Category: Games

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

YASD, the First for 2008

I was a tourist, exploring the dungeon with my yet-unnamed feline companion, when I found a ring. I put it on, and it turned out to be a ring of invisibility! How awesome is that!

I managed to get fairly far at a low experience level because enemies just couldn’t find me until I already hit them with my +2 darts or kicked them. I was sitting in a room after making it to a new level of the dungeon, inspecting my inventory, when a friend came over to my computer.

“What’s this?”
“Oh, this is NetHack. My cat keeps getting in my way.”
“Uh, huh…wait, what?”
“Here, let me show you. Oh…wait. Let me take off my ring of invisibility first.”

I took a moment to look through the help to figure out how to take off a ring. I’ve never survived long enough to want to take one off before!

“Ok, so this at sign here? That’s me.”
“Uh…”
“And that f? That’s my cat. These are the walls, this is the floor, and this is the door out of the room.”
“Where are your enemies?”
“Probably on the other side of this door.”

I opened the door, walked down the dark corridor, and made it into a room with a fountain. Just as I was about to describe that I was near a fountain, an iguana appeared in the doorway. I showed my friend the text that appeared at the top as the battle waged between the iguana and my cat. My cat was victorious.

“Uh, huh. Well, I’m going to go back to my world where things are tangible. Like, with graphics.” I joked that the graphics came from my imagination, and I pushed my glasses up my nose.

I continued to play. I decided to drink from the fountain…and water moccasins streamed out! There were three giant “S” characters looming before me on the screen. They were between me and the doorway out of the room.

And I was still not wearing my ring of invisibility!

I put the ring on, but not before they took a few bites out of me. I tried to move out of the way, and they started swiping at the air. Phew!

But then I walked forward, and they apparently got lucky and hit me five times before I could move. I was poisoned, but it didn’t matter since I was killed by one last bite.

Ah, NetHack.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

SimCity Source Is Now Under the GPL!

Found through TIGSource, which found it through Fear and Loathing:

This is the binary and source code for Micropolis (A.K.A. “S*mC*ty”: see the GPL License and additional terms, below), which is released under the GPL.

The One Laptop Per Child laptop is going to have an official and original SimCity game available for it. Don Hopkins has cleaned up the code and removed references to the SimCity trademark. Now the source to the original SimCity is available for everyone to study, play with, and change!

The key thing here is to peek inside the mind of the original Maxis programmers when they built it. Remember, this was back in the day when games had to fit inside of 640k so some “creative” programming techniques were employed. SimCity has been long a model used for urban planning and while it’s just a game, there are a lot of business rules, ecosystem modeling, social dependencies, and other cool stuff going on in this codebase. It may not be pretty code but it’s content sure is interesting to see.

Categories
Game Design Games

Gender Portrayal and the Meaning of Game Elements

In any discussion about gender portrayal in games, someone will talk about how female characters are unrealistically hyper-sexualized. Many people argue that it may have a lot to do with the fact that most game game developers are male and so don’t have anyone to act as a check against their juvenile urges.

Regardless of the reason, I wonder why hyper-sexualized elements, or any elements of a game, end up in the finished product if they aren’t specifically called for by the game designers.

In many good films, every scene is planned out in painstaking detail. If it’s on screen, it’s probably there for a reason. I remember an art teacher in high school talking about a film about people getting into brawls. He said that as far as you can tell, it’s just mindless fighting, but then if you listen to the director’s commentary, he’s talking about the symbolism of the design in the carpet during an overhead shot. If you are paying attention, you might appreciate the parallels with Greek mythology or some modern-day conflict.

In good books, every piece of dialogue, every name of a character or town, every situation is absolutely needed to push the plot along. Nothing is there without a purpose. If the protagonist encounters a dog on the side of the road, it isn’t because the author just happens to like dogs or decided on a whim to add this encounter. There is some reason why this encounter exists in the finished text.

And so with good games, shouldn’t we also expect that the game designer will add elements to a game on purpose? If you’re going to create hyper-sexualized female characters, how much thought have you given to why? Does it add anything meaningful to the game, or was it thrown in without much more thought than, “Well, I’d prefer to see this sexy figure if I’m going to be playing this game, so why not?”

