Bits & Pieces of individual Game Development
More funny stuff from the GTA front, check out www.videogamesareevil.com! Aah I love it when people get cynical! And if you are up to more fun in the same direction, watch the vids at www.purepwnage.com, for example Meet FPS Doug!
Cats are just cool! They are most independent from us humans but sometimes they let us get closer to them. If that is happening, it is also sometimes possible to use them as a storage space for all kinds of things from pizza boxes to babies! Yes, cats are actually more trustworthy than one might think! Here is the witness: stuffonmycat.com! It’s even better than the Infinity Cat Project, an endless loop of cats sitting in front of computer screens and seeing the photo of other owners cats who are sitting in front of the screen. It makes me want to have a cat again because cats simply rock!
Found this classified a while ago in a BBS signature …
… And damn I thought that’s the guy I saw last month when I traveled back into 1629 by modifying my microwave oven into a time machine! You can never say that there are too many boring people in the world!
We’ve been to her majesty’s sisters house in Koga the last weekend which is around 1h from Tokyo and spent a lazy Saturday/Sunday there and mostly played games on the GBA and PS2 of my niece in law which convinced me enough to buy a Gameboy again and so I’ve went to buy a black GBA SP last week. A great yield!
My favorite GBA game of the moment for it is GT3 Advance Pro Concept Racing! This game means a lot of racing fun on the Gameboy! The track design isn’t really 3D but uses mode7 which means it is rather a flat plane with the track on it and several obstacle sprites on it but IMHO looks better than the clumsy graphics of Collin McRae Rally.
More Shoot’em’up goodness can be found at Shmups!, a website dedicated to 2D Shooter games with plenty of reviews and information from Katakis on the C64 over Z-Out on Amiga up to Ketsui on Arcade machines! Z-Out wasn’t the best Shooter maybe but Chris Huelsbeck’s music on level 4 and 6 was brilliant! I still like the music of Gunbird a lot!
I’ve bought an Owltech PC-0301 today! That’s an adapter in form of a 5 1/2 inch drive bay insert which offers two ports for connecting Playstation controllers to the PC and use them for a crapload of things. They not only perform well for usual PC games but also worked great on PSX Emu’s and WinVice and WinUAE and MAME32 and… well that where the ones which I’ve tested so far. Gunbird with PSX Analogue Control rocks! Installation was super-easy with plugging to a free USB port and a 3-click-long driver installation from the included CD.
I’ve installed SuSE Linux v9.1 a couple of days ago on my now secondary PC and after 2-3 days also managed to get rid of that ugly default KDE desktop look and turned it into a somewhat bearable view.
Honestly when do the interface designers stop smoking strange things and come back to a neat and clear GUI design? The icons of the default KDE were huge (48px) and even looked way to big on my 1280×1024 resolution. The initially chosen color palette can only be described as atrocity and the default wallpaper was of minor quality! When flapping out the kicker menu (that’s basically the same as the windows start menu) again huge icons and text is thrown at you and shine in a multitude of fancy colors with soft edges as if they want to compete with the Teletubbies! Who ever had the idea to introduce 24 bit colored icons: here comes my hand and whips to your face!
I know what you think! And you are right! I’ve been absent for a while again from here but there are reasons for it. I’m working on a bigger scale personal Flash Project since shortly. As soon as I can tell more about it I will open a Flash category here to post more of Flash things like news about the project, actionscripting tips and code snippets which might be useful!
More and more people becoming something like a Retro-game-developer which is good news! It seems recently even the now young generation loves to play videogames that have an age of 10 years and beyond. Today’s games come with high class super realtime rendered 3D graphics and cinematic atmosphere but still the games from yesterday keep their spirit. I believe the reason for this comes a lot from the fact that the simplified graphic of old games allows more room for one’s own fantasy. While today’s high class 3D games look good while you play them (a decent hardware assumed), classics from the 8 and 16bit era look always good - in a gadget-likewise way.
We’ve been to the Star Wars Science and Art exhibition in Ueno yesterday. It was held in the Basement halls of the National Science Museum and I can tell it was worth the visit!
They had tons of models present which were used in the movies, from the Millenium Falcon and Star Destroyers to AT-AT walkers and the original sized Pod Racers. Also most of the costumes where put on dummies and it was very interesting to see how lo-fi the costumes from the ‘old’ episodes actually are but how real they look in the movies. The space ships were probably the most impressive things there! The 61×76x21 inch model of the Falcon was a good example on how to make a space ship model look authentic, it looked rusty, dirty and had details like laser shot holes in the hull.
… or things in the spring! I got my new rig set up finally! Almost done with installing all the stuff that I need for a convenient usage. This is what came out finally…
CPU: Pentium4 3GHz 800MHz FSB
Motherboard: P4C800-E Deluxe (excellent board!)
“Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when geeks were geeks and floppies were really floppy.”
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