Film Review #35: Band of Brothers (TV show)

Band of Brothers:  a TV "drama" (I don't want to associate it with any of the bad things "dramas" generally exhibit) war thing about Easy Company of the US military in WWII.  I'm gonna keep this brief, because frankly you should just go watch it.
Acting's pretty terrific, quite simply.  Cinematography is sharp, without any ostentatious, stupid flourishes that take away from what's goin' on.  Written by Tom Hanks and Erik Jendresen, using interviews with members of Easy Company for reference.  Produced/developed by Tom Hanks, that Erik kid, and Steven Spielberg; take note, Hanks and Spielberg were the ones heading Saving Private Ryan.  That said, you can guess it's pretty awesome.  It's got that WWII-movie color scheme (ya know, brown/green/gray-blue/black, and just about nothing else), but it isn't too overbearing compared to most productions suffering the same effect, and frankly, it works.  Also, every episode's accompanied by interviews of Easy Comp's members.  It's just...  Just really cool.  And educational (check this out:  it's TV, but IT'S HISTORICALLY ACCURATE!)
Yeah.  Band of Brothers.  Watch it.
http://www.hbo.com/band-of-brothers#/

Film Review #34: Prison Break (TV show)

NOTE: these are my FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

So.  When I first see this, I'm like, OK, this might be almost OK.  Basically, it's about a guy who sends himself to prison so he can jailbreak his supposedly innocent brother, and there's also some conspiracy or something.

Now, why it sucks (because it does):
The acting is just awful, and the show takes itself SO SERIOUSLY, ALL THE TIME.  Film makers, take note:

YOU DON'T NEED GODDAMN SUPER-SERIOUS SPY MUSIC FOR EVERY GODDAMN SECOND OF YOUR FILM, ESPECIALLY WHEN MOST OF THE GODDAMN FILM HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SOME GODDAMN SUPER-INTENSE CONSPIRACY OR SOME SHIT.

Sorry, but I've had enough of these people.  Just cool off and realize that a film can't maintain a consistent mood and still be good.  People may change the on-screen events, but if they don't change the music to correspond, it turns awkward, disengaging, and just bad.  Who gave you the goddamn budget?

Also, main character has the annoying super-serious-white-guy-who's-two-steps-ahead look on his face, ALL THE TIME.  It legitimately doesn't change.

This was just the pilot, so I can't speak for the rest of the show, but hey, FIRST IMPRESSIONS.  The basic plot stands a fighting chance, almost.   Nonetheless:  it's not very good.  Be warned.

Film Review #33: Gang Beasts (game)

Gang Beasts is simply the greatest game of all time.
I mean, almost.  Sub Rosa's neck-n-neck, probably winning, but Gang Beasts, man... I dunno... it's close.  Only time will tell.

So.  Gang Beasts is a shared-screen-multiplayer melee game.  Brawl.  Whatever.  Basically, up to 4 players on the same computer (using separate controllers, keys, etc.; controls are customizable, you see) go and duke it out as four colorful little bean-bag people (maybe potato-sack, maybe jello ... it's personal perception) who beat the living shit out of one another and try to throw eachother off the map (or truck, or gondola, or train platform).  It's a free-for-all, simply batshit insane.

COMBAT:
One key element to this game's wonderful, glorious flow is its simplicity.  There aren't power-ups, unlocks, or any of that crap.  Movement is basically walking in different directions, jumping, "crouching" (I'll rave about that later), punching/grabbing, and raising your arms to lift stuff up.  Plus "gesturing", which is just sticking your arms in the air in a demonstration of your awesomeness (generally after KOing someone off a Ferris Wheel, or something like that).
In terms of HUD, there is:
-the numbers in different colors representing the number of lives for each player on the current map
(top of the screen)
- the health (green) and grip (blue) bars for each player
(above the corresponding character's head).
About these: they recharge.  The health bar is... well... the health bar.  The grip bar (as I call it, anyway) is the strength of one's grip on whatever one is holding.  It decreases as a grab is maintained on something; as it gets lower the grab is more susceptible to breaking due to jolts, weight, etc.

