I stated before that I wanted to finish the [Review of Tomb Raider Legend](/articles/tombraiderlegend) before I made this site public, where public means I’ll tell other people about it. A little problem has appeared there.
The text is all done (although I should and maybe will read it once more to polish it a little), but many of the images I want in there are still missing. I recently installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and while that’s a very cool thing (I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live without Spaces again, for one thing), it also means that my trusty old Photoshop 7 will no longer work. That means for resizing images I’m stuck with GIMP, which is a slow and ugly piece of shit, at least in the Mac version. I did make some progress, and I just might finish that review using GIMP, but for the future, I’ll go back to Photoshop. My copy of Photoshop CS3 (actually whole Creative Suite, Student Edition) is already on the way to me, so that shouldn’t take too long, but you never know what might happen.
In other news, I recently acquired Sid Meier’s Railroads! and will, when I find the time, write a review about that one. This should be interesting, as that game claims to care about railroads, but from all the screenshots I’ve seen so far, implements them in a rather horrible way, trying desperatly to be cute. It was 10 € only, so I don’t think I’ll be disappointed too much.
And while we’re at it, I also bought Kuju’s Rail Simulator. For those of you who don’t know it, Kuju was the company behind the original Microsoft Train Simulator, in my opinion still the best railroad driving sim ever made. Their Microsoft Train Simulator 2 got cancelled, so they started their own project (from scratch, but the same basic idea), which is now published by EA. I haven’t installed it yet, as it requires Windows XP. I was actually hoping to skip XP altogether (currently, I use Windows 2000), and I’ll need Vista anyway for the new Microsoft Train Simulator 2 (which is not developed by Kuju, but by Microsoft). Going straight to Vista is not an option, however, as I can get XP for free using the MSDNAA program (being a student is rather cool), but not Vista, and I’m certainly not going to pay money for a Microsoft Operating System if I can avoid it at all.
I’m not certain if I should review the Rail Simulator. It’s a game that is really about railroads, so the errors they make (if any. Doesn’t look like it so far) are probably going to be on a completely different level, and might be justified in many cases. But then, it’s a game with trains in it, and this site can use all the content it can get. I’d ask for your opinion, but I’m pretty certain that nobody is actually ever going to read it, so I don’t.
*[OS]: Operating System *[MSDNAA]: Microsoft Developer Network Academic Access *[XP]: Experience *[EA]: Electronic Arts *[GIMP]: GNU Image Manipulation Program *[CS3]: Creative Suite 3
Posted November 7th, 2007, 21:22