On the back of the payment slip, there is a registration form for EDI, a foundation for transplants & organ donations. Yes.

Is this the most tactless time and place to recruit new members, or what? I figure the great exposure and the association between the two, but come on! Why push it in my face that I’m going to die? Is by paying the fee, I’m concluding my life, signing the dotted line and wishing doom upon myself?

Hmpf!

So, here is my list. 2009 has been the most diverse and crazy year I’ve lived through. I have seen a lot, accomplished a lot, experience a lot, and most importantly, learned a lot about life.

2010:

* Less Tweeting, more blogging
* Less running, more meditating
* Less talking, more listening
* Less flickring, more photographing
* Less computer time, more drumming
* Less computer time, more time reading books
* Less computer time, more playing guitar
* Less dreaming about it, more doing something about it
* Less tv, more movies
* Less coding, more outsourcing
* Less micro-managing, more peace
* Less beginnings, more completing
* Less technical, more artistic
* Less doing, more thinking
* Less online, more offline

Less is more

Happy New Year 2010!

(Cat meditation photo by Green Explorer)

We live in the dark ages of 3rd person role playing games and first person shooters. The year is 2009, and I expected we’d be over this by now. What in the early days was titled revolutionary, visionary and ground-breaking is today summed up into the word “Indie”.

Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game from the Czech studio Amanita Design. It is IGF2009 Winner and PAX10 finalist, but none of this matters really.

What really matters that it’s awesome on so many levels. In an era of burning desert, this is a precious drop of water.

Setting in a robot world, you play an honest robot that was just dumped as spared parts. Other robots are very poor, and two (robo-)bullies make the life of everybody a living hell.

What captured me about this game most, is that it brings back the most important essence of classic adventure gaming: everything takes time. After I purchased the game, I thought to myself, there’s no way to skip this walking sequence, with my ADD, I will never manage to complete it in this lifetime.

Machinarium is different.

I couldn’t stop and put it down. The puzzles were incredible, and so fun to solve! The graphics are mind blowing, the plot is awesome, and all the little animations and bits of story that make this game a perfect 10. (video)

Several other things that I just had to point out: the game has no HUD (Head-up Display), you have inventory and options, but the game goes all over the screen. There’s no speech, no text, no dialogs. Your brain makes up with imagination instead. Events are set up in a way that you are never lost, you always have a mini-game to solve or a place to go. And one last thing, robots have feelings. This story is about corruption, greed, crime and true love.

A demo is available for free download; if you loved Another World, Grim Fandango or King’s Quest 5, I guarantee you’ll fall for this as well.

Something has been rooted deeply in my childhood that the finest psychologists and your favorite fireman cannot help me. What is wrong with the screenshot on the right?

As an avid adventure gamer, I have played and completed most of Sierra Online’s quest games. Spending countless after-school hours. I loved every single moment of it and it substantially improved my English (who else played Leisure Suit Larry with an English dictionary?!).

But what stayed with me most is the scoring system. See, Sierra seems to be the only developer who limited a game by the maximum score. You can complete an adventure, save the King, slay the Wizard, and still have some points missing. How is that possible? From a different point of view, it’s like saying — you can do something well, but we know how you’d make it perfect. We’re not telling.

This has contributed a lot to my terrible fashion of perfectionism. Everything can be done better, up to a point. There is a state where things are Perfect. Have you ever seen another game (collecting items aside,) where your highest score has an upper limit?

Nowadays people compare themselves to their friends by the money they have in the bank. And why is that? We are competitive bastards. That’s what we are. Choosing my over other forms is simply because it’s numeric. $2 is greater than $1. Three houses are more than none.

Why not compare the number of good friends you have? Your lifestyle? The hours of days you have free for yourself? How many hobbies do you practice? Can you quantize love? freedom? happiness? success? how? why? why? why?

This post is far from perfect. I win.

All level backgrounds, all parallax secondary backgrounds, correct palettes and most sprites are extracted and converted to PNGs. At the moments the sprites are discovered by trial and error - hoping to find how they are stored in the code. I will release all code as GPL when I’m through.

I wouldn’t have been able to do any of these without the help of Mame. I hope to soon post a post-mortem on this game and its uber cool architecture.

