The Atlantic Accelerator is the final level in the game Syndicate. This game was developed by Bullfrog, and published in 1993 by Electronic Arts, who went on to publish a few more games.
This final level is insane. The mission briefing warns that you are completely outgunned and outmanned, and it finishes with a “good luck” message.
As soon as you enter the map you’re assaulted by enemy syndicates wielding mini guns. You have to pause the game and then frantically select all your agents, put on shields and fight back. It can take more than a few goes to get this right. This video shows how easy it is to be overpowered. Jump forward to about 4:00. Warning, it’s loud!
This video below shows how it’s done. Select all agents and put on shields. Select agent 3, enable panic mode and let him or her take out the nearby enemy with a laser. Mop up the rest with lasers.
An idea I picked up from a comment on that video is using plenty of shields and a flamer (flame thrower). The enemy syndicate stop firing after a certain length of time, which makes mopping them up easy. This worked mostly, but in the end there were two enemies left who refused to stop firing. Cross fire was more effective at reducing the numbers of enemy, however.
Syndicate Plus. The benefits of shields. Make sure you switch before it runs out.
These last two guys kept firing, I got bored. Shields and flamers takes a while.
I finished this game in the mid-nineties. I bought it a good few years ago on GOG and I finished it again, but this was probably my first play through in a decade. Still a great game after all these years.
If you’re in the mood for some retro gaming, head on over to this site, where you can play lots of old Commodore 64 games in your browser! Unfortunately, Firefox caused the audio to stutter, but the games play fine in Edge. I tested Flimbo’s Quest and The Great Gianna Sisters, and they were perfect. I somehow made it to level 5 in the latter game rather quickly. I normally use all my lives in level 2!
There is a huge C64 games archive at archive.org, and there are loads of demos there too! Give Arkanoid 2 a spin while you’re over there. It’s even trained, and you can play with infinite lives! The keyboard controls are the two shift keys and space to fire. 🙂
I noticed that Kerbal Space Program recently added another Easter egg to the Mun, which was enough reason for me to fire up the game again. (It was given away for free on Epicgames recently, so you probably have it!)
I had to reinstall it as it wouldn’t launch with my mods, but when I fired it up I saw there are now training missions.
I jumped ahead to the two Mun missions. The first one is getting from Kerbin orbit to the Mun. The instructions are clear and fairly easy to follow, I imagine, for someone who hasn’t done it before. The second part starts with you in orbit around the Mun and you have to land. I wish I had that ten years ago! Setting the apoapsis to a low altitude of about 6km and with a 4 star pilot it was simple to land. Just set the rocket to retrograde. The instructions to power up or down got a bit much and I forgot you can feather the throttle with CAPSLOCK (but I’ve mapped ESC to that key anyway…) which would help. When you’re only travelling at 3-5m/s it’s easy to reverse course.
When you try getting to the Mun outside the training missions, you’ll need about 7500 Delta-V to get there, land and return to Kerbin according to this old tutorial on the KSP wiki, but there are other tutorials now.
If you want to install mods, you should probably use CKAN. I need to get it working again and install Mechjeb and whatever the kids are playing with these days. My old computer isn’t that powerful, so I guess I’m not going for any of the graphical upgrades.
The training missions were a success. I landed on the Mun and returned to Kerbin in both missions. That was very satisfying.
I have to confess, I never played any of the Monkey Island games. I was aware of them but point and click adventures really aren’t my thing. Many years ago I bought the first Simon the Sorcerer game because I thought it had something to do with Discworld. The graphics and speech in the game were outstanding but after only a short time I got stuck and gave up.
So, what’s this Monkey Island thing about then? How do I play the original “The Secret of Monkey Island”? We live in exciting times and the Internet Archive comes to the rescue!
On this page you’ll find a fully playable copy of the game you can play in your browser. If that’s not enough, there’s also the Ultimate Talkie Version of the game with full speech instead of text.
Playing in the browser is OK for a preview of what it’s like, but the best way to play it is through ScummVM. On both archive.org pages above you’ll find zip files containing “The Secret of Monkey Island”. The talkie version is much bigger, but by today’s standards, quite small still.
