Fast, funny, ecxiting ?

 Yes, its Ignition !

This one day I was really bored, I had nothing to do, so I decided to go look for a game to play. In the shelf I saw warcraft 3, half-life, world of warcraft... nothing really exciting anymore. After looking through a pile of cds, I saw it, Ignition! I realized I hadn't played the game for about 8 years, so naturally I got this great nostalgic feeling and my mind really ignited.

The game itself has four modes you can choose between; Championship, Single Race, Time Trial and Pursue Mode. The latter is a pretty cool mode, where the one who is in last place is eliminated (Boom!) after every lap. Championship mode features three different championships. They all have the same maps though, but for every championship (with different levels of course) you get a new car. Then there is one additional mode, where you win a special car, won't tell which though, you'll have to try it yourself!

There are about seven maps, I believe. Each and everyone is very unique and has it's own character and setting, really well-designed. Each map also features very diverse environments; in one map, you'll race through a town, pass a train, jump down a waterfall, go through foggy forests, and then see some farmland as well!

I remember in the good ol' days, when you could play this via network, however it doesn't seem to work at all in Windows XP, it even crashes on me. And the only available type of connection is IPX. However there is one alternative, which is playing with split screen. You'd have to have game controllers or two (or more) keyboards though.




The Graphics were really great when the game hit the shelves in 97. The style is really awesome, you'll love it. The sound isn't bad either, on the contrary! I just love the different sounds when you use the turbo. Hearing school children scream or a monster roar. The ambient sound is really good too, makes the already great environment feel more alive.

The game itself isn't hard to play, you'll learn quickly how steer, and use that extremely cool turbo! ;-) It took me 2 hours to complete the championship in all levels, it may seem to be a bit short; but then I already knew what you gotta do. ;-) It was really great from start to end, for those of you who had this game a long time ago, I really recommend trying it out again, you'll almost be in ecstasy. ;-) And if you haven't tried it, it is really a game you wouldn't want to miss having played!

Watch the video, its nice !

Shit Happens

The thing is, my friend got into a crash a few days ago and what at first looked liked a harmless little accident is now turning into a real problem with the insurance company for my friend.

My friend was drivng to work. she was waiting for light to turn green, when it turned green cars kept going then suddenly police car ran across the intersection and car in front of her suddenly stopped. Her rear ended the car. She doesnt have insurance but the car is insured. Its her dads and he had it insured. There was a witness who saw the whole thing and explained it to the policeman present, who then gave the details to the insurance company. My friend was contacted by the other drivers car insurance company yesterday. My friend says that the driver he hit acknowldeges it was his fault for stopping so suddenly, yet now the car insurance company are going after my friend wanting an immense sum of money from him. Damn those car insurance companies !

Time for something casual !

I mostly play it when dead bored or when i feel like pwning some 35 year olds <.< You're asking yourself now, wwhat it is, well, here's your answer...It's an online game called : Type Racer -a wonderfully simple game that pits you up against other typers, and of course your 100-plus key stead. 

The goal is to type as well as you can to get your car from point A to point B. All the while you can compete with other users in real time and "race" across the landscape of the English language.
The one nice thing about TypeRacer compared with Keybr is that it uses real words. It's also a stickler about errors, requiring you to go back and make any fixes before continuing the race, keeping lead-finger slopsters from winning based on speed alone. I'm not really sure if TypeRacer really helps you type any faster, but it sure is fun.

Here is the link : Just search it in google, under "type racer".........Now tell me what your score is?

Lets go 14 years into the past.

Destruction Derby 2 !!!

Yes, you heared me right, we're going back to 1996 to have a look at an awesome game. Playing it today on my grandma's old computer it still brings me lots of enjoyable moments, not to mention the masterpiece it was back in 1996.
Let's face it: at a certain age, destroying your toys becomes more enjoyable than playing with them. When you were a kid playing with matchbox cars, did you ever actually race them against each other? I thought not. No, you slid the little die-cast speedsters as hard as you could at one another until they smashed to pieces on the kitchen linoleum. Am I saying that this is the correct way to play with matchbox cars, that one should be encouraged to enact scenes of demolition with his playthings? Yes, because it's fun.