Basically, the process of defeating someone goes like this:
1.  KO them.  Solid headshots can knock people briefly (a couple seconds) unconscious (basically they can't do anything until they wake up), while getting someone's health all the way down by punching them, making them REALLY fall on their head, etc. will KO them for longer (30 seconds?  I dunno).
2.  Pick them up.  The grab buttons are just the attack buttons for each of the hands, held down.  So, if you hold down your left attack key, your left arm will grab the next thing it comes in contact with/near.  Anyway, ya go up to the unconscious target, hold down your grab keys so your guy grabs the target, and then hit the lift key.  Thus, YOU LIFT THEM UP!
3.  THROW 'EM OUT.  Yep.  Just run to the edge of whatever death-distributing abyss the map presents you with, and let 'em fall.  Swinging them around, etc. helps.  You're done! :D CONGRATULATIONS, you've just THROWN SOMEONE IN FRONT OF A TRAIN!  YAAAY

I'm gonna stop going into detail and just say the game is a ton of fun with a few good friends.  The characters are all physics-based, the maps are dynamic and diverse, and the music corresponds to the maps.  There are also some levels with NPCs if you feel like teaming up on some helpless but angry purple people, plus a pink behemoth.  If you have extra computer-viable controllers lying around, get the game.  It's FREE for ALL COMPUTER PLATFORMS (I think; YOU can check that)!  IT'S SO GREAT!  Get it NOOOOWWWW.

some BEA-UUUUUUtiful gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7S2VShmyFI

time for an UPDATE!

So, what has been done over the past week:
in the FIRST-WORLD-PROBLEMS game (now called "Amature"):
-Complete rework of vehicle control/physics for optimization
-Complete rework of police AI
-Heli physics fixed
-Fire improved
-Car added, textured, etc., destruction WIP
-AI can now judge if it needs a vehicle to reach its target, and can enter/use/exit vehicles
-Vehicles have different seats that AI will enter; when occupancy is full nobody can enter
-Vehicle/AI death synced (if vehicle dies, occupants die; if driver dies, vehicle goes "off")
-Yolo (I forgot what else)

OTHER STUFF:
-making a rigged Alpaca (dynamic hair, armature rigging, some nice textures/materials, etc)

 As for the FILM:
I figure I'll make a semi-trailer-esque/story-thing for the game.  Ya know, just a weird little thing with a primitive story, probably following the one discussed in the previous post about this stuff.  I want to put the Alpaca in there too; no, it's not going to be very sane.

Now, GAME SCREENSHOTS! :D

Movie project!

Welp.  I got 2 ideas.

1.  Childhood
a pretty short, psychedelic/arsty-fied tale of a certain kids, from birth to early childhood to early death around 17, doing something really stupid.  Super-stylized, fast-paced, diverse color scheme, darker, contrasted lighting.  Song would be something like the first part of the song Never/Ever by the Black Angels, up to about the middle of the absolutely chaotic part.

2.  Fajitas (I don't know.  WORKING TITLE.)
a slightly-less-short-but-still-really-short film about an attempted and horrendously failed robbery by inexperienced, desperate people.  Animated, again, w/ minimal dialogue, though far less stylized; just CG-looking/stylized.  They rob something (a store, or a bank; I dunno) and make a getaway, but the cops are faster.  Turns into a really ugly car chase; one of the two robbers is bent on not getting caught to a dangerous degree.  This means some attempts to take out cops.  At one point, while he's driving, they, I dunno, run over a police officer; the other robber is having second thoughts about his partner-in-crime.  Ends with the questionable death of one or both.

First World Problems: the game

This is probably a working title.  Anyway, game about stealing things not-so-stealthily, and then running like hell.  WIP.

UPDATE: other projects

I haven't posted anything in a while because I've been pretty occupied.  Over the last ~two weeks I've:
-made about twenty poster iterations for the Learning Center
-made the Okland's Got Talent intro vid, now on its YouTube site
-made some OGT animated sparkly-star-things
-made a procedural generator for increasingly insane textures for the Yearbook (not in use, though; not note-booky enough)
-began building/expanding my online portfolio, and looking for internships
(a wee bit here: http://troglodytic-productions.blogspot.com/  (mostly placeholder, just to get stuff up quick))

