Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play Alley Cat ON THE COUCH
My love affair with the work of Ben Heckendorn continues to grow by leaps and bounds, as he’s just posted up photos of his new Atari 800 laptop. Fancy the specs on this sucker? Well too bad, you’re getting them anyhow:
- Atari XEGS motherboard.
- XE 130 RAM expansion built-in.
- MyIDE circuitry and custom OS ROM to use a 2.5″ PATA hard drive.
- Large “shinier” 15″ screen
- Original, “new-old-stock” Atari 800 keyboard.
- Flush-mount cartridge slot.
- Amazing old-school styling!
And it’s the last dot point that really makes this case mod stand out. Old school chic barely describes it’s awesome nature.
Of course he’s had practice. This isn’t actually the first Atari that Ben’s laptop’d. His previous attempts had different asthetics however, one was more debonaire and the other was somewhat space age.
As usual Ben gives the entire run-down of how the unit was constructed and how it looks inside. You may want to start saving if you’re after one of these, by the way!
These used to be bleeding edge graphics
Some news for the older school: to celebrate it’s 15th anniversary, Bethseda have released Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for free download to the public.
While the series solidified it’s spot at the top of the RPG genre with Morrowind and Oblivion, Daggerfall was the game that introduced a lot of us to the sheer idea of size in a RPG. Not only being able to travel around to hundreds of different towns, but being able to travel in-between them as well (usually being chased by pesky wolves).
The game shows it’s age of course (you’ll need DOSBox to run it!) but I loved the game when I first played it, and it’s still a classic. And it’s friggin’ FREE, what more do you need?
Head over to the Elder Scrolls site to grab a copy.
Prepare for a waffling!
WARNING: This post contains Matt rabbiting on, some pixelated pretty pictures and not much else! Hope you didn’t get enough waffle at breakfast!
Once the staple of home PC entertainment, adventure games have seen a steady decline ever since the second half of the 90’s. This, perhaps, is one of the few bad points ever to come out of our increasing fascination with multiplayer gaming. It probably also suffers from the immediate 24 hour support line that we know and love as the internet. Gone are the days that if you hit a block with a game you’d just have to wrestle your brain around it (or worse, BUY A HINT BOOK). These days, and I’ll admit to this myself, if a puzzle takes more than half an hour to figure out, it’s off to plunder the internet for solutions!
You know a game is hardcore when even the ball is covered in spikes
A new trailer has been released for the upcoming reworking of Blood Bowl, and it’s looking pretty neat. For those unfamiliar, Blood Bowl was one of the many table-top games released by Games Workshop back in the day. It’s basically an ultra-violent take on American football, where the objective is to get your team into the scoring zone with the ball … preferably with all your limbs. The twist of course is that fouls are actively encouraged in this game, alongside any other devious underhanded tactics you could think of.
Before anyone asks, yes, I once played table-top games. I was young and impressionable and hadn’t found out that D&D is just as much fun and with no expensive minatures to buy!
Blood Bowl has seen a previous incarnation as a video game however, in the beautiful glory of MS-DOS no less. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t that great a game, but it also didn’t have a lot of the great off-field aspects that the table-top game excelled at. So I’m pleased to read that not only will the new game feature the “classic” play style, in which teams take turns with their actions, but also a mode called “Blitz!” which sees the player take control of the match in real time. Overall, I’m kinda intrigued. The game sees it’s release for DS and PSP in around a weeks time, and an 360 version on the way in September. If the reviews are favourable enough, I might just grab myself a copy!
You can check the game’s site out here
Is your laptop a SNES? Yeah, I thought not.
Thought that a handheld console to play NES games was cool? Well then how about a SNES console which is actually an Acer Aspire laptop?
