You might have heard about the recent kerfuffle over the Facebook terms of service. If you didn’t, this brief summary from Rocketboom will get you up to speed.

Mostly, it was about whether or not you could revoke their license to use and distribute your material by deleting your account. Their argument was that they couldn’t practically delete material from their backups and, if you’d sent things to someone else, they weren’t willing to delete that material if you deleted your account. These aren’t unreasonable concerns, but their approach was to require perpetual licenses for all material and all uses. The change was far broader than needed to achieve those goals – more nuance was required in their terms. After lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, Facebook withdrew their initial set of changes, then, a few days ago, released a re-written set of terms that appear to be much less contentious. In particular, they explicitly state ‘People should own their information’. Hear, hear.

But, that’s not the point of this post. I’m interested in the fact that they’ve chosen to release two documents; one a high-level statement of principles, the other a statement of user rights and responsibilities. Compared to the old terms, which were legalistic and dense, these documents are quite readable. This, I applaud.

It’s not entirely clear, however, which one of them represents the real terms and conditions. Which is legally binding? If there’s a conflict, which takes priority? If they’re not binding, then where are the real terms of service? Most likely, the statement of user rights and responsibilities is meant to be the binding terms and conditions.

Generally, I really like the idea of providing a human-readable license alongside a legally rigorous version, because no one really ever reads terms of service, even though they should, and at least part of the reason is that they’re generally impenetrable. If the relationship between the two is clear and there are no incongruities, then great! Of course, language often isn’t that precise, and you can see how problems might arise.

A great example of this approach is in the Creative Commons license. When they were launched, much was said about licenses being written ‘legal code’ in that we have trained engineers and machines to read and use them, being lawyers and courts respectively. Let’s run with this, and see how a few concepts from software can be applied.

Software design are just common ways of thinking and solving particular problems that crop up again and again in various contexts. They might be abstract, and pertain to the way code is written (such as the decorator and singleton patterns), or they might be more concrete features that are applied such as, for example, common interface widgets like menus, scroll bars, and drop down boxes. In some form, design patterns probably appear in everything that people design. However, in software, these patterns are explicitly sought for, studied and re-applied. I’m not aware of this being a common practice in law, but I would expect the benefits of clarity, scalability, and re-usability that this brings to software engineering would be really useful in legal engineering.

Like software, legal systems can become horribly complex. In software, a major means of reducing this complexity is to employ modularity – problems are defeated by dividing and conquering. Where possible, software consists not of a single monolith of tightly coupled code, but of hierarchically organized components that interact cohesively. Benefits of this approach are a reduction in complexity, re-usability and portability of parts, and conceptual tools for analyzing and engineering models of complex systems. Various coding paradigms exist, the best known of which is object oriented programming; aspect-oriented programming and programming by contract are other paradigms that facilitate modularity. In law, there’s obviously some modularity (law is broken down into individual acts and codes, which are broken into articles, sections, clauses and so forth). Unlike well-engineered software, however, these components are strictly hierarchical and cannot be taken out of context.

Wrappers are an example of a pattern that allows software engineers to insulate themselves from the idiosyncracies of a messy component, a third-party driver, or a piece of hardware. Basically, an engineer writes a piece of code that knows all about how to handle the mess, then presents a nice clean interface that other engineers can work with without having to learn about the details of the mess themselves. Imagine if, instead of having to read all of the messy details of a complex license, you could just inquire, through a simple, well-defined interface, if certain conditions were true.

Before any of this makes sense, it’s important to consider the difference between informal language (that which we use every day), and formal language, where the meaning of all symbols and elements is defined within a particular lexicon, much as all software languages are. That is, legal writing needs to follow formal rules. One obvious problem here is that is required to be able to address pretty much any conceivable situation; this is effectively impossible to do with formal language, as you quickly end up with self-referentiality (which then allows self-contradiction a la the Epimenides paradox). If you don’t believe me, read Hofstadter’s ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’ first, then argue with me. To overcome this problem, then, we need to have some way of insulating the parts that can be modeled formally (effectively, the parts that are most clear and logic) from the parts that cannot (effectively, everything that’s subjective in some way). The wrapper pattern mentioned above allows for this – tokens can be used to represent subjective elements; these tokens are treated as simple propositions within the formal part of the system, then spat out at the end. Incidentally, this is how propositional logic, and almost all written reasoning works. However, lest I make this sound easy, I should mention that while, hypothetically, this is possible, it’s unclear whether or not the resulting system of formal law and subjective tokens are workable.

