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GAMING
"Busy, Busy, Busy" goes the lone little bee
Man, this week has been one of the worst weeks in terms of free time. Why were my leisure hours in such small supply? Here's what happened in the last 7 days:
- I spent last weekend studying for a chapter test for Japanese class; I took that test on Monday and received an 87% (not my best but also not bad considering the fact that I neither took nor used [much] Japanese over summer).
- I had a midterm in Psychology yesterday that I studied for from Monday till Thursday. This involved catching up on the reading and defining a list of over 70 key terms...well, I managed to narrow it down to 60 or so, since some of the terms were pretty obvious (*DUR* WHAT IS AN INDEPENDENT VARIABLE? *DUR*).
Well, that was basically it. I'll spend today and tomorrow studying for an Entomology midterm on Monday, but after that I'm home free for the next week or so!
My birthday's coming up on Sunday the 21st, and I must say I'm looking forward to it. No more will I be a "teenager", for I will have transcended into the roaring 20's! I managed to get a bunch of friends together and we're going to go celebrate at Raxx, a restaurant that has some of the best ribs I've ever had, putting it into direct conflict with Tony Roma's and vying for second seat as my favorite restaurant right behind D.Z. Akins in San Diego.
My Golden Sun collection is now complete (again) after purchasing another copy of the first and arguably best line of fantasy RPGs for the Gameboy. It's sequel, The Lost Age, surpasses the original Golden Sun on so many fronts; that's not to say that one should start with the second, since The Lost Age continues the story from Golden Sun. I think I'll play through it again over the next week or so, for old-times sake.
The Orange Box launched! It is AWESOME! Portal had one hell of a twist, Episode 2 answered a couple questions while raising a few more, and Team Fortress 2 rocks my proverbial socks! Here are some score tables from a few games I played a couple days ago:
I used to hate Pyros, until I figured out hot to kick ass with them B)
Nothing like a medic with ubercharge and a heavy with a fully-loaded chaingun to take down three fully-upgraded turrets; CRY SOME MORE indeed!
Annnnnnd I'm spent; now where did I put my DS...?
The Orange Box goes live on the 10th! Keep track of things here: Orange Box Countdown!
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Nothing makes me more giddier than a school girl than games like Bioshock or (soon) Unreal Tournament III. Bioshock wins my praise for the fact that it's coming out tomorrow!
To prepare for this momentous occasion, likened to the release of Half Life and rated 95%+ from every gaming magazine and website you can imagine, I've purchased an extra stick of RAM (bringing me up to 2GB of delicious DDR2 800) and a dual-core AMD Athlon X2 3800+ (65W edition, because I do my best to protect the environment!). Paired with my mid-line ATI x1600XT video card, my machine should have no problem fulfilling most of the recommended system requirements.
If you have no idea what I'm so enthusiastic about, check out some of the videos on this page.
Just 29 more hours to go!
What day and age is it when you live in an apartment complex and experience download rates that are CAPPED at 100KB/s? Obviously it's the 2007's, because I am living that nightmare right now.
I suppose I shouldn't complain too much, seen as how the internet is included in the rent, but I just can't see the justification in capping people at such a low rate...are they paying their ISP by the megabyte? Did they get an internet plan that included JUST enough bandwidth to supply every toom with 100KB/s bandwidth? In this day and age every room should have AT LEAST 300-500KB/s; we're living in the information age, slow internet just isn't going to cut it!
And here's something else that chafes me about the internet around here: any YouTube videos pulled from cache.googlevideo.com DO NOT LOAD. The majority of flash videos seem to be pulled from that site; whenever I want to watch a YouTube video, I'm stuck earmarking it and watching it later at work. Oh the humanity!
By the way, downloading 3.4GB of Painkiller (woo, got it at half price!) at 100KB/s does NOT equal fun. After letting it run overnight (seven hours or so), it's only downloaded ~700MB...*sigh* I suppose I'll just leave my computer running all day until it's downloaded.
There are only a couple things more annoying than not being able to remember where you put something, especially if it was less than 12 hours since you had that something in your hands.
Take my keys.
After going out with some friends for a Saturday evening of food and fun, I returned back to the dorm and partook in some Super Smash Bros. Melee with a couple more friends. I know for a fact I had my keys with me then, because I used them to open the file cabinet that houses my more expensive goods (several hundred dollars of software, blank checks, and my Gamecube games and gear). I brought my keys with me when I went to play SSBM, and afterwards I grabbed them on my way back down.
This is where the "fuzzy" part of my mind kicks in and I can't remember 100% what I did with my keys. I know I made it back to my dorm room with them, and I remember using them to open the locked file cabinet again, but after that I don't have any idea what I did with them.
