AKIRA Live Action Fan Trailer

I found this on EpicStream website here.

This looks FANTASTIC! I would LOVE if this got made into a full movie.

Tim Schafer plays DotT

This is a video of gaming God Tim Schafer playing Day of the Tentacle basically doing commentary on the game.

I’ve recently played Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders on SCUMM VM and the next game I’m planning to play on it was Day of the Tentacle. I was very happy to come across this video on PCGamer website because now I get to listen to and watch what is basically a commentary for the game by Tim Schafer himself before I replay the game.
Ah, nostalgia. Your name is LucasArts Classic Adventures.
 

Tim Schafer plays DotT

Click on this text for the original PCGamer article.

Nothing some duct tape wouldn’t fix…

There! It’s fixed! Seriously though, I have fixed my main gaming PC and just in time for the Steam’s Big Summer Sale 2013 too! My old video card HD5770 got upgraded to HD6670 and games look beautiful!

This Summer Sale I got Just Cause 2, System Shock 2 (yeah, about time I finally caught up on this classic), Warhammer 40k Dawn of War II, Shadowrun Returns, FTL (amaaaazing game, especially for an old Trekkie like myself), Dollar Dash (anyone wants to play?), DLC Quest (a very cute although short game) and last but not least – Deus Ex Human Revolution Augmented Edition.

I have a 102 games on Steam at the time of writing this post, 2 on UPlay and at least 10 I own outside of Steam and I have the worst of “First World Problems”, what to play. Currently I’ve decided to play Alan Wake (and American Nightmare) since they were on top of my Steam library list and I must admit that initially I was a little disappointed… but I’ll tell that story in the upcoming review.

Computer Hell

What a month this has been. First, my main/gaming PC went. First I had a problem with on of the top fans. Exchanged the fan and then for some reason I started messing with the other power supply I had and long story short: all of a sudden there was a small fire on my video card.

I couldn't fix it right away because my wife and I just had to do some major spending but I didn't mind too much because I got to mess around with my MacBook Pro which is still a pretty decent machine and just when I had everything set up perfectly - the graphic chipset on the motherboard went out again. It's a very common problem with this stupid model of this Mac but I just fixed it around Christmas 2012 so I figured it'd take a year or two before it gave out again. No such luck. The service warranty was only for 3 months too. 

So now, as I wait for my main/gaming PC to be fixed I'm on my very old LG laptop who I lent to somebody and I got back with so much crapware, adware, malware etc. that I didn't even know where to begin fixing/cleaning it. Word of advice: never go on polish, russian or any eastern european websites. Avoid like the plague, the water is filthy. Even though I speak fluent polish it's been many years since I voluntarily went to ANY polish website.

Anyway, I couldn't even re-install Windows 7 on that machine because the DVD drive wasn't working. I had two choices: 1) Do a crapload of work I didn't feel like doing and re-install windows from a USB drive or 2) Install Linux.

So now I'm running a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and I gotta tell ya, it feels good playing around with it. I tried Linux OSs before including a couple different versions of Ubuntu but only now I really, really got into it. I'm even considering running it as my main OS on my main PC when it comes back from being serviced. Good driver support compared to what it used to be, incredible level of customization and very efficient and fast running.

Anyway, I hope to be properly back on the intertubes soon. Geek on.

Borderlands GoTY

Ahhh Borderlands. I got some history with this game. I originally got the GoTY edition for the 360 way back when. Since then, I’ve started playing the game 10 times or so. It was always something, didn’t play for a while due to real life obligations and didn’t remember stuff from the beginning, save crashes and corruptions and finally my 360 hard drive died.

Finally I decided to play and finish the game so I got another GoTY copy on Steam and I finally finished it. Now that I’ve finally found the vault on Pandora and finished the main campaign it made me think what the heck took so long. I know I had to restart the game a couple of times due to technical issues but I also remember a couple of times just leaving the game for a while until all of a sudden an urge to play returned. I like the game’s theme, overall design and humor so I did want to play more but I think what put me off with this game were some basic gameplay and interface mechanics that just didn’t work for me.

First of all – the navigation system in this game sucked for me. The tiny compass on the bottom of the screen didn’t work for me due to the fact that a little of areas (especially rust commons where you spend a major part of the campaign) have a lot of canyon passages with dead ends and the navigation system does not work well for helping to navigate you to your quest objective. A small circular compass with a mini map in the top right section of the screen would have done wonders to help navigate a path to the quest objectives.

