Windows 7 Gripes
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life
Been awhile since I have posted anything, sorry for the absence! I’ve been dealing with spring cleaning my life instead of my apartment.
I am breaking back into blogging with a non gaming post, addressing that “wondrous” new Vista replacement, Windows 7.
Let me be the first to say that I steered clear of Vista alltogether. Ive barely logged a total of one hour of use on the OS, preferring to keep my XP until it was more of less pried from my cold dead fingers. It was the purchase of a new desktop Quad-core with 8 GB of RAM that prompted installing a x64 OS, and as luck would have it, the Win7 leaked beta was available a mere couple months after I installed XP. I threw in a fresh HDD, installed the beta, and never looked back. I think I booted into XP maybe 3 or 4 times, and for no more than a few minutes to copy files across to my Win7 partition, which wouldn’t give me access to my XP files.
The beta, leaked, not ready for public consumption, worked amazingly. It never crashed, it allowed to to force quit unresponsive apps with ease, and never hogged resources.
Suffice to say when the actual product hit the shelf, I was first in line to buy it.
Its now a good 6 months or so later, and I’m about to throw this machine out the window. I don’t know what they did, but this thing is slow, there’s STILL very little x64 bit support (why a 32 bit system that archaically still only addresses under 4 GB of RAM is still offered as an option…)
Very few of my games work, Steam acts up ALL THE TIME, the system always needs reboots, logoffs/logons….
Suffice to say I have decided to just get rid of it and get a MacBook Pro. I’ll probably also get some sort of strictly gaming rig, but nothing large and in charge like my current box.
I’m sad, but looking forward to the day when every game offered on Steam supports OS X.
Half Life 2 Contra??
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life, Video Gaming
In the spirit of the most recent 2d post I just made, I figured these would be great videos to post.
They are Half Life 2 mods that allow for 3d playthroughs of the first level of the old school NES classic, Contra, and of Castlevania!
Many of the sprites are 8-bit inspired, and all the music and sound effects are also lifted from the originals. The level designs are also completely flawless reproductions of the originals!
Enjoy!
Half Life Contra
Half Life Castlevania
Dragon Age: Origins – first thoughts!
Posted by Kim | Filed under Geek Life, Video Gaming
This past weekend at Toronto’s Fan Expo, I was lucky enough to try out the upcoming Dragon Age: Origins game on the XBOX 360 (they do, of course, have multiple console types set up for game play). As an aside, that’s a good reason to go to Fan Expo – you get to play games that aren’t even out yet.
I didn’t get to play for very long, as there were lines of people waiting to get their hands on the controls for a brief chance to play this game. However, I have to say that everything I saw was amazing.
Let me first start with the graphics – I felt like I was watching a lovingly-rendered CGI film. This game has set a wonderful bar for game graphics in its obsessive attention to detail. If you go to the official website and check out the videos, you’ll only get a taste of the glorious high-def graphics in the game itself.
As for game play, I’m not completely sure what to think. I didn’t get to play any introductory gameplay – I was thrown right into the thick of a battle in a castle keep. In this situation, of course, it’s always going to be really hard to figure out how to, well, hit the barbarian with your sword. It felt like most of the controls didn’t really do much – although I’m sure they do, just not in the heat of battle – and despite trying just about every button and trigger, it felt like actual fighting was eluding me. I am assuming that all of this is covered in the introductory parts to the game that I missed.
Unfortunately, this meant that a barbarian soon set me on fire. Yes, you can actually catch fire, and the third-person viewpoint means that you watch yourself go up in flames. Despite the fact that I felt like a colossal idiot, it was pretty cool to watch.
Dragon Age: Origins launches November 3, 2009 for the PC, XBOX 360, and PS3.
New life for Diablo 2?
