For the three people who have not seen the hit movie: This is the story of Louis de Pointe du Lac, a vampire created in the Louisiana of the late 18th century, and his quest for the meaning of life and death. I knew the book to be a classic, but that it was released as far back as 1976 came as a surprise. A worthy read, with or without having seen the movie (which I want to see again now for comparison).

My first impression of the GamePark GP32 handheld video game that I bought in Korea was rather desolate: It would not connect via USB to my iBook, and the game that came with it was the lamest piece of commercial software I have seen in a very long time: Can anyone remember GORILLA.BAS that came with QBasic as part of MS-DOS? Well, the game was like that, but with mobile phones instead of gorillas. I went straight back to the shop and traded it for Dooly Soccer 2002 which is only marginally better.

But after completing the necessary setup with a friend's laptop (USB works for Windows...) and finding out that I can upload files indirectly using my digital camera, I am getting more excited about the possibilities of GP32: The thing is extremely friendly to hackers, and this seems to more than make up for the lack / low quality of commercial games. A lot of classic games are being ported to it and there are emulators for almost all other systems, including MAME and GameBoy Advance.

• same size as GBA
• 3.5 inch screen (bigger than GBA, but also useless in the dark)
• Smart Media (same as my digital camera)
• built-in MP3 player
• USB connector (does not work with Mac OS X 10.2.x)

The first game I downloaded is Doom. The port is still alpha, but the only big missing feature seems to be sound (which unfortunately is a quite essential feature in Doom). It definitely plays the original shareware levels at full speed (good old WAD files from 1993, quite some software longevity).