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26th September 2024
Not long after publishing the Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession walkthrough, I took to speedrunning the game, culminating in a record speedrun of Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession in 1:12:37. just a few days ago.
Meanwhile, I've also made a number of additions and corrections to the Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession walkthrough text and maps. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the fact that the endgame changes a little when your two main characters are both dead.
Finally, I've made a few link additions to the Game Info page, including the aforementioned new speedrun, as well as links to articles about Diablo: Hellfire's development and preserving the past.
15th September 2024
One year to the day since the publication of the Menzoberranzan walkthrough, it is with great pleasure that I can finally share my new Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession walkthrough! This thesis-length piece of work, accompanied by 44 finely crafted maps and over 900 hand-picked screenshots, is your tourist guide to this brutal and atmospheric game which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary.
Aside from the walkthrough, I've also added Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession weapon stats and a Ravenloft: Stone Prophet review, both courtesy of gibberishh.
26th August 2024
It's been quite the summer for anniversaries.
- On 6th July, this site celebrated 18 years since it was originally launched as Gigi's Computer Corner.
- A couple of days ago was the 10th anniversary of my Musical Notes and Scales mini-web-app. It's really just an experiment from the early days when I was still learning jQuery. I never bothered to announce it publicly, and actually forgot about it for many years, but it's still around.
- Today is the 20th anniversary of The Minesweeper Legacy, my series of five (so far) Minesweeper clones.
- On 15th and 17th September, we'll celebrate the first anniversary of my Menzoberranzan walkthrough and latest speedrun, respectively.
The Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession walkthrough is on track to be published on 15th September.
While you wait, enjoy some recently added Game Info material, including:
- New subsections for Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse and Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager, and added release years in some existing ones
- Links to several cheat tables by gibberishh
- A link to a recent walkthrough of Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse by gibberishh
- Links to the official Warcraft 2 and Diablo 2 guides
- Links to a review by Kimimi and a forum thread about circumventing blocked doors in the Eye of the Beholder 2 Info page
5th August 2024
Author: gibberishh
Author: gibberishh
I have a few things to share that concern Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession:
- I've published a new article today that sheds light on the inaccessible room in the Caverns West of Barovia, long considered an unsolved mystery.
- I've added links to the above article as well as a review by Kimimi to the Game Info page.
- I have for several months been working on a new walkthrough, which is finally nearing completion. I'm planning to publish it around mid-September.
23rd June 2024
Earlier this month, Dune 2 and Dungeon Hack sections were added to the Game Info page. The Menzoberranzan walkthrough has also seen a few minor updates based on feedback from gibberishh. The most interesting of these is that the Helm of Spiders actually provides attribute bonuses to the wearer.
The first anniversary of the Day of the Tentacle walkthrough is also in a couple of days.
27th May 2024
Over the past week or so, I've made a number of small changes to clean things up, fix issues, and improve the focus of the site. A few of the more visible ones include:
- The Attitude page has been archived.
- The "About Me" page has been removed, as you can visit my personal homepage instead.
- The Email Technology page now has brief sections on POP3 and SMTP.
11th May 2024
Today is the first anniversary since Gigi's Computer Corner was rebranded as Swords and Software. The site has come a long way since then:
- A Day of the Tentacle walkthrough and a Menzoberranzan walkthrough were both published last year.
- New articles published include a Heaven's Vault Review, The Ravenloft Engine Trilogy's Automaps, and Slaying Anhktepot in Ravenloft: Stone Prophet.
- The site's image galleries have been made responsive (i.e. mobile-friendly) and they load lazily.
- A new Television page has been added. Others have been expanded, most notably the Game Info page.
- Many obsolete pages have been either archived or retired altogether.
- Several other minor updates.
I'm currently working on a new Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession walkthrough, which will take a few more months to finish. And I'll continue adding info to the site and carrying out other maintenance activities.
28th April 2024
I've added a new Television page, with some info on the TV series Murder, She Wrote.
21st April 2024
The Natural Language Processing page has been archived.
