It feels like the Payne...

I am an avid fan of Anime Music Videos (AMVs) and I think that some of them are really better than the original videoclips. The result of combining well edited video track with good music is sometimes extraordinary. Recently, however, I have noticed a new trend, something that I would call GMVs - Game Music Videos.

I will write more about some of them in near future, but today I would like to share a couple of them based on one of my favourite computer games of all time - Max Payne. Well, Max Payne 1 and Max Payne 2 to be honest, but let's just consider that I consider them one thing - a duology if you will.


The series is starring a bitter, depressive cop high on painkillers, whose mind seems to be devastated by death of his wife, baby, friend. I couldn't help but identify myself with the crestfallen hero, who fights for elementary justice in the world where he is left completely alone and everything seems to be against him. A trademark of the series are voice-acted pages of graphic novel unveiling the story as cut-scenes and occasional parts showing the visions of Max Payne, who is haunted by guilt and helplessness. The level where he is running in pitch black darkness on the blood trails with red snowflakes falling while sobbing of his dead wife and baby crying can be heard in the air sends shivers down my spine every time... but let's get back to the topic.

Firstly, the trailer for the sequel, telling the story of how Max falls in love with a killer, Mona, is simply great. A little too much shoot'em up action in the middle, but I adore this lines "This is love... love hurts" and "I thought it was over... It wasn't over... and it would get worse before the end". Cheesy as they are, they resonated well with me. But then again, I haven't exactly been in the happy mood recently, so...

Trailer

Secondly, here goes a great music video that retells the story, altering some parts of it, as well as the ending. Nevertheless, it is simply great and if you don't feel like playing the game (shame on you!), you can more or less see what it is about. If you know the game, it will surprise you anyways. I think this video won some sort of machinima competition - and rightly so.

Payne 2 the Max

And the last contender is this music video with the song actually being performed by the same person who prepared the video (this is rare). I liked both spectacular bullet actions and the general melancholic note to it ("it feels like the pain will never end"). Highly recommended as well.

I remember Max Payne

As a bonus, here's the link to real life rendition of Max Payne and to another GMV, namely home-made trailer for the first game (very good). Also, if you are one of the people who felt depressed after completing Max Payne 2, try to complete the game on the hardest difficulty setting - the ending will change slightly.

HexAxis

At least once I am happy about not writing about the game immediately, the game in question being Hexaxis. I was going to bash it and beat the crap out of developer (metaphorically, that is). I am glad I didn't.


What I was faced with at first seemed like an odd mixture of Lumines (moving timeline, falling blocks) and rolling dice. Technically it was nothing special, as you can observe on the screen below, some additional dice would appear on the screen out of nowhere and my inability to guess which face up the dice is going to land on when it falls was making me angry to say the least.


Well, I have decided to give it another chance and try next build. And yes, this time it is much better. You can immediately observe the improvement in graphics, but mechanics also got slightly altered. There are arrows at the bottom of the screen showing where new dice will appear, there is a sort of a semi-transparent ghost below the falling dice, showing which face up it will be placed when rolling down.


And indeed, now this makes sense. I was not hooked, somehow the game doesn't get to me, but at least this time it is a full-blown homebrew release. I may not like to play it, but it is a quality home-made game and in its last incarnation I have no hesitation to recommend you to give it a try. Maybe it will appeal more to you.

You may have a look at the gameplay in the video below and also try the PC demo available here.

EDIT: I have updated the story, click here to read the follow-up.

Happy birthday Spectrum!

Thanks to this article on Slashdot, I have realised we celebrate the 25th anniversary of ZX Spectrum computer.

I remember finding first computer magazine in my life (it was called "Bajtek") when I was nine - I have read through the walkthrough for "Three weeks in Paradise" and thought I didn't understand the rules of the game (there was a map for the game, so I thought it was a sort of board game). I got some explanations and fell in love with the idea. I was then reading on about games in other computer magazines, watching the photos of Lords of Midnight and l'Aigle d'Or in French computer magazines that my parents got - and I kept asking my parents to buy me one of these wonderful machines. Occasionally, my Dad would take me to his work, where I could play some Amstrad games (hey, Ghosts'n'Goblins!).

