Gaming goesZen

It's "Sun Bleach" by Lifeformed from the album Immerse. From the release notes: This is the original soundtrack for "Double Fine Adventure!", a documentary about the development of the game "Broken Age". This is my second music project - it's about the adventures of the Double Fine team, and its parallels with my own adventure […]

"The people that made this fucking game are geniuses." -- Dave Gardner @ AF 2012, Day 8, which is then seconded by Ben Burbank later on with "[on par, probably with] I don't know, maybe Dead or Alive Xtreme Beachvolleyball?". Good stuff. If you haven't done so, check out the other Double Fine videos. Or […]

This is what I've learned after a few hours of Urban Terror game-play, in TDM (or Team DM, Team Deathmatch) mode, and considering myself as being novice in UrT. The hints apply mostly to all fast-paced arena-style FPS, which prefer fun over realism. 1. Go for action. Tactics over strategy. Avoid being "smart" and creeping […]

The art of documenting how a creative work was put together, a making-of or behind-the-scenes, is mostly known from the realm of film. I love a good documentary about movie making. Yet, when you're too focused on one creative discipline, you may have overlooked a true gem of a making-of. It's from video games. It's […]

Manchmal kommt es vor, das Spiele nicht im Fullscreen mode angezeigt werden, oder anders, das Spiele, sobald man sie startet, nicht den ganzen Bildschirm ausfüllen, eben kein Vollbild. Vermutlich ist es das erste mal, das du ein gekauftest Spiel spielst, keine Demo, denn sonst wäre dir schon aufgefallen, dass Spiele immer nur verkleinert dargestellt werden... […]

So you've bought this new PS3 game, inserted the disc, started it up from the menu, and "what's that!", the game only fills about half of the screen, only the center is the actual game, with black bars around all four sides of the game, the game is not fullscreen, like a demo! Well, as […]

Two of the better games on the Commodore Amiga were Rick Dangerous I and Rick Dangerous II. Designed, developed and coded by the then up and coming CORE Design (who later came to fame with the Lara Croft franchise), these simple yet very entertaining platform jump-and-runs were a delight to play - despite their relative […]

Recently I've been doing a bit of research towards Nintendo DS emulation (NDS emu). What I've found out so far is that there a basically two relatively stable emulators out there: iDeaS and DeSmuME and No$GBA. All three have issues with some games, even in the newest versions. Only No$GBA is able to play multiplayer […]

The special appeal of Fax machines, the cause that makes them still linger around, is that they are "self-contained appliances" (see WIRED: Why Are Faxes Still Around?): it's easy to understand what the machine's purpose is, if you can place a call you can fax a document and nearly everyone has them so you can […]

It's now seven years since the initial release of "Uplink: Hacker Elite", time to have another look. In 2001 British developer Introversion Software released Uplink. What started as a demo version has developed into a cult game with an active fan and developer/contributor community and numerous re-relases and versions. I've always been a fan of […]

there is a film of that name, and the game itself has five different titles (see below), depending on the market it was released in. So, it might be difficult to track down, but it's worth the effort... Let's flashback to 1989, when a dense game atmosphere could compensate for limited system capabilities. That was […]

Let's start to build the system. For this Gaming PC here, I chose to use a Dell OptiPlex as base. While not a perfect choice, these systems bring most of what we need right out of the box: a black case, nice design, small form factor, Gigabit Ethernet, USB connectivity and sometimes even an S-Video […]

Over the years I've collected quite a few games. The problem is, they are literally scattered over multiple platforms and formats. Some are Commodore C64, PC games, lots of Commodore AMIGA disks while others are SNES/Super Famicom, Sega MegaDrive/Genesis, Sega Saturn, Nintendo64 cardridges and last but not least some real arcade ROMS. I own the […]

Have you played The Outfoxies lately? It's a true gem and worth another play. In fact, this clever arcade platform game from 1994 is on my list of all-time-favorite arcade titles. The story itself is quickly told: A group of hitmen, quite unique characters like a mad scientist in a wheelchair, a chimp in tuxedo, […]