sideways over at the archosfans forums has been messing around with porting sdl apps to the archos. The first one he tried was an nes emulator called FCE [...]]]> Well I guess that spam was even more relevant than I thought…it turns out there is yet another thing the archos has in common with netbooks: retrogaming abilities!

sideways over at the archosfans forums has been messing around with porting sdl apps to the archos. The first one he tried was an nes emulator called FCE Ultra.

It seems to work pretty well. The only major thing missing at this point is sound support. Never having had an nes, I’m not an expert on the games but there is a version of galaga which is quite enjoyable. Here are some pictures:

I previously wrote about doom and mame being my gaming mainstays on the eee before it became a server. Since they are both available for mac, I was thinking about setting them up on the wind. But since the wind is a little beefier than the eee, I wondered about quake?

Sure enough, there is an [...]]]>

I previously wrote about doom and mame being my gaming mainstays on the eee before it became a server. Since they are both available for mac, I was thinking about setting them up on the wind. But since the wind is a little beefier than the eee, I wondered about quake?

Sure enough, there is an osx port of the quake engine. I had to dig up my original quake files, they were on a cd backup from February 2000, essentially ten years ago! Good to see the cd was still readable.

I’m running the opengl version of quake, glquake. I remember the first time I realized this existed roughly ten years ago what a revelation it was. You were playing the same game but it looked about a hundred times better! This runs at the native resolution (1024×600) on the wind in fullscreen, it looks great and it runs fast! I even used vispatch to make the water transparent.

This cnet article on 20 netbook playable games was great although how they omitted WoG is beyond [...]]]> Well, I finally finished playing World of Goo. The fact it took so long is no reflection on the quality of the game. When the weather’s nice, I simply don’t play games at all. But now that winter’s back…

This cnet article on 20 netbook playable games was great although how they omitted WoG is beyond me. I decided to check out some of the titles on the list. I wasn’t really interested in looking at the older games on the list but more the recent low system requirement titles.

The first one I checked out was Plants vs. Zombies. I’d actually heard of this one already…I guess there’s an iphone version of it. I played the web version of it a bit and proceeded to download and install the mac version on my wind since it was one of the few games offered for mac. It’s easy to pick up and a lot of fun…great for casual gamers. I’d say similar to WoG but a little less ambitious.

Next, I took a look at Quake Live. This is an innovative, browser plugin-based implementation of multiplayer Quake. Sadly, the plugin locked up my browser/computer before I could even get my controls configured properly so needless to say, this was uninstalled.

Next up was Torchlight, a D&D style RPG. I tried out the pc demo of it but only gave it about 5 minutes before uninstalling…it seemed a little childish plus I did not really have the patience to invest in figuring out the inventory management system.

Lastly, I took a look at Alien Shooter 2. Again, I gave the pc demo a test drive. Initially, I feared it was bound for the same fate as Torchlight but I quickly got into the mindless action, wandering around blowing away hordes of aliens. This one’s a winner. It reminded me a bit of this CGA/EGA game called Electrobody that I played on my first computer, a 286 Toshiba laptop with a monochrome screen, primarily because of the main character’s Robocop outfit. (I found a video of Electrobody here)

One thing I noticed when looking at these games is how many of them are available on Steam and additionally, that they are invariably cheaper there than on the publisher’s website. I guess if you don’t mind the drm that comes with steam games, that’s the way to go.

Developed by a pair of ex-EA employees, this physics-based puzzler has players manipulating stretchy balls of goo to create complex towers, bridges, and other structures in an [...]]]> I was reading the Globe & Mail article on the year in gaming and in particular, the Top 10 and was intrigued by the description of World of Goo:

Developed by a pair of ex-EA employees, this physics-based puzzler has players manipulating stretchy balls of goo to create complex towers, bridges, and other structures in an attempt to reach pneumatic tubes through which the goo balls seek escape. Highly stylized visuals and a clever story concerning a nebulous corporation that uses the goo to make drinks and beauty products are just the icing on the cake (or goo in the vat, as the case may be).

I guess the game began as a $15 download on Wiiware but there are also versions for Mac and PC ($20) and a Linux version in the works! Talk about cross platform! You can read the full review here.

