Posts Tagged ‘news’
The last two months in a picture (and also words)
So it’s been approximately ages since I’ve done anything in this space, so I figured I’d quickly summarize my last two months with a picture.
(Numbers are roughly clockwise)
1) My torn-apart Eee PC 901. A while back, I broke the LCD by using it as a carrying handle, a use it neither was designed for nor deserved. So I ordered a replacement and assumed I’d be able to install it myself. This was a good assumption; expecting the shipper to send precisely the right model was not. All-in-all, the pins didn’t match up and the backlight didn’t work. Ordering the right part soon.
2) Machine of Death. A great book that I’ve been reading. I think it might be the first actual hold-it-in-your-hands paper book I’ve bought for my own personal reading enjoyment in years.
3) 3D glasses. I was on an Amazon shopping spree and figured why not.
4) My newly repaired Macbook Pro. The turdbiscuits at the Apple Store finally believed me that the issue was the same one I told them it was all along, namely that the Wi-Fi card was Wi-Fried, and repaired the slut of a laptop. So far, so good, but I’ve renamed it “Morgan”.
5) Playstation 2 and Persona 4. I picked up a used PS2 and a bunch of games for dirt cheap over the holidays and have really been enjoying it. Persona 4 is the one game I’ve spent the most time on, over 20 hours according to my save file but many more hours were played but lost to death. It’s really quite fun and I’m looking forward to playing more of it.
6) Magic: The Gathering deck. Yes, I’ve gotten into Magic. I have a few friends with whom I play a couple times a week and currently have 3 decks. Hopefully, I will be able to refrain from converting my entire life savings into trading card form.
7) My DVD copy of The Social Network. The local Blockbuster is shutting down and are in the process of liquidating their DVD inventory, so everything is on sale for, again, dirt cheap. I picked up the special edition of what I consider to be 2010′s best film for a delicious $8.
Otherwise, most of my time has been spent on game development and school. I made another Oceanspirit Dennis game and am currently working on two other unrelated, non-OSD game projects. I also might be working with a certain someone on a certain something that may or may not certainly be a book.
New PC!
I got a new PC. I made it myself. It has fancy parts for fancy games. Hip hip hooray. With the new PC comes new games, which I could not previously run. These include Just Cause 2, Crysis, Prince of Persia ’08, and all my old games on maximum settings.
Pics!
Shiny...
Messy... I'll get around to organizing the cables.
I’ve been pretty busy recently, working on several different things. Oceanspirit Dennis has been Oceanspiriting, but I’ve got other, different, game-related stuff on my mind. Not sure if anything will come of it.
Free Game Spotlight: Vector Vendetta
It’s called Vector Vendetta, and it’s flippin’ sweet. A bullet hell arcade shooter staring interesting geometrical shapes sounds kinda familiar right? But unlike Geometry Wars, VV is 100% free and able to be played by you right now by clicking these words.
Game Author: Radiant
Website: Crystal Shard
Oceanspirit Dennis
As my love of the name “Dennis” should be quite evident by now, it is no coincidence that some fellows and I created a character, nay, a new universe containing the name. Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you…
Oceanspirit Dennis
The basic idea behind OSD is that through all manner of unusual events, I ended up drawing the above picture and a hero was born. He is the forbidden lovechild of Batman and Cloud Strife, torn between a life of crime-fighting and being a typical JRPG protagonist poof. As such, he is perfect game-starring material and has so far been the focus of five games. Here they are in chronological order.
- OSD: Scourge of the Underworld, by Ben304
- OSD: Scourge of the Underworld DX, by me.
- OSD: Mighty Pirate, by Ben304
- OSD: The RPG, by discordance
- OSD: Pirates On The Poopdeck!, by Ponch
So you can see the guy has quite a career ahead of him. In fact, if downloads aren’t your thing, you can actually play Scourge of the Underworld right here in your browser by clicking these words! Pretty sweet, huh? One thing of note, part of OSD’s genesis involved a forum troll with a particularly loose grasp of the Queen’s English, so a couple of those games have appropriately incoherent dialog as a homage. Not mine, however, which instead includes voice acting! NICE. Here’s Oceanspirit Dennis’ new look, too.
Also, I played the first three hours of Metal Gear Solid 3 with a friend the other day. Or, more accurately, I watched two hours of MGS3 and played an hour.
Finally, new Hardydev review by me on a pretty sweet game called Yoomurjak’s ring. This one is a video review, baby.
12 hour retrospective.
So I succeeded in staying in bed for 24 hours straight. All in all, it was a fun experience, though I don’t plan to do it again anytime soon unless it’s for charity or something. Some highlights…
- I’d say most of my time was spent with video games, and most of my video game time was spent with Fallout 3. So far, pretty nice game, though arguably inferior to Mass Effect in most ways besides combat, graphics, and auto-saving. But it’s a different type of game for a different audience.
- It seems every time I rent Spider-Man 2, the DVD is scratched or really dirty or something else that prevents me from watching it all the way through. I still don’t recall if I’ve ever seen the whole thing.
- The best way to scare off someone on Omegle asking “m or f?” is to respond “lioness.”
- Richard Feynman’s a beast.
