Welcome to the Gap
Fifteen years ago, I was 15 years old, ambitious and filled with dreams. Most of these entailed the creation of those fictitious worlds that sucked me in. Adventure games presented me with both worlds of magic (far, far away), as well as dystopian, grim representations of OUR world. Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) belongs to the latter category.
With references to Nietzsche, Huxley and Orwell, BASS came packed with intelligence, leaving us disconcerted by… hiatuses of thought. Of course back then, in The Netherlands, all we got from our English reading list was Watership Down. Don’t get me wrong: I felt sorry for those rabbits. However, I felt even sorrier for those who did not get their hands on a copy of Beneath a Steel Sky.
Your quest
The game takes place in a post-nuclear world, divided in an outside - the Gap - and an inside - a hierarchical city. Or is it the other way around? Robert Foster is a child of both worlds: he finds himself growing up in the Gap, yet feels something from the inside pulling him in.
What or who this is and what happens next, are catalysts in Foster’s quest. Find out who you are, where you come from, who put you there and how exactly that fits into the bigger picture. Kind of like ordinary life, wrapped up in a shiny iPhone port of a classic adventure. Read the rest of this entry »
MoneySeize is a great example of retro jumping and collecting. Your hero, of sorts, Sir Reginald MoneySeize II, Esq. needs to collect all the gold coins he can find, to fund construction of the tallest tower in the world! No princesses to rescue here. There are 50 stages, with 1010 coins to find. Stages range from super easy to almost impossibly difficult. It even comes with the disclaimer “this game is very difficult” - platformer professionals will love it. It really is great, though, and our rotund aristocratic hero can do everything an Italian plumber can - while wearing a top hat.
This one’s for people with super human reactions! Bullet Time is a super fast shooter from Terry Cavanagh, developer of many wierd and wonderful indie game experiences. Here, your challenge is to survive as long as you can. You save up “bullet time”, so when you hold the space bar, the game slows, giving you temporary breathing space. You fire automatically, leaving you free to concentrate on movement. So far, I’ve only managed to survive 20.33 seconds. Can you do any better?
The stream of indie games seams to increase by the minute, from big and lengthy developments, to games created in hours. Much of this output is also free, and without commercial marketing constraints there are some truly bizarre
experiences out there.
A combination of money and resources mean the 2D scene is alive and well, from the beautiful Braid to short and tough mini developments like Sword Calibre. Some of these bring something new to 2D gaming, and many are resolutely retro in style and gameplay. Either way, what’s on offer is very different to most commercial releases.
There are 3D games too. Classic 1990s 3D engines, like Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake (the standard bearers for their respective generations) are still producing fun today: Bizarre story telling from cult developers with Judith, joyful uber street violence like Urban Brawl, and probably my favourite experience of the last year: Gravity Bone. If you want something that looks a bit more modern, college creation Glasshouse is an interesting 3D puzzle game, with presentation and graphics that are incredible for a free game.
Another genre that’s produced a plethora of indie releases is the “physics based game” (which generally mean your success involves using gravity in some way). Crayon Physics is the most obvious example, but there are others like FlickerStrings, Numpty Physics and the excellent And Yet it Moves.
What a fantastic title for a game! Terry Cavanagh’s new indie game Don’t Look Back! is a hard and atmospheric platform shooter. the basic 8-bit graphics work really well, the colors and sound effect work together to create a great sense of foreboding about… something. You have unlimited lives, and you’ll need nearly enough patience alongside some lightening quick reactions, but it’s worth it. Sign in to the site and you can register your high scores too.
A few months back, a National Videogame Archive was launched in Britain, aiming to preserve videogames that might otherwise be lost. I’ve been playing games of one sort or another since I was a little kid, and I have no idea what’s happened to most of them. Games are an important part of our social fabric, and it would be a great loss if elements of gaming history disappeared.
With that in mind, I thought I’d ask our team what games they would like to see preserved for future generations to enjoy:
Nick and James both proposed early 90s football games, Kick Off 2 and Sensible Soccer respectively (both on the Commodore Amiga). At the time people argued over which was best, though the years have been kinder to Sensible Soccer, which is currently available on XBox Live Arcade.
Nick also asked for Amiga games Speedball 2, the ultraviolent sport of the future, and Stunt Car Racer, a futuristic racing game that can be seen as a gentle precursor to PlayStation´s Wipeout series.
Elena took us even further back into gaming history, requesting Atic Atac, a ZX Spectrum game from 1983, which she says she remembers playing most as a child. Apparently it was voted 79th best ever Spectrum game in 1990! High praise indeed. She also suggested the daddy of first person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. This can now be found as an online flash game, and having looked at it again, I’m glad I’m around to play modern first person shooters! Read the rest of this entry »
The rise of game download portals such as XBLA, Virtual Console and PlayStation has presented a flurry of retro games and weirdly innovative titles. PC users needn’t feel left though because there’s a thriving indie scene producing tons of games, many which are free. While these are not the 3D, high production value epics we pay for, they do provide some unique experiences. They represent great time wasters with some fiendishly hard and addictive gaming - perfect for these difficult economic times. Here are a few of my recent stand-out indie experiences:
For relaxed ambient games, give chilled out real time strategy game Dyson a spin, or the demo of the hypnotic Osmos. Both of these manage to be addictive and relatively peaceful experiences. These are great if you have a spare ten minutes, but don’t mind losing an hour or two.
Equally stylish, but more traditional, is the wonderful Multiwinia. Download the demo here to check out one of the coolest looking action/strategy games from last year.
If you need more action, there’s fast paced 8-bit zombie gore-fest 10800 Zombies, or the slightly more cerebral The Manipulator, both of which are totally free and great examples of not-quite-retro indie productions.
I also recently looked at the cute platformer The Kiwi’s Tale, which is a great throwback to early-90s gaming. For a desktop high score challenge, check out Skull Pogo. I loved the simple controls and macabre comic-style graphics, and spent far too much time trying to beat my last score. It has an online scoreboard too, so keep clear if you’re super competitive!
Today is a special day for any Apple fanboy out there. On April the 1st 1976, Apple Computers Inc was founded by Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak and the first ever Apple I personal computer kit was created in Steve Jobs’ parents’ living room. Since then, Apple has gone through many ups and downs of which memorable moments we remember Steve Jobs’ outing in 1985, his triumphant return in 1996 with the acquisition of NeXT by Apple, the release of the first Powerbook in 1991, the Apple Store in 1997, the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the Macbook Air in 2008.
Although Apple’s market share in terms of computers in no way matches that of PCs, it has managed to create such a powerful brand image that any announcement it makes is instantly reported on worldwide. Just look at the release of the iPhone at last year’s Macworld convention, followed by millions around the world. And with the iTunes Store and the iPod, Apple has turned into a major player in the digital music world. The next step for Apple is the mobile world and the initial success of the iPhone shows Apple is going in the right direction.
Apple do not seem to have prepared anything special for their 32nd birthday. We encourage you to go to the Mac page on Softonic and try out some programs to celebrate more than three decades of Apple computers.
Oh, and did we forget to mention that yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the creation of Mozilla?
So the end of February also saw the end of an era - the result of an announcement at the end of last year by AOL, the last owners of Netscape Navigator, that work and support on the project would officially end. The figures say it all - over the past decade, the once dominant browser has gone from a market share of 90% to just 0.6%. It may seem outdated and archaic now, but Netscape’s legacy for internet users is considerable - not least that from it emerged Firefox.
For those who remember the early days of the internet, they may even shed a tear at the news as Netscape Navigator will be the first browser through which they first accessed the amazing world of the internet. I remember at my university, it was the standard browser installed on all machines and although by today’s standards it was painfully slow, clunky and just plain boring, it did open up a whole new world and without doubt, set the blueprint from which the browsers of today developed.
Netscape was originally launched in 1994, the brainchild of Marc Andreessen who founded the Netscape Communications Corporation. By 2002, the browser’s user base had almost completely disappeared however as more innovative and browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox started to dominate the market.
Netscape’s commercial history is quite interesting. Embracing the spirit of freedom that early pioneers of the internet encouraged, it actually started out as a free browser but within months of its launch, the makers presumably saw the massive demand and commercial potential it had and quickly reversed the decision making it free only for educational and research institutions. However, it was made available as an evaluation version after which people were merely encouraged to pay for it once they were satisfied. In the end, the company realised this was a fairly futile policy and decided to make it completely free with limited support and then eventually withdrew all support as demand was simply impossible to satisfy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Not many people may know it but on February 19th, Photoshop celebrated its 18th birthday. Yes, that’s 18 years of constant improvements in what has been and remains the best image editing application to this day. From the release of PhotoShop 1.0 to the latest version of Photoshop CS3, the program has always lead in terms of simplicity, powerful editing tools and new imaging possibilities. In what is much more than a coincidence, Adobe shipped new versions of both Photoshop and Lightroom this very 19th of February.
If you’re a real Photoshop fan or if you’re just curious about the story of Adobe’s image editing suite you can read up all you want on it, via John Nack on Adobe, who has a great post roundup of various blogs counting the history of Photoshop, from the evolution in features to the changes in its design. For one, I actually learned that the original icon wasn’t the famous eye, which you see in versions 1 to 7, but actually a 1hour photoshop, where people used to drop off their film rolls to get prints. The new icon, a more formal ‘Ps’, is much more minimalistic but blends in well with the line of other Adobe programs, making them all look like a periodic table of the elements. True, the pictures from back in the 90s really look dated, but you can quickly see the same logic and construction in the application throughout the years, the sign of a well built and solid program.
If you’re bored this weekend and the weather is wet and wild why not sit down and have a blast at a classic video game? Forget going out and buying a game for your console though, because some of the greatest titles new and old are available to download for free on your PC. Some are available as officially-licenced abandonware, while others are out-and-out copies, but I’ve put together a collection of top games that will keep you amused for the whole weekend. In fact, you’ll probably end up calling in sick the whole of next week too.
If you were a child in the 80s and didn’t have a ZX Spectrum, then quite frankly you were a bit of a dork. The Sinclair computer is often credited as being the father of videogames and I’m sure most of us can remember a handful of classic games that helped to waste large chunks of our formative years. Revisiting some of these old titles makes you realise just how addictive they were, and here are some of my favourite PC remakes:
- Cybernoid 2 - Get your blaster ready, there’s a whole lotta enemies to destroy
- 3D Live Pool - It’s still pool and it’s still 3D but boy are the graphics better these days
- Blasterball 2 - Arkanoid on steroids
- Deluxe Pacman - He’s 30 years old but the famous yellow blob is still scared of ghosts
- PiX Pang - Faithful remake of the Speccy classic
- Lode Runner - Make haste with the treasure but watch out for guards
- Boulder Dash - Pushing rocks has never been so much fun
- Bomberic2 - Blow stuff up just like Bomberman used to
- Dragon Jumper - Like Frogger but with a dragon
- Echoes - Modern day version of Asteroids with souped-up visuals
Fifteen years ago, there were so many cool games I wanted to play but couldn’t. We didn’t have internet access yet, and the occasional game my brother and I could get our dad to buy (like the awesome F15 Strike Eagle III) were pretty expensive. I remember that one of his work buddies gave us copies of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, along with X-Wing (with a trainer on the last disk!) but otherwise we were pretty limited in our choice of games to play on the ol’ 486.
Now we’re living in the future, you may expect me to have forgotten my love for Imperialism II and Wonderboy In Monster World… what do you think I am, fickle? Luckily, the games I loved (and the ones I longed for) can nearly all be found at Abandonware sites like Abandonia. Abandonware exists on somewhat shaky legal ground given that much of it remains under copyright (even though it may no longer be available for purchase).
While I’m not going to condone breaking the law I will say that I support the idea of keeping games alive by enjoying them long after their developers have abandoned them. There is actually a larger point to be made about the validity of the 70-year copyright longevity for software, something which is updated and superseded so quickly. But I’ll leave that argument for the dry legal experts of Wikipedia.
My first Abandonware Classic is the remarkable Shadow President. This impressive game puts you in the most powerful seat in the world: that of US President. The aim of the game is to handle your economy and your relations with every single country in the world. From a world map, you can click any country and then decide on all sorts of policy and aid issues such as trading partner status, intelligence operations, military and humanitarian aid and diplomatic coercion. You soon realise that the top job is a lot harder than just shaking hands and delivering speeches articulately. Hmm, that’s kind of worrying. Anyway, check out Abandonia’s great review of the game here and keep your eyes peeled for more classics.
There’s a good joke I heard once about how people were worried about computer games affecting kids’ behaviour but, says the punchline, if that was the case teenagers would all be running round dark rooms, listening to techno and munching pills. It may be overstating the case to say Pac-Man has defined a generation, but the little yellow man keeps popping up time and time again. And now he’s back completely revolutionising science.
A new study using a rather nasty version of the classic arcade game has discovered the way the human brain reacts to imminent danger. By plugging the hungry fellow into the mains, scientists gave players an electric shock whenever they were captured by a blue ghost. The scientists found that when the threat was far away players used the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain developed for complex planning tasks, and when the predator was about to kill them their brains switched to the periaqueductal gray, the survival zone. It all seems fairly obvious stuff. I guess when the scientists were analysing the results the ‘thinking’ part of their brain was working. Then they probably switched to the ‘talking’ bit and after that perhaps the ‘writing’ and ‘colouring’ zones. However, if anyone knows how to get hold of this version of Pac-Man, please let me know.
Remember the Amiga/Atari classic Sensible Soccer or Kick Off? Well Addictive Football is exactly the same and will bring back tons of memories for many who, like me, spent hours glued to their joysticks. Most importantly, the game has retained the playability that made the originals such classics of their time. It was never about the graphics with these games that’s for sure!
In Addictive Football, you can play 5-a-side rules on a variety of different pitches with 5 different game modes to choose from. These include a Knockout Cup and League style games as well as a Custom Game Mode where you set the team skills and names yourself. There are unfortunately only 10 teams to choose from but they all differ considerably in skills & abilities.
The game even features all the classic pitch surfaces like grass, astroturf, concrete, indoor, ice and a bizarre futuristic field. As a result, the ball acts differently when it bounces meaning no game between the same teams is ever the same.
The only other downside is that real team names and players have not been used, presumably because of licensing issues. However, in custom mode, you can rename squads and players to your liking so you can recreate all those classic encounters such as this one between Liverpool and Everton.