23rd March 2024
Today, I published an article detailing the process of Slaying Anhktepot in Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, based on a review by Anders.715 on GOG.com. The Game Info page, under Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, has been updated with a link to this article and another link to a forum post explaining how to transfer characters from Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession to Ravenloft: Stone Prophet.
20th March 2024
I continued expanding the resources in the Game Info page, with extensive additions to Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession and Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, as well as several new links added to Menzoberranzan and also one for Dark Sun: Shattered Lands.
16th March 2024
I've added some more links under the two Ravenloft games in the Game Info page.
10th March 2024
Author: gibberishh
I've just published an article about The Ravenloft Engine Trilogy's Automaps, an analysis of these games' automap system and its interoperability features, which includes viewing the maps outside of the games as ASCII art.
13th December 2023
I've given the Menzoberranzan walkthrough a final review, and applied some more minor edits and corrections.
The Game Info page has also undergone some maintenance, with structural changes to the per-game links, and some updates to the various links themselves.
Finally, I've archived the General Programming, Game Development, and Operating Systems pages, which have been obsolete for a long time and are full of dead links. They remain available as a historical curiosity, especially the Operating Systems page, much of which was built between 2008-2010 when both the Android and Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems were in their infancy.
19th November 2023
Since the Menzoberranzan walkthrough's launch two months ago, I've continued adding new discoveries and making corrections (thanks also to several contributions from gibberishh). All my planned changes have been carried out, so please enjoy the updated walkthrough.
There have also been a couple of minor additions to the Game Info page, wherein you can now find links to a lengthy Planescape: Torment video review by MrEdders123 as well as Warren Spector's 40-year retrospective.
15th September 2023
After a couple of months working on it, I'm excited to finally publish my new Menzoberranzan walkthrough! Similar in some ways to the Day of the Tentacle walkthrough published in June, this new piece is incredibly detailed and packed with screenshots and unique insights. Beyond that, it also comes with dozens of carefully crafted maps to accompany you in this dark and disorienting journey.
Since the last update here, the Hardware page has been archived.
23rd July 2023
I've just published a review of Heaven's Vault, an indie adventure game from 2019 with elements of science fiction and archaeology. It's quite beautiful, fun and fascinating, so definitely give it a try if you like mystery and exploration and have a little time to spare.
I've also made other changes to this site recently including:
- Added a section on the Cartography tool to the Security page.
- Moved all projects and some of the older and more obsolete pages to a new Archive page; and removed them from the site's navigation.
- In Game Info, removed the section on game addiction and added a new one on gaming blogs.
- Changed the style of block quotations.
- Several other minor fixes and improvements.
25th June 2023
Today is the 30th anniversary of LucasArts point-and-click adventure game Day of the Tentacle! To celebrate this occasion, I have published a brand new Day of the Tentacle walkthrough. Incredibly detailed and with almost 500 screenshots, it's a great way to experience the game again after all these years.
19th June 2023
Since the last news entry, I've been busy improving a number of things with the site. I have in fact finished migrating the galleries throughout the site (except for sub-sites such as The Minesweeper Legacy or Picaxo) to the new responsive gallery format.
These galleries, as well as those in the soon-to-be-published new walkthrough, now also benefit from lazy loading, meaning that a page with lots of images will only load the first few, and load others further down the page on demand as you scroll down.
Other updates include:
- I've updated Minesweeper 5, fixing the elusive "squashed button bug", and also applying a couple of other minor changes.
- The BSc IT Page sub-site, the Maltese ICT Sites page and the Tech Events page have all been retired.
- Fixed broken navigation links to a couple of my other sites.
- Changed the swords icons in the footer.
All is set for the publication of the new walkthrough I mentioned in the last news entry. Watch for another update in the coming days.
28th May 2023
Restoration efforts on this site have been ongoing. Some of the things that have happened since the last update include:
- More pages have been migrated to use the new responsive image gallery, although there are others still waiting.
- A link to Minesweeper 5 has been added to the Quick Links navigation section.
- Old news from Gigi's Computer Corner version 2 has been archived to a separate page.
