Month: February 2004

Next of Kin

Posted on by Nimgimli

So my latest Britcom ‘discovery’ is Next of Kin starring Penelope Keith (To the Manor Born) and Richard Gaunt (No Place Like Home). They play an older couple whose son and daughter-in-law were killed in a car accident. Now their three grandchildren have come to live with them.

It’s a comedy with a definite dark edge. First, the basic premise…here’re 3 orphans, after all.

Second is, the couple, and especially the wife, really aren’t thrilled with the arrangement. They’ve been living the good life: weekends in France, lounging about drinking wine with friends…just a comfortable life of idle retirement. Now they’re going to football matches and cleaning up after kids and pets and frankly, they resent it. Continue reading “Next of Kin”

Alcohol 120%

Posted on by Nimgimli

One of the few things I’m not liking about my new system is the CD/DVD drives. They’re LOUD. Incredibly loud.

So, inspired by Kevin Rose of “The ScreenSavers” I bought a copy of Alcohol 120%. This is CD/DVD copy software, make no mistake. But it also handles the creation of virtual drives.

So I can put a game in, rip an image of it, and mount that image as a virtual drive, which is of course silent, and also very very fast! Plus I can put the CDs away somewhere safe and sound.

There is one more piece to the puzzle, and that’s determining what kind of copy protection the CD uses. For that, I snagged a freeware program called ClonyXL.

For more info, go to the source and read Kevin’s article on the topic.

Its funny how I still feel guilty about doing this, even though I’m just ripping the games I own onto the hard drive I own in order to play them! (I’ve got enough friends in the business that I don’t pirate game software.)

There are probably cheaper ways to do this. I used to have a thing called Daemon-tools that set up the virtual drives, and used a trial copy of CloneCD to rip the images, but Alcohol 120% is a fairly complete all-in-one package, only costs $50 and has some nice convenience features, like multiple virtual drives and loading an image by double clicking it. There’s a 30 day trial version if you want to see for yourself.

I just got this all setup so don’t consider this a mini-review. I’ll have to see how it all works for a couple weeks before I pass judgement one way or the other.

More on Battlefield:Pirates

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I finally got around to installing BF:1942, patched it up and installed Battlefield: Pirates today.

What fun! Zipping around in sloops firing broadsides at each other, or manning the shore batteries (cannons, of course) trying to fend off a cutting out expedition (and getting hacked down from behind my a cutlass wielding mad man!).

Honestly I didn’t play for long since my BF 1942 skills are so horribly rusty. I can’t remember any of the basic key commands and I was costing my team in a big way. At this point there’s no single player game available.

So I think I’d best play some straight BF 1942 in single player mode to get the controls down again, then head back for some more Battlefield:Pirates. Well worth a look!

Norton’s not on the phone

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I must be getting old. A few months ago I bought a new pc and it came with Norton AntiVirus pre-installed. Not only did I leave it running, but I just decided to renew it since the free 3 month trial was up in March. The old me would’ve snorted at NAV and continued to live life on the edge…taking the ‘eyes and ears open to signs of trouble’ approach to fighting virii, rather than put up a sturdy (I hope) fence.

But now I’m old and tired, and the the $30 for a year’s protection sounded a lot more appealing than a weekend spent rebuilding my system because I slipped up and let one of the little varmints on to my system. (I should note that my PC is a gaming machine…I do my ‘real work’ on a Mac and I’m not so cavalier with that machine.)

All of which is totally tangential to the point I wanted to make. So I’m filling out the web based form to get my $29.95 yearly renewal to NAV, right? And I get to the screen where I enter my credit card and I noticed something. They give you the option to call up and give someone (presumably a warm body, but maybe a voice mail system) your credit card info over the phone, but they add a processing fee. I thought that was kind of odd…I mean isn’t customer support part of the cost of doing business? But what staggered me was when curiosity caused me to click on the link. The processing fee was $10!!! A $10 processing fee on a $30 item, just because you’re uncomfortable entering your credit card number into a web site…damn, that’s harsh. $2-$3 I guess I could understand, but $10 seemed really steep to me.

But then, I never call anyone if I can possible avoid it, so now I’m wondering if this is a common practice, or is Symantec just being brutal?

Battlefield:Pirates

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was going through my email and saw in the Fileplanet weekly newsletter mention about a new mod for Battlefield 1942. Talk about original! This one turns BF:1942 into a game about pirates!!. You get stuff like sloops and galleons, coastal mortars, and ‘turtles’ (little submarine things) and balloons.

I haven’t played it yet, but I’m going to have re-install BF:1942 and check it out. BTW, the lead developer worked on the XBox version of Crimson Skies as an environmental artist.

Comments

Posted on by Nimgimli

When I first started writing this blog, I never got any comments posted. I sorta got used to that idea and frankly, stopped checking.

But now I have two orders of business regarding comments.

First, for you folk who’ve taken the time to leave a comment, I’d like to say thank you, and to apologize for taking so long to acknowledge your efforts. It’s a real thrill to see that there are people reading the blog!

Second, you may have noticed a good bit of “spam” comments showing up. The damned spammers ruin everything they touch, don’t they? While I can go in by hand and delete them, its a bit time consuming with b2. The problem is that they don’t just show up on recent posts, but apparently they’re stuck in via some kind of script or something.

