Browse Author

Alexander Rehm

Alexander Rehm is a web designer, information architect and usability & accessibility auditor. He's currently working as a Director of Live Operations and has extensive experience of developing large-scale architecture and frameworks for online services, catering for millions of users concurrently. In his blog, Alex shares his musings on all things internet, usability, accessibility and gaming.

Ninja Gaiden meets Dark Souls – Say Hello to ‘Nioh’

The amazing people behind Ninja Gaiden have released a new gameplay trailer for their upcoming game Nioh.

Visually Nioh looks quite similar to Ninja Gaiden or Ominusha, which has always been quite nice. However, this time round gameplay is (very Souls-y) reliant on your stamina meter, ensuring that you keep a close watch on it as you plan your strike or dodge.

See for yourselves:

It does even have a bit of a Bloodborne feel to it, from a defense point of view, while at the same time following the aggressive play style of Dark Souls. Note that the UI and use of D-Pad also play homage to the Souls series.

It will be interesting to see how this game progresses over the next months, and how it’ll stand apart from the Souls series.

What a Day: Day of the Tentacle Remastered pre-orders open on GOG

Good times, the Remastered Edition of Day of the Tentacle is now available on gog.com, for a 10% discount!

day of the tentacle remastered edition - whatwasithinking.co.uk

Don’t know what this game is about?

Originally released by LucasArts in 1993 as a sequel to Ron Gilbert’s ground breaking Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle is a mind-bending, time travel, cartoon puzzle adventure game in which three unlikely friends work together to prevent an evil mutated purple tentacle from taking over the world! Now, over twenty years later, Day of the Tentacle is back in a remastered edition that features all new hand-drawn, high resolution artwork, with remastered audio, music and sound effects (which the original 90s marketing blurb described as ‘zany!’)

 

Watch the trailer:

Pre-order it now for 10% off!

After 19 years, MAME is finally Free and Open Source

19 years after its initial release, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) has completed its transition to a free and Open Source model.

Mame is free and open source

The development team behind it have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license.  As a result, over 90% (including core files) of files are now available under the 3-Clause BSD License, but the project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses.

The Division: pre-launch ‘Cinematic’ & ‘Gameplay’ TV Spots

Tom Clancy's The Division trailersSo tomorrow is the launch of The Division, the upcoming online open world third-person shooter role-playing video game developed by Ubisoft Massive, Red Storm Entertainment, Ubisoft Reflections and Ubisoft Annecy.

In anticipation of tomorrow’s launch, here are two amazing trailers released in the past days, to get you in the mood:

 

 

 

Are you looking forward to the game? I sure as Hell am 🙂

 

 

Good news everyone: Steam keys for existing Elite: Dangerous owners and Kickstarter backers!

elite dangerous on steam players will get a key

Remember this issue? Well, Frontier have finally responded to a ~ 270 page long thread on their forums about the Steam key issue. Community Manager Edward Lewis wrote:

Hi everyone,

Some breaking news for you:

We’ll soon be offering Steam keys to anyone who bought Elite: Dangerous from the EliteDangerous.com store who would like a key, and to anyone who buys the game from our store in the future.

We always appreciate it when you buy direct from our store because it means we can put more into supporting and developing Elite: Dangerous, but we know a number of long-time players and backers like to play through Steam and we think it’s fair everyone has that option, not just new players.

Elite: Dangerous runs on Frontier’s servers, so we’ve been working with Valve to give you a way to seamlessly connect your Steam and existing Frontier accounts in a way that’s easy. It’s coming soon. From May 28 you’ll be able to generate a Steam key from your account page, and we’ll have full instructions right here on the forums closer to the time.

The team really has been working hard on this one, and we’re all super happy to finally have an answer for you. Thanks for bearing with us and thanks for playing, as always.

Edit: This applies to Kickstarter backers, too.

Ed

Good news everyone! 😀

Elite: Dangerous arrives on Steam, another U-turn for Frontier

elite dangers on steam players won't get a key - whatwasithinking.co.uk

So, the kickstarter campaign-funded Elite: Dangerous has been out for a little while now, and people are enjoying it (Metacritic giving it a 80/100). I for one really enjoy it, though I admit I should be playing it more.

Anyway, Frontier Developments, the company behind it made a serious U-Turn during the developments of the game, changing it from offline-enabled (as originally planned for the release) to requiring an always-on connection (though, they have made decent strides towards only requiring a very limited connection to be able to play the game.

Now, what many hoped would just be an April Fool’s joke, Frontier’s latest space sim made it onto Steam, despite David Braben’s original comment that he doesn’t see a reason for ever going there. Not only that, right now it not possible to activate your already purchased version of Elite: Dangerous on Steam.

Obviously, fans are pissed. Some of them have spent a decent amount of money on Kickstarter or in the Elite: Dangerous shop to fund the game, and having executive producer Michael Brookes tell people that there is no plan to give existing players Steam keys has just added fuel to the fire.

Being a friend of Steam, and a backer of a number of kickstarter campaigns, having one central location for my games, with the same friends list and same game tracking and achievements display is a very nice convenience, and as a backer of the game I’d like to state, for the record, that I’d feel very much entitled to a key, seeing that I helped fund the game, or at least at a very (very) high discount.

Edit: Looks like the complaints and requests are gaining traction:


Let’s hope for the best…

Play over 2,000 retro games in your browser now!

over 2,000 free games are now playable in your browserYes, you read right, just over 2,000 amazing retro titles are now available to be played in your browser, courtesy of the Internet Archive. While it is still in beta (and has the occasional glitch) pretty much all of the games on offer are playable directly in your browser.

Why not browse around and play titles such as Metal Gear, Mega Man, Street Fighter 2, The Lion King, Wolfenstein 3D, Prince of Persia, Aladdin, The Bard’s Tale 2 or Sim City!

Click here to visit the Internet Archive’s Software Library.

Happy days 🙂

Unboxing of the New Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Edition (UK’s first!)

Yup, the first unboxing video of one of the very first (and very limited) New Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Editions!

Since this is my first unboxing video I’d like to ask you to cut me some slack during the video 😉

The New Nintendo 3DS will require a MicroSD SHDC memory card (see here for more information), so you may need to purchase a new card if you haven’t got one yet.