The Movies

I've waited 3 years for this one and now it's out. I expected more of a "make your own movies!" kind of game, but you'll have to add a Hollywood tycoon with that too.
You'll be amazed of the value this game is getting. It's kind'a huge: actors, directors, crew, extras, script writers, builders, janitors... relationships between actors, actors have moods, actors get bored, actors can practice, actors have ratings, you have to change the "image" of an actor or let him change it for himself, actors have to be relaxed, actors can be stressed, actors can give good or bad acting, actors can be specialized, actors have good or bad reviews, anyone can become a star (even a janitor)... Tons of things to do.

I've only played for a couple of hours with this one, and I'll going to update this post.

Gamespot The Movies review.

Gun

It's an wild west adventure style game. You have your pistol, you have your shotguns, flask of miracle drink - it heals you instantly, you shoot bad dudes, thieves, rogue native americans (indians), save innocent people, help the sheriff, ride the horse, blow up stuff with TNT... it's cool. The save system it's pretty good - you don't have to repeat a large portion of the game just to repair a mistake you've made and missed the goal. There is a zoom feature for the shotgun and a "quick-draw" - more like a slow-mo effect - for the pistol. It has a straight-forward action and it's pretty fun to play. I would give it more like 8-9 for all the cool stuff in the game (game handling, gameplay, story mode, wild west feeling...).

Gamespot Gun review.

NFS: Most Wanted

Looking good... (very good actually). The introduction in the game surprised me.

It's cool that they struggled that much to avoid the simple and obvious "Hello! You have to race to the top!" line.

Nice little features: Nitro will recharge (slow but it does), slow-mo action (you press a key and enter for a brief period of time in slow-mo, enough to cross that difficult section of the game perfectly), big free-roaming world, pretty good cut-scenes with real actors, lots-and-lots of blur and bloom/glow (so much that your eyes will start watering up), 32 excellent cars - presented right from the beginning, but not accessible, and ... THE COPS!

Update:

The game it's ok, but kind of repetitive after a while. Over NFS:U2 it has less items (good thing), it has preview even for locked items (also good), has shops, but only 3 kinds: upgrades, car-shop and home (also a good thing), the sections with newly unlocked items have an exclamation sign-icon attached to them (good), you have to change your car's appearance to loose heat, or use another car (pretty bad), once bought, a car will loose half it's price (bad), a car with lots of upgrades has an equal price with a plain one (bad), you'll always have a shortage of money (bad), if the police impounds your car 3 times, your car is lost, and if you don't have any more cars, Game Over (so-and-so).
It doesn't raise frustration but it's not so engaging. It's pretty much the best arcade car game of the moment and that's why I'll give it a 9.

Gamespot Need 4 Speed: Most Wanted review.

OS X 10.4.1 on a PC

I've got a developer DVD iso from a torrent about a month ago. Yesterday backed up all the important data from my laptop (in fact, my wife's) and installed it. It went smooth (but it did trash all my partitions at the install stage). In about 45 minutes it was installed. It has a cool interface, it's fast, no lag whatsoever. I configured the ethernet adapter but no wireless and no sound. One little annoyance is the tapping on the touchpad isn't working. Power-management is ok (but a little too lite for my likings). Safari is ok as a browser. Startup and shutdown are as fast as on XP (the shutdown sequence runs a little faster though).

It will not have a long life on my laptop though, because it isn't practical. Sure, it looks nice, it was a good experience, but that's it! Back to XP Pro.

One more thing: OS X is light-years away from Vista. Microsoft should hire some of Apple's developers and designers!

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

This is an amazing product. It's a picture browser, picture organizer and a picture editor. It pretty resource intensive, but I think it's worth it. I use Acdsee also (since Acdsee32 until Acdsee 8.0 - latest version), and it's much faster than Adobe's product, but it's also less refined.

As a picture browser it's slow. As a picture organizer it's very good. As a picture editor it's more than ok.

One feature that I like it's tags: pictures can be dragged onto a category tag and the tag appears to every picture in that selection. You can create Event tags, Place tags, People tags... and each tag has an picture (or a selection from a picture) to illustrate it. You can associate one photo with any of the tags (you can have multiple People or Event tags for one picture). Once you put the tags, you can select all the pictures from a particular Event, containing certain Person or persons... and even: every picture that wasn't made in a particular Place but it contains a certain Person... Displayed pictures can also be restricted to a certain time interval.


Other nice feature you have it's people's faces identification. It's not as high-tech as you would think but it does find almost all the faces in a particular selection. It presents a list of crops from your selection containing just the faces of those persons. If you have multiple persons in a certain picture, all the crops will be there.

