Brian was nice enough to send me an invite for the gaming website The Casual Collective which takes a different stance than all those other arcade sites out there. The Casual Collective is run by game programmers who publish their games exclusively on the website which means that this is the only way that you can officially play the games.
I'm playing Team Fortress 2 for a while know and thought that it would be nice to share the knowledge and expertise that I gained while playing the Beta of Team Fortress 2 with players who just got the game recently.
There is a lot of coverage going on at the moment on various sites that all report that the new Radiohead album In Rainbows which is exclusively available on a official In Rainbows website is spreading like any other major music album on Bittorrent. The main difficulties that the reporting sites have is that listeners may pay the price they like to purchase the album on the In Rainbows website which can be anything from $0 to hundreds of Dollars for the album plus a small service charge.
Unlike most commercial developers the freeware scene is always good for a surprise. Tower of Goo Unlimited is such a pleasant surprise. It is a small game that does not have to be installed at all. The task is to build a tower of goo by connecting drops of go that stick to each other.
Listing all installed multimedia codecs is an easy task if you use the software Installed Codec from Nirsoft. The software scans the registry in two places looking for installed codecs displaying them afterwards in a list that can be sorted in a few different ways.
I recently came upon a series of video game reviews called Zero Punctuation over at the Escapist Magazine which could probably described as reviews in a hurry. Yahtzee Croshaw, the guy doing the reviews, was apparently born with the talent to talk pretty fast which he is doing in those reviews that usually last between three to five minutes.
B-movies are low cost or budget movies set in a certain genre like Horror or Science Fiction. Not all have been bad movies and some were the first part to fame for actors such as Jack Nicholson or John Wayne. Bmovies.com is a website that makes available hundreds of B-movies to viewers from all over the world. The real beauty is that those movies can be streamed - and thus watched - on the website .
Website owners should create their own favicons that are placed in that tiny space next to your url and consist normally of 16x16 pixels. They show up in the bookmarks section of your browser as well and several extension for Firefox let you replace the text of the tabs with just the favicon of the websites.
If you experience troubles playing movies using the DIVX codec that is installed on your computer you might want to take a look at a bundle of fixes for DivX that is called All In One Fix. This is not intended for users who use ffdshow for instance to play movies, only for those who are actually using the DIVX codec.
Does it make sense to embed a web browser like Firefox or a Voice over IP client like Skype into a motherboard ? It surely has some advantages like fast boot times and increased security because everything done using those softwares is stored inside the RAM and not on the hard drive.
I wrote about some real heavyweights the last Fridays which is why I would like to write about a pretty interesting flash game today. Treasure of the Cutlass Reef is a game that reminded me a little bit of the oldschool Pirates on the C-64 back in the time when wonderful games would fit on a disk that had storage capacities of less than one Megabyte.
I don't understand why no one did create a software that would connect people form around the world to jam with each other and create music that way. This is one natural application that would make it easier for everyone from beginning musicians to bands that are separated and need to jam with each other.
Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Jamiroquai and even Madonna have something in common. They all decided to turn their backs on the Music Industry and either market their albums directly or - in the case of Madonna - use a company that is not related to the Music Industry.
I don't like to take my purchased movie DVDs with me when I travel but still love to have some of my favorite or new movies with me in case I would like to watch a movie on my notebook. I could of course burn those DVDs and take the backups with me but this is not ideal in my opinion. I do not like to carry any media with me when traveling.
What has been a rumor for some months seems to have become reality in the last weeks. Google is starting to punish websites that are selling links by dropping the sites Pagerank. Danny Sullivan noticed a huge Pagerank drop from 9 to 7 on the Stanford Daily website which happened to sell links since 2005.
Weekend Fun time again. H2O, no not Water but Heaven to Ocean, is a nice plattform puzzle game putting the player in control of a rather large water drop who craves to get back to the Ocean. To achieve this goal the player needs to move the drop around the screen by tilting the screen to the left or the right.
I knew we were going to see more PC and Wiimote mashups this year. After being able to play several shooters on the pc with the remote it was only a matter of time until someone would introduce applications or even a complete user interface utilizing the Wiimote.
Self-expiring, disposable or temporary emails have been around for some time and are quite useful for quickly joining a website that forces its users to register before they can see the content or participate. Disposable Websites on the other hand is a concept that I never heard before.
That is at least what Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, said when questioned in court about her music piracy understanding. I think that this is one of the main reasons why the Music Industry is doing so badly. Their view collides with the demand of the consumers.
Team Fortress 2 is an awesome game. If you are a gamer who loves sharp textures you might find the following console command for Team Fortress 2 useful. The command is mat_picmip -0.9 and has the effect that the textures in the game look much sharper than before.
Radiohead is a well known English rock band which was formed in 1986. They currently are under no contract with a major record label and are therefor trying to distribute their upcoming album called In Rainbows which will be released October 10, 2007 and exclusively available for purchase on an Internet website.
