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!