I scoured my room for them, looked in all the usual places, but still no keys...my dad's coming up tomorrow with some bolt cutters and a new lock, and probably a slap upside the head for being such a bonehead, so after we have lunch I'll find out for sure if my keys are in there.
In other more pleasant news, Starcraft 2 has been announced, and after watching all three gameplay trailers and the cinematic trailer (btw, Blizzard, how hard is it to offer up files for HTTP download, eh? I'm sick and tired of torrenting everything), I have to say I'm very "meh" about the whole thing. I've never really been much of an RTS guy, so I see a game like Starcraft and think, "wow, those are some pretty awesome graphics"...I'll try to get into it like I do with most RTS, but I'm just not sure I'll find the fun in this that many people who can handle micro-micro-management games will find.
I WILL, however, derive great pleasure from the new Super Smash Bros. Game that's coming out for the Wii. Super Smash Bros. Brawl promises new characters, levels, and items while retaining the familiar Gamecube control scheme we've all come to love. Nintendo announced its decision a year ago, as quoted from Joystiq's article back on May 10th, 2006:
Quote:
And before you ask, no, I don't have a Wii now, but a recent scheme came across my doorstep that, while sounding just a BIT too good to be true, also sounds plausible enough that I want to give it a try. Basically, it involves GameFly's referral program; right now, GameFly has a promotion where if I can get 5 friends to sign up for their paid service, I get a free year of GameFly or a Nintendo Wii. The cheapest GameFly plan is $8.95 for the first month, so all I have to do is give five friends $10 and have them sign up for a month of the service. Once I get my voucher for the free Wii, they all cancel, I get my Wii, and everyone's happy...except for GameFly. I have the five friends, I've scoured the TOS for any possible loopholes/catches, all I need now is to find a bit of free time to coordinate the whole ordeal. Its a bit risky, but hey, you don't get ahead in anything if you don't take chances!
Ever wanted to run your own railroad? Become a free tycoon today!
I played around with Railroad tycoon for a bit, but to be honest, I've never really been that good at micromanagement games or real-time strategy games so I failed horribly...I have a hard time keeping twenty things going at the same time, something about a broken X chromosome or something...in any case, there's the link if you're interested, and enjoy!
It is official, HDTP can start r0xx0ring your box0rz!
When: Today @ 6pm
Where: Foxhole
What: Counter Strike 1.6 Lanparty
Sixteen five-man teams enter for a chance to win one of three awesome prizes, a gaming mouse for first place, gaming headphones for second place, and a gift certificate to Best Buy for the third place team. Resolution is set at 1024x768, with stock Dell mice and user-defined mouse-sensitivity.
So its my first lan tournament, and I'm on a team. You would think I'd be happy, except for one thing: I SUCK AT COUNTER STRIKE 1.6! :O
I've been practicing, and I realized (again) why I hate 1.6:
1. In 1.6, its OK to shoot through walls; if the game lets you do it, its technically not cheating, right?
2. The bigger the weapon, the more damage it MIGHT do, unless its the AWP, in which case ONE SHOT TO THE RIGHT ARM KILLS YOU (true story =\)
3. Full Armor and Full Health? Not after three shots are put into you with an AK...its a shame I wasted $1000 on RIOT GEAR; was it too much to expect it to do ANYTHING in the way of stopping bullets? I guess so...
That's all I can think of at the moment. I'll let you guys know how it went sometime later tonight. Wish me luck!
So Angry and I squared off in Jaykon Bacon: Source today at approximately 5:00pm PST, and boy, what a hectic hour and a half it was. We were neck-and-neck every step of the way, and we each had an opportunity to pull a win out from all the sneaking and sniping.
Round 1: Deathmatch
Winner: Angry
The first round was played in the eternally dark map hl2jks_svm_assault. Angry won this round, but not after getting spanked by me in the first 10 minutes. Once we figured out each other's tactics, though, the game's intensity increased and we were constantly at each other's throats. He'd snipe me, I'm obliterate him with my heavy machine gun, and he'd come back around with his insane-range-shot gun. He laid the final blow with a sniper from the opposite corner of the map.
Round 2: Deathmatch
Winner: Matt
The second round was played on the sunny-day map hl2jks_svm_aztec. This time around, Angry got the lead, but the real excitement was at the middle of the round. The map broke and started spawning us in the exact same area each time we died. Needless to say, we spent a good 5 minutes racking up seven or eight kills each. I laid the final twentieth blow with my trusty heavy machine gun, and it was off to round three!
