Category Archives: Videogames

Gaming is not only about winning or losing, it’s about passion

Lowered expectations… or the lack of time

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It’s a cross. I overslept like three times this week. Firstly, I missed gym two times in a row. Ya, I know that four o’clock in the morning is a terrible time to get off for some training. Anyhow, I feel good with and I’ll stay with it (if I can make it out of bed). Whatsoever, I also missed my regular alarm clock for work today. It rang, I noticed it and fell asleep again. Luckily the loss of time wasn’t that huge so I can get back home pretty early.

I took a training session the day before and, well, my overall condition was not that bad. Okay, okay, I just missed one week but I was actually expecting the worst. Maybe I’ll be able to throw some loops this weekend and get a little boost on my stamina.

The Sony network is back online and Sony’s offering lots of free stuff and compensations and all kinds of shit. I’ve got another 45 days left to play the “DC Universe Online” and hopefully Sony will come up with a lowered subscription fee as well. I was totally fine with 24 Euros for three month but unfortunately did I have some issues with one of my credit cards and they put me back on normal rate. Life’s tough sometimes, you know?

The mystical cat report

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Hello out there, it’s been a while since my last update on what’s going so far. First of all, fitness is still existing and starts kicking ass again. I cannot deny that I had some serious difficulty to get back on the track, but with this week, everything seems to be on a satisfying level. My stamina feels like it was the day I let the whole fitness thing fade away, for say, it’s still on a high level. For my circumstances. Actually, I still have like 15kg of weight too much on my bones, but like I said, I’m not facing any serious trouble during training. I’m running solid 30 minutes on the treadmill followed by 30-40 minutes on the cross-trainer.

I decided to take no prisoners and I also increased the weight on many exercise machines. I’m doing very well with this and I’m making a lot of progress in this particular area of my training. Besides losing weight is gaining muscles one of my main goals for now. I know, it sounds weird, losing weight and gaining muscle mass on the other side but according to the serious amount of overweight at the moment a goal that can be reached. Like losing at least 15kg of fat and getting like 5-6kg of muscle mass.

What else happened? Well, I got a little bit more into photo editing and developing of RAW pictures. I’m not making great progress but it finally is some progress to be found. I also joined a couple of new groups on deviant Art to get a little bit more feedback on my works. And of course a few eyes more watching my stuff. I’m also looking for a new camera, not for now but for the end of this year. I’m thinking about buying a Canon 7D, this camera got all the features I want and is not that expensive as the Canon 5D MarkII. At least, it would be a total waste of money according to the fact that photography is just a hobby mine. It’s like 1,500 bucks that ring on the bill, but I’m sure it’s totally worth it.

Gaming, another passion of mine. If the days has like 36 hours I would definitely play some games, but currently I don’t really have time to play some more story based games. I play a lot of “Bad Company 2” these days, for like one hour a day. There are still some games in queue that I need to play. There are plenty of games, as there are “Medal of Honor”, it can’t be more worth than “Homefront”. The “Dead Space” games, I started “Dead Space 1” several times, but never managed to finish or do any larger progress. Several LEGO games are waiting and so on. Most importantly, “Portal 2” is hopefully in my mailbox these days and I’ll definitely play this game as soon as possible.

Last game I played through was “Homefront” which was a kind of disappointing. Weird performance issues. Weird story and pace of the game. I can’t say that I didn’t like it, but, well, I don’t know. They whole concept was promising but the presentation was a big and epic fail on the whole line. I instantly switched back to my beloved “Borderlands” after finishing the four hour campaign. I barely had any interest in the multi player mode.

Game of the week #8/2011 – Amnesia – The Dark Descent

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After games have left the uncanny valley, talking about scary does not always mean the horrible graphics, nowadays it can also mean that the game itself and his whole plot and story is scary and frightening. In the early nineties there were games like “Alone in the dark” that scared gamers to the bones. Nothing really was able to follow up this game and the first real horror game that can remember again was the ingenious “Clive Barker’s Undying”. Based on Unreal Engine I the look of the game still was almost artificial, but it was well scripted and was definitely able to give you the creeps. There were lots and lots of bloody and gore rich games in the late nineties and early new millenium years but nothing with a subtile horror feel. Even though games like “F.E.A.R.” and “Dead Space” are scary and claustrophic as well, in my personal opinion, they are still gory action games with a few frightening moments. The only game that had this special horror touch was “Silent Hill”, but it was stuck in the previously mentioned uncanny valley. If you really want to feel a cold chill floating down your back and shaking every single bone of your spine you should, no, you MUST play “Amnesia – The Dark Descent”.

