Last blog from Finland

As it turned out, I was unable to secure a job for myself in Finland. Today, that is 27th of May, I am leaving Finland for good. This is going to be my last post from the top of the world and my next posts will probably be from one of the hottest regions of the earth.

It has been almost 4 years since I started blogging. I wish that I had blogged on blogger from the begining as half of my blog is at MSN Spaces. But nonetheless, I kept on blogging from time to time and not too regularly as I had hoped. But still, it is better than nothing at all. today at 1:55 pm, I will be leaving Finland on Turkish Airlines and will set foot on my home soil at 3 am in the morning of 28th of May, which is also my birthday. Again, a scary thought as I will be 30 .. that is 3 decades old and yet to do a lot. 

I also got hold of Mac OS X version 10.5.6 and plan on installing it on my laptop. I hope that gets installed as it is not an easy task to do so on an Intel machine. If, however, I am successful, I plan on doing some cool things. Lets see how it all goes.

So next time, i'll probably write a blog form my home country. Cheers!

Old games new engines

Recently, for some reason, I have gotten really interested in many of the old FPSs that I once used to play. I started playing Doom Legacy ... just to kill zounds of monsters over and over again. It is a good mod for Doom 2 and makes many improvements. I wanted to try Doomsday mod too, but could not get it to work.

If you remember, the first FPS in the Star Wars saga was Dark Forces. It came out in the time between Doom 2 and Quake, and had graphics of the Doom era, that is, sprite based. The game was Dos based, so the only way you could play it was using the Dosbox on the latest windows like Vista or XP. But I recetly found out about the DarkXL mod that enhances the graphics of the original game, provides mouse look, makes it look much much better and also provides the functionality to play it in windows.

As I was searching for this mod, I came across the Dark Forces modification. It is actually a modification of the game Jedi Academy and gives you the first 6 levels of the Dark forces game, recreated using the Quake 3 engine. The work done here is quite outstanding and playing this mod is a treat. It is too bad that these guys are not making the complete game for some reason.

Right now I am downloading the Berserker mod for Quake 2 which makes it look as good as Quake 3 and in someplaces even better as it gives per pixel based realtime shadows. I will also install the high resolution textures that I found at a place and then I will check the mods of the games, Blood and Quake, if I get the time. If someone is also having an FPS nostalgia, I will be more than happy to help out.