Exposing my socks to the world

Picture this: You decide you want to fire up your game of choice… let’s say F-Zero GX. Put in your official Nintendo.net boot disc in the drive, let it go through it’s thing, select what game you want to play, throw it in, and start looking for an opponent. This can be done in one of two ways:

1. Automatic. The server searches for other people looking for a game that are on about the same skill level as you (more on that later) and you get down to business.

2. Directed. Of course you will have a Friends list that you can put your buddies, favorite opponents, famous people in, etc, and see your win/loss record with them, and maybe even some personal notes about them. You can both set up a time when you agree to meet online to throw down the virtual gauntlets.

Whenever you win a game in this mental exercise of ours, you will win a certain amount of points. The amount of points you win will be based on a percentage of your opponent’s points (rounded up). That way it works in your favor. If you somehow challenge and beat a level 58 opponent while you’re still on level 2, you’ll get a lot more points because, one would hope, the level 58 guy is supposed to be pretty darn good, while at level 2, you either aren’t really good yet or have just started to play online. Of course, you can also lose points. If you lose a game, you lose some points. Perhaps not as many as the other person gained, and certainly not enough to go into the negative points, but this will be to ensure that there won’t be many people that would rocket up to the maximum level within the first week the service was up and stay there (although I’m sure they would be there anyway).

When you go to play an Automatic game, the system will look for someone with at least the same level as you, then it will search +5 and -5 levels, giving preference to the higher level player. If no one is found, the search will broaden to +10 and -10 levels. If no one is found by the time that the search gets to +maximum level to -minimum level then that game may be on the verge of being removed from the network, you might want to look into playing something new.

Of course there would also have to be newsletters, contests, tournaments, chat areas, perhaps message boards, exclusive game demos (hmm, it’s almost starting to sound a little like the Satellaview), there could even be some sort of ‘secret area’ for subscribers of Nintendo Power. Kind of an online supplement to the magazine. For that matter, there could be some kind of bonus service to the subscribers such as: interviews with game developers, subscriber-exclusive news, demos a week earlier than everyone else, etc. I don’t even want to think of what they could do if they managed to get this working with the GameBoy Player. The Pok

Steam sounds like a good idea. You fire up your Valve game of choice, Steam checks for mods, updates, and etc., and you get to play with the latest version of everything. Great!

But there’s a downside. There’s always a downside.

Once you connect to Steam for the first time (whether you check for updates or play multiplayer online) you must then log on to Steam each and every time you want to play the game. If you want to play a Steam powered game at a LAN party, every computer must have a connection to the internet. Through my own LAN party experience, I’ve learned two things: Counter Strike is still one of the most popular LAN games, and not every LAN party has a connection to the internet (even some of the big ones like LanWar). So a lot of Counter Strike will not be going on at LANs. (Yeah, I know they get a lot of grief, but people play CS more than any other game at most of the LANs I’ve been to.) Why will people go to a LAN if they can’t play the game they want?

I don’t want to have to connect to the internet every time I want to play a single player version of a particular game. It just seems unnecessary, and I really don’t want to have to authenticate with the internet to play a multiplayer game if there’s no internet connection available. I just hope one of two things happen: 1. People like me abstain from purchasing Half-Life 2 in the hopes that Valve mends their software or, 2. Someone hacks together an authentication ‘workaround’ so that computers on an internet deprived LAN can actually play the games they want to play.

I’m not holding my breath for either, unfortunately.

I know that most people do their reflections on their respective sites on anniversary dates. Bah, that’s too far away. I don’t want to wait until January if I have no real reason to.

I alluded, in an earlier article (on a whole other website, to envisioning this site as some sort of gaming news site where I would have stories about comings and goings, new games, reviews, and the occasional whatever. Since you’re reading this now, it’s safe to assume that that didn’t happen exactly how I envisioned it, mostly because other sites do the same thing that I wanted to do, and much better.

Having spare time is definately a problem. I have a few alternatives when it comes to running a site. I can quit my ‘real’ job and try to make money at being a webmaster, which I don’t see happening in the near future, or I can just keep on having fun with it, providing content for free, which seems more likely.

