Jolt Country

ZORK: GRAND INQUISITOR: When Michael McKean said that the upcoming puzzle will test my “ability to click.”

ULTIMA 9: ASCENTION: When I left the original area and traveled down the street and saw how laggy and unplayable the game was.

KNIGHT ORC: Right before the encounter with the troll. I am “saving” this one.

X-COM II: TERROR FROM THE DEEP: After the second mission I went on. Seriously, fuck that.

TRIPLE PLAY ‘97: After 14 games. I realized there were no triples or doubles.

HALF-LIFE II: When I had to move around a big train compartment with an electromagnet, yet I couldn’t.

PREY: When the aliens or whatnot attacked and put everyone in chains. I know that makes it like the 2nd level. Still kind of hurting from that one.

RESIDENT EVIL 4: When my brother decided to practically complete the game in front of me before he left Colorado. I have to wait until I forget what he did so it’s all fresh to me.

DEATHROW: It’s going to be after one game unless there is a way to bump up the cursing. I thought this was supposed to be the most foul and filthy game of all time? There was more curses per hour in Transformers: the Movie!

BLOODMASTERS: I have never, ever seen someone on-line playing this on-line only game. What’s going on here? Is this some kind of sick prank? I’m not saying that the game looks like it’s … whatever you all consider to be a great game, Super Huey II according to this thread, but as far as top-down (free) shooters go it looks like a lot of fun. The only thing I can think of is that the developers are all from the United Kingdom and everyone goes to sleep right as I decide I want to Bloodmaster it.

JINXTER: Originally quit it because I couldn’t understand a single word. 20 years later the whole SUPABOOZA LEN GOES LIKE A DRAIN bit in the fake newspaper is positively pant-crapping.

CIVILIZATION IV: When my computer reacted like it had been on a fourteen hour bender and was coming to grips with the fact that the sun was up and they had to be at work in 45 minutes every goddamn time I played it. Possibly there is now a patch for this game that fixes the rampant memory leaks.

The Summer Olympics, where we drag out sports nobody gives a fuck about every 4 years.

The last time I watched a swim meet was Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield, and that was actually diving and pretty goddman entertaining since the villian from Karate Kid played the villian here as well.

So Michael Phelps, I want to see what the buzz is. You got mastercard doing one of there wretched ads suggesting this Phelps character has groupies. ESPN is documenting his quest for 8 medals like its a Red Sox-Yankees world series.

So basically the guy is the fastest swimmer. Great. He is the fastest backwards, forwards and when the have him do the other goofy swim strokes well. And then they throw in relays. Essentially he is doing the same fucking thing over and over, so 8 medals is unreal right? Not exactly.

If someone is essentially doing the same event over and over again and getting a medal everytime that would tell me there are too many redundant medal events. Take basketball, you play 7-8 games, win one medal. They dont then have a left handed only basketball medal round or backwards running basketball round.

If Phelps swam up and down the pool, won one medal and then jumped into a fencing outfit or climbed in the boxing ring and won a medal, I say Athlete, great Athlete and his medal count is given credability. Since he is just swimming and they hand out way more medals for it, YAWN, he swims fast, great.

I dont really have a point other than his 8 medals is vastly overated. He is the best at what he does and you can keep coming up with slight variations of it and he will win. What does that prove that winning one race doesnt?

I have an article I have been meaning to write for months now, about the game Castle Crisis. It is an arcade-perfect translation of Warlords for the Atari 800. If you had a 2600 (and any taste!) you probably played Warlords for the 2600, as it was quite common. The paddle controllers are in perfect form for the game, and it remains an excellent party game.

I picked up Warlords for the 360 (install size: ~35MB, cost: 400 points or $5) and after a long ummmmmmm I come right back to the problem I have trying to do spinner games without a spinner: you need a spinner!

So I don’t know. Is it even worth debating this one? hygraed, in the BBS, told me that there IS a spinner controller for the Xbox, and if I am going to keep doing this thing (get games that require a spinner - next up, Discs of Tron) then maybe it would be a good second controller for my system.

