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.
GP2X “The Wiz”
Posted by Jon | Filed under Casual Gaming, Video Gaming
Emulator gaming has always been exciting and fun for me, but who wants to play SNES games on their computer? Its always been preferable to play using emulators on consoles, but sometimes we want to have portable gaming with lots of options. Gamepark has been making emulator handhelds for a long time, and their vastly popular GP2X has just been upgraded with the GP2x Wiz version. The original was a bulky unit, and 233 Mhz…
The new one sports an ARM9 533MHz Processor overclockable to 800Mhz, a touchscreen, and 1 GB of built in storage. But it doesn’t stop there… Its equipped with an SD card slot for additional storage, functions as an e-book reader, calendar, and voice recorder. It also plays movie files including MPEG4, Xvid and DIVX formats.
You can play Atari ST games, Commodore 64, Amiga, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo, Flash Games.. its all open source, so you can visit plenty of home-brew pages to further expand its usefulness.. with a 320×240 crisp QVGA screen and 64 MB of video ram, it is blindingly fast and still provides 7 hours of continual use. Behold the GP2x Wiz…
available for 179.99 from ThinkGeek
Rogue Games releases Colonial Gothic revised!
Posted by Kim | Filed under Tabletop RPG
Last week, Rogue Games released Colonial Gothic Revised, a long-awaited follow-up to, er, Colonial Gothic (I know, you couldn’t guess that on your own, right?). This is such a cool game. As you’d presume, it takes place around the time of the USA’s colonization, and the years leading up to the American Revolution.
Oh, you think history is boring, do you? How about we throw in some magic, and supernatural enemies? Yeah, that got you thinking, didn’t it?
This game was a very early release from Rogue, and the play was a bit buggy – some inconsistencies, things left out of the rulebook, etc. However, with the Revised edition, just about all of that has been fixed. There’s so much more information, and a lot of the inconsistencies have been cleaned up with regards to the rules, etc.
There’s a free 7-page preview downloadable from the e23 link at the beginning of this post. It consists of some background info in the form of letters, and some chapter excerpts.
The players take on the characters of more-or-less everyday people, dragged out of their normal lives to fight the supernatural forces guiding events in the 13 Colonies.
For long-term GURPS or D&D players, the rule system may seem uncomfortably different at first. Each character has five stats – Might (strength), Nimble (agility), Reason (intelligence), Resolution (willpower), and Vigor (health). You also have stats which can change throughout the game, and they’re pretty self-explanatory – Vitality (your health, lose it and you die), Sanity, and Faith. Most decisions are made with two 12-sided dice.
The biggest complaint I’ve heard about the original Colonial Gothic is that it just wasn’t quite enough, in any respect. The Revised edition has really fleshed the game out, hopefully making it much, much more playable. I, for one, can’t wait to sink my teeth into this game.
Check out the main Colonial Gothic site 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.
The System is Down..
Posted by Jon | Filed under Tabletop RPG
Well, this is the first post in a monthly series that looks at different RPG gaming systems, their advantages and disadvantages, history, resources, and so on.
I will be starting this series off with a look back at the Palladium system, and more specifically, their most popular setting in their “Megaverse”, Rifts. Since its creation, over a quarter million copies of the original Rifts rule book have been sold and over 60 source books have been created.
Created in 1990 by Palladium’s creator, Kevin Siembieda, Rifts is set primarily on a post-apocalyptic Earth, that has been covered in “ley-lines” of mystic energy. This has awoken psychic and magic abilities for the population, and also all sorts of mutant life-forms. Where these Rifts intersect, rifts can be opened, and provide gateways to other worlds. This allows for all sorts of possibilities, and opens up the entire Megaverse of sourcebooks to be used, as the system is the same for almost all the worlds available.
The game uses the d20 system similar to Dungeons and Dragons (roll initiative to see who goes first, roll a d20 to strike/parry/dodge, and so on) but that’s where the similarities end. Filled with massive 20+ foot-tall robots and mechanized vehicles, psychotic “crazies” with super powers from electro-implants in their brains, the game becomes a gorefest and can twink our really quickly if not kept under control. Rarely are characters themselves injured; instead, characters vehicles and powers are slowly chipped away until they can recharge (Inner strength Points or Potential Psychic Energy for psychics and magic users respectively) or repair their robots. This is basically because once a character is stripped down to their bare human selves, they become “meatbags” that can EASILY die from a single blow. The simple reason for this is something called Mega Damage. Energy Weapons and other high powered guns do exponentially more damage than regular ones do. Even a single point of Mega Damage will obliterate even the most hardened human, who only possesses SDC (Structural Damage Capacity). This is because one point of MD is equivalent to 100 SDC, and as most guns rarely just do 1 point of damage, human characters are vaporized when taking 20 MD (translating into MD as 2000 SDC!) Robots, other super armored war machines, and some magic/psychic abilities endow their users with MDC, or Mega Damage Capacity. No matter how much SDC a machine gun does, it will just bounce off MDC structures, even if you fire at them for hours, potentially doing thousands of points of damage. This is similar to shooting at a tank with a machine gun. Sure, you might scratch the paint and scuff it up a bit, but you’ll never penetrate the amour. So, with all this said, frail humans without any powers are really powerless to resist death, and for this reason alone, the game never feels “life threatening” because, even if your amour gets shredded, you can often retreat to get repaired and live to fight another day. Personally I prefer a certain degree of risk and danger in games, and this one doesn’t ever really provide that.
Another point against the system is the ability to tweak your character upon creation to make a super combat oriented persona who has bonuses of +10 or more to parry and dodge. This provides a laughable situation whereupon a players character is untouchable, and the Game Master must exploit loopholes in the rules or fudge die rolls (both become predictable and implausible)
However, regardless of these minor flaws, the game does have an immense amount of flexibility and replayability, and although a tremendous about of skill is required to properly GM a game of this type, it can be very fun. This is the first system I even played with any sort of seriousness. If I tally up my gaming experience with this system alone, it makes up for the bulk of my 15 years spent with RPG’s, when split between GMing and playing. Probably because while the system escalates power and “twinkiness” very quickly, there are plenty of sourcebooks available that escalate the difficulty of opponents to match. This makes the majority of the equipment in the original rulebook obsolete (it is only ever really referred to for rule checking), and almost forces the dedicated player to purchase a number of these sourcebooks. Don’t get me wrong.. it is easy to get drawn into wanting the new books and the new equipment, especially if the player is a gearhead and wants to have some elite piece of kit that no one else in the party has.. But regardless, it isn’t a cheap game to invest in. Most people I played with spent at least $200-$300 on books within 5 or so years!
So if you want to give it a go, and can get into detailed combat that might take 1 or 2 hours for 15 seconds of in-game time, like big robots, and can find someone with a huge collection of source material, go for it. You will be very satisfied!
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:
