Sneaky bastards...

The other day, my dad asked me why they were showing old movies on the "Speed" channel. Turns out the cable company decided to change their existing cable package and make that channel available only as an add-on for digital customers. Great. So the cable bill automatically goes up by another $4~7 per month for the digital service and equipment rental fees, plus another few bucks for that one channel. What a fuckin' racket. My dad said he called them to see what was up, and they said that because people were unhappy, they were waiving the hardware rental fee for the first year... Except that's their standard promotion anyway; it has nothing to do with unhappy customers. Jerks.

Speaking of jerks, it turns out Microsoft isn't quite so asinine about upgrading previous versions of Windows to Vista. There is a work-around to the upgrade path I mentioned a few posts back that does not require a previous installation in order to use an upgrade licence, and not only is Microsoft aware of it, but they don't plan on doing anything about it!

Speaking of erroneous past posts, I was wrong in my belief that the PS2 version of Resident Evil 4 supported progressive scan. I confused it with natively supporting a widescreen format that the GameCube version didn't. Just to double-check all of my PS2 games (not all have the "Progressive Scan" tag on the case), I headed over to Mobygames to see what their database had to say. What a great site :) Oh, and yeah, this means I've finished God Of War... It was fantastic!

Anyway, a couple of quick final notes: The music in Oracle Of Seasons is some of the best I've ever heard come out of a Game Boy, or any system. It's just well-written and really stands-out because of it. Also, as I was wandering around downtown Toronto yesterday, I stopped-in at Game Shack (just off Yonge and Dundas, Northwest block) and saw a copy of Psychonauts for Windows for $15. I brought it up to the counter, and the guy said he'd get me another one. Turns-out he has stacks(!) of factory-sealed copies of the Windows and PS2 ($20) versions of the game that he got from one of his suppliers! I asked him about the XBOX version, and he said he'd look into getting it. If you're ever in the neighbourhood, kids, pick one up!

Well that's annoying...

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/faq.php#q72

You know you're jealous...

Last night, a very attractive young woman came over to my house and played through Streets Of Rage 2 (Genesis) with me. Then we took turns playing Katamari Damacy (PS2), followed by some fierce Burnout: Revenge (XBOX) competition.

ABUH!?

Now this is enough to warrant the purchase of a PSP. No, seriously, this is like... Gah! I can't even put it into words! I'm getting this, a PSP, and then Loco Roco just for kicks :)

Ooohhh... Pretty.

So I got the XBOX 360 HD-DVD player earlier this evening, and I'm currently taking a break from watching King Kong on it. While it's very nice to get a pack-in, they could've picked something a little less... Drawn-out :) I've never seen the movie before, and while it does showcase the wonders of the HD generation quite nicely, I'm a little over half-way through it and ready to do just about anything else. Also, the Universal Media Remote uses IR (saves on batteries, I'm assuming), and part of my entertainment centre kinda blocks the IR receiver on the console... And no, I can't move it somewhere else (wiring). Ugh. Still, I have an HD-DVD player. Hooray!

I've also been informed that the 360 up-samples regular DVDs from 480p if you're using the VGA cable... Now, I'm pretty sure my TV only has DVI, but an adapter would do the trick, right? Hrmmm...

Anyway, that's about it. Wait, one more thing: I did renew my XBOX Live Gold account, and immediately downloaded the Crackdown demo. Holy shit, is this game fun! Power-ups are accelerated in the demo, and once one of your attributes hits level two, a 30-minute time limit begins, but I'm already hooked! The graphics are nothing special (it's built on RenderWare technology, so it's not ugly, but not super-awesome either), the story is trivial, and the cel-shading style just seems out of place, but the gameplay is gold! Think modern Grand Theft Auto with Deus Ex/Matrix-esque abilities. I could skip all the missions and just jump from rooftop to rooftop for hours, and if I got bored, I'd just throw some cars and trucks around with my bare hands :)

Asinine!

So Project: Snowblind is officially relegated to the back of the line. Interesting game, but it just wasn't doing it for me and the floaty mouse controls didn't help either. I've moved-on to F.E.A.R. Extraction Point, and, well, it's more of the same things that F.E.A.R. offered only not as tight in the presentation. That's not a terrible thing, but does leave something to be desired... It's still fun, so it'll do for now. I've polished-off episodes 1 and 2 of the new Sam & Max games, and I dug out my old copy of Sam & Max Hit The Road because I had so much fun! Yes, they're short and a little easy, but they're funny as hell and still challenging enough to keep you entertained for an hour or two.

On the consoles, God Of War is in full-swing, and I'm loving it. I'm almost finished, but that just means I get to Resident Evil 4 sooner :) I've reinstated the PS2 as my second progressive scan device (XBOX 360 is number one, and the original XBOX has been bumped down to s-video) because of my console gaming schedule. Speaking of progressive scan devices, my brother got back to me, and Microsoft is indeed sending me the XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive! That includes the remote and an HD-DVD copy of Peter Jackson's King Kong! I'm excited. Ooh, one more thing while I'm on the subject: The trial month of my XBOX Live Gold membership has lapsed. Don't worry, I'll be back in a couple of days, but I did notice that I have to wait a few days before being able to download the new Crackdown demo as a Silver member... Jerks.

Okay, so, Windows Vista is out. Whoop-dee-doo! I'm in no rush to pick it up (Debian 4.0 is fantastic), but I'm sure I will eventually. Anyway, after reading this, I'm just angry. Yeah, installing an upgrade copy of Vista Home Premium or below requires an installation of a previous version of Windows to be on the computer! Seriously, what the fuck!? That's just asinine, and asking for a whole hell of a lot of avoidable support calls. Ugh. So I will now definitely be avoiding any version of Vista below Business. I think that whenever I get around to upgrading my system (something multi-core, 64-bit), I'll just grab an OEM copy of Business and be done with it. What a headache.

Sorry, been busy...

Finished Kameo; that was fun. Very, very pretty, but nothing stupendous. Tried to get into Perfect Dark Zero, but it's just not doing it for me. It's also a very, very pretty game, but I can't find aiming settings that feel good, and some aspects of the game design just don't make a lot of sense. For example, certain parts are just needlessly frustrating, and restarting the whole mission (you can't use checkpoints if you want your stats to be recorded) isn't my idea of fun. I'll finish it eventually, but I think most of my attention will now shift towards my PS2 and God Of War, followed by either Bully or Resident Evil 4... And then maybe Jak 3; I think I'm gonna hold-off on Okami, Enchanted Arms, and Final Fantasy IX for a few months until I have some actual free time to devote to them.

Things have been pretty quiet on the PC gaming front for a while now, but that's mostly because Project: Snowblind is just kinda boring and I've hit a particularly frustrating point right near the end of Most Wanted. I think I just might give-up on the former and start something more interesting. For the time being, however, I picked-up the two new Sam & Max games! I'm only just starting Culture Shock, but so far, so good.

Anyway, moving on, Slackware 11 didn't do it for me. It was nice; most notably, LILO and Xfce were interesting changes. The installer was very helpful with its descriptions, and the whole process was relatively smooth. Perhaps I was just missing something in Xfce, but things seemed to be pretty terminal-oriented, and packages were handled differently. No real complaints though; it seems like a solid distribution of Linux and I can see why so many people like it. After spending some quality time as a slacker, I decided to bite the bullet and grab Debian 4.0 RC1. Oh man, is this ever an upgrade! The new GUI for the installer is slick, the new themes are gorgeous, the packages are much more up-to-date, and so far everything just works! I still had to edit the X.Org configuration file myself to add my monitor's refresh settings, and I installed Flash and Java manually, but everything's great! Flash 9 actually works really well on here too! All I use my Windows machines for now is gaming, audio production, and burning program-specific disc image files :)

Quickly now...

Flash 9 is out for Linux. It's still slower than 7, and sound is still sketchy with some popular distros. Debian 4 is taking forever to come out, so I'm downloading Slackware as I type this. Wheee!

Crimson Skies on XBOX is just as much fun as the PC version, but with better controls. Phantom Dust is pretty weird, but I haven't played much at all, so I'll get back to you on that. Ridge Racer 6 is too much fun for a $20 game; get it.

Ooh! I decided to forego the XBOX 360 chargers and battery packs for a 15-minute Duracell NiMH charger that included four 2400mAh AA NiMH batteries. It was about the same price as an MS quick-charge (two hour) kit and a second battery back.

Also, yes, it's true: I was in a Wal-Mart yesterday, and while the Wii was sold-out, at least two 60GB PS3s were sitting on the shelf.

Strange Days

Since my last post, I've finished Gears Of War on "Hardcore" and Guitar Hero II on "Hard". Just as everyone maintains, Gears Of War is a fantastic game with amazing graphics, satisfying and varied gameplay, as well as great replay value. I haven't tried multiplayer yet, but all signs point to it kicking ass too. Now for the gripes: The narrative is spotty at best (I can follow the story, but a bit more exposition and character development would make things much more cohesive), and some of the checkpoints are annoyingly placed (watching the same cinematics and listening to the same radio banter over and over at some of the tougher parts is just unnecessary). I've read a lot of complaints about reptitive tasks (flanking troikas, dodging berserkers) in this game, but I found them to be used sparingly enough such that they didn't get stale by the time I was finished. I definitely recommend spending some real quality time with this title. Guitar Hero II is pretty much the first game with different songs, a little more polish, better multiplayer, and a few little tweaks to keep the gameplay interesting. It's a nice refresh to the series, and everyone should give it a go.

