I beat Megaman 1 on NES (I cheated).

Megaman is hard as balls. I suck at Megaman 9 and I’ve always sucked at any other one. It’s goddamn twitch shit. I can’t fucking stand elite twitch games. Ok, maybe you are good at megaman, street fighter 4 and all the other games I suck at. Great. You have my respect. But after that, there’s still a game there that I’ve barely seen.

Enter rewind.

Rewind is a feature on emulators that I’ve been slowly noticing. Maybe Braid turned me onto it. I’m not sure. Anyway, it simply rewinds time. Died on some spikes after carefully jumping over 20 blocks? No problem, just back up a few seconds. On one bar of health on the final boss? No problem, patiently rewind 100x and you’ll eventually get it.

So I beat it in one 1up (sorta) and actually had fun doing it. It was so pleasant that I got around to finally beating Gradius too. That’s only taken me since about 1986 to beat it.

Megaman has a great ending song and I’m going to remix it. Next up, Megaman 2? Damn, if only rewind worked on all the consoles …

When the PS2 was the end-all-be-all, I played Gran Turismo to death. I started late in the series with GT3 and loved it. I got 100% and it remains the definitive game that I completed. Then GT4 came out but I didn’t feel the same motivation to get 100% on it. I bought a wheel and had fun with it but it was pretty much the same game with a smoother interface and newer cars.

Who cares? Well it’s kind of a bit of insight into what was going on in the gaming world around this time. The PS3 was in development and Polyphony Digital (the devs of Gran Turismo) were famous for polishing their titles to obsessive levels. It was going to be a huge drought in the definitive racing series. Around this time too was the launch of the 360. Forza 2 was getting good reviews and I picked it up thinking it was going to be a cute diversion like Need for Speed or something like that.

Forza 2 turned out to be a hardcore racing game on par with Gran Turismo’s simulation take on racing games. It has a bit more edge than the weird mature smooth jazz GT style from japan but the gameplay is realistically pleasing to a GT player. I started Forza 2 when it was released (May 2007) and I’ve been racing a few circuits whenever I’ve had time or gotten an itch. So at 2.5 years, it took a long time to finish.

The ending was very weak and excepting the achievement, nothing really happened. I just finished all the races and put it away. Meh. But good game.

When GT5 comes out, I’m going all out with a G27 wheel and racing stand.

With E3 2009 over, a number of game sites are handing out awards and winner badges for their favorite vendor. I have watched and read their coverage and it has organized bulleted points of merit for each. Sony, with their strong line-up of games, Nintendo for their surprise Metroid announcement and Microsoft for their Project Natal. Project Natal with its image recognition wizardry and flashy “product vision” marketing slick sheet shows well with gamers who voted “who do you think did best at E3?”. This is intriguing. Has some kind of veil of deception been thrown on us? Sony and Nintendo had a strong software sequel showcase that is within their core business and MS promises a device that is no more revolutionary than a Wii Motion controller with more bells and whistles.

I am excited about forward progress and I want to have a minority report TV but this is a major software corporation who is copying Miis and remotes. There is nothing to be had that tech demos and mini games haven’t already given us. If the Wii Motion Plus can give us a light saber game then there is no market left for a light saber game where I hold an even more imaginary light saber. I turn a plastic remote into a sword, this is much more exciting than turning air into a sword.

The end-game is appealing. In a living room full of plastic peripherals; wheels, musical instruments, fishing gear, dance floors, tennis rackets, guns and even skateboards are approximated and interpreted as impressionistic clutter. Natal would lay waste to these contextual inputs where only one is useful at a time and all else lay in a closet. One would get upset if a basketball team had 5,000 players on the bench. Natal would abstract away the physical implementation of these plastics and make me become a sign language yoga traffic cop. This is the future but I don’t Microsoft to take me there.

Vaporware is a steamy cloud of water droplets emitting from a hot mouth (drama!). You can polish it up because the budget is limitless. You don’t have to worry about engineering and effort because you haven’t slaved away on anything yet. Everything is possible because no one can warn us of vaporware’s eventual let down. It is hope and blue sky. Burning off this vaporware fog is as easy as asking for a tech demo.

The video that made me buy Scribblenauts a million times is one where they try to break the illusion. Where I saw promises, I now see delivery. The testers of Scribblenauts write down random words and content appears. Precognitive design has happened. An artist built a Kraken and assigned animation to it. This is delivery, this is the work done and delivered into the hands of users. Natal has to have this test administered by skeptics and be able to interpret “Einstein fights God”.

Wow. What a game. Finished the DS remake of the SNES classic Chrono Trigger. 92 on metacritic, I don’t know what the SNES original would get these days but it’d be up there.

I have started it many times and either lost the save or lost track of what was going on. Buying and starting the DS version was a good move. They cleaned up a lot of stuff and the DS has a dependable save game function built into the cart itself.

When I worked in Florida at a Sony call center (hey, that’s a good job down there). I worked a 4pm-2am shift. There was a guy there who loved Chrono Trigger. He played it on an emulator while waiting for calls (I’m sure he had beaten it many times). I remember asking him what it was. He was very nerdy and nice at the same time about it. I must have seemed like such an outsider. This was in 1999. 10 years later I finally get around to beating it.

I followed a walkthrough and that made it much easier to find all the secrets etc. But it really wasn’t needed. It was fun seeing “omg massive damage” at the end but it was really a cake walk. I grinded a little bit at the end to get infinite strength capsules while listening to TWiT for 2 hours but it was more radio listening than playing. In the end, I had about 26 hours logged. Not horrible at all.

The game is very symbolic, er maybe not symbolic. I guess I mean they have circular and emotional story elements that very much make the game seem bigger than it is. For a game that is very dated, it still does a lot with sprites and cheap 2D effects. I’m glad to have this one packed away. Maybe 10 years from now I’ll beat it again.

2019. It’s a date.

Beat Grand Theft Auto 4. Goddamn is it good. One of the most compelling characters in anything I’ve ever seen. Niko Belic is a character that sticks with you. Good acting, good design, good game programming. It’s bigger than this blog is so I don’t need to go on about it.

I skipped the pigeon shooting in GTA4. It’s a mini game where you go around the city and shoot the “flying rats”. There are a crap-ton of them so I was marking them off in a digital map with a photoshop clone named Pixelmator. My little system was working great until I counted up how many I had left. My count was 57 and the game’s count was 58. That means I marked one down wrong. I spent some time backtracking but it was too much to deal with. Finding a missing bird is harder than finding a bird (and they are already hard to find). A bird that exists at least has a red glow on it and a missing bird is not as obvious. So I gave up on the whole goddamn thing.

The image above is from Beyond Good & Evil. Hmm, how to describe BG&E. I’ll keep this short. It’s an underrated and undersold adventure game from Ubisoft. It’s not as good as the fans say imo. I enjoyed parts of it (like the parts near the end) but it’s not the underdog that everyone says it is. I found it very frustrating and not that engaging. It had a very european developer feel to it (nothing wrong with that). It was just a little bit off most of the time. The controls were weird, the game engine didn’t keep up and the camera and level design was like playing blind pinball. I nearly sold it but then took it off the sell pile to put a nail in it. I’m just glad it’s done.

Back in 2004, when I was working at a small private company, I built a “God Box” gaming rig at work. I shipped all the parts to the office versus my apartment because that was easier for the shipper. Coworkers stopped by and oogled at the parts, we fired up some Nvidia demos. It was pretty stunning at the time running a single core AMD FX-57 and 7800gtx with DDR400. It cost about $3100. It was expensive and fast back then and now it’s not.

Fast forward to this past weekend when all my new parts came in for a brand new gaming rig. The parts were much less money and much faster. It’s a hilarious cycle. And even as shiny as my new toy is, I know it will return to dust when FPSTechDemo 2012 requires a house-glowing flux capacitor to run.

