Published on Wednesday July 30, 2003 .
IGN XBOX reviews Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
This is the first game I've found myself really wanting to play for the Xbox. But I'm either going to wait until the Xbox gets a remodeling so it's smaller, or see if I can borrow my friend's Xbox for a few weeks.
Published on Wednesday July 30, 2003 .
Wow, this recall election is going to be crazy. And even if she weren't a cute Berkeley CS graduate, I'd consider voting Georgy for Governer.
Oh, and just to respond to her question of "I continue to be misquoted, and to have my quotes taken out of context. What's up with that?!" that she asked on her blog:
That's politics. What did you think you were getting yourself into? A clean fight?
I wish her luck, and I'll decide whether or not I'm going to vote for her once the election is a little closer. At the very least, she's worth checking out.
Oh, and don't forget the standard disclaimer of "don't forget to register to vote, especially if you've moved recently, etc." The election is October 7th.
Published on Wednesday July 30, 2003 .
So there I was, playing Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, when I noticed that "Hey, there are an awful lot of Medusas flying at me (in the "Room of Illusion," very early in the game, right after you first meet Death). With no randomness to their flight path whatsoever.
And then I remembered, "Hey, if you hold down B, Juste will just hold out his whip, allowing you to jiggle it around and hit enemies."
And putting 1 and 2 together with creative use of a band aid box and a cell phone [2], my Game Boy is now sitting beside me with an infinite number of Medusas flying right into Juste's whip (at 3 experience points a head), earning me as many levels as I want to take the time to ... let the game earn for me.
Blah, talk about taking any difficultly out of what is already reputed to be an easy game. Of course, I don't have to take advantage of this, but when I see a programmer who did something as stupid as this, I feel obligated to exploit it. It's not cheating if it's just right there in the game, right?
[1] The Belmont you play in this Castlevania.
[2] Just for the record, rigging the GBA SP to keep a button pressed is much harder than it was to rig the old GBA to keep a button pressed, thanks mostly to the partially recessed buttons.
UGO interview with John Linnell of TMBG
This article has a lot of great comments from John, and just to pick one to comment on: I can't believe that people would actually ask them to autograph burned CDs. That's crazy talk. Anyway, good interview. Recommended reading.
Damn generation gap. I made the same joke she did and didn't even realize it.
Mom: Also, how come you were up to early this morning? I was really surprised when you messaged me back so quick.
Me: Roofers.
Mom: Very funny. Caffeine I'd believe.
Me: I said roofers, not RUFFIES. You know, roofers, like the fuckers who come and bang hammers on the roof at god awful hours of the morning? Not the date rape drug.
Here's a few more comments on my shiny new 3650:
- As Mike pointed out in the comments, the "hang up" button usually takes you to the top level of the phone, serving much the same purpose as the "C" button I was so used to habitually pressing on my 5165. The reason I dismissed that as a possibility initially is that I came across some screen where pressing hang up asked me if I was sure I wanted to delete something, which is a bad option to press habitually. But now that I look, I can't recreate that behavior.
- As if it weren't ridiculous enough that my digital camera can run MAME to emulate arcade games, now my cell phone can emulate Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Unfortunately, the circular keypad is a little awkward for playing game boy games, and worse, it doesn't seem like it acknowledges two simultaneous button presses (so I can't jump diagonally, for example).
- The phone can capture short videos, but the quality is far from fantastic. I suppose it might be amusing in some circumstance some day. (If you want to watch movies taken with the phone, you need this quicktime plugin.)
- This program both addresses my desire for scheduled profiles and auto-keypad-locking (though I'm not sure if the auto-keypad-locking is working). I'm going to have to play with it for a few days to make sure it's not too buggy before I decide to buy it. Being able to address problems with the phone through third party software is a nice unanticipated side effect of having such a seemingly overpowered phone.
- Ironically, the one thing I still have yet to really do is use this thing as a phone. Besides three calls to AT&T technical support (Once about locking myself out of the phone because I didn't know the PIN number (see the end of the last post), once about not knowing my account number (which I needed to use the web site), and once about the web site not letting me register and giving me some error code), I haven't used this thing for its intended purpose.
- It was sufficiently non-obvious to me that the call volume was adjusted by pressing left and right that I had to look it up in the manual. I suspect I didn't realize this because of a little usability flaw: Since I was calling tech support, I was in menu-hell, and accordingly, pressing lots of buttons. When you type during a call, the numbers are entered into an on screen buffer, and when that buffer is active, left and right move your cursor through the buffer instead of adjusting the volume. To adjust the volume, you have to hit cancel to hide the buffer, which I was afraid to do because I thought that would hang up my call.
- When I was on hold for a few minutes, the speakerphone option was really nice to have.
Cnet's Top 10 Must Have Gadgets
Man, I know I'm a gadget geek, but I'm almost embarrassed that I own the top 3 items on this list, and own one more if you count my TiVo series one.
