my first three Python scripts (programs)

1

inventory = ["sword", "Shield", "Charm", "Luck"]
spent = ""
word = ""
import random
while inventory != "":

 word = random.choice(inventory)
 print (word)
 spent = spent+word

 if word in spent:
  inventory.remove(word)
 else:
     print("/n")

 input ("press a key")

What this program does is select a word at random from a list.
Then it displays the word.
It then selects another word, it will not select the same word more than once.
It will always be a random selection.
The program concludes when there are no more words to display.

2

def game():
    again = ""
    buy = ""
    wallet = 30
    attributes = {"Dexterity": 30, "Wisdom":30, "Health":30, "Strength":30}
    print (attributes)
    while again != "n":
        if attributes == "":
            print("goodbye!")
        else:
            choice = int(input("1 = exit \n 2 = spend money on attributes \n for your character. \n 3 = sell an attribute. \n 4 = sell off an entire attribute. \n Choose a number from 1-4:"))
            choices = {1, 2, 3, 4}
            while choice in choices:
                if choice == 1:
                    print ("Goodbye")
                    input ("press a key")
                elif choice == 2:
                    #spend coin
                    buy = input ("what would you like to spend money on?:")
                    if buy in attributes:
                        attributes[buy] += 5
                        wallet -= 5
                        print ("You have ", wallet, " dollars left"); print (attributes)
                    else: print ("that is not a legit attribute!")
                    again = input ("play again y/n")
                    if wallet <= 0: print ("you can't play anymore"); break
                elif choice == 3:
                    #make coin
                    sell = input ("what would you like to sell for money?:")
                    if sell in attributes:
                        attributes[sell] -= 5
                        wallet += 5
                        print ("You have ", wallet, " dollars left"); print (attributes)
                    else: print ("that is not a legit attribute!")
                    again = input ("play again y/n")
                    if wallet <= 0: print ("you can't play anymore"); break
                elif choice == 4:
                    #sell an attribute
                    sellAll = input ("which attribute would you like to sell all of?:")
                    if sellAll in attributes:
                        wallet += attributes[sellAll]
                        del attributes[sellAll]
                        print ("You have ", wallet, " dollars left"); print (attributes)
                    else: print ("that is not a legit attribute!")
                    again = input ("play again y/n")
                    if wallet <= 0: print ("you can't play anymore"); break

replay = input("Are you tough enough to play? y/n")

if replay == "y": game()

This program still has a ton of bugs in it.

What it does is display a list of attributes and quantities of those attributes that your character has in his inventory.

Then the program gives you the option of selling some of or all of any of the attributes, or buying more of any of the attributes. I haven't yet got it to the point where you can choose to do anything.

It all runs fine until you decide to take a different action.

The program never returns to the main menu to list your available actions, it just repeats the question, for example, "what would you like to spend money on?" whereas it should say "what would you like to do next?"

3

parents = {"Luke Skywalker": "Darth Vader", "Judy Garland":"Liza Minelli", "Peter Fonda":"Henry Fonda", "Kate Hudson":"Goldie Hawn"}

print ("I know these children")

allInherit = list(parents.keys())

print (allInherit)

child = input ("Tell me a child and I will tell you their parent.")

if child in parents:

    inheritance = parents[child]

    print (inheritance)

    input ("press a key.")

This program is much simpler.

The program lists a number of people's names and boasts that it can tell you the name of one of their parents. You are supposed to input one of the names, be sure to spell it correctly. And the program will display the name of the parent.

This works, but it is a bit too simple, it does one thing and then exits.

After Burner - stages 1 and 2 (sega master system)

The first couple of attempts I'm left feeling is that it? Is that worth considering for a top games list? Or am I simply remembering and romanticising the arcade version which was shaped like a fighter jet and bent and moved with the jet on the screen. And vibrated when your jet got shot.

I soon begin to realise that there is a certain amount of skill in getting to stage two without losing a plane. Or without losing more than one. To start with I just stay in first position and rapid fire at the wave of enemies like synchronised swimmers, darting back and forth in unison before me.

Then I dip to the left when they come by that side. Dip to my right as they are bound to go there next. This isn't easy, only because the controls are clunky. The enemy lacks AI so I dare not call it intelligent, and enemy behaviour is designed so poorly I can predict even without having played it before, where their ships will go next and what maneuver they will try.

Despite this drawback, it is satisfying reaching stage two. And when I die and return to the beginning, I do still want to play again because I learned something from my mistakes. And I want to see how my new skills will be rewarded, how better I can play that first stage. Like fighting with the ghost of myself and winning.

