Removing duplicate covers in iTunes' Cover Flow

Seeing how I have an iPhone I've been using iTunes as my music player. It's far from perfect but it has some neat features, and since I need to have it installed because of the phone I might as well use it.

One of the features it has is to show the cover art of all your albums in a neat graphical presentation called Cover Flow. However it often ends up showing the same cover more than once and somewhat ruining the experience. So I set out to see if I could fix it and found a simple solution.

Joining Gamer's Aspect

A while ago I came to the same conclusion that my friend Ashran did, namely that keeping both the gaming parts and personal notes on the same blog gave it a bit of a jumbled appearance. So I've joined up with him and Shino on their blog called Gamer's Aspect. My first post there is already up where I've reviewed Bayonetta. So go on there and have a look.

In the future all my gaming related posts will likely end up there and in the meanwhile I'll dedicate this site to nonsensical personal drivel. Seeing how I'm starting to get fed up with the way Blogger works I might just start a Wordpress blog and export everything over there instead. But at least the links will still work then.

Death of a Salesman - Assassin's Creed 2 Review

The renaissance was a time of marvel. New ideas were born and pursued, famous works of art and architecture were made and people thought that storing money in banks was a neat idea. It's in this time period that Assassin's Creed 2 takes place.

Players of the first game will remember that the first game gave us the tale of Desmond Miles, an inconspicuous bartender who suddenly finds himself kidnapped by the clandestine company by the name of Abstergo. With the help of a machine called the animus and a lot of science fiction Desmond gets to experience his ancestors memories first hand, in his case an assassin by the name of Altaïr.

In the second game he reenters the animus, this time to retrace the steps of another assassin forefather, Ezio Auditore. Early in the game Ezio's family is accused of a crime they did not commit which leads to all male members to be executed except Ezio himself who manages to escape. The rest of the game follows how he tries to exact revenge upon those who framed his family with a few twists and turns along the way.

Dusting off Pandora - Borderlands Review

The scorching sun shines over the arid landscape. The great cliffs in the background stands defiantly against the elements and on a weathered road sign the text "Welcome to Pandora!"is shown. From behind it an alien dog-like creature hops out and lets out a ferocious shriek. It runs away onto the road and looks back just in time to see the bus running it over. Welcome to Gearbox's Borderlands.

Borderlands is a RPG/FPS in a postapocalyptic sci-fi setting that in many way are reminiscent of Mad Max. But less serious and with more aliens and robots. The type called "Claptrap" will especially leave no one without an opinion about them, as most will either love or hate these spunky little bit characters.

You play as one out of four different treasure hunters in search of riches on the next to abandoned planet Pandora, each of them with their own class set of abilities. There's the hunter, a sniper based class with the ability to send out a bird of prey to attack it's enemies, and the soldier, a class centered around assault rifles and shotguns with a portable turret. Then there's also Brick which is the big beefy guy you want to pick if you want to pound someone to dust with your knuckles or use big explosions, and the more lithe class the siren who can temporarily make themselves invisible and specialises in elemental damage.

Why no test drive?

Some games I can spend waiting for years to come, the expectation of some sweet deliverance of exuberant proportions digital joy being part of the appeal. Other games I merely stumble upon and for some reason decide to buy.

Fortunately I seem to have a lucky track record of buying games I know little of with only one of them being a disappointment. A few of the games I bought on a whim are Super Smash Bros. and Banjo Kazooie for the Nintendo 64, as well as a small game called Fallout, the latter of which I recently re-bought soundtrack alone. More on that later.

Then there's the middle child of these categories. The games I kinda know of but isn't sure if it's something for me. I've read some reviews and seen some footage, but is still not convince. Usually a great demo will be enough to sway me to buy it, but unfortunately that kind of software becoming something of a rarity these days. If I'm lucky I will be able to try them out some other way, maybe trying it on a platform at a friends or something of the like. There are still titles where I feel I'm flinging myself into them, not really sure if I'll like the game or not. Again, I'm usually in luck here as Prototype, a game which I had tons of fun with, and Borderlands are both fairly recent purchases which I've enjoyed. I plan on writing a bit more about Borderlands a bit later.