Mysterious mysteries of the mysterious: The Bermuda Triangle

Here's a joke reference with an audience of one. I should offer prizes

Many books have been published about the Bermuda Triangle over the years, with a lot of them attempting to solve the mystery. Titles like Limbo of the Lost and The Devil's Triangle came up with a variety of explanations that encompass everything from the sinking of Atlantis through ancient Incan magnetic technology to everyone's favourite: aliens. Oddly, not many book authors chose the explanation "Charles Berlitz just made it up," probably because that doesn't fill a page let alone fulfil a book contract.

Okay, so you're probably going to want a more detailed explanation than "it's bollocks" so I suppose I'd better write some more. Although the story of the Bermuda Triangle is quite interesting, the story of the story of the Bermuda Triangle (if you see what I mean) is much more fascinating. Wait - Charles Berlitz, the language course guy? Yeah, that one. I'll come back to him later.

Various Triangle boundaries - otherwise known as "desperately trying to get the data to fit the theory"

The first odd about the Triangle is it's location. One might presume from the name that it's in Bermuda and for most people it sort of is. Books about the Triangle tend to disagree with each other and the picture above shows various boundaries proposed by various authors. Note that some of them aren't even triangles and some of them don't even include Bermuda. Not a great start. The general consensus is that it extends from Miami down to San Juan (Puerto Rico) and up to the island of Bermuda.

In 1950, an AP press report on ships and aircraft lost in the area mentioned in passing the suggestion that the disappearances might be due to a mysterious cause. As one of the busiest shipping areas in the world, the amount of ships lost wasn't unusual and the AP report wasn't really taken up anywhere else. In 1952 an article in Fate magazine (a long-lived magazine about paranormal phenomena) entitled "Sea Mystery at Our Back Door" detailed the loss of several ships and planes in the area and made mention of the loss of Flight 19, which would go on to be one of the archetypal cases of mysterious loss in the area.

TBM Avengers - picture by Anynobody 

Flight 19 was a training flight of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers which went missing off Florida in 1945. They were participating in a training exercise that was designed to teach dead reckoning - navigating without aids or instruments. The flight took off at 14:10 and flew out to a bombing practice area after which they were expected to follow a couple of other headings on their return to base. Fifty minutes into the flight, one of the students called for a compass reading and was told "I don't know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn." Further enquiries amongst the students lead Taylor, the flight leader, to report "Both of my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it's broken. I am sure I'm in the Keys but I don't know how far down and I don't know how to get to Fort Lauderdale." The weather worsened and radio contact with the flight became intermittent. The last message was heard from Taylor at 18:20 "All planes close up tight ... we'll have to ditch unless landfall ... when the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all go down together." At the same time a tanker, SS Empire Viscount, radioed that she was in heavy seas and high winds north-east of the Bahamas, where Flight 19 was about to ditch. The aircraft were never found.

The article in Fate magazine ascribed a supernatural explanation to the missing aircraft and ships but was just the first of many. In 1974, Charles Berlitz published The Bermuda Triangle which became a best-seller and really brought the notion of the Triangle into the public consciousness. Berlitz was the grandson of Maximilian Berlitz, founder of the language company. As well as writing books on language, he had a keen interest in the paranormal and published a number of books on a variety of such subjects.

Berlitz became interested in the Bermuda Triangle, allegedly after hearing stories from passengers who refused to travel through the region. In his book, he included details of many disappearances and expounded a number of theories ranging from UFOs through to cosmic whirlpools although his favourite explanation was that it was somehow related to the lost city of Atlantis.

A year after the Berlitz book, research librarian Larry Kusche published The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved. Kusche investigated and checked the details of every Triangle disappearance mentioned in previous books and found none of them warranted a supernatural explanation. He found that many of the disappearances simply hadn't occurred, many had happened well away from the Triangle, false details had been added to real events, different accounts of the same incidents contradicted each other and that many weren't mysteries at all.

