Speed Demos April 11, 2008
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Four hundred games played through in as little as 30 minutes. This is Half Life 2 and Icewind Dale, now.
The Legend of Kyrandia: The Hand of Fate and Malcolm’s Revenge April 3, 2008
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Download the three Legend of Kyrandia DOS adventure game CDs here. Or search for Kyrandia on other torrent sites. These are the CD sized versions and therefore should have speech included. Makes it much easier and more enjoyable to play, given today’s graphics advancement in games.
Open with uTorrent or your bit torrent client of preference.
I was a young child when I first played the Legend of Kyrandia, which told the story about Brandon’s quest to balance the scales for his mother and father’s murders. It was a magical environment when I first explored Kyrandia. Full of inexplicable creatures, magical phenomenon, and scenes from fantasy. The logic puzzles and the mazes which required hand written drawings and breadcrumbs dropped from your inventory, were fiendish and great challenges to my elementary aged mind. The usual puzzles created from mixing and matching inventory items were solved mostly through trial and error for me, since I had not yet learned about any formal or informal systems of logic to aid my solution seeking.
The Kyrandian trilogy is abandonware, which may be said of software that have stopped selling and have lapsed in copyright protection. The companies that produced and owned the copyright to Kyrandia could sue to enforce those copyrights, if they still existed. And if Kyrandia was still economically worth something, other companies would have sought to obtain the copyrights. But they didn’t.
The trilogy tells three different stories in the same land. It was one of the precursors to multiculturalism. The comprehension of multiple cultures requires that you have a cosmopolitan viewpoint. You cannot simply look through the world from your perspective and your experiences and call yourself cosmopolitan. Nor does seeing things from other people’s perspective get any easier with time. Since as you grow older, you begin to create filters in your mind of what you think should be right or wrong. Your brain filters new data according to these accepted world views and tends to reject most of them out of hand if they conflict with your prejudices and judgments.
Shrinkwrapped writes about this subject in depth. I’ll only quote the portion that is relevant to my line of thought here. However, please do read the rest when you have a moment.
Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face
The mechanisms that succeed in seizing our sightline fall into two basic classes: bottom up and top down. Bottom-up attentiveness originates with the stimulus, with something in our visual field that is the optical equivalent of a shout: a wildly waving hand, a bright red object against a green field. Bottom-up stimuli seem to head straight for the brainstem and are almost impossible to ignore, said Nancy Kanwisher, a vision researcher at M.I.T., and thus they are popular in Internet ads.
Top-down attentiveness, by comparison, is a volitional act, the decision by the viewer that an item, even in the absence of flapping parts or strobe lights, is nonetheless a sight to behold…
Recent studies with both macaques and humans indicate that attentiveness crackles through the brain along vast, multifocal, transcortical loops, leaping to life in regions at the back of the brain, in the primary visual cortex that engages with the world, proceeding forward into frontal lobes where higher cognitive analysis occurs, and then doubling back to the primary visual centers. En route, the initial signal is amplified, italicized and annotated, and so persuasively that the boosted signal seems to emanate from the object itself… [Emphasis mine-SW]
Whether lured into attentiveness by a bottom-up or top-down mechanism, scientists said, the results of change blindness studies and other experiments strongly suggest that the visual system can focus on only one or very few objects at a time, and that anything lying outside a given moment’s cone of interest gets short shrift. The brain, it seems, is a master at filling gaps and making do, of compiling a cohesive portrait of reality based on a flickering view.
Fire play, a sort of mini riff, by chance, of Shrink’s Firefly post which I’ll write about later on.
A person that is young tends not to hold racist or prejudiced views, unless picked up from outside stimuli. I had the luck and privilege of being introduced to the world and the characters that inhabit that stage through these old PC-DOS adventure games. I had the misfortune, however, of being introduced to environmentalism, police, military, and political dynamics by the main sewer media. Thus I held these two types of philosophies hand in hand. On one hand, I saw the world as someplace to be explored and delved for hidden knowledge and wisdom. On the other hand, I was operating on a few prejudices that I had picked up from anti-military and Leftist influences via Hollywood and the tube.
Via certain stimuli like Kyrandia and the The Hand of Fate, I was required to actively try to piece together bits and pieces from the environment I saw on the screen according to some logic or inner working that was not revealed to me. I did not have internet access back then nor would I want to use money on a hint line. Over a period of years, with on and off again attempts, I was able to complete Kyrandia and then The Hand of Fate.