The graphics are not so lacking. It's not Tempest (Atari Jaguar), but the fighter jet animated, scratchy images take me back to a simpler time. The music and sound FX also remind me of that first time I played After Burner at the arcade in that massive Jet seat. Before big games like that cost $3 for one game and a game would last about ten seconds because they built them with the re-feeding of coins in mind.

So you pull up to tilt the plane upwards and climb, and you press down to tilt down and dip the front of the plane so you descend. A weakness I notice is that you can't dip right down to the ground or climb so high you stall - lacking realism and potential for more interesting design elements.

This limits the game design, mainly because anything more would require a lot of programming to fill in all those extra design elements - the crashing of the plane into the environment, what the pilot would see if he was pointing straight up. This is a simple game, limitations are there to keep the scale down.

Shooting enemy is fairly simple. When they come into your crosshairs, press B (second action button.) You dip and tilt to aim. You also need to avoid or shoot missiles that are shot at you by some of the enemy jets and helicopters. This is easy to begin with, but the controls are a bit awkward so it can get more difficult the more enemies and obstacles you have to destroy.

Overall, it begins as a challenging and fun game for fans of retro. But it's loaded with weaknesses, poor design and a big, dumb and clunky attitude.

Crash Cancelled

A video on Youtube brings us the first peek of Crash Landed – the unreleased demo of a cancelled Crash Bandicoot game for DS by Renegade Kid studios. Other games by the studio: Moon an FPS that looks like a cross between Doom and Alien Trilogy (PSX) and yet has a very slick and cool feel to the movement, which elevates it somewhat from the difficulty of making an FPS work on the DS. The Nintendo DS is not designed for first person shooters. The screen isn’t big enough, the controls are too small, the system was designed to be portable not cinematic. Dementium II - a horror FPS sequel, (with echoes of the House on Haunted Hill 1999 movie remake,) has creepy and volatile visuals, but is lacking in freshness. By now you get the idea of the kind of game these guys like to make - first person, walk around and be engaged (shooting or jumping.) So not thinky games, like Braid and Limbo – which is surprising because the xbox would be a perfect home to a cinematic FPS and the DS would be a good home for a cerebral 2D platformer. These games were switched at birth.

As far as the video of the cancelled game, leaked by the studio onto Youtube, Sonic springs to mind – with the precision jumping, collecting objects, ricocheting enemies to defeat them. The tone of a classic platformer, but with an added dimension. The genre never really succeeded in transitioning from 2D to 3D back in the days of the original Tomb Raider, where navigating 3D space just feels awkward. Except in the PSX game Tenchu which simulated all the slippery mischief ninjas enjoy – turning a rope and grapple hook into a flying fox, sneaking up behind people and slitting their throat, creeping alongside walls (somewhat reminded of another great game about creeping, Metal Gear Solid – especially in the VR Training.) In Tenchu, your ninja negotiates 3D space with ease, but then movement is so important to the mechanics of that game. Tenchu is about moving like an assassin, it would not have worked at all if its Japanese developer, Acquire hadn’t figured out a way to make the movement a fun process.

The results of the 2D to 3D platform transition experiment were the weird hybrids of Spyro and Crash Bandicoot which did manage to find their own audience among a certain type of hungry gamer. This was before games like Lego Star Wars began to address the problem with navigation in 3D space.

Wall E DS would be an exception, but that’s because he moves slowly, wheel tracks instead of legs. Crash of Crash Bandicoot walks and runs faster than the time it takes to ingest the environment. It would require tiny taps of movement – small spurts to be as effective in 3D as Sonic is in 2D.

What do fans think of the demo?

There seem to be two schools of thought on the demo. One thinks that the demo is harking back to the classic platform style – which seems to be a good thing according to fans.

The other thinks that it looks drab, clunky and that only Naughty Dog should do Crash games. Which I think is a little unfair, considering the demo was built in two weeks.

Nintendo Dreams - Bionicle Heroes DS

Learning to jump, I feel like a baby deer learning to walk. What's a baby deer called? Venison.

The enemy robots roll up in ball form. So far I have been unable to emulate this maneuver. They also come at me incredibly quickly, which would be menacing if they weren't so easy to destroy. The next enemy I meet is a humanoid like me. I shoot him, (which is probably the one simple action a robot performs.) And he dies.

