Publishers and Developers on STEAM.
Recently I have been trying to buy everything on the digital distribution service STEAM. I have begun to contact the publishers/developers of many of the retail games I purchased, and asked them if there is anyway for me to transfer my retail copy of the game, into a digital distribution version.
I have been largely ignored.
However, two of my favourite game companies, Introversion Software and Eagle Dynamics, have responded!
Unfortunately a representative of Eagle Dynamics responded to my e-mail saying that there is no way to transfer my retail copy to a digital distribution copy. That is very unfortunate. =(
I contacted Introversion Software-developers of Uplink, DEFCON, Darwinia, and Multiwinia-for a completely different reason. I had purchased the STEAM versions of their games. After a little research I discovered that two of their games were available on Linux! Awesome! Now I can play them on my laptop! DEFCON was very easy to download from their website, with no hassle. Uplink on the other hand was impossible to download from their website. The reason for this is that DEFCON has an activation key when you install it, but there is no DRM for Uplink.
I signed up on the forums, and asked everyone if there was anyway to get ahold of the Linux client files, since I had purchased it on STEAM. The general response I recieved was either: “You should have bought it from Introversion, and not STEAM,” “You’re SOL,” or “Run it in WINE.” Unsatisfied with these answers I decided to e-mail IS themselves. The next day I had an e-mail in my inbox from a representative named Mark. They offered to send me a retail disk of Uplink since there is no way to get ahold of the Linux client files without purchasing it from their site, or having a retail disk! Score one for proper customer service! Thank you for making my week Mark!
Filed Under MiscellaneousEmulator fun! Futurama… wut?
After a nostalgic conversation, in TeamSpeak, about old video games we used to play as children, I decided I wanted to relive some of those memories. While I knew where my Gameboy Advance and Gameboy Color were, I didn’t know where most of my game cartridges were, so I thought I’d go grab an emulator. I’m glad I did! I forgot how much fun these games really are! So far I’ve downloaded a lot of the old Pokemon games (Emerald and Leaf Green are the ones I’m starting with, since I actually haven’t played them), Bomberman Tournemant, and Advance Wars 2 (Advance Wars 1 was awesome, haven’t played the second one yet). Definitely brings back memories of a simpler time.
Although, now I want to go download a bunch of other emulators for old consoles, and play all the old platformers I loved…
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Futurama is one of my favourite shows. Up there with Firefly, Dollhouse, Chuck, and Top Gear. I was so massively dissapointed when I learned of it’s demise on Fox (like all good shows on that channel. Seriously, who the fuck is running the show there???). Over the years my mother collected the DVDs, and I’ve watched them several times. I’ve watched all of the movies, though they aren’t my favourite. When I heard that it was starting back up, I was thrilled! There have now been five episodes, each one more disappointing than the last. It has lost it’s satirical genius, and devolved into blatant attacks on various companies and products. It feels more like South Park, than Futurama. What happened to my beloved show? I will keep watching in the hope that they will revive the true Futurama again, but my hopes are no longer high.
Filed Under MiscellaneousSteam Sales – A Love/Hate Relationship
I really… really… really hate Steam sales. Whenever I see a good Steam sale on a game that I’ve been wanting, I just gobble that shit up. This week (EA week) /most/ of EA’s games on Steam went on sale at one point or another, and I ended up buying 4 of then.
On the other hand… I love Steam sales. I just got FOUR games for THIRTY dollars. =O
Filed Under MiscellaneousLatest Popular Mechanics Issue Features Something About Nuclear Power!
Nice! Although I do believe a year or so ago Popular Science did a article on it. But the nice thing is that on the cover there is a big yellow circle with ‘Nuclear Power is Safe (Really). Haha. I hope that people will actually read the article, although it won’t change THAT many people’s opinions, it’s better than nothing.
Filed Under Miscellaneous
Sick of the spam
I’ve been seriously considering converting this this to a joomla blog, just because of all of the spam accounts and comments I’m getting. Joomla for Kilo-Tango doesn’t seem to have that problem.