Via certain Hollywood shows and serial productions, I came to believe that the military, or any person in uniform, were only interested in demonstrating their authority and bullying civilians around. The military crushed civil liberties whenever it was convenient for them to do so. For example, many civilians were not allowed into restricted areas. Why? Apparently, simply because the military has decided that this is just how it is going to be. A totally arbitrary decision that is supposed to be seen as totally arbitrary by the audience watching. You also got a sense that the sentry guard telling the civilians to go away doesn’t even know what is in there. He isn’t making choices for himself, you see, he is just following orders like an automaton.
The whole idea of “national security” was only ever brought up for the military and other officials to stamp down on individualism, curiosity, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.
You can see why I reacted negatively to such military actions given my basic inquisitiveness and need to challenge my surroundings introduced and practiced through computer games, books, astronomy and cosmology texts, etc..
After awhile, those two lines of philosophies impacted after 9/11. 9/11 was only special to me because it was a disaster I saw on the news as it was happening. Or immediately after it was happening. Other news, such as the bombing of the Chinese embassy and the Oklahoma bombings and Columbine, were very distant to me because I didn’t watch the news. The news, even then, was recognized by me as uninteresting and not a viable route to learning about the things I wanted to learn about. To satisfy my curiosity, I watched such shows as Dirty Jobs, Discovery Channel, History Channel, PBS, etc. CNN and Fox News? Never before 9/11.
I also became interested in psychology about the same time I became interested in philosophy. To my way of thinking, if I can figure out what people are thinking of, I can get ahead of the game and avoid problems or solve problems. If I knew what the game developers of Kyrandia were thinking, I could have solved the puzzles in a shorter amount of time and avoided much frustration. But that was not my reason for studying psychology. I studied the field for much the same reasons as Neo-Neocon. I was curious and fascinated by the process of human thoughts and I also had an innate goodness and desire to help others.
In an ironic and hindsight sort of way, I now realize that much of any adventure game dealing with NPC puzzles involves you helping such people and getting an item or area unlocked so you can progress further towards the end goal of your quest.
There were no hints or other people to help you out, if you could not help yourself. So I learned something about the benefits of determination from rather unlikely sources. That was mental determination. The physical determination was acquired from similar, yet different, sources. Encounters with death, pain, and isolation are great learning experiences to help those that are young comprehend the benefits to physical determination.
Children are pliable and eternally adaptable. The glory of humanity is that we have carried such childlike qualities to our adult life. We are not locked into one path set by nature as adults and that is it. We have intelligence and free will, we can change through learning new things. While we can do such things, it is still very rare because of human psychology.
After I picked up a few things concerning human psychology, I came to think of psychological warfare and propaganda as fields in which I would be able to satiate my curiosity with. The step after comprehending how people think, after all, should be how to manipulate what people think.
And yet, that kind of thing was something I naturally found quite disgusting and unattractive. To a person interested in free thinking and exploration of the world and abstract concepts, the idea of manipulating people to make them do things is abhorrent. After all, that is what the military did.
It was around near that time when 9/11 occurred, while I was reading philosophy and psychology. After 9/11 occurred, I started reading more about propaganda because you just couldn’t avoid it when reading news accounts, polls, political machinations, and Presidential speeches.
My curiosity had finally encountered itself, in a way. In order to comprehend how others thought, I had to comprehend why I thought certain things. And that lead to my prejudices about the military and various other things that required introspection. It was a neat little completion of a circle. It wasn’t like I was actively avoiding things that were connected to the military before 9/11. Like most boys that was my age then, I had a peripheral interest in violence, firearms, fighting, wars, etc. Now a days, of course, I have far more than a “peripheral” interest. It was just that even if I saw Black Hawk Down, my prejudices still wouldn’t evaporate. While I could see the individuals fighting in Black Hawk Down as humans deserving of help if I encountered them, I could still not think good things of the military hierarchy that decided people should die and sacrifice for ambiguous and meaningless goals. Except, wasn’t it Clinton and the government that decided such things for the military in Somalia? And didn’t the Rangers say afterwards in a PBSesque interview that they didn’t mind being asked to give their life for their country, so long as those lives weren’t given in vain?
