Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

Machine Shrink

Entry 1622

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version was made for the American and German markets where they had shaved Hitler’s moustache and the attack dogs had been replaced by mutant rats.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

And Another Thing... or two...

Entry 1620

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

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 

Gimme Some Golfing

Entry 1591

Some days ago I got a mail from an Internet publicity agency that wanted to use my site to promote a new online golf simulation game. I politely thanked for that, not that I’m rich enough but a cent per click will not pay me for a Ferrari, and I meant the sunglasses. But I promised I would have a look at the game. Promise kept.

I used to be a kind of a golf lunatic in the past, not the real thing of course, as a real computer nerd I hate green open airy spaces, but the digital pixelised version of that. Over the years my favourite golf game became Shot Online that combines sport simulation with MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) elements. I even developed my own little Shot Online Distance Calculator utility that is still downloaded from time to time. I needed this utility, basically an Excel sheet with a lot of formulas inside, because Shot Online uses quite a sophisticated method of calculating the distance of the shot and takes into consideration different weather conditions, such as temperature, wind speed and direction and even air humidity (next to the club and balls you are using, of course, the different levels you have acquired as a player and the shoes you are wearing).

I haven’t played Shot Online for a while, basically because my old PC is getting rather sluggish and creates unnecessary lag between holes, but a second reason is that a 18-hole game in Shot Online with four players takes well over three hours. Games are played in real-time, each player takes his turn and one has to wait for the others to finish the hole before the game proceeds to the next one, just like in the real golf-playing world. So for 75% of the time you are looking at the screen, watching how the others are screwing up before you get a chance to screw up yourself.

Shot Online is free to play, and here is the secret addictive ingredient, with every game you get some virtual in-house money that you can spend to buy some gear. It is logical that an expensive set of golf balls will fly longer distances and land more accurately than the free ones. The makers of the game know that humans are an impatient species and instead of having to play hundred games in order to buy a decent set of professional clubs, which come in dozens of colours and sizes, you can also buy these immediately with real-world money. Like in the real world you have the have-nots who have played every single day of the year in order to get to level 35 and you have the haves who have obtained level 35 in a week thanks to a bucketful of cash.

There are some vanity issues involved as well, the initial characters look all the same, are wearing the same clothes so the game has a shopping mall were you can, à la Sims, change clothes, shoes, hats or gloves. It goes beyond saying that these have to be paid for as well, in virtual or real currency. Some of these attributes will also have an influence on skill, stamina, impact, and power settings so choosing the right set of clothes can improve your gameplay. I wasn’t kidding about these shoes, you know.

Gimme Golf made my appetite for online golf grow again and so I tried it, simple as that. The website promises thousands of players, more than 500 tournaments and hundreds of winners. But whenever I logged in there were never more than a dozen players around. I literally mean a dozen, like in twelve. It made me feel like Judas on the last supper, read further why.

Gimme Golf is free to play but as there is nothing like a free lunch the money must come from somewhere. The cash comes from (optional) tournaments where each player pays an entry fee, using a Paypal account, and can collect the fee of the others, provided he/she finishes on top of the list. As a teaser you get a 1$ account, but when I entered a 1$ tournament I found out that I had to enter a second dollar to play the top nine holes. I should have seen this coming, at the Skill Technology website the developers all have the second hand cars salesmen grin and if there is one certainty about second hand cars salesmen it is that they are always trying to insert a financial butt plug while claiming to be your friend. Scallywags! (Update: a recent post on their forum complains how one can enter the same tournament twice - or more, always against an entry fee - but the price money is only paid once, even if you hold first, second and third place.)

Download is pretty easy and takes only 100 MB, (as a retro-gamer I am a bit ashamed to write only 100 MB, some of my preferred golden oldies can be placed upon a floppy), turning into 130MB on the harddisk. The game is Java-driven and installs in the Application Data folder (if you happen to run XP, like I do), there is no uninstall option, but the FAQ explains that manually deleting all files does the job. The website is simple and easy, perhaps a little too simple, because at the time I write this the game-server is down but that isn’t mentioned anywhere.