Writers like Berlitz tend to cherry pick stories that fit their purposes and ignore any evidence to the contrary. Stories of yachts found adrift with no crew aboard sound mysterious and interesting and go right in the books, but the prosaic reports of moored boats being blown out to sea in storms tend get ignored in order to fill the pages. When the tanker the SS V.A. Fogg exploded and sank, it was reported in various Triangle books as being found with no bodies aboard except the captain huddled in his cabin clutching a cup of coffee. The US Coast Guard inspected the wreck, found several bodies and took extensive photographs which is ignored in favour of the more interesting rumour. That the Fogg actually sank off the coast of Texas and well away from the Triangle is also missing from the books by authors like Berlitz.

The most damning information in the Bermuda Triangle disappearances comes from Lloyd's of London. Lloyd's, as a leading shipping insurer, keeps extensive records of ships and their records do not show an unusual number of sinkings and disappearance despite the area being a busy shipping area and subject to tropical storms. Indeed, Lloyd's does not charge higher premiums for ships operating in the area.

The Bermuda Triangle simply doesn't exist and has been thoroughly debunked from the start. Despite everything in Berlitz's book being completely discredited less than 12 months later, neither he nor his publisher altered anything in it and reprinted it several times over the years. Many other Triangle books have been published since.

The rather funny 404 error page from diving website http://www.djldiving.com/

So what is it about the Triangle story that makes it immune to rationality? The public have a strong interest in paranormal subjects and publishers are more than happy to feed them a steady diet of books expounding such notions; that they are easy to write and thoroughly profitable only adds to their publishing appeal. There is an innate fascination and a desire to believe in magical mysteries beyond science. That none of them have ever really been borne out, doesn't ever dampen people's enthusiasm for them.

What's extraordinary about Charles Berlitz's book is just how much is asks the reader to believe and yet so many are prepared to do so. Berlitz accorded the disappearances to a number of forces, but his favourite was that it was a by-product of the cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis. So Berlitz is asking readers to accept that Atlantis existed, was destroyed by a force unlike anything known to science and that a by-product of this force still exists thousands of years later and that it selectively seizes planes and ships for no apparent reason. Any one of those claims seems pretty iffy and bundled together they are impossible to believe and yet they are appealing enough for people to suspend rationality in their desire to embrace them. And that's the real mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.

PS Thanks to Soulreaper for suggesting this article

Free Steam games. All of them

I was hunting around for free games on Steam in the hope of finding some that my chums and I could all play together. Oddly enough, there isn't any kind of section on Steam that allows you to find them easily. Annoyingly, I got about halfway through making this list before finding one written by Ivan Doomer (which was way better).

With each game, the "storefront" link will open the Steam store page in your browser. If you have Steam running, clicking the "install" link will open it up and set the install going. Some games on this list don't have a storefront page because they're super secret black helicopter shit and you're a leet hackxor just for looking at them.


Alien Swarm: install - storefront
Alien Swarm is basically a multiplayer top-down shooter. You, and up to three of your friends, move through a spaceship killing off the alien life that's come to visit harm upon you. There are different classes and you can choose and customise your weapons. Hackers can get through locked doors and computer systems, heavies carry big guns, medics can heal other players and so on. It's quite good fun and well worth installing.





America's Army 3: install - storefront
Designed as a recruiting tool for the US Army, America's Army is a series of First Person Shooters (FPS). It's like many other FPS games apart from the inclusion of Rules of Engagement which determine what you're allowed to do in game. It was released in 2009, based on the Unreal Engine 3 so it's not the most graphically impressive FPS, but you may like it for its reality-based approach. Okay, so it's a computer game and the realism can only go so far, but there's a distinct lack of torture and ear collecting.





APB Reloaded: install - storefront
After the initial release of APB died on its arse and took down Realtime Games with it, it's been resurrected under a new owner and it's free to play. I'm actually surprised by how popular it is as I had a go early on and found it annoying as hell. But maybe it's worth another look.





ArmA II Free: install - storefront
This is a slightly cut down version of the full ArmA II game in that it doesn't have any single-player stuff and you can play DLC or expansions. The only other thing missing is the highest level of textures. So it looks slightly less pretty than its full-priced brother. Oh and you're not restricted to playing other free users, you can play with anyone. The storefront page says it's a demo, but it isn't.





