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Cataldo D'amico is a new friend suggestion for you
A Word About The Brazilian Gaming Market
(NOTE: this content is a teaser from my HCI's 2019 paper and the last post of this year)
The Brazilian gaming market is full of opportunities and peculiarities. The country is well-known abroad for being an emergent field where new game ideas can be explored, andalso for its high levels of piracy, unfortunately. In a certain way, the country is a unique "ecosystem" where different business models and creative processes can be explored, given the size and the diversity of its population, of almost 220 million people.
The gaming industry in Brazil is not consolidated though, and under many aspects it is still in an initial stage. As a first step into our discussion, we can highlight some attributes of the Brazilian gaming market, using as reference the data collected in an important survey named Game Brazil Research 2018 (Pesquisa Game Brasil 2018, in Portuguese), conducted by the company Sioux Games.
In its fifth edition, the research comprised interviews with 2853 people, in an attempt to investigate some demographic, consumption and behavioral aspects of the Brazilian gaming field. The first information we need to highlight is the fact that 75.5% of the Brazilian population plays games in a wide range of platforms, like smartphones, tablets, computers, consoles, portable consoles, etc.
According to this research, the gamer audience in Brazil is mainly cross-platform,with 74% of players experiencing games on more than one device. Smartphones lead the numbers as the most popular gaming platforms in Brazil (37.6%), while consoles occupy the second place (28.8%), followed by computers, in third place (26.4%).
Another interesting piece of information from Game Brazil Research 2018 concerns the self-image of the Brazilian gamer audience: only 6.1% of the respondents considered themselves to be "hardcore" gamers. Most of the interviewed people identified themselves as casual gamers.
It was also remarkable, in the research about mobile games, that 60.7% of respondents said they played while in transit (bus, subway or car).
Finally, it is noteworthy that 53.6% of Brazilian gamers are women, and among the female audience the favorite platform is mobile (59%), in which they spend an average of one to three hours a week playing games.
From these preliminary data, it is possible to understand that Brazil is a fertile ground for mobile games and a place with high potential for new gaming business in this field.
There are no massive game publishers in Brazil yet, and mobile platforms like App Store (Apple) and Play Store (Google) constitute interesting opportunities for game designers, indie studios and small gaming companies to showcase their work, in Brazil and abroad.
#GoGamers
The Brazilian gaming market is full of opportunities and peculiarities. The country is well-known abroad for being an emergent field where new game ideas can be explored, andalso for its high levels of piracy, unfortunately. In a certain way, the country is a unique "ecosystem" where different business models and creative processes can be explored, given the size and the diversity of its population, of almost 220 million people.
The gaming industry in Brazil is not consolidated though, and under many aspects it is still in an initial stage. As a first step into our discussion, we can highlight some attributes of the Brazilian gaming market, using as reference the data collected in an important survey named Game Brazil Research 2018 (Pesquisa Game Brasil 2018, in Portuguese), conducted by the company Sioux Games.
In its fifth edition, the research comprised interviews with 2853 people, in an attempt to investigate some demographic, consumption and behavioral aspects of the Brazilian gaming field. The first information we need to highlight is the fact that 75.5% of the Brazilian population plays games in a wide range of platforms, like smartphones, tablets, computers, consoles, portable consoles, etc.
According to this research, the gamer audience in Brazil is mainly cross-platform,with 74% of players experiencing games on more than one device. Smartphones lead the numbers as the most popular gaming platforms in Brazil (37.6%), while consoles occupy the second place (28.8%), followed by computers, in third place (26.4%).
Another interesting piece of information from Game Brazil Research 2018 concerns the self-image of the Brazilian gamer audience: only 6.1% of the respondents considered themselves to be "hardcore" gamers. Most of the interviewed people identified themselves as casual gamers.
It was also remarkable, in the research about mobile games, that 60.7% of respondents said they played while in transit (bus, subway or car).
Finally, it is noteworthy that 53.6% of Brazilian gamers are women, and among the female audience the favorite platform is mobile (59%), in which they spend an average of one to three hours a week playing games.
From these preliminary data, it is possible to understand that Brazil is a fertile ground for mobile games and a place with high potential for new gaming business in this field.
There are no massive game publishers in Brazil yet, and mobile platforms like App Store (Apple) and Play Store (Google) constitute interesting opportunities for game designers, indie studios and small gaming companies to showcase their work, in Brazil and abroad.
#GoGamers
Chassuer Pics And Update
At the beginning of the month I made the trip up to the WHC for Gerry's birthday game, as I said before, a bit sad, as everything is going to close there and move to Basingstoke for next year. The event itself was however as much fun as it always is, thanks to all the players and of course Gerry for putting it on and Anne for putting up with 10 hungry gamers all week.
