erik reminded me about my new video card, which I forgot to comment about... it's fucking great. UT2k4 runs great at 1280x1024 highest quality EVERYTHING. I don't use FSAA. When I run games at 1280x1024, I can't even tell the difference between FSAA and non FSAA. I've tried it out, can't tell any difference, so I don't run it. So, I can't really tell you how well it runs with FSAA on, except I played KOTOR with the FSAA on and it seemed a little jumpy. But without FSAA on it was smooth as a baby's ass and that's fine with me.
FFXI seems to run at the same framerate as it did before (I'm guessing there's a frame limiter), but during fights and when there's a lot of people around, and when there's heavy weather effects, the game doesn't slow down even close to nearly as much as it did with the Geforce4, so extra points there. I haven't even noticed any major slowdown while playing FFXI since I got the video card, so I'm very happy about that.
Anyway, I don't at all regret spending 200 dollars (more like 220 since I got it retail) on this video card. I got a lot more than I was expecting and I hope that it lasts a couple years like the geforce4 did.
i got into that RYL beta and it's cool and all, but they limit your maximum resolution to 800x600, and you're forced to run it at medium quality graphics. So it looks pretty shitty. Luckily, I've been getting back into FFXI for the time being, so I don't really care much about RYL right now. I can't even log into RYL anyway, the login server is down. When I can log in, it's laggy and I get kicked a lot. They should maybe try to fix that.
the sony psp is gonna be awesome, check this out. finally the GBA will have some competition.
Just so you know, RYL is a really badassed MMORPG that I think was made in malaysia or china or something... I played the chinese beta like a year ago but it was in chinese so I didn't know what was going on... but I got into ENGLISH BETA and I"m happy. Gonna download while I work.
http://www.gamemyth.com.my
(don't know if that's the english site or not, I gotta go though)
so I totally got House of the Dead 2 and Confidential Mission and have been playing them on my dreamcast with my light gun. I was really pissed off at first because it seemed that the lightgun sucked and would never calibrate correctly. Turns out I wasn't lining up the sights just right and I was aiming the gun down a little lower than I should have been. But after figuring out how to actually aim the gun I had a lot of fun playing these games.
sadly, I think those are the only two lightgun games for dreamcast. Dreamcast was out around the time everybody was blaming video games for all the violence in the world (late 1999, after columbine), and I guess they were afraid to release lightgun games because stupid people would blame their kids' violence on these "murder simulators". Yeah, that's an actual quote from a stupid politician, "murder simulators."
Anyway, I'm sure everybody knows about House of the Dead, it's exactly the same game as Typing of the Dead except it has guns instead of dreamcasts and keyboards, and you shoot stuff to kill them instead of typing long sentences about jack buying hotdogs. It's fun.
Confidential Mission surprised me, because I had never heard of it and expected it to be pretty lame. But it's really good. The whole theme of the game is that you're a secret agent like james bond, and you go around and shoot everybody. It looks a lot like virtua cop in the respect that giant circles go around the enemy showing when they're going to shoot. The game rewards you a lot more for accuracy, and "justice shots" where you just shoot the right arm of an enemy to disable their firing but not kill them. The training mode is really in depth, with exercises like justice shot practice (shoot dummies' right arm when they pop up), combo shots (shoot the exact same place 3 times to destroy a target), reflexes (a bunch of targets basically flip over and you have to get shoot them before they flip back), judgement (2 dummies flip over at the same time, one badguy dummy and one hostage dummy, and you have to shoot the badguy dummy within a certain amount of time), and I think some others but I just can't remember. The training mode is effing hard and I think I'm gonna stay away from it until I have a better light gun.
But yeah, my new video card comes tomorrow. I'm pretty excited about that, I'm gonna have fun testing its limits to see how awesome I can make games look. I'll probably actually be able to use FSAA without it killing my comp completely, yay for radeon 9800 pro.
I think it's been almost 2 years since I upgraded, so I don't feel too bad about dropping 220 bucks on a new card... but the price was great for the card. I bought an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro off newegg monday night, retail version with some bundled software and stuff. Really looking forward to getting that...
Played FFXI for a couple hours yesterday and got really bored after not being able to get a party for a couple hours.
I'm really happy about my dreamcast now... I got my new spindle of cd's and started buring games, and they have pretty much all worked except for one. And the one game that didn't work was American 18 Wheeler Pro Trucker, or whatever, so I don't really care.
First I'm going to have to point out that Power Stone 2, is quite possibly better than Super Smash Bros. Melee. I mean, there's mini games in the middle of the fucking fights. It's crazy and it's great. For example, you'll be fighting on this airship, and you can punch and kick each other or pick up weapons and shoot each other or hit each other or throw stuff or whatever. Anyway, the airship blows up and you're flying through the air with all of you opponents, and there's a little mini game where there's coins flying around, but you also have to get an umbrella that's flying through the air, so when you land on the ground you don't get hurt. Then, once everybody lands on the ground, the fight continues until the last man is standing. Wow wow awesome stuff, I can't wait to play this at the LAN. If anybody has dreamcast controllers, I would highly reccomend that you bring them, because I only have 2.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 / Capcom vs. SNK 2 - These both work perfectly and I am just so happy. Capcom vs. SNK is in japanese, but it doesn't really matter because the menus are in english and it's a fighting game... don't really need to read anything.
