2024 November Retrospective

Where did November go? Honestly, I have absolutely no idea. It feels like I was writing up the October retrospective just a few days ago, and poof, gone like Houdini.

Half Life 2 - 20th Anniversary Update

While I am not a die hard Half Life fan, an anniversary update like this is still something worth talking about, especially when it comes bundled with a documentary.

The only Half Life that I played was the demo version of Opposing Force, which seems like a life-time ago now.

You can find and download the demo over here.

Impossible Creatures

Regular readers of this blog (are there any?) should already know that I am an avid RTS and ARPG fan, and I always pride myself with the fact that I am at least aware of most if not all games in the genre.

You can imagine my shock when I stumbled upon [Impossible Creatures][ic], which is an RTS ffrom the early 2000s loosely based on the The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells.

This makes me question if I might have missed more gems like this one?

At any rate, the demo can be found and downloaded over here. It gives you a taste of the campaign and the ability to play skirmish; which is more than enough to make a general idea about an RTS.

Cybernecropolis

It’s been slightly over a year now that Bram Moolenaar has passed away, and it got me thinking how GitHub inadvertently is going to morph into some strange cybernecropolis of sorts.

It’s quite surreal to see Bram’s final commit still there, sort of frozen in time, which reminded me of final commit of Jim Weirich, the author of Rake.

I feel like we got carried away at such high speed on the great information superhighway that we didn’t end up giving too much thought (if any?), about the foot prints being left behind.

The unknown sidelanes of the information superhighway

My google-fu remains pretty good still, despite the fact that Google seems to be doing everyting they can to prevent one from finding things, which is absolutely bonkers to me, given that search is supposed to be their bread and butter.

Even so, this month, I randomly stumbled upon wgld.org, which made me think that there must be a treasure trove of untapped collections of information out there that we’ll never find, due to not searching in the right language or simply because it’s too deep in the ranking hierarchy.

Maybe it’s hightime to restart and ressurect searchlores.org from the ashes.