Obligatory Holiday Post

My little brother bought me the Collector's Edition of Halo 3, and the DVD was still secure when I opened it. My boxing day excursion yielded Stuntman: Ignition for XBOX 360 and Prince Of Persia: The Two Thrones for XBOX (the Windows version uses Star-Force copy protection... No thank you), both new for $10 a piece. I also picked up The Darkness for XBOX 360, new, for $20. God Of War II is on sale for $30, but I can't seem to find a copy in stock anywhere.

Anyway, the rest of my downtime during the holidays has been spent getting back into Final Fantasy on PSP, replaying System Shock 2 (focusing on psi and research skills; no hacking or weaponry), and playing around with my XBOX 360's new DivX and XviD support. To sum things up, Final Fantasy needs a map function or a compass or something, System Shock 2 is still fantastic (especially with the Rebirth and Shock Texture Upgrade Project mods installed), and streaming XviD videos from Windows Media Player 11 to my XBOX 360 is a wonderful thing :)

Thank you, BFG :)

While I'm assuming it's mostly on account of limited AGP stock, BFG really outdid themselves on my warranty replacement. The fried 128MB GeForce 6600 GT OC was replaced with a 256MB GeForce 7800 GS OC... That's about twice the power plus pixel shader 3.0 support ;)

Oh yeah...

...This write-up on Kane & Lynch has convinced me to give the Windows version of the game a try. I'd liked what I'd initially read and seen regarding the game, but the mediocre reviews and middling general consensus had me second guessing myself. Silly me, I should've known better! That blog post is just like something I'd write in defence of a game like Psychonauts or Jericho, so now my interest is piqued. I'll be back with more once I get into the thick of things :)

"I gotta believe!"

I finally found a copy of PaRappa The Rapper for PSOne! It set me back $20, but I didn't even look at the price before I said I'd take it :) I also grabbed a copy of The King Of Fighters XI, since it's the first 2D KoF game that I can't get for MVS. KoF XI originally ran on Atomiswave hardware, which is based on SEGA's NAOMI hardware, which is based on SEGA's Dreamcast hardware... So I think it's kind of odd that I can only get it for my PS2... But whatever, it feels like a pretty solid entry into the franchise as far as I've played, and at $20 new, fans will not be disappointed. In related news, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, another Atomiswave to PS2 port, comes out this week! It's nice to see that 2D sprite based fighting games are still seeing some support :)

Moving on, I'm happy to report that I finally played a Wii yesterday. Yeah, I'd yet to do more than hold a Wiimote (and not use it) until yesterday, and it seems as though I have indeed been missing out on some good times. I wasn't wowed so far as to run out and search for system (I saw two at an EBGames a week or so ago), but I did have a lot of fun. I created a Mii, browsed the web, played every Wii Sports game, a few Wii Play games, and Excite Truck. I know, I didn't get into the blockbusters like Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime 3, or Super Mario Galaxy, but there's still plenty of time for that. From what I did play, I can see that the Wii offers a really solid and intuitive experience. I didn't think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I can definitely see a Wii in my collection before too long.

Finally, I started a season on the hard difficulty level in NHL08... And inadvertently overwrote my previous season in the process. The first game was a 5-4 loss to Ottawa, which is a little more true to life (here in reality, Ottawa won 4-3 in OT). I'm sure you're all sure that I'll keep you updated on how things progress ;)

Did it have to be against the Habs!?

Loss number three in NHL08. 3-1 Montreal. This one was different though; their goalie wasn't invincible, they didn't get a lot of shots, their stars didn't shine, and my goalie was alright (though it said he was fatigued after the game)... But my defence was terrible (even though I'd have them set to protect the net or contain the puck, they often did nothing of the sort) and my offence was sloppy (I've never seen so many missed one-timers, misread passes, and forwards skating away from rebounds!). I'd like to meet with the designers and see if these kinds of breakdowns are part of the game or not :)

I'm a Slacker...

I think I've worked out all of the kinks and growing pains from my move to the Athlon XP 3200+ system. Windows XP gave me little issue, but PC-BSD 1.4.1.1 would reboot during start-up (even in safe mode) and Debian 4.0 testing releases would hang during package installation... So I decided to give Slackware another go with version 12.0. Installation was smooth, setting up the proprietary NVIDIA drivers was a breeze, configuring the mouse and monitor in X.Org was straightforward, and KDE 3.5's Control Center made tweaking a simple affair. Upgrading everything else using pkgtool was pretty intuitive (and similar to PC-BSD's PBI system), but a little less elegant than Debian's APT package manager. I'm glad I gave Slackware another chance and put a little more effort into it this time, as it's definitely now on my list of recommended distributions.

Elsewhere, I've finished Crysis, and I'm glad to be done with it. The final few levels were dull while still feeling rushed, the story arc reminded me too much of Halo, and really, they'd just lost me somewhere along the way and I didn't really care what happened... I just wanted to be done with it.

Finally, I remembered what I'd wanted to mention in my last post: Bell has apparently upgraded my neighbourhood to a fibre-optic network, so I'm no longer paying for a 3Mbps connection that's throttled to 1.5Mbps because of my location... I now get pretty consistent download rates up around 500kBps :) They say my service tier can go as high as 7Mbps, but I won't hold my breath.

Keepin' busy...

Made little more progress in Jak 3, stuck on annoying boss battle in Ratchet & Clank on PSP (it's one thing to make a battle hard, it's another to make you redo the five minutes of mindless glorified mini-games that lead up to the actual battle each time you die), unlocked some of the co-op-only songs in Guitar Hero III (Sabotage! Reptilia!), am now trudging through Crysis (gameplay is so monotonous! Time-based events with no timer are annoying!), the "Title Update" for Gears Of War made no discernible difference in terms of performance on my PC (the sporadic chunkiness is there regardless of visual settings), I'm having some good mindless fun with TimeShift (it's not a bad game, just a stupid one; still fun) and I lost another game on "Medium" in NHL08... This time was against Nashville, and Jason Arnott scored both goals (the second one coming in OT). Like the previous loss to NY, only star players did anything for the other team, and their goaltender was fantastic (Chris Mason saved 47 of 48!?)... I'm assuming some player stats are randomly decided by a dice roll of sorts before each game?

Picked-up a DFI NFII Ultra Infinity off craigslist to replace the dead ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. I paid a little too much for it ($75 CDN; I was hoping for around $50), but they seem to be hard to find and going fast when they do pop up. Anyway, I got it home and discovered that the integrated ethernet controller doesn't work and that it's super fickle about RAM configurations (so it's running 1GB instead of 1.5GB). Still, it seems to be solid, and I've got everything up and running well. During the rebuild, however, I discovered that the ASUS board also took out my GeForce 6600 GT... Luckily, BFG offers a lifetime warranty :) Got an RMA number over the phone from a very helpful tech, and we'll see what they send back. Here's the real kicker though... Earlier today, I realized that the computer I built for my mom is running an Athlon XP 2200+ on an MSI K7N2 Delta-L motherboard... Yeah, I had a 400MHz FSB-supporting nForce2-based board at my disposal the whole time :\ Still, it would've meant either getting her a replacement board that likely would've run around $50 anyway, or doing a lot of work to transfer her stuff to the 2.4GHz P4 (which I am now planning to sell) that I was replacing with the Athlon 3200+ system.

I know I had something else to say here, but it escapes me for the time being, and I have stuff to do...

I'm a little behind...

I had an overseas voice conversation using Windows Live Messenger the other night, and the sound quality and delay were painful. Google Talk has proven to be a much more effective and reliable solution in that department.

I'm looking for a replacement 400MHz FSB Socket A motherboard so that I can build something out of the leftover parts from my little brother's computer upgrade, but it's proving to be a real challenge. I've come across an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe and an abit NF7-S Version 2.0 on craigslist, but both sold quickly :(

I've finished F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate, and it was a lot of fun. They don't quite explain why this new main character has super-human reflexes, but they hinted at a few possibilities. The gameplay remains the same, but the narrative is getting kind of repetitive as it plods along. While the story has become increasingly contrived, I'm curious to see how they wrap things up... But I hope they do it soon, because it's getting a little frustrating. Perhaps they're saving the big revelations for the sequel, or just mirroring Half-Life's structure, but the fact remains that I may lose interest if this keeps up, and I suspect many gamers already have.

Finishing-up Guitar Hero Encore Rocks The '80s and Guitar Hero III on "hard", but it's proving to be kind of, well... Hard. One song to go in Rocks The '80s, three or four in III. Gave up on Dead Head Fred on PSP; just wasn't holding my interest; Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters is doing a much better job :) Snagged my free copy of Carcassone from XBOX Live during their fifth anniversary festivities, and gave Screwjumper and Undertow a shot. The former seems solid enough as a relatively simple arcade game, but it's not really for me. Undertow's a bit deeper (no pun intended, I swear) and looks absolutely gorgeous, but that Battlefield-style gameplay has never really appealed to me all that much.

Finally, I think I've settled on playable graphics settings for Crysis (how come nobody told me ATi had released a hotfix!?) and Need For Speed ProStreet. I'm about halfway through Crysis, and I keep thinking that Far Cry already did jungle combat well and that Crackdown did the super solider thing much more effectively. While the game is still fun, it kinda drags and the gameplay isn't exactly groundbreaking. Perhaps they're just going for realism, but I can't shake the feeling that I've been disabling signal jammers and tagging air-strike targets for a little too long. While I appreciate the freedom the game offers in terms of how to approach each situation, I'd like the story to be just a touch more interesting between major plot points, please. ProStreet's awesome, by the way. I miss the arcade feel we've gotten used to since Underground, but I certainly don't miss the cheesy cutscenes. It's definitely more of a sim than before, but not quite Forza Motorsport or Gran Tourismo... Think more along the lines of Project Gotham Racing.

I think that about covers it for now...

So sleepy...

Destroyed Crackdown in no time and loved every minute of it; half way through F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate and quite enjoying it; found an old backup of my Most Wanted save game, so that's back in the rotation; got a Colecovision as well as some more Neo Geo MVS cartridges (Alpha Mission 2, Magical Drop 2, Windjammers, and SNK vs. Capcom!); couldn't find a replacement 400MHz FSB Socket A motherboard to replace my little brother's when some capacitors burst, so I overhauled his system (ASUS P5K Intel P35-based motherboard, Core 2 Duo E6750, 512MB Radeon 3870, 2GB DDR2-800, 350GB SATA2 HDD, 550W Antec TP3 PSU).

