Grab Beyond Good & Evil OST for free!

Beyond Good and Evil is one of my favourite games ever (might be smart to finally do that list one day and publish it here). I love its green-lips heroine, races design, story, orphaned alien children, graphical design and of course great soundtrack. It is therefore with much pleasure that I would like to point out that the aforementioned soundtrack is available for download free of charge (the password for the album is MySpace.com/HyllianMusic and the list of mirrors is here).

While the music tracks from Beyond Good and Evil haven’t reached the ultimate status that mp3 can dream of, namely being put in the permanent folder on my Zen Stone player, they are quite memorable and I do come back to listen to them every now and again. There is also a good deal of variation between them: ranging from ambient oriental music (“Ancient Chinese secrets”) which I have used as a background for one of my tea ceremony dates, through weird sounds of “Propaganda”, to aggressive techno-ish boss fight theme (“Sins of father”), they provide a good variety of tunes for different moods.

The soundtrack was in fact released for free long time ago, which is when I got it, but it’s just quite recently that it has popped up on MySpace. Even if it’s just the clever marketing ploy in order to draw our attention to incoming Beyond Good and Evil 2, I am comfy with it, because I do like freebies, plus this soundtrack is really awesome. Also, worth noting is this interesting remix of one of the main themes, availabe at OCRemix – it is an unofficial remix, but it’s quite good, so I allow myself to link to it as well.

Free MAC Address Changer

There are rare occasions when even an average user needs to change their MAC address, otherwise known the physical network card address (on Windows you can check it by typing ipconfig -all in command console). One of the most common reasons is MAC filtering by internet providers. In my case, I needed to be able to use my company laptop for strictly job-related purposes from home. The problem was that my internet provider only allows one computer to be connected to the internet; more than one computer sharing the connection means that monthly fee goes double. I am not kidding here – welcome to Poland.

Were I to use more computers in the home network, I would probably just sit down and tinker a bit, the result being a post on routers with MAC cloning (this may happen one day), but as someone who normally abides the rules, I didn’t want to go down this road. After all I only use my company laptop on rare occasions, so I just needed to change the MAC address of its network card.

While searching for a tool that would allow me to do that, I realised that there is a is a crapload of programs out there that I would have to pay to use. It seemed to me that changing MAC address is such a simple thing that a free program should be able to do it. I was right – there are free programs that will change your MAC address, they are just buried in Google underneath steaming piles of crappy software the creators of which are greedy.

The most comfortable solution I have found was Technetium MAC Address Changer v5 (the name is pretty much self-explanatory). It’s user friendly, simple to use, does not include fancy-schmancy overblown visual interface, gets the job done and rus on almost every Windows system out there (not sure about Windows 7 though). A great simple tool for a particular purpose is what it is.

Oh, and to anyone that would like to go on about how displaying ones MAC address on the internet can be potentially harmful – did you read the title?

Harpooned

I love Japan, I really do. But despite many things that make it great, Japan also has its dark sides. One of these rather dreadful things is the Japanese approach towards whaling. I wouldn’t be mentioning it here on Barts News (this is principally a game blog after all), were it not for Conor O’Kane, a man who has chosen a rather unusual media channel to draw people’s attention to the issue: he made a PC game about it.

Called Harpooned, the game is in fact a clever satire disguised as your average shoot’em up game. Player controls a whaling ship, killing whales and collecting their meat, while taking care not too shoot protesters. All this is accompanied by sarcastic messages such as “scientific bonus” taking a jab at Japanese explanation that this cruelty takes place just for scientific purposes.

As player progresses through the game, more whales get harvested for scientific research and fewer of them remain in the sea. The comments between the game levels will be saying things like “Our research shows that there are less and less whales in the area – we must kill more of them to find out why it is so” until finally there won’t be nothing in the cold waters but scientific vessel and icebergs…

Average player will be able to complete the game in couple of minutes, but it is not really so much a game but rather a statement disguised as a game, a way of drawing attention to the real-life problem. Therefore I couldn’t really say that its brevity is a handicap, on the contrary – average player will be able to reach the end of the game before they get bored and witness the empty cold sea themselves. I think this was intentional in order to make an impression on the player – it certainly worked in my case.

It’s also worth noticing that the production values are high for an indie game made by one man – from pretty graphics, through blood effects, to sad music, everything is polished and carries a sense of style. There also is an online score board for the best whalers scientists.

