Games Convention Germany

©Leipziger Messe GmbH / Uwe Frauendorf

The annual European gaming convention took place from 23rd to 26th of August in Leipzig Germany. It drew for a close with 185.000 visitors – about 2.000 more than in the year before.
I wasn't able to go to Leipzig. So I tried to keep me informed about the news of the different companies and publishers. When it comes to consoles I was a bit disappointed. There were no really breaking news. Nothing really exciting from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo regarding the Next-Gen-Consoles: No price reduction for PlayStation3 in Europe. At selling numbers the Wii overtook the XBox360.
The “Best of GC” award showed an outlook at the next generation of gaming. Some of the winners are Crysis (PC), Bioshock (Xbox360) and Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (PS3). A couple of nice games... I watched some trailers and I was really impressed.
Maybe I can be there next year to bag tons of merchandise stuff and to take some pictures of nice fair hostesses...

Abandon Monday

Do you remember the old games? No, I don't ask for games, which have been released 2 or 3 years ago. I talk about 10 and 15 year old games. This was the time I started to take some interest in computers. At that time I mainly focused on games. Even I had no own computer, I bought computer game magazines. Every month photo-realistic in-game graphic was newly defined. They also showed us the appropriate hardware to run these games. Graphic and audio boards with the size of pizza boxes (the big ones), 14inch monitors and 8 MBytes of RAM were considered to be the high-end. My turn came when I got my 486DX33… I bought some of the games I ever wanted to have – but most of them I never played...

About one year ago I wondered whether it is possible to emulate the good old DOS and to play these old games. I found a lot of emulators but I stuck with a great program called DOSBox. Back in that days it was a lot of typing to set up memory, drives and start a game. And so it is with the DOSBox.
For that case there are also some nice Wizards with which you can easily configure DOSBox and organize the settings for your old games. Most of them can be freely downloaded in web. The tool which I prefer is called D-Fend. Unfortunately its not maintained anymore.
But how to get the games when you not own them? Old games which are no longer available for legitimate purchase are called abandonware. Since this term has no legal meaning, you should inform yourself before downloading and using abandonware. There are a lot of websites in the web where you can find abandonware. This is no demand to download and use copyright protected software and the desicion is up to you.

Now you have everything you need to go back in time and check out all the games you ever wanted to play.
But I know its hard to remember what games were the most treasured in the good old days. To jog your memory a little bit, I want to establish the Abandon Monday! At every Monday I will recall an old game. And the choice which game will be highlighted is up to you! Use the poll on the right side to select the game you like most. The first Abandon Monday will take place at September 2nd. In the meantime (while I wait for your numerous votes) I'm going to post some hints how to bring up the old games.

So lets start going back in time. But be careful: the old games can be even more addictive than the current ones...

BMX... WOW!

Imagine a boy living in East Germany and the date is about 20 years ago. Every year during the big summer school holidays they showed some movies for kinds at the theater. In the year 1989 it was a movie called "Die BMX Bande". This boy was me and even though nobody knew what BMX means, we went in. The movie changed the lives of the most of us...

We saw BMX bikes and guys with cool protection stuff riding them. I still remember the protection masks the guys wore (now I know their purpose was to hide the stuntman). But anyway, the tricks we saw really amazed us. I shouldn't forget to tell you about the thrilling story about some bad guys robbing banks and the heroic BMX riders, who stopped them. But the story wasn't the point for us, which made us loving this movie. There was also this cute curly girl, who also was great with her bike. Back then I didn't know that the actress was Nicole Kidman.
Last but not least the scene which amazed us the most was when our heroes used a tubular water slide to get rid of their chasers. The only slide we had ever seen was straight and about 4 meters long...
After seeing this movie, everybody wants to have a BMX bike. Only a few got one. I belonged to the lucky guys. We never got to the level of Goose, P.J. or Judy, but we had a great times watching this movie and riding our bikes...

I really love this movie! You should also check it out!

Title: BMX Bandits

Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith

Writers: Patrick Edgeworth, Russell Hagg

Release date: Australia 22 December 1983

Cast: David Argue, Nicole Kidman, Angelo D'Angelo, James Lugton

My right ear works fine again!

©Sennheiser

About one week ago 8.00 in the morning: I was on my way to my workplace.
Suddenly my right ear turns deaf. Of course not the ear itself but one plug of my headphones got soundless. Damn! 5 minutes to walk with only half of the in-ear entertainment left. The first thing I had done at work was searching for a replacement. Of course I wanted a way better replacement! I remembered a friend of mine showed me a Sennheiser headphone. He was pretty content with this earplugs. I found the Sennheiser CX300 headphones for a good price. Today I got them!
I have to admit that headphones can look good! They are white with white cable. Not bad - but that isn't that important for headsets. Since the CX300 headphones should be placed tightly within your ear canal (intra aural), ear adapters in three different sizes are enclosed. My first impression was "is this really my music?". It sounds like a cow peeing into a bucket. I tried to put the plugs deeper into my ear and then it happened!
Really great bass-driven and powerful sound. And the best thing about these headphones is that your will hear nothing but your music! Your environment is almost mute. Its pretty cool when you only see your colleagues moving their lips...

Dead Silence - therefore I hate dolls!

©Universal Pictures

Nuremberg, Germany August 1st - that’s the day from which on I hate dolls. The whole time before I thought a guy with his hand in the back of such a doll is funny show. Not anymore!
At this day I saw the movie Dead Silence. It was shown in the course of the 21st Fantasy Filmfest. The story is about a guy whose wife was killed after he got a mysterious package with a doll. This doll belongs to a old (and dead) lady, who is a little bit pissed because she was murdered by the some residents of a village. But I don't want to tell too much in the case you still want to watch the movie.
It is a very good movie. The director (James Wan - yes the "Saw" guy) put a lot of scary mood in it. It wasn't that gory as I had expected it. So you definitely should see it if you hadn't yet.
Damn I hate this dolls!

You can also check out an other movie - Fido - which also was shown at Fantasy Filmfest.

Finally: Warhawk is ready to go!

An other PS3 exclusive title is ready to be launched: Warhawk!
My first impressions regarding the game were very good. I recently had a look at some ingame screenshots. Most of them look amazing. I also saw a gameplay video showing the functionality of the sixaxis controller. Nice!
You want to know how much money you have to spend for this at August 28th? You can choose between about 40$ or 60$. Why different pricing? For 40$ you can download it from the PlayStation Store. With the retail version for 60$ you will get a Bluetooth headset and "traditional" package and manual.
I would definitely buy it, but before I can do that, I have to fill the empty space reserved for a PS3...

GTA IV comes 2008

No! No! Nooooooooooo!
Take 2 Games announced that the release of Grant Theft Auto IV is shifted to spring 2008. The reason are the bigger effort to realize a game for two platforms - Xbox360 and Playstation 3.
If you want to see it in a positive way: the amount of money you have to spend for the great games released in autumn was just now reduced...
Additionally there are some vague rumors that the shift will lead to an earlier price reduction for the Playstation 3! My turn will come...

Golden Joystick Awards 2007

Recently the voting for the 25th Golden Joystick Awards has begun. Every game released between July 31st 2006 and August 1st 2007 is considered to be choosen in on of the following categories:

Ultimate Game of the Year
The Sun Family Game of the Year
Bliss Girl’s Choice Award
Nuts All Nighter Award
BBC 1Xtra Soundtrack of the Year
Handheld Game of the Year
Innovation of the Year
The One To Watch Award
Mobile Game of the Year
Nintendo Game of the Year
Online Game of the Year
PC Game of the Year
Playstation Game of the Year
Xbox Game of the Year
Publisher of the Year
Retailer of the Year
UK Developer of the Year

The final result will be unveiled at 26th October 2007 in London.

The first time the awards were held in 1982, the world of computer gaming was ruled by Atari, Commodore and Spectrum. The good old time...

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