Latest News
Current News
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Since the last update here, the Hardware page has been archived.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)