Sicarius

…and you can quote me on that!

Englisch

It’s a Me, Mario!(1) Welcome to my world, insect.(2) Nothing more than a little shrimp-like animal, standing on its head in a limestone house and kicking food into its mouth.(3) Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.(4) To be, or not to be.(5) Everything that has a beginning has an end.(6) Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.(7) We can pick the game, Niko Bellic, but we cannot change the rules.(8) Evil always finds a way.(9) But I don’t want to walk among mad people.(10) Madness…? This is Sparta!(11) We met a long time ago in Sparta. Before the war.(12) War. War never changes.(13) The more things change, the more they are the same.(14) Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.(15) Power, sex. Sex, Power. They both come down to one thing – fucking others.(16) Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. “Yes” is the answer.(17) Noooooo.(18) Can’t you do better than that! I’ve seen worms move faster. (19) In a perfect world you should already be dead!(20) A man chooses, a slave obeys.(21) The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.(22) Freedom’s just another word for people finding out you’re useless.(23) Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.(24) I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.(25) I fight for the users.(26) Too Bad! You are gonna die!(27) Give me names, I’ll give you blood.(28) 50.000 people used to live here… Now it’s a ghost town.(29) I’ll be back.(30) Don’t make a girl a promise if you know you can’t keep it.(31) The Enrichment Center promises to always provide a safe testing environment. In dangerous testing environments, the Enrichment Center promises to always provide useful advice. For instance: the floor here will kill you. Try to avoid it.(32) Yeah, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.(33) Among the blind, the squinter rules.(34) And now, the end is here.(35)

(01) Mario in Super Mario 64
(02) SHODAN in System Shock 2
(03) Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
(04) Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in his book Physiologie du Gout
(05) Hamlet in William Shakespear’s Hamlet
(06) The Oracle in The Matrix Revolutions
(07) Lemony Sniecket in his novel A Series of Unfortunate Events – Book 13: The End
(08) Dimitri Rascalov in Grand Theft Auto IV
(09) Gnarl in Overlord II
(10) Alice in Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(11) King Leonidas in 300
(12) Xena in Xena: Warrior Princess (Season 1, Episode 12)
(13) Ron Perlman in Fallout
(14) Alphonse Karr in Aristophanes‘ The Wasps
(15) Albert Einstein
(16) Geralt in The Witcher
(17) Swami X
(18) Darth Vader in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
(19) Farmer in Outlaws
(20) Duke Nukem in Duke Nukem 3D
(21) Andrew Ryan in BioShock
(22) Mahatma Ghandi
(23) Dilbert in Freedom’s Just Another Word for People Finding Out You’re Useless
(24) Pablo Picasso
(25) Bill Gates
(26) Tron in TRON: Legacy
(27) Gabriel in Swordfish
(28) Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad in Assassin’s Creed
(29) Ramirez in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
(30) The Terminator in The Terminator
(31) Cortana in Halo 2
(32) GLaDOS in Portal
(33) Sam in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
(34) Gerard Didier Erasmus
(35) Frank Sinatra in his song My Way

Sicarius

English Words

Artikel, Englisch, GamersGlobal, Spiele

Greetings Ladies and Gentlemen and welcome to another exciting episode of the webmaster’s bi-weekly ramblings on this Monday, August the 9th. Today the webmaster will talk about Tool-assisted Speedruns (TAS), Quake Live and probably not much else. There may be a hint of StarCraft II: World of Liberty, but we cannot promise you anything. But enough of the introduction – Bagdadsoftware is proud to present: the Webmaster!

*clap, clap, clap*

“Driving a game to its limit” – that’s the title of the tenth and final (for now) part of my almost as famous as my Westwood-article Speedrun-special over at GamersGlobal. Fitting of course, as it is an interview with no other than Andrés “adelikat” Delikat. With more than 70 Tool-assisted Speedrun-records and five years of experience he’s not only the main developer of the NES-Emulator FCEUX – the most important and TAS-friendly out there for this system! -, he’s also the main administrator of the central location for everything about TAS: TASVideos. I guess only Bisqwit, the original founder of TASVideos, knows more about TAS than Andrés which made for quite an interesting and unnatural long interview. And still so many questions remain unanswered. Especially the whole feud-thing between Unassisted Speedrunners and TAS would be worth its own article although it has cooled down a bit since 2004. Perhaps next year I’ll get both sides in one (chat-)room and truly do something, no other magazine has done before. Although I guess now that my idea is public, someone out there will probably snatch it and don’t give me credit for it…damn!

