When CD-ROM drives became widespread in the 1990s, video game developers found themselves confronted with an abundance of storage space. An HD 3.5-inch floppy disk could hold 1.44 MB; a CD-ROM could hold a staggering 650 MB. Thus began the age of multimedia encyclopedias like Grolier and Encarta, gigantic shareware collections like the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, and full-motion video games (FMVs).

Sierra, then one of the leading names in gaming, was never the kind of company to miss a trend. The first title in the Gabriel Knight series, Sins of the Fathers (reviews), had already demonstrated game designer Jane Jensen’s ambition to tell serious, movie-like stories in video game form. The sequel, The Beast Within, shipped in 1995 on a whopping 6 CD-ROMs, owing to several hours of digitized video material.

Our protagonist has left St. George’s Books in New Orleans under the care of his assistant Grace Nakimura; he now lives in the old German castle that’s part of his family inheritance. The other part—the one he is more reluctant to accept—is his responsibility to hunt and destroy supernatural evil, for Gabriel Knight is a Schattenjäger, a shadow hunter.

Of wolves and men

His latest assignment is to hunt a werewolf. That’s not a spoiler: in the opening of the game, the local townspeople seek Gabriel’s aid to investigate the brutal killing of a girl which they suspect to be, er, werework. And there are other victims. The official story is that wolves who escaped from the zoo in nearby Munich are to blame. Gabriel must follow the paw prints to discover the truth: are the murders the work of man, beast, or man-beast?

Meanwhile, Grace Nakimura, who played an important role in Gabriel’s earlier voodoo adventure, has no intention of simply minding the store back in New Orleans. After hearing that Gabriel is pursuing a new case, she books the next flight to Germany, drives to the castle, only to find—no Gabriel.

Instead, there’s Gerde, the caretaker, who welcomes Grace but doesn’t quite know what to do with her. In what seems rather a change of character from the first game, Grace bullies Gerde until she is given free rein to conduct werewolf-related research on Gabriel’s behalf.

The story continues over six chapters in which you play as both Gabriel and Grace. Soon, Gabriel discovers a secretive hunting club that seems to be more than meets the eye, and Grace traces a history of werewolves that dates back to the days of Ludwig II of Bavaria and Richard Wagner.

Yes, this is definitely what wealthy German aristocrats wear around the house. There is some homoerotic tension between Baron von Glower (left) and Gabriel (right), but it largely plays out on a symbolic level. (Credit: Sierra. Fair use.)

Point, click & play

In point-and-click adventure games, you typically walk from scene to scene, pick up items, talk to other characters, and solve puzzles. You do all these things in The Beast Within, but in addition, every click can lead to a video clip. Click on a door? Prepare to watch a video of Gabriel walking through it. Click on a newspaper? You’ll see a video clip of Gabriel picking it up and reading it.

Thankfully, you can skip each of those videos with another click, which you’ll do a lot as you revisit familiar scenes to search for clues. This is a 1990s game, so expect to do a fair bit of pixel hunting to figure out exactly what to click on.

Many of the puzzles are straightforward, but to advance, you have to carefully explore every location, which sometimes feels like you’re playing a hidden object game. Just like in the first Gabriel Knight, time stands still until you’ve done everything the game expects you to do. At least the map view offers hints that there’s stuff left to do in certain locations.

This is a Sierra game, so you can die at several points throughout the story, and some scenes involve carefully timing your actions. The chapter structure gives you some confidence that you’re on the right track and that you haven’t forgotten some key item that you need later.

While Gabriel hunts for werewolves in Munich, Grace Nakimura goes on an edutainment trip to German castles and museums. (Credit: Sierra. Fair use.)

Welcome to fake Germany

In many different ways, the game’s reach exceeds its grasp. The budget wasn’t sufficient to actually film in Germany. Much of the video was shot in front of a blue screen, with digital photographs taken during one trip to Germany inserted in the background.

In one scene, Gabriel walks around in a badly digitized version of Munich’s Marienplatz and has to deliver a letter. Because the developers didn’t recognize what German mailboxes look like, you must walk past a prominent mailbox that you can’t interact with. Instead, you have to find an nondescript building with a digitally inserted “POST” sign to send your letter.

As with many movies and TV shows, when there’s spoken German, it’s often read atrociously by American actors, but it’s at least consistently grammatically correct. There’s no logical consistency as to when Germans are speaking German and when they’re speaking English (to each other).

