Jay Lucky

So I was messing around with the VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta today, hoping to be able to get Age of Conan to run.  Sadly, it didn’t work out that great.  I was able to, after some finagling of the copied directory files, get it to start up, ask for credentials, and then present me with the above character select screen.  It was actually fairly responsive in full screen mode (don’t even bother trying windowed - it works, but only barely and it takes forever to load in the assets), however once I selected a character and tried to load the game, it deteriorated from there.

The loading screen took forever to process, most likely due to poor disk performance.  Having the vmdk file on the same disk as the OS is a pretty bad idea, particularly on a 7200RPM drive.  I don’t typically have I/O problems on my Raptors, but because this is a hackintosh, it’s the best I had laying around.

After the loading screen finished, the art assets would slowly start loading in, almost to the point where it seemed playable.  That quickly faded as soon as I tried to move my character… the entire screen started to distort, textures were missing on a majority of everything, and I lost all of the UI completely.

Oh well.  It’s a huge stride forward for virtualization, I have to say.  Hopefully they can get all of the DirectX bugs worked out and make it fully functional.  If they can, this could be a great way for Mac users to be able to play games without using Bootcamp.

Another thing I almost wet my pants over (but with a different bodily fluid…) was the announcement that Blizzard would be releasing Diablo 3!  Dear God it’s about fucking time… I swear, I was going to have to hunt someone down if they didn’t announce it this week after the bullshit 5 days of Blizzard crap they were pulling with their splash page.

Irregardless, it looks very very good and I can’t wait for it to come out in 2010, probably when I’m in South Africa for World Cup, because, that’s probably how it will work out, sadly.  Hopefully it will be sooner than that, say - Christmas? =)

I re-installed Diablo 2 just to play around in it again, relive some false memories I had of playing it (I never did), and I have to say, fuck me is 800×600 small as shit on a 30″ monitor.  Jesus Christ, did we really game in that horrid resolution?  The graphics, at best, are appaling by todays standards, however, the gameplay is surprisingly very good for a hack and slash top down dungeon crawler.

I probably would have lost hours of my life, much like this afternoon, playing it online back in 2000.  I only hope they release it either before WotLK, or sometime afterwards, because honestly, with how good it looks, I can see myself playing it quite a bit.

With every passing day, Blizzard changes it’s splash page with an ever revealing image, hooking pretty much anyone and everyone in gaming into it’s new game announcement, due this Saturday.

D3? WotLK? Lost Fucking Vikings!?

Sigh.

Todays image now has eyes in the center and another rune.  Apparently hidden in the CSS file for the page the Lost numbers are showing up in sequence, so far with 4, 15, 23, 16.  With 2 more days until WWI, that’s just enough time to add 8 and 42.

So either this is a huuuuuge fucking prank (or rather brilliant god damn marketing - motherfuckers), or now people think there might be a Lost Vikings game announcement.  Lost Numbers + Ice = Lost Vikings apparently.

Somehow I doubt that, but you just never know with these guys.  Either way, I expect it to be epic.  If it’s just something we’ve already heard about (SC2, WotLK) it’s going to be a huge disappointment.

So I played around with this a little bit tonight, check out my guy Kanichtwinn that I made:

[singlepic=14,400,300,,center]

Pretty fucking fun, I must say. This game is going to be a huuuuuuuge hit.  Can’t wait to see more of it.

So I’ve been playing the Halo 3 Beta for the last few days, and I must say it’s pretty cool. The graphics look awesome on my 50″ HDTV and it’s definitely a blast to play. However… the downside to this is having to listen to 12 year olds scream into the headset every fucking chance they get.

“GET THE FLAG GET THE FLAG GET THE FLAG OH MY GOD YOU SUCK!!11″

Holy jesus is this annoying. Seriously, if your kid is like this, beat him/her now. The rest of society shouldn’t have to put up with this crap.

On another note - I suck at this game. At least, the online part of it; I’ll own the shit out of the single player game, this is just a fact. I don’t know what it is… maybe I’m getting older? I thought this might be the case too, but then I loaded up Half-Life 2 and proceeded to own the fuck out of everything. To be honest, I just think that there really is a difference in control between keyboard+mouse and a console controller. I don’t feel like the controller is precise enough and using my thumb to aim really fucks me up. It’s more fluid with a mouse for me.