Also, I've been working on GAMES!  YAAAAY!  So:
I Gave Idiots Swords: continued work on improved spawning; not much else
new game, First World Problems: about robbing stores and getting away with it, though it seems the country has determined you a domestic threat for whatever reason, so, no, it's not gonna be easy.
FEATURES:
-Massive world generation, including elevation/hills, cities, and interconnecting highways (still very WIP)
-Large array of vehicles (as of now, a small heli, a Bell UH1 Huey, a BMW 507, a 1970 Chevy Camaro, a 1957 Maserati 450s Bazooka, and more to come.  Note, all are custom modeled to extremely low-poly but accurate forms, as these are, in fact, real cars.  Yes, even the Bazooka.)
-Vehicle PHYSICS-- accurate joystick control for helis, nice traction for cars, etc.
-Pretty much all of Hella Jank's features, as I used the character setup from said game as a template

There's more, and a helluva lot more to come, but accurate road generation, in short, is a very messy business.  Lots of ugly math.

A note on the simplicity of it:  I'm keeping it minimal because I want anyone to be able to run it.  This shouldn't be a high-performance game; if you want more particles, nicer graphics, etc., it's doable, but there should always be the option for people without supercomputers.  The meshes are all low-poly; the textures are all low-res and often recycled; the code is efficient.  The map generator itself can run on repeat every frame without breaking 60fps, simply because it's not necessary.  I might amp up the hill detail on the maps, but right now there are some problems with hill navigation for roads, so that's gonna need to be worked out first.

PHOTOS! (from First World Problems)

 

As I said, very, VERY work in progress.

 

BMW 507, Maserati Bazooka, 1970 Camaro, Bell UH1 Huey.  Untextured here.

Film Review #32: Luther (TV show)

Hey, you remember The Wire?  You remember that total badass Stringer Bell, like a slick James-Bond-modern-Ganster-Sylvester-Stalone-Corleone deathmachine of raw awesome?  Well, he's back.  Kinda.

Stringer returns as the ingenious, loose-cannon, on-the-edge modern British investigator John Luther.  His marriage is in shambles, he let a man literally fall into a coma (death, he had somewhat hoped at the time), he has a loose psycho-killer stalking him and his associates... His life is complicated.

So.  That's awesome.  But what about the show?

Well, for starters, I'm something like 2 episodes in, and there's not even ONE of the protagonists whom I hate.  Like, holy shit.  You DON'T KNOW how much of an issue that is!  I mean, unless you watch American TV.  Which, depressingly enough, I succumb to on occasion.
You see, Luther is BBC.  Thus, it is simply better.

Each episode seems to be based around a different investigation, though it shares overarching characters/metaplots; this could play well or badly.  We shall see.

Anyway.  From what I can tell, I can easily recommend this show; IT"S ON NETFLIX! YAAAAAAY-

Film Review #31: Les Revenants (TV show)

Quality.  Pure and simple.  Qual-ih-TEE!  This is speaking from the perspective of a witness to all the total shit that gets thrown up on Netflix, and supposedly somehow managed to get on TV.  The French pulled something pretty groovy here.

So, Les Revenants, or The Returned, is at a glance a show about a little French town in which the dead start coming back as their old selves.  Mostly.

I'm not going to go and say it's a zombie show, as while they are technically "undead", the essential traits of mindless, flesh-eating zombies seem to be lacking... For the most part.  Seriously, it's weird, and I've seen evidence both for and against the horde-of-mindless-flesh-addicts undead, very little "for", that is, so.... Yeah.

Now, that quality I was talking about:  actors/actresses seem skilled or at least competent, characters are deep and engaging, the storyline is complex, a bit all-over-the-place, and VERY intriguing, the soundtrack is simply awesome ("Wizard Motor", Mogwai), and the whole damn thing is just BEAUTIFUL.  Cold, morose, winding, stunning.

Now, I have ONE QUALM.  I mean, maybe more than that (I've gotten mildly annoyed by one particular main character), but...  MAIN qualm.  Yeah.  And that is that the season 1 finale (as far as I've gotten) is simply anti-climactic.  I mean, it wasn't THAT bad, but in context what happened seemed somewhat irrelevant and uninteresting.  The BUILDUP throughout the episode was terrific, but...  Eh.  Yeah.  Perhaps this is simply my primitive mind demanding some gore and explosions, but in all honesty I wasn't alone in my opinion.  Just... eh.  I'm tired.  Watch the show, and hope for some more ... something in season 2.  Exhaustion-rant over.

Apparently there was a movie first, which apparently sucked.  Don't watch the movie.  Just the show, for now.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2521668/

I DON'T KNOW if there was a book first, but it would make sense, given the complexity of the tale and the movie's failure.

