Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

Escape from Kuregem

Entry 1628 posted in: 1. General Mish Mash

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A slight miracle happened last week in Belgium.

Two important Flemish progressive parties, social democrats and ecologists, suddenly asked for a zero tolerance treatment in the hot quarters of Brussels.

When a few weeks before Christmas some (anonymous) policemen had complained in the press that they didn't dare to patrol anymore in certain Brussels streets this had been vehemently contradicted by the chief of police as utter humbug. Two incidents triggered this sudden change of opinion. A school in the Kuregem (Anderlecht) quarter closed and moved its classes to a safer part of town because its pupils were incessantly violently attacked and robbed by young thugs and the same weekend a police officer received three bullets in the leg from a Kalashnikov.

Until now these kind of occurrences had never been taken serious, last year had different incidents where police patrols had been ambushed by youngsters mostly because the law had tried to arrest a faithful fellow of the band. In one, rather ridiculous and shameful situation on the 7th of September 2009, the police could only get away by returning the Kalashnikov they had just seized from the gang. Later that day the Brussels police found a Kalashnikov, a riot-gun, a revolver and eight Molotov cocktails left after a shooting.

Only a few years ago the progressive parties called a sociologist racist because she had published a study comparing Brussels crime statistics with the nationality and religious backgrounds of these youngsters. Of course only a minority of Muslim immigrants are criminals but Brussels criminals are, almost without exception, part of the so-called lost maghreb generation. Instead of thinking of a solution for the problem the Belgian government tried to cover up the statistics by automatically giving all immigrant offspring the Belgian nationality. The result is that the immigrant criminality statistics lowered spectacularly but of course, not crime by itself.

The politically correct establishment tried to explain this as an anti-racist measure but a decade later theoretical crime researchers and sociologists complain that they have no longer the information they need to trigger the right stratum of the population.

To aggravate the matter the Brussels police is openly racist as was testified again this week by a Moroccan man who was arrested by mistake in the aftermath of the current events (the police simply entered the wrong house, doesn't police school teach anymore how to read housenumbers?). The cops kicked in doors although they simply could have opened them, smashed in windows just for the fun of it, emptied cupboards on the floor out of sheer sadism and sneered that it would be simpler to fire bullets through the heads of all Moroccans. The police officer (as a matter of fact the coordinator of the raid and thus the main responsible for the action) who uttered these threats was apparently unaware of the fact that the arrested man spoke fluently Dutch. Extreme right parties should finally understand that not only immigrants need to be instructed how to deal with other cultures.

But it also needs to be said that over 30 years of street work, educational projects and anti-discriminatory measures didn’t have the desired effect on the lost generation (the Kuregem quarter alone has got 4 neighbourhood committees where autochthons and immigrants can sort things out on a friendly basis). The editor in chief of the official Flemish television, not an illiterate racist redneck if you ask me, once told how the Brussels police was instructed not to verbalize cars if the owner was called Mohamed but only if it they found out the owner had a distinct French or Flemish surname. Those measures didn’t help, on the contrary, as these well-meant positive discriminatory measures only gave a minority the feeling that they could get away with anything. What started as a bunch of youngsters stealing handbags from old ladies has now evolved into gangs who empty their Kalashnikovs when they see a blue uniform.

But finally change is gonna come or so we thought. This is Belgium where a politician can't have a pee in his garden without creating a communotary crisis between Flemings and Walloons. Francophone politicians openly wondered what the fuzz this was all about and claim now that Flemings are planning a coup against Brussels (geographically speaking Brussels is a Francophone enclave encircled by Flemish territory). The mayor of Brussels centre called the shooting incident a fait divers and his 18 other colleagues more or less shared the same opinion. Brussels must be the only capital in the world that has nineteen (19!) different city managers, 19 city councils and 9 independent police zones.

But as is often the case also the Flemish politicians spoke without thinking first. Police and judges aren't opposed to the zero tolerance treatment but have already warned that this is not possible, at least not in the immediate future.

