morse

Wow, a game by akella. I would say that's all you need to know to stay away from it . Actually, it was fun looking at it. The very moment I saw a bat on the guy's shoulder I thought to myself "hm, somebody must've read volkodav lately", and sure enough, somebody did. I never watched the movie, but I did read the book. To my taste the witcher is better. Volkodav was written by 40-something single woman, and it shows. She desperately needs a man, but not just any man, a perfect man with a broken heart, which she can heal with the power of love... I think I need to puke. So anyway, nice game. I wonder how does it sound in Russian. I always prefer the original sound, even if I don't understand it. I don't trust the localizations, more often then not they are just cheap. Maybe it's the case here. Also, fun fact, did you know there was three games based on that movie? This one was the best, and the only one published outside of russia. Also, as another fun fact, you said that games based on movies usually suck because the publishers rush it to meet the release. Not the case. This one was actually ready before the film premier, and was lying on the shelf for half a year.

Actually, steam DRM is also something that the game developers enable or disable in their games. Steam just provides the API, but it's the game that uses it. Steam can't just disable the DRM in some arbitrary games, because it's not steam that put it there. As for "old OS support", and how gamedev should make the games playable forever, I have another one for you: how about old hardware support? Let's take "glide" for instance. To run properly the game written for glide, not only do you need the old OS, but also the old hardware. It is impossible to run such game on modern system, even if you manage to install the old OS on it. So what do you think the developers need to do in this case? Right now we have a new graphic API named vulkan. I can imagine that in 5-10 years it will replace completely both DX and OpenGL. The newer hardware won't even have the driver support for the older API, like they do not have glide support right now. ALL the games we have now will be unplayable, unless you have old OS, old drivers and old hardware to run it. So I think it's just impossible to make a game that will be runnable forever.

Hm, you're definitely right about US being more expensive than Poland. In fact, I think there are not very many countries that are cheaper But I believe you once said you live in Gdansk? If you considering a move, you may want to look for smaller towns, maybe even a village. You workplace is your computer, and if the clear air is all you need you might be better there. It'll also cut your price.

I would argue that even that is more recent. Especially in Germany. Atomic energy was always considered the future energy by many nations. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl never changed it. Well, much. TMI was largely without consequences, and Chernobyl... Well, maybe the west didn't believe in the soviet technology, I don't know (which would be wrong BTW, the technology had nothing to do with what happened there, but it's a long story). Also, Chernobyl happened after the 1982. But it is the recent years, when we see the rise of various eco-freaks. Greenpeace, global warming hype, anti-atomic movement - all that. My theory is, that it started after the fall of the soviet union, when the leftist propaganda all over the world suddenly needed the new ideology. Before that it was the capitalists oppressing the worker class. Now it's the capitalists oppressing the environment. They all started to tell us what sinners we are for not loving the nature like they do. I hope they all die some day, like the communism did. Preferably, without rendering 200 million people to a complete misery, like the communism did. Atomic energy in particular only recently become the target of eco-biggotry. Specifically, after the fukushima disaster. Which happened in 2011. And this game was released in 2012. Hm, do I smell a political message here? Now to the technical part. First of all: reactor meltdown is not the same as atomic explosion. People rarely understand that. Meltdown actually has nothing to do with explosions at all. It is, as the name suggests, a meltdown: part of the reactor melts down. Period. There was indeed an explosion in Chernobyl, but it had nothing to do with the meltdown or atomic fuel, and more to do with zirconium control rods and water dissipating into hydrogen and oxygen. Which leads us to second: the biggest problem with such a disaster is not an explosion, but the pollution. Usual atomic reactor has a fuel capacity of 50-100 metric tons of uranium. That is A LOT. If you throw it in the atmosphere (like in Chernobyl), or dump it in the ocean (like in fukushima), you'll get a fucking problem. But beats me how such a thing can cause a rainforest fire. Or global warming. Or whatever. And finally, pollution and radioactive waste. And that's why I particularly hate eco-freaks. Atomic power plants do not increase pollution, they decrease it! You can live 100 meters away from an atomic plant and be okay and healthy. Have you ever seen a coal power plant? It's a fucking death zone. You better not approach it closer than 50 km. But what about radioactive waste? Surely the disposal sites are the hellholes of earth? Well, that is partially true. You sure can't make the dumps clean. But here's the fun fact, which most people don't think about for some reason: atomic plants don't produce waste out of thin air. They produce it from fuel, which is as much radioactive as the waste. And which was also not produced out of thin air by the evil capitalists. It was mined from the earth. So atomic plants do not increase the amount of radioactive materials on the planet. If anything, they decrease it. So we take the radioactive materials from all over the earth, and dump it inside one well-equipped facility (or not so well-equipped, if we're talking about the Chelyabinsk dump site, but this is again, another story). Now tell me it's a bad thing. I can understand that maybe the atomic energy is not the best, but in absence of the magical energy algae, that's what we got to use.