Grab Bag
Let’s have some structure:
- Video games: I recently beat Mass Effect, and let me say that it is definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played. It gives COD4 a run for its money as my favorite Xbox game. Sure, it has a lot of flaws (annoying inventory system, the MAKO vehicle, Unreal engine 3), but it more than makes up for them with an incredible story, truly lovable characters, the best dialog system I’ve ever encountered, and more than tolerable combat. Go buy it now. Other games I’ve been playing recently: Left 4 Dead 2, Saints Row 2, Spider-Man 2, and Modern Warfare 2 (see a pattern?). All of them are really good, but none of them are quite as epic as Mass Effect. I’m planning on getting the collector’s edition (EDIT: For the sequel in January, that is), which is something I’ve never done.
- Computer problems: If you’ve read my twitter in the past two weeks or heard my screams of anguish (audible radius: 2000 km), you’ll no doubt know that my computer is friggin’ screwed up. I have nearly exhausted my options for fixing it, but I don’t think it’s too late yet. After some preparation, I plan to back up all my essential stuff twice, including app licenses, and do a complete format and reinstall. I’m probably going to end up doing this for both my Mac and Windows partition, so I’m going to use this opportunity to upgrade to Windows 7 and increase the size of my Boot Camp partition. I honestly don’t know why I’m upgrading, since the last 3 times I’ve upgraded my computers I’ve wrought nothing but sorrows.
- Christmas: I hate Christmas music. I like Christmas, but I hate the music more than anything. Other things I hate more than anything include the cold, rain, final exams, and media whores. Why I’m in Memphis during the winter and why I still have yahoo.com bookmarked is beyond me. But once again breaking my own rule of never announcing anything until it’s done, I have plans for literally 9 different thing for my holiday break. Instead of breaking my rule outright, I’ll just bend it a little by giving the first letter of each: M, C, A, K, F, T, P, S, and B. Guess away.
Free Crap
Well, it’s that time of year again. No, wait, it isn’t.
So it turns out MacHeist is doing a “nanoBundle” which, short story short, is a half-dozen odd Mac apps for $0, i.e., free. There’s some good stuff in it, like WriteRoom and Twitterrific. There’s some details about unlocks and some stuff on Facebook to get another app or two, but the big deal is that it’s free.
In the realm of not free crap, some pretty stellar-looking games are coming out this Christmas season. I’ve got Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2 pre-ordered, and the demo of L4D2 is friggin’ uh-maze-ing. I’ve also been getting back into the swing of PC gaming, TF2, L4D1, and my second play-through of HL2, not to mention copious amounts of fun in Gmod. My MBP handles these games all pretty dandily, HL2 gets 60fps+ on absolute maximum settings. My main issue right now, though, is a lack of hard drive space on my Bootcamp partition. I’d like to give it another 25-30GB from my Mac side, and I’ve heard murmurs that such a feat can be done with GParted. I’ve used the live USB with my Eee with eventual success. While I’d prefer not having to backup and restore, I might be willing to do it with Windows XP, maybe as a transition to 7. But I’m not at all interested in wiping and restoring OS X. This is something I’ll have to research, being a potentially fatal operation.
Google Wave Mass Hysteria
Not too long ago, Google announced “Wave.” It seems to be a shiny online collaboration tool made out of pure heroin. Or at least you’d think so by looking at how desperate people are to get their hands on an invite to the exclusive online party. But the obsession seems to have died down; Wave’s been out of the Twitter trending topics for a while now and I’m seeing fewer shameless pleas for invites.
Why all the fuss?
Sure, Wave looks pretty spiffy, and if you do a lot of collaborative work, I could see how it would be useful, but the demand goes beyond that. A lot more people want Wave than need it. Why? Well, for one, it’s new and exclusive. “Gosh, maybe if I can get a Google Wave invite I can finally feel special!” Plus, with the power to invite others comes responsibility, or, conversely, power-hunger. “Sure I’ll invite you… if you make me a moderator on your forum.” These motivating factors have led me to deduce that the hype surrounding Wave and the invites thereto stems at least partially from the economy of scarcity. Since there seems to be only a limited number of spots that Google will allow at this point, the value of an invite increases with time, to the point where invites start showing up on eBay. Because people want into the Google-select so badly, they are willing to pay actual money for a service that they’ll eventually be able to get for free. Of course, since time is money, some people can justify this monetary sacrifice.
I’m biased though, I really wouldn’t have anyone to collaborate with except classmates, but that’s commonly known as cheating. Plus, I haven’t really done any research at all on Wave. Still, I can see the allure of holding such a power, the potential for evil is… staggering. Yes… quite staggering.
Yes you want it, but do you really NEED it?
At work, I’ve started creating an iPhone app for my rapper boss and am looking at getting into iPhone development as a “serious hobby.” It could fit into some entrepreneurial ideas I have for the future involving videos for university courses, too. Now the virtual iPhone that comes with the SDK certainly works, but I imagine it would be much nicer doing the testing on an actual device. No doubt it would also be friggin’ sweet for mobile browsing, games, utilities, and more or less anything I could imagine. But, daaaamn, a data plan is expensive! Not to mention the charges I’d undoubtably rack up by going download-crazy on the app store. I have a phone. I have an iPod. Do I need an iPhone?
Condawg says no, an iPod Touch would do. I initially brushed off the suggestion as impractical because the Touch didn’t offer enough improvements to replace both my phone and iPod. I’m starting to think it still might be an option, but I’m unsure. Clearly, I’d prefer an iPhone, but would it be an investment or an indulgence? Before I bought one, I’d need to know that I could at least partially cover the costs from app or work income. So before I make the purchase, I’ll want to be more fluent in app design and Objective-C.
Or I could blow all my money on a plane ticket to New Zealand to get some dandy books.
In other news, Triumph of the Nerds is now for sale on ebay for $20! Check it out here.