It’s fairly obvious that now the site has turned into more of a blog style. It’s the wave of the present. Everyone, their cat, and their cat’s mother has a blog. Most of them, though, are just painfully boring to read. I do not want this site to turn into some kind of “I went to the mall today and got a Coke, but the guy behind the counter totally screwed up and gave me a Diet Coke instead. I smiled, walked around the corner and threw the almost full thing away. That’ll show ‘im” kind of blog. I just don’t find that reading about other people’s personal lives and experiences terribly interesting. Maybe that’s a character flaw. I don’t particularly like reality-based TV either.

So what does that mean that this site is going to be? Well, that’s something that I’m not entirely sure about. It’ll be different than what’s been here.

Probably.

Someone email me a Boot to the Head if I start talking about how my shoes were knotted up this morning or how the server put mayonnaise on my sandwich instead of mustard that day or the Mountain Dew I drank tasted like Mountain Wizz or etc. etc.

PHP-Nuke, while it has its uses, really wasn’t what I was looking for in a site, and I think Movable Type will be a little closer.

PHP-Nuke, and Postnuke for that matter, aren’t the most secure software packages out there. I had my homepage defaced once, and I fixed that hole, but there are just too many security holes to deal with.

I couldn’t get PHP-Nuke to look *just so* without extensive knowledge of PHP, sure I learned some (and could have probably learned more).

PHP-Nuke is OK, but after a year of using it, I think it’s time to move on to something (hopefully) better. Don’t worry, for now, the PHP-Nuke version of the site will live here.

Anonymous wrote: Everybody loves genuinely free software like abandonware. And the best unknown peice of abandonware is XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It’s an adictive little peice of game that combines turn based strategy, “SimMilitaryBase”, aliens and uh, staring at a badly rendered globe. For how simple the game is it is surpriseingly adictive. Check it out. here

1- Sorry, but there is no respawn.

2- Even though you are going in as a medic, when someone is hurt PLEASE DON’T stab them and then try to revive them.

3- Your melee weapon will not always be there, you can drop it.

4- Jumping all the time will not prevent someone from shooting you (and please don’t grunt every time you do jump).

5- It usually takes only one shot to reduce your entire “health meter.”

6- Funnily enough there usually isn’t a bunch of the correct ammo laying around on the ground.

7- Try and say what you want not shout F commands (F5, F5)

8- Medipacks themselves don’t cure everything.

9- You are not invulnerable when you are blinking, something is seriously wrong with you.

10- and finally, unlike most games a bazooka will take up more space than say…a key.

Most importantly, be careful John.

Current Crummysocks.com Super Smash Bros. Melee champion and all-around something brc64 has written an interesting article over at Driver Heaven that’s worth a read.



From the article:“(GLEXCESS) was, perhaps, the most interesting benchmark I ran. Scenes 1, 9, and 12 … resulted in some very similar scores, and somehow, the Pentium 3 managed to score slightly better overall.”

One thing that I never will understand is how people with a high-profile website will still post news (or whatever it is they post) that has some glaring spelling or punctuation error. I suppose it happens because they don’t know that they are doing it, and that someone should step up and show them, but some (and by ‘some’ I mean ‘a great deal’) people not only acknowledge that they don’t have a firm grasp of the rules of the written English language, but they aren’t inclined to do anything about it. That is an unacceptable position to have, especially on any site that tries to pass itself off as any sort of serious site.



I know that a lot of people have trouble with their spelling and grammar, but there are free tools out there to help them out.



Now I don’t want this to sound like I am condemning bad spelling/grammar on all fronts. Errors in IRC and other forms of instant messaging are acceptable because of their nature. There is little time for proofreading if you want to be a productive member of the conversation. Pages on the Web are another matter, there is ample time from conception to publication for proofreading of works, as well as the ability to correct them after a mistake is discovered, so there really is no excuse for the transgressions to keep happening.



Except for laziness, and that’s rarely a viable excuse for anything.



I guess I can get off my soap box now.

Bring your computer

I know this sounds obvious, but you need to remember to bring something to game on. If you forget this,
you are in for a long, boring and potentially expensive party. I, personally haven’t seen anyone forget
their computer yet, so this point may be moot, but don’t let it be said that I never helped anyone out.

Bring your cables/hardware

If you are bringing your computer, you are going to need to bring your hardware and all the connections
you will need. So you will need to bring, at minimum, two power cords, having a computer and
no power cords is just as bad as having no computer at all. You’ll also need to bring a power strip. Most
parties that I’ve been to will only give you one outlet to plug your stuff into. I won’t go into the math here,
but of you have two devices that you need to plug in and one outlet to do it, you are going to have a bit of
trouble jamming them both in there.