This particular one-of-a-kind piece of bad-assery comes care of the crew at Asobitech. The SNES case has been adapted to contain this little 1.6Ghz beast, with USB slots available through the original controller ports, and a specially adapted game cartridge that houses both the system’s DVDRW drive and it’s webcam. And if you aren’t impressed yet (you liar!), here’s some further technical necromancy performed on this monster. The case’s power switch is operational for the computer, the SNES logo on the rear of the system lights up for hard-drive activity, it has internally mounted speakers, the system is both WiFi and Bluetooth capable, and here’s the kicker: the internal boards are bracketed and supported by Lego.
Yeah, that’s right son, Lego.
Face it, it’d be difficult to beat the owner of this badboy in a geek-off! You can check out all the details behind it’s construction and more images here.
So admit it, you're singing the theme music out loud to yourself
The wife woke me up this morning to give me this news, and it was worth the interruption of my slumber. Two bits of news, in fact:
- They’re remaking The Secret of Monkey Island
- They’re creating NEW Monkey Island episodes
I can’t actually remember the last NEW adventure game I played, it was probably one of the “use random impractical solution 87″ Gabriel Knight series. Never-the-less, adventure games were one of those genres that never seemed to make it past the early 90’s. I think in the new millenium the only genre releases of note would be the new episodes of the brilliant Sam and Max series (which I’m yet to play, scolding reminder to self).
I’m happy to see that the genre hasn’t been forgotten, because for a long time it was the bastion of good writing in games. Action games stuck to their guns and explosions, racing games to wheel-spin and big jumps, and adventure had the storylines and the jokes. These days, of course, a game can’t (or sometimes really shouldn’t) leave the studio without having some epic nine-part storyline, take Cooking Mama 6: Death Throes of Time for example (coming this fall!). But in the massive effort to cover every single base, a lot of games can actually miss the mark completely.
So it’s good to see that adventure hasn’t completely disappeared off the developer’s repetoire, because more often than not it’s the best genre to mix storyline, puzzles and humour.
What’s also nice to see is that the remake of The Secret of Monkey Island is stay true to it’s roots. The updated version features handpainted backgrounds, full voice acting and a simplified menu/inventory system for those playing along on the consoles. What sold it for me, however, is that with a push of a button you can revert the game back to it’s original state, in all it’s 8-bit pixelled glory. It’s a nostagic touch, and a welcome one at that for those of us who grew up with the game. You can see the trailer and promo video here.
So I’ll be buying the remake, because I know it’s a quality game and well worth playing through again. As far as the new episodes go, well, those I might wait on the reviews for, but I’m certain they’re in good hands given that it’s under production by the original creators.
Maybe it’s my 90’s upbringing, but the mind boggles at technology sometimes. What technology you ask? Is it the various advances in medical science? The steady advance in robotics that will one day gain self-awareness and kill us all?
No, frankly I’m slightly amazed, outraged and impressed all at once by the fact that you can now play Quake 3 Arena in your browser.
Quake Live brings for free what used to be the cutting edge of FPS, and with seemingly no real drain on your computers resources. This was the game that used to be first choice of LAN events across the country in the new millenium. Times were that your computer may actually struggle to run a game as resource heavy as Quake 3 (may you burn in hell, Pentium 2!), and to get a decent game going you better have been ready to use all 56k of your dial-up modem.
Well crack open a Jolt Cola, because now you can play it as a browser plug-in with hundreds of other players online. And even poor little old shaped me can get a decent connection. It also supports friend lists and clans, so everyone can their dusty tags back out for an airing.
Which gets me to wondering if we’re at this level of technology now, what other great multiplayer games (that I probably still have mouldering away on CD-Rom) could now be played in browser? Unreal Tournament? BattleZone 2? Team Fortress Classic? Starsiege: Tribes? It would appear the options really are only limited by their respective copyright owners.
I’m also interested to find out if the eventual product will include a few of the classic Q3 mods. It’s been quite a while since I engaged in a bit of Rocket Arena.
Anyway, those interested in a little nostalgia for no extra cost, come notch up a few humiliation kills with (or on, more likely) me. Registration and installation times are minimal and there always seems to be an active game going on somewhere online.
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