Gaming Nostalgia – Part 1

Today’s Google Doodle (21 May 2010 – For Pac-Man 30th Anniversary !  ) remembered me of my ‘gaming history’ and that  made me feel nostalgic as gaming is (or was? 0_o) an important part of my life. Those days things were different. I was still an innocent child just looking to have fun. I really missed those times, when gaming was a culture, not a business.

Games are no longer as they were before. In the past developing games was a passion for people and they devoted lots of time refining the gameplay of their games. Unlike today there were technology constraints and each developers had the same restrictions. Nobody cared about graphics. It was all about having fun playing. And these games were pleasurable and exciting. You could have spent a great deal of time on them contrary to today’s games which are very short and much more expensive. If you want more, you have to pay more.

I was introduced to gaming in around 1996-1997 and the first game I remember to have played is of course the original ‘Prince of Persia’ on my late uncle’s computer loaded with MS-DOS!   The game was available on a floppy disk and I recall those wonderful moments spent playing it. My cousin and I used to memorize each command by heart (e.g : cd.. ENTER, cd Prince ENTER). In fact we didn’t even know what was an OS or how to use it, we just knew how to load the game and play it(even with cheats ).  The game was launched using the command ‘PRINCE MEGAHIT’. Then in-game we used ‘Shift+T’ for extra lives . At that time we did not know these were cheats but elders just taught us to play it as such and we just thought it as the usual process.

Prince of Persia is still a great platformer today and the dos version can be played for free using the emulator DOSBox : http://www.dosbox.com/. It was also released for different systems such as the Super Nintendo and Amiga. In my opinion the most beautiful version is the Macintosh version. I managed to run it, but it was quite tricky (and somehow not legal) requiring Mini vMac, a macintosh emulator, and a ROM image.

Another game I remember to have played is Mortal Kombat 1. This was my first fighting game. It was a cool game, but I found it very difficult to play(probably for a 4-5 years old child ) and the fatalities were even more challenging; only my older cousins could accomplish them. Mortal Kombat had an advanced gameplay for its time with also a good plot. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to play it again today, but I was a fan of its sequels, specially Mortal Kombat 4 on PSX.

In short these were some of my first and best ‘video game moments’. I would have loved to be part of the Golden Age of Video Games in the early 1980′s, but I was born too many years later.

Best WWII Flight Sim

I recently acquired the ‘IL-2 Sturmovik 1946′ compilation pack for pc and I am largely impressed by its content.

This pack contains:

- The original Il-2 Sturmovik

- Forgotten Battles and Ace expansion pack

- Pacific Fighters

- Operation Barbarossa pack

And 3 new expansions : Pe-2, Manchuria and 1946.

All these merged together into a single installation containing a total of 347 aircrafts with 256 being flyable (including prototypes not deployed in during war).   You can choose from over 10 nations (Soviet, Germans, British, French, Polish, Japanese, etc..). It features about a dozen of campaigns with around 1000 missions. There is also the Full Mission Builder which extends the game replayability and with online multiplayer you will never get bored.

I played several flight simulators before and I consider this one to be the best due to its realism and nearly unlimited gameplay time. The learning curve is a bit steep, but Il-2 Sturmovik is a must for every fans of World War 2 flight sims. Besides dogfighting (which is really intense ) it also offers ground-attack missions such as blowing up bridges, moving trains, airfields. The graphics are still good even after all these years and the damage model is very accurate. However casual gamers may prefer eye candy visuals. This game is more aimed towards hardcore flight sim fans, but anyone with enough patience to learn the basics will surely love it.

Besides Il-2 Sturmovik, other nice flight sims that are worthwhile to try are : Red Baron 3D (WWI Classic), Falcon 4.0 Allied Force(modern jets) and Flight Simulator X ( civilian aircrafts).

Update – New Screens : Battle of Britain Phase 1

Geek vs Nerd !

Many people consider geeks and nerds to be the same. Some of their characteristics do overlap, but they are definitely different. The definition of the ‘geek’ has changed over time, but the ‘nerd’ remained the same person and he is the one easier to characterize.

