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Review: The Last Arcadian

Mar 10, 2010

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The Last Arcadian is one of those games that in hindsight are pretty strange stuff for a public domain or shareware title. Considering even in the early 1990s a 3D shooter was automatically rather cool and thus profitable, The Last Arcadian makes you think why it wasn’t released commercially.

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Review: Starball

Mar 03, 2010

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I used to read ST Format back when I had an Atari ST. Later in its existence the magazine started to include better and more complete games and other software on its cover disk, probably because of the Atari was dying and publishers decided to give away their assets (or more like the actual developers [...]

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Introducing My Latest Projects

Sep 22, 2009

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… Or, How to Procrastinate Productively. klystrack3

I decided to make one of my current projects open source and post them on Google Code just for fun. The project is a toolchain that I’m using to remake Thrust. In reality, I decided to divide the project into two separate projects: the actual game engine and related tools, and a music editor that uses the engine.

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Wordle and 30 Years of Games

Jul 01, 2009

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small Here’s a superficial analysis on game titles. I have used Wordle to generate a word cloud from lists of recurring phrases in game titles.

What the word clouds show are very generic words like “space” or “super”, the number two (a game series is more likely to be two than three games long) and multiple word phrases which usually are popular game series, or games with many expansion packs. It is interesting that the generic words tend to be the same across 30 years — all generations of gamers seem to prefer dragons. Another point of interest is that a phrase from a 1980s game title is much less likely an established brand as it most likely is in the 1990s. Also, in the 1990s is became common that a game title has the release year attached to it, since EA et al started to churn out minor updates to their sports games as brand new releases.

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Collision Detection with Occlusion Queries Redux

Jul 23, 2008

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Here we describe a method for checking collisions between arbitrary objects drawn by the GPU. The objects are not limited to any shape, complexity or orientation. The objects that are checked for collisions can be the same objects that are drawn on the screen. The algorithm is pixel perfect but without further refining is limited to 2D collisions.

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