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20070819

Fishy

Entry 324

Fishing Champ is a new MMO brought to us by Games Campus that is also responsible for the superb Shot Online golf simulation. As in my personal dictionary the words fishing and simulation seem to be somewhat contradictory I was of course very eager to try it out. But alas most of the time the website was only announcing that a beta version of the game was still in the make.

Then on August the 16th came the news that an open beta of the game was downloadable. When I found out it was only 169 MB I didn't hesitate to beam it down and install. That went without a problem. Because it was the middle of the night at my time zone of the world I decided to get some sleep first and to start the game when I would wake up.

Starting the game has to be done, oddly enough by clicking a button on the official website. The icon on the desktop is only a shortcut to the webpage in question.

The next day after signing in and clicking the game start button Fishing Champ software started updating. Although this happens all the time on Shot Online, Carom3D and other Internet games I found this a bit strange on a program that had only been released the night before. It could be a good sign of course. Must be that the guys from BeTo Interactive were very alert to get the latest bugs out of the game. I was wrong.

Updating started at 13:52 and the percentage counter only added a percent every 90 seconds or so... I made me some food, gave the cats some food, made me some food again, watched some cycling on the telly and when I came back to the computer nearly two hours later the updates had finally finished, at 15:41 to be precise. My Sygate Personal Firewall logfile told me that the update had taken 583,919,093 bittersweets or about 557 megabytes. I find it strange that a simple upgrade of a 169 MB program takes 3 times the amount of the initial download but perhaps this is a typical Korean thing to do.

But let's stick to the gameplay. After you have created a character you can go to different maps that have several fishponds. Then, just as in real life, you sit on a chair and watch the cork floating. As it starts going up and down there will be a big chance you have a fish on the hook. Finally there is some time for action. You have to fight the fish so that its strength wears off before your power does. Manipulating the mouse buttons or the arrow keys does that. Once you have reached level 10 catching fish becomes a difficult struggle so the first ten levels may be considered as an introduction to the game.

The catch seems to be to acquire all possible types of fish; apparently there are over 30 normal species and some special god- and boss-fishes as well. Some fishes can only be found on the higher lever ponds, other fishes only take special bait, come out at a special time of day or swim in a unique habitat you have to find by yourself.

That's about it. Fishing will give you extra power, extra luck or extra focus and of course there are garments and hooks and rods that will add some points to your personality points as well. Probably when the game goes commercial there will be some ponds you will only be admitted to after paying for it.

The game appeals to the collector in all of us. After 20 minutes of gameplay I was thrilled when I found a new fish species or a bigger fish from a species I already got. But the question is: will this still be the case after 200 hours?

A part of the game I didn't try yet is the aquarium where you can keep your fishes as pets. This is the Tamagotchi part of the game, as you will have to feed them, change the water now and so often and try to keep the herbivores apart from the carnivores.

Graphics are rather cute in a kiddie's style so I suppose the game has been created for the kids segment, although one can never be sure with game creators, especially from the East. The fact that there is a very strict (and stupid) dirty words filtering system may have something to do with that. But I guess when you are a 14-years old you'd rather slash some monsters on the net than catch a fish.

I'm a bit afraid though that the freshness of the game will soon wear off. It'll take you a month to catch half of the fishes but once you realise it will take you another year to grab the rest it might be counterproductive.

But as this is still a beta perhaps the final version will still contain some extra surprises for all of us. (This open beta version expires at August the 23rd.)

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: The Sandbox Of God

20070825

Fish, nipples and donkeys

Entry 325

I quit playing Fishing Champ before the open beta was over. The reason why can be found on a forum thread, dedicated to the game, and written by Pompoko:
"I would say this game is probably boring from the start. But fishing is always boring as it is. You cast - sit - wait - reel in - cast - sit - wait, wait, wait, and wait..."

Now why is a fishing simulation boring and a golf simulation not? And believe me, playing a golf simulation isn't the world's most dynamic pastime either.

Although both applications are primary solitary, in Shot Online golf you mostly play (alone or teamed-up) against an adversary. Although the final outcome of the game is entirely up to you - you either play well or not - there is always the change to win the game when your opponent is actually a bit more careless or unfortunate than you. I have won games against people who ranked high above me but when I play against people who nicely par at level 10, I suddenly want to show off and desperately try to obtain the necessary birdie to win the game. Most of the time my ball ends in the local bunker or pond (alas without fish) and the low level player gets the bait. Such is the game.

The success factor of the Shot Online game is the fact that the player's input immediately leads to results. The program is made in such a way that the player beliefs he or she is in absolute control of all possible factors in the game. And the outcome is almost instantaneous, the moment you hit the ball you instinctively know if you have hit a killer ball or just a bum. For me Fishing Champ is just a bit too random to please me.

Not that Shot Online is so perfect either. The new update meddles with my version of FreeRAM XP Pro, probably the best free RAM manager that is around, and I have to disable that utility before I start the game. And a few days ago my round was abruptly stopped by the build-in Hackshield security tool, that prevents players to use illegal ways to obtain better results, only because my preferred media player MediaMonkey wanted to contact the web (after I accidentally used a keyboard shortcut that provoked that). Not only I lost the game I was currently playing in (and I was winning godammit!), but also my entrance fee was gone, including the extra credits and all other advantages that come after you win. On top of that I will probably be listed as a hacker on their database, which is, I assure you, not the case. Questions about this incident on their forum have not been answered yet.

And this brings me to the grass controversy of the game. Shot Online is intended as a family game so the use of inappropriate words is not allowed. Even I can understand that. Now, you may not know this, but there is also a real-life variety of golf played on planet Earth. To most people the green fluff that covers the ground on golf courses is a botanical organism commonly known as grass. Not to Shot Online players though. When you open a chatbox and type in: 'your ball has landed on the grass', the game will warn you that you have to be more polite. Because grass contains the letter combination a-s-s, and besides the fact that ass means donkey, it also means anus in those parts of the world where people are too lazy to write arse. Thus you cannot use the word grass in the Shot Online game.

I am and will always be against censorship, especially when the censorship is stupid. And mostly it is. Carom 3D is an online pool and snooker game that for one reason or another is very popular in Brazil. The rules are such that Carom 3D will ban you if you use swear words, if you use them too often you will even be banned for life. But the offensive words filters only take English words into consideration and thus the Brazilian players, especially the warm-blooded variety of them, will abuse you in their local lingo. I have become quite an expert in Portuguese swearwords in the last three years, I can tell you that.

Several Internet forums (I'm pretty sure Anthony Burgess would've preferred fora) also use word filters, often with hilarious (or better put: annoying) results. I once put a message on an Are You Being Served bulletin board about good old Mrs. Slocombe but wasn't allowed referring to her small carnivorous mammal in the way she usually does. Even the Late Night forum, dedicated to the words and works of Syd Barrett, doesn't allow the four-letter word that Syd Barrett has used in this song.

Yesterday I was watching the National Geographic channel when the program was interrupted for what I thought would be a commercial break. Instead it was an important health warning video telling you not to use Sanex shower products anymore. The accompanying video clearly showed that the lady, who was caressing her body in slow orgiastic movements, wasn't aware that the product had washed her nipples away! I suddenly felt very old and longed for those TV commercials in the mid Eighties for Fa Shower Gel.

Or should we refer to Elave who claim they have nothing to hide?

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: ArianeB 5.0

20070902

Donuts and doctors

Entry 327

Doctor I have been a fan of Theme Hospital for over a decade now and although the gameplay is a bit old fashioned, even to my standards, the game has never left my PC. It was only a matter of time, I hoped, before a fan-based clone, remake or upgrade would be made as the game still has some fervent admirers today.

