Where have all the good Adventure Games gone?

The computer era of great adventure games is unfortunately gone. It would seem as if gamers have forever lost their interest in adventure games and the computer-games companies stubbornly refuse to produce anything that has a quality beyond the normal. What has changed during the past years and why are there no people out there to create any adventure games at all?

This question has been haunting my mind for a long time and I have not yet found a satisfactory answer to it. A computer game takes no doubt a lot of time, effort and skilled, as well as talented, people to produce. I am not sure whether adventure games have lost their popularity due to the fact that they are not being produced anymore, or whether they are not produced anymore because they are not popular enough to sell. Another possibility is that adventure games have lost their popularity because there are simply no good adventure authors out there any more, because lucasarts has in an inexplicable way stopped investing in them and no other companies seem to take the risk.

I believe that adventure games can become popular again provided some really good ones come out again. In the Amiga era the legendary Loom has written a history of its own. To me Loom is the unsurpassed Adventure game, a brilliant story through a brilliant gameplay, with enough beautiful graphics and the right portion of mystery and magic. Loom had everything that made a great adventure game, it was a fascination, it forced the gamer to think and solve riddles in a unique and mostly beautiful way.

Riddle solving and mystery are two very important elements of adventure games. However, an adventure game is much more than that. Otherwise it would be enough to create games of riddles, like "Notpron - The hardest riddle online". But notpron can really not be compared to adventure games because it lacks the magic, it lacks the beauty and the aesthetic, which is inevitably present through a story that has been well written from the literary point of view but which also allows the gamer to dive into a world of fantasy. Notpron is just a boring math.

First of all, the goal of the adventure game should be to make the gamer travel into a fantasy world. The more the gamer can identify with the hero and feel intensely the events and happenings of that imaginary world, the more successful the adventure game is. So it is about getting engrossed and be given the opportunity to escape from the real world into a fantasy one. That is the similarity that exists between good adventure games, good fantasy films like "Lord of The Rings" or "Matrix" and good literature. The difference between films, books and the adventure games is that in a game we are given the chance to actually act, to involve ourself directly with the story. This allows the gamer to identify more intensely with the hero and his surroundings. This makes the game more interesting since one is not a passive viewer or reader but an active person that becomes a living part of the adventure game and has the power to control it.

To create a successful adventure game is an art, by all means, and this might be the answer to the question "why it is so difficult to create a masterpiece of its kind that will touch the hearts and minds of many people".

"Lord of the Rings" has a plot that would make an incredible adventure game. Instead, when they produced a computer game they chose it to be a normal and quite dull action game. On the other hand, it would make little sense in producing it as an adventure game since the plot is already known. There would simply be no riddles to solve, no tension in finding out the end, and thus no point in playing the game. An action game also uses the same plot but the plot is no longer the most important element there, it rather becomes of a secondary importance.

I wish that the great era of adventure games will return. That the technological means that are nowdays available to programmers will be used in a tasteful way, along with the talents of writers and graphic artists to produce unique and breathtaking adventure games. Because art is there to uplift the human soul and even it might sound strange, an adventure game has the potential of using the virtues of many different arts in a single unit. Adventure games can become the entertainment of the future.

EDIT: I just found out through blogger



that another fellow blogger posted at exactly the same time as I did, a very intersting posting about adventure games.

Animal Test

Another funny test, here are my results:

You Are A: Frog!

Independent yet still part of a large community, frogs are unique creatures known for their distinctive sound and ability to hop. As a frog, you spend your days sitting on lily pads or climbing trees, searching for delicious insects to eat. While there are some frogs that aren't exactly cute, you are certainly not one of those!

You were almost a: Mouse or a Parakeet
You are least like a: Puppy or a LambCute Animal Test!

The Color Psychology Test

Now this is my idea of fun in a psychological test! You just pick colors! But I did not like the results. They must base this test on subconscious perception, otherwise I see no other explanations about how it would be reliable.

OK I did the test again and I think this time the results really apply to me so I will erase the old ones and place the new ones!

Viruswitch took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Preoccupied with things of an intensely exciting n..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

What men say in their sleep

What men say in their sleep. Very funny.

Personality Tests

I took this personality disorder test last night. The results are rather weird:

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Disorder:	Moderate
Schizoid Disorder:	High
Schizotypal Disorder:	Moderate
Antisocial Disorder:	Low
Borderline Disorder:	Low
Histrionic Disorder:	Low
Narcissistic Disorder:	Low
Avoidant Disorder:	High
Dependent Disorder:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	Moderate
-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! -- -- Personality Disorders --

Schizoid is the opposite of Avoidant. So this result is weird!

Here is another test which was not that fun because the results do not seem interesting psychologically:

I'm a O80-C35-E31-A10-N37 Big Five!!

Mobile Phone Virus mystery solved

A few days ago, I thought I might have been sent a mobile phone virus in an mms. Today I got again another mms from the same number and I decided I have to solve this mystery now. I did not want to solve it the dangerous way (to download the mms) so I called Vodafone and told them about this MMS. They said that this number belongs to Vodafone and that these are Vodafone advertisements in MMS!