I recently watched Kim Swift’s Indie Games Summit 2007 talk about her team’s journey from student developers to Valve employers. Narbacular Drop is the precursor to the very popular game Portal. While the entire 32 minute video is a good for indie developers to watch, I found her comparisons of Narbacular Drop to Portal fascinating. She mentioned that Narbacular Drop‘s art design and theme wasn’t well thought out at all. The dungeon didn’t have much meaning besides being a place to host the game. The laboratory setting for Portal, on the other hand, was carefully thought out from the beginning.

A long time ago, character design was limited to what blocky pixels allowed. Today’s Mario has overalls, a hat, and a mustache because it made it easier to see him in his first games. Today’s technology removed such limits from developers. They could be more purposeful with their art direction. Is your own personal variation on the hyper-sexualized female character really adding anything meaningful to your game? Is its presence meant to say anything other than “FEMALE PLAYERS UNWELCOME”?

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Politics/Government

Steam: Further Impressions

I hate Half-life 2.

I hate it because one night I found that I was still playing the game at 3AM, and I was supposed to be waking up in only a few hours to get ready for work. When you have to worry about using the words “tonight” or “today” to describe “now”, you stop worrying about finding a good place to stop (there isn’t one. It’s like a well-written novel that way).

I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on playing this game for so long. I’ve played Quake 4‘s single-player campaign a bit, but it isn’t the same feeling. In Nova Prospekt and City 14, I feel like I’m dealing with a post-apocalyptic world. There’s hope hidden everywhere, and it feels like a idealistic fight. In Quake 4, I had one exciting fight against a giant mechanical insect, and later encountered a similar one while crawling under some tunnels. I remember being afraid as I crawled past it, thinking that at any moment the glass will break and it would be right on top of me. Still, the conversations and emotions didn’t feel real. I felt like I was playing a game. Half-life 2 is a really great game. Well, it’s not as if most of you didn’t already know.

And you know what else I like? That I don’t have to worry about finding my CD when I want to play the game. Unless I want to resort to using cracks, I still need a CD to play Starcraft or any number of games.

One of the things I remember worrying about with Steam was the problem of losing a network connection. When it was first launched, customers found that the network was overloaded and so they couldn’t play the game they already paid for. Well, that sucks for the people who ordered the game through Steam and couldn’t download or update it, but what about the smart people who bought the game at the store? No, they couldn’t play either because Valve decided that the store-bought version needed to be authenticated as well. I had sent an email asking about this, and after three replies in which I didn’t feel I received a satisfactory answer, I was told someone would get back to me and no one did.

So let’s do a test. I’ll disconnect my network connection and try to start Half-life 2. I get a dialog box that says Steam couldn’t connect, but I was able to start it in off-line mode. Nice. Half-life 2 loads up, but when I try to play, it crashes. Huh. Well, wait. Last time I played, I was in the middle of a firefight in “Anticitizen One”, and the game crashed to the desktop. If I use a save game from a few minutes earlier, the game loads fine, and my squad mates are yelling about the man in the mask who is shooting us from the street.

And now it’s 30 minutes later. Oh, yeah. I was running a test. I wasn’t supposed to keep playing.

Also, last night I received an automatic update for the Steam client. Oh. I, uh, didn’t know you were even downloading anything. What if I didn’t want the update? As mentioned years ago on Valve, Steam and DRM:

Steam pushes new versions whether you want them or not. Sure, you can decline to update, but you won’t be playing anytime soon. While this may look good on the surface solving incompatibility between revisions, the reality is much harsher.

The author mentioned Counter-strike 2 and the bots that were being developed for it. He loved them. Then an update came out that removed the bots completely.

Normally, you just don’t update and keep playing like you always did. Now, you don’t have a choice. Your entire gameplay experience is in the hands of some programmer. Whether you thought their previous effort was better is irrelevant. Whether you like an old feature or weapon is no longer your concern. Welcome to the DRM age.

