Centre of the Universe

The PC-GPE, or to give it its full name, the PC Game Programmer’s Encyclopedia is ancient. I can remember treasuring my copy of it I had way back in high school, and I had thought that it had disappeared.

The PC-GPE is a comprehensive collection of articles on how to program various bits of hardware with particular emphasis on games. So things like how to program a VGA card, or joystick are covered.

Most of the hardware covered would appear archaic by today’s standards, but it was a classic in its day, and still has useful nuggets in there.

Well, as I said in a previous post, I got Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion for Christmas. After I installed it and tried to run it, I almost lost heart. The game through up a Visual C++ runtime error, and no settings I changed could fix it.

Checking online, I found a forum discussing it, but the link they supplied no longer appeared to work, so I had an idea.

I downloaded the No-CD crack from GameCopyWorld, and lo and behold, the game now runs perfectly.

This seems to indicate that Locomotion has a bit of an issue detecting CD drives. My drive is on E: (often the default is D:) and my drive is also a DVD-writer. Which of these is the root cause of the problem, I do not know, but by installing the small fix, it does not matter much anymore.

When it comes to computer games, I have a particular fancy for railroad business simulators. Now, I am not talking about actual train simulators, like Microsoft Train Simulator, but rather railroad simulators that focus on the business side of things, like Railroad Tycoon, Transport Tycoon and A-train.

That is why,for Christmas this year, I asked Claudia to get me Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion, even though it was in the bargain bin. I simply cannot resist these games.

It all started when I first bought the original Railroad Tycoon way back in the early 1990’s, when I was still a teenager. I absolutely loved that game and played and replayed it endlessly.

Railroad Tycoon

Next up, I got into A-train, which was a seriously addictive, although underrated game. I enjoyed this one even more than Railroad Tycoon. It featured day-night variations, a stock market sim, and a healthy number of subsidiary businesses to build.

A-train

Transport Tycoon is the game that sucked up all my free time when I started university, and a brilliant game in my train-obsessed mind. I have played with the Deluxe version as well as played around with a few open-source ports of this game. It is a game that will never die for me.

Transport Tycoon Deluxe

Railroad Tycoon 2 I enjoyed, and played quite a bit, but, perhaps because, at the time, I was still too much into Transport Tycoon, I never played it to its full potential. It was a decent game none-the-less, and loved playing it.

Railroad Tycoon 2

The one game in this genre that I never fully got into was Sid Meier’s Railroads! It was not a bad game by any account, and I did find it fun, but it lacked the depth that the other games had, and therefore it got relegated to the shelf for times when I had nothing really else to play.

Sid Meier's Railroads

Now, though, I get to go and enjoy Locomotion….I know the game might be a bit dated, but considering how much I still love, Transport Tycoon, I am eager to see how it fairs.

In days gone by, in Siam, white elephants (which were essentially normal albino elephants) were considered sacred. This meant that by law, all white elephants had to be lavishly cared for by whomever owned them.

This little law came in useful for the king. You see, if one of his subjects irked the king, then as punishment, what the king would do is send a white elephant (as in a real live and kicking elephant) to the poor hapless courtier as a gift.

Now, the poor courtier was obliged to accept the gift, as it would be a massive insult to the king to refuse. Invariably, what this meant, is that the man would be reduced to poverty trying to pay for the lavish care required of him for the white elephant. A form of punishment unrivalled anywhere else.

Well, in a more modern version of this, a relative buying your son a Wii for Christmas (despite advice from me that it should be a Playstation or an Xbox) amounts to a white elephant.

You see, the problem is, last night after going to buy a Wii game for Cole, so that he would have something to play, it occurred to me that just about every game requires a special remote to play, which is extra, and if you want to play multiplayer, you would need TWO. At least with the other consoles the standard controller is more than sufficient.

And another problem is that there are far less budget titles available, which means having to fork out full price for games.

All this amounts to quite a bit of bother, especially when the economy is really biting hard…

Javascript is really starting to surprise me as a useful language. The latest project that has interested me isThe Render Engine, which is a Javascript based game engine.

It is an opensource endeavour and works in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. Unsurprisingly, I did not see Internet Explorer in the list.

There are a few demos on the site with an Asteroids clone and a few more.

One surprising feature is that it seems capable of creating games which wourk with the Nintendo Wii.

If you are old as I am, then you are likely to remember a little game that came out a good number of years ago called Skifree.

You were a skier skiing down a slope with a number of hazards (and bonuses) along the way. The point was to avoid the hazards to get to the finish line in the fastest time.

The graphics are simplistic – even by the standards of the mesolithic when this game was popular, but people seemed to love it.

Enter 2009 and xkcd. The latest webcomic published yesterday features the game, and then something amazing happens. So many people started downloading the game after seeing it on xkcd that it brings a few of those sites down.

The whole of Reddit was abuzz about Skifree.

Then this morning, I noticed that someone had during their lunch hour yesterday decided to write a version of Skifree using an HTML Canvas. It is missing a lot but looks just like the original. The original reddit post I saw this mentioned on is here.

All of this over one game, that happened to be the subject of one webcomic on the internet. Media has certainly changed!

The other night I was playing snakes and Ladders with Cole, and realised what a futile game that is.

Most games tend to be a mixture of logic and luck to varying degrees. Chess and checkers are almost wholly logic (which makes them so much more enjoyable to me), while games like Ludo or Jenga or Monopoly have quite a bit more luck thrown in, but still require a lot of thought to do well.

Now Snakes and Ladders is one of the exceptions. There is NO skill involved at all. The winner is solely determined by who gets to the end first based on what numbers you throw on a dice.

It is pretty much a kids version of playing the slots in a casino. I don’t see any thrill in winning a game where you have no control on the outcome. Winning just means you got lucky, and says nothing at all about how good you are.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, of all the games I play with Cole, he loves Snakes and Ladders the most….