gwax's rumblings

At the suggestion of my good friend Rodin, I grabbed a copy of the game [PROTOTYPE] (which I am going to refer to as “Prototype” because the brackets and capitalization are annoying to type) for my Xbox 360. Rodin’s suggestion was a very good one and so I am passing it on to all of you; Prototype is awesome, you should go get a copy and start playing it.

Discussing the story behind Prototype won’t really give you a sense of why you should be playing it so, instead, let me start off by saying that it’s a game where you can jump kick helicopters. Let me say that again, you can jump kick helicopters; this includes apaches, and you can destroy them by so doing. Other things you can do include consuming people for their knowledge and powers, shooting spikes through the ground to destroy entire city blocks, or throwing tanks at mutated monsters. All of this massive destruction and awesomeness takes place within the context of being able to run up the sides of buildings so as to jump and glide from one to the next. Your character is truly superhuman in a ridiculous and completely amoral manner; you will consume civilians just to restore a little bit of health.

The controls are tight, if a little complex, the camera is ok, and the gameplay is as cathartic as video games get. I’ve sunk, and enjoyed, enough hours of Prototype to say that it’s worth the $60 that I paid for it. It doesn’t matter what you’re playing these days, you should put it down and go get a copy of Prototype; unless you’re boring, you’ll thank yourself for doing so.

The video game Gods demand much in the forms of financial penance and prayer time but they do much to reward their supplicants. I have just now obtained for myself a copy of GTA4 (I know that I’m slow but I’ve been traveling for the past week). While I was at the merchant of the damned, GameStop, obtaining the aforementioned game, I happened to notice a sign proclaiming the impending arrival of Ninja Gaiden II (NG2), sequel to what I consider the finest video game yet produced. Seriously, forget Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, Myst, Quake, everything; Ninja Gaiden (Xbox remake) was where it’s at and now it’s sequel time. Not only is Ninja Gaiden II coming, but Soul Calibur 4 (SC4), next in the finest fighting game series of all time, comes out in two months. It certainly is a summer of video game sequels but, man oh man, is it going to be a good summer of sequels.

Between GTA4, NG2 and SC4, I will, unquestionably, be devoting rather a fair amount of time to video games over the next few months. It certainly won’t help much that my enjoyment and commitment to Rock Band has not abated. I guess that’s really a matter of perspective; I am, after all, committing my time to video games because they do provide me with a great deal of enjoyment.

Thank you video game Gods for this bounty, which you are bestowing upon me over the next few months.

Yesterday, I wandered over to Best Buy and finally picked up a copy of Rock Band for my Xbox 360. As I have already establish, Rock Band is awesome, so I’m mighty psyched to have a copy at the place now. I wasn’t properly set up for it earlier but now that we’ve got a projector and a proper sound system, we have an amazing Rock Band setup. Rock Band, of course, is far better as a multiplayer experience than a one person game, so anytime that any of you folks want to stop by and jam with me, you’re more than welcome to do so.

Halo 3 came out for the Xbox 360 on Tuesday and it’s awesome. On account of Halo 3, I’ve been going to sleep at about 2am for the past three nights, which wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t also have to wake up for work at about 6am. That said, it’s totally worth the unpleasantness of not sleeping enough. Sure, it’s more Halo and not altogether too revolutionary but, it IS more Halo, it is prettier Halo with cooler weapons and vehicles. Basically, Halo was already King of console FPSes and Halo 3 is just coming in and saying, “hey, I’m taking over for my dad so sit down because you know your place!”

Soul Calibur IV has been announced for the Xbox 360 and PS3. For those of you that know me and my preferences in video games, you might have some idea of how very excited I am right now. For those of you that don’t know my fondness for the series, suffice it to say that I am very excited. Furthermore, for those that didn’t catch the reference, HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL is taken from Jerk City (a puerile, offensive, not safe for work comic that I don’t recommend anybody read).

