As it is an Easter weekend and I am in-between projects I decided to sort out the nagging issues with this website, take off the dust covers and tidy up. In doing so I have reinstated an older wordpress theme I designed over two years ago that I love and both updated it and as many posts as I can find with problems (missing images, broken links, poorly written content… the list goes on.)

One post that did take my fancy during this clean up is simply titled Gooimaging and depicts an interesting little boredom breaker that I came up with after watching David Gorman’s Google-whacking adventures. I have decided to revive that game as its 8:59am and I need to wake up properly before getting on with work. As the old rules were written for a google image search that has since been vastly updated and improved upon, I have revised the rules and listed them below:

1. You must image search for a name, male or female. It must be a name that is associated with a person such as “Sam”, “Jamie”, “Keith” or “Max.”
2. Scroll down the equal page number to your birth-date-month and then count along the images until you rest upon the image equal to your birth-date-day. This is your selected image.
3. The image must not be pornographic or non-human (play with safe-search off for increased difficulty,) if it is then you have to go back one link. If at the beginning then start again with a different name.
4. Click on the image in question and open the webpage, you are looking for other names that meet rule one. You then repeat the rules for that name and continue doing so until you come to a dead end or you discover better things to be spending you time doing.

My Game

I began with a search for “Bronwyn”  and it returned 2,260,000 results of very similar looking people, this was however not a very good start as I landed on the only non human picture in the search: a pair of dogs from romanycollies.com. Taking this early defeat in hand I rolled again and searched this time for “Jamie” which amongst 810,000,000 results returned a photo of Jamie Foxx at thecinemasource.com a distinctively human image which has been linked to an article written by Andrea Tuccillo.

After rolling again with “Andrea” google returned 487,000,000 results and I hit upon the below desktop wallpaper image of Andrea Parker hosted at a blogspot blog titled filmovizia. Once again I looked for an attractive name prospect and chose “Alicia“.

Rolling with “Alicia” returned 203,000,000 results with my result in question being the Alicia Keys Wikipedia page and a shamefully small photo at that. Thanks to both google similar image search and Tineye plus a generous slapping of photoshop skills I have been able to recreate the image big enough to include below.

As Alicia’s manager is called Jeff Robinson I have decided to roll again with the name “Jeff“, this returned 2,040,000,000 results and landed me on another Wikipedia page. This time the page in question was that describing the professional wrestler Jeffrey Leonard Jarrett pictured below.

Wiki pages make finding names for this game too easy so in an attempt to make things more difficult I scourer the Jeff Jarrett wiki page for the most obscure name that I could find – the best I could do was “Dixie“. This roll returned about 86,900,000 results, the least amount so far so I was going in the right direction. However the first page of results had plenty of non human images and I was only four rounds in, this was not the time to play Russian Roulette with my results. I got lucky and landed on the below picture hosted at impawards.com of an 1976 poster for Dixie Dynamite!

The page in question only had two choices for names “James Bond” and “Drew Struzan,” as I am going down the obscure path I chose “Drew” for my next roll as I haven’t heard of Drew Stuzan, but every ones grandmother has heard of James Bond. In a search full of pictures of Drew Barrymore I landed on the only male photo in the list – just my luck. My sixth round search gave me a photo of Drew Brees amongst 676,000,000 other results of mostly Miss Barrymore. The photo in question pictured below is hosted at athline.com and a very quick look of that webpage lead me to quickly roll again, this time using the name “Eli.”

Rolling with Eli returned 184,000,000 results not as little as Dixie, but few enough to bring some interest back into the game as up until now the rolls I have made have brought mostly boring webpages. Unfortunately I have to say this my seventh roll was just as disappointing as I landed on a paparazzi family shot of Eli Manning hosted at tmz.com.

After a disappointing couple of rolls I decided a more mainstream name might help and Rolls with “Kourtney” from Kim & Kourtney Kardashian on the Tmz webpage. This roll returned the least amount of results so far, totalling about 44,500,000 and having to click “Click to view more results” for page nine meant I was going in the right direction so far as reducing the number of results. Rather disappointingly and at the same time unsurprisingly I landed on the below photo of the Kardashian’s.