I've been pretty tired the last little while, so I'll be back with more detail another time...

'night!

That was embarassing...

Well, I've finally lost a game in my NHL08 season... It was to the Rangers, a 3-0 shutout. All of their goals came on funny bounces from star players, and their goalie was eerily unbeatable. I tried a few exhibition games on the hardest difficulty level (I've been playing on the second-hardest), and while I lost both, they were close. It seems as though the opposition's defence makes the real difference, taking away a lot of one-timer opportunities. Regardless of any of that, I'm having fun with it, and that's what matters :)

I picked-up Crackdown, Earth Defense 2017, and Carcassone for XBOX 360 for $25, $15, and free (in celebration of XBOX Live's fifth birthday), respectively. I like Carcassone, Earth Defense 2017 seems a pretty boring third-person shooter (friends had raved to me about how fun it is, but I'm just not seeing it; fun mindless games are like DooM, Serious Sam, and Painkiller... this just feels cheap), and Crackdown became my obsession for about two days. Crackdown really gets the open gameplay concept right, basically giving players a huge playground to mess around in. Achievements are fun, the story is passable and completely optional, and leveling-up your character is too much fun... Worth every penny :)

What else...? Finished F.E.A.R. Extraction Point and am now into Perseus Mandate. Extraction Point was fun, and had some really spooky moments, but Perseus Mandate has me worried... The story follows a second First Encounter Assault Recon team on a mission that seems to overlap with the first two titles. The thing is, the character you play as has all of the superhuman reflexes of the other team's main character... I wonder how they're gonna explain that one... Or if they already have and I just haven't been paying close enough attention... I dunno... Ergh... Just gonna shut my mouth now and play through it.

Also got a chance to play the new Windows-only content in Gears Of War (pretty good so far), as well as Crysis (kinda boring, but found a combination of high, medium, and low visual settings that seems to work well enough). Call Of Duty 4 and Lost Planet are on hold until I get through some more games that've been waiting longer, and I may just pass on Blacksite, Soldier Of Fortune, and Kane & Lynch altogether for the time being... I do intend to pick up Need For Speed ProStreet shortly though.

Oh, my stars!

Uh oh... Things are really starting to pile up now. Area 51: Blacksite, Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Kane & Lynch, Need For Speed ProStreet, Soldier Of Fortune Payback, and The King Of Fighters XI are all set to be released this week... I don't know what to do!

I think I may hold off on Assassin's Creed to come out for Windows, to help lighten my load, but that's not gonna help much in the long run :)

I dunno...

It would seem as though I've solved NHL08 on it's normal difficulty setting... Perhaps I should restart on something harder. Some of the games have been down to the wire, so I'm guessing those're the ones I should've lost ;)

Anyway, I finished Jericho, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's akin to BioShock insofar as it really allows players to approach the game as they see fit, given a set of tools. It's linear and a little repetitive on its own, but players have the opportunity to make it something really interesting and dynamic. It's not a game that makes heavy use of advanced AI or physics or powerups, but presents a versatile toolset in a solid narrative with some of the most gorgeous architecture and lighting we've seen yet. The ending though... Wow... What a letdown!

I've since moved on to F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point (figured I should get around to it since Perseus Mandate just came out) and Call Of Duty 4. Both are pretty solid games (CoD4's presentation is really top-notch), but neither has really grabbed me and held on. I'm thinking of going back and finishing System Shock 2 and Indigo Prophecy to tide me over until the next big release.

Speaking of big releases, well, this isn't one, but Fading Shadows for PSP has really piqued my interest... It's a really interesting-looking puzzle game... Read more about it here.

I other news, the Maxtor (Windows) hard drive in my BSD/Windows box went bad... Right towards the end of a particularly large BitTorrent download... Grr... Since I use that computer as a workbench to service others, I opted to re-install XP on the other hard drive, relegating any open source operating system use to my laptop (IBM ThinkPad X22 running Debian 4 'testing'). Good thing hard drives are cheap these days... I won't be buying a Maxtor though. I've seen far too many of them up and die without warning over the past few years. That's just me though; I'm sure they're wonderful.

I also cleaned out some particularly nasty spyware and virus infections from two people's computers this week... It'd been a while since I'd had to deal with something like that.

Too much!

Hey, sorry been busy lately... Picked-up a lot of good stuff :)

I bought the PS2 versions of Guitar Hero Encore Rocks The '80s and Guitar Hero III on sale last Monday; grabbed the last copy of each in the store. They're both wonderful, but I do have a few qualms with III. Some of the character designs and animations lust look scary, they got rid of Eddie Knox, I miss the old look of the new dots on the fretboard, some of the rhythms for familiar songs feel pretty awkward (perhaps that's just because I'm an actual guitar player), and some songs seem to have extra notes and riff changes thrown in simply for difficulty's sake... I don't dig that. Still, the heart of the game is the same, and it's a hell of a lot of fun. Rocks The '80s is really solid, but awfully expensive for only 30 songs... Oh, and there's slowdown! Not acceptable! It's still playable though.

On my PSP, I've been progressing through Castlevania (unlocked Symphony Of The Night and the original Rondo Of Blood last night... So good :) ), got my hands on a copy of the God Of War: Chains Of Olympus demo (so gorgeous), and I'm trying to like Dead Head Fred... The thing is, all this Ratchet & Clank hype because of the new PS3 game has me itching to play Size Matters on PSP, but I really want to give Dead Head Fred a chance. Oh, and I picked-up Manhunt 2, but haven't really played it yet.

Jericho is still keeping me enthralled, but it's playing out a little more like Call Of Duty than Undying. The level structure (take a point, engage in a firefight, move to the next point) and team management (keeping your team from immediately getting their asses handed to them by giving effective orders and controlling the right characters for the situation) can get really frustrating at times, as I've found my whole team dying more often than I'd like to see despite my best efforts. It's getting better though, as I continue to come up with new strategies of playing specific teams and possessing different characters. Oh, also, despite my 12-0-0 record in NHL08, the game is actually still challenging. I'm playing it on the normal/medium difficulty setting, and a lot of games have been down to the wire (though I have had three shut-outs ;) ).

He's back!

I picked up Clive Barker's Jericho (been waiting for this since Undying!) the other day and I'm a few hours into it now. Things didn't look too promising at the outset, as I was treated to a poorly narrated video that showed nothing of importance... Seemed kinda pointless. I was then presented with a nicely pre-rendered and well acted video showing my Jericho team checking things out and getting into a firefight... Still, it seemed kind of out of place after the first video, especially since this second video was released as a teaser online some time ago. Next was the menu... The same boring menu from the demo. Ergh... My hopes were falling fast, so I tweaked the video options and started a new game... THANK THE HEAVENS, IT'S GOOD! Everything I was subjected to in the two aforementioned lacklustre videos is conveyed much more effectively through game-engine cinematics and during actual gameplay. They really should have just cut the pre-rendered crap out and prettied up the menu.

Anway, the graphics are very pretty (especially the blur effects), and the extended intro levels really do a much better job of walking players through the command menus, control scheme, and each different character than the demo did. Also, there are some pretty expansive areas here. I'm just getting into the game proper, so I haven't had to get creative with each character yet, but some of the team dynamics have already come into play (like ordering the team with the healer character to hold back while ordering the other team to engage exploding enemies in a narrow passageway). Also, the game is really holding my attention as the story unfolds around me... Don't let the ineffective demo and shoddy intro videos fool you, this is playing like a really solid title so far. I'll let you know if it starts to suck ;)

I also grabbed the Crysis demo and played through that. It feels like Far Cry but with some new ways to approach each area thanks to your character's 'nano-suit' abilities... This is a good thing, as I quite enjoyed Far Cry :) The Crysis demo was pretty well done in terms of setting up the story, introducing players to new gameplay mechanics, and hinting at what's to come; the cliffhanger ending is a nice touch. What bugs me is the game's performance on my system. I know I don't have the latest 64-bit dual-core CPU or a DirectX 10 GPU, but my system's no slouch either. I can run games like Jericho and BioShock almost at the highest settings, but this game requires me dropping things to the lowest at 800x600, and the audio is still spotty then. I've done some research into the subject, and Vista seems to be the culprit... Hopefully they fix that by the time the final product hits, because it looks absolutely gorgeous at the highest settings.

"This is the remix!"

It's out! It's here! I have it! AT LONG LAST!!! Castlvania: The Dracula X Chronicles, the very reason I purchased a PSP, has finally arrived, and it is gorgeous! By far one of the best 2D platformers anywhere, and easily one of the best Castlevania games ever released. Play this game!

An then, finally, some Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix screens and video! Now then, if only I didn't have to play it with the excruciatingly bad d-pads on the 360 and PS3 controllers :( Why is it so hard to make a d-pad like those found on the Genesis 6-button or the Japanese Saturn controllers?

Grrr...

So I'm thinking of restarting my season in NHL08... While the amount of goals the AI scores on its own net is unsettling, and while 6-3-0-3 isn't a bad record, it turns out that I'd been hitting the wrong button for speed bursts all along... I always wondered why my defenders would start skating backwards when chasing down an iced puck. I know I've blow a few leads that way, and it certainly is frustrating :\

Speaking of NHL08, remember how I said all but the most mindless games would be put on hold while I tackled Panzer Dragoon Saga? Yeah, well, all I've been playing are the mindless games... Hot Shots Golf on PSP, Marvel Ultimate Alliance on 360, and NHL08 on Windows :)

"...And I may just keep things this way for a while yet."

...Or I may not. After making my last post, I noticed that Opera didn't seem to play very nicely with Blogger, or iGoogle for that matter. So it's back to Firefox (2.0.0.6) on PC-BSD for me. Still very much enjoying the OS, with Flash 7's incompatibility with some sites being the only real issue I'm running into with everyday use.

The other white meat...

