Dislodging the ice-pick

Hello again. This time I’d like to have a more in-depth look at the relatively unknown Ice-Pick Lodge studios.

Ok, so first things first, who are Ice-Pick Lodge?

Well, they are a studio-based games development team from Moscow. The team first formed in 2002 and became a quite well-known name in Russia after the release of Pathologic, their first ever full game.

This release gained both critical acclaim and some notoriety. Pathologic won several major gaming awards in Russia, and earned the company a reputation for a certain degree of quirkiness, something that was to be continued in their later games. As if to underline this eccentricity Pathologic went on to win the "Most Non-Standard Game" award at the 2005 Russian Game Developers Conference, a feet they would later echo in 2007 with ‘The Void.’

To date they have released three games, Pathologic, The Void, and Cargo, each of which retained their unique take on the first and third person genres.

Cheap Windows CE Laptops, Good? Bad? or Ugly?

I’ve been taking a look at the low end Japanese Windows CE ‘Mini NoteBooks’ systems lately (also sometimes called Mini NetBooks) after seeing these slated on various public forums and especially on YouTube, and it didn’t take much digging before I realised that a lot of this venom seemed unjust, unfounded or at best misguided...

Most of the naysayers seemed to be ill-informed of what these machines actually are and of what their purpose may be. A lot of the comments seemed to be based solely on comparing the specs of these machines with those of a modern full-blown PC system. Something which is akin to comparing the specs of a smart-phone with a modern PC, although this fact seemed lost on the barraters. Some of these comments just didn’t add up to me. I had managed to get a quick look at one of these some time ago, and you can get one for around £30 on eBay. I have to say that I thought the one I saw was perfectly adequate for what it is. It won’t replace a desktop system as a main computer, and won’t ever get near the lofty heights of the iPood... sorry, iPad for ‘coooolness!!’ But as a basic big-PDA come network-browser it works fine, with very little to no configuration.

Just remember: It is not a PC, but it isn’t intended to be...

Free Steam!

In this thread I decided to take a look at the best free games on steam.

There are various forum and blog threads out there that purport to be an exhaustive and definitive list of free stuff on steam.

This is definitely not one of them.

No, this purely consists of my own opinion, musings, and ramblings about some of the free games I found interesting, with very little basis in reality outside of my own head... 

... so no change there then.

First off I must admit to not showing much interest in the steam site until I stumbled across a thread telling of their time-limited free download of Portal (sadly now expired). 

This was one of those games I kept meaning to play but had never gotten around to. So I downloaded it and got my introduction to the world of Steam! 

Just in case you don’t know, Steam is a PC and MAC based download site somewhat akin to the ‘PSN Store’ and ‘Xbox Live’ services for consoles. Some people may pick holes in this evaluation, but for the most part I think it’s a pretty apt comparison.

Steam lets you pay for games on-line in a minimum-fuss environment and then lets you download them within the nice shiny, and easy to use, wrappings of the steam application’s framework. This also provides you with an easy access point-and-click interface to your downloaded games, and/or other content.

Like the popular console-based offerings it also has a combination of pay-to-play and free content. And it’s this fee content that I’m having a look at here.

Massively online through the ages… or not.

I’ve seen it all…

Well, if I haven’t actually seen it all, I’ve at the very least mostly heard about it. And more-or-less at the time it was happening. 

What am I on about this time? 
Multi User On-Line gaming of course, what else?



 

  The very first exposure I had to on-line gaming wasn’t actually on-line at all. It wasn’t even on a computer. It was whilst reading an article about CompuServe’s MUD, the Multi-User Dungeon, in a very early edition of Computer and Video Games, and the article immediately caught my imagination...

