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His Dark Majesty (Atari 800 XL)

sascha — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:26:31 +0000

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

This site is now clean!

sascha — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:58:28 +0000

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

Running Sentinel Worlds on DOSBox with Tandy Sound

sascha — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 05:57:11 +0000

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!

>> Continue reading "Running Sentinel Worlds on DOSBox with Tandy Sound"

Shoot First

sascha — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:40:00 +0000

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.

>> Continue reading "Shoot First"

Ultima IV – The Flash Version

sascha — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:38:53 +0000

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

Starmap Filter for Filter Forge 2.0

sascha — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:14:50 +0000

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.

Videogame & Demoscene Music Radio Streams

sascha — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 15:50:55 +0000

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!

Ultima IX Ascension – Intro Video

sascha — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:38:43 +0000

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.

Setting up the Ultimate Flash Development Environment

sascha — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:49:31 +0000

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 …

>> Continue reading "Setting up the Ultimate Flash Development Environment"

Moments In Gaming 5: Fighting Force

sascha — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:29:11 +0000

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.

Mass Effect 2: The Future of RPGs? Oh really?

sascha — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:16:13 +0000

There has been a lot of hype around the release of Mass Effect 2 some weeks back and some people already start claiming that this game is going to be the Future of RPGs. Rampant Coyote took a stance and so did The Brainy Gamer. Being an old hand RPGer and having played Mass Effect 1 to the end and started playing part 2 I feel I need to have my say to the hype around that game.

>> Continue reading "Mass Effect 2: The Future of RPGs? Oh really?"

From the Labs: Tetragon Tile Engine Early Preview

sascha — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:28:02 +0000

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.

(Please open the article to view the Flash media.)

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.

Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic with Tandy Sound Enabled

sascha — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:16:34 +0000

Today’s video pick (yeah right, as if I had a new post everyday here) is from YouTube user Five5Six and about how he managed to get Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic to run on DOSBox with Tandy sound enabled. That’s right, Tandy sound! By default the game uses those bleepy PC speaker sounds as in my own video. Personally I haven’t yet figured out how to get Tandy sound working with this game, so there … a video with the marvelous Tandy-enabled sound of SW1:FM in all it’s glory …

Sword of Fargoal for iPhone

sascha — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:52:52 +0000

The classic dungeon crawler Sword of Fargoal has been released for the iPhone and it turns out that it’s one of the few computer/console-game-to-iPhone conversions I’ve came across that are actually fun to play on the touch-screen (unlike, say, Sonic, Bomberman et al). Go check it out if you’re into RPGs with an ever-changing maze-like dungeon accompanied by nicely done atmospheric music and sound effects.

Official Sword of Fargoal Website

Moments in Gaming 4: Whodunit? (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion)

sascha — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:00:45 +0000

While the main quest of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion didn’t attract me very much -- admittedly I haven’t even completed it once to this day -- some of the side quests were amusingly entertaining, particularly the Thief’s Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest series. Both of these feature stories with some pretty twisted plots and very interesting characters.

While doing contract work for the Dark Brotherhood you are being sent to attend a party where the guests are invited to search for a treasure that is supposed to be hidden in a house in that they are going to be locked in, except that there is no treasure and you are not one of the treasure hunters but an assassin hired by the house owner to kill all the other guests. Can a quest be more macabre and fun than this?!

The Whodunit quest which you are being assigned to in the latter part of the Dark Brotherhood guild quest series was somehow the highlight of it all for me. Not only combined it the cozy whodunit mystery with a medieval fantasy setting but it put you in the role of the killer instead of the detective. What made this quest so gleefully entertaining wasn’t the fact that you are the perpetrator but the way how you could manipulate the characters and watch how they became more and more terrified after somebody crossed the bar. There are several different ways how the NPC’s react which is especially interesting in the end when only three or two are left, even if eventually the quest concludes always in the same outcome.

Moments in Gaming 3: Grager’s Yacht (Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic)

sascha — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:04:05 +0000

Back in the days when computer games still required you to use your imagination to play them there was a role-playing game pearl named Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic, one of the many scifi-themed RPGs back then which today are only sparsely seeded in retailer shelves.