On a lighter and more entertaining note, I got Episodes from Liberty City. Playing through The Lost and Damned. Pretty good. Sick of driving a stupid bike everywhere though. Also wishing I could find ANY information about adding the old music and talkshows from GTA IV to EFLC. I’m sure all the music files are hidden in one of those .dat files in the GTA folders. Though I’m not sure about the game progress checks to progress the news reports (or I could just not include those).
Looking forward to getting ARMAII. =D
As far as Kilo-Tango is going right now, we cannot get an image resizer to work on the forums. Not sure why. All of them either plainly don’t work, or resize the header image. Very frustrating.
Filed Under Miscellaneous, RantsStuff
Worked on the Kilo-Tango site awhile. Got links displaying properly in news posts, now they can actually be distinguished from the regular text. Also got the favicon working again. Added a new rules page, and updated all the ‘Forum Rules:’ links.
Filed Under NewsBirthday
Had a pretty sweet Bday. Thanks everyone.
Filed Under MiscellaneousWeb Browsers: Part 5: Mozilla Firefox
And finally, we arrive at the most used web browser (behind Internet Explorer). Many people consider this the best web browser bandwidth can download.
There are actually two different realms within the Firefox world, that is, with and without add-ons.
While many users use Firefox for the speed and enhanced security it offers over Internet Explorer even without add-ons, other users are more concerned with the huge customization potential of the browser.
Without Add-ons
The browser without add-ons is very similar to every other web browser. Obviously it has it’s own look, vastly different from that of Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and much less scatterbrained. To me, the browser is logical. Buttons do not seem to be haphazardly placed. The back button is larger than the forward button, I imagine because it used quite frequently.
It is relatively fast, faster than IE and Opera but slower than Safari and Chrome.
Safety precautions built into the browser are nice for the average user, but can be a nuisance for more advanced persons. If you attempt to access a webpage suspected of phishing, the browser will come up with a page stating exactly that. The website is suspected of phishing, and you should not proceed. It then has a button to go back to the previous page. Unfortunately, the continue button is hidden, and rather difficult to find (which I suppose may be a good thing so that some users that do not read error messages and such do not click right past the warning).
Stability, stability, stability. For the most part Firefox is incredibly stable. Very rarely do I see a Firefox without add-ons crash.
Firefox also does an excellent job of showing you webpages, but because of this, it partially promotes laziness on the webpage developers.
Verdict
What it really comes down to is that Mozilla’s Firefox is a great browser. It does what it needs to do, and for the most part, it does it very well.
EDIT: I did completely forget about this. With the recent versions of Firefox (>3.0) the browser seems to have a massive memory leak. It will continually eat up your RAM more and more until it just crashes out, and often when it crashes you cannot restore your tabs. While not a major concern for most people who just browse the internet for a few minutes at a time, people that leave their browsers on almost all the time, and often have 10+ tabs open will find it very frustrating. If you are one of these people I highly recommend Opera instead.
Filed Under ReviewsSome Changes
I decided to remove all of the html pages I had worked on, and replace everything with the blog for now. This is all just a temporary solution. I never liked the way that the html pages looked, but I don’t currently have the html/css/photoshop skills to make it look pretty, so I am using the blog. I also picked out a new theme I really liked. I might stick with this, or I might keep looking for an even better one. We’ll see if I get sick of this one or not.
I have also been very lax in updating this regularly. That is going to change, I will try to update this at LEAST once a week.
I will also add a bunch of pages to replace some of the deleted html ones.
What to look forward to in the future:
- Some software reviews
- Hardware reviews (just built me a new computer)
Finally Changing Theme
I’m going to start working on finally changing the horrible theme of my website, to something at least tolerable.
It will probably be pretty basic for now. I’m going to practice my graphic design, and see if I can’t get better.
Most of the changes will be pretty basic at first, but at least it will be something.
Filed Under News