For a gamer…
My friend Don has updated the source code for his version of SimCity and made it available as an open source project named Micropolis. Electronic Arts generously made the source available as part of the One Laptop per Child project.
I am quite familiar with SimCity source code, and I'm sure Don's code is a heckuva lot cleaner than mine. I'm really tempted to do something with this… and if you can code, you should too.
If you watch the 2/8/07 video of Gamespot's "On The Spot" web show, you can see more live demos of the Wii (and PS3) game I'm working on. See if you can recognize the slouching demo guy…
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/features/onthespot/index.php
A cool video is out that shows off the custom Wii controls in the game I'm working on.
Check it out here: http://media.wii.ign.com/media/842/842201/vids_1.html
Update: Wow, it is now in the Top 20 on YouTube ![[YouTube]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
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One of the many cool things about the Nintendo Wii [godfatherwiivideo, wiionthespot, wiibomberman, wiisensorextension, wiigcgames] is the fact that it can play all games made for the Nintendo GameCube. There were a ton of neat games made for the GC, and most of them are now available for less than $30. Here are a couple of games that you may have missed on the GC, but are lots of fun to play on the Wii:
1-on-1 monster melee battles with all of the classic giant monsters from the Godzilla movies. Easy to play - sort of like Super Smash Brothers for grown-ups.
An ultra-charming adventure game where you play a miniature household cleaning robot. To stay powered, you need to find wall sockets and "plug yourself in" while exploring and doing chores in the house. Oh, and there is a pirate in the basement. Of course.
One of the most original games I've played in a while, Odama is a strategic war game set on a… pinball table. You advance your army by giving voice orders using the included microphone, and try not to kill your troops with the ricocheting pinball. The game is a bit hard, and leaves too much to chance, but the game design is truly brilliant. And addictive.
I'm seeing a bunch of wild and crazy solutions on the net for dealing with the short Wii Sensor Bar cable. I wonder why people are going so crazy with this thing when it is a simple two-conductor wire? If you have even the most basic of soldering skills (or not!), you can pretty easily extend the cable. You just splice in some longer wire, and… oh wait, that's all there is! And if you screw up, you can just order a new Sensor Bar from Nintendo for $10.
Here's what I did to extend the cable. If you decide to do this too, you do it at your own risk. I make no warranties and hold no responsibility if you do something like burn your house down… or worse. Why not just wait a couple of months for some pre-made extension cables to hit the market?
Most any wire will do, but I decided to use a 20ft 4-conductor RJ11 cable. Most folks would call this a "phone cord." Why did I use this? Because I had an extra in the closet.
I snipped the RJ11 connectors (the "phone plugs") off the end of the phone cable, peeled back the jacket, and stripped the insulation from two of the wires. I cut the Wii Sensor cable in two, and stripped the insulation.
The wires in the Wii Sensor cable are reeeeally thin. The flame from a cigarette lighter will burn off the non-conducting strands in the cable.
Even a poor, gobby, soldering job like mine will do the trick. I wonder if polarity even matters with this cable.
A little shrink tube (and that handy cigarette lighter again) can keep the connections safe, even if you do a crummy job like I did. Don't forget to slide the "unshrunk" shrink tube over the cable before you solder.
Voila, I now have a 30ft Wii Sensor cable that works perfectly.
Star Trek: Tactical Assault for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS is an underrated game. However, it isn't for everyone:
So with that all out of the way, I found the game to be a lot of fun, smartly challenging, and fictionally authentic to classic Trek. A D.C. Fontana storyline takes you through various missions where you battle it out with other starships. The Star Fleet Battle rules apply: keep your strongest shields facing the enemy, attack enemies where their shields are weakest, rotate between phaser banks, use as much ship speed as possible, fire photon torpedoes at close range, and above all, apply emergency power when you have it, because dammit Scotty, we need more power!
A light RPG system is included, where you can apply "crew upgrades" to your ship's staff. These let you recharge shields faster, fire weapons faster, etc. It feels a bit forced to have this system apply to crew members instead of the ship itself, but from a gameplay point of view, it works just the same.
There are a couple of annoyances with the game. One is that it is far too easy to accidentally smash your ship against an off-screen asteroid. As you replay missions, you learn where the asteroids are located, but it still feels unfair. Another annoyance is with the AI allies. I was once in a battle where I handily whipped all but one of the enemy ships, only to lose the battle because my AI partner lost a one-on-one battle with the last ship before I could join the fight.