Whenever the police catch a Brussels thief he is inevitably set free a couple of hours later as the courts have an eight months delay to catch up. Youth delinquent centres are overbooked, so are the prisons and convicted suspects with sentences less than three years are free to go for lack of space in prisons.

The politicians shouting for an immediate solution have not realised that putting speed trials into place will ask for at least 10 new judges. Apart from creating an extra budget for this the legal procedure to appoint a Belgian judge usually takes over nine months. So new judges simply can’t be appointed before the end of this year. Such is the law and the politicians shouting now for immediate action have voted it that way.

Then there is the shortage of blueshirts in Brussels. To create an efficient police force in Brussels 750 extra forces are needed, but nobody is eager to take the job. No wonder if even the mayor, who is also head of police, calls being shot at by a Kalashnikov a fait divers. And weeding the extremist and racist roots within the police will be a hell of a job as well and is as important as getting the young thugs of the street.

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Goofer Dust

Entry 1627 posted in: The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit

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The Holy Igquisition has been summoned to investigate the many rumours that an article in the March issue of the highly appreciated music magazine Mojo, In My Room, written by heretic Paul Drummond, uses many facts and figures that have been originally published by the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit, but without acknowledgment whatsoever.

If after deep consideration, examination and cogitation this should be considered proven, the Holy Igquisition warrior troops will siege the Mojo headquarters under the motto ‘"Tuez-les tous; Iggy reconnaitra les siens".

And if that will be asking a little bit too much, a new article at The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit might me envisaged as well: Goofer Dust.

iPod Random Generator January 2010

Entry 1626 posted in: 9. I, Pod

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For the third consecutive year my iPod will only play at random. The graph shows the 10 most played songs for the month of January 2010 and right underneath are the 10 most recent songs I have been listening to.

 

A Boy's Best Friend The White Stripes Freedom's Prisoner Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel Fee Fi Fo The Cranberries Spinning Wheel Blood, Sweat & Tears Jomo Man Blues Waymon 'Sloopy' Henry Real Wild Child (Wild One) Iggy Pop Les Chants Magnetiques 1 Jean-Michel Jarre Breakout (N.A.D. Mix) Swing Out Sister No Good Trying Syd Barrett Moonlight shadow (extended version) Mike Oldfield

(I've got my) Mojo (working...)

Entry 1625 posted in: The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit

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As if the world has suddenly been hit by a temporal rift in spacetime the March 2010 issue of Mojo music magazine has hit the stores bearing a big (slightly photoshopped) portrait of a mister Syd Barrett. The well-written and rather accurate cover article, by Pat Gilbert, ranges from page 70 to 81 and tells the story of The Madcap Laughs, Syd Barrett’s first solo album.

Two other articles are of particular interest to the Church as they describe the mythical presence of a ‘girl whose naked body graced the back cover of The Madcap Laughs’.

This week's instalment at the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit discusses Mark Blake's Who’s That Girl article. Next week's post will cover the second Iggy-related article from Mojo 196: In My Room, written by Paul Drummond, containing interviews with Duggie Fields, Mick Rock, Storm Thorgerson and Jenny Spires.

Slow Train Coming

Entry 1624 posted in: 1. General Mish Mash

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The Belgian railways have this magnificent computer management system that fully automatically delays all trains with 20 minutes or more whenever weather conditions change.

Although most Belgians knew it was going to freeze a couple of weeks ago the over-subsidized operators of the NMBS, drinking pink champagne with scarcely clad nymphets in corporate bubble baths, weren't aware of this fact and thus the train schedules suddenly looked like overcooked macaroni.

On television a communication officer explained that the train schedules were disturbed by, and I quote, the extreme weather conditions.

I understand it had snowed a lot and that it was minus five. Celsius that is, not Fahrenheit. But the press buff apparently wasn't aware of the fact that, in Belgium as in most other European countries, there is an annual recurrent phenomenon called winter.

