October 29th, 2007
“Another World,” Another Time
Not so long ago, “Another World” was re-released. The game first appeared in 1991, but I had never played it. I loved “Flashback”, a title very similar visually, and because of that sometimes mistakenly called the sequel to “Another World”.
Some time last year Eric Chahi released the game with updated graphics. It still has its distinct style, but now the graphics are more detailed (hi res). Especially the backgrounds. I downloaded the demo and was blown away. Great atmosphere. You can buy the game for 7€ which is dirty cheap for a game. In Poland “Another Wold” is also available in retail; with some extra goodies in a box (short video with interviews with people involved in the game’s creation, soundtrack CD, a postcard and a little book). I ordered mine on Tuesday, got it on Friday.
The most distinguishing feature of “Another World” is its animation style. Back in the early 90s, the pre 3d era, animation was done with a series of bitmaps, swapped every x milliseconds or so. But in another world characters were animated with vectors. I always wanted to know how exactly it was done. I mean, motion capture was not a standard equipment in game production, yet. You can read about how Eric Chahi did it on the official page.
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October 23rd, 2007
Like A Pirate!
He did it again.
After all those years he did it again. Not that I doubted in him during that time, but damn.
I’m talking about Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, among other games. Civ was the first game that made me forget about the real world. And sleeping. I was ten or eleven years old at that time.
Yesterday around midnight I installed Sid’s Pirates! and launched it; you know, I just wanted to try it out before sleep. What an obvious mistake. Three hours later I reminded myself about a lecture I had to attend in the morning.
As an absolute fan of the movie “Master and Commander” I really wanted a game about ships ‘n stuff but it appears sea battles are not a popular topic among game developers (or more likely, publishers). I’ve heard about Pirates long time ago but never played it, not even the previous versions. The latest incarnation of the game was released in 2004, so I found it in the budget section of a game store. Ahoy!
After some time spent with the game, I have to say I relly like it. It’s a really simple and fun game. I think I can safely put it in the casual games arena. It has simple mechanics and looks cute (but not Care Bears cute). My favorite part are the sea battles, but other elements of the game (trading, simplified duels and dancing) are interesting and fit really well with each other. And just like Civilization and its “on more turn” phenomenon, Pirates! doesn’t let you go away from the computer so easily.
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October 2nd, 2007
Love and Hate: My Relationship with ASP.NET (continued)
Some .NET Love
Nothing is perfect, neither is a beast as complicated as ASP.NET. Every developer finds something he dislikes in it. But in my view, there’s a lot more to love in ASP.NET than to hate.
Before summer I worked on a web application involving lots of AJAX. In essence it was an online game played via browser; persistent world, lots of data going from and to the server, and a quite complex interface (including a poor man’s version of Google Maps). And I didn’t know javascript at that time.
I really liked AJAX.NET because it is consistent with the model used in ASP.NET; that is building web pages out of ready controls. I looked at different AJAX frameworks and I think only Dojo did things in a very similar fashion. Although AJAX.NET has a pretty steep learning curve and forces you to write lots of boilerplate code, in the long run it’s a real time saver and, dare I say, joy to work with.
As a side note: as many other programmers, I also under appreciated javascript.
It may seem strange that I mention AJAX.NET as my favorite feature of ASP.NET, but I stand by it because it made me actually want to work with ASP.NET again. I liked the workflow of writing controls in client and server code, sometime the border between the one and the other seemed to blur (mainly thanks to how easy it is to include web service calls into the whole thing).
Other reasons to like ASP.NET? For me there’s only one: The .NET framework. It’s a strong enough reason not to ditch ASP.NET completely.
I have to admit that all my opinions above were spoken in a vacuum (almost). That is: I didn’t take into account the choices (or lack of them) a developer is forced to make when working on a project, or the fact that working with Microsoft’s software commercially usually costs lots of money. I assumed a free hand and semi-unlimited resources (eg. you already bought all the MS stuff).
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