Exposing my socks to the world

The Fatman has posted an article that deserves a look about the Voice Chat option in the new Unreal Tournament.

I don’t really have a proper update for this week, so I’ll leave you with this question:

Has anyone ever used the ‘Notes’ pages of a game’s manual?

Maybe I’m the weird one around here, but I can’t ever remember using the Notes pages of my manuals for, well, anything.

Discuss in the forums

I went through the archive and turned off commenting for all the past articles. Someone was posting trying to use my bandwidth to sell a variety of organ enlarging drugs.

From now on, if you want to talk back about an article, please do so in the forums.

It’s really hard to classify a game like Wario Ware. It’s what I like to call a Metagame. It’s a game that’s made up of a lot of smaller games, kind of like the Mario Party series, except that this is (mostly) a one player experience.

So what is it exactly that you do in this game? Well, storyline aside, your goal is to progress through ‘courses’ of micro-games, each one with a distinct theme and a boss-game every so often. The controls for all of the micro-games are different, but they are fairly intuitive, and they have to be. You have about three seconds to figure out what you’re supposed to do and then do it before the next game starts.

The micro-games that this cartridge offers is where the game really shines. There are about 200 of the things locked away in this cartridge, and while there are some similarities between some of them, they are different enough that each one seems like a whole new experience. The games are broken up into themes (or courses) that are presented be the characters in the game. Jimmy with the gigantic afro has sports games, Mona rides a scooter and presents the weird games, and 9-Volt the grade-schooler presents the old-school games just to name a few.

The graphics in this game are extremely varied. They range from extremely simple, to photographic quality. Every one of the games has a distinctive look to it, which is quite a feat considering the amount of them that there are. The scenes that play out to tell the story of the game are particularly well done.

Running through the courses of the micro-games isn’t all there is to do in this game. The game offers a practice mode where you can hone your skills at a particular game (as well as unlock some of the game’s secrets). There are some full versions of some games that you can unlock that have a Wario flavor to them such as Dr. Wario and Sheriff (an very old Nintendo arcade title), there are some extended versions of some of the micro-games and there are a few two-player games that require both players to use the same Game Boy. Definitely an interesting experience.

Wario Ware is one of those games that is perfectly suited to the Game Boy. It’s a game that’s got an incredible amount of variety, it’s easy to pick up and play, and it’s a good game to play in between other games, or on road trips or wherever. This is one of those games that you absolutely can not go wrong with.

I attended a small LAN party this past weekend and it reaffirmed that I still suck Warcraft 3. We did have a chance to sit down and play a little bit of the popular mod, Tides of Blood.

For those of you that don’t know, Tides of Blood is a custom Warcraft 3 map in which each side of the battle has installations in addition to the main stronghold. Periodically computer-controlled troops will come out and run to the opponent’s base… and mostly get slaughtered. So you control one hero on one side or the other and it’s your job to turn the tides of the stalemate.

Long story short: you control one hero and slaughter the other side. Fun!

This map/mode makes for some of the longest games of Warcraft 3 that I have ever played. The match that we played the other day lasted for nearly two hours and 40 minutes. The game was really a back and forth struggle, and, had the other team not given up, the game could have easily eclipsed the current record of three and a half hours. It’s a fun map, but it totally ruined my ability to play a normal game of Warcraft. Since you only control heroes, I completely forgot what a good build order remotely looks like. Well, I shouldn’t say that that’s the only reason that I suck at regular Warcraft 3. I haven’t actually played the game in several months. I suppose that could play some small part in the whole thing.

For those interested, here is a REPLAY(link removed 7.21.05 since it’s no longer relavent) of the match we had. It requires version 1.14 of Warcraft 3 and version .99M3 of Tides of Blood.

AsylumLAN 15 has come and gone, so I’m fairly well in a time crunch.

I did manage to put in a couple of hours in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, and I will say this: it’s definitely a game where you have to work together. It’s almost like playing Final Fantasy Lite (TM). I didn’t really check out any of the single player features in the game, but I can’t imagine the game being nearly as fun if you don’t have three other people you are trying to coordinate moves with.

Yeah, I thought this was a short update, too.

There is an interesting pair of articles over at the Richmond Times Dispatch that deals with retro gaming. They do quite a bit of listing of just what kinds of retro games that have been released (or rereleased).

Retro gaming is something that I’ve seen coming for a long time. During the ‘Sega vs. Nintendo’ wars, almost everything was directed squarely at me. Okay, well, maybe not me specifically, but I was definately in the target market. Problem was, though, that I didn’t have the kind of money that I needed to get all the games that I wanted (a problem that still persists today), so there were a lot of games that I either missed out on playing or got rid of so that I could play something else. Now that I seem to have a dollar or two in my pocket, I’m going back to those same stores to try and get some of those games back.

Now, I’m sure that there’s people that play these older games exclusively, just like there’s a lot of people who play new games exclusively, but I can’t do that. Yes, I believe that it’s important to know about and play some of these games (some of the conventions used in those early games are still in use today), but I like to play something new once in a while.

