Magazines and such...

So... I'm walking into the local Wal-Mart today to pick up a couple things and since it was raining I had the hood on my windbreaker pulled up and my head down.  As I'm making my way across the damp blacktop parking lot, something catches my eye.  It's one of those annoying blow-in cards from a magazine, all wet and sodden from the rain.  It was for GamePro magazine, which immediately made me think, "Who the hell reads GamePro anymore?"

Or for that matter, who reads gaming magazines anymore?

I'll admit I pick up the occasional issue of Tips & Tricks when the cover story catches my eye, and every so often I'll pick up PC Gamer (especially if they've got a code for a freebie MMO item in it), but other than that my gaming magazine reading is almost nil.  The only reason Game Informer sees the inside of my mailbox is because I get the freebie subscription with my GameStop discount card.

I blame the internet.  When I was in college and damn near broke all the time the internet was my salvation when it came to getting gaming news.  Things were just starting to ramp up on the Web.  FTP sites abounded where you could download moves lists for fighting games (anyone else frequent brawl.mindlink.net back when it was still around?)  I realized that I didn't need to chunk down $5 a month on a dead-tree edition.

Granted, I still enjoy the dead-tree editions - after all, it's a pain in the ass to try to take a laptop to the bathroom with you.  But in the grand scheme of things I find that they're becoming less and relevant to my interests.  And if anyone ever develops a cheap e-reader device, I get the feeling they'll become non-existent...

Posted by TechParadox @ 7:10 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Sweet jeebus, I'm out of shape...

In light of the recent changes in my life, I've decided to make some positive choices and get myself on a regular exercise regimen. the flipside of that is that I feel I'm too doughy to even think about showing my face in a gym. So, in order to burn off some flab, I've opted to just plain start getting more activity in my life. Combine that with video games and a PS2 and what do you get?

That's right. Dance Dance Revolution.

So this evening I broke out my copy of DDR Supernova I purchased the other day and fired it up. Clicked over to workout mode and input my weight. I won't mention it here because even for my 6'4" frame it's more than a bit over the norm and more than slightly embarrassing. I set the amount of calories I wanted to burn per round and kicked it off.

Now, let me preface the next part of this by saying that while my hand-eye coordination is halfway decent, my foot-eye coordination blows goats. Ergo, my score blew goats. Even on the easy songs. But I kept on moving because in the end I didn't care about the score on my first try, just the amount of a workout I got. After two rounds I knocked off because I was feeling winded and I know my body's limits.

My legs felt like Jell-O.

My heart felt like a trip-hammer.

My mouth felt like the rug of a camel tent.

And I had essentially jogged the equivalent of 2 miles in under 15 minutes. I hadn't done anything like that since I was in junior high.

It may not be much, but I'm pretty damn proud of myself for that. Now I just have to keep it up on a regular basis. That and figure out some way to keep the dance pad from shifting around on the carpet...

Posted by TechParadox @ 8:52 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

Unca Tech, can we play a game???

Music to my ears.

Let me elaborate a bit:  My brother bowls in a small league on Fridays, and to get to said league bowling he has to go past the town where I live (Yeah, the joy of the midwest - having to drive 30+ minutes to go do anything fun...).  He had made plans with me to do a bit of a road-trip on Saturday to go pick up a computer he had purchased off eBay (another story I might elaborate on later), and we had planned on taking off around noon to go do that.   And then something came up that made him have to go in to work on Saturday morning.  Nothing major and we could still take off around noon he said, but he needed someone to watch his boy (he's a single parent who has custody).

So he asked me if they could crash at my place on Friday night and I would watch the boy while he went in to work.  No problem, I figured - it's only for a couple hours.

To my benefit, the boy likes video games.  Also to my benefit, the ex didn't take the Gamecube with her, so I still have an outlet for him to play some age-appropriate stuff (he's seven).

He's playing Mario Party right now.  If I get lucky, he'll still be playing it in a couple hours when his dad gets back

Yeah, I know - I should be playing it with him or something, but he started up a single-player game while I was making breakfast and didn't want to restart it...

Sidebar in reference to my last post:  When I got back to Gamestop to pick up the Tekken 5 pack, it was gone.  Lord only knows where they shipped it off to or if it's in their stockroom gathering dust.  But in the shelf space where it sat were several copies of "Strawberry Shortcake Dance Dance Revolution".  I shit you not.  I'd like to meet the ad exec that pitched that one as a good idea - I bet that slick bastard could sell ice to eskimoes...  

