Arx Fatalis gets update and source release

Arx Fatalis is actually really rather a cool game. Think Ultima Underworld, fully jazzed up and with a nifty story full of surprising twists. I might produce a review of it at some later stage.

Arx isn’t a new game by any stretch of the imagination, being more than eight years old, and it had persistent performance issues except in the lower resolutions and on some specific hardware. Nevertheless, a patch (1.21) suddenly appeared which fixes all of that – although it actually maybe feels a little fast now.

Apparently it is the final patch for Arx Fatalis, but it is accompanied by the source-code under the GPL 3 (with a couple minor exceptions).

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Play it now – SpaceChem

Do you remember when I wrote about Gondola? Did you tragically lose a half a day to its rapacious mechanisms?

Well, I nearly didn’t get this piece about SpaceChem written. I didn’t want to stop playing long enough to write it. So be careful, it’ll eat a chunk of your day (or even days) and it’ll eat twenty bucks. You might also be afflicted with high levels of intellectual stimulation and fun. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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Owning the Playstation 3

Not too long ago, I had a big grumble about how modern consoles essentially weren’t owned by the purchasers – since the manufacturer could limit or change the capabilities of the devices more or less at will, alter the effective market value of the device in their sole discretion and so on. It was clear that ownership of the console continued to vest in the manufacturer, by the various legal tests for property.

The Playstation 3 was originally a much more open platform, allowing you the possibility of actually running your own software on it, but then Sony took that away, and asserted the rights of ownership when anyone attempted to open it back up.

Well, the Playstation 3 is now owned by users. Pretty much permanently.

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