If, hypothetically, enough of the mechanics of law could be formalized in such a way that it can be treated computationally, all sorts of things become possible. Firstly, there no longer needs be a legal priesthood whose job it is to parse the complexities of legal argument and language and explain this to the masses – this can be by software, and learned systematically. Imagine if legal code could be translated through some filter into a human-readable form. Imagine if you could query, using a well-defined interface whether a body of law has certain properties, or if certain activities are true. Imagine if law was extensible and modular. Imagine if the legal system was simple, accessible, and thin enough that legal disputes could be resolved in a matter of seconds rather than years, through software interfaces rather than the courts.

I don’t know which parts of this are actually plausible, or if it’s even possible. However, it t would make damned interesting research project for someone. I wonder if someone’s already tried..

Got 10-20 minutes free? Play “Neverending Light“. The games starts with you and your character taking a tour through a cave system full of stalagtites, stalagmites, and awesome voice acting. Needless to say, things go horribly wrong.

Part 1 of an ongoing series.

The other day, I stumbled on a delightful little adventure game called The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge by Jonas Kyratzes and friends. “Delightful” really is the right word, as it suggests something simple and childlike yet elegant and charming. Desert Bridge fits this perfectly, and is surprisingly sophisticated to boot.

On first impression, the whole game feels playful and offbeat. All of the graphics are sketched in crayon with a passion for colour and oddity rivaling that of a six year old. All the characters and spaces are slightly kooky, from the cat who believe he’s an emperor, to the spider-pig, the cuddly dinosaur in the garden, the collection of stoned mushrooms in the pantry, the giant hamsters, to Horaffe, the bionic giraffe. Coupled with all of this, the soundtrack really wouldn’t be out of place in some sort of clay-mation mystery adventure.

To some extent, all of this makes the game seem like it must be targeted at children, but it’s really not. The humour’s quite sophisticated and sometimes subtle, there’s a distinct hint of sadness throughout, and without giving away the ending, let me just mention that the word ‘sinister’ in the title doesn’t mean that everyone is left handed.

For the geeky, the game’s also riddled with references to geek culture, from Bill & Ted, to Fallout, to Zathras, a turtle that speaks, well, like Zathras (from Babylon 5). Furthermore, pretty much everything you can interact with is either funny, a pun, or just plain outlandish. Examples include flavoured monkey salt, polyhedrix asparagus extract, orange wolf honey, or liquid salami (and that’s just one room).

On a gameplay level, it’s your average point and click adventure – move from room to room, talk to people, click on objects, pick them up and merge to form other objects. It’s even got a ‘golden hammer’ puzzle; that is, a puzzle gimmick that gets re-used again and again, if only you realize that something’s a reference to it.

One of the nice things about the crayon graphics is that each of the scenes has less extraneous detail than many adventure games. If you can see something, it’s worth clicking on it, and if something can be clicked on, you can see it, as all of the objects are reasonably big and contrast well with the background. If I had one criticism for the game, though, it would be that you move by clicking at the edge of the graphics. Consequently, I would often try to click on something and instead, to my mild annoyance, be moved to the next area.

It’s actually just fun to wander around it and poke at things, though, which reminds me a lot of good interaction fiction where everything is worth tampering with, even if it doesn’t mean you’re making any progress. Incidentally, I recommend trying every possible action on everything you pick up. You never know what you might be able to gerbelize.

Difficulty is comparatively low – most of the puzzles are either straight forward or just require a cup of tea and maybe a re-read of some piece of text to solve. Incidentally, there’s quite a lot of text which, though well worth reading, does take a while and, if you’re impatiently charging through like I did the first time around, can seem a burden. But, if you slow down a little and put a little effort into appreciation, it really serves to bring out the characters, particularly Old Man Bill, around whom the story revolves, but who you never meet.

Takes about two hours to play if you’re taking your time, more if you’re obsessively trying things out. Quite unique, but if I had to characterize it in terms of other things, I’d put it somewhere between Zork, anything by Jim Henson, and the walls at your local kindergarten.

Play this game!

So, everyone knows what r stands for, right? What about v? Or f(x) and f’(x)? OK. How about x, y, and z?