Now for the game itself, that I managed to play a couple of times before (and after) their server exploded. The graphical quality is lower than Shot Online, but that last one is at least 5 times bigger (their download now takes over 500MB). There are only a few characters and courts to choose from and these are all relatively easy. Gameplay is simple comme bonjour, you take a club (obviously), choose the direction you want to aim at and hit the ball as hard as possible. There is no state of the art tuning as in Shot Online where you can add back- or sidespin to the ball, neither is it necessary to train on an accurate 3-click movement to get your ball flying where you want it to go, basically one click does the job. Rather than a simulation I would describe Gimme as an arcade game version of the noble game of golf. I’ve got nothing against that, of course.

The main difference with Shot Online is how the multi-player games are handled. In Gimme Golf every player plays his round at his (or her) own pace and he/she doesn’t have to wait for the others to tee off or to finish a hole. A plus point is that you can quit in the middle of the game, reload the course a while later, and continue without penalties (there are some time limits involved though). A Gimme Golf is very fast paced and I could play 18 holes in less than twenty minutes.

The backside of this all is that basically you are on your own. There is no interaction with the other gamers, apart from the ubiquitous chat screen, and all you get to see is the scorecard between each round with the results of the others. In Shot Online you observe your opponent’s moves and if his ball lands in a bunker it gives you the chance to adapt your hit and decide to go for an alternative swing. That kind of in-game tactics is impossible with Gimme.

The ideal online golf simulation lies somewhere in between. I once proposed the idea to Shot Online to have semi-simultaneous games where the 4 participants, each at their own computer screen, would swing at the same time. A par 3 would only be a couple of minutes shorter but a complete match would benefit from 60 minutes or more. (There are some issues to consider: normal gameplay should perhaps be resumed when a ball lands out of bounds, in water, sand or the rough. Personally I like to watch the ball in-flight movies, as this is where the fun is, but others could prefer split screens, etc…)

Shot Online is quite overwhelming for beginners with its abundance of settings and statistics, but Gimme Golf is perhaps a wee bit too simple. That all players are equal and use the same sticks and balls is nice, at least you’re fighting with the same weapons, but sometimes the arcade has really taken over the simulation. Here are some buggy things I found…

Heights
There are no height indicators, but the landing point is different when the fairway is lying much higher (or lower) than the tee. Height differences are even more important on the green. The graphics make it difficult to see if the green is going up, going down or if the path to the flag is tilting to the left or the right. (I remarked this myself when I saw, to my amazement, that my ball was rolling back to me instead of disappearing in the hole!)
Update: the developers told me they are working on a grid system.

Measurements
I’m a bloody European, I confess, but distances are given in yards on the irons and in feet for the putter on the green. This got me totally confused when I tried the AW swing on the green and couldn’t remember how many foot were going in a yard (don’t bother, I looked it up now). I would like an option to use the international standard for measurements, metres and centimetres.
Update: the developers told me they are working on a system to avoid confusion on the green…

Drop Ball
The drop ball isn’t always activated (I came into a situation on the fairway where I could have used it) and when it is it doesn’t let you decide where to drop the ball. At the 13th hole of Lakes of Sogndal the ball was dropped at least 100 yards away from the place it had landed.

Lobby
The server doesn’t always react adequately. I tried to enter a (free) tournament because the lobby screen read there was an open spot. I got the warning that the game had already started. These things happen from time to time when several people all try to log in at the same time. But more than five minutes later the game was still on the list asking for people to join.

Scorecard
After each hole the scorecard should appear with the overview of the previous shot. But this fails every so often, I have witnessed it in solo and in tournaments games. This could of course be related to the previous point.

What is the verdict then? Gimme Golf is a quick arcade style game without a lot of bells and whistles, perfect for the lunch hour. But if you have patience and a fast machine the real thing still is Shot Online, which is also free but has the advantage that it shows you your evolution from day to day.