Over four decades ago I learned a little French poem about winter, it was in first grade and I must only have been 7 or 8. I still can (partially) recite it now.

L’hiver est là
Et nos pas
S'effondrent la gelée (?)
Un beau matin
On n’entend rien
Car la neige est tombée

(Winter has come.
Our steps trace the ground.
On this beautiful morning,
you don’t hear a sound,
because snow has fallen down)

In those last 40 years something very important must have happened to our school education system that young university graduates who are willing to speak for our national railways do not have a notion anymore of what could eventually happen in winter. Do they not play White Christmas anymore on the radio? I would call minus 20 degrees damn cold, but is minus 5 extreme? People go swimming in the Northsea at minus 5.

It is a well-known secret that trustworthiness isn’t really demanded from NMBS public relations people. Belgium has always been an ambassador of surrealism and these spin doctors, paid with taxpayer’s money, need to excel in that artful quality as well.

A couple of years ago, and I dare betting my left testicle on it that this is the truth and nothing but the truth, the Parliament wanted to know why the Belgian trains had this uncanny tendency of always arriving too late.

This was, so said an NMBS fantasist on television, due to the fact that people were getting in and out of the vehicles when these halted in the stations, implying that if trains would drive around the country without any passengers on board they would at least drive on time. Obviously that made sense and the answer was very much appreciated by our politicians and the Belgian press.

It has to be said that most spokesmen (or women) of the NMBS only make it to the television screen once and that after their maiden speech they are never heard of again. It was rumored that this one was last seen in a straightjacket, just before he was ceremonially drowned in one of the corporate Jacuzzis.

This week on Tuesday, the commuter train I daily take was announced with a delay of 20 but arrived only after 50 minutes. The reason?

The temperature had risen above zero, in other words: it had stopped freezing. Just like an autistic can't bear a sudden change of environment so can’t our Belgian railway company.

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The Sandbox Of God 1.52 – Year 2010

Entry 1623 posted in: c. The Sandbox Of God

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It was already announced a couple of times before, but finally here it is: Sandbox Of God version one point five two. There is some good and some bad news.

People who were slightly aware of Mark Overmars’s Game Maker utility a couple of years ago obviously know Sandbox of God as it was, together with Seiklus, one of the top games created with this software. Sandbox is one those games proving that you don’t need ultra-realism and ten-minutes introduction movies to have decent entertainment.

Here is what I wrote about it in 2006 (the game was by then, already two years old, and still mega-popular):

The story itself is monotonous, the graphics are tacky, but in a strange way the game is very addictive. Before you know it hours have gone by because you still have not managed to create Volcano city or instigate world peace between rabbits and men.

Mr. Chubigans went on, creating Vertigo Gaming, now selling various (self-devised and highly original) indie games, but the legacy of SoG was one that couldn’t be easily forgotten and for the last lustrum fans have been asking for a follow up.

There have always been talks about a sequel and in 2008 SoG: Ancient Warfare was announced and then, a month later, put in the fridge again. The FAQ at Vertigo put it this way (for 2010 the text has changed):

Q: Sandbox of God 2?
A: I'm not prepared to say anything about that right now, and whether it's still going / cancelled.

Finally, last year, a Sandbox of God remake was announced for real. Mr. Chubigans hastily explained that this was NOT, I repeat NOT, Sandbox of God Part 2, the sequel, the next generation, or whatever… but merely an update to make the game running smoothly under Windows Vista and Seven.

Sandbox of God now comes in two flavours: the freeware edition (1.52) and the Remastered (and slightly commercial) edition.

The freeware edition has got the following changes:

Updated engine
Game Maker 8 instead of 5, making it faster and slightly more reliable.

Updated music and sounds
The original version contained some copyrighted music and sounds and these have been replaced.

Updating and news screen
Basically this is a build-in internet page showing you the latest news and updates from Vertigo with a possibility to download the most recent version (if any) .