Next up is Kameo. I have half of the elementals already, and while it is pretty and entertaining, the game feels a little too easy. I'm still curious to see how the story unfolds, and the gameplay isn't boring... Just be aware that there doesn't seem to be much of a challenge here. That's actually how I felt after playing through the Ridge Racer 6 demo a few times: No challenge. Well, I found the game new for $17.99, and couldn't pass it up; seven races in, and I'm already finding a pretty good challenge in this one. The graphics are sharp, the music is amazing, and the racing style is simplistic without being too easy. For an arcade-style drifting racer, there's a decent amount of depth here. I should also mention that I downloaded every HD episode of Viva Pinata on XBOX Live (they were free). Funny stuff for a kids show. One last thing: I found Phantom Dust and Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge for $20 altogether on the way home tonight. I haven't played them yet, but I'm excited :)

Okay, now that that stuff's out of the way, I want to mention that I've had to replace no less than three bad hard drives for clients this week! For the volume of work that I do, that's unheard of. Data back-up has gone smoothly though, so nobody's too pissed-off. One of them was a Dell Inspiron 1150 and the guy is looking for an excuse to buy a new laptop, so I'm just going to send him a link to a site detailing the Canadian lawsuit against Dell regarding the quality issues surrounding that model before I go any further with the repairs. I also started repair work on a custom build, and upon poking around inside the chassis, I saw that my work was cut-out for me. It's a pretty nice Socket939 Athlon 64 3200+ SLI (6600GT) system, but the wiring job was atrocious and the the dust bunnies were taking over. Upon cleaning that mess, the system would not longer boot. The culprit turned-out to be one of the video cards going bad on me. Luckily, the guy had noticed video issues previously, so I was off the hook for a replacement.

Finally, I picked-up one of these, and I'm so glad that I did with all these bad hard drives recently. It's basicaly a universal (3.5" and 2.5" IDE, SATA) USB drive enclosure, but without the enclosure part... I guess that makes it a dongle. Whatever... For $29.99, I don't care what it's called.

Not too much to report...

Found me a free copy of The Legend Of Zelda Collector's Edition for GameCube; that was pretty cool, albeit slightly frustrating after hunting-down and paying for the N64 originals and GBA ports of all four games included on the disc. Then again, I still don't have a GameCube or a Wii, so whatever... I also picked-up Myst: Uru: Complete Chronicles for $10. I've only played the original single-player game in the package and it was amazing, so this was a nice addition to my collection. I haven't had much time to sit down and actually play many of my games though, so the 'to play' pile just keeps growing. I have made some progress in Oracle Of Seasons (see right), I'm into the third chapter of Gears Of War playing on "Hardcore", and I've pretty much finished Guitar Hero II on Hard, but it's slow-going.

I delivered that 667MHz Celeron system yesterday, performed a clean install on an Acer laptop, and replaced the hard drive on a Dell laptop. The frustrating thing with the Acer laptop was the wireless driver; Acer posts drivers for for two models (TravelMate 3630 and 2420, if I recall correctly) on the same page... The problem is that the wireless drivers they provide are for Atheros and Broadcomm devices. The TravelMate I was working on (2420 series) used an Intel wireless chipset. Similarly, the Dell Inspiron 8600 I was working on potentially used something like four different GPUs, ten different wireless chipsets, and four different modems... As much as I enjoy deciphering vendor and device IDs from the device manager, they really should make the process a little easier for those who may not have original documentation and refuse to use manufacturer's restore CDs :)

Curse you, PCChips!

The 866MHz (133MHz FSB) Pentium III-based system I mentioned a few posts back went to my cousin and her kids for Christmas; they were running a 600MHz (66MHz FSB) Celeron-based Compaq Presario with 128MB of RAM, so this was a nice upgrade. I took the Celeron system back with me to see what could be upgraded so that they could have a decent second system for the kids to do homework 'n such. I had a Socket 370 850MHz (100MHz FSB) Celeron chip lying around, but stability was sketchy in the Compaq system, even after a BIOS update that supposedly added support for newer CPUs. I also got my hands on an old Slot 1 667MHz (66MHz FSB) Celeron system that also supported Socket 370 CPUs, but it wouldn't boot with the 850MHz chip, and BIOS updates weren't possible (long story, blame PCChips). So, their second computer's gonna be a 667MHz Celeron system with 256MB of RAM... I'm installing Windows 2000 as I type this.

In video game land, Guitar Hero II co-op is awesome, and the single-player game is as fun as ever. I don't think the track list is as strong this time around (I'm about 29 songs in) and some of the vocal performances are kinda weak, but I'm still enjoying it quite a bit. I really wish I had the time to get into Bully and Enchanted Arms, but they're just gonna have to wait... Probably a couple of months :( Picked-up Top Spin 2, Amped 3, and Perfect Dark Zero ($70 for all three), and they're all solid. Top Spin 2's load times are a little long, and Perfect Dark Zero's aiming feels kinda stiff, but they're all still pretty fun. I've added my "gamer card" to the column on the right there, so you can kinda see what I've been up to. It neglects to mention, however, all the game demos I've been downloading and playing. Highlights so far include Dead Rising, Lost Planet, Ridge Racer 6, and Tony Hawk's Project 8. Sonic The Hedgehog and Test Drive Unlimited were real let-downs, and stuff like Full Auto and Ninety-Nine Nights were about as mediocre as expected. Gears Of War continues to be stupid-awesome.

Dear "The System"...

...You just got beat :)

I was out doing some "Boxing Week" shopping today, redeeming gift certificates and such, and I came across some pretty good XBOX 360 deals. I managed to snag a Platinum Hits version of Kameo for $20, and Enchanted Arms also for $20! I mean, $15 off for Kameo was pretty exciting, but $50 off for Enchanted Arms? Awww yeah.

Those deals, however, were nothing when compared to my coup de grace: D-Link's DWL-G730AP. For $59.99, you can pick-up a tiny portable router/access point meant for hotel rooms and remote offices. What I like most about it is that it has this really nifty third setting called "Client Mode" that is only mentioned in the fine print and the manual... "Client Mode" is apparently D-Link-speak for "fantastically cheap wireless bridge". It's kinda sad that a compact, USB- or wall-powered, multifunction device like this costs so little and is abundantly in stock when "game adapters", bridges, and larger multifunction access points ranging from $90 to $200 are sold-out across the board. Anyway, yeah, that's right, I saved $70 getting my XBOX 360 wireless. Eat it, Microsoft! You know where you can stick your overpriced USB WiFi adapter... Yeah... Right there.

Oh yeah, and I rocked Guitar Hero II while I was in Best Buy... I attracted a crowd.

This is... Interesting

The wireless adapter for the XBOX 360 is $129.99. Yeah, $129.99. That's the price of a decent wireless bridge, so I figured that's what it is; a wireless bridge that plugs into the 360's ethernet port. I was mistaken. It is a USB wireless a/b/g adapter. Yeah, $129.99... FOR A USB WIRELESS ADAPTER!?!?!? How about a big 'ol "fuck that!" No, seriously, I could buy one of these for the same price and get more features, or a bridge or an access point for considerably less money... Ugh. Also, I didn't realize that all the good 360 games are going for $70. Right, so, that list in the last post? Let's shorten it a bit: Another wireless controller, Kameo, Enchanted Arms, and I'm considering Perfect Dark Zero.

In other news, I didn't realize that my XBOX 360 came with so much content. Demos for Burnout Revenge, Kameo, and Tomb Raider Legend, as well as both HD and regular videos for various products and such... I was wondering where those 4GB had gone ;)

Finally, I forgot to mention in my last post that the XBOX 360 auction listing my brother bid on was suposed to include the HD-DVD player. The package he received, however, did not. The matter is being explored.

"Have a holly jolly Christmas..."

We do the gift thing on Christmas morning in my family, and by the end of it this year, I thought I'd done pretty well. In terms of video games, I got Bully, Guitar Hero II with the guitar controller, We ♥ Katamari, and Resident Evil 4 (PS2). After spending the rest of the morning playing through the first nine songs of Guitar Hero II co-operatively with my older brother (way too much fun), we all headed off to his place for Christmas dinner. When we got there, he had something in the middle of his living room floor covered with a towel; I asked him about it, and he said it was my Christmas present. It turned-out to be an XBOX 360 Pro Console, Wireless Racing Wheel, Gears Of War Limited Collector's Edition, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Project Gotham Racing 3, and XBOX Live Arcade Unplugged. He had the winning bid on it at a charity auction. He was outbid on the PS3 package. Yeah. Holy shit.

Playing these games in 1080i (the highest my TV supports) is a thing of beauty, and the 360's presentation as a whole is quite impressive. Everything from the composite/component combo cable to the various software update methods just make sense and made the experience a notably smooth one. I like the idea of user profiles, I appreciate the wireless controller setup, and being able to update my console without connecting to XBOX Live (download the updates on my PC, burn them to a disc) is just a smart move. The backwards compatibility is pretty nice, and seems to run quite well for the most part. I did notice a few issues though, like the choppy movies in Conker: Live & Reloaded, and the apparent inability to save your progress in Soul Calibur II. Most disappointing, however, is the fact that I can't play my original XBOX copies of Burnout Revenge, Crazy Taxi 3, ESPN NFL 2K5, Gunvalkyrie, Jet Set Radio Future, Metal Gear Solid 2, Midnight Club 2 and 3, NBA Street 2, NHL 2K7, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, Otogi 1 and 2, OutRun 2, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Project Gotham Racing 1 and 2, ToeJam & Earl III, Top Spin, and The Warriors. That means that my original XBOX is still hooked-up alongside the 360, but now using only standard composite cables because my TV only has two component inputs; one set for my DVD+/-RW/VHS box , and one for my 360. I guess I could use the 360 as my new DVD player though, and use it as the optical device for my 5.1 decoder in the process (also currently hoooked-up to my DVD/VHS combo box)... We'll see what I get around to doing.