Other classic games have their 21st century versions for ages, one of the most famous is Transport Tycoon Deluxe that has two very active open source upgrades: Open TTD and TTDPatch. Both clone, copy and patch the original Chris Sawyer software and their first goal was to make the original game XP and multiplayer compatible. But as these patches made it also possible to add new graphics, new vehicles and new industries the open versions have grown into something quite new and refreshing.

My heart skipped a few beats when I found out in 2006 that an open Theme Hospital remake was announced under the name Open Theme Hospital. But alas the website didn't change in months and in the beginning of 2007 it simply vanished. Not long after that buzz was going around that a commercial Hospital Tycoon game was nearly finished. This made me conclude that the people behind the free version had gone commercial. To add insult to injury the new Hospital Tycoon is, to say the least, a medical error. Due to time and or money pressure the game was released with a lot of bugs still inside and with some functions and situations hiding inactivated inside the software. To add yet another insult to the one that was already added the makers of Hospital Tycoon then decided not to release any patches. Some fans are now trying to hack into the software to find some solutions themselves.

And then, out of the blue, a brand-new open openHospital Mk 2 was announced. The big brain behind the project, Leeor, also was involved in the first attempt to made an open-source version but, to put it in his words:

"openHospitalTycoon was my project. I didn't sell it to CodeMasters -- they created a commercial game before I even got a chance to start it. So I had to rename it in order not to potentially end up in a legal situation." (Source: Theme Hospital Clinic Forum)

And

"I have no idea who that Liam (Studham, creator of Hospital Tycoon) guy is but he definitely did not start the openThemeHospital project. I later renamed openThemeHospital to openHospitalTycoon in an effort to avoid attention from Electronic Arts. I figured there was no sense in getting in trouble with EA over a game concept.
Not long after I changed the name, Hospital Tycoon was announced so I ended up changing the name again to simply openHospital.
Essentially, openThemeHospital, openHospitalTycoon and openHospital are all the same project... the intent has always been the same despite the name changes." (Source: Round Donut)

So let’s hope this second start is the good one. To celebrate a brand new website has been created that can be found at : Round Donut. It can still take a while though before any downloads see the light of day, so for the moment it is best to stick onto your old copy of Theme Hospital.

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

20070915

Cyberhugging

Entry 329

Porn for women While my LA girl is scrutinizing the latest Ikea catalogue I have been messing around with a witty point'n click Flash game called Horny Afternoon. I'm not really ashamed to admit that, Ikea is pornography for women anyway, so I can have my share of the pie as well, just don't tell the misses...

Erotic inspired computer games have been around since, well since the computer was invented, I guess. Probably I was first confronted with it during my Amstrad CPC days when we all liked to play Samantha Fox Strip Poker. It hat tatty graphics, a tatty soundtrack and the lady herself has never been one of my favourites anyway, but the mere fact that you could actually watch some pixelated boobs made us lust for it like a water buffalo yearns for a mudbath.

I still have a soft spot (?!) for the original Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.

Sure we got lubbers.
What kind lubber you want? Smooth or libbed?
Coloured or plain?
Lubricated or rough-cut?
Striped or plaid?
Peppermint or spearmint flavour?
Hey everybody, this weirdo just bought a spearmint flavoured, plaid, rough-cut, coloured, smooth lubber!!!
WHAT A PERVERT!!!

Later on Larry would perform in several sequels including The Laffer Utilities that contained a database of the raunchiest jokes ever (the blonde who peed in a canoe is my all time favourite) and that promised the buyer to ‘provide you with non productive pastimes that make you look busy when you're doing absolutely nothing worthwhile'.

Eroticism seems to be an old fashioned word now; coming from the days that gay still meant 'keenly alive and exuberant'. Here is a fine example of the clash between the old and new culture.

Mr. Rumbold: Let's try to keep it light and gay.
Mr. Lucas: [to Mr. Humphries] I'll handle the 'light' part.

Erotic pictures and movies nowadays only seem to be made to please the amateur gynaecologist amongst us. Gone are the days you could have actual dialogue in an x-rated movie:

If you listen,
if you concentrate and listen,
I close my eyes,
I pretend I'm asleep,
you must sit very still,
pretend you're asleep,
then he comes out.

What comes out is not what one expects to come out... the scene is set in a Tartaros prison cell were a lost soul is eternally trying to kill a fly. His cellmate, Ms. Jones, who can only find salvation in sex, is confronted for eternity with a man who isn't at all interested in her. Put this awkward scene in a Pier Paolo Pasolini or a Federico Fellini art movie and we would have spoken of a classic.

Fast forward to the 21st century.

I like Shark's Lagoon games; they're witty, funny and sexually overt without being smutty (or at least, not too much). Shark's recent work is getting better and better, technically and creatively, although his latest creation, Horny Afternoon, has neglected the game side a bit and is more an interactive movie than a puzzle game.

His best creations, in my opinion, are the rather difficult 'A Late Night At The Office' and 'Don't Wake Her'. Shark has recently teamed up with HornyGamer, a simple glance at the links on that website show you that Shark's creations are well above average, avoiding the average smut the other (often Hentai) games show.

Probably the best dating game ever is not Flash based, but has been fabricated out of pure html and Javascript. It is called ArianeB and it contains over 670 situations. I strongly suggest downloading the package, as the server is often overloaded. It can be a very frustrating experience indeed when you finally have found the way to get ArianeB out of her knickers and only get rewarded with a 404 error. As there are quite a few scenarios playability isn't limited to one go as well.

Catch me in a few days when I will put some ArianeB walkthroughs on this spot. First my hormones have to settle down a bit.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: ArianeB 5.0

20070928

Freeware Poker

Entry 339

Alien Poker There is a lot of suffering in this world and that is perhaps why we play a lot or, better said, I play a lot of computer games. It is a matter of turning the wolf (homo homini lupus est) into a softer me, a homo ludens. Unless you prefer first person shooters of course (which I don’t).

A few posts ago I wrote how I liked Samantha Fox's strip poker on the Amstrad CPC. But the poker simulation that I liked most was a DOS program called Alien Poker. I tried to Google it but apparently the game has been completely forgotten since. Even Abandonware and DOS sites don't mention this game, which is a pity.

Alien Poker 1993

Alien Poker 1.1 was made by JD Software in 1993 and was distributed under the shareware flag. You could play five-card draw poker (aka closed poker) against a bunch of extra-terrestrials, each with their own skills, strategies and GPP (Genuine People Personalities).

Alien Poker is a game in which you are pitted against the most skilled poker players that the galaxy has to offer. You are one of the select few Earthling to know about a casino located on the dark side of our Moon. And every Saturday there is a game where you can invite up to five alien opponents to test their luck and skill against you.

Five computer players were included in the free version of the game, but if you paid 20 $ to Jeff Bogan in Nova Scotia, Canada he would send you the full game with extra characters included. As the game used full 256 color VGA graphics there was also a warning saying:

If the processor you use is fairly slow you may have irritating long waits while images are decompressed in the program.

I feared that I had to take my 80286 of the attic to grab a screenshot of the game, but the local black hole that is also known as my software cabinet made me find the disk within 3 minutes. This could be a sign, if only I knew what for...

The next positive point was that XP still allowed the program to be installed but alas, trying to play it resulted in the dreaded divison by zero error. Good there is such a thing as Dosbox that did the trick, the game behaves reasonably well under that emulator and that is how I could take the screenshot.

As the game can't be found anywhere on the web I have given it a safe place on my site. Vintage game addicts will not be disappointed. I still hope that one day someone will come up with the complete version, but as I said before, a Google newsgroup search only lead to some very snotty people who were looking for that as well.

Smoke'em Poker 1996

When my DOS days were over and I finally went into Windows 3.11 I found this magnificent poker game that was presented as follows:

Smoke'em Poker is a BeerWare program that I wrote to simulate a weekend game of five-card draw poker. You play against five opponents simulated by the computer. The simple interface includes lots of options, statistics (including a graph of winnings), auto-play mode, saveable games, and online help.