Lords of Midnight

My dream took quite a long time to realize, since my parents didn't really have much money (plus take into account the fact the official exchange rates between Polish zloty and American dollars, as well as the availability of even 8bit computers, remember that it was still '89). On the funny note, I can vaguely remember that in the eighties the Polish radio would broadcast ZX Spectrum programs and games, so that anyone with tape recorder could record it on the tape and use. How about that, American imperialists? We shared everything in the communist period (tee hee), and come to think of it, one might consider it to be a rough equivalent of the government warez . Gives all new meaning to the term 'radio connection'.

ZX Spectrum+

I finally got my first computer in 1991 - it was ZX Spectrum+ with a tape recorder. Games took five minutes to load, and the loading would often crash, since it was a cheap, Polish tape recorder and read the data with a little bit of liberty. Sometimes if you touched the cable, the game would abort loading before the end. My younger brother even got beaten by me once, when he crashed loading of Draconus (I feel ashamed even today when I recall it). Of course in '92 most of my friends would already have Amigas. Words can't describe it how gorgous looking these games appeared to me back then (Wolfchild, Moonstone, Swiv, Agony). However, instead of just playing my ugly (by comparison) ZX games, I took to programming so there was something good in the situation.

Chase HQ

I can safely say that my parents buying me ZX Spectrum+ was one of the best things that happened in my life. It is all a history now, but these were great times and we had incredible sense of power, forcing this crude (but then they appeared almost almighty) devices to do what we wanted them to do. That's when I got infatuated with computers, programming and, above all, games. That's where my fascination with insides, outsides and the logical part of electronic devices stems. That was the beginning for me.

Imagine how many possibilities this gave, how many doors to visionary worlds opened, how programming was tickling my mind - and we're talking about eleven years old me in a gray reality of a freshly post-communist country.

ZX Spectrum+ and its insides

I now meet programmers who can't tell me what processor their machine has, who don't understand the way their expensive graphic cards work, I meet engineers that barely know what's in that black box. If I still happen to like to know what's 'under the hood' (so to speak), it is because back then my childish curiosity was driving me to understand ZX Spectrum from inside out... and after that, every next generation of computers was easier to understand.

PSPectrum

Right now, I have ZX Spectrum emulator on my PSP and I can revisit the dungeons of Knight Lore or caves of Heavy on the Magic on the bus - and it's like a trip back to childhood days, only without waiting for the game to load from the tape (my original ZX Spectrum+ is non-operational and lies in the depths of my basement, but I still have it). For those of you who are online, there is a whole archive of the games to be played through your browser available at World of Spectrum (this is better for veterans), as well as a selection available here and here. Tears are almost trickling down my cheeks when I revisit Chuckie Egg, Bomb Jack, Who Dares Wins II, 1942, Green Beret and Lords of Midnight...

Clive Sinclair

Clive Sinclair received his Baron title for the success of ZX Spectrum and in my opinion rightly so. Happy birthsday, Speccy, and all the best to you Sir Clive!

Silent Hill Origins

Silent Hill series is located quite high on my list of favourite games. The story is great, albeit dark and twisted, and the presentation values create immersible experience that stays with player long after the game is finished.

My personal favourite was Silent Hill 2 with incredible story of James, sad man looking for his dead wife in the misty town (I may yet write a separate post about it), but part no. 1 and 3 together also made very strong impression on me. Number four was just tied in to cash in on the brand and it showed off.


I mention that because today I learnt that Silent Hill Origins for PSP is slowly nearing completion. As the name suggests, the game will be a prequel happening before the events of Silent Hill 1. I already lost the hope that it would be completed and classified it as vapourware to avoid getting my hopes high. Yet new movies surfacing confirm that the game is still in works and promise delivering quality Silent Hill experience. Have a look at the second movie - that's the very essence of the series. The music, the weirdness, lone strangers in cold, empty corridors...



Also, just recently I've read on Kotaku that the new title in the series (SH5) will be more in the spirit of the second part, which I definitely preferred. So that's two great Silent Hill news in one week!

UBUNTU - Good versus Evil

Brothers and sisters, I have to admit that what I saw today made me lose my speech for a couple of seconds. And this doesn't happen that often.

I think that if you are visiting my blog from time to time, there is high chance that you know what Ubuntu is (if not, please read more about it here - essentially it is very user-friendly free operating system). As with many programs and systems following the Open-source and Free Software philosophy, Ubuntu comes in different flavours - because everyone is free to take it and modify it.


So, last year I became aware that there is a Christian variant of Ubuntu. I am a practising catholic, but it made me raise my brow a little ("How do you make an operating system Christian?").

