Introduction to SCRUM

One of the changes within BartsNews formula is that I intend to post more about the software development, especially from the point of view of creating games - I actually have a cunning plan to document developing a game from the design phase to post-mortem in a form of consecutive notes.

Since I would most probably apply iterative approach in order to show you some Agile programming practices, I thought I'd bring you some basic explanation first. Here is a video that I have found that explains the basics of SCRUM (which is a more formalized framework for the Agile software development) and in my opinion it is a good starting point for venture into the Agile world:

Of course, I myself am not a SCRUM Master. However, I am working for the company that is quite focused on applying the Agile software development principles were applicable and feasible (which is not always the case with legacy code developed in the times when dinosaurs walked the Earth) and due to my role in the projects that I have participated in, I have had quite an exposure to Agile programming in general, including a good dose of healthy SCRUM practices.

Therefore, while I am aware that there's only so much that can be conveyed about SCRUM in such a short video, I think it is interesting, informative and approachable, thus constituting a good introduction to SCRUM method in particular, but also Agile software in general.

Sperm Wars (not the book)

I just had to write this note, my juvenile inner self laughing its ass off in the virtual equivalent of drawing anatomic sketch on the school toilet door. Today I bring you the game that's so full of silly in-your-face sexual innuendos that it passes through territory of terrible games into the awesome (kind of like point counters rolling over in early 8bit games).

The game in question is called Space Phallus. It's indie, it's free, it can be downloaded from here and it's starring a dog's head shooting penises and sperm. Yes, you've read that one correctly. The trailer below will clarify all the uncertainties you might have:

I love the chiptunes in Space Phallus, graphics are properly retro-stylized and gameplay is actually pretty solid but I didn't really play it for too long, because I suck at shooters and this one is damn hard. Also, juvenile humour is good for a while, but it loses its charm quickly. Still, I think that this post will boost my page rank with a couple of interesting keywords so I just had to write it. I'll wrap it up with some comments about the game that really crack me up:

“Needs more cock!”
“all in all, its a very ballsy game and i hope any critiques aren’t to hard on you :-o”
“You are a sick, sick man! And I heartily endorse your efforts :D”

New face of Street Fighter

So Capcom has recently discovered that there exists a lost demographic somewhere out there in the world, this hidden tribe being called PC gamers. Hence we can see more and more PC conversions of their titles recently, which is a good thing even regardless of the fact that some ports are plain crappy (Lost Planet, anyone?). But the trend is overally positive, so I'll stop whining, give them some credit and continue to the main point I wanted to make today. Wait, no, I'll just add one thing: what about Dead Rising, you bastards? Now, with that out of the way, la suite.

Recently I've heard that new Street Fighter is to be ported to PC as well. My gigantic erection caused by this announcement shrunk somewhat when I realized that we were talking about SF IV, the 3D one, instead of beautiful HD version of Super SF II Turbo. Oh well, anyways, it's still Street Fighter, said Barts, the naive moron that he is, and downloaded the benchmark to test his antique gaming rig. It should still be cool, right? Turns out, no, it isn't.

What? Street Fighter IV is not cool?

You see, I have this UDON artbook right next to my PC, called Udon's Art of Capcom. There are pretty pictures of, among many others, SF protagonists. And they look great. Now, we all know that the series has evolved from its early roots to what it is now and the characters' appearance has changed as well. One can make an assumption that something would be different this time as well.

However, this does not prepare you for what happened with characters in SF IV. From the very first moment Ryu's ugly mug appeared on the screen, I felt dread. What part IV has done to our poor warriors' looks is beyond critique in this gamer's not-so-humble opinion. They look terrible! I believe fugly is the word I'm looking for here. So while Street Fighter IV might be well executed overall, the faces spoil it for me, definitively. Just look, the image below depicts SF IV's rendition of Sakura:


Excuse me, guys, are we talking about the same Sakura? This one?

Image by Udon crew.

No. No, no, no and once more no - this is... well, I don't know what it is, actually, I'm a little lost for words. It's a good fighting game, only the characters are caricatures of Street Fighter heroes. Don't get me wrong - I do appreciate fluid animation, exquisite combo system, cool 3D camera slides that change regular supermoves into Matrix-on-crack visual spectacle in the air. It's just that model faces ruin it for me - I don't know why, maybe it's uncanny valley effect or maybe I'm just stupid. But face-wise SFIV fighters look, well, some might say as shit, I think I will just call it creepy and unsettling. And this is why I'm going to neither buy nor play this game, period.

PS. Capcom, wtf is that song in graphics menu? Did I hear it correctly? Something about love? In a fucking fighting game? Epic fail.

Barts' Short Bursts vol. 4 - Flash gaming edition

The topic of today's edition of is Flash gaming. I have to admit that for a long time I have almost completely dismissed Flash games as crappy timewasters for extremely bored office folk. Only from time to time would something catch my attention, but eventually I've come to acknowledge that there is a good number of really cool games out there.

In the recent months the pile of titles I've recognized as worthy of playing has grown to the point where I decided to bring them to you all together instead of one thousand small posts on each of them separately. Without further ado, let's go through the list of great Flash games in Barts' Short Bursts part 4!


The main dish today is a delightful mixture of platforming, adventure and exploration elements, presented in exquisite graphical form reminiscent of Tim Burton. The game in question is Scarygirl by artist Nathan Jurevicius: it's got charm, it oozes style and definitely is fun to play. Taking into account its size and quality assets, it might as well have become a commercial game - and thank $insertYourDeityOfChoiceHere that it didn't, because now all you need to play it is your browser. Click here to jump straight into play or watch a wonderful trailer before.