Updated save system
Making saved games more reliable compared to the quirky 2004 version.

Updated play speeds
You can now play the game in three different speeds.

That the game is an upgrade and hasn’t got any new situations (quite the contrary as the original easter eggs seem to have disappeared) can be proved by the fact that my walkthroughs from 2006 are still valid (I have updated them a bit). I’ll put the links of these five walkthroughs, that is all it takes to complete the game and end with a 100% score, at the bottom of this post.

Sandbox of God Remastered is an expanded version of SoG 1.52 and is not freeware, but, until April of this year, given away for free to existing customers of Vertigo Gaming. In other words, you get the game for free if you buy (or have already bought) another one.

SoG:R includes all changes from version 1.52 but has two new features:

The Sandbox of God board game. You can still play SoG in it’s classic style or switch to a brand new style called Simulated board game. In this new style, SOG:R simulates how one might play a board game version of the Sandbox of God in their basement using light gels, clay figures, blocks and cards, and Christmas lights. Switching between the classic style and the board game style can be done between rounds.

The Sandbox of God Warfare. This is a brand new game and we’ll switch over to Mr. Chubigans’s description:

As man sits atop the world, enjoying the fruits of his labour, evil rabbits plot revenge. Defend man’s civilization as you purchase new defences and upgrades, and prepare to do battle with the ever-multiplying civilization of rabbits. Use your godly powers of lighting and destruction to destroy rabbit armies and huts…provided that you have enough cash, of course. Unlock new cards by beating Sandbox mode and see how far into the future you can survive!

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The (recently updated) Sandbox of Gods walkthroughs can be found at:
Walking Through The Valley Of Eden (Sandbox of God Walkthrough Part 1) 
Bad Moon Rising (Sandbox Of God Walkthrough Part 2) 
Under The Vulcano (Sandbox Of God Walkthrough Part 3) 
I Want To Be A Little Fishy (Sandbox Of God Walkthrough Part 4) 
It's the Final Countdown (Sandbox Of God Walkthrough Part 5) 

Machine Shrink

Entry 1622 posted in: 2. DNA, 3. Gamebits, 7. Star Trek - The Original Sucker

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History repeats itself just like the chicken at the zoo that perpetually wanted to pick some breadcrumbs lying inside the monkey cage but got hit each time on the head by a vigilant monkey carrying a stick.

Examining the Wintermute Engine for one of my soon-not-to-be Unfinished Projects I fell upon the games section and instead of downloading the editor itself I ended with Mental Repairs Inc. on my harddisk.

Mental Repairs, Inc. is a small 2.5D point'n'click adventure following Henrik Liaw, machine psychiatrist. His job is to repair electronic devices that are depressed or have gone bananas by giving them therapy, counselling, guidance or – in the true tradition of point’n click – by solving some riddles and handing over some goods one has picked up from another place.

Point’n click games go a long way but have been forgotten a bit by all these 3D, real-time, first person shooting extravaganzas that are, in my personal opinion of course, plain boring. My first shooter was the original Wolfenstein 3D (1992) that I played several times from A to Z (I even found the secret Pacman level). The game was obviously forbidden in Germany where the ‘don’t mention the war’-credo has been put into federal law. Wolfenstein is set in a Nazi-castle, the guards are SS-officers, the walls are adorned with swastikas and one of the final bosses is mister Adolf H. himself. (A de-nazified version was made for the American and German markets where they had shaved Hitler’s moustache and the attack dogs had been replaced by mutant rats. It made the programmers quip that apparently, for American censors, it was morally acceptable to shoot people, but not dogs.)

About a year later came of course Doom (1993) but I put it fast aside as it made me feel seasick. At the same time I was also an admirer of William Shatner’s TekWar novels and when a computer game came out I jumped on it as the proverbial chicken in the zoo (see above) but that game was ‘one of the worst licensed games ever seen’. Of course the TekWar novels are also pretty bad, so bad actually, that they have become quite cult.

