10000 hits

Today this blog has passed the magical number of 10000 hits since it was started on Januari 25th this year.

Now it isn’t all that impressive for a site to reach 10000 hits in nearly 9 months, but from the 1 or 2 hits I got every day back then I now get about 40 to 50 hits every day, which isn’t all that bad for a blog that isn’t actually updated on a daily basis. If I would enter a story, like, every day I’m sure I would get more hits than I do now, but what do I blog about if I don’t have anything to blog about? Now there’s a good question… I’m not someone who’s just going to rant about nothing just for the sake of it… I will only rant with a reason about something that I think is interesting and not just about any junk I find on the web or in a store or wherever.

Anyway, now I’m allready at it, I found this awsome little gadget over in a webshop in Germany… It’s actually an awfully expensive webshop, but that to the side, these things aren’t very easy to find, so I’m willing to pay a little extra EURO for that.
And what is this all about then eh? Eh? EEEEEH!?

Well, about this:

Source: www.wikipedia.org

Even though the shipping costs are relatively high and I don’t want to recommend this webshop to anyone because it’s really expensive when it comes to classic gaming stuff I won’t actually place a link here and I won’t file this under Bargain Hunting (hehe). All I need to do now is transfer the money and I’ll receive it shortly I hope… If I’m not being screwed over badly, but I’ll wait a little with doing that, just to prevent what I just wrote and if anyone can point me to a place where I can get one of these for a price below €21,95 with some extra shipping costs I would gladly hear it and I’ll ofcourse give you credit for it on this very blog.

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FlatOut 2 review

As promised here, I wrote a full review of FlatOut 2 for you all to read. I might add some screenshots later, have fun.

I can only conclude that this game is f*cking awsome, go and buy it! Give the developers some credit.

You can read the review by clicking here, or by clicking on Reviews in the sidebar or by clicking FlatOut 2 (PC) in the sidebar under Reviews.

Oh yeah, it’s about 2936 words, which is equal to 16000 characters including spaces (13114 without spaces), 221 lines which comes down to 5 pages of A4 paper. MSWord counted that for me 😛

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FlatOut 2

It’s been a while since I last posted something, sorry for that, but I haven’t felt like blogging lately… But this can’t be left unnoticed.
For the first time since a long time I’ve bought a recently released videogame. This time it’s FlatOut 2 for the PC platform (Windows XP to be exact). This is the sequel to FlatOut which was released in 2004 and it is a destruction-racing game like the good old Destruction Derby for the good old Playstation in 1995.

On several forums all over the net there has been (and probably is still going) a discussion about the StarForce protection system. I haven’t participated in it myself, but it was going on the site of StarForce itself, the Daemons home and on the forums of several games it is used in including FlatOut 2. USA customers now consider themselves in luck for having a seperate release of FlatOut 2 which uses Securom 7 instead of StarForce 4 Frontline Pro. As for myself, I don’t really care, protection is protection and StarForce hasn’t given me any trouble whatsoever anyway. Where the old versions were controversial to say the least, this version even notifies the user of the installation of the protection drivers that are required for it to work and unlike the previous versions, these drivers are only active on demand and thus they won’t affect overall system performance like StarForce 3 did which came with games like Trackmania Sunrise and Psi-Ops: the Mindgate Conspiracy.

A good thing is that the StarForce drivers are upgradable and if you happen to own one the games that uses old StarForce protection and then install a new StarForce protected game after it, the drivers will be updated to the latest version (Frontline) and the old performance issues are eliminated while the older games still remain fully functional.

All in all, I think it’s all a bit overblown with this StarForce protection issue and people not buying games solely because of that while programs like Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% use similar technologies to evade protection instead of providing it.
For your information, Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% use rootkit technology to evade protection systems and just like these 2 StarForce uses rootkit technology to evade emulation software and protect the media that way. This means that both the protection software and the emulation software use hidden/invisible Windows registry keys to avoid detection and one very important thing to consider is that there is a difference between rootkit software and software that uses rootkit technology. Rootkit software is malicious software created to stay undetected while causing well meant damage while software that uses rootkit technology can’t always be defined as harmfull.
In my humble opinion, both the StarForce protection system and programs like Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% are NOT, I repeat, NOT harmfull software.

Anyway, I’ll be writing a review about FlatOut 2 soon and it’ll be added on the reviews page and a link will be added here too.

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Uberfighter: the game is done!

It’s now 11:17h, but the game was finished a few minutes ago. Read all about it here.

You can download the game here and it’s called UberFighter.

At this moment I don’t feel like writing any more stuff on here… I’m FUBAR…

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Announcement: a game in 24 hours

Thursday, august 10, 2006
11:00h

About a month ago I came up with the idea to create a simple game from scratch within 24 hours. Tell you what, today is the big day. The kickoff was today at 11:00.

The team consist of 3 people:

1. Michiel (NecroDOME) Gijbels
2. Frank (Mad Woody) van Gent
3. Jens (Zhooibaal) Waschk

We have decided on the following:

• 2D side scrolling beat ’em up
• We will be the characters
• Animation will be stop-motion
• There will be a bonus character
• All graphics will be photos
• A portrait of the characters will be displayed in the top of the screen

I will post regular updates on this page.

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