Everyone who call themselves a gamer will have heard of Duke Nukem. Duke Nukem 3D released in 1996 was a super hit. Duke was a big-mouthed, egoistical, gun toting tough guy who rescued the earth from aliens. And like any other successful franchise, its creators 3D Realms began work on a sequel.

In 1997 they officially announced Duke Nukem Forever. Since then they have released screenshots and videos and little else. 13 years in the making it has switched engines and technologies multiple times. The game was often ridiculed and some even called it an elaborate joke. Still everyone always wanted it. 3D Realms have on many occasions said that they’ll release the game, “When it’s done.”

Unfortunately on May 6th, 2009 3D Realms shut down due to a lack of funding. Which means a sad farewell to the game. Take Two Interactive still do hold the publishing rights to the game but they aren’t funding its development at present.

After all these years, if Duke Nukem Forever is ever released it better be one hell of a game. Only something rare can live up to all this hype. Perhaps it is a good thing that it has been shelved.

Source: Shacknews

An Art Director has released some new screenshots as a way of a parting goodbye. See them here.

At least in Japan anyway. Check it out below.

It doesn’t say anything and may be a little confusing to anyone who hasn’t heard about Chrome before. But it is still a cute little advertisement. And the first TV ad I’ve ever seen for any browser. Looks like Google is serious about pushing Chrome.

I also grabbed this screenshot from the HD video which looked nice enough for me to use as my wallpaper.

If you like it click here to download it in its original resolution (1280x720).

With the advent of digital pictures, most people are overflowing in more pictures than they can care to look at. I have collected almost 1,700 pictures on my hard disk and with the recent acquisition of a digital camera that number will increase exponentially. Recently I realized that I have the worst luck when it comes to hard disks, so I decided that I had to look for a backup solution.

Being the freeloader I am, I first looked for free services. Immediately Google's Picasaweb jumped up at me. It was instantly vetoed considering that it only gives me 1 GB of storage. Certainly not enough when each picture I need to store weighs in at around 3-5 MB. I needed more space. However it has its uses. This blog being hosted on Blogger integrates with Picasaweb to store all the images here.

Microsoft's Skydrive offers 25 GB of space. Which is a lot. I was inclined to use it but on further investigation I found that it was severely limited by the lack of a desktop uploader. Using a web based interface to upload gigabytes of pictures isn't really a good decision in Internet challenged India. Also I didn't really like the user interface. Sharing albums with friends is possible but features like embedding and slideshows aren't. There also isn't any easy way of downloading all of your uploaded pictures in bulk. You can download a folder as a zip but with hundreds of folders you are still stuck with a lot of clicking.

I landed onto Zooomr which looked promising. Unlimited storage of high resolution pictures. Unlimited is certainly its biggest USP. I ended up using it for a couple of months. However Zooomr is plagued by quite a few problems. Often pictures wouldn't upload. The site itself is pretty slow to load. And in the current state of the economy there's no telling when a free site offering unlimited space will run out funds to serve its customers and shut down.

I had used the free account of Flickr in the past and had really liked it. It is fast, has a huge user base and is owned by Yahoo, which for all the Microsoft drama last year is still a giant. The free account though has prohibitive limits. Only 100 MB of uploads a month and only 200 visible photos which won't be available in the high resolution. But it still offered the best user experience. The pro, paid account offers unlimited storage for photos and videos both of which will be stored as the original files. The one year account costs $24.95 which comes out to be around Rs. 1,300. It may seem like a lot but anyone with thousands of pictures they don't want to lose will understand that the price is worth it.

This is by no means all that there is to Flickr. It hosts billions of original pictures by talented photographers all over the world and the in built social features allow you to interact with them. There are many user groups where people share tips and tricks on how to become a better photographer. Flickr also has a well documented API which allows anyone to build applications around the service. From applications which allow you to tag your pictures based on face recognition techniques to some very useful apps which allow you to download all your pictures to your hard disk with all the metadata intact.

Which is why I took the plunge and decided to pay for the account. And now I can store all my pictures which nobody wants to see, online.

Just for added security, I am continuing to use Zooomr. A nifty little service called Pixelpipe allows me to upload my pictures once to it, which in turn forwards them to both Flickr and Zooomr. Along with my hard disk I am storing my pictures in 3 separate locations which allows me a certain degree of peace. Which is certainly desirable.

Living in India for all its mystic joy is fraught with perils. Killer buses for one. However the last couple of decades has seen the emergence of terrorism as a major threat. Terrorists strike with alarming regularity even as security measures have surpassed the point of simple annoyance.

Living in a suburb of New Delhi its not uncommon to be affected by terrorist strikes. I remember a few years ago, when the Police shot dead some terrorists in the basement parking of the Ansal Plaza mall in Delhi. My family had plans for an outing the next day but we cancelled them. The same thing happened when the pre-Diwali blasts hit Delhi in 2005.

However in the past few months India has been hit a lot. In fact the India had the highest number of terrorist acts in 2008 for any country not in a war. And slowly people have stopped being afraid or even caring. When Delhi was bombed again last year, no one I know cancelled any plans or anything. In fact the places attacked were back to normal business within a few days.

Yesterday the police killed two terrorists within 10 km of where I live in Noida. They were  carrying explosives, guns and grenades. They could have attacked anywhere had they not been intercepted. Yet no one reacted. It was a normal day as far as anyone was concerned. People did what they had to do without caring about what might have happened. Some people didn’t even know about it.

We have finally seen too much and terrorism is losing its edge. Terrorist acts are now just random yet regular acts of unspeakable violence. But it is failing to evoke any terror among people not directly affected by it. It is now just one of those unpredictable but common things which might happen. And that is sad.

It is not everyday that I get a chance to pat myself on the back so there is hardly any point in being modest about it. The XAT (XLRI Admission Test) results are out and here is my scorecard.

 
Yeah! That’s a 98.130 percentile. Also take a look at the 99.900 in the verbal section, better known as the English section. Of course my mathematics and reasoning skills need improvement but this is still a result to make me jump in glee. Still the result is not good enough for XLRI, so that’s a bummer. But it is still better than my CAT debacle. (Negative marking sucks!)

Meh. They really shouldn’t have put those “out of number” in the score section. It makes the result look even worse! Though 91.86 percentile is still better than most. 91.86% of the test givers to be exact!

I’ll shut up now.

The Guardian, which is perhaps the most famous of British newspapers recently published a list of 1000 novels which everyone must read. Now of course quite a lot of the books on that list wouldn’t interest me. But they have divided the list into different sections and one particular section deals with my favourite genre of writing: Science Fiction and Fantasy. Of course other people got their hands on it and sfsignal.com has started a meme of sorts; publishing the list and highlighting the books you have read. Like anything geeky I had to get my hands into it and so here is the list. The titles in bold are the ones I have read, my commentary in in italics.

1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) (if you haven’t read this, go do it now!)
2. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
5. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
6. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
7. J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
8. J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)
9. J.G. Ballard: Millennium People (2003)
10. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
11. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
12. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
13. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
14. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
15. Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)
16. William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
17. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
18. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
19. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
20. Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)
21. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
22. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
23. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
24. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
25. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
26. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
27. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
28. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
29. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
30. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
31. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
32. Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
33. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
34. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
35. Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
36. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
37. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)
38. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
39. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
40. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
41. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
42. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
43. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
44. Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
45. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
46. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
47. Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
48. Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
49. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
50. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
51. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
52. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
53. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
54. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
55. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
56. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
57. M John Harrison: Light (2002)
58. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
59. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
60. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
61. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
62. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
63. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
64. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
65. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
66. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
67. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
68. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
69. PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
70. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
71. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
72. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
73. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
74. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
75. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
76. CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) (just Book 1 though)
77. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
78. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
79. Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)
80. Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
81. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
82. MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)
83. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
84. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
85. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
86. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
87. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
88. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
89. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
90. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
91. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
92. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
93. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
94. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
95. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
96. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
97. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
98. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
99. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
100. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
101. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)
102. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
103. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
104. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
105. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
106. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
107. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
108. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
109. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
110. Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
111. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
112. Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) (just book 1, looking to get a few more)
113. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
114. Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
115. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
116. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
117. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
118. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
119. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) (who hasn’t?)
120. Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)
121. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
122. Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)
123. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
124. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
125. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
126. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
127. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
128. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
129. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
130. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
131. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
132. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
133. JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
134. JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
135. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
136. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
137. Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
138. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
139. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
140. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
141. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
142. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
143. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
144. Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
145. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
146. Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)
147. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
148. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
149. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

I guess 18 out of 149 isn’t bad. There are a few there I have been meaning to read but haven’t had the chance to. But the ones I have read were all excellent so this list holds some promise. Guess I’ll print it out and carry it with me everytime I visit a book store.

Many people blame piracy for killing the game industry. Many developers have singled out India for rampant piracy. To an extent this is true. Speaking from personal experience it is very easy to buy the latest games at less than a 10th of the original price at many shops. They are sold openly and often even under the legal tag! Yes some shopkeepers actually say that the games they sell are legal.

Of course that doesn’t mean that original games aren’t available. Take today for instance. Having learnt that the retail copy of GTA IV PC is at a low price of only Rs 500/- (most games retail for around Rs 1000 – 1500) I set out to obtain it for my after exams celebrations. So I did what any discerning buyer would do. I went to the nearest mega-mall full of big name stores. I went straight to my favourite store and asked for the game. Soon I would be knee deep in Liberty City! The joy…

was not to be. They didn’t have it! Its been a month since the game released and they didn’t have it. Oh well maybe they were sold out. I asked and they told me they hadn’t received the game yet. Mind you this was one of the biggest retail chains in India. So I went to another store in the mall. And another. And one more after that. Everywhere it was the same story. Nobody had it.

Now who would blame an eager fan, dying to play the game, willing to buy an original copy and being disappointed? Would you blame him for visiting the seedy marketplace within walking distance of the mall and picking up the same game from a pirated games store? I didn’t do that since I want to play the multiplayer in GTA. But a more casual gamer would. And I don’t blame him.

If a publisher releases a game, they should ensure that it is stocked in stores. A player wont wait for months to buy a game. He’ll either buy a pirated copy, download it or forget about it. Either way the publisher loses a sale. And nobody wants that. Of course they blame it on the pirates. But whom would you blame?