration window and using a targeting cursor to attack particular enemies. In fact, once combat was over, I found that regular exploration was also a lot like Ultima VI. As the leader moves, the other characters kind of organize themselves around him or her. You can switch between lead characters with the number keys (although there's no "solo mode") and do other common things like L)ook, T)alk to NPCs, and do a variety of things with inventory items. You can't manipulate the environment to the same extent as Ultima VI, and (annoyingly) you can't move on the diagonal, but nonetheless, by including this level of ground exploration and combat, New World has definitely gone a step beyond Starflight and Star Control II, even if the rest of the game seems similar.
          

Combat with robots in the outpost.

              
A door led from the surface of the planet to the interior of the "welcome station," where a friendly message invited us to browse various newscasts. As we moved from room to room, we faced several more combats, and I had to use medpacks (which we found strewn around the area) several times. We also found some better armor than we were wearing (kevlar) and some extra weapons.
           

A character inventory.

         
We ran into an android who somewhat explained the situation: the station had been attacked by unknown aggressors who stole "various tactical data about the sectors." Another android offered that the disappearance of Earth was "a tragic accident" and he encouraged us to continue our quest to find the various pieces of the Centauri Device. He specifically recommended going to Algieba Sector since "there's a part that is named after one of that sector's stars, after all."
             

But . . . Earth scientists named that part! They don't know where it really comes from!

            
Beneath a plaque labeled "Sector Izar," we saw an image of a spacecraft that looks a lot like the extraterrestrial ship that visited Earth. A recorded message was saying that "something is malfunctioning with the drive" and "the experiment may have been sabotaged." The overwhelming suggestion is that Earth's disappearance was an accident, but we still don't know what the aliens were trying to accomplish.

There were a couple of alien newscasts to watch. One suggested some kind of war developing in Sector Caroli. Another reported on a "white hole"--a kind of space volcano--forming in Sector Zaurak. Unforutnately, they were just text; they didn't show anything, so we couldn't see what type of alien they were talking about.
    
I was happy to find that you can save while on "away missions" and that you can turn off the relentless soundtrack with ALT-M. The rest of the sound effects are okay, except that when you view inventory, there's an annoying and unnecessary "ding" as you move from one inventory item to another. Scrolling through a lot of them sounds like you're demanding a bride and groom to kiss. On the positive side, every item seems to have a unique description, which I always think is cool.
            

I confess I don't understand this, though. Wouldn't the adjustment have to be on every cartridge?

        
In the final room we explored, an android gave us a key that would unlock the various "android heads" strewn around the base. There were eight heads, each offering information on one or more of the galaxy's eight sectors. Some of them were explicit about the technology and military level of these sectors, I guess suggesting a rough order of exploration. From lowest to highest, these are:
               

• Sector Algieba, where the Algiebian Empire has a low level of technology. This is the second explicit suggestion to go there first.

• Sector Zaurak, ruled by the "Rana Collective," which controls the resources and means of production and thus has kept development at a minimum.

• Sector Kornephoros, settled by refugees fleeing oppressive governments in Sectors Izar and Ankaq. Their technology is mostly good, but inconsistent because it is based on scavenging.

• Sector Caroli. The android says that at the end of something called the Grand Survey, Sector Caroli was reserved for "recreation and housing for lower tech societies." There, I'll find Oortizam Labs and the Life Gallery. The only native species is the Eldarin.

• Sector Alhena has no government. Two races called the Evian and the Scroe are in a war for its resources, while a race called the Dhoven tries to negotiate. It is a mix of mid- and high-tech ships and weapons.

• Sector Ankaq, ruled by a planet called Shadowside, has a high level of technology.

          

The android head's rundown on Ankaq.

        

• Sector Izar is where Centauri and the station itself are located. The android warns against penetrating further into the sector because the OMEGA (unsure whether this is the race or the name of an organization) is capable of easily destroying everyone but the Ominar.

• Sector Alnasl, ruled by the Ominar. Lately, they have been reporting bouts of insanity and mass violence, and other races are advised to keep away. "These developments," the head noted, "may well be connected to the disaster of the Sol Experiment."

            
If this really is an exploration order, it's too bad that the developers included it instead of encouraging the more open-exploration approach of both Starflight and Star Control II, not to mention previous New World games. Thus, I decided to defy it by heading direclty for Alnasl, one of the farthest stars in Sector Alnasl. I made it there with no problem, but when I arrived, a scaled alien told me that I was in violation of some "space conducts mandate" and refused to allow me to contact the single space station orbiting the star. I never figured out how this resolved because I had to take a break to reconcile my bank statement with Quicken, and Quicken decided it needed to update and took over my screen with its request for administrative rights, and whatever I did to make my DOSBox sessions survive such screen changes was undone when I restored the default configuration to play Planet's Edge. (In its default configuration, DOSBox always crashes for me any time anything causes a major screen change, including unplugging or plugging in an extra monitor, opening or clsoing the laptop, and getting a demand for administrative privileges.) Thus, when I reloaded, I was back on the Centauri outpost. I guess this is a good place to end for now.
        

If I'm "irrelevant," why don't you let me land?

         
So far, it's a decent game that evokes the best of Starflight and Star Control II, although I suspect the alien interactions are going to be less interesting and I worry that the blatantly suggeted exploration order will be essentially required. I also think it's too bad that New World, which has a lot of experience in more traditional RPGs, didn't bring more of their mechanics to character development and space combat. But it's early. We'll see how it goes.

*****

Time so far: 3 hours