If you’re not a math geek of some kind, you’re probably not reading anymore, but just in case you are, the point is that each of these letters has a common meaning in a lot of mathematical notation – p is a probability, v some arbitrary vector, f(x) and f’(x) some arbitrary function and its derivative, and x, y and z, are coordinates in 3-space.

The problem is that a lot of the time, this isn’t true, and even when it is true, it’s hard to tell exactly _which_ probability or set of coordinates you might be talking about.

Good math books typically get this – they define their notation, and use it consistently. If p means probability in chapter 1, it probably doesn’t mean ‘an arbitrary solution to the dual problem’ in chapter 2, unless it’s been explicitly re-defined. Each symbol should correspond to one particular value or concept at any given time. This makes the text easier and faster to read, and avoids all sorts of nasty confusion.

So, why is it that people presenting mathematical results always assume that you know their notation? If they throw up a complicated expression using a bunch of different letters, why do they assume that you know that r doesn’t actually mean radius (even though it’s shown on a circular diagram), and that, today, we’re using g to refer to probability, not p (except for that slide near the end, because it’s from a different slide set).

You’d think this just happens in badly prepared and presented seminars. Unfortunately, either you’re wrong, or I have an uncanny ability to attend only seminars that meet that criteria.

So, if you’re ever in a position to be presenting mathematical notation to a bunch of people, please, please, do the following..

• Introduce your notation. Tell the audience what each letter means as soon as you start using it.
• Don’t change what x means halfway through your talk, unless you really have to. If you’re using x to just mean ‘some arbitrary value’, that’s OK, but tell people that.
• Each value should refer to only one thing at a time. This is particularly problematic if you’re working through an algorithm that re-uses the same notation every step. Is B the initial basis matrix you chose, or the basis matrix at step 3?
• If you’re re-introducing some notation you briefly mentioned at the beginning, mention it again.
• If your expression expresses some important relationship, verbalize it – read it out. If your expression is really large but still important for your audience to understand, not just accept, break it down and read it out. If you can’t do that, your audience won’t get it.
• If you’re just showing algebraic steps, question why you included them in the first place. If you’re not expecting your audience to work through the algebra while you’re talking, leave it out.
• Just because you think p always means probability, don’t assume you can get away with not defining it. If a letter has different meanings in different fields, you’re bound to confuse at least one person. Sure, they might be able to work it out from context, but they shouldn’t have to. Besides, p means the probability of what, exactly?

I could go on, but instead, I refer people to Polya’s lovely short rant on the subject in ‘How to Solve It’. There’s a free version online. It’s on page 134.

People seem to forget that the entire point of notation is the economical expression of an idea for the purpose of memory or communication. Furthermore, memory is really just a special case of communication – you’re communicating with your future self. Imagine how confused they’ll be if, in your notes, q means different things without clear distinction. Imagine how confused your audience will be, not having been you in the first place.

This all boils down to this general point about communicating – if you don’t value your idea enough to make sure your audience understands, don’t bother opening your mouth. Play Minesweeper instead.

X-posted to various places

I’ve heard of colour affecting mood, but not performance. Interesting paper in last week’s Science on several studies examining performance and creativity in various tasks when using a computer with different background colours. It seems surprising to me that they were able to get significant differences simply by changing the background colour, not the content, or anything else.

Existing research reports inconsistent findings with regard to the effect of color on cognitive task performances. Some research suggests that blue or green leads to better performances than red; other studies record the opposite. Current work reconciles this discrepancy. We demonstrate that red (versus blue) color induces primarily an avoidance (versus approach) motivation (study 1, n = 69) and that red enhances performance on a detail-oriented task, whereas blue enhances performance on a creative task (studies 2 and 3, n = 208 and 118). Further, we replicate these results in the domains of product design (study 4, n = 42) and persuasive message evaluation (study 5, n = 161) and show that these effects occur outside of individuals’ consciousness (study 6, n = 68). We also provide process evidence suggesting that the activation of alternative motivations mediates the effect of color on cognitive task performances.

Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances. Ravi Mehta and Rui (Juliet) Zhu (5 February 2009) Science [DOI: 10.1126/science.1169144]

Why am I posting this?
I’m interested in pretty much any verifiable means of enhancing human cognitive performance, even if they seem a bit odd. If background colour affects us sufficiently that our performance and mood changes, I have to wonder what would happen if our whole vision was tinted. And, what does my green screen background colour mean? Interesting, if kooky-sounding, idea for augmenting reality. Brings to mind the general idea of using AR as a simple means of interposing image processing between the viewer and the viewed. Could be particularly useful for people with various vision deficiencies and colour blindness.