But back to the Mental Repairs Inc point’n click game. Although made by an ‘amateur’ named Renzo Thönen it is actually better than some commercial games of its kind. Of course it is rather short (only half a dozen of rooms and situations) and you can play all levels in less than 30 minutes. The puzzles are pretty straightforward, quite logical and not too complex, other than in Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic where some actions to be followed were so weird and arbitrary (and on top of that, incoherently programmed) that you simply had to buy the hint book in order to get any further. Hidden inside Douglas Adams was, next to a gifted writer who seldom came out, also a shrewd entrepreneur almost like an Italian second-hand car dealer, although his Digital Village company didn’t survive the dotcom crash despite the fact that it had devised a rather witty Wikipedia avant-la-lettre (read the funny H2G2 entry for Belgium). But even Wikipedia has got into serious financial troubles nowadays, so we can’t really blame DNA for that.

I haven’t been mentioning Douglas Adams’s name for the sake of mentioning his name alone. The Mental Repairs world is basically a Hitchhiker’s world where machines have their own disturbed mind. The copy machine has lost its coloured view on the world, the coffee dispenser is depressed because everyone kicks it and the elevator has got a split personality, one up, the other down. The idea of elevators only wanting to go up has been explored before in the Hitchhiker’s novels by the way, so we’ll call that a friendly nod from one universe to another.

I quite liked the warped humour in the game and the hero’s somewhat cynical comments, but that is because I am that kind of guy. The adventure takes a twist, like good adventures do, at the end but in order to make it comprehensible there is a rather lengthy explanation needed that takes, with my limited amount of patience, somewhat too long as it just adds extra ballast. Also Starship Titanic lacked in that department, where the main computer kept on babbling for about five minutes once you had activated it, so Mental Repairs is in good company.

All in all a very nice and enjoyable game (with excellent 3 D graphics, objects and persons, BTW) and, like I said, well worth the 30 minutes it takes to play. I saw that Thönen’s Hulub website also offers a second, slightly older, point’n click game, Murder In A Wheel. It mimics deliberately the Day Of The Tentacle style and has won an AGS award in 2007. I think I’ll download and play that as well because I simply can’t resist a game where the main plot is about who murdered the house hamster.

My next Unfinished Project will have to wait a little bit longer, I guess.

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Other point'n click games reviewed on this site:
Nomen Est Omen (Starship Titanic)
Tentacle Day (Day of the Tentacle)
East Side Story 
Walking Through The Valley Of Eden Sandbox of God walkthrough, compatible with version 1.52

iPod Random Generator December 2009

Entry 1621 posted in: 9. I, Pod

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Sometimes I think that my iPod has a mind of its own, telepathically connected to my own. I have literally made hundreds of radio programs in my angry young days, but the daring combinations the iPod randomizer presents me are quite spectacular and always always awe-inspiring.

Did it know it was the end of the year? The five last songs it presented to me were:
Mr. Tambourine Man, The Byrds followed by
The Beatles’s All You Need Is Love.

Then came a suiting intermezzo with If I Could Change Your Mind from The Alan Parsons Project (from their rather disappointing album Eve).

The last songs of the year, and damned if I do, were both from the same artist, a bloke named Syd Barrett whose Baby Lemonade was followed by Terrapin. Thus ended the year for my iPod.

The underneath graph gives the songs that were played the most this year (or last year, if you will), and apart from the quite hideous Vega-Tables from Brian Wilson’s Smile, I’m still not sure if I have to praise or to hate that album, it’s a pretty fair bunch.

And because I have now reliable statistics from the last two years (and obviously because I am a geek) I present you hereafter with an overview of that. It is the combined top 20 from the top tens of 2008 and 2009. The result is far from spectacular and up till now there is no deductible pattern, but it cost me quite some time to make it, so I’ll present it here anyway.

