What makes you happy ?

Today has been brought to me by Red Bull with Jet Set Radio, Metropolis Street Racer (Dreamcast) and SSX On Tour. I am definitely going to trawl ebay for the 3-4 must-have DC games. Not that I have a choice.. no shops round here have them.

I like this opinion on Safari 3 and the links it has. And this illustrates perfectly the fantastically annoying behaviour of some of the fanboys (check the comments in the second link from Macworld). When IE7 was in pre-release it was pulled to bits by the fanboys. They went on and on about how crap it was, how crap it would be, how Microsoft couldn’t make anything decent, how Window was a steaming pile, blah blah blah. And yet Safari with all it’s crashing and security holes? It’s beta. It’s allowed to behave this way. I have installed on the Mac in Parallels and I think it’s as bad as the os x version. Use it for real? Not.a.chance. Horrible thing.

Audio. I cannot abide iTunes. I have tried to like it, tried to find a redeeming feature but there is no needle in that particular haystack. So I wasn’t using it, I wasn’t playing music. I’ve mentioned Songbird before and I quite like that but overall it seems a bit too much – there seems to be weight in it I’m not after. Again, I’ve not played music. Until now…
Play. It is perfect. It doesn’t want to sell me anything, it doesn’t want to interfere with files, it’s open source. It just wants to let you hear the music. If I could uninstall iTunes I would. (Maybe I should create a ‘Redundant’ in /Applications for all the unused stuff.. I used to hide items in the XP Start menu so there was no visual clutter. Will os x fall apart if i* is moved? No idea.) But being able to play music again – excellent.

Looking for an old game that the girls wanted, and hoping I’d find one that I wanted, I saw that Gamestation were selling old Dreamcasts for 20 quid.

Bargain. Into town I went to find that they were in fact 15 quid and the (budget) games were buy one get 2 free. Double bargain. The DC I did have won’t boot for some reason so now I have a working DC, Metropolis Street Racer, Sega Bass Fishing, Crazy Taxi and Evolution to play. I’ll pickup Jet Grind Radio and Grandia 2 from ebay – which is where I just got a new VMU from for all of a fiver.
And I’ll also trawl there for Daytona USA and a couple of other class Saturn games. Gamestation had one for 18 quid. I bought the Saturn on the day of release for over 20x that. 400 it was.
Give it a couple of years and a 360 might be worth the price :)

(copied from the BBC.)

The BBC have an article describing the PS3 launch. They describe how Microsoft tried to upstage Sony. And they have an interview with a ‘gamer’ to promote the Sony PS3.

Nice product placement there by Nintendo.

I’ve kept playing SSX Blur in the hope that it will just ‘click’ with me. And all it has done is confirm it’s suck factor which is huge. There is no precision, no fine control, so true sense of control. It really was a waste of 35 quid. Supremely crap. And then some.

• There is no precision with the up/down/left/right of the wiimote.
• Trying to grab and NOT otherwise move the controller is impossible.
• Getting square-on while riding rails is impossible.
• The “shake the controller to get up” is designed to frustrate not help (they had this nonsense in another snowboarding game – 1080 I think – where you had to rotate the joysticks. Here’s a clue – every other game has regular button bashing to get up. This is not something you vary okay?)
• If they really thought this was a cool game they would have thrown a stack of new courses in. It’s like they’ve said “Hey, the controls are really going to piss people off so let’s give them familiar courses”. Not wrong on the controls.
• And it’s STILL wrong to throw Kick Doubt at a first level. How in hell do my girls get the most from this game? Oh yes, it’s not a Nintendo game is it? Nintendo don’t have cheats and keypress combos to get further. EA do. Can’t think why.

EA + Nintendo = a steaming pile to be avoided.

