I’m definitely not the first person to write about this game but it’s so good that I must post about it. It will take your breathe away and it demands to be replayed again and again. If you don’t believe me then watch this trailer

Prepare yourself for GLORY!!!

For those less seasoned gamers, here is the walkthrough

As allonby mentioned, the site has slowed down due to the release of new version of our favourite series (well I guess that’s debatable) and to be clear, I fucking love this game. So for those of you that haven’t played the game and for some moronic reason, aren’t sure if you should buy it, I’ll give you my impressions and thoughts on the game (btw, I’ve played about 10 hours so far, which may seem like a lot but when compared to allonby, it’s not).

To start with, let’s talk about the Subspace Emissary, the biggest first player mode in the game. I beat this mode and I would say it is very hit and miss. To be clear, its more hit then miss. The main part of this mode involves going through side scrolling levels with various enemies and it can be fun. Certain parts get tedious and some environments lead to stupid deaths. Depending on the character you are playing (until the end your choice of characters is limited) you could die by falling down a hole that another character could have jumped over. This is a small problem but it can be infuriating at the time. Other then that the boss battles are sweet and this mode is the best way to open up almost all the characters.

Speaking of new characters, I’m mostly impressed with the new comers and the changes to the veterans. Ike is a powerhouse with a sword which is sweet. Sonic is fast, lacks good finishing movies but his final smash is amazing. Metaknight also suffers from the lack of any finishing moves but he dishes out damage quite fast. Snake is alright, no great moves but fun enough to play. Olimar seems pretty useless to me at this point but I’ve been told that there is more to him. Pokemon Trainer is alright but I’m kind of disappointed. Wolf is pretty badass; he is powerful and fast and his move set is different enough from Fox and Falco to make me happy. Also, the changes to Falco make him unique in my opinion but considering he was a complete clone in melee, any change is welcome. Pit has a sword and can fly so I’m happy. So overall, pretty happy with the new guys this time around.

The new stages in Brawl bring more intensity and franticness to a series where I figured it would be impossible to make it any more frantic. New stages are either ever changing or destructible and each brings a new challenge to the brawls. Also, the new items available make brawls a new experience. Of course, the most powerful new items is the final smash ball which changes gameplay as soon as they appear and they are so much fun.

The only other mode I’ve spent time with are the event matches and I am quite happy with addition of coop event matches. These matches aren’t anything new really, same style of challenges but this mode as always been fun and with new characters there are plenty of new challenges.

Well that’s my thoughts so far on SSBB. I can guarantee that I will be playing this game for a long time as it is mine and allonby’s favourite past time (and to be honest, the basis for our entire friendship) and I will just get just as excited for the next one and let’s be clear, no matter what the tag line is for this game, Nintendo will continue to make this cashcow of a series.

Wow, a sudden drop in posting, amazing what the release of a certain video game I can’t stop playing can do to content flow.

Regular programming set to resume shortly.

In the meantime, check out this comic strip from VGcats. It really captures what it’s like to be in the fray of TeamFortress 2. Also this one from Penny Arcade parodying echochrome. heh.

Well, back to Smash Brothers for me.

ps - zOMG Star WOlf! sauce sauce

Here is the second half of our opinions of the characters in Brawl, enjoy.

Ness
fink: I have never really gotten good with Ness and I really couldn’t care less. He has some sweet moves (love that bat and yoyo) but the rest is just ok. Final Smash is also looking pretty weak and easily avoidable
allonby: Ness scares me. No, really. Not the character itself, but the fact that anyone who can actually play with him seems to be able to pound my ass into the ground. Luckily there are only 2 people who can actually play as him, and I can take solace in the fact that they live in their parents basement. Also, YoYo FTW!!

Peach
fink: I fucking love hitting people with that frying pan and while at first look her final smash looks weak, it makes people fall asleep which means free hit with frying pan/golf club/tennis racket which makes me very happy.
allonby: Ah, Peach… How I love the way you float about tossing turnips at all who dare question your place as sole sovereign ruler of mushroom kingdom. Even going so far as to “show ‘em the toad” if they step further out of line, asking whatever happened to King and Queen Peach. I truly admire your choice of weaponry as you continue your revisionist crusade to hide the true history of the bloody military coup which lead to your seizing power, and the throne. All hail General.. er, I mean “Princess” Peach. (zomg frying pan, lawlz)

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After almost a decade of playing Smash Bros, allonby and myself are going thoroughly insane waiting for the Brawl to come out. In an attempt to quell our anticipation down to manageable levels we will be giving our opinions on the characters that made it into Brawl and the new levels we’ve seen so far.

Bowser
fink: Bowser was fun to play in Melee but with the potential for Gigabowser in Brawl…well, fuck yeah
allonby: Bowser is one of my favorite characters, so much so I intend to name my dog after the antagonistic sonofabitch. I’m extremely happy to see the spiked collar wearing koopa king return this time around, and the thought of terrorizing my opponents as Giga Bowser has me down right salivating.

Capton Falcon
fink: Falcon is a classic character and has always been fun to play and this wont change for Brawl
allonby: Falcon has always been fun to play, but he has never been one of my favorites (maybe cause he can’t swing a bat :P). I truly hope he still sounds like Napoleon Dynamite versus a tether ball while executing his up B. “YES!”

**UPDATE to Falco**
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Free open source games that I actually want to play are few and far between. Then there is Wesnoth.

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme.

Build up a great army, gradually turning raw recruits into hardened veterans. In later games, recall your toughest warriors and form a deadly host against whom none can stand! Choose units from a large pool of specialists, and hand-pick a force with the right strengths to fight well on different terrains against all manner of opposition.

The art is wonderful and the game play and story are captivating. Available on more operating systems than you can probably name, hours of free entertainment to be had from the the multiple campaigns that are available.

So of course I tried to get it running on my Eee PC.

Initially I had terrible problems with the resolution, font size, sprite size, tiles, all of it seemed messed up. I was trying to compile the stable branch.

I tried the development branch and ended up with a whole other set of issues.

My entire adventure can be seen in this thread over at the wesnoth forums.

Turns out not all the fixes for smaller screens were back ported to the stable branch, and the dev branch’s image resize script was broken, so nothing was actually getting resize when compiled with –tinygui.

They released a new version the next day and it works just fine now.

Still a bit tiny, but very much worth it.

So yeah, if you’re looking for a great game to play on your Eee, go for Wesnoth. You’ll have to compile from source however, just grab the dev brach and ./configure –enable-tinygui.

UPDATE:

I suppose in my haste to finish this post, I neglected to mention the build dependencies.

Prior to compiling you’ll need to make sure you have the required development libraries installed. First off, you’ll need to add the debian repositories to your sources.list file. Don’t let that scare you off, I wrote a friendly tutorial for that type of thing here. We need to add a source repository in addition to the ones mentioned in that post. Once we have access to some source packages, getting the appropriate development libraries installed should be a piece of cake. So, following the same procedure, add the following line to your sources.list.

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

Next, open up a console (ctrl+alt+t) and type in:

sudo apt-get build-dep wesnoth

That will pull down all the stuff required to build wesnoth. There are a few more things we need to install to get the development branch of the code working on the EeePC however. One of these they decided not to mention on the wesnoth pages, which was quite a pisser when I was trying to get this working, and that is the imagemagick package, which is used when compiling with –tinygui to resize the images.

Some of the stuff in the following line may not be needed for it to compile, and I don’t have a machine to test it on right now. The first part (python-dev) you may be able to omit and have yourself some space on your EeePC. Same thing goes for libboost.

Try this:

sudo apt-get install libboost-iostreams-dev imagemagick

And then give it a try. If you get errors give this one a try:

sudo apt-get install python-dev libboost-iostreams1.33.1 libboost-iostreams-dev imagemagick

Then do your ./configure, make, make install.

I hope that helps, if anyone experiences problems with that please let me know in the comments.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I am a whore for Valve. A total whore. And I love it.

