It's silly, but it's phun!

Some lunaticEmil Ernerfeldt at Umeå University (we hang out in the same IRC channel) has created the game2d physics sandbox Phun, and the introduction video for it says it all. I once heard my nephew speak about building an automatic popcorn popper involving a conveyor belt through an oven and a robotic hand to put the popped corn into a bowl - I wonder what Phun would become in his hands. You can download it here. I don't dare to try it, I will get addicted, I'll just stick to Transport Tycoon when I need my fix.

PS. Unless I manage to pry my PS2 back from the hands of my other nephew and niece...

(Update: Now we're just wanting programmable PID-controller functions, then it could be cool to be able to script things like you do in Colobot. Please?)

(Update 2: While I'm at it, let's suggest games like Totem Destroyer and the Orisinal games. Happy waste of time :-P )

OpenTTD - All work and no play makes CJ a dull boy

As life has been really busy recently, I'm working from home and it's both a bit uncomfortable and choatic, yesterday I just had to break out the old OpenTTD (which may or may not be an acronym of "Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe"). I have mentioned it before, but it always brings me a smile as I'm reminded that my classmate Ludvig Strigeus largely built or was was involved in both OpenTTD, ScummVM, µTorrent and now is working on Spotify. Impressive guy!

As I played not on the easiest setting and had forgotten how to signal trains, I wasn't particularly successful and restarted one game and slowly went bancrupt on the second, but still, it was lovely.

Transport Tycoon remains a very addictive game, it's not very good for any sort of realistic simulation and you always tend to end up in a mess or just filthy rich, but still it is a nice way to tickle that brain and your sense of dealing with what's urgent. :-)

Which reminds me I've got both work and other play I want to get done, ta'ta!


PS. You can download the game from the homepage, and necessary data files can be found here

(Update: It's really too nerdy, but because I'm playing around a bit with screencasting and I wanted to show someone my Transport Tycoon transport network, here we go: screencast.com/t/RrPvITU4 , recorded and uploaded with Jing which I really recommend for those simple screenshots or explanative screencasts)