BattleForge: install
It's a fantasy RTS that uses cards (a la Magic The Gathering). EA were originally going to charge for this, but they changed their mind and so it's free. It will oddly show up as "Battleforge Demo" in your Steam library, but it's a full game.





Between : install - storefront
Oh, this one's a little difficult to explain (especially as I haven't played it). It's an indie game in a retro style (doesn't that just mean shitty graphics?) combining several different playing styles in order to uh... um... sod it, look at the video. Oh, that didn't help much either. Damn it, you'll just have to find out for yourselves. Oh and it's another one that says it's a demo on the storefront page, but it's actually the full game.

Yes, I know this is an advert for the Nintendo DS version, but you try searching YouTube for "between"



Bloodline Champions: install - storefront
PVP online fantasy smack 'em around. Yeah, that's it. If you like League of Legends or DOTA, you may well like this.

Champions Online: Free for All: install - storefront

Do you remember Freedom Force? No? It was probably the first decent superhero game. Champions Online is an attempt at a free superhero MMO. Is it any good? I dunno, but it's free.

Codename Gordon: install
Hey, this looks like a sort of 2D Half Life 2, doesn't it? Yeah and it sort of is. Feels a little like Abuse, if you remember that game.





COIL: install - storefront
Yet another game that Steam insists is a demo, but isn't. Actually I'm not even sure it's a game. The author says "Coil is an experimental autobiographical game that plays out more like a song or painting then an actual "game". I was basically trying to create an experience that put the player into an open minded space and let them question not only what the game was about, but what a game can actually be." And he's right. Play it with just movements of the mouse, not even any clicking. Heck I can't even find a video of it in action.

CrimeCraft GangWars: install - storefront
Crimecraft is another attempt at an FPS MMO and it's partly successful. I played it as part of the Steam Christmas thing where you needed to collect coal by doing various things in various games. The Christmas version had you taking part in snowball fights - effectively throwing grenades that didn't explode but killed instantly on direct impact. That was fun. I can't help but feel that that was better than the way it's supposed to be played.





DC Universe Online: install - storefront
This cost ten quid a month to play just a year ago. Now it's free. If you want a superhero MMO and you care about DC comics, then I suppose this is the obvious choice. Their trailers are all cinematics and no gameplay, so let's see what Yahtzee had to say over at Zero Punctuation.

EverQuest II: install - storefront
Want to play something like World of Warcraft but don't want to pay all that money? Yeah, well try this. The free version is a bit restricted, but you can play through the whole thing without spending any money at all.





Global Agenda: Free Agent: install - storefront
Shoot men in the face. In space. And now watch a video and think Todd Harris a dick. I think what I'd hate the most about being a games programmer (other than everyone complaining all the time about how I don't know what I'm doing) would be being forced to appear in videos like this. Everyone in this video is no longer alive, proving that it is actually possible to die of embarrassment.





Iron Grip: Marauders: install - storefront
When I saw a game with a name like this, I somehow imagined that the character I would play would be Japanese and that the entire game would take place on a train where I raped schoolgirls. But no, this is a turn based strategy game with hardly any rape at all. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed.





Mightier: install - storefront
Oh now this is unusual. Mightier needs a printer and a webcam in order to play. It'a gentle puzzle game and has some rather interesting features. You print out a puzzle and solve it with a pen then hold it up to a webcam and it gets scanned into your game for you to play through on the computer. Quite honestly the technology is sufficiently fascinating that you simply have to play it. My wife used to design arcade games and worked on a number of arcade games over in Taiwan and she hates pretty much every computer game, but this one is "alright I suppose" which is about the highest praise I've ever heard from her about anything except pandas.





Moonbase Alpha: install - storefront
What should be a fabulous game is now ruined by flaky servers. Join together with a bunch of friends to repair the oxygen processing centre of a moonbase in the aftermath of a meteorite shower. It's slow, you don't kill anything and it can be frustrating at times, but it's great when it all works. I've been bugging NASA games to get this fixed and they assure me that they're working on it. This is also the fore-runner for a full NASA MMO. Hmm.





