Sanitarium

I finished playing Sanitarium today, which is a 1998 horror adventure game that seems to have slipped under the radar. Like most other games from the Golden Age of PC Games, Sanitarium deserves to played primarily for its astounding art, design and storyline.

We see Max crash his car right in the intro, which results in him going amnesiac and seeing hallucinations, dreams and so on. Most of the game is set in such dreams. The game itself blends reality with fantasy, so you can never ascertain which parts were real, and which parts were concocted by Max.

I wouldn’t say it was scary as it is made out to be in the first few chapters, but it definitely leans on the bizarre/surreal angle. I think the creepiest setting of all comes in the second chapter, where you’re trapped in a town devoid of adults, and all the children are physically deformed. As the game progresses and story gets clearer though, you don’t get the chills as often.

One of the main factors to blame would be the games dialogue and voice acting. The voice acting especially is awful. The protagonist sounds like a dad from some 50s family TV show. While it was his voice that was the most painful, voice acting in general of this game feels terribly camp. If the game had included a voice volume slider, I’d have used it.

All in all, a great game that has its problems.

Minefield 3.1b2pre

With all this talk of Firefox 3.1 coming roung, I decided to give the second beta a whirl and I’m impressed. Like totally impressed. If Google Chrome was first, then Firefox 3.1 outruns it easily. While I haven’t tested loading times or general performance, web pages load extremely fast.

Fastest javascript performance, which was previously held by Chrome will not go to Firefox, with their new javascript rendering engine that makes Javascript fast, efficient and almost makes applications like Gmail feel like they’re offline apps.

As for visible changes, everything pretty much looks the same. The Add Tab button has been moved to the Tab Bar, which will now be always on by default. It’s optional, but there’s no way to but the Add Tab button back to the Navigation Bar, so this is something I’ll have to adjust to, but is no big deal.

Only Adblock was working for me at first, but I did some screwy things with about:config to get all my extensions working, so everything’s all smooth and good now. I’m going to make this my default browser for now, since after a bit of browsing, it looks fairly stable.

What it needs right now is a private browsing mode, which pretty much everyone else is having at the moment.

On Anarchy

The more I think of it, it seems that anarchy is the answer because it is only abject, uncontrolled violence that is truly honest and can save this world. It is decisive, judicious and almighty, swarming over the world like flies over waste: the world’s humans ridding themselves of their own existence, burning themselves with the fire of hatred and uncertainty, the safest path in the world. For what is safety without danger, and therefore how else is danger eliminated other than by eliminating safety altogether.

Death to the Earth, anarchy shall reign supreme. Order has brought death upon us, and only lies fill the sword that conquers; in anarchy, the order is broken and killed, as that is the only supreme truth. There is no order in this world, there never was, and never can be. Chaos is omnipresent, before and forever. Chaos is the supreme unity, truth and beauty: it is the core essence of the world, as it rightfully should be. Let destruction prevail.