Also, interesting point about likely variation between North American students (as interviewed in the study) and students of other nationalities.

via Cosmos

Like most things, games evolve. Modifications arise over time, sometimes by design, sometimes casually – examples include deliberate design, house rules, misinterpretation, and our innate tendency to search for parsimony and avoid unnecessary complexity. Since game designs are socially transmitted between both players and designers, and elements of game design can be recombined to form new games, these modifications accumulate over time, spawning new games that compete with others for attention and favour. Survival of the funnest, so to speak, with design patterns as genes, and boredom as the key factor leading to game species extinction.

The point here isn’t to assert that the evolution of games is the same as biological evolution, but to draw a few interesting parallels:

• Firstly, games should continually change to suit their environment; that is, the minds and taste of current gamers. Read simplistically, game evolution suggests that games will necessarily become more fun, more accessible, and more addictive over time. However, though this may occur on a localized scale, changes in taste and social context over time will prevent this, particularly with regards a given design’s more flexible qualities. This mistake is similar to that in which a modern biological species is held to be somehow more evolved and thus better in some way than an earlier species or a species that exhibits characteristics similar to earlier species. Later designs are not necessarily improved designs.
• Secondly, a relationship exists that mirrors that between biology and geography in biological evolution and, furthermore, has similar consequences leading to speciation. For example, in biology, allopatry is the phenomena where a population splits in two by some natural barrier and thus evolves into different species. In games, there is an obvious example in the many flavours of football, or, more recently and more abstractly, in the way that early war games evolved into a vast array of different role-playing games based on divides of geography, player age, taste, and available play time, all of which characterize the different ‘brain ecologies’ in which games live.
• Thirdly, the arguments used to defeat the blind watchmaker argument used by creationists can be used to conjecture a way in which games and play could arise spontaneously (click here for a good video demonstrating the blind matchmaker version).
  • Assume the existence of creatures capable of making a distinction between those activities worth doing for their own sake and those not, and capable of combining aspects of those activities to produce new potentially worthwhile ones.
  • Over time, the process of living will cause those creatures to engage in many activities. They are thus likely to randomly discover worthwhile activities.
  • Given freedom to act, those activities are likely to be repeated.
  • Two factors now come into play. Firstly, the original activity will vary each time it is produced due to circumstance and memory, and, secondly, activities may be combined.
  • As this process repeats itself over time, new, more complex forms of worthwhile activity will arise. The resulting activity is play.
  • To move from undirected play to games, we need formalisms such as rules, restrictions, and goals. These might evolve on their own or they might arise in response to social pressures, a desire for commonality and consistency, or even just desire for an economy of expression. It’s not clear whether they require higher function and language, however – perhaps animals can play, but only humans can play games.

None of this is really that revolutionary – game designs are just memeplexes, and Dawkins has already argued quite convincingly that memes and memeplexes evolve along similar lines to genes.

Point three, however, has an interesting consequence that I’ve not seen discussed elsewhere. Assuming the general idea holds, it has only minimal assumptions that any life with rudimentary language and intelligence would most likely possess. Therefore, this seems to suggest that games and play are an inevitable feature of all intelligent life. This seems somewhat intuitively obvious, but its nice, I think, to see why it should be.

From a front page article in the Press on Thursday:

By new capital spending I assume they mean capital investment in infrastructure and so forth. It’s not terribly important – either way, this paragraph appears to say that despite increased spending, debt is increasing. Well, duh – if you spend money, you can’t use it to pay down debt.

It’s reasonable to argue, but by no means given, that money invested in infrastructure could serve to increase productivity and thus decrease long term debt through increased revenues. So, it’s arguable that spending $1b now on infrastructure could support economic activity exceeding that over the long term. However, economic stimulus based on tax cuts pose a deeply puzzling problem: How does a tax cut of $X lead to increased economic activity of more than $X?

For this to work, consumer spending needs to result in a positive sum game with very high growth – that is, it needs to be the case that $X spent >> $X worth of increased productivity through investment. Furthermore, some will be disappear as it is used to pay down debt, and some will be spent on foreign sourced goods. Of that remaining, only a small quantity will make its way back to NZ public coffers. It seems completely bizarre to expect that economic activity, and thus tax revenues, could increase by even a small fraction of X.