At least I can rest assured for the moment that no other magazine – German or international – has taken such an in-depth look into the subject and hopefully I introduced new faces to the scene thanks to it. Of course some magazines did actually try to cover the subject over the years. But at least the German ones failed miserably in my opinion. They mostly thought the whole topic was only worth a stupid click-gallery to increase page views. How wrong they are…

Oh by the way: For everyone who doesn’t know squat about German, the original and very raw English version of the interview can be found here on Bagdadsoftware.

There are of course other topics I want to cover so extensive. One is “Music in Games”. No surprise here for our regular readers of course. Still I’ve so many ideas for it and want to talk to so many famous people in order to show how much work and love goes into a good soundtrack and how high the quality of the products out there is. Essentially I want to show the readers why it’s worth supporting and bring them to stop turning it off and instead play Britney Spears in the background. Again, regular readers already know that. It’s not as if I hadn’t talked about it yet, didn’t already make a Top18-list or wouldn’t give a NOCA each year to the best soundtrack of the year. So hopefully, I’ll have the time to expand on that and create another, insightful special.

For now I’m still pretty occupied with the third version of my Starcraft 2 Mehrspieler-Kompendium which has to go live before QuakeCon 2010 starts at the end of the week. Didn’t help me much in my match against Jörg Langer though. Still lost against him, increasing his score to 2:1 (Blood Bowl – Jörg Langer, The Settlers 7 – me, StarCraft II – Jörg Langer) in the all-time ranking. Took him a long time to win however. He could’ve finished it right after my first attack failed but he didn’t seize the moment and didn’t make the push. So it dragged on a bit. But who cares. Lost is still lost :).

Perhaps match 4 will take place in Quake Live which, completely surprising to everyone, finally left the beta-status last Friday. There are now those who complain that there are two subscription-options (Premium and Pro) available which ruin the game and everything in their opinion. Those guys (and girls) are idiots! Even if you don’t pay, the amount of game you get for your non-existing buck is still greater than anything else browser-based out there. Hell, even Battlefield Heroes has way less free content – and there you have to pay much more to get the additional stuff! You still have access to the friends list, you still can join a clan, you still can play in more than 40 arenas in five game-modes and you still have access to match-making including the extensive statistics. Basically you get all the stuff which was already there in beta and kept me playing the last year not to mention that Quake III Arena never left my hard-drive since 1999 until Quake Live came around which had even less features. And that little bit of advertising before each game is more than tolerable. So quit bitching and go fragging! Or do what I did: go Pro! It’s more than worth it…

*clap, clap*

Thanks Webmaster! And that’s it for today folks. We hope you enjoyed the show and come again! Good night.

Sicarius

Nintendo Wii

Artikel, Englisch, GamersGlobal, Hard- und Software, Podcast, Spiele

In 24 Stunden wird die Welt untergehen. Warum? Weil dann die Server von StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty live gehen. Ihr solltet also mit der verbleibenden Zeit so viel sinnvolles wie möglich anfangen. Mein Vorschlag: Hört euch die neue Folge des Podcasts an ->

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.6MB)

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Wenn es eine Konsole gibt, die nicht nur hier auf Bagdadsoftware zu kurz kommt, dann ist es wohl die Nintendo Wii. Vollkommen unverdient, wie ich finde, obwohl ich gar keine besitze. Deshalb habe ich mir mal wieder Philipp geschnappt. Als Wii-Spieletester kann er sich schließlich zu Recht als Experte auf diesem Gebiet bezeichnen. In der aktuellen Folge rede ich mit ihm fast 45 Minuten lang über die Entwicklung der Wii seit ihrer Veröffentlichung, analysiere mit ihm ihre Stärke und Schwächen und lasse ihn natürlich auch ein paar Kaufempfehlung abseits von Mario, Zelda & Co. aussprechen, um euch zu einem Kauf zu überreden. Ob wir das tatsächlich schaffen, weiß ich nicht. Aber ihr hört den Podcast selbstverständlich wie immer auf eigene Gefahr. Wir sind nicht dafür verantwortlich, wenn ihr nach dem Genuss einen starken Drang verspürt, der euch in die Wii-Ecke des nächstgelegenen Online- oder Offlineshops führt.
Abseits vom Podcast, ging gestern auch der neunte Teil meines umfangreichen Speedrun-Specials online. Dieses Mal habe ich mich mit Thomas “Lord_Tom” Seufert unterhalten, der zusammen mit TASer Mijitsu den aktuellen TAS-Rekord in Super Mario Bros. 3 hält. Ein sehr interessantes und aufschlussreiches Gespräch, wenn ich das so sagen darf. Und der Run selbst ist sowieso Kult. Warum das so ist, erfahrt ihr natürlich auch im Interview. Nächstes Wochenende, wenn endlich der ganze StarCraft II-Hype abgeklungen ist, wird voraussichtlich der zehnte und vorerst letzte Teil des Specials online gehen.