First thing that I really like about this game, you cannot fight, you can only run away. But let’s start at the very beginning, you wake up in a probably abandoned castle and you don’t even know how you got there. You suffer from amnesia, only your name, Daniel, and after finding a note you get to know that your memory was erased with intent and that you’re the chosen one to kill someone in this castle. During the exploration of the castle you’ll find more and more hints that make you come to several conclusions why you are here. Needless to say, that there are lots and lots of bone chilling moments while wandering deeper and deeper through the halls and floors of this mysterious castle.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1nY_5-UrY4[/youtube]

Like I mentioned before, you cannot fight in this game. You have no real weapons. You can only run away and hide. Another important thing is, that you have to keep an eye on your health status. A rapidly beating heart is everything else than helpfull and also your brain might play some tricks on you. Did I already mention, that Daniel is afraid of the dark? As you can see, lots of elements that are actually needed to give you a nice and intense horror feeling with a nice dash of claustrophobia. I wasn’t actually able to play this game longer than thirty minutes because I found it too scary. Mostly played at the dark hours and home alone. Which is not a good idea, well, in this case it is.

The presentation of the game is up to date. Based on Unreal Engine III you’ll barely have anything to complain about and the level design is done perfectly as well. You’ll also find some nice physics elements which leads to the grade of realism that was missed in the horror genre for such a long time. I missed that aspect personally. So if you’re tired of being a nearly immortal super soldier fighting hordes of monster in the dark with oversized weapons, you should, no, you MUST play “Amnesia – The Dark Descent”. It’s worth every minute of play, because it’s very intense and of course something different in these days of stereotype game mass production.

Whatever the case

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To be honest, nothing special was actually happening during the last days and this post is only to proof that I’m still alive. Well, some things did happen apparently. One thing that’s really important, my bike is finally fixed and repaired. I personally changed the tires and the rest was done in a repair shop. Brakes are working fine again, the gears can be shifted again and the suspension is now a little harder. I already did a couple of trips in and around my hometown. I’m a big fan of these trips at dusk, driving through the parks, along the river and nothing but windy noises in my ears and a couple of jogging people running by. This much more enjoyment than the gym, which I’m gonna visit again this week. At least two times is the plan. Actually, thinking of the gym brings a lot of boredom into my mind. But according to the digits popping up on the scale, I guess, well, it’s time to take this path again.

I’ve done the complete opposite of being a sports dude, I was even more a couch potatoe enjoying lots and lots of movie I always wanted to see and that are stored on my media centre for such a long time. Besides this I was involved in a few BBQs that were “celebrated” by some friends of mine. The first rays of the sun after a long cold winter are always an undisputed sign to do a BBQ. ALWAYS!

BBQ

Even though it’s nearly two weeks ago, I was off to London over a stretched weekend. All in all, it was a fine trip, if I’d brought the correct pair of shoes with me. I finally had to find out that both pairs that I brought along are not “sightseeing compatible”

You can also say, they were simply too small at this particular point. After giving them the stress test of walking London for like four days, they DO fit. Another pr0blem was, I’m actually having 20kg overweight which does not bring up any comfort when it comes to walk around the whole day and explore a metropolis like London in Chucks All Stars that are like new and half a size too small. Nowadays, they fit perfectly and finally made an agreement with my feet. I guess, I’ll revisit this city when my weight is on a healthier level and I also got the correct pair of shoes with me.