I'm not even sure that these robots are alive. But I am, so I treat them as such. And yet I kill them, go figure. It is the nature of the game. They are very eager to kill me so I consider it self defence. A few more advance on me, but I stand well back and shoot them while they are balls.

I hear a strange noise. Not exactly a buzzing. It sounds like car radio static doing an impersonation of  a buzzing bee. It's not in my ear and I'm not sure if it's coming from above, though you'd expect as much. The field and sky are filled with this noise and it has no centre. Finally, I find the culprit - a robot locust with guns. Well I assume it has guns because all of the other robots do.

Except it isn't actually shooting at me yet. I very slowly aim at it, because that involves looking up. Because I take so long, it shoots first. But when I blam my guns, I kill it quickly.

There are two others, so I repeat the tedious process and arise the victor. Suddenly, I begin to shake violently. Again. And again. I'm being shot at, but I can't see the perpetrator of this heinous crime. I use my radar and gradually turn around to view my enemy. It's a green spider-crab thing. I'm concerned about my health, because turning around has taken a long time and the spider-crab thing is a fast shooter. But it dies just like the rest.

The enemy squads seem inexhaustible. As soon as I finish killing the next batch, new balls roll up. But less than a second after they transform into humanoid form, they fall to pieces because I've been shooting at them since they appeared. It's only the high and low robots that seem to be giving me trouble.

Looking up and down is unfortunately the only complex challenge in this entire experience. Whenever a robot falls to pieces, it drops a number of cogs. Collecting the cogs recharges my health. Apparently cogs heal robot wounds.

I find myself in a room alot like all of the other rooms, fighting enemies that look alot like all of the other enemies. Enduring a process of slowly aiming and quickly killing which is becoming all too familiar. Only somebody shoots me and it's all black again.

I do remember dying. Neglecting to keep an eye on my health report and pick up cogs to compensate probably made an early death inevitable. But because I'm a robot, it didn't hurt. Come to think of it, I haven't felt physical pain since this journey began. I guess I could say that a robot's death lacks gore.

It isn't very interesting, either. So I won't go on about it.

Nintendo Dreams - Star Trek: Tactical Assault DS (part four)

There is a destination on the warp screen called The Neutral Zone, which means I'm not actually in the Neutral Zone, like I thought I was. So I hit the warp button. It's becoming less fun now. As soon as I arrive, we receive a distress signal from some planet that's being attacked. We warp over there, slickity-whip. I hail the green planet and the citizen tells me that the enemy are based on the moon. And guess what? We have to warp over there.

We finally reach the enemy ships. I can see one coming out from behind the moon. I hit L to lock on. It starts firing at me. Uh oh, I realise it's a freighter, but guess what? It's been customised with bigger guns. And there are two of them. This is not going to be easy. Because I don't know any better, I apply the same strategy as every other battle I've had so far in Star Trek Land.

Get close, shoot phasers. Tilt, swing by, side phasers. Turn, photon torpedo. Fly away, other side phasers as I retreat. Get the heck out of range while I recharge. I even over-clock my photon torpedo. Then repeat.

The problem with this strategy is that while I'm systematcially bruising one of the freighters, the other freighter is blasting me in the bum continuously with some kind of mega phaser. My shields are down pretty quickly. I've lost one of the ships tails, and I'm pretty sure I need that.

Now the rest of the ship is falling apart, beneath me. Mission Failed. Everything is dark. Darker than Space. Again.

That's the only life I've lost in this game world. So either it's random, which from what I know about Nintendo, is unlikely, or it's on some kind of timer. I spent about five minutes in training, three minutes foolishly wandering through Space. And I lasted two minutes in my first real battle. I probably was in Mech World for about ten minutes as well. I wish I knew how many game worlds there are, then I could calculate how long I have to live.

I'm a robot. Not inside a robot or a robotic suit like last time. I'm an actual robot. And the differences in the way my mind now operates are very confusing. For example, if I want to move any part of my body to my right, I move it to the right. It's the same with the left. As one might guess, this is normal.

But if I want to look up, I actually have to move my head down, and vice versa. This is very confusing and so it is also annoying. Walking is easy. Battling is not. The other robots are positioned all over the place, so this takes a lot of looking around and it's awkward. I do have radar. For this I am grateful, otherwise I would simply sit down and wait to die.

Except that I can't actually sit down. Or crouch. I can jump. But this is is also confusing...

