#this audio has been sitting on my pc since june

[five-by-five]

all done with the gauntlet?

[maximelebled]

Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years

This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.

This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year. 

And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.

Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.

My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)

It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.

Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:

Tubular Worlds

Descent II

Alone in the Dark I & III

Lost Eden

Formula One (not sure which game exactly)

Heart of Darkness

(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)

... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:

Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)

Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)

Earthworm Jim (but without any music)

The Fifth Element

Moto Racer II

There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.

First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.

There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.

I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!

Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:

A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)

But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.

It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.

(I don’t know if it still works.)

On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)

Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...

There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.

Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.

The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”

Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.

You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.

Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.

I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color). 

In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.

During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.

The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.

I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)

(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)

I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.

We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.

We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:

A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold. 

I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.

Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)

I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!

A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.

Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.

Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.

I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.

But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.

The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)

I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.

At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”

At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!

This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.

And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.

The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.

I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.

The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:

It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!

I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.

Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world.  (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)

I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.

And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.

But I digress.

Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.

I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.

I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.

I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.

At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.

We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...

But then, something serious happened.

In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.

I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”

Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.

This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.

My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.

When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.

(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)

While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.

I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.

In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.

But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)

I did more than playing games on it, though...

This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...

So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.

I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.

I made it work.

Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.

Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.

Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.

BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.

Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.

L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.

Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.

Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.

Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.

I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.

[stickylightnacho]

Fusion 6 For Mac

VMware Fusion makes Windows 10 feel right at home on your Mac. Whether you're doing a fresh install for that brand new operating system experience, migrating your Windows 10 PC, or upgrading your. VMware Fusion: Powerfully Simple Virtual Machines for Mac. VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Fusion Player Desktop Hypervisors give Mac users the power to run Windows on Mac along with hundreds of other operating systems, containers or Kubernetes clusters, side by side with Mac applications, without rebooting.Fusion products are simple enough for home users and powerful enough for IT.

Pre-sale Questions? Scan this code in Facebook Messenger to get in touch

Overview

MixMeister Fusion set the standard for combining live DJ performance with the pinpoint precision of the best music production software. Version 7.7 includes breakthrough new features like an enhanced timeline, improved time-stretching and support for Mac OS X.

MixMeister Fusion doesn't limit you to simply combining a few loops and grooves together; Fusion is designed to mix complete DJ sets from full-length songs. You get the functionality of a loop editor or digital audio workstation, but you can blend songs together to create stunning DJ performances.

MixMeister Fusion frees you from monotonous tasks like beat matching, setting cue points, and counting beats in your head. It gives you the power to unleash your creativity and shape your music in a million ways, with live looping and remixing, VST effects, harmonic mixing and more.

You can manipulate tempo, volume, and EQ in real time, on-the-fly. It even records all your actions (not just the resulting audio), so you can go back, listen to your mix, and make precise adjustments with studio-style editing capabilities. Fusion's live performance capabilities can be expanded via connectivity with MIDI hardware controllers. Export your completed mix as an MP3 or burned to a CD using the integrated burning tools. Whether you use it for live gigs or mix CD production, Fusion lets you achieve true performance perfection.

Highlights : New with version 7.7

Compatibility fixes for Windows 10 and OSX El Capitan / Sierra / High Sierra

Improved support for Retina based Macs.

Performance enhancements.

All new licence manager. (Self manage activations and never loose a code again)

Suitcase Fusion 6 For Mac

Other Fusion Highlights

Smart playlists help you get the most out of your music

Improved Keycode system for quicker and easier harmonic mixing.

Improved time stretching accurately matches beats with fast or slow tempos

Enhanced timeline display provides clear division of measures

Effect automation via MIDI controllers – External hardware can now manipulate effect parameters

Support for stored EQ settings in transition templates for advanced users

Fade and Cue Next feature fades and pauses your mix then starts at the next track – perfect for voice over announcements

New master volume control for preview output – headphone and main out can be controlled independently

Play a live set while you preview any moment in your upstream mix

Manipulate your mix in real time with a wide range of MIDI hardware controllers

See your music take shape with an advanced timeline view

VST audio effects (included) to process part of a track or your entire mix

Mix up to 8 songs simultaneously with perfect sync

Play with on–the–fly looping and remixing functions

Change the tempo of a song without changing key

Burn a flawless copy of your set to CD

VMwares Fusion software for Apples Macintosh will hit the market Aug. 6, after months of testing and beta releases.