Those two things, government negligence and fallibility combined with individual courage and virtue in the military, were what started eroding the barriers that kept my prejudices safe. Prejudices that I had adopted unconsciously from various external stimuli a decade earlier.
An interesting thing I noted was that I didn’t notice that I was changing. I noticed that I was learning new things and comprehending stuff I couldn’t before, but I didn’t notice that my basic values and philosophy had changed. I was still curious about human nature and my environment. I still cared my fellows, men and women. I didn’t become a jackbooted thug just because I admired individuals in the US military. Nothing had changed fundamentally as far as I knew. And yet, everything had changed.
Once you comprehend how your own thoughts can be manipulated, dissected, and pieced back together, you now comprehend how other people’s thoughts and feelings can be used against them. And even if you refuse, out of a sense of honor or ethics standard, to avoid doing that, unscrupulous individuals will not obey your standards of right and wrong.
So there was a choice to make. Do I recognize the painful reality or do I go back into a cocoon in which the world is rosy because it fits my conceptions of what the world should look like? Shouldn’t everyone make their own decisions based upon their thoughts, instead of being influenced by others using advertisement and propaganda? Yes, everyone should be like that, but everyone isn’t. The former is wishful thinking; the latter is reality.
PS.
I am currently playing Malcolm’s Revenge for the first time. I plan on replaying Hand of Fate with speech. Nostalgia is nice and beneficial to human temperament, but it is just that. A warm memory of a past that no longer exists. It should be cherished precisely because it no longer exists.
Rome Total War: Middle Earth March 9, 2008
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I have just discovered a mod set in the Total War barbarian invasions game that sets to faithfully recreate half of Middle Earth according to Tolkien lore. This must be the motherload for Tolkien fans that wish to use Middle Earth units in a fight. Sure, a real time strategy game in the form of Battle for Middle Earth was released, but they used the rock-paper-scissors model of tactics. The Rome Total War engine uses morale, fatigue, and all kinds of other goodies. Check out this trailer of the mod if you wish to see just why somebody would wish to play it on an old game.
Rome Total War Mod: Europa Barbarum November 11, 2007
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At the TW forums is this thread that provides unit card graphics for the recruitable units under the Romanii faction.
This is a very rich and historic mod with many background stories of the various units and buildings. The trait system is complex and tailored to different cultures such as Rome, Greece’s, and the steppe barbarians.
You can download this mod for Rome Total War here.
Tiger Direct Deal September 27, 2007
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Check it out
It is actually a very good bare bones kit. THe memory model usually goes for 20 dollars more [figure corrected]. And you have one stick of 1 gigabyte memory, which provides you better upgrading opportunities. Usually for now, 1gigabyte is enough, but if you are using Vista then you will need more than 2 gigabytes. Having to only buy one stick of 1gig or 1gig+ of extra RAM makes upgrade simpler.
You also get a 450 Watt power supply, which is enough to power almost anything you would need and extra accessories as well. The normal power supply is a 300 Watt one.
At 300 dollars after rebate, this is an excellent deal. The motherboard has 8 USB connections and is based upon the nVidia architecture. The processor is Intel Dual Core, the newest CPU architecture. First it was hyperthread, now it is Dual Core.
The new motherboards operate on DDR2 memory, which is actually cheaper than DDR1 memory.
While you could save 10 to 20 dollars from buying the same motherboard bundled with the same processor from tigerdirect, you would have to install it yourself.
Quick Guide on buying video cards and computers September 26, 2007
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For one thing, given the rate of technological progress, expect your brand new product to lose out around 50% of its status in a year to 2 years. Lower percentage decreases if you bought top of the line 1000+ or 1500+ dollar products for computers or $200+ video card products.
So in essence while there might be a 20% increase in performance from a 500 dollar computer to a 1000 dollar computer, by buying the 500 dollar computer now, because it is cheap, you will be able to spend the 500 dollars conserved in 1 to 2 years and still be top of the line, nearly anyways. This is compared to the buying strategy that buys top of the line products at retail or slightly less than retail prices when such product lines arrive on the shelves. The difference between relatively modern and state of the art, may be simply 30% yet the cost difference may be far more than 2X. You are essentially buying, if you so choose, state of the art products for immediate gratification. Again, this kind of buying strategy is different from the more conservative strategy I first listed.