Nintendo Dreams - Star Trek: Tactical Assault DS (part three)

I hit him. He's damaged. But my ship is almost a wreck. I back out of range while my photon torpedoes recharge. I decide to chance it and overclock them, (overclocking increases their power, but also increases recharge time.) Once recharged, I can't afford to get hit anymore, so I swoop in on tilt. Carefully centre the front of my ship (where the guns are) on the drone. And fire, destroying it. I let out a whoop, because this time I earned it. I won. But my ship is black and blue.

I can see really blackened damage on my ship's hull. But there's an emergency. Without repairs, I have to go into an actual battle to rescue a vessel from a rogue freighter. Apparently the freighter has small guns, but it's big and hostile.

I warp to the location, which is still fun despite my anxiety about having no shields. I find the freighter and start hitting it with my starboard phasers. And a photon torpedo for good measure. It's not going down. The vessel I was supposed to rescue explodes. The freighter is still firing, so I continue firing back.

As much as I enjoy certain elements of the experience and everything looks so cool, this battle really is no different from my last battle with the drone, and the one before that with the first drone. The only real difference is that this one is taking a really long time to kill - long enough that even with feeble guns, it might eventually destroy my ship.

I receive a hail from the Admiral, which is almost a relief. He's telling me to abort mission and return to the Training Facility. I respond that I don't want to, because I haven't killed the enemy, yet. He repeats the order, so I comply.

When I return, I am told that the battle with the freighter was a training exercise and I didn't fail, after all. Far from it, according to the Admiral, I and my crew acted outstandingly, with one exception - I need to learn to follow orders.

Finally, I am ready for my first mission: patrolling the Neutral Zone. As mundane as this sounds, it's pretty obvious I'll run into hostiles. This is a game, after all. As I'm leaving the Training Facility, I see a ship, so I hail it. This only results in idle chatter, so I try hailing the Training Facility. The Admiral offers his goodbyes and good lucks officially and that's the end of that conversation. So I set out on patrol.

I don't know which direction to go, as patrolling is pretty vague, so I pick one at random. I'm not going very fast, can see nothing but Space, and am unsure if I'm even going in the correct direction. After three minutes of this, I decide warp would speed things up a bit, and I discover my error...

Nintendo Dreams - Star Trek: Tactical Assault DS (part two)

There are drones in space that I need to track, shoot and destroy. But they will shoot back, so I have been informed that we will need to go to red alert to turn on the shields and the weaponry. So I click the 'red alert' button. I'm not joking, it's that simple and obvious.

Tracking the drone is concluded sooner than I expected and the fight takes me by surprise. I can see two weapon buttons, already we're being shot at. Both of the weapons take time to recharge after firing. My first missile is a near miss. I remember now, a woman on my crew was telling me that firing range is about 46. I'm guessing that's kilometres.

I steer the ship out of range, watching the number on the view screen. Then I go in for the rematch in melee. As soon as the drone starts firing, I tilt the ship. Click the phaser, direct hit. I notice his shield integrity has been damaged by the blast. My instinct is to fire the missile again, but I don't want to miss. So I line up just so and fire before he can. I think maybe his shields will absorb the impact but then he'll lose shields. Instead, the missile goes straight through the damaged shield and detonates on the hull. The drone is destroyed.

I'm so excited, I do a little dance. Then the officer at the Training Facility says, 'We also have photon torpedoes.' Cheeky sod. Eventually I realise that the missiles I had been firing actually were photon torpedoes. What I also didn't realise is that I also have side phasers. So instead of always attacking my enemy head-on and losing most of my shields in the process, I can do drive-bys.

Gearing up for my second training battle, I have time to contemplate my situation (my Star Trek Land situation, not my stuck in Nintendo World situation.) Firstly, I have still not lost a life while being in Star Trek Land. Secondly, I doubt the Admiral will let me die while undergoing training in a Training Facility, ie the drones are non-lethal.

The second drone doesn't fall for the same trick. His shields are completely unaffected by my phaser strike, which I take to mean that I missed. Meanwhile my shields are taking major damage from the drone's phasers. Twenty seconds and I've lost outer shields. Ten more seconds and I've lost inner shields. My phasers are still having no effect. I have no shields. I finally hit him with an overclocked phaser, but his shields are showing green.

Screw it. I fire photon torpedoes...

Nintendo Dreams - Star Trek: Tactical Assault DS (part one)

...When I return to the place where I destroyed the tanks, that colourful arrow reappears on my screen and my superior tells me there's an enemy Mech nearby. All I have to do is get close to it and attach the claw and I can steal the Mech. That doesn't sound too difficult.

