Bits & Pieces of individual Game Development
Part 1:
Four elderly men (black suits, red shirts, black ties / videos in background) perform “The Man-Machine”, “Expo 2000″, “Tour de France 2003″, “Vitamin”, “Tour de France”, “Autobahn”, “The Model”, “Neon Lights”,”Sellafield”, “Radioactivity” and “Trans Europe Express”
… Curtain …
Now this is just hilarious … Accidental Video Game Porn or like you would say ‘don’t let your mother see this!’ An archive of screenshots and animations showing explicit (and all non-intended of course) scenes from various old and new video games. Searching for backdoor demon sex with Zelda or hardcore bestiality orgies with Pikachu? You’ll find it there! I haven’t imagined video games are so full of ambiguous material! The funny thing about it are really the comments to the pictures. And unlike others, the emphasis lies here on ‘accidental’.
Though GUIs did not really change over the past 20 years and seem to become a little bit outdated today everybody wonders what will be a better way of communicating with our computers.
Listening to the latest Mac-rumors “Spoken Interface” is expected to be implemented within the next major update of Mac OS X (10.4) in 2005. But is this the way we will control our computers in future? I do not think so. Why? Read this old but interesting article!
Anyway. I always liked the simple and “to the point” design of early Mac OS interfaces.
This was how I’ve felt when I entered the Ginza Apple Store some days ago!
It was like “Hey everything is nice and easy and good” … but in a strangely artificial and rather canting way. I’ve opened my not so bad and somewhat stylish flash portfolio on one of the apples with lamp-screen and went up some floors and when I came back, the apple was set back to it’s screen with boring landscape pictures like it was before. Sounds rather like a bourgeois PC store, doesn’t it?! Let’s watch this again just for a lark (and then this one! ;)!
I feel I rather want to visit the 8-bit Museum and admire some of the old machines! An excellent informed website about obsolete computers with tons of detail, screenshots, photos and extended information that old.computers.com doesn’t provide! Old computer goodness from A like Nintari to T like Hexers Instruments. Unfortunately the site’s text is only in german.
It’s about time! We’ve finished a rather big job by now and it’s time for some coddling! I’m still loitering around with my outdated AMD 1.2GHz with yesterdays hardware so I prepared to buy components for assembling a new system. I will go with a Pentium this time, hoping to have not so many hardware probs, freezes and incompatibilities.
After some investigations and review study on several hardware testing sites, I’ve compiled my raw list of selections which includes a new CPU, motherboard, RAM, harddisk and additional stuff like PC case, power supply and CPU cooler. Maybe a new graphics card but that’s not primarily important for now. I came up with these …
I’ve been playing The Sims several times and while it was a very interesting (and resource demanding) type of game at first, with every add-on that was released the intended reason for this game became more dull. The characters can become a couple or disputes and you can follow the career path up to no real destination in terms of game ending but while this all becomes boring by time the real matter of this game is the interior house and fashion design by the game players! Yes, The Sims is not about simulating interpersonal relationships but about the design of interior and clothing.
Maxis made two mistakes in my opinion. The first was to make the game system too demanding and complicated. I don’t mean the games interface but how the game handles resources. You add more and more user created objects to the game and your harddisk gets spill over with ‘uncompressed’ BMP images and the like (my Sims folder was about 3Gigs at the end) and the game loading time could easily raise up to 6-8 minutes with that.
The second bad thing that Maxis did was to create completely boring add-ons. Great now you can have your sims become superstars or magicans but they stay what they are: too limited in terms of interaction and real life behavior.
There are masses of user created sites on the web which offer excellent free objects and stuff created by the players and which in many cases look better than the games default contents.
By the time there where two objects I’ve created for the game … one was a rather moderate designed character skin of Lacey Chabert with the dress from Lost In Space and the other one was an object of the Commodore C64 computer which offers some interactivity.
I would have the game still installed just for the fun to try out new furniture and clothing if this game wouldn’t be such a dissipater on the harddisk.
… was a quote from Bill Gates from 1981 according to the book Computers - An Illustrated History from Christian Wurster which I had a sneak look into some days ago in a well sorted book shop and which her majesty now surprisingly presented me as a birthday gift.
This book covers the whole history of computers from the very beginning when they filled a whole hall and were based on relay’s to current computer high tech while leading though the chapters for scientific and military computers, mainframe computers, minicomputers, then microcomputers and to desktop computers.
Review: Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic (DOS/C64)
One of my very favorite games back on Amiga was the space RPG Hard Nova (to be reviewed in a while) which took me long cozy winter nights to solve. The predecessor of Hard Nova was a game called Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic which was released in 1988 by Electronic Arts and had it’s success under science fiction RPG videogamers. Me - PC-less - always looked enviously over to the PC crowd. But that only until decent DOS Emulators were developed, like DOSBox.
Download: Custom VEB Missions and Campaign for Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games
My big move has been delayed for a short time! I will leave here at the end of December and move to far east in middle January! I actually packed everything and made most preparations so I’m stuck with being bored now, counting every minute and hope that time passes faster.
So what to do? One good idea I had, was to keep up with writing some blog stuff that I already planned in my mind. One if it being about one of my favorite Abandonware DOS games Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games!
Over the last couple of decades this game kept me from being bored often! With it’s cozy winter evening fireplace warmth strategy gameplay atmosphere and quietly playing midi music it charms easily to take a session of round based war monging.
finally found an excellent sorted database site about all sorts of game music! on www.mirsoft.info is a well worked out database containing info on all kinds of video games and formats! even found some info about the fighting force 1 soundtrack, which became one of my favorite by the time…. despite others gave it a medium rating, i’d say it is well made! they cover alot of formats from digital audio to Turbo Grafx-16 HES music but there is no original music downloadable, except for several MIDI files and alot of links to other sites.
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