I quickly chose “Lauren” for my next roll and at 696,000,000 results I had managed to shoot away from my previous low record. This time I landed on the below photo of Lauren Conrad hosted at hairstylespics.net and a page full of names to select from.

For my tenth, and for the sake of this blog post final roll. I chose the name “Evangeline” to which google responded with about 11,500,000 results and the following desktop wallpaper of Evangeline Lilly hosted at phombo.com.

By my own admittance, this wasn’t the most interesting series of web-searches (or blog post) and had I not been writing this blog post as I went along I would probably have gone through 100 rolls in the same time its taken me to roll and write this at the same time. Attached below is the timeline of my little adventure. I hope I have at least reduced your boredom levels a little bit.

The above is the screen that confronts you when you boot up the program MISSION.exe which is the main game executable, there is also another two exe’s BRIEF.exe and MISINDX.exe however I believe MISINDX to be something that BRIEF works with so its better to leave it alone. BRIEF.exe when run gives you a menu structure to browse through and read the background infomation on the games story and indepth instructions on how to play the game. The graphics of the game are ascii in nature much like Karel3 and other rogue games of the time but not to the same degree of quality, with this said the game does have a lot of playability and I distinctly remember playing it for hours as a child. The theme of Mission Mainframe is similar to that of The Wizard’s Castle however instead of a castle your in a corporate building taken over by a malfunctioning mainframe, the aim of the game is to blast through the building level by level until you find the mainframe and win the game. Each time you play the game is different, beyond simply being able to choose your intial character from commando, secret agent, detective and private eye and setting up traits by roll of dice; each new game randomly builds up the map so no two games are the same.

While I do have a soft spot for this game there are a few niggles which fixed, would have made it much better, for one the top down map becomes very similar between floors very quickly and while I know its more about imagination and gameplay than being told what things look like a bigger screen area like that in Karel3 would have been amazing. With that said the game has quite a few moments of greatness, especially with the amount of modification you can do to your character to better yourself within the game. A must play for those whom are into classic dos games, especially the early open source home brew section. I have made Mission Mainframe available to download below so more people can enjoy it as I have yet to find another working download location and I would hate for such a great game to be lost to time.

I have included everything in the download zip file that I found with my copy, the CHR files are save games and you can see the last time I played this was 1999 a good 10 years ago, I have left them in the zip so you can play with a working character. Feel free to comment below on the game or any others I should check out.

[download id="5" format="1"]

I found my copy of the game on an old floppy disk which had once contained omnis 7 (1994) that I had obtained from somewhere in 1998 and formatted for my own use, once I had the games full name I googled it and found much to my suprise the game creators personal website (moved from the original homepage). It is really an amazing feeling to find something after years of searching and yes I know that spending so long hunting down a home-brew video game is a little bit sad but it is really worth it in the end. The game concept was put together by Gandalfs friend Morgul in two initial versions Karelitima I and II, of course those are just their aliases and indeed the man responsible for this games pointless inception is Alexandros Karelas whom according to Alexios Chouchoulas (Gandalf) developed them as part of learning how to code games in Turbo Pascal even the name Kareltima is a link to the creators name. In any case Alexios wrote Karelitima III himself in addition to the previous two and published them into the open source scene. You can download various ports of Karelitima III from his project page, however the source for the original two games has been lost to history, much like I thought this game had been.

The game play wasn’t really the point of the game, however it is a typical ASCII dosgame, which in itself is a joke. It is Set in a supposedly mystical world, where Gandalf the Grey is in the fake ID business, pub landlords know their calculus, malacks roam the towns (beware!), and bored priests are, well, very bored. The game is full of inside jokes between the two original developers and is very rude and crude in parts, however the game is still suprisingly very fun to play and I wasted entire afternoons attempting to beat it. I am still not sure if it’s actually completable or if that is part of the joke but it is well worth playing if you are a fan of dos rouge like games and have a sense of humour/irony.

