The Download Munkey : A Link A Day ;)

IconFactory has always my first stop for icons because these guys not only create excellent original icon sets but also marvellous sets inspired by popular culture. These aren’t just collectable icons, they’re miniature works of art!

For instance, where else can you find an icon of those grappling hooks that the Fremen use to ride on the Shai-Hulud, massive sandworms of Arrakis made famous by the sci-fi classic Dune?

© The Iconfactory

Other than icons inspired by famous works of fiction, there’s also loads of icons movies from blockbusters and bestsellers to cult classics. Anyone fancy an icon of the Bride’s sword from Kill Bill?

© The Iconfactory

Speaking of swords, there’s even an icon set devoted to the swords of the Chinese comic Feng Yun (later adapted as the movie Storm Riders).

© The Iconfactory

Want more movie-related icons? My choice picks include the icon sets for Star Wars, War of the Worlds, V for Vendetta and even Austin Powers. Groovy, baby

© The Iconfactory

There’s also plenty of nostalgic stuff for kids who grew up on a diet of 80s cartoons and TV shows. Remember T-Bob from M.A.S.K? Or the butt ugly monsters of Ultraman? Classic Transformers? Relive those memories at IconFactory!

© The Iconfactory

Quite a few game-inspired icon sets from the classic Archon to relatively new games like Patapon.

© The Iconfactory

For the original designs, I especially like the horror/Halloween-themed ones. Bride of Macabre is one of my favourites, along with Vintage Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos (not technically Halloween, but …)

© The Iconfactory

Download these beautiful icon sets and more from The IconFactory.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Soccer Icons by Mr Wong / Mikio Inose
Official Tuzki (兔斯基) Emoticons
SG-related Pixel Art and More
Cute Dead Things Wallpapers

A tactical turn-based Flash game featuring soldiers armed with modern day infantry weapons such as assault rifles, light machineguns, sniper rifles, combat shotguns and a selection of frag, stun and flash grenades in an small, isometric arena. Think of it as a more lethal form of virtual paintball. Or a turnbased and less reflex-oriented Counterstrike. Picked up this addictive game at Kongregate fan blog COCAK.

You take turns against the computer to outwit, outflank and outfight your opponents in the campaign consisting of 23 missions. As the team leader, you gain experience for killing enemies with the soldiers under your command with this experience translating to rank promotions which in turn unlocks more weapons in the armory and extra stats and abilities for your troopers.

To organize your squad for maximum lethality, it’s essential to set up classes with different loadouts and abilties e.g rifleman, snipers, assault classes and assign the different loadouts to your individual squad members. A cool feature is that different uniforms and helmets can be used to customize and differentiate the various specialists in your squad.

If you find that your squad continually fails to complete a mission in the campaign, try exiting the mission, tweak and re-assign loadouts and retry the mission. I remember getting stuck at Mission 2 for more than five tries before I realized that classes were available at the start of the campaign

There’s several types of missions that I have encountered in the campaign. (currently I just completed mission 5)

Destination : Move your soldiers to the designated destination (marked by a blue star). Soldiers will respawn 1 turn after they die.

Search and Destroy : Eliminate all enemy units. Soldiers do not respawn.

Stealth : 2 units vs all enemies in the map. No respawning.

There’s a comprehensive interactive tutorial which takes you through the basics of controlling your soldiers and their weapons.

Some important keys to remember:
0-9 : Select soldier of that number
Cursor keys - Scroll the map
Z - Move
C - Shoot
R - Reload
G - Throw grenade / Use Aid Item
B - Wait (passes control to the next soldier)

Do note that once you select a soldier, you have to issue all the orders before clicking Wait or pressing B since he will not be selectable once control is passed to the next soldier.

Play Modern Tactics 3 on Kongregate or visit the official page at Throw the Project.

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Act of War : Direct Action Singleplayer Demo Impressions
Alfa Anti Terror Demo Impressions
C-Dogs SDL - Tactical Action Game
Aliens - The Board Game (Flash Version)

Katakijin is my favourite of the 10+ newly-discovered games I downloaded featured on the list of 365 games from Games Radar’s recent article about a year’s supply of freeware/open source games (and demos - unfortunately, they don’t exactly distinguish between the demos and the rest of the other games).

Created by Ultim8, Katakijin is a side-scrolling hack n’ slash featuring loads of ninjas - you control one particular black ninja who’s out to prove himself against a host of other ninjas with his dual katanas and flashy moves.

The controls are smooth and responsive which makes controlling and watching your nimble ninja leaping and running on walls extremely enjoyable. The sprites are very nicely animated which add tons of style to the combat - your foes explode in showers of blood and flying katanas (can’t believe each tiny ninja has so much blood in him ) If you’re still not convinced, just witness how your ninja makes his grand entrance into the game below

Style isn’t the only plus point for Katakijin since melee combat is quite tactical too - mashing of keys won’t help a single bit here since your ninja isn’t strong enough to stand and duke it out with multiple opponents at a time. Mixing evasive manuevers such as rolls and dashes with your attacks and parries will ensure that you don’t get cut to pieces in the first couple of minutes into the game.