If you’ve never played text adventures you won’t know the amount of effort that can go into a map. It’s not just drawing a box and labelling it (“Cavern. Bird in cage”) but also making sure that when you have gone to other locations that it’s all in line, makes sense. Seeing “Through the hole in the south wall you see a cavern which has a bird in a cage” is great because you are on familiar ground – but looking at the carefully crafted hand-drawn map which has your current location 3 inches to the left and 2 inches up from the cavern is no fun. Maps get messy and fast. At least mine did.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I wanted a drawing program and Claire(?) mentioned Omnigraffle. I played, said I liked it and might buy it. It might be useful in a work setting, it might be useful for the girls and it was nice, very nice. But for Infocom – fantastic.
Started a couple of maps last night and hit the trial license limit of 20 items. Using a full day license got me past that but that just proved even more how useful it is for mapping. The IFMapper post? Which stopped when I had to compile c ? I have no need, none at all.
It was £5 more than SSX Blur and it’s for playing games that are over 20 years old.

>put teh old woman in the clock. Lock her in.
(Sorry, but this story doesn’t recognize the word “teh.”)

Shame the parser couldn’t keep up with acceptable spelling :)

>e
Spooky Copse
A copse of willow trees makes this part of the cemetery look really spooky. Narrow lanes wander south and west.

There’s an open grave nearby, freshly dug, with a tombstone erected next to it.

>down
Open Grave
You’re at the bottom of an open grave, surrounded by six-foot walls of dirt.

There’s an old bone here.

>take the bone
Taken.

(Your score just went up by 1 point! Your total score is 2 out of 100.)

>e
You just walked into a wall of dirt.

So it is SSX Blur that takes the dubious honour of being the first game on the Wii which makes me want to throw the controllers at a wall. I’ve just given it an hour and it sucks donkey-sized balls so far.

There is no way to adjust anything. At least with a D-pad it’s in one of 2 states but this isn’t just weird it feels wrong. Uber-tricks? get real. And what’s with the computer players hitting all the short cuts at base level? That’s even more wrong.

I slagged the last SSX but that was because of some insanely difficult races. This one is just nuts so far. Maybe I’ll be wrong, maybe I’ll like it, maybe I’ll nail some pillows to the wall.

Oh yes, and Kick Doubt. What’s with putting THAT near the start? It’s bad enough when you are maxed out and hit it for the first time without being a n00b. Maybe this’ll be last EA game I buy.
Another thing – when it’s on the PS2 at the game start it says ‘EA SPORTS BIG but in the Wii it’s ea sports big. Maybe that was the big fat clue just there….

Update: Peak 1 completed, all golds. A few challenges done. And the game is still a waste of £35 The nunchuck is okay until you twist too far (which you just about couldn’t do on the PS2) and you need to stop and do a 3-point turn to get the player back. It’s also seems designed in such a way that no matter what is going on you really need to keep the left hand rock-solid-steady. That’s about impossible so you end up swerving or hopping when you don’t want. The tricking in much simpler and less of a game because of it. The ubertricks mean you just end of flailing around. I didn’t buttonmash on the previous versions but this feels like it. I’d rather play arcade Virtua Fighter wearing boxing gloves.
The game doesn’t feel as clean and polished. It doesn’t feel like SSX should.

From the oldest game to the newest:

The detail is amazing in the (as yet unopened because I have yet to set that time aside but I checked the one in the shop) guide. This is going to be one long experience…

The Z-code interpreter Zoom has just made me happy – I can now play Infocom adventures on the Mac. I’ve got them all on floppy disc, I’ve also got them all on CD and now I have them on the Mac. Happy :) What I didn’t have with the Mac version though was all the doc files so those I need to create so I really do have two identical sets.
Now…..

Joe’s Bar
An undistinguished bar, yet the social center of Upper Sandusky. The front door is almost lost amidst the hazy maze of neon that shrouds the grimy glass of the south wall. Doors marked “Ladies” and “Gents” lead, respectively, northeast and northwest.
You feel an urge.

Which way do I go…..? And if you think that’s an easy choice bear in mind that what happens when trapped in a cage with a gorilla later is directly related…. and ‘Lewd’ level is chosen. Well I am over 18..