It's been more than two years since I got my Game Boy Advance, and in that time I had a lot of fun with the system. But as time passed, my ability to enjoy playing games on it diminished as I was often forced to sit in uncomfortable positions with a light shining brightly over my shoulder. So my primary reason for wanting a GBA SP was obviously the lit screen, and the other features were neutral in my mind. So, here's the bullet point version of what I think of of the SP:
- The lit screen definitely delivers as advertised, and I'm now free to play my games whenever and wherever I want. It's bright enough that it can even double as a flashlight when I'm walking down the stairs in the middle of the night.
- I was a little skeptical of the durability of the new hinge-based design, but now that I've fallen asleep on the SP a few times, it seems to hold up just as well as its predecessors. And when I shut the case before I fall asleep, the screen is even protected. Overall, a win.
- In contrast, it turns out the new metallic paint jobs aren't nearly as durable as the solid plastic colors of the original GBA. I've already got some scratches on the top of my SP that I have no idea where they came from.
- I'm amused to note that Nintendo made the same design decision that Apple did on the older PowerBooks: If the SP is closed and you're looking at it, the "Nintendo" logo is right side up. But if the SP is open and you're playing it, the "Nintendo" logo will be upside down to an observer.
- On that note, once I find my Apple stickers in my still unpacked boxes, I'm going to see if one will fit on the lid of the SP to cover the scratches, to make it look like a mini-PowerBook. =) Of course, then I'll have to decide if the Apple logo should be oriented PowerBook G3 or PowerBook G4 style.
- Though they don't say so anywhere I could find, "SP" is probably supposed to stand for "Super Portable." However, it's nowhere near as "super portable" as some of the micro-cellphones you can buy these days, and really, I don't think it's that much significantly more portable than the original GBA. I'm pretty sure it's thicker, and it's at most half as wide. Anyway, the point is, if you're worried about the size, it's small enough.
- In the other direction, though, is it too small? I don't think so. I even think that the L and R buttons may be a little easier to press than on the original, thanks to having more room to grip the longer body of the SP. However, I haven't played any L and R button intensive games yet, so I can't say for sure how comfortable it will be in the long term.
- As for the rest of the buttons, though I believe the primary buttons and dpad are a little smaller than the GBA, they're still easy to press. However, if you have big fingers, I could see problems with accidentally pressing A when you mean to press B.
- All of the buttons are recessed into the body of the unit (to keep them away from the screen when it's closed), and while this isn't a problem for the primary buttons, the start and select button can be difficult to press even for my not-too-big fingers. If your fingers are much bigger than mine, I suspect you might finding yourself using the eraser of a pencil (or maybe your fingernail or your pinky...) to press start and select.
- The volume control changed from being a dial to being a slider, and I think I liked the dial better. With the slider, I feel like I'm going to accidentally slip and turn it all the way up or all the way down every time I use it.
- Speaking of which, I'm still irritated that the SP doesn't have a headphone jack, and that EB claimed that Nintendo doesn't even make an adapter when I bought my SP. Also, reference this Penny Arcade strip.
- As for the position of the game slot on the bottom when playing classic games with bigger cartridges that stick out of the unit, it is a little irritating, and does prevent you from resting your hands on a table or your lap in certain cases, but it's not really that bad. And most games you'll be playing will probably be GBA games, anyway.
- I do kind of wish the unit had a way to put itself to sleep when the lid shuts, but I suspect that would require some software support that obviously isn't there in old games. At the very least, it would have been nice if the light and sound would shut off when you close the lid. Oh well.
- And the rechargeable battery pretty much kicks ass. Admittedly, it doesn't seem to last as long as a pair of AAs did in the GBA, but I'm playing with the light on full time, I'm not wasting batteries this way, and I can charge the unit without having to stop playing. Pretty much yay.
To sum up, the GBA SP is an overall win. It does have a few flaws in that the paint scratches easily, there's no headphone jack, the start/select buttons are kind of hard to press (but no worse than the Gamecube's stupid Z button), and classic Game Boy cartridges stick awfully far out of the bottom of the unit. But overall, if you're debating between buying a $70 GBA or a $100 GBA SP, the extra $30 will be well spent on the SP instead of another game in the long run. Consider that you'll save on the cost of batteries and glasses and it pretty quickly adds up.
The truth about Bowling for Columbine.
Heh, and just the other day, I realized that Michael Moore was fairly equivalent to a liberal Rush Limbaugh. Don't get me wrong, I liked Bowling for Columbine for the most part, but I thought it was pretty obvious that Moore was stretching to make his points.
Tribes trash Davis over gaming plan - State wants $1.5 billion from gambling revenues.
Wow, a few of the quotes in this article are insane. And Native American sovereignty is a damn sticky issue. I don't even really know where I stand on it. Well, food for thought.