Games Archive

After our article on modern gaming a while ago, we decided to dive futher into gaming. That's why I met up with one of my friends, and asked him if he could loan me the best game he had for his XBox 360. Maybe I should have been a bit more specific, I thought, because when he came over, before I knew it, he shoved a Japanese RPG in my console. This would be my first foray into the strange, magical, and disturbed world of the Japanese RPG. Read on for a review of Lost Odyssey.

Not too long ago, I was convinced that the modern day gaming world was a rather empty and shallow one. If you grew up with games like The 7th Guest, the Keen series, Metroid, adventure games like Monkey Island or Full Throttle, and so on, more modern games seemed to have little to offer, besides yet another nameless hero in a grey space suit killing aliens in a grey world with the same set of twelve weapons. However, a little speck of hope was flickering on the horizon, a game seemingly made by people who could read my mind; a game about a post-apocalyptic wasteland, filled with quests and epic stories, where you were free to do whatever you wanted. Yes, I looked forward to Fallout 3, and since my computer was too old to run any game more recent than Wolfenstein, I decided to buy a game console. Read on to see how my venture into the world of modern gaming turned out.

"Atari was founded in 1972, but its crowning accomplishments in console gaming and computers were the Atari Video Computer System (or 2600) and the Atari 400/800 line of personal computers. This four-year period - from 1977 to 1981 - contains some of the most exciting developments the company ever saw in its history: the rise of the 2600, the development of some of the company's most enduringly popular games (Centipede, Asteroids) and the development and release of its first home computing platforms. This comprehensive look back, filled with quotes from the original creators and other primary sources, offers a detailed peek into the company that popularized video gaming as the '70s turned into the '80s, and created the first viable market for home consoles. For more detail, be sure to read Gamasutra's first Atari history article, which covers the period of 1971 to 1977 - the latter date being the year that the Atari VCS was first released." That's a grand total of 40 pages of detailed Atari history. Nice weekend reading for the fans.

Addictive 3D games for Linux users to fill their time with. These games are really good and some have won awards or have been featured on magazines. Most are cross platform and all of them completely free. You don't have to use 'Wine' to be able to play as they come with Linux installers.

Despite what many (including myself) thought when EA announced they would support the Mac platform, the games EA will release are actually not native ports - instead, they will use Transgaming's Cider engine, a Wine-like wrapper for running Windows games on Intel Macs. This news was found in a Transgaming press release. Apart from the fact that this might negatively affect performance, it also means PowerPC Macs will not be able to play these games.

"Last Wednesday, a company called Falling Leaf Systems announced the availability of an alpha of something called the Alky Project. The Alky Project has a lofty goal: to liberate DirectX 10 gaming from the confines of Vista and bring it first to Windows XP, and then to Linux and OS X. The project plans to do this by building a converter that can take in a DX10 game executable and spit out a modified version that can be run on a (non-Vista) target OS. The target OS must be x86-based, which rules out the PPC version of OS X, since the converter doesn't do any binary translation."