Fun, in case you were wondering, is what games are all about. Few auto racing games actually let the player do more than nail down the accelerator and brake around turns. Last year's Destruction Derby was a refreshing break from this monotonous trend, combining stimulating, competitive racing with the meaningless vandalism that action gamers crave. It was the first racing title to come along that encouraged you to and rewarded you for driving straight into oncoming traffic - now THAT'S a racing game. Psygnosis have finally released the sequel, and gamers who appreciated the irrational smash-'em-up mentality of the original PC version are sure to get a kick out of riding on the hard driving path that is Destruction Derby 2.
The most notable enhancement in DD2 is your car's ability to leave the road - skyward. Courses now include banks and jumps that send speeding cars flying into the stratosphere, colliding mid-air with other cars, eventually landing on more cars, only to skid on the ground and bash into yet more cars. Vehicles have to take jumps with caution or risk corkscrewing and landing completely upside down, helpless as toppled turtles. Occasionally, car physics push the limits of reality. Sometimes, when a car takes to the air, it careens overhead in slow motion as though someone had turned on the anti-gravity machine. Surprisingly this detour from true car physics just adds to dramatic quality of the action.
Crash scenes have also improved. Cars now spew more parts than an auto shop when blindsided. Vehicles can also lose hoods and wheels, driving around with engines exposed, trailing sparks as their bare axles scrape the ground. Damage is the word when it comes to racing in Destruction Derby 2, which lends new meaning to the term "eliminate the competition."
Seven new race tracks, ranging from winding desert roads to nighttime streets, are introduced in the game, and the races here seem to be much more difficult to win compared to the original. Additionally, Psygnosis has heeded the cries of the gaming masses, introducing four new destruction derby tracks (wherein the sole objective is to disable other cars) for our demolition pleasure. The last of these,called the "Death Bowl," features an inescapable chasm that cars can be knocked into. Playing in "Total Destruction" mode (where all vehicles, as if operating as a unit, abandon all other causes and go straight after YOUR car), you can lure a pack of vehicles to the edge of this pit and swiftly move away, watching them tumble over to their smoky deaths.
The graphics and playability of Destruction Derby 2 aren't as silky as they were in the Playstation version, but it's definitely a better looking and more playable game than the original PC Destruction Derby. Combine the new improvements with a bold, sludge-metal soundtrack and you've got a great sequel to Destruction Derby. The main complaint you could lodge against this game is that, compared to the previous title, the other cars are nearly impossible to overtake during a race. Still, if you're looking for more chassis-crushing fun in a game that ends up somehow being even more silly than the original, Destruction Derby 2 is your ticket.

Too much gaming is bad, m'kay?

A South Korean man has died after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks.  

The 28-year-old man collapsed after playing the game Starcraft at an internet cafe in the city of Taegu, according to South Korean authorities.
The man had not slept properly, and had eaten very little during his marathon session, said police.
Multi-player gaming in South Korea is extremely popular thanks to its fast and widespread broadband network.
Games are televised and professional players are treated, as well as paid, like sports stars.
Professional gamers there attract huge sums in sponsorship and can make more than $100,000 a year. 

The man, identified by his family name, Lee, started playing Starcraft on 3 August. He only paused playing to go to the toilet and for short periods of sleep, said the police.
"We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion," a Taegu provincial police official told the Reuters news agency.
He was taken to hospital following his collapse, but died shortly after, according to the police. It is not known whether he suffered from any previous health conditions.
They added that he had recently been fired from his job because he kept missing work to play computer games. 

So guys, tell me whats the longest time you've played a game without stopping? For me, eventho i consider or at least considered myself to be an hardcore gamer, to my own surprise, i don't think i ever had a longer gaming session than 4-5 hours, since i must stand up and go do something else, because otherwise my body starts feeling uncomfortable and eyes start to hurt. How about you guys?

Every person wanted to skip school at some point.

If you say otherwise, you're a total nerd and should leave the blog right now, unless you had a psycho father/mother at home, then i would understand.

Anyway, back in the old high school days i used to skip school quite frequently to play videogames, watch movies or just to jerk off. There are A LOT of tips how to skip school floating around the internet, but today i'll share with you 2 things i came up and they always worked.