The software, which allows a number of operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Linux and Sun Microsystems Solaris to run on the Mac, has had a total of 250,000 downloads since the Palo Alto, Calif., company released the first beta in December.

Fusion will support both 32- and 64-bit operating systems.

When the software becomes generally available on Aug. 6, for a price of $79.99, it will be available through VMwares Web site, the Apple Store and various retailers.

Since Apple introduced its first Intel-based Macs in January 2006, several companies have started to offer new virtualization software that will run Windows and other operating systems on the Mac. Besides Apples own Boot Camp software, Parallels offers a product called Desktop for Mac. On June 8, Parallels announced version 3.0 of the software, which has additional security features and enhanced integration between Windows and the Mac OS X.

Apple is mum about an upcoming press event but promises Mac-specific announcements. Click here to learn more about it.

VMwares Fusion works with Intel-based Macs and uses a Cocoa-native user interface that allows either Microsoft Windows or another x86 operating system to run side-by-side with the Mac OS X operating system. (Cocoa is Apples application programming technology for Mac OS X.)

Fusion offers Mac users a number of features, including automatic Boot Camp integration and support for USB 2.0 ports and three-dimensional graphics. In addition, the virtualization software includes a tool that allows users to take a 'snapshot' of their virtual machine configuration and then return to that configuration at any time.

At Apples Worldwide Developers Conference in June, VMware introduced a new feature called Unity, which integrates Windows XP applications with Mac OS applications and allows users to save Windows applications to the Mac OS X dock.

Pat Lee, a senior product manager for VMware, said the companys engineers were looking into Apples new operating system, Mac OS 10.5 'Leopard,' to see if they need to make any adjustments to the Fusion software.

Fusion For Mac Os

One Fusion user who has been impressed with the virtualization software is Matt Lydy, who, along with his wife, owns Matt Lydy Photography, a small photography studio in Columbus, Ohio.

Click here to read about Intels $200 million investment in VMware.

In an e-mail, Lydy wrote that he has been using Fusion software with his Mac Pro desktop—3GB of RAM—since the early beta versions of the software were released. For years, he had only worked with PCs and only recently switched to the Mac. The Fusion software, he said, helped him make the transition easier.

'I generally have a virtual machine running almost all the time now depending on what Im working on at the moment,' Lydy wrote. 'It is great not having to have multiple PCs running under my desk anymore. I have enough machines sitting around as it is, not to mention the energy savings I get by not having multiple PCs running.'

Lydy added: 'I use virtual machines to run my accounting software [Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2007] as well as some smaller photo-related applications that are not available for the Mac OS. I generally run Windows XP Professional and have one Vista virtual machine that I have been testing with.'

Suitcase Fusion 6 For Mac

Further reading

[shadowywonderlandobservatio-blog]

The best ways to Select A Home Stair Lift.