I happen to have a friend that works for Harmonix, creators of Guitar Hero I & II, which provided me a unique opportunity earlier today (technically yesterday). I got a chance to play a development version of Harmonix’s upcoming game Rock Band for a couple hours and, I have to say, it is awesome, really awesome. I had to sign a NDA so I am not allowed to tell you anything else about it but, seriously, Rock Band is awesome. Now, it’s time for me to settle in and wait for the game to actually be released.

About a week ago, I finally caved and bought myself an Xbox 360. Along with some really great games (ex. Gears of War) the 360 is also a powerhouse of media playing capabilities. Using Microsoft provided software you can set up your PC to serve media over the network to your 360. This means that you can listen to your entire music collection while you play you games (solves the only problem with Geometry Wars, the mediocre soundtrack); the 360 natively plays mp3s so you don’t need to do much of anything to make music work. Unfortunately, the 360 will only natively play wmv video files, and only ones that are properly formatted, which means that you’ll have to do a bit of work to watch and DivX, Xvid or, for that matter, just about anything else that you didn’t get from Microsoft to begin with. Playing my video files on my TV through my 360 is an important thing for me, so set about scouring the internet to figure out how to do this and, having done so, I now report to you on what I have found.

If you’re running Vista or XP MCE, it’s supposedly a lot easier but, since I have neither, you’re on your own and I cannot help. Supposedly, it’s possible to use TVersity on a regular XP machine to do real-time on-the-fly transcoding of your files into wmv but I was not able to make it work. It may be the case that my computer is not powerful enough for on-the-fly transcoding or it might be that I had it set up wrong but the simple fact of the matter is that, in my opinion, TVersity is pretty flaky and doesn’t provide a very good network interface when you access it through the 360. Using Microsoft’s software and manually transcoding files before I watch them is thus my option of choice for watching movies and listening to music on my 360. This brings us to the real meat of this post, how to best transcode files for playing on the 360.

I tried a whole bunch of transcoding options, none of which worked, before I came across Encode360. Encode360 encodes things perfectly and allows for the vital rescaling (more on this later) but suffers from two problems: it’s slow and it crashes a lot. A little more digging turned up that some had figured out how to use VLC media player to perform the transcodes. I tried the VLC transcoding method and discovered that it was both very fast and encoded perfectly. Unfortunately, the batch files provided for this purpose don’t do rescaling and have a number of other problems. The rescaling is vital because if you don’t scale your file properly, the 360 will auto-scale to fit the TV and the 360’s auto-scaling is terrible, leaving blocky artifacts all over the screen. In order to deal with the 360’s scaling issues and some of the other problems of the provided batch files, I read through VLC’s documentation and fiddled around a bunch and am proud to say that I have come up with a few new batch files for VLC that will process video files and make them work properly on your 360.

Go get your hands on a copy of VLC media player and then grab the batch files I have made (vlc2xbox480h.bat and vlc2xbox720w.bat). You will need to modify the batch files slightly for your system; open the file in a text editor and change the very beginning to point to where you have installed VLC (“C:\program files\vlc\vlc.exe” is where mine is, change this if you need to). In order to transcode a file, you will drag-and-drop the file that you want to transcode onto one of these batch files, depending on the files aspect ratio. If the files aspect ratio is less than 16:9, drop it on the 480h file; if the aspect ratio is greater than 16:9, drop it on the 720w files; if the aspect ratio is 16:9, drop it on either one. It is important to note that your file’s filename cannot have any single quotes (‘) or it will cause problems. So there you have it, the best way that I’ve found to transcode files into a 360 ready format. I might improve the batch files later or I might try writing a wrapper application at some point and, if I do, I’ll post those updates here.

One of my housemates got a Nintendo Wii and, I have to tell you folks, it really is the best thing to happen to video games in ages. I’ve been playing a lot of Wii Sports and Zelda: Twilight Princess, both of which are phenomenal games that I recommend; I also highly recommend Excite Truck, which takes great advantage of the Wiimote (controller). I haven’t had this much fun playing video games in a very long time and, considering how much I like video games, I’m saying a lot here. Twilight Princess is so much fun that I’ve logged about 34 hours within the past week and I haven’t even been side-questing very much.