Learning Center concept stuff.

Playing around with post-processing and an Adventure-time-esque base.

Film Review #30: BeamNG Drive (game)

Yeah, another "film" review about a game.  Deal with it.

BeamNG Drive is a car simulator.  And it's SUPER COOL.  So you know how metal is, in some way, soft?  It bends, stretches, etc.  Well, what BeamNG (the studio) has done is gone and simulated metal.  In the parts of a car.  So basically, a CG car that ISN'T just a box with wheels and a pretty visual mesh, but an ACTUAL PHYSICAL ENTITY, made up of dynamic parts capable of bending, breaking, etc.  It's amazing.  Everything from rollcages to doors to suspension to drivetrains to axles to wheels to tires, all simulated with dynamically tuned characteristics to match the physical properties of their corresponding materials in real life.  It's early alpha, and the physics can still get... interesting at times, but still, truly amazing.

The game itself features all this tech mentioned above, among some more awesome stuff like slow motion, plus multiple large open-world maps, plus multiple customizable vehicles, including various types of cars and trucks.  You can also spawn in multiple cars and give them behavioral properties, like follow (and smash), drive in this direction, etc., plus you can switch between them.  Easy access to built-in Lua code integration means you yourself can code in whatever might please you.  That's right, that, and it's got TERRIFIC mod support.  I've seen planes, helicopters, submarines, rocket cars...  It's pretty great.  Police chases and races are in the works/implemented in some respect or another.  Also, you can put stuff around the map.  Ya know, scenery-wise, and whatnot.  It's running in the CryEngine, which basically means it looks nice too, and is super-goddamn-optimized.  Like, dayum.

In terms of driving mechanics, it actually handles REALLY well, and not just for an insanely-complex-precarious-softbody-simulator-type game.  It's ... nice.  Different vehicles handle differently; the fastest car, an 80's supercar, handles far differently than the versatile little coup.

Anyway.  In all, I really enjoy BeamNG Drive.  It's fun, challenging, expansive... There's probably a whole bunch of stuff I simply missed in this review, just waiting for you to find.  It's for PC alone as far as I know, though via bootcamp and such macs seem to handle it pretty well too.  I dunno about Linux, though I'm sure you can find something on that.

Their dev blog:  http://www.beamng.com/blogs/
Just go and check that out.  Believe me, it's worth it.

Yearbook work: WIP facepage backgrounds

Started this stuff...  Wednesday?  Thursday?  I forget.  Either way, obviously, it isn't very near remotely finished.  Anyway.

I made a post-processing setup in Blender that takes whatever you throw at it and makes it look old, slightly water-stained/ink-seeped, and old-n-papery.  So that means I can take a straight B/W picture of white with some straight black lines here and there, and it'll color-tone it, deform it, etc.  Check it out.  These are a fifth of the size of what the finals will be, simply for rendering/size purposes, but the full ones will look the same with more detail, so fret not about scaling mucking anything.

So, this, above, to this, below.

 Some more stuff.

Forgot to change the distortion texture's coordinates for this last one, so the distortion roughly mirrors that of the previous.

So there ya go.  Old-book-like enough? (That's the assigned style for this year's book)
Lemme know what ya think; I've set up a system for easy value/saturation/hue+color-ramp/contrast manipulation, so it's very adjustable.  Want different colors?  Variety?  What?

Oh yeah

Also, I've made an effective portfolio-blog for the time being.  It's pretty much just a bunch of consolidated recent work.

http://troglodytic-productions.blogspot.com/

I've been applying for internships at various local game companies; hence, the above.

Film Review #29: Next Car Game (the game itself, as of now: EARLY ALPHA)

The actual game is… a different story.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s awesome as hell.  Still, it’s got a ways to go (it’s still in Alpha, so duh).

The game features demolition derbies and races on a figure-8, a gravel track, and a tarmac track, with controllable lap and AI counts plus track reversability.  You can use 3 cars, all with customizable paint jobs and parts which actually affect the car’s function, from horsepower to wheel type.  There’s also a sick cinematic camera with Depth of Field, for all your fancy obliterated-cars-and-lens-flares needs, and several camera modes, from a chase cam to a driver cam to a hood cam to a bumper cam.