Let’s debate it anyway. Warlords for the 360 comes in two styles: classic and evolved. Amazingly, like real-life evolution, the latter is worse for all the human tinkering. Graphically — and please keep in mind I am on a 19″ screen until I finish my next text game — it’s a cramped mess, with some kind of weird mechanized robotroid post-modern thing going on. (Put it this way: the presentation sort of reminds me of what Sentinel Returns did on the PC years ago.) Because we’re all used to the crisp and clear graphics of regular Warlords, anything else that gums up the works is not necessary. In the (physical) arcade version of Warlords, it pretty much takes one hit to destroy one block. Not so with the evolved 360 version! No idea why!

So, Warlords is an amazing game that suffers from control issues on the 360 with the standard controller. My opinion of this game is INCOMPLETE until such time as I find a spinner, or some humans to play against on-line.

I did finally buy a 360 on Thursday, so let me give some advice to other people who might be thinking of doing the same, so they don’t make the same mistake as I.

If you’re like me, you’ve taken an active interest in “Xbox Live Arcade.” In fact, except for Dead Rising, you may very well only be interested in the Live Arcade games. Microsoft sells something called the “Xbox 360 Arcade.” Surely this is what we need! Well, it isn’t. In fact it is the worst system to get if you want to play a bunch of Xbox Live Arcade games.

It doesn’t come with a hard drive, for starters. It does come with a 256 MB memory card, which is fine, except Braid takes 144 MB. So that’s over half of it gone from starters. Space Giraffe was another 44 MB, and suddenly tensions are high on the card with everyone crammed together. Doesn’t particularly help that I managed to lose the receipt, too, so I couldn’t take the thing back for a better version.

On the other hand, I DID get to do everything I wanted when I got home. I bought some Microsoft points and was playing Braid and Space Giraffe. Pac-Man: Championship Edition comes on a DVD with the system, so that was five bucks saved. And I loooOOOoOve the wireless controller. It really works! I feel like I am reporting from 1985 and just finished up with the PCjr’s wireless keyboard. I guess in the last 13 years they got the glitches ironed out.

I’m going to have to get a hard drive for the thing, and it looks like prices are coming down on eBay. Microsoft wants $100 for a 20 GB drive, which is laughable - so an auction site is my best bet. If it gets in the neighborhood of $30 for a 20 GB drive, I might have made out after all.

(And I have been enjoying the hell out of Braid and Space Giraffe, with Warlords and Bionic Commando up next.)

I missed the first day since making this a blog! You know what meme I like? Hitting the f key a lot. It’s going to take off. But how do I react to missing a day?

F-f-ffffffff-aaaack!

Anyway, I am going to post-date this, so nobody will now. A bunch of things to talk about tonight.

First off, I was linked to by a neat article on indie gaming over at The Monk’s Brew. So I am going to link back to him and more importantly, start reading his website because I want greater knowledge of the “indie” computer game scene, and carefully-written, thoughtful articles about it interest me. These articles are unlike the glazed-over slop that this article is. We’ll get to the excuses and blame in a bit.

Secondly, I had a chance to pick up some Nathan’s beef franks on Sunday. I like phrasing it that way, because it sounds like I am too fucking important to just pick up a package of goddamn hot dogs. About twice a year I want some hot dogs, because I get nostalgic for “Albon’s Hot Dogs” in lovely downtown Hilton, NY - in Canning Street Square. Oh, you have been there and don’t remember it? That’s because Albon went out of business about 20 years ago. F-f-f-ffffffffffffack! He sold hot dogs and nothing but. He was AWESOME. My mom would take me and Knuckles down there when they had parent-teacher conference days (PTA days were half days, and because my brother and I weren’t sociopaths, our parents never had to be there.)

All right, I think we’ve established why I get homesick and want hot dogs. I would always get the “Ballpark” ones because Michael Jordan was the spokesman for them. I have no particular affection for Jordan, so really, that’s the power of advertising. Thirty-something programmers dumped out on the street, having to grocery-shop for themselves. It’s all about the mental associations.