So now that there’s people in their 20’s and 30’s (and on up) that are trying to get back some of the games that they had growing up, and there’s people younger than that who realize that some of the older games are actually good, and there’s been two results to this: companies are realizing that they can get away with releasing compilations of old games at low, low prices and not have to do a whole lot of work on them, and communities like FatManGames spring up to facilitate the collecting of these games. Unfortunately, a lot of the games that are sought after are rare, expensive, and probably both.

So that drives people (for better or worse) to the emulation scene, well, that’s not the only factor, but I’m willing to bet it’s the biggest one. I’m not going to go into the legality of emulation or ROMs or any of that again, but as long as there’s at least some people that get into collecting and maintaining old games and systems after trying them out on an emulator, there’s some hope for ROM Masters.

Benchmarking a system can give you all sorts of numbers. I’ve run several of them and I think that I have quite a range to deal with here.

Let’s go ahead and list all pertinant system specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton Core
Motherboard: DFI NFII Ultra-AL
RAM: 512 MB(2x256MB) Kingston HyperX PC3000
Video Card: XFX GeForceFX 5700 Ultra

Now on to the fun stuff. Let’s run some tests!

First up is Futuremark’s 3DMark03.

3DMark is probably one of the most widely known and widely used benchmarks, so, of course, it’s the one I used first, yielding a score that I would put in the range of acceptable scores

Now that’s certainly a score, but I wanted more, so I went out to see my buddy Mr. Google and took a look around to see what I could find.

Turbo95

What it measures: Turbo 95 reportedly measures CPU speed, FPU speed, Cache speed, SVGA frames per second, and hard disk throughput. The writer of the program was nice enough to provide some sample scores so you have something to compare your numbers to.

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As you can see, my system blows the socks off of a P133, clocking in as the approximate P2940, and gets longer bars in every category Turbo95 could throw at it… Except for hard disk access. That’s supposedly a limitation of the program which might be fixed sometime before the sun goes nova.

Chris’ 3D Benchmark

Chris’ Benchmark doesn’t really come out and say what it’s doing, but it throws up a cube on your screen, spins it around, does some nebulous computations and then gives you a number.

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DIAG.exe

DIAG purports to be a complete system benchmark and analysis tool. Most of the features were tantalizingly dummied out of the free version, but I was able to run the video benchmark, which is really why we’re here, right?

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Now we begin to see some interesting results. My card scored lower than a GeForce2 running at AGP 4X in both text and graphics written to the screen. What does that mean exactly?

Yeah, I don’t really know either.

Landmark

Landmark is one of those utilities that tries to measure everything about a system on one compact screen.

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Now, admittedly, I didn’t shell out the $49.95 for the full version of the software, so these results may not be as accurate as they could be, but I think they tell a pretty good story. This program has really opened my eyes about the speed of my processor. It turns out that I’ve been buying Intel 486’s all these years, they just keep bumping up the speeds!

SysChk

The next three images are from a full system reporing utility called SysChk. This program was probably the most confused out of the programs I ran.

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Some things of interest that should be noted about my system that differs from what SysChk came up with:

My hard drive is larger than 3.77 MB
I apparently have the fastest 386 on the planet
AMD makes the Compaq 386sx Intel Pentium Pro

So there you have it. Lots of numbers to look at. What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, I don’t really know. What I do know is that I certainly have a special system on my hands here.

Wow, it’s been a slow week for games and gaming in general. About the only thing that I’ve even seen that’s worth mentioning is the announcement by Nintendo of the dual screened handheld unit. Sure, it sounds like it could be something neat to fool around with, but really, I don’t see what kind of advantages that kind of setup would really give to a portable gamer. There just aren’t really that many games out there now that would benefit from a two screen setup. The only concievable thing that I can come up with is that it would be a good setup for RPGs. Action on one screen, menus full of your items and spells or whatever on the other screen… Kind of like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is reportedly going to do.

Final Fantasy Crystal Cronicles, I found out recently, has been bumped forward to February 10th, or somewhere therabouts. Maybe I never noticed it before, since I never owned a Playstation, but it seems like that ever since Square-Enix re-friended with Nintendo, they have been putting out lots of games in a large quivering mass. In the last couple of months we’ve seen Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Final Fantasy 10-2, Sword of Mana, Final Fantasy 11, and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. I’m probably missing some, but that’s a lot of decent quality games in not a lot of time.

Since we’re on the Game Cube Connectivity Train, we have to stop for a rest stop at The Legend of Zelda Four Swords for the Game Cube. This is providing the competition for Crystal Chronicals, at least for my gaming dollar. Both games are (supposed to be) coming out at about the same time, and it looks like the Zelda game will be more like a party style game (kind of like Pac-Man Vs.) where you can just grab up to three of your friends and go for a round or two, whereas Cronicles seems like it almost is going to require you to set aside time with your gaming posse to complete the thing (sort of like an online RPG without the online part, I suppose). Now, I’ve never actually played Four Swords on the Game Boy, mostly because I didn’t want to buy a game I already had just to play the new multi-player version, although now I hear that the extra mode is entirely worth it, since Nintendo is bringing out an entire GameCube game based on the thing.

Gimmicky connectivity… I like it.