Freeablo is that Diablo engine remake we've been wishing for, is currenly looking for contributors (and general ravings about Diablo. In fact, mostly that)

Freeablo engine in its early stages

Who doesn't love the original Diablo? When it was first released in 1996, this game set a notable landmark for making the RPG genre more accessible to a broader audience, while still keeping many gameplay aspects of classic Rogue-derived RPGs, that kept the game fresh and unique even after being completed several times. This bridge between classic and modern aspects combined with an incredible attention to detail, a uniquely crafted atmosphere that still gives me the creeps, and a gameplay pacing and length that is just the right balance between level progression and grinding, has helped making Diablo one of my all time favourite games. Well, that and Battlenet, of course, we can never forget how Diablo was one of the first to make it so easy to just go dungeon crawling with a couple of friends online.

There is, however, one thing that I don't like about Diablo. One thing that annoyed me all over these years of repeated runs and occasional multiplayer meetups. And that is how Blizzard itself decided to neglect its maintenance and compatibility completely and practically drop all active support for it, despite keeping the Battlenet servers online. Yes, you will have a tough time trying to buy a fresh copy of this game nowadays, because Blizzard cares so much about their legacy games they don't even sell 'em anymore in their official store. But even if there still are plenty of used copies available online for cheap, running the game on modern systems can be a whole a new quest, given that the last patch is dated from 2000, which means no performance maintenance, no improved graphics compatibility, in fact, not even additional screen resolutions, and certainly no stability updates whatsoever. 

The first Cathedral levels loaded and randomly generated in Freeablo

As a matter of fact, Blizzard has a whole tradition of being disrespectful to legacy fans. They refuse to let resellers touch their games (physical Diablo II and Starcraft copies still go by $25 nowadays, with no Steam or GOG versions in sight), they frequently discourage and hamper any type of mod support or mod attempts, other than whatever's produced under their little walled garden editor-type programs and, obviously, they never ever released the source code of any of their games, just to make sure us, the plebeian fans, would never touch their precious abandoned heritage with our filthy paws.

Luckily, this might just be about to change, with the coming of a bold, new engine remake project most aptly named Freeablo. This project aims to rebuild and expand upon the original Diablo engine, keeping it fully portable and compatible with modern systems, as well as making it adaptable and moddable for anyone willing to modify the game. All of this while still paying due respect to Blizzard and requiring the original game files in order to run the game. Now isn't this nice? 

As of the current 0.1 release, there is still much to be done, which is why the project is open to contributors of all sorts. Hopefully, with enough time and effort, we can all free Diablo one day from the clutches of proprietary software and greedy corporate execs who are still stuck in a 90s mentality on how to commercialize and support video games.

Code License: GPLv3
Assets License: Relies on original proprietary data files

Official Website
Source Code (Github)

DJ Hero 2

The Short

Pros
- Same strong gameplay with marked improvements
- UI is dramatically improved and the new clean menus are an improvement
- Much stronger soundtrack drawing from modern bands
- Two player DJing
- Ditches the Guitar Hero brand
- All songs start unlocked
- Overall graphical improvement for characters, backgrounds,  and...just about everything

Cons
- Still insistent on "mixes" in quickplay rather than single songs
- Difficulty spike from Medium to Hard is still high
- Wish there were more songs
- Can't import songs from DJ Hero into DJ Hero 2
- You can still sing and play guitar. For some reason.

Time to get back to "da club!"

The Long

DJ Hero was an interesting experiment where I felt the developers were too tethered (probably due to pressure from daddy Activision) to the Guitar Hero brand to really branch out and do something unique. DJ Hero 2 is the game that completely fixes all the problems present in DJ Hero, giving the series it's own fresh look along with some great new gameplay tweaks. It also, unfortunately, marked the end of the DJ Hero franchise, as both the first and second games sold horribly and are considered (along with the absurd oversautration of Guitar Hero) to have brought about the death of both the music game genre and the "let's buy plastic toy versions of real things to play video games with."