Here’s the best argument I can dream up:
Of the money given to the public, some large fraction (S) will be spent on NZ goods, some fraction (I) of which will be re-invested in NZ companies, leading to increases in productivity (V) over the long term whose value exceeds the adjusted value of the money injected in the first place.

That is, $X invested leads to $(X x S x I x V) of long term value. If $(X x S x I x V) exceeds $X, then, over the long term, the stimulus could be considered useful. If not, its a poor expenditure of money. To be realistic, $(X x S x I x V) would also shrink by some factor reflecting inflation, potential interest and lost flexibility by virtue of the government not having $X to spend as other needs and opportunities arise. But, it seems that it’d be hard enough for $(X x S x I x V) to exceed $X in the first place, so let’s leave that out.

Let’s take a simple example. 1,000,000 New Zealanders are each given $1000, reflecting a total investment of $1b. 70% of that is spent on NZ goods (S = 0.7), and of that money received by NZ companies, 20% is re-invested (I = 0.2). Let’s further assume that money invested returns 400% of its value to the public coffers over the long term. This gives us $560,000,000 of value for $1b spent. Not a good investment. Furthermore, my understanding is that the numbers I’ve used in this example are quite optimistic.

What marginal effects could contribute to make this work? Where is the extra money coming from? Either my understanding of this is completely naive (which it may well be), or this form of economic stimulus is just a shell game.

Back in January, I wrote a short post about Micro-finance, the Grameen Bank, and Kiva, an organisation that also finance micro-loans via micro-investments. Unfortunately, at the time, there was a freeze on investments, so I couldn’t make a small investment on behalf of my sister, as I had planned.

Now, though, things are back in full swing, and so, for Christmas, my sister is getting a small investment to the Than Thol Group, a village bank with 32 members in the village of Sambuor Village in Kandal Province of Cambodia, with which they plan to buy fertilizer for their assorted fields and plantations.

So, if you’re buying gifts for someone who is generally civic minded, why not skip spending lots of money on buying something, and instead give them a gift investment. Maybe with a nice card or something small and personal to go with it, so you don’t lose out on the emotional satisfaction of actually handing them something..

I finally got around to writing this letter to NZ prime minister John Key as part of Morgue’s “Don’t be a Rodney” campaign. It’s probably a bit long, but, well, I had to get that all off my chest, and the key point is summarized at the end.

So far, I’ve only emailed it in, but I might print and send it when I’m back in New Zealand in a week.

Dear Mr Key,

I’m writing with regards the agreement on climate change policy in your party’s confidence and supply agreement with ACT.

From reading this agreement, it seems that the National party supports reasonable policy to meet New Zealand’s Kyoto responsibilities, and perhaps, policy that allows us to reinforce our international image, and allow us more latitude in the implementation of policy by taking some modicum of leadership.

However, it is also abundantly clear that ACT does not support this, and indeed considers it all to be a hoax, perpetrated by some unknown party for unknown or poorly substantiated reasons. From his statements in the house on September 2, it is clear that Rodney Hide, in particular, believes this fiercely. Furthermore, it seems that he was successful in shackling you to what will likely prove to be both a foolish and unpopular policy that, by returning to minority opinions already disgraced in years past, can only undermine you and make New Zealand appear foolish on the international stage.

I respectfully recommend and request that you either act to amend this portion of your agreement with ACT, or, while working within the provisions of that agreement, move swiftly to bypass the Mr Hide’s obsession by enacting the Emissions Trading Scheme as swiftly as possible. In particular, you should move past the ‘scientific review’ stage dictated to you in your agreement as swiftly as possible, and with a resounding acknowledgement of both the existence and magnitude of this problem.

I would like to offer the following arguments for why this would benefit New Zealand, the world, and you personally:

- First, and most obviously, climate change is perhaps the most significant challenge to face humanity. Naive appreciations of the problem in which global warming is thought of as an expensive annoyance are deeply flawed. Changes in climate tie into a web of global problems that, taken together, have the potential to be absolutely catastrophic. Changes in weather patterns could easily (and are most likely to) lead to massive disruptions in the global food supply at a point in time when the world is running low on cheap fertiliser from fossil fuels. Furthermore, small changes in climate now have the potential to (as they have in the past) lead to more catastrophic changes such as those associated with disastrous warming events in the deep past. Controlling our emissions is but one part of combating these possibilities, but one that is extremely important.

