Sprite avatars in Gravatar
After the release of Google Buzz, my Google profile which I had for years finally became somewhat useful. Seeing that I really liked the avatar I've added to that profile, I decided, that Frog should henceforth be my official avatar.
This also meant that I wanted to add Frog to my Gravatar profile which, unfortunately proved to be... let's say interesting.
The image resizer Gravatar provides on their site to fit the uploaded image to the sites need apparently was not designed for sprites as it tries to blow up sprites way out of proportion only to resize them back down. At first I though I could get away with cheating by uploading above picture with a huge margin added to it, but that only lead to a JavaScript error in their uploader.
In the end, this is what I have done:
- Convert the picture into the TGA format
- Scale it using hq3x (explanation of hq3x)
- Convert it back to png and re-add transparency (hq3x had trouble with transparency in the TGA file)
- Scale it to 128 pixels in height
- paste it into a pre-prepared 128x128 canvas
- upload that.
This is how my gravatar looks now, which feels quite acceptable to me:
The one in google's profile was way easier to create: Paste the original image into a 64 by 64 canvas and let google do the resizing. It's not as perfect as the hq3x algorithm, but that suffers by the downsizing to make frog fit 128 pixels in height anyways.
The other option would be to scale using hq2x and the paste that into a 128 by 128 canvas yielding this sharper, but smaller image:
But what ever I do, frog will still be resized by Gravatar (and thus destroyed), so I went with the image that contains more colored pixels at the expense of a bit of sharpness.
They just don’t want my money
Mass Effect is a wonderful game. Its story is one of the most interesting I've ever witnessed in a game. The atmosphere it brings over is very deep and impressive. It's science fiction. It contains aliens and explosions, so it's perfect for my taste.
Also, I like the role playing elements which contain just enough stats to make the leveling process interesting while not being overly complicated.
I bought Mass Effect for the XBox 360 back in December and played through it once, while being annoyed that I had to buy it in the (albeit very good) German version (it's practically impossible to get English originals here in Switzerland) and annoyed about the awful, awful equipment and inventory handling that made it impossible to really know how you should equip your characters (in fact, I went through half of the game in the starting equipment because I didn't understand how to actually put the items on).
So despite the immense replayability value of the game, I left it at that one runthrough. But I bought the Mass Effect book telling the story leading up to the events of the game.
And now, the game was re-released for the PC. Considering the fact that I actually bought the Mac Pro I'm currently using with PC-gaming in mind, I pondered with the idea of buying the game again for the PC. In English and with the fixed inventory screen (they actually fixed that in the PC version. yes. so it wasn't just my stupidity).
This may sound crazy, but as I said, the game provides incredible value to replay it: Different decisions, different choice of squad members, even choosing different classes to begin with (though I would never even have tried to play a caster in the 360 version - the interface was just too painful for that) - everything has influence on elements of the story. Playing through Mass Effect only once is clearly a waste of a very good game.
With a 25 MBit connection to the internet, I though that buying the game online would be a reasonable request too. So here's what I've tried:
- Buy the game via Direct2Drive. All seemed to go well and it even asked me for my credit card info. But then, on the final step, it told me that my cart was empty. And a little footnote informed me that Mass Effect has been removed from the cart due to country restrictions. Thanks for telling me in advance!
- On the web page of the publisher, there's a link to the EA store to buy the game online. Whatever I tried, I could only get the shop to actually provide me with the US version of the game which it refused to "ship" (hello? This is a digital download) to Switzerland - despite me trying on June 8th, two days after the official launch in Europe.
- I tried to trick the EA store to sell me the game none-the-less by using paypal to pay for it, giving a fake US-"shipping" address. No dice though as paypal refused to bill my account due to the "shipping" address being different from the address I've entered in paypal.
- Sure that electronic download will not work, I went to the local game store I usually get my games from. Unfortunately, they didn't have the English version of the game and won't be getting it.
On a world where digital goods can hop from one corner to the next in milliseconds, on a world where everyone is complaining about rampant piracy, it is impressive how hard it actually is to timely and legally get the digital goods.
Here's what I did in the end: First I began downloading the pirated version of the game and while that download was running, I went and bought the German version of the game. When I got back from the store, the download of the English version was finished. I've installed it, provided it with the serial number of my German original and then played it, using the German DVD as proof of purchase.
Why does it have to be so hard to actually buy a game these days?
My PSP just got a whole lot more useful
Or useful at all - considering the games that are available to that console. To be honest: Of all the consoles I have owned in my life, the PSP must be the most underused one. I basically own two games for it: Breath of Fire and Tales of Eternia - not only by this choice of titles, but also by reading this blog, you may notice a certain affinity to Japanese Style RPG's.
These are the closest thing to a successor of the classical graphic adventures I started my computer career with, minus hard to solve puzzles plus a much more interesting story (generally). So for my taste, these things are a perfect match.
But back to the PSP. It's an old model - one of the first here in Switzerland. One of the first on the world to be honest: I bought the thing WAAAY back with hopes of seeing many interesting RPG's - or even just good ports of old classics. Sadly neither really happened.
Then, a couple of days ago, I found a usable copy of the game Lumines. Usable in a sense of when the guy in the store told me that there is a sequel out and I told him that I did not intend to actually play the game, he just blinked with one eye and wished me good luck with my endeavor.
Or in layman's terms: That particular version of Lumines had a security flaw allowing one to do a lot of interesting stuff with the PSP. Like installing an older, flawed version of the firmware which in turn allows to completely bypass whatever security the PSP would provide.
And now I'm running the latest M33 firmware: 3.71-M4.
What does that mean? It means that the former quite useless device has just become the device of my dreams: It runs SNES games. It runs Playstation 1 games. It's portable. I can use it in bed without a large assembly of cables, gamepads and laptops. It's instant-on. It's optimized for console games. It has a really nice digital directional pad (gone are the days of struggling with diagonally-emphasized joypads - try playing Super Metroid with one of these).
It plays games like Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger - it finally allows me to enjoy the RPG's of old in bed before falling asleep. Or in the bathtub. Or whatever.
It's a real shame that once more I had to resort to legally questionable means to get a particular device to a state I imagine it to be. Why can't I buy any PS1 game directly from Sony? Why are the games I want to play not even available in Switzerland? Why is it illegal to play the games I want to play? Why are most of the gadgets sold today crippled in a way or another? Why is it illegal to un-cripple our gadgets we bought?
Questions I, frankly, don't want to answer. For years now I wanted a possibility to play Xenogears in bed and while taking a bath. Now I can, so I'm happy. And playing Xenogears. And loving it like when I was playing through that jewel of game history for the first time.
If I find time, expect some more in-depth articles about the greatness of Xenogears (just kidding - just read the early articles in this blog) or how to finally get your PSP where you want it to be - there are lots of small things to keep in mind to make it work completely satisfactory.
After 13 years something new in Monkey Island
It has been 14 years ago that I played Monkey Island for the first time. Well... maybe 13. I just don't remember exactly if it was 1992 or 1993 when my parents finally bought a computer and I illegally copied the game from a classmate (including a photocopied version of that "copy protection" wheel).
Of course it didn't take me 13 years to complete it. But the game was so incredibly cool that I played through it over and over again. And with the downfall of DOS came the advent of ScummVM, allowing me to still play the game.
And just now I started another run - probably because I've seen Pirates of the Carribean 2 last monday and I noticed quite some similarities to Monkey Island - especially the second part (Voodoo Lady in a swamp comes to mind)
Anyways. Today was the first time ever I've seen the scene I screenshotted there.
In all my previous runs, I always "salvaged" the idol as my last task which mean that as soon as I got out of the water, I've seen the ghost ship fade away with Elaine on it.
Now, I did it first as it actually makes sense as that task requires the least amount of walking around, which led me to see this cute scene between Guybrush and Elaine (and not to mention her stupid excuse for not kissing shortly afterwards.
How nice to find something new after 13 long years.