Download the game at Harpooned website (there is also a Mac version available) and if you can’t spare five to ten minutes to complete it, at least have a look at the trailer below:

Now, will anyone make a similar game for Taji dolphins?

How to save and convert YouTube to PSP

I know that there are programs like YouTube downloader and PSPTube to download and watch flv movies on your PSP. They both have some shortcomings, which is why I prefer to watch movies in mp4 format using PSP XMB menu – it is much more comfortable, esthetic and smooth than PSPTube (with all due respect towards its creators, of course).

My story starts with this great music video:

At first I thought that I would download it using KeepVid, an excellent page for saving Youtube videos, would be enough – after all, it provides user with a link to movie in mp4 format (higher quality version of the video) in 16:9 proportion and encoded with H.264, so theoretically it was a perfect choice for saving it for PSP.

Unfortunately, even though the movie looks nicely and is recognized by my PSP, it would hang randomly every now and then during playback, especially when fast forwarding. After careful examination with Gspot (ohoho, I see what you did there with the name), it turned out that the problem is due to resolution of the video. Look at the information below:

I actually missed it the first time – the resolution is 480×270, instead of 480×272. Almost, but in this case “almost” makes a huge difference.

Having no option but to convert video, I started looking for a program that would do the job for me. I wanted something that would be idiot-proof and easy to use, as I don’t have much knowledge about video encoding process (I used to dabble in image and video processing when I was a student, but that didn’t include meddling with half-broken codecs). I don’t have to explicitly mention that the program had to be free as well, do I? PSPVideo9 fit the description, so I downloaded and installed it.

On the whole I find the program annoying – error reporting is quasi-non existent, user interface is cluttered with spam (sorry, commercials). Blargh. But I have decided to give it a try, since I already had it installed. Since as I mentioned before I am a newbie when it comes to video encoding and I do not intend to waste my life on trying to learn the intrinsic details of the process, I have chosen Normal set of options ( less things to fiddle with).

After minimal trial and error, I have settled for these settings:

The result is the video that does not take too much space, has decent quality (more or less the same as seen on Youtube in higher quality) and plays flawlessly. Video parameters are as follows:

Yes, the video stream is a bit too generous when it comes to kbps, but still the result is satisfying. Reencoding with 500kbps doesn’t yield that much difference in file size, so for the sake of this HowTo I have decided to keep it simple and remain in Normal settings domain.

Now, the process of conversion doesn’t take long and with the settings now saved as default, it is pretty much automatic – download Youtube video with KeepVid, process with PSPVideo9, put on PSP, enjoy watching.

Now it’s feedback time – what do you think about this post? Useful? Simplistic? Plain wrong? Let me know via comments.

Barts’ Short Bursts vol. 1 – a bit of everything

I really do need to find some more suitable title for this (such as Gnome’s Decker’s Delight Links or Bytejacker’s Indie Rapid Fire): there are so many things worth bringing to your attention and so little time to write about them. Therefore, I have decided to make posts with a compilation of interesting links and tidbits that don’t quite qulify for a full post, either due to my chronic lack of time or because they are just a small curiosity. Here goes the first bunch:

No country for old pigeons.

Owl Country is a little indie title that I have found on TIGSource, but can’t recall how. It’s just pure magic of teh internets, I guess. While the game itself is a bit of a one trick pony, it has a great intro, amusing gameplay mechanics and big game makers could learn a lot from its authors when it comes to creating atmosphere. Be sure to watch the awesome trailer !

A true classic

Other not-so-indie game that caught my attention is in making is a remake of a retro hit we all know and love: R-Type. Check the trailer here – notice how the player can switch between 2D and semi-3D view, really neat. Another game these guys are making is Lode Runner remake, which makes me instantly like them, even if their website looks like prepared by a ten year old with an outdated HTML book (their Facebook page is a bit better). Sadly, this game is going to be available only for Xbox 360.

Penny Arcade noticed the existence of Poland in their comic strip. I love PA and this one is quite funny, but I need to point out that syfy would rather mean spots (as in nasty case of acne) and syphilis would be commonly called syf, which also means something of low quality or not nice. Always a nitpicker, Barts is.

There are also two quite interesting flash games that I would like to recommend for your gaming pleasure – Virus 3 and Bloody Day Out. They are both about logical thinking and planning a couple of steps ahead. The first one involves infecting a system of geometrical shapes as a virus and requires carefulk planning to infect the whole level within designated moves limit. The second one is starrring a cute little Death cutting through fields of equally cute critters. The trouble is, Death is bleeding out while doing that, so player needs to plan their moves carefully. Bloody Day Out is an excellent time-waster ad I heartily recommand it.