This application was written in 1996 by David O' Brien whose archived website still is around somewhere. As I am in a very good mood today I offer you this link that contains a favourable review of the game and the obvious download as well. Ay caramba!

I am not a trendsetter, on the contrary, so when the tidal wave called XP hit the software shores I did everything that was in my ability to ignore that piece of sh......oftware. Windows 98 was my thing and it would stay that way until computer dealers started to laugh at me in public.

But my first XP computer finally made it possible to have a go at Hoyle Poker, a commercial game from Sierra, which I had found in the sales bins of my local computer shop. The game contained 24 poker variations such as the classic 5 card draw, but also Baseball, Chicago, Cincinnati, Criss cross and an unattractive poker deviation called: Texas Hold'em.

But like I mentioned before, you can't stop a tidal wave and before one could say floccinaucinihilipilification Texas Hold'em was conquering the world. And just like I learned to appreciate XP I learned to enjoy Texas Hold'em.

PokerTH 2007

PokerTH 0.5 is a Texas Hold'em application, allowing people to play the game against AI players or over the net against real people. The only thing that is not real is the money. Finally there is an online computer game that doesn't try to rob your Visa or American Express account.

For the moment there isn't a dedicated server yet and people are asked to host their own games. But as more and more people (who don't want to loose money) will discover this software more and more rounds will be available to join.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: The Sandbox Of God

20071013

Heroes In The Sky (beta release)

Entry 347

MadCap that's me! I am not really into ultra-realistic simulation games. I love a nice simulation but it needs to combine good old arcade fun with decent realism. One of my colleagues at work was deeply into Microsoft Flight Simulator but this has never been my cup of tea. I mean what is the purpose of flying an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean if you can't shoot down some enemies? But perhaps I am still pissed off because I never managed to land a plane on the tarmac.

One of the first games trying to combine fact and fun was, if my memory is correct, Corncob 3D. It was a DOS shareware game, created in the early Nineties (late Eighties?) by Kevin Stokes from Pie In The Sky. To quote the maker (in 1993):

Corncob 3D is a flight sim I wrote a few years ago. It features 16 colour filled polygon graphics. It is pretty much entirely obsolete now, but I'm still making money off it. I certainly learned a lot about marketing with it!

As is usual in those kind of games the starting point is a bit weird. Aliens seem to have invaded Earth in 1938 so there has never ever been a WWII. About a decade later you happen to be a freedom fighter with a plane that is well equipped with guns, missiles and bombs. The unregistered version of the game came with tree missions, in one of which you had to destroy a flying saucer that was hovering high in the sky.

This was truly an amazing game as it combined a flight sim with first person adventure. Not only could one fly a plane, but one could also jump out of it (preferably with a parachute), walk around with a pistol in your hand inside the flying saucer, use a car on the ground to escape, etc... etc... (I remember that I combined several shareware versions of Corncob 3D on my hard disk, each with different missions, so at a certain moment I had seven playable missions instead of the usual 3.) The parachute trick came in handy, as I never learned how to land the plane in this game either. It is a pity that the MVP website, that distributed the game nearly 20 years ago, no longer dedicates a page to this archaeological piece of software.

The next f(l)ight sim I simply had to try was Red Baron. As someone has written:

One cannot talk about classic combat flight simulations without mentioning Red Baron. This sim was the first in the Dynamix Aces series, which set the bar high for the rest of the collection. Initially released in a 16 colour EGA version, it was soon updated to a 256 colour VGA version.

I only remember that Red Baron always used to crash my PC, but people who have managed to make it run confirm this was a classic. My somewhat negative experience with Red Baron made me loose my appetite for flight and fight sims until I stumbled upon a free magazine copy of Crimson Skies.

That game had it all: a (somewhat dodgy) story, nice graphics and, the most important of it all, an automatic landing mode! In one of the missions you had to follow a train with your plane and pick up a passenger before the train disappeared into a tunnel. Flying under bridges or inside caves resulted in snapshots to fill a personal-stunt-scrapbook. But alas, on my configuration mission 6 always used to crash in mid-air and nothing could be done about it. After a while I deleted the game from my disk and gave the cd to someone who could get away with it...

So that was it. Until a few days ago. I spent some time on the Shot Online Golf simulation site, currently hosted at GamesCampus and found out they had a beta running of a flight sim called Heroes In The Sky.

Hmmm. GameCampus beta releases. Where did I hear that before? Oh yeah, here. A few months ago they tested a fishing championship game. A fucking fishing championship game! Sitting on a chair, waiting for a virtual fish to bite, turned out to be as exciting as the real thing.

But this promised to be something else. As usual the website was very vague with instructions. Basically it read.

1) Log-in first to play the game using your GamesCampus account.
2) Once you log-in, you can fly any plane you choose.
3) Then go get'em.

That is all. The game has a certain simplicity that we would call vintage or classic nowadays. The arrows make you fly up, down, left or right. Shooting is done with A (gun) or S (missile). You see some planes that are trying to shoot you down so you better shoot them down before they do. That's all. It's simple. I like it.

And most important of all: you don't need to land. This could be a hit. I'm pretty sure of it. Now let's kill those bastards.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Penumbra Overture Website

20071109

Money for nothing and your bits for free...

Entry 353

I'm a great believer of freeware (or beerware as some call it). Practically every utility can be found legally and for free on the web. It's a bit like generic medicine. Some freeware sites however are not that harmless at all or are only in it for... the money.

George Dillon has put his 50 favourite freeware programs on one page and I'm pretty sure you will find one or two in the list that will make you say: hmmm... He writes that he wants to thank the authors of the programs he lists. By hyperlinking to his page I thank him for this pretty neat collection. The only problem is that some of the freeware he lists has been replaced by updates that are not free anymore or that have disappeared. Examples are jv16PowerTools that is no longer free and Sygate Personal Firewall that has been captivated by Symantec. In that case Last Freeware Version comes in handy. It offers you about 180 freeware programs that no longer exist.

About a decade ago I was a frequent visitor of Completely Free Software. It contained without a doubt the best freeware collection for DOS and Win 3.1.To quote its owner Graham Pockett: 

This site was born in May 1996 from frustration - frustration that many of the so-called 'free software' sites were not offering freeware but shareware, time-limited, or demo software which cost money to use or are not really functional. Only the download was 'free'.

Until Graham Pockett, out of frustration I believe, decided to turn the logic around and made his site 'members only'. Those who pay 35$ (for a life time subscription) can browse the site and download its content. Only a true Christian can find the path to make money out of freeware but out of sheer honesty Pockett (what's in a name?) could at least re-baptise his website to: The Not So Completely Free Software. (I confess, people who put Christian banners on their site duly piss me off.)

So I had to go and look for other freeware sites. Luckily CFS contained a list of other places with free content and that is how I found Freewarehome. I visit them at least once a year as their collection includes a pranks section that comes in handy when April the 1st comes around. It has a pretty neat games selection as well and probably it is the place where I first found Smoke'em Poker. Somewhere in-between CFS and Freewarehome lies Nonags. The site takes subscriptions as well, but you can still download for free.

Above sites are rather well done and pretty easy to browse and search but for the more adventurous mind there will always be Freeware World Team. Here is a site that replaces quality by quantity. Presenting some 32500 freeware programs it is pretty messy to find what you are looking for, but if you can't find it there, it probably doesn't exist.

After all these years the best download place for me turned out to be Snapfiles, previously known as WebAttack. They offer a somewhat limited, but fine, selection of tasty freeware. I even left some comments over there, although I am somewhat ashamed that I only reviewed 5 programs as the majority of my Program Files folder comes from their place. I couldn't survive the software jungle without them.

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

20071118

GiveAway Of The Day

Entry 356

People that keep a close watch on this blog may have seen that, since a week or so, there have appeared two links at the right side of the screen, right under the Google search for this site.

