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Review: Super Mario All-Stars: 25th Anniversary Limited Edition
It's bundled with a commemorative CD of 20 Super Mario tunes and sound effects, as well as a booklet filled with unreleased concept art and interviews with the high-bouncing, Italian-American plumber's creators.3.0
Mario turned 25 this year. So did I. And while Mario may not have necessarily run into the same maturity speed bumps as I did (from gangly clumsiness to fleeting interests in numerology and Chumbawamba), he, like all of us, has certainly changed throughout the years. Back in 1995, Nintendo thought the time was right to introduce Super Mario All-Stars, a collection of early Super Mario games that chronicled his evolution and made his classic titles available to younger players. Well, here we are, 2010, and the time is right—again: The '95 Super Nintendo compilation has been re-released for the Wii in a limited edition package.
Like the Super Nintendo version, this game is actually four games in one: Super Mario Bros. (which debuted on the original Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985), Super Mario Bros. 2 (NES, 1988), Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES, 1988), and Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels (NES, 1986). They all appear as they did on the 1995 Super Nintendo game (brightly colored with smoother, retouched graphics). Otherwise, they're exactly the same. Be prepared for flashbacks of blowing old cartridges in your Slayer poster-lined basement. It's a lot of good, old-fashioned 2D sidescrolling.
For those not familiar with The Lost Levels, it's a Japan-exclusive game that is the true sequel to the original Super Mario adventure. However, since the difficulty level was so much higher, and because it was so similar to its predecessor, it was decided that it'd be an unsuccessful sell in markets outside of Japan. So, when it was bundled in the 1995 SNES package, it marked the first time many global players had ever even seen the game. And it's true: The game's a beast. There are way more—and more aggressive—enemies, poison mushrooms, trickier obstacles and longer levels. It's an outing that's definitely not meant for the casual player, but rather those players who mastered the original Super Mario Bros. They don't make 'em like this anymore, that's for sure. The challenge was considerably high in the '80s, and it's considerably high now.
But what makes the Wii edition a worthwhile purchase, especially if you already own the original All-Stars, or even the original NES game paks? It's bundled with a commemorative CD of 20 Super Mario tunes and sound effects, as well as a booklet filled with unreleased concept art and interviews with the high-bouncing, Italian-American plumber's creators. The booklet is kind of cool, though I wouldn't describe it as jam-packed with never-before-seen sketches or designs (in fact, it's anything but). The booklet and the CD are collectibles, but not much more than that.
Unless you're someone who likes to stock on Nintendo swag, or if you or someone you know has never been graced by early Super Mario games' greatness, this collection has little new to offer. It's an especially redundant installment if you already have the SNES copy, the original NES games, or if you'd prefer buying the individual games on the Wii's Virtual Console—for a lot cheaper.
Developer: Nintendo Publisher: Nintendo Platform: Nintendo Wii Release Date: December 12, 2010 ESRB: E Buy: Game
Review: Lair of the Clockwork God Is a Fine-Tuned Comedy Machine
With their latest, Dan Marshall and Ben Ward successfully extend their lovingly parodic style to a much broader range of genres.4
"Why play only one genre of game when you could be playing two slightly different ones at the same time?" That's a somewhat misleading tagline for Lair of the Clockwork God, as you never simultaneously control the game's self-aware protagonists, Dan and Ben. Rather, you swap between them, as well as control schemes.
Dan is a platformer enthusiast who refuses to interact with objects, while Ben is a stubborn LucasArts point-and-click adventure junkie who doesn't care to jump. Figuring out how to use the skills we associate with their favorite genres of game to navigate through a Peruvian jungle, apocalyptic London, and an alien spaceship results in a game that's fresher and more innovative than yet another standalone platformer or adventure game would be. Lair of the Clockwork God is an exciting way for creators Dan Marshall and Ben Ward to not only set it apart from their prior Dan and Ben titles (Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please), but to successfully extend their lovingly parodic style to a much broader range of genres.
The game is a gold mine of comic scenarios in which the fictionalized, fourth-wall-breaking duo at its center solves novel puzzles using an intentionally haphazard control scheme. Dan's refusal to interact with even basic objects like a light switch results in gloriously convoluted workarounds, like the one where Ben must find a way not only to reactivate a drone, but to somehow make it glow in the dark. As the game points out, Ben is essentially Dan's platforming gimmick; instead of Dan having to seek out skill upgrades, Ben combines items from his inventory into accessories that allow Dan to double-jump or hang from walls. Lair of the Clockwork God's hybridization of platformer and adventure conventions is more than just a successful approach to everything that Ron Gilbert was trying to do with 2013's The Cave; it's also a simultaneous homage and critique of the conventions of various genres, with the two protagonists mercilessly commenting on how games have evolved—or not.
Lair of the Clockwork God's central conceit is that Dan and Ben must teach a faulty A.I. how to re-empathize with humanity. They do so by entering "constructs" (self-contained levels) that represent feelings like Grief or Fear, and each area is "beaten" once the duo has done enough to sufficiently model that emotion to the game's titular god. This focused, vignette-like structure also allows Marshall and Ward to quickly bounce between concepts, the result of which is a game that pokes fun at everything from visual novels to virtual reality, with plenty of righteous indignation left over for walking simulators and monetization options.
Ironically, the one thing Lair of the Clockwork God doesn't have much to say about is other platforming games. One of the 11 constructs, Anger, does a fine job of channeling through Dan the sort of curse-spewing, controller-flinging rage that those who've played masocore games like Super Meat Boy will instantly relate to. The rest of Dan's platforming sections feel secondary to Ben's adventuring. Whereas the inventory puzzles are given new life by Ben's outsized attempts to puzzle his way past obstacles that Dan can simply jump over, Dan's largely dialogue-free acrobatics feel like the interstitial stuff you have to complete to get to the next clever puzzle or bracing joke. Dan's the straight man who sets up the jokes, as when he mantles over some ledges so that he can pop the balloon holding up a dead clown aloft. But it's Ben who lands the comedy of those moments; his ability to Look at objects or to Use items on them provides the literal observational wit and shock humor needed to push these scenes over the edge: "I feel like pissing on a clown's entrails wouldn't be funny somehow."
Everywhere else, though, Lair of the Clockwork God has plenty to say, with each new area finding a clever way to demonstrate a particular emotion. Joy, for instance, manifests for Dan as a Sonic-like Green Hills Zone filled with floating beer caps and frothy alcohol waterfalls for him to run and jump through. By contrast, Ben's never happier than when he sets about dismantling the bureaucracy that governs the way a platformer respawns upon death.
Regardless of whether you share Ben and Dan's nostalgia, their emotions are infectious. The scenarios they face are absurdly over the top, but their actual responses are all too relatable. Most remarkably, however, is that the game can troll players with levels like Confusion and Disappointment and lull them into thinking that Hope is nothing more than a stinging punchline, only to at the last minute show up to the table with the unexpected sincerity of Regret. As it turns out, Lair of the Clockwork God is less about teaching an A.I. what it means to be human than about providing players with examples of how to be better people.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Size Five Games.
Developer: Size Five Games Publisher: Size Five Games Platform: PC Release Date: February 21, 2020 ESRB: T Buy: Game
Review: LUNA The Shadow Dust Is Visually Dazzling but Succumbs to Monotony
Its point-and-click adventure elements eventually feel alternately rudimentary and more than a little tedious.2.5
Presented in a beautiful hand-drawn style with detailed animation and a soft color palette, LUNA The Shadow Dust suggests a storybook come to life. The main characters, a cat-like creature with a shadowy face and a boy who wears a rabbit-eared hood, wordlessly make their way through a mysterious tower. Its rooms are full of puzzles tied to intricate devices and murals from long ago, depicting patterns to follow that will let you unlock the next door. But despite the game's considerable visual panache, its point-and-click adventure elements eventually feel alternately rudimentary and more than a little tedious.
Throughout, you control the characters separately, initially needing one of them to complete a simple task on one end of a room that will have some effect on the other side. As the game continues, you begin to split the characters up even further, moving them into entirely separate spaces. The creature, for example, may need to stand in some ethereal void filled with trees, while the boy pulls a lever to cycle the void through different seasons. Though the initially basic puzzles grow somewhat more challenging and satisfying to complete with this degree of separation added to the mix, monotony takes hold as you watch the characters laboriously shuffle from one end of the screen to another.
The game is at its best early on, as a kind of visual tour that demands minimal effort from the player, where the puzzles are a largely inconsequential barrier to seeing the sights. The puzzle rooms' initial layouts are economical, with small areas that hold some obvious visual clue for how to proceed. Such simplicity makes those first puzzles feel a little rote, but they're the most effective, unintrusive vehicle for simply appreciating LUNA's artistry.
As the game wears on, though, it introduces the aforementioned complex spaces, requiring the characters to separate for longer periods and trek up and down stairs as well as in and out the same doors. Combined with the sluggish walking cycle, the backtracking can often feel like outright punishment for not solving the progressively more involved puzzles on the first try. The very space that once seemed so breathtaking becomes easy to resent. As some of the animations and actions repeat for no discernible reason (one cart ride to gather books needs to be done a baffling four times), the gorgeous, otherwise relaxed experience begins to grate.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Application Systems Heidelberg Software GmbH.
Developer: Lantern Studio Publisher: Application Systems Heidelberg Buy: Game
Review: Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics Takes Path of Least Excitement
The uninspired material is unable to elevate the game's moth-eaten ramblings about good and evil.2
The draw of a game inspired by The Dark Crystal and indebted to Final Fantasy Tactics is easy enough to grasp. Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics offers fans of Jim Henson's 1982 fantasy film and Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance the chance to see Rian, Brea, and Deet—characters from the Netflix series—engage in tile- and turn-based combat. But it's difficult to imagine anyone being elated by BonusXP's game, as the paper-thin quality of its story is as undeniable as its mechanics are behind the times.
