Not(e) Worth It

Maybe it’s because I’m supposed to be studying, I’m in a mood to blog about game sales. Besides the crazy sale over at Steam, there are also quite a few acclaimed indie games on sale as a bundle . It’s pay what you want, so you can be as cheap as paying $0.01 to get 5 games: Braid, Machinarium, Osmos, Cortex Command, Revenge of the Titans. But wait, pay more than the average ($7.39 now) and get last year’s bundle #1 too! World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture and Samorost 2. 11 games for less than $8? That’s really a steal! Why you should get it It’s DRM free – you’re free to install on as many computers as you want, no ties and restrictions (please don’t pirate it though, it’s so cheap). And you can choose to donate to charities – the EFF and Child’s Play Charity. Yeah right, like that’s the main reason people buy games :P Seriously, the games are good. My favourites are Machinarium, World of Goo and Braid. The gameplay is good enough to attract casual playe...

Every year, around Thanksgiving and Christmas times, I’ll be looking forward to sales online. And Steam never disappoints. First off, what is Steam? Simply put, they distribute games via digital downloads. You install it, buy and download games from their store, and play on you PC (or Mac. Sorry, Linux.) What makes them special is their regular and surprise sales. There’ll be a ‘midweek madness sale’ and ‘weekend sale’ for a game each week. What gets people really excited though, is their Holiday Sales with insane discounts and bundles . Like now! (till 2 Jan 2011 , don’t miss it!) Even if you’re not an avid gamer, browsing through their catalog is always fun. Besides, you might find something you can gift to a gamer friend ;) In case you missed the link, here it is again: http://store.steampowered.com/ Check out the daily deals! Oh boy, my wallet’s gonna hurt. Now I hope it can survive through the new year… p/s: In my excitement I forgot to mention how crazy this year...

One Manga has gone down, and licensed titles have been removed from MangaFox too. My two usual haunts gone during my break, which I didn’t get to enjoy reading manga because I was busy working and my internet was down. Ah, life. So, in the post-OM and MF era, where can one go? I suppose the scanlator’s sites will be worth checking out, if they have one. MangaStream provides very high quality scanlations, but they only have the latest chapters of a few series (they just started not that long ago). There’s also Spectrum Nexus , a not-so-well-known site I found quite a while back. All the manga series here are allegedly hand-picked, so quite a lot of high quality manga (in terms of story) here. Of course, if you can't find the series you're looking for, there’s always torrents, IRC and Chinese scanlations to fall back on.

I actually planned a series of posts on keyboard shortcuts and tricks, but since July is ending, guess I’ll say goodbye to One Manga first. If you haven’t been paying attention, manga scanlation site One Manga has announced that it’ll close down by July 2010 due to pressure from publishing companies. Surprisingly, this doesn’t hit me as heavily as I’d thought, probably because I’d been reading less manga anyway. Besides, there’s always Chinese scanlations. But for the good old memories of manga series I started reading there, here’s a toast to One Manga~ What’s interesting are the debates going on. On the forums, many manga fans are either   a) blaming others for not using IRC and staying low   b) stating they’ll continue getting scanlations via torrents, IRC etc   or   c) blaming others for being pirates and not buying published manga while being all high and mighty ( Kurogane has a great rant post for those people). I must say I have ...

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (copy and paste) are probably among the most used keyboard shortcuts. Did you know, though that there’s another pair of shortcuts? Try Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert ;)  The usefulness is pretty limited though, since you'll usually need 2 hands to use them. (Huh, Insert is an often overlooked key, isn't it? Look out for future musings on the underdog keys on the keyboard.)

And Opera Turbo was on =.=’