Horror, 93 Minutes, 2014
Some children – let’s face it – truly deserve to be devoured by whatever monsters can be coaxed under their beds. Samuel (Noah Wiseman [IMDB]) may be one of these. He drives his poor mother, Amelia (Essie Davis [IMDB]), to the brink with his paranoia and the contraptions he concocts to defend himself. Alone, and never truly recovered from the tragic death of her husband, his mother simply cannot cope.
I spent much of December in Southern India for business. I was awash in culture and history yet the most amazing thing I experienced the entire time was the traffic. It’s impossible to accurately describe the semi-organized mayhem, the constant multiaxial motion and the utter and complete lack of fucks-given. Here’s a 10 minute video that’s a pale, sad shadow of what I experienced:
Still playing and, until now, thoroughly enjoying Dishonored 2. It may have been an error in judgement, but I decided to do my first play-through as a no-kill, no-spot, collect all the runes and bonecharms run. Unfortunately I, and many others, have hit something of a wall in Chapter 5: The Royal Conservatory.
[Minor Spoilers Ahead] The Conservatory has been overrun with witches. To beat the area without deaths, you must activate a machine that eliminates the witches powers. This can incorrectly result in some of the unconscious witches dying.
Apparently this can sometimes be rectified by determining exactly which witches won’t walk again and putting sleep darts in them before activating the device. Unfortunately this did not work for me as can be seen in the following video:
In my case, activating the machine results in four dead witches. After a significant, time-consuming search, I determined which four were dying and collected them in the burglars apartment. In my case this group included the two would-be bushwhackers encountered outside of the Conservatory.
All four are resting comfortably on the floor and alive. Pull the switch and all four are dead. Reload and sleep dart the lot of them, then pull the switch. Now the statistics only show a single death, however examining the bodies directly show them all as dead.
Frustrating!
You can read more about this on this Steam Discussion. Harvey Smith of Arcane Studios has also acknowledged the bug in this Twitter thread. Here’s hoping for a quick and stable patch!
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Dishonored 2. I’ll likely be writing more about it at some point, but for now, here’s a brief word on one of the trophies, “Heartbeat Reaper”. This requires you to eliminate six enemies within 1.5 seconds. I’ve seen several methods for obtaining this – attracting crowds into grenades or leveraging the new Domino ability. The key that I feel some may have missed is that your victims don’t actually need to be conscious.
Yup, that’s it. Collect a pile of unconscious dinks and toss in a grenade; one and done.
Several years ago we supported an odd little Indiegogo project: the Panono 360° Camera. The group has worked doggedly since to produce the device and strengthen their company. It’s been a long, sometimes frustrating road, but the camera arrived today and some things are worth waiting for! Here’s our first shot:
No, the subject matter isn’t particularly impressive, but the technology definitely is. The camera, about the size of a softball, packs in 36 cameras for a total resolution of 108 megapixels. The images are uploaded to a cloud service where they’re stitched and made available for sharing.
Expect a full review soon! I’ll be visiting Southern India in December, I expect the unit to get quite a workout!
Our Extra-Life 2016 Marathon is over! All told, with various breaks for jobs, prior engagements and at least one scheduled SAT exam, we had involvement from nearly twenty people and raised $873.55 to help sick kids!
Although the marathon is over, you can still donate, if you like! Please click on a team member to do so!
This year was more subdued than previous years, yet still a blast.
We want to thank everybody that helped with this and hope to see them all next year!
We’re about four hours into our Extra-Life 2016 Marathon! There will be some drop-ins later, but we’ve squeezed 16 people into our home and raised over $800 so far!
You can still donate, if you like! Please click on a team member to do so! We’ve playing a lot of classic console games, portable games and board games. There was also an odd digression into completing somebody’s engineering homework…
We’re getting ready to kick off our Extra-Life 2016 Marathon! In a little over 12 hours we will be invaded by over a dozen teenagers. They will fill our humble home with the sights, sounds and smells (oh when do the smells stop?!) of charity! And gaming. Lots of gaming.
Our team have currently raised $634 for sick kids. You can still donate, if you like (please click on a team member to donate!) – we can always use more sick kids; they’re so inspiring!
Things got a little weird at the 23rd hour last year:
We’ve got a PS4, a PS3, a Wii-U, a regular-old Wii and an impressive tower of board, card and dice games. Our Steam Link is ready to bring PC games to our TV and a proud, lonely PlayStation Vita stands united with a short-stack of Nintendo DS’s for private play. Controllers are charged and stacked like cordwood. Plentiful snacks are at hand! Caffeinated beverages are standing by!
Folks. We. Are. Ready!
Comprising four films since 2002, including the 2016 remake of the original, Cabin Fever is one of the lesser known horror franchises. One of the purest examples of the “body horror” genre, the stories revolve around a mysterious, never explained virus that slowly, grotesquely liquefies the flesh of its victims.
Eli Roth’s [IMDB] inspiration for the original film, his first, came after suffering a severe skin infection while on vacation. Unfortunately, Hollywood had lost confidence in the horror genre and the script was roundly rejected for several years. After a resurgence of interest in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, the film was completed on a shoestring budget of $1.5 million. Picked up for distribution by Lion’s Gate, it became their highest grossing property, and the highest grossing horror film overall, of the year, with nearly $22 million in domestic sales.
