Irene's Weblog

The Huskers got their asses handed to them at the game, but Ohio State University put on a great halftime show. It’s a shame this wasn’t on television.

Don’t miss out on the simulated galloping horse at the six minute mark.

For those of you who aren’t gamers:

1.Space Invaders: Gameplay
2.Pokèmon: Pokèballs
3.Pokèmon: Pikachu
4.Tetris: Gameplay
5.Mario: ?????
6.Mario: Coin Blocks
7.Mario: Star
8.Mario: Mario Head
9.Halo: Covenant Head
10.Halo: Covenant Design or Needler or …
11.Halo: Logo
12.Zelda: Hylian Crest with Tri-Force
13.Zelda: Link’s Horse, Epona, Running
14.Zelda: Master Sword
15.Mario: Castle and Flag
16.Pac-Man: Gameplay
17.Game Over

Source.

After four long years in the making we are proud to release Diaspora: Shattered Armistice. Diaspora is an episodic-release single and multiplayer space fighter combat game set in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica universe. Diaspora is a standalone freeware game based on the FreeSpace Open Engine, everything needed to play is in the download. The project is not-for-profit and not associated with NBC Universal or Bigpoint’s Battlestar Galactica Online.

Our team opted for episodic releases, each involving short plots surrounding different Colonial or Cylon ships and characters. The first Release, Shattered Armistice, tells the story of the Battlestar Theseus and her crew during the attack on the colonies. Many ships seen in the show are part of the first release but some such as the Viper MK2 and the Battlestar Galactica are going to be seen in later releases where they are part of the main story.

Shattered Armistice has a fully-voice acted 8 mission campaign with an original score and cinematics. Several ships never before seen in the Battlestar Galactica universe such as the Sobek class battlestar and Assault Vipers make an appearance.

If there is continued fan interest and support, future episodic releases will see ships such as Pegasus and Galactica from the show. You’ll also see more ships not from the show that flesh out the Cylon and Colonial fleets.

More info.

Download the game and soundtrack.

There are several video games that are free to play. If you can’t afford the prices of some of the newest games, just check out some of the classics below. Hours of fun, guaranteed.

Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun

Doom

Fallout

Full Spectrum Warrior

Grand Theft Auto

Grand Theft Auto II

Marathon Trilogy

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

Mech Warrior 4: Mercenaries This will actually runs at max settings on a netbook.

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

Warzone 2100

Wild Metal Country

This is an installer for Daggerfall that adds all the patches and tweaks and has its own DosBox wrapper.

There’s one for Arena too.

Liberated Games and Wikipedia also have large lists if these don’t keep you occupied.

I was going to post pictures of the games with this post, but my internet has been in and out (mostly out) for the past three days and I can’t be bothered with posting one picture, having my connection go out and having to edit and reset everything every time it happens. If you want to try these games, the links above have lots of pictures.

GOG.com’s Trevor Longino is concerned about saving gaming for history, but, because games like Diablo III require a constant online connection, we could one day lose that game.

“I would say one of the downsides that is going to be really bad for games that have an always online requirement is that unless at some future date the person who made that game removes that constantly online requirement you won’t be able to have a service like GOG selling that game”, Trevor Longino has told games™ talking about how part of GOG.com’s mission is to preserve gaming history. Games like Diablo III with bespoke constantly online DRM, Longino goes on to explain, could be lost to gaming culture at large if for any reason the games publisher or developer stops supporting that infrastructure. “So when you lose that online connection, “ explains Longino,” you lose a chunk of gaming history.”

Besides GOG.com, the maligned pirates are also helping to preserve older games. Still, without help from the original developers, it can still prove to be a problem.

As far as I’m concerned, once the publisher stops selling the game, it’s no longer a matter of piracy. There is no further argument about lost sales. If it’s not available for sale, then morality or ethics shouldn’t even be considered except to say that it is morally correct to save the game. This is particularly true as many games are now unplayable on their original cartridges or discs due to age, misuse, and/or improper storage.

For those that still do not understand, Diablo III is not an “online-only” game in the sense that you need an internet connection to play. You do not have the complete game on your computer. Your computer is the local client that renders the game and has some code. With normal online-only games, you can, eventually, figure out a hack so you don’t have to connect online. With Diablo III’s online-only, you don’t have access to the game on your own computer.

This puts the onus on Blizzard to preserve their own game indefinitely, which is unlikely to happen. If games like Diablo III are to be preserved, then there will have to come a point where Blizzard would stop selling the game and release the source code for that to happen.

I have played three of the four games this moron broke. Even when I believed in God and people convinced me that Led Zeppelin were doing the work of the devil, I simply sold my music and video games. I did not destroy them. Maybe it’s because I was raised to value things even if I did not ideologically agree with them.

Maybe it’s because I’ve seen and read history and understand nothing good comes from destroying things you don’t agree with. Maybe, I’m just not an ignorant asshole.

I suppose if you just want to break the stuff you buy that’s okay. The problem is that this sort of behavior then leads to protests, bannings, and burnings.

Source.