The one perk from this is that I was able to get DJ Hero 2 along with the wireless turntable for a measly $10 bucks from Toys R Us a few years back when they were clearing them out, which was the only way I would ever have paid money for this game. So, in the end, I guess it ended up ok. As long as you weren't the developers. Rough gig, that.

The new menus ditch the "street cred" stupid look for a clean, modern interface. 

I already reviewed DJ Hero so if you want background on how the game works, that's probably worth glancing over. What I will say is that there are a few minor gameplay specific differences between the two (that is, differences involving the actual highway of scratches, taps, and whatever else) that should probably be mentioned, and all are for the better.

The biggest improvement in that regard is the introduction of "freestyle" segments. Basically, in the first game you had a few rare instances were you could tap the red/middle button at your own choice to make the game yell obnoxious sound bites at you ("BOOYA!" "HERE WE GO AGAIN!") in some attempt to let you "freestyle." Now, however, that has been expanded in a fairly decent way. The red freestyle segments are back but replaced with actual sounds from the track, and the game gives you bonus points with how well on beat you tap them. In addition, segments allow you to slide the slider back and forth and actually pick how much of each mix plays at one time, again judging you based how well on beat your sliding is. In terms of point generation it's kind of just there, but it really makes you feel more like you're actually in control for parts of the song, rather than it being some ham-fisted addition.

Aside from that, the gameplay is virtually identical. You have scratches, directional scratches, slides, taps, that horrible 2x knob thing, and all the other stuff in addition to the rewind, the overdrive, and so on. One thing I will point out is the graphics actually do look HD in this one (unlike the kind of "low def" look of the highway in DJ Hero), and they slightly altered the colors to give more contrast to the notes, which is appreciated. Overall, it looks better, it plays better, and the songs are constructed better since they had one game to cut their teeth with and now they actually can put notes down in ways that are more fun.

The new UI is considerably better. 

In addition to that, the UI for how stars are displayed, overdrive is displayed, multipliers, etc. is all redone and done much better. Rather than the weird "light bulbs" for stars, now it's a filling vertical meter on the left which is very easy to read and the combo is much easier to just glance at. As a bonus (not in the screenshot), if you are online it'll show a leaderboard on the star ranking so you can aim to beat your friends or your past score, which is a cool touch (and something Harmonix borrowed for Rock Band Blitz's star interface). 

in addition, the menus are so incredibly improved it's like night and day. Gone is the awful "cover flow" view with bad art, replaced with an extremely clean white/black style interface that's super easy to read, navigate, and play through. Sorting options for songs are also improved, and songs better display what makes them difficult (number of slides, taps, etc.) before you play. 

The only downside is that it still doesn't have a "difficulty ranking" that is easy to read, like what Rock Band 2 nailed early on. As such, it's hard to know how hard a song is contrasted to another, even sorted by difficulty. Also, that jump from medium to hard is still astronomical, so be warned. 

It's about time we got some Deadmau5 in here

Speaking of songs, that is also a marked improvement. Rather than focus on weird mixes of classic rock with modern hip-hop, DJ Hero 2 goes all out with the majority of songs being mixes of modern bands (Daft Punk, Lady Gaga, and the aforementioned Deadmau5, who are my personal favorite out of that group) and even a few original works. The mix of Riding Dirty with Superman (Soulja Boy) is particularly fun, but lots of other great mixes and even straight up unmixed songs are there for you to play. 

To be fair, some of the appeal of DJ Hero's set is you usually knew at least one half of the mix (be it the classic side or the modern side), and with DJ Hero 2 if you aren't into club music the setlist is actually worse. However, these songs were made to be used with DJs (unlike whatever nonsense was used in DJ Hero), and even if you aren't familiar with the songs they translate much better to the gameplay overall.