In among the extra light-hearted nods, customers were reminded of Mike's uniformity when he revealed his snack of choice for his safety and security job in episode nine, a throwback to series 4 of 'BB. PC players will be able to experience Pneuma's unique problems in a special online fact mode via the power of the Oculus Break DK2. A certified trainer knows the best ways to come close to people in a positive, efficient way making the gym member feel safe, not teased or self-conscious. They are also contacted again to combat at the Abyss of Wickedness with the rest of Mesogog and also Lothor's forces; against the Ninja Rangers and also Dino Rangers. A lot of people have made it through conditions, rough life scenarios, distressing childhood years or awful partnerships, and as opposed to being victims, they have actually discovered power in those events as well as become more powerful. This power should be used for company performance as well as not for individual gain. But exactly what makes it particularly beneficial is that you don't need any equipment or special gear. Your body obtains the energy to sustain your task by damaging down a material called sugar when you lift hefty weights. Set up a trip to meet the staff of the fitness center with your child and also observe fitness classes. Mondo's strategy to split and also conquer was functioning, and also for the Rangers to do well, they needed aid from the Gold Ranger, Trey, that takes a trip to worlds where evil should be beat. Likewise it has some filler which is surprising due to the fact that this film is hardly 80 mins which probably provides you a pretty good idea of exactly how little potential the story has in this movie to be any type of good. The fundamental framework was built in a workshop outside the city and then raised into the Colosseum by a large crane. In 2015 it got rival chain LA Health and fitness and struck up a partnership with Olympian Sir Chris Hoy, that is a special adviser and brand name ambassador" to Pure Health club. Wheelchair lift vans are produced in such a way that this van will certainly have the ability to let wheelchairs to be raised and mobility device become a part of the seats of a van. On June 15, 2009, a tranquil objection of 1.5 to 3 million individuals protesting versus the outcomes of the presidential political election in Iran was repressed by federal government forces. Throughout a near fatality experience, Tommy has to fight his former selves as the Eco-friendly Power Ranger, the White Power Ranger, as well as the Red Zeo Ranger; in a dream where he is compelled to combat for his life. Many health clubs have actually already been declared by a team but there is still a small opportunity you'll find a 'empty' one, which you could assert for yourself and also your new team. Long modest strength cardio exercises typically aren't necessary to change your body, and don't necessarily need to belong of your health club set-up. When sufficient success have actually been declared to get the competing group's reputation there down to zero, your team just wins a gym for itself. Open up: Monday from 5.15 pm to 6.15 pm judo for children and also acrobatics from 6.15 pm to 6.45 pm; Tuesdays from 5.30 pm to 6.30 pm judo for youngsters; Wednesdays from 2pm to 2.45 pm as well as 4:30 pm to 5.15 pm baby-judo as well as from 3pm to 4.15 pm judo for teens; Thursdays from 5.15 pm to 6.20 pm and Fridays from 5.30 pm to 6.30 pm judo for children. The last time I ended up seeing a Martial Art motion picture from Thailand I experienced with the abysmal nonsense of Ong Bak 3. Currently while Power youngsters is more watchable compared to Ong Bak 3, it's nothing from what you would certainly anticipate from the typical Thailand Fighting style flick. Each people has a higher or higher power watching over us. As I specified previously, there are numerous descriptions for this entity we the higher power. It wishes to present the modern technology onshore as well as at sea, constructing systems with the ability to produce numerous megawatts" of power within the decade. Movie critic Agreement: Power deals with too much plotting and using excessively acquainted by-the-numbers story aspects. I'm always in some thriller as to how much time he can keep back from expressing his obsessive concern of being discussed the upper body: That's just how you take a male's power." When http://csakegeszseg.info like Roy Jones Jr. or Oscar De La Hoya sit in on a program, they seem to be running their thoughts past an internal Advertising and marketing Department before verbalizing them. This kind of stairway lift needs substantial room, as well as can not consequently be installed on smaller staircases. There are two types of Deck PL-P portable mobility device lift on the market; these kinds are battery ran mobile mobility device lift and electrical powered portable wheelchair lift. The solar energy inverter connection will go to the energy panel, to ensure that devices as well as lights will certainly operate in similarly when the button is activated. The factor is that in row 5, we have actually instantly got 2 numbers numbers (the 10s). Right here all right, now what I'm going to do is I'm gon na lift my heels up all right, I'm going to raise my boosts till my body forms a straight line right here utilizing my reduced back and my glutes. As they anchored at the pier, the captain one more time lifted her bag before politely assisting her down onto the wood jetty. It's the system that power firm intervenors standing for some 10 percent of U.S. generation, joined by amicus Preeminence Resources, have actioned in to safeguard here. Explores the globe of a boxing health club in Austin, Texas, home on the self-control of training as people from all walks of life desire reach their personal ideal. What interests me extra is exactly how in each story human life is placed relative to regulation and also political power. The oppositions can not wonder about whether the Clean Air Act authorizes EPA to restrict carbon dioxide pollution from power plants. The emphasis of his book is the effect power carries those who don't have it. He damages his evaluation down into 3 measurements of power: the very first is straight bargaining as well as involvement, the second is the exclusion of the vulnerable from that negotiating procedure and/or agenda-setting by the effective, and the third is the internalization of the ideals, worths, as well as choices of the dominant by the controlled. Rather counter-intuitively, the faster detachable quad lift has the same uphill capacity as a fixed-grip quad. Every wonderful audio speaker understands words have the power to lure, persuade as well as motivate individuals into a certain strategy. Power plants are all interconnected in a grid that supplies exactly the quantity of power demanded moment by minute. Since power exists, it has actually constantly preferred to broaden its power, even if it is at the expense of the lives of people, both foreign as well as pleasant. http://csakegeszseg.info/tudod-mar-hogy-ez-rossz-a-segitsegedre-hogy-megszabaduljon-a-folos-kilo-choco-lite/ works together with the Nautilus workout tools in order to help you fulfill your health and fitness goals. You get home at night after a frantic day at the office when you think that you need to own a few miles to reach your fitness center your excitement degree automatically drops. I really did not truly understand just what to get out of Daniel Kunitz's Lift: Fitness Culture, From Nude Greeks and also Acrobats to Jazzercise as well as Ninja Warriors As implied by the name, this is a bit of an introduction of the history of physical fitness and also the social assumptions of fitness bounded essentially by the time of composed human background. Power is a warmed-over daytime soap just superficially stressed with its lead character's connection to drugs as well as weapons. As he tried to identify a strategy, he could not aid yet question exactly what had occurred to the 4 various other Astro Rangers.

