The League of Magnificent Scoundrels

I just plugged into Dwarf Fortress by Bay 12 Games for the first time this week. So far I think it is fun, exciting, and challenging. It is currently in Alpha stage development, but is very playable.

I run Ubuntu Karmic 64-bit and the game was a bit of a challenge to install. I had not yet loaded the 32-bit libs so I had to retro my system to get the libncursesw.so.5 to identify correctly. Then I found that Ubuntu is only supporting libjpeg62 at this time so I had to compile a 32-bit version of libjpeg.so.8.0.1 and make a link to it in the [df]/libs file called libjpeg.so.8 and that was it.

For your convenience I have made the file available here:

• (Pre Compiled 32-Bit) libjpeg.so.8.0.1

Or you can go to http://www.ijg.org and get the code to compile it yourself.

• http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v8a.tar.gz

As soon as you get a chance, check this one out!
(don’t forget to sign up to the forums @ http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php)

Over the weekend I had the unexpected pleasure of stumbling over an old bargain bin game I had bought some time ago.  It was the Pc version “Shadow of Destiny” by Konami. It was relased in 2001 for the playstaion 2 and later ported to the Pc.

Graphically speaking the game is sub-par for a playstaion 2 game of the time, and even less so for the compter. It feels very much like a dumbed down final fantisy game style wise.

Where Shadow of Destiny really stands out is its story. You start out as Eike kusch, a 22-year old man who is fated to die. In fact you dont start controling Eike untill after he is stabbed coming out of a small coffee shop.  It is in death that Eike is given a small divice and a second chance. The divice alows Eike to move though key spots in time, in hopes to change his fate.

The over all game play is very simple. Most of the time is spent on changing small things in the past thorough actions and dialog with prominent people from the city’s past and present, so the game is more like a interactive story trying to find out ways to stop Eike from dieing and of course finding out who’s trying to kill him in the first place.

If you like time travel stories or adventure type games I would highly recommend  getting a hold of a copy if you come across it.

A long time ago, in a day before blazing graphics and reflex button smashing games. There was the Text based adventures.  In these games you where given nothing but a text based description of what you saw. From that you would have to chose what to do by typing your actions in to the command prompt. later versions added a picture to help the player visualize what was going on. (more…)