Anyway, so now I plan to pick-up a WiFi adapter, another wireless controller, Dead Or Alive 4, Dead Rising, and I'm considering Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Table Tennis, Test Drive Unlimited, and Viva Pinata :)

"Gone, gone, gone, she's been gone so long..."

I decided to put that 80GB HDD from the P3 machine to use as a second drive in my secondary machine (2.4GHz P4B). I switched it over to Windows XP a little while back for use as a hard-wired download/burning machine (my main gaming/audio production box is wirelessly connected to the network), and it serves that purpose well. With this new second hard drive, I was able to install Debian (3.1 rev4, 2.6.8 kernel) as a second operating system without messing with partitions 'n such. I opted for GRUB as my bootloader, but while looking into my options, I came across something that some of you may find useful. By keeping Windows in the primary hard drive and using GRUB, I had to write the bootloader to the MBR of the Windows drive; not an issue for my purposes, and much simpler to set-up that way. For those of you who would like to install Linux on a secondary drive without altering the Windows drive significantly, take a look at this article. It outlines how to 'trick' Windows' NTLDR bootloader into detecting the Linux installation. One of the main advantages of this method is easy uninstallation of the Linux system; returning things to a normal Windows-only boot simply requires editing the boot.ini file.

In other news, I found a copy of Super Smash Bros. for N64. Both this game and its sequel have become insanely popular, notably so among some good friends of mine. I, however, never quite understood their fascination, as it seemed like a terribly simplistic fighting game. Sure, it's cool to duke it out with four of your favourite Nintendo characters in themed arenas, but the damage system made no sense to me and the controls consisted of only two attack buttons. Anyway, I bought it, as it's both rare and supposedly a fun party game... I should have known, of course, that it's much deeper than my initial observations suggested. Yes, the damage system is still weird, and yes, there are only two attack buttons, but the fighting system they control is ingenious! Attacks are divided into strong and weak categories, and vary based both on what your character is doing (running, jumping, crouching) and which direction you hold the stick. The combinations are many, the strategy is deeply involved, and the pace is frenetic. Add power-ups and unique character abilities (Samus' charge attacks, Kirby's ability-adapting ability) to the mix, and you've got a highly-rewarding game that is easily approachable to newcomers. Definitely worth a closer look if you missed this one, and the current N64 and GameCube versions are probably good practice for the upcoming Wii iteration of the franchise.

A Blast From The Past!

Remember that Windows 2000 machine I mentioned a few posts back? Well, I was paid more than sufficiently to fix it, only to receive an e-mail from the owner a few days later saying they'd bought two new Athlon 64-based Compaq towers (got a great deal on them through a Best Buy employee discount). I was then requested to transfer the data from the computer I'd just repaired to the new ones. I agreed to help them, and they again insisted on paying me a more than sufficient amount for the services rendered. They were also going to throw-out the Windows 2000 machine, but I said I'd take it. 866MHz Pentium III, 384MB of PC133 RAM, 80GB 7200RPM WD HDD, 24x LG CD-RW, and a 5-port PCI USB 2.0 card were the most notably salvageable components.

I got my new used machine home and went digging through my pile of parts to see what I could do with it. I ended-up adding a DVD-ROM drive, another 64MB of RAM (458MB total), and swapping the 80GB HDD (that'll go in one of my nicer machines) with two 6.5GB drives I had. It's ugly, but it runs well. Anyway, while I was looking for parts, I came across the shell of my old 300MHz Pentium II machine. This box is close to my heart because it's the first computer I ever really played with; tweaking and such. Sure, I started back with my Commodore 128 and had a 386 and a 486 DX2 66 before I got this one, but this P2 was where I started upgrading video cards and RAM, adding more optical drives, flashing the BIOS, and really getting to know the modern Windows environment well. It turned out I had enough parts lying around to rebuild this one as well, so here I am, posting from my old P2-300, Intel AL440LX, 128MB of PC66 RAM, 6.5GB HDD, CD-ROM, 32MB ATi Rage Fury, Sound Blaster Live!, Windows 98SE machine.

The really cool thing was that the last hard drive I'd used in there was still there, and I hadn't touched it in over three years! All the old software, games, bookmarks... Ah... Memories... *sniff* I've since updated it with the latest versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, Winamp 2, and WinRAR, and the latest compatible versions of Java, Adobe Reader, and Quicktime; oh, and three years worth of Windows Updates :) It's a little sluggish to start-up and load programs, but once you're in, it's solid.

Nostalgia rules.

Christmas Shoppers and Lying Friends!

I was at Best Buy last night to pick up a surge protector and some compressed air, and two important things happened. First, I discovered that Best Buy is selling the PC versions of Max Payne and Max Payne 2 for $4.99 CDN and $9.99 CDN respectively. Both Max Payne games for $15? That's a deal. Second, I discovered that Best Buy apparently no longer sells compressed air (luckily, the Wal-Mart next door still did).

One other thing of interest happened while I was in Best Buy though; there was, surprisingly, this attractive female salesperson in the video games section who was helping out another girl and her mother. The customer was asking for a copy of the "World Of Warcraft expansion pack". I overheard and was already headed in their direction, so I mentioned that it hadn't been released yet as I walked by them. At this, the daughter turned towards me and angrily insisted that it was indeed available. Thinking that I had misheard their original conversation, I asked "The Burning Crusade?" and she said yes. I wasn't about to get into anything (she was much larger, and clearly angrier that I was), so I shrugged and turned to walk away. That's when she fired at me with "Then how come all of my friends I play with already have it!?" in an amazingly rude and sarcastic voice. I just said, "Okay," gave the cute salesperson a nod, and walked away. No, it hasn't been released yet; Blizzard is aiming for a January 2007 release.

Oh yeah, I took some time with their display PS3 on my way out. I believe I was playing the Motorstorm demo. It was very pretty.

Christmas Shopping Pirates!

I did some Christmas shopping for a few friends the other day. Tim's getting a TurboTap (expands the number of controller ports from one to five) for his Turbo Grafx 16, and Collin's getting Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Mortal Kombat, and Jurassic Park (all for Genesis). Naturally, I picked-up a few things for myself while I was out. I got The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle Of Ages (GBC) and A Link To The Past (SNES), Wario Land II (GB), Streets Of Rage 3 (Genesis), and Splatterhouse (TG16). The Wario Land II cartridge, however, turned-out to be a pirated copy, so I was able to exchange it for Street Of Rage (Genesis).

Wario Land II first showed signs of trouble when it proved to be a tight fit in my Game Boy Advance SP, and then really had me confused when the title screen appeared and I was apparently playing the Japanese version of the game. This prompted me to examine the label more closely, and, strangely, it read "USA". That was when I noticed the top of the front side of the cartridge only said "GAME" rather than the normal "Nintendo GAME BOY". This was a relatively high-quality pirated copy, and played perfectly, but I'd prefer the real thing.

Score!

I was at a friend's house last night, and I noticed a copy of Yoshi's Story (N64) on the floor by a pile of CDs and DVDs. This was an interesting find because this was the same friend who gave me his Nintendo 64 with Mario Kart 64 as payment for fixing his PowerMac G5-based recording studio rig a little while back. I've seen Yoshi's Story going used for as much as $35 CDN, and the previous game in the series (Yoshi's Island; SNES, GBA) is one of my all-time favourite video games, so this was an exciting event. I asked why he didn't tell me about it back when I got the console from him, and he said he'd just forgotten, but that I could take it with me. Then he remembered that he found a copy of Super Mario 64 in his house the other day, and gave that to me as well :)

In other news, I found a copies of Killer Instinct Gold (N64), Mario Paint (SNES) along with the SNES mouse, and The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Of Seasons (GBC) today.

Oh! Be sure to play through the trial version of Bookworm Adventures Deluxe! Fantastic game!

I think I have a problem :)

Sold an old laptop, fixed a couple of computers, and ended-up with more money than I expected to. This all happened, unfortunately, just before I brought my defective copy of Skies Of Arcadia back for an exchange, and I left the store with a little more than my credit's worth :) I walked out with F-Zero X (N64), F-Zero (SNES), Tetris 2 (SNES), and... SUPER METROID!!! This is an exciting event. Tetris 2 is a fun head-to-head game, F-Zero is classic (but this cart looks to be sketchy; doesn't always work, battery's dead), and F-Zero X is a blast... But SUPER METROID!!! This is easily one of the best games for the SNES, easily one of the best games of the 16-bit era, arguably one of the best games Nintendo has ever made, and by far one of my favourite games ever! It becomes abundantly clear after even just the first ten minutes of gameplay that this one is something special. The attention to detail, the little touches that will immediately feel familiar to fans, the ambience, the narrative, and the fluidity of it all... Not bad for a two-dimensional platformer from 1994.

Follow-up...

Got a friend's G4 iBook fixed, and for payment I swapped my SNES with hers. She doesn't own any cartridges that use the extra connectors, so she'll never notice the difference. Wheee! Now I can play StarFox!