As you can see, the DRM world isn’t as rosy as the pro-DRM lobby make it out to be. Technical glitches and decisions made by the copyright holders are turning the simple act of buying a game, installing it and running it into a minefield of checks, any of which can stop you from playing your rightfully purchased game or software should they fail.

Well, so far I haven’t had anything that I didn’t want changed, but the idea that the creator of the software I’m using still has control over what I can do with it after I’ve installed it makes me uncomfortable. Because of these concerns, I would still prefer to play games natively on my Gnu/Linux systems. For the most part, I can trust those computers better. It just makes me sad that I feel like I have to choose between really good games and really trustworthy games.

Also, I haven’t looked into this, but if I plan on purchasing The Orange Box, and I do so through a retail shop so I have a physical product in my hands, is there still a complicated activation process through Steam, or do the games play out of the box without requiring a network connection? I remember Half-life 2 needing some kind of decryption process for the game data that could take hours, although downloading the game in my experience didn’t seem to need extra time after I got it. Also, if I buy a physical product, will it require a CD in the drive to play, or does it associate the game with my Steam account and let me have the convenience that I’ve grown accustomed to?

Categories
Games

Steam: My First Impression

So far, adding a friend seems to be a pain. I guessed a friend’s screenname and typed it in manually. It turns out that it was a complete stranger. However, when I do a search for my friend’s screenname using the Steam Community feature, I found my friend. Same screenname, yet somehow a different ID? When I typed Anthony Salter’s ID to manually add him as a friend, it said it couldn’t find him, but when I did a search in the community feature, there he was.

WTF? As far as I’m concerned, I was doing the same thing. I was adding a friend’s screenname to my friend’s list. So why would manually typing a name give me one result while searching for a SteamID gives me the same name but a different person? Why set it up so that the same friends list allows two different people to have the same screenname? I must be missing something obvious here.

I like that I can add all of my games to my games list and have a central place to launch them. Of course, if this exists, why would Vista have a games-specific folder? Are Vista users supposed to feel good about the redundancy? Just a thought.

Categories
Games

I Won Name That Game 33!

Anthony Salter hosts a regular contest on his blog called Name That Game! He posts a screenshot from a game, and people are supposed to post the name of the game and the name of the developer. Well, Name That Game! #33 was a doozy. He posted three screenshots for three different obscure games, and in order to win, you not only needed to give the names of the three games and their developers, but you also had to explain the theme tying the three games together.

Well, no one submitted an email to him at first, so he gave some clues. The first two games were on the Apple 2, and the third game was on the ZX Spectrum. I haven’t seen any of the games, and so a new updated post was created with clue screenshots. The first game looked like a Pong clone and reminded me of Atari Olympics. The hint screenshot was easy for me to identify. I played Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set on my Apple 2 c+ for many hours as a child. It was one of the three games I had that made use of the joystick.

Well, I recognized the clue, but how was it supposed to help me identify the game in the 1st screenshot? I don’t know, but now I was in the contest. I did some searching and found that Bill Budge’s first game was a Pong clone called Penny Arcade. While I couldn’t find it in the Moby Games database, I did find an emulator site that offered the game for download. As soon as I got it running, I recognized it. Game #1 was successfully identified.

The other two games were a bit harder. I didn’t recognize either the original screenshots or the clue screenshots. Moby Games helped, but it involved a lot of searching. I eventually found a screenshot of Rings of Zilfin that looked very similar to the one in the contest. Reading about the author of the game, I found that the clue screenshot belonged to the author’s later game, The Magic Candle. In any case, Game #2 was successfully identified.

I found that the clue screenshot for Game #3 belonged to Jet Set Willy. So was the first screenshot Manic Miner? No, it didn’t look the same. For a bit, I couldn’t find any information other than that the author worked on Manic Miner, and so I tried looking up information on other people involved with him. There were a lot of dead ends, but then I found a new bio on the author that mentioned Styx. Sure enough, when I looked up that game, there was the screenshot! Game #3 was successfully identified.

And from all these clues, I found that the theme tying the three games together was that they were all games developed early in the careers of their authors.