For our foreign visitors: The interview with Thomas “Lord_Tom” Seufert is also available here on Bagdadsoftware in its original, English form but of course not with such a nice-looking layout.

In diesem Zusammenhang auch noch einmal ein Dank an JakillSlavik, der dieses Mal wieder das Teaserbild zum Artikel gebastelt hat. Geht am besten rüber zu seinem deviantART-Profil und “favet” das Bild. Verdient hat es das schließlich!

Am Donnerstag wird euch an dieser Stelle hingegen Rondrer begrüßen, da auch ich vor lauter StarCraft II keine Zeit haben werde einen zu verfassen. Mich lest ihr stattdessen drüben bei GamersGlobal. Nun verabschiede ich mich aber für heute mit den Details zur 24. Folge:

Zu Wort kommen: Christoph “Sicarius” Hofmann und Philipp “Knurrunkulus” Spilker.

Technische Daten: 44:31 min lang; 96kbit Qualität; 30,57 MB groß; Aufnahme mit Skype und Pamela for Skype; Editierung mit Adobe Soundbooth CS4

Musikcredits nach Reihenfolge:
Brian Conrad, Sue Kasper, Justin McCormick – SimCity 2000 – Track 47 (Komplett)
Brian Conrad, Sue Kasper, Justin McCormick – SimCity 2000 – Track 31 (Auszug)
Frank Klepacki – The Legend of Kyrandia – Pool Of Sorrow (Komplett)

Weiterführende Links:
Generation BLOG – Philipps persönlicher Blog

Wie im Podcast erwähnt, erscheint Folge 25 des Podcasts am 23. August und wird selbstverständlich die gamescom 2010 zum Thema haben. Da wir die Folge zudem direkt vor Ort aufzeichnen, habt ihr vielleicht sogar die Chance mal kurz reinzuschreien. Wann und wo wir die Aufnahme in Köln machen, werde ich natürlich kurzfristig hier bekannt geben.

Sicarius

Speedrunners

Artikel, Englisch, Spiele

Better late than never, I guess. What am I talking about? Some of you may remember my 7-part-special about speedruns over at GamersGlobal which was published at the end of July 2009. Besides a report and a top10-list, it also featured five interviews with speedrunners and admins from the Speed Demos Archive. Sadly they and most other SDA-visitors had to rely on Google Translate in order to be able to read them. You know, because they were published in German. The results were – well, you’ve probably laughed about the results yourself. So it came to no big surprise for me that there was more than one request for a proper translation:

Of course these aren’t really translations – the German versions are. The English releases above on the other hand are the originals. I fixed some spelling and grammatical errors but otherwise the rest is the uncut version of my questions and their answers in full length without any streamlining or other changes to the content which were needed for the GamersGlobal-release. I did only check before-hand if any of the details had changed but the records and videos are still current. So there was no need for me to intervene here either.

You could ask why it took a year to put these up especially considering they haven’t changed so much from what I had on my HDD all the time. The truth is: I don’t know. I guess laziness was a big factor. But why live in the past? As I said at the start: Better late than never. While the report probably will never see an English translation, at least the far more interesting interviews are finally accessible for our international audience.

I can however tell you that I’m currently working on part 8 to 10 of the special. This time it will all be about Tool-Assisted Speedruns and the corresponding website TASVideos.org. And since I’m already in the middle of conducting the interviews, you can expect the release once again mid to end of July – first in German of course but perhaps this time around it won’t take me a year to publish the originals.

PS: Blur, SBK X: Superbike World Championship (doesn’t look that good but still is the best motorcycle-game out there at the moment) and the very unusual Way of the Samurai 3 (GTA is basically a totally linear experience in comparison) have finally found their way into the MobyGames-database. So go over there and take a look. The Blur-entry is especially interesting as most of the 21 screenshots currently online are from the infamous 4-player-tournament between JakillSlavik, Rondrer, an unimportant third player and myself.

