… Let’s have a virtual party at this online bookstore and build our own site…
Thank you for checking out my weekly newsletter! I hope everyone is ready to wrap up 2020 (WHAT A YEAR!) and take a break. As the COVID19 vaccines started to be administered, and hopefully we are seeing the end of the tunnel, I want to list a few noteworthy changes that are driven by COVID, as a send-off:
- A Mission to Make Virtual Parties Actually Fun (Wired) – people getting Zoom/Meet/Teams fatigue and coming up with innovative ways to social. Gather sounds interesting. I also remember an article (can’t find it now :p) about Web Summit successfully building its own event solution that scales to all its remote attendees allowing mass meeting/networking as well as flexible breakout workshops.
- Building your own website is cool again, and it’s changing the whole internet (Protocol) – I see this trend, along with the recent social platform Congress testimonial, and Netflix’s Social Dilemma all part of the greater societal effort to get back our free internet, as we learned that the ‘free’ social platforms are really more like ‘freemium’ (costing our privacy, attention span, and for some, our sanity)
- COVID forced bookstores online. Can they survive? (Protocol) – Bookstore.org helps independent bookstores accelerate their digital transformation by providing a shopify-ish experience. But can they address the need for local bookstores to engage or interact with their customers? (not very dissimilar to some writers moving to Substacks or Patreon to gain that closer engagement with their readers)
The game for this week’s Nostalgic Game Review goes to…
4D Sports Boxing
This is yet another game released in 1991 that I enjoyed on my first PC, a 286 with a monochrome monitor.
What is it?
A boxing game that turned out to be quite realistic and enjoyable at the same time.
The game allows players to customize their character by various factors (weight, height, head/face, speed/power/stamina…etc) which impacts the fighting styles (e.g. being shorter, lighter, faster speed allow better dodging and counter with fast jabs; or heavy weight, higher power allow better defending, and more powerful punches and hooks.)
During the fights, the game allows various camera angles including first-person view, which maximize the sensation when you are throwing punches (or getting them 😉 The back box art probably capture this idea the best:
The motions are super realistic, they called it ‘Tru-motion’ but possibly there are some motion capturing involved. The fighters’ facial expressions also realistically (in a cartoonish way) reflect his/her condition (angry, hit, tired, passed out). Sound effects and music were also very enjoyable.
At the end of each ‘professional’ fights, you also get greeted by this awesome newspaper view:
What’s in it?
Nothing much, probably a quick manual aside the game disks, but the game was great enough 🙂
My impression
Absolutely loved this game and spent a lot of time trying different character customization and fighting styles. Too bad I only saw Fight Club 8 years after that.
The game is not available to play on the Internet Archive, but there are plenty of Youtube videos. I included 2 videos below, the first one you can hear the awesome opening music, but the person only played with the isometric camera view, so I’ve included the 2nd video showing more first-person perspective during the fight and how realistic it is 🙂