I sent in the email, and I received a response that I had won! So what did I win? According to the contest details, I get a copy of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode 1…which means I need to install Steam.

So I did. Long ago I said I wouldn’t install Steam because I didn’t like the idea of the so-called digital rights management being used. I’ve decided that I’m going to try Steam out and see how I like it.

Thanks for the challenging contest, Anthony!

Categories
Games

Current Game Obsession: Starcraft

As part of my plan for catching up on my life, I’ve given myself permission to breathe and enjoy it. I’ve been spending time with friends, who have been incredibly supportive and are just plain awesome, and I have been playing games with some of them. One such game is Starcraft.

Personally, I love Total Annihilation and would pick it over Starcraft if I could. Then again, I was a casual player in either game and so maybe I can’t really say much about having a preference. Starcraft is just easier to play with someone because more people still have it installed. With so many new games out each year, it’s a testament to the quality of development that Starcraft stays on people’s hard drives for so long. In fact, I wonder if anyone is really going to look forward to the sequel as much as it’s getting hyped. I’m willing to bet that more than a few people will prefer the original. As I understand it, Supreme Commander hasn’t fared so well, either.

When I play a game, I tend to pick a character or race and stick with it. With Starcraft, I always play as Terran. I’m loyal to humanity, what can I say? My friends will ask me to try to play as Zerg or Protoss, but I wanted to really master Terran before bothering to try getting good at the other races. In the past, I never really did much to try to get better, and I can go for many months between sessions of Starcraft, so my Battle.net account has been purged a couple of times already.

These past couple of weeks, however, I decided not to be so casual with my play time. It is fascinating what’s out there in terms of learning how to play! If you have never bothered to look up your favorite games online before now, you can be surprised at how dedicated the fans can be. There are websites full of basic and advanced strategies, optimal build orders, and debates on topics such as whether or not Battlecruisers can take on Carriers. If you play with a small group of friends, you might think that one of you is really good. Then when you play on Battle.net, you find that the people you play there are more skillful on an order of magnitude. Unless, of course, you are one of those elite players who find yourself surprised that your opponents can still be so lame. B-)

In fact, if you aren’t aware of the popularity of Starcraft in South Korea, An Introduction to Starcraft Progaming by Joe Dunn describes it as follows:

Korea’s Starcraft scene produces and attracts elite players, and I kid you not when I say that SC is practically the national sport in Korea. Games attract both live viewers — tens of thousands for championship matches — and massive television audiences.

The competitors themselves are celebrities in their own right, scoring sponsorships, endorsements, and large paychecks for important victories. Starcraft in Korea is comparable to NASCAR in the States — major corporations support both individual participants and entire teams as they compete in several independent tournaments simultaneously.

As a side note, you may be naive about the popularity of NASCAR in the United States, too. I’ve encountered a lot of people online who are surprised that ESPN will air broadcasts of car races when they won’t show world class soccer matches. I used to be surprised, but I know that if you look at the top games at download.com, I am almost sure that there will be at least one car racing game in the top ten list.

Anyway, so I started becoming interested in actually getting good at Starcraft. I don’t plan on dedicating the time to get good enough to compete against top tier players. I’ve seen videos of them playing, and they just click and hotkey way too fast. I would love to be able to dedicate the time to games in this manner, but I have higher priorities…like making my own games! Still, I would just like to hold my own during a regular match and maybe win a few games here and there.

Besides reading up on strategies and tactics, I’ve been watching matches on YouTube. Some links are in the Dunn article above, and I managed to pull of the Boxer vs Yellow bunker rush against a friend who consistently kicks my butt. We played a few sessions in which I was able to counter attack and advance on his base before eventually losing. He has told me that I actually make him nervous when we play now.

This idea of actually developing my skills with a game has me looking back at my game playing from my past, and I wonder how many other games that I played casually to the point that I didn’t enjoy them as much as I could have. Total Annihilation and Homeworld: Cataclysm are two other RTS games that spring to mind. I got my butt kicked handily when I tried to play strangers online. Each of those games also have communities of people who still play, although not along the same lines as Starcraft. They both have articles dedicated to teaching you how to play well.

