The Download Munkey : Tracking the Treasure Down …

Just a few weeks into 2008 and gamers have been blessed with not one but two lists of 100 +quality freeware games, the first originally compiled in Games for Windows magazine and currently available at 1Up.com and the other made by a industrious gnome. The Games for Windows version does stretch the definition of freeware quite a bit though by including some games that are apparently only demos – oh well as long as they’re good and free

On closer inspection, some of the games on both lists do look slighly similar attesting to the fact that great minds do think alike – or probably one of them hasn’t been doing his/her homework

Some of my personal picks from the two lists. Haven’t got time to take screenshots of everything when there’s so many games in the two lists to play with, so I’ve elected to use official screenshots from the game developers where possible

Games for Windows List

© Wolfire Software

Lugaru (Action Trip – Page 2) – Weird game featuring talking rabbits and kung-fu action. You’ll need to go through the tutorial to get the most of this demo though.

Gate 88 (Armchair Strategy – Page 6) – An unlikely mix of space shooter and base-building strategy. See those weird shapes? That’s my base

© Digipen

Toblo (Action Trip – Page 2) – Physics-based Capture The Flag game done as a project by five students at DigiPen Institute of Technology.

Gnome’s List

Dwarf Fortress (Unique weirdlings) – Actually known as Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, it’s a RPGish Dwarven society simulation complete with ASCII graphics. Wrote about it in March last year here.

© CrossCut Games

RuneSword II (Role Playing Games of the SFW kind) – A commercial project turned open-source, RuneSword II is a fun old-skool style RPG by CrossCut Games.

© The Battle for Wesnoth

Battle For Wesnoth (Strategy Games of all kinds) – A turn-based fantasy strategy game reminiscent of the classic Warlords II.

If 100 plus games aren’t enough, there’re always the excellent JayIsGames and PlayThisThing for quality flash/casual and indie games recommendations respectively, or my humble flash and game downloads archives

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Vantage Master Online
Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress
DoomRL 0.985
Be the Bad Guys of A Shoot Em’ Up in Space Aggressor

© Success Corporation

Operation Darkness is an turn-based tactical RPG game published by Success Corporation for the Xbox 360. The player’s conventional Allied troops are opposed by sinister Nazi forces which include alternative WWII history’s favourite fantasy Nazi conspirators – vampires and zombies Below’s a selection of the twelve available.

© Success Corporation

While some the Allied characters on the wallpapers are quite nicely illustrated especially Jack The Ripper & Eliza Van Helsing , it’s a pity there aren’t more wallpapers of the Nazi forces from this game because they’re definitely more interesting, like the Waffen SS duo of Carmillia & the vampiric Alexander Valdo below …

© Success Corporation

Mmmm, a wallpaper of a Nazi zombie would be nice …

© Success Corporation

Or a Waffen SS Panzer Daemon (seems that it’s hard not to compare every character design with the German WWII Stahlhelm helmet and glowing red eyes with the troopers in Jin-Roh) seen in the high resolution gameplay trailer (106 MB) downloadable from the official Japanese site and as concept art (further below) in the character profile section. (30 character profiles in total with accompanying concept art and description in Japanese).

© Success Corporation

The settings of this game reminds me of Sega’s upcoming Valkyrie of the Battlefield game, similiarly set around the time of World War II but with a unique rendering style that is sure to make it stand out from the crowd. More on Valkyrie of the Battlefield in the near future

Download wallpapers and trailers from the official Japanese site of Operation Darkness.

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SNK Playmore Wallpapers (King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, Metal Slug)

Japanese CG artist, Kyoshi Harada, has updated his Polygon Model website with 4 new 1280×960 wallpapers of WWII war machines.

© Kyoshi Harada

The first wallpaper depicts a submarine of the Imperial Japanese Navy Sen Toku I-400 class, the largest submarines of WWII. Read in the book Codename : Downfall (Thomas B. Allen & Norman Polman) that the Japanese actually intended to use these massive submarine carriers to launch their internally-carried floatplanes on one-way kamikaze missions to disperse plague-infected fleas over California & other cities on the American west coast under Operation Cherry Blossoms At Night (page 257).