Nevertheless, since it is essentially a version with added Bible study tool and content control software (not to mention nice light theme), I decided it was okay in my book. No crosses on the wallpapers, nothing that would ridicule the idea - I judged it a reasonable project.

However, there are people who didn't like the idea. Not sure why, but apparently they felt it is necessary to bring back balance to the galaxy, therefore they created... a satanic counterpart. I kid you not: Ubuntu - Satanic Edition.


Basically, it is just a collection of themes, wallpapers and screensavers (have a look at their screenshots gallery). No special program to optimise sacrificing virgins and desecrating churches whatsoever. I find it pretty amusing overall, but the idea itself surprised me at first.

As for others' reactions, Mark Shuttleworth (the main man behind Ubuntu) commented that "Ubuntu is a broad church", other nice comments involved waiting for Jehova's Witness version and my personal favourite "If you gaze long enough into the distro, eventually the distro gazes back at you".

And so the battle for our souls continues in digital plane as well.

Last Enemy Territory status update

I don't know how I became addicted to Enemy Territory, but it's a fact that I have realised I do play it a little too often. I guess virtual fighting hand in hand with other soldiers forming our team allows me to concentrate on real problems, like disarming the dynamite, stopping that damn tank from reaching our courtyard or blowing up the ramp leading to our base. It makes other problems trivial and less important - who cares about being dumped by a girlfriend, having persistent health problems, family matters, job getting less and less interesting, when you could be saving the day by breaking through enemy lines and changing the fate of the campaign?


Ahem. Still, that is my latest score and it sort of makes me feel better, knowing that only some thirty thousand people on this planet are better than me in this game.

Oh, and if you have enough of this topic, worry not. I removed all the files of the game and my profile records, therefore I shouldn't write about it anymore. You can check here if I hold my promise.

PDF on PSP

I always preferred real books to PDFs and their other on-screen versions. The pleasure of reading a book is something that I can't substitute with just letters glowing on the screen. It's just one of these things...


Nevertheless, traveling as much as I do ("You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI") one cannot take all his favourite books with them. This is where PDF versions come in handy and this is also where PSP can provide a great substitute to a clunky laptop computer. In this post I would like to write about using PSP to read PDF files.

Basically, there are two popular programs to do that : Bookr and PSPPDF. I tested them both, the test cases being Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman (memoirs of one of the greatest minds of our times, Nobel-winning physician) and Study in emerald (great short story by Neil Gaiman, can be downloaded for free). I used these books because they contain images - both programs have no problems with pure text, although I didn't have any books with oriental character coding so I am not sure how they would cope with it.

Main Bookr menu

Bookr in action - aesthetic menu can be turned off.

Bookr has very nice and elegant menu system (which can be hidden), reads TXT files as well, navigation is very easy with bookmark system and possibility of going backward/forward by more then one page. It didn't manage to open image-heavy Study in emerald, but had no problems with smaller images, as can be observed above.

Main PSPPDF menu

PSPPDF in action - no menu or display whatsoever

PSPPDF has crude text menu for choosing the PDF, I didn't see any in-book menu, navigation is basic and the program stopped responding when I tried to open Study in emerald. Overall impression left me rather disappointed (my favourite word).

So, if you are asking yourself which PDF reader is the best option on the PSP, then my answer is definitely Bookr. Go download it here and enjoy using it as I did.

Of course, if anyone feels like I forgot something that might tip the scales of judgment more in favour of the other program, then let me know via comments.

I'm back

I would like to apologise all of those who have visited this page during last two months or so and have been disappointed not to find any updates. Both the amount of events in my life on the other side of the screen and their impact on me have been tremendous. I won't go into details, because my personal life is something that I do not wish to disclose here, but nevertheless I promise that there should be more posts soon. Starting now...

Street Mario

Recently I went on a trip to Warsaw, the capital of Poland. The trip was very nice, but what caught my attention was this graphitti of the world's most famous plumber on the gray walls of the city :


It seems like the folks behind it come from the Warsaw anarchistic/artistic underground - you know, squatters, street artists and such, see here ("grupa relaks" is mentioned in the text) or here (other interesting shots).

Some more serious posts will appear soon, I promise. I just didn't have as much time for digital entertainment as I would like to, but since I'll be travelling again soon and there's a ton of fresh homebrew showing up, expect some updates in no time.