video games

It looks like I may finally get my PS3 in less than a month. I was waiting around for the rumored 120GB version, since the 80GB is out of production. Well, I’ve decided I won’t wait past June 12th, when the MGS PS3 Bundle comes out. It will have:

• 80GB PS3. Note that this is the piano black PS3, and not the rumored limited edition gunmetal grey. I’m not sure who gives a shit about color, but it ain’t me.
• DUALSHOCK 3 Wireless Controller. This is the new force-feedback controller.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I’ve never played any MGS games, but I’m not not fond of FPS, so this could get eBayed quickly.

The whole thing is $500, so it’s like you get the upgraded controller and video game for free; that’s probably a $100 value. I will be putting that towards an extra controller and, if I feel like spending ridiculous money on (what most would call) a minor convenience, the infrared to bluetooth converter and the Harmony One remote.¹

1. I really love my Universal Automator, but there seems to be no way to support the IR2BT. [↩]

I was not expecting AoC to live up to the hype, but it did.

I was not expecting it to be so gorgeous, and not just because you can see boobies. The youtube clips don’t do this game justice.

I was expecting it to be buggy and to have that “new game” feel, but the content I have seen so far is kicking butt. I have not yet gotten stuck, had a buggy quest, or had the game crash.

I was not expecting AoC to run as smoothly as it did, considering I am playing it on a Mac using Bootcamp, but the only thing limiting it is the steaming load that is Windows XP. I have 8 cores and 16gb of ram running on a 64 bit bus, most of which just sits there unused. I went with a slower processor and dumped the savings into upgrading the machine, but I have never used more than 35% of the CPU. The 8800GT is doing all the work, and all I can say is WOW (no, not WoW, not anything like WoW).

The fighting mechanics are still growing on me. I was one of those rare people that will admit to liking Oblivion, especially compared to the click on target mash buttons lameness that most classes in WoW utilize (sure, in raids they are now forcing you to move around to avoid hot lava, but the only reason this is hard is because many people don’t have the skills to actually watch their cast bar AND the screen). So far I have only played a barbarian, and the casting time for longer combo moves seems a bit off. Many times I think I initiated a combo, but my toon is just standing there getting beat on. Finally, the combo will pop up, and like some tard at the fair playing whack-a-mole, I excitedly mash the buttons in the order shown. Sure, I could have gone with the dance dance revolution comparison, but that would give away my winning idea of using a dance mat for controlling my toon!

Things I am not digging as part of the Early Access include the craptacular server maintenance schedules and lack of voice acting for the quests past the starting area, but maybe those will be fixed with the official launch. Of course, they are european, and expecting even half-assed customer support would be purely naive. Don’t believe me? Go try to find their phone support number…. nope, they don’t have one. Hopefully they can make up for it with adequate online GM support.

Should Blizzard be worried? Yes, they should. Not because everyone will be leaving WoW to play AoC,though some will, just for something new to do. Personally, I am not yet to the point where I am hooked, and I fully expect to go back to WoW some time before the next expansion. AoC may just delay my return for a few months. The real reason Bizzard should be worried though is that a bunch of weird Norwegians showed that WoW did not set the bar too high, and they are no longer the only real option for people wanting to get their MMO on. Two days ago I was still resigned to WoW being the best option for the foreseeable future, but now I can see that providing them competition is not only possible, but likely. This is good for gaming in general, and I look forward to seeing how the competition drives the genre in the future.

This (or something very like it) came to the Hollywood Bowl. It’s an orchestral soundtrack to classic video games.

Tip of the hat to Or.

So I want a Blu-Ray player, and the PS3 appeared to be the logical choice. After considering the setup and looking at the features, I’m not so sure.

The house where I’m staying has the TV (a 70″ Sony LCD rear projection) set into the wall. The A/V components are above it on a shelf also set into the wall; it’s a sort of cubby hole. There is a hole between the components and the TV where wires are fed. It’s the kind of setup that, when you have to modify the wiring, you start by staring at the system for five minutes, mutter “Fuck me,” and then try to find a way to not do that.

I thought I had accomplished that. There’s an existing DVD player, and it’s connected with component cables, so it thought I could just do a drop in replacement with the PS3.

Not so fast. The PS3 does not have direct component out. It has a proprietary analog A/V connection, which forces you to buy a special cable for $20. You can’t just use your existing cables and plug them right in. If you’re in my situation, or the cable is too short (which it might be since they don’t tell you how long it is!), you need a component video coupler. This is a set of 3 RCA female-to-female connectors, known amongst electrical engineers as a lesbian 3-way adapter. Luckily, it’s only $4 at Radio Shack. So I gotta shell out another $24 bucks I shouldn’t need to, but I can live with that.

