Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Aquaria: A Beautiful Game

I just beat the Indie game Aquaria, and I'm very impressed with the game. I got it through the Humble Indie Bundle not long ago, and that was my first time hearing about it. Of all the games I played from the bundle, Aquaria was the best experience, more so than World of Goo (Though World of Goo was quite good as well).

I rarely use the word beautiful to describe a game, but that's the word I would use. The artistic style given to the game, along with the scenery of the underwater world that Bit Blot created is wonderful. What added to the beauty as well was the story and voice overs. The story isn't as deep as something like Lunar 2, but it's good, and the voice for Naija was done very well. After playing the game for a while I became very interested in the characters, and hoped for a good ending (Which it did). The gameplay started out slow, but as you gain more powers along the way, things really picked up.

For an Indie game, this was very well done, and for whatever it's worth, I give my recommendation.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Search2mzIdentML: A Simple Ruby mzIdentML Converter

I've been working on building software to aid research in proteomics. With the suggestion of my professor, I created a Ruby implementation of a pepXML to mzIdentML converter. Proteowizard already created one, but through the power of Ruby and Nokogiri, Search2mzIdentML is simple, clean, and easy to expand. There were some challenges that came along while creating this, but I believe that Search2mzIdentML is now a releasable program.

I know that my blog only has about two readers, but just in case there's someone out there who searches for an mzIdentML converter that happens to come across this, I hope they'll find it useful. What's more, if that person could give some input about any problems or concerns, that would be even better.