Xavier Defrang

If you ever talked face to face with a computer or if you just want to take a stroll down the memory lane with some anonymous heroes, I highly recommend you to take a look at Halcyon Days, a collection of interviews with bytes counting and cycles saving übercoders from the golden age of videogaming.

This is a screenshot from a news on the BBC website

Now don't these riot police officers look strangely familiar? They surely do...

Welcome. Welcome to City 17.

Update: I'm not the only one who noticed the gasmask.

Following up on my post on dystopian music video, here is a short selection of clips from dark futuristic video games (mainly from the 90's).

• Syndicate cinematic introduction and some gameplay
• The sequel, Syndicate Wars, sucked about as much as its cinematic introduction
• Introduction of Beneath a Steel Sky (now free and works great in ScummVM)
• Origin's System Shock. Never liked the game but pretty descent cinematic for that time.
• Fantastic 16-bit aesthetics: Snatcher
• Cheesy montage from the Blade Runner adventure game
• Intro movie to the original Command & Conquer
• Last but not least, simply the best dystopian game ever: Dreamweb (that music is killing me)

Missing in the selection : Bloodnet, Fade to Black, Flashback, Subwar 2050, ...

Some insane nerd posted a two hours long speed run through Super Mario Sunshine (part 1 and 2).
This guy is a machine, he runs through the most convoluted levels with scandalous ease. Pretty mad skills although it seems to use an unlimited water cheat.

A neat little web-based mindreader... give it a try! (Thanks Colin)

Now that you're in shock and awe, run this snippet in a Ruby interpreter...

0.upto(100) { |x|
    a, b = x / 10, x % 10
    p x-a-b
}

I wouldn't go through the demonstration though, I've never been that good with arithmetics...

Virtual worlds crowded with hordes of gamers are valuable new territories for evangelization.

Looking for something pointless to do? Why don't you give a try to this Mario Paint Music Compo?

If like me you spent a good deal of the early 90ies with a joystick in your hand, make sure you check this collection of old french videogames magazines. I actually gave up reading such magazines shortly after TILT stopped to focus on more nerdy issues like programming with machine level languages.

Cool! Here are a bunch of eyetoy flavoured games for your iSight-enabled Mac : say hello to Toysight

Create your own pixel punk dolls... so cute! I'm quite confident that this toy would allow to recreate dolls of a pretty good deal of brussels' nightlife galz...

Everybody's waiting for Half-Life 2 but what about having fun right now? Soldat is an incredibly addictive 2D multiplayer shooter developed by a single hacker in Poland. Quoting the author Michal Marcinkowski : It takes the best from games like Liero, Worms, Quake and Counter-Strike and gives you fast action gameplay with tons of blood and flesh. Soldiers fight against each other on 2D battle arenas using a deadly military arsenal. This is what multiplayer was invented for. Please, port this dope to OS X!