What I can’t live with is the PS3 Blu-Ray remote. It’s Bluetooth, not infrared. Yes, this means you don’t need need to point it at the console - but who isn’t trained to do that anyway? I already shelled out $160 for a Universal Automator remote with macros, volume punch through, etc. The BR remote isn’t even back-lit. And there’s no one-touch power off, meaning that even if it did have infrared support, you couldn’t use macros to turn it off.

So as much as it pains me, I think I’m going to have to pass on the PS3 and go with a straight up BD player. Hopefully they have some that fully support BD-J. For me, that was the big selling point for the PS3. Of course, the games wouldn’t hurt, assuming it gets some good ones.

This is awesome. Kristin Kreuk will play Chun Li, the speed-kicking, high jumping uber cutie in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li.

I’ve sunk more quarters into Street Fighter II than any other game. I even have an X-Arcade stick, pretty much just for fighting games on MAME. And I think Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang on Smallville) is one of the loveliest actresses on earth. So this is a big win for me.

I’m also happy to hear Balrog will be played by Michael Clarke Duncan, and Chris Klein will play Nash¹ . Moon Bloodgood (the hottie from Journeyman), will also star, but I don’t know who she’ll be playing². To top it all off, it will be choreographed by Dion Lam who did The Matrix.

The only bummer is that we’ll have to wait ’til 2009 for the release. In the meantime, there’s always Smallville. And a couple photos of our heroines:
Read the rest of this entry »

1. I’ll be honest, I didn’t remember Nash/Charlie as I didn’t spend as much time on Street Fighter Alpha. [↩]
2. Chun Li’s better-endowed sister? [↩]

Here’s a technology demo for how to do VR head tracking with a Wii remote. It creates the illusion of 3D to the wearer of the headset. This could add a really cool element to shooters.

Great tribute to a classic PC game.

I know there are agents out there that love Texas Hold ‘Em. It’s nice to just… get together with friends and have a drink or two. Steal each others’ money. It’s great, just great.

But since there haven’t been that many games going on, I started looking for free Texas Hold ‘Em online. So far, the best place I’ve found is the Hold ‘Em Poker tables at Yahoo! Games.

Of course, you need to be registered at Yahoo! but who doesn’t already have an account with them? It’s free. You can sign up here.

First off, it’s nothing short of bitmap graphics. It’s obvious this wasn’t made to evoke some glamorous lifestyle but it gets the job done. There are plenty of skill levels to play with and tables to target them. Or you can play socially, since every table has chatting enabled. But one feature I was hoping to use is the option to create a private table and invite whichever players you want. You can’t set the limits or the wages, though, that’s the only downside.

So, if anyone’s interested, post a comment and let me know what your user name is. Maybe we can schedule a night to log on and play. Everyone starts with $1000 and if you go below, you just owe the bank. I’ve seen players with -$7243. I haven’t the heart to tell them they have a problem.

So….

Anyone else want to rip their hair out trying to get those camera angles just right? I don’t remember this being such an issue with the first one.

Aside from that, GREAT GAME if you got the computer muscle to back it up. I had to add ANOTHER fan (5 total) to my case because it was sweating so bad. I’m not even sure why. The game is nice, but it doesn’t look better than Oblivion.

Hey Atari! Give us a camera upgrade! One that stays DIRECTLY behind the player would be nice.

I’ve been thinking of my next PC. It will be a beast all around, and totally more than I need, but on par with what I want. One of the components on this mythical system is the Dell 3007WFP, a 30″ LCD monitor.

Everyone knows bigger is better. Ok, yes, except for penis size (you heard Shannon Doherty in Mallrats, a good size means small). But for monitors, 30″ has to be better than 24″, right? Well, maybe.

The problem is something called “native resolution”. That’s tech talk for, “if you use a different resolution, it will look shitty”, at least in comparison. And you didn’t shell out all that money to look at something with subpar clarity. You can usually switch to a lower res in an even multiple. In other words, if the native resolution is 1280 x 1024, you can cut that to 640 x 512 and still have it look good. You’re now using four pixels to represent one, so it’s still a square.

You might be asking yourself, “Why would I want fewer pixels? We just established that more is better!” And if you live in the 2D world, you’re probably right. Watching movies, surfing the web, reading email - no big deal.