The obligatory guard tanks give me a bit of trouble, but once I'm around the corner, I see the Mech in the distance. It's big. Really big. But it's not shooting at me, yet. So instead of flying, which would probably only irritate it, I cautiously make my way toward it, instinctively staying close to the wall. Which won't help because there is nothing between me and the Mech.

I'm not scared. Just a game. I'm not scared. BOOM!

Every other time I wrecked my suit, I was carted off back to base and put in a shiny new one; most of those times I fainted and woke up as they were strapping me in. This isn't like that. I'm awake. I'm sure of that, but I can't see anything. I don't think that explosion just wrecked my suit. I think I'm dead.

The good news is I'm not dead. The bad news is I'm not a woman anymore. It looks like I'm inside Star Trek. I don't think I'm teleporting from world to world. I think the game worlds are changing around me. I must have a certain amount of lives in each world. My only hope is that when I die for the last time, in the last world, I am returned home and not treated as just another game character, disintegrated and redistributed among the nets as code.

My crew in Star Trek Land are really quite meek, but that's okay. I think they think they're being respectful. My command seems to involve alot of talking - or I should say conversing, as communications with the crew and other vessels appear as readouts. This doesn't bother me for now, as there is not much to read.

The ship's controls are cause for some concern considering the fact that I'm controlling a Federation Starship and these controls are laughably simple. Various buttons are used to hail other vessels, detect objects and examine. The ship's directional controls are merely a set of steering arrows. I would have expected something more sophisticated.

Learning when to squeal the brakes or tilt the ship are both easy, but I'm glad I'm learning all this at the Training Facility. I am getting antsy to see some real action, though.

How to describe how much fun it is to engage warp? Not as much fun as it was for real, when Kirk did it. For me it was like sitting on a tame rhinoceros while playing virtual hackey sack - on a portable console.

Nintendo Dreams - Mech Assault: Phantom War DS (part three)

It's surprising how many hits the elementals can sustain from me, due to their being so miniature. I haven't tried stomping on them, mainly as they're much stronger than humans, they intimidate me. I know they're killable, though. The first just exploded. I had to unleash a barrage of plasma, but I did it. I have to alternate between shooting the tanks and the elementals; I don't want anyone sneaking up on me.

That's it, they're all dead.

A yellow-green radar on my screen. I decide to follow it. There are tanks in the way, but after the ambush of the elementals, destroying these tanks is easy.

I've been given a new suit, God knows why. It's not like the mechanised robot which I was controlling from my seat in the sky. This is more like an armoured uniform. I'm only slightly larger than the enemy soldiers. I can still kill them by running into them; my armour is not just for defensive purposes, it seems.

I've got a few new gadgets with this thing, one in particular - the claw! Apparently I can use it to grab onto things. The problem is pulling the trigger for the claw, (it's a complex little device,) means taking my attention away from everything else for a second.

I'm told there is a wall here somewhere and I have to get up it. Surely that's what the jump jets are for. But I realise as I find the wall, a blurry grey monolith, with holes and fixtures, definitely man-made. And begin to ascend, that my jet fuel runs out before I reach the top. Use the claw!

By the time I refuel I've fallen. So this time, as I'm scaling the wall, I latch on and wait to refuel. I realise this is all far too easy. It's not a simple process, but as a player I'm not challenged. There are no obstructions deterring me from getting to the top. No sequence of falling bricks, from an avalanche maybe, or snipers to dodge - like something out of Rambo.

More tanks here. Not a problem. A number of well-placed walls provide me with cover. And by now I'm pretty confident about destroying tanks. I'm still getting used to swiveling the Mech's head and strafing at the same time. Honestly, I can't do this at all. So I hide, swivel, then line up my cross-hair and shoot like mad. But while I'm shooting, I run around in case they shoot back. In a few minutes the tanks are burned.

Nobody is in my ear. The radar is blank. The environment before me looks the same as behind me. I think I'm lost. I got turned around after stealthily destroying the last two tanks. I think I'll go this way. I reach a slate grey platform and jump off it. It's not until I find another one and jump down from there as well, that I realise these are the walls which I climbed using the claw!

No wonder there are no enemies, I've gone back the way I came. If this was a game I was playing from the outside, I would switch it off out of frustration.

Nintendo Dreams - Mech Assault: Phantom War DS (part two)

I keep knocking over trees; that's cool. Shows how big and powerful I am. It's a bit like owning an SUV. This experience is somewhat limited. Everything I look at seems simplified. There's no real texture to anything. I feel like I'm in a war in 1944, on an alien planet, hence the advanced technology.

