DS Lite collage
Originally uploaded by sangsara.

I bought a DS Lite over the weekend (thanks to the Progress Package arrangement). It is freakin’ sweet and I can’t go back to the old DS now. It’s with Kimberly anyway, and she seems to really like playing Tetris and Brain Age. So that’s great.

It’s not official out here yet, so this was a Japanese import, and I’ve got to use a 220v-110v stepdown converter to charge it, which is a bit of a pain and an eyesore. It’s also selling out everywhere fast, with the White model being quite impossible to find.

Rumors on the street are that the local distributor is about to release them officially, with the proper charger, but no word yet on how much they’ll cost. I had the feeling that they’d be around $350 or more, and so decided to get one early. Actually I could have waited a couple of weeks… and then I would have been able to get a white one, but goddamnit if I didn’t have to just get one then!! It was irresistable.

No regrets! The brighter and sharper screens could make any turd of a game look good.

Space Blaster… plus Monster!
Originally uploaded by sangsara.

Truly value for money.

Found at Sim Lim Square.

Dilated Peoples’ excellent, pretty much essential, album Expansion Team is going for SGD$7.95 brand new at the Heeren HMV in Singapore. Also, Athlete’s last album Tourist. I looked through the other stuff but nothing else really stood out apart from an Ed Harcourt album.

Kodak has gone from being a brand I wouldn’t even consider when buying a digital camera to one that’s now on the top of my list. Well done! I remember doing some basic market research on their position in the Asia-Pacific region while at my last job, and they looked in serious danger. Further proof that money spent on R&D and design will pay for itself many times over.

Back to this camera. Jesus. If they actually deliver on this come May 8th, and the picture quality is any good, I don’t think Sony or Canon has anything in their lineup this year to beat it.

• 10x optical zoom. Where the first dual-lens V570 camera went from wide-angle to normal/3x zoom, this new one goes from a normal 38mm lens to a 10x telephoto one.
• Bluetooth.
• Video recording at 640×480@30fps, directly into MPEG-4 in a Quicktime container! Up to 80mins continuous limited by your memory card, and you CAN ZOOM while recording.
• In-camera editing tools including cropping, correction (I assume auto level adjustments and exposure compensation), red-eye removal, and a blurry photo alert icon.
• 2.3cm thick, 11cm by 5.5cm body.
• A hell of a beautifully-designed box.
• Only USD$450 RRP, comparable to Sony’s T9 which is looking a little old now.

It also features one of the tastiest, geekiest taglines I’ve seen on a consumer electronics product:
A dynamic intersection of performance and sophistication.

Before I forget, the site that offers a daily sales deal to U.S. residents, the physical product version of MacZOT, the one I mentioned to Ci’en and DFE sometime back but couldn’t remember the name or URL of… is woot.com

Thinking about interactive fiction again led me to remember a game I played about 8 years ago, that left a lasting impression on me in a way that games rarely do. In the last 5 minutes, I tried hard to remember what it was called, and eventually found it mentioned on the Wikipedia entry on Interactive Fiction.

Photopia. It’s really, really good. If you still have a DOS-capable system, you owe it to yourself to run through it once. It’s more like a linear story that you read, but you need to enter some commands along the way to advance the story. In my memory, it was a fantastic circular narrative story that had some really clever moments. The bit where you wander about in a canyon comes to mind. It feels like a Zork maze and you wander about for a bit. I won’t spoil it for you, but don’t give up. You’ll find a way, and I think I will remember the moment that I did until my dying day. It worked in a way that simply isn’t possible in the literal, visual, games of today. Imagination went hand in hand with narrative and interactivity, and it’s a shame that’s mostly lost now.

You can download Photopia and other IF games free from Adam Cadre’s site here.

Praise for Photopia:

• “Photopia is an amazing piece of work.” —Paul O’Brian
• “It is a beautiful piece of work, haunting, evocative.” —Lelah Conrad
• “It’s the greatest game I have ever played.” —Aris Katsaris
• “Photopia is quite possibly the most skillful, creative, and affecting piece of short fiction I have ever experienced.” —Suzanne Skinner

The old Lone Wolf adventure books are available for free download online! At least, the ones written by Joe Dever are, donated to Project Aon. To those who don’t remember, these were like the Choose Your Own Adventure books aimed mostly at younger kids, but with kickass ninja action and violence that required you to roll dice in combat. At least, that’s how I remember it. They would come with 2 crazy illustrated pages of the different ninja moves you could do, with names like Teeth of the Tiger Throw (fucking loved this one), and the unstoppable Kwon’s Flail kick. I must have read them over 15 years ago and can still remember the feeling of being in some of the book’s trickier situations. They were by and large the closest thing us old people had to videogames when those were still too expensive.

Slashdot thread on Interactive Fiction

roxy, again
Originally uploaded by chotda.

Cheer up! Your day can’t be that bad after seeing this doggie.