- New Zealand holds a great deal of prestige for its ‘clean, green’ image. This prestige factors strongly into our attractiveness as a tourist destination, our national pride, and in our ability to ‘punch above our level’ in international discussions. By arbitrarily back-pedaling at this stage, we stand to look like fools and diminish this prestige, just as the US finally begins to come around to dealing with the problem.

- There is significant economic opportunity in adapting current infrastructure and technology for reduced emissions. By moving swiftly, we open incentives for New Zealand companies to invest in improving our domestic infrastructure and, by doing so, place them and us in a strong position within the emerging global green technology industry. By moving slowly and, worse, by making our country seem backwards on this issue, we both lose opportunities, and increase the likely costs as we play catch up as the rest of the world forces us to control our emissions.

- Leading up to the election, your party participated in the development of the ETS bill. Furthermore, a strong mandate exists for New Zealand to move in this direction. Now, following the election, it seems that you have been emasculated by ACT, and forced to accept policies that do not echo your party’s policy, the mandate of the people, or the opinions of the best minds of our time. You must know how foolish this makes you look. It is emphatically in your best interest that you assert yourself and show us that you can be the leader you said you would be during your campaign.

You campaigned on a platform of making a place we are proud of. I simply cannot see how allowing yourself to be led around by Mr Hide on this issue helps you in that goal. I beseech you to do the right thing for New Zealand, yourself and the world, by moving swiftly to pass the Emissions Trading scheme.

I love moral ambiguity in games. I love characters who struggle with intense yet believable emotions, and who are conflicted by their actions and beliefs to the point that they nearly destroy themselves. I love the simple humanity of this, and I love it when this is set against a bleak, gritty setting that offers scope for exploring the darker side of human nature without being too pretentious. I’ll take a plot where simple people tear themselves apart over one in which heroes save the world any day.

I finished playing Iji the other day and it fits that characterization well. Here’s the trailer:

And, here’s why I liked it:

Plot & Character

The game begins with the world’s destruction in a massive alien assault. Any hope for a happy ending is gone before you it has a chance to materialize.

Iji wakes up in a lab in an underground base, having been modified by now-dead scientists with game necessary but plot irrelevant nanotech. She’s confused, lost, and angry at the world in a hopeless, self defeating way. Even worse, she shortly discovers that her brother is still alive, but, though he tries to help her, has become hardened and cold, and expects Iji to get over her fears and save the world.

The basic premise isn’t particularly novel, but the way Iji plays out really works. The insanity of the situation she’s in isn’t dismissed as irrelevant with a short angst session early in the game, rather, she breaks down and cries from stress at various occasions, and it just works. She’s not a hero type, she’s just a person, stretched to the emotional limit.

I just loved this – I can’t recall ever seeing a game in which the hero breaks down and cries over their victims. Probably no surprise given the constant reminders that she’s slowly turning into a killing machine. As you play, you pick up logbooks left behind by aliens; early in the game you find a diary entry in which an alien scout waxes lyrical about his lady love, stationed elsewhere in the facility. You can imagine that this doesn’t turn out well.

Anyway, I won’t go into any more detail for fear of spoiling things, but this was one of the most emotionally satisfying games I’ve played in a very long time.

Level design

Most of the levels are somewhat linear with occasional secret areas. What’s interesting is that you can approach them in several ways. By no means do you have to go on a rampage, killing everything in sight. In fact, it may well be to your advantage not to (certainly, in the later levels you’re almost forced to just run away from things lest they set you on fire). Furthermore, the game’s weapon options allow for a variety of different tactics in confronting your enemies.

Even more interestingly, though, you can play the game as a pacifist. That is, you can make it through the whole game without killing more than two of the game’s several hundred aliens. Unsurprisingly, this results in the plot taking a fairly different direction.

Gameplay

With a range of different weapons combined with various special abilities and an attribute point system, Iji creates a wide range of options for the connoisseur of killing. Different weapon choices require different styles of play, and not all weapons are effective on all enemies. Multiple weapons aren’t special in themselves, but few games use them to produce diversity of play in the way that Iji manages to.

In some games, only the boss fights require much thinking and observation in order to determine how to defeat a given set of enemies, but in Iji, this is frequently the case. Even on normal difficulty, you have to use your brain.

x-posted in a bunch of places