Caveman Craig is a side-scrolling strategy game with amusing animation and writing. It’s a bit of a niche genre (Steam Brigade leaps to mind) but I love the idea.

The game has a simple but clever concept. You lead a cave of cavemen. Each caveman has a specific role: Hunter (throw rocks at things and hide), Gatherer (gather berries and drag carcasses home) or Preparer (turn berries and carcasses into food). Once you gather enough food for a new caveman, the clueless Neanderthal will follow you around. As you do actions they learn them too. As soon as a caveman finishes learning their role (or sooner, if you choose), they run off by themselves and carry out their work.

Being historically accurate, your cavemen soon find themselves being hunted by, or just in the path of, increasingly large dinosaurs. No prize for guessing which one poses the greatest challenge. Rival cavemen can show up as well, leading to large stone-throwing fights.

As your population grows you receive useful additions to your cave, such as a roasting spit to prepare meat faster, and a target for training hunters, which is handy later on when it can be quite difficult to reach a dinosaur first to throw rocks at it before your other hunters.

There’s no real story, the game just gets harder as dinosaurs attack more frequently. It does get repetitive after a few plays, but it’s good fun seeing new events. There is a large unlock when your cave grows enough that I haven’t achieved yet–my best cave was wiped out by raptors and a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

You can download Caveman Craig or play it online at its Game Maker page or check out the developer’s blog. They’ve accounced a special edition with added features coming soon.

A bit like Che Guevara, his anti-authoritarian image has a lot of appeal, but he and Che are deeply flawed as role models. Che’s problem was that he was a violent murderer… Whereas Thompson just seemed very, very drug-munched.

I suppose because (I’m guessing like a lot of younger people) my introduction to Thompson was the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I thought his drug-crazed adventures were his most remarkable point.

After seeing Gonzo I had new-found respect for Thompson.

I knew Thompson ran for Sheriff of Pinkin County, and the brilliant bit where he shaves his hair off so he can refer to the standing sheriff who had a crew-cut as “My long-haired opponent”. But seeing footage of his attempt, it wasn’t a random stunt, it was a stunt Thompson cared deeply about and really wanted to work.

And his involvement in the 1972 Presidential Campaign… Wow. New to me.

Gonzo is full of Thompson’s funny antics, but it’s a fantastic and informative documentary too. Some great music in there as well. Highly recommended.

• Official movie site and trailer.
• A good review
• The song list

Problem: I needed to iterate over records in a table, but there’s potentially too much data to fetch every record at once with findAll().

This isn’t a case of premature optimisation–using a CakePHP model to fetch records with complex associations can cause your script to be killed for using too much memory (the default allowance is 32MB, I think).

I only need a single record at a time, so rather than increase the memory limit (which won’t scale that well) I’d like to change how data is fetched.

Solution: Use a while loop with the “Model->find( ‘first’ )” method and a page variable, like so:

$page = 1;
while ( $record = $this->Model->find( 'first', array( 'page' => $page++ ) ) ) {
  print_r( $record );
}

And that’s all there is to it. We can now work with each record, having only one record in memory at a time. Eventually find() will return false when it has passed the last record, cleaning up the $record variable.

This is a similar approach to querying the database with SQL directly, then using a method such as mysql_fetch_array() to parse the results.

The only difference is the addition of the $page variable, which acts as a pointer and is incremented so it returns the next record each time. Otherwise we would get the first record returned over and over, creating an infinite loop. mysql_fetch_array() uses a pointer like this too (as far as I know), but it’s hidden inside the method.

You could easily do the same in CakePHP to create a findNext() function on your CakePHP model that then calls find(), along with any other conditions passed in. It would be used like so:

while ( $record = $this->Model->findNext( $conditions ) ) {
  print_r( $record );
}

But I haven’t tested that yet.

You can use a model without creating a file for it or defining a class for it.

Call a model from your controller or define relationships in other models as normal, and that model can be saved, fetched, recursed, etc, using normal “$this->ModelName->foo()” calls.

Without a model class you wont have any relationships or validation rules defined on the model, but this is still a useful feature.

I often have tables whose only purpose is to populate a drop-down list and/or keep the database normalised. A table of country names, for example.

In the past I would have created a bare-bones class for the model with nothing in it, but now I don’t even have to do that.

I’ve tested this using PHP5 and it works on the latest stable version of CakePHP (1.1) and the 1.2 beta.

I suspect this wouldn’t work for PHP4 though because of the comment that you should declare a model’s name inside its class when using PHP4.

My only interest was trying to decide if a PC with a decent graphics card could render the movie in real-time (conclusion: probably). It wasn’t unattractive animation, just very simple. You might need to remove a stick of RAM to authentically* capture the jerkiness that plagued a lot of scenes though.

* Haha, I split the infinitive.

Click for a full review from someone else who likes to writes things.

Funny and enjoyable, thumbs up, worth seeing. A bit like Groundhog Day but things get quite poignant. I didn’t agree with the ending.

The trailer is a bit lame so here’s a funny clip
(need sound).

The lead-up to that’s pretty good too…

I am yet to find a screenshot capturing of spirit of Metal Slug. Getting close. Click pic for more.

Metal Slug is video gaming’s Rambo or Commando. So much so, I actually thought the game had been released in the 80s rather than 1996.

I’ve been having fun playing it via WiiStore. Mostly I love Metal Slug for its detailed and humorous pixel art.

P.S. Remember playing Badlands? That awesome car game with four steering-wheels…

These are some bad lands.

1. Turn on Wii.
2. Open WiiStore, store is set to New Zealand rather than Australia.
3. Check options, no country option.
4. Quit WiiStore.
5. Open settings, change country to Australia.
6. Open WiiStore. “Must accept new Internet Terms & Conditions.”
7. Quit WiiStore.
8. Open Wii Internet settings, accept Terms & Conditions.
9. Open WiiStore. “Your system settings are corrupt. Contact support.”
10. Reboot Wii.
11. Open WiiStore. “Unable to connect. Would you like to try again?”
12. “Try again.”
13. “Your country has changed. Would you like to continue?”
14. “Yes.”
15. “Please accept new Terms and Conditions.”
16. “Accept.”
17. “Thank you.”

Incidentally…

It’s $18 NZD for 1’000 Wii Points, compared to $15 AUD.

The frog experiment is a success!
(Date unknown)

Dr. Grimgore went on to become a renowned pigeon-trapper, attributing his success to frogs.

N.B. Some readers have written expressing confusion over the nature of the frog experiments. These were not experiments on frogs, or the effectiveness of different frog traps, but rather a study on the application of frogs and their oft-overlooked, inherent pigeon-catching abilities–Dr. Grimgore later expressed these latent abilities as quiet movement and leaping unexpectedly from dark places.