As much as I love the Wii, my point in this post is not to sing the praises of the Wii but to warn you of the dangers and suggest possible preventative measures. There have been a number of stories propagating their way about the internet about people throwing their Wiimotes into windows, televisions and other people. Nintendo’s response to hearing the people have been throwing controllers into televisions and such has basically been to tell people to hold on the controllers. Prior to yesterday, I would have, and did, scoff at those idiots that broke their crap but that would have been before yesterday. Yesterday, I was playing Wii Sports bowling with a few of my friends; we were using one Wiimote between the four of us and since the transitions were fairly rapid, we weren’t bothering to use the wrist strap (big mistake). One of the housemates I was playing with *cough*Paddy*cough* lost control of the Wiimote and threw it into our wonderful 51″, rear-projection HDTV. The front surface of our TV was 0.093″ PMMA (a.k.a. Acrylic or Plexiglas), which is a fairly brittle and not very tough material. Needless to say, a Wiimote thrown fairly hard at a thin sheet of PMMA results in a pretty big crack (see image). A broken HDTV is a very sad thing, especially when it’s your TV.

So there we were with a cracked TV so, clearly, the thing to do was pull it apart and fix it. It took me a while to get the thing apart but eventually we had TV bits all over the living room floor and I’d gotten that PMMA screen out. Having pulled the PMMA out at about 2am and having no replacement on hand, the parts were left sprawled out in our living room. First thing (1:30pm) today, I went off to Home Depot with the responsible party and another so as to obtain a nice big sheet of 0.093″ Polycarbonate (a.k.a. Lexan), which is about three times as expensive and about thirty times as strong (impact strength) as PMMA. After a bit of time cutting the sheet of Polycarbonate down, a bit more time putting the Polycarbonate in the screen and a bit more time reassembling the TV, we have a functional 51″ HDTV. Additionally, Polycarbonate is what’s used for bulletproof glass so hopefully that’ll make it Wiiproof too.

So, the morals of this post are: 1) make sure that you always use the wrist strap, and 2) replace your screen with Polycarbonate or put a sheet of Polycarbonate in front of your TV.

Just this morning, I was thinking about Nintendo’s upcoming video game console, codename Revolution. At the time I was thinking about how fantastic a marketing and hype-building job Nintendo has been doing. The end line of my thinking was the only thing that Nintendo could do wrong at this point is choose a bad release name for the console and they’ve done just that; they’ve decided to call it the Nintendo Wii (pronounced like “we”). Now, certainly part of my dislike for the new name is based on having considered it the Revolution for so long and having a general repugnance for the practice of name changing (that’s a whole other discussion in and of itself); I expect that I won’t dislike “Wii” as much when I get used to it. That said, “Wii” is a terrible name for the US market; “Xbox” and “Playstation” aren’t great either but at least they can be pronounced without ambiguity and have some recognizable traits. In Nintendo’s defense, I think they’ve got “Revolution” planted firmly in a lot of heads so people are going to buy it regardless of the name and call it what they feel like; heck, I might just call mine a “Nintendo”.

I remember, time was, you bought a computer game, popped the CD in, copied the executables over and then played the game. All the data stayed on the CD and you didn’t use up your whole hard drive. These days, every game demands that you install the complete contents of the CD/DVD to your hard drive and it pisses me off. It’s not like it needs to be copied to the hard drive, I’ve seen the very same games run on consoles without hard drives to install to and my computer has a faster DVD drive than most consoles. It just annoys me to have the number of games I can play at a given time limitted by the fact that they all demand to exist on a CD/DVD and my computer, especially considering they all demand that you have the CD/DVD in the drive while you play the game.

