Posts filed under 'Games'
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve certainly noticed the growing number of prototypes of casual games implemented in browsers using their latest canvas and related technologies.
Actually, this is the kind of start of revolution you’ve been seeing in every computer generation at the beginning, this is just a repeating pattern. Just remember how the PC started around 1992/1993 with their first 3D games and mobile phones started a few years ago, too.
How long will it take until we’ve something like ScummVM ported to a browser? Or Another World? Or think about the Sierra Classics.
May 24th, 2008
Now this is what I really call retro: a side hosting classic Amiga games reviews.
They’re having articles from the following magazines: Amiga Computer, Amiga Power, Amiga Format, CU, Amiga Joker, Zero and Zzap! Currently they host more than 3000 reviews of nearly 2000 games. Awesome!
January 21st, 2007
I received my copy of Gothic 3 yesterday and because I’m currently moving to another flat I could only test it on my company IBM Z60 laptop. Unfortunately there’s a very annoying behaviour of Gothic 3: it forces the numlock to always be on! It completely ignores the user choice. On my laptop this is a problem because I don’t have a separate numeric block but they get maped over the regular alpha keyboards, which means that now in gothic I don’t have the keys m, j, k, etc. but they are numbers 0, 1, …
Which means that for example I can’t press the M key, because it is actually 0, which means jumping on the numeric one.
I crawled the ini files but didn’t find anything hinting that this behaviour can be disabled. I don’t understand what developers sometimes have at their mind. I sincerly hope that they issue a patch either removing this horrible thing or at least provide an ini setting for it.
October 14th, 2006
It seems that the dawn of fan made games is finally there. We’ve observed AGD Interactive releasing remakes of King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II and currently working on a remake of Quest for Glory II, now Infamous Adevntures releases a remake of King’s Quest III. On the other hand we’ve also Screen 7 Entertainment working on a Indiana Jones based fan game called The Fountain of Youth.
This seems to become a very promising future about fan made games.
Download King’s Quest III
June 25th, 2006
Today I stumbled over the Quake2 AbSIRD project. It modifies the software renderer so that it renders the 3D environment of the game as a stereogramm.
If you think the hard part is to see the world, think again. It’s quite hard to follow the rapid 3D movement and even playing just a few minutes can give quite a headache. Anyway, quite interesting experience.
February 2nd, 2006
Now with the move in of the canvas element in browsers and the first prototypes of even 3D FPS games popping up, how long will it take until someone ports the classic games/engines like ScummVM to a browser near you? Will we see a new generation of web games which don’t require any browser-plugin?
Flash in terms of graphical capabilities is lightyears away from what browsers can do in certain places, but why is it still that I hate flash and would love direct support in the browser instead? Maybe it’s the infection of ads coming from flash. Or that it is a closed binary format (maybe this is not true anymore, someone correct me). Or is it that it’s development environment is not open source and you basically depend on it?
On the other hand, wouldn’t it make much more sense to use SVG for games? The canvas element is bitmapped, thus it has a fixed size in pixels which isn’t very adequat for multi-resolution clients like the users desktop. SVG would fit better because it can scale.
It’s very exciting to whatch the current evolution of browsers, not only in terms of game capability, but also Ajax and stuff. The paradigm is shifting, and it’s shifting fast.
November 28th, 2005
Now that Civilization 4 is out of the door I tried to fill the time gap until I have it with playing the classic Civ1 from 1991. Since my knowledge ist already a bit rusty I rustled up two good resources:
One funny note from the CIV FAQ:
… Build lots of phalanxes, chariots, legions, catapults, ships, settlers, and
diplomats. Let me clarify that: by “lots of …”, I mean “infinite numbers
of them”. A dozen ships might be enough, but you can never have too many
chariots…
October 30th, 2005
From http://www.lucasfangames.de/
The time has come to make it official: We will make the Indy1 adventure game!
This would truly be a great thing for all nostalgic fans. They even invite everyone to provide opinions, wishes and suggestions in their forum.
Best wished and hope for release soon ;-)
September 2nd, 2005
Having played CS:S for about 2 weeks ocassionally now I’m already seeing things here and there I’ld like to see being changed.
First, I’ve never played CS. I was one of those who choose the Q3-Way, and one of the games on this was a TC called Urban Terror. Due it’s nowadays outdated engine, UT cannot cope with todays 3D games. However it’s not the graphics I like about UT: it’s how the game feels. And it feels good.
I’ve read that many pro-gamers are not satisfied with CS:S, they call it “not better then the beta” or “still beta”. I guess they’re right, it’s always in the eye of the beholder. For me it’s not beta at all. Still, yes it has a serious bug with mvoeable objects and physics, see further down.
Let’s start ranting a bit about CS:S :
Physics:
- Blocking objects
No game currently (except for Max Payne maybe) feels so real when it comes to objects and physics. Lets’ welcome CS:S. However, there’s a major drawback which leads to very much frustration during gameplay. The objects tend to either block or push back the player in certain cases. Both are pretty annoying because for me, as a player, I see no reason why I cannot jump without problems over a filing cabinet on the floor or why running against a barrel should push me back.
Movement:
- Climbing
Actually, not implemented. I like climbing. I like reaching places beyond the normal path in a map. Jumping is nice and ok. UT implemented this and I must say, it’s really a cool feature. Climbing works like this: if you reach the edge of any object, and you press and hold the jump-key, your player climbs up the edge. It costs time, it’s slow, it makes noice to nearby players can hear you. It adds more for the tactics.
Graphics:
- Glass refraction
If you compare D3s glass refraction to those of CS:S you’ll see that the refraction of D3 looks much better. It almost feels real. The glass in CS:S looks like it has a simple environment mapping applied to it, much like it’s done already with the Q3 engine in the past. If you look at the D3 glass effect, you can see how the scene behind the glass is distorted, adding more realsim to the scene.
So much rant, I know. So don’t let us forget how great the glass breaks into it pieces, how you hear when you go through a half-broken glass in a window. Extra bonus points for this one. Still ;)
That’s it for now.
Update 26.Nov ‘04:
Now that I’ve played HL2 a bit I’ve seen that Source of course can do the same kind of refraction D3 does with glasses. They’re just not using it for normal windows.
November 2nd, 2004
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