Here are some quick stats.
BOX: Antec P182 Case
CPU: E8600 3.33ghz dual core
MEM: 4gb DDR3-1600
VID: ATI 4870X2 2gb
MB: asus rampage extreme x48
evga 790i ultra

It was a dramatic build. I spent 16 hours straight (skipping dinner and lunch the next day) putting it together. At first, I cabled it all up. Then it would just turn on / turn off. It wouldn’t even stay on. So piece by piece, I dismantled it trying to figure out what was wrong. I thought it was a short, I thought it was the CPU, it could be anything.

So then I dismantled everything and put the motherboard on a towel. I had the power supply in the case powering the board with a single cpu fan hooked up to the motherboard. The board has a power button on the board itself so I didn’t even have to hook up the chassis jumpers. Nothing else (no cpu, no memory, no cards) were hooked up. Eventually I replaced the power supply and the motherboard with retail-bought replacements. This was annoying because ripping out a motherboard and power supply is like removing your skeletal system and then your circulatory system.

After making these swaps, everything seemed to run fine on an EVGA 790i Ultra motherboard. I lost the ability to do crossfire but I was fine with that for now. About 3 months later, I wasn’t quite done with this thing. I ordered another 4870×2 to do quad gpu. I put the asus crossfire board back in. It was a tight fit in the case and the heat coming out of the back really did warm the room. It was a bit louder too (the whole thing was loud by itself). It was marginal gain for the titles I play so I returned it.

Yes it plays Crysis. Although Very High still isn’t playable. High looks just fine. Even the developers said that they threw that setting in for future systems.

Confirmed on dual 4870X2s with full screen mode on and Catalyst AI turned to standard to enable Crossfire. Before WoW’s full shadow quality caused blinking shadows when using Crossfire modes (windowed mode forced single GPU mode).

I also saw the flickering shadows in L4D which is what I assume what the 8.12 drivers were released for.

With the gtx280, gtx280+, 4870×2 and other new hardware-craziness happening out there, my aging PC is starting to look like ‘Ol Yeller. At some point I need to forklift it. I don’t know if the Nehalem release this fall will be my trigger flinch point. Nehalem is Intel’s new arch. They called it i7 for some reason, is this the Septimum? I dunno, but 16 threads on 8 cores is crazy (maybe madness — as in useless — for gaming).

3 years ago, I spent $3k like I always do and got a 7800gtx and an AMD fx-57 with ddr400. I put a 8800gts 640mb (older process) about a year ago. It’s incapable of playing Mass Effect, Crysis, any CPU-bound RTS game and DX10 (because I don’t have Vista). It’s fine really. I play WoW most of the time and everything else is consoles (cept Portal and steam-stuff). Valve and Blizzard try to appeal to mass-market and don’t do “tech demos”. That’s fine. However since I got a 24″ LCD, things are running slower at 1080p. I’m getting spoiled on AA settings and image quality (especially in WoW). A new rig could be under $3k and last another 3 years.

I tried posting some questions around the intertubes but no one cares about WoW benchmarks. It’s such a simple game that people don’t even pay attention to it. This was my post in the WoW forums (no response).

If you have a massive new machine that was built for games outside of WoW (but you play WoW anyway), help me understand what life is like.

- What AA setting do you use? I encourage people to talk about 16-24x FSAA at 1080p or higher. :)
- Can you force AFR with SLI or Crossfire cards? Benefit?
- What can you run in the background if you have dual or quad core?
- What transparency modes can you run in? ATI calls this Adaptive AA, Nvidia transparency AA. What’s the nice balance for you?
- In Shatt (which is CPU bound), what FPS do you maintain and what CPU do you have?
- Do you run any hacks to enable larger distance drawing etc?

Since there are few recent WoW benchmarks, can you give me an idea of what FPS you get in CoD4 or Crysis etc (which have no limit on benchmark results)?

