Straight Jacket Type Fun
8/31/2004
Finally, a machine that can play Doom 3 in all it's glory!
8/30/2004
Well, all the stalkers can rejoice as their agenda of pissing off and scaring the holy hell out of their focus of attention. A new tool exists to spoof phone numbers and it's web based. How super.
Security will be fixed in Windows in 10 years. Ok, I'll buy another copy then.
8/29/2004
Naturally, it'd be Japan who would want 10 Gigabit connections, so they can continue to download all their adult anime and bukkake videoes. Buncha sickos.
Despite really like Total War: Medieval I never finished a campaign for the expansion for some reason up to this point. But today I binged on the game and finished the Viking campaign. The ending of the game when you perform total victory is a major disappointment compared to Total War: Shogun. In Shogun a neat little AVI video file appears and it shows a modern Japanese city square and in the middle is a statue dedicated to your dynasties house and there's some slick music and voice over. It's not a lot but it's a whole lot better than what you get in Medieval which was simply a picture basically saying, "Congratulations, you win" and a voice over singing the praises of the united British Empire.
8/28/2004
I am not one to normally encourage criminal mischief but since it's 12:20 AM, that means most movie theaters are closed. So, go break into one right the hell now and go see "Hero." Take a Greek Tragedy play, throw in some Crouching Tiger wire kung-fu stuff, and then also some Total War: Shogun for the PC and that describes this movie. While I am not a huge fan of wire-fu, the other two piece of the puzzle make "Hero" a really great movie to see. And unlike other "epics" which are three hours of complete crap and boredom ("Troy"), this movie's 90 minutes, well paced, and looks outstanding.
Yes I know this has been bootlegged since 2001 or so but even if you have the bootleg go to a theater and watch this thing in all it's spectacle.
8/26/2004
Saw on Blues today that there's a new game being developed. Here's the description verbatim: ""Spy Fiction" is a fast-paced stealth-action video game that introduces a number of new features and game play mechanics to the genre."
Um, excuse me how can a stealthy game also be fast-paced? Wouldn't those two be mutually exclusive?
Arstechnica has an article about a new form of silicon which is denser, more resistant to heat, and is a solid performer with the same performance of standard silicon. Sadly, Nvidia video cards will still need heat sinks that were once used as radiator fans on '57 Chevy Bel Aire's.
You mean Windows XP Service Pack 2 is buggy? No way!!
8/23/2004
Let's have some funny today. First, a joke. Here's another joke regarding the Phantom game system. Finally, Nintendo patented the Xbox. I mean, isn't Nintendo the only console without online game support? Huh, what?!
Rome: Total War demo here. Let's finish the day off on such a good note and go play it.
8/22/2004
The continued torture that is no Total War: Rome continues by the persistent teases of interviews. Now there is some light at the end of the tunnel though as a plan for releasing a demo Monday (8/23) has been revealed. Can't wait.
8/17/2004
Fatal1ty is considered one of the best shooter competitors out there. Last year I believe he won the Quakecon 2003 Quake 3 tournament. In fact this guy's apparently a public relations machine with his own representative and booth babes.
And isn't it odd, dare I say convenient that this man, out of the 3000 people at Quakecon made it into the Doom 3 competition. A competition, mind you, which was open to anyone who entered and seats were given out by a drawing/raffle. Why, perchance was the drawing fixed. No of course not. Maybe they just meant, "We'll let you get in but then you have to run the gauntlet of elite gamers before we'll even think of the little guy winning $25K."
Even though the Avault's gone a little crazy with all their content, they still put up some good game reviews.
8/16/2004
ATi Drives updated to 4.8
A study was done surveying online gamers and their time online as well as their habits of playing what type of online systems. As might be expected, PCs still dominate and males are in the majority, but not by much. Here's the full article. I appear though to probably be well above the average on time per week.
Just like in the 60's, analysts under estimated the force of Charlie. I mean Charley.
8/15/2004
So Quakecon wraps up today and I finally got to go out there yesterday for a few hours. I met some people from the ND80 Community as well as meeting some of my teammates from RtCW for the first. Including Saura who advanced pretty far in the Ms. Quakecon tourney. Congrats. Anyway, SiliconSlick is going to make a little write up for my site on his experience at Quakecon, which might be interesting considering his experience hasn't been the best. hehe....
More KoTOR 2 screenshots are here.
8/13/2004
FarCry now has a co-operative mode. Now games like Painkiller and Doom 3 need to get into the swing of it. You'd think after the commercial and critical success of Serious Sam that development teams would get on the ball about that sort of thing and make it de facto standard for shooters anymore.
Want to see something stupid? Go to this site and watch geeks compare their system performance on Doom 3. It's like listening to car nuts talk about their times in the quarter and just as dumb.
