Probably the first computer playable game I ever got addicted to was the HHGTTG from Infocom, although 9 Princes In Amber and Leather Goddesses of Phobos were both hot on its heels. Now you can play the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy Game 30th Anniversary Edition online at BBC Radio for an updated retro gaming experience. They do warn you to save your game state often, as it tends to kill you a lot, but it includes a bunch of new story passages written by Douglas Adams that they have been sitting on for a while.
Have an old Pentium III or Pentium 4 gathering dust because you can’t stand the 20 minute wait while it slowly boots an obsolete version of Windows? You can now turn it into a fast (or at least faster) useful machine again using Legacy OS 2.1, a Boot From CD (most of the computers from 2000 to 2006 didn’t have DVD drives in them, so a bootable CD is your best Live Disc option) Linux build. The latest version was released earlier this week, and comes with over 200 software packages ready to run right off the disc. That includes all the usual web tools, media players, office software, and everything else a modern computer should have. Of course, after you have tested the Live version to make sure it recognizes and can use your hardware properly, you can always install it to the computer’s hard drive and get it to run even faster, as well as be able to update or add new software, if you like. Another variation this Australian build came out with last October is Legacy OS 2.1 Gamer, with over 100 classic games, including the Open Source version of Doom. It is always good to make something useful and fun again, and this project does that nicely.
If you like gaming, check out Did You Know Gaming, they have a lot more than just this history of Doctor Who references in games. Their other site (sister site? friends doing similar stuff?) is Video Game Facts, which also has a ton of cool stuff. And yes, I will get over all the Doctor Who posts in a while, but it is still the 50th anniversary and I am still a bit stoked.
Doctor Who: Legacy is a free mobile RPG/Puzzle game app from BBC Worldwide and Tiny Rebel Games, yet another celebration of 50 years of the Tardis. It starts off with the most recent Doctor, Companions, and Villeins from the latest two seasons, but the plan is to expand it to cover everyone from the entire 50 year history of the series. They have versions for Apple and Android, and I should probably mention that the game supports micro-purchases, meaning you can acquire objects and characters by spending real money. Personally I went into settings and turned that function off, but every day in December they plan to have new stuff for free including K-9 and Sarah Jane Smith, and in early 2014 they will have everyone from Series 5 also available for free. The screen shot is the first point in the game where the Doctor speaks to you and invites you to become a companion; the music and artwork for this game are quite tasty.
The vampires in Kiss of the Damned don’t sparkle, but one of them does have a very dramatic love story which may effect their entire community. It is actually an interesting and intelligent tale that is a bit of a homage to the 60s and 70s vampire films. Starbuck is not being promoted as science fiction or fantasy, but I am pretty sure any movie about a man who has 533 children fits that bill. This comedy also appears to have a lot of heart, and when they do the English remake it looks like they got Vince Vaughn for the part. The English version will be out in the fall, but you can watch the original this week.
This weeks TV option is just silly: Duck Dodgers: Deep Space Duck Season 2. Any show that includes Marvin the Martian as a regular character is all right in my book.
In Anime we have Phi-Brain: Season 2 Collection 1, AKA Puzzle of God: The Orpheus Order. Yes, our protagonist defeated the Puzzle Of God by the end of the first season, but now a new crew has shown up with a grudge to work out, and a whole new series of deadly puzzles faces Kaito and his friends. Fairy Tail: Collection Two continues the story of the 4 person wizard guild that tends to do more damage to innocent bystanders and the surrounding area than they do to their opponents, so running away very, very fast is your best option when they show up to save you.
One Piece is rolling out the first half of season 5 this week, bringing the series up to episodes 264 through 275. That might sound impressive, but that season is from 1999, and Japan is up to episode 604 as of last week.
There are two releases in a Mecha franchise this week, 2005’s OVA Super Robot Wars Original Generation, and 2006’s DVD TV series Super Robot Wars OG: Divine Wars. They were loose sequels of the 1999 anime MasÅ Kishin Cybuster, which was itself a loose interpretation of a huge series of games that can trace its lineage all the way back to 1991’s Super Robot Wars for the Nintendo Gameboy. They very rapidly expanded the game to run on pretty much every current platform available, and then kept releasing updates and new versions across an ever expanding set of platforms incorporating more and newer Mechas, battlegrounds, and scenarios. One of the really smart twists to the game was the fact that they had a huge range of character Mechas because they weren’t too fussy about where a bot came from and signed licensing agreements with a bunch of different franchises. This crossover universe arraignment meant that you could fight a battle with a Mazinger Z, a Getter Robo and a Mobile Suit Gundam on one side, and a Evangelion or Rah Xephon Mecha on the other, pretty exciting stuff. It also meant that the legal agreements ran into so many issues once you tried to cross national borders and keep them in compliance with all of a given companies other licensing agreements that only 3 of the games were ever released outside of Japan, and then only on a limited number of platforms. So this anime series is a rare glimpse into that whole shared universe of battling Giant Robots that those of us here in the west never really got to experience.
On a related note, the Robotech: 2-Movie Collection includes the titles The Shadow Chronicles and Love Live Alive, one of which they claim has never been released. I have also seen reviews saying they took some footage out of an exiting Robotech property and added 15 minutes of new footage to it; since I have not seen it yet, I have no clue which claim is real and so can’t speak to whether this one is worth adding. Finally, I should mention that the first 5 seasons of Case Closed are being released as [S.A.V.E], or Super Amazing Value Editions, which allow you to pick up entire seasons for around $20. In fact you should just check out the whole list, there are a bunch of series you can pick up that way.
In honor of the Apple iStore’s 5th anniversary, a bunch of games and apps have become free for a limited amount of time. They haven’t made it official and posted them anywhere, but Kotaku figured it out, and Techtola has collected up the ones they could find and listed them on that page. There are a few real goodies newly made free, and as usual some turkeys thrown out in the hopes some folks will mistake quantity for quality. App Snatcher lists some of them as well, but seems to be running a bit slow (probably because of all the folks hitting the site), and includes a few the other sites have missed.