What’s up again? Today was another interesting day, my room is missing the lower half of what use to be a wall. I can only use computer games for the next week since everything is covered in painter’s plastic. That stinks especially when Bob is coming over to play games tomorrow. Yesterday I went to his house, it must have been weeks. He hasn’t changed though his friend, Angie, lives with him now. Hmm, ya I know…usually people don’t live with each other unless their married. But hey – free country, right? That’s what I thought. Bob has his computer full so he has no room for games so he plays his Playstation 2 instead. Plus he can’t go on the Internet because he thinks there is something wrong with it. When I came over he showed me Baldur’s Gate Deadly Alliance (I have this game for Xbox.) He says he beat it already. Bob likes to play soccer – the wonderful game of soccer. Bob was getting the red cards, and he accused me of cheating because I get the yellow cards. He was just bossing me around which is fine when it’s multiplayer. He likes to customizable settings in Winning Eleven though he dislikes Winning Eleven 7 for whatever reason….I think that’s because he doesn’t know how to turn penalties off. Then we played Versus in DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball. Who ever did the soundtrack should be shot. LOL! Yes, it was that bad. Bad 90s pop riffs. Though it did fit the scenery. The game is as good as it is in the screenshots. Most of the time I felt that all I had to do was hit A button on the Xbox controller to do everything. I am a little afraid the whole game will be like this. Being overly simple isn’t good. Although that also could be good game design. Probably not use to the game’s excellence? Or is it? After 40 minutes of that, Bob and I went on to Rally. Bob is neutral when it comes to racing games. He doesn’t care for them I don’t think. So I kept beating him in Rallisport Challenge. He’s not very good partly because he’s never played it before. Each race was a within a couple seconds of each other. He likes to make his car accelerate faster sacrificing speed which I don’t think helped him in the long run. Bob wanted to play Halo because it was a FPS. As I said before he’s not as much a racing fan as I am. We went into sniper arena with the tanks. But he got me 3-1 each time. I finally got into a system where I sniped once than used my revolver to do the rest. That worked a lot better than trying to get him the first time around.
Today I just had to have my computer. I couldn’t live a week without it. So I brought the heavy 19’ inch monitor and somewhat heavy tower upstairs so I could “game” while the cleaning people did their thing downstairs. I talked to them a bit. I stood there for a minute and they really didn’t have much to say so I asked them if they wanted to talk about games in general. They agreed. We some how got off subject and talked about burning audio cds. I told them I’ve been doing that for 5 ½ years. I can do that in my sleep and then some. Because I was sick of playing computer games, I went to town to get McCollen’s Rally 04 and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for Xbox. I originally was going to get Splinter Cell 2 for PC, but I reminded myself I am already playing 3 games (Far Cry, KOTOR, Diablo 2). I got both games for 48 dollars, a real bargain at the videogame store.
In case you were wondering PC is still on top of my list. This free emulator software is getting pretty big. What console can you actually surf the Internet with besides Dreamcast? In recent years Sega tried releasing new browser releases as a freebie in their online games such as Phantasy Star Online and Daytona USA to try to have a advantage with internet. In fact, MSN-TV could have been blown a way by Dreamcast’s browser if it wasn’t buggy. It did have many issues such as it handled javascript badly, it couldn’t read Media-streams at all. DC’s browser also allowed local ISPs to connect to it for free. All and all it was a welcome alterative. I went online with Dreamcast’s web browser too. Why can’t X-BOX do this without hacking into it? The only way you can surf the Internet on your videogame console is to get it modded or hacked. My thought about modding is it’s too expensive right now for me! Don’t get me wrong I would love to get my X-Box modded so I can play emulation ROMS and store MP3s on the hard drive and play games while listening to them! Microsoft had nothing to loose by allowing playable MP3s be listened to on Xbox – but Microsoft likes to do things the hard way though they are a multi-billion dollar company with no competition. Unless you’ve found a website that’ll give you game copies for 10 dollars, it’s really not worth it. Ripping the CD image onto your hard drive for coping is I guess okay for a PS1 game, but PS2 games are way too large. It’s a lot of hacking just to say I played a game copy on my PS2 yesterday. In a couple years PS2 and XBOX emulation will be at a point where they can be played on the PC fully emulated. In fact the current PS1 emulator EPSXE can read game backups no problem. Alcohol 120% can make the backup. Just as long as you have a recent version of Alcohol 120%.
To get back to the Microsoft issue. The Microsoft anti-trust in 2002 was just to make Microsoft smaller…and they did by calling their game’s division Microsoft Games Studios. They also allowed 3rd party software to be added to their OS. Which kind-of makes me want-of laugh because all I download is 3rd party software. The venders such as Dell, Compaq, HP and Sony all include third party software with their operating system that includes a recent version of Netscape. Everyone likes Internet Explorer, but I found something better – Mozilla. And why does IE crash more when there is spyware on your computer? Because it does. Spyware tends to attack IE and Netscape. Mozilla and Mozilla FireFox don’t crash as often and it’s surfing speed is faster than IEs. And they have Anti-spyware software in the browser itself. So if it’s free, why don’t people realize that IE and Netscape aren’t the only options? Netscape tends to take more resources then Mozilla Firefox so I stay with that. Firefox is a great browser!
I have a feeling that I may be going to bed early. Like at 10:00PM today, I am really tired, more than usual. Well than, goodnight everyone! If bob comes over tomorrow we might have to go to a movie because it doesn’t look with all the construction and plastic over my stuff that I’ll be doing LAN any time soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment