d-log

Good Old Games (GOG) is now offering In Cold Blood, a classic adventure game by Revolution Studios, with a hint of action elements.

Everybody that loves adventure games has heard of Revolution Software. Their first two games, Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky are now freely available, and can be played on many operating systems thanks to the open source ScummVM. After that, Revolution went on creating high-polished adventure games that redefined the genre.

Sometimes, that re-definition wasn’t always appreciated by the gaming community, as was the case with In Cold Blood. The mere hint of action elements led the hardcore adventure gamer to leave the game be. The game wasn’t a big commercial success, which made it impossible to find until now.

Thank you GOG for keeping up the flow of gems from the past.

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The guys at Larian really want all of us playing back the game that started it all : Divine Divinity. After the initial release on GOG, as I mentioned earlier, the game has how also been made available on Impulse.

Now is your time to choose: GOG delivers the games without DRM, and as such the price is at $9.99. Impulse requires you to download the impulse client (a bit like the steam client from Valve) and due to the fact that you have DRM involved, the price is read more »

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At the current Unite 09 conference, a new release of the Unity3D was announced, bringing it up to version 2.6. According to the website, this new version brings along  more than 100 enhancements in respect to the previous version.

The most notable thing, however, is the fact that the $200 Indie variant of the engine has disappeared. It has now been replaced with a free version and has been renamed to “Unity3d”.  The new version includes read more »

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Larian games has just released Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity on Gog.com. As a prelude to the worldwide release of the new installment in the Divinity universe, Larian is giving us the possibility to get re-acquainted with the fantastic worlds their stories play in. Divine Divinity (or ‘Sword of Lies’, as it was called initially) is now available on GOG.com for $5.99. The sequel, Beyond Divinity, is announced as ‘coming soon’ with a price of $9.99.

Divine Divinity was the game that put Larian Games on the map of the RPG-playing world. I had the luck of being able to go playtesting the first game just before the demo was released, and I was truly impressed by the insane amount of detail that went into the world.

The game sports a massive world with diverse locations to explore, an enthralling storyline offering weeks of gameplay, plus a great atmosphere, augmented by an outstanding musical score. If you like RPGs, you cannot miss this one.

I couldn’t agree more. The comparison with “Baldur’s Gate” was made quite often, and it still remains incredible that a small Belgian games company was able to produce such a polished and fun game.

As for the music, just come to Zwinneblomme in Knokke at the end of November, and you’ll be able to hear and see Kirill Pokrovsky himself. He’ll be enjoying himself entertaining the people in the piano bar at that party, so it won’t be games music. Nevertheless, it’ll be a blast, like every year.

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Electronic Arts has been drip-feeding information about the upcoming C&C4 for the last few weeks. Some news is puzzling, such as the fact that C&C4 will require a permanent connection to the internet, fueling the suspicions that EA hasn’t learned from the DRM debacle with Spore. Other news is more game-related, and quite more positive for the fans of the series: the subtitle for the latest installment in the series will be ‘Tiberium Twilight’.

That is good news, as that is a title going around in C&C circles since the release of C&C2. The names for the entire series would have been ‘Tiberian Dawn’ (C&C 1), ‘Tiberian Sun’ and ‘Tiberian Twilight’. Of course, that was before Westwood was disbanded, and many years have gone by between Tiberian Sun and C&C3 Tiberian Wars.

The fact that the title was chosen by the fans shows that there is still a large community of first-time fans that know their history. The promotional video on the C&C4 site is a nice opener, as it shows the sorry state of the world, and a good mystery to construct the game story around.

Well, it won’t be here before 2010, so there will be much to speculate about. Let’s hope the other news will be as possible as the name, showing that the fans of the first hour get what they have been waiting for : a worthy conclusion to the RTS series that continues to define the genre.

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I found this on the Adventuredevelopers.com forums. The apparition of ScummC, a compiler with ScummVM 6 binary code as target, has stirred the waters a bit. The ScummVM project is one of the most visible and recognised adventure-related projects at the moment. Being able to develop for this platform is quite interesting of course.

G33k on the Adventuredevelopers forums found OpenQuest, which is an open source game made in AGS, to act as a demonstration game. The idea is to port this game in ScummC  to have a reference and test the functionality of the compiler. It isn’t much of a game, as the story seems to be lacking.

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And now for something totally different: adventure games. I’ve been introduced to computer gaming, like an entire generation, by the means of the adventure games made at that time by Sierra Inc and LucasArts. Many will have fond memories of The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and the likes.

Several different Adventure engines have seen the light of day, among which the most known are Sludge, MAD, AGS, The Wintermute Engine and Agast. read more »

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Garagegames seems to be very active at the moment, as only a few months after the 1.6 release, we are spoiled with the 1.7 release.
Looking at the changelog below, I notice the Collision Polygon and the Linkpoint editors, which are the only reasons this is a new release. If it had been only bugfixes, I would have expected a 1.6.1 version.
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Gisteravond opnieuw Annabelle op MSN gezien. Dat was al een hele tijd geleden, maar wanneer ze me vroeg hoe dat opeens zo lang geleden was dat ik online was geweest, kwam ik tot de conclusie dat ik voor meerdere maanden de SuSE Linux 10.0 had geïnstalleerd, en gewoon vergeten was Kopete in te stellen.
Wat me nogal trof was dat we elkaar toch al een jaar niet meer hadden gesproken, maar dat één van de eerste dingen die ze vroeg was ‘Hoe gaat het met Nebula?’. Ik moet dus toch lang daarover doorgeboomd hebben als we nog samen rondtrokken in Leuven.
Ik zal me dus wat meer moeten toeleggen op het produceren van dingen, en wat minder op het filosoferen. Met ‘O Denneboom’ zal daar wel wat verandering in komen (gepland voor de kerstperiode), maar daar kan ik nog niets over zeggen omdat het zich nog in een te vroeg stadium bevindt.

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De laatste tijd is er weer veel last van Spambots op het Nebula Universe . Ik ben dus bezig met de nodige pagina’s te blocken, en eens te kijken hoe ik kan vereisten dat de gebruikers zijn ingelogd voor ze toegang hebben tot de pagina. Misschien ook een nieuwe MediaWiki versie ophalen, misschien dat daar wat gaatjes in gedicht zijn.

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