Working from home: A gamer’s dream?

Between the girlfriend and the work, I realized that I was wasting a lot of time waiting for one or the other. How often are you stuck with 20 minutes free time and no good gaming opportunity? It’s not enough time to go find a good online game and who would like a 20 minutes strategy game session? So the basic answer to that issue is “checking email”, “checking blogs” and “Youtube”. Well I had enough and decided to make the most of my time with some online work.

Mostly because I liked the name I registered with “Clickworker”. Of course I did a bit of research before giving my identity to a random website. Once in, I took various tests to prove that I have a decent command of French, English and I am fairly competent at Google searches.  All in all, it was an initial investment of 1.5 hours, with the constant fear that it will all go to waste.

In short: Yes it works!

The first day, I did nothing more than to reply to a survey for 0.10c. So clearly, I this is not sufficient to sustain yourself, let alone buy a new graphic card! However I checked the website regularly and found new assignments to be completed every few hours. In 2 days, I had gathered 19 euros and decided to stop to see if I was going to be paid. It took me some days to realize that all payments are differed for a week, but the next week, on Monday morning, I had my 19 euros on my paypal account!

So I can confirm that it is a legitimate business. So far I have written ads for airlines, travel agencies and restaurants. I also did some WebPages evaluations (not for the faint of heart!). Is it easy money ? Yes and No. No, the income per hour is very low, at least compared to my qualification and day job. But yes it is easy money that I got making use of time that was lost anyway!  

Yesterday I was waiting for the game to start for a League of Legend amateur tournament. So I was in the lobby room with my team, waiting. Clearly could do nothing useful. In the 10 minute wait, I evaluated a 100 webpages and go paid for it a few euros. Not bad in my view.

This blog, does not need support, but if you are interested in making some money, you might as well help me and click on this link to Clickworker. As far as I know there are dedicated task for at least 40 different countries (Europe, US, India…)
 

Did you work for a similar “micro-tasks” / crowdsourcing website ? Is it worth it for you? 

EuroExark

Easy Abandonware: How to revive them?

Have you tried a recent game online, lost in a fraction of second and thought you were happier in the 90’ soloing through Duke Nukem, Populous or Red Alert ?

Well don’t despair, most of these old titles are still available, even free… and some or them are still really good!

Download + Install time, less than 2 minutes!

Ready to use only, no time to waste!  

The main difficulty with old games is the compatibility with newer systems. Some of you have probably tried to install old games without success.

The big news here is prepackaged games for Windows XP and Windows7 that come directly with the emulator. 

Here are my 2 favorites links for that:

DJ Old Games The one we will use in this demo

Abandonware France for my fellow French speaking gamers

 

Need a quick guide?

1. Find the game of your childhood, check that it is available for PC (See red box), click on the name (See red box).

2. Click on download (See red box), then check that an install package .exe exists (See red box)

3. Final check that you have the good package and then lets go, download.

The rest is as easy, double click on the downloaded file and follow instructions !

Last words on install:
- Alt + Tab to go in full screen
- Keybord will probably be in QWERTYfor the game… you will be fine, just click around!

For those who want to go further and customize their install or want a really obscure game to run, try DosBox the most used emulator out there.

Let’s enjoy the goodness!

	Lemmings Are you clever and quick?		Dune 2 The Father of all RTS
	Populous Still simple and efficient		Wolfenstein Shoot'em all!

Is it really free and legal?

General answer is yes, but please use good judgment. If the game isn’t more than 10 years old, it probably shouldn’t be available for download. Here are some legal information from Wikipedia

"Abandonware is a product, typically a software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no product support is available. It is differentiated from a discontinued product because the manufacturer has not issued an official notice of discontinuance, instead, the manufacturer is simply ignoring the product."

For example no game from Lucasarts (Monkey Island, Star Wars: X-Wing) is in Abandonware. They still maintain their copyrights on them. Don’t be sad, there are litteraly thousand of other good titles out there.

Did you had success reviving an old game ? Please let me know!

EuroExark