Soukie's Place
keeping track of random thoughtsArchive for entertainment
Feed
Art on iPhone
Gallery of iPhone ‘art’ apps
Smartphones opened limitless possibilities of throwing your free time out of the window. These range from push-y ’sync’ of your business email, to games with names evocative of hours of sophisticated fun, such as iPeePeeNo, I am not making this up.. But are there more creative uses too?
As the title indicates, the answer is yes. Join me for a look at some interesting artistic tools available for the iPhone. (Of course, you can find similar applications for other platforms too.) Continues »
Silver Screen Fascination with Robots
Some of the famous robots (spanning just over 100 years)
I used to think there was some kind of evolution in sci-fi movies. For example, that robots started with awkward boxes and blobs as seen in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) or Forbidden Planet. One only needs to see Fritz Lang’s silent-era Metropolis (1927) to learn there is nothing new under the sun not only in terms of robots but of the overall structure and themes of sci-fi films. Continues »
Modern Text Adventures (Pt. 2)
Commercial interactive fiction practically disappeared by 1989 with the demise of Infocom. In retrospect, it was probably good for the new medium. Let’s see why.
See also the first part of this article.
Amateur programmers were trying their hands at producing text adventures of their own already during the commercial era. Writing a game from scratch in a general-purpose programming language is a daunting task though, with most of the effort spent on the ‘backbones.’ Soon, specialized authoring systems started to appear, and the online services (and later Internet) allowed enthusiasts to connect with each other. Continues »
Modern Text Adventures (Pt. 1)
Imagine a moment from your favorite adventure movie or drama. Imagine you are the hero. And imagine what happens next is up to you. “Text adventures” (or interactive fiction) are a modern text-based medium that opens up worlds of possibilities not limited by cgi effects or a single story-line but only by your imagination. Let me briefly touch on its fascinating history that includes cave explorations, early virtual computers and the rise of graphic adventures, to finally emerge in its state-of-the-art with the spread of the Internet.
The story starts with Will Crowther, one of the three software developers of arpanet (the forerunner of Internet), who managed to overshadow this achievement by writing Colossal Cave Adventure game (or simply Adventure). Continues »
What Makes a Schattenjäger
A portrait of Gabriel Knight, the main protagonist of the series
“A mix of good mystery, writing and music,” would be a correct answer. If you are thinking “What is a schattenjäger?”, you will find the answer in the game series written by Jane Jensen. The first game, Sins of the Fathers, could not appear at a different time. Published in 1993, it came at the end of the golden age of adventure games: targeting the broadest audience possible was not the priority and companies were spending on lavish productions (the package included a companion full-color comic book) even though the genre has a high cost of content creation (compared to laying new levels for first-person shooters). Continues »
entertainment
e-mail subscription 
follow Twitter