At one hand I am the same age as Ross, so my teens are long forgotten. On the other hand, when I was a teen, I was listening to classical music. Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky... And stuff like this never ages. I think if you REALLY want to tell everybody "I'm an artsy nonconformist, and I don't give a shit about trends and opinions of others" - that's what you should go for. Apart from the obvious reason that classical music is just very good (it has centuries of time-test, nothing else doesn't even come close) and that it will nurture a good taste in music in you, apart from that I can guarantee you, that you'll be the only person in your class (hell, maybe even in the whole school, including staff) who'll be listening to something like that.

We must be overjoyed actually, we are witnessing the first steps of the AI right here But regardless of the quality of that particular AI, I don't see the issue here. Of course AI will never properly categorize "artsy" and "obscure" things, but youtube is a commercial organisation, not a patron of arts. Advertisements are not some manna falling from heavens, the business companies order it, and they decide for themselves what kind of clips they want to pay for, and youtube just tries to match their requests. If it does that good it will be profitable, which is it's ultimate goal. If not, the competitors will eat it in a snap, the e-business is very mobile. So, if you're an artist who seeks the new creative ways to express himself - ask your fans for help, and remember, that most artists lived in poverty. And if you want that sweet lucrative deal from the corporate business, well, too bad, you have to conform to the mass-media standards.

Also, fun fact: the MIDI files containing music are not actually supposed to by all piano! The tracks inside the files are marked like this (world2 midi file as an example): Sequence: twinkle1 Track name: twinkle2 Track name: flutes Track name: bassoon Track name: clarinet But the instrument is indeed set to be "grand piano" for all (which is the default for midi). It shouldn't be hard to actually modify the instruments to the ones the track names suggest. It won't make the music less sombre, but it'll at least be less piano

Oh, no, I'm not worried about legality in a, well, legal sense. I meant "gameplay means". How are you supposed to unlock them without, you know, hex editors As for providing the save - sure. But keep in mind that this is for the DOS version. The windows version seem to not go well with wine, and I don't have a windows box I can screw with right now. If anyone can send me a sample savefile from the windows copy, I can try something with it too. Unpack the content of the file into the GAME folder, rewriting everything. This should create the player "morse" with no password and every level unlocked. dos_baldies_save.zip

I downloaded the file with the idea to mess a little with everything. Forget the game! Out of ~500MB of the disk content the win game occupies ~80MB and the dos version of game ~90MB. And in each case about 50MB of them is the single file which looks like a video. Everything else is nice collection of some ancient software, like netscape navigators 3 and 4, directx 4.0, acrobat reader 3.0 and some weird educational materials about the late 90s internet. UPD: OK, I had a little fun with the dos version of the game. Just as I suspected, the savefile format wasn't very complicated. Just a bit of hex edit magic, and I have all the levels available. And guess what! This game has a shitton of bonuslevels! I have no idea how to enable them legally, or even if you can really play them at all, but at least knowing they exist is a start.