Shenmue II is awesome from what I have played so far. It is the european release, because it never came out in the US except on Xbox, which left me feeling really fucking gypped by Sega. I mean, they released it in ENGLISH in europe, and they didn't even bother to do a quick sloppy port over here. Did they feel that the english dubbed voice-overs were that necessary? The euro version has the japanese voices with english subtitles, and it's much much better than the shitty english voice overs in the first Shenmue. Seems like they also made some interface upgrades and general graphics upgrades, which look great, especially for a Dreamcast.
I also got some emulators. I haven't burned the MAME emulator for Dreamcast yet, but I'll get to that soon probably. I burned a Genesis emulator that has like 450 roms included on the CD, and tried it out. It worked, and seemed pretty compatible. I tried out Streets of Rage III, and the speed seemed to be pretty much 100% with no real slowdown except for emulated genesis slowdown. The sound emulation didn't sound very good, but it gets the point across and it's good enough not to ruin the game. Far from it really, this seems like the next best thing past NesterDC. Now only if they can get a fast running SNES emulator for Dreamcast going.
I also got Elemental Gimmick Gear (E.G.G.) which seemed like a pretty good game while I was testing it out. It had the RPG Zelda type gameplay going for it, so I might play that a bit also. I think I'm gonna have to buy yet another memory card for dreamcast now, and that would make THREE. I wish they could have made their VMU's bigger, jesus. I buy this cool looking memory card with a screen on it, and it saves like four games. Sega, come on, what are you thinking guys. You might still be making consoles if you weren't so dumb.
so I have a new flavor of the week. Last week it was muds and the week before it was KotOR, this week it's definitely burning dreamcast games. So far I have Skies of Arcadia, Armada, and a dreamcast shooter pack that includes Ikaruga, Zero Gunner 2, Psyvariar 2, and Border Down Remix, all on one CD. All japanese, and all awesome. Score city man, score city.
Just finished downloading the first CD for Shenmue 2... don't have any blanks to burn it to though. Oh well.
I fixed my guitar yesterday. It hasn't really been critically broken, but right now it's in better shape than it's been in literally years.
I think it started when the pickup screws started falling out, so the pickups were just sitting loose inside of the guitar without any screws holding them in. They would fall against the strings while I was playing, so I put duct tape over them to keep them inside. Duct tape was probably on that guitar for about two and a half years.
I ended up taking off the nut locks because I changed tuning on the guitar so much. Nut locks are little clamps that go up at the top of the guitar between the headstock and the neck. They keep the tuning in place which is really convenient, but also at the same time really inconvenient if you change tuning a lot. Well, I ended up losing the nut lock clamps and the screws.
Then I think the tremolo tension springs in the back of the guitar started to give way a little bit and lose some resistance, so I couldn't tune my guitar to standard tuning without the bridge sticking up two inches off the guitar. This would make the strings stick up about an inch off of the neck, pretty much eliminating the ability to even play effectively.
So, I ordered some pickup height adjustment screws, which were all I needed to fix the pickups (I should have gotten them a long time ago), some new nut lock clamps and screws (the clamps cost 3 bucks a piece, jeez), and a couple new tension springs so I can tune the guitar into standard tuning. Then I got a couple new sets of strings and some Fast Fret™, which you just slice around on the fretboard and it makes the fretboard all slippery and is supposed to help keep it clean and "enhance the life" of your fretboard. I was giving my guitar a makeover so I figured what the hell.
So yeah, the guitar sounds better, looks better, and feels better than it has in years, and it makes me really happy. I'm seriously considering dropping some money on an effects processor or something like that.
Anyway, I got the mud running again. I'm being really careful not to crash it because I still dont' know what the problem is. All I know is that when I shut it down, I don't have the problem. When it crashes, all hell breaks loose. Luckily, this is a fucking great codebase I'm working with (1stmud, a ROM derivative), and it has a little feature called "Copyover", which basically does periodic backups of the whole MUD, and then when the mud crashes, it starts up the backup almost immediately when it crashes. Sure, you lose all of your saved changes since the last backup, but you would have lost them either way, but you can start right back up on what you lost rather than waiting for the mud to reboot or figuring out how to get it running again.
Yeah, so I still haven't been playing FFXI much. I'll come back and play a lot eventually, but right now I'm messing around with muds. To be more specific, I've recently been compiling muds via Cygwin and then running them. I've found a few codebases that are really nice but just this morning I found one that I think I'm going to keep and try to work on and try to make something unique out of it. It's the 1stmud4.5.1 codebase (based off the ROM2.4 code) and it's really cool. Built-in automapper is the #1 thing that really makes me happy, it kind of adds a graphical feeling to a text based game.
The codebase starts with a few stock areas and monsters that come with it at the beginning, but I think I'm going to start building a town from scratch so the game doesn't feel like every ROM based mud out there. If any of you play muds as much as me (probably not) you'll know the basic ROM stock town layout... with the town square and the market square directly south of that, equipment shops along the road east and west of town square and guild halls along the road east and west of market square. Yeah, I don't want the typical stock areas, played them dozens of times and it's the same every time.
But anyway, if anybody wants to see what I have so far (nothing really), talk to me on AIM and I could give you directions on how to connect... I would recommend using a mud client like Mushclient to play on it. I recommend mushclient because it's just as good as Zmud, but way easier to crack.