Peggle Extreme: install - storefront
Ten levels of Peggle for free and all themed around Valve games. Really rather fun. You'll even get to understand why the Japanese sit in front of incomprehensible pachinko machines for hours on end. Did you know that pachinko is a North Korean invention? This blog's educational. I keep saying that, but no one believes me.





PoxNora: install - storefront
Did you think this was another Japanese rape game? Of course it isn't; the name's way too obvious. They're normally named shit like "Improper Deviation Experience Self Offering Young Married Lady" So this is a turn-based fantasy strategy MMO and it looks quite nice.





Puzzle Pirates: install - storefront
Isn't it nice that nerd girls are cool and attractive all of a sudden? It enables chicks like this who aren't quite whorish enough to be mainstream airheads to stick on some ugly glasses and pretend to be geeky. I like to think this video is an exploration of how quickly pity can turn into outright contempt. Watch as she reads what's on the screen, tries to make her pirate slutty (I kid you not) and then partakes of some of the most amateur swearing I've ever had the misfortune to hear. In any other country in any other time she'd have starved to death by now, but 21st century America has made it possible for someone so worthless to actually have a job where her inadequacies can be compensated for by some fake spectacles. Oh and there's a puzzle game... with pirates!






Rise of Immortals: install - storefront
Fantasy grindfest that makes me hate myself more than I loathe it. So it's got that going for it.





Sam & Max Episode 104: Abe Lincoln Must Die!: install
You must surely know what the Sam and Max games are about by now. If you haven't tried the new ones, then you may well enjoy finding out if you like them by playing a whole episode. Personally, I preferred the bitmap art of the old ones. The 3D lacks a certain charm for me, but plenty of people like it.





Spacewar: install
This 2MB(really!) game is actually a test to show programmers how Steam features are integrated. It's not much of a game and it's not very well done. Some of you may remember Spacewar as one of the very first computer games, in which case you are true gentlemen of the circuit and I salute you.

Spiral Knights: install - storefront
Charming little fantasy MMO. Very nice graphics. Not much rape.





Star Trek Online: install - storefront
It's Star Trek. It's online. It used to cost money, but now it's free. Any good?





Team Fortress 2: install - storefront
It cost money until recently and now it's free. The free version is very slightly restricted, but not so anyone would notice. Make just one in-game purchase (buy a frigging hat or something for a few pence) and it suddenly becomes the full version anway.





The Cat and the Coup: install - storefront
Frigging weird and has to be played! "The Cat and the Coup is a documentary video game in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. During the summer of 1953, the CIA engineered a coup to bring about his downfall. As a player, you coax Mossadegh back through significant events of his life by knocking objects off of shelves, scattering his papers, jumping on his lap and scratching him." Intrigued?





TrackMania Nations Forever: install - storefront
Little cars zooming round tracks.

Phlogiston and magic smoke

Back in the 17th century, German scientist Johann Joachim Becher was attempting to explain the mechanism of fire (and rust) and he came up with an interesting theory that fit with most observations that could be made. His hypothesis was very interesting and attracted widespread support, but the downside was that he was pretty much completely wrong.
Now before I get into this, I do want to make clear that Becher was no fool; he was a well-respected and successful physician, an important political theorist and one of the first to define and study chemistry. But just in case you go thinking he was a genius, I should also say that he was an alchemist who believed that, if he could just find the right material, he could make himself invisible.

Becher's explanation of fire and combustion was quite simple: stuff that burned was full of phlogiston. The wonderfully-named phlogiston (pronounced pretty much as it looks: flodge-iston) was the very substance of fire. When things burned it was because their phlogiston was escaping into the air.

Although the notion of phlogiston seems quite silly these days, it actually makes a great deal of sense. The science of chemistry was only just becoming separate and distinct from alchemy and the phlogiston explanation tallied with observable facts. Combustion and rusting had been correctly linked as different aspects of the same thing and experiments were devised to prove the existence of phlogiston. The theory of phlogiston remained the pre-eminent explanation of combustion and oxidation for well over a century. Even as it lost ground, many of it supporters still regarded phlogiston as a principle rather than a literal substance.