The 1st one might be a bit radical! Here we go: We all know allergies....when i was really young i used to have quite a lot of problems with them, but at around the age of 10, my allergies went away. It wasn't anything radical, i just had a red face (lol), kinda similar to a really light sun burn. It didn't hurt at all and it made it possible for me to stay home, so i figured, why not fake this shit. When i was 11 i started....i took a detergent, a strong one, put some of it on a towel and kept rubbing my face for 5 minutes....yeah, it did hurt a little bit , but the result was a red, allergy-like face which lasted for 2-4 days. Man, those were the times :)

Proceeding to the 2nd way. This one is nothing special, used it to skip some difficult tests, since its more of a 1 day method. I woke up 30 minutes before my parents, got a big glass and put some milk into it, then i added some cocumbers, little pieces of bread and more and more shit to make it look like the meal i ate the previous day. Then i made my way into the bathroom, spilled it into and around the toilet and made vomiting voices "Blarrgghh" <.< This was like 4 minutes before my mom and dad woke up, so my mom would come running upstairs to me "Son, are you alrighty?" and i was like "No, i'm feeling kinda sick" . Then she would let me stay home and the moment my parents drove off to work i was like "Fuck yeah" xD

So thats that. Do you guys got any similar stories and/or ways to skip school?
If you do, then let the younger generations know :)

Back on track: World of Goo

First of all i would like to apologise for the delay, but starting right now, my blog is back to its full activity! As expected i failed my exams and this year at college, so starting with the 1st of October i'll start looking for a job. Anyhow, lets get to the game! World of Goo is a multiple award winning physics based puzzle / construction game made entirely by two guys. Drag and drop living, squirming, talking, globs of goo to build structures, bridges, cannonballs, zeppelins, and giant tongues. The millions of Goo Balls that live in the beautiful World of Goo are curious to explore - but they don't know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious.

• Mysterious Levels - Each level is strange and dangerously beautiful, introducing new puzzles, areas, and the creatures that live in them.
• World of Goo Balls - Along the way, undiscovered new species of Goo Ball, each with unique abilities, come together to ooze through reluctant tales of discovery, love, conspiracy, beauty, electric power, and the third dimension.
• The Sign Painter - Someone is watching you.
• World of Goo Corporation - Congratulations! World of Goo Corporation is the Global Leader in Goo and Goo Related Product, including World of Goo Corporation Trademark Brand Soft Drink Beverage and World of Goo Corporation Trademark Brand Facial Exfoliating Lotion. Succulent!
• Massive Online Competition - Human players around the world compete in a living leaderboard to build the tallest towers of goo in World of Goo Corporation's mysterious sandbox. World of Goo Corporation is contractually obligated to state that everyone is a winner and is enthusiastic to celebrate everyone's tower building opportunities equally.
  
  Congratulations, and good luck!

Starting over again !

With tomorrow my blog will return to its full activity, which means daily posts, comments, polls and much more to come. Tomorrow i have my final exam which i hope i will pass, altho things currently are looking really crappy.

Troubles with studying !

I would like to apologise to everyone for not being as active as i could be. The thing is, i've got some upcoming exams which i am going to fail anyway, but i still need to study fro them, since i'll need to do them next year and i don't want my parents to think i'm lazy and want to fail them on purpose. A few days of studying more and lets say on friday i will start actively updating my blog again. Hope you guys are doing good !

Reviving an old classic: Worms Reloaded

Worms Reloaded marks the series' long-awaited return to the PC in 2D form, but is largely the same offering as the Xbox 360 release of Worms 2: Armageddon. The game sports full Steamworks-integration to handle multiplayer, stats, and achievements.

Personally, I'm sad to report that the game could have stood to evolve a bit with this new PC version. I'm not sure what could be done to the Worms formula at this point, but it's a too close to what I played 10 years ago. The HD graphics help, but a few new modes and weapons don't really make this game stand out from Worms Wold Party or Worms Armageddon.

There are a bunch of modes to play, including two campaigns and a mode that pits a single worm against an infinite amount of enemy worms, but the real value is with the multiplayer, which supports 4 players on the same computer or online.

There are a good amount of modes available online ranging from competitive, ranked play to goofy, just-for-fine variants. Since the AI isn't all that fun to play over and over again, your enjoyment of Reloaded will likely depend on your willingness to jump online.