Took care of two computer jobs yesterday: A Vista tutorial and an OS X tutorial. I'm really glad I adopted Vista when I did and that my last regular job involved working alongside Macs, or else I would've been far less effecticve yesterday. Now then, if only people would start asking me to set up and show them around Linux :)

Speaking of which, I had my fun with Ubuntu 7.10 and was thinking of installing the latest 'daily' build of Debian, when I noticed that another open source operating system had recently released a new version. PC-BSD 1.4 was released on September 24th, and of the major updates (things like FreeBSD 6-STABLE, Xorg 7.2, KDE 3.5.7), three really helped to make the set up process much more enjoyable. Bundling Compiz-Fusion 0.5.2, support for Flash 7 in native BSD browsers, and official nVidia drivers (while controversial because of their immaturity, superficiality, and proprietary nature) goes a long way towards providing a complete and relatively painless desktop experience; that is what PC-BSD is going for, right? Really though, personally, I'm just glad to see OSS doing all the pretty things (right 'out of the box') that Apple and Microsoft are doing :)

I did, however, run into two bugs worth noting while setting up this new release. First, the same show-stopping issue between my SoundBlaster Live! and the bundled EMU10K1 driver that I had with 1.3 (freezing during start-up) still exists, but booting in safe mode and downloading the .pbi driver package from pcbsd.org still fixes that. Second, both of the bundled ATi drivers worked fine with my Radeon 8500 until I tried to enable Compiz Fusion. Using that window manager would cause all of the window borders to disappear (supposedly a driver bug, affecting only certain models), effectively negating all novelty of the fancy visual effects and killing a lot of interface functionality. Since I had no newer ATi-based video cards lying around, I swapped the 128MB Radeon out for a 64MB GeForce3 Ti200 and switched over to one of the bundled proprietary nVidia drivers (with the greatest of ease, I might add!), and all has been well and good since. In fact, I'm currently posting this from PC-BSD 1.4 using Opera 9.23... And I may just keep things this way for a while yet.

A Roadie!

Check out this trailer for Brutal Legend :) Oh, and this one for Street Fighter IV! And how about the new Bionic Commando? Looks pretty spiffy to me!

Finished Episode Two, had a lot of fun, can't wait for Episode Three... I really hope they're a little quicker getting that one out.

Unreal Tournament 3 feels like another Unreal Tournament game, and that's not a bad thing! Very pretty, and I'm sure there're all kinds of nuances 'n such that the hardcore fans are digging... But I'm too much of a casual fan to get into any of that here.

In a wonderful display of human error, I accidentally deleted a bunch of pictures from my recent trip to Iceland (luckily I'd already uploaded the best of that bunch to online photo albums), as well as a bunch of saved games. Since I don't really feel like starting Need For Speed Most Wanted all over again, this seemed like a good opportunity to move on to Carbon. It's been fun so far, but I think I like Most Wanted better.

I also started a season in NHL 08, and my Leafs are 4-1-0-1; it would seem my suspicions of rubber-band gameplay were incorrect.

Ubuntu 7.10 is out. I grabbed it before the rush, early this morning, and the Compiz effects are pretty nifty, though they're not perfect (on my Radeon 8500, anyway; fast 'n smooth, but a few artifacts in the corners now and again). The only gripe I have with it is with the initial rush on repositories; simple package downloads like Flash are taking ages or outright failing. Perhaps that's just local to the Canadian servers, but still...

Finally, two recent service jobs I took... The first involved a malfunctioning laptop. The girl just bought a new one, but kept trying to boot-up the old one. Turns out her hard drive was failing, and I can't imagine her tinkering was prolonging its life any. I was able to get her most important data backed-up, but it involved going through folder by folder. Fun times, let me tell you! The second involved integrating a new tower into a home network. This addition involved mixing parts between four computers to make the best possible combinations. I sat down with the guy and made a list of things to do, so once we got that settled, things seemed okay. I ended-up taking two towers (that he'd pieced together) back with me to perform a couple of clean Windows XP installations. One, a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 B, went pretty smoothly once I got the wires out of the case fan :\ The other, a 3.46GHz Celeron D 360, was a whole different story. The Windows installation kept crashing while configuring the network, so I pulled out the second NIC he'd installed, and that fixed that. Then Windows would crash every time I installed the video card drivers (256MB AGP8X GeForce 6200), but worked fine with the latest drivers for the integrated video. Then I realized that the SCSI card he'd installed wasn't running the SCSI BIOS after POST, and the SoundBlaster Live! Platinum wasn't detecting... Upon closer inspection, he had not properly seated ANY of the four add-in cards he'd installed in the system! So much wasted time, but all is working well now.

Oh, and the 'safely remove' system tray issue is back on my Vista machine... Grrr...

!!!

Tim Schafer and Jack Black, together at last!

In other news, I'm thoroughly enjoying Half-Life 2 Episode Two and Team Fortress 2, PGR4 seems pretty solid, NHL2K8's new control scheme is indeed painful, and I just finished installing the new Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Demo.

Portal!

I bought The Orange Box today, and played through Portal tonight. Fucking amazing. Easily one of the best games I have ever played, it mixes challenging logic/physics puzzles with twitch first person shooter controls while managing to weave a story full of truly disturbing horror, laugh-out-loud comedy, and nods to fans throughout. Definitely pick this one up!

Almost forgot...

More XBOX 360 demo impressions!

Bladestorm: Haven't played too many games quite like this one... Feels like a combination of Dynasty Warriors (same publisher)/Ninety-Nine Nights and Full Spectrum Warrior. I don't much care for it, but you might...

Conan: Looks like Heavenly Sword, which is probably why it feels like a God Of War rip-off ;) I'm all for formulaic games if they can get it right, but this one just didn't do it for me. The graphics were a little unpolished (but still very nice), the dialogue was only passable, and the controls felt far too floaty.

Looney Tunes Acme Arsenal: Maybe I missed the point, but it just felt really, really boring to me...

The Simpsons: Not bad! Seems like there's some potential for fun here. The free-roaming reminded me a bit of Crackdown.

Project Gotham Racing 4 and NHL 2K8 are downloading now...

Quick update...

So I haven't gotten too far in Panzer Dragoon Saga yet... No, Lost Planet didn't distract me; that's actually been pretty boring. I've really just been completely sucked-in by Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee on PSP. I'd never played a Hot Shots Golf game before, and now I'm upset that I took so long to do so! Oh yeah, and I got past that boss battle in Daxter that was giving me a hard time. Also, M33 Team is Dark_AleX?

Anyway, I also picked-up The Orange Box today, so it looks like Panzer Dragoon Saga's gonna be on hold a little longer :) The funny thing is that I had to go to five different stores (Future Shop, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and two EB Games) before I found it... And It's not that it was sold-out; the first four stores had no evidence of it ever existing on their shelves... Weird.

Ooh, and as for that safely removing devices via the system tray issue I mentioned, well, I fixed it... By re-installing Vista again :\ I checked out the usual knowledge bases and forums, but no luck.

Vegemite!

There's a tube of Vegemite sitting on my desk... It was a gift, and I have yet to open it.

Anyway, I finished BioShock today, and I'm impressed. The graphics are great, the art style is truly awesome, "big daddies" are really cool, etc... You've probably gleaned at least that much from elsewhere online. What really stuck in my mind by the end was the truly dynamic gameplay coupled with a wonderfully intriguing storyline. The story grabbed me immediately with the introduction's voice-over, and having played previous "Shock" games, I was expecting some interesting twists and turns. The morally ambiguous choices the story presents players with don't really affect the gameplay mechanics as much as they do how players feel about their role. As the game progresses, you'll have plenty of cash, weaponry, tools, and a wide array of biological modifications regardless of the choices you make. At first this glut of powerups bothered me, but then I realized that it actually gave me freedom. Instead of specializing in hacking and setting traps or stealth or raw firepower and being locked into that style for the whole game, you're free to employ any combination of approaches simply by tweaking your loadout. Yeah, that seems like a lazy kind of way for the developers to go about it, but in a game so morally charged, that freedom really helps bring out the player's true motivations. There's a great big sandbox to play in, but the developers have managed to squeeze it into a pretty linear narrative; the results are truly engaging.

So, now that that's out of the way, (and after reading this) I'm finally sitting down and playing through Panzer Dragoon Saga on my Saturn. Everything else is on hold, save for mindless games (Lost Planet) and portables (Hot Shots Golf).

Speaking of Hot Shots Golf, that's where I've been spending most of my PSP time since I've been stuck on a boss in Daxter and am still slowly progressing through Crush.

On a completely unrelated note, I decided to move on from Adobe Audition (not fully Vista compatible, kinda clunky, not exactly industry standard, etc...). I was going to give Pro Tools (M-Powered) a shot, but it's not Vista compatible until the next version... Same goes for Cubase. Ableton, however, plays just fine with Vista, so I'm giving that a go. Sure, it's overkill for what I do, but it works, and it certainly is pretty :)

Ooh, and I did a Vista re-install not too long ago after an annoying video card driver debacle. Mostly my fault, but not worth the trouble of fixing manually. Anyway, since the clean installation, I can no longer safely remove devices by left-clicking on the system tray icon. Right-clicking to bring up the menu or doing it from Windows Explorer works fine, but not left-clicking the system tray icon. Erg. Also, since AVG's scanning engine doesn't play nice with Vista and the number of false-positives got annoying, I've switched to Avira's AntiVir... Seems to do the trick without breaking anything.

Hyper!

Forgot to mention this earlier, but anyway, a friend called me this morning saying that I had to come over; that it was an emergency. I headed over as soon as I was free in the early afternoon to see what was up... Turns out he scored a revision 2 Hyper Neo Geo 64 arcade board and four games! He had it all hooked-up to his JAMMA cabinet, and while I didn't get to spend a whole lot of time there, Buriki-One is a really interesting fighting game (move back and forth with the A and B buttons; all attacks are performed with the joystick), Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition and Samurai Shodown 64 seemed like competent 3D translations of their 2D predecessors, and Samurai Shodown 64: Warriors Rage is a very stylish improvement over the first game. He got it all for ~$500... I'm very jealous.

In other news, my Microsoft software supplier contact got a replacement Office 2007 disc and product key shipped to me... But I think she shipped me the wrong one :\ The original order was for Office Enterprise 2007 (got the right disc, wrong product key), and the replacement sent is Office Professional Plus 2007. You can compare the differences here. While I don't actually use Groove or OneNote, it would be nice to get what I ordered...

Crashing The Bandicoot

Played the Crash Of The Titans demo on 360... I had really high hopes, but it didn't look as good as the screenshots I'd seen before, some of the effects were grainy, the gameplay wasn't nearly as fluid as the original PSOne games, and I found a lot of the camera angles to be awkward... Gabe seems to disagree with me, but I still play the original three, and didn't touch any of them after Warped. I also tried the FIFA 08 and Party Animals demos; they seem solid, likely enjoyable if your into those kinds of games.

