Exposing my socks to the world

Here’s how the Sucktinuum works:

You start at the Zero point on the scale and measure the amount of Suck or Awesome is in whatever you happen to be measuring. You then travel along the Suck Track (ST) in the proper amount of Suck Units (SU) until you arrive at the Final Suck Rating (FSR). It’s that simple!

Yes, I have prepared some examples.

Here is a scale for one of my all time favorite games, Tetris Attack. Clearly this game has more Awesome than Suck.

Here’s the scale for one of the worst games ever created, Zoop. Zoop is such an abomination that I don’t even want to call it a game any more. From now on, I’m going rename Zoop to Waffle.

Here’s the scale for Karnov, a game so bad that it actually crossed the Suckawesome Traversal (SaT) and actually became good. Absolutely nothing about the game makes sense, but somehow people like it. It’s tough to make a game with that special brand of Suck so that it becomes an underground classic, but Data East found a way.

Here’s the scale for a game that was so good that it crossed the Suckawesome Traversal (SaT) the other way and became bad. It’s probably even more difficult (and rare) to find a game that is so good that it becomes hated. The best example I can think of is Counter Strike. I’m sure that the people that are still playing it think that it’s a good game, but I’ve washed my hands of that opinion a long time ago and I’m sure that many of you have done the same.

Now I don’t want to give the impression that the Sucktinuum is solely intended for games. The beauty of it is that you can use it to rate just about anything. Go ahead and use it to evaluate whatever you can come up with. I’d be very interested in seeing what kinds of results you get.

The site was down all night last night because the cable modem that we had here at Casa De Socks apparently croaked. My ISP was surprisingly quick about getting us back on the ‘net with a new modem (called them at 10:55 last night and got going around 8:45 this morning).

Hopefully that will resolve the connection issues I’ve been having and the page won’t disappear every few minutes like it has been doing for the last few weeks. (That made online gaming an impossibility also).

Believe it or not, there have actually been some things of note that have happened this week in the realm of gaming.

Apparently someone has figured out how the dot-codes on the e-Reader cards work and has made a program to make your own custom dot-codes (assuming you’re into such things). This relieves me about this much since I was convinced that I was one of only two people on the planet that bought an e-Reader. Maybe someone out there will make some new fun for the machine.

Over at RIT, someone has apparently decided to make game based on Metroid as a project in one of his classes. The game is bound to be short, since it’s being based on just the first area of the original Metroid, but so far the game looks very nice. The game also just happens to be in my price range, so I may have to go get a copy here soon.

And that’s essentially it!

Oh, and you need to go watch The Super Mario Bros. Cartoon Show if you know what’s good for you.

I don’t care what anyone says, having a LAN party outside is one of the best things you can do, especially if the weather’s nice like it was this past weekend. It’s like bringing the indoors to the outdoors! I want to thank the Dakota and Dakota’s Princess for putting on the thing.

If you know anyone that has the capabilities to put on an outdoor LAN, you need to get them on it! For that matter, you can probably rent out a shelter house at one of your local parks for not too much money. Just make sure you have someone who is at least familiar with the outdoor grilling arts handy. Outdoor LANs beg for grilled food.

I think I need to go back to bed.

1. Get two boxes. This solution is probably the least annoying of the three, but it brings out some interesting issues. I would need little road map on top of the main box to figure out what combination of buttons I’d need to press to get my games to appear on the screen. “Super Nintendo? That’s 2-3. Dreamcast? 2-1. Genesis? 1.”

2. Splice them all together with Y-adapters. For about $5 a piece, you can buy a Y-adapter that will let you plug two RCA type plugs into one receptacle. So you can buy several and just chain them together like so (and yes, I’ve done this, it’s not pretty): Hook one Y-adapter into each input (Left Audio, Right Audio, and Video). We’ll call these A, B, and C. Now hook up your Super Nintendo into it’s respective adapters, and plug new Y-adapters into the other side. We’ll call these D, E, and F. Hook up your Dreamcast to the new Y-adapters, plug in more Y-adapters, call these new ones G, H, and I. GameCube, Y-adapters, J, K, L. Nintendo 64, Y-adapters M, N, O. Hook up your Genesis, now the new Geneses only have output for one audio, so you have to decide which speaker you want the sound to come out of and hook it up to that and the video feed. Oh, and new Y-adapters, called P, and Q. Same story for the NES. One audio, one video. Plug them in. You won’t need any more Y-adapters until you get a new system. (Some of you could keep going, I know, but that’s all the systems that I have).

The benefit to a system like this is that all the machines are hooked up to the television at the same time, and there’s no button combinations you have to remember. The problems? (Yeah, there are problems) 1. Signal loss. With all these connections to the TV, the quality of the signal is degraded a bit. The systems at the end of the chain are affected the worst, and it will only get worse as new systems are added, and 2. Let’s say that I want to take the N64 somewhere for some reason. Unless I labelled all the plugs in the above example, I’m going to have an incredibly tough time figuring out which wires to pull. Not to mentiion that there would be enough wires back there to strangle a buffalo.

3. Hybrid. I could combine the two methods and hook up two or more systems to each switch on a box, but then I have the same problems I faced in the earlier solutions, just lessened some. I’d still need a road map to figure how to get any given system on the screen (“All Sega systems are on Button 4, all Nintendo systems made before 1995 are on Button 3.” etc.), and to take a system on the road would be slightly easier, but still more trouble than it should be, especially with two or more wires coming out of each plug.

So what do I want? I want a box that I can plug about 12 systems into that is mechanical (so I don’t have to plug it into the wall). I figure that if I have space for about 12, I won’t have to complain again until about 2016.

If you’re seeing this on April 1st, then I guess you figured it out.

If you’re seeing this on April 2nd, then you either didn’t visit the site yesterday or… Uhm, there’s always next year.

*Note* The fake index page I had up can still be found here.