Many experiments were conducted to investigate the existence of phlogiston and a lot of them yielded results that did indeed appear to confirm it. The experiment below was devised by Joseph Priestly:

Mercuric oxide is heated and the effluent passes down the

pipe and into the cylinder, displacing the water. The gas

collected in the cylinder supports combustion better than air.

Bear in mind that no one knew about oxygen (and thus oxides) at the time and that seems a perfectly reasonable experiment that seems to confirm the existence of phlogiston. These days we know that oxidation is caused by oxygen, but the very idea that there was a magic stuff in the air that allowed things to burn or rust seems more fanciful than the idea that it would originate inside the substances themselves. They had the right idea, they just had it backwards.

You might have been told how computers work. you might have been told that electricity flows through the circuits and chips and somehow makes it all go. This is obvious nonsense, but it's how we explain things to beginners so it's easier for them to grasp. It also sounds complicated enough that no one ever asks any questions after that kind of explanation. The real truth is that all electrical and electronic devices run on a substance known as magic smoke.

All wires, chips, etc are filled with magic smoke. When they are damaged, the magic smoke escapes and they stop working. Look at this wire. It's been damaged and the magic smoke is escaping. Soon it won't work any more. You know it makes sense.

Kimi Raikkonen is back in F1. Does he care?

When I was jabbering on about Formula 1 the other day, there was one driver that I didn't mention: Kimi Räikkönen. After retiring from F1 a couple of years ago, Kimi's back for the 2012 season and I'm quite excited about this, mostly because Kimi isn't. To be fair, Kimi doesn't seem to be excited about anything ever.

For many drivers, the effort, expense and difficulty of getting to F1 often means that it becomes all they can think about. When Michael Schumacher 'retired', he was a pathetic sight hanging around the Ferrari pit lane. Clearly, he had nothing else in his life; nothing to do at all. So it's unusual for a driver to have other interests and with Kimi, you rather get the feeling that Formula 1 isn't even his favourite sport.




In the clip above, Kimi has just won his first Formula 1 race - the 2003 Malaysian Grand Prix. You'd expect most people to be a little excited, especially when starting seventh and passing both the Ferraris and the Renaults, but for Kimi "the race was quite good." Indeed, Kimi's often so excited before a race that he regularly falls asleep; on his F1 debut, he managed to doze off just twenty minutes before the start.

Lest Kimi be seen as a dour, humourless robot, when he's not racing F1 cars he's jumping on stage at lap dancing clubs and stripping off himself, sneaking off to compete in dangerous sports that his F1 contract forbids (he signs himself as James Hunt when doing so), going out drinking heavily with his friends or setting fire to stuff and getting arrested for breaking things (don't ask).


Having just sneaked the 2007 championship in the last race, Kimi is ecstatic

Sadly, Kimi's personal website is currently down for editing as I'd love to have seen what it says at the moment. During his previous stint in F1 his site barely mentioned the sport. It was full of stuff about Kimi racing snowmobiles, going snowboarding, his motocross team and a dozen other things before it mentioned Formula 1... which was, like, y'know his frigging job at the time. This is why I love Kimi so much: on any given day he's got five things to do that matter more to him than driving an F1 car. Thanks to the money and the TV interest, Formula 1 interviews are normally extremely dull - drivers just say what they're told to say and most of them parrot the same lines endlessly. Blah, blah, blah, try our best, blah, blah, whole team has worked so hard, blah, blah, passion for the sport, blah, blah, dedication, blah, blah, blah. So I find it very refreshing for there to be a driver who doesn't stick to the 'party line' and just says what he likes, no matter how difficult that makes life for interviewers.

It turns out that Kimi does give a shit after all

So Kimi's back in F1 after two years away. Is he still any good or is he going to go down the Schumacher road of mediocrity? Nah, Kimi will be fine. In the test session at Jerez yesterday Raikonnen was faster than everyone else. In a test session, the teams are usually trying different parts, collecting data, etc, so just because he was fastest doesn't mean his car's at the top of the field, but it certainly means it's not going to be at the back.