I could turn off comments altogether, but that’s kind of giving in to the spammers. I could require ‘registering’ to post a comment, but that really is asking a lot of a person. Someone must have a solution to this problem; I just need to do a bit of research.

If anyone reading this has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

And please accept my apologies for any offensive spam comments you might come across in this blog.

Weekend Wrap-up

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t know where this hit of gaming goodness came from. I mean, its February, not December. E3 is still a ways off. Its supposed to be a quiet time for gaming, and yet there are SO MANY great games laying around my house.

I spend a LOT of time this weekend playing Champions of Norrath on the PS2 (exclusively on the PS2). Its a fairly basic hack & slasher a la Diablo or the console versions of Baldur’s Gate. I enjoy this type of game on the PC, but I love ’em on the console. Kicked back on the couch, a bottle of Woodchuck Amber close at hand, the home theater system lending power to every slash of the sword…it’s just a wonderfully visceral experience. I played a bit online with a friend, and that worked well too, once I took my router out of the loop. Its nice to see the PS2 getting some online cooperative love.

Besides CoN, the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo was out this weekend (you can get it for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux). Good lord, what fun. I’ve always preferred Unreal to Quake, and UT was one of my favorite and longest lasting games. UT 2003 was good, but this version really breaks loose. There’s a new game mode called Onslaught that has teams having to control linked nodes in an attempt to assault the opposing base. These nodes act as ideal choke points and really keep the action pumping. And the even bigger change is the addition of vehicles, both land and air. Finally a game that makes Halo seem dated. I loved this demo so much that I already pre-ordered the Special Edition.

But wait, there’s more! I’ve also been sucked into Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town for the GBA (though I play it on the excellent Game Boy Player accessory for the Gamecube. This isn’t a new game, but I was just turned on to it. Yeah, its a farming sim…but its incredibly addictive.

And still NFL Street and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles await my attention. The first is a really fun arcade football game that I really enjoy. FFCC though, I’m still deciding on. Its another action-RPG but I’m not sure the single player game will hold my attention.

Anyway, even with all this gaming I found time to watch a whole bunch of A&E’s Horatio Hornblower movies. I loved the HH books, and I’m loving the movies, too. I bought all 8 at Christmas, and watched the last 5 or so this weekend. Very nicely done and highly recommended.

Thank goodness for 3 day weekends, eh? Of course, I still wasn’t ready to come back to work…. 🙂

Bachus blows smoke

Posted on by Nimgimli

So a week or so ago the news went out that Kevin Bachus has joined Infinium labs (dreamers of the vaperware console, The Phantom). To track back, Bachus started as a PR flak for some game company (which is when I met him in my previous life as a gaming journalist; frankly I no longer remember what company it was. Acolade or Empire or something equally insignificant, I think.) and ended up at Microsoft as “one of the fathers of the XBox.” Good show so far; I have to admit I’m quite a fan of the XBox.

But then he and a few other X-Dads left to start a company, CEG. That flopped, and now Bachus is at Infinium. And damn, is the man blowing smoke!! Read this article and prepare to be amazed. The boy spins like a top. He calls CEG ‘wildely successful’ in some ways, and he mentions that the system specs for The Phantom still haven’t been nailed down (wasn’t it supposed to ship in March?) yet he says the company is in ‘a state of transition.’ Oh yes? Transiting from what to what? Vaperware to…more vaperware?

Sorry, but I see a guy like this laying down his slick spew and I just want to give up hope in the world. It isn’t what you know. It isn’t how good your work is. It isn’t your integrity. It’s all about the pitch and the spin.

I didn’t trust Bachus the first time I met him, and I don’t trust him any more now. Not saying he wasn’t a nice guy, but he was just one of those salesman types that’ll do or say anything to get you to buy his line. And from what I’m reading, that hasn’t changed a bit.

New Rating System

Posted on by Nimgimli

It came to be in a blinding flash that knocked the scales from my eyes and let me See once more.

All game rating systems (I’m talking ‘review ratings’ not ESRB ‘who should play?’ ratings) are flawed! 1 star? 5 stars? A? B? D-? 86%? What’s it all mean?

From now on, I’m going to use my own rating system, and here it is:

DNFB: Did not finish – bored. A game with this rating was, well, boring. I lost interest in it and drifted off to something else. Frankly most games will get this rating.

DNFD: Did not finish – difficulty. This is a game that got too hard for my poor old reflexes to handle. I was enjoying it and intending to finish it, but was unable to master the skills needed. A good example of this would be Viewtiful Joe

FWR: Finished with relief: I got to the end of this game and was relieved to be done with it. The game must’ve had *something* going for it, but by the time I got to the end, I had HAD ENOUGH! A good example? Knights of the Old Republic

FWM: Finished wanting more: My highest rating. Very few games will get this rating. Its *possible* that this rating indicates a game that is too short, but to be honest I find very few games that are literally too short. More likely, this just indicates a game that I was really enjoying when I got to the end. This very rarely happens for me. A good example of this is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

It just occured to me there is one flaw with this system. How do I rate a racing game, or a sports game? Essentially any game without a campaign or a story doesn’t have an “ending” so my new ratings can’t really apply. Hmm, will have to keep working on this.