HackUberGeek's Blog - 2old2play

Long Live Elvis

Chromehounds

It died. Everyone (almost.. Siberkat anyone?) stopped playing this.

Somehow, the worst game I ever loved couldn't stay dead. Now it looks like I will have a pretty decent looking squad running CH. Good times. Bad games, what more can you ask?

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Nice work English _C6H6

English _C6H6, that is some nice work.

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Not about games

So lets see here, ok its a little about games. But only a little bit. This bends more serious. I think my wife and I are about to try to have kids. Specifically two of them. Currently we have none. I know I want kids, and my wife has always wanted them. Now logically, we can afford helpless beings now and we never could before. In addition, the next 18+ months would actually be more convenient for my wife to carry around, ah the child. See the next few months are the last of her pediatric residency, and not as difficult as the last 30 were. Then its 12 months of being a Chief Resident, which is more administrative than anything, and she could easily take maternity leave then. After that, she wants to start three more years as a Fellow for intensive care. Think more respect than a resident, less than an attending, but very long hours still. That means she could have a child then, but it wouldn't be as easy.

So logically now is smart. Now there are so many other things floating around in my crowded little head, that I tend to circle around alot, so if I jump from idea to idea, please forgive me. I think I should start with the intentionally vague statement that I am under the impression that actually concieving a child will be difficult. Difficultly runs in her family (though they do obviously overcome it) and she is under enough stress that I suspect hitting the 18+ month window may not happen. So while having a child is good, having a wife worrying about why we haven't had one yet will suck. Not sure what I will do when that day comes, but I think I should probably think about it.

Now then there is the guilty thoughts that I have a pretty good life going here. I do what I want, buy what I want, have very little serious concerns. I play in an average week 20 hours of games. I have a house with sharp edges and nice things. I go out with my wife and have fun if the mood strikes. And I love it. I know that I will love being a father, but this part of my life is really cool too. Its not without guilt that I realize part of me will always miss this when its gone.

Then there is a differnet kind of life changer. I could quit my job. I could be a stay at home dad. The money would be tight for at least the next four years, but my wife hasn't even started a career, and we both would prefer not to leave raising a child to strangers (no family to help out either). So that leaves me, and I know that I don't have to, and I think I want to do it. But that means leaving my career behind. For a while, I have judged myself based on how I do there. I am good at my job. I am the guy who fixes the hard problems. That trains the new guy. The go to guy. I expect that if I leave work, I will never get back into the career path I have chosen. It will pass me by. Not working doesn't seem so bad. Being a Father first is something that I can be proud of, and a chance that not many people get. But what will happen when the kids are older, when I don't need to be around? I am not sure that I can handle a quiet house, or if I get another job that it will be challenging enough. This is a choice I haven't made yet. Or maybe I have, and am just nervous about it. Sometimes it hard to tell.

Well, anyway. Thanks for reading a snapshot of my life. Still not sure why I wrote it. I know that anyway I cut it, I have it pretty good, and I am grateful.

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The Wii Party

So my wife got invited to a Wii party. The friends of hers tend to be gadget freaks, so it didn't shock me they would try out the Wii. The smallish get together had about 12 people, more alcohol than the group could consume, pizza and wings. So right there excluding the Wii would have been enough to have some fun. Even being well fed and watered, it was clear the Wii was the reason we were there. I had only played for a few minutes prior in a store, so while I knew what to expect, I was still definately a rookie.

Wii Sports was the only game we played that night, though they did have Zelda, I didn't get to see it. I started off by doing the "Wii Fitness Test" and scored a 50. For the group I was about in the middle. Ironically, the guys who have gaming "skills" did much worse than the girls who had none. Maybe that isn't surprising, but it was a very clear trend. By the end of the night though, everyone was on equal ground. So this fitness test was bowling, tennis and baseball. I tended to not make the complete imitation of the movements, settling for the miminalist take on each of the actions. This was easiest in baseball, where a flick of the wrist was good enough for home runs. It was pointed out that I was much less entertaining. That didn't bother me.

For the most part, people tried to do exactly what they would have in real life playing these sports (we hit all five, Boxing and bowling were the most popular, golf and tennis were the least popular) So the games were enjoyed by all, and the best part was that no one was hesistant to play, but I chaulk that up to people knowing that we would all suck. I wonder if people will want to play against the Wii owners when they know they will lose in a few months? Only time will tell, as I am sure that this is not my lasy Wii party.

So walked away having had fun, but no desire to buy one. My wife was thinking that she might like it, but realized that she would only use it when people came over. I thought that as a party game, it was fantastic, but it couldn't be my only system. I use the 360 as a place to socialize online. The Wii might have some ability in that area, but I can't see it being better that my 360. If we have a vistor more than one nigt a month, its a rare occurance. When my wife is around, she and I tend to go out. I have no kids to play with (although with kids its an instant hit I am sure). So I see this as a great system for some people, but just not me.

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Do I have anything to say?

Yah I do. Been too busy at work to post here while at my desk, and when I get home, I don't pick up a PC.

So anyway... My wife in the last two days has played 5 hours + of Heavy Weapon. I like the game too, but her liking it was a real surprise. She says it reminds her of "older" games. She also figured out the control quickly since she occasionally plays Geomertry Wars (but only one game, this she plays over and over)

Anyway, I have been playing alot lately. RB6:V is still interesting. I can't wait for Baine's Clan Bloodsport tournement. 1v1 and 2v2 sound very interesting to me right now. I am not sure how well I will do though. I have good nights, and wretchedly bad nights. I tend to be way too impatient, and that leads to death in RB6:V Oh well, I wonder what the hell I was thinking getting into a tactical shooters clan? Anyway, even if I suck, I expect it will be fun.

I also just got Lost Planet. Haven't even tried the MP yet, just going through single player now, but I really like it.

The arcade games are something that are like crack to me. I buy way too many. I play them too, but man, I need some self restraint. I think I may start posting reviews of the arcade games here. Not sure if anybody cares what the hell I think, but hey why the hell not?

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Games of 2K7

2006 was a good year for gaming. I had a lot of fun. But I can't help but look to the future. Here are the games I know that I want to play this year (assuming they get released... )

Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions

This is the game most likely to disappoint me, but I have been seeing parts of it for so long, I need to play it. I am a sucker for robot armor and sci-fi shooters. Lost Planet had me at Hello.

Bioshock

It's underwater, has guns, and looks cool. Not sure if its a rent or a buy, but i want to see it.

Too Human

I thought it should have been out by now, but since its not, and even if it is I haven't played it, when I see it I want to. Its supposed to be most a normal action style game with some RPG as well. Its on the rent list because the replay value seems limited.

Mass Effect

This RPG looks great! The real time battles and dialog systems from the limited footage I have seen are really exciting. I may even buy it despite lack of replay. Hopefully it lives up to potential.

Fable 2

Too lazy to get a decent picture, but I want to try out this series. I skipped RPG's when the first came out for the xbox, so I want to hop on board.

That's all for now, though a little game called Halo 3 is coming out too. That sounds cool.

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Vegas Baby!

So there is progress on the game I am writing in XNA, but that isn’t this post. Today is about Rainbow 6: Vegas

I got it a day before Christmas when I learned that I wouldn’t be getting it. In fact, I learned that my brother-in-law bought me Lego Star Wars for the Xbox. Way to go, couldn’t you find anything cheaper? He plays games too, he understands how they work, and had he put a little thought it…

Anyway, since I wanted it, I went out and got it. I have to say that the multiplayer is really good. Joining yup with your friends is easy, and that counts for a lot with me. There are some game play parts that I don’t like. I don’t like it when I can’t look down over a ledge, I like having the “roadie run” in Gears. I actually think the GoW cover system is better. I also think that some of the Maps are unbalanced. They give a definite advantage to one side, and after rounds, they don’t flip starting position. I also don’t like the team shuffle when maps change. I think that we would do a decent job of balancing teams if they let us, and if we balance it then they shuffle, I get pissed.

But for all the knocks against it, this is clearly the multiplayer that I will have for a while. CoD3 will go back to Gamefly. I still like Gears though. I think it’s a great multiplayer session if you can get it set up with a full room and they all stick around you can have a really good time. It’s just stupid that I have to plan out my 8 person gears session.

Back to RB6:V, the single player is tough, but what really annoys me is that twice its not saved an area after I completed it. I even got the stinking achievement and started the next area, but then it didn’t save it. I may have to beat some one with a stick should this continue.

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In up to my elbows

First post about learning XNA
Second post about learning XNA

Well, I am getting into building the actual game I hope to make. My clan mates already know the basic premise since I forced them into giving me ideas. Anyway, it’s going to be a Super Mario Brothers like side-scroller.

My first task yesterday was to get a few images ready to be sprites. I can’t draw, but that didn’t seem to stop me. I got five backgrounds ready, all which would work if set right next to each other. So really the plan is to make it look like one background 5 times as wide as the screen that loops over and over. I set it up several times as different widths, more on that later. Then I built my main character. I have more to do since it’s not at all animated. He is just frozen in space, but for now it’s good enough. Having never made an animated Gif I didn’t try, although I have a how-to on that. I can also animate the thing programmatically, so I have to figure out what will work best for me. I have actually seen the code that moves through the frames of an animated gif in synch with the program, as well as the one to build an animation on the spot, but didn’t look at it at all.

