October 31, 2006

Marathon

So I've never really been much of a gamer. I like Tetris, I played a lot of Mario back in the day, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is hands-down one of the greatest games ever.

I'm taking a class on Machinima right now, so I started looking more into games. I was talking with someone at work, and he hooked me up with original copies of Marathon.

Bungie Studios made Marathon in the early to mid-'90s, originally for the Macintosh. In a slight bit of irony, Microsoft bough them in 2000, releasing Halo exclusively (at least at first) for Microsoft's XBox.

Long story short, Marathon is a FPS that predates Halo. While its graphics are obviously inferior. its gameplay and even its storyline are very similar. But when I played it via OSX's Classic, but it ran really poorly. It was unplayable.

So imagine my excitement when I found Aleph One. An open-source, cross-platform engine that lets you play any of the Marathon games (there are three) as well as independently-created games. Mac OSX, Windows and Linux are all supported.


So how well does it work?

To put it simply, damn well.

I've only run it on a Mac (my Linux box is, sadly, dead), but it is amazingly fast. My Powerbook and my G5 at work play it equally well, as does a Quicksilver G4 here at the office. Network play is awesome and really easy to use. The install (like I said, I only did this on a Mac) was a breeze, and even installing the provided hi-res textures was pretty easy.

Not often that I get excited about a video game, but here I am, excited.

Labels: , , , ,

October 17, 2006

Blogimedes

Its fairly well-known that the internet is pretty much the source for all the wisdom and knowledge of the universe.

But what if you want to understand what makes someone a "fat fuck" as opposed to a "really really extremely super fat fuck"? There are many shades of obesity.

Or what if you want to know why WoW is better than the Office?

To answer these important questions, there is Blogimedes. He addresses the issues in a way we all can understand. With booze.

Witness the wisdom:



Truely life-changing.

Labels: , ,

October 16, 2006

1week of art works

Labels: ,

October 12, 2006

iPhoto

So anyone who knows me know that I'm a Mac user. I have been a Mac user exclusively for a few years now (maybe two), and before that I was bi-platform. Anyhow, one of the applications that I've been using since before I got a Mac is iTunes. We all kind of take it for granted, but when all is said and done, I think its a great app.

A lot of people didn't like the new version (iTunes 7) when it first came out, mostly for the changes made to its appearance, and some pretty strange interface changes. I happen to like the way it looks just fine, but one thing I like a lot (which I'm in the process of taking advantage of) is the ability to have multiple libraries.

This is pretty great becuase it is going to let me keep all my music on my external drive, and keep less on the internal of my Powerbook, freeing up some of the rapidly-dwindling space on my 80GB drive.

iPhoto logoAnyhow, today, while thinking about adding a bunch of my girlfriend's pictures from her recent trip to India to my iPhoto library, I thought "Wouldn't it be cool if iPhoto allowed multiple libraries like iTunes does now?" I don't know if I want iPhoto to deal with that many high-res photos every time it opens (slowing its launch down even more), so I thought this'd be a sweet way to get around that problem. So I tried it, and it does! And I'm only running iPhoto 5! Not even the most recent version!

Apparently this is somewhat known already (mentioned here, while talking about this feature in iTunes 7), but a quick google for "multiple iphoto libraries" turns up some stuff, with a lot of people pointing at iPhoto Library Manager, so I'm not sure how widely known this is.

Useful? Probably not extremely for most people. Cool? Most definately.

Labels: , , , ,

October 02, 2006

Talib Kweli: Listen

So today on Pitchfork they posted a stream of the new Talib Kweli single. There's not much hip-hop that I love like I love Talib Kweli, and oh man is this going to be a great single.

Catchy as hell, danceable, and intelligent. Not as political as he gets sometimes, but its a single, and you can't listen to politics all the time.

You can stream it here, and stream the video here.

And if you're too lazy to Audio Hijack it yourself, I have an mp3 download here. (LINK REMOVED)

Via Pitchfork.

Labels: ,