Download the game, unzip and point ScummVM at the extracted files and you can play the game on your home computer! As you’re unlikely to finish the game in one sitting, here’s how to save and load the game in ScummVM. Enjoy!
Late on Thursday evening I received an email from an ex-Automattic friend who asked if my Steam account was compromised because he received a message from me saying,
[8:34 PM] DOC: What’s up mate
[8:45 PM] DOC: may i ask u favor?sorry for disturbing u btw
I don’t call anyone “mate”, I don’t use “u”, I use punctuation. It didn’t sound like me so it raised red flags immediately for him.
In a panic I checked my Steam account and I still had access to it. Steam Guard was still active and I hadn’t received any emails about changes to my account. Nevertheless I went through the process of changing my password.
A series of emails followed. I thought someone was impersonating my account but a screenshot showed the age of my account and account XP which is impossible (I presume) to fake.
Eventually I found out through a Reddit post that my account had been compromised.
There is a new scam going around where a friend will ask you to vote for a team to get the team into a competition for me it was Intel Extreme Masters they may use different names, but that is all I have encountered.
That rung a bell for me. About two weeks ago someone messaged me on Steam and asked me to vote in a team logo competition on a website called roplautstar .com. I’m not hyperlinking that website because it has since changed how it works and simply shows a “Sign in through Steam” dialogue box.
roplaustar
Clicking on that button shows a fake “Login through Steam” popup.
roplauster fake login
At the time I was first asked I didn’t fill in the form. I was tired after a long day at work. I worried about linking my Steam account to this random website just to vote in some silly competition. So I forgot about it. Unfortunately they got back to me a few days later and asked again. I reasoned that if my Steam friend’s account had been compromised they would have noticed in that time and it must be legit so off I went and happily entered my login details and Steam Guard code and thought nothing more about it.
Until Thursday night.
Those emails and the revelation my Steam account was hacked is very upsetting. I pride myself on being very paranoid about logins. Especially on Steam where there are all sorts of scams to steal tradable goods, buy giftable games or launder money and more. I’ve been online for more than twenty years. How the hell could I have been hacked?
You should be asking yourself that too. You couldn’t possibly be hacked.
This fake login was very good, but there were signs I ignored because I saw the familiar “Valve Corp” in the address bar. Turns out it’s just an image you can download.
I should have been wary of a popup asking me for my Steam login, but half the time I use Steam in my browser I’m logged out due to inactivity so that didn’t raise alarm bells. I should have opened Steam in a new window to check if I was logged in.
If I had clicked on any of the links in that popup I would have been alerted to the scam. Firefox wouldn’t load the page in an iframe and gave an error.
But I didn’t. Why would I?
The popup is very believable. It features the window decoration of Windows 10 (close/minimize/maximize button) which should have tipped me off as I’m using a Mac. If I had tried moving the popup I would have discovered that it can only move in the bounds of the “parent” window. Hovering over the drag bar at the top changes the mouse pointer or an icon showing horizontal bars I’m not familiar with.
They had access to my account for about two weeks. They messaged four Steam friends with the same message. Luckily nobody clicked the link and two people ignored the initial “What’s up mate” greeting. I wish they had warned me via other means. One person was messaged on October 2nd and she could have contacted me on Facebook.
I went through the messages of all my friends checking who it was sent me the original message but I couldn’t find it. Maybe I’m blocked from seeing their messages.
Check your Steam Friend Chat Log. You’ll see who you talked to recently but it only goes back 7 days from what I can see.
Go through your friend list in the chat and see who is blocked.
Unblock any you find and check that they did not get a suspicious link and tell them you were hacked. Tell them to change their password if they had entered their Steam credentials in that site.
Check your Steam Login History. All my most recent logins are in Ireland except for about six that are all in Russia. Why doesn’t Steam alert me when I login from a different country?
If you receive an unusual message from a friend try to contact them through some other means. Do you know them on Facebook or Twitter? There’s no harm, and they will be very relieved to find out there was a problem.
Looking back toward my “home” moon and the gas giant around which both moons orbit. Part of my main bus visible in the foreground.
Build machines to automate building more machines to automate researching new technologies to build more machines and eventually build a Dyson Sphere around the local sun. Rinse and repeat in a new solar system.