If you don’t know already, MUD on CompuServe was probably the very first time an on-line multi-user computer game was available to the general public. Sure, the boffins with their mainframe and mini computer access had been hacking and slashing their way through reams of text for a fair while by this point. And there were some rather obscure BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) running versions of it, but finally this strange new concept for an adventure game was available to the rest of us.
Looking at the simple text-screens of MUD toady it’s hard to believe just how important a milestone this really was. At the time it was viewed by most as a bit of an elitist novelty. Then again, they say hindsight always comes with 20/20 vision…

Is retro-piracy a legitimate way to see old games?

So you’ve got a bunch of old machines....
But they don’t make new games for these machines anymore, so who are you hurting by downloading some old ROM and disk images?

Well, the short answer is quite possibly nobody would, but, and of course there’s a ‘but’ … not all manufacturers want you to have those old games. Why? You ask. Well there are the fairly lucrative mobile-phone, hand-held, and on-line markets. Not to mention the various compilations that always seem to be amongst the first things to appear for every new console or other gaming platform. Quite a few older games have been re-released with a fair degree of monitory gain for little effort. Always a good thing if you are doing the selling. And the copyright holder do have the legal write to ‘just say no’ without giving, or having, any reason at all.
Having said that, and although there is no such legal thing as ‘Abandon Ware’ (the copyright always reverts to somebody), much of the software houses responsible for developing 8 and 16bit games have released these programs to the public domain, or otherwise given permission for them to be freely used and distributed. Ultimate – Play the Game, being a notable exception to this.

The Dandy wars…

I’ve read three different independent reviews lately that all said Dandy was a Gauntlet clone. Not true, my inner ATARI-Geek shouted. In fact the exact opposite is (more or less) possibly true; because, if anything; the mighty Gauntlet is in fact a Dandy clone.

Originally adorned with the snappy title of ‘Thesis of Terror’ and written in 1982 by Jack Palevich's for his bachelor's thesis at MIT. The game was based on the cellular automaton principles displayed in John Conway's Game of Life, and wasn’t especially produced with a commercial goal in mind.

The system designed for running the game was a two-part affair. With a file-server program running on a Hewlett Packard Workstation, which supplied the maps data, and a series of four Atari 8bit machines connected up as graphics-terminals through their serial ports, to display the graphical front-end.

The design of the game was very much based on, and influenced by, the Dungeons and Dragons role-play table-top systems of the time (although reportedly Palevich had never played D&D in his life!). Imaginative, yes… but not the type of setup most people could whip up in their bedrooms.

Down on the farm…

Ok, when I go retro I don’t do no wishy-washy half-measures!

 

This blog was inspired by an accidental glimpse of an old advert I remembered from my misspent youth.

The advert was by the, then, mysterious ‘Softwarwe Farm’ and promised ‘hi-res’ graphics on the ZX81… a machine that everyone knew couldn’t do user-defined hi-res graphics, and I have to admit that I was sceptical.

Well it turns out that everyone, including sceptical teenage me, was wrong, and the humble ZX-81 could indeed do ‘hi-res’ user defined graphics. My dumb was well and truly struck, and probably like many others I immediately began to wonder how this was done. As it turns out Julian Chappell, the main programming half of the one man / one woman Software Farm team wasn’t too forthcoming on this front. And who could really blame him. It reportedly took him six months just to work out the user-defined graphics procedure code.

In hindsight I think the most remarkable thing about this revelation is that it was done at all, far-les done commercially and successfully on a machine that was already falling out of favour. This really was a relatively major software coupe at the time, and although the games were more-or-less successful I still don’t think the user-defined graphics process got the technical accalation that it richly deserved. If this had come just a few years earlier it would have been hailed as a major accomplishment.

In today’s world of neo-photorealistic graphics this may not seem much to write home about, but at the time it was scarcely believable. Imagine the impact of some little-known software firm announcing it had come up with a purely software only solution to allow the 360 or PS3 to show real 3D on a normal monitor. Yes, it was that fantastical a claim for some people in the ZX-81 community at the time. It was something that accepted knowledge said just couldn’t be done.