Ethernet cable, you need to have Category 5 (5e, 6, any of those are fine) cable to connect to the network
provided. If you get to a LAN party and can’t connect to any part of the LAN, you’ve essentially just
moved your computer across town (state, etc) to play Solitaire. Not so fun.

Bring a mouse pad. This isn’t so essential with the newer breeds of optical mice, since they do so much
better on surfaces with regular patterns (eg wood grain), and in a pinch, you can use a sheet of paper to
substitute for a mouse pad, but nothing beats a real mouse pad. If I had to guess, I’d say that mouse pads are the most frequently forgotten item at a LAN party.

Now I don’t understand it, but at almost every LAN party that I’ve ever been to, someone at some point
needs a 3.25” disk. I don’t know why, and I really am having trouble coming up with a good reason to even
need one, but the need will arise. So, while not *technically* required to enjoy yourself at the party…
unless you are the one that needs it for whatever reason.

Drivers

No matter how well your computer works at home, odds are good that it will magically, and of it’s own
accord, stop working in some way. No matter how trivial you think the drivers are, you need to bring them.
You need to to *at minimum* bring drivers for all the hardware you will be using at the event. So you need
drivers for your video card, network card, sound card driver (although you can do without sound, having
no sound in games really really sucks), and misc drivers for your motherboard (especially important if your operating system of choice doesn’t provide drivers for your hardware). Other drivers you can live without,
at least for the duration of the LAN. Once you get home, you can worry about getting your stuff going
properly.

The easiest thing to do is to put all your drivers for your hardware on a CDR and keep that in your LAN
bag. You don’t want to necessarily put it on a CDRW because, if you have to reinstall all your stuff, you
won’t be able to get anything off your CDRW disc, unless you fixate your disk. CDRs are cheap enough
that you can stand to put all your updated drivers on one. Besides, if using a sub-dollar disc will save your
day/evening/weekend/whatever of gaming, then I think it’s an excellent investment, especially if you had
to go out of town/state to go to the party.

Prizes

Now here’s where I need to get on my soapbox for a minute. You should not go to a LAN party expecting
to win a prize. Even if it is advertised that there will be some awesome swag given away at the thing, that
shouldn’t be the sole reason you go. Yeah, it’s cool to win some of that really neat gear, but there are so
many other reasons to go that the prizes should really take a back seat to them. Right… Prizes… If you are
at one of these LAN parties where something really cool is given out (like the new Whizbang 3300 video
card) please fight the temptation to install it at the LAN. If your system is working, don’t do anything to make
it not want to work (like changing out the hardware). The minute you start messing with hardware, that’s the
minute that your system will decide to take a big dump all over your fun. Hope you brought toilet paper.

Money for Food

This varies from event to event, but you should generally remember to bring money to get food at the
event you are going to. Sometimes (very rarely I might add) the food will be provided, but that certainly is
the exception to the rule. You could also go out and buy food outside of the event, but that is another
source of income for the proprietors of the event. If you are thinking to yourself (and I know a few of you
are), “They make enough money off of me by charging to get into the event, why should I buy food from
them?” The short answer: nobody starts/runs a LAN party with the intention of getting rich (at least none
that I’ve been to), and the food is a way to help them break even. If you don’t believe that, then go ahead
and start pricing out what it would cost to put on an event of any size, and you’ll start to see pretty fast that it costs a lot more than you might think to get a decent sized party off the ground.

And that’s it! That’s all the essential things that you need to have a fun time at a LAN party. There are other things that would be helpful to have, but you don’t *have* to have them, such as: a coat (some of those
venues get fairly frigid when the computers start turning off in the middle of the night), something to sleep
on like a blanket/pillow/etc., and (I know this sounds corny) a good attitude. If you can keep these tips in
mind, you’ll have a good time at the LAN party you choose to go to guaranteed*.

*Not guaranteed.

Wow, another AsylumLAN has come and gone, and a good time was had by all that attended. Of course the Socks was there, and sponsored the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament. Congratulations to Dark Yoda and Xsyqo! Now I have just enough time to recouperate for the next one in November.