This time I picked the “Nathan’s” hot dog package, because they sponsor competitive eating. Which I think is fascinating. Since I am already hours late, and this is an embarrassing subject anyway, let’s wrap this up: the hot dogs are great! I used to think that those disgusting eyesores ate 60 of them in 8 minutes on the 4th of July because they were looking for fame, fortune, and one of those giant checks. Maybe not so! They are just plain tasty. Best of all, no hot dog connoisseur is going to show up in the comments and tell me to fuck myself and my pedestrian upbringing.

All right, hot dogs and indie games. This made CZK two hours late. Sorry everyone!

2008 PGA Championship DISASTER UPDATE!!!!!!!!!

The second round is virtually over, so let’s check our masters of disaster to see how the four most loathesome men in golf fared today!

For each douche, I will at the end rate them (on a 0-10 scale) on 1) likelihood of following through on disaster, and 2) how terrible it would be if the disaster occurred. By multiplying these together, each douche will receive an overall DISASTER RATING of 0-100. Then you can mark these numbers on your wall in crayon. Right on the wall. Use different color crayons for each douche.

(more…)

Hi! ICJ here. As you can see, I have pretty much taken the last few days off, as Pinback has helpfully described the sorts of foods he could throw back into his slavering maw every single day. This has been a sort of slow torture for me, as I have been updating the website at night, and in order to be less of an eyesore, I am on something that is half a diet and half a healthier lifestyle tha-ZZZzzzz whoa, bored myself to sleep with that sentence. Anyway, I am on carrot juice and cauliflower until I pass out, and I can’t even BEGIN to describe how much I would have loved a Double Kalua Lobster at eleven PM these last few nights.

One thing I did do some work on was the new RSS feed to the other site I maintain, Caltrops. Then our programmer, Entropy Stew, threw my stuff out and did a much better job. You can subscribe to the feed here:

http://www.caltrops.com/rss.php

It is filtered as best we can. I can’t promise it is completely work-safe, but we have tried to make it as such. It’s a feed of forum posts. We haven’t done anything for the articles, but those are infrequent enough that it wouldn’t make much difference.

Thanks, and please feel free to subscribe. If you’ll now excuse me, I see that baby in the lobster costume, and I am going to go to the store to finally sate my late-night craving for bab-LOBSTER!

Emily Short wrote up a nice piece for today’s game on Play This Thing. It is honestly things like this that makes it — the creation of text games — all worthwhile. Plus, Play This Thing has a nice web layout. Thanks, Emily!

Oh yeah, this is also the update for today around here, so football week was also four days, like Knuckles the Clown week. I will leave comments on so my own brother can attack my upbringing, which always stings until I go HEYYYYY.

I’m on vacation this week, but I am trying to write stuff in advance and set it to publish in the future.

Here is a post I wrote on Caltrops regarding Peter Moore, President of EA Sports, telling us why they aren’t making anything for the PC any more. Amazingly, “because you’ve all wised up to our filth” was sort of glossed over. If you have a comment, please do not hesitate to make it over at Caltrops, registration is not required.

A few years ago I did the vocal, bass and drum tracks to a few new songs, in what would have been the third Beaver compact disc.

It never materialized for a number of reasons - the fact that we lived in four different states didn’t help, but at the same time, it was ultimately going to require someone running around all over the country with a shitty Tascam Portastudio03, recording things. And when I realized that the best recording I was ever going to get out of that goddamn thing was a continually-popping pantomime of listenable…ness..ity, it really made the hundreds of dollars (which I didn’t have) in travel seem like a pointless expense.

Enter the Internet! You can now collaborate on songs across the globe.

Anyway, I am attempting to fix up some bugs in a text game I released 8 years ago. If you can play a reasonable guitar… haha, I am just kidding, you can’t suck more than me - if you can play a guitar poorly, sign up to www.kompoz.com and help me out on this track: http://www.kompoz.com/compose-collaborate/home.project?projectId=5168 . The tough part would then be in naming our band?