So now I’m taking it upon myself to do some testing.

The test

Orgrimmar to Azshara internal /timetest benchmark on WoW 2.4.3. V-sync disabled for timetest. Both

The Hardware

AMD FX-57 PC:
AMD fx-57 2.8ghz
8800gts 640mb
2gb of DDR400 timings at 2-2-2-5
AF 4x (nvidia control panel override)
AA 4x (nvidia control panel override)
AA Transparency off
177.83 driver version
XP 32-bit
1920×1200 (all settings max in WoW client)
Fullscreen

Mac Pro:
Octo-core 2.8ghz 45nm Xeon 2008 model
10gb ddr2 fb-dimms
8800gt video card
OSX 10.5.4
1680×1050 (all settings max in WoW client)
Maximized Windowed Mode
Full screen glow disabled (osx suffers greatly)
4x AA

The Results

What is wrong with OSX drivers? My slower PC looks better (more image quality, more resolution, more effects) and is 3 years old. XP on the Mac Pro is a completely different result! It’s not the hardware. The Mac Pro is a killer workstation for sound and video but that doesn’t mean that a fast nvidia driver is out of the question. There’s one little bit of software that needs to be optimized to open up the Mac Pro for a whole new market and use. I’m not trying to oversimplify the work involved but I’m trying to make a point.

Apple has no pull at Nvidia or ATI. They can no more get faster software than Microsoft can get simpler software. It’s just not in the cards until OSX market share is 50/50 with Windows.

Update: Friend of mine ran this on his G5 with a X1900. 52.812 avg.

I ran this again with a new rig. Forced transparecy AA, Forced 16AF. All other driver settings forced to high-quality. E8600@4ghz,ddr3,4870×2. I ran it once with forced quality (set to insane levels — which looks great) and one with normal settings compared to old PC and Mac.

Updated Results

The quality is so nice and LCDs can’t show more than 60. I think I’ll leave it on.

Final Fantasy XII. It’s a PS2 game that got amazing reviews from most review sites. I won’t bother covering the game itself. You care or you don’t already. In short, it’s a fantastic ride with some of the most convincing acting and modeling I’ve ever seen in any game not to even mention a previous gen platform. Unless you are an Atlus and JRPG elitist with too much time on your hands, this is RPG créme de la créme and cannot be avoided unless you don’t like cream at all.

True to how I beat X & VII, I was on a mission to beat the hardest “weapons” of the game. Then I could blaze through the ending like a warm bullet falling effortlessly through a warm ocean (knife / butter metaphor avoided). Such was FF12. It’s an adventure for about 50-80 hours and then you have a choice to make (as in past ones). Should you just end it or should you spend more time getting everything done? In FFVII, this choice was made when a friend of mine and I decided we’d take on the Ruby and Emerald weapon. This had some implied baggage, firstly that we had to get abilities and gear to make this happen (I can’t remember the exact things). The same decision point came and went and the very same friend and I decided that “yes we were going to uber”.

So we (in parallel game save universes) sought out to get the materials to make The Tournesol (The Sunflower). The best sword in the game. It’s a real beauty and it took forever to get it. It’s just like grinding in an MMO. Kill stuff, sell stuff and get goal done. The mechanics in XII are actually pretty entertaining. You have to sell a number of items and then an item is unlocked to buy. Once you buy it, the item count resets and you could start all over again. Of course, if you read online you can figure out the minimum path to unlocking an item. The Tournesol is such an item that you’d want to follow this path because it could save you 20 hours of gametime. I don’t know what my time was but it took about a week (after work) to get this damn thing. In the end, it’s funny because just like other FF games, you don’t really have the cool stuff until the end and then the game is over. Feh.