Talking about couch potatoe and overweight, I already made every pre-order for all the interesting games coming up this first half of the year. I recently finished “Bulletstorm”, which was also ‘Game of the week’ (Link) here in this blog. I also started playing “Amnesia” which scared me to death and gave me the creeps. This game is really scary. It’s meant to be scary, it’s not that the game quality is scary, but give it a try on your own. Next game in queue is “Homefront”, but I actually do not expect that much of it. And, most importantly, “Portal 2” is coming out next week and, hell, I’m so excited about this game. The predecessor was so brilliant, but unfortunately way too short, and I’ve got high expectations for “Portal 2”

That’s it for the moment, some stuff about photography and of course the HTPC is coming up within the next seven days and I guess I’ll also be able to do another “Game of the week”.

Game of the week #7/2011 – Bulletstorm

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Yes, time for stuff. It does not happen very often that a videogame makes me laugh out loud and manifests a solid smile in my face while playing, but this week’s GotW is one of those. It’s ‘Bulletstorm’, the latest output by Cliffy B., realized with the Unreal engine III and developed by the guys from ‘People Can Fly’, that you might know from the ‘Painkiller’ series. ‘Bulletstorm’ is truely a FPS that puts the fun back into shooter gaming. After playing thousands and thousands of ultra-realistic first person shooters situated in a modern warfare scenario it felt like a kind of deliverance to play this particular game. I was a little sceptical before the release of ‘Bulletstorm’ if this game is not just only a pure feature-gadget-firework that lacks of fun in gameplay. I was seriously wrong.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvigZY44PCw&feature[/youtube]

First of all, for those of you who still don’t know, here’s short story introduction. You play Grayson Hunt, a space pirate from the black-ops squad called Dead Echo. After finding out that their squad was misused by the evil General Sarrano, who let them kill innocent civilians, the squad starts to revolt against Sarrano and calls for revenge. The real plot of the story starts with a crash landing on the planet Stygia and basically two things are left to do. Finding General Sarrano and kill him. And to escape from the planet.

During the escape you find lots of interesting guns and you also get a nice gadget plugged on your arm to grap enemies with a kind of tractor ray. You gain the most of the fun with the so called skillshot system. It’s not just only about fragging enemies it’s about fragging them with style. You can grab enemies with your little arm gadget. You can throw them in the air. You can push them into spikes. You can make them suffer on a slitted throat and gain points for ‘gargle effects’. You can shock them with electricity. You can shoot their balls off. You can slide them off. You can throw them off heights… etc. etc. etc. It’s just so much you can do, to frag your opponents with style and gain points for that. The earned points can be spent for new guns, ammunition and extra charge for your weapons. Each weapon has a secondary fire mode which is much more devastating, and fun, than the primary mode and mostly effective in boss fights. The boss fights itself are challenging, not too tough and of course a lot of fun.

The game is also rich of totally nice and funny events like escaping from a giant, I mean GIANT, mining wheel. Fighting a mechanical dinosaur in a miniature theme park. Fighting your enemies with the help of the mechanical dinosaur. It’s also nice to see, that the pace of the game is not always be held on high speed, and that it offers some moments to let you breathe. Which is actually good because the whole presentation of the game is just awesome. Even though it was made with the “old” Unreal Engine III, the game looks absolutely state of the art. It also does offer Physx, with some manual tweaks, and a DirectX10 render path, also with manual tweaks. For some unknown reason are the config files encrypted so you cannot simply edit them by using a standard text editor, you actually need a decrypter (!?). This seems to me, like the curse of the multi-platform development, hopefully we, the PC gamers, get rid of this with an upcoming patch.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehIGQZsniEw[/youtube]

To summarize, I want to recommend this game to everyone who is tired of the common, standard first person shooters stuff that gets released each and every day. This game gives you a fresh breeze into your face that soon becomes a storm of pure shooter fun that you haven’t experienced for years. ‘Bulletstorm’ has so many great ideas included and so many funny things either that your money is well spent on this game. I also want to mention again, this is not just a game that builts its innovation on a couple of newly introduced game gadgets. GO! BUY IT!