We played 3 games, an Eylau scenario which saw me playing Davout with a flank attack being faced off by Gerry who led me a merry dance fending off my infantry with repeated cavalry charges and lots of his pesky light infantry units ....I wasn't a huge fan of his new light infantry rules before and I'm less of one now!...to be honest, I don't mind the rules themselves but its the quantity of the units he is employing that I feel is colouring the game. The odd btn here and there would be fine, but with some formations having 3 or 4 of these each they can dominate. I don't think the staggered bases add much to the visuals either.
That said, we had a great time, so who cares?
Game 2, Friedland, saw me battering away at Herbert, quite a relaxed game. He wasn't coming forwards into my massed Russian gunline and I wasn't going to far forwards into the minefield defence he'd set up around a village. He had to wait until my flank was threatened and the position unhinged by (wait for it) copius quantities of Light btns romping through a wood on my right. Then I had to fall back slowly but he didn't have the strength to press his attack. The French weight was elsewhere on the other side of the river.
The final game was an 1813 "what if" - Spremberg, a normal game without the light btn rules etc, to be honest I enjoyed this the most despite the fact that we cocked up our deployment and had too much cavalry in the wrong place (in front of a redoubt, - although we didn't know it was there). Nonetheless we had a fine game.
A biggish project prior to Christmas was going down to the new WHC at Basingstoke to see Mark Freeth's new set-up..well, at the moment its a big, airy, empty unit! Not strictly true after me visit as I dropped of a very full van load of timber in order to help mark build the all important tables. I've volunteered my rudimentary carpentry skills to help him and we are going to start building in the new year. Should be pretty straightforwards but blimey, do you need a lot of wood!
He finally has his website up and running so I said I'd pass it on here to any of you avid readers who hadn't seen it
All sorts of stuff in there, lots of pics (some taken by me!) and info on the fairly packed programme he has prepared for 2011.
So, if any of you fancy a big game weekend he deserves your support, I shall certainly be able to get over there more often in future. I timed the drive, door to door is less than an hour from West London! Big difference to the five hours each way to Scarborough.
Last, but not least a quick word about the photos, I realised I have no pics of Napoleon on this site....Now I thought that was a bit remiss considering the majority of stuff here is "Napoleonic". So a pic of him and his staff and naturally the accompanying regt of Chassuers to go with him. Mostly Connoissuer figures with a few Surens I think- all painted by Doug Mason and now all about to move from Yorkshire down South.
Anyway, Happy New Year to you all.
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The Journeyman Project - Justice - Won!
Written by Reiko
Agent 5 Journal #5: "My work is finally done here. Sinclair is neutralized and the timeline should be back to normal now. He'll be imprisoned, I'm sure, and justice will be done. After all, if I hadn't stopped them, his robots would have killed thousands of people. It's sad that such a brilliant mind turned out to be so unstable."
Last time I finished the third time period and returned to the present to find that all of the temporal rips have been resolved. I exit the time machine and start looking around for what to do next. We've got to stop Sinclair from carrying out his final plan to assassinate the Cyrollan ambassador, but where is he?
Oddly enough, I find that if I go back into the Control Center and check the computer, it still identifies the same discrepancies as before, even though the timeline shows no temporal rips. You'd think that correcting the timeline would make the current history the same as the previously recorded history again.
Well, there's nothing more to be done at the agency, so I go back down the hall to the transporter to see if I can go anywhere. When there were temporal rips left, I wasn't even able to access the transporter, but now I can. After I enter it and put my transport card in, it gives me the same four transport options as at the beginning of the game. However, this time, if I try to select anything except returning to Caldoria Heights, I just get a message saying, "Agent 5: You must discover the source of the temporal rips." I guess it isn't really a choice, then.
Back I go to my apartment complex. Surely my apartment isn't interesting, and I can't access anyone else's apartment. The only interesting place remaining is the rooftop area, which is still closed for the alien procession. But, hmm. The door has a slot on it. (The transporter seems to have eaten my transporter card this time, so it's no longer in inventory and can't be tried on this slot. It doesn't do anything even if you try it at the beginning of the game, though.)
I have something else that can fit into a slot and affect electronics: the access card bomb. I drop it onto the slot and it blinks a few times and then abruptly explodes, destroying the door and punching a large hole through the wall. Through the hole, I can see a man, Sinclair, holding some kind of gun. He turns to look at me and warns me not to interfere. Instead of shooting me immediately, he goes back to lining up his shot, which gives me a moment to act. I pull out my stun gun (having to painstakingly scroll all the way to the bottom of the inventory to get to it) and stun him before he can shoot the ambassador.
