Splurge

Teddy Boy and Zillion for SMS; Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and Journey to Silius for NES; Chakan and Panic On Funkotron for Genesis; Jurassic Park, Killer Instinct, Super Punch-Out, and Tetris & Dr. Mario for SNES; as well as NBA Showtime, the "Sonic bundle" pack-in of Sonic Adventure with the Sonic Adventure 2 demo, and a second copy of Soul Calibur for Dreamcast.

Bullets

Recent Purchases:

• Samurai Shodown Anthology (Wii) (No SSVS!? Boo!)
• Sonic Gems Collection (GC) (It was $5)
• Gauntlet Legends (DC) (It was cheap, and I had credit to spend)
• Space Channel 5 (DC) (My copy was in a sorry state; traded it in)

Current Windows 7 dilemma:

• Ardour (Linux; FireWire Solo relegated to acting as a pre-amp)
• Cubase (Industry standard, good personal experience so far)
• Sonar (Supposedly great product and hardware support; 64-bit)
• Pro Tools (...But 8 still doesn't officially support Windows 7)

Cleaning-up.

I finally sold the second Power Mac G4. I ended-up dropping the price to $100 from $125, but that ain't too bad; essentially, this means that I got my dual 1GHz Power Mac for $25 :)

I ragequit NHL 07 again... This time I was up 2-1 with just minutes left in the game when the same passing issue showed-up. My player was in the neutral zone, and instead of passing to the forward at the opposing blue line, he made another backward pass, this time to an opposing player who scored on the ensuing rush.

Anyway, I recently picked-up Draconus and Zombie Revenge for Dreamcast, Mr. Bones for Saturn, and Thunder Force III for Genesis. I plan to get Darius Gaiden for Saturn this evening.

7

The new workstation at work only came with the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, but my 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate disc arrived the other day, so I tried to install the latter using the product key from the former... No dice; SKUs don't match :(

I did get Windows 7 Ultimate installed on my trusty old Athlon XP 3200+ machine though, and it runs wonderfully :) There were only two issues, one was easily solved (had to manually set the WLAN service to "automatic"), and the other involves patience (Pro Tools 7.4 doesn't work with Windows 7). Because of the Pro Tools issue, I'm strongly considering going back to Vista for the time being.

My time with Windows 7, on the whole, has been swell. In terms of superficial everyday use, it's Vista with a streamlined taskbar (sporting some nifty new features) and a few different settings windows, and that's just fine with me.

Ragequit

I've gotten back into NHL 07 on PSP (with the latest roster update), and my Leafs are kicking ass; something like 15-2-0. That record and the player stats aren't out of line with some of the other teams though (e.g. Pittsburgh is 9-2-1), so I don't feel too bad about how well things have gone so far. I did, however, quit toward the end of the third period of a recent game against Buffalo. I was down 3-1, and the game had been so one-sided that it was ridiculous. Buffalo players we're literally diving to create penalties (the replays didn't help their case), and the refs were falling for it. Until mid-way through the third period, PIMs were something like five to one in their favour, and all three of their goals came on the powerplay. The last straw was when one of my players passed the puck slightly backward to his left, at my goalie, who promptly spun around and put the puck in his own net... The problem was that I was trying to pass to a player at the blue line. Not cool.

Not bad, not bad...

New workstation at work: Dell Vostro 220s

• Core 2 Duo E7500 (2.93GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 3MB L2 Cache) CPU
• 3GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM
• Intel G45 Chipset
• Intel GMA X4500 HD GPU
• Dell E2010H (20" widescreen) LCD
• Windows 7 Professional 32-Bit

...Definitely an upgrade from what I had before :)

Points

Got me some XBOX Live points and grabbed Shadow Complex along with a bunch of Foo Fighters and Nirvana songs for Rock Band. Shadow Complex is a sweet Metroid clone, but I fear it may be a little short; one solid afternoon of play, and it looks like I'm already half-way done.

I finished The Darkness the other day; my opinions of the game have not changed since my last post.

Next is prolly gonna be LostWinds: Winter Of the Melodias, or Wario Land: Shake It!

Oh, and my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate is in the mail :)

News

Nintendo sent me a whole new Wii with a new one-year warranty. They paid for the service and shipping, and covered the taxes. That was a very nice gesture from them, especially considering that the Wii malfunctioned a month or so after its original warranty had expired. I didn't ask them for anything; just sent an e-mail indicating that I was an unhappy customer. They assured me that the issue was not the result of a design defect, but I won't be leaving the thing on standby anymore, just in case it melts again. It was funny that the replacement system came with an insert that told me to re-synchronise my controllers and mentioned that they had updated the system software for my convenience... Except that they hadn't updated my system software ;)

Anyway, I sold my 867MHz Power Mac, and am close to selling the 800MHz one as well. If all goes well, I'll have made my $300 investment back, which ain't bad when you consider that $300 got me three Power Macs and I'll get to keep the best one. Speaking of the best one, a friend came through with two 512MB sticks of PC133 RAM, so my dual 1GHz G4 is now maxed-out at 1.5GB of RAM :)

I want to write more about Brütal Legend, but I've yet to collect my thoughts on the subject. Rest assured that it is a spectacular original game and well worth anyone's time. I've completed 100% of the single-player game since my last post, and have been participating at the Double Fine forums, so expect more here on the subject in the coming week.

Upon finishing Brütal Legend, I popped Psychonauts into my 360 and was promptly sucked right back into that world for the better part of an afternoon; there's a reason it's one of my favourite games of all time. There is an annoying bug with the 360's backwards compatibility with the game though; when you pause, the main character's texture colour scheme gets all messed-up, and the only way to fix it is to quit to the game's menu and load your last checkpoint. Not a game-breaker, but definitely annoying. I wonder if the "XBOX Originals" version on XBOX Live does the same...

Playing Psychonauts got me all nostalgic, so I dug up my copies of Beyond Good & Evil (Windows, XBOX, GameCube) and did some research in hopes of figuring out which is the penultimate version. Apparently the GC port is rarest, and missing some language options and concept art, but was supposedly the lead platform during development. The XBOX version has shorter loading times and the best graphics of any console, whereas the Windows port can be even quicker and smoother, but may have some annoying bugs and DRM... So which do I keep?

Finally, I'm almost finished The Darkness on XBOX 360, and I'm pretty disappointed. This game has solid source material, a well-written script performed by quality voice actors, and some truly unique gameplay mechanics... But it's all so disjointed that the experience ultimately falls flat. Much of the music is horribly out of place (some of sounds more like something from a fantasy game than an FPS featuring a violent anti-hero prowling the streets of modern-day New York), the Darkness powers are poorly managed (why can't I use them all at once? The colour scheme suggests that this may have been the case at some point in development), the free-roaming aspect and side-missions are unambitious and ultimately unnecessary (effectively breaking any narrative flow), and major plot points are either poorly-explained or glossed-over completely... Seriously, the fact that the protagonist has creepy, bloodthirsty monsters protruding from his body is really only noticed by one other main character, and even then, only in passing; the big transformation scene when the Darkness first manifests itself just kinda happens and is promptly forgotten; key scenes in your character's internal struggle are left to chance instead of logic (wander around until you find something you can interact with)... I could go on, but you get the idea. The Darkness isn't a broken game, and it's pretty enjoyable at times, but I just can't get over the fact that it could've been so much better... Ditch the free-roaming aspect and tell me a good story.