Links: Official website

Config decrypter

Duty Calls (commercial game)

Game of the week #6/2011 – ScummVM

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I have to apologize that I haven’t made it to announce the game of the week for such a long time, but finally I’m back and I have to apologize again, because this week I don’t have a specific game that gets the title, it’s just an emulator. Actually, this whole thing happens because for one simple reason, because I can. As you may know, I was modding and coding on my cellphone for a while to improve its performance and gain a couple of features of it that I actually haven’t had before. One side effect was the installation of ScummVM, which is in some kind of way this week’s “Game of the week”. ScummVM is an emulator that lets you play all the good old Lucasfilm/arts adventure games from the early to the mid-nineties. Actually, this emulator made me revisit a couple of games that I still love and I recommend to everyone. I’m talking of games like “Maniac Mansion”, which was like my first comedy, horror adventure game ever and it was only topped by the ingenious “Day of the Tentacle”. Secondly, “Zak McKracken and the alien mindbenders” which was for me, back in 1991, the incarnation of open world gaming. I mean, you could travel the whole world, while in other games you where simply walking from the left to the right to free the princess.

ScummVM is such a great tool, you can play these adventure games on nearly every platform. I started playing “The secret of Monkey Island” on my Android and it’s such a nice experience. If someone told me 20 years ago that I gonna play Lucasfilm adventures on a cell phone you would have found laughing on the floor. Back in the pixel days you needed monstrous computer with a large amount of nearly 2-4 MEGABYTES of RAM and hard drives with at least 80 MEGABYTES of space. My first PC actually had 2MB of RAM and a large 85MB hard drive. I wasn’t able to play a game like “Doom” since I got my first Pentium PC in 1995, but that’s another story.

I don’t want to get too much in detail with the games of Lucasfilm, but I can only advise to everyone who still does not know any of these games give it a try. I also recommend these games to everyone who is simply interested in videogames history, because if you don’t know the Lucasfilm games, it’s truely a lack of knowledge. Once upon a time where adventure games where the strongest and biggest genre in PC gaming and these games are one of the reasons why. If you tried these games and you found them great, give Lucasfilms competitor a try and play the Sierra adventures. But when it comes to Sierra, you can no longer use ScummVM, for most of the games (like 99%), the DOSBox is doing a great job. Sorry for the short and minimal description on the games, I just wanted to give a short introduction to them by presenting ScummVM.

Links:

Official Website

My media centre – A field report

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It’s been nearly 9 month since living with a media centre PC in my living room and it has become a regular part of my daily life. The balance between the simple watching of TV broadcasts and the common use of a PC, like surfing the internet, playing games has changed. Nowadays I do watch more and more content that is streamed and published via the internet and old school TV makes only a minor part in my daily life. The point actually is, that I don’t have the time nor the will to watch specific contents on TV at a special time and nor do I have the will to spend like half an hour to setup the HDD recorder that I don’t miss a show on TV. This is old-fashioned in my opinion, especially by regarding the fact that if I use the media centre I can watch whatever I want and what I subscriped to at any time I want. If I watch TV I’m bound to a fixed schedule and like I previously said, I’m not going to waste my rare free time to TV programs.

Another, and in my opinion, very important point that the media centre has become so popular for me is, that the content it offers is mainly customized to my needs and interests. As you may know, I’m a gamer and I love to watch broadcasts with videogame content, so I watch like GameTrailers.com, GiantBomb or GameSpot contents any time I want. If I’m more in the mood to get a little relaxation and enjoy earth’s beauty I lay back and watch the marvellous shows of Earth-Touch.com. I’ve also got tons of subscriptions on Youtube, mainly gaming content but also channels with subjects like sports, news , photography or simply comedy. As you can see, I’ve got this large variety of things to watch at any time I want, I’m near the point to think about cancelling my cable provider subscribtion because it makes barely sense.

Besides simple watching of different contents the media centre also offers another ability to serve me well, it’s a gaming platform. I had to make a compromise between ultra silent media centre PC and gaming PC. This PC serves in both ways and is not as quiet as a media centre usually used to be, but this doesn’t really matter, because while watching movies or anything else like this, you can barely here the PC and it’s not as disturbingly load as a regular gaming PC. This case, where the hardware was built in, is a silent case and I also avoided the use of unnessecary fans the gain a low noise level and I’m pretty happy with the final result. I can’t deny that there’s still some room for tweaking the system to gain a little less noise, but it’s fine the way it is.

