Elefantin

Here you will more information about what Martin’s doing with his live. There’s also a page about us, and a page about Els

Photography

One of my favourite things to do; shooting images. This whole blog is mostly focused around this hobby, as many posts shows small images of the result of this hobby. Apart from this, more information about my camera’s, tools etc. on the Photgraphy Page.

Music

Computer games

From time to time this is getting out-of-control. Games can be very addictive. Some of the very best ever games came from Westwood! It started with ‘Dune II’. Then ‘Command & Conquer’. These are so called strategy games. Later ‘Red Alert’ and all the mission disks came out. If you ever wanna play over the Internet, then drop me a mail. In those days I could not wait for ‘ Tiberium Sun‘ to be published. Alas, ‘Dune2000‘ was given priority and when it was finally there (1999) I was very disappointed and reverted back to C&C. I also liked building maps for C&C a lot, but soon you could get zillions of them from the Net and my interest disappeared. Later, the next ‘Red Alert 2′ series healed all my wounds. Next I wondered what ‘Renegade‘ (A 3D 1st person game) would bring. I don’t think it was a big success. Later, Westwood was taken over by Electronic Arts, and they published ‘C&C Generals’. Pretty good game I must say. On Wikipedia you can find an extensive article about the C&C universe. While writing this (2009) Red Alert 3 seems to be in the making.

The only first person shooter I ever like was the ‘Half-Life 2′ series. It was developed by Valve Corporation and was released in 2004. It is the successor of the original ‘Half-Life’ series, which I never played. Still playing HL2 ccasionally though. After the initial HL2, three expansions were announced of which two were actually published (called episode1 and episode2). I am still waiting (2009) for episode3. Again, on Wikipedia you can read all the details. It is interesting to note that Valve distributes their games using the ‘Steam’ Client. No box from the shop, but a digital download. This service has proven to be stable and reliable.

It was while using Steam, that I discovered ‘Company of Heroes‘, one of my other favorite strategy games. Not widely know, but hugely popular by the people playing it. The first sequel is ‘Opposing Fronts’ and a second was recently published (2009) as ‘Tales of Valor.’

Another game I like to mention is Supreme Commander or SupCom for short, another real-time strategy game. The man behind the game is Chris Taylor and is  developed by his company, Gas Powered Games. An expansion, called Forged Alliance, was also released in the same year (2007). The games are the follow up for the immense popular Total Annihilation (1997) series. Find out more on Wikipedia. SupCom2 is in the making while writing this.

Finally, I like to mention Blizzards World of Warcraft or Wow for short. It is a dangerously addictive Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORG).I am unsure of what it actually makes it so addictive. I am plying this for more then three years now, and paid a lot of monthly fee. Cannot say it is cheap, but for a game as long lasting as this it is reasonably priced at 12.99 Euro per month. Besides regular content updates (called patches) Blizzard aims to launch an expansion each year. The first was called ‘The Burning Cruisade’ (BC) the second ‘ Wrath of the Lich King’ (WotLK) and a third is announce and called ‘Cataclysm’. Players enter a virtual computer generated fantasy world in which they can develop different a characters by exploring the arty 3D world by performing quests and battling monsters (or other players). The players have to choose to be either ‘Horde’ (the Bad) or ‘Alliance’ (the Good), which are (currently) the two factions that populate the world. Recently I have cancelled my subscription, not because I did not like the game, but because of technical difficulties with the Game Servers and a very poor response from Blizzard to fix it (it seems now fixe (Oct-2009).