Tag Archives: games

Robot Unicorn Attack vs Canabalt

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canabalt meets robot unicorn attack

Forget your COD, CSS and Half Life. Two of the worlds best games are free (as in beer) and run on most operating systems. Canabalt and Robot Unicorn Attack. Both require less than three keys to play.

Both are platformers that have the exact aim. Get as far as possible with out falling or running into something. Pretty simple right? You can really get addicted to these and end up spending hours attempting to get to the non existent end.

Canabalt

Canabalt is a pretty straight forward 2D platformer. A guy is trying to escape from something (I’m guessing killer aliens) and takes to the roof top. You can’t stop running, and your only control is jumping. Jump from building to building. Run off the edge – dead, run into a building – dead, run into alien spaceship parts – dead, run into boxes – slowed (which eventually leads to death). Some buildings decide to crumble underneath you. Points are gained by distance traveled.

Keys
x,z – Jump

Robot Unicorn Attack

Like Canabalt, this is a 2D platformer. You are a Robot Unicorn which has some pretty nifty features, Dash and Jump. Your job is to get as far as you can without running into a wall, star, or falling off the edge. Longer you go, the faster you get. Points are earn’t on distance traveled, stars destroyed (using the dash skill).

Now be warned. After 2 hours of playing this game. Looking away from my monitor resulted in the room spinning. Sound is required.

Keys
z – Jump
x – Dash / Rainbow attack

=app-emulation/wine-1.1.44 pulse

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Currently the number one use for Wine in Linux is for gamers. I don’t game very often, but it’s fun to play some games here and there, and this time I felt like getting pwnd in Counterstrike Source. It is amazing how far wine as some since 2002. The new steam installs and runs in Wine like a windows app would, and both Portal and CSS worked out of the box. TF2 needed a little tinkering to fix out audio caches, but after that it worked fine. Considering that wine has to take all the DirectX calls and turn them into OpenGL, I am quite impressed with the frame rates, and the best part was I was still running compiz-fusion! Unlike Windows, this allowed me to switch between the game and other apps without tones of redraws.

The only issue I did have was that sounds from Wine took ~2 seconds before I could hear them, making first person shooters fairly hard. Knowing that Wine didn’t have Pulse Audio support I looked around, and sure enough someone had released a patch. Not only did someone release a patch, but it had been added to portage, and just required unmasking.  Apply the use flag and I had sound working at a decent quality.

ADSL 2+ and Valve

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So I decided to get ADSL 2+, at a discounted price of 50% (<3 parents), and I'm loving. Despite the fact that I had to ring up, and had all sorts of problems in their tech support center, People Telecom ADSL 2+ has been awesome so far. The setup was very quick, however they decided to send us the login details via email, after we had lost our internet. Kinda stupid right?

Since I don't really trust my modem with being able to handle all that many connections, I decided to turn it into a bridge and let my server do all the work. It's pretty awesome, once I got the kernel compiled right, and iptables done, everything works nice a fast now. I am planing on getting a block of 8 IPs from People Telecom, so having setup like this will be good.

Also with the help of Hamzah I got e-mail setup on my server, which is quite a bitch to do usually. After changing from Optus, I can now use port 25 and 80. As another addition I’ve decided to use Lighttd over apache, just for shits and giggles, and it’s pretty damn good.

Now, I really wanted to test out my new Linux router and ADSL 2+, what better way to do it than games. Jack was able to lend me some PayPal monies, and I bought the Valve complete pack, which was 99 USD. It contained all the games I wanted to play, and a few others. (It also contained a few games I pirated and wanted to pay for, since they are awesome, esp. Portal). I would have bought the orange box, but it was missing a few games I wanted.

Other than that, I’m starting the last week of school, so I’m basically just been having a rest from work and school, and just doing things I either enjoy or would like to get done.

Cravings

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crav-ing |ˈkrāvi ng | |ˈkreɪvɪŋ| |ˈkreɪvɪŋ|
noun
a powerful desire for something : a craving for chocolate.

Cravings are weird. An internal impulse to do something, sometimes something you typically don’t do, or dislike. This morning I had a craving for drinking a glass of plain milk. I hate milk and I am also semi lactose intolerant. I didn’t end up drinking the glass of milk.

Earlier in this week I craved playing Douglas Adams Starship Titanic, which I started playing while I was at my Nan’s several years. I got most of the way through the game, but never finished it(I think I was up to the musical instruments part [possibly]). I found it really enjoyable, and I believe it has a quality many new games are missing, that is, letting the user think for them selves.

New games I’ve seen focus on “Kill 50 bores and get their blood” (The grind-tastic ones, World of Warcraft and the like), “Shoot and kill everything on the map” (Unreal Tourny, Counter-Strike ect..) and the “Go save this person, along the way level up, loot some mad weapons and gain guest points” (Similar to the grind-tastic ones, but a little less grind and more game play, Diablo ect..). Don’t get me wrong these are great games and I like to play them, but I really like to think now and then.

Starship Titanic is an excellent game, even if it is a little bit out dated (Made is 1998) but the graphics, sound and game play is still awesome. It lacks in features , but who cares, when the puzzles are so awesome and fun. I feel that I should buy the Mac version and play that, however their shop seems to be down at the moment.

My last note, I thought my blog theme was getting a bit outdated so I decided to change it. (Another craving). It’s fairly basic, which is what I like. Now to make the changes to my MySpace profile, to make it look the same.

In the time it took me to write the post, I got 3 RSS feeds and 8 Plurk replies.

GMod On OS X (2.16 MacBook with Intel 945GM)

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I bought GMod the other day and enjoyed it while in Windows Vista (Boot Camp) however it was a bit sluggish. I know from experience that source games tend to run nicer inside Crossover than actually in Windows, go figure. First off you’ll need to install crossover, and steam inside crossover, there are plenty of tutorials on how to do this. Next you’ll need to complete the font hack so you can see the text. In crossover go Programs, Run Command, select the correct bottle, and type in regedit. Inside regedit navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER – Software – Wine – AppDefaults – hl2.exe – Direct3D and double click on tf2_alpha_hack and replace it with “-game tf2; -game ep2; -game portal; -game garrysmod”. Now in steam you’ll have to right click on Gmod and click properties and change the launch parameters to “-console -heapsize 512000 -dxlevel 70 -novid +cl_drawmonitors 0 +r_shadowrendertotexture 00″. If your game launches and you can only see a quater of the window, just change the video settings, they just fit in.