The VS mode is actually kind of fun

The single player has a few marked improvements, including "battles" with popular DJs which basically are just playing segments better as you "mix off." This also translates into either a competitive (as in you play to do better in segments) or just basic vs mode (where you just play to get more stars), both of which are well done and added additions. The segment competitive mode is particularly good, where you switch off parts and whomever gets a better percentage gets a bar. First one to the top before the song ends (or who has the most when it does) wins. It's basic, but good.

I unfortunately don't have a second turntable so I can't say either way if playing against actual humans is fun (does anyone in the world in this day and age own two DJ Hero controllers still?), but based on the mechanics presented I'm going to say it would probably be enjoyable if you both already have fun with the game.

Nice glasses, NERD. 

As a final thing that should be mentioned on the graphical front: the DJs look phenomenally better. Again, pulling away from that "plastic nightmare toy" look that Guitar Hero loved for some reason, now DJs still look cartoony but not scary. As a bonus, on the Xbox version you can use your Avatar to spin some discs, leading to a hilariously dis-proportioned monster with a massive head and hands leading a club of somewhat normal looking people. I highly suggest doing this. It's pure stupidity.

DJ Hero 2 keeps the solid, dexterous, challenging gameplay from DJ Hero and cleans up the interface by with you interact with it, all while tossing in a handful of much better songs. It's a downright shame you can't import DJ Hero's tracklist into DJ Hero 2's interface like you can with the later Guitar Hero games (and all the Rock Band games), but considering how badly both games sold it's not a huge surprise that it wasn't offered. DJ Hero 2's greatness was, unfortunatly, completely overlooked as most people had decided the games were garbage after not buying any copies of DJ Hero, making this sequel seem like one of those games that was already developed before sales figures for #1 actually showed nobody cared.

Regardless, I'm glad it exists, if only because 1. Now I can use this stupid turntable for two games and 2. DJ Hero 2 is actually a lot of fun. If you have a thing for hard music games that require complex, quick responses (such as Rock Band Blitz) and can pick it and a turntable up for a low price (say...under $20), I'd say it's absolutely worth checking out. It's a damn shame Guitar Hero kept going long after it's prime (and after Rock Band thoroughly destroyed it with Rock Band 2 and 3) while DJ Hero got thrown to the dogs, as I'm convinced that DJ Hero was the superior music series from Activision. Oh well. 

Four out of five stars. 

DJ Hero 2. For all your thug life cat's needs. 

DJ Hero

The Short

Pros
- Unique music game experience (mostly)
- DJ Turntable is actually quite fun to use and fairly intuitive
- Difficulty range means anyone from noobs to pros can have a challenge
- Lots of songs of...interesting mixs
- Considering what they were working with, they pulled of something surprisingly good
- Can play with both a guitar and a mic
- Music actually alters based on how you are playing the mix

Cons
- Mixes are really weird, mostly older songs (Jackson5) mixed with modern stuff (50 Cent?)
- UI is taken straight from Guitar Hero World Tour. This is not a pro.
- Feels a little too stapled to the Guitar Hero name to really be it's own thing
- Menu UI/mix selection is atrocious
- Have to unlock songs. Like...no.
- Can't have two DJs spinning at once
- No Deadmau5? All the Daft Punk are remixes? No dubstep remixes? What?
- Difficulty jump from Medium to Hard is much too large
- Thing cost like $150 when it came out for the game and controller (which was corded).
- Character designs for the DJS are downright horrific, because they look like Guitar Hero

I ain't DAFT, this game's got PUNK. ...no, I don't know what that means either. 

The Long

Yeah, so I'm reviewing DJ Hero in 2014. Sue me.

For a bit of history for those of you oblivious to the big music game explosion of last gen, basically Guitar Hero(made by Harmonix) showed up on the PS2 and made a bit of a scene. People were buying giant plastic Fisher Price guitars and pretending to be rock stars in their living room (myself included), and everybody was having a great time. Activision (also known as "Anti-fun") quickly snatched up Guitar Hero without Harmonix, making Guitar Hero III and focusing heavily on using the name of the franchise to push sales (much like what they do with Call of Duty even to this day). Harmonix, on the other hand, went off to make Rock Band, making more toys including drums, mics, and...well, just those. Activision, who didn't have a creative brain cell in its bureaucratic body, copied the idea wholesale with Guitar Hero: World Tour and, in an attempt to outdo Harmonix, pumped out a hot new music game, that used it's own plastic thingy and was totally unique.

