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 :\