Did you know you can play hundreds of NES games online? I didn’t, so when I first learnt about Virtual NES website, it cost me a good hour or so spent with Belmont, Mario and others. Also, contrary to abandonware sites (mostly illegal), the owners of the site have gone to great lengths to prove their website is legal. Definitely worth a look, especially for other retro freaks out there.

Double portion of LSD Pong

The title says it all – today I would like to share with you two versions of the classic Pong game that both look as if their respective creators enjoyed experimenting with LSD a little too much.

I found the first remake while reading my daily portion of Exophase. It is not so much a full game yet, but a tech demo showcasing what can be done with the new PSP game engine by A_Nub. The chances are that it will soon become a regular game with cool graphical effects. If you have a PSP, download it from the release thread – static screens don’t fully show how trippy this game is. If author adds pulsating plasma background, people will get high by just playing it.

Speaking of plasma, watching Gnarly Pong in action made me recall equally trippy game for PC called Plasma Pong and I have realised that unfortunately I never mentioned it here on Barts News. Essentially, the game is good, old Pong with added fluid dynamics and funky visual effects. It is quite fun to play in short bursts.

While googling for more information, I found out that the notice on author’s page suggests that Atari was unhappy with him using their trademark. On a positive note, though, author promises a new title to make up for that and the original game can be still found in many places over the internet, for example here.

You owe it to yourself to read more detailed review here and see Plasma Pong in action in this video, because similarly to Gnarly Pong the beauty of the game manifests itself best in motion.

[via Exophase]

Zombiegrinder 60000

Not that much can be said about Zombiegrinder 60000, except that it is a scrolling shmup that allows player to literally grind zombies – but there is a little twist to it, which makes it slightly less forgettable.

Player is put in the blood-covered shoes of a man with shotgun who is incessantly running to the right, killing zombies while accelerating. The original concept, however, is that the action is closely tied to music, so when the music slows down, the time flow also does in the bullet time manner, and when the music goes crazy, the action pick up on speed to match it.

Simple? It really is and I don’t think anyone can play the game for more than a couple of minutes, but it’s well executed, provides some distraction from work (ahem) and the idea of time slowing down together with music is neat. Plus there are zombies in it and gamers love zombies, so without further ado, ladies and gentlemen (okay, somehow I don’t think ladies are going to actually play it) I give you:

Olle Hemmendorff’s Zombiegrinder 60000

As the name implies, the in-game music (I know that calling this sound thingy music is perhaps stretching the definition of the word to the limit, but oh well) is grindcore. If you are not familiar with different kinds of metal, such as for example vegetarian progressive grindcore, feel free to inform yourself by means of this excellent video.

[found via comment section of Rock Paper Shotgun post on something completely different]

(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors

Have you ever dreamt that you were a gargantuan creature dwelling deep in the cold darkness of the ocean’s bottom, reaching to the light above with your myriad of tentacles, observing these little warm creatures of flesh, maybe catching one of them and drawing down to the murky depths below?…

What? No, me neither, just asking.

Yet apparently some of us have this kind of dreams and take this matter one step further, creating a game that allows player to control such a creature. That’s what “(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors” is all about – the process of discovery and interaction through three eyes of tentacled sea monster, all in delightfully retro graphics.

Note: I like retro visuals, but I am not too keen on pixel art abuse – just because it’s easier to make blocky pixelated sprites doesn’t mean the game is going to look good. Sometimes, however, pixel art really does become art (in real word, too, on rare occasions) and as a result right now I can’t imagine “Majesty of Colors” in any other graphical form.

I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of finding out how the game works, so I will not elaborate further on the gameplay itself. Remember, it’s up to you to discover how to play it and what to do, and the outcome will vary depending on that.

This touches the subject I want to tackle in more detail here on Barts News one day, as well as exploit myself: games are an excellent medium to tell a story that has visual appeal, builds ambience in a cinematic sense and has one advantage over movies and TV – player interaction and multiple variants. Traditional storytelling cannot give you what games can – influence over story itself, pushing heroes to act more to our liking, ultimately achieving different endings in functioon of player’s choices.