This was DJ Hero. And despite all signs pointing against it, this game doesn't suck.

Hello ladies, let's get mixin. 

DJ Hero borrows a lot from Guitar Hero. In so much that they put "GUITAR HERO" on the box, in the opening credits, and wholesale lifted the UI for the star ranking, points, and star power from it. I'm only going to mention this once because I don't want to go back to it: the fact that it's weirdly tethered to Guitar Hero during the point in time when Guitar Hero was easily at it's worst is one of the biggest things bringing this game down. The UI from World Tour is pretty atrocious (they fixed it in Guitar Hero 5), and it doesn't even fit all that well with DJ Hero. Star power is hard to see when filled, the points are in a bad position (upper left would work better), the indicator for how far you are to the next star is some weirdly glowing light bulbs for some reason (also, bad), and just overall fairly weak.

While I'm on gripes, the menu UI is also really, really bad. So bad nobody bothered to put any screenshots up on google, so you don't get to see it. But the point is thus: the game is broken up into various "mixes," meaning 3-10 songs that you play in a row on location. But rather than sub-menu this, it's right there in the main menu. All 15 odd mixes. Hidden amongst all that are things like settings, co-op, quick play, etc. (though there isn't a quick play, just "make a mix," where you can add one song to quickplay it), but the menu is oriented in Cover Flow style (large graphics that scroll left to right), making it hard to find anything. And when you're trying to drive an UI on a freaking turntable controller, it's...kind of a massive pain.

Look mama, I'm a real DJ!

But enough about that, what about the game? How does it work? Well, it's actually very well designed. Similar to Guitar Hero or Rock Band, DJ Hero employs the "freeway" idea of notes coming at you in three dimensional space. However, DJ Hero is much more than just tapping buttons (though you do that). A big portion is aligning the highway to the right mix. As you can see in the screenshot above, the blue line is moving to the right (and then has a tap button). For those instances, you slide the little slider tab (you can scroll up to the controller for reference) to the right, then slide it back to the middle to put all the lines at "default" after tapping the note. You can do the same with the green to the left. It's a simple mechanic, but tricky when you add all the other crap you have to do.

Pictured: all the other crap you have to do

Key portions of the game are "scratches." Basically, you hold down a button on the turntable and then "scratch" back and forth for the duration of the scratch. It's simple, but surprisingly satisfying to scratch this fake turntable. These get more and more complicated with scratches that have to be scratched in a particular direction (either all up or all down), and sliders that you have to slide over just for a split second in the middle. Add on top of that having to tap buttons, and (the bane of my life) twist a knob over particular segments to earn double points, and you have yourself a complex game. The usual nonsense of blue notes giving star power (or "overdrive" in Rock Band) is there, activated by pressing a large button next to the twist knob. Lastly, the big change is "rewind," which lets you spin the DJ wheel back every few whiles and "rewind" a previous area, either in an attempt to do it right (if you screwed up), or get more points by replaying it. A cool idea, but unnecessary. 

The props I must give this game is how easy it is to pick up and have a great time. Unlike Guitar Hero or Rock Band where I felt the game meant to emulate something in real life, DJ Hero's biggest strengths is that it's a fun music game. I never felt like a DJ doing this because...let's face it, I never wanted to be a DJ. But as someone who loves music games (especially dexterous ones that get nice and difficult the more you play), DJ Hero knocks it out of the park. The controller is extremely solid (granted, I have a DJ Hero 2 wireless one) and scratching and managing all those buttons is...fun. You feel like you're launching a nuclear missile or something when you pull of a crazy mix, and it's exhilarating and satisfying. It doesn't press the same buttons (hur hur) as Rock Band does with it's group rocking concept, but as a single-player game about dexterous reaction times, it's incredibly solid.

