Some (old) news about ducklings

As for the brood of sucklings one of my previous posts was about, they live and prosper. Well, only two of them prosper actually. All the others have died.

First we thought they are common wild ducks, but now it seems they are Muscovy Ducks. I can't tell if the info is correct, but they looked similar to Muscovy Ducks our acquaintance had, plus this picture looks the same as they were when they were young. They almost have ended up being cooked but they were eventually spared, and there are plans of making them survive the winter in warmed up hen house with all the chicken our relatives have.

I stopped posting here because I've switched to making my Russian blog (I had some problems with translating my Russian thoughts into English), so I beg your pardon for very rare updates. Feel free to contact me on Steam or anyhow you want. If I see you want something to read, I'll post an article or two specially for you ;)

Good luck and have fun!

A post of self-torture

I think I'm tired of all these new games. My psychology kills me actually, tearing my mind and soul apart. I have a kink of getting everything I can. I'd like to get all the trading cards and badges for all the games I have on Steam, I'd like to buy all the games I like despite of already having a huge backlog and plain physical inability to play all my hundreds of games at once. I can't eat and digest them all (figuratively), but I still want to. Argh, my extravagancy ails me bad...

Wild ducklings in the heart of capital of Kazakh Republic

Good evening (morning), my dear readers.

I was planning to make a useless post about how I struggled for saving some bandwidth by not redownloading music and prerequisites by fiddling with game files and Steam download mechanics, but it's not a topic people would be as agitated as myself about, so I'll change the direction drastically and write about an adventure our family had today :)

We're currently guests at the house of my mother-in-law in Astana, Kazakh capital. We have a private lot with two small-ish houses and all the beuties of post-soviet rural life like having conveniences in the kitchengarden and manual water delivery from water pump down the street. Well, it's not as bad as it seems - we're all got already used to it and it feels pretty comfortable now :) But that's not the point of my post.

Imagine my amasement when I felt strange agitation in the street after awakening at noon (I was resting after being preparing the last article 'till 5 AM). Our nephew and neece have found a whole brood of wild dicklings in open sewage trench by the street road (how did they get there?), so we had to catch them one by one and place them in plastic bathtub covered with thin perforated metal sheet or they'd certainly die of hunger or being eaten by street animals or crows. It was decided to build them a pen from spare scrap metal we had in abundance in our lot after our cat Murka has stolen one of them to teach its kitten to hunt. I might post a photo of the construction we made some later.

As for now I'll just post a photo of ducklings in the cardboard box we placed them 'till morning. Only one duckling is visible, while four more are bunched up under the veil. They feel warmer that way :)

I might post some updates about the wild life in our rural metropolitan home some days later. As for now the next game I plan to review is Organ Trail: Director's Cut, so stay tuned. Feel free to post a comment or two if you have anything to ask or to say. Bye!

P.S. Don't pay any attention to the timestamp on the photo - camera's clock was upset. Sorry for the inconvenience :(

Some additional info about Shattered Haven game folder's entrails

Good day (night) my dear readers :)

During the last post I stated the Screenshot Hunt, and, you know, the Hunt was successful. I've managed to get some photos no one (yet) posted over the internet. The way I did this was simple - tackling with some game code. Well, I *did* played the game for some hours, but solving the puzzles *again* was so painful that I decided it won't worth the efforts to beat the game anew for the sake of picture or two. And just before hitting the Quit button I noticed that Shattered Haven has an embedded editor. Yay, maybe I can find a way to play cinemas in under 15 minutes?

After reading some manual and digging through game folder in my Steamapps diretory I've managed to get all the list of game cut-scenes encrypted into base script of the first level. It didn't work properly though (it was playing the last file from the list) so I had to play scenes one by one and pick as much shots as it was required to please my aesthetic feelings. All the cut-scene files can be found at Steam\steamapps\common\Shattered Haven\RuntimeData\Scenes folder. You may encode playing scene by editing any cut-scene script by changing StartCunscene (paste-the-name-of-the-scene-here) command and then pressing one of the Test buttons just as I did.

Another good news is the music can be taken from the game RuntimeData\Music folder wothout any additional ripping. Feel free to listen it when you feel like it (just the same way as AI Wars: Fleet Command and many other Arcen Games games, excuse me for pun). You might also draw And if you're an ace of pixel-art you might want to create additional alternative visual content by following the instruction at RuntimeData\TexturePacks folder. In short you'll need to create your folder and place there some edited pictures with the same names and paths as of the original files at the Images folder and - voila! - your art is in the game :)

That's all I've managed to get you for some hours exploring the game entrails and bowels. Feel free to post a comment or two if you'll find something interesting.

Have fun! :)

Shattered Heaven - Screenshot hunt declaration

After having some months playing everything I could reach (like Skyrim, Left 4 Dead and Organ Trail), reading more info about zombie apocalypse-stuff (like Russian forum ozomby.ru and Walking Dead comix series), earning some spare bucks of pin money and getting completely bored with posting no new info on my blog, I decided to make an update. I declare a Hunt for good screenshots for my previous post. You know, it's much easier and appealing to read something with pictures, doesn't it? Well, I tink just the same way as you do, so I devote some next hours to picture-hunting playing Shattered Haven on my netbook with squeezed screen (1024x600, which is slightly less then the game supports). Wish me luck and wait for some updates in the future :)

Shattered Haven short review

Good day, my dear readers.

I've bought a new game some weeks ago and saw some to none reviews over the net, so decided to post mine. :)

Shattered Haven is a retro-styled game about fighting zombies (they called Grays) by solving environmental puzzles by moving small char over the screen in top-down perspective. One has to find inventory items and apply or place them to the right places in order to vanish all the Grays and move on. Action field is divided in screens. Player starts in the Overworld where he or she can visit any screen (s)he want and pick any portal (puzzle) he decide. Some puzzles require logic or trial-and-faliure approach, though some of them are action field, so if I had a friend to play the game had turned for me to the likeliness of Nintendo-like Left 4 Dead for two players. Though I had none so I won't discribe that part of the game.

The part I really liked was a story. Simple, strange and artificial, but filled with touching moments. Narratives are performed by one voice actor during a series of hand-drawn pictures (one picture per each "cut-scene"). While acting might be below the mark or up to par, the pictures are the reason why I had beaten all the puzzles just to look what I will see in the next episode (another reason was my thorough attitude and some other personal motives).

Though the story might be described in as short as one paragrapgh of plain text, and all NPCs and players are drawn as just tiny figures over the screen, I enjoyed the game a lot. Either it's just my personal traits like my love to different brain excercises and being a gamer since 1991 or just for the game's quality, I enjoyed playing a lot. I liked crawling in the bushes with a sickle and some iron spikes searching for new and efficient ways of eliminating patrolling Grays or laying traps to kill most hard enemies. I enjoyed hack-and-slash type of missions but some Bomber Manish puzzles delighted me as well. I was pleased to shoot my way through the hoards of zombies (bullets has no iron so they just stop them for a while), but I was happy when I found a baloon just to fly over them.

...Well, I liked the game. Really. But I don't think everyone will. Though you may try give it a shot, maybe you'll like it just like I did :)