An iphone sword of Fargoal remake

Screenshot from Sword of Fargoal ported to the...
Image via Wikipedia

Another reason to love my iphone: a remake of the classic old Commodore 64 rpg-lite, Sword of Fargoal, by the original developers. Info on the new iphone version can be had over on toucharcade, there’s a decent write-up on the original here on wikipedia, and I’ve mentioned it at least once before here when a pc version was released. I picked this up when it came out several weeks ago for $5, and it’s on sale now for only $1.99. Definitely worth grabbing if you played the original and have fond memories of it, and also worth a look if you enjoy the genre.Ā  The remake adds graphical polish, item and monster enhancements, and user interface changes to make it work well on the phone.

Friday fun: adventure games, old school style

Graphic adventures have made something of a comeback over the last couple of years, thanks in no small part to the success of the wonderfully funny episodic Sam and Max games, but they’re still very much a niche game genre. This wasn’t always the case – back in the 80’s graphic adventures were one of the most popular genres, and one of the biggest producers of this genre was Sierra, now sadly long gone. Their games live on though, and Sarien.net is this week’s friday fun link – they have many of the classic old Sierra games from the 80’s available to play for free in your browser. If you fancy a walk down memory lane from back in the day, check them out.

Why I’m not buying Modern Combat 2

I really enjoyed Modern Combat – I played through and enjoyed the single player campaign, and I played a ton of multiplayer when it came out. I also enjoyed World at War, its sequel, and still occasionally play it online.

I won’t be buying the sequel. This fantastic chart over on Destructoid sums up why: this release is a huge middle finger to PC gamers. I’m not going to get all caught up in the nerd angst these moves by Infinity Ward have provoked, I’m simply going to walk away from their product. I think they could basically care less – they know they’ll sell 10 million+ copies to console gamers. Good on them, they know their market. I think they’ve lost sight of their PC market though. Meanwhile there are plenty of other great modable, extensively multiplayer, , extensible, client/server FPS for me to choose from on the PC. Personally I think Infinity Ward should take a good look at Valve and think about how Valve is succeeding in all the areas Infinity Ward is claiming are causing them to make these changes.

update: There’s also a pretty good summary of all the downgrades Infinity Ward have applied to Modern Combat 2 over here on Ars Technica

Friday Fun: Torchlight

Did you play and love Diablo or Diablo II back in the day? Do you wish there was a modern equivalent?  If so, you can stop reading now and head over to steampowered.com. Buy yourself a copy of Torchlight for $20, and you’ll be in action rpg nirvana within a half hour or so.

The same principle applies if you played Fate some years ago – Torchlight is by some of the same folks and if you like Fate, you’re going to love Torchlight – it’s Fate on steroids with a shiny new coat of paint.

If you’re not familiar with these games, they’re easy to pick up and play, feature some light’ish rpg elements, tons of variety in setting, enemies, and most especially loot. You run around doing simple quests, fighting bad guys, leveling up, gathering up swords of +5 smacking of goodness, lather, rinse, repeat. They don’t necessarily require much heavy thinking but there are tactics that work and those that don’t, with plenty of health potions required for those who don’t want to bother thinking and just want to plow ever deeper into the dungeon.

I love the genre and this is the best example of it to come along in years. There’s a video below so you can get a sense of the gameplay. For now this is PC only but there’s a Mac version on the way due in January. For now you can only buy this via the digital download services but a boxed version is also on the way. There are also development tools on the way and the game is very Mod friendly. If this does as well as Fate did, expect tons of additional content, conversions, and more.

My only criticisms of the game are that I wish the loading was a bit faster and I wish they had included multiplayer, but man, it’s $20 and it’s a blast to play. Definitely worth checking out if it seems like it’s up your alley.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/ghQBj6Gfn10&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0

How to embed a google wave in wordpress or drupal..or pretty much anything

Addendum: see the note at the bottom – there’s now a much easier way to do this.

There are multiple solutions to this scattered across the web, and there are probably better places than this to find out how to do it, but since I just went through finding out how to make this work and had to multiple google to find all the pieces of the answers I needed, I figured IĀ  would do my bit to spread the word in case others find it useful. This works in October of 2009. Things are rapidly evolving so I make no promises for the future, but right now if you want to embed a google wave into WordPress, Drupal, or any static or cms controlled page that allows you to use script tags, there are a couple of options. The first is the wavr plugin for wordpress. The gui for it fails on my instance, but the tag syntax works once you have it installed – just put the following into a post:

wave id="googlewave.com!wavid" bgcolor="#ffffff" color="#000000" height="300px"

Note – surround that with [ brackets or it won’t run. Also note that you’ll need to know both the correct wave server to call and the correct wavid – read below for how to get those.

The second method is to use this javascript:

http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/embed.js var wavePanel = new WavePanel('http://wave.google.com/wave/'); wavePanel.setUIConfig('white', 'black', 'Verdana', '10px'); wavePanel.loadWave('googlewave.com!w+RhSPBtyUB'); wavePanel.init(document.getElementById('mywaveframe'));

Which I originally found over on this post on geek whorled.

To actually post the wave you again need the correct server and wave ID. Unfortunately what google prints in the URL bar doesn’t match completely with what the API expects for the wavid, so you have to copy the wave url and change the ‘w%252b’ portion of it to w+ for the waveid . An example – this:

https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BRhSPBtyUB

has a waveid of:

w+RhSPBtyUB

I figured this out thanks to a google support post, which you can see here. Note that the actual answer I needed was not initially shown to me, I had to expand the answers.

The only other thing to bear in mind is that waves can be sourced from different servers. It’s not clear what all is out there in terms of valid server addresses, but googlewave.com is what’s worked for me. The google wave url I’m looking at is wave.google.com, but the source url to pass the api call to I have to use is googlewave.com. I think that folks who were initially granted access to the sandbox that predated the 100,000 ‘public beta’ that started in October 2009 have to use a different url to pass their waveid to, and I suspect if you’re running your own wave server you’d have to use that server’s address, but like I said some of this is still unclear to me.

Anyway, hope this was useful. Now if someone can solve the speed issues… šŸ˜‰

Addendum: or you could just add embeddy@appspot.com to your contact list and then add this bot to any wave you want all the embed code for. I wasn’t aware of this when I wrote this all up, and possibly it didn’t even exist at that point. Anyway now there’s a much easier way – just use embeddy.

Testing WordPress->Google Wave integration

I’m testing embedding a google wave into a wordpress post using the wavr plugin. The plugin dialog seems busted but hopefully the syntax still functions. If you don’t have a google wave account yet you probably won’t be able to see/interact with this.

[edit] I’ve pulled the wave out of this post because it was slowing this page down tremendously and I got too many complaints about it. There are instructions on how to embed a wave into a wordpress post on this site, use the search if you came looking for this and found that the example is now gone.