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Videogames highlights - March 2012
This is a pretty weird period for the gaming industry: the old Japanese stronghold is described as dying and closed on itself, the PC platform - that should theoretically be already dead ages ago from a gaming standpoint - is pointed at by the Epic veterans as the ideal place where to start developing new games, the renowned Smithsonian museum opens the doors of its long-awaited exhibition on the industry. Everything changes, even if it isn’t always for the better: “playing” with Dragon Ball Z on Kinect (Xbox 360) seems more like a wet nightmare than a dream come true…
Retro-anniversaries for OS/2 and Windows 3.1
During the first days of April, anniversaries for two genuine pieces of the operating systems’ history took place, two different evolutionary lines of what should have been a single product born from the partnership between two giants of the PC industry. IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows 3.1 were initially destined to be merged in the graphical interface-based operating system by Big Blue, afterward history went in a different way and OS/2 sunk while the competing OS turned into the dominant platform on the market.
Legend of Grimrock released on GOG.com
From the mist of the video gaming past a genre thought extinct returns, thanks to a title provided with “an oldschool heart but a modern execution“: the genre is the grid-based dungeon crawlers one, the game which brings it to the present is Legend of Grimrock made by Finnish developer Almost Human. LoG has been released starting from April 11 on the software house site, Steam and on GOG.com, and in this last case the release is particularly important because it matches the renewal of the gaming digital delivery “alternative” service for PC.
Videogames highlights - February 2012
The new installment of my beloved/hated Videogames highlights (let’s call it “installment of the hopefully regained normality”) almost seems a first person shooters fair. Personally I would prefer to devote much more attention to the Half-Life sci-fi universe, but Gabe Newell says that it isn’t the case to stir things up too much before the time has come. Right: Half-Life 2: Episode 3 should be out just for Christmas 2007, so there is still room for rumors on improbable Steam consoles, BAFTA awards (Portal 2) and other niceties. Never mind, it means that I will spend time with Diablo III (coming out on the next 15th of May)!
New beta version for 4DO, the open source 3DO emulator
Born from the ashes of the deceased FreeDO project, 4DO is an emulator of the historical 3DO console released under an open source license. 4DO aim is to improve on the already remarkable accuracy level of the FreeDO main core by adding new features, bringing bugfixes and making the software compatible with more games from the actually-not-so-large library of titles published for the 3DO.
Ok, now I hate Twitter a bit less…
It always happens like this: technology evolves, newer computer tools become more and more widespread and I am forced to change idea or conform my opinions to the present time rather than keeping them tied down to the past. I hated (Windows) Vista, now I use Vista (waiting to upgrade to Win7), I hated Twitter… And I still hate Twitter, in very truth, but I can’t help acknowledging its usefulness beyond the foolish use made by dickheads thinking with their smartphone instead of their brain.
So long Interfree, and thanks for all the fish!
I am used to bring along my “historical” Internet accounts even if they are actually useless, because for me one of the most important things is “retrocompatibility” and support of all the e-mail addresses opened in the past in the unlikely case someone would decide to contact me there. So I have learned with much disappointment the news about the change of Interfree’s free services into professional paid products, a transition that will take place from today and that will have the practical effect of disabling the mailbox and the web space offered at no cost to users thus far.
Videogames highlights - January 2012
Finally the videogames highlights (pain and delight but mostly pain of this blog) return to their ordinary format, hoping that in the future I won’t have to torture my nights swimming in an amount of links and trailers well beyond the verge of tolerable. Before starting here is just a quick note about the Interactive Achievement Awards, given by the non-profit USA organization Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences during this year’s D.I.C.E. Summit: Skyrim, as predictable, ruled the show.
Videogames highlights - June-December 2011 special (part 2)
Here is the second part of the Videogames highlights special covering the last 7 months of 2011. In this case too, skimming of links and games collected in a so large period of time left out a good amount of nice things and other awful ones (Duke Nukem Forever, oh god…) but the final result pleases me anyway: there is so much good stuff to enjoy, gaming events to remember (Fus Roh Da! :-P) and little gems that in my opinion are worth all the attention they can get.
Videogames highlights - June-December 2011 special (part 1)
And after much waiting and trepidation (especially for myself), even the videogames highlights return on these pages with a maxi-update covering the last 7 months of 2011. While thinning the huge amount of links and games collected during the aforementioned period I’ve tried (as usual) to partly follow my personal tastes and partly listen to the industry ballyhooing horns, which have been able to stun the world anyway with events like E3 and related press conferences by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, Tokyo Game Show and the introduction of the PlayStation Vita console. There is so much stuff to digest, so now I close the intro and start discussing the single games pronto.