If you've been playing the Worms console releases, you won't find a lot of new content here, but if you've been missing Worms and do not mind the old gameplay, this is what you want. The game hasn't really evolved since its previous 2D incarnations, but Worms: Reloaded is easily the best way to play multiplayer Worms on the PC in 2010.

If you've somehow never played a Worms game before, this should serve as an excellent introduction to the series. You probably won't find it outdated, too!

Little break from gaming -> watch this video

Don't just skip the first 45 seconds and watch a fragment and skip 30 seconds again and so on.... watch the whole thing, send it to your gf or w/e :D

Battle Realms: An overlooked masterpiece

Battle Realms places you in the role of a commander in an Asian-themed, fantasy setting. You'll command small armies of ronin, samurai, warlocks and werewolves. It's more of a tactical game in spirit than a strategy game, but by taking the focus down to a much more personal level, Battle Realms succeeds in drawing you deep into the action.
Battle Realms gets by with only two resources -- rice and water. Instead of buying units outright you'll need to train your peasants as warriors in order to create your armies. This is a really refreshing approach but has a few shortcomings. The more units you have on the map, the slower new peasants are created. This means that building up your army towards the end of the missions is a lot more time-consuming than it needs to be. Apart from being strange from a gameplay standpoint, it also seems like bad biology -- I would think that, up to a certain point, more units on the map would mean a quicker birth rate for your peasants.
Inexhaustible resources and a severe fog of war also lead to one of my biggest frustrations with the game. As long as a single enemy peasant is able to escape destruction, your opponent can quickly set up a new camp somewhere and be up and running again before you're likely to find him. This isn't a problem when you're only facing one enemy but when you've got to go head to head with the Lotus and Wolf clans at once, you can find yourself destroying the same base over and over again.
Tons of personality in the animations and voices bring the units to life. Every warrior has a handful of combat animations that are truly thrilling to watch (your own hero unit will occasionally draw his sword and practice some moves when at rest). Samurai kneel and pray, wounded units stagger and limp around and peasants get thrown to the ground when taming horses. Perhaps the most thrilling animation is when you select a group of your units and watch them all draw their weapons in anticipation of carrying out whatever ass-kicking you've got in mind.
In Battle Realms all units start as peasants but they can train at various buildings to become other units like spearmen and archers. You can then take those units and send them to be trained at other structures to produce even more powerful units. Spearmen can be sent to the archery range to become dragon warriors. Archers can be sent to the alchemist hut to become chemists (apparently a Japanese word for "guy who shoots fireworks at you"). You can then even take these units and train them at other buildings as well to produce yet even more powerful units.
While it's an awesome concept, there are a few shortcomings. One, there's no clear indication as to which units are suited to a particular task. The manual sort of hints at some general strategies but it's still not clear why you'd pick a lower level unit when it's just as convenient to upgrade all the way to the top. And as the birth rate of your peasants slows as you reach the higher levels, there's always time and resources enough to make an army of the biggest, baddest unit available. If you've managed your economy just right, you can make do with only one person collecting each resource. But if you do run out of a resource you can't untrain or retrain units so you'll have to kill some units before you can produce more.
Ultimately, dragon warriors are way better than a mixed group of archers and spearmen, and samurai are better than a mixed group of dragon warriors and powder keg cannoneers. Heck, the samurai are so tough that they'll prostrate themselves right in the middle of a river and start praying while underwater. If that wasn't enough to convince you to leave them alone, the fact that they kill themselves before the enemy gets a chance to should convince you not to mess around with them.
Given the tactical nature of the game, it's a shame that there aren't any formation controls. You can set sort of general rules of engagement (strangely not all the time) but for the most part your units will run in a big clump to attack whatever big clump the enemy has around. It's best not to mess with them when they're like this, but just pray that your units will come out on top once the skirmish is over. And while the units themselves seem to have a good time finding targets of their own to attack, the healer units show almost no initiative on their own, meaning you have to heal damaged units during a fight by yourself.
A lot of personality has been incorporated into the environments of Battle Realms. The game takes place in a beautiful and detailed world. Realistic ripples appear when your units cross rivers, shadows of rain clouds drift across the ground and birds dot the landscape. But far from just being aesthetic effects, these details are integrated into the game. Rain affects combat and can turn the tide of battle by extinguishing the fires you've set in the opposing villages. Birds scatter and fly whenever enemy units are near, giving you an early warning of their approach. Blood pools on the grounds and in ponds as units are killed.
The cutscenes let you get close to the action between the missions. While the graphics aren't spectacular at this level, it really preserves the feel of the game to see the same units in the cutscenes as you see on the mission maps. Good voice acting and a stirring story only add to the illusion. The story itself involves your efforts to subdue the rival Wolf and Lotus clans through recovery of a hidden artifact. And even though the game is relatively linear, there's a really good sense of choice built into it all. At the beginning of the game you're presented with a moral choice that leads down one of two campaign paths.
Just as an aside, I take notes while I play these games and then I use those notes to write up the review. Usually I can fit them in to a coherent sort of outline but there's this one entry in my notes that I don't know where to put, so it's going here. I have written, "that warlock lightning [expletive]." Let me just say that "that warlock lightning [expletive]" is perhaps a bit unbalanced. The part where I talked about the blood in the water? That was the next entry under "that warlock lightning [expletive]." It's kind of a cop-out in terms of organization, but I thought you'd like to know.
In short, Battle Realms is a remarkably well-produced and intimate game that is the perfect answer for all of those "more is more" strategy games. By focusing on small unit action and narrowing the field to a handful of units, Battle Realms reminds me a lot of the time I spent with Warcraft 2. The hardware requirements are a bit steep, but if you do have the rig to run it (at least a P500 with a minimum of 64MB of RAM and a decent video card), it's definitely rewarding.