But overall, if you love Trek and war games, Star Trek: Tactical Assault is worth a purchase. It definitely makes me anxious to pick up its big brother, Star Trek: Legacy for the Xbox360 , when it comes out later this month.
A few months ago on Kevin Smith's blog, he lamented that a movie idea of his was getting made. Without him. Several years ago, he had an idea for a particular film story, but never got around to making it. As time passed, someone else eventually, and independantly, came up with a very similar film idea, and has since finished production.
The same thing just happened to me with a game idea. Several years ago, I had the idea of creating retro-style arcade games with a unique theme. The graphics would look as if they were hand-drawn with pencils and pens on loose-leaf paper, hopefully triggering some high school study hall nostalgia. I figured that I would call them "Loose Leaf games." I even went so far as to prototype an Asteroids clone with a background image of a scanned sheet of notebook paper. But the long hours of my "day job" took over, and I never followed through on the idea.
This year, someone else came up with the same general concept, and release a game. SketchFighter 4000 Alpha is a classic scrolling shooter game, with, you guessed it, a hand-drawn graphical theme with a notebook background. The game looks terrific, and even made the "Featured Download" on Apple's Mac OS X games page. I hope it sells well.
I wonder what will happen to the rest of my game ideas?
As you probably already know, the Nintendo Wii is a must-own video game system. The included Wii Sports game is an excellent family game that is practically worth the price of the system. But, in my opinion, the real reason to buy a Wii is:
For a mere six bucks, you can download the original TurboGrafx-16 version of Bomberman '93 and play it right on the Wii. The Wii has the best TG-16 emulator I've ever used. Grab your old GameCube controllers along with the Wii Remote, stock up on beer and chips, and have a full 5-player Bomberman match. This, my friends, is what video gaming is all about…
The PC game Sword of the Stars (aka SotS) is billed as a simplified space strategy game a la Master of Orion , but it actually plays a lot more like an updated 3D version of Spaceward Ho!, or perhaps Ascendancy without the planet micro-management. This would be a promising game concept, except for a frustrating galaxy view and confusing battle mode.
Like most space strategy games, SotS is set in a galaxy where you begin with a starting planet, and expand outward by colonizing other planets, meeting and fighting other races, etc. The galaxy map is rendered in 3D, which looks very nice, but forces the camera to be locked to a selected planet. This means that there is no way to get a decent birds-eye view of your conquered territory or fleet locations. Worse, all planets look the same at a medium zoom level, making it very difficult to judge the distance between planets. Acendancy did this better eleven years ago, and I wonder if the SotS developers ever studied it. Fortunately, SotS includes a "spiral" galaxy type, which is a bit flatter than the others and easier to deal with.
The battle mode is supposed to offer a Real Time Strategy fleet battle, but the controls and ship responses are confusing enough that the only strategy seems to be an AI-controlled Weinberger Doctrine - which is my favorite wargame strategy anyway. But it is a shame they didn't evolve the intuitive 2D combat used in the excellent game Weird Worlds: A Return to Infinite Space.
I love to support indy developers, and this product was clearly put together by some skilled programmers. However, at $39, I paid way too much for this. When this drops to under $20, it might be a worthy "laptop game" for old Ascendancy or Spaceward Ho! fans. Just be sure to buy a downloadable version so you don't have to worry about the annoying disk-based copy protection. For me, I'll just keep playing Ascendancy in a DOSBox.
Cooking Mama is a ridiculous game for the Nintendo DS. And I mean that in a very tasty way, as Cooking Mama is a quick appetizer of a game that is well worth the $19 price tag.
The game involves using the DS Stylus to whip up a variety of dishes, mostly Japanese-style. You start by preparing a basic bowl of rice, and progress on up from there, unlocking new and more complicated dishes as you go. The learning curve is a lot like Warioware , meaning there really isn't any learning curve. Just do what the recipe tells you, and soon, you'll be tapping the screen as you chop onions, or sliding the Stylus as you try to firmly, but not too firmly, crack open an egg. Each dish takes only a few minutes to create, so you can pick up and play a quick session easily.
The recipes seem pretty realistic. After playing this game, I'm pretty sure I can make Tonkatsu (yum!) in real-life. But also just like in real life, I stink at peeling potatoes in Cooking Mama.
The Godfather: The Game [godfatherwiivideo, godfather360, godfather] is out for the Xbox 360 . If you've played it on the PS2, you'll find a bunch of new features in the 360 version, including some new missions, a new ability to hire crew members, and my personal favorite, the ability to bribe cops and have them fight on your side. If you haven't played it yet, well, what are you waiting for? Go get it!
