I'd never had the time to re-create Cascade, the ancient PlaySite game. Well, I'm getting better at using AI, so I threw together a basic single-player re-implementation of the original. Ironically, the tile art is better than the original artist-drawn tiles - the artist in question gave me the sketches but never came through on the final versions so I had to ship the placeholders.

https://clamatius.github.io/cascade/

Team Fortress 2 Initial Impressions

I played my second night of Team Fortress 2 last night. It has the important advantage over Guild Wars PvP that if the baby wakes up mid-game it's not a major disaster.

Valve may have taken their sweet time getting this game out, but clearly they spent a good amount of time polishing it. It's surprisingly forgiving for an online shooter - unlike Natural Selection, Quake Wars or the Battlefield lines, where noobitude is punished heavily - I felt that I was actually helping my team despite being terrible.

Art direction is excellent throughout and the game design is solid. I'd say my major criticisms are:

• I prefer the capture-the-flag mode over capture-the-point, but there's only one CTF map.


• There's a bit of a dearth of maps all round. I assume Valve is relying on the game community to fill this gap.


• No bot support means no lunchtime games at the office.

For what it's worth, right now my favourite class is the Demoman - in a world where capture-the-point is the most common game type, area denial via sticky bombs and grenade spam is clearly strong. Quick caveat here: given that I only started playing, any tactical insights I have at this point should be basically ignored.

Guild Wars: Beating Costume Brawl

Since presumably Costume Brawl was pulled today at the end of Halloween, now seems like the perfect time to post a guide to how to win a lot. How2beet as the kids these days say. Well, I'm very lazy and Rex already wrote one, so you can go read his endless waffling instead.

My free time so far this week at home adds up to a grand total of nullminuten so I didn't get to play any more Costume Brawl. I for one think the Brawl will be back, so I'm not totally heartbroken. I bet the skill bars are different next time though.

Games: Cascade

Felt curious and trundled round the Internet today for a bit of nostalgia. Turns out a little word game I wrote back in the day called Cascade (registration required) is still going, albeit displayed in the prime locked-filing-cabinet-beware-of-the-leopard placement I'd expect. The original site it was on was PlaySite, but that's changed hands a few times now and now it belongs to iWin. Cascade is certainly playable but needs a lot more love to be actually good. Still, when I left, it had had about 10 million games played and that was about 6 years or so ago now. I was sorry to see that apparently noone ever found the wacky intermittent tile freeze bug that cropped up occasionally.

Cascade is somewhere between Tetris and Scrabble. My wife was always a lot better at the game than I am - and some of the players out there have notched up 10,000 games or more and are amazingly good. My verbal IQ can be contrasted unfavourably with a week-dead badger's, so it's not very surprising I'm bad at the game.

According to Google, some other bright spark decided to put out a different game called Cascade (in 2002, which if I recall correctly was after when my game came out in perpetual beta) and since that's actually a money maker it hides all the entries for my little game. Alas.

EDIT: vibed up a single-player version with essentially the same mechanics. Available at https://clamatius.github.io/cascade/