Basically here’s a nerd :

A nerd is a person with above-average IQ who has a fascination in particular a field of study (often subjects which others find too boring or  too complex such as quantum mechanics, astrophysics,etc..). They usually study and experiment things that take lots of time and have no practical benefits for them. Nerds are highly intelligent and can solve difficult problems, but they have little to no social skills. They are highly critical. Consequently they have difficulties to get around other peoples and may tend towards being introverted. Their specific field of study is their  ‘love’.

Nerds look weird and act weird. In a conversation they can talk only about ‘nerdy subjects’. They like stuffs like science-fiction (star wars, star trek), fantasy, video games, comics, strange music or even classical, D&D  games, extraterrestrial discoveries,etc.. However nerds contributed greatly to inventions and discoveries. Thanks to their intelligence they are the one who fill the ranks of the NASA, they become professors, renown researchers,etc…

And remember to never challenge a nerd’s knowledge, you’ll be surprised about what he knows

Now here’s the geek :

As shown above a geek is much cooler than a nerd

A geek is sometimes defined as a ‘nerd with social skills’. Yet their hobbies and field of study differ. A geek is more practical and learns for pleasure rather than accumulating lots of knowledge that would be useless for him. He usually obtain good grades at school, but unlike a nerd he does make an obsession of being the first in class. Geeks are generally extremely good with computers and most of them are hackers. They engage in activities such as engineering, programming, novels, electronics, trance music, gaming or some odd activities ( but cool ones ). Someone can be a geek in a specific field : computer geek , engineer geek,  math geek,etc..

Nowadays people started to be envious about geeks. Geeks think differently; they are usually interested about issues in a broader scope than nerds. A geek exceeds the expectations of everyone.

They are not very trendy. Nevertheless they don’t look weird. In fact some of them have great social and dating skills. Geeks usually have a prominent career (though not as good as a nerd) and are the one who manage to date and/or marry the sexiest women.

This is my definition of Geeks and Nerds. In reality they may differ.

Some famous nerds/geeks are : Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Steven Hawking and John Carmack.

Backtrack 4 Final

Backtrack is a linux distribution used mainly for penetration testing and forensic. It is originated from two formerly competing distribution : WHAX and Auditor Security collection. Although it has been specially designed for pentesting, many people use it as their main OS.

Backtrack 4 is currently its latest release and is available as a LiveDVD, but it can also be installed on you hard disk or vmware machine.

Download link :

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/downloads/

For this post I have used VMware Player which is free.

Tools:

Backtrack contains more than 300 tools ready to be used. With these you are able to perform various task such as sniffing, information gathering, network monitoring, scanning vulnerable ports, sql injections, exploiting, tunneling, spoofing, both online and offline password cracking, etc..

A large number of people make use of Backtrack for the specific purpose of cracking wep keys on a wireless network. I am not against that, but don’t forget that Backtrack  has many functions besides wep cracking.

Some popular tools are : Nmap, FastTrack, MetaSploit, OpenVas, Aircrack-ng,aireplay-ng, Wireshark, Ethercap, Hydra and John The Ripper.

For those who want to try it here is how to activate your ethernet connection. ( assuming you use myT)

In console :  start-network

Or : /etc/init.d/networking start

Tips:

To list all your wireless devices  type : iwconfig

To list  you networks interfaces type : ifconfig

eth0 is your primary network interface, to activate it type : ifconfig eth0 up

United Gamers of Mauritius

Last year a friend of mine created a gaming community called ‘United Gamers of Mauritius’ in order to promote video gaming in Mauritius and to group all Mauritian gamers in a same place. Recently we’ve been having some members and started to become active.

We have a group on xfire as well on facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101005414310&v=info

http://www.xfire.com/communities/unitedgom/

At the same time we are also promoting the use of xfire which every hardcore gamers should have

Don’t hesitate to join us, whether you’re a casual or a hardcore gamer.

As shown in the second screenshot, some games we play are :  Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1, 2 , Counter-Strike, Dota,etc..