I saw Marvel Ultimate Alliance Gold Edition for 360 for ~$30, so I picked that up the other day. I figured it was about to become a "Platinum Hit", so I wanted the original packaging. Unfortunately, I later read that the "Platinum Hit" version is to be called Marvel: Ultimate Alliance Enhanced. Damnit! That means it's prolly gonna have more cool characters that they'll try to get me to buy online... Ergh.

Picked-up Lost Planet for Windows now that I have a video card that can actually play it. It's very pretty, and it's fun despite being able to run past most of the enemies... I also grabbed the demo for Clive Barker's Jericho for Windows. It felt a little cheap, but I can't quite put my finger on why... Maybe it was the weak voice-over in the promo video, or the lacklustre menu, or the mindless AI... But it certainly is pretty, the gameplay holds a lot of potential, and if Undying is any indication, Clive Barker's touch is going to make this something special.

Oh, and here's a fun one: I can't seem to play DVDs in Windows Vista Business without resorting to some third party software. I was using nVidia PureVideo with my GeForce 6800, but Avivo for the Radeon X1950 Pro doesn't seem to do the trick. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but I don't think so... There don't seem to be any instructions or downloads on AMD/ATi's site. In Windows XP, I could just grab the ATi DVD Decoder, but that doesn't work with Vista... Any ideas?

Revolutionary

Played through the SEGA Rally Revo demo on XBOX 360 last night... It's a good game, very pretty, fluid controls, sports some unique features (dynamic ruts in the track!)... But it barely feels like a SEGA Rally game. I was able to place second and first in two three-lap races (unlike the checkpoint/stage races of the first two games in the series) on my first play-through. Just to make sure I hadn't become awesome at SEGA Rally since last playing, I popped SEGA Rally 2 into my Dreamcast, and then SEGA Rally into my Saturn... Nope, I still suck at them. Perhaps the Revo demo isn't fully indicative of the final product, but I'm a little disappointed that the franchise seems to have taken such a departure from its predecessors. Also, I think I still like DiRT a little better :)

Followed-up on that Microsoft Office 2007 product key today, and it seems that a replacement key was sent out about a month ago, but my contact with the supplier doesn't seem to have forwarded it to me... Wonderful :)

Finally, NHL 08 has me worried. Every game I've played so far has ended in either overtime or a shootout. The first few were tight, exciting games against evenly matched teams... Even though I did find myself having a few unlikely hero moments when I was behind. Then I took note of one game where I was playing a much weaker team and went-up 3-1 early in the game... They were able to tie things up in regulation, but both goals came during two very suspicious situations that saw my goalie wandering well out of his crease and staying there in high-pressure situations... And no, I wasn't controlling him. I'm afraid that NHL 08 is employing a system akin to NBA Jam's (and countless racing games') 'rubber band' scoring, where the team trailing is given an advantage to keep things exciting... Ugh.

Decisions and Finality

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is out. I've decided to use OOo in lieu of Microsoft Office 2007 due largely to the fact that my software supplier still hasn't provided me with a proper Microsoft product key. They did say they'd get back to me all those months ago, but then I haven't really followed-up :\ The dilemma I'm faced with now is that IBM has released Lotus Symphony Beta 1, and I am intrigued... More to come as the situation develops :)

Anyway, so, my brother really wanted to play BioShock, but his AGP Radeon X850 card didn't support the shader model version used in BioShock. He didn't feel like dropping $200+ on a stop-gap video card upgrade (opting rather to do a whole new build in the near future), so I gave him my GeForce 6800 and bought myself a 512MB AGP8X Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro for $199.99 CDN; the best AGP card my contacts at AMD/ATi could get was an X1650... Ugh. Anyway, the new card's very nice, and everything runs quite well (including BioShock at full detail at 1024x768); it also overclocks from 580/702 (GPU/RAM) to 621/742 pretty well so far. Oh, and while I am aware that there are independent projects out there to bring SM2.0 support to BioShock, they don't seem to be completely perfect just yet. The main point here is that his is the end of an era though; my main box is now as upgraded as it'll ever be... thankfully, aside from lacking DirectX10+ hardware support, it definitely still has legs :)

NHL 08

Got a chance to play through a few exhibition games in NHL 08 on Windows, and while it's definitely a top-notch hockey game, I'm kinda disappointed with the graphics... It looks like PC users have been given a high-res port of the PS2 version :( It's not particularly ugly or anything, but it certainly is disappointing when the 360 version looks so much better. I'm still liking NHL 2K7 better...

Saving Money...

I finally got around to playing through the Project Sylpheed demo on my XBOX 360, and it was pretty sweet :) It's definitely worth going through the tutorials, and the game is as fast, frenetic, and pretty as any other good space shooter I can remember playing. There was some slowdown at one point, but overall it was enjoyable and intense; might pick it up if I see it on the cheap, but there didn't seem to be anything that made it a must-buy for me.

I also grabbed the Tony Hawk's Proving Ground demo, and it was a lot of fun as well. I've heard it being knocked for feeling like the original game with too many extras tacked-on, but I beg to differ. The new gameplay styles (aggressive "hardcore" skaters, creative and adventurous "riggers", and technique-oriented pros) are interesting albeit potentially unnecessary, but the new controls they incorporate into the game feel like things that should've always been there. Nail-The-Trick in Project 8 was a very welcome addition, and Proving Ground expands that further with Nail-The-Grab and Nail-The-Manual. The aggressive kick introduced by the hardcore skating style in the game is a feature I've been wanting since the beginning, and the free-roaming track-construction options the riggers bring seem to add a whole new game to the mix. I can see how the implementation of the riggers' track editor can pull players out of the game, but with some suspension-of-disbelief it can really add to the experience... Besides, would anyone really want to have a ramp-construction component in the game? Would it be fun to wait for an afternoon while your in-game persona put together a new rail? Nah, not so much. I don't think I'll be buying this one right away (still working on Project 8), but it does have enough interesting new stuff that I'll remember it down the road.

Oh, and apparently NHL 08 is the way to go over NHL2K8 this year on account of some poorly-implemented new controls on 2K Sports' part. Apparently, you can still play with the classic 2K control scheme, but I'll just stick to 2K7 on my original XBOX for that... That's $60 for either new game that I just don't really need to spend.

Oh hell YES!

"Rez HD Coming to XBL Arcade in Early 08"

Bloat!

I can't recall if I've mentioned this on here before, but why does iTunes install Apple Software Update even if, during the installation process, I explicitly indicate that I don't want to use Apple Software Update? Also, why does it install Apple Mobile Device Support when I don't have an iPhone? Hell, they're not even available in my country yet! I appreciate that they're easily removable, but I'd appreciate it even more if I could just opt-out of installing them altogether. Even if they were just passive programs, It'd bother me less because I could just not use them and all they'd do is take up some hard drive space, but they're both active services that take up hard drive space and (admittedly small amounts of) RAM! Grr.

I was sad to see Dark_AleX leave the PSP modification scene, especially since there had been a few official Sony firmware updates since his release of 3.40 OE. Thankfully, M33 Team has taken-up the reins. 3.52 M33-4 seems to work just fine, even on TA-082 hardware!

Happy Easter!

Google Earth is one of my favourite applications, and it just keeps getting better... The latest revelation being that it's a flight simulator!

Anyway, I've also been playing games like BioShock and Overlord on my PC, and while they're playable (even in Vista), they could stand to have a little more horsepower under the hood to smooth things out a touch. I was looking at a Radeon X1950 Pro (my best bet short of upgrading to a PCI-Express motherboard), but this news will keep me hanging on to that $200 a little longer; AGP GeForce 8-series and Radeon HD! :)

I'm working on an older P4 system (1.5GHz, 256MB RAM) for a client at the moment, and they could use a memory upgrade, but it's RDRAM... Stupid RDRAM.

A mildly disappoiting day...

I'm hearing good reviews of Dead Head Fred and Jeanne D'Arc on PSP... I plan to look into those. I've played through the new NHL 08, Tiger Woods 08, and TimeShift demos on the 360, and I'm kinda torn; they're all potentially great games but just seem to end up being solid and not really worth buying. NHL 08 has some fantastic graphics and unique gameplay, but the announcers are lame enough to make we wait to see what 2K Sports comes up with this year. Tiger Woods 08 feels like a really great golf game, but the graphics look pretty 'plasticky' and the controls (specifically putting) seem to have a relatively steep learning curve. Like NHL 08, this game has me waiting to see what the competition comes up with.

Moving on, TimeShift is really disappointing. I remember playing an early demo of this one in Windows a while back, before it was revamped for the 'next-gen' hadrware, and it seemed like a fun game that was coming along nicely. Now TimeShift seems like a fantastic game that has been oversimplified, borrows heavily from its competitors, and still isn't quite finished. Most notably, the time-shifting play mechanics are pretty much taken care of for you as your suit's computer automatically selects the best choice of slow, pause, or rewind unless you tell it otherwise, and that really affects the challenge and uniqueness of the game. There are a number of similarities to Half-Life (in the character interaction, scripted sequences, and story design), but then that's mostly just nit-picking on my part; I'd like to think the game does more to differentiate itself from the rest in the full product. Finally, the oddities: I noticed that one cool feature, the weapon grab (where you freeze time and steal an enemy's weapon right out of his hands) doesn't work very well if your ammo's full. The result of this bug(?) is the player finding himself wasting his time-shifting power only to have it run-out with an angry enemy at point blank range... Sweeet deal. At one point in the demo, there's a scripted event showing an enemy soldier executing someone. The game then suggested pressing a controller button to throw a grenade, but I thought that'd be kinda mean. Instead of blowing-up both the good guy and the bad guy, I decided to manually freeze time and take-out the enemy soldier. Well, I unloaded round after round into his frozen person, but it changed nothing and the scripted event continued as if nothing had happened once time un-froze. Consistency is important, kids. I'm still hoping the full game gets things right, because there is the potential for a hell of a lot of fun here.

So, I'm a Windows Vista Business man now. Nothing much is new since I last played with it, except that my FireWire Solo now works :) Adobe Audition 2.0 isn't compatible with the fancy Vista GUI, so Windows automatically downgrades itself to the Home Basic GUI, but that's not the end of the world. There are some real gripes I have though, like how Windows thinks the network connection is disconnected when it's just congested, or how there's no easy way to relocate the user folders (to another drive, for example). If I'm clogging the network with downloads on other computers, XP would keep going, albeit slowly; Vista, however, keeps disconnecting me, and that's especially annoying on Windows Live Messenger. Regarding user folders, in XP, one could simply change the target for the My Documents folder and voila, all is well. Vista's user folder structure is a little different though, and you can't easily move the whole user folder; only its subfolders :\

Sea Change?