Sicarius

Ramblings

Englisch, Gespielt, Spiele

Snow. Frozen water. Gift of the heavens. Curse of the workers. Probably even more poisoned than normal rain – so have fun anyone who likes to eat it. Chernobyl, normal pollution and guys who take a piss in it made sure that I would need to be almost dead before putting some in my mouth. Luckily I don’t care for snow so much anyway. Yeah, it looks nice and all but mainly from behind the window. Otherwise it’s just cold, wet and blinding if the sun shines.

Personally I like my snow more in form of 0s and 1s. Ski or Die – that’s the way to have fun in the snow without getting cold hands. It’s still one of the only games to date which actually featured a decent snowball-fight. Most winter-games don’t even bother with putting them in. And even last year’s Shaun White’s Snowboarding only made a half-ass attempt on simulating the satisfaction of hitting someone straight in the face. But I’ve to admit: it was fun for a while. I mean throwing snowballs. Doing tricks on the board still is fun with that game.

Today’s winter-games mostly concentrate on the simulation of Olympic disciplines. Honestly – where’s the fun in that? Even back in the day with the one and only Wintergames I didn’t bother with most of the disciplines. “TLDNP” would be the appropriate acronym for most of them (Too Long Did Not Play). I mean running 1.000 meters was already a chore in Summergames and killed more than one joystick – but doing a full langlauf? Even biathlon was only fun because of the shooting part. Yes, I know – there are more. But without house-rules I’m one of those people that just aren’t interested.

Not really a surprise considering I ignore most sport titles except for snooker/billiard- and ice-hockey-simulations as well as racing games. Only fun titles like said Shaun White’s Snowboarding peak my interest – but they are almost all console-exclusive. Even Shaun White Snowboarding – World Stage will only be released on Wii because no-one cared for the PC-version of the original game (for understandable reasons). What do we get instead? The next 10.000 winter-olympics-based titles from RTL Games with only marginal upgrades since last year’s version. I guess at least someone did learn from EA Sports…

But what am I moaning about? The death of the PC? No, not really. If I turn my head left, I see the Tower of Babel made out of decent games released in the last three month for the PC alone. Perhaps if there were really less games for the PC, I would have more time playing them. The reality is that there’s enough material left for the Bagdadsoftware NOCAs. The nominees will be made public soon by the way. This year they may include one or two console-titles too for obvious reasons. I already have five games for the Xbox 360 after all and Brütal Legend has more than a decent chance of winning a category this year. Not enough for their own “Console game of the year”-category though But all in good time – first I need to get two more articles for GamersGlobal out the door this week.

One game that certainly won’t make the Top 3 of “Best First Person Shooter” of the year 2009 is Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. I mean I love Serious Sam even more than the Duke. But the remake is terribly lacking in many departments – including the most important part of the game: multiplayer.

Pings from hell, lags and crashes (in single-player too) aren’t my idea of fun. It’s especially sad if you look at how awesome the originals ran. No strain on the hardware and a network-code-quality still unreached by 90% of the games out there. Even Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has its quirks and I mean that game has been polished to hell. Still much fun though. The whole leveling system, earning rewards and all never gets old. Thanks to Mosh-Pit-mode even the maps and game-modes stay somewhat fresh. Singleplayer? Not so much. But I already talked about it when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released. Constantly respawning enemies just aren’t fun. I’m always running through the levels in the search for the next checkpoint/cutscene/scriptsequence. You can’t stay at a point for five seconds without grenades raining down on you forcing you to move on.

What were we talking about? Ah, Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. That the graphical overhaul isn’t that big and the cooperative-mode runs like shit is a real shame. Serious Sam’s one-liners are still funny and killing hundreds and hundreds of enemies never gets old. But if I’ve to reset my graphics driver sometimes every two minutes in order to continue gaming – I won’t bother anymore till a second patch hits. Let’s hope they learn from this experience for the already announced Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter. I wonder if we will see a new Duke-game until then. I mean the game came out in 2001 and the jokes are STILL valid and funny.

At least there’s a good chance for a second patch to be released. The waiting period for that all-fixing Red Faction: Guerilla on the other hand just keeps getting longer and longer. A release in 2009? Becoming more and more unlikely as we speak. And the famous S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl-patch 1.1? Well, we don’t really talk about that anymore. Just go and buy S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat…

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