Sega’s re-releasing the Dreamcast in Japan?

So, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) using a free 10-day trial that I got from Fileplanet and it’s pretty darned good if ask me; in fact, it pretty well is the electronic crack that people make it out to be. Blizzard, however, is not the best crack dealer out there and made the mistake of making the trial a bit of a WoW-lite, which falls a little shy of the addictive power it could stand to harness. The trial version is crippled in a number of ways, some worse than others: (there may be more, this is just what I’ve noticed)

• You can’t use the public chat channels – not a big issue, you can always respond to people with personal messages
• You’re capped at 5 gold – not a big issue for me, I was usually spending fast enough to stay below 1 gold most of the time
• You can’t trade with other players – this annoyed me a little at first but then when I got my brother playing on a trial account and wanted to get him up to speed with me, I got really annoyed; since cooperation is one of the key selling points of the game, this is a real buzz-kill
• There’s a level cap of 20 – this is the real killer; I’m only just barely into the game; I can’t get a mount and I can’t reasonably do any PvP stuff. If they had made the level cap 40, I’d get a taste of all of those things and then probably be acheing to be able to play for 20 more levels and max my character but instead they’ve just pissed me off a whole bunch.

So Blizzard, take note, if you overly cripple a trial version, it’ll turn people off, not attrack them. At this point, I’m pretty much on the edge as far as WoW is concerned, the level cap was a real buzz-kill. Hmm, we could probably reverse the metaphor and draw conclusions about how to best sell crack: give out free samples that are just below your best crack in quality, then when they come to buy crack the first time, sell them your best stuff at a lower price than normal and every time thereafter sell them lower grade stuff at an inflated price.

And while we’re on the topic of highly addictive drugs and video games, hey technology people, where the heck are BTL-chips already? (Shadowrun reference)

I have found a new God, and it is this man playing Ikaruga.

Through one or another of the linksites I visit regularly, I came to an article about a Kansas State U. support group for girlfriends jealous of video games. The group goes by Girlfriends Against Video Games and the article made me think pretty much one thing, girls need to play more video games.

It turns out there exists a reason not to hate the DOA series of fighting games, other than the high quality female chest rendering effects that make the 16 year olds oggle. You might be asking, what possible reason might a die hard Soul Calibur afficionado, like myself, have to like DOA? Well, it turns out that Tecmo’s pulled a franchising fast one on me and included master ninja Ryu Hayabusa of Ninja Gaiden fame in their DOA games. The problem here, of course, is that I didn’t want a reason to like DOA, I was plenty content considering it a crappy fighting game. Now I’m going to have to go and find myself a copy of DOA2 for the Dreamcast, reevaluate my opinion on the matter as regards Ryu Hayabusa and then I’m going to have to think about this later when DOA4 comes out. Incidentally, the proposed cover art for DOA4 prominently displays Ryu (back row, second from the left) in full ninja get-up. Damn you for finding my weakness Tecmo, damn you!

UPDATE:DAMN IT! DAMN IT! DAMN IT! DOA4 is also going to include a Halo Spartan, namely the female Spartan-458 (Master Chief is Spartan-117). They really have found my weakness, commercialization of fighting games. MVC, Smash Brothers, and now DOA, these fighting game makers are clever.

These images are screenshots taken from my copy of Soul Calibur that show my record of 1′04″02 in Arcade mode. All this thinking about video games made me remember and I figured it was as good a time as any to put proof on the intzorweb. We didn’t think to tape it when I beat the record, so this is the best I’ve got. Sorry about the tagging, but I care about this and don’t trust the internet half as far as I can throw it. Also, since this was back when I was at my absolute best, I would be mighty surprised if anyone has done any better than this, ever. Some people on the internet seem to have claimed better times, but the best confirmed time I’ve found is around 1′30; if you can find better, please point me to it. It’s a real pity that I didn’t mange to beat a minute. For the search engines, if they care, this is my best time high score in Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast in Arcade Mode.