The first is called 'Giveaway of the Day', the second 'Game Giveaway of the Day'. The concept behind these websites is fairly simple (it must be, otherwise I wouldn't understand it). For one day, one day only, a commercial program can be downloaded and licensed for free. The software in question, so it goes, is a full working version, so no time limited trials, liteware, crippleware, demoware or nagware is allowed. As long as you don't re-install or copy the software to another computer it should keep on working.

I have been following the website for some time now and after some serious consideration, helped with a few Guinness beers, I finally decided to add the links last week. Then disaster struck. November the 12th presented a program called Safe’n'Sec Pro. This piece of software described itself as a Trojan, spyware, backdoor and rootkit scanning device.

A first thing that was found out by the downloaders was that the program would only remain active for 6 months, so instead of defining it as an unlimited free offer it should've been defined as a time-limited trial version. Then other reports from a far more serious nature started coming in. On several systems the installation made the computer crash, sometimes rebooting the machine over and over again. Sometimes this could be repaired by going to safe mode or by starting up with the last reliable configuration. Other people had been lucky to make a restoration point before installing the software (a thing that, in fact, everyone should do before installing n'importe quoi). Several virus scanners detected the Win32.Agent-BQC.Trojan inside the package and prevented an installation. Other people saw the dreadful BSOD for the first time in their entire XP history... and then there was the user who wrote:

This program killed my computer...total freeze up...I had to reinstall everything...! One terabyte worth... BAD BAD ...there was no way to undo any changes.... bad program...delete it.. quick!!!

Giveaway of the Day has been accused before of giving overpriced software away, but at least it did it for free. But Safe'n'Sec Pro crossed the line and it is a pity that the management of GAOTD didn't even find it appropriate to comment or to apologise for this piece of shit. Of course GAOTD didn't write the software, it only gave it away for free. But the absolute silence from its management makes one wonder. It is one of the reasons why Bear Bottoms (another one of those goofy freeware sites) removed the GAOTD link on their site.

Just when I was thinking to delete the GAOTD links on my blog they came up with MemOptimizer, basically a RAM management system with some cute bells and whistles. At 19.95$ or 13.62 Euro it is blatantly overpriced for this kind of software. There are enough freeware solutions to manage RAM on your system, but as it was free for a day I installed it and it is now running very smoothly on the background.

Another giveaway this week was EverNote, a database to collect and search through notes, sticky papers, snapshots and even handwritten messages. Some people who already used the freeware version of this software have called this the best Giveaway ever; others called it a cult application that you will find indispensable once you have used it.

On Game Giveaway of the Day I found Mahjongg Artifacts this week. You either love or hate mah-jongg but this proved to be a simple and very addictive game. Although, again, I would never pay 19.95$ for it. There are enough freeware mah-jongg applications on the web if you ask me.

So for the moment I still give GAOTD the benefit of the doubt. For those interested to download and install some software from that site I would strongly suggest to await the comments first. These are mostly pretty straightforward. Read them and decide if the Giveaway of the Day is a valid program or not. Remember: even for free crappy software is still crap.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Money for nothing and your bits for free...

20071123

Some updates...

Entry 357

Audacity
beta 1.3.4 released
stable release version 1.2.6.

PokerTH
beta 0.6 released. With this new version of PokerTH, you no longer need to exchange IP addresses and configure routers to play on the internet. The makers are now running a dedicated server which will host PokerTH games.

Thingamablog
beta 1.1 version 4 has been released fixing some bugs.

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

20071202

No time.

Entry 358

I had these superb ideas for at least half a dozen of posts on this blog but local warfare prevented me from writing, more about that later. Then yesterday, when I had some time at hand, my LA-girl threatened with divorce if I didn't go to the hairdresser.

So I took a bus to the hair stylist where a consultant recommended me what to do. In my days one went to the local barbershop where an elderly cantankerous guy would give you the choice of three different haircuts: short, shorter or bald. Nowadays you get a horde of women of the opposite sex who smother you with a lot of oohs and aahs. In those places that practice, for whatever reason, the haute coiffure you never get the same girl twice but as long as they carry the obligatory T&A you won't hear me complain. Yesterday there were 4 or 5 fresh daisies, so to speak, to choose from and one entity who I immediately baptised the hairdresser from Hell. Guess who took care of me? A while later I came home and this time my LA-girl threatened with divorce because I had gone to the hairdresser. Some things will never change.

Last week I also found a budget DVD (only 6 Euro!) containing the first two Age of Empires games and their expansion packs and that is what kept me busy on my PC for the last few days. So before I'm off to kill some Greeks (geeks?) here is what is new, in a hurry...

Again a bunch of useless iPod stats on my MySpace page.

For the top 10 list of the songs I've been listening to since January go to http://www.myspace.com/atagong.

For the top 10 list of the songs I've been listening to in the month of November, go to the MySpace blog section.

...and oh yeah, there is a new Thingamablog version as well... it has some goofy extra features, but I've got no time to explain you, I've only got some time to kill...

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Heroes In The Sky (beta release)

20071211

Cym City

Entry 359

People who have ever bothered to read the introduction just above this post...

Start nerdy bit.
Only if you are reading this
on the main page of this website and
if it is the most recent entry of the blog.
End nerdy bit.

...know that I have a very limited attention span. So after playing Age of Empires vigorously for a week or so, at night I was literally dreaming of little antlike men crawling over my desktop, I suddenly gave up from nanosecond n-1 to n. Just like that. I started the same mission a day later only to kill the game 30 seconds later. The magic was gone. Over. Finito. The end.

Now I had a problem. A serious one. Sitting in front of my PC watching naked women giving a visual rendition of the term 'slithery people' wasn't my cup of tea either so I went browsing on the games folder on my desktop.

I tried Carom3D and gave up after one game of pool (I did win however). I had an online Texas Hold'Em poker session but gambled all my virtual fortune in an All In game just to get over with it. I ran like a thief after 3 holes on the Alfheim course on Shot Online. Could it be that I was near to depression?

Then I found something I hadn't noticed for a while. It was called Cym4.

Cym4 stands for Cycling Manager 4, a 'Tour de France' simulation made by Cyanide.

Nowadays the game is called Pro Cycling Manager and as far as I can recall the most recent version is number 7. As there is a new version every year I thereby deduct that Cym4 dates from 2004.

I still remember the very first version of Cycling Manager; it was so dreadful that even I refused to play it. The problem was that I compared it with the Fifa soccer games from EA Sports that were even superb in the last millennium.

Cym4 still is a slightly retarded member from the sporting simulation games family. All cyclists have the same face, some aspects of the AI suck (the cyclists refuse to fight for the mountain trophy, to name just one) and the commentator is just plain ridiculous, having only a dozen sentences or so. It is quite stupid to hear that your 'breakaway has a good chance of making it to the finish' if you have just lost 3 minutes to the chasing peleton (or pack) behind you and there are still 50 kilometres to cycle. And even if the commentator is logically right when he mentions that your 'lead is over two minutes' this sound rather stupid when it is really four and a half.

But for one reason or another the game is very addictive, fans over the globe have put alternative databases for download and for the moment I manage the legendary Molteni team featuring Eddy Merckx, Marino Basso, Joseph Bruyère and Herman van Springel.

Champs-Elysées, here I come!

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: The Sandbox Of God

20080118

Sense And Sensibility

Entry 366

So happy together! I quite like the Shark's Lagoon website that I once stumbled on, completely by mistake. It now contains 18 what is commonly called 18+ games. I shall not repeat what I already said in a previous post called Cyberhugging namely that they are witty but not too smutty (see now, now you've made me say that again anyway!).

A side effect of this all is that his bandwidth (or better said: website data transfer) is rocketing sky-high and that in the past couple of years he had to move his place a few times.

Another side effect is that his loyal fans tend to ask for more: A Late Night At The Office Part 2, Really Hot Sand Part 3, Fruits de la Passion - the lemon's revenge (before you click, I've made these up).  

