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Back when I was younger … much younger … the first computer I ever possessed was a Atari 600 XL which I got from my parents after a lot of begging. I had exactly one game for it, a cartridge with Jungle Hunt on it. Needless to say this got boring very quickly. My friends all had a C64 already and so it wasn’t until long that I also got a C64 and sold the Atari to a friend.

Back then I always knew the Atari was no match for the mighty C64 and for some part (16Kb RAM) this is true. But I never really realized until recently that the Atari 600/800 XL had much better graphics than the C64. The 256 color palette was already way ahead of it’s time and it had 4 sound voices instead of C64s 3 voices etc. But I suggest you see for yourself about that in this nifty video showing gameplay of a 2010 produced game, the RPG named His Dark Majesty …

video with courtesy of marquisor

Just in case you were wondering about all those dreadful malware warnings that were thrown at you if you tried to visit HDRS over the last couple of days … The site had been infected with malware a month or two ago like so many other websites on Media Temple but I have cleaned up now every single trace of malware and removed all suspicious links from the database. Actually I already removed all those nastily injected malware links about a month ago so there was no danger over the last month from visiting this site. However it seems that Google and co is a bit slow to react on this topic and so my site was just only recently labeled as containing malware. I hope this trouble has an end now once and for all. Media Temple isn’t exactly doing much help to the malware clean-up either, I had to suck the necessary information out of my fingers about how to clean up this crap! Here’s some good guides …

How to Remove Trojan.JS.Redirector.cq from Your WordPress Site
JohnnyA WordPress malware on MediaTemple
Detect and clean Malware on MediaTemple

I’ve mentioned before that it’s possible to run Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic in DOSBox with Tandy sound enabled but I couldn’t figure out how to get it working. Today I’m back with good news in that I can tell you how to get this fixed so the trillions of SWFM fans out there can enjoy this fantastic game with the excellent Tandy sound!

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Shoot First, a game by Beau Blyth, is a mix of a Roguelike and Run-N-Gun where you explore a randomly generated dungeon while searching for precious items and encountering vile enemy monsters of all kinds. You get thrown into the dungeon at a random entry point from where you have to make your way to the next-lower floor. On the way you find chests that you can shoot open to reveal useful items and occasionally you find companions who join your party or damsels which you have to rescue from captivity. If you escort them safely to the next exit they will thank you with a reward item.

The game isn’t your generic rogue-like, it’s actually very fast-paced. To get forward you have to encounter many monsters and dispatch them or at least evade them but the enemy AI is quite smart. Many monsters will try to flank or evade you and try to shoot you while you’re hiding in a tunnel. That said, Shoot First is not an easy game. The enemies shoot a lot and they shoot well. Many of them are also quite powerful. To counter this, you’re able to shoot into any direction or strafe-shoot into one direction while running. You can also increase in level which will improve your character’s skills. You’re doing so by shooting monsters and collect small, yellow artifacts (gold?) that are revealed after a monster dies. Still the game is rather difficult to beat and to be honest I haven’t made it any further than to the third floor so far.

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Oldschool RPG fans can now enjoy playing the classic Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar directly on the web via this impressive Flash port. The game is an almost one-to-one conversion of the 1986 original but the author Blair Leggett also made some enhancements to it.

Flash Version of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

After a longer break from creating game artwork assets here’s a new filter I’ve made for the recently updated Filter Forge version 2. In case you’re using Filter Forge and you we’re interested in my Galaxy Photoshop Tutorial, you might as well like to give this filter a try. You can grab it here.

Having digged around recently in search for videogame music radio stations and found a couple of decent ones.  Here’s a list of some of the old ones that probably everyone knows already but also a couple of streams that were completely new to me …

Kohina – www.kohina.com – Everybody knows them, very 8bit, very piko piko, a lot of C64 tunes mixed with a very good selection of Japanese Videogame and Arcade music. Sometimes also Spectrum music that sounds more like sizzling oil in the frying pan.

Nectarine – www.scenemusic.eu/demovibes – The Demoscene Radio, lots of the typical European Demoscene music and as that very good. Unfortunately they recently often also play some very strange vocal pop/rock-like homebrew stuff that sounds everything else but good.

