September 27, 2004
Ninja Gaiden
Every gaming console has a handful of games that make buying the console worthwhile just to play that game. The Nintentdo Gamecube, for example, has Mario Kart (quite possibly the best party game ever) and Metroid Prime (a redux of the old metroid, without losing any of the goodness).
Ninja Gaiden is such a game for XBOX. It stands among Halo and Splinter Cell as being one of the few games for which it is conceivable to buy an XBOX simply to play those games. I'd been playing it for a bit when my parents were around and had to give it back to a friend so that I would stop playing it and spend some time with my parents. For some reason, the game ended back at my place a few weeks ago and it was all over - there was no stopping till I finished the game - which I did just a few minutes ago.
This game has everything you can expect from an actin / puzzle type game. The puzzles are not very puzzling, needless to say, but the action is just awesome. All sorts of cool swords and bladed nunchucks and whatever else you want. At some point the game does get a bit tiring especially when it comes to using its arrows - something that they didn't get quite right in this otherwise nearly perfect game.
It fully exploits all the graphical capabilities of the XBOX (which is more advanced than the GameCube or PS2) and so is visually stunning.
Definitely worth checking out the screenshots at the website
September 24, 2004
Fun with Gimp
Gimp stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program - in short, a free, open-source version of Photoshop. Not nearly as powerful (though more than powerful enough for me) and a rather esoteric user interface, but loads of fun once you start using it and playing with your digital images.
I'm been playing with Gimp over the past couple of days. Granted, its a really old version of Gimp (1.2.5) but it still seems to work well with most of the tutorials (and there are quite a few) to be found on the web.
The tutorial that I've been working on for the past hour or so is selective colorization. Fun stuff, here are the results:
Original image, shot somewhere in Scotland:
Manipulated image:
Granted, its nothing exceptional, but its a lot of fun playing with the 80 gazillion digital images we've all taken over the past few years.
September 15, 2004
Mozilla users.. upgrade
There are some critical security vulerabilities in Mozilla (XUL, if you want to be more specific) based applications. Users of Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird, please get the latest bits from the respective websites.
September 9, 2004
Kill Bill soundtracks
I'm listening to the Kill Bill vol. 2 soundtrack at work right now and I must say that a few of the songs are just excellent. On the whole, its not nearly as good as the volume 1 soundtrack, but a few "songs" are awesome. Probably worth the 99c purchases for certain tracks whenever KBv2 is released on iTunes.