There’s so much in this early access game but even at this early stage I can easily recommend Dyson Sphere Program if you are a fan of Factorio or Satisfactory. I got bored of the former and never played the latter. DSP hits the spot for me.
For help check out the related Steam community, the DSP subreddit or any of the numerous Youtube videos on the game.
This tweet reminded me that Retrograde had great loading music.
I don’t think I’ve ever listened to the whole tune and the odd stops are jarring, but it’s worth it. Steve Rowlands was a master on the C64.
Andy Roberts left two interesting comments on that video.
Some of the tunes that Steve did were certainly very inspired by music they were listening to at the time (the Creatures Shop music is based on Izit/Stories.They also did a version of The 45 King/The 900 Number for one of their demos.
Generally speaking, Steve was usually inspired by a riff or beat or bassline; when we went clubbing, you would occasionally see him staring off into space trying to pick apart a tune and memorize it.
The disk version was the original version of this tune. While mastering the game, the cassette loader would always hang at the “pause” in the music (the point where everything stops for a moment – listen for this at 1:31). They tracked this down to the pause in the music and thus the cassette loader uses a slightly different tune which doesn’t stop.
And in response to someone asking if they can update the HSVC entry for this song with his information, he replied,
Sure, feel free to add to the list. I also forgot to add that the Level Complete music from Retrograde is based on “Jack your Body” by Steve “Silk” Hurley. 🙂
Someone recorded the Retrograde title music with two SIDs creating a stereo effect the original C64 lacked. It sounds pretty good to me!
Fabulous looking game. It got a bit boring after a while but there were great power ups and the amazing visuals and sound were stunning.
I don’t remember E.T. making a big impression on my life in 1982. I never saw the movie back then, and a couple of years ago watched half of it before falling asleep in front of the telly. I guess you had to be there when it was first released?
Ireland in the 1980s was a country in recession. I certainly knew nobody with a 2600 console so we were spared the abomination that was the official game of the movie. While we had some sort of Pong clone in the early ’80s we moved away to “proper” computers like the Speccy and C64 after that.
Nonetheless, it was an important game. It helped bring about the collapse of Atari and the video game market in the US!
99% Invisible just featured an episode by podcast Sidedoor about E.T. The Videogame and it’s enthralling. You can hear all about how bad it was, the story of it’s development from game developer Howard Scott Warshaw, and finally to his reaction that people are still obsessed with the game all these years later.
This game is ridiculous. I love it. If you’re a fan of tower defense games you’ll love this real time strategy game. Wikipedia describes it as a,
mix of real-time strategy and tower defense, where there is only one enemy and it can only be repelled rather than destroyed. The player must hold back a purple mass called the “Creeper”, which has already destroyed most of humanity and is now attacking Odin City, humanity’s last bastion. This is done by placing towers onto the battlefield which shoot at the Creeper. The main goal of the game is to connect the player’s base to energy totems through the use of energy collectors and relays; doing so opens a jump gate which allows Odin City to teleport to a new planet and attempt to escape the Creeper again.
Steam says I’ve played close to 100 hours in the game, many of those hours in frustration or getting overwhelmed before figuring out how to defeat a level.
It’s like tower defense except that the enemy is a liquid that comes at you from all directions so you have to build towers to protect your assets everywhere. I find most levels have an initial “OMG Moment” at the start where it all seems too much, but by building up your batteries, and your towers you’ll soon be fighting back.
Sometimes it’s a slog, and the last level I just played is one such map. Fortress Siege by Blaze in the Alpha Sector is one to leave until you’ve had plenty of practice. 4 emitters spew out vast amounts of creeper. It’s hard enough just keeping it back but advancing is on another level of difficulty altogether!
I did eventually defeat the map and once one of the emitters fell it was plain sailing. I earned two achievements playing this one:
Build 25 shields in a mission.
Build 25 Berthas in a mission.
Maybe a little excessive, but I swear they were needed! For a taste of what it’s like have a look at this video.
Disappointingly only one of my friends on Steam has the game. Check out the reviews on Steam. Recent reviews are “very positive” while all reviews are “overwhelmingly positive”.
Creeper World 4 is on the way too, but there’s no release date for it. It’ll be done when it’s done to paraphrase the developer but I’m looking forward to it already. It looks great!
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