A while ago I wrote a post about how video games change history facts and make the Third Rich a scifi team of super villians. To make my point stronger, new screenshots from EA’s upcoming Wolfenstein RPG (iPhone) were released to the public, rendering Hilter as a modern struggling rockstar with a badly glued toupee. And to calm everybody down, the swastikas were replaced by a plus sign. Remember when Guy Montag burnt down historical art because it might upset people. Just a bad taste in my opinion. Not only you are killing history, but if you’re making a theme game (Nazi), at least get the BRAND straight.

Charlie Chaplin did:

I intend to publish a technical article about Readysoft’s FMV engine, and compare different console versions. It’s part of Gawd’s Museum of Dissected Games, and a detailed autopsy and source code will be uploaded later.

This is a rewrite of the animation code made for the PC platform. The Amiga, Atari ST and Apple IIgs used similar code and graphics. Visit the ReadySoft Animation Player. ]]> http://www.megidish.net/2009/06/06/announcing-readysoft-animation-player/feed/ http://www.megidish.net/2009/06/06/announcing-readysoft-animation-player/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/megidish/~3/YWkiyhEBhWI/ http://www.megidish.net/2009/06/05/why-i-never-forgave-metallica/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:56:14 +0000 gawd http://www.megidish.net/2009/06/05/why-i-never-forgave-metallica/

A few days ago, while dusting off some old cds of mine, I came across my good old copy of Metallica’s Load. Now, you have to realize. Unlike my older brothers who grew up in the 80s, I’m not that high on Queen, Eurythmics or The Smiths. My heroes were Kurt Cobain and James Hetfield. While Cobain made sure there is no new material coming out anytime soon, we still had high hopes for Metallica in high school. And indeed, by 1996 Metallica has released Load, after 6 years of total drought. The cliche’ goes about a rain and a desert, and was absolutely just like that.

When the new album hit the stores, I remember the day I took the bus to the city, just to walk 30 minutes to that special and only place around that sold punk/metal music. If you were of the lucky early birds, you also got this cool ass poster of the band with short hair and 1970s pornstar mustaches. Load was a great album, and the 1997 compliment of Reload made it a swarm of new material. We were happy.

Back in 2000s, when P2P file sharing was booming, Metallica took a stand to lead the industry war against piracy. That was almost a decade ago, and I’m not dumb enough to believe there was no pressure from records label to fight till the death. But for some reason that made question why am I still buying every album they release. What really broke me was MTV Cribs; in the early 2000s, MTV toured rockstar houses. One episode that really caught my eye was of Korn’s bass player, Fieldy. He bragged about everything he owned, and especially his gold coated toilet set and bathroom sink. That really pissed me off. That was the day I stopped buying major bands albums. No more Metallica or Korn. I still buy a lot of cds, but they are mostly either local or indie.

Years have passed and Metallica kept releasing new albums. It slowly fade away for me and letting Trujillo sit at Newsted’s chair at Metallica Icon just made it less attractive. Last I heard from a friend was that St. Anger had no solos. Their signature was broken. It’s very sad to see your idol die. Metallica still play the old their good ol’ stuff at concerts. I’m not ruling out attending (another) one. Their shows are awesome and it’s authentic nostalgic at a low price.

The episode was hysterical, there’s this character who just shoves funny glasses and nose to everybody, without their approval. A bit that was especially interesting, was then Bert asked Ernie, where is that guy. And he said, No One Knows (Nose.) The thing is, the show was dubbed so he said “אף אחד לא יודע” (Af Echad Lo Yodea.) Literally, it’s the same joke, exact same principal applies on both. But what is truly amazing is that Knows phonetically sounds like Nose. In Hebrew, Af is either Nose or Nobody (lt. none). Knows translates to Yodea. I think it’s insane! Episode was great too. Loved it! Gym flies when you’re Disney-channeling.

Alas, zombie nazis are just the beginning. Earlier this month I saw this very funny game called Stalin vs Martians. It’s an utterly stupid rts, but the concept is refreshing. Wait, why is it different, aliens not zombies? I’ve never been against violence in video games, but now I’m starting to worry that future generations will lose interest in history and what will stick will be old screenshots in their memory. Maybe I’m thinking too far, but look at us, 2,000 years later and we have no idea about the pyramids or Jesus.

Last but not least, I’m uploading a screenshot from the original Castle Wolfenstein game (1981). It is, and always has been, one of the most scariest games I have ever played. It had a really strong concept: if you get shot, you die. You had to work your way through bunkers, bribing and killing officers. If one fired up the alarm, you’re done for. If they shot your leg, you are done for. One mistake and the game is over. There is no save/load, and you can’t idle much. They don’t make games this serious anymore.