The gameplay loop of Age of Resistance Tactics is beyond familiar. You select different points on a map to initiate battles with bad guys—in this case, everything from the Skeksis, the main antagonists in the The Dark Crystal franchise, to giant worms. As in chess, you move your characters to different tiles in order to control key segments of territory, set up combination attacks, and so on. The objectives of war range from wiping out every enemy to moving a set number of characters to an exit. After victory, you gain experience points and gold, which can be spent on equipment that increases your power, defense, and other attributes.
Oddly enough, you rarely acquire enough gold to buy much of anything for a party that eclipses 10 members, but it doesn't matter. You can get by with substandard weapons and armor in Age of Resistance Tactics because the battles don't demand any unusual strategic thinking. Enemy groups tend to be small, the environmental elements are unthreatening (gusty winds, for one, can be avoided or ignored with little repercussion), and the character techniques fail to fall outside of what one would expect from a tactical game of this nature. The melee techniques, buffs, projectiles, and magic attacks at your disposal recall the player's combat options in everything from Into the Breach to Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
The developers at BonusXP try to spice up the affair with tiles of different heights and a job system that allows characters to combine disparate abilities. Obviously, then, they believe that emulating the well-executed concepts of Final Fantasy Tactics is a sturdy enough foundation, and to their credit, the results are serviceable. You certainly can't sleepwalk your way through Age of Resistance Tactics and fail to, say, increase the adaptability of your party by making offense-dominant characters adopt healing skills from a defense-oriented job. And you can't truly take advantage of the soldiers with ranged attacks unless you pay attention to height dynamics. But these gameplay elements are integral to more than a few titles from this subgenre of game, and BonusXP mostly just follows a well-tread formula.
Take away the characters, myths, and other connections to the Dark Crystal universe and it's easy to see that Age of Resistance Tactics has no real identity of its own. Outside of the occasional comic-book cutscene, the story is largely relegated to a small handful of lines of dialogue before or after battle. The plot is easily digestible but with the anonymous quality common to something made by committee, as in the way the heroes have to exterminate pests before a community will guide them to a new location. And such uninspired material is unable to elevate this fantasy game's moth-eaten ramblings about good and evil.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by ONE PR Studio.
Developer: BonusXP Publisher: En Masse Entertainment, Netflix Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: February 4, 2020 ESRB: E10+ ESRB Descriptions: Alcohol Reference, Fantasy Violence Buy: Game
Review: Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition Is a Magisterial Elegy for a Nation
Kentucky Route Zero is about America in a way few games aspire to be and fewer still succeed at.5
Had Kentucky Route Zero been released for the first time this year, it would have been easy to mistake its concerns for being entirely contemporary. When we talk about recent art that addresses the many injustices of capitalism and widespread disenfranchisement, there's a tendency to frame such discussion in the context of the 2016 election. Rising discontent, widening income gaps, and chosen ignorance in the face of ecological devastation have further popularized stories to voice our collective anger, usually with subtext about eating the rich or gazing upon the end of the world. The setting of the five-part episodic adventure game fits right into such an atmosphere of resentment: a ravaged, mysterious Rust Belt stripped for parts and left to rot, its people displaced and indebted yet doing their best to scrape by.
But this towering masterwork from the three-man development team of Cardboard Computer stretches back further, taking a much longer view of things past than what might simply be described as "post-Trump." Though the first part, Act One, came out in 2013, the game's weariness and outrage extend beyond even the late-2000s financial crisis that inspired it, cutting to the very bones of moral compromise that make up the United States. Kentucky Route Zero is about America in a way that few games aspire to be and fewer still succeed at, as its deceptively quiet story gives way to something odd, sad, and brimming with humanity.
Though the game begins with Conway, an old man who drives a sputtering delivery truck for a floundering antique store, the cast gradually expands with each act. Shannon Márquez repairs old television sets in the back of a bait and tackle shop and is the cousin of the enigmatic Weaver, who tends to appear and disappear through pirate TV signals. Ezra, introduced in Act Two, is a boy who lives with a giant eagle in the Museum of Dwellings, a housing display over a razed neighborhood. First seen in Act Three, Junebug is a robotic musician in punk attire, originally designed to clear the old mine but now making her own way and her own sense of self alongside Johnny, another mechanical worker. To some degree, you control all of them, moving them around the screen in different scenes, but mainly you choose their dialogue and decisions.
Spilling out in a script-like format and typeface, the words of Kentucky Route Zero are numerous, the majority of the game predicated simply on talking to people and visiting dreamlike places. Though it superficially resembles a point-and-click adventure game, there aren't really any puzzles, just choices to navigate the locations and the dialogue paths. A few of the choices matter, though most are flavor; for one, Conway's dog can be a male Homer, a female Blue, or have no designated name and gender. Mainly, you pick the direction of conversations, defining what the characters might say and what they fixate on, who speaks and who stays quiet as the other choices often melt away, the dialogue having flowed in one direction instead of another.
This is, then, a game that asks you to inhabit multiple perspectives rather than consider them from a fixed distance, absent the artifice of world-defining choices. You consider personalities and states of mind, discovering the characters through half-remembered snippets of stories and the way they speak to each other, the way they think, the way they interact with the world. The game develops its own unique rhythms of easygoing movement and gradual exploration, a gorgeous synthesis of sound, image, and text that gets to the heart of how it feels to be out in the night air, to inhabit space along country roads and woods and fields. This is a twilight drive made physical, evoking the imagery of abandoned places and husks of human habitation often only through the words of characters who speak in the over-sharing cadence of the lonely and lost.
Here, you don't poke around for collectibles or experience so much as a general sense of discovery, the urge to take your time and drive through the darkness for the simple sake of finding weird, pretty scenes dense with metaphor. One of the most impressive things about the game is how it has evolved, growing more ambitious from one act to the next while remaining remarkably cohesive. Later acts switch up camera angles and dialogue presentation without uprooting what's come before, without diluting its power; some of the most affecting moments are still the early ones that eschew the simplistic graphical style entirely, leaving you only with the text interface and the brilliant sound design of ethereal music, chirping bugs, and dripping water.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game often content to remain as mysterious as its namesake, an underground highway seemingly unbound by physical laws. Any fights, between unions and predatory companies, have already happened or doubtless will happen again. Instead, it explores the aftermath of cultural devastation, of how people survive in the ruins of the American experiment and how they build atop (or beneath) that wreckage, with the strange reality meant to represent what capitalism has done to the world. The magic is there, only contained and warped by the society that has grown around it.
The characters' paths narrow as the game continues, as the fist of an unfeeling system closes and people are overwhelmed by weaknesses; you drift from the role of driver to the person being driven to a simple observer of what's to come. The people you encounter are refugees of greed and exploitation and obsolescence, and there's a sliver of hope as they defiantly continue, finding pleasure in creation and companionship. They write, they compose, they perform, and they record, inspired by past struggles and a world content to forget its own history beyond facile preservation attempts in arbitrary little museums. After seven years, this visionary masterpiece concludes, an impressionist portrait of people doing what they can in a world that will never recover.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.
Developer: Cardboard Computer Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: January 28, 2020 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Language, Use of Drugs Buy: Game
Review: Reality TV Strikes Back in the Darkly Satirical Ministry of Broadcast
The game does a fine job of narratively showing the way in which a person can be broken down and made to believe anything.3.5
There's always been something fatalistic about video games, the way in which, once you've selected your playable character, you're locked into a specific role. As much as certain games might emphasize personal choice, like Mass Effect, or navigational freedom, like Skyrim, they're ultimately offering little more than the illusion of control.
The darkly satirical Ministry of Broadcast doesn't wait for some late-game BioShock-like twist to reveal that your character has never been—and never will be—more than a cog in the machine. The reality television program The Wall Show, filmed in what appears to be a repurposed Siberian prison, serves as a framework for a game that can't help but emphasize just how scripted everything is in its world. Even in the opening title sequence, which shows your character blithely jumping out of the back of a speeding truck that's just gorily flattened a janitor, the game is gleefully explicit about how your progress comes entirely at the expense of others, even going so far as to point out your complicity in all of it. What won't you stoop to as this unnamed, ginger-headed competitor in the latest season of a dystopian country's reality program, hoping to win the right to cross the wall and reunite with your loved ones?
Though this shoeless, put-upon protagonist believes himself to be an unsorted contestant, one without a clearly defined role in the competition, it quickly becomes obvious that Shoeless is being molded into the exact sort of player that the regime ruling the country he calls home demands its citizens to be. Resistance isn't just futile, it's not even an option. This is the flipside of what happens in Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, where saving your colleagues simply requires additional puzzle-solving. Here, you absolutely cannot progress if you're not willing to repurpose your comrades as fleshy bridges over spiked pits, or as distractions for feral dogs.