Every year or two, someone rediscovers that you can play the full original SimCity Classic over on simcity.com. Today, a writer at 1UP discovered this.
SimCity Classic Live was launched back in 1998, and supported Internet Explorer 3, IE4, and Netscape Navigator 4 (!). It runs as an ActiveX control and a Netscape Plugin. However, it requires a little Java applet for site security, so if you can't get it to run, make sure you have Java enabled.
Awesome. Last week, I saw parody of the "my kid is an honor student" bumper sticker. On a car in Hayward, I saw a bumper sticker that read, "My gamer fragged your honor student."
Oh wow, my old pal Takahashi Meijin has a web site and a blog which he seems to update regularly: http://www.hudson.co.jp/16shot/. I wish I wasn't so illiterate in Japanese so I could read it. And I have got to order one of his T-Shirts.
If you don't know who Takahashi Meijin is, he's the main character in the classic NES Adventure Island video games produced by Hudson Soft. He was mega famous in Japan during the 8-bit gaming days. In the US versions of the games, his character was known as Master Higgins.
To my surprise, the DVD player in the Xbox 360 [xbox360dvdplayer, xbox360firstplay, xbox360ad] is pretty impressive. Compared to my Panasonic XP50, the Xbox 360 DVD player shows a noticeably sharper picture with stronger color when connected to my Samsung HL-R4667 via component cables. The technical review at Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity also concludes that the 360 is indeed a very good DVD player. They mention that it only outputs 480p (720×480 according to the Samsung's Info button), but the resolution sure looks upconverted.
The 360's UI is amazingly fast, including chapter skips, fast-forward, and the front-end. Layer-changes are simply unnoticeable. Frame-rendered is also fast. Comparing panning scenes between the XP50 and the 360, the 360 seems smoother, with fewer dropped frames.
The 360's DVD player software does have a couple of minor flaws, including high black levels which require adjustment to the calibrated levels on your TV, and a "phantom" line of color about a pixel or two below the magenta and red color bars on the THX color test. I'm seeing some pink-ish pixeling in the blue skies of Tattoine on the SW:EP2 DVD, and I wonder if this is related.
Hopefully Microsoft will patch the flaws sooner or later, as there is no reason that a 3.2GHz triple core machine shouldn't be the most powerful DVD player ever made. Maybe they'll consider adding 1080i upconversion, as well as make an HDMI cable available.
Compared to the Samsung HD950 and Panasonic S97 upconverting DVD players I've "borrowed" from Best Buy, the Xbox 360 is right up there with the best DVD players I've used.
Sadly, however, the quality of the player emphasizes a critical flaw with the Xbox 360: it is an extremely loud machine, well beyond the noise levels you would expect from a device that belongs in a music room or living room. What was Microsoft thinking when they made this thing that loud?
UPDATE: I had one of the "Cinema Modes" enabled on my XP50. After disabling it, the picture is now almost as clear as the Xbox 360.
Just got an Xbox 360 set up with the rest of my consoles. Some quick first impression notes:
Leave the gun, take the cannolli.
The Godfather ships today for PS2, Xbox, and Windows XP. I think gamers are going to be very surprised to see a game like this come from EA.
The PS2 and Xbox games are well worth playing on current gen consoles. No need to wait for XBOX360… play it now.
The Sudoku craze that has swept through Japan and England has finally caught traction in the US. If you haven't played it, Sudoku is a numerical puzzle consisting of a 9×9 grid. A little like a crossword puzzle, the goal is to fill each row with the numbers 1 through 9 (no duplicates), as well as fill 9 3×3 sub-grids with the numbers 1 through 9.
The best free online Sudoku I've found so far is syndicated on the San Jose Mercury News web site.
As fun as it is, I'm not sure why it's so popular. Once you figure out how to solve one Sudoku, you can solve any Sudoku. It took me about 3 puzzles to realize the solution pattern. I still play it occasionally to test my wits, even though I know I'll solve the puzzle in just a few minutes. I wonder if others are doing this too, which would explain its popularity.
What I find more interesting is how the puzzles are generated - a very clever game design mechanic that always provides just enough clues.
Thomas Warfield, the developer of the very successful shareware game Pretty Good Solitaire, writes an interesting blog about developing and selling successful shareware. Well, his blog is interesting with the exception of his gratuitous pictures of… cats.
The blog is called A Shareware Life.