Anyhow, the media centre is a well balanced and efficient gaming PC as well and I use this PC very often for some relaxed gaming sessions. I used to play a lot of games that are played console style (with a gamepad) on the media centre PC and left the FPS and RPG to my main game system. It’s way more fun to play a soccer or a basketball game on the couch watching the stuff on a giant TV instead of seeing this on a small 24inch PC monitor. It also fulfills some social aspects because I personally play much more games with friends visiting me as I’ve done before by just having the “normal, regular” gaming PC. Another important point for me is, I don’t have to waste money on an expensive console, even though I would like to have a PS3.

As a final conclusion can I say, that the media centre was a good investment. Ordinary TV becomes less and less important for me and like I said, I’m near the point cancelling my cable provider subscription. I gain more information in a much smaller space of time and most importantly information that I actually need instead of getting tons and tons of crap information, e.g. celebrity stuff. Some of my “gaming habits” have changed too because I’m more willing to play “casual games” like sports games and games regularly played with a gamepad. Yap, I like the media centre, everyone should have one.

Game of the week #5/2011 – Borderlands

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Actually, this week’s game of the week is not as “indy-ish” as the games before and one could say that this is mainstream. Well, it may be mainstream and it was very succesful in 2009 and 2010, but I still know a lot of people saying, “Yes, I heard of this game before, is it truely that good?” and I can answer “Yes it is, try it, you’ll love it”. I’m talking about “Borderlands” by Gearbox Software that delivered a great piece of software and a brilliant mixture of first-person shooter, RPG and brawler. The story of the game is simple too, but nevertheless  really entertaining. You play one out of four characters that land on the planet Pandora to unveil the secret of the “Vault” that grants wealth, fame and honour to its owner. These four character have different abilities and skills, like “sniper”, “rogue”, “soldier” and melee fighter, so you can play this basicly in a FPS style that suits you the most. I personally decided to play the hunter which is the previously mentioned “sniper”, he can also control a pet that can attack enemies. The pet control is pretty basic and only available for the hunter, all three other classes have different special skills like a phase walk, gaining more bullets for you and your team, just to mention a few.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwxiAGWJa-o[/youtube]

Team? Yes, and here’s the thing, you can play “Borderlands” completely in a single player mode, but you can also switch to cooperative online play at any time. The coop is a lot of fun, even though it lacks a few features like an interface for simply sharing loot or a roll mask to decide who’s going to get the loot. When it comes to booties of the prey, “Borderlands” has got a lot to. The developers can’t to mention it as often as they can, that they have included a “bazillion” of guns and tons of other goodies, like shields, grenade kits, class mods, to improve your character. This is also a positive catch of the game, you can’t stop playing, because you always want to get new guns and new guns and new guns and new guns. And of course new guns. Urm, and you also want to reach the next level to spend a skill point in your skill tree.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86WpLFOIYjw[/youtube]

The AI in “Borderlands” is not the smartest one, but does its job and that is what counts, I mean, this is not a high intelligent tactical shooter, this is a fun shooter with a couple of RPG elements and a nice taste of humour. The characters in the game are developed very well and the bosses you meet in your encounters are challenging and not this standard meal you have to choke on in every other game. It’s also not a game with lots of moments of frustration, when you die in the game you can revive by simply killing an enemy in your phase of dying, which is about 15 seconds, and if you die anyway, you revive at a spawn point next to the fight not too far away. I enjoy “Borderlands” for more than a year now, I also bought the GOTY edition of the game, that includes all four DLCs. The DLCs are worth every penny, except “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot”, which feels a little like a hoax compared to the rest of the game. So if you like FPS, a little of amount of RPG and have some friends to join you in coop, then “Borderlands” is the game of your choice and why it’s my “Game of the week”.

Links:

Official website

Wikipedia

Straight epic fail

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It turns out these days that I’m real lazy guy. I mean, reeeaaal lazy. As you may know, I was announcing “Straight edge 3.0” a couple of weeks ago and had so many great plans and goals in mind, and now apparently NOTHING is happening. The biggest bummer is, that I don’t really feel the need for a project like this. On the other side, this is not a 100% correct. I do feel like a fat cow these days and it’s much more than just obvious that I completely lost shape. I’ve got around 104kg of weight, which is 12kg higher than my lowest weight in the very first straight edge project. It’s a kind of distracting to have these rules once again and till now does it take a lot of overcoming to get to the gym. The will to get to gym actually overcame me not at all till now, but the positive thing, I feel like I have to, I also feel the lust to finally do some fitness and sports but as mentioned before, I’m a kind of shy or afraid to finally go there. Not sure where this fear actually comes from, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to disappear as soon as I’ve been to gym for the first time again. When it comes to nutrition, I also fail, but not as badly as I did a couple of days ago. I was near cancelling Straight edge 3.0, but I guess, I leave it in this kind of a waiting position before throwing everything finally away.