At first, this violence is explained away by The Wall Show as being staged: Nobody's really dying, thanks to absurdities like puncture-proof clothing. And Shoeless's belief in that allows him to absolve himself of guilt. For players, the pixelated aesthetic and comic tone of the game are similarly distancing: They downplay the goriness—and finality—of some of these later encounters, as if a person is any less dead if they've been cartoonishly impaled on a zeppelin, sucked into a drainage pipe, or consumed by an alligator. But though your character escapes angry enforcers, collapsing structures, and radioactive rooms, the game itself never lets you get away from the consequences of your actions. Regardless of the nature of any episode's violence, it always ends with your protagonist having to trudge back through the prison-like facility's basecamp, passing the baleful stares of his unhappy fellow contestants.
While Ministry of Broadcast does a fine job of narratively showing the way in which a person can be broken down and made to believe anything—the game's creators cite George Orwell's 1984 as an inspiration—the gameplay often feels out of sync with that storytelling angle. For one, the limited control scheme only lets you jump directly up or across and makes it difficult to position yourself by the ledges you're trying to climb. Making Shoeless's actions so laborious feels incongruous with the game's central premise: that Shoeless is all too easy to control, that he doesn't struggle or think twice about killing his companions.
It's one thing to be inspired by the classic mechanics of cinematic action-adventure games like 1989's Prince of Persia and 1991's Out of This World, but it's another to be unnecessarily beholden to them. Indeed, Ministry of Broadcast's allegiance to those games' clunky controls is especially odd given that its artistry is miles away from the drab, pixelated graphics of those older titles. This is a game that knows how important it is that players feel the full illustrative soullessness of all those snowy exteriors, graffitied corridors, red-lit bunkers, and empty warehouses that make up the barbed-wire-ringed confines of The Wall Show.
But if you can get past its unnecessarily irksome controls, there's a lot to enjoy about Ministry of Broadcast. While it remains a platformer throughout, the game's various episodes offer different takes on the genre, from the emphasis on stealth during a prison break, where you walk around wielding an imaginary finger-gun, to a surreal horror sequence in which you stumble around the dark depths of the facility where The Wall Show is filmed, led by a talking, glow-in-the-dark crow. One day you're participating in a (rigged) election between the colors Red and Blue, and the next you're in the middle of a war movie, diving desperately into bunkers as you flee an enemy nation's aerial bombardment.
The only constant throughout these settings is the way in which you're being conditioned. Just look at the way each episode's name riffs on the Kübler-Ross model, shifting from the "Celebration of Denial" to the "Repression of Depression" before ultimately ending with a fatalistic choice in which you either accept what you've done, or you die. Or to frame it as Ministry of Broadcast does, sometimes a game simply isn't winnable.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Hitcents.
Developer: Ministry of Broadcast Studios Publisher: Hitcents, PLAYISM Platform: PC Release Date: January 30, 2020 ESRB: T Buy: Game
Review: Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot Is a Bloated Serving of More of the Same
The world here is littered with side missions out in the wild, and most of them amount to uninspired fetch quests.2.5
With over nearly 40 years of material to draw from, for any Dragon Ball video game to retell the story of the first Saiyans to arrive on Earth and Goku awakening to his lineage is as lazy as a Star Wars game going to Hoth. And yet, that's exactly the story that Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot tells, without doing anything new to make it worth telling.
It'd be nice to say that Kakarot at least represented a sea change in telling that story as an RPG, but "DBZ as an RPG" has also been done to death, even done quite well a couple of times. And, for what it's worth, Kakarot isn't even remotely the worst example of a Dragon Ball RPG: For that, look no further than the awful, throwaway card-based games.
Visually, this game is largely on par with 2018's stellar Dragon Ball FighterZ. The combat, while extremely simplified, does capture much of that trademark DBZ flash and destructive flair. And quite a bit of work has gone into recreating the show's TV-style presentation through interstitials, narration, and music, bringing back the playful tone of the original Japanese production (every version of the show broadcast in the West tries to introduce an edginess that isn't there in Japanese cuts). The best thing about the game is that it's the most faithful adaptation of the saga, but that also happens to be the worst thing about it.
The anime was notorious for padding out each episode and each story arc with startling amounts of filler material. That included special attacks that would literally take multiple episodes to charge and fire, slapsticky interludes involving characters light years away from the main action, and, at times, characters just standing around waiting to continue a fight.
There's a sequence early in the DBZ metaseries where Saiyan baddies Vegeta and Nappa face off against Earth defenders Piccolo, Krillin, and Gohan, but when they sense that Goku—killed in a previous battle with his brother, Raditz—is being resurrected, they literally stop the fight to wait for him to arrive. There's legitimate reason for that on the show—the anime was in production while the manga was still being drawn, which left the animators stalling for time—but, for reasons beyond explanation, this and other excruciating wheel-spinning has been replicated perfectly in Kakarot. And there's easily over 25 hours of that sort of scene here. Indeed, this is an RPG that won't allow the next major story beat to be advanced until you've done unrelated busywork to stall for time. What should be rousing nostalgia for the early days of the DBZ series ends up bringing back painful memories of playing Anthem.
What makes Kakarot particularly egregious is how much its padding issues apply to its design. This is, ostensibly, an open-world game, abundant in massive countrysides and cityscapes, but these environments are largely empty. The world here is littered with side missions out in the wild, and most of them amount to uninspired fetch quests. There are cooking and fishing mini-games, though neither of them are as crucial to the plot, character development, or your survival as similar mechanics in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Final Fantasy XV.
In Kakarot, you can fly around collecting orbs that can be spent to unlock new moves, which is fun but not nearly enough to justify all that empty, unused space. There are training grounds scattered across the game's open world where you can defeat random characters to learn new moves, and there are stores that sell healing items to use during battle. These are both useful resources, but they're tiny points of light across what's otherwise miles and miles of nothing.
Though Kakarot comes alive during combat, that's also not without its flaws. You can perform all manner of light-show-inducing Super Moves by holding the left shoulder and pushing a button. However, as long as you can maneuver properly and you're stocked up with enough healing items, you can so very easily cheese your way through the entire game by just spamming your most basic attacks. Super Moves wind up being for your own satisfaction than a vital cornerstone of a fight. That's despite having an entire Final Fantasy-style grid/job system meant to provide enhancements to your team of fighters, and the lack of tension or challenge from fights provides you with absolutely no urgency or incentive to use it.
Kakarot's overarching problem is one of focus. This is a game made with all the resources necessary to create a great Dragon Ball title, and no small amount of affection for the universe. It also has no ambitions of being more than a set of weak, timewasting barriers between you and witnessing a storyline that fans have seen recreated dozens of times before. Even the folks behind the anime knew there was room to reduce the story to its strongest elements, which is how the abbreviated Dragon Ball Z Kai came about. It's not certain who exactly needed Dragon Ball Z regressed to its most bloated form, but it does this story no favors.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.
Developer: CyberConnect2 Publisher: Bandai Namco Platform: Xbox One Release Date: January 17, 2019 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Mild Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence Buy: Game
Review: Journey to the Savage Planet Gamifies What It Means to Critique
The game's themes feel like facile wallpaper over mechanics that feed into the ideas being critiqued.2
In Journey to the Savage Planet, you work for Kindred Aerospace, a dubious space exploration company. At their behest, you're dropped onto the uncharted planet AR-Y 26 with orders to explore, document, and ultimately plunder the place for resources. All the while, live-action videos of Kindred's wacky CEO and audio commentary from EKO, the sociopathic ship AI, emphasize that this is all supposed to be comedic. By loudly depicting resource exploitation as well as general disregard for the environment, the company's personnel, and any semblance of collateral damage, the developers at Typhoon Studios mean to send up colonialism and capitalism at large. (The "savage" part of the game's title is satirical, or at least it's supposed to be.) But like The Outer Worlds, the game's themes feel like facile wallpaper over mechanics that still feed into the same ideas being critiqued.
Like so many modern video games, for example, you must engineer new equipment from whatever stuff you've scrounged from the environment. AR-Y 26's system of branching paths, potential shortcuts, hidden health upgrades, and scan-able objects recalls Metroid Prime, only with the addition of alien alloys and mineral deposits to swat at for crafting materials. It plays like the standard-issue consume 'em up, only with EKO's snarky voice whispering in your ear to assure you that this is the point—that this is the commentary.
EKO jokes that your menial progression is incremental at best, and for a while, that's true; it takes several hours before the game feels particularly satisfying to navigate, as you gradually invest in things like grappling hooks and jetpack boosts that provide double, then triple, then quadruple jumps. The combat never feels particularly good, either, since it demands too much aiming precision from what otherwise amounts to an undemanding series of dodges.
The game might have been onto something if its progression was appropriately banal or if your struggle for resources felt particularly disempowering, positing you as a lowly worker whose labor chiefly benefits someone higher up the ladder. But instead, the materials are your reward. You're meant to comb the environment's tall grass and hidden alcoves for any hint of more resources to vacuum up, because the allure of that incremental progress is your carrot on a stick. It's a compulsive progression loop familiar from so many other games, where finding another orange goo or alloy chest pumps the good chemicals into the right part of your brain. The only difference is a thick cloak of irony that's supposed to pass for subversiveness.
In a game like Subnautica, the exploration gives you a better sense of the world; it makes you feel small, makes you appreciate what you're taking from it to survive. At its most intermittently successful, Journey to the Savage Planet is built with a thrilling verticality that might have achieved a comparable, if far less successful, effect. The outcrops of floating rocks are conducive to death-defying shortcuts and last-minute grapples, often letting you hop right off the edge of one area to immediately land in another far below.