Next year all my iPod statistics will be reset to zero and a new set of greatest hits will be randomly chosen. Welcome to the machine.

As always the playlist of the month will appear on my MySpace blog and the overview of the year will be glued on my MySpace entrance page. And for those who still want to know the how and what and where and when I give you this old link: Random Blueß aka sucking for statistics 

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If you want to know how the graph looked like last month: iPod Random Generator November 2009 

And Another Thing... or two...

Entry 1620 posted in: 3. Gamebits, c. The Sandbox Of God

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I am not very fond of the end of the year, partly because everybody wants you to be happy, which I am, by definition, not. Another recurring nightmare are the end of the year lists that are published everywhere and the New Year’s resolutions for the coming year.

So I had decided not to publish such a list, but then…

OpenTTD 1.00

OpenTTD, probably the best game in the world, has put a first beta for version 1.0.0 on their website. With this version you can run OpenTTD without the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe data files, although you can still use them.

OpenTTD entries on this blog:
2008
Tycooning 
2009
Rock around the block 
Horses and heroes 

CorsixTH (Open Theme Hospital) - demo 1

Another gem from the past (1997) is Theme Hospital by Bullfrog Productions. The game has been imitated a couple of times but these attempts were always worse than the original. For a couple of years several projects have attempted to create an Open Source version of the game and (some of) these different projects have been described on this blog before. Most of these projects have died a lonely death for the simple reason that a man (or woman) alone can’t cope with the ten thousands lines of coding such a huge project needs.

For the moment I am aware of three simultaneous Open Theme Hospital projects that share the same blog and forum: OpenTH, Java Hospital and CorsixTH. (Finally people have understood that it is better to bundle forces and start coding instead of making nice and flashy websites that promise things that will never come.)

CorsixTH has now released a playable beta 1, making it the first open source Theme Hospital clone to reach playable status. Representing five months of development since the project launched, CorsixTH Playable Beta 1 implements many of the features of the original game, and runs natively on Windows, Linux, and OS X. The intent of this release is to increase awareness of CorsixTH, and to encourage more developers to assist in the project.

Similar to how OpenTTD started, years ago, CorsixTH requires some of the original game data files to provide graphics and sounds and some tweaking needs to be done in configuration files, just like in the good old TTDpatch days, although in my case it was just enough to add the line C:\Program Files\Bullfrog\Hospital\ in the config.txt file.

Since the project went public on July 24th 2009 the core development team grow from one person to four people. Despite this, the project is looking for more developers to report bugs and submit code. Artists interested in creating a new set of graphics, and hence removing the dependency on the original game data, are also welcomed. (This last phrase is perhaps wishful thinking, it took OpenTTD five (5!) years to accomplish this and, according to Wikipedia, it is the 8th most active Sourceforge project on this planet.)

Open Theme Hospital entries on this blog:
2006
Open Source Theme Hospital Clone Announced (project abandoned, website unavailable)
2007
Theme Hospital Tycoon (project abandoned, website unavailable)
Donuts and doctors (project abandoned, website unavailabel)
2008
open Theme Hospital - 3 different ones (this developed in OpenTH)

Now that I am busy with this silly list, why don’t I go on with it…

Widelands - build 14

Widelands is an open source (GPLed) real-time strategy game. It is built upon the SDL and other open source libraries and is still under heavy development. Basically Widelands is a Settlers II remake rather than a clone carrying its own graphics, sounds and music. It is a project that is very alive and kicking.

Widelands entries on this blog:
2008 Widelands 

UFO: Alien Invasion 2.2.1

Also UFO: AI is not a clone but a remake from the popular X-COM games from the Nineties. The community is very active and new versions appear on a nearly monthly basis.

