RAF Marham 2019 Tornado Liveries for X-Plane 11

On Tuesday 19th, Wednesday 20th and Thursday 21st February 2019, three specially painted Royal Air Force Panavia Tornado GR4’s (ZG752, ZG775 & ZD716) from RAF Marham took to the skies across the UK to say farewell to places that were of significance throughout the history of the RAF Tornado.

Three training variants of the Tornado received special ‘tail art’ markings including a camouflage scheme which the Tornado sported in its early career.

I decided to create these three special liveries for X-Trident’s Panavia Tornado, so simmers can enjoy recreating the fly pasts in the comfort of their own homes.

The X-Plane 11 liveries can be downloaded for free from the x-plane.org store.

Mun Mun Sticker Pack for iOS

UPDATE: This iOS sticker pack is no longer available for purchase.

Mun Mun Stickerpack in iOS App Store

It’s official … I am now an Apple iOS developer (kinda).

Today, my first iOS sticker pack was successfully submitted to the Apple iMessage Store. A pretty straight forward process once you get your head around all the hoops you have to jump through in order to satisfy Apple’s T&C’s.

Although, I do think using XCode to build sticker packs is massive overkill, and extremely daunting if you have never used XCode before.

Nevertheless, my Mun Mun Sticker Pack is now available for download.

The Problem with Trophies and Achievements

Since the introduction of trophies (PlayStation) and achievements (Xbox) in video games, I’ve always been less than satisfied with how the whole process works and is implemented. In my opinion, the whole trophies and achievements idea needs a huge rethink.

When trophies/achievements first started appearing in games, I despised them, and I pretty much still do. In the past, I could play a game, enjoy it, complete it and move on to the next game on my list.

Now, whenever I play a game and complete it, I then have to play the game again (or again and again …) in order to clean up the remaining trophies/achievements that I never got on my previous play through’s. This is something I appear to have no control over, my brain just will not let it go.

What’s even more frustrating about this whole process, is the fact that the trophies/achievements you are going back in for are either the trophies/achievements which force you to play the game again on a ridiculous difficulty setting, which ends up ruining the gaming experience for you.

Or you have to grind through some repetitive nonsense, like killing a specific baddie a hundred times or more, in a specific way, at a specific time and place in the game, using only a specific teaspoon which you picked up in a previous mission.

Interview with Kim Frederiksen – AKA Psycho from Budbrain

The first demo that we did, I learned everything during the programming of that demo. We probably started like late 1988, or like early 1989 ... Every time I didn’t go to school, I was working on this stuff with my friend

Budbrain Mega demo

One of my all-time favourite Amiga demos has to be without a doubt, the Budbrain Mega demo. Created by two guys from Denmark, Psycho and Diablo, and released at The Silents Red Sector Amiga Conference in 1990.

Dan Wood and Ravi Abbott from The Retro Hour were lucky enough to sit down with non-other than Kim Frederiksen, a.k.a. Psycho, the original coder of the Budbrain Mega demo to ask him how he first got started in the Amiga demo scene and what prompted him and Diablo to spend a year of their youth crafting one of the greatest Amiga demos of all time.

Review: Rise of the Tomb Raider

When Rise of the Tomb Raider release date was first announced as a timed exclusive for Xbox platforms, a lot of fans of the franchise were not happy, (and rightly so). Thousands of people took to the Internet to vent their anger over this decision on social media, blogs and gaming forums.

I’ve never really understood why this needed to happen. I was always under the impression that Tomb Raider games sold by the millions, so I was surprised to see they had entered into a deal with Microsoft for exclusivity rights. Which, personally, I think harms the gaming industry.

You are basically blocking access to your game on release day and alienating a select group of gamers because of what gaming console or system they own. Not cool.

My Tomb Raider career started way back in 1996 with the release of the first ever Tomb Raider by Core Design and Eidos Interactive on the original PlayStation. This was groundbreaking stuff. I don’t think I had ever played a computer game before with a female lead character, especially a female lead character that looked like Lara Croft. Normally, the female character in any game is the one you are trying to save.