I've been back from Iceland for a little while now, but I've also been exceedingly busy and barely gaming since then. I have managed, however, to play through all of the cool new demos on XBOX Live. Strangehold takes the Max Payne formula, transplants it into a Hong Kong action movie, and really brings it to the next level; I'm definitely looking forward to the final product. Skate is a more realistic take on professional skateboarding while still maintaining a great level of casual fun. Eternal Sonata is something I'm really looking forward to playing, as the graphics are gorgeous and the dynamics of the battle system are really refreshing after the last few RPGs I've been through. Beautiful Katamari didn't seem like anything particularly new, but then it was a pretty short demo. BioShock was beautiful, fantastically atmospheric, and just a whole lot of fun. There's no denying that it is essentially another System Shock game, but really, that's not a bad thing after so many years :) In the Arcade, neither Space Giraffe nor Street Trace: NYC really did anything for me; they're not bad, but I doubt I'll ever buy them... They are pretty though.

While I was out of the country, the vast majority of my time gaming was spent with Lumines and Final Fantasy on my PSP. Lumines is Lumines; if you haven't played it yet, you should; if it doesn't grab you at first, stick with it... It will. The Final Fantasy remake is really solid, and I was having a whole lot of fun with it... Until I ventured into the Earth Gift Shrine, an optional dungeon that was added to the DS and PSP remakes. Now, perhaps I just suck at RPGs, or perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but I'm in the final room, all of my characters are level 26 and well-equipped, and I can't defeat any of the enemies or find any exits aside from the ones behind the aforementioned enemies whom I cannot seem to defeat. FAQs haven't been much help, but then I'm trying to avoid them (I like finishing games on my own). The game hasn't been touched since returning to Canada.

Moving on, I think I may be installing Windows Vista on my main system in the next few days. With Microsoft's recent release of the Vista compatibility and performance updates (which together cover most of the updates announced for early-2008's SP1), M-Audio's release of a FireWire series driver for 32-bit versions of Vista, and the ability to disable driver signature checking for RivaTuner (was always an option, even when I was bitching about software overclocking in Vista in the past), things are starting to come together nicely... I'll be back with more on this soon.

*grumble*

Stranglehold and BioShock demos are out... And I'm in Iceland.

Hepping Boursdey!

I had a birthday the other day. Got Dead Rising for XBOX 360, Mortal Kombat Armageddon for XBOX, 300 on HD DVD, and a totally unexpected Canon PowerShot SD700 IS Digital ELPH with a 2GB SD card :)

Oh yeah!

I forgot to mention that I downloaded the Transformers demo the other day... And wow! What a pile! :) The graphics are alright (well, Bumblebee looks good, and the fancy lighting effects are decent; the enemies and environments, not so much), the controls when in robot form are passable, and uh... That's about it. The driving controls are loose and floaty to the point of hitting Alt+F4 (I believe that's Apple+Q for all you Mac users), the locked camera while driving is too low and supremely annoying, combat is terribly repetitive, the generic enemies look like giant cameras, and, worst of all, when checking the options menu to see how to transform, the command was linked to a function called "convert". CONVERT!? DON'T YOU MEAN, "TRANSFORM"!? SERIOUSLY, THE GAME IS CALLED TRANSFORMERS! These people couldn't've been that stupid... All they had to do to effectively realize a good game that fit their apparent design was rip-off Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown, and toss-in some giant transforming robots. I'm guessing development time constraints were the culprit here... Sad.

Anyway, on to happier things, has anyone been watching the video game retrospectives over on GameTrailers.com? They did one for Zelda last year, and are in the midst of Final Fantasy and Metroid retrospectives at the moment. It's a great bit of nostalgia if you're familiar with the series, and potentially an interesting history lesson if you're not. Episodes are 10~15 minutes each, and new ones are out each week. For the first time, I'm starting to see Web-based 'TV' as a viable entertainment option :) Five minute home movies with random release schedules just weren't doing it for me...

ENOS Lives, URNOTE... The "E" should be red :)

I finally got to spend some quality time with a PS3... Hooked-up to a 70" 1080p Sony rear-projection HDTV (via HDMI) and a 6.1 digital audio receiver :) The guy who owned the setup didn't have any full games, but he did have a bunch of demos (and I downloaded a few more while I was there). I played Blast Factor (kinda a lot like Geometry Wars; not necessarily a bad thing), Full Auto 2 (prettier and more full-featured than it's XBOX 360 predecessor), Gran Tourismo HD Concept (same old; very pretty), Heavenly Sword (God Of War, but less good!), MotorStorm (it opened with one of my favourite Nirvana songs, Breed :) ), Ninja Gaiden Sigma (like the XBOX game, but with more stuff and better lighting), Resistance (*yawn*), Ridge Racer 7 (it's Ridge Racer), and Virtua Tennis 3 (same as the 360 demo, but with more options and opponents). The menu system was the same as the PSP's, and everything was pretty solid and intuitive. The 60GB systems are available for $549 CDN at the moment, with add-on deals like MotorStorm for $20 or Enchanted Arms for $0.01, but I'm still in no rush to blow that kind of money... I wouldn't knock anyone for owning one though; Sony's got a solid platform with a lot of potential there; I could stand to have the install and load times a bit shorter though.

Moving on, I've been sick for the past week, and so I started a new career in Top Spin 2. This is the first time I've played it since it crashed during my first career tournament and saved my game with a loss recorded. Ergh. Well, I'm having a lot more fun this time, and the load times seem to be way more bearable (was there a software update?), and no more crashes. So far it's a lot of fun, if a touch easy, but still challenging enough to keep me interested. I just hope it's not like Virtua Tennis 3 (on PSP, anyway) where the opponents suddenly get frustratingly hard as you get to the upper rankings.

On an entirely unrelated note, when I last worked as a regular service technician, I was told about a data recovery company to refer certain desperate clients to. I'd heard stories of $400/hr bills, but never got any solid numbers back myself. Well, that corrupt filesystem I mentioned last time wasn't satisfied with the handful of digital camera images I'd managed to recover, so I sent him their way. He came back to me saying they had "good" news; that they could recover most of his stuff, and that it would be cheap! Only $850! :)

Demos 'n stuff...

I recently downloaded and played-through demos for The Bigs, Blue Dragon, The Darkness, and Stuntman: Ignition on XBOX 360. The Bigs didn't really resonate with me, as I was hoping for something more along the lines of NBA Jam or NFL Blitz; what I found didn't feel terribly different from MLB 2K7. Blue Dragon felt like a solid RPG with pretty graphics and a fun approach to combat, but it didn't really grab me... Then again, the demo offered little in the way of plot. The darkness was good visceral fun with really nice graphics and some cool twists to FPS gameplay; the level of immersion was right up there with the best of the genre. Stuntman is very pretty, a lot of fun, and just the right kind of frustrating; it didn't feel quite as impressive as the videos I'd seen online, but it's a good buy if the price is right. I also grabbed Juiced 2 and Project Sylpheed, but haven't spent any time with them yet...

On PSP, I've finished LocoRoco and Puzzle Quest, and both are must-buys. LocoRoco really is unlike anything you've played before and features amazingly endearing characters and music. Puzzle Quest, whether you own a PSP or a Nintendo DS is a fantastic RPG/puzzle game that'll keep anyone entertained for weeks, and constantly coming back for more. I've since moved-on to finishing Daxter and Crush, but I also picked-up the recent PSP re-release of the PSOne classic PaRappa The Rapper! I've been waiting for years to play that game, and it completely lived-up to my expectations. It's short (only six songs) and silly, but holy crap are the songs catchy! I just picked-up the soundtracks to both PaRappa 1 and 2 :)

Recent computer fixes have consisted of replacing a blown PSU (smoke 'n everything, apparently!), spending hours recovering digital photos from a SATA laptop hard drive sporting a corrupt filesystem, a bad power connector on another laptop, and a bad power adapter on yet another. Luckily, that last laptop is still under warranty.

Ooh, and my RAM upgrades arrived last week! My main system now has 2GB of DDR400 RAM running in dual-channel mode, my second system has 1GB, and the rest will be distributed throughout the family's desktops (currently running in 1GB and 512MB configurations).

Cooool!

I just heard about MenuetOS, and it sounds pretty awesome... It's a new OS developed from scratch, written entirely in assembly language! If this thing is functional enough online, it could knock-out Debian as my alternative OS of choice. Not only would it be faster, but it would have the whole 'security through obscurity' thing down pat.

Updates!

My main computer's fine and everything's back up and running on Windows XP there, the 2GB of RAM has shipped and should be here early in the week, and I decided to replace Debian with PC-BSD on my second machine for the time being.

Installation of PC-BSD was a breeze, but I did run into one problem upon the first boot. The system would freeze just after loading the drivers for my PCI SoundBlaster Live! card. I was able to get things going in "safe mode", and I noticed that it was also trying to load drivers for my motherboard's integrated audio chip even though it was disabled in the BIOS. I enabled the onboard audio and reinstalled the OS, and it installed no sound drivers. Sweet :\ So I grabbed the SoundBlaster drivers from the PC-BSD website, re-disabled onboard audio in the BIOS, and now everything's peachy. I'm using Opera to browse the web and, well, that's about it, but it's pretty nice! KDE is about the same as I remembered it and still not my preferred GUI, but it's pretty and functional. PC-BSD's package system, while not quite as self-contained as those found in some other OS offerings, is still pretty slick and really easy to use; of the Linux/BSD distros I've played with, it's probably most akin to Slackware's system. The only real gripe I have so far is that Flash 7 seems to be a little sketchy, and in this YouTube world, that just makes things slightly more annoying :)

Also, XBOX 360's backwards compatibility has been updated again! They fixed Jet Set Radio Future and SEGA GT 2002, and now I can play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Project Gotham Racing 1 and 2! Wheee! :)

Well, shit...