And that's all there is to the endgame. Sinclair crumples, and abruptly I've won. The game dumps me to a screen with an ending message and a final score.
Winning message: "Congratulations, agent five! You've stopped Dr. Sinclair and assured humanity a place in the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings! A promotion is surely in the works for you. But a Temporal Protectorate agent's job is never done..."
My final score was 114187, with only one time period considered as having been solved peacefully (Mars). That was after crushing the NORAD robot in the high-pressure room, which is apparently the violent solution. It seems to have done more damage to the robot itself, anyway. I don't know why, but the game seems to think I visited 2310, the rally level, twice. I don't know if there was a glitch somewhere, or if it was because I saved after getting the antidote and reloaded, or what.
I also replayed the endgame from the other NORAD ending with the loader arm. Everything's exactly the same about getting to the rooftop and stunning Sinclair. For some reason, my final score there is a little lower, though: 106729. But my total energy remaining was actually slightly higher, so the penalty is all from the fact that now it thinks I tried the NORAD level twice as well. I didn't do anything except reload and use a different solution on the robot though. So I have to wonder if somehow the game is tracking when I restore a saved game? But I saved and restored at multiple places in the Mars level (the ore crusher is the most critical point) and it only counted one attempt for that level.
So I've finished the game, but I haven't achieved a fully peaceful ending. To do that, unfortunately, I have to replay almost the whole thing again, because I did the time periods in the wrong order. But since I know what I need to do, this doesn't actually take all that long.
I restore back to the point where I've done the comparison with the record disk and am ready to start dealing with the three main time periods. This time I go to Mars first. I make sure to pick up the maintenance key and the wire cutters in the transport, and I quickly dodge the robot, fill the oxygen mask, disarm the access card bomb, and thread my way through the mining maze. I carefully ride the ore crusher and chase the robot down in the extra shuttle, being careful to capture it rather than destroy it.
This time, when I get the Trace and Optical Memory biochips, the memory biochip contains the Ares Objective file. I never got that in my previous playthrough. I think there must be some glitch with the memory cards if you do the levels out of order. I noticed originally that the memory biochip was supposed to originate from the Mars level, so that's a hint about that. The Ares objective is pretty straightforward: Sinclair gloats at how clever his plan is to destroy both the Mars colony and the alien ship and make it look to Earth like the aliens did it and to the aliens that the colony did it.
Next up is the rally level. I analyze the tranquilizer dart and synthesize the antidote as before. This time, when I face the robot, I use the wire cutters from the Mars level on the padlock for the fire control access cover. I open it and poke at the controls, which I think causes sprinklers or something to come on, again shorting out the robot but without doing as much damage as electrocuting it. I carefully pull all the biochips, including the Retinal one. As before, the memory biochip is updated with the Mercury Objective file.
Finally, I redo the NORAD level. I use the shield chip against the robot's plasma shots, and then the retinal chip to bypass the retinal scanner on the Alpha station door. I play the minigame to deactivate the nuclear silos and thwart the launch. Then I use the loader arm to neutralize the robot. Its biochips are duplicates, but the memory chip gives me the Poseidon Objective file, so this time I have all three.
I'm nearly done. As before, I transport back to Caldoria Heights, ride up to the rooftop level, blow through the wall with the access card bomb, and stun Sinclair. I win again, and this time I get the best result: all levels are peaceful and have one attempt (I was really careful, so I never had to reload), and I get a 25,000 point bonus for the peaceful finish. Mission accomplished. The replay only took about 45 minutes total, which means that, once you know what you're doing, the full game would only take about an hour to play through.
Each time, from the winning screen, I get an option to view the credits instead of the buttons to restore, restart, or go back to the main menu. However, the credits button from the winning screen very briefly takes me back to a screen that looks like the game screen but with a warning message about being out of energy. It's so brief that I couldn't even get a screenshot of it. Then it dumps me back at the main menu, which also has a credits button, and this one actually works properly. You can see Michel Kripalani, the originator of the Journeyman Project, in the bottom-middle slot. His friend Greg Uhler, the programmer, is next to him.
Final Maximum Score: 132827
Session Time: 1 hr 15 min (including 45 minutes for final replay)
Total Time: 8 hr 30 min
Deaths: 1 (total: 20)
There's one more death available in the endgame: if I wait too long to stun Sinclair, he shoots the ambassador and then turns and shoots me. The ending is called "Shot by Sinclair". The message reads: "In killing the Cyrollan delegate, Sinclair felt he was ensuring the continued existance [sic] of humanity. You may have disagreed. If only there had been some way to stop him."