Giant purple blocks invade the world of Google Maps
I think that finding a visual flaw in an extremely popular service like Google Maps doesn’t happen frequently, but detecting something weird in a photographic view a few meters away from where you live must be even more rare. And yet it’s exactly what happened to me a few months ago, and the problem is still there today: the view of a street hereabout is simply bugged, with a giant purple block hiding the sight at one of the roadway sides - all along the street.
The Thief series and the horror games by Trilobyte land on GOG.com
Even though it has partially overcome its original mission to be the cornerstone of legal retrogaming on PC, GOG.com (formerly Good Old Games) continues to delight old gamers’ taste (and even the new ones tired of the usual FPSes or the dumb casual games for smartphones) by releasing true gems of the past equipped with compatibility fixes for the latest Windows OSes. During the last days the digital store has practically ran wild in that regard delivering the first two chapters of the Thief series and announcing the coming of the historical Full Motion Video horrors made by Trilobyte.
Xenon 2 and DRM, almost irreparable damages?
Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and their noxious inclination to spoil the day for PC gamers are steadily at the focus of the gaming debate, and almost everyone takes for granted the fact that it’s a contemporary issue not concerning games of the past at all. Nothing more wrong: maybe some years ago (or many years ago) they were more trivially called “copy protection”, but DRM restrictions continue to do harm even among people that engage in the noble art of retrogaming or are interested to digital contents preservation.
“Get Perpendicular” amarcord
What happens when a big company dealing in hard disks decides to explain the benefits of a new technology to the mainstream public in an unconventional manner? In such a case what can happen is that the aforementioned company ends up with something like the following animation, a lump of nerditude like few have been probably seen in the entire commercial history of consumer storage.
New update for ScummVM
More than two months after version 1.4.0 came out, ScummVM is now updated with release 1.4.1 (code name “Subwoofer”). The new version of the virtual machine for adventurers and retrogaming lovers is depicted by developers as a “maintenance only” one and it is mostly designed to fix several bugs found in the previous release, even though ScummVM 1.4.1 does bring some of the new features introduced afterward.
GOG.com: numbers, controversy, outlooks and great classics
The latest weeks have probably been among the most turbulent ones in the brief history of Good Old Games: the retrogaming store has caused controversy, released “new” classic titles of the PC gaming past and has preannounced an important novelty for the product type that will soon be available on its virtual shelves. The digital delivery service created by the Polish publisher CD Projekt is in a sense victim of its own success, and of the ample trust granted by its users as an alternative channel for on-line videogame purchases.
Emulation galore: news for ScummVM, ResidualVM, PCSX2 and Supermodel!
What follows is a report for a long series of news occurred in the emulation world during the last period, and by “last period” I mean the latest months before the beginning of the new year at least. For this reason, in some cases I can’t exactly talk about “news”, but it felt right to me to emphasize them considering that these are already established advancements that will be the foundations on which to build the future ones. After all emulation is an ever-evolving world, and I want to start over to tell its progressing without losing too much important things along the way 
Happy new retro-year everyone!
Like the nachzehrer which lives a half rotten life chewing its own shroud in the grave, during the last six months Sir Arthur’s Den has been a half-dead blog - no “status update” or new post, but a non-stop attention by the owner to static management of the (few) legit comments and the (too many!) spam comments collected daily by Defensio quarantine. As 2012 comes, Sir Arthur has finally decided to come out of the grave - shroud or not - and try to put his hands on these pages again hoping to succeed.
Videogames highlights - May 2011
With this new May installment, Sir Arthur’s Den video games highlights should finally return to their traditional monthly serialization. And even though it’s really just accidental, the choice my twisted mind made for the past month’s games pleases my hardcore PCist gamer’s nature: all things considered PC as a gaming platform always performs WAY BETTER than the industry windbags and the specialized “journalists” state, the DRM issue can be resolved with a bit of good will and the classics never go out of fashion. On the contrary.
Videogames highlights - October 2010-April 2011 part 2
So here is the second part of the videogames highlights spread over a too much long time frame to be allowed to happen again on these web pages (yes, it’s a promise; mostly to myself :-P). The titles featured below should represent the highest technological peak reached by the video gaming industry thus far, and among those there are games capable of excelling, for a reason or another (graphical resolution and clearness, superior controls accuracy), on PC rather than on console. After all the top grade developers say that too: the PC is a generation ahead of Xbox 360 and PS3. Crytek, don’t be shy: let’s say two 
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