Here’s a great friday fun link - a free racing simulator from BMW, released as part of a marketing campaign for their cars. It was developed by a commercial game developer known for their racing simulations, and you can tweak the settings to the point where this is a very difficult sim. It’s free, runs fine on older hardware, and worth a look whether your tastes tend towards arcade or sim racing since you can configure it either way. Promotional page is here, and here’s a handy download link. This is PC only, sorry to say.
Archive for September, 2007
Check out Battlemachy, a flash based shooter. You’re a dude mounted on a Pegasus armed with a spear. The game is mission based and in each mission you can only move on a clearly defined track. Some missions play out similar to space invaders, others are like star castle, and so on. You earn money based on your performance in each mission, which you can spend between missions to upgrade your gear with things like faster flying and shooting speeds. Simple fun with good graphics and a worthy friday fun link.
I met with a specialist today and he’s pretty sure I will have to undergo shoulder surgery, the only question is the extent of the surgery. I have to go back and get another MRI, this time with a dye injection which will help highlight the tears (turns out there are multiple tears) in my rotator cuff muscles.
The gist of what’s going on in my terms is, your shoulder is sort of a fulcrum, with a ball of muscles that holds the joint in place in the center of its socket. There are tears in those muscles on my shoulder, which allows the shoulder ball to abrade against my shoulder blade bone, which in turn is causing tears in the muscle at the top of my shoulder blade. I may need repair on all of those muscles, or only the ones holding the ball in place in its socket. I’ll know for sure after the second MRI and consultation with the physician.
The even worse news is that if I don’t opt for the surgery, my shoulder will eventually degrade to the point where I can no longer use it for almost anything, though he said that would take a long time.
The good news is he thinks surgery will restore my shoulder to almost good as new state, and definitely remove the pain issues I’ve been having. I may never toss a football 40 yards again, but at least I’ll be able to swim and toss a tennis ball with Soolin.
… in a men’s room with a suspiciously wet floor.
Thats is all,
So, today’s Halo day in north america, probably globally as well though I haven’t paid close enough attention to know for sure. Despite my mixed feelings about Halo, I’ve got my copy and will be playing it online tonight. In honor of Halo day, here’s a live action halo movie created as part of the marketing effort to convince Hollywood to finance a Halo movie. Or something. Either way, pretty cool live action Halo follows:
Here’s a great idea - take the digg approach to ferreting out the ‘best’ of the web and apply it to ‘fastest game demo download links’. That’s Filerader in a nutshell, and at first blush it seems to work as advertised. Users post links to downloads for game demos, mods, and other content, and if the link is fast users vote it up. The better the link, the more votes and presumably the faster you get the content. Worth a bookmark if you regularly grab game demos like me.
Yet another in a series of articles illustrating why I decided not to buy a house when I moved to MA. The basic facts remain the same: median income has not kept pace with the median purchase price of housing. Historically this has always meant a correction in housing prices, and the level of disparity between income and housing costs is huge this time, suggesting that the correction this time around will be huge and painful. There’s a lot more detail to be found in this piece if you’re curious.
Check out www.jottit.com, a new site which lets you build a webpages or an entire site. The interface couldn’t get any simpler -there is none, you simply type text (or html if you know it) into a form. To create new pages you hit one of the few ‘buttons’ available on the site, and you can similarly edit previously created pages. You can create an account and get a subdomin to permanently store your pages at, which I’ve done (it’s at tempus.jottit.com), and you can choose whether or not to make pages public or share the ability to edit them with others.
I’m really enamored with this, for many of the reasons I like wikis so much. This lowers the barrier to entry for creation of web content - if you can type text, you can create web pages, basically - while still allowing for more more sophisticated content creation for those who need it. Having spent this summer getting beat up via proxy by the alumni of my current employer, who are displeased with the complexity of the tools we’ve built for them, a drop dead simple interface like this has distinct charms.
It’s not clear for how long this will be free or what the creators’ intent is for the service, so I don’t know that I’d go building out a lot of content in this yet, but it’s easy as can be to pop over and check it out and is well worth a look.
Given my mention of Bioshock earlier in the week, and the fact that I’ve repeatedly talked about how System Shock 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, I thought this little recipe for getting System Shock 2 upgraded and running on a modern windows box might be of interest. It includes instructions and links to patches and graphical, gameplay, and sound updates for the original game. If you haven’t played it, even without any of this it remains a superb game and has aged much better than other games of that era (I’m thinking of you, Deus Ex). It also has online co-op which I’ve tried and failed to really interest any of my friends in, though Nick gave it a shot one winter weekend long ago.