The quality of the acting is very hit-or-miss. Gabriel (played by Dean Erickson) seems fidgety and uncomfortable in almost every shot; Grace (played by Joanne Takahashi) is exaggeratedly rude and confrontational in much of the early game. Some of the other actors are delightful to watch, especially Peter Lucas, who plays the charismatic Baron Friedrich von Glower.

The Verdict

Does The Beast Within hold up in 2021? Even today, the game’s size and scope impress. It manages to tell a complex story that’s largely internally consistent and satisfying. FMV games are often short—think 2-4 hours. To beat The Beast Within, plan for 10-15. The game culminates in a wonderfully ludicrous final chapter that involves a short opera specifically written for it.

Very few point-and-click FMV games exist, and The Beast Within hints at why: it’s expensive and difficult to get right. The game’s mechanics and technical flaws have aged more poorly than many pixel art games from the same era. Yet, to this day, few companies have done a better job than Sierra at combining film and game.

If you’ve played and enjoyed the first Gabriel Knight, you won’t want to miss The Beast Within, warts and all. The FMV genre is currently experiencing a revival with indie titles such as Dark Nights with Poe and Munro and Her Story. Fans of the genre may also want to check out this 1995 classic to see how it compares to more recent efforts.

Additional reading

• Jimmy Maher’s Digital Antiquarian blog features an excellent history and review of the game.

It’s Wikipedia, it has like all the things. I just made this to encourage reviewing

I don’t have a fancy gaming box, so I’m a bit limited when it comes to game selection, but the one’s I’ve found have worked well on Linux. I’ve heard the new handheld will encourage it more.

Liberapay ist in meinen Augen keine Crowdfunding-Plattform auch wenn die englischsprachige Wikipedia sie als solches kategorisiert. Hier werden keine Spenden bis zu einem gewissen Betrag gesammelt sondern die Betreiber von Online-Angeboten bitten um eine regelmäßige Spende.

Liberaypay-Logo (Namensnennung: Liberapay.org. Gemeinfrei.)

Auch ohne diese Spenden kann der angebotene Service des Spendensammlers weiterbestehen und hier liegt der größte Unterschied zum Crowdfunding. Ohne eine erreichte Spendensumme wird es kein Produkt geben.

Der komplette Programmcode ist auf GitHub einsehbar und die Nutzung der Plattform Liberapay kostet nichts. Alles Spenden gehen komplett an den Empfänger allerdings sind die Spenden auf 100,00 € pro Woche und Spender begrenzt.

Ich nutze Liberpay um ein paar, von mir sehr geschätzten, Projekten regelmäßig einen Betrag zukommen zu lassen. Dabei sind die empfangenen Spenden jederzeit auf dem Profil des Empfängers einzusehen. Ein sehr transparenter Weg um Projekte zu unterstützen.

Steam needs no introduction. (Credit: Valve. Fair use.)

When it comes to PC gaming platforms, Steam is the king of the hill.

Steam pretty much has it all. A store with massive selection, community mods, cloud saves, you name it.

What I really would like to focus in this review, is the work they’ve put up to make gaming possible on Linux. Their compatibility tool Proton (or SteamPlay) allows you to run Windows games with just hitting play on Linux. Of course it doesn’t work on every title, but in general the results are impressive. Underneath it’s based on Wine.

Many of the games also simply have native Linux versions available. This is the case for all major Valve titles, which deserves them even more Linux-points.

Privacy issues seem to be in quite good shape too. When creating an account, only an email account and a country of residence are required. It’s also fine to have multiple accounts. One minor hiccup here though: It’s forbidden to use a VPN when creating a new account. I suppose that it’s partly to reduce smurf and cheater accounts in CS:GO and the likes. A minor bummer though.

I have no experience of Steam as a publisher so I cannot comment on that.

Sometimes games (or their steam codes) can be bought cheaper from somewhere else but overall the prices are good. And I’m anyway happy to support a company that has such a strong positive influence on Linux gaming.

The product looks like this. (Credit: Rexona. Fair use.)

Rexona men invisible black + white markets itself as not staining your shirts. After a few uses this really seems to be the case. However, I have used this product long enough to confidently say that it definitely leaves hard yellow stains in the long run. The stains won’t come off in a normal wash (nor have I found a non-normal wash that would save the shirts).

The stains this product leaves are pretty much exactly what they are advertising against in this picture. (Credit: Rexona. Fair use.)

Stains aside, the product works fine as an anti-antiperspirant. There is supposed to be some fancy “motionsense” technology but that’s obviously just marketing crap.

I wouldn’t recommend this product. If you want to avoid stains, probably the best bet is to leave the aluminum loaded antiperspirants and just use a normal deodorant.