But the game scarcely quiets down long enough to give in to these moments of wonder, undercutting any fleeting semblance of awe with obnoxious comedy. AR-Y 26 is a playground to be bulldozed, full of things to poke, prod, and jokily slaughter in Kindred's name. It is, for example, reasonably humorous that your jetpack vomits out a conspicuous cloud of smug. But it becomes far less funny once EKO insists with a wink that, no, it definitely isn't harming the environment. The whole game is like this. There's no restraint or subtlety to the comedy, only loud and constant underscoring of the things that the writers (often mistakenly) believe to be funny, like an explorer log that details horror at encountering the "Valley of a Thousand Farts." Titles and text entries are riddled with groan-inducing internet lingo, as one quest advises you to "kill it with fire" and EKO's self-written encyclopedia entry opens with "It me."
There's perhaps a version of this game that's content to shut up and let players get their colonialist kicks in blissful ignorance. Though it wouldn't fix the problems inherent to the premise or video game progression systems in general, it would rouse a mere fraction of the irritation. But as is, so full of insistent and toothless satire, Journey to the Savage Planet is a monument to hypocrisy, content to gamify and reward the very things it means to criticize. The result is less an anti-capitalist statement than a statement that anti-capitalism is trendy.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by 505 Games.
Developer: Typhoon Studios Publisher: 505 Games Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: January 28, 2020 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Crude Humor, Language, Use of Drugs, Violence Buy: Game
Review: SELF Nightmarishly Grapples with Our Vanishing Sense of Self
SELF rejects the power-building, level-gaining escapism that typifies the majority of pop games.4
Developer doBell's SELF employs a storytelling mode that defies easy categorization. For one, you must play the game and see multiple endings in order to truly understand the nature of a young boy's search for his missing dad in a world that scarcely comprehends him. The text-based narrative is, for no immediately apparent reason, presented as subtitles on a monitor that will often be overwhelmed by static at certain points. The game's terse writing places your playable character in a dream of sorts, where the people closest to him avoid answering his questions and where everyone in the city he calls home can disappear in the blink of an eye. The effect is nothing short of nerve-wracking.
By repeatedly showing an image of cracked glass, where the diverging lines of the crack are explicitly characterized by the narrative as different pathways and destinations in the story, SELF encourages the player to restart the game after arriving at one of many endings. The proceedings concern a child named John who wakes up from sleep only to enter an obfuscating nightmare of an existence in which he cannot find his father. The fractured narrative is consistently fascinating to put together as a puzzle, even if does occasionally lead to tedium. Even though a helpful checkpoint system allows the player to skip parts of the story, you may still have to retread sections of SELF's narrative that you recently finished reading, depending on which ending you're trying to discover on a subsequent playthrough.
A bigger drawback of SELF, though, is its occasional reliance on the "bullet avoidance" of Toby Fox's acclaimed indie Undertale. This type of gameplay is one-dimensional by design, as the player simply controls a powerless icon within a box and attempts to avoid contact with objects that move into the space. The largely mindless routine of moving a bland avatar—a heart in Undertale, a crudely drawn face within a square in SELF—away from easy-to-dodge projectiles becomes stale, and the action is even more unsatisfying in SELF, as objects entering the box have even more predictable trajectories than those in Undertale.
Luckily, everything else about SELF largely works and adds up to an unsettling and revelatory experience. John's mother absurdly evades the child's questions about the new status quo. Eventually, he's able to leave the house for answers, but visits to an arcade, school, hospital, and bus bring more confusion before the player is able to discern exactly what has happened to John's family. And along the way, any sense of calm in the story is challenged by a variety of sharp sound effects, from balloons popping to the high-pitched dinging of bells.
The game goes in different directions based on whether John wishes to "face" the truth during crucial moments in the story, and the various endings often transpire out of nowhere and vary in their emotional impact. In an unexpectedly comic turn, one ending brilliantly comments on the tale's general sense of fatalism: At the very start of SELF, the player can choose to keep going back to sleep rather than get out of bed—one of gaming's oldest clichés—and this decision brings you to "The Happiest Ending," in which John never has to wake up to the disturbing dreamscape that awaits him otherwise.
Other choices reveal curious reversals of seemingly established facts. If you're able to trigger particular memories within the dreamlike narrative, the text will sometimes read as if it's written more from the perspective of John's father. And deeper into SELF, the script implies that perhaps you're actually playing as the father who imagines himself as the son.
Although the story certainly suggests that dreams contain hard-to-define approximations of reality, the ultimate theme of SELF is that you are whom you love. In a mind-blowing twist on the game's primary visual conceit of a monitor displaying text, SELF redefines the screen as a mirror with nails in its corners. If you remove the nails and then the mirror, another mirror appears with a silhouette of a kid. From there, one by one, mirrors can be pulled away to reveal a larger shadow of a person. The tragedy of life, as SELF sees it, is the older we get, the more we grow, but this growth is offset by a loss of self via the deaths of loved ones. Far from an orthodox release, SELF rejects the power-building, level-gaining escapism that typifies the majority of pop games that audiences so casually, unassumingly embrace.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by indienova.
Developer: doBell Publisher: indienova Platform: Switch Release Date: January 16, 2020 ESRB: E10+ ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence, Mild Language Buy: Game
Review: The First-Person Puzzler Lightmatter Coasts on One Bright Idea
It can't step out of the silhouette of its most brilliant predecessor, Portal.3
At the start of the first-person puzzler Lightmatter, within the mined-out heart of a mountain, an arrogant scientist, Virgil, is experimenting with ways in which to efficiently turn light into an energy source. Things inevitably go wrong, and soon your blank slate of a protagonist is stranded in the depths of the mountain, trying to follow Virgil's caustic directions in order to safely evacuate a facility overrun with killer shadows. It's a concept that turns everyday objects, from an overhead ceiling fan to a conveyor belt, into deadly platforming challenges, as the shadows they cast must be avoided at all costs.
At one point, Virgil directly compares this situation to the classic childhood game "The Floor Is Lava." It's a too-winking nod that calls attention to the carefully constructed nature of Lightmatter's puzzles, which are better encountered as a naturally occurring part of a given area's background, like the way in which a cubicle farm's haphazard arrangement of desks and chairs damningly form a river of shadows that must somehow be forded. In such moments, the game hews closer to The Witness than Portal, in that the puzzles feel like natural extensions of the environment as opposed to artificially engineered test chambers.
The correct paths through Lightmatter's once-generic office and cavern areas are deliberately engineered to have a single, tricky solution. But the game generally does well to distract the player from this contrived construction, wherein the path to the exit is always blocked by a broken light source but the moveable klieg lights and beam-reflecting photon connectors you'll use to literally shine some light on the problem are always conveniently within reach.
It's not until the last third of the game that the puzzles become jarringly conspicuous in their design. Until this point, the various contraptions found within the facility—like conveyors and light-activated switches—have a practical purpose, whether that's for transporting quarried rocks or for testing and containing the lightmatter. Only a few of these machines felt like they served no purpose other than creating a puzzle, like an elevator that doesn't normally travel between floors, requiring instead that you send it back to the first floor so that you can ride atop it to the third. In these final experimental labs, though, the rooms give themselves over to needless brain-teaser padding, as they serve no purpose beyond stymying players.
On a visual level, the developers at Tunnel Vision Games have done a fine job of translating the complexities of lighting into a puzzle mechanism. Going with a clean, cel-shaded look, as opposed to a more photorealistic aesthetic, ensures that the spotlight effects operate predictably in each environment, just as the game's muted palette makes it easier to distinguish between objects. Perhaps taking a cue from Mirror's Edge, the rare splashes of color—green plants, orange machinery sparks, red warning lights—help make even clearer what can be interacted with. And, incidentally, this streamlined aesthetic doesn't lead to dumbed-down puzzles, as the complexity of each area stems from clever design as opposed to an excessive number of obstacles or a misleading series of visual cues.
Would that the game's mad-scientist-run-amok storyline weren't so derivative. There's not a single transmission from Virgil that doesn't bring the comically sociopathic ribbing of Portal's GLaDOS to mind. (There's even a reference to Aperture Laboratory and its cake.) Those lines can do little else, because Virgil is ultimately as much of a cypher as your own "persistent, replaceable, and silent" player character, whom Virgil identifies as a tourist, a safety inspector, a journalist, and, finally, a spy, as if trying to establish what the developers won't.
This is a game that tasks you with trying to escape the facility in one moment, then with helping to shut it down in the next. And because your motivations are so ill-defined, it's impossible not to see your character as anything but a vehicle for solving puzzles, ensuring that Lightmatter is unable to step out of the silhouette of its most brilliant predecessor. And that's a damning thing for a game that's all about deadly shadows.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Zebra Partners.
Developer: Tunnel Vision Games Publisher: Aspyr Platform: PC Release Date: January 15, 2020 Buy: Game
The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s
Wherever the medium goes from here, these are the games that point the way forward.
Comedian Kumail Nanjiani claimed some years back that video games are the only art form that got better solely because of technology. While that's arguably been true for much of the medium's history, it ceased to be the case in the 2010s. The decade in gaming didn't lack for astounding technical achievements, but its arc was defined less by powerful technology than powerful ideas.
This was the decade that saw tiny studios, lone creators, and crazy concepts reign supreme. This was the decade that saw every platform become a viable place for ideas to sprout and bloom. The limits of the medium are seemingly bound only by the human imagination, and at every level, regardless of the horsepower needed, it now feels like anything is possible.