Oh, heck, what about chess? I have a friend I play online. He always beats me. I’ve made an occasional good move once in awhile, but he’s studied the game long enough to know counters to moves that I don’t even know have names. There are entire books on openings, books on the mid-game, and books on the end game. There is an entire market for information products that teach you how to pick the optimal move in a given situation.

Ah, for now, I’ll play Starcraft as Terran. I’ve become a decent player. Or, at least, I think I have. I’ll see if I can beat a random player on Battle.net before making that assessment. B-)

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical General Personal Development

Catching Up On Life

Since moving into my current apartment in August, I’ve let things get a bit out of control in my life. My last Thousander Club post was in September. My inbox has been looking like a huge chore to get through. My blog comments were an even worse chore, but I hope I fixed that problem (more later). November is National Novel Writing Month, and I had entered NaNoWriMo, only to write a little over 2,000 words out of the goal of 50,000. It’s not that I haven’t had the time. With not working on Killer Kittens or writing blog posts, I had plenty of time. Without going into details, things in my life have been fairly hectic these past couple of months. Frankly, my business, blog, and side projects like novel-writing had to be put on the back burner. That I managed to finish reading a book throughout all of this is an accomplishment.

But I’m finally getting back on track. I’m remembering how to write lists to focus my actions. I’m itching to work on Killer Kittens again. I want to write about games and their development again. But first, I need to work on my backlog of tasks I’ve been neglecting.

I finally reduced my email inbox at the day job to 0, and I have been maintaining it for the past couple of days easily. I still need to tackle my GBGames email. I just installed Akismet, and I should have done so a long time ago. Today I deleted another few hundred spam comments, and a couple of days ago I had over 1,000 spam comments. I didn’t even bother going through it to see if a legit message was in there, so if you had posted a comment that didn’t automatically get posted for being a loyal commenter, you may need to repost.

My physical inbox at home is still a pile of mail, notes, and papers, but at least I finally entered all of the receipts on my desk into GnuCash. My bills are paid. All the urgent and important things are taken care of on this front. I can tackle the rest either all at once or in chunks.

I need to renew my domain names, renew my just lapsed membership to the IGDA, and renew my ASP membership.

And all the while, I need to remember to make lists of Next Actions and Projects.

Oh, and I want a TV. Nothing sucks more than having six different consoles of as many generations without a television to connect them to. Still, I have a computer and a decent network connection, so while I can’t watch Heroes, Chuck, and Pushing Daisies, I can watch Irving Renquist, Ghost Hunter and random cats and elite Starcraft matches on YouTube. Wait, I can watch Heroes and Chuck online, but it’s just not the same.

Anyway, I’m hoping to get back into regularly updating my blog. I might not have a post each day, but hopefully I will have something interesting to contribute more often than not. Tonight I think I will update the books I’ve read and games I’ve played list. Quake 4 is actually fun, by the way.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Politics/Government

Cloning is Ok? Absolutely!

GameSetWatch reposted an article by Dr. Colin Anderson of Denki, creator of Denki Blocks. The article appeared on Gamasutra first. Opinion: Denki’s Anderson On Why Casual Game Cloning Makes Sense argues exactly the opposite of what many indie developers would claim: that allowing games to be legally cloned actually fosters innovation and is good for the industry.

And after reading his arguments, I agree.

I have yet to publish my own game, so if you think that my opinion doesn’t matter, then feel free to ignore the rest of this post. Considering that I will be publishing a game (hopefully soon) and probably many more afterwards, I am planning on entering a business environment in which you may already sit. I also know that I am not alone in thinking this way.

Anyway, I want you to think back to 2000 when Hasbro was going crazy with lawsuits. GameDev.net had posted news item after news item about lawsuits by Hasbro against game developers. Diana Gruber wrote an article titled Why the Hasbro Lawsuit Should Terrify Game Developers And what we can do about it. It’s a short read, but a good one. Unfortunately the news item it links to is down, but good ol’ Archive.org saves us again.

