Electrophotonic Timesinks

Red Faction Guerrilla, where you play as a merciless freedom fighter, fighting the corporate overlords on Mars using your powerful hammer

I’ve been pretty busy with exams, some new courses, and games these last couple of weeks, so I haven’t felt much for updating the blog. Curiously, Wordpress ATE the draft of the last entry I was working on a couple of weeks ago, though it might have been for the best. Still, it did put me off writing for a bit. I do get most of my blogging fix from Twitter, and it’s hard to justify filling out those microblog entries to post them here. Still, some of the autumn photos I’ve been tweeting these last couple of days might deserve a post of their own.

I’m listening a lot to Yellow Magic Orchestra, Gorillaz, the Deltron 3030 album, and Mr Scruff at the moment, and I’m definitely starting to feel inspired to write some mammoth music posts. That is, if I can tear myself away from studies and Red Faction Guerrilla, which I got extremely cheap from Impulse, Stardock’s equivalent to the Steam store. I hear that store is less restrictive than Steam when it comes to DRM, so by all means, give it a look if gaming is your thing.

Speaking of gaming, I’ve been doing that quite a lot lately, both at home and at a LAN at Visingsö. Apart from the already mentioned Red Faction Guerrilla (the best hammer-em-up since Ice Climbers, but on Mars and without seals to bash on the head), I’ve finally gotten all the stars in Braid (the hidden central theme in that game is very relevant to my interests, and this ending only confirmed it), made a Dr Robotnik in Champions Online’s character creator (which is just about all I did as I found the game terribly boring), and messed around in Heroes of Newerth, that DotA clone. Yes, DotA. It’s probably the most elitistic game I’ve played, and I hate it for it, but it’s still pretty fun to have a go at from time to time with friends. I’m not buying it though, just participating in the invite-only beta.

Shooty astronauts in Shattered Horizon

What I AM buying is Shattered Horizon, a finnish multiplayer shoot-em-up set in very near space in the very near future. Basically, it’s all about semi-realistic spacewalks with jetpacks and guns, and an intriguing suit power down mode which makes space just as silent as it really is. I’m far too much of a space geek to pass it up, and now I’m just waiting for Steam to unlock it come tomorrow morning.

An improved Orion rocket (?) for the REXUS student programme. Image copyright ESA.

While on the topic of space, something I’m reeeaally psyched over. I’ve been selected to participate in next year’s REXUS student program. In short, me and a 5-10 man group of students at KTH will be developing an experiment that will fly onboard an Esrange-launched REXUS rocket to the edge of space, at 100km. From there it will detach and carry out scientific measurements on the way down, before finally inflating airbags to airbrake and cushion its landing. I’m so damn excited about this, it’s almost a dream come true and just the kind of foot-in-the-door-of-the-space-industry I’ve been hoping for. This year’s mission has a blog; it would be pretty fun to contribute some writing to next year’s. Anyway, there are a couple of selection processes before what we propose to work on actually gets built and flies, but things are looking pretty good.

This is a game I’ve wanted to write about for a long time. Not so much for its gameplay, but for its presentation and above all music, both of which I think have stood the test of time remarkably well. Warning, opinionated author!

Music from Ridge Racer Type 4. Click to play, more further down.

In early 1999, Namco released a game called Ridge Racer Type 4, the fifth (!) installment in the Ridge Racer series on the Playstation, counting Revolution. I didn’t have a Playstation at a time, but when I saw the cover of Super PLAY magazine in I think it was April of that year, I knew I had to get one. It featured long-legged mascot girl Reiko Nagase, dressed in a white one-piece dress and white boots, in front of a sleek sports car, the rest of the cover keeping to the stark black text on yellow background seen above.

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