Monzool’s Personal Publishing

THE TITLE FOR this post could almost as well have been “Warlords II, Flashback, Abuse and How I Spent My Youth“. Well, perhaps not really; I did play a lot of other games too :-D. When I think of great games I played in my long “carrier” of PC days, those three games I’ve always categorized as games with exceptional gameplay and a spellbinding atmosphere. No matter how horrible the graphics may look today, these properties was what kept you playing hours upon hours.

Warlords II

When it comes to Warlords II, me and my friend Michael Rasmussen that lived a couple of houses down the street, used to battle in this game for an almost infinite amount of hours - and before that, we played Warlords I for almost as many hours. Actually when hearing the hours being clocked by people playing WoW it reminds me of myself playing Warlords. I guess its the same magic.

Warlords II is reincarnated in an free open source clone LordsAWar. This project builds on the C++ implementation of FreeLords ( FreeLords it self, seems to have spawned as a Java implementation instead). LordsAWar is a multi platform game and can also be fetched from the Debian repository.

Flashback

What Flashback have in gameplay and story it also had in graphics and jaw-dropping animation sequences.

Presented in a dystopian theme, it were almost something like a “Indiana Jones meets Blade Runner” feeling of the game.

Flashback is released for Amiga and DOS platforms, but some talented fans have written the game engine REminiscence as a multi platform replacement for the original game engine. Supplying the game data files, downloadable from Abandonia, and compiling REminiscence is that enough revisit Flashback ;-) on a Linux box. A later extended CD-ROM version of Flashback is also available on Abandonia. Old reviews can be read on the Amiga Magazine Rack.

Abuse

Abuse is also abandonware and is available from Abandonia, but also exist in a free open source edition called Abuse-SDL. Like Flashback, Abuse is a dystopian game where one guy must escape from prison where all his cell mates has become monster due to experiments gone wrong.

Abuse is both a horizontal-scrolling and vertical-scrolling platform game. The controlling of the main character is somewhat unusual for a platform game, as the keyboard moves the character and the mouse controls the gun aiming. A review is available on the Amiga Magazine Rack.

Well… time for some more gaming. How needs sleep anyway?

FOR A COUPLE of years now I’ve wanted to learn to play the game of Go, but I just haven’t managed to find the time. Go is a strategic game for which the saying is “easy to learn, hard [impossible] to master”.

There exists a brilliant live-cd called Hikarunix. The Hikarunix CD contains a huge set of the quality information on Go found on the internet. A great asset is also the collection of tutorials, trainers and databases over played Go games. In theory Hikarunix bundles all that is required to study, learn and play Go.

Hikarunix is definitely recommendable, but experience tells me, that if you really wanna learn a subject to depth, get a book written by experts in the field and benefit from their hard earned knowledge. Hence I have bought the book Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go.

The book comes highly recommended (e.g. from www.godiscussions.com) so I’m looking forward to reading it.

I am also very exited about playing on my Go board.

This beautiful board is actually handmade by my mother. When wooden Go boards are generally price tagged in range of a Ariane space rocket, its nice to have a family that got talent :-)

The wood is a 48.3[cm] x 55,5[cm] leftover from a kitchen table and then drawing of the grid and cutting grooves for all the lines as well as coloring the lines and applying the sealer is handmade.