The U.S.S. Quad Damage

now at the much more official sounding http://blog.quaddmg.com, the new quad damage offers 20% extra punch per bag. Please ask me for passwords.

I hope soon to ween people off this site with redirections.

This is the official USS Quad Damage wallpaper in widescreen & 4:3.

White Knight Story will actually make you want to buy a ps3. Terrible, but true. I'm not gonna link to the movie here, because it's kind of depressing, and we wouldn't want to encourage Sony, but despite all the laughing at the hilariously overspecced and expensive ps3, there's really something really quite amazing about this platform if they can make games like that...

Fuck.

There's a show on ABC2 called Good Game. Is this a good thing or bad thing? Discuss. You can download entire episodes and see for yourselves whether it's a good show. I'll summarise my opinions on it:

It's a crap show. In the intro sequence, they show some TLAs with their meanings below it, like "LOL" with "Laughing out loud" below it. "FPS" "First Person Shooter", "RTS" "Real time Strategy". They bill themselves as a show "by gamers for gamers", but explain such simple things. It's retarded. The show is very dumbed down, so you'd think (like Top Gear), at least the writing is clever...

You'd be wrong there as well. We've written better reviews on our off days. If we made a competing show about gaming called "TCLOL" it would be far superior in every way:

Before you start to build your gaming machine, you need to figure out exactly what it will be used for. It sounds painfully obvious - "I want to use it for games!", but really, think about it for a moment. There are so many different types of games out there, all with different requirements. What you need to run relatively simple games, like Starcraft or Quake 3, is radically different to what you need to run something like Oblivion or Black & White 2.

... yyyyeaah. For gamers... Well done...

What's the good news? Well, hopefully it'll eventually become the "Top Gear" of gaming, encourage gaming in youth as well as encouraging young kids to become coders / artists / whatever. Maybe an Aussie mod community will rise up. Hack the planet! If enough attention moves down here then maybe game companies will set up shop here and we'll get an actual gaming 'scene'. Maybe I'm just being too optimistic.

Anyway, TCLOL y'all!

Nothing like this to make you feel special...

The Nintendo Revolution (now known as the Wii, the gayest name of all consoles, evar!) will be sold at a profit, and I'm happy about it. It's not because I'm some Nintendo nutcase that worships at the altar of Nintendo (although I'm considering this shirt), I'm happy because this hopefully opens the door for homebrew game designers everywhere. While this is not a sure-fire truth, it's a hope that I think many of us hold, and I'm guessing we'll win Nintendo around.

See, developey people want to see the ps3 sold at a (hopefully heavy) loss so that we can buy a couple, put something like a raytracer on it, and try to render our rendition of the next Toy Story. It's a bargain priced supercomputer. People want the Wii to be sold at a profit because we want nice dev-kits and open-ended controllers. The DS was initially dubbed the "Developer's System" because it was supposedly built for developers, and Nintendo was apparently doing "stuff" to help "independent game makers". While the third party NDS adapters are by far the easiest way of getting started, I'm hoping that Nintendo will soon be opening up more... legal... avenues to allow people to make games for the DS.

The signs for the Revolution are positive, and the fact that it's region free and will allow downloads of previous Nintendo games off the web are just some of the things that lead me to believe that Nintendo really are trying to open up to independent, and perhaps even open source, game makers. I'd love for a bunch of free software "killer apps" to appear on the "Wii". I think when Nintendo sees exactly how having an open platform can make the Wii a platform for the "intelligent box near the TV", I think they'll really start taking steps to open up both the Wii and the DS.

I'm just confused about what I should call the thing...

In case you don't believe me: froobie.

We have an insult for most races. "Lebs", "fobs", "honkies", "wogs", "skips", "abos", just to name a few. Admittedly, some of them aren't really insults but more contractions ("leb" would be a pretty shit insult). However, we do not have an insult for Americans. A friend suggested "American" as the perfect insult for an american, but I think this dodges the issue somewhat.

I propose "burger".

I haven't been posting much, but neither has anyone else. I've been working on a rails version of this site. It's going to be based on typo, but I haven't had much of a chance to work on it because I'm lazy and I like playing video games. Worse, typo's just hit 4.0, and I was using the svn repository. This means I'm gonna have to synch my repo with the official one, which promises to be a royal pain. Worse is all the unit tests that are broken left right and centre. I have no idea where to proceed. Perhaps I should've tried to make the site from scratch instead of trying to learn ruby, rails, and typo all in one shot.

Also, my life's been pretty boring. I've moved, so I'm doing a lot more stuff now. Cooking, travelling, meeting more people, but it all feels ho hum. Don't get me wrong, you guys are all fun and everything, but you know, hanging out is nothing new. I'm also still afraid of cooking, because of my horrible failures. The big problem is cleaning up afterwards. It's like an entire night gone to waste. I think I'm possibly just spreading myself too thinly on all my interests and obligations. I've been playing some games, trying to fit in the website somewhere, cooking and seeing you all ends up taking all my time. I haven't had a satisfying round of picture taking since the grave, and I know it was only a couple of weeks ago, but still.

I want to shoot a little skit or film or something, and I'm hoping with Tim more free we can actually think of some ideas. Hopefully when I get the new site out of the way I can go back to working on luminous, and then a crazy MMOG or something.

I got a copy of Meteos for my DS, which is a puzzle game by the makers of Lumines (which is on the PSP). This is the second game I've got other than Advance Wars: DS, and unlike advance wars, which makes excellent use of both screens but doesn't use the stylus (you can but it's less powerful than the D-Pad + buttons), this game is pretty much made for the stylus, although it doesn't use the non-touch screen very well.

The great thing about the DS is that it's got a bunch of nifty "stuff" that developers can use or not, so I don't really mind the fact that games only use a subset of the features. Brain Training and it's crappy "call out the colours" aside, I have yet to see a game that really uses the microphone well. The stylus was one of those things that I figured was probably not going to be great for fast paced gaming, because I haven't yet seen any games (on, say, palmpilots) that would do such a thing.

Meteos has changed that perception. You must move blocks, a lot, and you must move them really quickly. You can't possibly move them with the D-pad. The ability to "touch" a block and "drag" it to it's proper place is astounding, and in fact it's a lot quicker than a mouse would be for the same task. This is clearly awesome. I've been playing it a lot since I got it (about 2 days ago), and I try and squeeze in some play whenever I can. It's addictive as all hell considering.

Which really brings to light what I'm doing considering I could be playing the damn game! later peeps.