To me, the racing is pretty tough— the AI drivers are unrelenting, and driving is precarious, with cars prone to spin-outs.  However, most people seem to embrace it as a fair challenge, so it’s probably just me and my own inability behind the wheel.  The destruction is beautiful as ever, but given the relatively (to the tech demo) tame nature of the forces inflicting destruction— just your standard smashing cars and guard rails, no giant flailing metal spiders— it doesn’t seem to be fully utilized.

Also, the damage-to-car-functionality is lacking: each part of the car (back-right, left door, front-right, engine, etc) has a damage node which registers “damage”.  If one of these nodes maxes out the car is broken.  The real trouble is the damage-reading system is inaccurate, and will often distribute “damage” to the wrong parts of the car.  Don’t get me wrong— in terms of visuals and physical meshes, it’s still just as brilliant as before.  It just seems that the system for perceiving this damage and affecting the engine’s functionality is broken.  Luckily, they’ve addressed the issue, and are apparently working now on a much better, accurate system.

Obviously, the game lacks content at this point, but one must remember that it’s in early alpha.  Everything is still in the works; there’s a great deal being developed and there will be such for quite a while.  I can’t wait to see what they do with it, and I really, REALLY hope they integrate some more insane car-wrecking machines into some new maps.  That’d be nice.

Again, their dev blog:
http://nextcargame.com/blog/

Film Review #28: Next Car Game, the tech demo (2.0)

I’m splitting my review of Next Car Game in its entirety into two reviews, simply because the tech demo is something on its own.

So, when a game is first announced, and while it’s in development, some developers release to the public— whether for free or through preorder,etc.— some sort of demo to give them an idea what they’re making.

Bugbear Entertainment released a tech demo to show off the hyper-optimized physics/destruction engine they’d developed for their WIP game “Next Car Game” (supposedly a working title, as that is apparently what they “name” all their unnamed games before something comes to mind, though it seems to be sticking).  And guess what: it’s goddamn amazing.  Amazing.

The player plays as a weathered American muscle car among a sea of other beater cars in a playground of pure car-obliterating chaos: giant hammers, massive metal spiders, car grinders, trial courses, tons of massive jumps, loops, basketball hoops, building-sized cannons, destructible buildings/structures, jet turbines, and more.  Just insane, really.

Basically, you drive around and smash other cars, the environment, and yourself to pieces.  Debris piles up, wheels roll about distorted and unconnected to anything identifiably a car (nothing is, really, after a couple minutes), and the player slowly turns his/her car into a small, tatterdemalion cube, with perhaps some misshapen wheel protruding from where the engine used to be.  Or something.  The player can, of course, press E to repair the car, or R to reset its position to something navigable (instead of, say, upside down at the bottom of a pit of blenders).

Now, the physics:  they are awesome.  Awesome.  This is, of course, conjecture, based off observation and my own limited knowledge of game development, keep in mind.  The vehicle distortion system is not fully, constantly soft-body— that is, it isn’t constantly acting like some extremely plasticine piece of jello.  Rather, impacts cause the car to calculate distortions in its mesh.  In this sense it is still very realistic, as most games that have tried to simulate constant soft-body meshing tend up to produce utterly cloth- or jello-like vehicles, which are, ostensibly, not very realistic relative to actual metal vehicles.  Plus, this approach— NOT the jello approach— runs much faster, if managed properly.  Needless to say, Bugbear has managed to pull it off brilliantly.  Car destruction looks amazing most of the time, and when it doesn’t it’s just ridiculous— which is kinda an element of the game, or the tech demo, anyway.  Vehicle physics AND visual meshes are distorted by impact, along with functions— that is, wheels will continue to turn, if only in their new position on the car, which frankly ends up being just about anywhere.  If you smash your car properly, it’ll simply be a smaller version, still drivable, steering and all.  Not realistic, but hey, it’s the tech demo.  The actual game is different, with more accurate destruction-based function degradation.

Now, gameplay itself, opinion-wise:
Very fun.  Car handles well, drifts in an easy, controllable manner; it’s fun to see how long you can actually keep the thing under control just driving it around and smashing it to bits.  Smashing into the environment or other cars is tons of fun.  Plus, the game has a “physics cannon”- you can fire rockets, black holes, giant spheres of doom, more or less everything in the environment, and more at whatever you want with controllable force, either from a flying free-cam or from the front of the car.  It’s… insane.  Tons of fun, especially given there is a free more limited tech demo available on their site, which is just like, hot damn, GET IT.  For PC, that is; not for anything else at this time.

