One of the better jobs out there

A new Assassin's Creed has just come out and this one is based in Paris at the time of the revolution, and one person's job working for Ubisoft was to delve through the historical archives to reconstruct Paris as it was at the time.

Et dans la mesure où rien ou presque ne persiste du Paris du 18e siècle, l'historien a dû tout reconstruire de zéro:

«[...] prendre des archives, des peintures, des gravures... C'était mon boulot. Leur montrer tout ce que nous avions en terme de culture visuelle. Pour être capable de le reconstuire.»

It ranks up there with whoever is in charge of making a trip to Slovenia from Slovakia or vice versa every months to exchange the mistakenly delivered mail.

This would make for a nice monthly business trip. pic.twitter.com/KNv8mrqGLK
— Dave MacLeod (@mithridates) 10 oktober 2014

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Hyrule Historia available in German in the Harvest

Hyrule Historia appears by us in the Harvest 2013 and will 29,95 euros cost!

The Legend of Zelda – Hyrule Historia erscheint bei uns im Herbst 2013 und wird € (D) 29,95 kosten.

Any Zelda fans that are learning German may want to get a copy of this.

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World of Warcraft to be released in Italian (language #11)

That's according to this article, which says:

L'italiano darà l'undicesima lingua supportata da World of Warcraft e la settima in Europa dopo inglese, tedesco, francese, spagnolo, russo, portoghese e brasiliano.

= Italian will be the eleventh language supported by World of Warcraft and the seventh in Europe, after English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese and Brazilian.

Not sure what "Portuguese and Brazilian" is.

There is a video to announce this:



Looking at the comments it seems that Italian users find the "il mio odio brucia nelle profondità cavernose" (my hatred burns in the cavernous depths) to be funny. No idea how awkward it sounds to an Italian native speaker.

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It's time to allow custom button remapping in all games

Edit: now with Estonian subtitles!

Today on /r/gaming on Reddit this video has been getting massively upvoted, and for good reason: it's a video made by askacapper, a quadriplegic gamer, who is gathering signatures for a petition to make custom button remapping the norm. Sometimes button configurations can be changed, other times only a few layouts are offered, and not every layout meshes well with everyone. Individual gamers may also prefer to change button layouts for whatever reason. He wants the video to be reuploaded as much as possible but instead of just doing that I also added captions, and rephrased it a bit in order to make it easy for both Google and people to translate. Here it is with the slightly modified captions, and don't forget that the cc button needs to be red to display them:



If you feel like translating it into your language, just copy and paste the following, translate the English parts, send it to me, and I'll do the rest.

1
00:00:00,001 -- 00:00:04,000
Hello, internets. My name's Chuck, I'm also known as askacapper, and I'm a quadriplegic gamer.

2
00:00:04,001 -- 00:00:06,500
And I need your help.

3
00:00:06,501 -- 00:00:09,000
I've been doing the custom button remapping petition,

4
00:00:09,001 -- 00:00:13,000
and for that I'm asking gaming developers, instead of just shipping their games,

5
00:00:13,001 -- 00:00:19,000
which nowadays have four, five presets to choose from in the button configurations,

6
00:00:19,001 -- 00:00:22,000
to allow custom button remapping.

7
00:00:22,001 -- 00:00:27,000
Which is the ability to change the button layout to your preference.

8
00:00:028,001 -- 00:00:31,000
This is important because, as a disabled gamer,

9
00:00:31,001 -- 00:00:36,000
some button layouts for games that I buy can't be changed,

10
00:00:36,001 -- 00:00:38,500
thus I can't use the layouts, and I can't play the game.

11
00:00:38,501 -- 00:00:40,000
And it's just not enjoyable.

12
00:00:40,001 -- 00:00:45,000
So it really would help every disabled gamer if this is a standard feature in all games.

13
00:00:45,001 -- 00:00:50,000
And it would really just help any gamer in general who just doesn't like the standard buttons.

14
00:00:51,001 -- 00:00:59,000
Here's a little clip of me playing. This is just an example of horrible aim.

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00:01:02,001 -- 00:01:10,500
People call me "only use me face" because that's how I roll (that's my method).

16
00:01:15,001 -- 00:01:19,000
I faceroll in real life.

17
00:01:21,001 -- 00:01:26,000
Here's what I will do: I will go to Pax East, the Penny Arcade Expo, in 30 days.

18
00:01:28,001 -- 00:01:32,000
I will go there, talk to all the developers in the place, explain the petition,

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00:01:32,001 -- 00:01:36,000
I will bring the petition to them, show it to them, show them your comments,

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00:01:36,001 -- 00:01:40,000
and I will explain the benefits to disabled gamers, and every gamer.

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00:01:40,001 -- 00:01:45,000
because most gamers at one point or another want to change the buttons.

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00:01:45,001 -- 00:01:52,000
So I have 24,000 - 25,000 signatures at the moment. Can we reach 30,000? Can we reach 40,000?

23
00:01:52,001 -- 00:01:56,000
Well, that depends on you guys, if you'd like to help.

24
00:01:56,001 -- 00:01:59,000
This also affects computer gamers. Garrett, a gamer in the UK,

25
00:01:59,001 -- 00:02:06,000
recently couldn't play Dead Space 2 because he couldn't remap the buttons.