The decade's best games took full advantage of that new freedom by pushing the envelope in every direction. Wherever the medium goes from here, these are the games that point the way forward. Justin Clark
100. BioShock Infinite
BioShock Infinite is a visceral experience about an irredeemable psychopath murdering a city of despicable fundamentalists. Booker Dewitt is tasked with saving a reality-tearing woman from a floating white-supremacist paradise, leading to the interactive slaughter of its inhabitants; so much was made of the game's violence that many overlooked that the repugnant brutality was exactly the point. While most shooters shy away from grue or any consequences to the player's actions, BioShock Infinite vividly depicts these rippling across universes, where a single choice can carry disastrous results. This is an astonishing game that philosophizes on the human condition—consider that the opponents of Columbia's segregation aren't interested in equality, only in suppressing their suppressors—while critiquing its entire genre, concluding that the protagonist of a first-person shooter shouldn't be allowed to live in any universe. Ryan Aston
99. The Norwood Suite
The public is more aware than ever of the infallibilities of well-known artists, and Cosmo D's The Norwood Suite evokes the discomfort that many of us often feel when the dirty secrets of an icon are put on display. The setting here is a hotel that houses the legacy of a bandleader named Peter Norwood, whose exploitative relationships with other musicians come to the player's attention via surreal trips down hidden passageways. Yet this building also bears numerous odd pleasures to behold, not least of which is a soundtrack that seamlessly morphs as you move from room to room. The characters are literally riffs in Cosmo D's stupendous orchestration; different instruments and notes accompany different lines of dialogue as they appear on screen. The more you explore this strange location, the more you see the threat of commercialization in the form of corporate employees aiming to turn the hotel into a greater moneymaking scheme. Cosmo D gives no easy answers on how capitalistic culture can reconcile the sins of artistic giants, and that ambiguity makes The Norwood Suite a complicated and essential illustration of contemporary concerns. Jed Pressgrove
98. Overcooked
To make it absolutely clear that Overcooked isn't your traditional cooking game, developer Ghost Town Games opens mid-apocalypse. A giant, ravenous beast—imagine the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man made of spaghetti and meatballs—threatens to consume your rooftop kitchen. The Onion King, cheering from the sidelines, implores you to fend him off by hastily preparing a soothing selection of salads; after you've failed, he transports you back through time, so that you can be a more seasoned chef next time. The subsequent missions, then, are less about tapping out increasingly complex orders, as with Cooking Dash and its ilk, or the exquisite, Zen-like Cook, Serve, Delicious. Instead, Overcooked keeps the recipes simple and the kitchens about as unconventionally chaotic as they come. At times, the difficulty can make this party game feel like a lot of work, although in fairness, the same can be said for Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, another demandingly chaotic, but ultimately enjoyable, couch co-op title. The meat of the title—cooperative, chaotic cooking—is almost perfectly handled, as are the garnishes, from the catchy musical score to the delightful crew of unlockable animal chefs. By keeping the kitchens varied and the action constant, Ghost Town Games avoids the flavorless death known as repetition, and doesn't overcook its premise. Aaron Riccio
97. Downwell
Downwell is a quarter-eater without the quarters, an arcade game from out of time. As your character tumbles down an enclosed space, collecting gems and shooting bullets from his feet, the game feels like something you play as much as you give yourself over to. Each run demands split-second decisions. Do you go back for more gems, as a cabal of monsters closes in behind you? Do you risk a stomp attack that demands more precision but will reward you with a badly needed reload? Do you break the block for gems at risk of losing space to maneuver? Each run showers you in game-changing upgrades that introduce still-more variables to consider at a moment's notice, while you continue blasting your way into the abyss. Like the very best action games, Downwell becomes its own trance state. Steven Scaife
96. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Prepare to die a lot. The modern gaming landscape is one littered with checkpoints, save states, and wonky AI. 2K Games's reimagining of the XCOM strategy series harkens back to the cult classic's unsettling gameplay and punishing difficulty. The rewarding sensation one receives after successfully commanding a squad out of a heated skirmish with strange intergalactic warriors is unparalleled in modern games. These tense battles eventually lead the player to actually form an emotional bond with your team members, which makes their inevitable demise that much more crushing. These interactive elements lend XCOM's tense action an atmosphere that's engrossing and wholly addictive. It's easy to treasure an old-school counter-offensive game that understands the motivating power of fear. Kyle Lemmon
95. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
In the not-so-distant future, large corporations and multinational firms have developed their operations beyond the control of national governments, and human biomechanical augmentation is simultaneously rising in popularity across the world and being demonized for its role in changing humanity. Like the very best sci-fi, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is about ethics and consequences; this is a game that asks what it is to be human. The game presents both the rise of biotechnology as a means to advance human ability and the human experience, and the subsequent consequences on the world. Its layered narrative matches its deep multifaceted gameplay, set in a rich and atmospheric universe that feels not too far away from our own. Despite a slow start and occasional missteps (the much maligned boss fights were "fixed" for DLC), Eidos Montreal has created an engaging, compelling experience that does justice to the critically acclaimed Deus Ex series. Aston
94. Death Stranding
Hideo Kojima's first game away from Konami, Death Stranding, finds him tearing down the familiar structure of the open-world game and building it back up again as something weirder, more deliberate, and more honest about what it is. It transforms basic traversal into the entire conceit rather than more or less a time sink between story missions and side activities. It peels away the artifice of open-world structure, revealing the dressed-up delivery missions underneath while declaring that they're a worthwhile pursuit in their own right. And once you've totally internalized that idea, the tools the game provides become enthralling revelations: You eventually build sprawling highways and ziplines that propel you across arduous terrain. You've worked for them. You've earned them. Death Stranding is an admirable experiment for big-budget game design, playing like one long, bizarre, and startlingly persuasive argument that the journey is fulfilling in its own right. Scaife
93. Iconoclasts
While Iconoclasts's bright and imaginative 2D pixelated graphics would look right at home on a 16-bit console of yore, its themes and ideas are very much that of the modern day. The game's silent protagonist, Robin, is trapped in a fascistic society ruled by fundamentalist dogma, where her skills as a mechanic are outlawed, positioning her as a criminal and counterforce in a setting that opposes scientific advancement and free-thinking. Robin's journey to escape execution and expose the truth of her society's dominating political organization aligns her with other well-crafted characters who oppose the tyrannical theocracy both in ideology and ability, and it's through its characters' unique facilities that Iconoclasts demonstrates a kind of Ludonarrative harmony, as the gameplay and themes are in lockstep, crafting an experience that tackles important issues of faith, religion, and totalitarianism. Throughout, Iconoclasts's varied gameplay mechanics directly serve the narrative. Consider Robin's special tool, an illegal wrench, and how it not only symbolizes suppression of science and personal freedoms, but is used as a weapon against enemies and a means of controlling technology and traversing obstacles, often directly modifying and rearranging objects in the world. It also pushes Robin toward her ultimate goal of fixing the broken world for good. Aston
92. Yakuza 0
This prequel faced the unenviable task of taking a decades-old abstruse Japanese series and making it accessible for the masses. Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima, important underworld figures later in the series, are introduced to us as a low-level recruit and disgraced outcast, respectively, from different organized crime syndicates. They're pulled into a conspiracy after Kazuma is framed for murder and Goro rejects an assassination job after finding out that the target is a defenseless blind girl. Their captivating narratives come together in a larger plot brimming with sociopolitical intrigue about property development and clan territory. Think of Yakuza 0 as noir through the lens of '80s Japan. Its gameplay simplifies the series's complicated mechanics without limiting the player or compromising the variety in the details. One can take part in any manner of activities throughout the Tokyo and Osaka settings while progressing through the campaign, allowing the game to prove itself both as a compelling prequel to an ongoing series and as its own self-contained story. Aston
91. Dishonored
Arkane Studios's Dishonored combines elements of other immersive sims, like BioShock and Thief, to create a mechanically enjoyable first-person stealth game that challenges your awareness and resourcefulness. While its narrative about betrayal and revenge is familiar, the game is enticing for the autonomy it offers players. Dishonored is very much a gamer's game: It hands you a target—kill High Overseer Campbell, for example—before then turning you lose, giving you the freedom of the world and Corvo's powers to deal with your target however you see fit. Though the end of every mission may resort to a binary lethal/non-lethal choice, the ways you can approach any mission are bountiful, making each run different enough to warrant multiple playthroughs. Jeremy Winslow
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i am in need of an efficient way to resize a 2d array. the 2d array must be able to increase and decrease in size very frequently.
currently i am doing it the least efficient way possible.
public void ArrayResize(int rows , int columns){ holdArray=new int[iMapTiles.length][iMapTiles[0].length];//copy the current array into temporary array for (int r=0; r < holdArray.length; r++){ for (int c=0; c < holdArray[0].length; c++) holdArray[r][c]=iMapTiles[r][c]; } iMapTiles= new int[rows][cols];// reinstantiate the array to be the wished size if(rows>holdArray.length||columns>holdArray[0].length){//copy the temporary array into the new array for (int j=0; j < holdArray.length; j++) for (int k=0; k < holdArray[0].length; k++) iMapTiles[j][k]=holdArray[j][k]; }else{ for (int j=0; j <rows; j++) for (int k=0; k <columns; k++) iMapTiles[j][k]=holdArray[j][k]; } }
this works, but it is very slow since i re-instantiate the arrays very often. i was thinking of either implementing a 2d arraylist(seems hard) or just using variables to hold the size of the array and instantiate the array to be bigger than it actually is, then i would only have to resize it every once in a while(like an arraylist).
any tips? thanks

