Reviews

👽 So, is it back? I like the Alien franchise a lot and tend to talk about it more than I probably should. But if I narrow it down, my focus is mostly on Alien and Aliens — two of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Then we had the weirdness of Alien³ and Alien Resurrection, which had some cool action but also a ton of questionable decisions. Prometheus started as something separate but eventually merged into the Alien universe; and while I think it has its merits (especially the visuals and large-scale sci-fi world-building), there are plenty of head-scratching and plain dumb moments. And Covenant? Oh I don’t even want to talk about that one, it exists. ...

I use SDL 1.2 on my engine, but just for the window creation and input handling. That prevents me for writing boring window handling code for each platform, it just works. These days SDL can be use on almost every platform, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android. They recently launched the a new version, SDL 2.0 and I was lucky to receive a copy of SDL Game Development written by Shaun Mitchell that covers that new version. ...

So being a big fan of Quake, Quake 3 Arena and Doom I was eager to get my hands on id Software latest game, Rage. Like most developers out there I’ve been impressed by John Carmack’s work and breakthroughs in gaming and computer graphics for years. When I first heard Rage was targeting 60FPS I got intrigued. Almost every game targets 30FPS and targeting twice as that leaves less time to render each frame, even more since they were promising vast wastelands, detailed characters, top notch animations and AI. ...

I don’t usually write reviews about games, maybe mostly because I don’t play as often as I used to. Most games today are just graphics graphics, I use super shader ray-traced lights but I forgot gameplay because I’m a tech demo. I grew up with a Super Nintendo playing Super Mario World and Zelda A Link to the Past, yeah shocker, no Spectrum to me :P, so I’m 2D gameplay type lover. ...