Max Payne film appears to be coming after all. The teaser is here.

My first impression of this something along the lines of "it doesn't seem to have a shred of the famous Finnish melancholy". One of the reasons I liked MP1 and MP2 was that they were depressing in a positive way - this place is f'ing dark, life sucks, but if you look at the stuff around you you'll also see funny things (starting, of course, from the very concept that the whole games are so angsty in the over-the-top way).

And, uh, the music is wrong.

Oh well, I guess I'll end up watching it anyway. And I hope Payne and Redemption, if it eventually comes, will do a Maxpaynesque film a bit better. =)

Glest, which I found some time ago, seems like an interesting game. The open source world could certainly use a few good real-time strategy games, especially ones with cute dragons.

A few things seem to speak against Glest right now: While the game seems decent, it's not exactly polished what comes to the user interface. For some reason, from general playability point of view, there seems to be some sort of... well, one could call it apathy. I guess the game core is important, but the rest of the game user interface seems just boring. When you start the game up, you get logo and web site URL. Yawn. Boring fonts. Loading screen is one of those "technical" kinds where boring-font text shows that boring files are being slowly heaved into the computer memory from the disk. Compare this to, say, Wesnoth: Thrilling title screens! Nice buttons all around! Progress bars, while a bit boring, aren't aesthetically dubious, and you don't need to suffer from filenameitis.

Another is that it doesn't really run on the old comp with GeForce 2 MX. And Mac install is... well, really difficult - it's not an .app you can drag to the Applications and remove by dragging it to trash, like Wesnoth - I hate games that have to be scrubbed.

But aside of technical problems, I really hope all of the best for the developers - it certainly looks like a promising game.

A lot of people have published a “my favourite mods for game X” list. I’m being innovative by, uh, not really doing anything particularly interesting in addition. This is, simply put, just a bunch of really mods for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. For some of the initial footwork, I have to thank Pelit magazine, but I basically picked my favourite ones and looked at some latter mods. Besides, they specifically excluded mods that just improve the graphics — games that strive to be experiences, graphics are important. This post is primarily a “list of Cool Stuff I’ve downloaded, in case I need to remember all that again” - so it could be later supplemented…

Thank God for YouTube. They make so easy to find really cool game stuff. And some... weird stuff, too. Okay, mostly the weird stuff. And cool stuff.

I've seen some screenshots of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon before, but seeing the thing in motion was a downright amusing experience. This stuff will haunt me. HAUNT me. I really wouldn't mind seeing a Zelda game with Zelda being the lead character, or even (!) seeing a Zelda game with actual dialogue, but looks like this is the kind of stuff that leaves Nintendo folks scarred for life. And I'm not blaming them. But a game with Zelda on lead, please? Princess Peach got her own game, why not Zelda?

Then YouTube has some classic videos, like that commercial, and some cool fan stuff, like this amazing bit.

Some time ago, I was kind of thinking "why is nobody porting Cube or something to DS and PSP (and N-Gage too, in case anyone cares)? Let's settle the console war/fanboy differences once and for all, get together in friendship and joy and harmony, load up the same game to all of our portables, then play a nice rousing round of a bloody FPS game" =)

But I'd definitely settle for Quake on DS, as described on GameSetWatch. That would be pretty good, and more advanced than Cube too. Quake's control scheme is very versatile, and it would work on both joysticks and touch screen. Quake doesn't need +mlook, but benefits greatly from it, and DS is able to provide all that stuff. And heck, if Nintendo 64 could run it, I guess DS can too, and even better...

Too bad this depends on PassMe. Would be much cooler if this were a real licensed DS card that came with an accessory module that has extra RAM, and flashRAM to store downloadable mods and maps in. A big hint to Activision/iD folks...

This is kind of old news. Jack Thompson wanted people to make a game about a father who has lost a son due to a someone influenced by violent video games going to a murder spree. So, people made the game. Two of them, in fact.

One is called I'm O.K. - which I hadn't seen, because it's Windows only and Wine doesn't really run it. Game Politics tipped that there's now a video of the game. I like speedrun videos already, this was quite interesting!

I just find it odd that (according to Wikipedia) Jack Thompson didn't think it was even possible that such games were published, due to game companies not wanting to depict violence toward themselves. Umm... hate to break it to you, but there's many games already that depict violence toward game companies, often specifically toward themselves. A very early example of this is in the above image from Mechwarrior 2, where we can find the Activision headquarters in one of the levels - conveniently targeted by this big war machine in the picture. I've heard there's such funny feature in Command & Conquer series too, if I remember correctly - though these days, you can't blow up Westwood anymore.

Seriously, the only reason Rockstar/Take2 is holding that back is that they're, well, a big company, and game like this doesn't sell.

Wayyy back some time ago, I bought the PC version of Sudeki. Of course, I didn't have "Windows 2000 or better" at the time, and I sure don't have Windows 2000 or better now, either... so actually playing the game has been kind of impossible. I just bought the game to send a message that hey, more games with Finnish lead designers would be a good idea.

Nowadays I'm Windows-free, and all of my PC stuff happens on Linux. I now happen to have a spare hard drive that's only "almost" dying. Wouldn't hurt installing Windows on that and loading up all sorts of game crap on that and play games... would rule to work on Neverwinter Nights mods again, or play Morrowind! Would be pain to open the computer and unplug my main hard drive and install the spare hard drive every time to play the game though...

...um, wait, why a completely separately used hard drive? You can put two drives just fine on one IDE cable, right? It's possible to dual-boot between Linux and Windows, right? GRUB is love and universe and life, right?

The thing is, way back then, I heard Sudeki has a sucky copy protection system. Apparently, someone had had their Linux partitions ka-boomed. (I guess they just got their MBR blown off, but I can't be too sure without testing myself.) If I unplug my Linux drive while using Windows - well, let's see that copy protection stuff try mess with that!

What's with the remembrance of things past? Well, just today I heard of a fun copy protection system StarForce that installs itself as a Windows device driver, completely messes up the IDE access (now this is starting to sound pretty typical) and does other interesting things.

I was not at all surprised to find Sudeki from the list of games.

(I would post about this to the Boycott StarForce site, but since I haven't checked my e-mail this week and need to download my spam again when I have time, I'm temporarily boycotting forums that need e-mail addy to register... =)

Oh, and I wish to say StarForce messing up Linux partitions is just hearsay and I can't remember the site where someone said that. Apparently, StarForce can't take critique.

Now that I'm a full-time Linux user (though at the university I sometimes also use Macs and I sometimes have to Fix Windows Stuff when people somehow think I'm the Computer Guy, to which my reply is usually to look at the computer dumbfoundedly for half a hour, run Spybot S&D and install Firefox and tell them to Never Touch IE Again), may I ask what the hell is going on in here? The last version of Windows I used was 98SE, and a few years back everyone was saying "hey, switch to 2000 or XP, that's more stable and more secure." I could understand the malware concern in 98SE where everyone can install everything. I run Linux. XP is supposed to be up to the caliber. So here we have a game that needs Windows equivalent of "modprobe lazily_mess_with_ide.ko" to run? I'll stick to my Linux binaries from those thoughtful companies that care to port their games, thank you very much. And this GameCube and DS thingy.

In related news, everyone should try playing Neverwinter Nights on Linux - It doesn't use the SafeDisc copy protection found in the Windows version, I can't even remember when I last time took out the game from the box...

Firstly, I finally found an English fan translation of the Metroid e-manga. Great.

But here's something cool <boycottrant>that company like Electronic Arts would never allow anyway</boycottrant>: Ultima VII: The Black Gate comics. Originally in French, but there's a slightly broken English translation too, so this goes pretty well just after the Metroid manga. =)

(Updated 2006-04-05 to fix the links and formatting)

Well, here's a late-as-usual link, thanks to Slashdot Games: 4-player Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles without GBAs.

Five. Gamecubes. With Wavebirds. Five. Televelevisions. Five each. H-ho-ho-holy cow. I'm still shaking.

All right, step aside, Steel Battalion! We have a new champion holding the title to the most Manly Controller Available, and I don't think this title is going to go anywhere just yet.

One GC for the game itself. Four GCs with GBA Players and Wavebirds, and each with their own television for controllers. The controllers are fancier than the actual game console running the game!

This is the new standard. A Steel Battalion game, including the controller, costed just about the same as the XBox itself. Now, here we have, tum de dum, a game, four game units, their controllers, and televisions... I'm absolutely awed.