Round 3: Snake V. Monkey
Winner: N/A
The last round was a game of Snake Versus Monkey. Basically, it was a game of keep-away with explosives and cardboard boxes. But these weren't your average boxes, no, these were cardboard boxes that made you invisible if you crouched under them. The goal of the game was for the snake to steal a pile of stuffed turtles. Don't ask me why, that's just how it works. Anyway, Angry admitted to being paranoid several times during this round, and I couldn't blame him: when your enemy can turn invisible and run faster than you, you have to be paranoid. Each role was well-balanced, though, with the Snake having a silenced pistol, flashbangs and the hide-box, and the Monkey armed with an SMG, sniper rifle, pistol, and several types of explosives. We were both convinced that this mode of play would be more fun with more Monkeys and Snakes, but we'll see where that goes :D
All in all, trash was talked on both sides, and in the end...I ultimately came out the winner, with my FIRST win yesterday ;)
Final Score: Matt 1 (1), Angry 1
[EDIT] Apparently, Angry has no sense of humor, so I modified the score to make him happy :P
Angry is terrible at Half Life 2 Jaykin' Bacon: Source
Don't trust anything he says. Compared to me, Angry's a noob at blogging, too ;)
I guess there's no convincing some people that they need practice before they challenge a master...Master_Kale, that is! :D
...and a techie who missed his daily intake of 12 volts
It turns out things were not as bad as they appeared regarding the apparently "dead" motherboard I received from Newegg.com.
No, the problem was a result of operator ignorance and error...I took the motherboard for granted and applied two year old knowledge to a problem today. It turns out that I had missed a plug when I hooked the computer up. What plug did I miss? Take a look at the picture below and see if you can guess what plug I might have missed:
Now, to find out for yourself what POWER PLUG I missed, just click the picture...I'll wait.
YES! That's right, I forgot to plug in the 4-pin 12v power cable to the motherboard. In my defense, I'd never worked on a computer that was new enough to use this plug, and there was no mention of the socket in the manual. I found out the error in my ways only after going to Fry's, dropping $118 on a new motherboard and power supply, installing the new board, and then having my good friend William point out that maybe, JUST MAYBE, I might want to plug that 4-pin connector in. After getting the new motherboard to beep, I tried the same set up with the board I thought had died and *Beep Beep* it worked!
So now, I have to apologize to Newegg.com (Sorry, Newegg, for thinking that you'd taunt me with faulty hardware), kick myself in the butt (I'm standing as I write this), and then see if Fry's will be nice and allow me to return hardware I purchased out of stupidity...
And so there you have it, my new computer is up and running, and OMG the difference in performance is night and day. I took a couple screenshots of Half Life 2: Lost Coast at 1280x1024 and with 16x AF and 6x AA to show off the power of the ATI Radeon x1600XT I have chugging away under the hood:
A picture of the coastline, showing off HDR
The level of detail on the fisherman is phenomenal, especially with all the graphic settings turned way up.
That's it for the evening, good night!
This wizard's health is just fine, so keep your food
To cut an otherwise boring story short, I'm fine in just about all ways. Lungs and heart checked out, no hernias, and pulse (60 BPM) and blood pressure (117/80, I think, or maybe it was 117/60) all normal. I've never really been a sick person, and I'm guessing all those years of baseball, wrestling, and cross country are paying off in decreased medical bills.
I've gotten addicted to EVE Online recently. They had a 14-day free trial and I had a lot of free time, so I decided to give this space-based MMO a try. I must say, its a very interesting game. Most MMO's have you raising character levels and stats, and equipping various armors and weaponry. EVE deviates a bit from this by removing the concept of levels. Right off the bat, you start training various skills. These skills come into play when you purchase a ship or add various weapons and armor to your ship. Each usable item in the game has various skill requirements, and you must meet each requirement to use the item.
The size of space in ginormous, and EVE does a VERY good job of portraying the size of New Eden (the name of the system the races of EVE inhabit, for more back story check out this page). You navigate by setting destinations and engaging your auto-pilot, which proceeds to navigate the vastness of space to get you to where you want to go. This method of navigation sounds a bit boring to some, but the fact is the time it takes to get from system A to system B can be so long (5, 10 minutes) that you can actually put the game down and let it run its course while you go do some chores or read a book or watch TV. Right now, as I write this, I'm returning to my corporation's headquarters, and I have about another 2 minutes of travelling before I make it there.
Don't count EVE out, I really can't do the game any justice unless I take up a whole two more pages. Just know that this game is very community-based, from system alliances to corporate espionage, all the way up to the very economy that you buy goods from. Demand and supply play strongly into commerce, and you can even follow EVE's "stock market" in-game. Neat stuff!
