Jason Crowther’s Blog

Nothing beats a 3d racing game where you have three ways to win:

1. Beat all the opponent cars. Nothing special here.
2. Destroy all the opponent cars. Crash ‘em, smash ‘em, push ‘em off cliffs, push them into land mines.
3. Kill all pedestrians. Yep, give up racing completely and just run people over.

Yep, that’s Carmageddon, the ‘Racing Game for the Chemically Imbalanced’ in a nutshell. I’ve been a fan since version 1.0. The newer editions are fun, but the I think the original is still the best. I could play all day, everyday.

Unfortunately, until recently, I haven’t been able to get it run on Windows XP. The game was originally released back in the days of DOS and Windows 95. It seems to install OK under Windows XP and begins to fire up under XP, but goes down in flames before the first race begins. Probably some time of graphics or extended memory problem.

Enter Glidos, a 3dfx driver wrapper for Windows XP. It was primarily designed make the original Tomb Raider work on Windows XP. Not only does it make Carmageddon playable, but you also get the high quality 3dfx version graphics. Even nicer, you can run it in a window. Its not 100% perfect, it locks up every now again; but, working most of the time is better than none of the time. The $10 registration fee was a no brainer.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta get back to smashing things… hehe.

Geez, how much fun can you have with flash game that uses only 1 button? Check out Leo Steel to find out. Great way to kill a few minutes or hours. Good thing I didn’t find that at work.

Ah, harkening back to the days of my youth, I remember the Nintendo Entertainment System had a ton of cool alternative controllers like the PowerPad (kinda the grand daddy of the Dance Dance Revolution), the PowerGlove, and the funky Uforce (infrared motion detectors). I thought some of the controller ideas were kinda neat, but they never really had great game support in my opinion.

O’reilly Make (which I really need to subscribe to soon) has a fun article about turning these wacky controllers into MIDI musical instruments. Cool idea! With some interface hacking and some glue code built a pretty cool instrument. I’d really like to see a video of some real time music creation.

I got wind of TrackMania Sunrise via a recent CNet update. Its basically a 2005 version of the game Stunts (that’s the only Stunts related page I could dig up in a quick Google search) we though was all the rage back in 1993. I thought the graphics were too good to be true (see these screen shots), so I was tempted enough to suffer through the 209Mb download. The original Stunts fit on half a floppy!

Looks and plays fine on my non gaming optimized pc (2.8Ghz, 1Gb Ram, old video card). The instant replays with vapor trails are a hoot. It has some interesting stunts like upside down jumps and jumping vertical surfaces that I haven’t seen before. The 3d stuff is also very well done; I like how you can skip across the water at bit before you sink in.

Didn’t have time to mess around with the track editor yet. But, team that up with network multiplayer, and you could have a grade a hoot-n-nanny of a time. Geez, I think I might have to drop the $45 on this complete waste of time.

Update - A few links down on that Google search page was a link to a downloadable version of Stunts. The page claims that its Abandonware, but I’m not sure, so download at your own risk.

NYT has a good article telling us how Sony will rule the world again with its forthcoming Playstation Portable, hitting the shelves on March 24. Its got a pretty good mix of features. If I had an extra $250 lying around, I’d probably pick one up.