Speaking of quest objectives, with so many quests you can accept, tracking just ONE AT A TIME was a huge mistake! I often got frustrated because instead of playing and doing something fun I would have to go to my quests screen, choose tracking for each quest and keep switching to the main map back and forth to see where the quest objective in that zone is on the map! This is frustrating cause no one wants to waste time driving back and forth while one of the quests object is right along the way! If the game at least allowed me to track all the quests for the zone I was questing in (Rust Commons East for example) it would have made my life much easier, questing and moving between objectives more fun and less frustrating.

Now, one might argue that while getting lost you would encounter more trash mobs and collect more loot. Well, the trash mobs would just re-spawn after a short time anyway, meaning every time I got lost in an area I would have to fight the same group of bandits over and over again, second the loot was simply putting it – crap! Throughout the game I’ve had in my possession hundreds if not thousands of guns, gadgets, grenade upgrades, etc. and I have used MAYBE 20 of them throughout the main campaign. Usually the upgrades were so nominal I didn’t even bother swapping them out. The upgrade trees for the character talents were the only ones that I actually put any thought to and the choices seemed to affect how my character performed (I finished the game as the Siren named after my wife – JennyChan).

I’ve just recently started playing the DLCs and so far I seem to be enjoying the gameplay aspect of them much better then the main campaign. Again, remember that I enjoyed the theme, stories and humor of the game a lot, it was the gameplay and interface that bugged me. I am currently playing the Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot in which I completed part 1. Incredible adrenaline rush of fast paced challenging and surprising (you never know what upgrades or downgrades you or your enemies will get) gameplay. I’ve also started The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned (not to be confused with Dr. Zed ;p ) and I am really enjoying the overall theme of this expansion. I like all kinds of zombie stuff so I was looking forward to this DLC to begin with and the cool, creepy Halloween style graphic design of the level was just an icing on the cake. Due to simpler level design and amount of quests per zone I am not nearly as frustrated with this DLC as I was playing the main campaign (I had an epiphany here that I mostly got annoyed driving the fast vehicles in game while feeling kind of blind and being forced to switch to the map all the time).

Borderlands GoTY is worth the purchase when it’s on sale even if for just the DLCs because they are really fun. The game seems to be heavy on coop play but due to many features missing in a loot heavy game with strong coop play options like trading and possible auction house purchasing and selling the game fell short where it could have dominated. I own Borderlands 2 and I am looking forward to seeing if a lot of shortcomings and design errors that I’ve found with the original were addressed and corrected in the sequel.

System Shock 2 on Steam

The Escapist : Zero Punctuation : System Shock 2

For all of us who missed the games that started the Shock series, System Shock 2 is now available on Steam… but is it worth the few bucks it costs to purchase it in this day and age?

Excellent and funny review by Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame, enjoy.

Retro City Rampage

Retro City Rampage is to video games what Hot Shots was to movies. A parody of many video games and pop culture from the 80s as well as 90s. It doesn’t really feel like a new video game trying to imitate the old school stuff. The level, sound and graphic design of the game, all give a good retro feeling of playing old school games.

The game takes place in a retro sandbox type of environment city (think original GTA games) called Theftropolis. You – “The Player”, play through approximately 50 – 80 levels, depending whether you do the side missions or not. Many levels are set in a classic GTA from the top perspective, a lot of levels however, are almost like little mini-games using gameplay mechanics from many very popular and retro classic video games (the final level made me feel very nostalgic for example).

The game does not take long to finish. This is an indie video game that costs about 10 bucks. You know what though? It’s worth it. I felt like I got lots of entertainment out of this game and although I wish there was a little more I could do after finish the main story line I feel that the main playthrough was worth the game’s price. I doubt people born after 1999 will get nearly as much kick and fun as I did out of this game but I think the game’s designer didn’t have that generation in mind as target audience when designing this.

As of February 28th people who purchased this game for the PC (I have bought it on Steam) got a free update with a different version of the game called ROM City Rampage. This version shows exactly what this game would have looked like if it was released for the original NES. I think in a year or so I might go back to RCR to play that mode just to see what it was about