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.

If you ever had similar thoughts, here is your game: Cloudphobia is a classical 2D shoot’em up like the ones we used to get in the good old times, featuring giant robots and anime schoolgirls. Note: my first connotation when seeing the title was the vision of someone who totally hates Final Fantasy VII and its main protagonist.

As for the game itself, there are a few interesting twists to it – player cannot allow enemies to pass them and slip through, as they can damage the mothership, there are markers showing were the enemies will arrive and there are missions in which you pilot a robot that carries a sword instead of the gun. Yes, giant robot with a sword – quite neat, eh? Where Cloudphobia got me, however, was in the level where player is guiding their robot between hundreds of missiles swirling around. Sure, the gameplay is essentially a 2D affair, but the beautiful animated background gives the game some depth and sense of scale. Also, it’s damn pretty in movement, as you can see in the video below:

You can also see a more anime-ish trailer here. Once done, go check the game homepage: there is a two-level demo begging to be downloaded and since Cloudphobia is available in digital distribution, it’s easy to buy a full game immediately after trying.

[Found via AVClub]

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.

Today’s post will provide you with links to a lot of reading material, hence the name:

* Saracen, the Arabian Knight, has played Deus Ex and obviously likes it a lot. Read his reflections on politics, philosophy and other serious issues in one of the best games ever created in his blog post. It is a pleasure to see praise one of my favourite title written by someone coming from totally different cultural background. Also, it goes to show that truly good pieces of art and story, be it a movie, a theatre performance or a game, can be appreciated regardless of spectator’s origins.

* Trent Polack shares some thoughts on game design and emergent gameplay in this article entitled “An economy of fun”. Whether you want to create your own game one day or not, this constitutes a very interesting piece of lecture.

* Recently published game Velvet Assassin is based on the tragic events that took place during World War II, namely the heartbreaking story of Violette Szabo. Is basing a game on such real life drama an exploitation or is it not? Alec Meer from RockPaperShotgun put down his doubts in form of a short article. Be sure to check comments, too.

* Even though I haven’t blogged about it, I got to play Braid. Contrary to most folks, however, I didn’t like it, among other things because of its insane difficulty level and demonic puzzles. Krystian Majewski has written a great article on Braid’s difficulty and nasty tricks it plays on innocent, unsuspecting gamer. I really wish Jonathan Blow would have read it before publishing Braid.

* Last, but not least, Simon Ferrari deciphers some of Beyond Good & Evil themes. While I don’t necessarily agree with all that he put in the article and some of his connotations are a bit too far-stretched for my taste, it is refreshing to see other of my favourite games (I really should make a list one day) analysed from a different perspective.

As a bow to all the other true hardcore readers, I have decided to be somewhat malicious this time and not to adorn this post with any shiny images – the little letters will have to suffice, dear gamers.

Being a visualization freak working within air travel industry (to some extent, at least), I find it beautiful, but I believe that normal people can enjoy it as well. Which is why I am posting below a similar video that I have found just recently:

Enjoy!

My girlfriend (who, on a side note, looks like Zafina from Tekken 6) has shown me Notre-Dame de Paris, the beautiful French musical, fragments of which can be found on Youtube. After watching the song called “La fete des fous“, I couldn’t shake of the feeling that I have seen it somewhere, or at least something very similar.

After some time my neurons made an intriguing connection – I realized that this scene reminded me of Galbadian parade of sorceress Edea in Final Fantasy VIII. Although I’ve heard voices on the web that dancers are doing Thriller routine, I frankly am not convinced at all. For me the parade scene carries more resemblance to the one from musical, in the overall tone and way that dancers move. Seeing how the musical predates the game, the speculation that this particular fragment became influence for the aforementioned parade scene cannot be totally ruled out.

I’m curious to hear your opinion: first click here, than here – do you see any similarity, or is it just me?

My PSP has the latest custom firmware by Dark Alex, namely 5.ooM33-6. The bad thing about it is that there exists a lot of homebrew that would run on my PSP at some point in the past, but won’t anymore. I already got used to the fact that there are problems with homebrew programs written for 1.50 firmware – even though I had 1.50 firmware extension, which theoretically makes 5.00M33 firmware fully backwards compatible, a number of programs would not run. Period. These include R-Gear, Snakes and other programs I really liked, so it really hurt me.

Unfortunately, that is not all. Many programs that would run under 3.xx firmware refuse to run under 5.00M33. In this group the vast majority are the emulators. Below is a list of four emulators that I used in the past but can’t use now:

• DGen – Sega Genesis
• CPS1PSP and CPS2PSP – CPS System 1 and 2
• MVSPSP – NeoGeo
• Castaway – Atari ST

Nowadays all we need is a PSP.

The development of technology doesn’t cease to amaze me. I was quite shocked that PSP could handle GTA in its full three-dimensional glory, but it was programmed by a team of experts for a particular hardware after all. But a huge surprise for me was finding out that a mere homebrew program can actually emulate early PCs – such emulation, while perhaps less stunning visually, is a very complex task and thus also a very impressive thing.

What you see here is in fact not Norton Commander,
but its free Russian clone – Volkov Commander.

PSPDOSBox is a PSP port of DOSBox, a program that allows accurate emulation of DOS environment, in this case on your PSP (this sentence is sponsored by Captain Obvious). It is not a very user friendly homebrew and some amount of tweaking configuration files coupled with a number of trial and error runs will be necessary to set it up properly, but if you are patient enough, you will be rewarded with the ability to play PC games on your PSP – and isn’t that worth fighting for?

As for the speed of emulation, don’t forget that PSP has but a 333MHz processor and emulating a machine as complicated s PC requires significant processing power overhead. As a rule of thumb I would say that XT and AT games mostly run fine, 386 is pushing it, 486 is in some cases borderline playable and early Pentium is beyond the limit of what this emulator can do.

Also, DOS4GW games are generally a no-go, which is a shame. I tried some tricks, but was unable to run them. Some internet sources claim that it is feasible, so perhaps someone with more time, willpower or technical aptitude will manage to do that. I didn’t.

Have I ever told you that I have actually finished Targhan all by myself?

Taking the above limitations into account, I used PSPDOSBox to replay a couple of PC classics of old. I spent most of my time with games from a legendary French developer Silmarils. Metal Mutant, Targhan, Colorado, Star Blade, Ishar – these titles are as playable as they were fifteen years ago. Other games I have played include Prince of Persia, Fury of the Furries, Prehistoric and Electro Body. They all run fine, the only problem being key-mapping – PSP has significantly fewer keys than average PC keyboard.

You will have to excuse me, but I don’t remember exactly which combination of files I used to get DOSBox to run. Below is a couple of assorted links that I used to find files, configs and tips on running the games:
- posts tagged DosBox on QJ.net
- Google-translated Russian forum thread on PSPDOSBox (original here)
- description of p-sprint keyboard
I am afraid you will have to experiment with them by yourself, dear reader, but I assure you that these were my only sources and they were enough to get me to have a playable and usable version.

Other than that, I can only encourage you to give it a try – having a PC on your PSP is definitely awesome. There are even reports on the web of running Heroes of Might and Magic II on PSPDOSBox!