The default keys as follows:

Movement
Move with cursor keys
Tap left or right twice to dash
Tap down twice to roll (good for evading attacks)
Press Z to jump.
Hold Z when jumping towards a wall to wallrun

Fighting
Press X or C to slash with your katana
Hold C for an alternative chargeable slash attack
Press Space to throw shurikens
Block attacks with Shift. Note that blocking two consecutive strikes stuns your ninja and leaves him vulnerable to enemy attacks. You can cancel out enemy attacks by pressing X when you anticipate an attack.

Download Katakijin or read more on GameRadar’s 365 Days of Free Games. There’s another (probably older) version of Katakijin at 64digits which is pretty fun too (comes with unlimited shurikens)

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Ninja Rinseout
Ninja Gaiden 2 Official Wallpapers
Tenchu Z Official Wallpapers
Blood in the Boardroom & Other ShadowRun Cover Artwork

I’m been searching for an application to convert some of my Opera bookmarks to a Link/URL table format as a spreadsheet in Excel or CSV format for several months now and I think have finally found one fits the bill (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this )

I basically wanted to transfer my current list of bookmarks to downloads and sites that I haven’t checked out in detail in Wikidpad which I store most of my personal Todo lists. More on Wikidpad in the future.

While I usually try not to recommend shareware here at The Download Munkey if freeware and open source alternatives exist, but at this time I’m hard-pressed to say if there are any other software (even commercial) that surpasses Bookmark Buddy’s capabilities and flexibility in converting and exporting bookmarks. I do know there are free software to convert bookmarks for transferring between broswers, but I definitely haven’t seen any that can export to CSV (yet).

Below’s a a quick 3 step guide on using Bookmark Buddy to export your bookmarks to a more processable format (is there such a thing as processable?)

Import your bookmark list.

Mark folders and bookmarks that you wish to export (not needed if you just want to export everything in the list.)

Select format to export to. Remember to check Include only marked bookmarks if you’re exporting a partial list and you’re done!

The example here uses Opera since that’s the only browser I use but the other major browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox are also supported by Bookmark Buddy, of course.

Export and conversion of bookmarks is only one of the many features available in Bookmark Buddy. To be honest, I’m not exactly familiar with Bookmark Buddy since I only used it for an hour or so to convert my Opera bookmarks to CSV but here’s a list of the more usable features I found while fiddling with it last weekend.

• A central repository for storing, organizing and visiting internet bookmarks in your preferred browser. Should be very useful for people who regularly use different browsers and want to share the bookmarks between them without the hassle of trying to keep the bookmarks in every broswer in sync.
• Delete duplicate bookmarks via Edit > Manage Duplicates
• Scheduling of bookmarks to visit using Smart Folders.
• Checking of updates to your bookmarks in the background so that you don’t waste time visiting sites that haven’t been updated or have been moved or disappeared.
• Encryption of your list of bookmarks with a 128 bit Blowfish algorithm for the paranoid.

Download Bookmark Buddy or check out the features. The application is available for a 30 day trial and costs 29.95 USD to register.

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NirSoft.net - My First Stop for Quality Utilities
Foxit Reader vs PDF-XChange Viewer vs Sumatra
Combining PDFs with PDFTKBuilder
Lifehacker.com - Productivity and Software Guide

Dan LuVisi’s stunning portrait of an unmasked Predator first caught my eye in Issue 7 of Artzmania. This artwork is part of his BLACK series in his deviantART gallery in which he paints portraits of some of the most recognisable faces from movies.

© Dan LuVisi

The Predator is just one of the three works related to the Aliens vs Predator universe - the other two being a Alien Warrior and a grim Colonial Marine - I just love the glistening carapace and salivating jaws of the Alien Warrior

© Dan LuVisi

Since then, he has gone on to paint the three major characters of the recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight for his BLACK series, two of them being the Caped Crusader himself and his arch-nemesis The Joker (below)

© Dan LuVisi

There’s other movie characters in his gallery, of the charmingly eccentric Captain Sparrow and of King Kong locked in mortal combat with a ferocious V-Rex. There’s tutorials for this particular piece if you’re interested in the techniques used in creating this piece.

© Dan LuVisi

Gamers aren’t left out either - there’s Master Chief from Halo as well as Army of Two and Crysis art amongst others in his deviantART gallery.

© Dan LuVisi

Now if you’re thinking that Dan LuVisi only does portraits of characters from popular culture, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by his original pieces like this oddly attractive shark-headed humanoid - I’m still trying to figure out where the tentacles come from

© Dan LuVisi

Or this lopsided fight between a heroic knight and a massive dragon/T-Rex hybrid.

© Dan LuVisi

Check out Dan LuVisi’s deviantART gallery and view the above pieces in their full resolution. Don’t forget to visit his blog too - there’s a cool warrior panda concept exclusive to the blog

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Cubee Craft - Marshmallow Man, Master Chief, Imperial Stormtrooper Paper Toys
Game Fan Art @ Ryu’s Form Site
Lego Batman Wallpapers