Now I wonder whether it costs anything to download these mms, which would be rediculous to pay for almost spam. Should I call them again?

F-Secure Blacklight :: Yes!

I would like to publish here my responce to a post I found about Blacklight in another blog. I think I am a bit of an F-secure fan without even ever having used the actual antivirus or suite. I want to try it out though. I had kaspersky for a year, now I have the antivir premium version and the next one I might try is f-secure, just to gather experiences. One year testing each program is fine :)). That post refered to the suite which is not something I would never consider getting since I love Kerio Firewall. But the antivirus would be interesting.

My first reply to this post is here:

Blacklight cannot be compared to a firewall! It is a rootkit detector! It detects rootkits and ONLY rootkits. It will not detect viruses, troyans, spyware or any other malware.

Security should be based on prevention and prevention can only work if people stop surfing in suspicious websites. Prevention will work only if people stop clicking on anything that is animated and colorful on their screen. It is natural that people will get infected if they go after porno sites, cheats, casino stuff and download programs which they have not doubled checked whether they are trustworthy. People get infected only because they are not security aware and not because there is a conspiracy behind this. They just dont care.

It is not true that there are no good firewalls. Kerio Firewall is an excellent and extremely powerful firewall. It can be unistalled perfectly ok without any problems.

You simply cannot handle your operating system in a correct way. These problems do not arise unless you have really messed up your system. And who knows what else you have done with it.

Blacklight is a great program, the best rootkit revealer out there.

Second reply:

Blacklight is big because it was one of the first and few programs to detect rootkits. Rootkits are a not so common threat but a real one, which might develop into the future nightmare of IT security. I have seen rootkits in action. Rootkits can hide malware from the operating system completely and thus from antivirus software. They can install more malware which will remain invisible and take control of a system. Rootkits are dangerous and thats for sure.

I am not talking about you personally since I do not know you. But people in general get infected due to reckless surfing, due to an internet behaviour, which is not within the limits of reason because these people either do not have the necessary education on security or do not wish to accept it.

It has been 2 years since I last got a piece of malware (which did not even activate itself) and that was because I deliberately surfed in suspicious site. Apart from that nothing comes through the fortress of my pc. Why? Due to my antivirus? No. I even consider antivirus and firewall unnecessary if the pc is patched, windows and browser settings correctly set and one knows that the sites one visits are trustworthy.

I am not sure why they did not respond to your email. I also despise bad support. However, they always reply my emails when I sent feedback and problems related to blacklight and viruses.

You do not need to be a novice computer user to mess up your pc. It can happen to anyone, a small incompatibility between two running programs, errors from wrongly installed drivers, remains of registry keys, running processes or temp files etc from long erased programs can all lead to a great destruction. Sometimes the reason cannot even be identified. Windows is just windows.

War against Spammers

I feel like hunting down some spammers tonight. I got a few emails today and the previous days from greek spammers. Somehow I dont mind foreign spammers because they simply dont have my email :P. But I have a greek domain which was used by another person previously and that person was not able to protect this domain from spammers. Now I have to put up with these spam emails. But I am going to report them to their providers. I declare war!

I think I got the Commwarrior worm

A few days ago, at dawn and after of only a couple of hours of sleep.. my phone rings. I wake up and check the phone half-asleep. A message! "What kind of an ill person sends me a message at 6.38am?" I thought to myself. I opened the message and I realised that it was a multimedia message (MMs) which I would have to download if I wanted to receive. By principle I do not use MMS, I believe it is just another way of the mobile phone companies to make a lot of money, so I have not activated GPRS in my phone. "No, thanks!" I angrily thought again and went to sleep again.

But I was alerted. I considered this to be another inexplicable mobile phone phenomenon, because nobody sends me MMS. The few people who have tried to do so, I explained them that I do not use MMS. It has happened before that I get in weird hours such multimedia messages and I have dismissed them as another spam effort of mobile phone frauds but this is another issue.

Then last night, a "eureka event" occured to me! I had forgotten all about this mms and I downloaded from the F-Secure Weblog a speech of the director who lectured on mobile phone viruses. This guy seems very knowledgable and I got engrossed in this fascinating security speech. At some point he started describing the various mobile phone viruses, the way they function and why people get infected. Well what do you know? There is a virus worm called Commwarrior that sends itself to other phones through an MMS ONLY during the night until 7am. At 7-8 am it deletes all logs from the phone to erase proofs to its activity. Now this is amazing, I believe someone sent me the Commwarrior and I am now thinking of activating gprs and downloading it :)). I would have to delete all people from my phonebook though, because I wouldnt want it spreading to others. During the day it infects other phones via bluetooth.

If you want to listen to this fascinating speech about mobile phone viruses visit this page.

"Internet Forums are a very dangerous constitution"

... claimed the judges of the Hamburg court (Landesgericht). This is about a well known german information technology news portal (Heise.de) and a court dispute that arose from the posts in their forum. So far administrators of forums were responsible for the content of the forum messages only if they had knowledge of them. And they were not obliged to read every single posting of the forum (which sums up to 200.000 postings a month!).