Download

[download id="4" format="1"]

1. Search for any name, male or female. One name only such as “Sam”, “Jess”, “Alex”, must have someone called after it.
2. Go to the page relevant to the number month you where born in. For me that’s page nine as I was born in September.
3. Choose the number picture displayed coinciding with the day your where born on. For me this is the 11th image shown.
4. *Must not be (if so go back one link):
   1. Pornographic.
   2. Non Human.

To make it more difficult you can have safe filter turned off and follow an additional fourth rule that the image must not be pornographic. Now you would think that such a simple game wouldn’t be very appealing and thus only a couple of minutes would have been wasted playing it. But to quite Dave Gorman nothing is that simple when it involves the internet and so I have wasted practically a whole day playing this silly game.

*After spending today playing the game I have added fourth and fifth rules.

Now naturally I began playing this game by entering in my own name “Simon”. And I found the following image:

This linked me to a cheesy Simon Kirke fansite which didn’t give me any reason to hang around after the seccond time the mp3 looped on the page. Any page that thinks auto playing music to me, is not worth my time. However I had a game to play and wondered where I should go from here. Then I noticed the yellow copyright tag on the image, it gave a name and I knew what I should then do. I typed Lucy into google image search and the following came up.

It would appear that female names are more likely to show images of women wearing very little, but I was lucky this time as the 11th image in was an image from Tasteful Celebs and thus I was able to continue playing, but not before having a quick look through the page for another real name to use, I thought all was lost as the comments section only gave me names such as ajay but then I saw at the bottom the name Dennis and continued to google images to check it out. By now I had come up with the hypothesis that I would find much more porn connected to female names than male names, thus the likelihood of me coming across a pornographic image and thus loosing the game increased with female names. I thought now I would see if I could make it to ten names in a row and see if my hypothesis was proven true or not, for now with current evidence it remained true as the name Dennis gave me this:

The page is the self authored biography of the self confessed pipe smoker Dennis Womack. Evidently this image is neither of a girl, or pornographic so I continued down the page in hope of another name from which to flow from. This was the first page I had come to on this journey which actually held my interest, the guy has a rather cool hobby collecting and smoking pipes is more classy that cigarettes and thus allowed (not sure if there are any health benefits but the smell of pipe tobacco doesn’t make me want to vomit like the cheap cigarette tobacco most smokers, smoke). After reading through the page a couple of times my eyes fell across the name of his wife “Syler” I had never heard of this name before but he said it was his wife’s so I took his word at face value and entered it into google hoping for clean images. I wasn’t that surprised to see that google images didn’t give me that great a choice, but at least it wasn’t porn. Unfortunately due to copyright constraints on the page and me not wanting to post a tiny thumbnail here you will have to go here to see it, I got there from an index page of articles taken from the Northwest Indiana News this gave me a host of names to choose from and as there wasn’t anything of much interest to me on that page I just grabbed the first name (“John”) and entered it into google. This brought me to the following page in Stratford-upon-Avons website and gave me the following image:

By now I had become less interested in the content provided to me and more interested in finding 10 images linked in a row, so I scanned down the page for the first name to be mentioned and found “Robert”. This brought me to Robert Bradford’s personal website and it would appear he is an Artist living in Cornwall and the image google gave me was of him and his wife Penny hanging a frame, not only was it a nice image but it gave me the seventh name for my journey.