So then I took my “art” and fired up a new project in the TorqueX app I mentioned yesterday. I still like that I can convert the target platform with one of their apps, but to use their main app to build a game, I have yet to get excited. I actually assumed that this thing was going to win my heart, and when the 30 day demo was up, I was going to buy it for $150. So far, I won’t do that. It gives an easy way to import art work and set up properties about it, but overall when I look at a premade game, and a blank project, I have a hard time breaking the game down to reconstruct one myself. Maybe I need to find more to read on this thing, but so far I feel like I am making more progress working directly with the code itself.

After tinkering with the TorqueX program for a bit and getting nowhere, I went back and worked directly out of the XNA Game Studio again. I found some code that I could adapt to do just what I had planned for the background. In just a few minutes, the wonder world I had created came alive, but horribly squished and cut off. (All sky, no ground) Now my images were 1280x720 worthy, but the program from what I could see look like it was working at 800x600, and after some poking around I found that I was right. I didn’t, and still don’t know where the code had pulled it from. It may be the default, but I want to find that somewhere before I speak it as Gospel. What I did find was some code to hard code the background to a width and height. It’s a solution that is good enough for today, but I want to stretch the height to what’s available and leave the width alone (it’s a side-scroller, so let it scroll). Now I am not sure if I altered the background, or the whole application. I think I altered the whole application. Overall though, I am ok with what I have.

Then I tried to add in my main character. I tried to pull code from another game, basically to place the sprite in the left hand corner, let it run back and forth, and it had jump too, but I was going to save that for the next step. After adding in all my code to the same app where I had my backgrounds, I blew the thing up. I saw immediately what I had not caught, some of the objects were being used in different ways between the two sets of code I stole... ah… borrowed… from open source games. I decided to just get the running man working in its own app first, even though I was confident with some find and replace that I could get it working. Well, as I went through it the second time, it became clear that there were no controls for the controller. Just keyboard controls. That pissed me off, and I was done for the night. I have games that use BOTH too, but I don’t think I have any that are just for the 360. I will have to start looking into those more complex examples and see what I can learn from it. Overall, I am enjoying this.

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I can do this...

So if you didn't see it, here's yesterday's post. I am pretty much picking up where I left off. Read that if you need to.

My adventures of XNA Creator's Club continued last night. In 15 minutes I did the basic tutorial where you draw a graphic (I used the .jpg of my avatar) on the screen and get it to bounce around like a screen saver.) Again this took almost no independent thought on my part, but at least I am getting a better feel for the parts of the code. I definitely see patterns about where things should be, and where the game logic is built. Since I was feeling adventurous I didn't stop, and I attempted several of the customizations recommended by the help file (like adding a second sprite, adding collision detection, and steering the sprite with the controller).

This was cool. I had taken a pre-built MS sample and moved it over yesterday, and today I followed direction enough to get something there that I had done personally. But there was a whole application I hadn’t touched yet, and I had heard good things about it. The TorqueX Game Builder by Garage Games is supposed to handle some of the heavy lifting for you. I honestly didn’t know what that meant when I started yesterday. But learning from my XNA Game Studio mistake, I cracked open some of the help docs. (Again, these were quite good) and it told me to use some added templates to the XNA game studio to get started with them. Ah, but if you read yesterday, you know that the laptop I am using doesn’t run any of the windows based games (it’s graphics card sucks), and all of these were set up to be compiled for windows, not the 360. I was distraught, but only for a bit. The people at garage games have seen a weakness in the Strategy MS had, and fixed it. And actually I don’t know if there is a way to do it in game studio or not, I bet there is, but TorqueX gave me a convertor. All you do is point to the game source file for windows, and it converts it to a 360 source file. Now I don’t know what happens if one of the commands that windows uses isn’t supported for the 360 (and there are some), but the games I am looking at are so simple that it hasn’t been a problem. So I converted a few of their demos and was off to the races on the 360.

I didn’t even tinker with them, but that is supposed to be easy as well. We’ll see about that later today.

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Hit over the head with the Creator's Club

So it’s another early day (4 am) at work where my shit is done and I am waiting to hear that no one broke anything I care about. So far so good.

But that isn’t today’s post. Nope, I have real honest to goodness thoughts to share. Today we will be talking about the XNA Creators Club. I mentioned that I thought this was the best thing since slice bread earlier, but I wasn’t sure about it. My curiosity won out, and I shelled out the $100. In fact I did it almost a week ago, and have been too chicken to do anything with it. Seriously, it was a late night when I did it, I bought, saw you needed to hook up stuff from the PC (kind of a downer) and set it aside. Well, last night I did something with it.