Windows XP seems to have died on my main machine, and I'm not sure I want to activate Vista on the second hard drive... A repair installation of XP didn't work, so my current plan is to grab a Linux distro and back-up my data that way; seems like a good excuse to try something new. I was thinking of going with Ubuntu 7.04, as it has been a while since I've installed Ubunutu. I guess I could go with another big one like Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, or whatever, but they're not really grabbing my attention. Gentoo might be interesting, but I'm not in the mood for that kind of potential frustration right now :) Perhaps I should look into PC-BSD... Anyway, the data seems to be intact, so I'm happy.

I also noticed some cheap 1GB sticks of DDR400 (various brands) at some local stores the other day (~$55 each), but they were all sold-out when I got there today. The cheapest they had was a 2GB OCZ dual channel kit for $149.99. I ended-up ordering two 1GB sticks of Crucial RAM online for $54.99 each; we'll see if they actually have them in stock or not :\

I finished Black (on my XBOX 360) this morning. I enjoyed the game quite a bit, and certainly recommend picking it up, especially since it can now be found for as little as $9.99 used. It's not the longest game, the story isn't particularly important, the AI isn't the brightest, and there's no multiplayer, but it's still great fun and worth a couple of plays through. Next up is Grabbed By The Ghoulies...

Progress...

Since my last post, I've picked-up a few more Game Gear, PSP, Dreamcast, and Windows games.

The Game Gear acquisitions entailed browsing the local independent specialty shops, and included Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic Chaos, Shinobi, Virtua Fighter Animation, and Super Smash TV. The Sonic games are all solid, Shinobi is akin to the corresponding Genesis titles of the same era, Virtua Fighter's kinda dull, and Smash TV is an atrocity... But then I should've suspected that. Smash TV is a classic franchise, due largely in part to its control scheme (two independent directional controls, one for movement and one for attack). For whatever reason, the Game Gear's lack of buttons didn't register with me when I bought the game. Ergh.

On PSP, I've just-about finished Puzzle Quest (did everything but searching for runes/forging weapons) and LocoRoco, so something new is in order. Daxter and Crush are on deck, but I picked-up Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Marvel Trading Card Game. Ultimate Alliance is kind of boring so far and I haven't spent much quality time with the card game, but it's safe to say that neither has thrilled me.

As a nice follow-up to scoring NHL 2K2 for Dreamcast, I came across Tennis 2K2 just a few days later! This game is the best in its genre for the generation, and has been ported to the PS2 and PSP... And it was only $4.99! I suspect that the price may have been so low because the disc was kind of dodgy, but upon closer inspection, there was just some gunk on one section of the surface; so a quick wipe later, all was well.

On Windows, I've gotten back into Tomb Raider Anniversary, and I'm loving it. Croft Manor, specifically, is a wonderful gaming experience, and really sets an example for what I think episodic gaming should be like. I also snagged a copy of Overlord, and it's too much fun :) The mouse is a little weird (especially for "sweeping") after being introduced to the game on XBOX 360, but it's probably the better controller in the long run. The gameplay does seem to get a little stale after extended play sessions, but the graphics, writing, and pick-up gameplay is top-notch. This is the kind of title that should keep me wholly entertained for at least a couple of weeks of casual play.

Paying Respects.

Today, I bought a SEGA Game Gear with Sonic 2, NHL 2K2 for Dreamcast, and Body Harvest for N64. The Game Gear was a decent price and an important piece of my childhood; it was the first mildly popular (albeit relatively expensive) colour portable. Seemingly unattainable some 15 years ago, it was nice to pick one up for a song today. NHL 2K2 was the last hockey title on the Dreamcast, and is easily one of the better hockey games of the DC/PS2/XBOX/GC generation. Body Harvest is a game that was developed by DMA Design around the same time as another popular DMA Design game titled Grand Theft Auto. What's interesting is that Body Harvest, while focusing on time travel and alien invasion, shares a lot of gameplay design cues with the GTA series, but does so in 3D some three years before GTA went 3D on the PS2.

I just thought it interesting that I picked-up three bits of video gaming history today :)

Memory's the first to go...

I completely forgot to mention something very important in my last post here. The event omitted is so momentous that it warrants its own post though, so it's cool.

My friend Tim gave me a Puzzle Bobble MVS cartridge.

I am going to repeat that...

My friend Tim GAVE me a PUZZLE BOBBLE MVS cartridge.

I'm at a loss for words... I can't even hope to possibly come anywhere near adequately conveying the amount of praise and recognition this act deserves. Some of you may know this game as Bust-A-Move, or are familiar with similar games such as Snood; the MVS version of Puzzle Bobble is where it's at though.

Now all I need is another AES controller :\

You can plant sheep!

I've been on the lookout for a copy of Spider-Man 2 for XBOX, as I keep hearing it's a pretty fun game (and entirely different from the not-so-awesome PC version). I figured since it was apparently a "Best of Platinum Hits" title, that it'd be cheap and plentiful... Sadly this was not the case, and I'd yet to see it in any store since around the time Spider-Man 3 came out. Well, I was out in a mall, killing some time the other day, and I stopped-off at an EB Games. They had a used copy in good condition for a little over $20... More than I wanted to spend, but I splurged. Then I saw Odin Sphere. $50 new. I splurged again. I need to learn some self-control :\ It's a good thing that they both turned-out to be pretty good games! I haven't spent a whole lot of time with either, but Spider-Man 2's freedom of exploration and Odin Sphere's unique gameplay really promise to be a lot of fun. I want to mention that Odin Sphere reminds me of Guardian Heroes on SEGA Saturn in terms of gameplay and Astal (also a Saturn game) in terms of graphics... Those are very prestigious comparisons, by the way :)

I also downloaded Prince Of Persia and Pac-Man C.E. from the XBOX Live Arcade, and I'm probably spending more time with them than anything else right now. It's nice to see old games updated the right way. These are definitely worth the money.

I've finished Season 1 of Sam & Max, and I'm satisfied. While some episodes were better than others, some puzzles were needlessly frustrating, and the episode formula was a little repetitive as the season progressed, it was still full of hilarious writing, great acting, and good old classic adventure gaming. You can buy episodes from Telltale's website, GameTap, and Steam, or you can buy season sets from Telltale or retail stores later this summer.

More on Vista...

Lessee... After a few days, Vista's still pretty cool, but here're the issues that are keeping me from making it my main OS:

• Software makers aren't yet up-to-date. Programs that are designed for Windows XP and earlier that require administrator privileges are annoying in Vista, as it asks you to "cancel" or "allow" every time you run them. In the majority of these cases, this is the fault of the software makers, not Vista. Many applications have caught-up (WinRAR, for example), but they're not all perfect yet.
• Software overclocking is supremely annoying. I use RivaTuner to unlock and overclock my GeForce 6800 video card. I suspect that this is the kind of application that requires administrator access, and that means "allowing" it every time I restart Vista. I hope someone finds a workaround soon.
• Some copy protection schemes and software modifications aren't Vista compatible, even though the games they rely upon are. This renders the game unplayable. Ugh.
• Hardware support. My ViewSonic monitor's drivers don't seem to install, despite following ViewSonic's instructions to the letter and trying a number of my own methods. Similarly, my M-Audio Firewire Solo is still unsupported. These are minor annoyances though, as I wouldn't mind keeping XP as a secondary OS for audio production anyway.

So we're getting there, but not quite yet.

Anyway, moving on, I downloaded the demos for Shadowrun, Tenchu Z, Vampire Rain, and Overlord from XBOX Live. Shadowrun seems fun and unique in the genre, but I'm not much of a fan of the genre so I didn't do much past the tutorial. Tenchu Z looks very promising, but I hope things (menu, controls, animations) get a bit more polished before its release. Vampire Rain is a really cool concept (a Splinter Cell-esque team taking-down Vampires!), but it's so shoddily put-together that it's just robbed of any real fun. Sneaking around was alright, but combat was so painfully awkward that I won't be touching it again. I haven't played Overlord yet, but I hear good things... Stay tuned!

What I've learned from a day with Vista...

Windows Vista serves me about as well as Linux does. It's really good for web browsing, instant messaging, multimedia playback, and general optical media burning. It just works out of the box after a little set-up (drivers, programs), it's relatively secure, and it supports most of my hardware. Also like Linux, it's not great for gaming at the moment, doesn't support certain specific optical disk image formats, and it doesn't support some of my more purpose-specific hardware. The only real issues I've had with it so far have been in the form of the odd skip in MP3 playback through Windows Media Player and having a bitch of a time getting the Boot Configuration Data store (Vista's boot.ini replacement) to work with my old XP installation (in the same computer, on a separate hard drive). So no real show-stoppers yet, and it seems like a solid every-day desktop computing platform... I also thought it was cute how Vista Business doesn't install the packed-in games by default :) I'm excited about Vista though, especially after learning more about what's actually new about it. Ars Technica has published the first two parts of their three-part in-depth look at Vista, and it's a good read that shows just how much promise Vista has.

I haven't spent much time with Office 2007 yet, but it sure does look pretty, and I like the new menu system... I'll be back with more once they send me an Office product key that actually works :\

Let the fun begin! ;)

My copies of Windows Vista Business and Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise arrived!

I'm thinking I'll install them on my 3.6GHz P4 machine, as support is a little sketchy for the Radeon 8500 and SoundBlaster Live! in my 2.4GHz P4 Linux/XP dual-boot machine (which only has 512MB of RAM at the moment anyway). I won't be touching the current XP install on the faster machine, however, as support for games in Vista is still a touch sketchy and support for my M-Audio Firewire Solo in Vista is non-existent :) Luckily, I have this 160GB 7200RPM Western Digital IDE drive lying around that failed on someone else before, but tests-out fine now, so Vista should be a good way to test it more thoroughly. I'll keep you posted...

Convoluted!

So I haven't taken much time to play any games, though I did pick-up Tomb Raider Anniversary and Jade Empire Special Edition for Windows. I've been busy fixing people's computer problems all weekend, and I've got some stories and a new toy to show for it (well, those and some cash). First up is that 3.0GHz Pentium 4 I mentioned in my last post; It was hurting bad from the spyware and such, so I backed-up their important stuff and started fresh. Whoever built that thing must've been out cold, 'cause I was half asleep and noticed that the power fan was plugged into the chassis fan connector, the power LED was plugged-in as a two-pin connector instead of the three-pin connector the motherboard takes, and the RAM was installed in single-channel mode. I fixed those issues, installed a PCI fax modem, dusted everything, updated the BIOS, and from there it was smooth sailing. While I was delivering the finished product, I was offered one of these. I wasn't intimately familiar with the Dell Digital Audio Receiver, but I figured it was some sort of PC-to-stereo streaming apparatus, judging by the ethernet port on the back. Well, as it turns-out, I was right, but wasn't getting the whole story. You can actually use your home phone network to stream music to any room with a phone jack (or an ethernet hub/switch/router)! Pretty cool feature, but I'm currently using it in my bedroom (through an old router) to listen to my MP3s from my bed with a remote. It's a fun little toy, and was pretty expensive in its day (over $300 CDN after taxes!), so I'm happy to add it to my collection of random tech crap :) Now if only it ordered albums by track number instead of alphabetically :\ Making your own playlists using the device's interface is just a bitch.