Oh, and graphics.  The graphics are unbeatable.  Probably.  Realtime raytraced reflections?  No, sorry, you lose, Next Car Game wins.  Runs INCREDIBLY fast, too— the physics and graphics engines can be pushed to ridiculous extents without any FPS hit.

Now, their dev blog:
http://nextcargame.com/blog/

For School: McSweeney's and the world

McSweeney's is ... I don't really know how to describe it.  A catalogue?  Publishing house?  Writer's Coalition?  Now doubt there is a more legitimate title, but, as of now, such a name has escaped me.

Now, how does this correspond to the assignment?  Well, frankly, I forgot what exactly the assignment WAS, what with this unconscious dependency on the expectation that the internet will solve all my problems (of remembering homework), and so this may not correspond to the rubric (which doesn't exist).  HOWEVER, from what I gather, I was supposed to find an artist of some sort who creates work circa world issues, etc.; while McSweeney's is rather far from a singular artist, it does indeed provide commentaries, stories, reports, and criticisms on nearly everything you can think of, from the modern sociopolitical dilemmas faced and lives lived by "Latin-American" commonfolk ( https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/mcsweeneys-issue-46-47 ) to the trials of a very vehement seasonal decorator ( http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers ).  Whilst not always strictly nonfiction, McSweeney's publishings are always pertinent in one fashion or another, whether to modern events or historical happenings/cultures.  They aren't always strictly humorous, either.  Not to mention the ART (which is just awesome):

Honestly, I don't really know/keep up on many politically focused artists, so ... yeah, here you go.  If you wanna read about them/just see their stuff:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/

Art things

Grabbed these out of my sketchbook as now that this thing is serving as a semi-portfolio (I know, not a good idea), I should probably put some work up, though time runs short and so this is a bit rushed, plus I don't have a scanner, so I apologize for the quality.

(too much Hendrix?  NEVER)

Proof

Proof that I do, in fact, do semi-serious work/game art.  A few recent rigs/models, hi-poly and low.  Sometimes with normal textures, sometimes diffuse, sometimes specular, often all.

"Hella Jank" game vid

Yep.  Framerate's crap because recording software's crap, and computer's crap.  Waddayaknow.

"I Gave Idiots Swords"-- new videos

yep.

Features Overview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoXuZSDpACI&list=UU12PimWlvg0JX8D0CHFE3Vw

Map Generator:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zVifnOdFOY&list=UU12PimWlvg0JX8D0CHFE3Vw

Sorry for not embedding it; Blogger's decided that the Features video doesn't actually exist.

Film Review #27: Black Shades (game)

We all know Wolfire Games, yes?  Indie game dev company, created such brilliant digital experiences such as Receiver and Overgrowth?  Well.  They have made quite a few games (relatively), one of which being this beautiful old-ish game, Black Shades.

In Black Shades, you play as a body guard (or something with roughly the same job description) with some slick black shades, attempting to protect a dapper fellow in full white garments.  Basically, people run around with pistols, shotguns, snipers, knives, and more and try to kill this particular fellow.  Your job is to STOP that from happening!  Gameplay takes place in a randomly (?), infinitely generated city, in various kinds of weather, among civilians, assassins, and (sometimes) zombies.  The player is, in each level, given one particular weapon-- a type of pistol, a machine gun, a grenade, etc.... One of those, among a number of others.  You can melee, shoot/stab/lob grenades, and tackle.  OH!  And slow down time.  There's also a curious super-sight-type element, though frankly I simply don't use it much.  Maybe I'm not competent (I'm not), but it's worth mentioning, given this is a review.