I had a few infantile encounters with Flash programming as well and the following feeble experiments can be found on this place.  

  • Syd A Choo Choo was an attempt to create a click'n point game based on the album artwork of Pink Floyd. I gave up after their first album, and then decided to glue two entirely different animations together. You can read a bit about it on the A man called Syd post.
  • Douglas Adams' How To Leave The Planet aka The Abandon Earth Kit uses a build-in typewriter effect from SwishMax, so there wasn’t a lot of programming to do. Douglas originally wrote the text for an advertisement campaign although no one on the web seems to have been able to locate the original and the two main biographies about Douglas don't mention this text at all. It makes one wonder...
  • My last Flash based thingy is the Pink Floyd Pie Chart. This was basically a vehicle to test some programming tricks; more exactly to draw a 'dynamic' pie chart based on the results of the previous questions. Typing 1567 at the first question will open a debug screen showing how the points have been given.

Making these little silly things taught me one thing. In programming the big work is not in the creation of the main code, the big work lies in the fine-tuning, testing and debugging. This is the last bit of the process, only a few yards from the finishing line, but it takes forever to cross it. Those remaining 5% take as long as all the programming before.

Shark's latest creation is called Sensual Experiment or Expérience Sensuelle in his mother language. How does it come that things sound so much sexier in French? Expérience Sensuelle is much smoother than its English counterpart. Of course it could have been worse and the game could have been called:  'Das Sensuelle Experiment'. I've never understood how on earth Germans create offspring.

Anyway, Shark's latest mini game is a hit. Funny. Witty. Not smutty. Blah blah blah. But I observe some crackling side effects of this success. Time wasn't on Shark's side. Perhaps a few extra days of fine-tuning could have been used. I won't say anything about the music, if one can describe the annoying jingly loop like that, a button to switch that of would come in handy. But here and there are some minor flaws: a leg-part that could have been moved a few pixels, a boob job that could have been done better, the incredible voyaging nipple bit...  Perhaps it is about time that Shark would go commercial and create a full interactive movie-stroke-game.

But of course my main interest in Shark's games lies not in the boob fondling business. I am, naturally!, mostly interested in the technical side of his projects. The fact that these happen to include pictures of girls in different stadia of nakedness is only a bonus.

Shark uses Anim8or to create his models. Anim8or, to quote Wikipedia, is a freeware OpenGL based 3D modelling and animation program created by R. Steven Glanville, a software engineer at Nvidia. The main advantage is that it has a very smooth learning curve. Shark has been so friendly to put some of his 3DS files for download on his website. That makes it easier to experiment a bit.

Creating 3D models is not as easy as it sounds. If one googles for an open source 3D creation suite he or she will immediately stumble upon Blender. Blender, so everyone seems to agree, is the best and most performing 3D package for free. But, and also here everyone seems to agree, it looks quite intimidating. I downloaded Blender ages ago. From time to time I upgrade it, open it, look at the labyrinth of links and buttons on the screen, sigh a bit, and close the program again for the next couple of months. Blender was original an in-house application for an animation studio, designed by professionals for professionals and in those circles user-friendliness is about the last point on their wish list. I see that at work all the time. The more professional a package has become the more buttons you have to press before you can roll out a simple page on a nearby printer. 

Open the Blender workspace and you feel as if you're trying to fly a Boeing on your annual trip to Benidorm. This doesn't look like MSPaint at all. Open the beginner's manual. It takes you 128 pages before the text triumphantly exclaims: you have now drawn a ball on the screen. In another 300 you will have learned how to change its colour.  

If you want to experiment with 3D it might be a good idea to start with Anim8or first and only switch over to Blender if you start feeling what Anim8or lacks (Anim8or is about 10 times smaller than Blender). And if you are confident enough to release the inner Frankenstein you can always download MakeHuman and start creating your cyber world.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: ArianeB 5.0

20080403

Tentacle Day

Entry 572

Yep, it's a flying toilet. I start with my favourite Groucho Marx scene, (probably) with Thelma Todd. They are having a romantic rowboat scene (as far as a romantic scene with Groucho is possible) when she says: “Spring is in the air.” Groucho replies: “And fall in the water.” Cracks me up every time.

Of course you need to know that this is partially a Yiddish joke. I don’t speak it but Yiddish antecedents can be found in the German language and the German language isn’t that far from Dutch.

So when Thelma Todd says: Spring is in the air, Groucho interprets this as shpring meaning jump. Jumping up and down in a rowboat on a lake is a hazardous thing to do and you might ‘fall in the water’. Of course this elaborate explanation has ruined the joke completely so it is better to go on with the actual subject of this post.

Thus a few days ago I said to myself: “spring is in the air” and for one inexplicable reason or another this idea got intermingled with the thoughts of a game I used to play in the early Nineties. The only problem was that I couldn’t remember the name of the game anymore, but I did remember that it involved putting a hamster in a deep freezer and defrosting the poor animal in a micro wave oven about two hundreds year later. And I could remember, oddly enough, the makers of the game: Lucasarts.

The official LucasArts website doesn’t mention those vintage games they used to make when pixel were roughly the size of square centimetre. They prefer going on, ad nauseam, about episode XXXIX in the Star Wars saga. So I went over to Abandonia instead. That site doesn’t mention any LucasArts games at all. Very strange. Over to Home Of The Underdogs. Some games were mentioned over there but not the one I was looking for. It only made my appetite, called it hunger, for the unknown game bigger.

I soon found out that LucasArts (and others) have asked several abandonware sites to remove their games, even when they date from the past millennium and can only be played using emulators like Dosbox. Legally the makers have the right to do that, these games are still copyrighted by their owners, but what if I decide to play the original Manic Mansion and find out that my computer will not eat a five and a half inch floppy disk anymore?

Thanks to the net I found out that it was the Manic Mansion sequel Day Of The Tentacle I was lusting for. A lucky wind of bits put it on my hard disk and after a few false starts (due to the incompability of XP and good old DOS) I was laughing out loud with its wacky humour. This game hasn’t aged a bit.

Googling around I found out that some German fans are willing to take over the world with a version called DOTT2. Germans and humour? They must be meshuge.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Nomen Est Omen: Starship Titanic.

20080425

East Side Story

Entry 751

Isn't it good to be lost in the woods? The last week I have been playing a point and click adventure game called East Side Story. It came as a free download at game giveaway of the day (GGAOTD) that should be better renamed to game giveaway of the weekend if you ask me. But nobody ever does so I'll just go on if you don't mind. I'll skip the flame war avalanche that this download created for the simple reason that it is old news now; if you are interested you can look up the insults & co right here.

My download arrived in a jiffy – in my case the 500 MB file was not corrupt. As a matter of fact the generation of the license key took longer than the actual download, some work in the activation department needs to be done by the developers of GGAOTD, if you ask me. Did I already mention you that nobody ever does?

East Side Story is remarkable. Really. Its half a gig stuffed with high quality pics from a Swedish town called Norrköping so the game looks a bit like a tourist brochure. The story starts when Carol Reed, a female investigator? - this must be Sweden!, is lying in a hammock contemplating the meaning of life and such. Before Death can invite her for a game of chess she decides to water her cucumbers and - en passant - solve a murder mystery as well.

What follows are those typical mystery puzzles we all loved and cherished in a past millennium: in order to open a door you need a key that is hidden in a cupboard, to open the cupboard you need another key that can be found inside a shirt, to find the shirt you have to go to the laundry, to go to the laundry you need dirty knickers, to get dirty knickers you need to play a game of ArianeB 5.0 (I’m making this up, of course). Another typical thing in point and click games are annoying people that will only help you, or give you hints, after you trace something they have lost. One would think they do it on purpose!