Evil Islands : Curse of the lost Soul

This is one of my favorite games. I discovered it by accident about 8 years ago, when i was browsing through my friend's brother's game collection. I must say the game changed my view on modern games.

Evil Islands is a russian RPG that published by Nival Interactive in 2001. While I had found the game in 2001, I played and finished the game throughtly in 2008.

EI uses a 3d engine, which tormented my Geforce 2 machine in 2001. Pretty demanding and goodlooking game for its time. And, with the settings can be maxed with my modern rig, EI still provides lots of beautiful landscapes and such. All the forest, swamp, snow locations are beautifully crafted.

There is a clear distinction between quest areas, and combat areas. You can talk with people, receive new quests, arrange your inventory, and equip new gears only on quest areas. You begin the game as a man who can’t remember about its past. Aldo, story seems a little bit cliche, there are some twists and turns in it. But, dialogs and story are mediocre. Not bad, but don’t expect too much. In combat areas you can explore and fight as the name suggests. You can’t browse through your inventory, change armor, distribute your stats in combat areas, but you can change your weapons at least. It can sounds like an awkward system, but believe me system works like a charm.

Evil Islands uses a tactical combat system similar to Baldur’s Gate. We can pause the game, give commands then unpause, etc. This system was implemented nicely with a few innovations such as stealth system. Stealth, unlike other games, very important in EI. With appropriate skill, and a bit of luck you can creep behind an enemy unnoticed and stabbed him. Successful backstabing means multiple damage. A good blow to the head can even kill an enemy with one strike. Another nice addition is you can determine which limb you strike. Striking to the arms makes enemy’s arms slow and unable to strike, while legs makes them unable to run, and as i mentioned before head means critical hits. These rules also is applied to your characters too. So, wearing a helmet is a must. You can also increase the speed of the game, that can be very useful since sometimes there’re too much combat.

Experience and skill system is cruel. With each skill you choose, the exp points to advance at this skill and others increases. So you must choose wisely between using a sword or an axe. EI is a very difficult game. At normal difficulty this game is way too difficult from most other game’s very difficult setting. And, this is the best part for me.

For only 10 dolar you can buy this little gem from Ebay. So give them it try. 

Greetings !

My name is Steven, i'm a 20 years olf student from the middle European country Slovenia. My life has been highly influenced by gaming since the age of 10, so i decided i should write a blog about it and i'm also feeling rather bored. The blog will contain my opinions on some older as well as newer games, some information regarding my personal life and how games infulenced it and also fun, not necessarily game related stuff. Hope you'll enjoy my blog!