It's nice to rotate your pictures with just Ctrl + Left or Ctrl + Right (and it's working on selections too).
Auto red-eye removal will do automatically the work if the photo's EXIF "Flash used" flag indicates true.

A good thing it's photo stack: you can select some pictures and stack them for whatever reason: they present the same scene, there are several shots of the same subject, they represent several edits/versions of the same picture... It saves your space (all the pictures in the stack are represented by one single picture), and it makes it easier to navigate through your collection. You can unstack them whenever you want.

Also nice it's the compare feature in the Full Screen Preview screen. You can split your screen and choose pictures to be displayed in either left or right panel (if you want this split screen feature).

It does some complicated slide shows. Has lots of transitions and effects and the working environment resembles with a non-linear editing software.

One of the best features is by far Quick edit and Standard Edit. It's more like a lite version of Photoshop. You have all the tools, plus new ones over CS2: relating to selection and color matching (You can select something by drawing with a red pen over the desired area. The program will try to select in a continuous area all the similar pixels you've drew over. You can balance starting from a neutral - white/gray color. You can balance colors based on skin color tone. etc.)

It's a realy good, polished product. You can see it here and you can download a tryout version here (you'll need a username/password pair and you can obtain it from bugmenot)

Bought a Sony DSC-H1 digital camera

I've purchased a DSC-H1 after about a month of reviews reading. I'll continue with kind of personal review.

Update:
Pros:
- Fast AF, nice "Focus" button, pretty nice manual focus
- 12x zoom (36mm-436mm - 35mm form) and quite speedy optics (2.8-3.7)
- Quick review (~0.2sec)
- Easy to handle and operate (nice jog-dial, good positioning of the buttons, fast and clear menus)
- Feels firm in your hands, good construction
- Good Anti-Shake system
- Medium quality (slightly better than the concurrence, but still medium)
- Very good value (small price for such a camera and delivered accessories)
- Nice 48 smart zoom in low-res (640x480-VGA) captures
- Good flash (adjustable power, but nasty powerful AF infrared light helper - it's like a lantern!)
- Good WB
- Bracketing

Cons:
- The batteries life will be pretty short (~200 pictures with 2 2100mAh NiMH rechargeable batteries)
- Little AF hunting at tele (but not that slow)
- Just a few size & compression choices for the capture (5, 3:2, 3, 1, VGA sizes at Fine or Standard quality)
- Pretty small EVF

D&D - Dragonshard

RTS with D&D creatures. It has an interesting story, it's full of side-quests, it's pretty straightforward, has 4 main heroes, with it's own special abilities and specialization, enough unit types to try some strategies, has nice graphics (if you run your characters through the snow, there will be snow-paths, if you run your characters through the nice high grass, the grass will bend realistically), nice animations, etc.
All in all: it surprised me. For a first impression I would give it a 9.

Gamespot Dragonshard review.

Serious Sam II

Serious Sam II it's the sequel to Serious Sam and Serious Sam Second Encounter, two fun games. It's a FPS, not a classical one (find the exit, search for the key, shoot those guys, open the door), not a team-based FPS, no RPG influences... just mindless shooting and mindless fun.

It has beautiful colorful graphics, nice little animated characters, functional physics engine, LOTS-and-LOTS of BIG-BIG-or-FUNNY-LOOKING monsters, IMPRESSIVE-BIG-SHINY-GUNS, some sarcastic comments...

It's cool with me but I was somehow bored by it. You always end up locked in a room and somehow, the bad guys are spawning everywhere. You have to have a minimal strategy but in the end you'll run like crazy, spinning and mindless-shooting everyone in the room, even the last object ('couse it just might get you a medical pill or some bullets). Yeah, it's fun, but you get tired of running like that. "Hey man! If you can't take the pressure, don't play it!" would be the comment, but it isn't like that, because games should give you fun and accessible.

I would give it a 8.5 for the crazy-spinning and disorienting shooting, but else, for the graphics, for the fun, for the comments, for the engine, for the content (characters, monsters, animations, fun, crazy and variated weapons, vast levels) I would give it a solid 10.

Gamespot Serious Sam 2 review.

Fable - The Lost Chapters

I've played Fable (The Lost Chapters) on the good side. It was a realy cool game in my opinion: very fun, very addictive - good hack-and-slash (something like Enclave, but much-much deeper), nice RPG, nice Good-vs-Evil option, vast world, extremely nice graphics, very good sound, etc.

Now I'm going to play on the evil side to see what would have happened if I'd taken the other decision.

I would give a 10+ to this game and advise anyone who enjoys games to play this one.

Gamespot Fable - The Lost Chapters review.