March 2011 – Something Odd!

Gaming History in Pictures

A few games I found recently while sorting through boxes at home:

Quake 3 tin box, Linux edition. I wrote an article about this for the Irish Times a few years ago.
Double Dragon, C64 version, I posted pictures of this before of course.
Gyroscope, the first 5 1/4 disk based game I owned on the C64. It was given to me by someone, can’t remember who now but I used it later for Stunt Car Racer and even printed the loading screen from that game on a dot matrix printer for the disk cover.
The excellent Stunt Car Racer manual and box cover.
The System 3 Premier Collection and Thalamus The Hits compilations were the pride of my games collection at one time. I still remember the excitement of getting those boxes in the post.
C64 Cabal, tape version. Brilliant game. I remember spending as much time tinkering with the game ASM code as playing it..
Half Life 2 Collector’s Edition and Half Life 1. Steam was launched when HL2 was released and I was recently able to register the HL1 CD key in Steam and download that great game.

The wonderful thing about PC games is the competition among online retailers and the lower than console prices charged for most games. While Xbox Live now has older full price games for download they’re usually given a premium price too. Steam and the other online PC game stores regularly have sales where even big name games are offered at a discount.

Here are a few links for keeping track of what sales are going on plus price comparison sites:

First up is Steamprices.com where you can compare the prices of most games in Euro, Sterling and US Dollars. What becomes obvious is that people paying in Euros are over charged more often than not. Boo!
Steamgamesales.com and Didimatic.com are great for tracking what’s on sale on Steam and other online stores. You can subscribe to both in your RSS reader but the former being better because you can limit it to regional sales.
The Big Download Blog is a great resource too, listing the bigger sales in the main stores and elsewhere. Worth subbing to that too.
Finally, there are online stores where you can buy CD keys cheaply. These stores buy the keys in less expensive regions and then allow people in richer areas to buy these legitimate keys at knock down prices. Here’s a thread on boards.ie about them. I haven’t tried them and responses are mixed. Buyer Beware!

Oh, if you know someone in another region served by Steam and the prices there are cheaper you could ask them to buy games for you and then pay them via PayPal for the gift. Thanks Alex, I owe you a few drinks next time we meet! 🙂

the Duke will see you soon

I’m downloading Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition from gog.com. I don’t expect it to have aged gracefully but I figure I got so much fun out of the shareware version many years ago that I should give the full game a go. It’s only $5.99 too!

BfBC2 Conquest Fun (as a noob)

Some gameplay from a few games the other night on my second PSN account, xeer2000. Played with David, Conor and Miquel and had a great time.

Watch as I level up to level 2 and get about halfway to level 3!

Xeer

Many moons ago I wrote about where my handle xeer came from. A planet in the classic 8-bit game Elite was called Xeer. Unknown to me, Xeer is also the polycentric legal system of Somalia!

Back in 2003 someone asked to use my hotmail account of the same name but I declined and found out it was something to do with the constitution of Somalia. That Wikipedia page dates from 2009 so at least I can read up on the part of Somali heritage now!

TyeWebb’s defense on Laguna Presa

TyeWebb’s first Bad Company 2 commentary and it’s great. As a console player on PC he came across many of the same problems I had/have with the different control mechanics. He’s a lot further on in the game now and runs rings around me whenever we’re placed on different teams!

Lead and Gold free this weekend

Yes well, I’d rather have some free gold but this budget shooter, Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West is free to play all weekend on PC. Fire up your Steam client and the game will download when you click the link in the news page. Or so I presume it will as I haven’t tried it yet. The game is also 75% off which is a pretty good deal.

Links: metacritic page (70%) and game forum.

So who’s up for some wild west shooting?

Moriarty Tribunal in Text

The Moriarty Tribunal cost the Irish tax payer more than 100 million Euro and all we got was a 2,400 page protected PDF.

If you view the report’s PDF files you won’t be able to quote from it by selecting and copying text. You’ll have to manually type out anything you want to extract because the files are protected.

Value for money eh? Anyway, I ran the pdf files through the tool “pdftotext” and came up with m1.txt and m2.txt.
Use the original PDF files to read the report but for your convenience these text files will be much easier to quote from.

Please don’t link directly to them, mirror them on your own site if you write about them!

Here’s a Wordle tag cloud of the findings created by Jamie Lawrence.

Amazon Appstore opens in North America

The Amazon Appstore for Android opened today and apparently Apple are already suing them for confusing consumers with a name similar to their App Store.

I wouldn’t really know because after downloading the Appstore app (beautifully simple procedure: click a link in an email/text to a .apk file) and logging into Amazon it refused to let me download the exclusive Angry Birds Rio game.

The Amazon Appstore for Android is not yet available in your region

Good thing I’m sick of Angry Birds, but it’d be nice if it worked over here too!

BfBC2: Recon’s Revenge

If there’s one thing I don’t like it’s being shot out of a moving vehicle by a sniper in Bad Company 2.

That’s what happened to me when I joined a game on Arica Harbour as an attacker. I hopped in a Humvee and roared up the road only to die at the hands of a sniper in the tower on the hills. FFS! I only logged in to check the networking was ok (getting the “The router in use may not support IP fragments, and the communication features of some games may be restricted.” error.)

Anyway, I came back as a recon, and armed with the M24 and 12x scope I spawned near the UAV controller. From there I could see a tiny dot moving about in his tower and the occasional flash as he continued to take pot shots at my team. I tried a few shots but an electricity pylon got in the way. I dodged over to the other side of the road for a clearer view and on my second shot got the kill! Me? The noob recon got a long distance kill, marksman headshot or something and 413 points! Woohoo! Yes David, I performed a ritual teabagging too. You’d be proud.

‘Course I didn’t record it. My PVR is upstairs, laptop in the kitchen, PS3 in the living room. Bah.

Oh, and if anyone has any suggestions for the “ip fragments” problem I’d love to hear them. I already set the MTU lower without making any difference to the error showing. None of my friends were playing so I didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone so I don’t even know if it is a problem. I don’t even remember if I that error was showing before. Oh well.