I held back for a second before entering it into google, so far I hadn’t landed on any porn images which was nice. But this was a female name and as my hypothesis predicted I had a higher chance of coming across an image which would end the game for me then and there. I took that chance and searched, finding this:

Yes a graph! This wasn’t a picture of a girl called Penny, but a graph of her “Wealth Dynamics Profile” more of which can be seen here. It would appear upon closer inspection of the page that she is the Founder of Ecademy a website created to connect business people. I decided that as the image was so far down the page, I would only focus on the “page area” it was on, saving me from reading through the entire page to find a name, the name given was her husbands (“Thomas”) and it gave me the following image:

Thomas the tank engine, it was a dead end! There where no other names on the page, even the image itself didn’t give rise to any leads. I was stuck, could this be game over? Had I lost at the 8th hurdle? Cursing xs-stock I thought back to the inspiration for this journey, Dave’s Googlewhack adventure and thought hang on, when he got to a dead end he just turned back and followed another lead. So what was to stop me from doing that, it wasn’t in the three rules so that is exactly what I did, I turned back. My seventh GooImage was Pennys and I quickly scanned through the page for any other names than Thomas, I held high hopes as I didn’t want to have to go back all the way to five and build up from there. I didn’t have to search for long as right at the top of the page under her 50 words was the name “Hannah”. I held my breath as I searched google for it and breathed a sigh of relief as the following image popped up:

It took me to a rather nasty looking web page, not nasty as in content but the aesthetics made my eyes bleed, wasn’t surprising considering it had been designed in Microsoft FrontPage 5.0! I once again scanned the page for a name and saw it had been “designed” by a J Turner. A name being a name (first or last) I entered it into google and was happy to be faced with the following image as ninth in the chain:

The image lead me to the homepage of Turner Sports Cars. It was interesting to read and find out about a British built car I had never heard of. The image itself was of the man behind the design and building of the car, a car which was only built during the years 1949 to 1966. It was nice to read a little bit of history on such a beautiful car. To think if I hadn’t begun playing this game, I would never have seen this page. I found the next name and my tenth link in this chain at the bottom of the page, the name Russell was sat almost next to the image and without waiting any more I entered it into google and found the following:

It wasn’t a picture of a person, rather a cartoon and the page in question was about the cartoonist Dan Russell. It was also the tenth link in the chain. I have to admit that at this point I felt the game had been too easy I had got to ten in a row with only one set back, if I where to play it again I would need to make it more complex. Also my hypothesis wasn’t proven either correct or incorrect as I had mostly received male names, this could be attributed to the fact that males dominate the internet but that would be a question to be answered another day. Instead I compiled the following diagram to show my journey and thought up two more rules to be added to the game.

It was at this point I noticed something odd. I had only done 9 links. I thought I had finished and won, but I hadn’t. I still had that 10th link to find. Fortunately this didn’t cause that big of a problem, the 9th link had provided me with many names to choose from and I went once again for the first in the page (Jim). Upon a very quick google I came across this:

Not going to comment on the image, just glad it wasn’t porn. It looks like the page is from someone’s blog describing a holiday they went on. For me it was a gold mine for names. However I had to take a break, spending this many consecutive hours on google does things to you. So that is where I leave the journey for now. 10 Links, 11 images 1 dead end. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

At the current build sound isn’t entirely functional with a little way to go before the bugs are kicked out and there are a few graphic based problems and bugs to be worked on as well as the addition of multiplayer before this can be called a finished Quake DS port.

Now if only someone could port Unreal Tourniment to a portable platform and I would be happy.

Source: Drunken Coders Via MaxConsole

Because I use xp64 on my pc a lot of the good old dos games I used to play wont run, even under dosbox – which is a problem from windows 2k onwards im afraid. One of my favourite games of all time UFO Enemy unknown will install from cd but the actuall game wont run on my pc. Now if i were to admit to being a hard core computer user, I could boot up from dos on a floppy disk (yes ancient technology I know but it works!) mount the cd rom and play the game – but thats a lot of hard work just for one game. I decided to google it, see if anyone had fixed the problems I had come accross, since I used to play it loads under windows 98 and when we upgraded to XP none of my old dos games would run, let alone on my even newer xp64 box. This is where I stumbled into the world of abandonware. After a few hours of searching I had found UFO Enemy Unknown and decided to download it as the website said it supported windows xp. Im not sure of the legality of downloading it but as its abandonware and as I already bought the cd years ago – and still have that cd in my posesion – I dont see it being a problem.