I also picked-up Perfect Dark (N64), Beyond Oasis (Genesis), and Skies Of Arcadia (Dreamcast). Perfect Dark's kinda cool so far, but I've only played the first level; I still need to see how it plays in 16:9 high-resolution with surround sound and two analog controllers. Beyond Oasis is one of my favourite action-RPGs (alongside it's Saturn sequel, Legend Of Oasis), and the best competition SEGA's ever had for Zelda. Skies Of Arcadia is kinda hard to find (and impossible to properly back-up) while apparently being one of the best RPGs in recent memory, so it seemed like a smart buy. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work. It froze during the second battle the first time I played it, and wouldn't even load after restarting. There are some strange markings on the disc's surface, which leads me to believe that the previous owner tried to buff-out the scratches with a CD resurfacer. That's really a shame because Dreamcast GD-ROMs are a touch more sensitive than regular CD-ROMs. Time to see if I can get a refund, or find someone with a Game Doctor (I have a set of Dreamcast-specific resurfacing wheels).

Hey, here's a fun one: I just finished fixing a Windows 2000 machine that had somehow been compromised. The computer itself was set as a restricted site, and because Explorer is used to access the file system as well as the Control Panel, the computer was kinda useless. All scans came-up clean, and I had access to some functions in Safe Mode, but things were pretty far gone. Long story short, I was able to back-up the important data and perform a clean OS installation. Fun.

Burgers and a View

I walked into a Burger King on my way home yesterday and bought three XBOX/XBOX 360 games; no food though. $12.99 + tax later (or $4.99 + tax each), I had copies of Sneak King, PocketBike Racer, and Big Bumpin'. Yeah, Burger King is currently offering cheap XBOX games with the purchase of a value meal. Here's the crazy thing: These games are actually a lot of fun! Sneak King is sort of a stealth action game where players must achieve specific goals that involve sneaking-up on hungry people as that freaky Burger King mascot and giving them food. PocketBike Racer (featuring Brooke Burke) is Mario Kart-esque title that is surprisingly deep, very solid, and a hell of a lot of fun to play. Finally Big Bumpin' is a really creative bumper car game that offers a number of different gameplay styles and challenges. If you have an XBOX or an XBOX 360 the games are definitely worth your time and money.

Also, I'm glad to finally see something like this. It's nice to see a succinct chart that tells me everything I need to know about the different versions of Windows Vista. No longer do I have to trudge through the marketing speak on Microsoft's site, or the over-analytical bullshit on all the other tech sites. From the looks of things, anything under Home Premium is kinda pointless from anything other than a compatibility standpoint, and Business looks to be the best value (especially considering this little tidbit of information). I may have access to a copy of Enterprise in the near future, but that may also include an Ultimate license, so I guess we'll wait and see. I figure I'll be upgrading by summer, at the latest.

Fucking Grrr...

Looks like the problem is with my SNES. I talked to the guy from the shop who tested my Starfox cartridge, and he had no problems with it. Upon closer inspection, after getting home, one of the connectors in my system is missing. The upside is that it's one of the connectors for the extra set of leads used only by cartridges that employ enhancement chips, so most games will work just fine. The downside is that this means I potentially can't play titles such as Starfox, Yoshi's Island, Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart, Star Ocean, Mega Man X2 and X3, Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dreamland 3, and Super Mario RPG! I'm not sure which of these cartridges use the extra leads, but they all use enhancement chips, so they're potentially unplayable! Gah!

How I roll...

Things are starting to settle in the PC software department for me...

Windows XP (operating system)
AVG Free Edition (antivirus)
Spybot (antispyware)
Firefox 2.0 (web browsing)
Thunderbird (e-mail)
OpenOffice (desktop publishing)
GIMP (image manipulation)
WinRAR (archive management)
BitTorrent (BitTorrent client)
FrostWire (P2P client)
foobar2000 (audio playback)
VLC (video playback)
GEAR PRO (audio and data burning)
Alcohol 120% (disc copying, image burning)
CloneDVD (DVD back-up)
ConvertXtoDVD (DVD creation)

Nine of those programs are completely free, most of them are simple, lightweight, and unobtrusive, and the default configurations for most are more than adequate for the casual user's purposes. Alcohol made the list because it supports a number of formats and options that GEAR does not.

I would, however, like to point-out something about Firefox's default configuration. I've noticed a number of concerns regarding the browser's memory usage since version 1.5 was released. It seems to use an awful lot of RAM for a web browser (I've seen it go over 150MB and stay there on my main PC), especially when considered alongside Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9. People have made accusations of memory leaks and sloppy code, but the fact of the matter is that it's a design decision intended to help smooth-out the browsing experience. By default, Firefox stores copies of viewed pages for each tab in the system's memory. This practice allows for quicker page-rendering, for example, when you click the 'forward' and 'back' buttons and switch between tabs, but at the cost of requiring more RAM. Thankfully, the Firefox team has made efforts to keep this memory usage from getting out of hand. Firefox bases its overall memory usage for these cached pages on the total amount of physical RAM in the system so that the browser never really bogs-down your system performance. If, however, you're neurotic like I am, and want your Firefox experience to leave a smaller footprint on your system, read this page. Following those instructions, you can reduce (or increase) the amount of RAM used to store the aforementioned data (or just turn off the feature altogether), and even have the browser free large amounts of RAM when minimized. Based on my experience, the performance gains from this memory usage are insignificant, and I appreciate being able to minimize the browser to free resources instead of having to close it. Memory usage after these tweaks now tends to hang around 20~40MB; 2~6MB when minimized.

From the Games department: NHL2K7 was proving to be just too easy on the "Pro" level, so I've restarted my season on "All-Star". I picked-up F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point and Need For Speed: Carbon Collector's Edition. Still working on Project: Snowblind and Need For Speed: Most Wanted though, so they'll have to wait. Picked-up The Legend Of Zelda and Link's Adventure re-issues for GBA on the cheap; about half-way through the first one so far. Finished Astro Boy the first time through (it needs to be played through twice to be finished), but I'm setting it aside to get into Gunstar Super Heroes for now. Found a sealed copy of Rez for PS2 (only domestic version ever released). While it is 'jaggier' than the Dreamcast version, it's not an issue; the game is still a work of art. The increased framerate over the Dreamcast version is also nice, and the slowdown is negligible. If you ever find this game, for either platform, buy it. Also, I heard back from the video game store, and they say Starfox works just fine... Looks like there's a problem with my SNES... Rats.

Oh, hey, I thought these were clever: http://tv.truenuff.com/mac/

Well then, that takes care of that...

I found a used XBOX with a Samsung DVD drive and a three-month warranty for $109 yesterday. It's a little noisy at times (both the DVD drive and the HDD, but they're normal noises based on my PC experience), but all of the disc read errors are gone! It's so nice to enjoy my XBOX games with consistent loading times, audio that doesn't cut-out while the drive makes ominous seek noises, and (so far) no fear of random, progress-threatening crashes! I also picked-up Otogi 2 (XBOX) and NHL '97 (Genesis; classic!) while I was out, as well as Starfox and Starfox 64 the day before. Turns-out the SNES Starfox cartridge doesn't work, so we'll see if they give me a refund, or let me exchange it.

I must make note of just how excited I am about this. The idea of an Oddworld movie just works a little too well in my head. If you've never played through any of the Oddworld games, then all you need to do is a read a synopsis of one and check-out some of the artwork, and you'll start to get the idea. If you'd like to see exactly how well this could work, watch the intro movie to Stranger's Wrath and feel the anticipation :) Speaking of, I'm nearing the end of Stranger's Wrath, and I've throughly enjoyed the experience (especially once I discovered the quicksave feature). This game constantly impresses me with its graphics, gameplay, and storyline/humour. The only knock I have against it is that it can get repetitive if played for too long all at once. It works fantastically, however, as a game you can pick-up for an hour or two a few times a week.

Oh, heh, before I go, my Leafs in NHL2K7 are 20-0-0 this season :) Yes, I'm playing it at the "Pro" level, and no, I'm not using any funny cheats or settings... A number of games have been quite close, production has been spread-out well across the roster, and Raycroft has not been stellar. I've been winning by playing a very physical game (defending Raycroft at all costs) while being exceedingly aggressive on offense (like 40+ SOG per game). The price has been a number of injuries (usually a few days or a couple of weeks at a time; Kubina's out for a few months), but my rookies (Ondrus, White) have really been able to step-up. Also, the shenanigans of those Florida games I mentioned earlier seem to have subsided; it's not perfect, and I guess I'll have to accept that injured players stay in until the end of the game, but it's been a lot of fun for the most part.

"They say she's the same, but she's not the same..."

I really don't like it when developers release different versions of the "same" game on multiple platforms. More often than not, at least one version stands-out from its other-platformed bretheren, and not in an encouraging way. I hate the idea that one might unknowingly buy the shitty version, be denied the better version because they don't own the right platform, or have to play two different games to get the full experience. Prime examples include Need For Speed, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2, and Splinter Cell Double Agent.

The original Need For Speed was a relatively (to its contemporaries) reality-based racing game on the 3DO and PC. The PSOne and Saturn versions were altered to make them more arcade-like, but retained the exact same name and cover art. Misleading? Uhm, yeah. Hot Pursuit 2 was developed primarily as a PS2 title, and it turned out to be a fantastic one on that platform. It was not, however, quite as fantastic on the PC, XBOX, or GameCube. An entirely different development team made a very different game for the other platforms, which is sad because the PS2 version was so much better. Finally, Double Agent on the 360 is a completely different experience on the XBOX 360 than it is on the XBOX/PS2/GC (I'm not sure about the PC version). The older consoles offer a more fleshed-out storyline, entirely different co-op and competitive multiplayer, and only night missions. Weird, eh?