No-Life Radio – nolife-radio.com – Surprisingly good station! Lots of varying game soundtrack, both Western and Japanese, 8-bit, 16-bit and modern soundtracks in abundance, spiked with Jingles by GlaDOS

Retro PC Game Music Streaming Radio – gyusyabu.ddo.jp/MP3/MP3.html – A Japanese radio stream and the name is program here … plays nonstop pre-2K DOS/Adlib style Game music. Nice for a change when you’re grew tired of Kohina.

Radio SEGA – www.radiosega.net – Haven’t given this one much time to listen to yet but obviously plays a lot of music of SEGA titles.

CGM UKScene Radio – www.lmp.d2g.com – Somehow very similar in style to Nectarine. As of now only lo-fi stream available. It’s a good idea to listen to Nectarine and whenever they play those horrid vocal tracks, switch to this station!

… Know of any other related streams that are worth to mention? Let me know!

What’s best to do on a stormy spring autumn evening in your cozy carpeted living room with fireplace lightened messy bachelor apartment on the seventh floor while the wind cries outside through the trees concrete gaps? Correct! Playing a nice and well-matured Role-playing Game like for example Ultima.

Ultima is the one role-playing game where you start in the present world and then travel into a fantasy parallel world of Britannia, usually via a portal. Here’s a nice video (from RetroHD) of the last game in the Ultima series, Ultima 9 -- Ascension which introduces the beginning of the game.

This guide explains how to set up a Flash and Flex development environment with Eclipse, FDT, Flash Builder and a couple of other editors that you want for ActionScript coding and Flash development with style! This guide is based on Windows because that’s what I’m using but I’m sure you Mac and Linux guys can figure out the parts that differ on your OS! Let’s get started …

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Today’s installment of Moments In Gaming covers the 1997 Playstation game Fighting Force. It was one of those games in the late nineties era of video games where the fresh 3D technology of the Playstation spawned an avalanche of outstanding 3D games.

In Fighting Force you play the role of one ruffian (or ruffine) who is hired to intrude the premises of a certain villain named Zeng with the goal to eliminate him.  So much for the story!

The graphics are of the typical early era PSX low-poly style but the environments that act as staging grounds for the rumble work surprisingly well. The gameplay is fun for a couple of rounds. You have a set of attack moves and combos available and you are able to pick up stuff from the ground like weapons, sandwiches, coke cans as well as bundles of dollar bills and even gold bars! Some items like cars, vending machines and trash cans can be destroyed to spawn makeshift weapons like metal bars that help dispatching bad guys quicker.

But the one feature that makes Fighting Force worth mentioning is the soundtrack by Martin Iveson. A well shuffled mixture of Electro and Techno beats blended perfectly together with filtered guitar riffs, fat bass lines and police sirens, sometimes uptempo and other times  subtle and atmospheric. This is one of those soundtracks that has a very personal note and stands on its own among the deluge of orchestral mass ware and prefab sound loops often found in games today.

An early tech demo of the tetragonLib Tile Engine on which I restarted work on recently again. Click the image to view. There’s not much interaction yet though. You can scroll around with the cursor keys and apart from that open the Rhombus App Framework built-in debug console with F8 and the FPS monitor with SHIFT+F8. Everything is still under heavy development.

However the demo already shows some of the special features of the tile engine. It’s a blitted multi-layer engine which supports animated tiles (but it doesn’t use MovieClips or Sprites for this but animated Bitmap tiles). The demo shows two layers, one as a backdrop and the other with the maze on it. Additionally layers can use layer effects like the second layer here uses a drop shadow filter which is also defined in the tilemap file.

The engine tries to be resource friendly. If there is nothing to update it will not waste render cycles. E.g. if you move to any area without animated tiles on the screen the engine will shortly after start to consume less CPU.

Quite a list of features is still planned to be implemented, for example map-wrapping (to create endless maps), auto-scrolling and support for hexagonal as well as isometric tiles has already been started before but these implementations are going to be completely overhauled.

If you’re interested in having a look at the engine’s tileset and tilemap data files, they can be found here.