But most games create a 3D world, and that world is computationally intensive, and that intensity is resolution-dependent. The higher the resolution, the harder your graphics card has to work. A couple years ago I bought a Radeon X800 Pro graphics card, which was definitely high-end at the time ($400 retail [1]). I bought it to play World of Warcraft at high resolutions. The game played fine for a while, but eventually it would sputter and stall and crash. Maybe 15-20 minutes into it [2]. Then I upgraded damn near everything else, but it still crashed. Obviously, the good folks at Blizzard wouldn’t provide a resolution choice that was impossible to play with state of the art equipment. And if they did, well, their tech support people would tell you right away. “Lower your resolution! That setting is for hardware that hasn’t been invented yet!” Well, I never heard that, but maybe that kind of honesty only comes after you’ve fetched all their rocks. I finally broke down and lowered the resolution and some effects, and voila, it ran smoothly for hours. Same thing happened with Oblivion.

Oh, when I say high resolution, we’re talking 1280 x 1024, not 1600 x 1200. 1.3 megapixels. My card maxed out at about 1024 x 768, less than .8 megapixels.

In other words, nowhere near the 2650 x 1600 native resolution of the Dell 3007WFP. Simple math puts that at 4.24 megapixels, more than 5 times the max res. of the X800. The card is now 2 years old, understood, but it’s still not bottom of the barrel. Even so, let’s discount it. Let’s look at the awesomest card on the market, the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI. $470 on PriceGrabber.com. According to the VGA charts at Tom’s Hardware, that card only gets 20 FPS on the benchmark for Oblivion run at 1600×1200 with everything on, in an outdoor scene (very common in that game). I don’t know if that’s single or dual card setup, but they also say that an extra card only buys you a 30-40% boost. And remember, while 1600×1200 may sound high (and it is!), it’s less than half of 2650×1600! Assuming the complexity scales linearly with resolution [3], you’d need a card 3 times more powerful than the best card available. And probably a stronger CPU, too. And that’s on a game released months ago. What happens when you try to run future games, using DirectX 10? You’re probably stuck running in 1325×800, if that resolution is even offered by the game. Most likely, you’re in a crappy looking non-native resolution, just so you can get the game to run. What a waste!

Luckily, there aren’t any games driving me to build this beast, not even the upcoming Neverwinter Nights 2. Alas, the original plan of waiting for Diablo III is still in effect. I’ll have to find something else to waste stupid amounts of money on. Perhaps a bigger penis…

Update:

I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken. I thought I might not be throwing enough money at the problem. Well, Tom’s Hardware’s $10,000 PC - with quad SLI (that’s four videocards bridged together) - gets less than 18 FPS on Oblivion outdoors. Granted, it does well on all their other game tests, but I don’t want to play those games! Check out Tom’s PC anyway, it’s an interesting read.

[1] Amusing story about that. Friend went to a major electronics store, let’s call them Pommes Frittes, or Fri’s for short. Wanted a Radeon 9600 with DVI for his pricey Apple LCD. It’s on sale for $130, but when he goes to buy it, it rings up as $400. He points out the price tag and the sale sign to the cashier, who agrees and charges him the marked price. He goes home. He opens the box. Inside: another box. This one says Radeon X800. It’s price tag says $400. Clearly, some shennanigans going on at Fri’s, probably a warehouse guy setting himself up for some extra take-home pay, which my friend inadvertently thwarts. But it’s win/win, as I buy it off him for $250. Huzzah!

[2] If you know the game, it also happened as soon as I took a gryphon ride.

[3] This is a really big assumption, but I have a hunch I’m being lenient.

I haven’t watched South Park in about 8 years, but last night I was flipping through channels and stopped dead on what I thought was some sort of game demo.
Turns out it was a South Park episode all about the game “World of Warcraft” and since I know some Crack Team members are into this, I had to watch it. Much of the episode includes actual gameplay.

The story line goes: There is this high level player going around killing characters for no reason. I guess that normally characters have to accept a duel before risking their characters’ lives? Well this guy is such a high level that he overrides this rule.

The staff at Blizzard Entertainment is worried because the guy can “kill” administrators’ characters, so even they can’t stop him.

Cartman and the gang figure that if they spend every waking hour for months on end (in hiding) they might reach a level high enough for the four of them to defeat him.
Can the gang of four, with the help of Stan’s dad(a noob) and Blizzard’s banned “Sword of a Thousand Truths”, defeat the serial killer?

Quotes from the show:

Blizzard staff: What kind of person would do this?
Blizzard President: Only one kind. Whoever this player is, he has played World of Warcraft nearly every hour of every day for the past year and a half. Gentlemen, we are dealing with someone here who… had absolutely no life.
Blizzard staff: How do you kill… that which has no life?

