You might wonder how I got here. I was looking into chiptune music, and a colleague recommended Jeremy Blake’s music, which is indeed awesome if you are into this stuff. I recommend listening to his album called “Superstructures”. This album is created using a tracker, similar to the trackers I used on the Amiga 500 back in the days. My favorites were Protracker and later when I had a MIDI keyboard Octamed. It turns out Jeremy is using a Dirtywave M8, which can also be built using open source software and one of these handheld gaming consoles. Houston we have a project!
Category: Games
Why some App Store apps won’t install
I was happily playing around with the appstore, and came across this funny free game called “Hedgewars”. Originally a free Linux game, it apparently got ported to the Mac and put in the App Store, just as a slew of Flash-based games (yes, Steve has some ‘splainin’ to do).
I tried to install Hedgewars on my trusty Mac Mini and got this message saying “This Application can not be installed on this machine”:
The Manualist
There’s a funny comercial on Dutch television which says that you should be paying too much for all the rubbish you download on the internet. Here’s a nice example of stuff you don’t want to pay too much for 🙂
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bKq3x74UE]
It may look silly, but this guy actually had to be practicing a lot to get to this (Mario) level.
Real guitar game: Guitar Wizzard
No, I’m not a guitar player, but I noticed this cool post on TUAW where the “Guitar Hero” game has been taken a notch up. TUAW reports that the guys at www.musicwizard.com have built “Guitar Wizzard”, a game with which you can learn to play popular songs on a real guitar. From what I can see in the video, this looks way less frustrating than doing the same excersizes over and over to learn to play the guitar.
Okay, you might not turn in to Mark Knopfler in a week, but isn’t it a much better feeling to hold a real guitar in your hand, in stead of that plasticky, toy-like mini quitar with the bright colored buttons? And the price is about right for a game including hardware aswell.
Monokai
I just checked out the new Dutch CC CD/DVD released under the Creative Commons license. While I was there I found a great piece of music done by Monokai. It’s kind of old C64 game like music, you like it or hate it. I went to check out Monokai’s website and I’ve spent a good 30 minutes playing with it.
The website is filled with music, photo’s and electronic games, and is fun to play with. Go check it out! Nice quality!
The real bike simulator
From the makers of Gran Turismo:
Is this great or what? It clearly is built on the Gran Turismo 4 rendering engine, and supports everything we’ve come to expect from Digital Polyphony. Arcade and Trophy mode, Photoshoot mode, a bucketload of (real life) tracks, and a truck load of different bikes to choose from!
Looks like my next addition to my PS2 game collection…
Airbus 330 Entertainent system
I recently went to Vegas, which is a very long trip (about 20 hours including stopover). I don’t like flying that much, my ears hurt and it is very boring to be crammed in a chair for 10 hours, with a headrest that makes your chin touch your chest no matter how you adjust it. However, on this flight (and the one back) there was a nice personal entertainment system installed in each chair.Below are some images of the personal entertainment system which is installed on the Airbus 330’s of Northwest Airlines. These are a real treat on long distance flights. There is a fair selection of on-demand movies, music, some simple games and flight information. It lets you choose a movie, and you can pause and skip as much as you like. You can use your own 3.5mm jacked headphones, no more of that adapter-buying-if-you-are-lucky-you’ll-get-stereo crap you see in the older planes. The menu even contained an item called “email”, but it was not functioning at the time I tried it. Besides you had to swipe your credit card for it, which I didn’t find worth trying even if it would work.
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| Nice little game, Bejeweled | The controller (has to be turned 90 degrees sometimes, confusing!) | Guess where we are? Travelling at 950km/h there 🙂 | Watched Chicken Little. It does not live up to it’s commercial by a long shot. |
Funny thing is, that my wife’s entertainent system actually crashed during flight. It got stuck for about 5 minutes, after which it automatically rebooted, and guess what? I saw a Tux! It is actually a Linux system. A bit of googling revealed that a few people even have seen the system crash on all monitors at the same time. Good thing they aren’t using this system for the flight controls yet. 😉
But it does make sense. It doesn’t cost anything, and being open source, Panasonic (the manufacturer of the system) has full controll on getting all the glitches out. Now they actually do need to do that still, but I bet they got a nice (remote?) update procedure for that. After all, they also need to upload new movies every now and then. Maybe they use the same connection as they use for email? 100% remote update would be nice. No “downtime” for the planes!.
I for one liked the system very much. It actually has games which let you compete with other passengers, but that didn’t seem to be popular on my flights to Las Vegas. I didn’t even had to get my PSP out of my bag 🙂
Now if they only could make those stupid headrests removable so I can put my head back when I want to sleep (like most normal people), flying wouldn’t be all that bad.
DTM2 on PS2 uses Gamespy!
History, Sony Online Drama
I bought a Sony PS2 a few years ago, when it just got out. I beleive it belongs to the first or second batch of Playstation 2 consoles arriving in the Netherlands. It costed a small fortune. About a year later, I purchased the Linux kit for my PS2. The Linux kit came with a network adapter and a harddisk. It worked like a charm. Sony had not started the online game service back then.
When Sony finally announced their network gaming plans, the Linux for Playstation group very kindly sent me a “Network Access Disc”. This is the disc you normally get when purchasing your network adapter for the PS2. However, being an early version and all, I never got it working properly. I spent hours (no, literally!) trying to register my handle and username. I never got it working properly. Friends of mine who bought the official adapter had newer versions of the software, which seemed to work better but still not good enough.
The beautiful world of non-Sony developers
I had given up on online gaming on the PS2 by now. A few months ago I played an online demo of DTM race driver 2 on my PC, and had great fun. I registered with GameSpy and was online and gaming with my friends in less than 5 minutes.
Last weekend, I found a copy of DTM2 for the PS2. Since I liked the fysics engine of DTM2 for the PS2, I decided to give it a try. Not even thinking about the cruddy PS2 online gaming option. When I got home and started the game, I was pleasantly surprised to see that DTM2 for PS2 actually uses the GameSpy system in stead ot the stupid Sony stuff. Again, I was playing online in within 5 minutes (had to look up my old GameSpy Id). I even hooked up an USB keyboard, which made logging in even simpler! Terrific!
My compliments to Codemasters and Gamespy, who have restored my hope and ability to play online games with my PS2.