Sunday, July 31, 2011

Dwarf Fortress

I saw a couple of articles lately about this game called Dwarf Fortress.
I'll just leave this here in case anybody (or I) ever feel like getting into it... :)

Dwarf Fortress: “perhaps the most complex video game ever made”
and
Online class to teach Dwarf Fortress
and
A Candid Look Inside the Weird and Wonderful Minds Behind Dwarf Fortress

Friday, July 29, 2011

Focus - Mike Ross / Street Fighter IV documentary

I had seen the trailer for the documentary Focus a while ago (it's about Mike Ross, a professional Street Fighter IV player) and I saw yesterday that it was now completed and available to watch online for free. I just finished watching it and I gotta say it's a great piece.

The movie follows Mike Ross throughout the year 2010. We learn about his childhood, how he got into videogames, how he developed a passion for Street Fighter and started to compete. At the same time, he also earned a college degree and still plans on using what he learned to do work besides playing SF4 competitively (producing CrossCounter TV, for example). Other than that, the documentary is about his passion for the game and his sense of competition. We see interviews with him, his friends and his family.
I found the movie was well done and interesting to watch.

Below is the trailer and here's where you can watch it (for free).

FOCUS: A Documentary Full Length Trailer from Steve Hwang on Vimeo.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Eric Chahi

There was an article on Kotaku about the game Another world (also known as Out of this world in the US), programmed by Eric Chahi as a one-man-project. The article was accompanied by the following video, which is a full walkthrough:



All this made me think of another game Eric Chahi worked on: Heart of Darkness. I have it for PC somewhere at home but I can't get to it now. I think I never finished it, I played it for a bit but haven't seen the ending. Now I'm thinking I should find a copy for the PlayStation and play it again (since my PS3 can play PS1 games).

Eric Chahi is currently working on a new game called From Dust. It's coming out now (or soon) for Xbox360 and PC and a PS3 version will follow later, I believe. I saw a video of it and it looks interesting.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Free Beats!



He brings the beatbox, you bring the rhymes!

(found on BoingBoing)

Monday, July 11, 2011

New rig

I decided to build a new PC with enough Ooomph to run current games and do some video-editing with Vegas or Premiere. It's been a while since I had my last desktop PC (only had MacBooks in recent times). So I spent some time in the last weeks reading articles on tomshwardware.com to get some inspiration. Their "system builder marathons" were especially useful. They seem to do them every 3 months and they build out systems for 500, 1000 and 2000 $ each time. My target was 1000 $, I ended up going slightly over that, but that's okay. :)

Here's what I picked, placed the order yesterday:
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=16722405

I bought the case, the CPU cooler and the motherboard at Fry's since their price was the same as Newegg's after shipping (the CPU cooler was even cheaper at Fry's). And I added two 200mm fans for the case.

A thing I didn't expect to spend much time thinking about but still ended up doing so is a keyboard. I was first gonna go for a Logitech G110 or G510, but then a couple of articles about mechanical keyboards caught my attention. At Fry's, they had a Razer Blackwidow Ultimate on display and I tried it. It felt fantastic. Right then I decided I'd get one of those and I was debating between a Das Keyboard (possibly the Ultimate version, without labels) or the Blackwidow Ultimate. I ended up going for the latter because of the backlighting and the fact that Newegg had a 30$-off coupon for it.
I might still get a Das Keyboard at some point in the future (maybe for work?) and I'm also thinking about getting one for my dad as a surprise.

Eclectic Method - The Dark Side

Eclectic Method - The Dark Side from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

GTA4 enhancements

I saw 2 things related to GTA4 today: One is a series of screenshots (enhanced, probably) taken from GTA4 running with various mods that make it look really sleek. The other is pretty much the same thing, but in motion: