Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Long shot

I have spent a major portion of my college life playing multiplayer games on our LAN (ah.. those memorable days, afternoons, nights.) and arguably I was the best in house. Yes I was beaten many times, but my win percent was always high.
Anyway, anyone who is a gamer knows the value of a sniper. Be it when you are on top of the tower in "CTF-Face" (Unreal Tournament) or when you have the AWP in your hands in "Dust" (Counter Strike) You will be the most hated person by the opposition and the most valued by people (bots??) on your side. Anshul even prided in calling himself "Sniper-Krishna", because there was once a time when no one could get rid of him while playing in CTF-Face. That is no one ... other than me B-)
And then there are the classic snipers from the movies: "Saving Private Ryan", "Enemy at the gates", "Phone booth", "Behind enemy lines" (yes there is a very short sniper sequence during the end of the movie and we have watched it enough times to notice), "Band of brothers", all highly coveted positions. Of course of the lot the best sniper (according to me and Anshul) is the one in "Saving Private Ryan".

So, now having ascertained that we are huge sniper fans, when someone shows me this, my reaction is: "Damn! I got to have that thing."

Quick link thrown in as an after thought: Making your breakfast more interesting.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Ehh.. 3 more

Two movies and one gaming console. Here goes:

Pyar Ke Side Effects
Pros: Witty dialogs, Mallika Sherawat's acting.
Cons: The movie drags on a bit too much, Mallik Sherawat's acting.
Verdict: Average

Dor
Pros: Shreyas Talpade stands out! His mimicry is a refreshing change. Everything else.
Cons: None
Verdict: Damn good!

XBox-360

Ok this one won't be like the above two, because its not a movie and because I'm a computer guy.

The XBox-360 is Microsoft's attempt to get the gaming console into the Indian houses. If you take a look the Sony Playstation has been here in India since quite some time, but Sony never marketed it like Microsoft is doing (I hope you have seen the Akshay Kumar/Yuvray Singh ad). I had the opportunity of using the X-Box 360 recently in one of the many shops they were being demo-ed. So what is it like?
Not good!
I think the console is over-hyped. People come in already believing that the graphics are mind-blowing. For example the guys who were before me on the demo-stall were already like "Wow! Look how cool the graphics are!!" when the initial game video was playing!! Before I go on, I would like to point out that those guys were satisfied by the video alone, because they couldn't navigate the menu to actually play the game :D
I, of course, could.
The demo consisted of the X-Box 360 console (which comes in a slim gray cabinet a la the Dell cabinet) , the X-Box 360 controller and an exquisite 27" Samsung plasma monitor. The game on demo was some racing game whose name I forget.
So after navigating the main menu and starting a new game, what do I see? Jaggies!! A whole bunch of them. The anti-aliasing was rather bad. Now I don't know whether the X-Box 360 or the game was running on a low-performance setting, but that is what I saw and if they are going to show me something like that in a demo I won't take their side >:) and will assume that it was running on full steam.
I finished the race coming 2nd, but not liking what I saw.
The only good thing is the controller. It fits in my hands nicely and gives a nice force-feedback, but again I will be frank and say that this is the first controller which I have laid my hands on (which has force-feedback) so I'm bound to like it.
X-Box 360 is priced at 24K (including the controller). The one which comes with the wireless controller is priced at 27K (which includes a 20gig hard drive) and as Rahul pointed out: "You won't be playing on a 27" plasma, but on a 21" CRT (!!), so the quality is bound to decrease further from the demo." Other than that each game title costs around 2.5 K.
So what should you do if you have already saved a bit of cash for the 360? Well... assuming you already have a PC, an AGP slot (if not a PCI-X), and some green goodies: buy a massive Nvidia graphics or ATi card and live life in peace.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Three more

So here I'm again trying to amuse my audience (if any of it remains) and myself. So what do I have this time around in my bag of goodies? Well here goes..

With terrorism on the rise how do you educate people to take preventive measures? Well .. you show them pictures and hope that they don't misinterpret things.

It had always been a childhood dream to integrate emacs into the browser, so that I would be able to edit all the text areas with the help of the razor sharp editor :) A recent discovery lets me do just that.

There are normal ways to have tea and then there are some people who like to take some effort in doing the exercise.

Among other things I'm trying to learn how to drive (ride??) a bike (as in a bike with gears, I consider all things without gears a disgrace) so that on the long run I can buy a bike, drive (ride??) it, and not be at the mercy of the Bangalore auto-wallahs (who are the biggest dipshits I have encountered and till now there have been no exceptions)

Monday, October 02, 2006

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Stumbling through the weekend

Found this, tried drawing my own face, failed miserably, realized my inabilities once more, had a coffee, life is still good :)

Of course at first there was Xiao Xiao and I was impressed by that. This is again of equal caliber.