I have been a huge Ultima computer games fan in the 90’s. What, you don’t know about this mythic series ????

These computer role-playing game series consisted of nine games published during the 80’s and the 90’s. It began on the Apple II with a rough user interface, and ended with the ninth installment with modern 3d graphics. But besides the purely technical perfection that every episode did reach, the most interresting thing about these was the stories developed. It was always very imaginative, full of virtuous and epic themes and deep characters.

No simplistic evil vilain to slain with high level character in these. Rather the hero known as The Avatar had to incarnate goodness and save the world by doing good deeds.

My favourite epoch was the second trilogy which featured these three games:

• Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar

• Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

• Ultima VI: The False Prophet

A long time ago, I started to work on a compilation of guitar arrangements based on these games’ themes. That’s what I did, an I just published an early version of this book on my site.

I uploaded my latest composition: Voyager
This track, inspired by the odyssey of NASA’s probe Voyager-1, is a 15 minutes long epic instrumental.

You can learn more about it on the page I added to present it.

Today’s the day of the release of Final Fantasy XII in France ! After 5 long years we can at last put our hands on this new opus.

Reviewers seem to all have loved this one, so the last hours will seem like an eternity before I can finally play it….

To celebrate this special day, I wrote an arrangement for two guitars of “To Zanarkand” and put it in the music section. This piece originally written by Nobuo Uematsu was the main theme of Final Fantasy X.

I just finished to migrate Alcibiade’s e-Den to Wordpress. I guess that this will allow me to update it a bit more often.

Here’s a bit of its history.

1999: Alcibiade’s e-Den v1

This first release was an HTML4.0/CSSv1 compliant hand-written website.
Graphics for icons were already rendered with povray, as it is still the case today.

It contained some early 3d renderings, a few guitar arrangements and some Java applets I had created at this time. The most famous part being my Java Rubik’s Cube solver which allowed me to impress all my friends. I asked them to shuffle my real life cube, then I went on my computer, took a few seconds to input the colors configuration on a cube projection, and then the applet gave me all the rotations to apply. A few seconds later the cube in my hands was clean, and my friends bluffed…

2002: Alcibiade’s e-Den v2

Second release, this time a dynamic php site. I included more contents and created contents with a templates mechanism.

All graphical elements are stilll build with povray. I tried to keep this look in the Wordpress Theme I just created for this site. I’ll perhaps release it in the Wordpress Theme repository.

2007: The Show Must Go On…

I’ll now work on publishing as much content as possible on this new site. It’ll take some time to bring everything online, but I guess that this won’t be too long…

So keep connected for more updates !