- Various info updates have been applied to the EOB2 Info and EOB2 Walkthrough pages.
- Added a custom 404 error page.
- Added syntax highlighting to the old C++ STL Priority Queue article.
- Upgraded the old Picaxo Image Viewer page to use HTML5, and fixed HTML validation errors.
- Other minor fixes and improvements.
Although there's more work to be done, I'm pausing restoration work for the moment to focus on something new: a walkthrough. More on this in a future update.
11th May 2023
I have a few big things to announce about this site.
- Today, Gigi's Computer Corner has been rebranded as Swords and Software. Along with the new name, the site now also has its own domain (swordsandsoftware.com) and has undergone some cosmetic changes.
- I've optimised many of the game screenshots (around 1,700 of them), saving hundreds of megabytes in storage and achieving faster page loads, without any noticeable quality degradation.
- The site has been made mobile friendly, so you can happily browse it with your phone. The mobile version uses the site map for navigation. Some image galleries will still cause a horizontal scrollbar (see next point).
- I've started applying the responsive image gallery from Dino's Ultima Page, allowing image galleries to comfortably overflow on smaller devices. This has been applied to the larger screenshot galleries but is still a work in progress for other parts of the site.
There have also been a lot of less important changes and improvements. The Basic Virtual Deposits System project has been retired and its page has been removed. The early EOB2 Walkthrough screenshots no longer have a DOSBox frame. The links in the EOB2 Info and EOB2 Walkthrough pages have been updated, and the individual EOB2 Walkthrough pages now have links back to the main EOB2 Walkthrough page. And lots more.
I've still got some more restoration work left to carry out on the site, but I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out, considering how old it is.
16th October 2022
Although Gigi's Computer Corner has been in archival/historical state for a long time, the fact that it still has some useful information means I occasionally perform a little maintenance to keep it healthy.
Since the news posted last year, I made a lot of updates including:
- Added/updated a lot of links in the EOB2 Info and EOB2 Walkthrough pages.
- Added a main/contents page for the War3XOrc Walkthrough.
- Added a "Quick Links" section on the right containing the most popular/useful resources.
- Restructured page metadata of the whole site for better search engine and social media optimisation; this includes nice previews when you share pages on social media.
- Fixed or removed a lot of broken links.
- Fixed HTML validation errors.
- Various other minor fixes.
20th June 2021
I haven't updated Gigi's Computer Corner in a long time. I launched Gigi Labs in October 2014, and it has since taken over as my primary platform for writing and sharing my projects and other work.
While it is not updated any more, Gigi's Computer Corner has a number of resources that remain useful to this day, the most prominent being the Eye of the Beholder 2 walkthrough.
As a result, over the past year I've done a handful of necessary updates to keep the site in working order. These include:
- Upgraded from XHTML 1.1 to HTML5.
- Fixed a bunch of HTML validation errors.
- Removed the Valid XHTML and CSS images at the bottom.
- Switched the site to use full HTTPS.
- Added metadata description to be more search engine friendly.
- The site is now printer-friendly.
- Fixed broken parts of the BSc IT page.
- Various other minor fixes.
Also, some old projects on this site received a sequel in recent years:
- Picaxo Image Viewer was originally developed in 2008. In 2016, I built and released Picaxo 2.
- Ultima 1 Revenge, an engine port of Ulitima 1 started in 2007 and rebooted in 2012, had further iterations in 2015 and 2016.
- The Minesweeper Legacy, a series of Minesweeper clones I started in 2004, got augmented with Minesweeper 5 in March 2021.
On the other hand, Magnetic Pool no longer works since it was released here using the Unity Web Player, and web browsers have since dropped support for such plugins. I'll look into what it takes to restore this using WebGL, but can't provide any guarantees.
Finally, while Gigi's Computer Corner will remain online as a historical archive, do follow Gigi Labs for my latest blog posts and projects.
Older News
- No news between 2015-2020
- News Archive (GCCv2) (2010-2014)
- News Archive (GCCv1) (2006-2009)