According to heise news the judges decided that now administrators of forums are obliged to check every single post before it gets published and then aprove it. They decided that internet forums are a very dangerous constitution and those who run such "sources of danger" could be arrested!

Aparently this decision has not yet become a law in germany but it is on its way of becoming one.

I believe that this verdict is not only outrageous, illogical and unpractical but mostly dictatorial!

Most forums on the internet are non-profitable, run and moderated by a couple of people who dedicate their spare time to them. Naturally, it is impossible for them to moderate and check 200.000 posts a month! If an offensive post is found and reported to the administrators a simple deletion of it should be enough! What the judges suggest is to have all messages on a waiting list to be aproved. THat would mean that real-time posting would not be possible anymore, admins would have to spent countless hours reading messages and approving them. In that case the approvals would take a tremendous amount of time, the postings would not be current any more, news could not be discussed, the freedom of speech would be eliminated, forums would simply be uninteresting and eventually die. The judges suggested that the administrators of forums should have enough people to run them, that would mean that if a forum should function in an almost real-time mode, there have to be enough people employed to read and approve the messages. In 200.000 posts a month, there are 6.666 posts in 24 hours and how many moderators would be necessary for this? This is simply illogical because support forums that deal with open source matters for example do not have the funds to hire so many people! I also do not think that any serious company would ever invest on a forum if it would cost such tremendous amount of money to maintain it!

The judges that came to these conclusions are greately ignorant of the internet culture, of the purpose of internet, of the society of free information, of the open source community.

Forums are the very soul of the internet, without them the internet dies. Without them the developement of technology is going to reduce dramatically and almost cease. Without forums there can be no immediate reporting of bugs, no discussions on how to eliminate them, no new ideas flowing around, no creative minds to grap them, transform them and develope them. Without forums there will be no innovating technologies developing faster and faster all the time, no co-operation among numerous researches from all over the world, no access on free information and discussions on technological matters. These judges simply ignore the nature of the internet. People who abuse forums to insult individuals and companies in any way should be made responsible for. Why make the administrators responsible for the wrong doings of others and kill the entire forum culture?

The sure thing is that even if this law comes to pass, forums will continue to function maybe illegally, maybe in servers of developing countries. Maybe they will transform into underground societies, password protected where only an elite of white-hat hackers have access to. The sure thing is that what is by nature just and right will continue to exist until such illogical laws collapse under the weight of their own inaccuracy.

And for god's sake, to call all forums of the world a dangerous constitution is simply an insult. Forums have offered way much more to the world than they have done harm.

How does a virus analyst feel?

I wonder how a virus analyst feels. He exists because viruses exist. He loves to combat viruses and is there to crack them. He combats a threat, without which, he would not exist. Isn't that tricky?

How can you try to eliminate something when its own destruction means your own end (as a profession)? Isnt that as if you are fighting with yourself? Of course practically this is not possible, since viruses will keep existing. But isn't that still kinda weird?

I am just trying to decide whether I love viruses or hate viruses. But then again Doctors also deal with illnesses all the time, the police force deals with crime. The fact that one occupies himself constantly with something negative, does not make him one with the subject. Or is that why psychologists look like mentally unstable persons, policemen like criminals and virus analysts like hackers :))!?? LOL

NVU html editor disappoints

I have been using dreamweaver by Macromedia as an html editor and have been very happy about it actually. However, I sensed a certain resentment towards it by css enthousiasts. NVU is a freeware html editor, unlike Dreamweaver and is being praised as a better alternative. I used it but got very disappointed because it is unable to handle greek characters. It automatically translates them into entities which makes the editing of the source code entirely impossible. I posted in their support forum a while ago but received no reply about this problem. Also it just creates very strange piece of code with html tags I have never seen before. Maybe a side-effect of the greek entities? The code it produced was not compatible with the webstandards and it did not validate. Dreaweaver on the other hand did validate.

Look2Me Removal Tool

F-Secure developed a new, very useful removal tool for the nasty spyware Look2Me. The most annoying part of this spyware, besides that is invades our privacy, is that it will not allow security tools to start, such as Blacklight and Escan. More info and download in the F-Secure Site.

Gmail Problem with the outgoing email account in Thunderbird

For the past few days I was receiving emails from my friends in a totally different email than the one I was using to send from. I am using Thunderbird with 9 different email accounts. One of the problems of Thunderbird is that it can use only one smtp server for all your email accounts. That means that if you wish to hide your smtp server or use a different one for each account, you simply cant. A clever person can then guess that your smtp includes clues from your "real" email adress and there goes your anonymity. Anyway. The smtp trick is another thing, but to simply show as an outgoing email account one I am not even using? That was a riddle. The riddle was solved in the Mozilla Forums where they told me that if you used a google email smtp then "GMail has an anti-spoofing mechanism in place that replaces your sending address with your GMail address".

:o! Never again use Gmail SMTP in Thunderbird!

Comedy Blog

This is a hilarious blog. When I first saw it I thought this guy was actually serious but after reading it I saw that it's a very funny comedy.

http://cyberpoirot.blogspot.com/

Cyberpoirot or the adventures of an online detective.