Centre of the Universe » Gaming

PC-GPE on the Web

Serge Meunier — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:44:49 +0000

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.

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Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion struggles with CD detection

Serge Meunier — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:45:09 +0000

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.

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A few of my favourite train sims

Serge Meunier — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:16:00 +0000

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.

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The tale of the Wii elephant

Serge Meunier — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 07:00:22 +0000

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…

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The Render Engine

Serge Meunier — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:38:04 +0000

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.

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The effect of the modern internet, or, the revival of Skifree

Serge Meunier — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:07:18 +0000

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!

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Whoever dreamt up Snakes and Ladders?

Serge Meunier — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:19:05 +0000

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….

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A few must-have The Movies mods

Serge Meunier — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:44:53 +0000

I absolutely love The Movies, and even though I know the game is a few years old already, I find it still incredibly fun to play.

One good aspect of The Movies is that it is very easy to change almost any feature in the game by modifying the data files found in the Data\Pak folder. By putting one of the modded configuration files in the Data folder makes The Movies use that instead of the file found inside the pak file.

There are also a host of custom made movie sets available for download all over the internet. some work better than others, but they do provide a nice variety to the built-in sets.

One word of warning before you begin. These mods have the potential for completely ruining the gaming experience for you.

So, here is my list of great The Movies mods and utilities. Just click on the links to download them.

Pak Poker
This is THE most useful utility of all. It gives full access to all the files stored in the pak files, which in turns allows you to modify any of them to tailor-make your game.

The Employees mod
The employees mod gives you a heck of a lot more people lining up in the lines for each building. I found this useful since, especially when my stars started demanding an entourage, there just weren’t enough people.

Increased lot size
This little mod gives you a bigger lot size, which greatly helps in placing buildings in the game, since the default lot size is way too small for my liking.

If you would like to play with the values, I have found that in the first 3 values after [size] give the width and height as pairs of numbers. The second number of each pair can be pretty large, but my game crashed when trying to increase the first number, so be warned.

Experience mod
This mod gives all your employees a lot of experience.

Mood mod
Do you want all your stars to be in a good mood? This mod helps keep their mood good.

Social mod
This lets your stars increase their relationships much faster. I found this useful as I found in the unmodded game, this usually takes very long to improve.

Ground mod
This mod increases the attractiveness, and the speed at which people walk over various types of ground.

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Funny Farm – a sure way to lose several hours of your life

Serge Meunier — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:22:07 +0000

I cam across a link to a rather frustrating, yet completely addictive game, Funny Farm.

The game is divided into 25 “maps”, and you start with only the centre map available. The them for the centre map is “on the farm”, with each map having a different theme. Starting at the centre, there are a number of blank vertex coming off it – much like a mind-map, with dots representing the letters of the words that go there.

The aim of the game is to guess which words – related to the word in the adjoining vertex – which belong in each vertex. As you find more words, more vertices become available, and as you find words on the edge of the map, then the adjacent maps will become available too.

If you want a little help to allow you to get some sleep, have a look at this forum at Nordinho.

However, before you venture forth to this game, I absolve any responsibility for lost hours .

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JSNES: A new online Javascript NES emulator

Serge Meunier — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:06:43 +0000

Web technology has come a long way, and browsers are finally becoming fast enough to do a little bit of gaming.

JSNES is a NES emulator written by Ben Firshman, in Javascript, that will run on most browsers. A word of caution though – Javascript in most browsers is too slow to run JSNES with any real playability, although, Google Chrome, with its lightning fast Javascript engine runs this application without a problem.

For those of you who are too young to remember the NES, which stands for Nintendo Entertainment System, was the grandfather of today’s consoles. It was an old 8-bit console introduced in 1985, and was all the rage back then, and was the platform that launched the stardom of the Super Mario Brothers.

There is a small selection of the good old favourites available to play on the site.

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