Posted by TechParadox @ 8:40 am EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

My Fandom is Random...

A cute tidbit of rhyme, no? I got it from John Kovalic's Dork Tower comics, and I felt it was worth re-using, considering the things I'm in to these days.

On to the meat-and-potatoes:

Dropped in to Gamestop today. I was intending on buying a Tekken 5 deluxe pack they had sitting on the shelf that has been there for the last three or four months, priced to sell but there haven't been any takers. It includes Tekken 5, a slipcase to hold all the Tekken games, and a Tekken-branded arcade stick for use with the PS2. I've been meaning to pick up a joystick for my PS2 anyway, and I played the hell out of Tekken 3 back in the day, so it was a good fit for my tastes.

When I got there, I decided to browse the used games first, on a whim. Lo and behold, there in the used section, was a copy of Disgaea (the first one). I'd been looking for that game for bloody forever, so that immediately made it a must-buy. A little mental math told me I could still afford the Tekken pack, so I headed over to the rack where it still sat... and there beside it was a still-sealed copy of Beatmania, with the controller.

I'm a sucker for Bemani games, even if I do suck at them. And the local Gamestop didn't have any copies of the game in stock back at release. Where this one suddenly appeared from, I have no clue. My best guess would be that someone pre-ordered it, didn't pick it up, and they found it gathering dust back in the stockroom so they threw it on the shelf at a discount. Thirty bucks and it could be mine...

Needless to say, my plans to get the Tekken pack got shanghaied.

Oh well. There's always the next paycheck...

Posted by TechParadox @ 11:28 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

A-packing we will go... and a game night was had!

Well, the holidays are over, and with them also ends my respite from organizing and packing everything I own in preparation for clearing out and fixing up the house. I've packed for moving six times before in my life, and it never seems to get any easier. The adage of "the amount of stuff you own will expand exponentially to fit the space you have" still holds true.

On the flip-side of that, the soon-to-be-ex and I sat down and had a talk last weekend. It's the first time we've talked since before New Year's when she packed up a large suitcase and left, telling me she was "going to go stay with her parents for a while and maybe go on a little trip." Turns out that on this "little trip" she went to Seattle to "visit family out there" (and hook up with a guy she had met online.) She didn't really tell me that last part but it was pretty easy to infer, as during the talk she told me she had now found someone else and was going to be working towards saving enough money to move. Nothing like dumping all your responsibilities and going off on a whim, eh? Well, if she's happy then I say more power to her. I'm not holding a grudge in this thing, I just want it to be over and done with. I've officially had the papers signed and notarized and her lawyer should have them by now. It's all over but the filing, and I fully expect that after she has enough cash scraped together to pay the startup costs of moving to Seattle then she'll be out the door with not so much as a "good-bye". It's funny how when we first got married I said we should stick with renting a place for a while so we could be more mobile if something better presented itself job-wise... she objected and wanted to buy a house near her family... I gave in to her whims... and now she's the one who is essentially ready to skip town.

Irony, you're a cruel bitch...

On the downside of this, all the packing means that I'm going to have to seriously curtail my gaming. Now granted, I'm not going to go completely Nucking Futz and pack up everything under the sun - the computer is going to stay hooked up until they pry my cable-modem out of my hands. But there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to balance work, packing, and gaming during the next two months or so. I'm going to be putting in a LOT of long hours with a tape-gun and boxes...

Ok, enough boring crap about my personal life - on to gaming news! This past Friday I got invited to join in on a gaming night with a bunch of friends from work. Apparently one of the managers has a large finished basement and every couple months he throws a geek-out night where his wife goes out with her friends and he has a LAN-Party in the spare room. We got six people going on the LAN at the same time (BYOC, of course) and had a blast playing Starcraft for several hours. We tried Rise of Nations a couple times just to change it up but as the games of that took almost double the time of the Starcraft rounds we hung it up pretty quick. There wasn't much FPS action going on, which suited me just fine. Apparently in the last couple years I have developed a problem with FPS games and can no longer play them, as after about ten minutes or so I start getting motion-sick. That really sucks! I used to love playing UT and Half-Life multiplayer, but those days are gone, my friends. Fortunately I have no problems at all with RTS games (aside from getting repeatedly PWNED as I haven't touched Starcraft in about six years!) A good time was had by all, and we're hoping to do it again in the future.

Tech Out

Posted by TechParadox @ 10:42 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments