Games Archive
I had prepared myself to experience the world's best game. Judging by
other people's reviews, Grand Theft Auto 4 was crafted in a special gaming studio in heaven, authored by Jesus Christ himself, and it descended upon us from the heavens on a golden chariot made out of chocolate covered in fairy dust. Imagine my surprise when I experienced the world's biggest turd in gaming since Davilex' A2 Racer (Dutch people will understand).
Recently, I learned that there are two types of zombies. You have the undead ones, that have arisen from the grave, probably a little disappointed in the afterlife, and who come back to eat your brain (which indicates that the afterlife really must suck if it compares unfavourably to eating brains). Then there's the virus type of zombie, you know, from Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. Left 4 Dead sports the latter variety, but really, does anyone even care? Zombie mayhem!
Blood Frontier is a hot new free and open source first person shooter with original artwork and based on the Cube 2 engine. Phoronix takes a look "Blood Frontier is based upon the Sauerbraten engine and takes advantage of the features like a 6-direction height field world model, real-time map editing, light-maps, shader-based lighting effects, integrated physics support, and a particle engine. Like Cube and Cube 2, Blood Frontier uses OpenGL and SDL, which makes it multi-platform friendly with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X."
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Do you remember the good old days? When game manufacturers fully realised that gamers don't really need a motivation and a back story to make them want to kill everything on screen? The good old days, when Grand Theft Auto 1 was released, and Carmageddon 1 and 2 were made. Those were the days. Somewhere along the way, however, game designers started shoe-horning backstories and motivations into games where the goal is "kill everything", and as a consequence, these games became pretentious. Thank god, however, for Saints Row 2: a game that brings back the good old days of mindless violence - just for the fun of it.
ExtremeTech installs and launches 22 popular game titles - both old and new - to see
which ones run on Windows 7, and which ones don't. And then there are games which do run but not without issues. Either way, the article provides gamers a glimpse into how Windows 7 affects gaming performance and if your favorite gaming title will run or not. They conclude:
"We encountered relatively few problems, even with some of the older games. And given how sleek Windows 7 feels compared to Vista, we're looking forward to moving to the new OS as soon as it's released."
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.
Microsoft Research has been working on a new gimmick for XBox Live subscribers, something called "Kodu" that allows kids (and parents, perhaps?) to
design their own games without prior knowledge of programming, and all done on the XBox console.
Indie game developer Wolfire Games gives
5 solid reasons why games developers should support Mac OS X and Linux.
"Obviously supporting Mac OS X and Linux means you tap into another platform and expand your potential market base. That much is clear. But surely adding an extra 5% is negligible, right? Wrong. Not all five percents are created equal." For their game Lugaru, they go on to claim
"supporting Mac OS X and Linux directly increased sales by around 122%."
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.
Android is a java based environment. This is nice for new developers as Java is widely accepted as a much easier language to get started in than C++, which is the norm for mobile development. Google has also done an excellent job with documenting the API and providing examples to use. There is an example to show functionality for almost 100% of the API, called API Demos. If you're familiar with Java and have already used Eclipse, getting your first app working
should be fairly simple. If you've never coded anything in your life before, you will have a lot to absorb as you move forward, but don't get discouraged.
OSNews doesn't really do games all that often, but for some,
we I make an exception. We're a few days late, but last week PopCap Games, makers of Bejeweled,
released its sequel to one of the craziest and most addictive games ever made:
Peggle. The sequel is called
Peggle Nights, and is basically more of the same. Peggle users around the world, rejoice! Another opportunity to become a Peggle Grand Master!
Submitted by stepardo
2008-08-23
Games
"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.
Comparisons between iPhone and the Wii have already been fairly abundant simply because the two have arguably garnered the top spots in"electronic gadget mindshare" for at least a year each. But looking at the demos today, OFB's Timothy R. Butler thinks perhaps the iPhone could be on its way to being
the Wii of portable devices-- literally.
The source code to the
original SimCity game has been released under the GPL, with all references to the SimCity name removed due to
copyright trademark issues; it is now called
Micropolis. You can
download the source code, or
read a bit more about it. SimCity is one of the
most critically acclaimed games in history.
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.
Nintendo has reportedly decided to
stop all repairs of the original Nintendo after 24 years of support, Agence France Presse reported on Friday. A spokesperson said that the company has decided to end support due to increasingly short supplies of replacement parts. The iconic game system was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System in the US and Europe, and as the Famicom in Japan. Nintendo's Ken Toyoda said that while the company is sad to turn its back on the NES, the company wanted its legions of loyal fans to focus on the Wii, currently the best selling next-generation console worldwide.
"It's hard to pin down
what exactly the Penny Arcade Expo is. The point isn't to sell anything, although you can buy a lot of games and gaming-related merchandise at the show. The point isn't to hype games that are coming out, although this year many developers and publishers were on hand to do just that. The point isn't to organize tournaments or to win anything, although there were tournaments and many prizes. This year, PAX boasted over 19,000 people in preregistrations alone, and the show outgrew its old home at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, instead taking over the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle."
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.
We usually don't report on games, but I would like to make an exception today. Blizzard Entertainment
has announced the sequel to what many see as the best realtime strategy game ever made: they announced
StarCraft II. The original StarCraft, released in 1998,
tops many best-games-of-all-times lists, and has sold over 9 million copies worldwide; it is still one of the most popular online games, despite its age. In fact, in South Korea, StarCraft matches are even broadcast on TV.
The Wii (pronounced as the pronoun wee) is the fifth home video game console released by Nintendo. The console is the direct successor to the Nintendo GameCube. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, but it competes with both as part of the seventh generation of gaming systems.
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