Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Let the sunshine in

Okay, I admit. This topic is just a lame reason to post a nice picture of a sunbathing beauty. But truth be told, the weather was damn good today! I am told that our everlasting patience for some nice weather will be rewarded with as much as 27°C tomorrow. Seeing is believing, but so far it looks promising.

I'm going out now; hopefully I'll run into the "arms"of a beautiful lady that needs a refreshing drink... fat chance to that *sigh*

That's all, folks! Cya tomorrow.


Monday, May 01, 2006

Hooray, it's a holiday!

The roads were abandoned today; not because I live in a godforgotten neighbourhood - no no, far from that. The roads are usually very lively here in Antwerp, either crowded by cars or roadworks. The latter can both prevent and cause the me(n)tal roadmadnesses.

The reason for the eerie quietness lies in the fact that most people had a day off today, and lots of Belgians fled abroad for a city trip (where the grass is greener and the air is cleaner?). There were, of course, unlucky souls that work in an industry that require their places to be permanently occupied (I once belonged into that category), but I guess that's life, and partly their choice.

This holiday is called "dag van de arbeid" in Dutch, or the international Labor Day, as you prefer. I use this day as an excuse for a fulltime day of nothing-happening (it's in fact by far the only day I can really justify my laziness).

This doesn't mean I didn't do anything today; it just means I did nothing productive, I guess. Unless catching up with a dear friend falls into that category :) Because the clouds outside were filled with sadness, and temperatures were below acceptable degrees for this time of the year, the activities were mainly indoors: PlayStation 2 and a movie. In between we went out to visit a family who had a nest of kittens. As a side note, the daughter looked pregnant too. My friend was interested in getting one of the cuties, so we had to take a look. The cat mother is a Holy Birman, the father is (probably) the neighbour's Blue Russian cat. They were a-dorable! I'm an animal lover, so I'm pretty sure a cat will be one of my comrads when I leave this place to live on my own. Our landlord doesn't allow any pets... what a shame.

By the way, the picture on this blog entry is a modified version of a Garfield cartoon, courtesy of Jim Davis. You'll find the original here.


New Game: Dreamfall

It's here, it's here!

Dreamfall is the long awaited successor of The Longest Journey, the best (in my humble opinion) adventure game on the market, next to Syberia. The fans' patience was stretched to its fullest as the game's development took four years. Originally announced for a Q4 release in 2005, the game was postponed because the team's focus was to deliver quality, rather than making a deadline. This raised expectations of many critics and gaming communities alike.


"It's quite easily one of the most anticipated adventure games in years" - Gamespot

The challenging question "will it be as good as its predecessor?" was already partly answered positively during development phase by sneak previews during many game events and developer interviews.

I got the PC DVD release of the game yesterday. In case you wanna play for discjockey, it comes in a PC 6-CD release too. There's also an X-Box version. Anyway I'm addicted to it ever since I started to play. The gameplay is very different compared to The Longest Journey, but after 30 minutes you get the hang of it (this is the learning curve, as reviewers like to call it). The graphics are wonderful, the voice acting is superb and the musical score blends it all together.

Unlike The Longest Journey, your character can die so it is important to save your game often, which you can do at any point. If you don't have the reflex to save the game unti you finish playing, the autosave feature does this for you at critical stages in the game. These are so-called checkpoints. You can die in several ways, but one of them is during the combat mode, which is another new gameplay addition compared to Dreamfall's predecessor.

Tagline: "The future holds secrets only the past can reveal"

Also new is that you can play three different characters. You start off as Zoë, but very soon you will get introduced with April Ryan, the heroïn from the original game. A very interesting aspect of the game is that you can respond in different ways when talking to people. The way you respond might take you onto a different path in the storyline (if you like this concept, check The Pandora Directive). For me this is enough reason to start the game all over again once I finished it, to answer the eternal question in life: "what if?".

I already dare to call this the best game of 2006. If you are an adventure gamer, then you will definitely want this gem on your shelf.