2012 looks to be quite interesting in Formula 1. There are six world champions on the grid so the racing is likely to be close if Vettel doesn't just drive off up the road. Kimi will be driving the confusingly-named Lotus (there was a Lotus Racing team in F1 last year, but they've changed their name to Caterham whilst the former Renault team is now Lotus). They didn't have the fastest car last year and they haven't gone for a radically different car this year, so will it be fast enough to challenge for race wins? And will Kimi care either way? Dunno, but I'll be watching.

My wife thinks Kimi looks like a husky because of his eyes reckon that cold weather causes pale blue eyes

Ferrari unveils 2012 F1 car. Why should you care?

On Friday, Ferrari unveiled their new F1 car for 2012; the rather unimaginatively-named F2012. Well, actually the weather was a bit bad so Ferrari didn't actually wheel the car out and give people a look (that'll happen in due course though), but they did produce a series of photographs of the new car so we can have a look.

Formula 1 is an odd sport. For many people it's impenetrable and unexciting. It's certainly a hard sport to begin watching without knowledgeable friends to guide you. The rules are complex and sometimes seem rather contradictory or eccentric, the cars all look the same, may races seem more like a procession than a competition and often it seem like the winner is the driver of the fastest car.

Actually, a lot of that is part of the fascination of F1. Yes, there's a disparity in the performances of the cars and it's very unlikely that the teams with lower budgets will win a race. But F1 isn't like football, you don't pick one driver and support them above all others. Formula 1 fans tend to have several drivers they like as well as a couple of teams, but we also tend to have drivers we hate.

In any given race, I'm cheering on Fernando Alonso and Ferrari in general, but I'm also a big fan of Kamui Kobayashi of Sauber (but I greatly miss Tacuma Sato). I'm also pretty keen on the progress of the Force India team and I love Mark Webber. I'm also quite interested in the upstart Caterham (formerly Lotus) team. I hate Sebastien Vettel and Lewis Hamilton and I'm not very keen on Felipe Massa or Michael Schumacher. So in every race, I'm watching at least half a dozen drivers. For me, it's not just about who wins the race as much as it is about drivers outperforming their cars and intriguing battles.

Half the fun of F1 is talking about it afterwards with other people. The spectacle doesn't end when the chequered flag comes down. Who was to blame in the collision between Hamilton and Massa (as happened so many times in 2011)? Were the marshals justified in penalising a certain driver? Should Michael Schumacher have stayed retired? Is the Red Bull a superior car or is Vettel just a really good driver? How come Mark Webber's so far off the pace when he's in a Red Bull too? Is DRS helping the sport? And so on and so on. There's just so much to it that you never run out of things to talk about or think about.

The cars are a bit more different than they appear. It very interesting to see teams that develop all their own kit like Ferrari versus teams like Force India who buy in parts from other teams and companies. For instance, the 2012 Force India car (also unveiled on Friday) has a McLaren gearbox and the same Mercedes engine as the Mercedes and McLaren teams. Toro Rosso and Sauber use the same engine as Ferrari, so how come there's such a big difference in the performance of their cars? It's all the other parts as well: the aerodynamics, the suspension, the electronics, the engine mappings and so on, not to mention the drivers.

When it comes to technical analysis of the differences between last year's and this year's cars, I can only go so far and I reckon most readers would lose interest pretty quickly. If you're interested in that aspect of F1, I'd suggest you take a look at Craig Scarborough's excellent blog where he covers such stuff in dizzying detail. He's got an excellent analysis of the McLaren car up at the moment.
http://scarbsf1.wordpress.com/

Beautiful screenshots

Mass Effect 2

Bit of an unusual one today. Duncan Harris is a videogames journalist and he's got a weird hobby. What he likes to do is what he terms "videogame tourism" and some others call "videogame photography". He tours round games trying to get some really nice screenshots. And he doesn't just play around a bit and hit the PrintScreen key - he uses texture mods, camera hacks and a whole bunch of other tricks to get the very best out of a game. He also runs a pretty blazing PC in terms of hardware and he pushes it hard to get the highest resolution shots that he can (generally 2160p). So what the hell, I'm going to break the blog's formatting again to show these shots at a better size.