[online-smartphone-store-ca-blog]

Pixel smartphone upgrade highlights Google push into hardware

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Google last week unveiled new versions of its Pixel smartphone, the highlight of a refreshed line aimed at weaving artificial intelligence deeper into modern lives. Click best online smartphone store in california for more info

Google software and artificial intelligence were common threads in the gamut of new devices it unveiled to step up its challenge on the hardware front to rivals such as Apple and Amazon

The new Pixel 2 and larger Pixel 2 XL are the first Google-made phones to be released since the California tech giant announced the acquisition of key segments of Taiwan-based electronics group HTC.

The upgraded smartphones will be available for order as of Wednesday in six countries starting at $649 for five-inch display Pixel 2, and $849 for the six-inch Pixel 2 XL.

The new aluminium-body smartphones along with Google's upgraded connected speakers and new laptop computer all aim to infuse artificial intelligence to make the devices more user-friendly, built around the Google Assistant - the rival to Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and others.

Google vice president Rick Osterloh said Google's new devices "are simple to use and they anticipate your needs."

Osterloh told the product launch event in San Francisco: "You interact with your devices naturally with your voice or by touching them."

UNITED STATES

New Google earbuds offer real-time translation feature

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Google on Wednesday introduced new Pixel earbuds that the company says are capable of real-time translation of conversations in different languages...

3 days ago

Google, by bringing in a team of engineers from HTC, aims to emulate the success of Apple iPhones by controlling the hardware as well as the software used in the premium-priced handsets.

The revamped camera in the smartphone retains a single lens but seeks to improve images via "computational photography," an artificial intelligence tool that can enhance pictures.

Analyst Ian Fogg of IHS Markit said in a tweet that the new smartphone "adds incremental improvements on the great v1" while noting that "Google's challenge is to solve production limits which hurt the original."

Fogg said the use of computation to improve images with a single lens "is technically impressive."

Google announced a slimmed down version of its connected speaker called Google Home Mini starting at $49 in the United States, stepping up its challenge to market leader Amazon.

The new Google Home Mini is available for pre-order in the seven countries where the device is offered and will go on sale in stores October 19, the company said.

SOUTH AFRICA

#EntrepreneurMonth: Persistence propels businesses forward

Sabelo Sibanda and Thulisile Volwana are the founders of Millbug, an electronics manufacturing company, as well as Tuse, an Android app that tackles connectivity issues...

Ilse van den Berg 4 Oct 2017

The new speaker, which responds to voice commands using artificial intelligence, is less than half the price of Google's first generation speaker and makes this "more accessible to more people," said Google hardware designer Isabelle Olsson.

A premium version of the speaker - a $399 Google Home Max unveiled Wednesday - offers more power and audio quality for music aficionados.

The new Google Clips camera - one of the surprises of the event - "looks for smiles (and) moments, because the software is in the camera," said Google product manager Juston Payne.

"It's like having my own photographer shooting and choosing my best moments for me," Payne said of the $249 device.

Another surprise from the event was the wireless Pixel Buds, which can deliver audio from a smartphone and also include the Google Assistant and real-time translation.

A demonstration at the event included a two-way conversation with one person speaking English and the other Swedish.

"The camera and the earbuds were really held up as examples of what the company can do by leveraging the Google Assistant," said Ross Rubin of Reticle Research.

A new Pixelbook laptop was touted as a "high performance" computer powered by its Chrome operating system and designed as a rival to Microsoft's Surface and Apple's iPad Pro.

With a 12.3-inch display, the device is a convertible PC that can be used as a tablet and is sold starting at $999 for US customers.