26
00:02:06,001 -- 00:02:09,000
Even on a PC.

27
00:02:09,001 -- 00:02:12,000
And I will be talking to PC developers also.

28
00:02:12,001 -- 00:02:19,000
So to help you can download the video link below and upload it to your YouTube account,

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00:02:19,001 -- 00:02:23,000
you can post it on Facebook, show the links to the petition to people,

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00:02:23,001 -- 00:02:25,000
you can read the FAQ on my website to learn more,

31
00:02:25,001 -- 00:02:27,000
and we'll see how many signatures we can get.

32
00:02:27,001 -- 00:02:29,000
And remember, this will help every gamer.

33
00:02:29,001 -- 00:02:32,000
New gamers who are learning a game can pick up a control,

34
00:02:32,001 -- 00:02:35,000
and instead of you just telling them which button is jump and which button is shoot,

35
00:02:35,001 -- 00:02:38,000
you can ask them: what button do you prefer for jump, and for shoot?

36
00:02:38,001 -- 00:02:41,000
So that's why button remapping is simply a good idea for the video game industry,

37
00:02:41,001 -- 00:02:44,000
and for accessibility for disabled gamers.

38
00:02:44,001 -- 00:02:47,000
So thanks for your help, guys, I really appreciate it.

39
00:02:47,001 -- 00:02:50,000
It will really help everybody, and I thank you so much.

40
00:02:50,001 -- 00:02:55,000
So game on, gamers. Rock it.So game on, gamers. Rock it.

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FreeCol now available in Interlingua

Yesterday the UMI informed us on its Facebook page that the strategy game FreeCol (kind of like Civilization, but free) is now available in Interlingua and I've been trying it out. Translating a game like this is naturally an excellent idea, and a brilliant way to promote a language. It also happens to be available in a number of other languages as well, including (of course) Esperanto, Afrikaans, Estonian, Occitan, Persian, and many others. It seems that a language does not have to be completely translated in order to be available either, as Persian is only about half complete and untranslated parts simply appear in English...actually, according to this page Persian is only 17% translated, Interlingua is at 100%, Esperanto is at 93.53%, Afrikaans 97.5%, Ido is at 1.03%, and even Ancient Greek is at 26.7%. A translation into another IAL shouldn't be too hard, and Sambahsa comes to mind here.

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1983 and the predecessor to Rogue, Angband, Diablo, etc. etc.

Yesterday was a great day for me, because after years and years of wondering I finally found a game I used to play way back when on my ADAM computer, the first computer we ever owned. In case you've never seen the ADAM, it looks like this:



Oh yeah. Ours didn't even have a monitor as we hooked it up to the TV instead. The printer on the right also functions as a typewriter. Flip the switch one way and it's a word processor, flip it the other way and it prints out whatever you type, as you type it. You'll also notice that uses audio tapes instead of a disk drive, and loading something on those takes a few minutes, which feels like forever when you want to play a game. Rrr-rr-rr-rr-wheeeeeng-rr-rr-rr-rr-wheeeeng-rr-rr-rr is the sound it makes.

But then the game finally loads and now it's time to play. You can see the joystick there to the right of the keyboard.

Now, ADAM was made by Colecovision and every once in a while I would come across some of the old games it had while browsing online, but there was one game that I could never find, as I never paid much attention to the title while playing it even though it was awesome. It was a dungeon-based game similar to Rogue/Angband/Dungeon Hack etc. but different in that it was in real time instead of turn-based, so it could also be thought of as the predecessor to Diablo. Until yesterday all I had of it were fragments of memory, monsters such as garter snakes (the weakest) and asps (super fast and impossible to defeat) to treasures such as copper coffers and armour such as breast plate. The player starts out in a room and when you walk into a new room the map expands, while at the same time any monsters within the room also start to move and that can be deadly. As time goes on the monsters become harder and harder to defeat...

Searching through Google, going over lists of Colecovision games, nothing had ever worked. So yesterday I posted a plea to Reddit for any help in finding the game, and once again no luck. Taking matters into my own hands, I then carried out a massive search yesterday...and eventually an a fairly extensive list I came across a suspicious-looking title called Gateway to Apshai. I remembered the game starting with an A, but was that it?

It was!

And there are videos of it on YouTube as well. But first I'll show why I couldn't remember the title. The title screen looks like this:

I remember thinking of the word on the top in large font (EPYX) as being the title, but somehow remembered that the actual title started with a. In my memory until yesterday it was something like Akteris or Aptris or Axelis or something along those lines, just clear enough that I would recognize it upon seeing it again but too vague to properly remember alone.

And now to the game! Voilà.



Very, very addictive.

Yesterday I also found out why we never beat it:

Level 8 of the dungeon perpetually repeats until the player runs out of lives, ending the game.

Good to see that it wasn't our fault. This game needs to be remade.


Some of the other games for the computer we played at the time: Dragon's Lair, Zaxxon, Buck Rogers, 2010: The Text Adventure Game, The Dam Busters (pretty much impossible), WarGames, Smurf, Bump N Jump, Hard Hat Mac (level 2 always creeped me out for some reason), Pitfall, and many more. Gateway to Apshai though was the only one I simply couldn't remember.

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