You can score System Shock 2 cheaply off of ebay, where it shows up periodically, or via the home of the underdogs, where there are links of questionable legality available to download a copy.
Most long time PC gamers would agree that System Shock 2 is one of those games that belongs in the gaming canon - a classic that any game lover should play, even if just to get a sense of how its design choices informed the games that came after it. I’ve played all the way through it twice, the only non-strategy game I’ve ever done that with, and have replayed portions of it, especially the beginning, dozens of times. It’s really that good. Give it a shot, it’s well worth it.
This has been sitting in my wordpress unpublished queue for ages waiting for me to get around to finishing the post and publishing it. A shame, that, since it’s one of my favorite podcasts. 1up yours covers videogames, mostly from a console perspective but they do pay some attention to the PC market as well. The show’s a bit on the raw side, sort of an aged frat boy (but maybe don’t know it) tone, and sometimes they drink too much and descend into exuberant incoherence, but all in all they do a really good job of covering the week’s gaming news, they occasionally do really good in depth coverage of issues, and several of the hosts have an encyclopedic knowledge of games (Shane especially) that’s really impressive and helps give context to the new games they’re talking about. Check it out using the link above, or find it in iTunes by searching for 1up yours.
The second phase of the project I was hired to work on came out at the start of classes this year, and the student newspaper noticed and wrote about it. It’s nice to get a little positive coverage since most of the time I get criticism and occasionally vicious complaints. The tone of the article is basically very positive, and they get most of the details right which is unusual for a newspaper 
I picked up my second PS3 game a while ago, Warhawk, and have been playing it a lot. I was a fan of the original single player only game on the Playstation 1, and I like the new game even more. It’s basically Battlefield 2 for the PS3, featuring versatile Warhawks (a sort of plane/helicopter hybrid) as kings of the battlefield. It’s a multiplayer only game that supports up to 32 players per match. There are 5 huge maps which restrict access to different areas depending on the number of players, and a number of game modes, including Capture the Flag, various kinds of Deathmatch, Warhawk only deathmatch, and Zones of Control, which is basically capture the flag with stationary flags and a different scoring mechanism. I’ve mostly been playing Capture the Flag, and despite how easy it is to fly the Warhawks I find myself sticking to ground vehicles and infantry combat for the most part because life expectancy in a Warhawk is a lot shorter than if you stay out of them - they’re everyones’ target. I’m occasionally winning matches at this point, using my tried and true flag defense tactic that goes all the way back to Threewave CTF on quake - stick back, defend, and rack up the defender kills on folks trying to snarffle the flag.
The game offers a glimpse of things to come in console land in that you can either buy it at retail for $60 with a bundled bluetooth headset, or digitally directly onto the PS3 for only $40. This is something Microsoft is not yet doing on the 360 (they’re only doing it for smaller games), and I like this element of Sony’s online strategy. There are several other games coming this year that will be offered in the same way, and much like Steam on the PC I expect I’ll increasingly be buying games this way.
Unfortunately the game also has a crippling flaw at present. The server browser is an absolute piece of crap. There is no relationship between how many players the server browser says are in a given game, and how many are actually in the game, meaning you try to join servers only to be told the server is full. It can take 30 minutes to get into a ranked server match because of this. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the interface claims you can refresh the server, but as far as I can tell that function does absolutely nothing. Still, like a Pavlovian idiot, I find myself sitting there jamming on the server refresh button endlessly as I try and get into a match.
The game shipped with other flaws and they’ve patched them already, so I have some hope that this will ultimately get straightened out, and to be fair to the game once you get in it’s a blast, but getting into a match is an exercise in frustration and patience. Buyer beware so far as that goes.
Anyway my PS3 handle is Tempus67, look me up. I generally try and play on the official Incognito studio ranked CTF 32 player servers in the evening, and you can usually find me back on defense or chasing after whatever rat bastid ran off with our flag 
Bioshock has been getting great reviews, and it deserves it. One of my all time favorite games is System Shock 2, and Bioshock is basically an updated version of the same game in a new setting with a few new features. The setting is a riff on Ayn Rand Objectivism, with a fantastically realized undersea utopia in collapse, nominally overseen by the game’s primary antagonist. The graphics, audio and art design are all superb, as are the writing. The gameplay is FPS mixed with adventure/exploration. I’ll steer clear of spoilers and simply say if you enjoy this style of game, pick this up - games of this quality come around very rarely - it’s been at least 6-7 years since a game grabbed me like this.
