Final Fantasy Series Video Documentries

A few weeks ago I found online a brilliant set of video documentaries about the all time best video game series, Final Fantasy. The videos are being made in the run up to the release of the Final Fantasy 13 games on PS3.

There a going to be a complete set of 13 separate videos telling the complete story of the Final Fantasy series from its very humble start on the NES console to becoming one of the biggest selling video game series of all time.

These videos are brilliantly made, amazingly detailed and in most cases are a real blast from the past and bring back the great memories of some of the previous Final Fantasy games.

I have so far watched them all, detailing all the games from one up to eleven and can’t wait to see the new videos which appear every Monday evening, although by the time you read this they may all already be there .

I think looking back at these games I still think seven is the best that I have played with 10 a very close second. After watching these though I might have to go and buy some of the earlier games i.e. games 1-6 that have recently been re-released on the GameBoy and PSP.

Anyway enjoy the show there really worth watching:

The Final Fantasy Retrospective

How To: Setup and use iPod without iTunes!

Now I’m not a fan of Apple iPods for the one reason that it forces upon users a nasty piece of bugware called iTunes.

But recently a bought my partner an iPod Shuffle because she really wanted one and I have to admit iPods are cool little bits of kit and they do look good.

However once we got it home and tried to use it we had a problem. It states you have to download iTunes in order to format and setup your iPod to use and iTunes happens to be a massive 45Mb download. Thats huge and just so I can set up my iPod and transfer files, you must be f**ing joking!

So online I went to search for an alternative, and there are plenty, see links at the bottom of the page. The only trouble is in every case you have to download iTunes and setup your iPod first. There was no chance in hell I was going to do that, I have my principles and I was not going to waste my time and bandwidth on downloading that piece of crap.

So what was the solution, well it was my good old friend, Winamp! There is a plugin available for Winamp that adds iPod support called ML_iPod.

This is so good one of the guys who developed it now works for Winamp and so this feature is built into Winamp from version 5.2 and above. However the plug in has more features so is a better choice and I’m not sure all the features needed to fully support using your iPod without iTunes is available in the built in version as I haven’t tested it so any one who has please let me know. I am quite happy with Winamp 5.03 and see no need to update at the moment.

Anyway onto the plugin, it’s a stupidly small file to download and as easy to install as a single click on the installer. In seconds you can launch Winamp and set up your iPod.

There are detailed documentation for this plugin here:

http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/wiki/Ml_iPod_Basics

Built into this plugin is the best feature ever. It has a ‘Restore or initialize an iPod’ function. This means that you can initialize and format a brand new iPod without going within a country mile of iTunes or any annoying Apple software.

Then you can use this amazing plugin to sync your Winamp playlists onto your iPod. Read the documentation for more details as thats all I have for you.

I’m just so relieved that I didn’t have to download iTunes, which for some unexplained stupid reason has to come with Quicktime as well!! Why? Arggh! So if you did download it both iTunes and Quicktime would bug you every 2 secons to update, upgrade, buy, until you give in or jump out the window!

And best of all its all in Winamp, the best music player ever invented in the entire universe!

Great!

As promised links to some sites that list other iTunes alternatives if your interested:

10-alternatives-to-itunes-for-managing-your-ipod/

http://ipodmanagers.blogspot.com/