The file downloaded was pretty much the game files so all I had to do was copy them accross to where I wanted to run the game from… D:\My Applications\Dos Games\UFO\ and it worked. It just worked, sound and everything (because im doing this from memory i cant remember if it just worked natively under x64's 32bit emulation, or if I had to use dos box. But thats not important, the important thing is it worked).

Well seeing as todays modern PC games – with a few exceptions: doom III, UT2k4 – are focused totally on graphics and less on game-play I decided to go on the hunt for some free ones online (not the abandon-ware ones mind you, the open-source free ones). My first port of call is sourceforge and I have found a huge list of games that look to promise some good game play. As I am not at home atm I am unable to provide a first person review of each game, so for now this shall have to provide as a preview and when I get home tonight I shall download the ones listed here and play them so as to write a comprehensive review on them.

Automanic

From the description this sounds like it could be a fun game to play. I used to spend countless hours playing twisted metal in turns with friends and my sisters – so it could be classed as a good favorite of mine. It is written in C++ and python and although as far as I can tell they have only ported it to Linux because of the languages used to write it, it shouldn't be too difficult to port to other frameworks – if they don't have an x86 windows port I might try to compile it with native x64 support. The graphics aren't all that good it seems, but then again it was always the game play in twisted metal that kept me playing for hours on end.

Irrlicht Engine

Not a game on its own but the Irrlicht Engine really does look like something good. If you go to the engines website you can find a varied list of games that have been built using the engines base. I have included this here in the list because I shall be checking out some of the games that have been made using it and writing an article on that. Also I am bored of the useless collection of windows screen savers that come with xp, so I may use this engine to create some pretty ones all depends on how quick it is

UFO2000

This one goes back to the beginning of this article my love of UFO Enemy Unknown and looks to be one of the first I shall download and try tonight. Im not too sure how well developed this is as it is still in beta. But from the screenshots it does look to be a pretty good representation of the UFO games, and the developers say that it is able to import the image maps from the actual game to provide an even better representation. Even though I am likely to play UFO Enemy Unknown over this, it does look to be an interesting game and so I shall give it a go and let you know what I think.

EDuke32

Next to UFO Enemy Unknown on my list of games I loved would be Duke Nukem 3D. I haven't been able to find this in recent years, although ages ago I managed to find a demo download which was basically the full first level. The last time I properly played this was on an N64 and since then I have only been able to find and play demo versions for the pc. Alas since getting an x64 pc I haven't been able to find a version of Duke Nukem that will run – however if this one doesn't run the source is available and so I may be able to port it to native x64 architecture – although I don't know too much about such things. In the past I have simply pressed compile and ran the executable it produced. The developers describe this as A cross-platform, OpenGL-rendered Duke Nukem 3D port which provides many new features for mod authors. So if it wont run under native 32-bit emulation I should be able to compile it for native x64. If this works I will be one happy bunny as I have tried numerous times this year to get a version of Duke Nukem working.

Scorched 3D

Summarized Scorched3D is a 3D remake of the popular 2D artillery game Scorched Earth. Scorched3D can be played against the computer, other players and remotely across the internet or LAN. I never played Scorched Earth, never even heard of the game to be honest, what attracted me to this one is the multiplayer function. Many a late night has been burnt up with me and Andrew playing Worms Armageddon and AOE II over the network, and if this provides some good game play then it may be added to our list of multi-player games. The problem with many PC games nowadays, is the fact that you need a fkn cd to play the game, so what if you want to play the game multiplayer on your computers on your network? You can't, unless you crack the cd! I don't know about you but this sounds like the game companies are fueling piracy… all the way though the UT series up-to UT2k3 you could install the game on any PC you owned and not need the cd when I found that UT2k3 wouldn't run without the cd the first thing I did was hunt for a crack! Fortunately the game makers discovered the dismay this caused the UT community and almost immediately released a no-cd patch for the game. Fortunately you don't get this problem with open-source :p