subset: commoncrawl


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And thats how the war started.
And thats how the war started.
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Getting school lunch nutrition right for all is complicated
Nutrition is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.
That was one of the messages I took from this intriguing New York Times story about New York City schools cutting calories below federal minimums as they made school meals healthier.
For most Americans, nutritionally dense food that has fewer calories is a good thing, but a child hunger advocate quoted in the story made the point that it's not beneficial for all.
Joel Berg, executive director of New York City Coalition Against Hunger, criticized the move toward making meals leaner.
"It is based on politics and personal whims, not nutrition science," Berg was quoted in the story as saying. "It is based on the city's absurd belief that hunger no longer exists among children, despite federal data that proves that one in four New York City children live in food-insecure homes. The city's one and only response to child hunger is taking food away from kids."
Yet, 21 percent of New York City middle and elementary school children are obese.
The situation encapsulates the complex relationship between obesity and hunger, and underscores how difficult it is for a school system to stand in for parents in deciding how to best nourish a child.
Making school lunches out of real, healthy food is a positive trend, there's no doubt about that. But when a skinny, hungry kid is shorted a few hundred calories in an effort to provide a menu designed to cater to his plump classmates, it shows how far schools need to go in devising appropriately varied nutrition strategies.


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Send Savana Fudge Cake to your relatives, friends etc. The cake is always symbol that you are happy in other success/occasions and be part of his/her happiness. keep the smile in other happiness.
We offer you beautifully designed cakes with exceptional taste. A little bliss in every bite brings a perfect finishing to any occasion. Now give your loved ones a royal gift and get the cake that everyone is talking about. We made your occasion, a day to remember. Innovative cakes with elaborate taste. We present you very special cakes for your very special occasions. Decorations and finishing touches may vary but we will do our best to provide you the cake you dreamed of.
Deliver only to Lahore.
Order before 11 A.M Pakistan standard time for same day delivery.


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Tech Update
Dispelling Myths About Plasma Cutting
Myth No. 1: Plasma is expensive—While plasma systems can come with a higher pricetag that other cutting equipment, high cutting speeds and superior cut quality from PAC result in productivity gains that save operators time and money. Faster cutting speeds—without any preheating of the workpiece required—enable operators to complete jobs quickly. Better cut quality, with less dross and better edge quality, means fewer labor-intensive finishing operations are required. And, since most handheld plasma systems run off of compressed air, shops avoid costly cylinder rentals and delivery charges.
Case in point: Northern A1 Services, Kalkaska, MI, a safety and environmental cleanup company, recently switched from oxyfuel cutting to plasma to cut titanium for a variety of aerospace projects.
"There's no question our company is saving money by using plasma," says Northern A1 project manager Brian Balon. "We used to pay a lot for gas. With plasma, we're saving that money and creating a safer working environment."
Myth No. 2: Plasma is only for use on thin materials—Twenty years ago, this statement may have been true, as some early handheld plasma systems did not meet expectations for performance on thicker materials. And, plasma does offer some advantages on thin materials—a smaller heat-affected zone and less warping—compared with oxyfuel cutting. As PAC technology has advanced, systems now provide cutting capacity to 1.75 in. or more.
Northern A1 finds that PAC is the best choice 80 percent of the time. "We still use oxyfuel when cutting our thickest stuff, but for the vast majority of jobs, plasma is faster," Balon says.
Myth No. 3: Plasma is only for use on stainless steel—Many PAC-system owners purchase their first plasma system for cutting stainless steel, aluminum or other nonferrous alloys. Some continue to believe that plasma can only be used on these materials. In truth, plasma proves effective on any electrically conductive alloy, and is one of the world's most popular methods for cutting mild steel. The process also is effective for cutting painted, dirty or even rusted steel.
Myth No. 4: Plasma is only for cutting —Plasma systems cut, pierce and bevel electrically conductive alloys and parts of all types, shapes and sizes. With a simple change of the torch and/or consumables, some plasma systems can switch between hand and automated cutting. Plasma systems also can be used on X-Y cutting tables, robot arms, with a track burner for effective long, straight cuts, or with pipe-cutting and beveling tools.
Myth No. 5: Plasma is difficult to use —While the underlying technology of a plasma system may seem complicated, even a first-time PAC operator can achieve good-quality results within minutes of picking up a plasma torch. With air-plasma systems, there are no gases to regulate, and with features such as nozzle shielding, operators need not hold a standoff—they only have to drag the tip of the torch directly along the workpiece.
Hypertherm, Inc.: 603/643-3441; www.hypertherm.com
See also: Hypertherm, Inc.
Related Enterprise Zones: Fabrication


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Allegan (AHS) Class of 2014 Alumni List
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If you are an alumn of Allegan you should register now in the alumni directory. We also encourage you to interact with the rest of the alumni on this site. You can find old friends, share photos and stay updated on the latest school news.


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Photo: An oil removal ship is seen next to the Costa Concordia cruise ship as it ran aground off the west coast of Italy at Giglio island, January 16, 2012. Over-reliance on electronic navigation systems and a failure of judgement by the captain are seen as possible reasons for one of the worst cruise liner disasters of all time, maritime specialists say. (REUTERS/ Max Rossi)
When I read hastily the headlines on Jan 14—a shipwreck in Italy, seventy missing, three known dead—I immediately thought: it must be the Africans again. The refugees, the clandestine, the invisible, the nameless, the unwanted… Those "less-than-human" people coming from all over the world to the Italian coast, looking for a safe haven from dictatorships, from hunger.
My Somali Italian friend Suad, who works with her community In Italy now, urges her people in Somalia NOT to take that dangerous ride: even if you survive the trip, what waits for you in Italy can be fatal. Italy is in deep economic crisis today, on the verge of bankruptcy and social disorder. The new government struggling to remain a G8 power while the euro and United Europe are at stake. Italy also struggles to overcome a big moral value crisis after twenty years of Berlusconi's reign of sexism, racism, indolence and corruption.
But I was wrong about the Africans. It was a fancy cruise ship full of wealthy foreigners that wrecked unexpectedly near the island of Giglio. Read the rest


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02 December 2013 | News | By BioSpectrum Bureau
Mr Christophe Weber - The new president of Takeda Pharmaceuticals
Singapore: In an effort to speedup business expansion in emerging nations, Japan's largest drug maker, Takeda Pharmaceuticals has chosen its new president from a rival company.
The company said in a statement that 47-year-old Mr Christophe Weber will succeed the current president Mr Yasuchika Hasegawa as leader of the country's biggest drug making company.
Mr Weber is currently the president of GSK Vaccines, part of GlaxoSmithKline, and will assume the post of chief operating officer by April 2014. He is expected to become Takeda president after being approved at the firm's general shareholder meeting and a meeting of its board of directors in June.
"To be competitive in the global market, we need a global person in an important position. We have extremely high expectations for Mr Weber's contributions to further enhance and accelerate the implementation of Takeda's global strategy. He can understand the situation in both advanced countries and emerging countries," said Mr Hasegawa in his statement. He is expected to become chairman and chief executive officer of the firm.
Takeda's earnings from its principal business of diabetes drugs has fallen for three consecutive business years due to expiration of patents. Reports pointed out that Mr Weber would be the first non-Japanese chief in 230 years of history at the company, which is based in western Japan.


