"God, I miss pants."

I took Sunday to sit down and finish Jak II. It was fun, funny, a good story, and just the right kind of challenge/frustration. I must say that even though I had a great time with this game, I preferred the first game in the series. Perhaps it was the GTA-inspired mission system, but something just felt a little off after having so much fun with the original. D'ah well, now I have to decide what to play next on my PS2. Shall I continue the series and dive into Jak 3, or finally get around to finishing Ico? What about God Of War? Yakuza? Okami?

Oh yeah, I broke-down and bought Yakuza and Okami :) Yakuza has been great fun so far; it's a story-driven brawler with a very Shenmue-like presentation (same character design team, apparently); I understand it's a spiritual successor to SEGA's SpikeOut. Okami is just beautiful. Think Nintendo 64 Zelda gameplay, but done entirely in a style of cel-shading that is made to resemble Japanese painting on papyrus; yeah, the game pretty much paints itself right before your eyes as you play it, and some of your attacks and puzzle-solving techniques entail painting on the screen yourself!

I also happened across cheap copies of Gunstar Super Heroes (GBA), and Metal Slug 3 (XBOX; my favourite game in the series, it'll be a nice present for someone).

And before I go, I should mention that I got back into playing Stranger's Wrath. I had left it alone a while back because I was finding this one part, about two thirds in, to be extremely frustrating. I remember wishing there was a checkpoint or something so that I didn't have to repeat so much work just to die again and again... Well, today, I realized that the game has a quicksave feature, and that I could've made a checkpoint of sorts anywhere I wanted. Gah. Such a great game, and I've seen it for $13 CDN brand new at Best Buy!

Bah! I give up...

iTunes 7 would've been bearable if not for the skipping music, so I decided to try a nightly build of Songbird; it was nice, but there was a serious memory leak (MP3 playback software should not use 650MB of RAM). I switched back to Winamp, and I like it, as it's definitely a comparable product to iTunes. It has, however, always had weird issues with the "always on top" function... Even when that option is turned off, my auto-hidden Start menu (which is set to "always on top") is no longer "always on top", and therefore inaccessible whenever another window is maximized. Gah! So now I'm using foobar2000, and it's fantastic. It just works out of the box, it's light-weight, and it's pretty customizable.

Yeah, I considered downgrading to iTunes 6.0.5.20 (too much work) and playing with Windows Media Player 10 (not a fan of the interface; waiting for 11 to leave BETA), but foobar2000 spared me the trouble.

Before I go, I finally got the SNES my brother picked-up for me for $20 at a garage sale. It came with two controllers, the stereo composite cables, and Super Mario World. Wheee! ;)

iTunes 7! Wheee!!!

I like the new interface, and I don't mind the unification of the iPod drivers, Quicktime, and iTunes into one neat package.

I do not, however, like that my MP3s now skip when I play them in iTunes, or how the stand-alone Quicktime's update feature wouldn't find the 7.1 to 7.1.3 update (prior to installing the new version of iTunes), or how if the "iTunes" folder isn't in the the "All Programs" folder of the "Start" menu, iTunes assumes that it isn't installed properly and automatically attempts to re-install itself.

Finally, I prefer the green over the blue tied eighth notes icon.

That is all.

Just a follow-up...

More good Steam/Vivendi/Majesco/Double Fine news! Read the press release here!

I mean, really, if it turns-out to be $20 for Psychonauts, then that's a steal!

Lies! All Lies!

I have been deceived! In my half-assed search to find a compatible HSF mounting bracket for an old Socket423 motherboard I have lying around, I stumbled across some interesting stock on the website of a local computer shop. I've dealt with this place before, and it certainly doesn't have the best reputation in town, but I figured I'd give it a shot anyway. They had both a CoolerMaster Socket423 HSF and an ASUS P4C800 motherboard listed as "In stock", and I figured it's entirely possible that they had a dusty old box or two kicking around the store. I planned on checking-out the HSF to see if it included the mounting bracket, and the motherboard was just a great find (Socket478 motherboards using Intel's 875 chipset haven't been manufactured in quite some time, and would offer a nice performance boost to any of my P4-based systems). Turns-out they had neither, and tried to push a VIA-based ASUS board on me instead... Bah!

In other news, the freelance work continues to roll-in steadily, and I've picked up Shinobi for my SMS as well Crash Bandicoot 2 and Crash Bandicoot Warped for my PS2. Wheee!

Speaking of Naughty Dog (Crash, Jak), this looks awfully cool.

doom, Doom, DOOM!!!

