Tag: games

Elite is 31337

John Winkelman

I was feeling bored nostalgic bored at work today so I spent some time browsing around the int0rw3b. As luck would have it, the first site I surfed to, The WikiPedia , had some interesting stuff in it. Specifically, a link to an entry on Harun al_Rashid . He was the Caliph in the Thousand Nights and a Night , and more recently he was the central character in issue 50 ( Ramadan ) of Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman comic book .

After looking up a few other random words I typed in “elite”. This returned a variety of possible results, one of which was subtitled “computer game”.

Could it be?!? YES! An entry on the greatest computer game of the 1980s!

Doing a Google search brought up a great BBC article on the people who created the game, all those years ago. I am still in the process of looking for good ports of the original to a PC platform. They are surprisingly, frustratingly, few and far between — although this one looks promising. I say “surprisingly” because there is nothing about the game that could not be easily done in Flash.

So if I don’t find any good results in the next few weeks, I guess I will have to quit my job and build it myself!

geek.count++

John Winkelman

Where have I been? Ah! Therein lies an interesting story…

Nah, not really. I have been playing around with new things.

On Friday, when I decided not to go to work, I spent a couple of hours downloading and installing Apache, PHP and MySql on my home computer. To a certain extent, it all worked. Apache worked without a hitch. PHP runs fine, although I haven’t quite figured out how to get all the extensions (e.g. XSLT) working. And MySql stopped working when I did something with my firewall, which makes no sense because the firewall adjustment was to block MySql from accessing the internet, which it should NEVER have to do.

Meh. I’ll sort it out soon enough.

The other cool new thing is actually a cool OLD thing, and by old I mean 1985 / Commodore 64 OLD. The game is Telengard, and there is a fella made a perfect clone of it for PC users. After a couple of hours of playing I have to say, Wow, what a nostalgia trip.

Maybe I just need to get out more.

Games and Such

John Winkelman

I pimp Orisinal on an almost-weekly basis, to keep my readers entertained when I am not regularly posting to my journal. For those of you who think Orisinal is too Cute, I have two new ones:

The Mystery of Time and Space is a graphic adventure in Flash, highly reminescent of the old Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure. And Triglax is an astounding, Diablo-esque game done entirely in Dynamic HTML! Now THAT is some serious mojo!

I am flexing my Flash muscles a little, and soon Bock and I should have a rudimentary working draft of Battlefish up and ready for testing. Stay tuned!

Great Things Are Afoot

John Winkelman

Updates will be few and sparse as I recreate the server-side stuff for es.o. Shouldn’t be more than a week. SO to keep you occupied, here are some games . The guy who makes these is on the short list for Saint-hood.

The list of new es.o features will include the following:
-the option to link to, and therefore bookmark, individual entries.
-full portability to Flash MX
-web-based content management
-email-based updating
-XSL/XPath tutorials
-possible new interface
–GO!

The list goes on, and on. So until next time, keep on truckin’!

Best Game EVER!!!

John Winkelman

Any of you who had Commodore 64s may remember Paradroid , wherein you controlled an “influence device” and flew around capturing/destroying other robots on a series of ships by taking them over, circuit by circuit. Well, it’s back , thanks to some folks who know the value of replayability and innovation. Should work on Windows and Linux. And possibly Mac OSX.

This was a great vacation. Four days of excitement and sleep in equal quantities. I hope I remember where I work…