Today he posted the answers to an email containing lots of naive questions about the life and business of a shareware developer. His answers are priceless. My favorite Q&A:
Q: Quite often people take on huge game projects and then they are unable to complete them. Do you think this is because of a lack of planning, lack of staff, or lack of commitment to the game?
A: It's because they are stupid.
A few weeks ago, the Inside Microsoft site posted a video of an Xbox 360 TV commercial that is pure genius. It truly captures a childhood sense of fake guns and combat "play", except that in the commercial, the kids are actually adult commuters. This instantly brought back memories of backyard "gunbattles" all the neighborhood kids and I used to play out when I was 11 years old. You can't help but smile when you watch this.
Supposedly, Microsoft's legal folks won't allow this commercial to air.
In my effort to find great, short games to play during long data builds at work, I downloaded and played Oasis, an award winner from the 2004 Independent Games Festival. Where Strange Adventures in Infinite Space could be called a five-minute version of Masters of Orion, Oasis could be called a five-minute version of Civilization.
Oasis is a level-based game where the player has a limited number of turns to reveal a map of cities. After the last turn, a hoard of Barbarians launches an attack, and the player's score and level progression is based on the survival of the cities. There's a ton of ingenious depth to each level, including the ability to mine mountains for technology, reveal a complete desert oasis to unlock bonus rounds, discover nomads to add to your population, and explore each city to enable stronger defenses. Since each decision costs the player a turn, many strategies emerge during each level, allowing for plenty of replay value. I always wish for just one more turn before the Barbarians attack.
The production quality of this shareware game is so polished that I wondered if some experienced game creators were behind it. Sure enough, the credits list the highly respected designer/programmer/lecturer Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc as the designer and lead engineer.
The free downloadable demo allows for an hour of gameplay, and I recommend playing through the tutorial levels during that hour. Afterwords, you'll easily be able to justify the bargain price of $19.95 for the full version.
While I was getting a haircut this weekend, the woman cutting my hair mentioned that she was "totally addicted to computer games" right now. When I asked what game she was playing, her answer was Texas Hold 'Em Poker. Intrigued, I asked her several more questions about games, and found her thoughts interesting:
I'm willing to bet she is a very typical casual game customer. She got hooked on a game that required almost no learning of the rules (poker), and wanted to play other games. Disappointed in all of the Bejeweled clones on game sites, she went to Best Buy. She managed to find and buy something familiar (CSI), get it installed on her computer (wow!), and play it enough to be disappointed. And now she's stuck, wondering how to choose her next game.
I suggested she try Grand Theft Auto
I have tons of old games for a variety of systems that I never got around to playing. In search of something I could play while waiting for data builds at work, I reached in to my pile of old games and pulled out Ascendancy, an epic space strategy game circa 1995. Unfortunately, my laptop isn't capable of playing it. Why?
Ascendancy runs in MS-DOS, not Windows XP.
Luckily, someone at work pointed me to an open source app called DOSBox. DOSBox is a full DOS system emulator that effectively creates a virtual 486 on your desktop. Do the terms Tseng ET4000, Gravis UltraSound, and EMS sound familiar? They're all emulated in DOSBox. Ascendancy and other classic DOS games I've tried are fully playable.
Although the official 0.63 release of DOSBox works fine, there are several updates and bug fixes in CVS that make downloading an unofficial CVS build worthwhile. (Get it here: http://ykhwong.x-y.net/page.htm) In particular, the CVS version of DOSBox supports DirectX PixelShaders for some very nice graphics scaling.
Time to dig more of those DOS classics out of the closet and get gaming!
File this one in "news of the obvious," but the new Nintendo GameBoy Micro really is tiny, almost too tiny. It's only a hair larger than my Sony T637 cel phone. Although the color screen is easily the best screen I've ever seen on any gaming device, it does cause me to squint a little. In general, the overall size of the Micro causes all of the buttons to be closer together, which forces you to uncomfortably bend your fingers and thumbs much more than on the older GameBoys.
There is also only one speaker, so stereo sound can only be heard with headphones. The speaker itself is just below the A and B buttons, and my adult-sized thumb tends to cover it during gaming. Unlike the GameBoy Advance SP , however, there is an included headphone jack. The digital volume control is excellent and much improved over the awful manual slider on the GBA SP and Nintendo DS .
If you're looking for comfortable GameBoy gaming with big buttons and a large-ish screen, the Nintendo DS is easily the system to buy. But if you want something less bulky so you can have gaming access at any time, the Micro fits the bill perfectly. And if you are a total gadget geek like me, well, get both!
Hey Nintendo, when do we get more GameBoy Micro faceplates?