When I got my Macbook Pro when they first came out, the only regret I had was that I wouldn’t be able to play Half Life 2, or any of the episodes, on it.

Well, the orange box finally hit and I caved. First attempt was using parallels. Disaster. 2nd attempt was bootcamp, and while it did work perfectly I actually had to boot out of my beautiful OSX and use fucking Windows to play it. I needed a windows install, and software license for it, and i had to tie up all that fucking space just to touch the greatness of Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. And that was OK, because i’m a whore for Valve.

But then the day came where I needed that hard drive space back (OMG BattleStar Galactica!!!), and i decided to wipe my Mac clean of bootcamp and windows, and I could whore no more.

And for a time, all was quite.

Then came CrossOver Mac, and I could be a whore again.

…

CrossOver Mac is essentially Wine++. Wine was initially meant to run windows apps under linux. Apple switched to intel and OSx is basically BSD underneath. Perfect. I tried Darwine, a Wine implementation for OSx, but it just didn’t have the speed. CrossOver is where it is at.

This thing just works. They have install scripts setup for lots of popular applications, Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 among them, which lead me to believe they are also whores. Excellent.

The only “downside” is that CrossOver is not free. But it is worth the $50 they want for it, because it delivers exactly what they say it does. (to keep up a trend) Go buy it. Now. They have a free trail (one i’m still using, I’ll be buying it when it’s up) that you can test out to make sure it works for you, which it will.

So you download CrossOver Mac, install it, select the app you want to install from the list(Steam), pop the Orange box CD in, or just let it auto download the steam installer. Once steam is installed you can get everything else installed and running as you normally would. The only thing is, Steam itself is slow as hell to load. I’m not sure why, but it takes /forever/ to load up. Once it’s up and running however it’s business as usual. HL2, Portal, TF2, all run flawlessly. At native speeds. With no windows install. No license key. No eating up the rest of my hard drive.

So, I’m a whore again. Singing Still Alive while sipping pretentiousness from my Aperture Laboratories coffee mug and cursing the wretched Combine.

The cake is a lie.

Taking cues from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and movies like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, and SwordFish, Uplink from Introversion Software is an amazing “hacker sim” that brings to life the campy hollywood concept of hacking we often see on the big screen.

…

Your trace tracker is beeping like crazy as you’re bouncing your signal all over the planet to avoid being caught as you hack away at a corporate firewall, intent on destroying a database as outlined in a contract from a shady employer. Sweat beads on your forehead as a storm of packets fly by. Bypass the firewall, wipe the database, remember to delete the logs! BEEP BEEP BEEP! Time is running out! Hurry, the trace almost has you pinned down! Hurry it’s-

…

Anyway, I love this game.

One of the great things about Introversion software, is that they simultaneously release all their games on all 3 major OSs. We’ve got Windows, Mac, and Linux, right out of the gates. Pretty damn nice for “The last of the bedroom programmers”. Uplink costs $20, but you can also get it in a 3 pack containing the other amazing games these guys make, Darwinia and Defcon, for $40. Go buy em. Now.

So, what we’re interested in here is the Linux release, and how perfectly it runs on my EeePC. I’ve also tried the other 2 mentioned above, but since the Eee has no graphics card, they aren’t any sort of usable.

Basically you’ll want to unzip the linux version to a location of your choosing, download the latest patch and install it. Then you may need the code card, depending on where you got the game. At this point it should be ready to run, and it should run flawlessly.

One of the things I really dig about this game is that there is out of game content that you need to “hack” to get access to, the game extends beyond the executable. Just as an example, you need to decrypt a series of images using a hex editor so you can get more info from them and move onto the next challenge. There was additional content to be hacked on the bonus CD which you can’t really get anymore, but has been made available here. Also there is a developers CD available containing the source for Uplink, which has led to all kinds of user made mods and expansions for the game.

Uplink does it all just right, and with a tag line of “Trust is a weakness”, it really brings the paranoid campy fake hacking of the movies to life.