If you ever wanted to be a guest in one of those famous tv shows such as Deal or no Deal, Who wants to be a Millionaire or Blockbusters. WeDigTV, the World's first TV2 Network, lets you play these shows and a couple more blending show footage with interactivity.
Joost has released yet another version of their acclaimed Internet TV client that streams prerecorded TV shows to the users computer. The new version has one feature in particular that was well overdue. Joost can now be updated from within the client. Users do not have to download and install new versions from the Joost website anymore.
I heavily rely on Everton from Connected Internet who sends me new interesting ways to monetize my sites from time to time. Today he was sending me a link and a short description of TNX which basically sells links on your website. Unlike other sites that sell links the links from TNX are sold on a per page basis. Every sold page earns the user points which can be either exchanged into cash or used to buy links as well.
Some images at Flickr are weakly protected with an image overlay called spaceball.gif. Whenever you right-click the image to save it you do save spaceball.gif instead which is a 1x1 pixel image showing nothing at all. The same happens if you try to drag the image to your desktop or hard drive.
Source Engine games are Half-life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source and others. Those games, or better part of those games, can get internally defragmented and can't be optimized using a software that defragments Windows hard drives. It is a good idea to defragment those games regularly to speed them up.
Team Fortress 2 is a great game. I play the beta regularly with some of my friends. The German version of Team Fortress 2 puts players at a serious disadvantage though. There is no blood in the game which means that German players do not know if they hit an enemy or not because the blood has simply been removed without adding some other means proof that the enemy was hit.
Poizoned Mind is an entry to the B-Game Competition held at The Independent Gaming Source which, judging from the looks of it, seems to be one of the better games of the competition. It reminds me of those classic adventures like Guild of Thieves and The Pawn which were among the first to combine text with beautiful images to support the story of the adventure.
It seems that the TV companies have finally began to understand that the Internet is more than just a way to publish their TV program on the website. They understand that it will benefit their business if they publish TV premieres early on the Internet to create some buzz that could not be created otherwise.
I always wondered which company would be able to compete with Apple's iTunes store and only a handful companies came to my mind. Besides Microsoft and eBay Amazon came to my mind. They are a established brand and I do not know a single person who does not have an Amazon account already.
Last.fm does not offer an obvious option to play music streams in an external music player. It is however possible to obtain the stream url for several radio streams from last.fm and use them in your favorite music player. This is also an excellent opportunity to record those songs using that player. I do recommend XMPlay for this.
Synaesthete is one of those trendy arena shooters that bombard the player with a splendid mixture of color and sound while keeping the game mechanism as simply as possible. The task of the player is to destroy all enemies in an level to be able to cross the bridge to the next level.
I was really looking forward to play Team Fortress 2 once it came out on October 10th and decided to read a lot of news regarding that release to be up to date. My heart began to beat like hell when I realized that it was possible to make the purchase at an discount right away and be eligible to play the Team Fortress 2 beta right away.
Server operators who happen to have songs on their servers that are distributed illegally will have to pay the fine of 20000 Euro ($28000) per song: at least in Germany according to the district court in Hamburg. Private downloaders get it much cheaper though. They only have to pay 6000 Euro for the first song, 3000 for the second, 1500 for the third and 600 for all remaining ones. A cheap bargain don't you think ?
In a place far away from reality - which happens to be somewhere near Seattle - two Star Wars geeks decided to create the ultimate home theater: A Star Wars Death Star Home Theater. It took them 36 months to complete the project which in my opinion resembles the interior of an Imperial Star Destroyer and not the Death Star.
For people who enjoyed Team Fortress Classic and maybe even still play it, there is a new multi-player modification out for Half Life 2 called Fortress Forever.
I do not like the way all major browsers display and let you manage the bookmarks and favorites. Internet Explorer 7 displays the favorites either in a sidebar or a tiny window and it becomes really annoying if you have to edit a lot of favorites from time to time. I do add a lot of websites to the favorites at work because that is the only computer that I'm forced to use the Internet Explorer.
A new beta version of Winamp 5.5 has just been released as usual in a full, pro and lite version. Winamp lite is basically a music player supporting many different audio formats while the other Winamp editions support video playback, cd ripping and an integrated browser to browse sites like Shoutcast.
It has been a long time ago that I was addicted to a multiplayer shooter. The game back then was Unreal Tournament and I have yet to witness a game as addictive, as fun and exciting as the original UT 99. Team Fortress 2 could be that game judging from the trailers, class videos and gameplay movies that I have seen so far.
This episode of Weekend Fun at Ghacks is reviewing a straight 2D shooter called Arachnos that reminds me of those old Gradius titles that I loved to play back then on the SNES. You choose the type of weapon that your ship is equipped with and realize that this will be a hell of a ride after the first waves of enemy hit the screen.