These kind of games live by what the players want, as they pay the bill, and if Gimme Golf is still around in 2010 it will probably be quite different from now. For the moment nobody can predict in what direction it will evolve, although I’m pretty sure that there will be a ranking system soon with goodies attached if you attain a certain level.

A final thing about the name. The game is called Gimme Golf but that particular shot can’t be chosen. Perhaps that would be a nice addition as well…

Note: The previous was written before I found out that the game isn’t really so new after all, a beta test was launched in April 2008 and the game was officially released in November of last year. It puts the many promises to do fast upgrades into a different perspective….

PS: A last word on problem gambling. Gimme Golf describes itself as a game of skill, directly matching ones intelligence and ability against that of online competitors. In US states it is completely legal to play these kinds of games for money, in other countries this may not be the case. But legal or not, it still means that you can pay up till 25$ entrance fee for the bigger money tournaments. You are warned.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Fish, nipples and donkeys

Lost Yoot

Entry 1538

I honestly thought that I already wrote an item about SimTower on this place, but as Google can’t find it back who am I to contradict that? Google doesn’t has it, ergo it doesn’t exist. The Matrix is closer than you think.

SimTower was a game devised in 1994 by Yutaka ‘Yoot’ Saito and published by Maxis as a kind of spin-off of their popular SimCity series. As a matter of fact the game didn’t have anything to do with the SimCity brand name and its successors (such as SimHealth, SimCopter and Streets of SimCity). Originally Yutaka designed it as elevator simulation software with additional eye candy and released it in Japan before Maxis acquired the rights for the rest of the world.

Because SimCity 2000 was one of my favourite games (this was before I discovered Transport Tycoon, I guess) I needed to have the tower version as well. The trailer looked very promising, but what a bummer it was when I first opened it. The 2D graphics were poor and cheaply animated and all in all the game only had about half a dozen of different rooms to choose from.

What a difference with SimCity that had nine different power plants alone, elaborate residential, commercial and industrial zones and a quite sophisticated budget control system. SimCity 2000 used fake 3D (some called the axonometric viewpoint 2D and a half) that you could turn around to get a better view of things. It contained train stations, airports, harbours, libraries, schools, prisons, army camps… and so on…and so on…

SimTower had none of that all, you could only watch one side of the tower and control the elevators in order to keep the masses moving up and down as fast as possible. And that is were the fun was. This game proved that graphics don’t really count when the concept behind it is daring and fun (a golden rule modern game makers seem to have forgotten).

Despite its simplicity SimTower was (and still is) very addictive and apparently I am not the only one who has the same opinion. There are still several fansites around (for over a decade now) that still attract visitors. It can be downloaded at several places as it has reached the grey area called abandonware.

Yoot Tower

Just like Chris Sawyer did by upgrading his Transport Tycoon to Transport Tycoon Deluxe Yutaka Saito tried the same and released Yoot Tower a couple of years later, but now distributed by Sega games. Yoot Tower didn’t do a lot in the shops; most reviews found it ‘more of the same’ and the initial concept of releasing expansion packs (containing extra locations, alternative towers and rooms) had to be abandoned, although the Japanese release had some extra Towerkits that could be purchased. One of the never developed ideas were a ‘moonbase’ and a ‘cruise ship’ template that could be stuffed with rooms, and of course, elevators…

Yoot Tower websites (and downloads) are harder to find, although last month a rather detailed (and very funny!) playing guide appeared to celebrate the game’s tenth birthday.

OpenTower

Every vintage game that has a small, but dedicated, group of followers has its 21st millennium open source counterpart. OpenTTD and Alien Invasion are amongst the most popular and active ones, other games, like the different incarnations of Open Theme Hospital, start with a lot of enthusiasm, but fail to deliver a playable beta version of the remake. I am a bit afraid that this is the current situation of the open source SimTower as well. The community has a website, a wiki, a forum and, not one, but two games in development: OpenTower Classic and OpenTower 3D. Needless to say that, apart from a downloadable preliminary preview no coding has been done yet. As a matter of fact the community has been very busy lately fighting some internal forum wars about the most efficient programming language to use.