Filed this morning at the US District Court in Boston, MA, the complaint seeks to require the defendants to cease production and distribution of, and to recall and destroy, the following games: Intergalactic Exterminator, 3D Astro Blaster, TetriMania, TetriMania Master, 3D Maze Man, Tunnel Blaster, UnderWorld, XTRIS, Patriot Command, HemiRoids, Bricklayer, 3D TetriMadness, Mac-Man, 3D Munch Man and 3D Munch Man II. Hasbro Interactive is also seeking damages.

So Hasbro, having obtained the rights to a number of classic games from Atari, decided to protect their copyrights. No biggie, right? How dare companies try to make games based off of Pac-man, Tetris, and other licensed properties. “Consumers should be aware that the companies named in this suit are making games based on properties they don’t own or control.”

What was the first game you created? Was it a clone of Tetris? Pac-man? Space Invaders? It was a learning experience, right? Did you know that it was copyright infringement? Did you know that even if you didn’t try to sell it like the defendants in the lawsuit, who were definitely making games for commercial gain, that you were still committing copyright infringement? If you need a refresher course on copyright (and considering how complicated it is, who doesn’t?), you can read through my article on copyright law and come back to this article. Now think about how copyright law, if enforced the way Hasbro wanted it enforced, would harm the game industry in terms of educating new developers.

When someone learns how to paint, they usually start with still lives of fruit in bowls. Writers learn how to write doing standard creative writing assignments. Musicians play standard pieces of music. Most everyone in the game industry understands that new game developers will need to work with simple, basic games before moving up to more complicated, original games. Almost everyone suggests that you start out by trying to make Tetris, Pong, or some similarly simple and classic game.

I remember reading the news about Hasbro’s lawsuits and becoming afraid. I made a Pac-man clone once. Will Hasbro come after me next? Maybe I shouldn’t work in the games industry if I don’t have the means to defend myself against a lawsuit.

If Hasbro had its way, the game industry would be made up of a handful of unique games, games in which there isn’t any overlap in gameplay and mechanics…or an industry in which only the owner of existing works can innovate off of those works. Imagine Capcom needing to license the rights to a side-scrolling platformer from Nintendo. Would MegaMan have been made?

Frankly, we don’t need any companies like Hasbro suing developers for copyright infringement simply because their games have the same game mechanics. Musicians don’t sue other musicians for making use of the same chords. Software patents are scary enough. Learning about those made me once again think that I should get out of the game industry. Software patents CAN and HAVE been used to legally prevent games with similar play mechanics from being made or published. Patent lawsuits, however, are expensive, and so they aren’t nearly as scary. Microsoft or IBM might sue someone for patent infringement, but it is unlikely that they will use their patents against indie game developers.

However, more than a few indie game developers hate clones enough that I can see them owning patents on their own games simply so that they can sue a supposed infringer to next Tuesday. Again, patent lawsuits are expensive, so they’ll need to be careful.

Another reason why I think that the ability to clone games isn’t a bad thing: I think copyright lasts too long. Again, see my copyright article. The life of the author plus 70 years? Do you know how many generations of video game consoles you’ll go through before someone can make a derivative work on an existing game? Being able to innovate based on existing games today means we’ll see more innovative games, and sooner.

And yes, that’s right. I think the ability to clone games will lead to innovation. Does it sound contradictory? How can cloning a game lead to innovative gameplay? Wouldn’t everyone be copying everyone else, leading to stagnation? Of course not! If you were making games, would you rather create another me-too product on the Internet shelf space, or would you try to create something that stood out and has a better opportunity of being noticed by customers? And if you’re worried about others cloning your game and stealing any potential sales, you’ll notice that Bejeweled isn’t suffering from having millions of clones available. Everyone knows Bejeweled. No one really knows the name of any of its clones.

If the judgement had gone the other way and the judges had decided that ideas could not be copied, then we’d be in trouble. The floodgates would have been opened for developers, publishers and patent trolls would end up mired in endless lawsuits, fighting over who created what first and what core mechanics, controls or ideas are at the heart of their games.