Anyway, on a brighter note, Clive Barker's back!!! Clive Barker's Undying is easily one of my favourite video games. Period. So the news that he's working on a new project called Jericho has made me quite happy :)

Grrr...

NHL2K7 does not remove injured players until after the game is over. Perhaps this is common knowledge for hockey video game enthusiasts, but I'm a few years out of the loop and somewhat surprised (though it does make sense when one considers such factors as player-specific stats, textures, and audio clips being loaded per game rather than manipulated in real-time). Also, I no longer trust my XBOX; it crashed with another dirty/damaged disc error as I was saving my profile, and corrupted the file in the process. I lost all of my settings and achievements... Luckily, the season data is stored in a separate file. Since I'd rather not risk my season data or (potentially?) the integrity of my hard drive, nor would I enjoy resorting to saving everything twice (once to a memory card, just in case), a new XBOX is in order.

On a brighter note, I'd had my fun with Windows Vista RC2, so I replaced it with Ubuntu 6.10. It was very nice, very fast, and seemed to do everything right... So where's the fun in that? :) I'm back on Debian (3.1 rev3) here, and I think I'll keep it this way for a while. The "Desktop Environment" option in tasksel does what I need without too much bloat, and all I had to do afterwards was add Gaim and BitTorrent, edit XFree86 to allow higher resolutions, and set-up a static IP. Anyway, here're a couple of interesting things I've discovered over the past couple of days: The "ati" driver that comes with most Linux distributions performs a hell of a lot better with my Radeon 8500 than the final ATi-distributed "fglrx" driver that supported it, and the full ISO image of Debian 3.1 rev3 didn't seem to include "Desktop Environment" in tasksel. Annoying, eh? Yeah, I swapped the Radeon 8500 (AGP4x) from my Athlon XP 2200+ machine (AGP8x board) for the GeForce 6200 (AGP8x) in this one (AGP4x board).

One more thing, about the CD/DVD suites: GEAR PRO is very nice, but I've still got a few small gripes. I did, however, remember one suite that I'd forgotten about before: SlySoft's "Clone" products. It's been a while since I've used them, but I remember good things. More on this next time...

If I may...

Allow me to bitch for a moment.

Nero. Yeah, the CD/DVD creation suite. Remember when it was good? When it wasn't horribly bloated, infectious, and broken? Yeah, me too... Man, those were good days. What used to be a full-featured, clean, and very effective piece of software now tries to do everything at once, integrate itself into Windows, and quite simply doesn't work on many systems. I could've dealt with the bloat and the integration because I was able to cut them out and focus on the core application, but then my audio CDs started acting-up. If it wasn't skipping tracks (even when previewed in Nero, before being written to CD; this was fixed by manually reverting to an older mp3pro.dll), it was including huge chunks of silence at the ends of certain tracks (no other application had this issue, using the same source material). So I started looking into my alternatives. Roxio? Still bitter from their past pieces of trash; they've got some explaining to do :) Alcohol? Nice, but does some really strange things to the registry, and doesn't do audio anyway. CDBurnerXP Pro? Definitely a favourite, but doesn't support DAO burning on a number of newer drives, and still has some annoying bugs (reporting that the disc is full before anything has been added; having to force it to burn). Cheetah? Now we're getting warmer, but the feature set is a little sparse. Well, I'm currently trying GEAR PRO, as it looks like the product with most comparable feature set to Nero (the good one). I'll keep you posted about how it goes. Oh, and don't bother suggesting iTunes for burning audio CDs; the ones it burns are always really touchy and seem to randomly skip.

Next on the block is NHL2K7. I was off to a great start (3-0-0) with my Leafs, but then came Florida. The first time I played them, as my goalie was holding the puck to freeze it, one of their players poke-checked him well after play had stopped (but just before the whistle), took the puck, and scored while my goalie just kinda stood there... Obviously, Raycroft was as shocked as I was. So I reloaded my season and restarted the Florida game. This time, play was stopped, Bouwmeester suffered a major injury and was to be out for a few days... And then somehow scored on me later in the game!? I won in a shootout, but still, what the hell? Oh, and just to add insult to injury, at one point Jokinen skated from beside the net, around Raycroft, and scored. Here's the thing: RAYCROFT DIDN'T MOVE! HE JUST STOOD THERE AT THE SIDE OF THE NET!?!?!? Seriously, I'm starting to have doubts about this game... Maybe the dev team were Panthers fans.

If I were to build a computer today...

Every now and again I get to wondering what I'd buy if I were to do a major system upgrade right then and there. This time, I've decided to share:

65W AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ ($300)
ASUS M2R32-MVP ($180)
256MB ATi Radeon 1900 GT or XT ($270 vs $310)

...And the rest would probably remain pretty close to what I've already got. The 4600+ has similar performance to a Core 2 Duo 6400 for about the same price, so there's no need to jump on the Intel bandwagon there. The M2R32-MVP is based on ATi's Xpress 3200 chipset and offers fast and reliable performance, right up there with any Intel- or nVidia-based board. The video cards, while lagging ever so slightly behind comparable nVidia products in terms of FPS, offer a higher overall image quality. Also, if I ever want to try a CrossFire setup, the ATi-based motherboard will come in handy, but that's just even more wishful thinking. Besides, this setup keeps in line with the recent AMD-ATi buyout :)

Otherwise, I'd just keep what I have and buy a Mac Mini to play with; it'd cost about the same.

P.S. I love the spell-checker in Firefox 2.0!

So long, productivity!

Surprise!

I'm right pissed-off...

Silly me, I bought a game on a whim while out with a friend today. The details of this shopping trip aren't important, but rest assured, I want my money back. Unfortunately, there are generally no returns on opened software, plus my friend had the receipt... and threw it out. Fuck.

The game in question is Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition for Windows, and boy, did QA fuck-up on this one. The price was right (under $20), the packaging was nice, the game installed without issue (barring the fact that it came on five CDs), and things looked really sharp at 1152x864; better than they ever did on the game's native PS2 platform.

Here's the problem: The controls are painful. No, they quite literally hurt one's body. The game automatically maps the player movement to the right analog stick. Yes, the one on the right, which is, in fact, the wrong analog stick. Oh, and no, there's no way to change it. I did some research on the issue, and it is apparently not uncommon at all. It's so not uncommon that either Capcom or Ubisoft (I'm not sure which, as I can't find it on either company's site) quietly released a patch that addresses this, as well as other issues. Unfortunately, the patch still doesn't support a number of popular controllers from major manufacturers, including my XBOX 360 controller. So my options are to either map the keyboard movement keys to the left analog stick using third-party software, or play with the keyboard. The latter would seem to be the simplest solution, but a fast-paced brawler simply does not translate well to a keyboard. Apparently there are other issues of crashes, slowdown, and missing effects... Wheee!!!

I really wish I'd checked-out the reviews for the PC version before buying it, but I just figured that since the PS2 version was so universally loved, I couldn't lose! Maybe I can get a good trade-in value or something... Guh.

I only have time for a quickie...

IE7's out. I like it. Give it a try if you're on Windows XP or 2003. Hey, did anyone notice that the IE7 version number in XP (7.0.5730.11) is earlier than the one in Vista RC2 (7.0.5744.16384)? Exciting, no? No, not really.

I was doing some shopping for a friend's upcoming baby shower, and made a few stops while I was out. I came home with a McDonald's Cripsy Chicken Sandwich (had a coupon for a free large sandwich; decided to try the most expensive thing they had), a humidifier (for the babies; she's having twins), The Warriors (XBOX; it was cheap), and DooM 64. The sandwich was okay, the humidifer was on the registry, The Warriors doesn't like my XBOX (what else is new), and DooM 64 is a whole lot of fun. It would be nice if DooM 64 saved your control and brightness settings (you thought DooM 3 was dark? Hell, they don't even give you a flashlight in this one!), but it's a minor annoyance.

Before I go, a quick update on my Zelda progress: I finished Ocarina Of Time the other day, and it was a lot of fun. Not as much fun as I've ever had with a game, or even a Zelda game (Link's Awakening is still my favourite), but definitely a solid title worth anyone's time. I'm now getting into Majora's Mask. If the introductory chapter is any indication, this is definitely going to be my kind of video game. For anyone who hasn't played the game, the entire story takes place over three days, and time passes pretty quickly; the time travel aspects of the previous Zelda game return in Majora's Mask, however, so things promise to be interesting. It seems as though the more original gameplay aspects of Ocarina Of Time (music, masks, time) have been streamlined and augmented to have a greater effect on the core gameplay and not just the plot and sidequests. What really stands-out above all else, though, is the presentation. This game requires the N64 RAM expansion, but doesn't just toss in more and higher-quality textures to the same old game engine; instead, we're treated to some really creative cinematography, characterization, visual effects, and sounds. The result of this more ambitious approach is a very effective visual and aural storytelling component of the game. They're all ultimately little things, as the game still remains true to the Zelda franchise, but they definitely make a very welcome difference. So, I still need to pick up Ages, Seasons, Minish Cap, and Wind Waker, as well as replay Zelda and Link (I'm thinking the GBA re-issues), but I'm making progress ;) By the time I'm done with those, Wii, Twilight Princess, and Phantom Hourglass should all be readily available.

Sorry...

...Can't talk; busy with Yakuza, Zelda, Katamari, and the Guitar Hero II demo.