Yoot Attack

All is not well with Yutaka ‘Yoot’ Saito either. He released a couple of tower remakes for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS and invented some weird gaming concepts like Seaman (a virtual fish with a human face, and guided by a voice recognition module) and Odama that tried to combine pinball and warfare (you defend your castle with giant flippers that shoot the balls into the enemy troops, as in this YouTube movie). Needless to say that these games seem to be popular in his homeland Japan, the only country in the world where they do like fish flavoured icecream, but are regarded as terrible stinkers in the rest of the world.

Recently Apple rejected his iPhone concept for a ‘virtual caveman on a lost island’ game, called GABO, because they found it ‘unpleasant’. As a demo trailer on YouTube shows, the game is a bit weird, but unpleasant?

SimTower links
Review at City Empires, contains an (old) interview with Yoot Saito.
Uval And Harel's unofficial Simtower Page
Zellgamers, guide, hints, tips and tower downloads
Walkthrough/FAQ for SimTower
Sean's Page for Sim Tower Help
Smoser2's SimTower Headquarter
McLure's Sim Tower Stuff 2
RoadWolf's SimTower: Review, ‘Cheats’ and Guide (2008)
Scott's Addictions (review)

Yoot Tower links
Astoria Theodor Lauppert's Yoot Tower (review)
ATPM review
GiantMike review
A Misacrope's Guide and Commentary for Yoot Tower(2009)

OpenTower
OpenTower

Update 2009.07.05
This post was only a few hours old when I received an answer from Mr. D, a semi-admin, of the OpenTower community:

The "Current Situation" you speak of and refer with a blog post of another blog is not the "Current Situation" today. The reason development has been slow has been for a few reasons:

1. Is at the beginning of the year we had to trash what we had in terms of code because it needed an outdated library to run so a new Dev is in the process of writing a new code (Which has evolved into an alpha as seen here).
2. It is a hobby and is taken as such.
3. The Dev's RL lives have to take then away from the Comp. from time to time so there is periods of inactivity.

Now about this "Active Fighting" about programming language. Is is not as you say, a squabble amongst ourselves, but is more like one person creating an account and being "Fanboy" about Python (Programming language). He has not been around the forums in a while so this issue should not pop up again.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: open Theme Hospital - 3 different ones 

Ancient Warfare

Entry 1349

This page contains some visitor's statistics that will be daily updated for a week seven days period: complete.

A couple of years ago I was interested in Mark Overmars’ Game Maker utility because I had this concept that would blow the complete game industry to pieces. I tried several game creators but always reverted to Game Maker, I subscribed to the forum and asked some silly newbie questions, I downloaded the complete tutorial (and the software itself, obviously), started learning its programming language (although Game Maker’s best feature is the drag and drop menu that lets you create games without a single line of code) and started designing, well I almost started…

The back side of this all was that the forum was literally overflowing with game projects in alpha, beta and gamma stage and that I spend more time looking at other people’s games than at my own.

Thus this project became one more on the pile of my unfinished ones although quite recently it came back crawling through a hole in my head, hence this post. Who knows what the future might bring? (But knowing myself, don’t hold your breath.)

Two GM games have intrigued me ever since.

The first was Seiklus and you can read more about it at the following posts: Seiklus & Seiklus (again). If you want to know how this game looks like you can watch some video speed runs, about 35 minutes in total, on Youtube.

