If there’s one thing that all superhero and licensed titles have in common it is that they are universally terrible. Sure there have been some games that haven’t been exactly terrible, but at best you’d say they were decidedly average (X-Men Origins: Wolverine I’m looking mat you) and as a fan of comic books you’d be left wondering if your favourite hero would ever feature in a game worthy of his or her talents. Enter Batman: Arkham Asylum stage right. What Rocksteady Games has done with this game is nothing short of miraculous. Not only have they managed to make the best licensed game I’ve ever had the pleasure to play, but they’ve also done justice to one of the most complex and interesting superheroes out there. Continue reading ‘Batman Arkham Asylum review’If there’s one thing that all superhero and licensed titles have in common it is that they are universally terrible. Sure there have been some games that haven’t been exactly terrible, but at best you’d say they were decidedly average (X-Men Origins: Wolverine I’m looking mat you) and as a fan of comic books you’d be left wondering if your favourite hero would ever feature in a game worthy of his or her talents. Enter Batman: Arkham Asylum stage right. What Rocksteady Games has done with this game is nothing short of miraculous. Not only have they managed to make the best licensed game I’ve ever had the pleasure to play, but they’ve also done justice to one of the most complex and interesting superheroes out there. Continue reading ‘Batman Arkham Asylum review’
Being a kid in the 80s meant I grew up watching one of the all time cheesy action shows, The A-Team. Following a group of Vietnam veterans who were on the run from the Army for a crime they didn’t commit as they helped anyone who could afford to hire them. It was perfect to watch as a kid with explosions and gunfire that never seemed to kill anyone and with almost no blood shown even though almost everyone had a gun of sorts. It also seemed as though every show had some point in it where the A-Team would get captured and locked up, only to bust out in a home-made tank they built from seemingly innocuous odds and ends that they found lying around.
Fast forward to 2010 and you have the new movie attempting to bring back the A-Team with Liam Neeson starring as the team’s leader, Hannibal and Sharlto Copley playing the part of Howling Mad Murdock in his first big role since District 9. While I was initially a bit worried at the idea of seeing a beloved show from my childhood getting the Hollywood treatment my fears have been silenced by the first trailer for the movie. The last 10 seconds of the trailer make this film a must watch for the year 
This past December it was not only Christmas and New Year for me but my annual birthday. This year, as always, I decided to take it slow and not organise anything as most friends were either away or had other plans, so my birthday was spent relaxing with family and getting in some gaming time with Ryan and Craig at Ryan’s pad. As an added bonus they got me two figurines from our local Figure Fanatix, namely Angel & Devil Homer Simpson as well as Peter Griffin from Family Guy. A geek’s treasure trove indeed! Thanks to Ryan, Dean and Craig for the presents.
Homer depicting mankind's internal struggle etc etc
Peter Griffin standing vigilantly...
Seeing as its Christmas Eve here in sunny South African I thought it might be a good time to do my 2009 wrap up post for the year that was. This year saw a few ups and downs for me with the highlight of the year being my recent qualification as a full member of the South African Institute of Professional Accountants. Since the start of my university career its something I’ve tried to achieve for close to 10 years so to finally clear that hurdle in my professional career was a huge milestone for me. I also ended my tenure at Boshoff Visser and embarked on a new job at NF Maartens & Co and while I miss some of my co-workers from Boshoff Visser I think it was a good career move on my side and something I needed.
On the personal side of my life it was also an exciting year with some exciting visits down here in the Cape, as well as the great honour of helping Craig at his wedding where he tied the knot with Chantelle. Unfortunately I’ve also lost touch with some people with whom I was good friends and I’ll miss them but I’m feeling good in the knowledge that I’ve also had the great fortune to meet some wonderful people who share my interests and outlook on life and that is something that is incredibly hard to find.
Overall 2009 has been an important year for me and hopefully one that’s going to usher in some great new changes in my life in the years to come. To all my friends, old and new, thanks for making this a year to remember and I hope all of you will be blessed in the years to come. To all those of you who are stumbling on this post via random searches, here’s hoping you like what you see on the site and that you too had a great 2009 and will have a wonderful 2010!
I’m not much for making New Year’s resolutions but I do know that in 2010 there is a lot that I want to do with my life. With the FIFA World Cup being played on the African continent for the first time I would love to attend one of the matches and become a part of the rich history of the sport of football. I’d also like to try to go overseas for the first time in my life and experience different cultures and see the sights like a real tourist. I want to get more involved in my writing and return to my days of reading books by the dozen. Even if I only do one of those things I’ll be a happy man in 2010.