Dark Void

Harris uses a variety of games to get his shots and some of them aren't at all obvious or even familiar. His favourite shot, is the one above from the relatively obscure Capcom game Dark Void. I couldn't even remember seeing this game at all, apart from Yahtzee rubbishing it about two years ago.

The Escapist : Zero Punctuation : Dark Void

It's really rather impressive the lengths that Harris goes to to get the perfect shot. That Mass Effect 2 shot up at the top was taken using a high-resolution texture pack, a free camera hack, a timestop hack, custom FOV, in-world HUD textures blanked, antialiasing (injected max quality FXAA 3.11 w/ texture pre-sharpening) and 2160p rendering. It's a real labour of love and the results can be stunning. He also points out that he doesn't use Photoshop or anything else to improve the images once snapped. What he's trying to do is grab an image that's as close to the designer's intentions as possible. In fact the only time he uses Photoshop is to blank out an in-game HUD that can't be removed any other way.

Dear Esther

Even rendering at 2160p is down to trickery. As he himself says:
"My personal method for rendering games at 2160p, which is a higher resolution than almost any consumer monitor supports, is derived from a tutorial that sadly doesn’t seem to exist any more. Furthermore, it’s only achievable on certain displays, potentially dangerous if your monitor isn’t one of them, and enormously taxing on graphics hardware. I literally burn through some of the most expensive gaming hardware on the market to produce many of these shots, so bear that in mind before reading further. The method is basically: 1) hack the EDID values of your monitor’s driver so that its native resolution is 2160p; 2) create a custom 2160p resolution through the Nvidia Control Panel and registry, using unique monitor timings to display the result through 1080p pixels; 3) select the newly available 2160p resolution in regular game options; 4) use an FXAA/SMAA injector or thirdparty app (Fraps, PlayClaw, etc.) to grab the full 2160p shot. There might well be new or updated tutorials and methods for this elsewhere on the net. Newer Nvidia drivers have broken this ‘feature’, however, which is why I’m stuck with a much older driver for the foreseeable future."

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

So head on over to his site to see some of the finest screenshots ever produced.
http://deadendthrills.com/

Oh and there's an iPad collection of 360 of the finest shots, cut to fit that screen perfectly.
http://deadendthrills.com/collections/5755-2/

Unusual games: Fortune Summoners

Fortune Summoners is a relatively traditional Japanese RPG. It's 2D, you're accompanied by various characters, there's magic and you hit stuff. Unlike most JRPGs, it's side-scrolling rather than top down which is a refreshing change. For those of you familiar with Recettear (the weird item shop RPG game), you'll be delighted to hear that this game has been translated by the same team at Carpe Fulgur and to the same high standard, retaining a lot of the humour and expression of the original Japanese text.

According to the laws of Japan, everyone is either a giant robot, a tentacled rape monster or a schoolgirl. Staying within the bounds of legality, you play Arche, a Japanese schoolgirl and you've just moved to a new town. In a very similar vein to Recettear, your parents run an item shop

The new school in which you're enrolled seems to take magic pretty seriously and a lot of class-time is devoted to the subject. There's just one problem: everyone needs an elemental stone for classroom practice and you don't have one. It turns out they're expensive and although your classmate turns out to be the daughter of an elemental stone seller, you're going to have to find one. Cue running around the landscape twatting monsters in a series of random encounters whilst you level up and improve your equipment.

I was quite keen to play this when it came out. I had a go of the demo (available on Steam for free) and it certainly piqued my interest. Effectively the demo is the first chapter of the main game and, rather neatly, your save game carries over between the two so you don't have to repeat anything.