UFO: AI entries on this blog:
2008 Illegal Aliens  

Open Tower / High Rise Developer alpha 0.0.3

In July I wrote about on Open Sim Tower project and how it suffered from the same disease as a lot of other game clones or remakes. The leader of the project, most of the time a student, is very enthusiast, but fails to produce a downloadable game, because real-life catches up with him: exams, girlfriend, work, a home and a dog. This is no criticism, mainly an observation, but hours after I had blogged about it I received a reply from the Open Tower community with the clear message that I had exaggerated and that the project was still very active.

Last week I checked again and found that the main website of Open Tower had disappeared (it now leads to an OpenTower wiki) and the forum has been closed down due to lack of interest in development. It is not the time of the season to joke about this all, simply an observation.

However, on top of the Open Tower wiki is a banner saying that their project has got nothing to do with High Rise Developer. My attention was grabbed and it appears to be - yet another – attempt to create a Sim Tower style game. They have an 0.03 alpha which means that the project is still in a very early stage, but at least some work has been done.

Open Tower entries on this blog:
2009 Lost Yoot 

Sandbox of Gods: 1.5 & Remastered

Sandbox Of Gods was one of the freeware indie hits from 2004, the game looked absolutely vintage, with tacky graphics and sounds, and that was probably why it went in that well.

Basically you are a god (as in the man with the beard) and you can choose if you will give humans or rabbits the chance to evolve into an intelligent species. You can try to develop both species as well and the final result will either end in a global nuclear war or in a peaceful world where humans (probably all vegetarian) and rabbits are peacefully living next to each other.

The walkthroughs for this game can be found on this blog and in only 5 runs you will have discovered all possibilities of this point’n click sim. Of course playing by these walkthroughs takes most of the fun away, as you should find out yourself, by trial and error, how an early decision will develop thousands year later.

For years there were plans for a sequel, but these were never concrete until this year when, out of the blue, a SOG remaster was promised.

Basically there will be two SOG 1.5 versions:

An updated freeware version containing the following changes
- support for Windows 7 and Windows Vista
- upgraded resolution
-new music and sound effects
-a new save engine which allows for updates and patches
-a new options menu

A Remastered version, containing the freeware game and some extra games, inspired by the original (this version will be given away, as a bonus game, to existing Vertigo Games customers)
-SOG boardgame: a boardgame version of the Sandbox of God simulation using light gels, clay figures, blocks and cards…
-SOG warfare: where rabbits plot to take over the world and attack the humans in a 20 level turnbased strategic extravaganza

If all goes well SOG:R will be released on the last day of this year: the 31st of December… suddenly the future does look bright…

The Sandbox of Gods walkthroughs can be found at:
Walking Through The Valley Of Eden (Sandbox of God Walkthrough Part 1) 
Bad Moon Rising (Sandbox Of God Walkthrough Part 2) 
Under The Vulcano (Sandbox Of God Walkthrough Part 3) 
I Want To Be A Little Fishy (Sandbox Of God Walkthrough Part 4) 
It's the Final Countdown (Sandbox Of God Walkthrough Part 5) 

Desiderata

Entry 1619 posted in: 3. Gamebits, a. ArianeB

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ArianeB 6.1

Since a couple of weeks the dating simulator ArianeB, also known as Ariane Barnes or Virtually Date Ariane and even Ariane Brodie (sorry, just adding these synonyms to get a higher Google ranking), has been upgraded to version 6.1.

The changes have been applied to the html pages alone and as far as I could check no images have been tampered with. Apart from some bug fixes the story is identical to that of version 6.0. The main difference is that Ariane’s responses, which - up till now - were only visible as tooltips on the images by moving the mouse over the appropriate area, are now reflected as well in the bottom text area.

For the original overview of the changes you can always check the Life in the Metaverse blog.

I will not end this post by saying that the walkthrough of version 6.1 will come any day now, as I still didn’t find the time to investigate the different new scenario’s of version 6.0 (nor 6.1). But I did play version 6.0 a few times and I immediately came home with a toaster!

Let me say that my wild friendship with ArianeB has temporarily tempered a bit, and the arrival of several new characters at Shark’s Lagoon will certainly not help remediate that.