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While I love sunshine and sunny days in general, I'm just not used to this kind of heat (especially after significant time spent in the rather mild climates of San Francisco and Portland). Denver gets the kind of heat that I haven't really ever experienced. The sun up here is brutal -- it burns my skin so easily, making it actually physically hurt to stand in the direct sunlight for too long. This is kind of a big deal, considering that I was born in the tropical Philippines and went to high-school in Texas.
In order to try and beat the heat, I decided to take advantage of the ice cream maker attachment for my KitchenAid mixer and make some ice cream. According to Thomas Keller in Ad Hoc At Home, nothing beats freshly spun, homemade ice cream. He's completely right:
I decided to go with a green tea flavor simply because I had a giant can of matcha powder sitting around. I found a traditional Japanese recipe online and was drawn to the recipe because it was simple and only had a handful of ingredients -- very much unlike the recipes in my only ice cream cookbook Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream.
However, because the ice cream is from a traditional Japanese recipe, it isn't as sweet as most ice creams I'm used to -- although it was still delicious and flavorful, it had a slight bitter and tannic aftertaste. I decided to remedy this by whipping up a dark chocolate Earl Grey fudge sauce from Momofuku Milk Bar's Cookbook -- and boy was I glad that I did! The fudge sauce married to the green tea ice cream well, its sweet dark chocolate flavor complementing the green tea and offsetting the tannic aftertaste.
Without further ado, here is the ice cream recipe:
- 1 cup heavy whipping cream
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 3 tablespoons matcha green tea powder (available at Asian supermarkets; for Denver residents, matcha powder can be found at Pacific Mercantile Company)
- 1 pinch of salt
- Put the cream, milk, sugar, matcha powder, and salt in a heavy bottomed saucepan and whisk ingredients together until combined. Try and whisk the majority of lumps away, but don't worry if it's not perfectly smooth. The next step should help eliminate most of the lumps.
- Heat the mixture on medium-high heat until it comes to a full boil. Keep whisking until it starts to foam. At this point, your mixture should be pretty lump free -- the heat will have eliminated most of the lumps. Remove from heat.
- Transfer the mixture into a large bowl and let it cool down. Cover, then refrigerate the mixture in the coldest part of your fridge for at least four hours, or, ideally, overnight.
- When the mixture has chilled, remove cover and give the mixture a whisk to bring it together. Churn for 20 - 25 minutes in an ice cream maker, or, according to your manufacturer's instructions. Serve freshly spun -- it will have an incredibly creamy texture (almost that of soft serve) at this point. For a more traditional ice cream texture, transfer to an airtight container and freeze overnight.
- 3 tablespoons water
- 1 Earl Grey tea bag
- 1 ounce 72% dark chocolate, chopped (I used Valrhona dark chocolate, available at Whole Foods)
- 2 tablespoons unsweetened, dutched cocoa powder (I used Ghirardelli's, available at Safeway)
- 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
- 2 tablespoons light corn syrup
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
- Bring the water to a boil in a small saucepan or in a tea cup in the microwave. Remove from heat, add the tea, and let steep for 4 minutes or longer (depending on how much you want your fudge sauce to taste like tea).
- Wring and remove the tea bag and pour the tea into a medium bowl. Add the chocolate, cocoa powder, and salt.
- Combine the corn syrup, sugar, and heavy cream in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and stir intermittently while bringing to a boil over high heat. The moment it boils, pour it into the bowl holding the chocolate. Let sit for 1 full minute.
- Slowly, slowly begin to whisk the mixture. Then continue, increasing the vigor of your whisking every 30 seconds, until the mixture is glossy and silky-smooth. This will take 2 to 4 minutes, depending on your speed and strength. You can use the sauce at this point, or store it in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. Do not freeze.


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About The Spot
Welcome to The Spot!
The Spot, located in Hermosa Beach, is the oldest continuously operating vegetarian restaurant in Los Angeles. Originally established in 1977, chefs Tonya and Maurice Beaudet purchased the restaurant in 1980. Today, the Spot has become one of Southern California's most popular vegetarian eateries serving up creative culinary concoctions that are both healthy and delicious.
Most of the menu is available gluten-free, fat-free and dairy-free, or "vegan". They always serve organic whole grains and legumes, using seasonal organic produce when available. They serve and cook only with purified water. Their homemade bread, cornbread and desserts are sweetened with raw agave. None of their recipes contain isolated soy protein (SPI). Their fat-free soups never contain any oils or dairy products. (read more)VIDEO: The Spot on The Travel Channel's Hamburger Paradise
Most of our entrées are available gluten-free, fat-free and without dairy products.Read More »
Treat yourself to our full-flavored desserts sweetened only with organic agave.Read More »
DrinksPair your meal with our hand-chosen selection of domestic beers and wines. Teas and juices, too! ... Read More »
Purchase a copy of the book that features many of The Spot's secret recipes.Read More »


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"Saturday Night Live" started with "Fox and Friends."
The crew likened videos of Wal-Mart shoppers on Black Friday to Syrian refugees coming into the country.
"Syria's always been good to me," Brian Moynihan said before talking into his cellphone -- mistaking Syria for Apple's Siri.
U.S. & World
Jay Pharoah played a soft-spoken Ben Carson.
"Sorry if I seem revved up about this," Pharoah said with a monotone as the presidential candidate about the vetting process for refugees.
"All refugees will be given mad libs that says 'death to blank,'" Pharoah explained. "Anyone that writes 'America' will not be allowed in America."
Faux Carson said in close to a whisper President Obama made him so angry it was enough to "flip his top."
When asked why Carson appeared so calm, he responded: "Oh I'm like a koala bear. I may seem nice on the outside but on the inside, I've never held an elected office."
The refugee issue and other political hot topics resurfaced in a later bit where a family gathered at the table for Thanksgiving could only stop bickering for one thing: Adele. A recording of her song "Hello" was enough to get everyone to stop yelling at each other and instead stand up and sing along.
Adele performed later on "SNL" as the musical guest.
Matthew McConaughey hosted and in his monologue riffed on the origin of "alright, alright, alright," his famous catch phrase from "Dazed and Confused."


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Kitchen Cabinet Store in farmington, ME
hammond lumber company
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Our brand portfolio, ranging from standard to custom, continues to grow and evolve to offer quality cabinetry solutions for the kitchen, bath, and other areas of the home.


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Philips' high-end sets are reliably innovative and tend to produce class-leading pictures, ensuring that the first of Philips' 9000 range arrives with some high expectations to live up to, despite its relatively small screen size.
The £1,300, 32-inch set will soon be joined in the Dutch firm's lineup by the 46-inch 467PFL9705H and the 40-inch 40PFL9705H.
If you can't afford the 9000 series, the only other new Phliips models we have full details on so far are the midrange 7605 sets.
Available in 32-inch, 37-inch, 40-inch and 46-inch options, these feature edge-LED lighting, online TV services, Ambilight and Philips' Pixel Precise processing.


