Down by the Wetlands
A few photos taken down by the Jerrabomberra Wetlands.
Autumn is Over
With Autumn finished, it becomes harder to find good photos. At least Canberra gets plenty of sun even in Winter.
Mechanical Mastery
They don’t make ’em like they used to. Like its Arcade Game Series sibling Dig Dug, Galaga is designed for arcade gaming sessions with no continuing story or narrative. You are a spaceship that shoots aliens. Simple. So in order to keep the player coming back and dropping their quarters in the arcade machine, it needed a hook. Galaga is an arcade shooter which is geared from the ground up around raising the skill ceiling, making expertise and skill matter as much as possible. I’d even say that Galaga is the anti-Farmville. I mentioned in my Dig Dug article the simple joy of mastering mechanics and chasing higher scores, but Galaga manages to distil this down into its purest form.
What Can We Learn From Retro Games?
Dig Dug, released on Steam as part of Bandai-Namco’s Arcade Game Series is a port of a game which turns 35 this year. Which does make it odd, writing about a game which is older than I am. Yet for all that 1982 feels like ancient history, within 5 years of Dig Dug we had Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania and Dragon Quest. So Dug has tunnelled us a nice time capsule to the end of the arcade era. But with so much progress in game design since that time, is there anything worth learning from Dug’s digs?
A Calm Afternoon
I rode down to the lake, hoping to play around with some golden hour light.
A Couple of Wildly Different Shots
I went for a stroll down by the river through the golden and blue hours, which resulted in a couple of decent shots. These kind of capture the difference betwen what you can do with golden hour light and blue hour dark.
Evoking an Atmosphere
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the first game on which I’m using my 1 hour rule and pulling out early with. This is because it is able to evoke such an excellently disturbing atmosphere. If I was to continue to play through Amnesia alone, at night, in a dodgy neighbourhood, approaching winter as my go-to game, then I’d end up a gibbering mess on the floor.
Playing With Processing
I’m quite happy to process my photos to with an inch of their life. Photography is about how you interpret the world, not just capturing it. So with some photos which perhaps didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, I’ve turned the tweak to overdrive on a couple of these.
The Perils and Potential of Licensed Games
Licensed gaming tie-ins with existing media have been met with groans ever since the infamous ET drove Atari to the wall. But in this most surprising of places, I’ve found that perhaps this class of games have been unfairly derided. I was expecting very little from Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders, having no familiarity with the source book or characters popularised in the Poirot TV series. However, this game shows the potential that comes from richly detailed characters and an already well-plotted story to draw upon, while also showcasing some of the pitfalls which can come with adapting an existing work to the game format.
Autumn Colour From the Lake
With calm winds and clear skies, I took the opportunity to shoot the last vestiges of Autumn.