[Typically what I mean by "obsolete" is the time frame in which you can buy a computer that outperforms your current one in all sectors, and have it cost 50% less than what you bought your first computer for. A 500 dollar computer in 2000 would become obsolete, in my view, when a 250 dollar computer in 2002 would outperform in ALL aspects the 500 dollar computer. Typically the rate of obsolescence for CPUs are lower than the ones for ram and the obsolescence rate for RAM is lower than that for GPU, graphics cards]
Concerning recouping of costs or conserving of dollar value, there are some methods people use to make the strategy of always buying brand new state of the art products more cost effective. For one thing, ebay allows you to sell your state of the art products once the “new state of the art” has been reached. Since you paid like hundreds for one piece of electronics and thousands in aggregate computer component costs, you are able to recoup some of your expenses by selling it on ebay. THe users will bid because while your product may not be brand spanking new, it would still be at least one tech level above what most people could afford and would definitely be far <B>cheaper</b> than an equivalent retail product. So this is sort of an addendum strategy to buying state of the art. It requires you to use your own initiative to recoup your expensive buying habits, but in return you get unparalleled performance. Not cost effective for people that don’t use games or their computers a lot, of course. That would simply then be a status symbol, rather than a tool for commerce and life.
Okay, second topic. The guide on buying video cards is sort of similar to the one to computers. I am leaving out the very different models of computers, such as barebones kit, full complete kits, individual assembly of computer with pre-selected parts, etc. There is a rather significant difference between buying a bare bones kit and stocking it up to your standards and needs, and buying a full kit complete with computer accessories and near state of the art memory,video card, monitor, etc. The individual computer assembly strategy is employed by people that already have an economic grasp of what components cost, what they can afford, and what they are willing to pay for. Aside from that, the topic on video cards is divided into similar categories.
For one thing, there are two primary main designers of video cards for computers: nVidia and ATI. Different manufacturers take their motherboard design and tweak it, thus you get like eVGA cards and whatevers. Then there is the naming conventions such as Geforce 2 TI, Geforce 4 420, Geforce 5 GO 5600, Geforce 6600, Geforce 8800 GT, Geforce 8600 GT XXX. Seems like nonsense code to most folks. It is very important to understand the difference, however, since it will allow you to get the best value for your dollar. I will chiefly focus on nVidia graphics processors, rather than the ATI brand naming conventions. They are similar in design, but the numbers are the same. Both nVidia and ATI use the “series” form of naming conventions, after about series 4 or 5 I believe. The first number after the “GeForce” is the series number. So Geforce 2 is the second generation, Geforce 4 is the fourth, and so forth. THe early generations were sort of industry revolutionary days, so don’t expect much consistency. THey were still figuring out what was what. WIth the advent of ATI as a main competitor, the two companies figured out a sort of “balance of powers” in terms of marketing and advertisement. One area where knowledge of war, strategy, and politics come into play for a short time.
Essentially, every new generation of video cards come with new technology, new shader model versions, and better chip architecture and memory/ram/ramdac/core speeds (in mega hertz and soon gigahertz). So the value is determined by the performance and generation your product comes from. Performance is determined by the market the company seeks to address. For rich folks and power gamers, nVidia provides the upper number systems, the 800+ such as 8800 or 7800 or 6800. The first number is the generation number, the second number is the quality of the card in terms of how much raw power they stuffed into it. It is like an up armored humvee in a sense. Instead of a newly designed jeep, we get the old one and spruce it up with extras and bells. That would be the x800s and x900s and anything above. For folks on a lower budget, in the 200-300 range, they have the below x800 line. They remove some of the power (like horsepower and cylinders in engines) and reduce the memory bandwidth and core clock. Still better than the last generation’s stuff, but now it becomes more difficult to tell.
