With a standard keyboard we lefties actually have a  slight advantage over right-handers when it comes to playing First-Person-Shooters or third-person-view games since we have a nicely separated block of keys that we can use for controls with the right hand where right-handers would need to use some obnoxious key layouts in the depths of the left side of their keyboard, in particular the notorious WASD keys.

>> Continue reading "For less Left-Hander Discrimination in Gaming!"

Realms of Arkania is classic hardcore role-playing, flip3D style intermezzed with isometric combat screens and you can get this for a ridiculous cheap price now.

So far gog.com is only releasing DOS or Windows based games. For some games I wish they’d add Amiga games to their line-up simply because many Amiga games were better than their DOS conversions, just take a look at highly regarded Hired Guns. in case of Hired Guns you feel that the developers were a team of Amiga enthusiasts. The DOS version feels bland and rushed compared to the shiny and atmosphere-oozing Amiga version.

Either way, for DOS games Good Old Games are packing their releases up with a copy of DOSBox pre-configured and ready to install and run. For Amiga versions they would probably have to pack up a copy of WinUAE to assure a hassle-free experience. Not sure how that would work out.

But after we finished bouncing off the intruders and I’ve started a dialogue with him it turned out that he’s not such a gentleman after all. In nearly every second sentence in his dialogue he makes use of the notorious ‘F word’! No exaggeration! After a short while listening to his insults (calling me a moron several times) I got fed up of his overuse of nasty language and started to loathe this guy. Note that it turns out that he’s supposed to be an unlikable character but this could have also been very well transported without the overuse of bad language. … *Spoilers ahead*!

>> Continue reading "Bad Language in Games"

Developers can introduce their creations and find other developers – both professional and hobbyist – to get working together on a project. Games made in Flash are welcome and there’s even a category for it.

The game is basically still the same since I left it! Many of the same old bugs and a gameplay that has only distantly something to do with RPG. Examples: Tried to continue the ‘Secret of the Syrens’ quest but the Black Sun Bunker at the waypoint never spawns,I want to call my mount pet inside the Kashyyk Hunting Grounds but it doesn’t spawn, I want to attack that imperial trooper that permanently shoots at me but I can’t because he’s stuck inside a wall … the list could go on for a while.

>> Continue reading "SWG … once again"

>> Continue reading "Fun with SWG NGE"

memorial gallery for SWG, the game that once was a hell lot of fun. There were many nice times playing, hunting, flying, taming and crafting around in the galaxy and it still hurts a bit that the game since a while is gone as we know it.
Maybe there will be a time when a new and similar good MMORPG appears, maybe even a SWG2, who knows?! Whats left until then is good memories and a crapload of screenshots. I’ve picked some of the more interesting from my collection and made a retrospective to show some of the things that others eventually might not find in any of the other popular MMOG’s.

(Caution: Large amount of image data ahead!) …

>> Continue reading "Memories of Star Wars Galaxies"

Playsyde has published a video of the first 10 minutes playing into Tomb Raider Legends. This is the first time you can really see how the game looks in action and it looks pretty impressive I must say! It seems that Tomb Raider finally grew up (after the unsuccessful TR Angel Of Darkness). The graphic looks stunning and Lara’s movement seems much more natural and smooth than before.
The game is going to be released on 18. April and you can count on a review from Dataleak! Until then check out the official site for more info and preview treats!

What do you need spells for if you got a decent Blaster Rifle?!

According to this forum post on allakhazam.com, the result of Lucas Arts Focus Group discussion about the future of Star Wars Galaxies most participants yelled for a server rollback pre-NGE in unity.

Star Wars Galaxies suffered a huge loss of players in late 2005 because of the NGE total game damage that a certain Julio Torres who thought he might be funny came up with (dataleak reported). Obviously the royals at Lucas Arts and Sony Online Entertainment were envious about the high sale counts of other MMOG’s (WoW) and tried to make Galaxies conforming for dummy players. But somehow Fantasy themes are much more popular than the Star Wars Universe (something I personally will never understand).