Oh look, it's a "party game" now 

What isn't solid is all the ham-fisted features added at the last minute to merit that stupid Guitar Hero logo in the opening. Yes, you can play with one turntable and a guitar, or even a singer (though why you'd want to attempt to belt out crazy remixes is beyond me), but not with two turntables at once. Playing with a guitar is also fairly painful, as the mixes keep switching up and there's really no rhyme or reason to it all. It's obvious they added this to make it seem like DJ Hero wasn't just a game where you spent a bunch of money on a single player plastic DJ experience, but...DJ Hero is best as a single player plastic DJ experience, so the extra crap is not really welcome. 

Another oddity is the setlist, which is all over the place. Basically, you can make any song in DJ Hero by doing this: take one popular club artist (50 Cent, Daft Punk, Eminem) and smash them into somebody in classic rock (David Bowie, Jackson 5, Queen) for some weird reason. There's 90% of your setlist, with the other 10% being even stranger matchups (Jackson 5 and Third Eye Blind? What?). I feel they were trying to reach as wide an audience as possible, so they just took a bunch of classic rock and a bunch of modern artists and smashed them together, but the end result is something relatively unsatisfying for everybody. Where's Deadmau5? Skrillex? Lady Gaga? Actual legit Daft Punk? Well, they're in DJ Hero 2, but that's a review for a later time.

The fun of the gameplay itself makes up for the totally out there playlist, but just barely. A playlist makes or breaks a music game, and DJ Hero's very nearly breaks it.

He's gonna scratch his way into your heart

Graphically the game looks like Guitar Hero World Tour, and that's not a good thing. I've mentioned the menus, but the art they plaster over the bad UI is like bad graffiti art mixed with some quasi-modern pop club album art nonsense that just looks cluttered and atrocious. Character models (aside from Daft Punk, probably because their faces are covered) look absolutely horrible, drawing from the Guitar Hero 3 and World Tour idea of "let's make the most nightmare plastic abominations the world has ever seen and have people play as them" line of thinking. The clubs themselves look ok, and the general graphics of the highway are good but somewhat uninspired. Again, World Tour's UI bits looked really low-def to me, and because of this DJ Hero's do too. The only thing that may really matter is that highway and it's notes (which is fine and easy to read), but everything around it looks like trash.

Yeah this is weird. 

As it stands, DJ Hero was an interesting experiment that I thought was going to be a trashy awful spinoff (like Band Hero). Instead, the game pleasantly surprised me in that it was, if not a good DJ simulator, a fun and challenging dexterity game. Managing all the things going on screen on their weird turntable was genuinely interesting and fun, even if the jump from Medium to Hard is a bit too far. I spent a good portion of time in DJ Hero (enough to get pretty good at it) and enjoyed my time with it. However, it's worth pointing out (at the risk of spoiling a later review) that DJ Hero 2 does everything this game does and does it a billion times better. Just saying.

It's also worth pointing out that I'd bet this game is super hard to find now, as you have to dig up a turntable (I'd suggest the wireless ones from DJ Hero 2; why they even sold wired ones this gen is beyond me) as well as the game itself, both of which are becoming scarce. If you do manage to find it on Craigslist or something, and you enjoy music games that are challenging and don't care too much about a setlist, DJ Hero is a pretty good time.

Just don't go taking your newfound "mad skillz" to the club. Just...trust me on this one. And don't ask how I know.

Three out of five stars. 

Sweet bling totally included. 

Trainz Simulator 2 Free Game Download

Download Free Game Trainz Simulator 2 - MAC Game - Full Version



Trainz Simulator 2

Language: English
Platform: MAC
Release Date: 2014
SIZE: 7.97 GB
Genre: Simulator



DOWNLOAD LINKS:

Download Trainz Simulator 2 Free

Vote for the LGA: May 2014 (OS game engine remakes)

And Holarse.de even did a small trailer:


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