So then I’m approaching 150 hours in game and I leveled to about 90ish. Vaan is 90 and most others are low 80s. Time to take on a “weapon”. In XII, there’s a corelation that the Internet hasn’t summarized, Yiazmat is the Ruby Weapon and Omega Mark XII is the Emerald Weapon. There was an Omega Weapon in X, I believe that would be the equivalent of the Ruby Weapon or Yiazmat. They’re not exactly all the same but whatever, those details I don’t care too much about (join a ff forum and argue until you’re a hermit). I’m just trying to set the stage here.

I downed Omega Mark XII, no problem. Tom had beaten him before me and I got all the strategy from watching him. Youtube (as always) has some monkey-see-monkey-do tips that make him a non-issue. I really wish I had the same resources during FFVII for the Ruby Weapon fight. Looking back, I didn’t have gamefaqs or net sharing, just AOL on a 386. Perhaps this is the “walking uphill to school both ways” geezer talk of the modern era. *pause for effect*

So now the game is approaching the singularity point. I’m not maxed out and there’s only one thing left. Yiazmat. Oh noes. I had read about this one. See, in the game it’s described as a fight that NPC’s in the game had heard about from their fathers. Yeah, this boss fight has been passed down from generation to generation. One NPC said his father died after fighting him for a week. Ha! Ok, so this guy is some kind of HP-sink-hole of doom, how bad can he be after I level to 99? Hmm. Reading the Brady game guide, my eyes tear up in horror … “Yiazmat has 50 million hit points”. I then proceded to run around the room like Christopher Lloyd shouting “1.21 gigawatts?! 1.21 gigawatts?!” I put it away for about a week and did other things while muttering “50 million hp … feh”.

Eventually, I started back up again and I piled all my party peoples into the Henne Mines. I set up my gambits to kill the undead bats that drop in on you. It’s a great place to grind out XP. You just mass sleep everything and mass-Curaja “Target: Undead”. I was able to practice drumpad and recording while I slowly leveled everyone to 99. Then when I had a block of time on a weekend, it was time to start on Yiazmat. It wasn’t actually too bad. It took me a little while to learn the best gambit setup and I had to babysit it most of the fight. I only saved once and I was mostly holding the controller for the entire 4.5 hour boss fight. Yes. Longest boss fight ev-ar. 4.5 hours. I ate dinner, I vacuumed the room, I recorded some stuff and I left the room for breaks while my guys pounded away on 50 million hp (6999dmg hits at a time). Eventually he fell and things were done.

After the hardest fights are done, everything else is easy (makes sense). The ending is really, really good. I won’t say anything about it. The ending fights at level 99 is a lot like being 99 and fighting Sepiroth in VII. It’s a non-issue.

Fantastic game. Best game on the PS2 if you ask me.

Birthday was a week+ ago. Wife got a full-on NES bundle as a sweet-ass birthday present. The thing came in the original box, even the original cords and styrofoam. It works like a champ. Funny thing is, I pulled it out and turned it on and there was all this garbage on the screen. So I blew the dust off the cart (you know, the NES trick) and it freaking fixed it! Having something that cliche work was quite a shock, like an airplane meter actually responding after you tap the instrument dial. Cliche.

It came with SMB1 and Duck Hunt. Classics but I wanted to expand my horizons to maybe a humble stack of 10 gray carts. I don’t want to go overboard (see the rest of my life) but the NES carts can really be cheap. I picked up Baseball Simulator 1.000 for $2+$3 shipping and some ones too:

• Baseball Stars
• Baseball Simulator 1.000
• Zelda (yes gold cart)
• Kirby’s Adventure – I used to borrow this one from a friend
• Legacy of the Wizard – was like $3, classic!
• SMB3
• Tecmo Super Bowl (ut! ut! ut!)

The modern TV is kind of puking at the signal but it’s working fine. I really have to chuckle at the size of the carts and no fans anywhere on the box. It’s extremely light compared to the PS3/360. Also, remembering that there’s no save games (outside a code on a napkin) was something I completely forgot about after all these years.

Wife gets a cookie for birthday present from heaven.