About Johan Appelgren

Software developer and gaming nerd.

Gaming nostalgia

When I was a kid I used to play a lot of adventure games, the point-and-click variety. Like

  • Space Quest
  • The Secret of Monkey Island
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
  • Day of the Tentacle
  • Simon the Sorcerer
  • and many more..

Haven’t played that kind of games for quite some time now though, even though there has been some notable additions lately. The last one I played was The Dig I think, and it is not exactly new.

Anyways, after reading an article about the history of adventure games I felt like trying out some of them again. So I downloaded ScummVM, which lets you run old games based on LucasArts’ SCUMM on a modern computer, and pointed it to the data files for Beneath a Steel Sky and Day of the Tentacle. I must say that both games have ages very well. I’ve had plenty of fun playing through them, although I remember it taking a lot longer the first time through. Maybe it’s just because I still remember a lot of it?

Wonder what game I should try next. Something more modern that I haven’t played, like Grim Fandango, or even newer, like The Longest Journey. Playing through The Dig again would be fun too I think, it was so well done, with great art, story and music. At least, that is how I remember it. 🙂

OnOff service

<rant>
Yesterday I finally got my SE k750i back from service. I must say I’m not impressed by how OnOff, the store here in Sweden where I bought the phone, handled the whole thing.

About two months ago the camera application on my phone stopped working. After upgrading the software as recommeded by Sony-Ericsson’s support failed to correct the issue I dropped the phone off for service at store where I bought it. Contrary to what SE’s support had told me that the service would take a maximum of 15 days OnOff told me it could take up to 30 days, they have their own people doing the service I was told. That’s a long time to be without one’s new phone.

A month later I got a letter from OnOff that told me the service would not be done within the promised month, adding about 9 days to the service time. Fine, I thought and waited. This time, luckily, they had apparently guessed the amount of time needed correctly because a month and a week after I turned my phone in I was told it was repaired.

Unfortunatly things didn’t turn out so well after all, because about 15 minutes after I had picked the phone up I noticed it had no reception what so ever. Somehow during the service of the camera they had broken the antenna, how could they have missed that the phone was completely unusable as a phone after they had serviced it? Shouldn’t they at least try and turn the phone on as a test? It would hardly take much of their time. Anyways, I had to turn it in a second time, third actually since the first phone I got when I bought it didn’t work at all so I got a new one the day after I bought it. And now, two months later I got it back, and it seems like they have finally fixed it.

The conclusion is, if you are in Sweden, never buy anything from OnOff that could possibly break.
</rant>

origenxbox360.com

Looks like origenxbox360.com has opened and it is some kind of competition. Unfortunately I couldn’t tell fact from fiction so I failed to join in on all the fun. Don’t even know what the prize is, so maybe I’m not missing anything anyways.

Anyone want me to mail them from the site so I can try again? 😉

Oblivion article scans

This game is looking better and better for every new article I read. Hopefully it can live up to my expectations. But since I really loved Morrowind I can’t see how they can go wrong. The only thing that has me worried is that I’m probably going to get this game for the xbox360, and Morrowind on the Xboxh ad some pretty nasty bugs. Time will tell I guess.

Link

Xbox360 region locked

TeamXbox just reported that Microsoft has decided that the Xbox360 will be region locked both for games and playing dvd. I really hope that it isn’t true. Who in their right mind would by a dvd-player that is region locked? Can’t really understand the point of locking games to a specific region either.

I was hoping to replace my current dvd-player with the Xbox360, but I guess that it isn’t Microsofts goal to make the Xbox360 the media center of my living room.

PInvoke and QueryPathOfRegTypeLib

While writing a Nant task that resolves a type library guid and version to a path using QueryPathOfRegTypeLib via pinvoke I ran into a bit of trouble. When I used my task the tlbimp task complained that it wasn’t given a valid path. Apparently an extra ‘\0’-char is added to the end of the string returned by QueryPathOfRegTypeLib. I couldn’t figure out why it was added, don’t think there is anything wrong with the pinvoke declaration I got from from pinvoke.net, so for now I just strip the last character of the path in the task.

So now I can build my projects from scratch even if they require an interop assembly without hardcoding the path to the type library used.

Update: Just saw that the guy who wrote the signature on pinvoke.net wrote a small note about this after I asked him about it. Link.

Xbox 360 pricing

After some confusion it looks like the pricing for the xbox 360 has been confirmed. It was first leaked on LATimes and later confirmed on ign and GameSpot. LA Times requires registration so use BugMeNot if you don’t have an account.

Xbox 360 core system: $299
Xbox 360: $399

I seriously doubt anyone will buy the cheaper core system considering what you get at the higher price point. According to the price list on GameSpot just adding the harddrive to the core system will add up to the total price of the Xbox 360 $399 package.

Via EvilAvatar.

Update: Major Nelson has posted the same info but with some additonal pretty pictures of the peripherals and boxes. Nothing really new.