Blue Chi’s

As a promotion of her upcoming 3rd studio album, Amerie has released a mixtape featuring some new full songs, remixes of other artists songs, samples and skits under the title “Because I Love It – Vol 1″. Her next album is due sometime early next year, and another mixtape shall be released sometime before the official gets released. My favourite tracks are Push It, Take Control, Blow, and Money Maker. You can listen to the mixtape over at Amerie’s MySpace page. (Use the iPod player on the left to play the tracks)

1. Because I Love It (Intro)
2. Keep My Head Down (Skit)
3. Push It
4. Reminisce Witcha
5. Take Control
6. Same Thing (Skit)
7. Blow
8. Money In The Bank
9. The Money (Skit)
10. Money Maker
11. Get Gone
12. Rest of My Life
13. That’s What You Are
14. Weekend Love
15. Outro

3.5/5

Title: Megaman ZX
Genre: 2D Platform Scroller
Released: September 12th, 2006 (US)

Megaman ZX is the first Megaman to be released on the DS and the it title suggests the start of a new sub-series; ‘ZX’. The game plays and looks similar to the ‘Z’ series on the GBA and because it does not make much use of the unique DS features it feels as it was made for the GBA and then got imported into the DS. However, the graphics and sounds of the game are top notch and do not look much different from the recent 2D Megaman games we have seen on home consoles.

ZX is a traditional shoot, cut and proceed old-school 2D scroller with great action packed gameplay powered by tight controls and challenging level design and bosses. ZX departs from the traditional Megaman series by offering an exploration-based gameplay instead of the previous known level selection mode of play making the game play somewhat similar to the Castlevania games in that the player could go back and forth through the different areas in the world which are connected through a single map. However, the awesomeness of this new addition is undermined due to the nature of the poorly designed map. Unlike Castlevania maps that show sufficient details of how each room is connected with another, the map in ZX shows only whole areas and not actual rooms giving you no help on how to actually reach a certain area from within the area that contains a link to it.

Though it is possible to explore the majority of the game freely, the player would have to select a mission to undertaken at save points to proceed with the storyline to trigger story events upon reaching certain areas. It is also possible to undertake optional requests from various NPCs found in civic areas in the game, accomplishing those could offer the player secret items and equipment that cannot be found otherwise. What I did not like about the option quests is that they play exactly like the story-related missions in that they have to be accepted at a save point even after finding the trigger character for a certain quest and the player can only select ONE mission OR request at a time, so it is not possible to accept a mission to go to fight a certain boss and while being there look for an item needed for a certain quest because you can only do one thing at a time.

The Megaman games have been always about the different weapons and forms that Megaman can transform into, ZX offers five standard weapons (called Biometals in this game) that you have to find to complete the game and one optional one. All the five standard biometals are unique and interesting to use, but only if you know how to use them. I completed the game without knowing what the ‘Overdrive” button does and only knew, by mistake, halfway through the game about the special charge commands to be executed while holding certain directions for certain biometals. The game manual did not say anything about these and it was not mentioned in the game as there is no tutorial feature in it.

Megaman ZX is a great 2D scroller, but it could have made better use of the the DS hardware, deciding not to use the touch feature in the touch screen could be a matter of choice, but that does not leaving it empty. While it is supposed to change in accordance to what biometal is equipped, the main form; ZX, leaves the lower screen with a screensaver-style image saying MEGAMAN. It could have at least be used to show the status of the player or the equipment menu.

I do not know how I managed to make this review sound so negative, the game itself is fun to play is one of the greatest 2D scrollers available on the DS currently, but it left this bitter taste in my mouth as I played it for all the potential it had to be an a serious masterpiece if it was not for all the little annoyings I noted above.

4/5

I wish everyone an enjoyable time with family and friends during this Eid. Mozilla has also given us another reason to celebrate, the final version of Firefox 2 is finally out. You can download it for free via this link.