Some games are pure perfection. Tetris on the original Game Boy comes to mind. Super Hexagon by Terry Cavanagh (a $3 indie title w/ cult status) is another such game. It’s almost a trainer for achieving flow state.

You pivot a triangle between rapidly approaching walls that will immediately crush you upon collision. To survive, you must learn repeating patterns and keep your reaction speed high.

Chances are you’ll crash and burn after a few seconds. And again. And again. The game design is optimized to keep you playing: restarts are instantaneous, and the (excellent) chiptune music shifts a little bit on each restart to keep things interesting. A few seconds may turn into hours before you notice.

This screen, which you will see a lot, shows your current and best score for the level you’re playing. (Credit: Terry Cavanagh. Fair use.)

You are almost certainly going to beat the game’s first couple of levels if you keep trying. When you do, it feels incredibly rewarding. At the same time, while staring at triangles and hexagons for an hour, it can be hard to shake the feeling that you’re in some sci-fi story in which your brain has been hijacked to serve a terrible purpose.

Even if you normally don’t like twitchy games, Super Hexagon may surprise you with its elegant simplicity. Unless you have an aversion to flashing lights and colors, I highly recommend giving it a spin. I come back to it at least once a year.

The switch has a nice metal casing. (Credit: Zyxel. Fair use.)

I can’t say anything about how it performs with the OEM firmware since I installed OpenWRT as soon as I got it. Zyxel has made some complications to the installation process but it’s still quite doable. OpenWRT wiki has instructions. Once the firmware has been replaced, only sky it the limit of what (networking) you can do with it.

In deed, the fact that OpenWRT supports this switch (and it’s bigger cousins as well) is the biggest strength of GS1900-8. This is a good low-end switch for OpenWRT users.

Mit Software-Projekten, die von einer Behörde in Auftrag gegeben werden, tun sich die Deutschen erfahrungsgemäß schwer, sehr schwer. Aber mit der Corona-Warn-App, kurz CWA, ist eine, meiner Meinung nach, sehr gute App gelungen. Anfangs ging es nur um die Ermittlung von Kontakten, welches mittels einer von Apple und Google geschaffenen Schnittstelle bewerkstelligt wurde.

Im Laufe der Zeit kamen viele gute Funktionen dazu. Erwähnt werden muss die Check-In-Funktion oder die Möglichkeit, das digitale Impfzertifikat in der App hinterlegen zu können. Im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen Apps werden hier keine persönlichen Daten erhoben und weitergegeben. Dieses wurde vom Chaos Computer Club getestet und veröffentlicht (ab 14:55). Neben der Telekom und SAP, die mit der Entwicklung der Apps beauftragt worden sind, kann über GitHub jeder teilnehmen.

Leider wurde nach einem guten Start von der Politik eine andere App favorisiert, die jedoch durch Datenlöcher und mehr Schein als Sein auffiel. Jedem, der seine persönliche Daten nicht einem unbekannten Datensammler in den Rachen werfen möchte, kann zur Corona-Warn-App greifen. Dazu ist nicht einmal die deutsche Sprache notwendig, denn die App gibt es in elf Sprachen und ist mit vielen anderen Systemen in der EU kompatibel. Für Geräte mit einem Android-Betriebssystem wurde ein vollständig kompakter Ableger entwickelt, der andere Komponenten im Hintergrund nutzt. Mehr dazu bei f-droid.

Die App benötigt wenig Speicherplatz und der erhöhte Leistungsbedarf durch die Bluetooth-Funktion fällt mir nicht auf. So lange wir diesen Virus nicht ausgerottet haben wird diese App auf meinem Smartphone einen festen Platz haben.

Der Georgengarten liegt in unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft zu den Herrenhäuser Gärten und der Leibniz Universität in Hannover. Viel Grün welches um die zentrale Herrenhäuser-Allee herum drapiert wurde dominiert diese Anlage. Der Verkehrslärm ist kaum wahrnehmbar und es gibt sehr viele Erholungsmöglichkeiten, sprich Bänke zum verweilen.
Blick auf die zentrale Herrenhäuser-Allee im Georgengarten in Hannover (Eigenes Werk. Lizenz: CC-BY-SA.) Des weiteren sind im Park das Wilhelm-Busch-Museum, der Leibniztempel, eine Hundewiese, eine Minigolfanlage sowie der Palaisgarten zu finden.

Eine gute Alternative zur Eilenriede, wenn in Hannover eine Erholung im Grünen gesucht wird. Mit der Stadt gut zu erreichen aber noch besser mit dem Fahrrad.