Recently in games Category
i bought a gamecube a few years ago for mario kart:double dash alone
it met my expectations
but only just
the depth of the gameplay just didn't measure up to the n64 version that hooked me
in the first place
the majority of the levels lacked the demented imagination of the prior version
and there were fewer shortcuts
wrong turns
and surprises
so even if we were to be measuring it by that alone
mario kart wii exceeds that mark by a significant margin
the courses are by turns vertiginous
dastardly
strange
and fraught with opportunities for your enemies
to fuck you up
the number of times i cuss out yoshi alone
should be enough to explain how much better it is
but the true sign of how awesome it is is that it's got me
sitting indian-style on the floor
three feet from the giant television
holding the steering wheel at arm's length
like maggie's toy at the beginning of the simpsons
twisting and leaning this way and that
and getting my ass kicked by eight-year-olds worldwide
after a ludicrously busy week at work, a restful weekend was exactly what i needed. naturally, it was something less then restful. weird, but hardly restful.
- friday night i was in the bleachers. it was spectacularly cold and windy in row 36 (this is directly beneath the center-field scoreboard), but it was all okay, since i wasn't bad luck for the sox. wakefield got run support, and at long last, dougie went deep! i had my first fenway franks of the year, and a few pints of guinness. it was a good night.
- after that, i wandered the north end digging in trash cans, having been told that this was a good way to impress women.
- nothing i say makes any kind of rational sense anymore.
- saturday i caught the soccer doubleheader in foxboro. the us women embarrassed the mexican team, and the revolution owned toronto fc utterly. it's not every day that you get to see nine goals. some of them were pretty spectacular, too. a treat.
- alas, i left my german army shirt in section 110. dammit, that was the best shirt $3.99 could buy.
- later that night, we went to the buffy the vampire slayer sing-a-long at the coolidge corner theater. this is where i learned that playing 'don't stop believin' on a kazoo is a good way to make friends. is there nothing that journey can't do? other than that, i learned that firefly evangelists are frightening, and that a theater full of people with party poppers and bubbles looks pretty cool. and most importantly, we learned that garrett sings.
- i think that things started going downhill for me when i started wearing matching socks more often.
- sunday i played a lot of guitar hero. my wrist hurts, but i am getting better. not as good as jess, but better. we're also working on getting minh hooked on it.
- i went for a run, too. in the nor'easter. my nike+ipod graph tells the tale of the headwind running east on beacon street vividly. i do not envy the marathoners today.
- and i did some work. boo.
- on the bright side, i got home from work before 2100 tonight. 2045 counts, okay?
there was a span that ended last night, where i didn't get home from work until well past 9 for five days out of six. the missing day was sunday. so, you know, it's been a little busy. and i'm more than a little fried, and probably rather more goofy than normal, which is only going to get worse; i ain't done yet.
on the other hand, my order from amazon arrived the other day, which means that when i get some free time, i'm going to waste plenty of it playing 'guitar hero'. in my case, it's a self-limiting addiction, since my left hand gets tired after a while. i think one of my roommates might already be hooked on it. it's like brightly colored, noisy crack, which has the bonus feature of allowing you to look totally ridiculous with a toy guitar in the privacy of your own home. i'll be honest. i left work 'early' (read:830pm) one night 'cause i wanted to go home and play.
and then, last night, garrett convinced me that i should probably go to the baseball game, so i finally broke the streak of working wicked late, and made it there for the fourth inning. it was nice to be back, even though i'm clearly bad luck. there is a theory that i need to burn my 'damon is my homeboy' shirt before i can be good luck again. we'll have to give that a try, perhaps soon. standing-room only tickets are awfully nice when you're 6'4", even if last night, the frosty wind doing its best to freeze us in our spots. matsuzaka wasn't as impressive as he was in kansas city, but on the other hand, if he pitched like that every night, he'd win most of his games and not a soul would complain. hernandez, well, flirted with a no-hitter; it's hard to compete with that. nevertheless, at the start of the eighth inning, the crowd essentially seemed to take it upon itself to put that to an end, roaring as one for j.d. drew to get something started, and he almost instantaneously responded with a hit up the middle. sure, it was just as quickly followed by a double-play, but it saved them the indignity of being no-hit. no one wanted to see that. as i went to go get some coffee, there was a large group of japanese tourists, wearing matching red sox jackets, embroidered with their names, piling in through gate d. i really hope they made it up the ramp to see matsuzaka throw a pitch or two; this was in the top of the 7th, and he was done after that. it would really suck to come all the way from japan to see him and miss it completely.
given that most of my job is software qa at this point, i guess it shouldn't surprise me that i refused to leave broke enough alone, and continued fiddling with SimCity 4 on my TiBook. And, as it happens, i managed to get it to work.