Next up will be the rating. We'll take a look at what this game did well and what it didn't. For one final opportunity for bonus CAPs, see if you can figure out what band produced the songs whose titles became my post titles for Journeyman Project. (The first one, Time Distortion, was just too perfect for the situation, so I ran with it from there.)
Agent 5 Journal #5: "My work is finally done here. Sinclair is neutralized and the timeline should be back to normal now. He'll be imprisoned, I'm sure, and justice will be done. After all, if I hadn't stopped them, his robots would have killed thousands of people. It's sad that such a brilliant mind turned out to be so unstable."
Last time I finished the third time period and returned to the present to find that all of the temporal rips have been resolved. I exit the time machine and start looking around for what to do next. We've got to stop Sinclair from carrying out his final plan to assassinate the Cyrollan ambassador, but where is he?
Oddly enough, I find that if I go back into the Control Center and check the computer, it still identifies the same discrepancies as before, even though the timeline shows no temporal rips. You'd think that correcting the timeline would make the current history the same as the previously recorded history again.
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| The objective files make it clear that the source is Sinclair... |
Back I go to my apartment complex. Surely my apartment isn't interesting, and I can't access anyone else's apartment. The only interesting place remaining is the rooftop area, which is still closed for the alien procession. But, hmm. The door has a slot on it. (The transporter seems to have eaten my transporter card this time, so it's no longer in inventory and can't be tried on this slot. It doesn't do anything even if you try it at the beginning of the game, though.)
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| Sinclair should have shot me here when he had the chance. |
I have something else that can fit into a slot and affect electronics: the access card bomb. I drop it onto the slot and it blinks a few times and then abruptly explodes, destroying the door and punching a large hole through the wall. Through the hole, I can see a man, Sinclair, holding some kind of gun. He turns to look at me and warns me not to interfere. Instead of shooting me immediately, he goes back to lining up his shot, which gives me a moment to act. I pull out my stun gun (having to painstakingly scroll all the way to the bottom of the inventory to get to it) and stun him before he can shoot the ambassador.
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| Final Score (non-peaceful) |
Winning message: "Congratulations, agent five! You've stopped Dr. Sinclair and assured humanity a place in the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings! A promotion is surely in the works for you. But a Temporal Protectorate agent's job is never done..."
My final score was 114187, with only one time period considered as having been solved peacefully (Mars). That was after crushing the NORAD robot in the high-pressure room, which is apparently the violent solution. It seems to have done more damage to the robot itself, anyway. I don't know why, but the game seems to think I visited 2310, the rally level, twice. I don't know if there was a glitch somewhere, or if it was because I saved after getting the antidote and reloaded, or what.
 |
| Final Score (mostly peaceful) |
So I've finished the game, but I haven't achieved a fully peaceful ending. To do that, unfortunately, I have to replay almost the whole thing again, because I did the time periods in the wrong order. But since I know what I need to do, this doesn't actually take all that long.
I restore back to the point where I've done the comparison with the record disk and am ready to start dealing with the three main time periods. This time I go to Mars first. I make sure to pick up the maintenance key and the wire cutters in the transport, and I quickly dodge the robot, fill the oxygen mask, disarm the access card bomb, and thread my way through the mining maze. I carefully ride the ore crusher and chase the robot down in the extra shuttle, being careful to capture it rather than destroy it.
 |
| Last time, the rally level gave me Mercury and the Mars level gave me Poseidon. |
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| Shorting out the robot with the fire controls. |
Next up is the rally level. I analyze the tranquilizer dart and synthesize the antidote as before. This time, when I face the robot, I use the wire cutters from the Mars level on the padlock for the fire control access cover. I open it and poke at the controls, which I think causes sprinklers or something to come on, again shorting out the robot but without doing as much damage as electrocuting it. I carefully pull all the biochips, including the Retinal one. As before, the memory biochip is updated with the Mercury Objective file.
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| Collected all objective files. |
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| Final Score (peaceful) |
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| Credits with photos |
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| Credits with names and titles |
Final Maximum Score: 132827
Session Time: 1 hr 15 min (including 45 minutes for final replay)
Total Time: 8 hr 30 min
Deaths: 1 (total: 20)
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| In the crosshairs of Sinclair's gun |
Next up will be the rating. We'll take a look at what this game did well and what it didn't. For one final opportunity for bonus CAPs, see if you can figure out what band produced the songs whose titles became my post titles for Journeyman Project. (The first one, Time Distortion, was just too perfect for the situation, so I ran with it from there.)