What? IE7 and Firefox 2.0? Google and YouTube? Responsibility? Real life in general? Bah, it can wait...

Volcanoless?

Decided I'd had my fun with Vista RC1 Update, and finally got around to snagging a copy of SymphonyOS. SymphonyOS is a Linux distribution based on Debian with touches of Mozilla that aims to streamline the whole desktop computing experience. From the Orchestra development environment, through the Mezzo desktop environment (very cool; check it out), to the OneClick package installation "store", the result (still in BETA at this point) is very promising for general Linux desktop computing. I had no problems with the bootable CD version of the OS, but I couldn't get it to install properly on my hard drive. Luckily, Vista RC2 was released shortly thereafter, so I put Symphony and any associated frustrations on hold. RC2 (Build 5744) doesn't seem particularly different from RC1 Update (Build 5728); still runs just fine, looks very pretty, and Internet Explorer 7 has the same rendering issues (specifically with Google sites and Slashdot). I assume that the onus of driver support at this point is on the hardware manufacturers, so we'll see if Creative and SiS decide to let me use my existing hardware in Vista.

I've got a few service contracts in progress at the moment, but not enough time to get into them all at the moment, so I'll save that for my next update.

Oh, and I picked-up a 10dBi directional wireless antenna today... The wireless signal on my main machine is much more consistent now.

On the video game front, I picked-up the two N64 Zelda games (Ocarina Of Time, Majora's Mask) along with the RAM upgrade cart for a pretty reasonable price. I'd been meaning to do this for years now, but with the prices they were going for coupled with what I already had on my plate, the whole endeavour just didn't make sense. I also happened across a sealed copy of the original Katamari Damacy for PS2 for under $30... Had to pick that up :)

Hosed! :)

My time spent with Linux seems to go in cycles... I grab either a new version of something I'm familiar with or try a new distro, figure out how to get things running smoothly, then worry about the niceties (browser plug-ins, DVD playback, CD burning, etc...), then focus on smooth 3D gaming. After that goal is achieved, I tend to start over or revert to some form of Windows for a while. I gave-up on Ubuntu 6.06 last night, after it mangled a basic data burn to a CD-RW. It worked fine sometimes, and came-out unreadable others... Not good enough to keep me interested any longer (plus Flash for Linux is still stuck at version 7), but good enough to prompt me to hose-down the system and install Build 5728 ("RC1 Update") of Windows Vista.

I haven't noticed any huge differences since BETA 2, but then I haven't spent much quality time with either release. I did discover a few new things by installing Vista on my P4 2.4B system though: Vista doesn't (yet?) support SoundBlaster Live!s or SiS products particularly well. The SB Live! is simply unrecognized and unsupported, and the onboard AC'97 audio hardware, while recognized and supported, produces no sound and seems to make the system crawl; SiS' website offers no Vista software. So, no audio! Wheee! Also, the 256MB AGP 4x (8x bottlenecked by mobo) GeForce 6200 gets a performance rating of only 2.2 for "Desktop performance for Windows Aero", which is strange, since it gets a score of 3.0 for "3D business and gaming graphics performance". It's sad when your video card can run something like UT2004 without effort, but can't handle your OS's GUI ;) Okay, no, that's not true; the card can handle Vista's "Aero" GUI just fine, but the new performance rating system rates your system by its lowest-scoring component... Kinda sucks when your entire system's rating is brought down so low just because there're faster cards out there; or at least that seems to be the case when you consider the adequate performance of my current setup.

I Need A New XBOX

I wanted to start this season off right, so I did my research and checked-out what the sports companies have to offer in terms of hockey games this year (the last hockey game I played was NHL2003 on my PC). It looks like EA neutered all but the XBOX360 release of NHL07, and they're charging nearly twice the price of the competition on current-gen systems. Considering these two important factors along with the fact that 2K Games' offerings have been getting slightly higher reviews, the logical choice was (at a mere $20 CDN) NHL 2K7 for XBOX.

I've been having an absolute blast with it for the most part (I could live without the over-reliance on one-timers), but my Thomson-drive XBOX isn't cooperating with the disc. It's kind of annoying to have an awesome game and unlock some of the tougher acheivements just to have the game crash with a dirty disc error before it can save your progress... *sigh*

"God, I miss pants."

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

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

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

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

Bah! I give up...

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

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

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

iTunes 7! Wheee!!!

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

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

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

That is all.

Just a follow-up...

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

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

Lies! All Lies!

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

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

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

doom, Doom, DOOM!!!

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck YES!!!

Double Fine is still alive and kicking!

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

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

The End Of An Era

I quit my job at CPUsed. Looks like it's back to sporadic consulting contracts and student life for me for the next little while!

I built a new PC for my friend Tim a number of years ago. It was an 800MHz AMD Athlon (100MHz FSB), an All-In-Wonder ATi Rage 128 Pro video card, and a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum sound card (with the original Live!Drive) all on an ASUS motherboard (VIA KT133-based). Over the years he upgraded the CPU (to a 900MHz Athlon), memory, hard drives, and video card (GeForce FX 5600), but plugged-along with more or less the same rig. The impresive thing is that he does professional 3D design and animation (I believe he works mostly in Maya). Now, he didn't use this machine for his heavy rendering, but he did do most of his work on it. Well, it's nothing too special, but I'm giving him a free upgrade this week. I was able to build him a 2.4GHz Pentium 4B system on an SiS 651-based ASUS board at very little cost to me. We'll transfer the hard drives and video card and such, and he'll have a nice little bump in speed.

I guess he was pretty excited when he heard this because when I visited him last week, he gave me a Turbo Grafx 16 with Keith Courage and Bonk's Adventure, a SEGA Master System two games built-in and a light gun, and a World Heroes 2 MVS cartridge! Fucking sweet deal :) Tim's good like that because he collects that kind of stuff to an obscene degree (because we all need 12 SEGA Dreamcasts each, right? ;) ), and he works with a local coin-op dealer. In other news, my older brother picked-up an old SNES at a garage sale for me the other day. w00t!

Oh, and I came across what I thought was a 128MB AGP8x GeForce FX 5200 card (model no. MS-8903) the other day, so I put it in my Linux box in order to take advantage of nVidia's drivers (the 128MB Radeon 8500LE I had in there was just performing painfully slow for a card that powerful; DirectX 8.1, pixel shader 1.4 support). Well, nVidia's drivers tell me that it was actually a 64MB AGP8x GeForce4 MX440... Quite the downgrade, considering the pathetic feature set of the MX440 (DirectX 7, no pixel shader support). Either there're two cards out there with with the model number 8903, or someone's lying.

Finally, I downloaded the Java Runtime Environment version 1.5.0 Update 8 the other day on one of my Windows PCs. I went back to download it again for my Linux machine as well as my other Windows machines, and all of the downloads had been changed to Update 6. I wonder why there was a two-version downgrade... Did I miss something?

Ooh! One more thing! I finally got around to picking-up the rest of the Jak & Daxter trilogy (Jak II and Jak 3... I'm not couting the PSP or racing games); expect impressions soon!

Mad Cheddar!

The last two parts came today, and OS installation went smoothly... And so it is with great pleasure that I present to you all, the most fantastic computer I have ever built:

• Intel® Core™2 Duo E6700
• Asus P5W DH Deluxe (Intel 975X-based) Motherboard
  
• nVidia Quadro FX 3500 256MB GDDR3
• Two OCZ DDR2-1000 PC2-8000 Platinum XTC 2GB Dual Channel Kits (4GB Total)
• Two 250GB SATAII 7200RPM w/16MB Buffer WD Caviar HDDs (500GB Total)
  
• Pioneer DVR-111D 16x DL DVD+/-RW
• Antec TruePower 2.0 TPII-550 PSU
  
• Antec Titan 550 Case
  
• G-RAID 3-Port FireWire 800 PCI
• Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

Sadly, no, this computer is not for me, but rather for a consulting contract I accepted a few weeks ago. This was my first encounter with a Quadro, as well as with Windows XP x64, but it was nothing too crazy... Well, unless you count paying somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2000 CDN for a video card crazy ;)

On a completely unrelated note, I found myself in Oshawa, Ontario earlier in the week, and I picked-up Outcast (PC) and Wild 9 (PSOne) at a local new & used game shop. These are both games that I missed for various reasons back in their day (due to high system requirements, not having a PSOne; stuff like that), but have definitely stood the test of time as solid titles. Outcast still looks pretty good for a seven-year-old game (I blame the high prduction values as well as the innovative use of voxels), and Wild 9 is just mindless fun :)

Oh, and a quick update on my last post: ZDoom runs Strife much better, although it does conflict with certain (trivial) aspects of the standalone game, and doesn't offer the same nifty 3D-accelerated effects of some of the other front-ends. Still, it's Strife, it works, and it's great fun.

Muthafuckin' Strife on my muthafuckin' PC!!!

While I was out purchasing a DVD burner for a system I'm building, I happened across a fine collection of *ahem* classic PC games. Most were $9.00~$19.00, and brought back many fond memories. I decided to pick-up Lemmings Revolution ($9.00), and as I went up to the counter to pay, I noticed Strife... Sealed, in the box, perfect condition, and only $7.00!!!

You wouldn't believe how giddy I was about this. Strife is right up there with games like Clive Barker's Undying and Psychonauts as one of the most overlooked gems in gaming history. Built around the DooM engine, Strife was one of the better first-person action-RPGs I can remember playing in the '90s, and it's still great fun to play today.