East Side Story is a game for calm people, not for caffeine fuelled bunnies like me, so I soon got annoyed. It is a bit like browsing through those endless Powerpoint presentations, with some soothing pan flute music on the background, promising you the most beautiful nature scenes of the year 2002 that some people insist on keeping on sending me. They indifferently end with the same picture of a lonely surfer and a hungry shark; only it is not a shark, but just a copyrighted dolphin…

East Side Story is a puzzler’s paradise and some puzzles are only revealed after you have clarified others. Somewhere in the game there is a path trough the woods that goes on for about 10 clicks. The photos are tremendous, showing trees, leaves and some more trees. Every slide however hides some other slides, exactly like in those prehistoric text adventures where you could walk east, west, north and south (and look up and down). Left from you there are some trees, right from you there are some trees. Lots of trees. Nothing happens when you look at these. So after you have walked through the path for the third time you don’t bother anymore to look sideways. But somewhere, during a conversation or by reading a piece of paper (they seem to lie everywhere in this game), a trigger has been activated and suddenly the fifth eastern slide of the pathway will reveal a hidden item that wasn’t there before. Before you know it you spent most of your time visiting all the places you have visited before and opening all cupboards, drawers and toilet seats you have opened before. Unfortunately there are hundreds of those possible places. I simply had to give up this game, it made me crank nervous. Really. Not my cup of tea. Utterly boring but strangely wonderful. Must be typical Swedish, I guess, a bit like Volvo, Ikea and Abba…

Some geeky stuff: East Side story has been made with AGS. Adventure Game Studio is a freeware that allows people to create point-and-click adventure games, similar to the early 90's Sierra and Lucasarts adventures. A slightly more recent (and more evolved) software to create these kind of games is Wintermute but who needs evolution anyway if the purpose is to make a vintage style adventure? On the other hand, AGAST seems to have lost the battle of the point & click editors as their site hasn't been updated since 2003.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Tentacle Day.

20080520

Much Ado (the sequel)

Entry 806

Actually not a screenshot of the original Audacity, the excellent freeware audio editor has got a new beta release, but that is not the topic of this post, but now you know it anyway. What I really wanted to say is...

In 2006 I wrote a topic about my most treasured vintage computer games.

Spindizzy was one of those and the original Tetris if my personal RAM is still intact. Anyway if you promise to come back after the intermezzo you can read about it here: Much Ado.

Tetris clones can be downloaded by the dozen, but my favourite amongst those is still the Blockout 3D version from California Dreams that accompanied the original game on my very first 8086 computer. It took me about 30 seconds to trace the game back in my box of floppies. Here is a printout of the about bit (it is amazing that this floppy still works after nearly 20 years):

echo BLOCKOUT - Version 1.0
echo Copyright (c) 1989 Logical Design Works, Inc.

Spindizzy clones are harder to find and the open source remake that was promised for 2007 is still on the design table. The thread on the Retro Remakes forum has now got 21 pages proving there is a certain interest for this remake. If you want to experience the look and feel of Spindizzy you can have a go at a Flash-based clone called Gyroworld. It all looks relatively simple but it is addictive as hell.

Another one of my all-time favourites is Theme Hospital. The 3D clone has now been indefinitely delayed (if one reads between the lines of the Round Donut forum) but apparently the creative team is trying to make a fresh restart in June of this year. It must be the second or third time now that the project is trying to resuscitate so if you don’t want to drop dead in the hospital corridors don’t hold your breath. My endless dwellings on the web in search for some Theme Hospital news lead me to Connection Endpoint. Alexander Gitter did some reverse engineering on the original Theme Hospital game, hoping that someone would catch his drift and turn it into an open source project. But alas…

The original 2006 topic about my top 3 games ended with the sentence: “And what about the best game ever then?” I realize now that I have never concluded that post. I have never stated here what is, in my own not so humble opinion, the best game ever.

Well, let me tell you… but just another time. First I’m going to have a go at it first. You will not have to wait for another year, I promise you that.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: East Side Story 

20080524

Tycooning

Entry 810

I once met this young guy, bright, slightly nerdy computer chap, who liked to travel to Jamaica in order to inhale some of the local herbs and drink a few gallons of rum. But his finest hour came when he discovered Thailand and its abundance of sweet smelling Rosies.

After each visit he came home loaded with original Thai movies, music and software. One of these packages contained a fine selection of DOS computer games: Links 386 Pro (the best golf simulator of the mid Nineties, later bought by Microsoft), Sim City 2000, Twinsen’s Little Big Adventure (remind me to dedicate a post in the near future to this incredible adventure) and something that I would almost like to call the best game ever. It involved trains, planes and automobiles and its main purpose was to transport people, mail, coal, iron ore, cattle and grain from one place to another (and making money out of it).

Sounds simple? It wasn’t always.

Building railroads was its most rewarding feature. Since 1995 I have lost lost countless hours of my unfruitful life just watching the avant-garde interactive ballet of trains and semaphores.

Its name: Transport Tycoon.

I just called Transport Tycoon almost the best game ever. That is because a year later, that must have been 1995, Chris Sawyer released Transport Tycoon Deluxe or TTD (sometimes TTDL). The most interesting improvement of the game was a new set of semaphores enabling a greater control on the train tracks.

TTD migrated with every computer that I owned. It was playable under DOS (obviously), Win 3.11, Win95, Win98 (and ME), but when I finally purchased me an XP machine one of the biggest counterpoints of that operating system was that Transport Tycoon Deluxe refused to run on it.

Lucky for me there were a bunch of TTD enthusiasts who found that it was about time to make this game playable under XP as well. TTDPatch not only made the game XP compatible, it also gave the players from the third Millennium the change to pimp up the game (originally TTDPatch had been created by Josef Drexler to solve a few bugs). Nowadays over 160 new features can be switched on (or off): new graphics, new vehicles, new industries, new signals and so on and so on… As the readme file says…

Now you'll be able to own 240 trains, 240 road vehicles, 240 planes and 240 ships, and altogether up to 40,000 vehicles. Also you can have larger stations, with up to 7 platforms, each with a length of up to 7 squares, or even mammoth trains with up to 126 carriages.
New Signals: Pre-signals offer a new way to guide your trains and allow very small, yet efficient stations.
New Graphics: TTDPatch enables new vehicles with new and exciting graphics, and supports making even more vehicles with a new add-on mechanism.
Other conveniences, including refittable train engines, mixed stations with different types of trains, selectable station goods, more useful "full load" option, the ability to use realistic acceleration on mountains, or turn off the effects of curves and mountains entirely, and much, much more.

TTDPatch soon grew into a very slick little GUI, with Windows style wizards, checkboxes and switches (no need anymore to manually alter some code somewhere on a initialization file) and has the ability to upgrade and download new graphic files on the fly. It also has the very neat possibility to downgrade back to the previous fail-safe version if something goes wrong.

With TTDPatch still being very active a new project saw the light of day: OpenTTD. This open source project still uses the graphic files of the original game but has released its own executable. OpenTTD tries to incorporate the best of TTD and the TTDPatch although the two projects have diverged a bit the last couple of years. OpenTTD runs on about 20 different operating systems, including Linux and Vista, and multiplayer abilities (using LAN or Internet) have been fully integrated.

Some features of the TTDPatch are not implemented in OpenTTD and vice versa but it seems that the battle of the Transport Tycoon cloning devices is slowly tilting in favour of OpenTTD. Not so long ago a developer from the first project announced that he was changing sides and if my opinion can be of any service here, I also have made the switch from Patch to Open a couple of months ago.

Transport Tycoon has entered the 21st century and it is probably still going to be around for a while. Strangely enough the only person who is unwilling to see that is the original author of the game, Chris Sawyer, who writes on his FAQ:

Neither the DOS version nor the Win95 version will run under Windows 2000 or XP. The changes required for Transport Tycoon Deluxe Win95 to run under Windows 2000/XP are probably minimal, but it's unlikely it will ever be updated unless the time and costs can be justified by potential sales and the willingness of the publisher to market an updated version.