Though there is alot of false publicity from SOE and Torres striving in the wild of the official boards and gaming sites about how well the NGE was accepted, it was obvious to them that SWG went nose-dive after the NGE was published. The damage was done!

The question for them is: what to do now? Many of the players left SWG and went over to other MMORPG’s, some of them are happy with it, others think they are a poor replacement for SWG and wish that SWG would come back like it was pre-NGE or even pre-CU. The SWG servers are yawning from emptyness with too few players on them. My once shiny bunker house that I got when pre-ordering Trials Of Obi-Wan surely has thick layers of dust in it’s vaults! How many players would come back to SWG if it would be rolled back and how many of the new post-NGE players who are fine with the current game would leave because of a rollback?

I have managed to not play SWG since the NGE came live (4 months now) but I would resubscribe without a second thought if the game was rolled back, simply because there is no other MMORPG that has the amount of complexity that SWG had before. If I wanted to play a no brainer shooter, I’d use any of the FPS’s out there. WoW is too simple for my taste, the graphics are inferior and the population too childish and besides I totally don’t dig fantasy.

My favorite GBA game of the moment for it is GT3 Advance Pro Concept Racing! This game means a lot of racing fun on the Gameboy! The track design isn’t really 3D but uses mode7 which means it is rather a flat plane with the track on it and several obstacle sprites on it but IMHO looks better than the clumsy graphics of Collin McRae Rally.

>> Continue reading "Review: GT Advance 3 Pro Concept Racing (Game Boy Advance)"

I’ve bought an Owltech PC-0301 today! That’s an adapter in form of a 5 1/2 inch drive bay insert which offers two ports for connecting Playstation controllers to the PC and use them for a crapload of things. They not only perform well for usual PC games but also worked great on PSX Emu’s and WinVice and WinUAE and MAME32 and… well that where the ones which I’ve tested so far. Gunbird with PSX Analogue Control rocks! Installation was super-easy with plugging to a free USB port and a 3-click-long driver installation from the included CD.

More and more people becoming something like a Retro-game-developer which is good news! It seems recently even the now young generation loves to play videogames that have an age of 10 years and beyond. Today’s games come with high class super realtime rendered 3D graphics and cinematic atmosphere but still the games from yesterday keep their spirit. I believe the reason for this comes a lot from the fact that the simplified graphic of old games allows more room for one’s own fantasy. While today’s high class 3D games look good while you play them (a decent hardware assumed), classics from the 8 and 16bit era look always good – in a gadget-likewise way.

>> Continue reading "The 8 and 16-Bit Revival lives!"

Maxis made two mistakes in my opinion. The first was to make the game system too demanding and complicated. I don’t mean the games interface but how the game handles resources. You add more and more user created objects to the game and your harddisk gets spill over with ‘uncompressed’ BMP images and the like (my Sims folder was about 3Gigs at the end) and the game loading time could easily raise up to 6-8 minutes with that.

The second bad thing that Maxis did was to create completely boring add-ons. Great now you can have your sims become superstars or magicans but they stay what they are: too limited in terms of interaction and real life behavior.

There are masses of user created sites on the web which offer excellent free objects and stuff created by the players and which in many cases look better than the games default contents.

By the time there where two objects I’ve created for the game … one was a rather moderate designed character skin of Lacey Chabert with the dress from Lost In Space and the other one was an object of the Commodore C64 computer which offers some interactivity.

I would have the game still installed just for the fun to try out new furniture and clothing if this game wouldn’t be such a dissipater on the harddisk.

One of my very favorite games back on Amiga was the space RPG Hard Nova (to be reviewed in a while) which took me long cozy winter nights to solve. The predecessor of Hard Nova was a game called Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic which was released in 1988 by Electronic Arts and had it’s success under science fiction RPG videogamers. Me – PC-less – always looked enviously over to the PC crowd. But that only until decent DOS Emulators were developed, like DOSBox.

>> Continue reading "Lightspeed flight and laserfight"