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.