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Articles by Brian Hirt
ELECTIONCUTED
Brian E Hirt · Follow 21 min read · -- Didn’t this last election feel a little…Odd to anyone else? Something was just not quite right, but can’t quite put your finger on it? This race should have been far tighter than it was. Didn’t it seem like there was an overwhelming wave of articles, opinion pieces all with a vague aura of deja moo bullshit? All variations on the same thing all moving in waves of the most recent controversy? We know the election system itself was secure…So what got hacked?
Carbon Capture & Pragmatic Progress
In the early 2000s, as climate change concerns intensified, a new hope emerged in the fight against rising carbon dioxide levels: Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This technology promised to revolutionize our approach to emissions, allowing for the continued use of fossil fuels while dramatically reducing their environmental impact. Two decades later, the landscape of CCS is markedly different from those early optimistic projections.
The Chessmaster 2000
The Good Chessmaster was the first computer chess game I ever played, and I was addicted from the start. Back in the days of Intel 8088's with 256K of RAM, Chessmaster was a good contender for an amature chess player like myself. This game had no bells and whistles like annoying music and overpowering sound effects. There was a single CGA screen with a top down view and good images of the pieces. The board was quite easy to focus on without being distracted by the other information displayed.
Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams
The Good For those of you that have been living in a submarine for the past years you should know that the Silent Hill series are the "serious" survival horror games, the ones big, brainy fellas like to point at as being the finest games around horror-wise. Hype notwithstanding, the original game had a lot going for it, and it's sequel is even more impressive. First of all the production values for the game are on a league of it's own.
Trevor Chan's Capitalism II
The Good A toy rather than a game, you can do just about anything business related--retail, manufacturing, r&d, media ownership, real estate and stock market speculation. You can be the CEO of a one-product firm or a huge conglomerate. The Bad In the interests of gameplay, I understand that total realism is impossible; however here are some gripes about unrealism in a few major areas: No taxes are paid by the company on its profits. Like this ever happens.
Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny
The Good Ever since switching to PC platform, I let Westwood be my guide towards the unforeseeable future. Basically, that summed up to real-time strategy genre. But being great as they are, main menu almost always featured some sneak peaks of their other titles, and so, Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny was spotted. Never being too keen on any type of role-playing games I was reluctant to give it a try at first, but the better side of me pleaded to give it a go.
Quake II (1997) - MobyGames
The Good Single player is nice, considering this was Id's first attempt to put a story in a game (Doom 3 just happens to be the second...). Although, by todays standards, the AI may look very weak, it was impressive at that time, and those Stroggs were just tough! The guns are the definitive FPS standards. In other words, almost every generic FPS will have equivalents to these ones. They cover the all of most simple and generic weaponry needs in a game of this type.
NHL 99 (1998) - MobyGames
The Good The attention to detail in reproducing the feel of network sports really floored me. Maybe I haven't been playing enough sports games in recent years, but the camera angles, wipes/fades/dissolves, occaisional stats that pop up, and the targeted announcer commentary were impressive. The basic controls were simple to figure out. You can play entire games with just button A for passing and button B for shooting.
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is completely different from Unreal: it is now mainly based on multiplayer, like Quake 3. At the beginning, you have to play classic deathmatch rounds. After you have successfully won some of them, a new game mode becomes available, domination. In domination there are about three or four different areas scattered around the map to be controlled by your team. For a certain amount of seconds you control one area, a point is added to your score.
Heart of Darkness
The Good Heart of Darkness is an excellent game, disregarding 3D accelerated graphics, complicated interfaces and all that mumbo-jumbo, Heart goes back to the basics and delivers a gaming experience based only on the ingenious and inventive machinations of these 2D gods that used to be Delphine soft. It truly is one of those cases when it's "so old, it's new" The story is inconsequential (which is unfortunate, see "the bad") but the gameplay is nothing but genius.
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