• Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
Well, the last week and a half hasn’t been much fun, I’ve been working flat out on some urgent stuff for work (all that web page/Perl I mentioned in an earlier post), only really stopping while waiting for scripts to run. After lots of effort, I’ve finally managed to break the back of the work, I’m so looking forward to actually having some spare time again. *phew*
During a one of the aforementioned waiting periods I managed to fit in playing some “Shadow of the Colossus”. All I can say is wow. It reminds me a little of Freak Out for PS2 in that it consists entirely of boss fights. What’s more is that these bosses (or Colossus as they are known) are damn huge many times the size of your character and are much bigger than those of any other game that comes to mind.
Don’t let the screenshot fool you, you get in much closer than that.
There are no minor enemies at all from what I can tell. The graphics look somewhat dated due to limitations of the PS2 hardware but at the same time the design and composition look incredible. If there’s any game deserving a next generation port this must be it. As far as downsides go, the camera view is not perfect and the controls are not 100% responsive or intuitive, but in both these areas it’s at least as good as 90% of the other games out there.
I don’t know about anyone else but occasionally when I have things on order I really have to wonder if they will ever arrive. I’ve been getting that feeling a lot lately with a few things on back/pre order for months. One very odd thing I have observerd is that release/shipping dates seem to tend towards the 24th of the month. The 24th of February and March will both be “lucky” days for me it seems and none of these items were originally supposed to ship on those days. Spooky.
Somewhere (I have no idea where exactly), I stumbled across this Japanese character design.
I have no real idea what exactly she originated from but she has officially appeared on some kind of chocolate/trading card game in Japan which is in some way related to Bandai. Her name is Astarot (??????) and she is apparently some demon general (Astarot was a demon according to some demonolatry hierarchies). As seems to happen in Japan, when it comes to fan art, even dangerous and/or evil characters can end up being cute and possibly even innocent and that appears to be what has happened here. I’ve not found a single non-Japanese site talking about her so I might as well be the first. Why do I care? Honestly, I really like the character design and would kill for a resin figure…or even a tiny gashapon figure. No luck yet though. :/
• Saturday, February 11th, 2006
I’m jumping into the world of PCI-Express graphics cards and therefore no longer have any need of my AGP card so I plan to sell it. I’ll probably throw it on Trademe but I thought I’d check first if anyone I know is interested. It’s a GeCube X800 XT VIVO, AGP 8X with 256MB of GDDR3 RAM for x86 PCs (i.e. Windows, Linux), specs can be found here (This is the exact card I have). It’s never been overclocked, is no more than six months old and is in mint condition. All cables will be supplied although the box and manual are nowhere to be seen. If you want to know how fast it is, here’s some gaming benchmarks comparing it to many other cards on Toms hardware. Personally I’ve played many of the most demanding games on it, F.E.A.R, Doom 3, Half Life 2, World of Warcraft, etc and all of them play smoothly with a good resolution and all high quality features turned on.
I’ve been keeping an eye on these things on Trademe and it seems I’d get NZ$400 for it without any problem. If anyone on my LJ friends list is interested, I’ll part with it for NZ$300.
• Thursday, February 09th, 2006
Now I’ve always been annoyed by bad HTML on webpages but over the past week or so I have come to really, deeply, loath bad HTML. I’ve been trying to migrate a very large website (42000 static files, many megabytes in size, extracted from a dynamic site via a web crawler) and make it suitable to run an automated migration tool across everything. The original site was apparently designed by some students and it seems consistency was not one of their fortes. I’ve seen links not matching the case of the actual directories on the filesystem (evil for automated scripting and hosting), quote enclosed links with quotes inside them in the file names (!!!!), links with missing terminating quotes, links with other illegal characters that cannot actually be represented in the filesystem. On top of this, the site makes heavy use of frames (all of which I have to strip out via scripts since migration tools hate frames) but the content frames all have different and inconsistent names…i.e. “content”, “main_23423_frame”, “BODY”, etc. To only make things worse, the only scripting language I had access to do this with is Perl. Learning a new language when doing such a task with a tight deadline is not fun. Argh! One nice thing though, my dual processor Powermac G5 can run these scripts about four times faster than the servers at work (A 3.4Ghz Xeon is included in that insult).
Oh, and I see the grammy awards clearly don’t care at all about their credibility after giving U2 the Song Of The Year award. Not that they’ve had any for a long time but you’d think they’d at least try…
• Monday, February 06th, 2006
I had a holiday recently in Pauanui and only got back a few days ago. Some friend of the family owns a batch there and said we could stay there for a while. My brother stayed for about two weeks and I came to stay for a few days before they went back home. It wasn’t very sunny but I wasn’t complaining, it was still nice and warm. The surf beach and the harbour were both very nice. I took many photos and, much to my surprise, some of them turned out damn good (If I don’t say so myself). I’ll have to put up a gallery with a few of the better ones.
I’ve been playing around a bit with Apple’s iLife 06 suite. In the past I’ve used iPhoto heavily, Garageband for playing around and a little iDVD here and there. I haven’t really explored it all yet but I definitely like the iPhoto changes (Full screen mode and the translucent black Quicktime-esk floating palletes are great). I’ve also been toying with iWeb. As you can probably guess, iWeb is a tool for making web pages. It has templates for making welcome pages, “about me” pages, blogs, photo pages, movie pages and podcast pages. It’s been years since I fiddled around with tools like Dreamweaver, etc I’ve just used Mozilla’s composer for creating the skeleton of any basic pages I’ve built so I don’t know what the state web page creation tools is today. iWeb though, while still very rough, seems to me to be a step in the right direction. It’s purely a layout tool, there’s no sign of any HTML tags yet it still allows some decent customisation of the templates. It’s not without flaws, things like the slide show interface cannot be customised, the HTML code generated looks horrible (although it renders correctly in all browers I tried) and it just generally seems to be in need of user feedback. For a version 1.0 product though, it’s impressive. I’m thinking I might try upgrading some old pages I have to use it. I’m definitely looking forward to see what they do with the next version.
It appears Grandia 3 is finally getting a US release this month. No idea when/if it will ever come out here so I’ve got a preorder in. From the looks of things it will give me something to play while waiting for the Xbox 360/Oblivion releases around the 23rd/24th. The early Grandia 3 reviews sound promising and the screenshots look rather lovely, especially the ones showing the sky. I’m really looking forward to giving this a go.
Things are a bit of a pain computer hardware-wise right now. My Windows PC could do with an upgrade (Due to what I want to run on it) but it’s at a technical dead end and not worth spending any money on. It’s a Socket 462 box (AMD duron, Athlon XP processors only) with AGP. Even when I bought it (must be near two years ago now) this thing was a cheap low-end box. Buying a new AGP card is a waste of money as is buying any Socket 462 processor (Which won’t be faster anyway). I had originally thought Apple’s Intel Powerbooks would be out by now and that I’d be able to run Windows on one of those instead but that plan seems less viable all the time. Partly because it’s not going to be much of an upgrade, partly because it won’t be very upgradable longterm and partly because there’s no sign of Windows running on them yet. I’d only considering buying a Shuttle XPC but all of their Athlon 64 kits are a bit lacking in various ways and due to different CPU sockets and video interfaces I’d have to get a new processor and video card at the same time. Gah!
Sometime I’ll have to fix the music/mood indicactors on here, they broke with the last wordpress upgrade.