[think about that for a minute]

Blizzard staff: There are over seven million people who log on to World of Warcraft! Are you telling me all those people’s characters are going to die, and there’s nothing we can do to save them?
Blizzard President: Yes. And it won’t be long before everyone gets really really frustrated and stops playing altogether. Gentlemen, this could very well lead to the end of the World…… (of Warcraft).

Cartman:[Trying to convince others to join his cause.] If you had a chance right now to go back in time and stop Hitler, wouldn’t you do it? I mean, I personally wouldn’t stop him because I think he was awesome, but you would, right?

Sony announced that the PS3 will be delayed in Europe, and cut U.S. Christmas shipments in half. Add to this it will cost $500-600, versus $300-400 for XBOX 360, and >$250 for the Nintendo Wii, which confirmed it’s shipping on time. Apparently there are technical and/or supply problems with the Blu-ray components. Getting a Blu-ray player with your console is decent, but I haven’t seen a $600 console since Neo-Geo. Are they gonna have $130+ games, too?

Yeah, there are a few of these out there, but this was exceptionally well edited. The timing is just perfect.

Masterchief recently pointed me towards Penny Arcade, a gamer-oriented online comic strip. They’ve also started the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), an alternative to E3 for consumers (E3 are being dicks about letting in non-industry types). I was going to hit Seattle until air fares skyrocketed, which I am against. Anyway, the strip is pretty hilarious, here are some I liked:

My thoughts on pineapple pizza exactly
D&D online misadventures
She knows what you’ve been watching
I’m pretty sure Blizzard doesn’t need to do this, with their license to print crack
On the benefits of manga
Why I still feel self-righteous about quitting WOW
Fun at Fry’s?
An accurate portrayal of WOW’s patch distribution
What are friends for?

The marketing people at Gamefly probably are trying to figure out how to send me a check for that one, but anonymity is far too important for an ass like me to give up contact info on a public forum. Instead, I would ask that they donate the money to a young aspiring nurse, cuz the world needs more nurses. I suggest going to a local strip club, cuz I met a bunch of ladies there who were going to college to be nurses, naughty, sparkly nurses.

If you own an XBOX 360, with the exception of Call of Duty 2 and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, I haven’t found a single other came that required more than a few days of my time to be finished with them. In the 3 weeks I had Oblivion with Gamefly I saved an assload of cash (though I am sure I will buy a used copy some day to play it again). For all the other games I got on Gamefly, there was not a single one that had any replay value in my opinion. Most of them I would have actually been quite mad about if I had purchased them at full price. Before Gamefly I researched purchases quite a bit, and was much more cautious with the games I tried, so on the plus side I guess, I tried some games that I would not have considered otherwise, and, of course, they sucked.

This is leads me to what really what makes Gamefly rock. See, most reviewers are soulless whores of the gaming industry. Then only decent reviews I have read in quite a while were at Penny-Arcade, while reading their comics. Seriously, their comics are one of the only sources of decent game reviews I have found, which is kind of like watching the daily show for news. For some reason, the idiots at all the major game sites figure you won?t remember the steaming pile of crap that they gave an 8.5 out of 10 to when you are reading their next ?review?.

The bottom line with Gamefly is that it saves a ton of cash. For $15 a month, I avoid buying $60 games. Simple math is that in 4 months I have spent what it would have cost for a single game, but I played 10 of them, which would have put me back $600. I would have played fewer games if some of them had been a bit better, but that hardly makes the service less compelling. The only ?downside? of Gamefly is that it is a bit slower than NetFlix, but then I live like 40 miles from a regional NetFlix center, so I usually have single day shipment from them (yes, I send a movie on Monday, it gets to them Tuesday, and I get my next one on Wednesday, which is pretty cool).

In the extended entry (if it works) are some mini-reviews from some of the games I played from Gamefly (not all were for the 360, but I need to fill in between their release schedule):
Read the rest of this entry »

Finally picked this up, and am just getting the hang of it. For a more detailed review by far better gamers than I (Masterchief and Zbalance) read these comments. Haven’t had much time to play, but was disappointed with the lack of online help and the pamphlet of a manual. Yes, I’m one of those geeks who reads the manual before he does something.

Coming from WOW, I’m used to automated updates and tons of UI mods. Oblivion has many content mods built with their construction set, but very few UI mods. No nifty Lua scripting engine to make UI tweaks easy. Another interesting file type available, surprising because it’s been forever since I’ve played “adventure games”, are saved games! One useful one puts you right after the tutorial (with all possible loot) and right before you choose your final stats. I’m also used to many dedicated strategy sites, including a few professional ones. There are far fewer for Oblivion, and IGN has decided to charge a subscription for their guide. Booooo! Anyway, I found some useful links that I thought I’d post. If you have more, please let everyone know by commenting. Thanks!