Apparently he has never heard of OpenTTD or of TTDPatch but he will have my eternal blessings for making the greatest game on Earth - ever.

And then there is still the story to tell of my geeky friend who lend me his copy of Transport Tycoon. He finally decided to move to Thailand, married a Hard Rock Café waitress and they got a son. After a couple of years his computer shop started to become a business but before he could grow into the Thai equivalent of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates his vintage Volkswagen was crushed into a million pieces by a passing truck. As a matter of fact, so was he...

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Much Ado (the sequel) 

20080531

Twinsen Ma Non Troppo

Entry 817

Deadly simple? Simply dead! I urgently need to stop writing about these games I’ve once played. Remembering LBA (Little Big Adventure aka Relentless in the USA) in a previous post Tycooning was enough for me to go hunting after it. I soon found the floppy version (only 13 MB) and thanks to Dosbox I could play it in a jiffy.

I tried it for a couple of days and decided that the floppy version wasn’t exactly what I wanted, although it does contain the complete game, but without the vocals and the intermediate movies. So I went webbing at the market-for-free for a cd version. Now I want to tell you, girls and boys, that I am totally opposed to downloading copyrighted games. But LBA is presently floating in a grey area that game aficionados call Abandonware and – AND – I used to have a completely legal - official - original cd of LBA in the past but I can’t find it anymore, honestly. Probably I lend it to somebody who never bothered to give it back. Not that this comment would carry much weight at the court of law.

Finding a cd version of LBA isn’t hard, there are several versions floating on the web, but making it run was nearly an adventure as exciting as playing LBA itself. Dosbox has the ability to masquerade a folder on your drive as a virtual cd-drive, provided you have a so-called image of the cd you want to store on the harddisk, and that is what I wanted to test.

One 460 MB download contained a NRG file but it wasn’t recognised as a valid cd image. I extracted the file with Izarc so that its directory structure was revealed and created an ISO file out of it, using an utility called ImgBurn. This time Dosbox mounted the ISO-image without a problem and I could install LBA from the virtual cd drive (D:\) on a virtual dos drive (C:\).

The Magicball forum was very helpful in showing me how to setup the sound card configuration for the game:

D: [Enter]
Install [Enter]
Choose your language
Hard Disk Installation
C:\RELENT
Music Sound Card Configuration: "Sound Blaster Pro 1 (OPL2)", "220"
FX Sound Card Configuration: "Sound Blaster Pro 1", "220", "7", "1"
Speech Configuration: "Keep Speech Files on Hard Disk - YES"
Save Parameters
Quit

But when I wanted to start the game I got an error that there was still no cd present. Blast, blast and triple blast! This was a dead end for sure. But if Twinsen, the hero of LBA, refused to give up trying to save his world from the dictatorial reign from the evil FunFrock, so would I.

µTorrent lead me to a 496 MB archive that contained a cd IMG file that was created with yet another cd-copying tool. Bingo! Here is how my Dosbox configuration file looks like now:

mount C C:\Download\Lba
imgmount D "C:\Download\LbaCD\LBA1.img" -t iso
C:
cd RELENT
RELENT

Although Twinsen’s world is populated with hilarious bunnies and funny elephants that seem to have escaped from a Teletubbies show it doesn’t mean that this is a child game, quite the contrary. If a hostile elephant grabs you he clobbers you to death as in a Quentin Tarantino movie and there are several really-very-close-to-suicide missions (the screenshot above-left shows an unhappy encounter with an armed Rabbibunny clone) .

It took me several hours to get through the Temple of Bù (rolling logs, spitting fire balls, murderous skeletons) and believe me; it can be very frustrating to get through a maze of blazing mitraillette fire only to be killed at the end by a soldier who comes out of the toilet.

On the other hand LBA is very humorous in a kind of continental way, LBA was (is) a French game and thus PC (as in political correctness) is not casting its evil shadow over it. The second LBA game, so I recall, started with a very proud Twinsen who shows us his big-bellied girlfriend, and correct me if I am wrong, there are not many games around where the protagonist has a pregnant wife to care for.

I was amused to find out that there is still a rather active LBA community on the web, with people trying to make a fan-based Twinsen prequel and others still hoping for the release of LBA3, a project that was stopped when the original company merged / disappeared / went bankrupt (just pick your choice). Apparently the original makers of the game still try to revive the interest for the third part of the trilogy . But for the moment all that there is to read on their website is: coming soon…

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

20080914

open Theme Hospital - 3 different ones

Entry 972

No vomiting in the corridors please! Anybody who has read this blog knows that I am a fan of Transport Tycoon Deluxe and that since more than a decade ago. It is probably the best game in the world and thanks to the Open TTD project the game is doubtless more popular than ever. Open TTD used reverse engineering to recreate the DOS game from scratch and to export it to other platforms, including those that are not Microsoft friendly. Since a couple of years aficionados are busy finding ways to replace the original 8bpp graphics with newly created 32bpp ones. This is not only done because the game will look more modern that way but also because the old graphics are, in theory at least, copyrighted by the initial creator of the game Chris Sawyer.

Slowly the game is evolving into something new but a bit too slow if you ask me. It is a pity that nobody thought of creating a slick utility to create your own vehicles or buildings for the game. There isn’t even an Idiots Guide how the coding of the graphic objects works, so it is quite difficult to find new recruits. Volunteers first have to struggle through old forum posts from a different version of the game (the so-called TTDL patch) and need to muddle through a swamp of page-long threads from there. Some links providing must-read help files or dos-utilities (to unpack tiled graphics and reveal the code behind it) no longer exist, so all you can do is to waddle a few days more through old forum posts hoping somebody has revealed the answer to your question. Do I sound a bit depressed here? Yes, but you can blame that on the season.

But there is now finally a realistic chance that another remake from the last century will try to push Transport Tycoon from its spot. I’m of course talking of Theme Hospital.

Somewhere in 2006 it was announced on Sourceforge that an Open Source 3D version of the game was going to be made: Open Source Theme Hospital Clone Announced.

About a year later the TH community was thrilled to see a commercial follow-up appearing on the game market: Hospital Tycoon. The game was a dud and for one reason or another the makers released what could be best described as a buggy beta version. You can now buy Hospital Tycoon at 5 Euro a piece in warehouses around the world. But even at that price it isn’t particulary a good buy: Theme Hospital Tycoon.

Time for a new venture. Round Donut launched a website, a forum and the promise to release an open source 3D version of open theme hospital very soon. That was in 2007 as well: Donuts and doctors.

As you have probably figured out by now Round Donut couldn’t keep its promise and all the website can offer to download today is a tacky logo of the soon-to-be-released game. Some developers found work or had to devote more time to their studies or needed to babysit their grandmother on Wednesday afternoons, whatever the reason is, the first line of coding for the second open source project still has to written. (If you read this, guys, no hard feelings, I know you’ve tried, it just didn’t work out,…)

By pure frustration I started to browse the web and found a blog entry from Alexander Gitter who had used reverse engineering on the original files, just to see if he could recreate the original graphics: Much Ado (the sequel).

Now its about time for a bit of narcissism: I mailed the bloke, put his blog entry on the Round Donut forum and let the virus spread. Out of it grew a new project, the third if my count is exact that will now try to reverse the game to the 22nd century à façon de Open Transport Tycoon. It's name: openTH. The fact that a third project was founded brought some life back into the second and perhaps we will see two versions of an open source version of Theme Hospital in the future.

But hold it for a minute. Let us all sit down for a while and recapitulate. So a third Open Theme Hospital was founded because the second was virtually dead, right?
Right.
But because the third project started this gave the comatose second Open Theme Hospital at Round Donut a new boost to start all over again, right?
Right.
So now we have two Open Theme Hospital projects running at the same time, right?
Wrong.
We have three.

