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!
Emulator 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.
Steam 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
Latest 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.
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.
Birthday
Had a pretty sweet Bday. Thanks everyone.
Some 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)
Interstellar Marines – Wow!
I came across this game the other day while I was perusing a random website someone in the #projectreality channel on Quakenet linked the channel to, and I was immediately impressed. The first thing that caught my eye was what was in the ‘publisher’ field. “It’s AAA Indie baby!” I thought it was some kind of sarcastic comment written by the auther of the article. After visiting the Interstellar Marines website though, it turns out that they really are an independent game development company, that does not have a publisher.
After reading through all the information that the development team has posted so far, this game sounds very interesting! Especially since it appears that they have done their homework for the most part.
Currently the plan is for them to create the game and release it on PC, and then work on 360/PS3 versions.
Check it out, and show your support for this awesome-project!
Not keeping up
Wow. I haven’t been on here for quite awhile, and I apologize for that. I kind of completely forgot. Got caught up in other things, many of them not even that important anyways.
I will finish my browser reviews in the coming weeks and months.
What actually reminded me to come is I needed to amend my Google Chrome review slightly. So there will be some changes to that. Check it out.
Web Browsers Part 1: Opera 9
Over the next month or so I will be posting some personal reviews of the most popular browsers: Opera 9, Opera 10, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, KDE Konqueror.
I like Opera. I really do.
About 4 or 5 months ago I was an adamant user of Opera 9. I was pretty excited for Opera 10, though not completely thrilled; I thought the whole facial gestures thing was, well to be frank, retarded. Mouse gestures are bad enough, why would I want to make faces at the computer screen??
So back on topic, I used Opera 9 for, oh lets say six months (that sounds right to me). I like it a lot. It was really nice to have my mail, my RSS feeds, and my web-browser all in one application. Opera link is also pretty cool, you can sync bookmarks, and notes, but not e-mails (I guess that is what IMAP is for, right?). That is really frustrating. I like IMAP, but I want to see the exact same thing in each browser, that wasn’t going to happen. Oh well, it’s still an awesome browser.
I will mention the apps were really bad in Opera 9.
Opera has always been slower than FireFox. That’s just the way it is. It really isn’t too noticeable, until you use it constantly, and you really notice it gets sluggish, especially when loading images, or long pages.
Ultimately that is what made me switch away from Opera 9 back to Firefox. I just love the Fox.
Currently I am trying out Opera 10. After a few weeks usage I will report back on how that works.