And before I sign off for the evening, I owe a friend a plug for some skinning he did. First off, a little background: as some of you may know (read: most of my readers), I'm the webmaster for the Deus Ex High Definition Texture Project (HDTP) and have been for a little over a year. Over this last year, the project has been aiming to enhance and recreate (in high-poly models and high-resolution textures) all the weapons, decorations, crates, barrels, and NPC's in the game.
Well, a great deal of progress has been made, and I happen to be good friends with some of the texturers and modellers. One of the modellers, ThalesA7X, was nice enough to do some custom skins of upcoming weapon models for HDTP, and here they are, a lineup of the best Matt's Blog Weaponry available on the blackest of markets!
The always potent Gas Grenade, filled with hot air and ready to kill
Knock off a few baddies with this witty weapon
When you're up against a mech, go with the best
Because you deserve the best...plasma-based weaponry
Recognize anything about the textures? And before I get anyone else mad, I want to thank JC12[/b] for the Gas Grenade, Glock, and LAW models (fan-freaking-tastic work my friend), and [b]Snipamasta for the Plasma Rifle (can't wait to see that baby in-game)! And of course, watch for the official release of these weapons (with appropriate textures of course) sometime in September, if everything goes according to plan :P
And because he did such an awesome job with these, ThalesA7X gets a plug and I make myself out to be an marketing whore...but hey, I have custom weapons and you don't!
Good night everyone!
So now, I must hit the streets again and play the "oh please sir, may I have a job?" card in the hopes that someone will bite and give me work. If I don't find some work as an employee, I'll have to bust my ass at some web design work, and hope that I can get enough that way. So far, I have one web design job I'm working on, so it looks like I'll have to kick it up a notch with my design skillllllz....
And Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 is pretty awesome. I used it to type this entry and for the most part, I must say I'm impressed...at least with the spell-checking feature. I don't know if I like my tabs each having a "close" button on them; it was for this reason I never used one of the earlier extensions that put those same buttons on the tabs. The search bar is also unusually long for some unknown reason...huh. I know there's a "how to tweak Firefox 2.0" article floating around on http://www.Digg.com somewhere, I just have to find it now.
Well, that about wraps it up for now. I hope you're all having an awesome time over July! Oh, and before I forget, there's a map I'm working on for the Deus Ex: MIB mod that I'll post screen shots of, so for people who like DX and the mod community (*cough*EER*cough*), stay tuned!
So, what's been going on? Hmm, John Minns recently updated his site to version 3. Its a rather nice site and he's going to feature a lot of cool stuff: narrated video tutorials on several programming languages, anyone? He's recently begun coding in PHP and CSS, so I give him advice when he asks for it and THE WORLD KEEPS ON TURNING!
You should also go check out my friend's forum at http://forums.wolfram-studios.com/. It's a bit dead right now, possibly because of end-of-the-year testing, but feel free to register and start posting. There's a lot of neat threads in the General Discussion, and you're sure to find something that'll make you laugh in the aptly titled Funny Stuff thread.
If you own Half-Life 1 and you've never played SvenCo-op, you owe it to yourself to download this EXCELLENT mod and proceed to lose entire days to it. Sven Co-op (SC) is a quirky mod that is designed with cooperative game play in mind. There are literally thousands of maps available and just about all of them involve over-powered monsters, jumping puzzles, and unique weaponry to mow down the competition. I was a member of the Cafe of Rabid Snarks SC clan up until it was disbanded, and I'm the one responsible for their current site layout (though, it looked a lot sharper beforet the clan leader got his hands on it).
So yeah, there's a little bit of background behind some of the affiliates I've linked to on the right. Go and check them out for a nice change of scenery; you might be suprised at what you'll find!
P.S. To those of you who've stayed loyal, school is almost out and my time is almost free...*HINT HINT*
I had lost faith in Nintendo after sub-par games on the DS and a general lack of games that I felt were for the older audiences (i.e. hardly any extreme violence/shooting action-type games), but this video rekindled my appreciation for the quality and innovation Nintendo has come to be known for.
So I've decided to stick it out with Nintendo...at least until the next console wars!
"Wah-wah, wah wah wah, wah, wah-wa-wah"
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here's an audio clip of the sound you hear when you're "listening to the news".
[quote]Valve's Doug Lombardi has confirmed to Mod-HQthat their upcoming expansion pack Half-Life 2: Aftermath will ship on April 24.
"We're currently targeting April 24th for the release of both Aftermath and Platinum.Platinum will include HL2, HL2 DM, CS: Source, DoD: Source, and Aftermath."[/quote]
Wow, its about time. Aftermath dropped off the radar around Novermber, and I hadn't heard anything about it until now. I hope this expansion to Half Life 2 lives up to the hype...