Long before I encountered gamemodding I already had fallen in love with desktopmodding. The better part of which can more accordingly be called -tweaking, as most of this discipline’s alterations do not dig too deep. Instead they scratch the surface, sometimes very effectively, sometimes only on the level of cosmetic surgery. Above you can see the result of my very first attempt at customizing the looks and feel of the graphical interface—replacing the recycling bin by a big white telephone. I keep that toilet bowl since years, through time it migrated to every new machine of mine—though a lot … Continue reading
Tag Archives: max payne
In ye olde days of ↵MPHQ, multiplayer for Max Payne was an issue. First the possibility of making a mod comprising a multiplayer mode was seriously discussed in the forums. [Then the topic became a nuisance, and finally a running-gag played on ↵n00bs.] Quickly it became clear, that it was impossible to achieve for certain reasons: from the technical side lack of access to the source code was a powerful argument, the problems arising with ↑bullet time another. The essential knack lies in the very concept itself. A player going into bullet time gets the decisive advantage from it, … Continue reading
For everybody harbouring a piece of cyberculture inside the depths of the mind getting connected to the Internet is vital. Obviously. This banality starts to get interesting when one is obsessed with questions like that one: What machine shall I connect to the Internet and via which path? Yesterday ↑KerLeone managed to connect an ancient Toshiba 1200XE laptop to the net via a cellular phone and published the ↑Retro Wireless Blogging Tutorial [in German] explaining the feat he pulled off. In my ↵project’s abstract I wrote that I will set my fieldwork-results into relation to the appropriate parts of the … Continue reading
↑Deutschlandradio aired a small ↑feature on cyberspace and computergames [.mp3 | 1.1MB | 4.42min | in German] which has Max Payne as a starting point for a short discussion of ↵FPS and violence. In the feature Matthias Mertens, post-doc at the ↑Zentrum für Medien und Interaktivität [‘Center for Media and Interactivity’ in Gießen, Germany. See a presentation by Mertens at netzspannung’s ↑playing media] starts to ‘speak pro FPS’. Mertens sees Max Payne as a ‘culturally relevant expression’, just like movies are or can be. He goes on stating that we have no problem with accepting a movie by Quentin Tarantino … Continue reading
With the recent hype around ↑Revenge of the Sith hitting the silverscreen I was reminded of the heap of work we had done for the Max Payne 1 total conversion (TC) Lightsaber 4 (LS4), but which never was included into it. Lightsaber 5 (LS5) never was completed, so everything done for it counts as an outtake, I guess. Quite some of this work never saw release, but only was circulated amongst the members of the modding-team. After ↑the ludologist officially having created the new genre of ↵fake computergame-outtakes here now are some real outtakes from a computergame modification—the Lightsaber project … Continue reading
The following thoughts are based on a forum entry of mine at ↑PayneReactor (meanwhile the ↑original thread has migrated to ↑MaxPayneForums) dating back to 29 July 2004. The post was an answer to an article dated 28th July 2004 by highly respected modder Maddieman at his website Hell’s Kitchen. Maddie tried to answer the question “why people cling on” although only “such a small percentage of ↵mods come out, less of which are any good; why do people still bother waiting for them? The variable ratio reinforcement schedule is a term that explains why some behaviours or behavioral thinking is … Continue reading
The field I am doing fieldwork in consists of three spaces (or kinds of spaces) at least. First there are the conceptual communication- and interaction spaces made possible by the Internet-infrastructure, respectively by the various Internet-services like www, e-mail, ↵IM, ↵IRC, and ↵ftp running on top of it. Very common, I know; inside academia nearly everything cyber- deals with these spaces. But more often than not they are associated with communicaton, seldomly with interaction. Good examples for the latter’s presence are ftp and IRC’s ↵DCC feature, because exchanging ‘things’ like pictures, movies, demos, program-applications, or code itself undoubtedly is an … Continue reading
The waiting has an end: ↑Mission:Impossible—New Dawn has gone gold and can be ↑downloaded. … Continue reading
Maniac and Aavenr from the much respected Max-Payne-site ↑Deep Six met with Remedy’s Sam Lake (Lead Writer and the man who lent his face to the original Max Payne—although at first glance I thought it was Mickey Rourke, no offence ;-) and Petri Järvilehto (Lead Game Designer) at a Diner like seen above (I mean an online one) and conducted an enlightening ↑interview [via ↑AlanWAKE.Net] on Alan Wake. Now we know about the story from first hand: SL: Alan Wake is a successful horror writer. For the material of his first novel, he used the strange dreams that he had … Continue reading
Just three hours after my musing on AlanWAKEnet becoming the official fansite and the developers’ attitude towards the fanhood, ↑MikaRMD announced AlanWAKEnet to be the game’s official fansite: It also gives me a great pleasure that we can announce ↑www.alanwake.net as official fan site. The site is still owned and run by our long time fan, ADoomedMarine. By calling it an official fan site, I hope that we (our guys at Remedy) can make alanwake.net forums our interactive “home” on the internet. The official home pages at ↑www.alanwake.com will, of course, be the place to get the latest official news … Continue reading