I'm really hooked on the game Strange Adventures in Infinite Space by Digital Eel. The best way to describe it is to say that it's a cross between Spaceward Ho! and the classic Super Star Trek, but… enhanced... so that the entire play experience takes only 15 minutes. This is a great game to play while you're waiting for a download, boiling water, watching paint dry, etc.
You play for a literal high score, which is something you don't often see in modern games. To get the best score, you must explore a game space that is filled with lots of discoverable ship upgrades and loot that you must return to your home planet. But since there is no reference guide of any kind included with the game, you might want to have a notepad handy so you can remember which ship upgrades and loot are the best to keep.
Ernest Adams has a more detailed review where he calls SAIS a "perfect short game." For a mere $15, I'd tend to agree. Now I can't wait for the sequel, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, which should be released this month.
Update: In a way, SAIS does include a reference guide of all items in the game. All of the data for the game is stored in simple text files in the installed gamedata directory. Of course, reading it is a little like cheating, and does take away from some of the discovery. The data is so easy to modify that Digital Eel even includes a mod guide and a graphics packing tool. I sure am impressed with the elegance of both the game design and its architecture. Inspiring stuff for old game hackers like me.
At the Game Developers Conference earlier this year, a student handed me a production quality DVD case of the game Squirrel Squabble. This weekend, I finally had a chance to install and play the game, and I must say, it is a ton of fun. As a cross between old school action platformers and puzzle stacking games, Squirrel Squabble is easy to learn, nicely addictive, and has very good production quality for a student project.
Judging by the news on their web site, it looks like these guys are bound for success. Awesome.
There is an incredible amount of misinformation about video games being disseminated by the media and narrow-minded politicians regarding Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas . Perhaps some of these ill-informed talking heads should spend a few minutes reading Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked, written for PBS by the highly respected Dr. Henry Jenkins, professor and director of comparative studies at MIT.
I would then recommend actually playing GTA:San Andreas before forming an opinion. Aside from the boring opening, terrible target-locking controls, and tedious mission failure / restart states, the game is quite fun!
The San Jose Mercury News launched a series of blogs recently, including a gaming blog from writers Dean Takahashi and Mike Antonucci. Whether you agree with their game opinions or not, the blog is interesting.
However, if you try to subscribe to the gaming blog RSS feed… well, you can't, unless you want to read every blog entry for the whole newspaper. Apparently, the Merc is using FeedBurner to serve all of their new blog feeds, and they only serve a single RSS feed that includes every single one of their blogs. I find it amazing that the newspaper at the heart of Silicon Valley can't figure out how to split up RSS feeds on a per-topic basis. Get a clue, Merc, that's the point of RSS.
Every time I use my PlayStation 2 , I need to roll my video game cart closer to the sofa because the standard PS2 DualShock 2 controller cable is too short. I don't have this problem with the long cable on the Xbox Controller S, or with the brilliant Wavebird wireless controller on the GameCube .
I've tried a variety of wireless controllers for the PS2, I can't stand any of them. None have the perfect button throw of the DualShock, or the accurate D-Pad. Although the most popular wireless controller, the Logitech Cordless Action , has a really comfortable form factor, it has clunky (slow!) buttons and one of the sloppiest D-Pad's I've used.
My solution? Too obvious! Buy an extension cable. Not a bad option for just a few bucks, eh?
Coinciding with the film release and the BBC 4 radio show of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the BBC created a huge web site repository of Hitchhiker stuff.
The coolest thing there? A fully playable version of the original Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, designed and written by game design legend Steve Meretzky. Like all Infocom games of that era, the Hitchhiker game is text-only. However, the BBC held a contest for amateurs to illustrate the game, and the two winning entries are both available to play.
I'm not really a boxing fan, but you don't need to be one to love Fight Night: Round 2 from EA. I've never played a game that felt this viscerally satisfying. If you're ever in the mood to just pummel the crap out of someone, you won't find a better outlet than Fight Night: Round 2.
Graphically, FN2 is stunning. There are seemingly limitless ways to customize your boxer, and the face close-ups are so realistic its eerie. When your boxer is sitting in the corner between rounds, breathing heavily and sweating (or bleeding!) profusely, you really believe an honest-to-goodness fight is happening.
I originally played Fight Night 2004 on the Xbox, but found the game so difficult that I gave up in frustration (I'm playing Fight Night: Round 2 on the PS2, where the controls feel better to me for sports games). The learning curve and game balance has improved tremendously in Round 2, particularly if you skip the tempting 'Quick Fight' and 'Create a Champ' options and go straight to 'Career Mode'. And the addition of a Haymaker punch really opens the game up.
