"Chaotic Neutral"

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.

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.

Read more

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.

Recently I’m tending to shun most of what runs nowadays on TV!

While today in the twothousands all kinds of TV series theme seems to be only about sex and interpersonal relations, they were all about humor, sarcasm and worse sci-fi in the nineties and even more back in the eigthies and seventies about action and trashy sci-fi.

So despite many people see 80/70′ties action series only as poor film making or trash, I see them with much more value today than 20 years ago and it’s an enjoyment to catch up an episode of A-Team or Airwolf on a Sunday afternoon besides all this spoiled modern tv program!

This website is all about one of the golden age of action tv series which I like to remember, The Bionic Woman, the unjustified critics told follower of The six million dollar man series! The site has a nice retro feel and even has some of the cool sound effects from the series while offering info on the cast, episodes, story etc.

I was hoping some of the episodes coming through on a p2p network someday and it seems I’m lucky today, they being one of the more hard to get tv series tho. I couldn’t find my favorite episode, Doomsday is tomorrow yet, a two parts episode which I remember very well where Jaime has to defeat an insane scientiest who is threating the world with a giant bomb named the ‘Doomsday device’ and she has to infiltrate his secret underground lair which is full of this old computer stuff and traps and all kind of things which make her life more difficult. One of these many charming examples of how people imagined the future during the mid century!

Review: Star Wars Galaxies (PC)First of all I’m not that far yet and played this game now for one week so you will not get any too detailed information about it here. I’ve spent most of the recent days training my character in the Tyrena area on Corellia an finally got my pistol skill tree full being able to call myself a pistol apprentice. I thought I would be able to hop right on the novice smugglers skill trees but to my surprise I still have to get some more skill points in at least pistol ranged combat before I can do that.

I’ve started off with an artisan and did the tedious task of surveying and sampling ore, minerals and chemicals for a long time with the intention to manufacture my own (better) weapons, since these seem to be very rare (at least on the Chilastra server?!), even bought and planted some personal mineral extractors later but got bored with it and decided to get onto the adventurous side with the rebels. Gladly I’ve already worked my pistol skills up a lot to that time. So after doing rebel delivery and destroy missions until I’ve got 200 rebel faction points to join them and hanging around on Corellia for almost one week I’ve decided it’s time to take a flight to Tatooine.

Shortly after I arrived in Mos Espa, I’ve grouped with a Trandoshan and a Bothan who asked me to join to raid Fort Tusken which lies close to that area. Three persons are way to few to raid the Tuskens but we thought to find others on that location to team up.

Read more

I’ve been selling and buying antique computer stuff on Ebay and also managed to get an old Commodore C64G! The G model was the one with the brown bread bin case and brighter keyboard which was introduced later after the C64C model actually got sold.

This brought up some moods of nostalgia remembering the ‘good old’ days of computing and playing 8bit games. I even found some old 5 1/4″ floppy disks with old tools and games and tried to code some assembler which is even fun in a special way compared to the today’s luxury of coding applications.

There’s also now – as you might already have found – a new category named downloads in which I will put various stuff to leech down from time to time.

Besides there are still some draft entries on hold and unfinished yet on the authoring side. I’m going to finish them when I think it’s time!