Now, REVIEWING:  the fact that, for computers, the game is free makes it certainly worth getting.  It's a small file, and provides plenty of fun.  A classy, quick little singleplayer FPS, with a unique feel and set of skills for the player's character.  They ARE somewhat broken in one fashion of another, varying with platform-- for example, in the Windows version, tackling throws off the character's rotation immensely, making that form of attack essentially void.  As I said, the vision thing doesn't operate very conveniently, though frankly I haven't played with it much and thus am not quite suited to talk about it.  It DOES look nice.  The game's slow-motion is awesome, but that is to be expected with Wolfire; they seem to have perfected it, along with most everything else.  Again, it's an old game.  Another thing: if your Mac lacks PowerPC support (newer OSs no longer feature this), then this game's mac version simply won't work for you.  That said, just use Wine or something; it's not exactly a performance-intensive game, so using DirectX emulators, etc. won't ruin the experience.
    About that:  the game's graphics are basic.  Flat diffuse shading, no shadows.  However, these aren't, of course, necessary to make a good game; the use of mist/atmospherics plus rain/snow effects mean atmosphere is most DEFINITELY achieved.  Ragdolls are also a thing.  A fun thing.

*ALSO!  Doesn't seem to be on Linux.

Site:  http://www.wolfire.com/black-shades

I Gave Idiots Swords: everything else new.

I've added quite a bit, relative to my (lacking) standards!  So.
Change/added features list:
-soldiers now have teams:  red, green, and blue.  They don't attack allies.  Isn't that nice.

-soldiers now have helmet plumes: correspond to team color.  Color is maintained in ragdolls.

-soldiers are now born from soda machines: ...  Spawners, based on assigned properties, can spawn soldiers of a certain type (or random type: swordsman, pikeman, archer), and can determine the team of said soldiers either randomly or by assigned property (a spawner with a property "SPAWN:team" that reads "red" will only spawn red soldiers.  If it's empty, it'll spawn soldiers of random teams.  Same system goes for soldier type.)

-there is an onion portal:  it's a box into the Onionworld, from which denizens of that horrid land spew forth.  ...
No, but seriously, I made onions, and when you press O they spew out of a wooden crate.  When I've gotten around to it, one in about 20 will metamorphose into a yeti when sufficiently pulverized.

-the ground is trampoline lava:  when someone falls off the towers and bridges into the bland abyss below, they are launched back up towards the center platform at...  High speeds.  It makes for a more literal experience of, "IT'S RAAAIINNIN' MEN".  That said, it's terrifying.

-the player has health, and can be damaged: about 10,000.00 of it, versus the 40 of yetis and 2 of normal soldiers.  Nothing happens when you die (yet), but taking damage causes a damage-based camera offset that makes you feel like your character has a burning urge to look at the spear in his stomach.  Mostly because he "does".  Or she.  Your pick; at present the player is an ethereal sword-and-shield-bearing nothing.

-the player has a shield: that's another thing; the player now has a usable shield!

 -shields actually do something: impact via shield will prevent damage (usually) and cause knockback to both attacker and attackee.

-spears are still broken: people impaled by spears still fly into space.  I think I'll leave that.

-yetis have ragdolls: yes, even the yeti can be killed.  And dismembered and thrown into pieces.

-impale physics working: yep.

-finally... SOUNDS!: impacts on metallic and bladed impacts, arrow sounds, blood sounds.  Also, yeti shrieks.
 

Plenty of other background stuff has seen work as well.  Now, I'd like to note:
 RAGDOLLS IN BLENDER ARE NOT INTEGRATED.  The Blender game engine doesn't have a direct ragdoll support system; thus, ragdolls are created via scripts that run through each limb/part of a character and, based on their traits, create ragdoll limbs linked by unique physics constraints/pivots, inheriting the velocity of the original character.  These limbs can be removed by some blades.  Just for the record, as an explanation for my eccentric obsession with pulling this stuff off.  Now,
SCREENSHOTS!

-- WAIT --

This game is horrendously graphic.  This hideous, morbid excuse for a "game" will strike terror into the hearts of those who view it.

Oh, and it's pretty gory.

--

The onion portal at work.

 

 Vending machines, one for red team, one for green, one random.  (Blue's been excluded)

The unfortunate fate of those who fall.

That's right, not even yetis are spared.  And yeah, they fly pretty high.

A little more on the ... egh... "yeti".  It needs some work.

Also, he grabs people and clubs others with em.  For the record.

Some inter-team combat.  Actually, some friendly fire, a flying arm, and someone trying to hack my arms off, but hey, one can dream.

Some proof that the sword does NOT, in fact, just sit on the side of  the screen.

Sword throwing is still functional.

A NOTE:  This game is not meant to be pretty.  It's meant to run fast and be consistently fun, if not functional.  And silly.  Just keep that in mind.