It took me a while to get it running properly in Windows XP (everything was smooth except for the sound effects; they were unbearably choppy) because VDMSound just wasn't doing its thing. I ended-up having to resort to Vavoom, which is still somewhat unstable. I'm downloading ZDoom as I write this, to see if it fares any better.

Things that make you go, "Hmmm..." or "Grrr..."

I recently played through the Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic demo, and now it's definitely on my shortlist of upcoming games to keep an eye on. The Source engine (Half-Life 2, SiN Episodes) is looking fantastic, and the gameplay is like Oblivion with less freedom, but way better combat. The demo was awfully short (even with the unofficial saved game that lets you continue playing past the official end), but great fun; totally worth the download if you have the bandwidth to spare. Interestingly, this demo made me realize something about my video card: An overclocked, unlocked, AGP8x GeForce 6800 is now officially a mid-range part. I could either play the game with HDR and medium-high video settings, or without HDR at just about maximum video settings. The difference wasn't terribly pronounced (high-res smoothness vs. dynamic lighting effects), but it reminds me that an upgrade will be in order before too long. Hopefully it'll be at least another year or so before I'm forced to do anything though, since the next upgrade means a whole new platform; I've pushed Socket A and Socket 478 to their limits with my Athlon XP 3200+ and 3.6GHz Pentium 4 AGP8x rigs.

Aside from PC gaming, I've been spending some quality time with all of those console titles I keep writing about. I'd like to talk specifically about Burnout Revenge. It keeps 'crashing' on my XBOX. I am one of the apparently unfortunate souls who has been blessed with a Thomson DVD drive. From what I've heard, this particular drive is problematic for most, and often has issues reading discs. Now, I've played a lot of different titles on that XBOX without issue over the years (the only times I really noticed any problems were with Panzer Dragoon Orta and Shenmue II, but they were rare at most), but Burnout Revenge gives me the 'dirty/damaged disc' error pretty consistently. Grrr indeed.

Oh, and really quickly, I picked-up God Of War and Gran Tourismo 4 for PS2 for $19.99 CDN each (regularly $29.99 each) at Best Buy thanks to a price reduction and some coupons! Haven't touched Gran Tourismo 4 yet, but God Of War is great fun so far (I'm only at the second save point).

Finally, I got kinda bored the other day and set-up static IPs for every potential connection on my home network. That's ten IPs... And counting? :)

P.S. I'm working on a really exciting project (well, exciting for me and any hardware nerds reading this) that should be just about ready sometime early next week. Watch this space!

Birthday!

Sorry for the delay; been busy. I had a birthday last Friday, and there were related and unrelated festivities throughout the long weekend.

In recent news, I finished Prey. It was short. It was a hell of a lot of fun, and even a little nausea-inducing with it's blatant disregard for everyday expectations of space and gravity, but there isn't much to rant about. The graphics were slick, the presentation and voice acting were both solid, the weapons were effective (though interchangeable in most situations), and the plot was interesting enough. Most notably, the way the developers played with gravity and portals was quite effective, and the native American spiritual subtext was pretty interesting. These aspects really set Prey apart from most FPS games, which is why it's sad that they seem to have run out of time while making it. There are two very convenient events later in the game that effectively skip over what promise to be long and varied explorations of both an alien ship and a spiritual plane. *sigh*

In other news, I'm almost finished Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. The final battle, however, is proving to be quite maddeningly frustrating. I dunno, maybe I need to level-up some (my guys are both at 38). Fantastic, albeit short, game though. Definitely pick it up if you have a GBA, DS, or even get it for an emulator. You won't be disappointed, especially since it's now one of those discounted "Player's Choice" titles.

Since the end of last week, I've picked-up Guitar Hero (PS2), Burnout Revenge (XBOX), Sonic Mega Collection Plus (XBOX), Unreal II (PC), Need For Speed Most Wanted Black Edition (PC), and Peter Jackson's King Kong (PC). Guitar Hero was a birthday present from the family, and I love it so ;) Within a day or three of casual play, I'd already finished all of the regular songs on medium difficulty as well as unlocked all of the bonus songs and the Grim Ripper. I'm so happy to see "No One Knows" by Queens Of The Stone Age on there :) Burnout Revenge was marked-down to ~$20, so I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about. It's very pretty and pretty fun, so it's definitely worth what I paid for it thus far. Unreal II, NFS, and Kong were impulse buys while I was out shopping for a new computer desk. Staples had them marked-down to the ridiculously cheap prices of $0.97, $9.97, and $9.97, respectively. Kong presents me with an unfortunate situation though; I now have three StarForce-protected games on my computer (Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Trackmania: Sunrise, and King Kong). Fortunately, there is a free tool that removes the offending software when I'm not playing the games. Unfortunately, I have to restart my computer before and after each StarForce-protected gaming session.

You may have noticed that I skipped over that Sonic collection I mentioned in the last paragraph... Here's why: It's mostly fantastic, and deserves a paragraph all to itself. You can find it brand-new for under $20 CDN these days, and it includes four of the best reasons to own a SEGA Genesis: Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Ristar, and Comix Zone. That's right, not only does it include the Sonic games (including the "lock-on" games, Spinball and 3D Blast), but it also has some real classics in Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (a.k.a. Puyo Puyo ;) ), Flicky, The Ooze, Ristar, and Comix Zone. This "Mega Collection" also includes a spotty collection of Sonic's Game Gear adventures that strangely omits some of the better ones (Sonic 2, Triple Trouble) while including lacklustre titles like Sonic Labyrinth, Sonic Drift, and the painful Sonic Blast. Unlocking the locked games in Sonic Mega Collection Plus can be mind-numbing (playing certain combinations of unlocked games 20 to 50 times each), but it's still a great value for $20; you really can't go wrong when you consider what you get. Oh, and I should mention that you can save at any point in any game. Now I just hope we see the Sonic Gems Collection (it includes nearly every Sonic game that this collection doesn't, including the venerable Sonic CD) on something other than the Game Cube here in North America.

And finally, I've just played through the demos for Call Of Juarez and Lego Star Wars 2. The former is very pretty if your computer can handle it, has some really promising gameplay dynamics, and takes absoloutely forever to load each level. The latter is just like the first one in the series, but with even more detail (building an AT-ST walker and then driving it around is great fun) and more freedom (designing your own character can get pretty funny).

Alright, that was long. I'm going to bed. 'til next time, kids, be well!

Summer Lovin'

My game collection has grown quite a bit since my last post here...

I had some gift certificates left-over from Christmas for a local video game chain, so I headed-out to see what I could find. I came away with two Saturn games (Daytona USA CCE and SCUD The Disposable Assassin), a Japanese-style Saturn controller (the black US ones that came with later Saturns; arguably the best controller ever!), and Swagman for PS2 (I'd always wanted that one). Daytona's a huge improvement over the original Saturn version, SCUD's kinda low-budget but a great property, and Swagman is a very pretty game with a cool concept that kinda falls short with it's routine gameplay.

Once I'd finished at that store, I headed out to the one where I'd picked up the 32X games the other day, since it wasn't too far away. There was a sign on top of the display case in which they keep the 32X games that said 50% of everything in this case... So I asked for everything in the case ;) Well, not everything, but they did have nearly every 32X game. Apparently some guy had come in a few days earlier and sold his collection, which included Spider-Man: Web Of Fire. Web of Fire is one of the rarest 32X games, and sells for over $100 US on eBay. This place was selling it for $80 CAN, and I missed it by only a few days.

Anyway, I bought all the 32X games I didn't have, save for some sports games (NFL Quarterback Club, RBI Baseball, and WWF Raw). This purchase included Brutal Unleashed (garbage, but hard to find), Cosmic Carnage (a competent fighter, but nothing special), NBA Jam T.E. (classic game, horrible music), Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure (really good platformer), Shadow Squadron (sadly underrated 3D space-shooter), Space Harrier (classic arcade goodness), and Star Wars Arcade (meh, it's alright). I also picked up SEGA Rally, Virtua Fighter Remix, and Panzer Dragoon for Saturn, as well as Sonic 3 and Vectorman for Genesis (all in the same display case, so same sale price).

Finally, I had to make a late-night battery run (to get a 2032 lithium battery for a computer), so that meant Wal-Mart. Not only did I get the battery, but I also picked-up Crazy Taxi 3 ($9, fun game for 15 minutes at a time), Grabbed By The Ghoulies ($9, beautiful graphics, great control scheme, so far lots of fun), and Sonic Heroes ($18, entertaining enough, but Sonic Team still hasn't quite got it right) for XBOX.

I think I have a problem :)

Good Reads

I caught a link to this interview with Tom Kalinske, the former president of SEGA of America, at the Ars Technica journals. Some highlights include the story of SEGA's origins, how Sony got into the industry it would eventually come to dominate, how the Nintendo 64 was originally designed as a SEGA console (we got the Saturn instead), and insights into the internal rivalry between SEGA of America and SEGA of Japan.

Another article of interest is [H]ard|OCP's take on gaming performance from Intel's new Core 2 Duo CPUs. There are a lot of reviews making the rounds that paint this part as the new king of everything in computer land, and while it is a great-performing, energy-efficient, and reasonably-priced chip that certainly puts Intel back on top for the time being, that's not quite the whole story...

With a vengeance, children!

