Soccer, smile and good teasing

The soccer games like "Fifa World Cup", "Pro Evolution Soccer", just to say the most famous and many others of their kind that have done so much to challenge children of all ages. But not only, also have given more people more great moments of fun with friends, even challenging each other with well-organized tournaments. I have also personally challenged hundreds of times with various versions year after year were promptly sold. Pure carelessness is often characterized by teasing with their friends. For sure I will think of memorable matches, won or lost, with spectacular
goals, stupid mistakes or bugs really fun.

Holly & Benji (Captain Tsubasa) videogame

This weekend has been very long for me. I am home because of a little injury I had during the week playing soccer. Nothing serious, but my friends are mocking me about it, and I was mailing with one of them a video of an old cartoon I used to watch when young (well, all my generation did): in Europe it is known as Holly and Benji, the original manga title is Captain Tsubasa.

There are a lot of funny video in internet, because the cartoon broke the rule of physics and a whole generation has been affected. Time and space were two concepts that the cartoon designers did not take in consideration! Infinite flashbacks were typical in that cartoon and some of theme used to last for two or three episodes!!

Adventure games, rise and fall

I want to take opportunity of a very interesting article I read few days ago about the history of adventure games genre. We know, beetween 80s and 90s it was a great age for this genre.

Software houses like Sierra and Lucas Arts had great success thanks to epic masterpieces we loved so much. Reading the article I understood how this genre had to adapt to technology and usability, since, from the first attempts of text adventures, it was clear the necessity to make easy for the player interacting with carachter and environment.

But the success was not only due to the machine-human interaction mechanism. The great storyline behind titles such as Monkey Island or Gabriel Knight (just some example) with its comedy or its drama was really important too. However, the genre changed along the years, pushed off the main scen by FPS (First Person Shooter) before, and by casual games later.

Abandonware? points of views.

A couple of days ago I stumbled up on a very interesting article written some years ago about abandonware phenomenon. I know it's a bit annoying speaking about this topic because we did so many times in the past. I tried to recover some old discussions we had when Squakenet had a forum, and instead I found this Gamespot article by Marc Saltzman:

http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/abandonware/p2_04.html

I am posting just the page I would like to comment that does contain some interesting points of view of the persons that most should give opinions about abandonware: the game creators. Well, I do post that link also because unfortunately the whole document has some broken link from the first page.

Ten years of Squakenet

2011 just came, we are still drunk from the parties. First of all, happy new year to everybody. Today is another day off (thanks God!) and I am just realizing that this year we are going to celebrate 10 years of Squakenet! Time passed so fast indeed and our little portal survived along all these years. I would never imagine all this time spent togheter when first discover the word "abandonware".

I leave you having a look at Squakenet history, I published that memory some months ago, remembering the different steps we've followed in the last years. The first day the site went on as squakenet.com was November 1st 2001 and thanks to the great support all the game lovers (you guys!!) gave us since that first day we're still here.