Thomil's Random Ramblings

How the hell am I even supposed to start? I didn’t even have VR on my tech radar for the foreseeable future, despite the insistence of a VR-converted friend of mine. It had simply not been on my private tech roadmap due to budgetary restrictions. I also don’t have the necessary high performance gaming PC to use it with, and none of the standalone headsets really piqued my interest. But, as things so often go, an opportunity to dip my toes into that topic almost literally dropped into my lap. You see, my current employer usually sends out a gift package containing a few goodies in the run-up to our worldwide kick-off event in January. Normally, it’s just a bit of swag but this time, among company branded socks and a t-shirt, came something else. I found out about it when my Instagram stories suddenly lit up with pictures of VR headsets. My own package took a bit longer because UPS has become mostly useless over the last couple of years but finally, on the Monday before Christmas, the pa...

Well, after a three-year hiatus, it’s finally time to return to my Slim Gaming series, where I review games from the viewpoint of running them on a weaker machine. I have long since sold my trusty old MacBook Air, and am now running a pretty decent 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, however this still isn’t much of a gaming machine, especially when it comes to running all-time favourites of mine, such as Cities Skylines. It does however run a number of other gems, and in this article, I’ll be taking a look at one of my current favourites:  Airport CEO Now, as I’ve stated a few times on this blog, I’m a plane nut. Some people also say I’m plain nuts, but I’ll leave that to you to decide. Anyway, I’ve had jet fuel running through my veins ever since I was a little boy, and while aircraft of all shapes and sizes are certainly interesting, I’ve always found airports as such much more fascinating. I’ve lost count of how many hours I spent at numerous airports of all shapes and sizes, from...

Ahh, Transport Tycoon. No other game has been installed on so many of my computers. Starting from my dad’s old desktop, through my first notebook, a venerable IBM (Yes, IBM, not Lenovo!) Thinkpad 755CD, a number of Toshiba and Dell notebooks, all the way to my Eee Pad Slider, and my current MacBook Air. While planning the first few instalments of this series, I had originally planned to exclude Transport Tycoon on account of its age. It was, after all, first published in 1994, just months after my family had left Germany, and I originally wanted the series to focus on more current games. However, given the amount of time I’ve sunk, and continue to sink into this game, I decided it was only fair to include it. Railways are the mainstay of the game. From small branch lines like this...  ...to large mainlines with multiple branches, the only limits, are your creativity, your bank account, and the goodwill of the local authorities. The premise of the game is simple. Yo...

What better way to start off a series about computer games than with a game that sees you as the head of your very own development studio. Game Dev Tycoon’s premise is deceptively simple. You start out as a stereotypical bedroom (or in this case garage) programmer back in the 1980s, and the aim is to move from a one man operation to a studio that can rival the likes of Biohazard, Dice, and similar companies. You have full freedom to program games for whatever platform you want, you decide on the genre, the type, and assign priorities to different features during development. Sound simple, right? Well, like all good games, Game Dev Tycoon is difficult to learn, but hard to master. But let’s take it step by step. The developers of Game Dev Tycoon, Greenheart Games, originally developed this game for the Windows Store, back when Windows 8 was a thing. They expressly state on their website that they designed this game from the ground up as a single player simulation game, without ...