“(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors” is but a short little game, but it does exactly that – presents different story arch and ending based on player’s decision. As simple and limited as it is gameplay-wise and story-wise, it has an original concept, innovative idea of playing, multiple endings and one or two brilliant moments, my favourite one being the opening, when a little baloon makes the creature see colors.

Go ahead and play it, the experience will be worth it. And if you are an aspiring game creator, read wonderfully detailed post mortem on GameSetWatch to see how the author made it happen.

Free As A Beer versus Budveizer Freemium

(I know that the title of this note is a terrible attempt at a joke, but I can’t forget this one beer commercial with the name read in the funny voice…)

This note is a heads up on what’s coming next, both in the sense of incoming posts on Barts News and on a larger scale in the gaming world. Two interesting free online games have popped up – Quake Live and Battlefield Heroes, each a bit different in the approach that they take, but also similar in one general aspect.

As I have mentioned in my note on rapidly changing times, we are seeing a lot of new things happening nowadays. Up until recently, for me and probably many other gamers online gaming meant two things:
- fully fledged commercial games, requiring moderate to heavy horsepower of your system, that player pays for (ahem, at least theoretically) and is playing them at home;
- casual flash titles, requiring just a browser and little to none requirements, that player does not pay and usually plays at work. Okay, so there are some people who play these for fun at home, still, quite a lot of bored office workers do as well.

Simplistic as this division may be, it worked – if you think I’m raving, tell me through comments. With the arrival of Quake Live and Battlefield Heroes, however, a new model is emerging on our eyes – 3D online games that are free to play, in which player joins and plays via browser (not entirely true in case of BH, but close enough). But how are their creators earn money, after all the infrastructure costs quite a bit? The revenue comes from either players paying for extra features (freemium) or from other companies buying commercial space within the game world (in-game advertising), or perhaps both. With that in mind, let’s have a look at two titles in question.

Battlefield Heroes is cartoon-themed quasi-WWII third-person-perspective shooter that applies the first business model – freemium. Anyone can play the game for free, but for extra items such as fancy clothes for your characters player will need to pay up. When I started writing this note two days ago, I was bashing EA for being greedy, because I thought ALL extra things were to be bought, including gestures, stronger weapons and items. I even made the obligatory Penny Arcade reference.

Turns out, I just didn’t get the system at first – there’s points that come from, well, player’s money, but there’s also other kind of points (called Victory Points, abbreviated to VP) that come from playing game a lot, scoring objectives and undertaking special missions. So while you may not be able to buy that fancy pirate shirt without investing some real-world money, there’s no fear that your battlefield veteran will look the same as that rich little bastard who paid instead of playing. Weapons can only be upgraded by spending VPs, so the system seems rather fair.

Observations:

• It is really fun to play so far. It is a little rough around the edges, but so far playing it has been highly enjoyable.
• Vehicles are fun to ride, but this part seems somewhat unbalanced – planes are bloody useless, tank can’t trip a road sign and explodes way too easily. But driving a car packed with your team mates is like a high-school road trip, with that “yooohooo!” feeling and added shooting.
• It runs smoothly on my gaming rig that is rather mediocre (2GHz proc, 2Gb RAM, NVidia 9600GT, Windows XP). It might be more heavy on hardware requirements than Quake Live though, what with all the fancy cel shading effects.
• It is a bit simplistic gameplay-wise – in Enemy Territory there were more classes, more objectives, more mission types. So far all I have seen in Battlefield heroes are three classes and gameplay based on controlling a number of control points.
• …but there’s plenty of so-called Missions to do (adding some extra objectives in order to score more points), skills system, different weapons and other things to keep player busy.

I definitely will write a full note just on Battlefield Heroes in near future, but so far it’s very good and I like it. Also, on a related topic, I encourage you to read more on freemium here and here.

Quake Live applies different business model – playing the game will be free in all aspects, or so I understand from the information available, but there will be billboards in game which will act as virtual advertising space (in-game ads). The focus is not on customization and milking players for it, but rather on advanced matchmaking and statistics system.

As for the game itself it is pretty much good, old Quake III with slightly graphical overhaul – quick, fast-paced, visceral shooting. I have always been more on the Unreal Tournament team, but Q3 is still worshipped by many and remember with nostalgy by others. Last time I have seen it in action was some two weeks ago in my company – some chaps have been playing it (after working hours, of course). So while it is nothing particularly new or fresh, it uses a formula that is considered as a benchmark for online gaming in conjunction with web-2.0-like community and statistics.

Observations:

• none so far, since for three days I haven’t gotten to play as much as the training level!

