The Witness

An extended journey into the Braid creator’s new game

Jonathan Blow’s post-Braid game, The Witness, has been in development for seven years now. In that time, audiences have been introduced to the game’s mix of linedrawing puzzles and island exploration. I didn’t know what to make of the game at first. How could drawing lines remain interesting for any real length of time? Was that all there was to it? After spending nine hours playing the game, I now have a sense of how the seemingly simple concept is expertly stretched, twisted, and manipulated to become something far more fascinating than a surface reading might lead you to believe.

Error messages

Isuppose I should be pleased that error messages are getting friendlier. Sure, Windows 10’s stability (or lack thereof) hasn’t always filled me with confidence, but at least when things go pear-shaped it tells me something that sounds like it’s been written by a human being.

‘The server stumbled, page could not be loaded’ is easier to take than ‘Windows store error, exception xxxgetstuffed’, even if it means you’ll be jumping through hoops for the next two hours just to get a few updates to download. And while I’m not a big fan of ‘We couldn’t complete the updates. Undoing changes. Don’t turn off your computer’, at least it explains roughly what’s gone wrong.

Magix Music Maker 2016

A quick way into all kinds of music

There are plenty of affordable Windows programs for digital music enthusiasts – including Steinberg’s Cubase Elements, Cakewalk Music Creator and Ableton Live Intro – but nothing quite like Apple’s GarageBand for those of us who just want to dabble without a lot of complications. Music Maker includes some of the kinds of features you’d find across all of these, at a relatively basic level.

Remembering… Acorn BBC Master 128

We look back at a classroom computer and an old friend

Those of us who are old enough to recall sitting in a classroom in the mid-80s will undoubtedly also remember the sudden swarming around one of the school’s limited computers.

At the teacher’s signal, the students would race over to one of the few BBCs and sit around arguing whose turn it was to sit at the keyboard and whose turn it was to read out from the hastily written BASIC listing in the exercise book. It was a pretty remarkable time to be growing up, although we never realised it at the time.

Top 5 Things We Learned From Black Friday

A few lessons that only rampant consumerism can teach us…

1 Friday Lasts All Week

And the week before. And the week after. The whole idea of Black Friday is that it’s a sales period that comes after Thanksgiving, an American celebration that has nothing to do with us, and now we can’t even stick to the day that’s actually in the name. Instead, retailers declare long in advance that ‘Black Friday lasts all week!’, then when the Friday in question arrives, ‘Black Friday lasts all weekend’, and then when it’s over, we’re told it’s Cyber Monday. No doubt we’ll soon be told that it lasts all week, then retailers will probably just give a special name to every day of the year, all with the explicit intention of making people spend money they don’t have.