Perhaps it’s because I “grew up”, per se, on computer FPS’s. Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Unreal… these were all the games I played in what I would consider to be my formative FPS years. Or… maybe not. Either way, getting insta-killed every time you spawn fucking blows.

Seriously. What kind of bullshit excuse is this for not showing up to the firing of pretty much most of the staff of your company?

f13.net: And the next party… god, I am a fucking cynic. Why weren’t you at the firing party?

Brad McQuaid: Well, this is going to sound corny but it’s true. I would have broken down in tears.

Go die in a fire you fucking pussy. You can read the whole interview on f13.net, if you dare. But I warn you, it will only piss you off. For anyone that doesn’t know who Brad McQuaid is, he’s the guy behind the original Everquest and of recent design, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

HOLY CRAP. I wake up this morning and read my daily morning dose of Joystiq only to find that apparently the biggest gaming expo in the world has been canceled. Crazy. Where the fuck am I going to get all my hype and shitty game previews now? I guess there’s always the Game Developers Conference, but that really pales in comparision to the huge over the top displays and booth babes that E3 has… and to think, I never got a chance to go =(

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out… I’ll be curious what sort of offshoot conf’s pop up to take the place of E3 if it does end. I mean, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo need somewhere to spout off their bullshit, right?

So, I’m what you might call an “Old Skool Gamer”, or, in other words, probably like most people in there early 30’s that grew up on Atari/Nintendo. I love me some platforming! Cloning Clyde, as it turns out, has this in abundance, giving you 40 levels total of pure platforming bliss. It’s actually really fun, blending some pretty standard side scrolling platforming with inovative ideas, such as the whole cloning and DNA alteration thing. I honestly didn’t think it would be as fun as it turned out to be, but I must say, I’d reccomend this to anyone that enjoyed Super Mario when they were younger ( or hell, even now! ).

The price is a bit steep, 800 points ( which is $10 USD ) and it was somewhat short, but I definately would like to see more original games like this come out on XBLA. Please, keep this kind of shit coming. Galaga came out today for 400 points and from what I read, it’s just not even really worth it.

For anyone that doesn’t know about the Red Lights of Doom, it’s what happens when your Xbox 360 is completely FUCKED. Basically, it’s how your 360 tells you it’s burning inside because someone ( we won’t name names here, but I’m going to guess that it was an employee at either Flextronics, Wistron, or Celestica in the Pearl River Delta region in Southern China) was fucking sleeping on the job and didn’t put enough thermal paste somewhere, or didn’t fully solder some capicitors into the main board.

All I know is that mine died yesterday. It had been giving me the checkerboard problem for a couple weeks sporadically, which quite a few people have reported, but it was still playable if I rebooted it a few times. Yesterday it started completely locking up, either instantly on boot at the 360 logo, or shortly therafter… it didn’t matter what I was doing. There’s been several reports of this happening lately after the Spring update. I think the correlation between the update and the failures is bullshit, but you never know. At this point, I really wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to fuck something up like that. I checked my secondary code and found out it was 0102, which from what I’ve read is the General Hardware Failure code. Basically, that code means something is wrong but the 360 has no fucking idea what it is. In essence, my 360 was dead and done.

Thankfully I had the extended warranty from EBGames, which I HIGHLY reccomend getting if you’re going to buy a 360. I walked in and handed them my old unit and got a new one, no questions asked. I even got to keep my HDD, so I didn’t lose anything that I’d downloaded. Best 40 bucks I’ve ever spent! The sad part of this is that alot of people don’t have the extended warranty, so that means they’re screwed and have to now pay Microsoft $130 USD to fix it. How fucked is that?

Let’s hope this 2006-05-06 version holds up a little better than that old piece of shit 2005-10-25 version I had.

Ok, so maybe I’m a little late with this new XBLA fad… but so what, this game kicks ass. Who knew that playing Uno online with three other people would be so damn entertaining… I sure as hell didn’t think it would be. That is, until I tried it. It’s so much fun that I’ve spent most of the last three days playing it online.

Hit me up if you want to play a few rounds of progressive penalty, draw until play Uno. I need 18 more wins for my last achievement! =)