Holy Shmoly! » Games

Robot Enrichment

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:35:11 +0000

I just noticed that Portal 2 now has a store where you can modify your robot. I like the way Valve monetize their games. They bring out free DLC, expanding older games with updates and offering them either free (TF2) or at a steep discount. Then they encourage you to buy hats and personalise your character! Nothing like some of the other grind to play free games I’ve played elsewhere.

Two games spring to mind, both free Android games. Samurai vs Zombies and Garfield Defense. Both play in exactly the same way even though they are apparently by different developers. I swear they used the one game engine and just swapped out graphics and sound.

In both games you collect coins to purchase power ups but those purchases are fairly pricey and by the time you get to level 10 you’ll need to grind and play the level 4 or 5 times to get enough coins to buy an upgrade to finish the level.

Still, not a bad way to spend a few minutes while waiting for the bus or something but to be honest I’d rather use my phone to read a book!

I almost forgot to mention the iOS version of Plants vs Zombies. It received a few updates recently which added the ability to plant flowers that reward you with silver and gold. I only tried it briefly but soon discovered that you need to use fertilizer or the plants will wilt. Of course you have to use real money to buy the fertilizer. *sigh*

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BF3 vs TF2

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:59:24 +0000

Who wins when two great games collide?

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Console BF3, now with servers to rent!

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 04 May 2012 21:09:33 +0000

Yay, they bring the one thing I didn’t like about playing PC Battlefield games to the consoles. I could not care less about what server I play. I just want to squad up with my friends and play a game.

Now, let me play with a keyboard and mouse and I’ll be happy. I’ve had enough of using a crappy controller. Ironically enough, in the PC world apparently most servers have hackers so all platforms have their downsides.

Back to Skyrim then. As I said on Twitter earlier, I feel like a tourist in that game finding new stuff all the time as I wander about.

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Reddit PvE Rev 6 Minecraft Server

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:36:38 +0000

One of the great things about Minecraft is that you can pack a level into one nice compressed archive. r/Minecraft on Reddit have a number of servers (I think) and this is one of them. You can download that world from here, it’s pveRev6.tar.gz but there are lots of other worlds there to check out too.

I had to fiddle around a bit to get creative mode working. I think I copied the region folder from the tarball into a creative world I created for this purpose. There was probably one or two other steps too but it’s been a while. Figuring out stuff in Minecraft is half the fun isn’t it anyway so go find out yourself

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Happy birthday my rubber keyed friend!

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:25:44 +0000

Well, 2012 has turned out to be quite a year for retro computing. The Commodore 64 turned 30 this year, Jack Tramiel died, and the ZX Spectrum is 30 years old too!

I have fond memories of the original 48K ZX Spectrum. Even though it had a tiny rubber keyboard it suited my much younger and smaller hands. I do recall the “Symbol Shift” key got stuck a few times making it hard to type in BASIC code but I guess I opened up the machine and cleaned the keyboard membrane when that happened.

On the off chance you haven’t read it yet there’s a great article on the Sir Clive Sinclair’s machine in the first issue of Retro Gamer that came free with the 100th.

At the time many 8 bit machines used tapes to load their software. Disks were a rare luxury. The loading sounds became so engrained in our minds that even now they’re recognisable and someone created an iOS app that recreates them. (Thanks Conor!)

Or the real thing. It takes a while …

Edit: Conor noticed that google.co.uk has a new Google Doodle for the day that’s in it:

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The Irish Indie Bundle is looking for games

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:22:40 +0000

The Irish Indie Bundle is looking for submissions. Follow the discussion on Facebook too.

Will there be extra marks if it’s as Gaeilge? (via)

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Prince of Persia: the Apple II source

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:17:36 +0000

It’s been a good few months for the 8 bit versions of Prince of Persia. Last October saw the release of a C64 version. Yesterday the original source code for the Apple II version was uploaded to github! Read about how Jason Scott recovered that source code from 20 year old disks (similar to what I did recently!)

The game was originally written in assembler so the source code was already out there. How? Machine code is the language a machine understands and assembler is a human representation of that machine code. For example, the machine code “A9 00 8D 20 D0″ is actually this more readable assembler: (that inserts the value 0 into the memory location $D020)

LDA #00
STA $D020

The assembler code released yesterday goes one step further. It uses labels, variables and comments. See BOOT.S as a good example. Variables are defined at the top and labels are used throughout making it a lot easier to deal with moving and adding code around. Look for the text “skewtbl” where you’ll find a simple loop that reads in data from memory and inserts it into 2 registers.

:0 ldy sector
 lda skewtbl,y
 sta $3d
 lda sectaddr,y
 beq :1
 sta $27
:rdsect jsr $005c
:1 dec sector
 bne :0

 lda SLOT
 jmp $900

skewtbl hex 00,0d,0b,09,07,05,03,01
 hex 0e,0c,0a,08,06,04,02,0f

sectaddr hex 00,09,00,00,00,00,00,00
 hex 30,31,32,33,34,00,00,00

Jordan Mechner puts it more poetically:

Non-programming analogy: Video game source code is a bit like the sheet music to a piano sonata that’s already been performed and recorded. One might reasonably ask: If you have the recording, what do you need the sheet music for?
You don’t, if all you want is to listen and enjoy the music. But to a pianist performing the piece, or a composer who wants to study it or arrange it for different instruments, the original score is valuable.

Props to this Slashdot post for the extra links. Also worth a look is the development diary of the C64 version and there are videos showing how the game was made back in 1985!

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Giants: Citizen Kabuto going cheap!

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:24:50 +0000

If you want a humorous FPS and have $2.99 to spare you can’t really get any better than Giants: Citizen Kabuto. It’s 50% off right now as part of an Interplay promotion at GOG.

It’s an old game, released back in the dawn of time (or the year 2000, whichever came first) but it holds up well. There’s very funny dialogue, the graphics were amazing for their time and still look great. Back then you’d be hard pressed to find a machine that could play it well but that’s not a problem with any sort of modern machine.

Go on, go on, go on. It’s lots of fun and I can’t recommend it enough.

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Steam will pay you to play games

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:15:24 +0000

The Gothic Bundle on Steam was 150% off a few minutes ago. Steam were going to pay me 25 Euro to buy their bundle. Pity I couldn’t add it to my shopping cart ..

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I draw something

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:55:57 +0000

Ah, so I draw something along with another 34,999,999 people apparently. On the day that the game’s developer, OMGPOP was sold to Zynga.

It seems to be everywhere today. Ryan twittered about it and I downloaded it to see what it was all about, then a few games later I saw a few more people mention it, this time on Facebook. Feels like the rush when Google Plus launched. Hope it doesn’t fizzle out like, errr, Google Plus…

I wonder why it is that I manage to get 10 words in a row right with one opponent while I struggle to get 2-3 with everyone else? Luck of the draw I suppose.

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