Desire and Submission

Shark, from Shark’s Lagoon, has once done it again and leaves us with a nice Christmas bonus. He has teamed up with a few people from the Shark’s Lagoon forum and together they came with a new flash game called Desire and Submission, an adult sim exploring the boundaries of BDSM, but always staying within the limits of Shark’s universe, meaning that the adventure is rather witty than offensive or vulgar.

Shark’s games are a mixture of point and click simulation adventures, graphic novels and/or interactive movies. The story develops in the usual way, with people talking to each other through text balloons and a next button to proceed to the following scene. It is advised not to skip the texts as some contain hints for later on, but you can scroll rapidly through the different panels by clicking on the space where the ‘next’ button arrives, even if it is not visible.

Once in a while the story is halted, the mouse pointer changes into a circle and it is up to the player to trigger the following events. As such the game resembles those classic point and click adventures like Day of the Tentacle, but of course Shark’s latest asset is not about a bunch of teenagers careening through space and time, deep-freezing and microwaving hamsters en passant. Desire and Submission contains adult topics, adult topics we adults like so much that we can’t have enough of them. Well, some of us do.

In Shark’s earlier creations a single click would start a next scene, but in this game there are quite a few puzzles where so-called combo-clicks, in the right order and inside a limited time frame, have to take place. There are also some interesting sidesteps, if the player takes the wrong decision for instance, the story will continue for a while and will only reveal a dead end after some further developing situations have taken place. Personally I liked one alternative ending so much that I would like to see it develop into a parallel universe, so to speak.

People who are not used to Shark’s games (and the way they work) may have some problems initially; I have ‘grown up’ with Shark’s earlier incantations and know how they have been evolving, from release to release, always towards the better. This last effort is, undoubtedly, his best creation ever. Lagoon games have that certain cartoonish 3D style that makes me wonder if this is the kind of thing the Thunderbirds were doing after hours.

As usual the Shark’s Lagoon forum has dedicated a thread to the game were subtle hints are dispersed over its 25 pages or so, members have been informed not to give too much away as this will take away the fun of the game, so asking for the password to get to the second episode of the game will simply be ignored, if you are lucky (if you are unlucky you will get a spank for help).

Shark’s last has evolved into a real interactive story and has been separated in two different episodes (with hopefully more to come). Part 1, Alancy, shows how the fresh wife of a nobleman is introduced in the strange ways of French nobility, including whips and dungeons. When the first episode has been ended to the satisfaction of all parties a password is revealed that can be used to start the second episode, Florian, but if no password is revealed the game has switched over to an alternative ending, that is also fun to play, but will not lead to success.

Talking about success, Shark’s games are not only getting better from release to release but are also gaining in popularity. The downside of this all is that since "desire and submission" is on-line, the website is very slow. The visitors are increasingly numerous in the lagoon and the server cannot respond all the requests.”

The website has increased from about 2000 visitors a day during the Sweet Alison days to its tenfold. So Shark has now got to think about the possibility to move his site to a bigger server that will obviously cost more money. Shark's games have always been freeware, but he did accept donations through PayPal, but this account has recently been closed, due to PayPal's shady politics of ‘diffusing of sexual contents’.

Bad luck never comes alone.

Desire and Submission can be found at Shark’s Lagoon. The games can also be downloaded and these downloads have better graphics than the on-line versions. Unfortunately these files are hosted on Rapidshare, a website that has the most misleading name ever. Getting the files tempt to be a rather quirky business and are very very very slow. Episode 1: Alancy takes about 33 MB and episode 2: Florian around 41 MB.

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Shark’s Lagoon games that have been discussed here before:
Horny Afternoon: Cyberhugging
Sensual Experiment: Sense And Sensibility
An afternoon at the swimming pool: Autumn Blues
First Time: (insert title here)
Secret Fantasy Dreams: Secret Fantasy Dreams 

and the ArianeB section can be found at: ArianeB