So, to anyone else with a PowerBook or a Radeon 9000 and having trouble, try the following. Go into the SC4 loadpoint, and look in 'SimCity 4 Data', and edit the file 'Video Cards.sgr'. Scroll down to the following line:
card 0x4966 "Radeon 9000 Pro"
...and change it to:
card 0x4c66 "Radeon 9000 Pro"
after that, it should work fine. i shit you not.
so maybe i was destined to do QA for a living. aw, fuck that...
so, i finally got my copy of simcity 4 today. oh, no. actually, i have a lot to do this weekend to prepare for my upcoming big trip to europe, but i reckon i will nevertheless find some time to play... ;) so, the good news is, it runs well on my G4/867 tower. The bad news is, it just plain doesn't run on my TiBook. Which is, in all respects, a better machine. Looks like there was something of a gap in their testing--i wasn't the only one reporting this trouble on a Ti. Hopefully it's fixed soon. Someone from the porting house has been lurking around this thread on the macnn boards, so hopefully this will be a short-lived problem.
in the meantime, i'll be parked in front of my other 'puter. :P
(updated)
the problem with having an apple store 5 minutes from my house is... well, there's a lot of problems with that. i innocently went there to get a better case for my ipod (at soze's recommendation), given that yet again i took it out in the rain today, and that doing so is not terribly bright. so, anyway, i wound up also purchasing unreal tournament 2003. which i then spent half the night installing, because it takes 3GB of space. but i played the hell out of the demo, and it's just a fun game, so i'd have bought it eventually anyway. something for hardware to grow into, for sure, but it's really fun, just like the original... i sat on the couch and plugged my mouse into my powerbook and played for a while, and it was good stuff. it is something of a beast though, and it's kinda deceiving, considering that it ships with default settings that are good for screen shots, and playable, for sure, but not really what you would call 'optimal'. it plays fine on my powerbook, but it may cause me to buy a better video card for my tower. good stuff, and just the thing to wash out the bad aftertaste of master of orion 3 (which i started out kinda liking, then quickly grew bored of, and worse).
update, the next day:
So, after spending much of my free time playing it, i have to say it, like the first, was well worth the $50. oddly enough, the original UT was the surprise hit of late '99 since everyone expected Quake 3 to be the juggernaut. Turns out that they both went on to have an enduring influence on the first-person shooter genre. But UT was hailed as a better game due to its slightly more forgiving requirements, less cartoony physics, and superior (and surpassingly creative) level design. Now UT 2003 has seemingly gone the other way, with cartoon physics, somewhat more conventional level design, and harsh, harsh requirements.
so, anyway, it's wicked fun. and the funny thing is, the hardware demands are kinda weird. There are some levels that really beat you up, performance-wise, but the majority i've played actually run really well at 1024x768 on my powerbook. the ones that run less well are the big ones, with lots of bots, and you know what, cranking the resolution and the detail down doesn't even help. the thing is, the game is CPU-limited in a big way. a forum post somewhere said that you actually lose 2-3 frames per second for every bot that is in play. that's just crazy. but at the same time, they're pretty impressive; the team deathmatch bots noticeably work together. they cover for each other, guard doorways, stuff you can easily notice going on.
but the thing is, so much is made of frames per second, because these games are the equivalent of the 0-60 time for car geeks. you know what, as long as it's playable, and as long as it's fun, it's good for me. even making sacrifices to play the big maps, it's still wicked fun. that doesn't mean i'm not pricing a badass 1.4GHz board for my quicksilver, but in the meantime, i'm having fun with it...
anyone who's never been to a lan party probably thinks that they are populated by pasty geeks hosing each other down in counterstrike while drowning in mountain dew. it is both much lamer than that, and much cooler at the same time. the common misconception is that playing video games is antisocial, but in this context, it is the furthest thing from it. after shouting epithets at your opponents' stubborn thrall at their unwillingness to die in the 30th straight game of King of the Hill on Dead Man's Float in Myth II, then going and gathering 'round to watch the replay, it's immediately clear that it is actually as social as video gaming can get. and it increases the fun tenfold.
that said, let's go over the checklist.
power strips? yep.
salsa and chips? yep.
penguin mints? not yet.
soda? lots.
'puters? i've got 4, depending on the game requirements.
mice? a few spare.
hello kitty party hats? yep.
beer? soon.
hundreds of tiny plastic cups for the century club? yep.
oregon trail? yep.
hundreds of tiny dancing thrall? of course.
sleep? overrated.
rurik? well, i'm not sure if rurik is invited...
and, to top it all off, now we have duck hunt, too. drunks with a light gun. how can you go wrong?
another game that's sucked much of my life away (like, oh, an entire summer vacation, hiding in the basement, cursing my friends' worms) has an exciting new version coming. Worms 3D. woo-hoo! i still play the original occasionally, and it's every bit as fun. i can only imagine what the Concrete Donkey looks like in all its 3d splendor!
Yes, i talk about SimCity a lot. Encouraging news from a preview on IMG:
"Performance also seems to be promising, though of course final judgment should be reserved until the full copy is released. Running SimCity 4 on my G4/867 with a GeForce 3 at 1600x1200 was not a problem, though the game did take about a second and a half to redraw whenever I zoomed in or out quickly. The animation of a city also tended to chug a bit when I had a particularly industrious city going. Hopefully, running the final build at a lower resolution will address these problems."
Should be just fine on my Powerbook, then. woo-hoo!