© Kyoshi Harada

The second wallpaper is of the ‘workhorse’ of the German Army in WWII, the Panzerkampfwagen IV (PzKpfw IV) tank. The tank in this wallpaper is the earlier Ausf D/E/F1 variant with the short 75mm KwK L/24 cannon for infantry support.

© Kyoshi Harada

The third is a cutaway model of the Type 3 Chi-Nu medium tank of the Imperial Japanese Army. It’s rare to find high resolution 3D renders of Japanese WWII armor on the .Net and even rarer to see high-quality cutaway models like this:)

© Kyoshi Harada

The last wallpaper is another cutaway model of the radical-looking Kyushu J7W1 Shinden interceptor. The devastating armament of four nose-mounted Type 5 30mm cannon can be seen clearly in the render.

Download these wallpapers @ Kyoshi Harada’s Polygon Model website. Do note that the past wallpapers are not archived at Polygon Model and will disappear permanently from the site once they are replaced by newer wallpapers.

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I’ve been searching for good freeware hex editors as my current work requires viewing and manipulation of binary files. My thumbdrive also screwed up recently, so I resorted to using a hex editor to read and recover some of the text stored on it.

Here’s two of the better ones (freeware) I found on the .NET below.

HxD 1.6.1.0 by Mael Horz.

© Mael Horz

This hex editor has a simple uncluttered user interface. It loads large files very quickly and I especially like the file truncation operation where you can truncate bytes by selecting and pressing the Delete key. It also has a handy feature to generate checksums for the currently opened file for a variety of algorithms like MD5, CRC32 and SHA-1.

It’s also able to read the memory of currently running applications or the actual physical disks (like my thumbdrive). The memory reading feature is definitely useful for reverse engineers

Hexplorer 2.5 by Marcin Dudek.

© Marcin Dudek

A open source hex editor released under the GNU GPL. Features like viewing of the PE file header and a built disassembler will definitely interest both coders and reverse engineers. Also includes data analysis features like finding byte patterns and data manipulation operations like XORing and byte swapping and flipping. A macro facility is also provided. The only complaint I have is that loading of large files is slightly slow.

At a glance:

HxD

• Clean interface
• File splitting, joining and truncation features
• Load large files quickly

Hexplorer

• Coder/reverse engineering features
• Data manipulation Operations
• Extra tools for editing executable files

I currently use Hexplorer for editing executable files (patching, etc) and HxD for editing binary data files like bitmaps, etc. If I have to keep only one, HxD would be my choice for its ease of use.

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Fravia.org – Web Searching & Reverse Engineering Knowledgebase

Well, breakdancing is still a form of art, no? I will be adding the occassional music and dance posts to Art Friday from today onwards, since it’s sometimes hard to find the time to write, select the artworks and obtain artists’ permission to post cool illustrations up here every week

© Elephant Eye Films

Planet B-Boy is an upcoming feature-length documentary by Elephant Eye Films on the unique dance artform known as breakdancing. I love watching breakdancing since it’s one of the most visual application of physics that I have seen

© Elephant Eye Films

Some shots from the intro trailer released a few weeks back at Apple Trailers. (direct link (4.9 MB))

© Elephant Eye Films

More shots from another trailer posted at SpikeTV displaying some mad skillz by dancers around the world – on the streets in Osaka and commuter trains of Seoul to picturesque locations in view of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the glitzy neon lights of Las Vegas.

There was another film, Stomp The Yard, released last year which featured krumping, a dance style quite similiar to breakdancing. There’s some slick dance moves in there, so watch the video on YouTube or better still download the HD trailer from Apple Trailers

Finally, here’s the the music video that started my fascination with breakdancing – Jason Nevins vs Run DMC – It’s Like That (That’s Just The Way Life Is) (Wikipedia) featuring a awesome battle (plus nifty synchronized moves) between two rival breakdancing crews which you can view at YouTube.

Visit the official site of Planet B-Boy for more information.

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