The other stories are far less interesting. They involve troubleshooting one person's home network via text messages and installing a wireless router for another person. Wheee!

Stay tuned...

The revamped draft-saving function of Blogger doesn't seem to, y'know... Work :)

Anyway, I've picked-up the last three episodes of the first season of the new Sam & Max games, Unreal Championship 2 for XBOX ($5 new; Best Buy's marking-down their XBOX titles; looks awesome on the 360), as well as Burnout Dominator, Carol Vorderman's Sudoku, Chili Con Carnage, Crush, and MLB '07 The Show for PSP. They're all pretty much what one would expect from their pedigree; a solid racing game, a challenging puzzle game, a mindless yet fun action game, and a very pretty baseball sim. Then there's Crush... What a fucking cool concept... The gameplay, not the story. It's an action-puzzle game with a really cool twist that involves "crushing" the world from 3D to 2D and back again to overcome obstacles. It's difficult to adequately explain in a short space, but you'll get it immediately upon seeing it for yourself. Definitely worth looking-into that one.

I also just finished work on a horribly misconceived Pentium 4 2.4B system. Solid CPU on an Intel-based ASUS board, plenty of storage space (over 120GB), and a nice 17" Samsung LCD... But that's where the good news ends. I suspect the system started-out as a Pentium III-based box (judging by the Pentium III sticker on the front of the case), and was later subjected to a half-assed overhaul. They left Windows on the original 13GB 5400RPM drive and just slapped-in an arbitrarily partitioned 120GB 7200RPM drive (both Maxtor brand, both very noisy), and only installed 256MB of DDR RAM (8MB of which was shared with the integrated Intel 845 GPU). It was a mess, and Windows' integrity had been seriously compromised. I backed-up the important stuff, took out the 13GB HDD altogether, repartitioned the 120GB 40/80 for programs and data respectively, and installed another 256MB of RAM and a 128MB AGP4x Sapphire Radeon 8500LE. After getting a fresh Windows installation on there, things started crashing... Turns-out there were bad sectors galore on the 120GB. I tried "regenerating" the drive, but one (from the thousands found originally) bad sector popped-up again the next day. I wasn't sold on its reliability, so I got them a near-silent 160GB Seagate drive.

I'll be back with more once I finish the Sam & Max games (I'm really looking forward to Episode 5), and get to work on a 3.0GHz P4 system with 1GB of RAM that was brought to its knees by spyware.

"There are times when cake is not available, and instead we are destroyed. This is the deep poetry of the universe."

Why do I suddenly have the urge to spend in excess of $50 buying the same magazine five times?

Spluuurrrge!!!

It all started two days ago, while I was out wandering a mall to kill some time. It'd been a while since I'd had any significant amount of time to kill and a long time since I'd been in a mall, so I gave it a shot. I found myself in a Wal-Mart, watching some guy with a list of games dig through the new batch of $20 video game two-packs. Turned-out he was looking for a specific few that had trade-in values at EBGames of over $20 :) I ended-up stumbling across a copy of The Red Star for PS2 for $20. I've yet to see that game anywhere else for any price, so I'm glad I picked it up. This is a game that almost didn't get made, and it's sad to think so. It's an interesting new twist on the side-scrolling beat-'em-up genre (Final Fight, Streets Of Rage) with graphics and controls that are reminiscent of 2D shooters (R-Type, Ikaruga). The fact that it's based on a popular graphic novel just means there's even more to potentially enjoy. Definitely worth a look.

I found myself back out in the land of rampant consumerism yesterday to check back on a few good deals I'd seen the day before, and ended-up with Ninety-Nine Nights for XBOX 360, Mercenaries and Breakdown for XBOX (both backwards compatible on the 360), and Metal Slug Anthology and Killer 7 for PS2. These are just some titles I'd been meaning to pick-up if I ever saw them cheap, and the really nice thing was that none of them were over $20, save for Metal Slug which was $40 (regularly $45~$50). N3's kind of a boring game to actually play for more than 30 minutes at a time, but it is very pretty and has some beautiful cutscenes :) Mercenaries is just something I'd kept hearing good things about (Grand Theft Auto in a modern warfare setting), and it is a lot of fun. Breakdown, similarly, is another game I'd heard good things about, and they were right; boring graphics, convoluted controls (reminiscent of Trespasser, another game that aimed for realistic first-person immersion), yet wholly endearing gameplay that keeps you coming back for more. Metal Slug means I get to play Metal Slug 6 at home; that's all that really matters :) I'm not sure how I feel about the new backgrounds, but as long as it's better than 4 and at least as good as 5, I'm happy. Finally, Killer 7 is just weird. Very, very weird... And engrossing. I have no idea what's I'm doing or what's going on, and I barely understand the control system, but I get the feeling this is gonna be one of those games that's rewarding in the long run. Oh yeah, if you're on XBOX Live, download Aegis Wing! It's Free!

Ooh, I also picked-up The Fountain on HD DVD, and Firefly on DVD (it was $25; I had to). With the latest XBOX 360 HD DVD update, it's gonna be nice to be able to use my DTS decoder :)

Luckily, I found some work this past week that'll help pay for all of this! ;) I neglected to mention that the system upgrade I did last week only had one IDE controller but four IDE devices, so I picked-up a PCI IDE controller for them. Then I took a job that involved picking-out the best parts from three systems (300MHz Pentium II, 350MHz Pentium II, 500Mhz K6-2) and building the best possible system; he ended-up with the 350MHz PII, an Intel 440BX-based motherboard, 192MB of RAM, and a 32MB AGP TNT M64, all running Windows 2000 Pro. Finally, I did a clean installation of Windows XP on an AMD Athlon 3200+ system (nForce2 Ultra, 1GB DDR400, 128MB AGP8X BFG GeForce 6600GT OC); it was nice to work on a faster system again :)

...And I'm back!

I was off in the wilds of Northwestern British Columbia for a week, and while I did have Internet access at most times, I didn't have much to post here. My PSP kept me busy during my downtime on the trip (Puzzle Quest and Daxter, for the most part), and my IBM ThinkPad X22 running Debian 4.0 "testing" worked without a hitch. Stealing WiFi using the default network settings GUI wasn't particularly fun though.

Anyway, I've recently been devoting the majority of my console gaming time to Jak 3 on PS2, and I'm happy to say it's thankfully less like the misconceived Grand Theft Auto-inspired design of Jak II, and more linear like Jak And Daxter. I also downloaded the Monster Madness and Forza Motorsport 2 demos from XBOX Live; the former seemed a little shallow for what is supposed to be a full-fledged game, whereas the latter was a surprisingly deep and full-featured demo. I'm still a SEGA GT fan when it somes to more realistic racing games, but Forza 2 seems to be a very solid contender.

I performed a system rebuild (Athlon 1800+ to Athlon X2 3600+, new motherboard, RAM, video card, and power supply) and subsequent Windows XP repair installation on Wednesday. It was nice to get back into the swing of things now that my schedule has cleared-up, especially since everything went so smoothly.

Finally, I've been using Google Talk to make 'calls' to Australia, and I'm very impressed by the the quality and reliability. I couldn't get Windows Live Messenger's call function to work at all, though "voice clips" worked fine. Google Talk really strikes me as an instant messaging client that I'd like to use, but nobody else is ever online :\

Addiction

I picked-up Bust-A-Move for PSP... Should've known better. It's just so hard to put down.

Anyway, so I've compiled a bit of a shopping list:

• Odin Sphere
• Red Star
• Metal Slug Anthology
• God Of War II
  
• Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando
• Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal
  
• Sly Cooper
• Sly 2: Band Of Thieves
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves

No particular order, or rush to pick them up. Coincidentally, they're all for PS2.

Oh, and that Linux future hard drive business I was babbling about earlier? Yeah, it was referring to my Windows drive and is no longer forcing checks... So... Whatever :)

Explosion de Baies

As one might glean from my XBOX Live gamer card thingie over to the right of this page, I've recently picked-up Viva Pinata and Rockstar's Table Tennis; both solid games that I got new for about $20 each. Viva Pinata promises to be a lot of fun, especially considering the wonderful graphics. I realize that it's pretty much The Sims, but I find it far less annoying. Table Tennis is friggin' hard, but I suspect that I may just suck.

On the PSP front, I've been spending the majority of my time with it playing Daxter, LocoRoco, Puzzle Quest, and Virtua Tennis 3. Daxter's just plain gorgeous and plays a lot like the Jak And Daxter PS2 games, so I'm happy there. LocoRoco is easily one of the most stylish, original, and endearing games I've played in a long while, plus there're plenty of reasons to play levels over again. Puzzle Quest is basically a turn-based RPG with an expanded Bejeweled game for a battle system, and it works well. Finally, Virtua Tennis 3 is more Virtua Tennis, and as any good Dreamcast fan knows, that's a good thing.

Oh! Debian keeps telling me my hard drive was last mounted in the future and forcing a check at start-up... But all the clocks are checking-out fine. Any ideas?

Sooo excited!!!

New Clive Barker's Jericho media!!!

Oh, and here's a useful little utility: AoA Media's free audio extractor.

And finally, video game dorks everywhere, prepare to climax!

Strike while the iron's hot!

Just a heads-up; now is definitely the time to build...

• AMD Athlon 5200+ (89W Socket AM2) - $219.99
• ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition - $236.99
• 2x 1024MB PC6400 (800MHz) DDR2 - $171.99
• 256MB DDR3 PCIe BFG GeForce 8600GTS OC - $280.99

On a mostly unrelated note, I found Burnout Revenge for XBOX 360 for under $30; despite its new "Platinum Hit" status, nobody seems to be carrying it anymore. Given that Burnout Dominator is supposedly a completely different kind of experience (who wants to focus on dangerous driving instead of mindless destruction!? ;) ), it made sense to grab the best possible version of a fun game. I guess I'll trade-in my XBOX version, or give it to a friend.