Really though, I don’t think the description above does the game justice. This is a prime example of gaming as art. When I hear that phrase, the only things that really spring to mind are Tempest, Myst/Riven, and the freeform exploration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Of course, “physics-based puzzler” and “gaming as art” both sound a bit pretentious and un-fun. That couldn’t be further from the truth. World of Goo is a helluva lot of fun and incredibly addictive. The whole enterprise has a subversive and childlike Dr. Seussian vibe to it which is extremely appealing.

I’ve been playing the PC demo but will certainly be buying the full version. You can get the Mac and PC demos here. Also, check out the video below which will give you a feel for the game:

These three were my favourites where you are the shoe thrower:

http://www.kroma.no/2008/bushgame/ http://www.sockandawe.com/ [Sock and [...]]]> Dale pointed out the speed with which a game based on this incident appeared. However, I found the object of that game to be unsatisfying. Shooting down the shoes before they hit the potus? C’mon. You can do better than that.

These three were my favourites where you are the shoe thrower:

http://www.kroma.no/2008/bushgame/
http://www.sockandawe.com/ [Sock and Awe! Get it?]
http://bushbash.flashgressive.de/

I also really enjoyed this one:

My favourite of the bunch is the final level which is pretty damn difficult (as a final level should be).

You can [...]]]> Once I realized that if I enabled cheats in Tempest, I could skip to arbitrary levels, I ended up creating a full set of 16 levels for the game. The remaining ones are shown below.

My favourite of the bunch is the final level which is pretty damn difficult (as a final level should be).

You can download the rom for the levels here. Just dump it into your tempest.zip file (back it up first) replacing the file that’s already there. To play it, play Tempest Tubes as that’s the rom I’ve replaced.

My favourites so far? Level 4 is just a circle which [...]]]> I spent some time yesterday messing around with TempEd. Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to use. I created the 9 levels shown below. I’ll probably only do a couple more since I don’t think I’ve made it beyond level 11.

My favourites so far? Level 4 is just a circle which happens to be what the first level of the original Tempest starts with. However, that level is a closed circle while mine is an open one. What that means is at a certain point going around the circle on mine, you can’t continue and must reverse direction which makes it harder. Level 5 is both fun and difficult, I really like this one. Level 9 is my homage to the “spiral death trap” level from Tempest Tubes, fun but also a little bit difficult!

I’m sure 25 years ago when I played Tempest at the corner store near my house, I never imagined I’d be able to create my own maps for it. Ain’t technology grand?

In addition to the Doomsday engine, I now also have xmame set up on the eee so I can play my favourite vintage arcade games, specifically Arkanoid, Galaga and most of all, Tempest! It’s working pretty well but it took some doing [...]]]> Are you sick of these cute “eee” post titles? Yeah, me too.

In addition to the Doomsday engine, I now also have xmame set up on the eee so I can play my favourite vintage arcade games, specifically Arkanoid, Galaga and most of all, Tempest! It’s working pretty well but it took some doing to get there.

First I installed the X Windows version xmame-x. I hauled out some old roms and some worked and some didn’t…not surprising since I have not used mame in many years. Also, I could not figure out how to get the games to run fullscreen. In order to figure out which games were working and which weren’t, I temporarily added the xepc.org repository and installed the kxmame frontend. Due to a dependency bug, this uninstalled xmame-x and installed xmame-sdl instead. Kxmame was good for auditing my roms…basically I realized I needed to get newer Galaga/Galaxian etc. roms for this version of mame. I still couldn’t figure out how to get it to run properly at fullscreen…it would run fullscreen but not scale the video up properly. Since my roms were now sorted out, I decided to remove kxmame/xmame-sdl and reinstall xmame-x and give that another try.

Sure enough, this was the way to go. I eventually figured out the right command line to get games running properly in fullscreen using xvideo. With the raster games, I’m getting good framerates, around 60fps. Vector games like Tempest are not so impressive but still quite playable. My one remaining problem is I can’t get Galaga to save high scores. I downloaded hiscore.dat and put it in the appropriate place but still no dice. Oh well.

While doing some mame-related surfing, I came across this extremely interesting site. TempEd is an editor for windows which lets you create your own levels for Tempest! I had played the Tempest Tubes hacked version of Tempest but I never knew the story behind it. It’s pretty fascinating and you can read about the guy who created it here.

I’m pretty excited to try my hand at creating (and playing) some new Tempest levels…should be fun! The eee is turning out to be a great portable gaming machine (among other things).