Hence, a word of complain – if you venture to set up any online venture, be sure to at least try to assess the load and infrastructure needed to handle it. I know it is not easy, but come on, you should be able to guesstimate order of magnitude of the the level of interest and provide some scalability.

I am working on a daily basis with systems that are processing more requests per second than world-wide credit card systems (I believe I have completely exposed my secret identity, because there are not that many in the world) and for heaven’s sake, we do deal with this kind of issues. There are numerous load-balancing systems out there, hosting companies that will provide flexible amount of space and bandwidth based on the need, so in that context this emo sounds slightly pitiful.

Okay, now that I have vented my frustration, let’s give Quake Live team benefit of doubt. They are aiming for something new, and new things are always difficult to pull off in the beginning. The weekend lies in front of us, I do hope all the kinks will be ironed and I will be able to write glowing review of the game and associated services.

Genetically Modified Musician

Some of the sweetest of my childhood memories are the ones related to gaming – wrapped in a comfortable cocoon of synthesized sounds, covered in delicate shinining of monochrome monitors, I was threading the virgin grounds of 8 bits entertainment, which then smoothly became 16 bits. But even though game music evolved to the point where it can be released as a regular album and no one will notice, I still have a soft spot for retro chiptunes, as you can infer from some of my posts. So in this note I will recommend a bunch of delightfully retro music, which, additionally, is free of charge and can be downloaded at your leisure – another thing that is a definite plus in my book.

The first retro music project that caught my attention was Ugress. I can precisely pinpoint the moment when I first heard about it – it happened on Wojciech Orliński’s blog, in comments section to be precise, Anno Domini 2007. I downloaded Makina Fifth, because its description (“Commodore 64 discotronics with Therese Vadem“) caught my eye. Five minutes later I was already in love and furiously downloading all other free tracks. Some of these songs were a bit too weird for my taste, but some have gained unpassing place on my MP3 player – and that is a lot.

Some time has passed and through random googling and link surfing I have come across Shadow of the Beat, quirky musical project with the name related to a certain Amiga title. I barely noticed that the project has the same man behind it as Ugress – I tend to forget things I don’t find useful very quickly, so I just didn’t care (the definitions of “useful” that my mind applies are somewhat peculiar, though, which becomes obvious when you talk with me and I give you accurate description of some 80′s game third level).

Some time later Last.FM, Pandora or some other music service suggested to me PixxelTyger, which I instantly liked. Yes, it bore some resemblance to Ugress, and no, I didn’t give a damn. Lots of things sound like other things, if you excuse the generalisation. I downloaded the track, of course, but didn’t bother to check the project website until recently, which resulted in not reading more about who made it.

In December 2008 I got one click too far and discovered Ninja 9000, yet another retro project composed of two releases, each of them sounding like a soundtrack from non-existent 16bit games. Commander Moira is yet another track that I am listening to a bit too often, but it’s so incredibly well executed that even my girlfriend likes it, despite not being a fan of 80′s electronica.

All these things came together like a fractal puzzle, the pieces of which were spread across my brain (and incidentally time as well), after having read this post by Weirdnik. The post is in Polish only, sorry, I tried Google Translate, but it massacred the text beyond any recognition – anyway, the bottom line is that Weirdnik wrote about his own soft spot for chiptunes and all the projects listed above (plus one that I have missed so far). This actually caused some bits of my mind to finally fuse together and I realised that for good part of last two years I have been listening to music made by one man without even being aware of it…

The mastermind behind all this music is the talented individual, known as Gisle Martens Mayer (hence the title of this post). He owns his own label, Uncanny Planet – a good place to start browsing his numerous projects. The funny thing is that since the beginnning of 2009 I have been toying with the idea of writing a post about cool music available for free on the internet – it turned out that roughly 70% of the list would be GMM’s different projects…

My top three GMM’s tracks so far are Kosmonaut (thanks to Weirdnik I realised it has its own communist webpage), perhaps somewhat influenced by this retro game, the other two being Diurnal Entropy and Commander Moira. I have ideas for animated music videos to all of them and will realize them if I only I manage to get two months of free time and enough money to pay my mortgage rates in the meantime. Ah, it’s good to dream.

So there you have it – a solid portion of free, retro-stylized, game-like music. You can buy GMM’s music through here and if only you are not total douchebag cheapskate, you will throw a coin or two to this great guy who is not afraid to share his creations for free.