Number two: Sandbox of Gods was so inspiring to me that I created some walkthroughs allowing the casual player to reach all the possible goals in the game. As the game is icon-driven the best way to illustrate the different possibilities was, in my opinion, to have a graphical representation rather than a textual approach. Although these walkthroughs were never as popular as the one for the Penumbra Tech Demo, that more or less gave this blog its lift-off, it had its visitors, especially when SoG was still rather hot in the indie freeware game scene. From time to time, once or twice a year, I check the website of Mr. Chubigans to see if the long awaited Sandbox of Gods sequel has been released (or not) and this week, nice springtime weather by the way, I found it the ideal opportunity to have a go. The good news was, well read for yourself…

There have been two attempts at getting a sequel to SOG, even a contest with a major announcement of Sandbox of 2: Ancient Warfare. Since then, nothing much has been churned out, mainly due to the overwhelming amount of work Fred and I had at the time, and the second attempt being at a bit of a bad time (last month, as the holidays were approaching and I was finishing Spirits of Metropolis). Still, there will be a sequel to SOG, and it won’t look like it did before, nor will it have an Ancient Warfare theme (used due to the competition theme we were entering at the time). But it will be done later this year. (Taken from Vertigo Gaming)

That SoG still attracts some player was proven on the Vertigo forum where quick11 wanted to have the answer to the following questions:
How do you get 'Ancient Defences'?
And how do you get 'Bunnies Killed [A.D.]'?

Needless to say that Unfinished Projects contains the answers to these questions. As I was browsing the forum anyway I responded with a link to my graphical walkthroughs, but to my amazement my post was deleted a few hours later. I asked the moderator (who is not the maker of SoG, by the way) for some explanations. Those sounded like this:

I deleted your post because your site contained pornographic material on it, which we strictly do not allow.

Because a previous article that mentioned SoG also contained some links to an ArianeB add-on and to some games on Shark’s Lagoon I am now known, at least on the Vertigo Games forum, as an official pornographer. I have never been so proud in my life!

This assumption however made me wonder if the above is indeed true. As I am quite a geek I decided to monitor the visited pages of my blog at several intervals. The results (in percent) so far are:  

Page	2404	2504	2604	3004	0205	0305	0605	Total
a. ArianeB	86.11	70.84	75.26	58.78	39.96	38.74	60.00	61.38
e. Crystal VD	3.01	4.97	3.35	16.73	36.03	33.26	21.24	16.94
Index page	6.25	11.66	9.22	13.06	10.04	13.05	6.39	9.95
c. The Sandbox Of God	1.16	4.97	-	1.22	2.62	2.95	0.82	1.96
Secret Fantasy Dreams	-	-	2.94	2.24	2.84	2.32	0.82	1.59
3. Gamebits	1.39	1.51	2.31	0.82	1.75	0.63	0.82	1.32
d. Shot-Online Calculator	-	-	0.84	1.84	1.53	3.58	-	1.11
5. The Pink Thing	0.23	0.43	0.84	0.61	1.31	1.68	0.82	0.85
Autumn Blues	-	1.51	0.63	1.22	1.09	1.26	-	0.82
The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit	-	0.55	0.84	1.02	-	-	2.89	0.76
1. General Mish Mash	0.46	0.65	0.63	-	0.66	1.26	-	0.52
b. Dirk Gently	0.46	-	-	-	-	-	1.03	0.21
2. DNA	0.23	1.08	-	-	-	-	-	0.19
Archive Index	0.46	-	-	-	-	-	0.62	0.15

24th of April: A staggering 86% visits this blog for ArianeB alone and if one adds the other posts that mention adult gaming that number rises above 90%. Other games, including Sandbox of Gods, make out about two and a half percent of the public. My various Pink Floyd and Douglas Adams posts only reach one percent of the hits...

25th of April: ArianeB still rules at more than 70% and, perhaps due to this post, the interest for Sandbox of Gods has risen to slightly over 5% (adding one third of Autumn Blues). A lone believer has found salvation at Iggy's Church.

26th of April: 3 out of 4 visitors surf directly to the ArianeB pages, a very small minority (too small to make the chart) still reads the Dirk Gently, DNA and Star Trek entries. Sandbox of Gods stands at position 14 (and is thus not included in the top-10 overview of today). I am proud that my Shot Online Calculator (no longer supported or updated since a couple of years) still could attract one visitor.

