Entries from January 2006 ↓

Ismo has a post today about an interesting project he has been working on… It’s a nice PHP/MySQL app for personal movie reviews. It even has a wish list of sorts with a log of movies in line for future purchase and ones which will be skipped over. I suggest everyone check it out.

Hey, Ismo you should add a suggested viewing section so people can submit films they think you’d like – and when you release the source let me know (I think I might have to add that to my site).

It seems that after I unsticked the Save Huck post the theme went to hell. I’m now in the process of trying to figure out what happened.

*update*

I figured it out. It looks like a stray DIV found it’s way into the post. Now I just need to determine if it was the sticky plugins fault.

On Friday I released that I had missed the release of the Empire at War demo – so I quickly hopped over to Mininova to grab a torrent. I am an RTS junky – I can trace my RTS roots back to Dune 2 from Westwood Studios (and so can some of the team over at PetroGlyph) in fact I think that the originals for the game are still sitting in my closet at my parents house.

Since it’s just a demo Lucasart’s is only including one campaign which can only be run as the Rebels. The rebels start off with a small force on Hoth – with a small asteroid belt and then Tatooine as your main targets. They were nice enough to include Han Solo and Chewie as the hero for this campaign. By sending Han and Chewie over to the asteroid belt you can smuggle credits away from the Empire operation and also see what forces they have stationed there. Your first mission is to defeat the Empire forces in the asteroid belt. The space battle is very well done – it captures the feel excellently – but it isn’t in 3D so the vastness of space is lost. It’s more like a land map with space ships.

Once you have destroyed the forces in the belt it’s time build up your ground forces and move in to liberate Tatooine. The ground battle comes off just as you’d expect it. An RTS with a Star Wars theme. I for one enjoyed the space warfare much more. The ground battle is by no means a walk in the park. With AT-AT’s, shield generators and even Boba Fett against you – it’s a pretty good fight.

The demo was short and really only serves to whet the appetites of Star Wars fans. In an effort to extend the demo a little I did some poking around with the configuration file. Through a little bit of trickery and a handy-dandy hex editor I was able to start the game with a Corellian Gunship (see screenshot below) and make a few more modifications but I was unable to unlock any of the other missions or the locked buildable items.

I do wish the demo had some more meat to it – it was just too short. They could have at least given us two or three more missions to do. I’m definitely putting this game on my wish list though. Someone better buy it for me for my birthday in February…

The big news for today? The redesigned Nintendo DS! It won't be hitting the shelves till March 2nd (wonder when the US release is going to be). I'm guessing the release delay is probably to help dry up stock in places other then Japan where it is already sold out – a wise move on Nintendo's part.

And you know what that means? Ebay is going to get flooded with the old model! I'm hoping to finally get one – which will promptly be flashed so I can run homebrew apps. We'll have to wait and see what design changes they have made this time around to stop people from flashing the firmware – and how long till Darkfader cracks this one too.