Secret Maryo Chronicles

Described as a Classic Mario game like Super Mario World or Super Mario Brothers with an advanced Leveleditor and new Graphics based on SDL, written in C++. Im really interested in the level editor as I always liked the concept of being able to make your own maps for a game. I really liked the Mario Games on the NES and Super NES so being able to play similar on the PC and to be able to edit my own maps for playing is a really cool idea. The graphics look rather good, albeit in a cartoon style. But I'm all about the game play and if they have managed to make that even half of what the original was like then this should turn out to be a new favorite. Says it runs under linux and windows so we shall see if it runs on my x64 box if it does this looks from the screenshots to be a game I may play often.

Cytadela (the Citadel)

From the description it sounds like this is a port of an old doom clone for Amiga. They say that it is OS portable, so I hope they have a x86 version for me to run under emulation. I don't know too much about this as the description was rather brief so all I can comment on is the screenshot that I have got hold of. From the screenshot this looks like a good old 3D FPS and if its based on doom then I'm interested to see what the game-play is like – seeing as I really liked the doom series right up to doom III (which I am having problems getting to run on x64). I shall be able to shed some light on this one and let you know wether its good or not, once I download and play it at home.

As you can see from the tiny selection I have posted above, the world of free open source games is pretty varied and of reasonable quality. Some of these projects have as many active developers as closed-source games and the quality of some can match if not surpass that of retail versions. I chose to ignore any games listed on sourceforge that didn't have screenshots in the main listing when I was browsing. However I am sure I must have missed a few good ones, mainly because Azerius didn't have a screenshot in the browse list either and although I really don't like that torrent program (Im a utorrent guy) it is of good quality.

I shall attempt to get some of the aforementioned games working tonight and get back here with an article explaining a) how i got them to work and b) reviewing how they play. 

So back to the going to town with Andrew thing, well as you may know Andrew (from now on refered to as Weeble) likes buying things money burns not just a hole in his pocket but a hole in his hands, legs well anything really so it doesn't last long. Not to say I haven't been there, I myself on a whim bought a laptop, a iriver, speakers, computer parts and a new phone over the past few years all as unthought out, unplanned purchases. So what did we get today? I took Weeble along to Maidstone with me so as to pay in some money – after doing so we headed off to the retro game shop that was closing down. There we bought a saga master system for £10 or so! The one that comes with Alex Kidd built in For the past hour or so since we have got home it is all Weeble has been playing, which must mean it is a pretty good game

For more infomation on Alex Kidd check out this fan site.

The game itself is described by the creators as being a massively multiplayer online game set in a futuristic persistent universe. Where players can discover a huge galaxy with billions of planets and can explore, combat, trade, socialize and more with the possibilities being endless.

For more info go check out their website. 

I have since completed it a week later, the graphics aren’t bad, but they could have done so much better with the graphics capability of the DS, but instead they ported the Game boy Advance version and added some touch screen addons and the 3D X-Wing fighter missions which are also available in death match mode on multilayer (which would be cool if I had two DS’s let alone two copies of the game). I knew what the graphics would be like before I bought the game, so this didn’t put me off much, with the 3D modes being awesome in my eyes and beyond my expectations.

The game play is standard beat them up, you have sword they have guns, you kill them; and it follows the Movies story line pretty much exactly with a lot of the diolouge being quoted from the film script.

The multilayer would have been better if you only required one person to own the game, that way I would have been able to play with at least 2 other people. Instead I have been sort of forced to play the multiplayer – single player mode – which is basically against AI and is fun for a while. I wish more games would only require one game card on multiplayer unless its technically impossible to only do so on one card. Because otherwise I’m left paying for a multiplayer function I cant use and am made to advertise the game to friends in the hope they will buy it so we can check out the multiplayer. No thankyou.

All in all the single player mode of the game is great, while the multiplayer is lacking in my eyes, the 3D X-wing fighter style is nice and so I give this game a rating of 7 out of 10.