So they want you to plug everything in via cable (not wireless), which I did. I followed the instruction to set up my wife’s laptop. Now you need some stuff installed on the laptop to make it work, this doesn’t bother me, but the installs took like two hours. I needed the .NET framework 2.0 (I had 1.1), DirectX 9.0 (which you most likely have if you play games on your PC), the XNA Framework 1.0 (if you want to play something you build on the PC), the Visual Studio C# Express Edition with MSDN help files (took most of the time to install/download), the XNA Game Studio Express, and optional, although I hear it cool the Torque Express Game Builder eta. I haven’t tinkered with it, but since I hear I want it, I installed it.

Then from inside C# express you can finish setting up the link to the PC. So now friggin’ what? Well for someone like me, the answer was simple, poke around until something looks interesting. I should have gone straight to the help file, but more on that later. I opened a new project and have some templates to choose from, some of which are the nearly complete games. One had an option for the PC, and for the XBOX. Well, I thought I would start simple and just try the PC version. That has to be easier right? So I tried to find “compile” in the menus, which I didn’t there was a debug thingy, and since I like hitting buttons I tried. That was what I wanted, so I got lucky. Sadly, my wife’s laptop doesn’t have the horse power to run this sucker. The graphics card is too crappy. I was distraught and cried for two hours. OK, not really, I actually just figured I would install this shit on my desktop and try to make it work wirelessly later, but I close the first project and opened the XBOX version of the same game. Since I had set up the connection already, it compiled and went over to the XBOX 360 and worked. There was a bit of fiddling, but wasn’t hard, and it opens up with the instructions right in front you. If you read it, the built in samples will work.

So I had just put a game onto the 360 myself, and even though I did no more than what you can get a well trained monkey to do, it felt good, and I felt like I had a shot at this. So inspired by the built in directions from the project, I looked at the help. This is what a moron like me needs. At the same time, my wife wanted to watch some stuff on the DVR. It turns out she recorded the “Clay Aiken Christmas”. As a side note, this is the worst show ever in the history of mankind. And I have watched the homemade stuff on Cable Access. So while that sin against humanity played in the background I read the help file. It has some very good, and basic tutorials. I haven’t tried them yet, but expect to see me post more on this as I go.

So going forward, I am definitely going to complete the tutorials, then start out on a basic game. I have some basic themes floating around, and I think I will try a side-scroller. The tutorials look like they will give me a decent shot at succeeding at that. I may also try to write an article for the site about this whole process. Let me know what you think as I go.

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I suck at COD3

It's not my fault.* Really. I am just renting COD3, and I don't even have a manual.**

Issues that I had last night? No cover/roadie run, and weapon switching. Now clearly I can overcome that eventually. But why is that after I die and respawn that I land right in the middle of the fighting? Let me start off somewhere safe, and let me choose the bad spot to get into.

So I still love Gears, but I can't play it every night. If I do, I will lose interest. It's no Halo. That means I either need to buy COD3 or RB:V6 (or both... ) to get in on some other multiplayer action to last the winter. I know that I want to play Lost Planet when it comes out, but I am not sure that it will be a multiplayer sensation.

Anyway, last night I go t pissed off, pissed on, and played piss poor. Oh well.

* Translates to: It is my fault, but lets ignore that.
** I could dowload it, and it didn't slow me down in the Single player campaign, but we need to look past that.

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Full Metal X-mas

[Youtube]http://www.stupidvideos.com/player.swf?sa=1&i=25930&uid[/Youtube]

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I have been there

So I have decided that today's Penny Arcade is an Instant Classic

Haven’t we all seen this? My most recent experience is with Gears of War. I didn’t preorder. Why? I really don’t like giving people money for nothing in return. Since they refuse to guarantee getting my game (or console… ) the day of launch when I preorder, I refuse to preorder. It’s that simple.

So anyway, I walked into the GameStop, and there was a line of guys standing there with their moms. (Its rated M for mature which these people clearly were not, so Mother’s were required) They had enough for the preorders (maybe, they weren’t sure about that either) and the line was 30 minutes long. Luckily I caught an “employee” to tell me this in advance so I didn’t have to wait for nothing.

But here’s what cracks me up. DVD’s are not hard to stamp out. How can you not make sure that your store doesn’t order more copies than you have preorders for what you assume will be a bestselling game?

Anyway, I loved this comic.

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Shenanigans

I call shenanigans on a recent Joystiq article that states, “The rumors that Metal Gear Solid 4 is not a PS3 exclusive continue to snowball.” Read it for the full story.

Now I am not mad at Joystiq, they do what they do, but it sounds fishy. I for one would love to play this game on my 360, and there is no way I would buy a PS3 just for this game. But from Sony’s point of view, they need to keep this and Final Fantasy (and Square promises to do only what keeps the FF franchise making money) I can see Konami using this to get a better deal with Sony. I can see Microsoft betting the farm to get them on their system too. I can’t see a flagship game being lost by Sony again.

I am now a dedicated 360 game player, and even I don't believe this. It would be cool though.

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