03.27.09
Posted in Personal, Videogames at 12:17 am by Jacobo Aragunde
I really love accumulating old (and not so old) gaming devices and games. Recently I got two distinguished members of the club of handheld game consoles 
. The first one is the well-known Game Boy Color:
A Game Boy in its original package, with some games. Great!
The second one is not so popular, but very interesting: it’s a GP32 BLU (in the photo, with my tablet to compare its sizes ):
This console was released in 2001, and it was very powerful in that moment: it featured a 133MHz ARM CPU, 10MB of RAM and a screen resolution of 320×240, quite impressive for a handheld device. But the most special feature is the possibility of developing your own programs with the SDK provided by the company and save them to SmartMedia Cards which were used as game cartridges; there were also a few commercial games, but not with an awesome quality. Anyway, their idea for game distribution was also interesting: some games were sold physically in their own cards, but some other were sold digitally via internet, to be downloaded and stored in your own card (obviously by a cheaper price 
). As you can see, they implemented digital distribution long time before the “boom” we live in.
The GP32 wasn’t a huge success, but it was enough popular among hackers for the company to launch another machine, the GP2X, fully based on linux.
By the way, does any of you have a SmartMedia Card? Now I need one of those old relics .
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11.28.08
Posted in Personal, Videogames at 12:46 am by Jacobo Aragunde
Last week I was installing the latest Ubuntu (8.10 so far, time flies…) in a computer, for a relative of mine. Once I had finished, I took a look into the gnome-app-install application to look for new programs, and I was happy to found Passage in the games section. I knew about this game about a year ago; sources are available in the web page, as well as binaries for Windows and MacOS X, but I hadn’t found a user-friendly way (I mean, packages ) to install it in GNU/Linux before.
Passage is a game about the flow of life and death. I think that it was born with the aim of demonstrating how a videogame can also be a work of art, in a classic way. Its graphics have the symbolism of a painting (built of huge pixels, of course), its gameplay has hidden meanings, just like poetry, and its crappy 8-bit music will stay in your head for ages. When the game ends and the screen fades off you stay for some seconds looking at that black screen, silent, shocked. I personally felt some kind of anxiety, and sadness.
I don’t want to reveal all the content of the game, so I recommend you to give it a try. A game lasts only five minutes, and installing it takes even less. After that, if you’re interested, you can read the creator’s statement to know everything he wanted to say in this game, and compare it with your ideas. Until I read it I couldn’t figure out why the punctuation system works as it does :S .
But at the end, I have noticed a curious contradiction: Passage is a game, but it isn’t fun. It’s all about feelings: you can play it once or twice, for some minutes, to try it and feel what it has to communicate. But, at the end, you won’t play it anymore. Don’t misunderstand me; it’s art, I have no doubt; but for me, Super Mario Bros. is also art for different reasons; and I still play with it every now and then .
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