Category: games

Citation on how the author experienced the end of Fallout 3:

The final quests consists of following a massive MechWarrior-esque robot who basically does all the killing and fighting for you. All you have to do is stay behind him and collect the loot of the dead Enclave soldiers – loot you’re not going to need anyway, but hey, in an RPG, grabbing loot is a reflex. You then shoot a few Enclave baddies in a building, flick a switch, and the game ends. It was so easy I kept on telling myself this was just an intro to a massive battle.

When I realised I had actually finished the game, I was all ready to grab some chips, and make me a nice pot of tea, but before I even got up off the couch, the ending sequence was already over. Five pictures slid by, with the voice over telling a three-sentence story, and that was it. The end. That’s your reward for 140 hours of gaming and 64 Euros. A sepia slideshow.

Usually, I’m not that much of a fan of Thom Holwerda’s somewhat provoking/sensational writing style, but this piece really is an entertaining read 🙂
Read the full story on OSNews

from the second hour 🙂
Official birthday video showing TM’s history:

Postprocessed vid via TMUnited blog

Also, check out the 1K project

For more trackmania videos, visit TM-tube.

Kiki always reminds me of a friend I know since childhood who somehow got stuck with the nickname kiki. 🙂

Anyway, kiki the nanobot is not to be confused with my friend. It is an open source 3d puzzle game, or like the author states: “basically a mixture of the games Sokoban and Kula-World“. A colleague recommended me to try it out. I was a bit reluctant as it didn’t seem to support linux, only windows and mac were mentioned on the website. Which was quite awkward as it seemed to use python and sdl.

So today I decided to find out the truth about kiki and checked out the cvs head. 🙂 I was delighted to find a linux subdir with a readme, yes, there were even makefiles! I installed the prerequisites (dev packages for python, sdl, sdl_image, sdl_mixer) and was ready to go! I did have to adjust a makefile to point to the right python headers (why not use the general /usr/lib/python instead of /usr/lib/pythonX.X?) Then, everything built just fine. Kiki’s core is in C++, levels and configurable parts are written in Python, bridged using SWIG.

Kiki the nanobot seems like a great puzzle game although it could use some polishing here and there, but given its age (6 years!) and the timeframe in which it was developed (3 months, for a contest), I think it’s quite an achievement. 🙂 You can read a dev post-mortem here.

quite original if you ask me 🙂

see:
steam app page (streaming trailer)
official website

I know: through the eyes is not really correct 🙂

If you’ve never played halflife (2) or day of defeat or counter strike or portal or team fortress (2), then now is the time to buy! All, every single, valve games for just $100?! That’s just.. euhm.. very unhealthy for your night rest. 🙂 Oh right, their latest game Left for dead is also included 😉

The problem is, once you’ve bought another pack like the orange pack, it’s not worth buying these other packs since you already own half of the games. 😉

I accidentally came to know about this great freeware game because it’s getting rereleased as WiiWare by these guys and here is how it happened.
When the game got released back in 2004, TIG was the first to take an English interview with its Japanese author Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya.

Doukutsu Monotagari aka Cave Story is a 2D non-linear platformer in its most true sense. 🙂 It makes you feel back in the nineties, the graphics are pixelish and the music and sound effects are so cheesy, but that is all just part of all the fun! I am certainly no hard core platformer but when I started playing this game, I just couldn’t stop until I got defeated by some boss. 🙂 So I’ve warned you, it’s quite addictive. 😉

The gameplay is extremely well balanced and there is quite some variation. I don’t know how big the game is, but at the current pace, I’ve seen quite some environment variation and weapon upgrades. It’s quite fun to clear the screen with a rocket launcher at level 3. 😀
All in all, it’s quite a polished game, you just gotta love it. 🙂

Try it yourself:
First, download the binary (hint: he only made 1 game in 2004 ;))
Then patch it with English translation

Btw, it runs fine on wine/linux!

As a huge portal fan, I’m delighted to read we can already taste some prequel goodness through this great mod.

Apparently, the author worked on it very secretly for some time so obviously he was very disappointed when Valve announced it would also make a prequel. 😉 However this motivated him to finish it as soon as possible. Also, Valve didn’t see any problem or violation in this project and even offered its help.

Thanks to Klaas for the tip.