As with Fight Night 2004, the audio production is superb, with excellent surround sound, thundering hits, and some of the best play-by-play voice-over I've ever heard in a sports game (and far better than the annoying hip-hop guy in FN2004). Fight Night: Round 2 is a game that should make EA proud.
Twinoo, a cool little DHTML game, is billed as the first Mono MultiPlayer Game, that is, a game that you play against yourself. It pits your right brain versus your left brain, with subjective versus analytical thought. Twinoo is surprisingly addictive, but it actually gives me a headache!
I use the Xbox HDTV AV Kit to connect my Xbox to my HDTV. With it, you can run any Xbox game at its max resolution, whether it is 480i, 480p, 720p, or 1080i.
The Peter Molyneux game Fable runs in 480p. But every time I tried to run the game, the graphics would be completely corrupted, rendering the game unplayable. I've never seen this in any other Xbox game.
Turns out, the game can't deal with the Xbox dashboard when it runs in 480i (say, when you use Xbox Live ). The solution? You can force the dashboard to run in 480p. The dashboard looks so much better that way anyway. But I could've sworn older dashboard versions would run at the highest supported resolution. Or was that just on dev kits?
BTW, I'm not sure I would recommend this game at full price, since Fable is a bit… clunky. But at twenty-something dollars, it's worth considering, just to see the results of a legendary PC game designer's first attempt at a console game.
On Wednesday, the PS2/GameCube game Alien Hominid deservedly won three awards at the Independent Games Festival at GDC. Alien Hominid is a tribute to classic side-scrolling shooters like the type you'd see back on the NES and particularly the PC Engine. But its unique hand-drawn comic-book art style and genuinely ass-kickin' weapons and explosions give it an excellent fresh take on the shooter genre. Hard to believe it was originally a web-based flash game.
Alien Hominid is the first game in years to give me a sore case of joystick thumb. A must-play!
I was fortunate enough to see the legendary game designer and screenwriter Hal Barwood give a talk at this year's GDC. During his talk, he mentioned a game he did a few years ago called RTX Red Rock. That one slipped under my radar at the time, so I decided to look for it today. Turns out that you can buy it for less than 10 bucks at Amazon (actually Toys R Us), or you can buy a bundle of the PS2 game, CD soundtrack, and strategy guide directly from LucasArts for $9.95. Nice price for a Hal Barwood game, eh?
I know, I'm like a year and a half late, but I finally started playing Crimson Skies on the Xbox. This game is fantastic, with a really intuitive flight model and control scheme. The production value is top notch (well, for late 2003), with excellent explosions, a respectable storyline, cut scenes that are worth watching, and best of all, nicely mixed 5.1 surround sound.
To top it off, Crimson Skies is a real blast to play on Xbox Live. I haven't had this much fun in an online dogfight since I played Red Baron back on the Sierra Network Online / INN. And that was over a decade ago!
I only wish it supported HD resolutions beyond 480p.
If you're like me and missed this game when it first came out, grab it now with the under $20 price tag, and meet me online!
Squidge just posted a new beta of FrodoZ, the Commodore 64 emulator for the Tapwave Zodiac. The coolest new feature in this version? Sound! It felt great today to hear the classic intro theme to M.U.L.E., even if the song was playing a tad… slow.
FrodoZ is a nice piece of work - I can't wait to see some future revs.
I've been very picky about keyboards over the years, as I tend to type like a machine gun. Several years ago, I found one that I thought was perfect: the NMB RT6856 which used to be bundled with Micron desktops. I actually possess 6 of those.
Well, I figured it was time for me to get out of the stone age of PC keyboards and try something new. So I picked up a Saitek Gamer's Keyboard. This thing is slick! A dedicated macro pad, an ultra-quiet key throw (so long, 'machine gun'), and groovy blue LCD backlighting.
And its just plain cool-looking too:
The Urbz: Sims in the City hits the shelves today on PS2, xbox, GameCube, and GBA. A Nintendo DS version will also be available when the DS is released. Platform notes:
The official Urbz web site is http://www.urbzsims.com. Check out the sweet web comics! If you're a comics fan, the artists will be very familiar.
The music in The Urbz is performed by the Black Eyed Peas! Check out some of the tunes at http://www.blackeyedpeas.com/.
I'm watching the review scores here:
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ps2/urbz/
http://www.gamerankings.com
http://www.gamestats.com/objects/677/677567/?ui=wishlist