Just because I have nothing better to do at the moment...

Fall 2007!? I could've sworn they were aiming for spring/summer... I can't wait that long :\

Also, how did I miss the PS2 release of the Metal Slug anthology!? It was released on March 26th, and apparently fixes the control issues of the Wii version and noticeably shortens the load-times of the PSP version. Sweeet... I finally get to play Metal Slug 6 :)

Oh, and expect some PSP mini-reviews on here in the near future.

Genius!

Exciting!

Java Runtime Environment 6.0 Update 1 crashes Iceweasel 2.0.0.3 on my Debian 4.0 "testing" machine... That is all.

Gah! They got me!

20 new games makes Brent a happy PSP owner :)
So far, I have:

• Bomberman
• Daxter
• Every Extend Extra
• Exit
• Killzone Liberation
• LocoRoco
• Lumines
• Lumines II
• Me And My Katamari
• Metal Gear Ac!d
• Metal Gear Ac!d 2
• Mind Quiz
  
• Pro Evolution Soccer 2007
• Puzzle Quest
• Ridge Racer
• Sonic Rivals
• Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins
• Virtua Tennis
• Virtua Tennis 3
• Wipeout Pure

...And they're all pretty awesome. Some are definitely better than others (Every Extend Extra, Killzone Liberation, and Sonic Rivals aren't without their flaws, while Daxter, Exit, LocoRoco, Puzzle Quest, and Ridge Racer have really shone so far), but for the most part, as a late-adopter of the platform, I couldn't be happier! Prices are low, the library is now pretty solid, and the extra features (audio, video, web, camera sync) make for a great value.

Well I'll be...

Remember that iMac I posted about, like two posts down? Sure you do :) Well, that little bugger tore a hole in my home network's MAC filter! My brother was over yesterday and tried to connect wirelessly with his Archos video player, and got in just fine... What the hell!? I went to check the router settings to see if I'd messed anything up as I had been updating the list of accepted MAC addresses for my PSP. Nope, all was well. I'm not sure of exactly what happened, but it turns-out that the iMac was never released from the MAC filter (even though I had deleted it) or the DHCP pool (I leave two IP addresses available with half-hour lease times for visitors that have been added to the MAC filter), and the Archos device was able to access the network without a hitch. I had to perform a soft-reset on the router to fix the issue. I don't know if this was because of the iMac, Mac OS 9, the SMC router, or the Archos device, but still... Interesting.

So the PSP is pretty sweet. Memory Stick Duos are expensive (the cheapest 4GB I've found is like $118 CDN), Mind Quiz, Loco Roco, Puzzle Quest, Lumines, and both Virtua Tennis games are all pretty great, the web browser and cell-phone-like text entry aren't that bad, and video playback is nice... But man, looking back at old prices, firmware, and software selection, I would've been pissed as an early adopter.

"My name..." "Starts with a D!" "...Is Razputin!"

Earlier today, I took advantage of a one-day sale at Zellers: Buy any Ubisoft or selected PSP game and get a PSP core system for $149.99. I picked Mind Quiz for $19.99, which I may just try to return for something else :) Oh, and I guess the PSP system I grabbed had been sitting on the shelf for some time, as the firmware revision was 2.60. Yeah, so now I can run *ahem* "homebrew" software on my PSP using the 1GB Memory Stick Duo my little brother had left over from when Rogers sent him a free 4GB Memory Stick Duo with his new cell phone ;) It's kinda funny seeing the PSP next to the Nomad on my desk...

Oh! While I was out, I stopped by an EBGames that was in the same mall, and they had a used copy of Psychonauts for XBOX!!! I couldn't resist, and playing it on my 360 is a joy. If anyone's curious, Game Shack at Yonge and Dundas still had a few new copies for Windows in stock the last time I was there, and the Sunrise Records in Erin Mills Town Centre had a few new copies for Windows for $4.97!

Fucking hell...

So I thought I'd be clever and make this post from the iMac I just finished working on... I was able to type the post and everything before the web browser decided to eat everything I'd written :\ Anyway, my friend was given an old iMac (Rev. A 233MHz G3, 96MB of RAM) and didn't even know if it worked, so I offered to have a look at it. A clean installation of Mac OS 9.2.2 later, and the thing was actually running alright! Unfortunately, the latest compatible version of a Mozilla-based web browser is 1.2.1 (from 2002), and the only OS 9 web browser that's still maintained is iCab. Neither is particularly awesome in conjunction with the new Blogger interface, it seems. Anyway, all said and done, the iMac is an almost-competent web browser, desktop publisher, and CD burning machine... With a dim display. It was a fun little learning experience (my first pre-OS X Apple installation) that kept me occupied this morning.

In other, much more exciting news, I bought a SEGA Nomad!!! Finally! I'd wanted one since they first came out, and I just happened to see one in a shop yesterday. It was a little over-priced and had a few minor scratches on it, but I didn't care; I had to have it. This acquisition inspired me to go and pick-up the over-priced SEGA CDX I saw at another shop a few weeks earlier, but when I got there it'd been sold... Prolly for the best ;) They did, however, have a whole new selection of Saturn accessories and games! I bought an analog controller (new, but not sealed, in box), Fighting Vipers, a mis-priced Virtua Cop 2 ($6.99 CDN!), Dark Savior (sequel to the Genesis sleeper hit Landstalker), and... EARTHWORM JIM 2!!! My love for the first two EWJ games runs deep, but I've always held-off on getting them in hopes of finding the best versions of each... Which would be EWJ Special Edition on SEGA CD and EWJ2 on Saturn. Well, that's one down.

Finally, I was just playing Texas Hold 'em on XBOX Live, and I was down a little over $100 when the table started to clear-out... Which was strange because one guy had just gone all-in with almost $1500. I'm confused... Were they being nice to me? Did I get disconnected? Regardless, my system saw me as the last player still at the table, so I got the pot :)

Nuclear fallout for the win!

Late last night (or early this morning), I finished the single-player campaign of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow Of Chernobyl. Immediately after the credits rolled, I started playing it again. Yeah, it's good :) Most of the reviews of it that I've read are pretty spot-on with their assessments; that the graphics are about on-par with Half-Life 2, the gameplay is most similar to Oblivion, and it's full of bugs. The graphics are indeed a little dated, but still look quite nice (especially with dynamic lighting enabled); the gameplay is more of an action-oriented FPS-with-RPG-elements than Oblivion's RPG-with-FPS-elements, but the similarities (mission structure, resource management, exploration) are undeniable; the bugs though... Oh man. While I didn't run-into any real show-stoppers, the ones I did see were glaringly bad. Everything from bodies disappearing before they hit the ground to infinite armour, the glitches were ever-present. They didn't, however, detract too much from the overall experience. The other common thread throughout the major reviews is their praise of the game's atmosphere; this game is immersive like few others, and so the bugs are ultimately excusable. Vast (though not as open as Oblivion's) landscapes and buildings to explore, plenty of side-missions to complete (or ignore), in-game politics to consider, a good variety of weapons and enemies, and an interesting (albeit somewhat perplexing) story with (I've heard) seven potential endings make for a particuarly good game.

I have only a few real gripes about the game, and they won't even affect most players anyway. First, as pretty as the dynamic lighting is, it kills my GPU (over-clocked AGP GeForce 6800). I can run the game with all settings at maximum using static lighting and it's very nice, but dynamic lighting brings it to its knees at anything over 1024x768 and "medium" detail settings. Second, a patch was released shortly after the game's release, and while it's nice to see so many issues addressed (and sad to see a broken game shipped), it was painful to learn that it breaks your saved games! Gah! Finally, there's the script. While the voice acting is superb, some of the bits of text are a little off... Like when the middle-aged Ukrainian guy refers to his "homies", and when the military commander calls an opposing force "the shit", and when your new armour is called "inefficient" when it's pretty safe to assume that they meant to write "efficient". Still, it's a rock-solid game that will draw you into its world, plus it's only $40.

Oh, and while I was out this afternoon, I noticed that Best Buy has Viva Pinata marked-down to $20! The two locations I checked were out of stock though :\ They did, however, have the Guitar Hero II XBOX 360 demo unit running. The graphics weren't a huge improvement over the PS2 version and the controller felt small and cheap; I was not impressed. Then I tripped (but didn't fall) over the cord connecting the controller to the demo unit, taking the 360 to the floor. The noises coming out of that thing didn't sound very healthy at all, but the salesperson was cool about it :)

Changes...

Just a quick one before I head out for the evening... I finally got around to playing with the default template of this space, as I'm sure you've noticed. This is the result of a first run-through of the default code, so I'll soon fix the rough edges near the top and continue to tweak the text colours.

Getting back to the usual stuff, I *shudder* traded-in some old PS2 and Windows games that I had lying around; various titles that were either given to me or I picked-up for about $10. As expected, the resale value of not-exactly-rare software still sucks, and I'm sure the mark-up will exceed 100%. I was, however, glad to finally be rid of them (stuff like Devil May Cry 3 for Windows and Tekken 4 for PS2), and used the store credit towards a new copy of the Devil May Cry 5th Anniversary Collection for PS2. This collection includes Devil May Cry, Devil May Cry 2, and Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition. As expected of any Capcom game, the translation sucks, the design is weird, and the controls are awkward, but the graphics are killer, the gameplay is rewarding, and it's generally a fun experience by the end... Or at least that's how things are shaping-up so far; I'm only about a quarter of the way through the first game :)

I was gonna make some crack about a mirage, but...

Beyond Oasis is apparently now available on the Wii Virtual Console service! If you've ever wondered where SEGA's answer to Zelda was, here it is! It was originally a Genesis game, and there is a sequel (Legend Of Oasis) for the Saturn. Both are spectacular games that definitely hold their own against the Zelda franchise. Definitely worth a download if you have a Wii.

Upon further review...

Shortly after my last post, I had another go at the first boss of Link and promptly kicked his ass on the first attempt. I'm still not sure why I had so much trouble before, but oh well, moving on... The game still hasn't done much to hold my attention, but it is nice to be making progress. My only real gripe at this point is having to start at the beginning of the game each time I load a saved game; repeating the journey to get back to where I left-off ad nauseam isn't exactly the most fun I've had in this title. I suspect this will get more bearable once I get the hammer from Death Mountain and open up some alternate routes, but still, not a great way to start a game.