Okay, so, Tim's new computer. Delivered it last week, setup was a breeze, kid was happy as could be, and all seemed well... Until we got to work on cleaning-up the old one for use as an Internet box (plus there was still some data transfer to do). There was some malware to remove, defragmentation to done, left-over stuff to be cleaned-out, etc... That all seemed to go just swimmingly until I did the final restart and Windows wouldn't boot (system file errors). Tried everything from Knoppix to enclosures and recovery software to get at the most important files (his data drive was fine, but there was some stuff on the system drive that he needed), but I was getting weird ownership errors and such (even after altering those atrributes and removing passwords). Finally, after getting all but some of his Cygwin-related stuff, I said fuck it, we got most of it, and there was a possibility that one of his developer friends had some recent back-ups of the stuff we were missing. Format, re-install. It was during the re-installation of Windows XP that I finally realized what the problem was... Tim had insisted on upgrading his 896MB of RAM to 1024MB by replacing the 128MB stick with a 256MB stick he'd pulled from a computer he got from his buddy... Yeah, never bothered to run Memtest86, and yeah, it was bad, and the cause of all of our problems. Fucking hell. Anyway, that's all up and running and fixed now, and he'll be investing in a router, a KVM switch, and a PCI video card so that he can have a sweet triple-monitor workstation to work at.

I've taken on a few service orders this past week that include a half-assedly-built Athlon XP 2000+ system that was wired oddly and was using no hard drive newer than seven years old, an "unclassified" decomissioned Dell from the US government (this one came to me through a tattoo parlour employee who picked it up from a doctor's office), and a wireless home network that was using a combination of no-name and TRENDnet wireless adapters to 'steal' a signal from a Linksys router next door... Where the woman's parents lived. Fun times, let me tell you. A follow-up on the $5000 video-editing machine: The Avid software he's using doesn't work in Windows XP x64, so I set-up a dual-boot for him... The 32-Bit version of XP Pro only sees 3GB of RAM, but he'll live. I have two more potential customers in the works, and one in progress, so expect more exciting stories in the coming days.

Anyway, on to that new video card I stuck in my Linux box! Got me a 256MB XFX GeForce 6200. Now all I need is a motherboard that supports AGP8x ;) That's the last part I'd like to upgrade in that thing (not a big fan of my current SiS 651 chipset), but there's no rush, and the video card runs very well at AGP4x; it's quite nice to be able to play UT2004 in Linux at 1024x768 with all of the settings turned to the maximum :)

There's a nice segue into games... Yup, I got more. I decided to suck it up and just go for beefing-up my 32X collection. I bought a bunch of those crappy sports games I never wanted, like NFL Quarterback Club, RBI Baseball '95, and Golf Magazine Presents 36 Great Holes Starring Fred Couples. They're all horrible. I also grabbed Doom Troopers: Mutant Chronicles for the Genesis (it was cheap, and on sale; fun 2D action game), as well as Wonder Boy and Vigilante for my newly-acquired SEGA Master System. Then there were the impulse buys of Bonk's Revenge (TG16), Project: Snowblind (PC), and Astro Boy: Omega Factor (GBA); they were all pretty cheap (sale, clearance, and used, respectively). Project: Snowblind is the spiritual sequel to Deus Ex: Invisible War (one of my favourite games), and Astro Boy is a fantastic 2D action game from Treasure, one of the most revered 2D action game developers of all time. Next to pick-up on the GBA list is Gunstar Super Heroes, also from Treasure. Oh yeah, I also happened across a copy of the first Otogi game for XBOX! It was the lone copy siting in a Wal-Mart, which was kinda strange, since I haven't seen this game, new or used, anywhere for at least a year or so (and I'd been kicking myself for not buying it back when it was available everywhere). Whatever, I have it now :)

Finally, Yakuza was released for PS2 in North America on Tuesday... It's on sale at Best Buy for $45 CDN, but I resisted. Too much on my plate right now, but some day soon, I'll get to enjoy that Shenmue-inspired goodness I've been hearing about.

Fuck YES!!!

Double Fine is still alive and kicking!

...In case you're wondering why I'm posting about this, Double Fine is the development studio behind Psychonauts, one of my all-time favourite video games. That studio is also led by game designer extraordinaire Tim Schafer, whose credits include the likes of Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and Day Of The Tentacle.

I'll be back soon with details of the harrowing adventure that was delivering and setting-up Tim's new computer (see my last post), troubleshooting a strange home-networking issue for a new client, and the new video card I procured for my Linux box.