Instead we can all go out and innovate, polish and create, without having to worry that someone will land a lawsuit on us for using blocks, bricks, colours, tiles, or a similar control method to an existing title.

The comments following the article seem to indicate that people believe innovation will die simply because it is now easier to copy someone else’s successful work. And then there was the developer of Jewel Quest:

Without allowing for clones, the genre may not have had the fertile ground to produced a Puzzle Quest. I think the ruling was the correct decision despite the fact that I personally would never want to make a straight clone of another game and strongly dislike others that do.

Jewel Quest wasn’t simply a clone of Bejeweled, although it may look like it. It uses similar mechanics, but then, my car uses similar mechanics found in other cars. No one will claim that my Ford Contour is a clone of a Mustang or a Ferrari. There is plenty of room for innovation without having to fight over simple game mechanics.

Cloning will be a problem for some individuals, as it always has, but others will find ways to prosper BECAUSE they can innovate off of what came before. I don’t think a single company should be in charge of platformers, but if the ruling went the other way, that situation would be exactly what would happen. I’m sure a lot of people will whine about these rulings, but if they want to succeed, they’ll have to deal with reality. You can’t expect to do well by cloning someone else’s success. Legally barring someone from doing so is silly and dangerous because it adds unnecessary barriers to entry for people doing things slightly (yet significantly) differently from existing games. Imagine if your Sims-with-a-twist or Space Invaders-with-better-AI would land you in court simply because they were similar enough that the owner of the original game could bring about a lawsuit.

Now look back on the history of video games and tell me what it would look like if cloning was completely banned.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

My Moving Giveaway

Yesterday I signed a lease and will be moving into my new apartment at the end of the week. I have some hardware that has been collecting dust, and so I figure it is time to give them to someone who can provide a good home.

– HP Deskjet 612c
– HP Deskjet 840c
– Micron CRT monitor (Model RM07R11) (has a visible line running down
the front, but otherwise works well) (also, I obtained it from CTI when
they were getting rid of it. It still has the CTI barcode on the top.
You can carry the torch!)
– 2 x AVerTV Go 007 FM Plus video capture cards. One of them worked
flawlessly in my MythTV box, the other seemingly didn’t. I presume it
likely works fine in Windows, though. Both are not hardware-accelerated
capture cards, and so I replaced them.
– One of those Hauppauge Windows Media Remote controls

I also have an old PC that was getting finicky towards the end of its
usage. The finicky part of the machine could have been the hard drive,
or it could have been the mobo itself. It was too much work to figure
out and new computers were cheap, so I ended up replacing it. The
following parts are probably worth more than the whole.

You can probably still make use of the processor. The mobo is an Abit
BE6-II. The processor is an Intel Celeron (or at least that is what I
can read below the fan on the processor itself. I can’t find out what
speed it is, but I do recall it being overclocked to 800MHz.

1 x 128MB SDRAM 133Mhz memory stick
The power supply and case
An ethernet card
Possibly a Soundblaster Live! sound card (if not, a regular sound card
with multiple inputs)
Nvidia Vanta 16MB video card? I’m not actually sure, but I think that
is what I see. My first video card. It has served me well in the past.

There is a CDROM drive in the machine as well, but it doesn’t say what
speed it is on the front.

I sent the above to the mailing list of the DePaul Linux Community. Separate from it, you get a special treat! I have a few old Sega Genesis-related materials! Since I do not own a Sega Genesis, they aren’t doing me any good, so maybe you would love to own the following:

Empty case: Centurion: Defender of Rome
Instructions in case: Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Super Monaco GP
Game in case: Star Control, NHL 94, NFL Football 94
Games and Instructions in case: LHX Attack Chopper, Joe Montana 2: Sports Talk Football, Hard Ball 3, Super Hydlide, Flashback (has strategy guide instead of instruction book), NHL Hockey, RBI Baseball 93, Bill Walsh College Football 95

I also have a Game Genie Manual and Codebook…but no Game Genie.

If you are interested, feel free to email me or leave a comment. I’d prefer not to ship it, so if you could pick it up yourself here in Chicago (obviously easier for some people than for others), you can get it for free.