We published a set of Islamic-themed tutorials at Oman3D during the holy month of Ramadhan, we were supposed to have more of these, but some were not good enough, some people never showed up after their promises, and we ended up with those remaining ones. We are still very happy with the outcome, hopefully we will manage to do a bigger collection next year. Here are the links:

• Modeling a Lantern Using Splines and Loft (3D Studio Max)
  
• Creating a Simple Flash Website (Macromedia Flash)
  
• Modeling a Minaret (Swift3D)
• Drawing a Mosque on a Starry Sky Scene (Photoshop)

I had to record this so that future generations can understand the suffering we had to go through while watching TV.

Today is the first day of our Eid break, we are getting 9 days in total if you count the weekends. About a month passed since I started working at the MOLA. I think that I need to write a post on how work has been going.

I am employed at the Ministry of Legal Affairs as a legal researcher, my job involves revising commercial contracts that impose monetary obligations upon the government with a value more than half a million. These could be anything starting from making roads, schools, hospitals, and all the way to tourism projects and oil deals. There are various types of contracts under all those categories, I think that the main ones are official government standard contracts, unofficial ministry-specific standard contract, and non-standard contracts.

The government has official standard contracts for most of the generic projects such as civil engineering and mechanical works, the contract for these come in a standard form that the other party merely has to fill certain blanks to complete, e.g. the parties’ names, value of contracts, penalty values, etc. Revising these involves checking that the values are correct and that all the relevant forms have been supplied, e.g. the registration form with the chamber of commerce, tender board acceptance letter, etc. The ministry-specific standard contracts are those that have been constantly used by the same ministry to do a repetitive sort of work and dealing with them is similar to the official standard ones.

Non-standard contracts are those that have been written specifically by the two parties for the deal in question, these could be on a topic that has not been covered by a standard contract, or could be a special set of terms and conditions imposed in addition to the standard ones. Our involvement with these varies, at times it could be the mere approval before the final signature by the Minister in question, at other times we join in the negotiations process by drafting the contract term by term between the two parties. In theory, we have the power to request the Ministry in question to remove or add whatever clauses as we find appropriate.

Also, due to the fact that our department is the only one with English speakers in the Ministry, we get the occasional random letter to be translated into Arabic.

There are currently five people in our department, three advisers and only one other legal researcher in addition to me. There were two legal researchers that have been sent to do their Masters. Although we have been short on employees, Ramadhan was not too bad as barely any work gets done during Ramadhan short working hours, I hope that the upcoming months do not get too hectic.

“Hurt” is the title of Christina’s second single from her most recent album “Back to Basics”. The song was originally written by Linda Perry, who previously wrote “Beautiful” on Christina’s previous album, however, the song was later edited by Christina after feeling that the lyrics were too personal. Christina also directed the video and surprisingly it came out really good. The single will be released on the 23rd of October in the US and on the 6th of November in the US. Here is the video served by Youtube. “Hurt” is one of my favorite tracks on Back to Basics and I think that it deserves to do well on the charts.

I was tagged by 3anooda to post my a screen shot of my desktop, this one is at work.

The English version of Final Fantasy 12 is finally coming out soon, the game that took about five years of development time is the first Final Fantasy to receive a 40/40 from Famitsu. The game has already sold more than 2.38 million copies in Japan only. The North American version is due October 31st, 2006. Here is the English trailer of the game:

Official website.

KOM is holding the second Gulf gaming conference here in Muscat on December 10th and 11th. The Gulf’s gaming conference is going to be focused on mobile gaming and gaming for training purposes, it is mainly a business conference to introduce to gaming as a business opportunity, mainly mobile gaming due to its low start up fees in comparison to other forms.

We at Oman3D are going to provide coverage of this event and are going to participate with minor contributions by helping in the search for local game developers to display their work during the event. We are not looking for professionals necessarily, but any young casual individuals that have attempted developing games for mobiles, PC, Internet or even console gaming would do. If anybody knows such a person interested in taking part, please let me know.