XP Service Pack 2? Yup, no problems! I mean, don't read this article.
8/12/2004
Woo! Quakecon started today. Here's the schedule of speakers and events and such. Looks kinda sparse this year.
Steganogpraphy? Sure. "Ever wanted to hide a message into an executable? Now you can with Hydan. Presented recently by Rakan El-Khalil at Defcon and Blackhat, this tool lets you embed data into an application without changing its functionality or filesize!" Neato.
I have to admit this Nvidia GeForce 6600 is a nice budget video card. The fact that you can run them in tandem for twice the power is a plus.
8/11/2004
Microsoft thinks their fight with Japanese trade commission is bad for their image. Isn't this just business as usual?
Now you won't find a bigger AMD fan than me. I've used them for my four previous computers and have never had a problem with them. Neither have my friends or their friends and they cost less than Intel. But isn't this prediction a little much?
8/9/2004
The Intel EE chip didn't last long since "demand has shifted to other Intel processors." Replace "Intel" with AMD64 and you get the gist of the story.
So here's a quandary. Businesses don't like P2P file sharing items such as Kazaa and BitTorent and they are of course actively pursuing legislation against them. But what do you do when BitTorent is proving beneficial to people who want the Windowss XP SP2? You know what you do? You take things on a case by case incident just like most legal issues. If for example someone steals a car do you ban all cars? No, you prosecute the one bad person who stole the car.
8/5/2004
Microsoft merging with Nintendo? Could two wrongs make a right?
Violent video games don't cause violence, but reporting as such sure helps it's sales.
As we can see here, Christian Antkow, lead sound designer at id obviously hung out with Trent Reznor too much before Reznor bailed on id.
8/4/2004
Ah, most excellent. Console commands for Doom 3 abound on this site. INCLUDING SERVER COMMANDS! Thank you ViperLair! Yes, my server is running but I passworded it so... ppppppth
So the Anti-Elvis sent me an email explaining what big man at id ToddH does:
>"Ah, he's the guy who saw what people were doing with
> DOOM and said: "Y'know, if we made our games based
> around a sort-of game engine that could easily be
> modified, not only would the kids have more reason
> to shell-out for it and increase our game's shelf
> life, but we could charge other developers millions
> of dollars to license it..."
All well and good and I had that impression about the CEO of a company. My quip earlier was a joke. Yes, I promise, it was a joke. I'd lick ToddH's and the rest of id's boots.
There are a few problems with Doom 3.
1. Still no ability to lean around corners. You'd think after all this time that could be added. Please.
2. Dedicated server setup, instructions, and execution completely SUCKS! First, if you want to run a dedicated server you have to have the CD in the server! WTF is that logic? This has to be Activision's logic from their lawyers at work.
If you're running a dedicated server that means you're more than likely going to go to another machine and connect to your dedicated server. Why the hell would you need the CD in the server since you WON'T be playing the game on that machine.
Second, the instructions for the dedicated server are a joke. There are none basically. No help whatsoever. They assume your server will have a 3D card so instead of giving some help on setting up a command line based execution of Doom3, the game will not load due to the fact that a server doesn't support OpenGL. So basically you have to use the basic GUI interface in the game to setup a dedicated server. Worthless.
Utter crap! Hopefully some modders can address this OR id puts out a real dedicated server executable. I'm sorry but I really like running a dedicated server off of a T1 line rather than hosting on a DSL/cable line.
Now if you'll excuse me though, there's some two headed
monster thingies that need to be killed in the single player which is quite
the sweetness.
8/3/2004
I've had good feelings in my life: graduating from school, drinking beer, and of course others. But nothing quite satisfied my nerd gene as much as getting my pre-ordered copy of Doom 3 was a nice feeling too.
Is there a chance the track will bend? Not on your life my Impish friend!
8/2/2004
Modders, take note and get to making some new stuff with the Far Cry SDK files. Please. Damn this game is hot!
I thought an Apple a day kept the doctor away? Jobs doesn't know that.
Ah, an update on Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich. Fun site here.
8/1/2004
Once again, I appear to be ahead of the curve in some areas of computer hardware. This site has an article about the benefit of an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ if you're on a budget. Which I told you all about three months ago.
It's been admitted by Microsoft that their search newsbot will give priority of news searches to anything on MSNBC. Honestly, does this surprise anyone? If it does, I'm ashamed of you.
AMD Processor roadmap and Intel roadmap. AMD will be going full bore on 90mm chips and Intel continues to support Celeron (up to generation D now).
Finally, buddy of mine pointed me to this article regarding the demise of co-op. This author is a bit of a tool though, since he fails to mention anything about Serious Sam, the greatest co-op experience ever!