At Gamesradar I found an interesting article about the “History of Cheating in Games”. It may be written a little bit silly, but provides the basic facts of the – how they call it – “cheating industry”. For example:

Early in the history of videogames, cheating was really cheating. It was achieved by loading games into memory and modifying useful values before launching them. These memory hacks were called POKEs, named for the BASIC function used to overwrite memory. (…) The concept of intentionally created cheats also appeared early in the evolution of games, at about the point when cheats became necessary for testing. Without some sort of debug mode or life-extending cheat to make games easier, testing the absurdly difficult games of yore would have been absurdly difficult.

Yes, games were really much harder in the 8-bit era. But cheats survived them. With the rise of the game-pad the A, B, A, B, left, right, left, right – cheats appeared and slowly wandered into gaming culture. The latest offspring of cheats are “pay-per-cheat” in browser games for example, where people can decide to play the game and invest time to get achievements – or to take the short route and pay for a cheat. Well, with the intention of the game-designer of course, in order to monetize the game.

Not exactly a cheat, but its relative: the glitch. Seen on the NES.

Just keep on reading more about the phenomenon at Gamesradar.

ICU64 – some information, that I could dig about this one. The ICU64 should be a C64 emulator, or better memory manipulator or cheat engine, that should be released later this summer. It uses “Frodo Redpill”, a tool / modified version of the Frodo C64 Emulator.

ICU64 is more meant as a hacking tool, than a typical emulator. Well, just look at the video how this is meant: zooming, browsing, changing, enjoying C64-memory. I found more useful reading about this project on the Lemon64-forum. (via)

The 12th Evoke was a blast. Great location, great products, great people! Thanks go to all participants. The t-shirts selled out in record time – Evoke staff is preparing a second edition. They are taking pre-orders now.

Lunaquatic by BluFlame (Winner 4k!).

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Picture (cc) BY mkandlez

Let facts speak about Twitter, the “newest of all media”. According to research from Sysomos (another summary here), only 5 percent of all twitterers (better say twitter accounts) have over 100 followers. Most of the accounts (circa 70-80 percent) are not very active, while only 5 percent are doing 75 percent of all tweets. Well, I guess not counted the spam-accounts. If you look carefully you can see Pareto’s Law all over the place.

Evoke is early on this year. The Cologne Demoscene-Part will start tomorrow at a new location. I hope the party is going as fresh as the new website from them. Cya there!

Holy cow. The aliens are landing! If you look at this music-controller, that is basically consisting of 7 joystick, things are getting spooky. Indeed, a “mini-orchestra for the fingers”. You can even combine many of this controllers. Let’s start the engines, commander! More images at Yanko. (via)

Glenn Marshall once again hits the scene, this time in the iPhone. He uses generative art, to make an beautiful application “half screensaver, half machine”. The work is not finished, Glen says about Zio it in his blog: “I think I’m about 66% of the way there now.”

(via)