I’ll also offer a counterpoint which is that the game is A) dumbed down somewhat compared to System Shock 2 (thanks, console gamers!) and B) fails in any way beyond graphics and sound design to acknowledge advances in game design. Why exactly is the plot being related to me via tape recordings I have to hunt for in the environment? Back when System Shock 2 came out this was a bit more acceptable but we’ve had games like Halflife 2, with reasonably intelligent AI characters to interact with and a story that emerges as you participate in it. Storytelling has moved on but apparently the designers of Bioshock haven’t.
There’s one other issue that had I known of in advance would have been a showstopper for me on this game. The publishers have seen fit to include vile DRM that A) limits the number of times you can reinstall the game you purchased and B) refuses to launch the game if you’ve run certain apps on your machine (in my case, process explorer, which is actually from Microsoft these days). Mind you, it refuses to run even if process explorer is not currently running, and you have to reboot your machine before you can run the game if you’ve run process explorer prior to launching the game. This shit infuriates me and I won’t be buying a PC game from this publisher again. Had I known they wouldn’t have gotten my money in the first place. Meanwhile, guess what - the pirates are already playing the fucking game, in other words as per usual the shitty DRM screws over the legitimate purchasers of the game while serving as little more than an annoyance to the pirates. Fuck you, 2k Games.
These two points are a bit more than nitpicking but still, the game is one of the best of the year and well worth playing through if the DRM bullshit doesn’t bother you.
So I got a Netflix account. It’s great, as anyone who has one already knows. I added a little widget to my site down on the right, to show what movies I have or most recently had out of Netflix so you can see what I’ve been watching. If you already have a Netflix account, you can add me as a friend using one of my spam email addresses - ask me for the details so I don’t have to post them here for the spam harvesters to grab.
Here’s another in the amusing ‘Dave is occasionally an idiot’ series of posts.
I got a new color laser printer, the Samsung 300P, and spent last weekend printing a bunch of stuff to test it. To my surprise, after less than 60 pages the red toner cartridge claimed to be out of ink. This pissed me right off since one of the prime motivating factors in my buying this printer was to escape the ‘inkjet ink is more expensive than human blood’ syndrome. I was convinced there was still plenty of toner left in the cartridge but no amount of shaking, cursing and configuring could force the printer to recognize that. Angry yet at the same time curious as to what was going on, I proceeded to try and break open the toner cartridge.
This printer uses cartridges that look like oversized film cannisters, and I knew there was some risk of a mess so I took it out into the yard. Various efforts to pry it open all failed so finally in a fit of who gives a shit I started bashing it with a hammer, which caused it to pop like a balloon, showering me in violent pink powder.
So, I was right. There WAS plenty of toner left in the thing, but now it was all over me. I cleaned off in the hose, laughing at myself but still irked that I had to drop ~$40-50 on a new cartridge when there was nothing wrong with the old one besides being clogged or something. From now on I’m going to periodically pull the cartridges out and shake them about to try and prevent this from happening again.
There’s a coda to this story too - my yard got a dusting with this stuff. I wandered around with the hose trying to wash it away, and we had rain as well, but still, while playing with the dog yesterday I noticed Soolin’s water had taken on a distinct pinkish hue - the toner was getting into her drinking water, probably via the ball as it picked it up from the grass. There’s also a pink stream tracing the flow of the rainwater that follows the contours of my driveway.
Aside from the annoyance with the red toner cartridge, the printer’s decent. I now have a monochrome samsung ML 17something looking for a home, if anyone’s in the market for a laser printer on the cheap.
The great free cross platform open source s/ftp client Filezilla has been revved to version 3.0, go get your copy here. I’ve been using earlier versions for years now and it’s my favorite free client by far. Seems like most of the changes are under the hood, but I immediately noticed that they’ve added a tree browser for the remote view which is slick and performs much faster than digging around looking for whatever it is you’re looking for.
Because I’m working on it. Bear with me. Got bored with the old theme and have begun tinkering with new ones. I’ll get this one banged into shape over the course of this week. Meantime all the content is still here to play with.
Just sayin, is all. Originally planned to head off for some camping and hiking in the Adirondacks, but my lungs are having none of it, so instead I’m lying around miserable watching tv for the beautiful holiday weekend. Bah. Bah I say!
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