27th, 28th and 29th of April: Ooops. Forgot to download the statistics.

30th of April: Virtually Date Crystal hits the market, strong. Would you like to know that 0.20% of my visitors went to the iPod page. I guess not.

2nd of May: Virtually Date Crystal is a hit and the first walkthrough that has been published gets 36% of all hits (46% if one adds the index page). My Penumbra page still attracts some people after all these years (but too little to be mentioned in the top 10).

3rd of May: Crystal surely has broken the hearts of the adult gaming community and the walkthroughs are getting a lot of attention. I do love it though that the Sandbox of Gods still gets its hits. it's a great game and it involves bunnies as well...

6th of May: Over 80% visits this blog for its adult games walkthroughs and a small, very small, minority wants to read about, what we shall call, regular games (amongst them David Galindo, creator of Sandbox of Gods, thanks fore your mail David!). The final results show that the Sandbox of Gods walkthroughs end up at the fourth place but that they can't compete with ArianeB, nor with newcomer Crystal.

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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) 

Crystal Voyager

Entry 1339

A couple of weeks ago Chaotic placed the following message on the Shark’s Lagoon forum:

Virtually Date Crystal is a game I've made myself and is similar in many aspects to Virtually Date Ariane (ArianeB). This seems to be the place to give it a public test run.

It isn't quite as technical, more a direct maze of events to navigate through. There are five different endings, and if it's popular enough, I'll probably add more content.

The game can be played (or downloaded, update: broken link) at two different locations, but as the server often is overloaded the best thing is to download the package and to play it offline. Just like ArianeB this is an html based point & click adventure. To start the game you need to unzip the package to a directory of your choice, locate the helloworld.htm file (in the VDC folder) and double click it. The browser of your preference will open and show you the catchmatch opening screen.

The introduction offers you 3 different persons to meet and greet but for the moment only the Crystal character works. Before the simulation starts catchmatch does a personality test and if you give a wrong answer the game will not start. I like these useless game introductions; they remember me of that Larry Laffer episode where you actually had to prove that you were old enough to play the game. Which is quite stupid as:

Like many "mature" rated games, Leisure Suit Larry is best experienced (a) if you put yourself in the mind of a 13-year-old, or (b) if you are, in fact, actually a 13-year-old, and the concept of seeing naked boobs still totally blows your mind. (Taken from Classicgaming @ Gamespy.)

The catchmatch introduction shows us the weakest point of this simulation, if you have given the wrong answer all you need to do is press the backspace key until you arrive again at the question, and try another answer. Virtually Date Crystal does not use Javascript triggered parameters that will influence the game later on and the backspace trick can be used throughout the game. This also means that you can start the game on whatever web page you want, if, for instance, you want to skip the introduction quiz, you can just start at knock.htm. No harm done.

Anyway, the Shark’s Lagoon adult gaming community jumped on Crystal as Sir Austin Danger Powers did on Felicity Shagwell and as they came to about the same conclusions as I did I will just copy and paste some of their comments (with thanks to AngryH, Blaman, TheBrain, Bonhomie, Palladium and of course Erana…):

Some great idea here and there, and finally a threesome!

Some impressive graphics (but also some other ones, see below).

Some situations are exactly the same as in ArianeB. Crystal also has its Truth or Dare game, a strip show in a night club, a photo shoot, a Jacuzzi scene...

There are too many run-through screens. They only allow you one click and merely lead to another image.

Some of Crystal's facial expressions are too plastic and the rendering could have been better in places. In some situations the persons seem to be floating or don’t fit with the background.

Decisions early in the game have no impact later on. This is mainly a ‘hit or miss’ game that doesn’t lead to subplots like ArianeB does (in ArianeB drinking, kissing and the choice of lunch all have an impact later on).

An example of this is the casino scene. You can play the roulette but the outcome of the game has been hardcoded in the script. The first time black will always win and whatever colour you choose the second time, it will always loose, what is not realistic, even for casinos owned by the maffia. A small Javascript randomizer would have made this situation much more interesting.

Some bugs are still present in the game and the end scene does not always show the proper image, especially in the downloaded version.

Walkthrough

On the other hand the above comments may sound a bit too harsh. This is a first attempt and comparing Crystal 1.0 with ArianeB 5.5, made by a professional 3D artist who has years of coding in his hands, is not honest either. But this criticism may help Chaotic when he decides to program the other dates in the game. The choice is up to him.

In order to write this post I created a flowchart with the possible paths in the game. You can call it a walkthrough if you want. If you have got, by any chance, Diagram Designer you can visualize the chart by downloading Crystal.zip. Otherwise you can open a very big PNG image (1419 x 2766 pixels) and do with it whatever you want to do with it. Update: new (upgraded) walkthroughs for version 1.1 have been made and will be published on this blog in May 2009.

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If you liked this (adult gaming) post - you might be interested in this one as well: Secret Fantasy Dreams 

Horses and heroes

Entry 1331

Time for some game updates. This post can be watched by anyone, if you are looking for some information about adult gaming, please consult Secret Fantasy Dreams or ArianeB UP 16 (game add-on).

OpenTTD, the open source remake of Transport Tycoon, finally has a stable upgrade, version 0.7.0. It brings you, amongst other things:

a reworked order system (with conditional orders and non-stop instructions);
more engines than in previous versions;
path based signals;
an AI framework;
downloads and automatic install of AIs, graphics and scenarios from a central server;
adjustments of previous limits concerning window size, the number of windows, network clients and companies;
… and a bunch of new languages.

Although the internal programming has been upgraded a lot the casual player will be most pleased by the download utility. The original Transport Tycoon was a bit too limited for experienced players and over the years several add-ons have been made to adjust the original framework. These add-ons can be divided into several categories:

eye-candy: replacing original graphics with new ones: vehicles, roads, houses, industries… These downloads don’t change the gameplay, but merely alter how the game looks;
new industries: the original game had only about a dozen of industries and these all evolved more or less independent from each other. Downloading new industries has made it possible to create realistic (and sometimes complicated) industrial chains, meaning that a secondary sector factory will only start producing if it gets raw materials from mines and farms, but also that the production will come to a halt if the finished product doesn’t get to the end consumer (the cities);
new vehicles: new industries mean also that new methods of transport have to be created and a lot of NewGRF files deal with alternative vehicles;
new (fan created) scenarios and maps.

In the past one had to browse through the Open TTD forum in order to look for a certain add-on and there were literally a hundred of places on the web were you could go looking for a particular add-on. If the add-on was changed (or upgraded) you had to find that out by yourself although the wiki more or less tried to centralise the information.

This is all gone with the download utility in version 0.7.0. It gives you a (long) list of the possible downloads and also warns you if the version present on your harddisk has been upgraded. Newbies however should be warned that downloading and activating all add-ons will not enhance the game, on the contrary, because some add-ons are not compatible with others. But the new version of Open TTD has also thought about that and allows you to save individual configurations.

A (quite recent) graphic set I like is called eGVRTS. The original game only started producing vehicles around 1930 (the default start of the game was 1950) but this enhancement offers horse-driven carriages that are available a century earlier (in the early 1800s). The screenshot at the top left side of this topic shows my current game in 1872 with a convoy of coaches transporting citizens from one city to another.

Open Transport Tycoon has been discussed a few times on this blog before and the last time was at Rock around the block. Programmers and would-be programmers can now make their own artificial intelligence module. AIs are added and constantly upgraded at the central server and give the human player some extra things to worry about. Two computer players have been created to do absolutely nothing, except providing some eye-candy. TownCars and StreetTraffic (that second one is an enhanced clone from the first) will randomly create cars to populate the streets in and between cities. Their only purpose is to give the streets a more realistic look and will of course from time to time block the commercial vehicles by creating traffic jams.

If you’ll excuse me now but I have some cows to transport.

Secret Fantasy Dreams

Entry 1330

Time for some adult game updates. If you feel offended (or are too young to read this) please consult the item Horses and heroes.

The Wendy games series from Shark’s Lagoon has got a new episode, the fifth one if my memory is correct. Secret Fantasy Dreams is all about Nanny and Wendy and their search for eternal happiness. There isn’t a lot of story in the game unless you want to re-define that as a toy story, if you catch my drift.

Shark’s games have become more sophisticated over the years. In the past you had to click a single spot to trigger an action but in this game you have several double spots to activate. And these are not always easy to find. If this is getting on your nerves one can always ask for a hint by typing ‘dream’ in the game. Nice feature.

If you are really stuck in the game or are to lazy to play it you can watch a video walkthrough that has been created by Arnulf and that can be downloaded at Rapidshare.

Actually this is part one of the adult games update series: part two can be found here.

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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)

Rock around the block

Entry 1125

When I look at my latest posts it appears to me that I have become a grumpy old man always at war with the world around him. I blame it on television because I’d really rather chase some nude virgins around, frolicking in a poppy field. But even these virgins aren’t anymore what they used to be, cf. Ahmed The Dead Terrorist.

I can’t shout this loud enough from the roofs of Atagong County, the best game in the world is (Open) Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I know you male chauvinist pig readers come here mostly to nookie ArianeB as fast as is humanly possible but you wouldn’t like your kids to play that game, wouldn’t you, you dirty hypocrites? Transport Tycoon is kids-friendly, non-aggressive, non-violent and it has that certain je ne sais quoi that makes games and girls irresistible. In that order, exceptions notwithstanding.

The big problem with the original TT game and its second millennium derivates is that the AI, to put it blindly, sucks, even at the most difficult level. The computer competitors try to make your life difficult in the beginning, but if you just ignore them and build your own transport empire at your own pace you will overhaul them in a period of three years to three decades. After a while the AI is so confused that it will not do anything anymore, it just sits there, scratching its head, eternally contemplating what move to take next. Transport companies will come and go, as the AI refuses to locate the opportunities to build an empire.

Actually the AI helps the human player to become a transport mogul instead of preventing it. As the AI refuses to update, upgrade (or downgrade) during the game you can use that knowledge for your own advantage. Many times I have witnessed that a competitor spends zillions to build a road system from, for instance, an iron ore mine to the nearest steel factory and then puts only one or two trucks to feed the factory, regardless of the fact that his depot has enough freight to use at least a dozen of cars. The competitor makes some money, but could do a lot better by simply increasing its fleet. Only, this never happens.

Once you (the human player) have spot this situation, all it takes is to build a depot next to that of your competitor, his overstock will leak into your depot and your army of trucks brings in loads of money. All this requires is minimal investment as you use the competitor’s roads and bridges. Capitalism can be fun!

Since last month the nightly builds (experimental versions) of Open TTD include an artificial intelligence module that replaces the original, dodgy, one. Everybody is invited to write his (or her) own AI and several versions can compete with each other during the same game.

A very vicious AI experiment is called Rondje Om De Kerk (Dutch for: round around the church), made by a collective circling around Maninthebox. It uses several unethical ways to make money. It uses the aforementioned trick of borrowing roads build by other players to keep investments as low as possible and instead of sending empty trucks back from the offloading point to the loading hub it simply sells these truck at the destination point and buys new ones at the starting point. Apparently it is much more cost effective that way but some humans consider this cheating, as it is not ‘realistic’.

Probably Rondje will not be integrated into the next stable release from OTTD but other programmers have been dissecting the code to see what bits and pieces they can pinch to insert into the first stable version with the improved AI. The future of Open TTD looks brighter than ever.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Tycooning