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life, Video Gaming
Diablo 2 was one of those games that I would always have on any machine I owned, from desktops to laptops, to netbooks. The only reason its not on my current desktop is because I have a 24″ flatscreen with a 1920×1200 display, and the 800×600 mac res that Diablo runs in looks like total ass! Well fret no more! No longer to do have to suffer in waiting for Diablo 3 to be released (I’m betting 2010 or 2011) and you don;’t have to cry at seeing massive pixels on your screen when playing this classic. High res native display support has been released, and boy does this breathe replayability into this Blizzard game! Here’s a link to a 1280×1024 screenshot
Looks amazing! So what are you waiting for? Direct download link here.
DDR Alarm Clock
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life, Video Gaming
Have trouble finding the snooze button in the morning after a late night gaming? Turn off your alarm clock too damned quickly and end up passing out and missing work? Have I got an alarm clock for you!
It’s a miniature version of DDR that requires you to follow the pattern of the light-up dance pads with your fingers in order to turn off the alarm! and priced @ $16 bucks, its cheap to replace should it meet an unfortunate end due to a high-speed collision with your wall… Get it here.
Note: looks like you have to order at least 6 to order this product from the above site… so pick some up for your friends and cross all the gamers off your x-mas list early.. (or store them for inevitable breakage replacements as noted above!
Ravage Transformers Flash Drive
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life
In the spirit of all things geeky, and following on the tail (ha ha) of the Star Wars Flash drives, comes a FULLY TRANSFORMABLE RAVAGE FLASH DRIVE.
Amazingly nerdy, its also available in 2 GB flavor like its Star Wars brethren…
Available on pre-order here for 42.99 (add $2 for “collectors grade”?)
Pirates Movie with Mindstorms NXT Lego sets
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life
This is completely breathtaking… While the actual movie looks like something entirely CGI, it is in fact a movie of a Lego Mindstorms setup. Peep the video, then check out the behind the scenes one following it.
Geeky Pillows!
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life
Another non-gaming related post.. so sue me, its Canada Day, and I’m still at home blogging.. I can post whatever I want!
I may have moved from Facebook to Twitter (its just more my style… FB has waaay too many apps and is too cluttered for me) but I still see the über geekiness of this entire collection of pillows… Available in Digg, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Reddit flavours..and even the Adobe Icons like Dreamweaver are onsite ready to be purchased!
$14.99-19.99 USD, available here.
Starwars Bobblehead Flash Drives!
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life
Darth Vader, Yoda, Storm Trooper, and Boba Fett, all able to store 2 GB each of delicious data… To be released on October. these little guys can be pre-ordered from Entertainment Earth for $24.99 (USD)
Emulators for handhelds
Posted by Jon | Filed under Geek Life, Video Gaming
While I have tried running numerous emulators for various handheld PDAs and phones in the past (most recently with my iPhone) I have always been hampered with a mixture of halting speeds and/or bad touchscreen controls that end up making the experience less than palatable.
With the advent of the new faster iPhone 3gs with an improved graphics processor, Apple has made the jump from a 412MHz ARM11 processor core to a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8, and added a PowerVR SGX 520 graphics processor supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 along with double the amount of DDR memory at 256MB. This should see real world performance of the iPhone 3GS running up to 2x faster than its predecessor, and the the new graphics core has 7x the geometry throughput of the iPhone 3G and 2.5x the fill rate. This means that GBA and even PSX emulators can run at an astoundingly buttery smooth 150FPS to 225FPS with a frameskip of 0, while the older iPhone 3G struggles to reach 60fps.
Peep this video of psx4iphone running Final Fantasy 7:
Personally, I prefer to just keep a DS in my pocket rammed with a 4gb ROM cart, because I like having an actual dedicated gaming unit that doesn’t share a battery with my mobile phone/internet device, but I’m sure those who like to game on their iPhones will be very pleased with this performance boost.. I will try and get my hands on this to see if the controls allow for a worthwhile gaming experience, but it will probably still only be useful for games that do not require a twitch response, like RPG’s
Update!
Seems like the Pre has a version of ZodTTD, and plays Playstation1 games faster and better than the iPhone 3gs, not to mention the hardware keyboard makes control that much more precise
Check the video:
