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foone
foone
@Foone 2 years, 5 months ago 2033 views

An interesting set of games that I've been vaguely interested in since I was a kid, after seeing one at a friend's house and never being able to find it again, was the BATTLES IN A DISTANT DESERT/BATTLES ON DISTANT PLANETS series.

 These are turn-based wargames for windows 3.x, sharing the same engine.
Battles in a Distant Desert is from 1992, and is based on the first Iraq war (Desert Storm)
and Battles on Distant Planets is from 1991, and takes place in SPACE!
I'm pretty sure this is the one I played as a kid.
They've got 3 options to play with:
* Player vs. Player
* Player vs. Computer
* Computer vs. Computer

So it's a 0-2 player game!
They also did a DOS strategy game called "STARDATE 2140.2: GALACTIC CONQUEST" in 1990, but it seems to be lost.
All the games share an experimental AI system based on neural networks.
There's also CRUSADE IN SPACE from 1993, which is on the internet archive but doesn't seem to work:
https://t.co/LsXXGlcxTD
There's WORLD WAR II BATTLES: NORMANDY from 1994, (which seems to be lost but I have some leads, so I'll keep looking), and finally LANDS OF SWORDS AND SORCERY, which was in development in 1995 but then halted so it could be revamped for Windows 95 (which never happened)
So those are the six shareware games from Glacier Edge:
Three we have, two missing, one incomplete and never released.
But who was Glacier Edge?
They were basically one person: Eric Dysband, of Glendale, CO. He was a freelance AI consultant working on a bunch of games.
He was a playtester on The Perfect General (1991) by White Wolf Productions.
and the lead developer on Enemy Nations (1996) by Windward Studios.
He programmed The War in Heaven (1999), a Christian FPS from Eternal Warriors/ValuSoft.
He was the AI programmer for NHRA Drag Racing 2 (2000)
His final game was Men of Valor (2004), a Medal of Valor spin-off game.
Sadly, he passed away on April 15, 2004, due to an aneurysm.
He also worked on the AI for Rebel Moon Revolution, which was supposed to be the third game in the Rebel Moon series, which was canceled before release.
There is footage from the demo version, showing the squad-based combat it was going to use.
It turns out the engine for War in Heaven is the same as Rebel Moon Revolution, too.
https://t.co/wbyeSOYZ0j
A correction: I misread what he was saying on Usenet, his games were trying to do AI WITHOUT a neural-network based approach.
He also made some commercial games under the Glacier Edge name:
PARACHUTES AT KANEV (1987) was a DOS wargame based on the Kanev board game, under contract for World Wide Wargames.
He also wrote a series of articles for Gamasutra on AI middleware:
https://t.co/i5lDxELoNb

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time to get back to "repairing" old computers


The funny thing about making the 8-bit-guy into a meme about "repairing" computers with powertools is that the obvious heightening joke would, like, the "8 rounds guy", who fixes computers with firearms

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The front folds down


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You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?
OK, so there's a physical problem with our eyes: We move them in short fast bursts called "saccades", right? very quick, synchronized movements.
The only problem is: they go all blurry and useless during this

having your vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes is obviously not a good idea, so our brains hide it from us. Now, imagine you're an engineer and you have this problem.

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if I just type "foone blah" now...

it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.


and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"


there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(
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So Sony has this format called Optical Disc Archive, right? It's a high-density storage cartridge, but it turns out it works by cheating.


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