markus’ blog

Outcast

There was an interesting roundup about “Games that never become games” on Extreme-Players (german language).

The very first game mentioned was Outcast 2. Being tied to computer since (too long), I’ve heard/read about every game on PC at least once. But Outcast? Seems I’ve started to miss a few, and in this case, a good one.

The short excerpt and the screenshot of the “want-to-be-outcast2″ convincied me: I’ve to take a look at the game myself. So I headed over to Amazon and bought me one of the used versions. I hadn’t ignored the comments about the games were people mostly ranted about the crap resolution (max. 512×384). But hey, this game was released in ’99, what do you except? Ok, you would expect you can choose any resolution you graphics card supports, like Ultima 9 did :)

Anyway, no reason for me to give up that soon. CDs arrived a few days later and finally installed and loaded it up.

• The intro

  Amazing. I mean it, really. This was five years ago. I hand’t seen a good intro movie in a game for years! Part of the good atmosphere were the character facials, something people still don’t get right most of the time in todays rendered videos. Animation was allright, a bit wierd from time to time. But then, and for me this came really good in the german version: Slades’ voice spoken by Brucle Willis german synchronise voice. That gave the right touch right from the beginning

• The game

  There was it again: good old voxel graphics! I think we all remember the good old Comanche days. Sure, at such a low resolution and on monitors exceeding the 1024×768 resolution, it doesn’t look that appealing. You have to love it or you hate it. For me, it’s the former. The HUD system is appropriate, the animations are smooth and the vital world is impressing.

When I ever find enough time to actually play it in-depth I’ll add further impressions here.

For german capable people: There are some interesting patches available at adelpha.de (german portal about Outcast), like the resolution patch which allows to run the game at a greater resolution (unfortuantely didn’t work for me).

Some screenshots:

Update 13.10.2005: Yes, I noticed the adelpha.de links don’t work anymore. If you’ve got helpful links to the patches, contact me!

Add comment October 29th, 2004

Bookmarks? Imap!

Bookmarks are nice, they let you store the name, location and description and you can organize them like files in folders. Everything is fine, but I wanted more.

Sometimes I need parts and pieces of the boomarked item immidiately available. Sure, add it to the description. More parts & pieces? Try notes. What if you want to store some nice notes along a bookmark? Description? Sure. More notes? What about .. and, yes, I’m talking about files. Attach files to a bookmark? Insane, that’s not what bookmarks were ment to be. Right. So I choose Imap.

Long story short: I ended up organizing my bookmarks as Imap messages in folders. Lucky me I’m running my own MTA, coupled with an Imap server, so no problems running out of storage.

I haven’t mentioned synchronisation yet, but this was always a nightmare. Different computers, different browsers, and always an imported bookmark I needed wasn’t available. Imap? Accessing my bookmarks from everywhere, problem solved. Sure, not so nice integrated into the browser, read: no integration at all. But availability of information was more important to me. Oh, and yes, of course I need to install/configurate the email client on every new computer. So why not just copy the bookmarks instead of going through the hassle of setting up email all the time? Synchronisation.

Add comment October 27th, 2004