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Here is a short report from the 2010 Australian National Freestyle Championships.
The full results can be found soon in the results section.We have just seen the completion of the AKSA Australian Kiteboarding Championships. We are proud of the spirit all competitors have shown in this contest as a result we expect a surge in opportunities for kiteboarding and interest in our sport.
This event would not have got off the ground without the unwavering support of the Australian Kiteboarding Association.
I would especially like to thank Chris Wardel and Phil Morrow for their endless hours of work they have put into make this event a reality.
Secondly I would like to thank our major sponsor Red Bull and I hope the success of this event forges a closer bond with the brand.
Our presenting sponsor Cabrinha kites have backed us 100 per cent. Thank you Hudson for sharing in our vision and seeing the potential this event can bring to our sport.
Chris Sal from Kite Republic, thank you for your friendship, teaching me to kite and supporting not only this event but my magazine from day 1. None of this would have happened without the faith you showed in me so thank you.
I am lucky enough to have five right hand men: they are Hooky (Tim Nanninga), Andrew Jaspan, Paul Felsovary, Ryan Fehily and Nick from Kite Republic. These guys have worked their guts out to make this happen and have been with me all the way.
This event has attracted some of the best kiters in the world. They are Jesse Richman, Andy Yates, Kristen Boese, Jules Hosp, Sam Light, Tom Court and Susi Mai. You have all made sacrifices to be here and it is rare to receive such brilliant support. You are welcome to Melbourne anytime.
Anton Richardson, on behalf of the riders we are honoured with the opportunity you have given our best competitors to compete in the PKRA. We will do everything we can to ensure your event on the Gold Coast is as well supported by local kiters as this event is.
The judging at this event has been world class under the direction of our head judge Toby Bromwitch.
Toby you have lifted the standard for Australian Nationals. Thank you. Alexander James Lewis-Hughes, Tom Court and Sam Light thanks for being our judges.
Our media sponsors have generated huge interest in our event. They are Extreme Kites, Seabreeze.com.au, Kite Life and Foxtel.
Special thanks to Paul Cousins and Susi Mai from Kite Life for their commentary.
As you all know events like this are expensive to put on. We would not have got here without the support from these brands.
XLR8ED DJ hire, Sure Tech Security, Fakie, Smoothstar skateboards, Fluid Kiteboarding, Gale Force Kites, Find boardsports, SHQ, Paqua, Blue Eye, Graffi-t, Australian Kite Surfari, Derevko wetsuits, Nobile, Kite Power, Barz sunglasses, JN kites and Slingshot.
Please support these fantastic brands that have shown so much faith in me.
Last but not least I would like to thank our volunteers who have also been here since day 1. They are Ivan Salmon, James McCann, Scott Fleming, Simon Blake, Karen Grant and Rosie Espanio.
George Ierodiaconou, Kite Mag, publisher
Results of the 2010 AKSA Australian National Kiteboarding Championships held at St Kilda beach, Melbourne, Feb 11 to 13, 2010.
1. Andy Yates (Caloundra)
2. Keahi De Aboitz (Noosa)
3. Ewan Jaspan (St Kilda)
(Note: Keahi and Ewan get a "wild card" into the PKRA World Tour comp to be held in Gold Coast in December as Andy is already competing as the world's No 5)
1. Chrissy Gaudieri (Perth)
2. Shannon Duckar (Perth)
3. Michelle England (Newcastle)
(Note: Chrissy given a wild card into the PKRA World Tour comp)
1.Keahai De Aboitz (Noosa)
2.Ewan Jaspan (St Kilda)
3.Lincoln Reeves (St Kilda)
Masters (over 35s)
1. Scott Sollar(Terrigal, NSW)
2 Mario Steffan (Adelaide)
3. Rob Sellar
The Andy Yates Talent Award, best up and comer; Lindsay Hobbs,15 (Gold Coast)
AKSA appointed judging panel: Toby Bromwich, head judge at St Kilda comp and one of six full-time PKRA World Tour judges Sam Light, from Hayling Island, UK, and 2009 British Kite Surfing Association Men's Open winner, ranked 5th in PKRA World Tour circuit.
Tom Court from Isle of Wight, UK, ranked 11th and on the PKRA World Tour circuit and until recently UK No 1 for under=18 Alexander "Sir Rowdy" James Lewis-Hughes, experienced kiter and judge from Elliot Heads, NSW. Jesse Richman, Maui, Hawaii, 2009 and 2008 KPWT World Champion.


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Sort of a quiet week coming for new releases, though a couple arrive on PC that many have noticed: Antichamber, the indie, non-Euclidian mindfuck puzzle that has gotten plenty of attention, and Omerta, which interprets gangsterin' as a management sim and turn-based combat. Here's what you've got coming this week.
• Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear (PC)
• Dungeonland (PC)
• Hitman Trilogy HD Premium Edition (360, PS3)
• Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear (360, PS3)
• Airline Tycoon 2 - Aviator Edition (PC)
• Dungeonland: Dungeon Maestro Gilmoire Pack (PC)
• Dawnstar (Mac)
• Skulls of the Shogun (PC)
• Antichampber (PC, Mac)
• Company of Heroes 2 (PC)
• Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (PC)
• Call of Duty Black Ops II Season Pass (PC)
• Omerta: City of Gangsters (PC)
• Bloody Vampire (3DS)
• Witch's Cat (3DS)
Follow Dealzon on Twitter.


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Cubic surfaces
|Geometry and topology index
|History Topics Index
An algebraic surface is one of the form f(x,y,z) = 0 where f(x,y,z) is a polynomial in x, y and z. The order of the surface is the degree of the polynomial. A surface of order one is a plane. A surface of order two is called a quadric surface and consists of surfaces such as ellipsiods and hyperboloids. These include cones, cylinders and paraboloids. The surface whose history we are interested in for this short article is a surface of order three which is called a cubic surface.
In 1849 Salmon and Cayley published the results of their correspondence on the number of straight lines on a cubic surface. It was Cayley who, in a letter to Salmon, first showed that there could be only a finite number of straight lines on a cubic surface while it was Salmon who then proved that there were exactly 27 such straight lines in general. At the end of his 1865 treatise The Geometry of Three Dimensions Salmon described how the two had collaborated over finding the Cayley-Salmon theorem.
Steiner already knew of Cayley-Salmon theorem about 27 straight lines when he started his own work on cubic surfaces. He wrote an important article which gave results that allowed a purely geometrical treatment of cubic surfaces. He proved in 1856 that:-
The nine straight lines in which the surfaces of two arbitrarily given trihedra intersect each other determine, together with one given point, a cubic surface.He introduced the notion of a "nuclear surface" and investigated its properties. Many results on cubic surfaces were stated by Steiner without proof and we shall comment later how Cremona and Rudolf Sturm proved many of these ten years after Steiner's paper.
Clebsch described the plane representations of various rational surfaces, he was especially interested in that of the general cubic surface. Using the Hessian surface, he gave the first proof that any given cubic surface could be written in the pentahedral form which had been proposed by Sylvester. Other results on cubic surfaces were proved by Clebsch which included: there exists a covariant of order nine which intersects the cubic surface in exactly 27 lines; and every smooth cubic surface can be represented in the plane using four plane cubic surfaces through six points and vice-versa.
It was Steiner who communicated to Schläfli the Cayley-Salmon theorem on 27 lines on a cubic surface. In 1858 Schläfli became the first to classify the cubic surfaces with respect to the number of real straight lines and tritangent planes on them, finding that there were exactly five types in his classification. Schläfli then found 36 "double sixes" on this surface. He divided cubic surfaces into 23 species according to the nature of their singularities in 1863 and he published the classification in his paper On the distribution of surfaces of the third order into species, in reference to the presence or absence of singular points and the reality of their lines. In his lengthy Memoir on Cubic Surfaces Cayley presented Schläfli's complete classification of cubic surfaces into 23 distinct species and he also added further investigations of his own.
In March 1866 Cremona published Memoire de géometrie pure sur les surfaces du troisième ordre Ⓣ. In this memoir he established many of the properties that had only been stated by Steiner. He also established connections between the Cayley-Salmon theorem on 27 lines on a cubic surface and Pascal's Mystic Hexagram:-
If a hexagon is inscribed in any conic section, then the points where opposite sides meet are collinear.For his memoir Cremona was awarded a share of the Steiner Prize. He shared the Prize with Rudolf Sturm who studied third degree surfaces in their projective representations and also proved theorems stated, but not proved, by Steiner.
In 1869, at Clebsch's suggestion, Christian Wiener constructed plaster of Paris models of cubic surfaces which, together with other models of surfaces he had constructed, were exhibited in London in 1876, Munich in 1893, and Chicago also in 1893. Klein investigated cubic surfaces in 1870 and his work shows a special concern for geometric intuition regarding spatial constructions.
Karl Geiser's great uncle was Steiner so he set out on his mathematical career already having links to one of the important figures in the development of the theory of cubic surfaces. Perhaps, therefore, it is not surprising that he should make his most important research contribution on cubic surfaces. One of his results explains how the 28 double tangents of the plane quadric are related to the 27 straight lines of the cubic surface.
Le Paige spent his whole career at the University of Liège where he worked on the theory of algebraic forms, a topic whose study had been initiated by Boole in 1841 and then developed by Cayley, Sylvester, Hermite, Clebsch and Aronhold. In particular Le Paige studied the geometry of algebraic curves and surfaces, building on this earlier work. He is best known for his construction of a cubic surface given by nineteen points. Starting from the construction of a cubic surface given by a straight line, three groups of three points on a line, and six other points, Le Paige was led to the construction of a cubic surface given by a line, three points on a line and twelve other points. By means of this construction he then constructed a cubic surface given by three points on a line and sixteen other points, finally arriving at a cubic surface given by nineteen points.
The last person we will mention in this short history of the study of cubic surfaces is Gino Fano. Fano studied with Klein in 1893 and did an Italian translation of Klein's Erlanger Program (1872), which gave his synthesis of geometry as the study of the properties of a space that are invariant under a given group of transformations. It was later in his career that Fano became interested in cubic surfaces and algebraic surfaces in general. Already by this time, however, interest in topics of this type had somewhat declined.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson


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3/4 cup plain unflavored soymilk
1 cup 100% pear juice
8-10 baby carrots
1/2 cup frozen blueberries
1 Tbsp. flaxseeds
1 Tbsp. wheat germ
1 Tbsp. oat bran
2 cups baby kale
Mix together in the blender, starting slowly than on high until fully blended. Timing will vary depending on the oomph of your blender.
|(Photo: this kale decoration was only for the photo op and was put into the bag to be added into tomorrow's smoothie!)
Good taste, good health!
Where kale is more than decoration on my plate!
Diana Dyer, MS, RD


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