On this page:

• About games and gaming
• My favourite games
• Games I've made

About games and gaming

Aside from being a gadgeteer, I'm also an enthusiastic video gamer, always have been, as long as I've had computers and video game consoles at hand. Which makes many many years... It's been interesting to follow the development of games and gaming, from the Sinclair Spectrum & Commodore 64 days, through the heyday of Amiga, through weany early PCs to current PC hardware monsters and through many video games console generations to the latest top-of-the-line consoles. It's been even more interesting, and especially fun, to play many many many different classic games throughout the years. It's still endless fun and I see no reason to stop playing games in the foreseeable future either.

These days I'm playing games pretty much on consoles only. I gave up (mostly, anyway :) PC/computer gaming ever since I got my first Playstation console, as I found that console gaming is so much more convenient and instantaneous compared to the endless installation, this'n'that driver version upgrades, display card etc.hassles and the mandatory hardware upgrades every couple of years that PC gaming is like. I'm not really missing PC gaming, consoles are much more fun anyway; "CD in, power on, play!". And most interesting games come out on consoles anyway, some even only on consoles, so content- wise I'm not missing anything either.

Currently I have two games consoles, the Sony Playstation2 and Microsoft Xbox. I'm still considering Nintendo GameCube as well, but haven't made up my mind yet; It would be cheap now, but Nintendo is traditionally the "kids' console" (much to Nintendo's dismay) while PS & Xbox are aimed at "more mature audiences" (uh, right... :). Xbox has the most powerful hardware, but hardware is not the problem for any of these consoles. The content is king (as always) and right now the content with the freshest ideas, innovations and sheer playability still seems to be on PS2, while GC also has some interesting title. Xbox has long seemed the weakest of the three; the first generation games are generally audio-visually very good, but lack any innovation, new ideas, playability, "execution excellence" (ahem, a consultantspeak term... :) or "soul", if you like. Good looking, but "peruskauraa", as we Finns like to say (good luck in finding that in any online Finnish-English dictionaries... ;). Well okay, "mediocre" might the word... In any case, Xbox Live and Live-enabled games have been a great improvement content-wise for the Xbox and these days I do actually tend to play more with Xbox than the PS2

Top

My favourite games

I have too many games to list them all here, but maybe my current top 3 on each of the platforms might interesting:

Playstation2:

1. Gran Turismo 3 - the ultimate in car driving fun! Still my favourite. I'm waiting for GT4 "like for the moon to rise" (as we say)
2. JakII - the top of the line platformer at the moment, excellent looks and playability.
3. Metal Gear Solid 2 - it blew my mind again (like the first MGS did)! But sadly now overshadowed by the likes of Splinter Cell.

Bubbling under: Prince of Persia, Burnout2, Rez, Deus Ex, GTA3, TimeSplitters2, Medal of Honour Frontline, Baldur's Gate etc.

Xbox:

1. Splinter Cell (original and Pandora Tomorrow)- a thinking man's action game. Excellent stuff. One of my all time favourites.
2. Halo - still the best FPS that Xbox has, FPS with an interesting story, great playability. But can't wait for Halo2...
3. Project Gotham Racing 2, the best racing game on Xbox currently, Fun by yourself, supreme fun in Xbox Live!

Bubbling under: Crimson Skies - High Road to Revenge, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, Metal Arms - Glitch in the system, Wolfenstein, Hitman2, Dead or Alive 3 etc.

Top

Games I've made

But hey, not only do I just play games, but during the many years of gaming I've even created a few games of my own. Most of them have been very simple and/or never finished (read: just programming technique experiments), but there's one shining example of my "game programming prowess" (if you can call it that).

Some historical background on this game first: while I was finishing my studies in 1994-95, I tended to have a lot of free time and a some of that time I spent at my school's "Mac lab" playing this game on the Macintosh. I was hooked. Then a new programming technology, called Java, appeared and I wanted to learn what this Java thingybob was all about. So, as my first ever Java (and object-oriented, which it really wasn't :) application, I decided to adapt my favourite Mac game into a Java applet to be played on the web! Again, a bit of forward-thinking on my part. :) Remember, it was 1995/96 and Java was at v0.9x and v1.0...

I can tell you that as my first ever Java application and first ever object-oriented application, the source code for this game is not a pretty sight, but hey, if it works... :) The really amazing thing about this game, or rather of the power of Java technology, is that this game has worked without modifications ever since on all the Java versions I've had installed on my computers. I even adapted this game with only minor UI modifications to the Nokia 9200-series Communicator. Cases like this really demonstrate the "write once, run anywhere/anytime" qualities of the Java technology, although the WORA aspect was also much over-hyped in the beginning. I guess you can't avoid over-hyping with any new technology...

But anyway, on with the show. Let me introduce you to the game of "Montana"! As mentioned, I've created the Montana game as a Java applet, as a Java application for Nokia Communicator 9200, as a PHP web application and now also as a mobile J2ME version!:)

So why don't you go ahead and give Montana a try either as the original Java version or the PHP version. You can read more about and see the screen shots of the mobile Java version of the game in the mobile section. If you have any comments about the game, let me know. :)

Of course, the PHP version is not as smooth as the applet, since the game page is reloaded after every click and depending on your connection speed it may take a while to display all the card images after a reload. But the point of this PHP version was to experiment with PHP and see how it works. It was actually surprisingly easy to create this game using PHP. It took me about 8 hours to create this app and it consists of about 700 lines of code (some of it just plain HTML).

Top