So once again let me say to one and all out there: Happy holidays and be safe! See you in 2010!
Even Cthulhu himself celebrates Christmas!
The Cthulhu Christmas pic is taken from The Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu. Read it!
Well well well, what a day its been. I’ve been sitting in the office doing some work while waiting for my Friday to end and the weekend to hit. Much the same as every other day you might think and you’d be right. That is until I received a mail from SAIPA (South African Institute of Professional Accountants) to tell me that I had successfully passed my board exam that I’d written in November.
I can’t begin to describe how overjoyed and relieved I was to finally hear the news that I am now a fully qualified accountant. Its been a long road getting here and at some points I’ve doubted my ability to make it but the payoff has been huge. My studies at Stellenbosch and my articles at several firms have all taken their toll on me so to know that it’s finally over and that I can view myself as a true professional accountant is a huge relief to me.
As an added bonus this is of course the month with Christmas, New Years and my birthday so there’s plenty of reason to celebrate! It’s great to know that I can go into 2010 on this high and I can’t wait to tackle the next step of my career.
Throughout my time as a Linux user I’ve always relied on good ol’ faithful Firefox. So far it’s handled all my surfing needs with great skill and aplomb. At the same time I’m also quite fan of Google and their services so when Google Chrome came out I was eager to give it a try. Unfortunately for me I was constricted to only trying it out in Windows as there was no official version for Ubuntu.
I tried the Chromium project (on which Google Chrome is based) as well as the nightlies for Google Chrome but I’ve never been a fan of using anything less stable than a beta. So I was relieved to see that just last week Google finally announced the arrival of Chrome as a beta for the Mac and Linux platforms. Google provides both 32- and 64-bit debs for Ubuntu that installs the Google repository and the latest version of the Chrome beta on your machine. It’s as easy as you’d expect from a company such as Google which prides itself on simplicity in design.
The browser is remarkably stable and has yet to crash once in the week or so I’ve used it and seems to perform as good, if not better than Mozilla Firefox on my machine. As an added bonus Google also announced the availability of extensions for their browser which means that many of the same functions you get in Firefox via plugins is now also available in Chrome. Of course the extensions are not yet as mature and stable as their Firefox versions but given time they should hopefully become better.
An indicator of Google Chrome’s improvement over the last year or so is that I’ve been so impressed by it of late that I’ve now made it the default browser across all my various PCs and operating systems. While Firefox is still a great browser to use it just seems to have become bloated of late and Chrome has focused on providing a fast and secure browser that is best at what it does without using all your memory. Perhaps when Firefox finally gets around to using separate processes for its tabs and extensions I’ll give it another look, but until then I’m going to stick by Google Chrome.
I’ve always been a fan of Westerns and Rockstar’s games in general so when I saw the video for Red Dead Redemption I was over the moon. April 2010 can’t come soon enough!
Those of you who have a Feedburner feed for your blogs and have been relying on Twitterfeed or a similar site to post your blog updates to Twitter will be glad to know that Google has announced that Feedburner now has the ability to post directly to Twitter. Another tidbit of news is that Google also has its own URL shortening service, goog.gl that will be used by Google Toolbar to share web pages on social sites and by Feedburner when posting blog updates to Twitter.
I’ve been having hassles with Twitterfeed so I’m interested to see how Google’s servers deal with mass posting to Twitter. The one drawback is that it will only post to Twitter which means that if you make use of any other microblogging services such as Identi.ca or Facebook you’ll still have to rely on sites such as Twitterfeed to post to those sites.
If you’re interested in trying it out you can follow the instructions in the Feedburner blog post to set it up for your site. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Those of you who have a Feedburner feed for your blogs and have relied on Twitterfeed or a similar site to post your blog updates to Twitter will be glad to know that Google has announced that Feedburner now has the ability to post directly to Twitter. Another tidbit of news is that Google also has its own URL shortening service, goog.gl that will be used by Google Toolbar to share web pages on social sites and by Feedburner when posting blog updates to Twitter.
I’ve been having hassles with Twitterfeed so I’m interested to see how Google’s servers deal with mass posting to Twitter. There are some drawbacks in that it will only post to one Twitter account and the only service it currently supports is Twitter which means that if you make use of any other microblogging services such as Identi.ca or Facebook you’ll still have to rely on sites such as Twitterfeed to post to those sites.
If you’re interested in trying it out you can follow the instructions in the Feedburner blog post to set it up for your site. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
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