For those of you, who were missing the “Game of the week #5/2011” I can only say, there wasn’t actually a game that totally deserved this title. I played a lot of StarCraft II and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and I haven’t really found the time to get into something more indepently. “Magicka” still looks promising for a title like this, but I would like to wait until the major bug fixing period is over and the game is getting playable without distracting bugs. I’ve got some feedback from other “Magicka” player telling me, that their game runs perfectly fine, maybe, I can’t share this point of view and will wait until I can tell the same. I’ll hopefully be able to announce and shortly review the new “Game of the week” at least on Friday.

20 years of id Software

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Today’s the day where we gamer’s have to bow down and pay some respect to one of the best software studios that we’ve got the last two decades, it’s “id Software”. Today’s the day where “id Software” celebrates its 20th birthday. When it comes to push gaming technology to a bleeding edge limit “id Software” always had the leading role. The game engines John Carmack created and developed are absolute masterpieces and it does not matter if we talk about “Commander Keen”, “Doom” or “Quake”. They set the marks everybody else has to compete with. They have never been great story tellers in games, but what they did and still do, they take the gameplay to a level where everybody can handle it with fun and without any unnecessary complexity. It’s truely like John Carmack said, “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” When you look back in time their games were more like tech-demos put in a tiny game shell. Especially “Quake III Arena” was one of these games, there’s no story, just a few maps, a couple of opponents and that’s it, and this concept survived for years. Now, twelve years later “Quake III Arena” is still alive in the online remake “Quake Live”. The id Tech 3 engine that was used for “Quake III Arena” is one of the most popular game engines so far, if not to say THE most popular. “American McGee’s Alice”, “Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.²”, “Return to Castle Wolfenstein”, “Medal of Honor:Allied Assault” and sequels, are just a few of the famous branches based on id Tech 3.

I personally had millions, no, billions, no, bazillion hours of fun with games by “id Software”, it started for me with “Commander Keen” way back in 1992 (it was actually released in 1991, but 1992 was the years where I switched from the C64 to a PC). Then I played “Wolfenstein 3D” and “Spear of Destiny”, which was actually forbidden for a young kid like me and after these games I had the first LAN experiences with “Doom”, mainly in 1on1 deathmatch. 1,000,000,000 frags later a “Quake” came and me and my friends heard of these crazy people doing the whole aiming with a mouse and we started playing FPS that style. Those people still stuck to cursor keys and pic up and down keys were just the victims of us. I actually skipped “Quake II” right on its release, for one simple reason, I wasn’t gaming (— SHOCK —). I finished “Quake II” sometime in 1999, but I never played the multiplayer, because as you might know, 1999 was the birth year of “Quake III Arena”. Q]|[A also lead to a new era of how to handle your game. Lots of people started to tweak their game to gain highest rate of frames per second, they started overclocking their PCs, modded their PCs, tweaked their internet connection to get the best ping and more and more people played in clans, esports was going to become drastically bigger and more and more important to the whole gaming industry. There sure were tendencies in this direction in the nineties, but it was nothing of importance and just a sideshow.

As you can see, “id Software” not just only influenced the coding and the designing style of games, they also created a new kind of community and a brand new way of how to compete with each other, in another kind of sport, the electronic sport. There’s a reason why the most popular gamer’s communication net on IRC is called the “QuakeNet”. Although they lost I little of their undisputed leading role, with competitors like “Crytek” and “Epic Games”, “id Software” still sets the standards and every new product is a blast and I am very sure that this company, as long as whizz-kid Carmack develops, will be able to survive another 20 years, and I’ll be an grey haired old man and look back on a great chapter in gaming evolution.