Once I got going on the main quest I encountered a few frustrations. Quite often I didn't know what I was supposed to do next, or I did know, but had no idea of how to get going. When this happened, I tended to have to run around talking to everyone until I found out what to do. For instance, on about the second game day, we had the day off from school and I seemed to need to go and explore some caves. But I soon hit the problem of some impassable water and had no clue where to go next. After a lot of running about, I eventually found my classmate (who unknown to me could navigate water) hidden inside a small shed behind the school that I had rightly assumed would be deserted. That took me an hour to work out, so I was a bit pissed off at that point. Never mind; I probably just missed a clue somewhere as I have a habit of skipping through the text.

Level up, equip stuff, improve your stats... yep, pretty typical

As I progressed through the game, other frustrations set in. The combat system is a bit deeper than just whacking someone with your sword - you can modify it with other button presses that allow for a quicker strike, a lunging stab whilst stepping forward, etc. In fact as you level up, more sword techniques become available to you and the manual explains that you can chain them together to form your own combos. Yeah? Well all my fights go along the lines of stabby, stabby, get hit by the monster, stabby, stabby, there's another one behind me, stabby, stabby, finally hit something, stabby, stabby stabby. It's not great. The manual suggests a level of finesse and planning that is entirely absent from my experience. Perhaps I'm just shit at it, but I soon found that just mashing the attack button whilst alternately pressing up and down tended to yield fairly good results leaving me entirely unwilling to bother learning combos.

One neat thing is that you can switch to control another member of your party at any time, so you can leave the computer to deal with the bladework whilst you concentrate on healing your swordsman and casting area attack spells. But it's this that throws up another frustration - the AI ain't too bright. Several times when I was fighting, my magic use managed to wander off a cliff edge and get killed out of sight from me. This left me to either fight through without a healer at my back or to just allow myself to be killed so we could redo that bit and continue on together.

Some of the monsters you fight are really fucking irritating. There's a bunch of merkids (geddit?) who have longer range melee attacks than you and have an annoying habit of jumping around everywhere so you'll be slashing away in one direction when they're suddenly behind you - and turning round in combat is surprisingly hard when you're wailing away on the attack button. Merkids are often accompanied by their own magic users who tend to heal them and cast area attack spells.

I soon found that I'd get through one set of annoying monsters only to encounter another (don't get me started on the fucking bees). I'd get pissed off with the new bunch and moan to myself about how awful they were only to encounter the formerly annoying monsters on the way home again and realise all over again just how much they fucked me off.

Fortune Summoners is a good game, but I did find it ridiculously repetitive. It doesn't help the the background graphics, charming as they are, are so similar that I frequently got lost. Trying to find my way back out of a dungeon or a cave was an exercise in annoyance as I couldn't remember which identical corridor or doorway I'd come through on my way there. Getting stuck and having to run around talking to everyone all over again soon got pretty frustrating too. And often the next step in a quest was to run to the opposite end of the map or return to a previously visited area with a new item or party member.

I've actually got to the point where I don't know if I'm going to keep playing. I've no idea how far I am through it, but I think I'll give it a rest for a while and see if I choose to come back to it. Most reviews I've seen have expressed amazement that the game was pretty much made by one guy (someone else drew the stills for the cutscenes apparently), but I find it hard to care about that kind of thing. I don't give a shit how many people were involved in a TV show or film, just whether it's good or not, so why should I care that only one guy worked on a game? And, to be honest, I reckon if he'd had another person there to point out how repetitive certain bits were then it'd be a better game.

It's 25% off on Steam at the moment (£9.74) and I still find it over-priced. If it was a fiver, I probably wouldn't think twice, but when it costs more than Terraria, I just don't feel that it's value for money. I loved Recettear which is essentially more limited, much more repetitive and even costs slightly more, but flowed more smoothly and just feels like a better game.

If you're looking for an RPG to play and you don't want to get into something like Final Fantasy Ten Billion, then by all means give Fortune Summoners a go - but try the demo first to see if you can handle the repetition.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/203510/

Damn this blog layout. The screenshots are all hanging off the side. I'm going to have to rethink this. And no one will ever notice that the picture in the background is actually Alnwick castle and not the default pic. Grr, moan.