My Friend Ari has posted about an indie developed game called Fez.  Fez is developed by a Quebec group knows as Kokoromi, and received the 2008 Independent Games Festival Award for Excellence in Visual Art.  I’ll let the trailer here speak for itself.

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Two days ago, Full Sail Real World Education changed its name to Full Sail University.  I don’t know if this is anything more than a name change.  But it does sound much better.  My theory is that they want to resolve any ambiguity between the school and Full Sail Brewing.  The beer, I’m told is very good.  I’d say that the school and the brewery should combine forces, but that sort of thing is unlikely to get very far.

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Personally, I’m a fan of “updating” old games.  This is were a single fan or a team of fans take an older game and either port it to a new engine, making a completely new game, but with gameplay and graphics more befitting modern times, or more commonly replace the graphics in the existing game and bring them up to modern standards.  There are two that I would like to showcase for you.

First, Black Mesa Source, which going to be a complete re-working of the original Half-Life, but brought in to the source engine, which Half-Life 2 uses.  While they seem to be quite some distance from a release, what media they have release so far looks absolutely stunning, with production values rivaling commercial projects.  I hope to god this gets out sometime soon.  Half-Life was quite groundbreaking at the time, and the gameplay still holds up, seeingit brought back and re-invented has me excited.

Next up is a project I actually found by accident while farting around with Garry’s Mod.  Known as Fakefactory’s Cinematic Mod, this Half-life 2 mod replaces almost all the models, textures and environments from the original game with stunningly high-resolution ones.  Not for the faint of heart, this come with a warning attached about running this on a low-end machine.   The listed hardware requirements are pretty intense:

- DX9 capable graphics hardware with minimum 256 MB VRAM. (512 MB recommended)
- 3 GB RAM (4 GB recommended)

I’ve managed so far with 2GB of ram, but the load times are pretty long. What this guy has don in regards of improving the visual and auditory quality of the game is pretty astounding.  If you computer can handle it, I highly recommend it, though I have mixed feelings about the new Alyx and Mossman models.  I’ve put together some comparison screenshots after the break to further tempt you.  Be warned though, should you choose to download, it clocks in at over 5GB.

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This is what got me into computers in the first place!

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