It all started about a week or so back, when I was at a Blockbuster to rent some movies. I saw a used copy of PaRappa The Rapper 2 for $10, and I had to make it mine. I played through it in one sitting that night, and that event coupled with my recent completion of Golden Sun: The Lost Age started a new era of video gaming for me. A few days after this Blockbuster visit, I finally got around to checking out a video game store near my buddy's house out in the West end in hopes of finding a copy of the original PaRappa. I left with Mortal Kombat II for my 32X, Crash Bandicoot and Final Fantasy IX for PSOne, and Killzone for PS2 (it was only $10 used, in great condition, and I'd been meaning to see what it was all about). After realizing that I needed a PSOne memory card to save my PSOne games, I headed back to the shop a few days later and left not only with the memory card, but with a copy of After Burner for 32X as well! Fast-forward a few days, and you'll find me at a friend's house with a few people playing Guitar Hero. Now, I've never been much of a fan of rhythm games, with the exception of PaRappa, Cool Cool Toon, and (to a lesser extent) Space Channel 5. I've given the likes of DDR, BeatMania, Amplitude, etc... a try, but they just didn't grab hold of me particularly tightly. Guitar Hero, though... Wow. Maybe it was nailing "No One Knows" and "Cowboys From Hell" in my first sitting, but something just clicked. I've got a birthday coming up pretty soon; you can guess what I want ;)

Some impressions: Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is fantastic, and has been satisfying my portable needs more than adequately since completing Golden Sun 2. After Burner is as much fun as I remember, and owning one of the best home versions of Mortal Kombat II (my favourite game in the series) is a plus. Crash is still one of the best platformers there is; it's just too bad that Universal seems to have run the franchise into the ground. Then again, if that hadn't happened, then we may never have seen Jak & Daxter. Thanks, Naughty Dog! Killzone's kinda cool, but doesn't seem to be anything really special. Final Fantasy IX has renewed my faith in the series; VIII didn't really do it for me, and I've been hesitant to take the time with those games ever since.

I also picked up an old PS2 demo disc from a friend that had a demo for Primal on it. I remember seeing the commercials for this game years ago, and it really interested me. I didn't pick-up a PS2 until recently, so it'd kinda faded from my mind. Well, I played the demo, and it was thoroughly medicore (and clearly not the final product). Perhaps I'll pick it up if I see it on the cheap somewhere, simply because the premise (hot chick transforming into brutal beasts, trailed all the while by a well-spoken gargoyle) has so much promise.

I think I've covered just about everything... Ooh, I picked up an awesome little USB flash drive (1GB Kingmax Super Stick) for $25! This thing is literally about the size of my thumbnail!

Anyway, yeah, that'll do for now... 'til next time, kids.

Vista

I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 on a spare 40GB 7200RPM IDE HDD on my main Windows machine (S478 P4 o/c'd to 3.6GHz, 512MB GF6800, 1GB DDR400). I get a "Windows System Performance Rating" of 3 (though if you actually average-out the scores, I get 3.92; higher if I were using my main hard drive).

Anyway, here're some first impressions:

• Slick installer; quick, painless
• Very pretty, smooth, responsive
• Doesn't seem to like KVM switches; device issues disappear when KVM switch is not connected
• Crashed a few times (one blue-screen); possibly due to default drivers or the KVM issue
• Woke-up from standby at unsupported refresh rate; fixed by installing monitor drivers
• Gadgets appearing randomly on desktop at start-up
• Nice interface, convoluted Control Panel, annoyingly redundant confirmation dialogs
• New games! :)

Overall, it's a very nice interface upgrade, but doesn't seem to do much of substance otherwise. From here, I guess we wait to see what 64-bit applications and DirectX 10 have to offer.

Ooooh... Pretty!

Windows Live Messenger - the successor to MSN Messenger - is out, and it's very shiny... Shiny like Windows Vista. I think it does some new stuff that works (or will work) with other (upcoming) Microsoft software applications and online services, but really, I just use it to keep in touch with friends and make arrangements to do thing things in RealLife© The shiny is a nice upgrade, I guess.

I've also been playing with Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 and Opera 9, and comparing them to Firefox 1.5.x.x. Both IE7 and Opera 9 look very slick, offer all of the same basic functionality we've come to expect from Mozilla's products, and seem to offer comparable browsing experiences to the general user. They have some interface nuances that aren't exactly what most users are used to, but they're intuitive enough that they can be picked-up pretty easily. Aside from the font-smoothing of IE7, all three browsers looked pretty much the same, and performance differences between the three were negligible as far as I could tell (although I like how IE7 and Opera 9 free-up memory when you minimize them; Firefox hasn't done that by default for a few versions now). Aside from what seemed to be a Flash issue on YouTube with IE7, I didn't run into any glaring problems... I think that means that things bode well for Internet Explorer. Like Messenger, these products all do much more advanced and wonderful things like run "widgets" and "extensions" and the like... But really, I use them for browsing webpages, so I'm gonna leave it at that.

I also got to play with the latest Windows Vista Beta on a laptop that had a performance rating of 1 (out of 5), and it still looked very pretty. The menus (and Control Panel, etc...) seemed convoluted, but then again I only spent like five minutes with it while two people looked over my shoulder. I might put it on one of my systems some day soon if I can find a hard drive to spare, but I'm in no rush.

Sorry for the delay...

...I wanted to finish Half-Life 2: Episode One before posting this.

So let's get that much out of the way: I was able to pick-up Episode One a few days after my last post, and I just finished it about 15 minutes ago; it's a short game, but a fulfilling one. I spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of two weeks of very casual play on this game, and even though the final scene came about sooner than expected, the road leading to it was engaging to say the least. It was standard Valve fare, so there's really not much more to say. If you enjoyed the first two Half-Life games with their clever puzzles, creative enemies, and epic storyline, then you'll enjoy this. Really though, for $20, you know you're gonna try it anyway. Also, the trailer for Episode Two looks very promising... And green.

So what else is new... Ooh! I've come across the laptop to end all laptops, and by all laptops, I mean all of my laptops. I found me an IBM ThinkPad X22 in pristine condition, complete with a docking station. Highlights include an 800MHz Pentium IIIm CPU, 640MB of PC133 RAM, an ATi Mobility Radeon, a 30GB HDD, integrated 802.11b, and a DVD-ROM and a floppy drive in the docking station. So it's an upgrade from the Toshiba Portege 3480CT I was using, but here're the best parts: It weighs well-under 4lbs, has a 12.1" screen, and is no more than one inch thick! Also, I've installed Ubuntu 6.06 on it without issue (wireless and power management work great), and on top of all that, it's got the fantastic IBM laptop keyboard! Who's a happy boy? That's right, I am :)

Anyway, back to games. I kinda took a break from every other game I've been playing lately to finally get around to finishing Golden Sun: The Lost Age for Game Boy Advance. Still a lot of fun, if kinda easy to get lost (especially if you haven't touched the game for many months and can't remember what you were supposed to do next), and very easy to overpower most enemies. Oh, and the dialogue... *snore*. Still, as I was saying, a lot of fun to play. It's a relatively simple, yet satisfying, RPG. I'm almost done, with just a goal or two left to achieve before I can finally get into Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. I've heard good things, and I'm getting excited.

Finally, the Japan-only release of the "SEGA Ages" remake of Panzer Dragoon for PS2 has come and gone. This news inspired me to dig out my old PC port of the game and see if it was still compatible with Windows XP... And compatible it was! There was something inexplicably entertaining about playing an old SEGA Saturn game in high resolution on a 3.6GHz CPU with an XBOX 360 controller.

Dapper Drake

Ubuntu 6.06 ("Dapper Drake") was released yesterday, and most of the main distribution servers were subsequently rammed. Luckily, I seem to be the only one who tried the Ukrainian server; it was quite fast. I've installed it over Debian, and I'm impressed; very slick. The disc is both a 'Live' CD and an install CD; unfortunately, this means that one must (apparently) wait for the "Live" version of the OS to start before it can be installed to your hard drive. On the plus side, however, this means that the installer is very pretty and the installation process is a piece of cake. Overall, installation was relatively quick and painless. I still had to manually edit xorg.conf to take full advantage of my monitor's available resolutions and refresh rates, but aside from that things were great on the hardware side.

1. The default packages are fantastic (almost everything you could want, and up-to-date), the interface is shiny and clean, and updates are a breeze. I've run into only two issues so far:DVD and MP3 playback aren't available by default, so I grabbed VLC, etc... from the "universe" and "multiverse" binary repositories. While I understand why this is the case, they didn't make any solutions apparent for novice users.
2. After installing the updates, VLC, Flash Player, Java 1.0.5_07, and ATi's proprietary driver, OpenOffice.org stopped working. My guess is that it's related to the Java Runtime Environment I installed, but I'm still looking into it.
   

So far, Ubuntu 6.06 is shaping-up to be one of the cleanest, most lightweight (*ahem*SuSE*cough*), and easiest-to-use versions of Linux yet. The more up-to-date stable packages are a big plus, and the automation of many everyday desktop functions elimiates a lot of the headaches that Linux can bring to the majority of computer users. Unfortunately, it kinda takes a lot of the fun out of the Linux experience for enthusiasts. I just don't feel the same kind of satisfaction here that I do after installing Debian or tweaking Windows to get the best performance out of my hardware. Regardless, this release of Ubuntu is a huge step forward for Linux becoming a viable desktop environment for the casual computer user.

In other news, I went to Best Buy, EB Games, and Wal-Mart (same plaza) to pick-up Half-Life 2: Episode 1 yesterday. Best Buy said it came out on May 30 (but didn't have any copies), EB Games said it wasn't out yet (even though it is), and I tried not to talk to anybody at Wal-Mart ;)