Future Magic was first released for DOS and a port for the C64 was published later which looked almost equally good as the DOS version with excellent graphics done by Michael Kosaka. At times the game is quite bizarre. For example there is a planet with ranchers and farms just like in an old western. Another planet has two very high towers that reach into the orbit and these are the only colonies on the otherwise untouched surface. On another, icy planet you scout an abandoned research base which is overrun by saber-toothed creatures … but this is how the games were made in the golden age of RPG. Despite the number in the title a follower was never developed for Future Magic but instead the acclaimed Hard Nova served as a spiritual sequel.

The game let’s you control a group of five space mercs who are send out on a mission to stop mysteriously appearing raiders which are attacking ships in the local system. Right after your ships drops out of hyperspeed you are being attacked by them. However while the other ships of the space convoy with that you came are trying to fight them you are able to take some distance and locate a yacht floating in nearby space. It’s the space yacht of a tycoon named Grager which turns out to be a luxurious vessel full with the newest technology.

RPG Design: Character Development Example

sascha — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:36:43 +0000

Welcome back to the RPG Design series where I try to talk a bit about the work and progress on my game project, the development of the darkish, space -themed computer role-playing game Stellar Conspiracy: Entanglements Of The Marenis Sector (working title).

In the last part I’ve introduced the character design template I’m using and mentioned to post a character example next time which I’m doing hereby while introducing you to Eliza Retinienne, a Gessjanian security systems expert from the planet Shielle, a small world bordering on the fringe of the Suulun Sector which in turn stretches over a large area of the southern galaxy.

Eliza is one of the key characters in the game’s story and one of the characters whom the player is supposed to encounter and who eventually joins the player’s party. She is also supposed to receive her own side-quest in which the player can engage to help her out of the threatening situation she is currently in.

Note that this sheet is basically just here to give an example of how the character design template can be used to shape out a character so I suggest not to look too critically into the details. Things can (and will) still change and also the sheet is not filled out completely, for one reason because some details are irrelevant for this character and for another that I haven’t found any other suitable details for her yet. Either way I hope this gives a good example of how to utilize the template!

>> Continue reading "RPG Design: Character Development Example"

Moments in Gaming 2: “All In” ICBM Launch (CoD Modern Warfare)

sascha — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:17:39 +0000

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is one of the few FPS games that really impressed me. First, it didn’t feature the same overused WWII theme but a refreshing present day scenario, second, it has a very professional feel to it. The graphics are awesome, the gameplay is perfect and characters and dialog are believable. And third, the story plot is thrilling, there are so many twists and turns to it that make you glee at the screen. CoDMW is full of these jaw-dropping moments. This Moments in Gaming episode shows one of these unexpected moments.

Later in the game the SAS unit around Captain Price is moving forward to the missile base deeply hidden in the Altay Mountains in Russia when suddenly two ICBMs are being launched in close vicinity. This is one of those “I cant believe this just happened!!”-moments in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Moments in Gaming 1: Cate Archer vs. Isako (No One Lives Forever 2)

sascha — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:57:38 +0000

No One Lives Forever and it’s sequel are two games that I particularly enjoyed playing. Set in a mid-century spy movie theme you are playing Cate Archer, a top secret agent for an English secret service called U.N.I.T.Y. who has to take down the terrorist organization aptly named H.A.R.M.

The two games are very atmospheric and full of 60ties flair, concealed spy gadgets, exotic locations, fast-paced action, insanely dangerous situations and spiked with a good dose of humor. Gladly they don’t take themselves too serious unlike some other games of the genre.

In this video Cate Archer and a ninja named Isako (who is - rather unwillingly -- one of the villains henchmen) are fighting it out in ‘No One Lives Forever 2‘ in an impossible showdown taking place in a trailer home which is being hurled away by an approaching tornado and somehow both are getting out of it alive.

Turrican I Theme (Overdrive Mix)

sascha — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:10:16 +0000

I’ve been busy with some audio work recently again and decided to remix the famous Turrican I Title Theme by Chris Huelsbeck. Here it is … I haven’t intentionally made too many changes to the arrangement because I wanted to stick close to the original on the first approach and concentrate on the instrumentation instead which has been completely changed. You can download it too (if you’re into synth music/game tune remixes that is).

(All work done in REAPER. Instruments used: Synth1, V-Station, minimonsta, Nexus, MOTU BPM for drums.)

turrican-theme-overdrive-mix by sys2074 +