🔗 Mikael Ero shared a link
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A Fear Of Flying They Call It
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| Image in Public Domain. |
Being the easily impressionable student that I am, I decided to take on the collegiate tradition of studying abroad. It's a common cliche to hear alumni gush about how studying abroad changed their life, and will change yours, too. The salesmen sure know how to pitch, but I can't say I was completely sold.
I study Spanish, by the way. No, it didn't come out of a great passion for the language, or anything noble like that. In my freshman year of high school I had to select two electives. I chose Spanish and Wood Shop, since they seemed to be the easiest grades. Sure enough, they were. I intended to stay for only two years in Spanish, but stayed longer for the fiestas. Yes, I'm sleazy.
A few scholarships later, I found myself at the airport, ready to go. Well, not so ready. My proficiency in Spanish was crap. I'd only taken a cursory glance at the map, so I getting lost was inevitable. My destination was Santander, Spain. A city I'd never heard of before.
The luxurious plane trip did well to calm my nerves. I have always been pensive about flying, having heard the stories of cramped seats, crowded bathrooms, and crappy airplane food. I didn't worry too much about airsickness (since I'm not prone to vomiting), but I grasped my sick bag should Pazuzu suddenly feel the urge to possess me. I expected lifting off to be like riding on a roller coaster (did I forget mention I don't like those?) yet flying through the air hardly felt any different that riding in a car. Better even. My fears about airplanes were assuaged halfway between the in-flight movie and risotto. This was the Blackjack of Setzer Gabbani. Yet, alas, no flight lasts forever.
In the book of Exodus, Moses names his first son with Zipporah, "Gershon", while in exile from Egyptian royalty. In Hebrew, "Gershon" means "stranger in a strange land." In Spain, I thought my name was "Gershon", but in Spain, my name was "mud."
My problems started as soon as I landed in the Madrid airport. The place was a labyrinth and with no David Bowie to guide me, either. After studiously running around in circles for about two and a half hours, I finally found my plane...just about to take off! The flight crew had to stop the departure for me to get on. I scrambled into my seat, sweaty, delirious, and paranoid.
I took a taxi to my host mother's apartment, knowing my habit for getting lost. The Spanish was mostly basic, "Hola", "¿Que tal?", "Estoy bien", etc. I think those cheap formalities would've sufficed, but I overreached my hand and chewed off more than I could swallow. She gave me a slightly confused look. To this day, I wonder what it was that I said. A cat named Rita also lived there. Cats speak the same language in Spain.
I soon had to meet up with my classmates at "Ayuntamiento" which is Spanish for "town hall." I stepped into the streets nervously, my hands jammed into my pockets for fear of thieves. I tried desperately not to look a tourist, but that veneer faded as soon as I brought out my map of the city. I was lost for two hours. A fat lot of good the map did. At the end of my struggle, I gave in and searched out a taxi, but the cab driver nearly laughed me out the vehicle. It turns out that Ayuntamiento was only a few minutes away.
The next day was hardly any better. Classes began at 8:30, so I woke up at 6:00, knowing that there would be a long walk ahead of me. The school was somewhere on the other side of the city, and I had no idea what it looked like. I figured at the time that a university would be easy to spot. Well, you know what they say about assumptions.
The trek was tiring, to say the least. It often had me going uphill through the various neighborhoods and alleyways. I recalled watching The Flash on the plane. How I would've loved to have had Barry Allen's super-speed at the time. Though if I did, I might've missed out on many of the aesthetics. The shops and dwellings of Santander were melded to fit into the rising landscape. Laundry hung on clotheslines outside of the windows, while pigeons scurried on the grounds, pecking for bread crumbs. By the orange hues of sunrise, it all looked at times as if I had wandered into a painting. Though I doubt if a late student would get extra credit for cultural appreciation.
La Universidad de Cantabria was far smaller than I had anticipated, though I suppose that was for the best. If it had been any larger, I'd probably get lost there, too. The university, small though it was, would become something of a second home for me. The think with relish on the countless hours I would spend outside of the cafeteria, listening to quirky stories NPR, memorizing Spanish vocabulary, or eating what was left of my pig liver sandwich.
Perhaps it was the Sea of Cantabria that kept me (relatively) sane throughout all of that initial madness. My host mother had an apartment near the sea, so it sort of functioned as my North Star. I need only know where the sea is, and I'd (eventually) find my way home. It was a great, wide blue that glittered in the sunlight, its waves licking the shore.
I suppose there's something poetic in the sea, though I can't tell you exactly what it is.
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