I'm having fun because I like shooting things and I have a morbid sense of the humorous - so their screams make me laugh. Again I feel detached from the experience. I hope this is okay. But there's no real quality to the entertainment. There's no sense of immense power in my weapons or movement, or in the enemy's. There is nothing here that elevates this experience above a run of the mill commando mission in a heavily armoured machine.

I get the feeling that all of this is just a game, and it feels like a Nintendo game, but that would make sense. I don't know how this is happening, but like a dream, I get the feeling that the best course of action is to go along with it, observe and try to learn something.

The female commander is yelling at me again. It occurs to me that perhaps the reason that I'm a woman and the commander is a woman, is a political decision to try to assert female authority in games. I don't have much time to think about this because I'm back in the field again. It's so easy to kill the little men that I don't even think about it anymore. Cue jump jets, stomp, stomp, and back with jump jets, stomp, stomp.

Now to find the cadet. The most challenging part of this mission is swiveling the mech's head. If I had a more intuitive control system I could delegate the head-swiveling to my subservient brain processes, leaving my main focus as hunting and dodging. Because up until now I haven't done much dodging. And that's why I keep failing, (repeatedly destroying what I assume are excessively expensive mechanised suits.)

This is my fifth attempt at this mission and nobody has even hinted that I might be close to a level-up. The challenge I find myself facing, is this: One of the few men on my crew lets me know that destroying the shed at the back of the compound will stop the tanks from continually deploying against me. But the tanks are guarding it.

I dodge a few unrealistically huge laser beams and head directly for the shed, while shooting off the odd round at any passing tank that strolls through my cross-hair. Then I hit the shed repeatedly, full force. I ignore the tanks shooting at me, most of which miss; I'm not sure why that is, perhaps due to bad programming.

The real danger is that destroying the shed is a milestone that triggers the next tier of enemy - the elementals, who I think of now as red commandos with insane bullets. And I still have to destroy the remaining tanks. Last time I couldn't manage it. But now I'm taking the time to dodge the lasers from the tanks. The red commandos are bigger than human soldiers...

Nintendo Dreams - Mech Assault: Phantom War DS (part one)

I was playing Nintendo all day, so I wasn't surprised that I'd fallen asleep. Though I could have sworn that I never left the house and if I had done, I surely would have taken my DS with me.

The first thing I am aware of is the strap, I'm strapped into a not particularly ergonomic metal chair. The sky out the window is crackling. The next thing I notice is the control panel, which looks to be way over my head. The voices in the headphones assure me that it's simple enough. Press R for fire (possibly because R stands for red and fire is red.) A and Y: look sideways. X and B: tilt view. Arrows make the thing walk. That's when I ask the perilous question, 'What thing?'

My name is Jared, but these people, I think they're friendly, they keep calling me Vallen Brice. And whenever I voice my concerns, I hear myself speaking in a woman's voice. I am a mechanised soldier, that much is obvious. I'm sitting inside a giant armed robot and I'm supposed to save a cadet who was on  a recon mission but ended up knee deep in the smelly stuff. He's getting nailed by enemy forces.

When I see people on the ground, they're tiny, and I think they're shooting at me, so I stomp on them, it's pretty fun hearing them scream. I hope I'm dreaming, otherwise by now I'm definitely going to Hell. When I first woke up in this thing a woman was slurring my mission plan. The first time I tried to save the cadet, I was still getting used to my control panel. I ended up shooting a few of the enemy who were harassing him. I couldn't really see, because I was quite a long way from the fight. I must have long-range guns. So I repeatedly fired on the cadet and he exploded. Friendly fire. I failed.

Anyway, I found out that I can actually fly, with what they're calling jump jets. That makes it possible to get closer quickly and when I can do that, they're all easy kills. Unfortunately, I can't tell how exposed I am because this suit makes me feel invincible.

The second time I went on mission, I saved the cadet, but then the elementals killed me. They are these tiny red men with tiny guns, but their energy bursts have a lethal effect. Also, because I can only see forwards, unless I manually turn my head, I didn't notice the tanks I'd left standing, who were shooting at me this whole time.

This is fun. I'm getting the hang of this. Though I've already wrecked three suits. Now that I've understood how to use the jump jets, I just swoop in and kill those tiny human soldiers, and now they don't have time to shoot at me before I stand on them.