OpenTH wasn’t running for a week when somebody came up with yet another openTH clone project. Named openTH, to add confusion to the previous one that bares exactly the same name, it can (also) be found at Sourceforge. And of course it also has its own forum.

As there is now a busload of would-be programmers around the good news is that discrete negotiations are being held to join forces and to merge into one big project. To be continued...

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

20081018

Autumn Blues

Entry 1041

Recently I have been in my cynical go-get’em-all mode and I want to apologise for that. I blame it on the season but it could of course also be that my bad character is beyond fixing.

The following text (part 1 and 2) is about gameplay for adults. If your legislation forbids to read this under a certain age and if you are under that certain age you are advised to skip the first two entries of this post and to read only part 3, which is about The Sandbox of God.

On the other hand, if your religion forbids you to read about gameplay involving divine powers as well then this post is entirely not for you.

Settled? Can we go on now please?

It's spaghetti time again! Set 1. ArianeB add-on

I can’t deny it. Most visitors of my little blog don’t come here to read my philosophical musings, but to check the ArianeB section.

ArianeB is a free adult click-n-play game, made by an anonymous human being who roams the net under the same name. Insiders more or less know who hides behind that pseudonym but it is not my task to divulge that information. It suffices to say he is rather interested in the intersections between mathematics and 3D graphics.

I can’t blame the man, it is easier to explain the mathematical formula A ∩ (B ∩ C) = (A ∩ B) ∩ C by saying that
a: if Rebecca is skinny dipping in the pool with ArianeB and
b: if you join ArianeB in the pool for a good old game of booby touching
the chance is big that
c: the three of you are in the same pool at the same time.
That is what they call apllied mathematics.

ArianeB 5.0 still contains some bugs in the coding, meaning that some action sometimes trigger the wrong events or pictures. Erana was one of the first to create an add-on to get rid of these bugs and to add some extra features as well.

Soon after that I was contacted by Arnulf who made an add-on for the add-on, if you understand what I mean, but my appetite for ArianeB was a bit tempered by then as I had played it about a hundred times just to make these goddamn walkthroughs. So I never added Arnulf’s creation to this blog.

But when I recently checked the forum where Arnulf posts his versions I found that his add-on has now reached version number 12. It is about 16 MB big and can be downloaded from RapidShare. Expect no walkthrough from me this time. You’re on your own!

Wendy v1 v2 v3 Set 2. An Afternoon at the Swimming Pool

The forum where any new incarnation of ArianeB (and the add-ons) is closely scrutinised belongs to Shark’s Lagoon. Shark has made quite a few sexy adventures and one of his most popular creations, Horny Afternoon, has now been extended to episode 3. In An afternoon at the swimming pool we meet Wendy, her nanny aptly called Nanny, a friend from school Cloé and, of course, Franck, the handyman who comes in handy in different ways.
(Part 2 of Horny Afternoon can be found here: Another very special afternoon. Some more information about Shark in old posts of mine: Sense And Sensibility and Cyberhugging.)

For those who have not the patience to play the new game until the end (and then once again because there are different endings and then once again because it is so damn good) Arnulf, oh no not HIM again!, has made a 24 minutes during movie with all the situations in the game. That 64 MB video walkthrough can be downloaded from Rapidshare as well. Damn, and I also wanted to make a visual guidel. There go my extra 1,000 visitors a week!

Sandbox of God Set 3. The Sandbox of God  

Far less people join this little blog to check The Sandbox of God walkthroughs. I can’t figure out why. Apparently the urge to procreate, even virtually, is far more appealing than playing god in a world populated by rabbits and men. But please bear with me for a moment.

This is what I had to say about the game in 2006:

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.

The game is indeed very addictive and it is not very strange that it has acquired a loyal following. People have asked for a SoG sequel but for one reason or another, its maker, Mr. Chubigans wasn’t too keen to start producing one.

Until the following message appeared on Mr. Chubigan’s blog on the 24th of February of this year:
Sandbox of God 2: Ancient Warfare is coming April 20th.

But less than a month later it was already announced that the game would not meet its deadline and that the release date would probably be June of this year. June past by like a whirlwind and Mr. Chubigans was obliged to make another statement:

I think it’s time for a SOG 2 update, eh? I’ll be completely honest here: the project is stalled for now. Fred has gotten quite a few sprites done but there are still plenty more to go. On my end, only the night/day cycle is done. There is still much, much more work to do.

And the Vertigo Gaming unofficial FAQ has the following message:

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

Blaming it on the season or not, this is quite depressing news. But instead of jerking off to ArianeB or Wendy, why don’t you just download The Sandbox of God and play with bunnies for a change?

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

20081109

Illegal Aliens

Entry 1060

I woke up this morning with a Karen Carpenter tune whistling through my head.
Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?
It is the distinct proof that my brain is slowly alzheiming away. Although it is of course a great song… but not very cool to admit that…

I had promised to do a lot of blogthings, there is an article for the Church crying to be written, I need to extrapolate on my ArianeB walkthroughs now that there has been an online update, my friends at the Late Night forum are flooding me with news and goodies about The City Wakes festival, I still have the Orb album The Dream to listen to, the complete series of The Prisoner to watch, and so on…

To add insult to injury I found last week exactly the right time to download UFO: Alien Invasion. I had downloaded it before once, over a year ago, but then the game was way too alpha to be enjoyable and it had quickly disappeared from my harddisk. But this time was different…

I am of course on a nostalgia tour here because UFO: Alien Invasion is an open source equal of the classic game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, that was issued around 1993 by Microprose. The game was known under different names such as XCOM: UFO Defense and UFO: Enemy Unknown, depending on the country or the publisher you were buying it from.

XCOM was a warfare game, with two different gaming layers, one slightly real-time, the other turn-based..

The Geoscape, a map of the world, let you decide where to build a military base. Given a limited amount of money, you had to divide the funds between military buildings and equipment, research facilities, hospitals, the obligatory power plant and radar… With the remainder of the money military and non-military personnel could be recruited, weapons bought, research sponsored, etc….

After a while the radar would spot a UFO attacking a village and it was up to you and your task force to stop the assault.

The game would then switch over to the Battlescape simulation screen. Basically this was an isometric world where your band of soldiers would try to kill the evil aliens from outer space. Capturing them alive was even better so that your researchers could have a go at proper vivisection. These Battlescape scenarios were turn-based: it was up to the human player to position his soldiers so that they would be able to eliminate the enemy without being subject to enemy fire, taking into account the limited energy (needed for movement and firing) every soldier had per round.

Both simulative worlds, Geoscape and Battlescape, would of course interact with each other. Before each battle, weapons and soldiers had to be chosen in the Geoscape world and after the battle wounded soldiers needed a rest in the hospital, provided you had build one and manned it with medics.

In 2007 XCOM was voted the best PC game of all time by the IGN staff. And now you can play it all over again, in 3D, downloadable at UfoAI. Alien Invasion is not a clone of the original game, it uses its own graphics, music (excellent music BTW) and story-line. Some features are still a bit buggy and not all weapons and buildings have been implemented yet. But I suppose it will be only a matter of time before these will be sorted out.

While researching several bits and pieces for this article I stumbled upon Ufo2000.

UFO2000 is free and opensource turn based tactical squad simulation multiplayer game. It is heavily inspired by the famous X-COM: UFO Defense game. While UFO2000 engine was specifically designed to be compatible with the graphics resources and maps from X-COM, you don't need any proprietary data files to play as a new fan-made set of graphics exists and is included in UFO2000 distribution by default, so the game is ready to run out of the box. But if you want an exact X-COM look and feel, you have an option of installing original X-COM and TFTD data files and use them for extending UFO2000 with additional maps, weapon sets and units.

This remake is closer to the original but can only played against human opponents as AI hasn't been implemented.

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