GLOBAL

Amazon beefs up Echo lineup and Alexa skills

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Amazon has unveiled upgrades to its Echo speakers and announced that Alexa smarts will be built into BMW and Mini automobiles by the middle of next year...

28 Sep 2017

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said the new devices showcase the tech giant's artificial intelligence.

"We've been working hard continuing our shift from a mobile-first to an AI-first world," he said.

"We are working on software and hardware together because that is the best way to drive computing forward."

The launch comes in the wake of Apple's announcement of a new line of iPhones, and Amazon's upgrades to its Echo speakers powered by its Alexa digital assistant

"It is a portfolio designed to take Google into more parts of your life, particularly in your home," Reticle Research analyst Ross Rubin said of the array of devices the internet giant unveiled on Wednesday.

"Amazon is focusing on a range of price points and designs; Google is focusing on a range of experiences."

Source: AFP

02

Why Starbucks Shut Down Its Online Store

Starbucks has revolutionized food and beverage retailing in the last two years, convincing millions of customers to pay, and even pre-order, with their smartphones. Given Starbucks’ tremendous success, food companies should pay close attention to what the company just did: it just shut down its online store.

How can an online-focused business survive without a website? Starbucks wants its digital efforts to be focused on its mobile app, which will also convince customers to come into the stores instead of sitting at home and surfing the web. Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz has said that retailers need to become “experiential destinations,” to keep up with the Amazons of the world. That means you have to convince people to get off their butts. “Your product and services, for the most part, cannot be available online and cannot be available on Amazon,” he told investors in April. Instead, the company is urging shoppers to look for Starbucks products in its stores and in grocery aisles.

It’s a bold move, and one that has already caused a bit of a backlash. Starbucks sold flavored syrups online, and when the website went away so did those syrups -- including vanilla and pumpkin spice latte mixes that some customers craved.

Starbucks’ decision is yet another sign that the shift in retail to online buying is not proceeding in an obvious direction. Even as Amazon gobbles market share from traditional retailers, for instance, the company is also opening its own brick and mortar stores, and making a big bet on Whole Foods. Meanwhile, analysts say some companies like Nike may have shifted too quickly into digital sales -- by making its products so easily available online and elsewhere, Nike made them seem less special, they argue.

By forcing customers to actually walk into stores, Starbucks is making it harder for them to casually buy a pound of coffee from home. But in the long run, forcing people to make that extra effort could forge a deeper connection.

Big Picture: Starbucks closed its online store, a striking decision from the leader in online food and beverage retailing. online smartphone store in california

03

Cash is already pretty much dead in China as the country lives the future of mobile pay right now

Alipay is owned by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial Services and has 520 million users, according to its international website.

The app is linked to online money market fund Yu'e bao, encouraging users to invest and spend with Alipay. Attractive interest rates of nearly 4 percent or more have turned it into the largest money market fund in the world, with 1.43 trillion yuan ($217 billion) as of the end of June, according to state media reports citing Yu'e bao's manager, Tianhong Asset Management.

"We expect China ePayments to quadruple to Rmb300tn, while eWealthmanagement AUM and eFinancing could triple to Rmb 6.7tn and Rmb 3.5tn by [2021]," Elinor Leung, head of Asia Telecom and Internet Research at CLSA, said in a September 5 report.

"High mobile internet and ecommerce penetration, and an underdeveloped traditional financial market will drive growth," Leung said.

Mobile pay is growing so rapidly in mainland China that as a foreigner I sometimes found it difficult to complete basic transactions without it.

When I tried to pay at a Beijing McDonald's on a late night, the only payment options were China's Union Pay credit card system, Apple Pay or WeChat Pay and Alipay. As an American visitor without a Chinese bank account, I wasn't able to find a way to use those systems and the store clerk wouldn't take my cash.

"Cash is accepted in all McDonald's restaurants across China. After our investigation, we believe this is an isolated case that happened during night shift change, and thus, all cash counters were temporarily closed," a McDonald's China Customer Care Center told me in an email.

Taxis were also nearly impossible to hail in Beijing due to the rise of Didi, a ride-hailing app that bought Uber's China operations in a deal worth $35 billion last summer. Again, Didi was linked through WeChat and I couldn't use it without a Chinese bank account.

When I finally did get a taxi, the driver gave me a fake 50 yuan bill in change. Several stores also claimed three of my 100 yuan bills from a New York money exchange were counterfeit. If I could participate in the cashless society, I would not have lost about $50.