BPI inside

Tag: Games

  • Metroid SR388 down the tubes

    A bit more than a year ago, the new website for Metroid SR388 opened its doors. It was very well received and had quite some fanbase which was eagerly waiting for the very promising Metroid SR388 metroid remake by a guy called "von richter".

    Nowadays I’ve given up all hope on this project. There has been some more progress and some more trailers but around spring this year the project began to stall. There was a bit confusion in the forums (vonRichter renamed himself to ProjectLeaderGuy and some crazy stuff) but from that time on there wasn’t much of any news.

    And now the website domain went down and is for sale again, so I guess that Metroid SR388, as much as it has been hyped in the community, is gone for good.

    What’s now left for me and my need for retro is another Metroid fan project, AM2R. I hope this one survives a bit longer and releases a final product sometime in the future.

  • Stackoverflow: first class Q/A for software developers

    For some time now I was aware that the Question/Answer platform from Joel Spolsky, StackOverflow.com, was up and life.
    But I didn’t bother any further as I was quite happy with Google and the set of references and personal know-how I’ve build up over the time.

    A few days ago I had a problem which was not solvable with my usual batch of resources and in my desperation I hopped over to StackOverflow and tried to find help there.
    Within a day I got exactly the hint I needed to be able to solve my problem and continue the work.

    Quite happy with this experience, I decided to give it a bit more thought and maybe also answer some questions myself if I knew a bit about it.
    After some time I noticed a bar on top of the site telling me that I had earned a "Student" badge and seconds afterward a "Scholar" badge. What were these? Reading on I found out that the "Student" badge means that someone accepted/voted on my question when he thought it was an useful question. And the "Scholar" badge means that an answer from me had been accepted as the most helpful one for the questioner. And then I noticed that on top of the page there was some sort of Score, the Reputation and also a small statistic on my earned badges.

    After thinking about it some more now and continuing to participate on the site I came to the conclusion that the way the questioning and answering works on StackOverflow.com is the most ingenious way to help developers I’ve seen so far in my life.

    StackOverflow.com turns the boring process of writing a question and giving an answer on forums and webpages into an exciting game, where good questions and answers are rewarded (by upvoting) and bad ones are hindered (by downvoting). And you also have a running score (the Reputation) which you can compare to others and is calculated from up/down-votings on your questions and answers and also how often your answer was considered as the best one for the one having the question. Even the factor how often your question has been found and visited counts to points and badges.

    Earning a lot of different badges and improved abilities on the site (e.g. leaving comments at Rep of 50, Retag questions with Rep 500 and even edit other peoples posts with a Reputation of 2000) add to the fact that one wants to reach the goals and also has a long-term motivation to continue giving help.
    And this means qualitatively high questions and answers as this earns more points faster and consistently on the long term than quick answers which only contain tiny pieces of help and get a few points for just a few hours.

    I personally already have added StackOverflow.com as a quick, reliable and qualitatively high resource to my recherche-sources and will continue to build up my highscore 🙂

  • Metroid SR388 website up

    Finally! After some delay the website for Metroid SR388 is up and available. vonRichter announced it on his (now deprecated?) blog. Currently the website contains only few new information but more is announced and can be expected.

    Furthermore, vonRichter has given a target date for the first playable demo of Metroid SR388: November 1st.

    It’s really hard to wait for the time to go by…

  • Full retro ahead

    After last weekends exams I had some time to spend on my Wii. Besides giving Super Smash Brothers Brawl a try, which ended with a mixed impression as I didn’t read the manual and was overwhelmed by the different game-modes and moves, I also installed the Homebrew Channel and added ScummVM and Snes9X.

    I spent a few relaxing hours with some of the LucasArts games (especially DOTT). As I have also read that Chrono Trigger will be rereleased for the Nintendo DS this winter and that Mega Man 9 will find its way to the Wii this fall, I’ve also played a few hours of SNES Chrono Trigger.

    Now if just Metroid SR388 could give me a bit more than this outdated trailer or this more recent anti-spoiler… my joy would be perfect 🙂

    Update And a new Mega Man 9 Trailer is out… I think I feel young again 🙂

  • System Shock 2 Addons

    Just for the record, so that I don’t forget about those:

  • Classic Remake – Metroid SR-388

    Maybe I’m a bit late on this but when I read about that I’ve been very excited and forgot to mention it. Metroid SR-388 is a fan project for Metroid which takes on the SNES version "Super Metroid" and follows this path.

    Currently, all what is available is this teaser but as the creator says it is already outdated and even this looks incredible, the expectations for this game are quite high.

    I just hope the final product will be available and copyright issues with someone (Nintendo) won’t put this to an end.

  • Dwarf Fortress – a new tempting time-waster?

    Recently I read an article in the german webzine Telepolis about a quite unusual game, Dwarf Fortress. At first I thought, well yeah another of this small games which would be able to entertain me for an hour or two but after reading the article and digging through the games website and wiki it really seems to turn out as a huge enjoyment.

    In fact, this game doesn’t have fancy graphics or an easy user interface, quite the contrary. You have to cope with a, at first at least, disturbing ASCII-graphics-interface and an unintuitive menu system. But these hurdles are soon forgotten when one gets into the extremely deep environment where one cannot directly control the dwarfs but rather tell them what to do. If they then really follow your orders depends on the current state of the dwarf as well as his mood and running orders. The complex interactions between the many elements of this yet-to-leave-alpha-status game seem like the individuality of a hundred Tamagotchis thrown together and distilled.

    I’m not completely able to express my curiousness about this game so I’d rather like to point you to this small introduction and the followup posts on that in the archives of that page. You have to read the posts from bottom to top, sorry ’bout that. Also have a look at the Dwarf Fortress Wiki for more info.

    Update: Also, I imagine if someone unfamiliar is watching someone other playing DF it must look like as if the player is looking at the Matrix itself. I really have to take care, that I wait with digging deeper into Dwarf Fortress until my exams are over this weekend.

  • Wii games pickup list update

    Just a small update to my Wii games pickup list:

    Just to write down a quick list of games I’d really like to acquire so that I don’t forget it until they are available.

    • Already picked up

      • Mortal Kombat Armageddon
      • Super Paper Mario
      • Zelda – Ocarina of Time (VC, incl. Classic Controller)

    • High Possibility

      • Metroid Prime Corruption
      • Super Mario Galaxy

    • Low Possibility

      • Godfather: Blackhand Edition

    • No Possibility

      • The Rest (until a review or tryout changes my mind 😉 )

  • Wii games pickup list

    Just to write down a quick list of games I’d really like to acquire so that I don’t forget it until they are available.

    • High Possibility

      • Mortal Kombat Armageddon
      • Metroid Prime Corruption
      • Super Paper Mario
      • Super Mario Galaxy
      • Zelda – Ocarina of Time (VC, incl. Classic Controller)

    • Low Possibility

      • Godfather: Blackhand Edition

    • No Possibility

      • The Rest (until a review or tryout changes my mind 😉 )

  • Freecraft is back

    Last year I mentioned that Freecraft was shut down.

    Now I found news at LinuxDevCenter, that Stratagus is the resurrected Freecraft, just de-emphasizing WarCraft compatibility.