To give some concrete examples, Tigerdirect.com sells Geforce 6600 card, a low budget card of the 6 generation series which had a very nice value especially since it was the lowest end card you could get that had Shader Version 3.0 (minimum required by Bioshock), at 79.99. In comparison, tigerdirect.com also sells Geforce 7300 LE at around 69.99. The x300 series are a really low budget card compared to the x600 or x800. I mean, they strip much of its power away, leaving the main GPU, graphics processing unit, with little memory speed or processing pipes to work with. In practice, a 7300 would definitely be outperformed by a 6800, even though the 7300 is a generation higher on the scale of things. Now take a look at the more expensive line of Geforce 8800 line of cards. The reason why it is more expensive is because those cards DON’T have most of their power stripped away like the x300s. It is why typically a 6800 card can outperform a Geforce generation 8 card of the 300 series. Typically speaking of course, since there are a lot of overclocking, memory size, memory bandwidth, etc issues that could affect speed.
Anyways, the value of the x300 series is pretty low. In that, before long you will have to replace it if you wish to play the more modern games. It’s 50, 60, 70 dollar value will be replaced by the new generation’s x300, thus requiring a very high turn over value that still won’t let you play most games well. However, the x600 series I have found are very affordable and are of average value. The 6600 which I bought had shader version 3.0, which allowed me to play Bioshock without upgrading. I had to play it at the 640X resolution, but it was good for a year and a half for most things. It was good value for a card that only cost around 55 dollars one bay. Now the 8600 is the newest generation card, and it prices around 110-220 retail in US dollars. Typically a x600 card is obsolete by the time two generations of new video cards have been produced. That takes about 2 years all in all. That still has more [affordable] endurance than the 8800 card that costs 300-800 dollars. That might conceivably last 3 years to 4 before becoming obsolete.
Obsolescence for video cards are a tricky phenomenon. Framerates, meaning performance, is important while playing games for with a fps below 20, you will get slowness. SLowness equals more time spent on game and less value. Ebay typically sells new cards for 25-50% off if you can get a good deal. My friend Phileosophos bought the new nVidia Geforce SLI cards that cost something to 800 dollars total for two cards in SLI. He usually sells old video cards on ebay after a year or two, since Phil likes maximum performance and he is willing to pay through the nose for such. Buying retail gives you warranty, usually eBay doesn’t have warranty unless you buy from some kind of select shop rather than an individual. I am okay with Resolution 800X600 or 1024X860. Others prefer 1600X+ resolutions or 1980X resolutions. The higher the resolution, the greater the demand on the video graphics card. A card that might be able to play games well at 800X could have its fps, or performance, value decreased by maybe 50% once the resolution is bumped one level to 1024X.
Adrenaline Vault: Global Conflicts: Palestine August 12, 2007
Posted by ymarsakar in PC Games.2 comments
July 2007 was a busy month in terms of news from Palestine and Israel. The conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the West Bank and Gaza Strip managed to grab headlines away from sectarian violence in Iraq while paving the way for the Arab League to officially meet with the Israeli government for the first time. With all the headlines last month, it was sometimes difficult to remember that the stories were but the latest chapter in a series of events that reach further back than May 14th, 1948, when the State of Israel declared independence. The complex history of this region of the world is often read in biased terms by all parties involved, creating a morass of different interpretations that can confuse anyone.It is within this intellectual chaos that Serious Games Interactive sets its first offering. Global Conflicts: Palestine attempts to go beyond educational games that add gameplay elements to rote learning and immerse you in the contemporary world of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an investigative reporter. As you pursue the news, you come face to face with both the larger aspects of the conflict, such as the bombings, kidnappings and military reprisals, as well as the smaller aspects, such as the security checkpoints, poverty and discrimination.
An interesting setting for sure. I stopped going to Adrenaline Vault because their site was down for quite awhile, at least to me, while they were changing website layouts. While going through my mozilla links, I decided to revisit it. The new layout is in the form of a blog, which I found particularly interesting because I’ve always wanted to ask the individual reviewers certain questions to judge their bias and likes. If you know that a particular intervewer doesn’t like the games that you like, then you have a reliable way to judge his reviews in the one criteria that matters: how it relates to what you, the consumer, wants.
They seemed to have dropped their download section, which in my view is a good business decision. Fileplanet and fileshack and their competitors have pretty much taken up that niche. There’s no point shelling out money for bandwidth when people come to your site for the reviews and the news on new games. Avault has two features I like. They review games that often slip through the cracks of major publications or internet game news sites. They also add in quite a lot of detail in their final grading sections, which allows me to reflect on what particular things lead them to their grading decisions.
Course I selected this particular game review because of the political and propaganda connections to the real and serious world.
[Whoops. Forgot the link]