The second game gets credit for a title that will resonate with every geek and nerd out there: Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar. It's about robot dinosaurs that, uh... no, we won't go this way. The game is a reasonably well done horizontal shooter that would be relatively forgettable were it not for the fact that there are Robot Dinosaurs in it. Plus, they shoot beams when they roar (gee, thanks, Captain Obvious) and there's a little twist to it - if your dino roars for too long, its beam gets weaker, so some quick thinking is required to keep firepower at its maximum. Roam and roar here.


The third game doesn't get credit for originality - but it's an all-time classic, namely Doom, playable in your browser. I know that Doom has been ported to pretty much everything, but I think that Flash version is news. If not, then at least there are two other games to keep you entertained, Hexen and Heretic, so all in all this tripack deserves a mention. To go back in time, click here.


The next game, is more of a classic Flash timewaster of the pixel-perfect-balancing-things genre, but even though I normally get extremely annoyed by those, mainly due to my imprecision and impatience, this one has somehow gotten to me. Entitled CatCarWatermelon, which pretty much describes what objects player will have to balance, this game has bombarded me with its ubercuteness and, surprisingly, it worked. Click here to mix kittens and fruits, just be careful not to drop them.


The fifth game, Lost&Found, can be categorized under buddy service, because I'm putting it on the list more due to the fact that I know its author than due to its merits. Seriously though, while it's not something that would shake the world of Flash gaming, it is an interesting first project. As anyone who has ever ventured into game-making territory can attest, completing even a simple game is quite a feat in itself. Creating something that's reasonably entertaining on the first try is spectacular - and this is the case here. Somewhat reminiscent of Cave Story game- and graphics-wise, Lost&Found is a little thingy definitely worth wasting ten minutes of your life to complete it. Click here to check it and here to read introductory note (in Polish).

The next two games are something that I already wrote about, but checking the statistics for the site, I found out that you are not clicking the links, brothers and sisters, and these are fine games indeed, so it's a shame - hence, I'll try to convince you once again


Bloody Day Out is an incredibly addictive strategy game starring cute little Death taking life from a bunch of totally sweet critters. Unfortunately, with each move Death is also slowly losing health and as the game progresses keeping balance between staying alive and cutting through little creatures becomes increasingly difficult. Very amusing, very cute, very well executed and very original as well - Bloody Day Out is a must-play.


Virus 3, while less spectacular in the visual layer, requires a good dose of intelligence and strategy from the player, who controls a disease spreading through an organism. By choosing the cells of which color should be infected next, player influences the direction in which the disease will crawl. The goal is to cover the whole board, but on harder levels with more colors, obstacles and fancy cell shapes this will force player to conjure every ounce of their gray matter. I recommend it to anyone that likes thinking forward - click here to start infecting.


And while we are at the subject of the things that I already have written about, remember that page where you can play NES games online, vNES? Well, I've found another one! I wouldn't be writing about it, though, because that would be rather redundant, were it not for the fact that this other 8bit Nintendo gaming site is a part of larger family that includes Commodore 64, Game Boy (both Classic and Color!), Sega Master System and even early PC games (Moonstone in a web browser, I might faint). Above you can see the screenshot of Prince of Persia being played online - pretty cool, eh?

Phew, not bad. That's quite a choice you got there - so many fine games to play for free and they don't even require powerful computer. Be advised, some are really addictive and will surely get you fired if you try them at work, so don't tell I haven't warned you!

PSPKanji 2.3

PSP, being a portable platform, can be very helpful assistant in learning on the go in short bursts. I used to have it loaded with Pimsleur Japanese Course, but this is something that one can do on a regular MP3 player. What such device would not be able to do, however, is to have a regular Japanese study program on it and this is where PSP can prove a useful companion. The program I'm talking about is PSPKanji, and while I've written about it some time ago, in the meantime the new version has popped up and it adds some new features.


As far as I know, the first Kanji study tool for PSP was Kanji Trainer Portable. It had two little problems, though - it was Japanese program not available in Europe or States and it wasn't free. PSPKanji was the homebrew community's answer to Kanji Trainer Portable - a free and open-source software that could be used for memorizing Kanji. When I first described it, the program was still missing a couple of useful things that were added later on.

Now, in version 2.3, PSPKanji allows for custom lists loaded from XML files, displays Kanji stroke order, works on M33 firmware and PSPLite, Kana quizzes were added, language support has been extended and a number of bugs have been squashed. Honestly, it's hard to find something to add, except maybe wishing for spatial repetition algorithms, but this would be quite a big thing to implement, so let's not exagerate and be happy with what we have - and we have a lot of options to boost Japanese study with PSPKanji.

The funny thing about PSPKanji is that despite its name it's not PSP-only software. It can be downloaded from SourceForge in a PC or even Mac version. With all due respect to PSPKanji's creator, though, I think that on these two platforms there is a choice of more interesting programs, both in terms of user interface and possibilities they offer. This does not mean that PSKanji is a bad piece of software - it is a competent homebrew program that shines on PSP, but hets overshadowed on regular computers by the likes of Anki and Mnemosyne.


Overall, if you have a homebrew-enabled PSP and a thing for Japanese, you owe it to yourself to try PSPKanji. Its developer, Aion, has done a good job, coding useful and nice-looking language study tool for the PSP crowd. Visit PSPKanji homesite (don't get scared at pure html, though), downloaded and play with it a bit - I am sure you'll like it.

Transforminators versus Termiformers

I have vowed to provide quality content on this blog, but some things are geeky and crack me up and that's about all that can be said about them. Such is the case with the following trailer, mashup of Terminator and Transformers:

Seeing how both me and my girlfriend are waiting impatiently for both movies, I allow myself to share this little animation here, maybe there's more geeks around that will appreciate it.