Oblivion Character Creation Tips
Lockpicking Made Easy!
The Alchemy FAQ

I could really use a guide on magic. And a game that didn’t hang when you switched to window-mode.

Edit: The game now crashes my system, apparently due to some video driver or performance issue (and I have a decent card: Radeon X800 Pro). I recommend others hold off until a general bugfix patch is released.

It has recently occurred to me that I have forgotten enough about World of Warcraft (WOW) that I am probably at the point of no return. In other words, the time I’d have to spend remembering how to play the game, customize the interface, optimize my character, etc., feels like more effort than its worth. So I’ve been thinking about finding a new game to waste time on. As a couple people have pointed out, Elder Scrolls Oblivion is out, but I’m not sure I’d like the play style. Since there’s no demo available, I’ll pass. (I’m guessing that a game that takes up 4.6GB of hard drive space can’t be easily shrunk to demo size.) In reading the description, they are really after casual WOW gamers, as they list short challenges as a primary selling point; big challenges (that require 5-40 of your friends to be online and up for the same challenge) is one of the biggest complaints about WOW.
     So I was pretty happy to hear that they are making Neverwinter Nights 2 (NWN2). I was a little worried when I read that they’re using the same game engine as NWN (Aurora). But the full truth is that Bioware is just providing Aurora to Obsidian, who is modifying it significantly and has renamed it Electron. Yes, that means Bioware is not actually developing NWN2, just helping a little.

The Good:
+ Follows D&D 3.5 rules
+ All races and classes from NWN, plus new ones like Duergar, Drow, Aasimar, Tiefling, Wild Elves and others that aren’t as cool (meaning evil).
+ All classes and prestige classes, plus new ones like Arcane Trickster (rogue plus wizard/sorcerer)
+ Improved graphics based on DirectX 9 and Pixel Shader 3; old game engine != old graphics

The Bad:
- No epic levels, at least to start with; cap at 20 again
- No psionics, unless you’re an illithid. And you can’t play an illithid. Boo!
- No mounts, gotta run everywhere on foot, just like in real life. Because horses weren’t invented back then… Boo!

So overall, pretty cool, except it’s not due until 9/1, according to EB. That means I’ll have to find another game, or stay productive until September. I’m pretty I sure won’t make it that long.

P.S. I got most of this info from the Wikipedia entry.

So there’s been a paucity of posts since my whirlwind romance with World of Warcraft. Alas, the infatuation has faded. I still play, and plan to for some time, but its hold over me has been broken. I think I first realized this the weekend I spent more time reading about J2EE than playing. There have been other things on the plate, and I wasn’t sure how to get back into this. Mind you, this is still a group blog, nobody else was prevented from writing here. Of course, nobody’s prevented from reading, either, but that doesn’t stop them. (I am a master of circular logic).

Anyway, Blizzard released a game patch, which means my big set of community-created addons (Cosmos) has probably been broken, and it will take a couple days to fix it. Luckily, my characters will be gaining rest bonus (extra xp for time spent away from the game, basically rewarding you for not using their servers while still paying them money). So no big loss, and I’ll again be suckling at the teat of mother Blizzard in a few days time. ‘Til then, I write!

So I am definitely on Warcraft now, and quite happily addicted. I’m also in very good company, and would like to set up this post as a central place to organize what I hope will be our guild.

The Crack Suicide Squad (Uldum)

I recommend adding everyone above as a friend. I’d also suggest reading Chapter 12 of the manual if you haven’t already. A neat feature is that even though many of us aren’t ready to be colocated, we can use the in-game mail system to send items to each other. It’s nice for items you can’t use, but others can, and won’t get you much copper from the merchants.

For more tips, check out is the guild-to-be’s web board.

Ok, most know I don’t care for Sony products. If they work, they’re decent, but I and several friends have found they break all too often.
     Sony’s decided to build on that success. c|net has an article about a recent Sony demo disk for PS2s that can erase your memory card, wiping out your saved games.

They go by “Les Seules”, which means the loners, or outsiders. They’re cute, and they kick ass. At Counterstrike.
     Seven Swedish and Danish girls, aged 16-25 (almost good enough for Castle Anthrax), have formed a team to compete in the world of video game tournaments. They’re currently sponsored by NVIDIA. They took fourth in the female division of the 2004 Electronic Sports World Cup in Paris, kicking the counter-struck asses of the American and Brazillian teams. In other news, there’s an electronic sports World Cup.

Read more (and see pics) here:

• NVIDIA UK

• AP story at Yahoo