Monzool’s Personal Publishing

BLADE RUNNER HAS been one of my favorite movies since the first time I saw it.

I’ve always hoped that I would get chance to see Blade Runner on the big cinematic screen, but hadn’t really believed that an old 1982 movie would get big screen time. But suddenly the chance came up, as BioCity in Århus arranged a special marathon, dedicating one show room for continuously playing Blade Runner - Final Cut at all time slots for almost an entire week. The sensation was enhanced by the fact that the movie was projected from a digital copy with a high resolution projector. What a fantastic picture quality! This was the first time I’ve seen a digital movie projected at the cinema - and what a debut experience with such a picture-beautiful movie as Blade Runner. This is how movies should be seen.

Definitely worth the almost 150 kilometer drive.

Rating:

IT MIGHT BE that Chuck Norris and RMS got some skills, but Tiesto - he performs even in those undefined places of NULL pointers.

Metaphysical respect.

THE 2008 F1 season finally started with the opening race in Australia. Given the new significant ruleset restrictions like mandatory gearbox reuse and no traction control, the progress of the first race was anybody guess.

With only six cars finishing, the race might not give the best grounds for comparing the strength of the teams. An “easy” win for Hamilton and fifth place for Kovalainen indicates that McLaren-Mercedes are very fast again this year, whilst Ferrari have serious endurability problems. BMW-Sauber was a close third team last year, and they seem to have progressed further. I am confident they will take a win this season. Renault disappoints in performance which resulted in bad qualifyings, but Alonso made the most of what was available. Christian Vettel in the Toro Rosso and Nico Rosberg in William-Toyota both preformed spectacularly. The biggest surprise was perhaps the competitiveness of Barrichello in the Honda. If they hadn’t made two stupid mistakes of pitting while the pits was closed, and Barrichello leaving pit on a red light, the resulting sixth place might as well have been a podium position.

A non-sport observation was the (much needed) updates in the realtime information graphics. FIA realtime information graphics has slowly been progressing the last couple of years and finally they realized that e.g. a vertical scrolling information bar is an effective and nonintrusive way of continuously giving position and time updates. Anyone thats seen Formula 1 on Speed TV would known, that the official FIA graphics compared to the Speed TV graphics was like comparing caveman drawings to Pixar renderings.

THE TITLE FOR this post could almost as well have been “Warlords II, Flashback, Abuse and How I Spent My Youth“. Well, perhaps not really; I did play a lot of other games too :-D. When I think of great games I played in my long “carrier” of PC days, those three games I’ve always categorized as games with exceptional gameplay and a spellbinding atmosphere. No matter how horrible the graphics may look today, these properties was what kept you playing hours upon hours.

Warlords II

When it comes to Warlords II, me and my friend Michael Rasmussen that lived a couple of houses down the street, used to battle in this game for an almost infinite amount of hours - and before that, we played Warlords I for almost as many hours. Actually when hearing the hours being clocked by people playing WoW it reminds me of myself playing Warlords. I guess its the same magic.

Warlords II is reincarnated in an free open source clone LordsAWar. This project builds on the C++ implementation of FreeLords ( FreeLords it self, seems to have spawned as a Java implementation instead). LordsAWar is a multi platform game and can also be fetched from the Debian repository.

Flashback

What Flashback have in gameplay and story it also had in graphics and jaw-dropping animation sequences.

Presented in a dystopian theme, it were almost something like a “Indiana Jones meets Blade Runner” feeling of the game.

Flashback is released for Amiga and DOS platforms, but some talented fans have written the game engine REminiscence as a multi platform replacement for the original game engine. Supplying the game data files, downloadable from Abandonia, and compiling REminiscence is that enough revisit Flashback ;-) on a Linux box. A later extended CD-ROM version of Flashback is also available on Abandonia. Old reviews can be read on the Amiga Magazine Rack.

Abuse

Abuse is also abandonware and is available from Abandonia, but also exist in a free open source edition called Abuse-SDL. Like Flashback, Abuse is a dystopian game where one guy must escape from prison where all his cell mates has become monster due to experiments gone wrong.

Abuse is both a horizontal-scrolling and vertical-scrolling platform game. The controlling of the main character is somewhat unusual for a platform game, as the keyboard moves the character and the mouse controls the gun aiming. A review is available on the Amiga Magazine Rack.

Well… time for some more gaming. How needs sleep anyway?

SOMETIMES IT SEEMS that I often am the last person in the world to get exited of new television series. Granted that television is crammed with series and keeping up with just a fraction of the lot is an impossible mission. But once in a while a series pops up that just explode in popularity with everybody - everybody except me that is.

Right now I’m crazy about the (ReImagined) series Battlestar Galactica.

When I saw the first episode on TV I quickly rejected it and zapped on. After some preservation from a friend that is a passionate fan, I borrowed the series to give it another try. After all I just learned my lessen earlier this year when, after much resistance I agreed to watch the series Lost. That series I had rejected as being boring as hell, but on the second try, I was hooked. I consumed one DVD after another in almost spell bound fascination. No one, however told me that the series was only had three seasons completed, so now, like the rest of the world, I’m stuck on a cliffhanger - aarrgh. As for Battlestar Galactica, the history repeats it self. I am absolutely trilled about the series, and being a huge StarTrek fan, I can’t comprehend why I didn’t find interest in it the first time around?

Actually something similar went for Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

It just didn’t appeal to me the first time. Then I coincedentially saw a rerun of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel one hangover’ed Sunday morning. Now I have both the Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the Angel Collectors box-sets

…along with the Buffy The Vampire Slayer coffeecup and T-shirt :-)

I wonder if 24 and Heroes will come back to haunt me later on. I watched the first episode of both series, but I just didn’t get interested first time around.

I STUMBLED UPON an excellent Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time ranking list. Even though my personal views of technology and the future are definitely more utopian, I’ve always found these dystopian movies to be the most fascinating. Interestingly this list does in fact list include most of my favorite movies, even though I do not agree with the ranking order in which they are listed.

My personal top 10 dystopian movie hit list would go like this:

• 10. The City of Lost Children
• 9. Brazil
• 8. RoboCop
• 7. Akira
• 6. 12 Monkeys
• 5. Dark City
• 4. Gattaca
• 3. Matrix
• 2. Alien
• 1. Blade Runner

FOR A COUPLE of years now I’ve wanted to learn to play the game of Go, but I just haven’t managed to find the time. Go is a strategic game for which the saying is “easy to learn, hard [impossible] to master”.

There exists a brilliant live-cd called Hikarunix. The Hikarunix CD contains a huge set of the quality information on Go found on the internet. A great asset is also the collection of tutorials, trainers and databases over played Go games. In theory Hikarunix bundles all that is required to study, learn and play Go.

Hikarunix is definitely recommendable, but experience tells me, that if you really wanna learn a subject to depth, get a book written by experts in the field and benefit from their hard earned knowledge. Hence I have bought the book Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go.

The book comes highly recommended (e.g. from www.godiscussions.com) so I’m looking forward to reading it.

I am also very exited about playing on my Go board.

This beautiful board is actually handmade by my mother. When wooden Go boards are generally price tagged in range of a Ariane space rocket, its nice to have a family that got talent :-)

The wood is a 48.3[cm] x 55,5[cm] leftover from a kitchen table and then drawing of the grid and cutting grooves for all the lines as well as coloring the lines and applying the sealer is handmade.