Just another useless personal blog
Though I don’t have an XBox, I keep running across bits of information about Forza Motorsports here and there.
The good news is that it features the ability to highly customize your cars, including custom paint jobs with a lot of detail, and race them against others online.
The bad news is that it means you may wind up suffering the humiliation of being beaten by someone in this. (From the Forza Customization site.)
So named because that’s about all the time I’ve had to play them recently…
Champions of Norrath (PS2): It bears little resemblance to the original EverQuest, and could be any old generic fantasy environment with the names swapped, but it’s still a fun hack-and-slash Diablo-II-esque game. Sometimes you just want to run around and Beat Stuff Up, and this fills that need perfectly.
God Of War (PS2): Wow, a fighting game I might actually not suck at. Great graphics (and not just for the prurient reasons), smooth controls, and plenty of action and puzzles.
The Simpsons: Hit And Run (PC): The Simpsons meet Grand Theft Auto. Much like the GTA games it’s fun to just randomly explore and find hidden stuff. Missions are challenging, but not impossible, and usually quick enough that you can retry it a few times without getting too frustrated. Plus, it’s fun to drive around like a maniac in the various vehicles, knocking lampposts and mailboxes over and sending people diving for cover…
Gran Turismo 4 (PS2): This game is a continual reminder of how awful I am at driving. But, it’s at least still fun to collect all of the exotic cars, take some action shots, and fiddle with the B-spec mode on the longer and more difficult races. I just wish I had the time or patience to dedicate to actually putting in some real practice.
This is why I probably shouldn’t be allowed to have a driver’s license:
See what happens when advertisers invade video games.
The tradeoff is that you can play for free because of it, at least…
Yesterday, a day important for gamers everywhere in North America, I went down to Future Shop with one goal in mind. I was determined to buy…a Nintendo DS.
Continue reading “Dissident”
One of the great things about operating systems like Windows is that, in its role as an abstraction of the hardware and other fundamental tasks, with an emphasis on backwards compatibility, you don’t have to care too much about specific versions of the OS. Write code that works on Windows 95, and it should work on future versions of Windows forevermore, right?
Well, maybe…
Continue reading “Too Old, Too New”
In a similar vein to Penguin Baseball, this is one of the strangest Flash games I’ve seen recently:
“A dating agency in China has launched with the idea of uniting men and women who want to get married – but who have no interest in sex. The Cupid agency, in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, caters exclusively for couples seeking a completely sexless relationship. ” — From the BBC
Come on China, get with the times. These have existed in the West for years now; we call them MMORPGS…
I would have thought this was a joke if it had been at any other URL…
Apparently my character in World of Warcraft is no longer content to be a priest. As of now he’s a grizzled old private investigator with a crime-solving cat as a sidekick.
While sorting through some old links, I discovered that Scott Jennings (a.k.a Lum the Mad) is updating fairly regularly again. Head over there for all sorts of snarky insight into the massively-multiplayer gaming industry.
I only just noticed that they finally revealed what the 23 new runewords on the 1.10 Diablo II ladder are, and it’s about time. It was a bit unrealistic for them to have expected us to discover them for ourselves when you consider that there’s around a *billion* different possible combinations when you consider six-socket items, and that many of the runes are very rare. When something like a Zod rune only has a one-in-137-million chance of dropping, you’re not going to waste it on trying some random combination that’s very, very unlikely to turn out to be one of the undiscovered runewords…
You’d better not mess with my undead priest now that’s he’s acquired his newest weapon:
Well, throw one more onto the list: World of Warcraft. I actually started about a week ago, but didn’t really have much time to play or think about it recently.
Continue reading “Orcs Suck”
It looks like Steam is still generating a lot of controversy, and what would a gaming-heavy blog be without yet another uninformed opinion…
Even I forget what I have and what I’m working on, so collected here is a list of all of the games still on the pile: (Updated 05-29-2006)
While I was picking up a new network card, I figured I’d finish converting all of my video cabling over to S-Video. I’m running everything through a switcher now, but all of the inputs have to be of the same type, so they were all still using composite/RCA for lack of enough cables. The PS2 was the real sticking point, since it only came with a composite cable and needs a special plug, and the official Sony S-Video adapter was $50 when I checked on it. Nuts to that. Fortunately, this time I found a third-party cable that was much cheaper.
And wow, what a difference it makes. I’d never really taken a close look before, since it’s sometimes hard to tell what the difference is, but GTA:SA makes it blatantly obvious. All of the fine print on the loading screen is clear and readable now instead of blurry, the little mini-map in the corner is sharp now, so it’s easier to tell where I am and what the markers are, I can finally clearly see the ammo numbers, and it just seems sharper and brighter overall.
Component inputs on an HDTV would be even better, but then I’d be spoiling myself…
I’ve been interested in checking out World of Warcraft for my next MMORPG fix, but apparently they’re having a few problems… If I do decide to give it a try, I’ll probably wait another week or two first.
If I can find the time. Damn this affluent Western burden of having too many leisure options… :-P
Reviews of the Nintendo DS are starting to trickle in, and they’re pretty positive so far. Although the dual screens and touchpad seem a bit gimmicky, it’s at least as functional as a standard GBA if you strip all the gimmicks away. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with the WiFi and Internet capabilities, too.
I’d been thinking of upgrading my plain old GBA to a GBA SP for a while, but I’ll probably pick up a DS instead. There’s nothing terribly compelling right now, but it’ll still solve the backlight and battery problems with the original, and still let me use any nifty new DS-specific stuff that might come out…
I am now waiting on the completion of the single biggest thing I have ever tried to download: Half-Life 2. It’ll probably be at least 3-4 gigs of data transferred, to meet the ~8 gig install size, but at this rate it should be done by morning.
Normally, given the option, I prefer to get copies of software on actual physical media instead of downloading them. In this case though, there is a difference: the CD version apparently still has the CD-in-drive check on startup. Even though the downloadable version obviously doesn’t. Don’t bother trying to reason it out; it’s apparently because of Orders From Above and nothing else… There’s also been the what-happens-if-I-lose-it concern, but they’ve actually included the ability to burn backup copies to DVD/CD.
The whole online activation requirement for HL2 has been a bit controversial, but at least it’s a one-time-only thing for the single-player game. (Multiplayer always has to do a key check, as is standard nowadays.) It has been effective, though: they avoided having any pre-release or zero-day leaks of pirated copies of the whole game, unlike nearly every other big title to come out recently.
Hopefully my system is even capable of running it well. I technically meet all of the specs, except that my FSB is stuck at 266MHz, which is a bit lacking compared to the effective 800MHz you can get on recent motherboards. It should be good enough with some options turned down, at least.