Hm, so you're familiar with GitS and Akira? And even mention some stock anime poses. I guess game dungeon on "Oni" is not far away

And now humble bundle is selling the sources of uncanny valley for just $12.29! Now who wants to turn this game into a masterpiece?

Nice episode. I can see you put a lot of effort into it. Yet, I kinda sorry to say that I don't understand the point. You spent 40 minutes explaining to us why this game is bad. Is this what "game dungeon" is about? The game wasn't bad in any particularly bizarre way, just bad gameplay. The voice-acting was funny (the REAL eastern-european accent for once, hollywood should take a note ), but it doesn't warrant a 40-minutes episode. There are hundreds of games with bad gameplay, especially diablo-style action RPGs. Why exactly did you pick that one? So, I think this episode doesn't answer one important question: why should we care about this strange game we never heard about? And this undermines all the efforts.

It's not negativity I'm filled with, but rather pragmatism. Chances of a source code being released are pretty much nil. ID software remains the only company in the industry who is reliably releasing the sources to it's engines. And while it brought the company the unanimous love of all the opensource community, it never gave them any commercial success. The practice of opensourcing your games is not viable in the current videogame industry. So with that in mind, I think it's not fair to call Daybreak "evil". They didn't commit any sins, they probably did what they could, keeping PS1 running even though they could probably shut it down as soon as PS2 got released. The task of committing developers to the end-of-life plans for their games is already very big. But if it includes changing the attitude of the entire industry towards opensourcing their software, then it goes from the "very hard" category right into the "nigh impossible".

Is it? It's debatable. I will agree that it's at least NOT WORSE. For example, I'd prefer to not play a game at all, than to play a buggy parody (I was much younger when I played L2 ), but that's me. But then again, better for whom? Certainly not for the developers, who I guess want to increase the number of PS2 players. Yeah, like that's ever gonna work. NCSoft was trying for years to shut down the russian L2 servers. All they managed to do was to learn some fancy russian swear words. Releasing a source code, especially the one that wasn't designed to be released, is a very complicated process. It's like opening a pandora box, who knows what kind of legal landmines are hidden there. And once found, you can't just "close" the code and politely ask everybody to unsee it for old times sake. And let's not forget that a) they are probably using a good chunk of PS1 server software for PS2, so it's not abandoned yet, and b) lots of code can be just licensed, they don't own it in the first place, so they certainly can't release it to public (one of the landmines I mentioned). You're speaking "The people who actually fired this game up" like it's a sure-thing to happen the moment the sources are released. Suppose they release the sources. Just dumped the whole thing to public in one giant archive. It requires dozens of people working full-time and knowing what they are doing to just run this thing, what are the chances that a couple of people with no knowledge of the software sort this out at their free time? I'd say the chances are slim. The chances that the competitors will use the code to their advantage is on the other hand very real. And don't get me wrong - I'm all pro-opensource. I participate in a couple of GNU projects myself, and when any company releases some code to public, I cheer for that company, even when this company is microsoft. But here, I just don't see how this can work out. Well, maybe we have a misunderstanding on the meaning of the word "play" or "enjoy". Being able to run around the game world reminiscing about the times when there was something to actually do there isn't something I'd call "fun". While I support the idea of end-of-life plans for the games, I still think that there are games for which the end-of-life plans are simply impossible. BTW, there was one item I wanted to note for some time. There is this game called "Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet". It's interesting because it was made for one purpose: to incorporate the artwork of Michel Gagne. It was sponsored by microsoft and released as an XBox exclusive, and later ported to this unholy abomination "games for windows live". It got a couple of awards and then was mostly forgotten. A couple of years later GFWL finally died, and what was my surprise, when I found out that ITSP was ported to steam. Achievments, network and all that, all now use steam. It made me to beleive in better in people, even if the small studio which was tied by microsoft contracts managed to port it's small indie game three years after it's release, then not all is lost

You can try the IR lamp for the "dark gameplays". You'll need to remove the IR filter from your webcam though.