Armored Core: Clean Front
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November 29, 2004 - Being part of the PSP launch doesn&#39;t just mean being the first to play PlayStation Portable games. Sure, that part&#39;s cool -- as is lording over your friends and family as one of the only
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To each his own, but I love eye candy.  When I heard that you could get the 3D Xgl and Compiz environment running on Ubuntu/Kubuntu dapper (my default distribution), I immediately searched the web for instructions.  Most of the instructions take a reasonably timid approach, which gets your 3D environment running in a test console (the second display, or :1).  I'm more adventurous, however, and I immediately went for a total replacement.  What follows are instructions for doing the same.
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Behemoth publisher EA seems to be a bit hard on its employees, reslting in law suits. But employee abuse and poor working conditions isn't as simple to solve as it might seem. And EA is the catalyst for a potential revolution
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Description: Production of armored vehicles has gone up dramatically in the past year, from about 15 vehicles a month to 450. But amid questions about how well troops are protected in Iraq, the Army and at
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An implementation of the famous Snake game written for MS-DOS in Pascal. This is a project from my early days of programming which I wish to update and develop as it's a bit rough around the edges and relies on libraries more than it really should. Othe   Although this program is in version 2, I have had it since long before my SourceForge.net days and have just decided to take another look at it after 6 years on the shelf.
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Tycho:  Sony hasn't been entirely clear regarding what their 1.92 update for the Playstation 3 actually does, suggesting that it "focuses on some PS3 compatibility and playability issues for select titles," but our own experience with the update has been conclusive.  In the Internet's dark places, aggrieved Lair fans are suggesting that this update improves the game's motion controls, and that each media outlet must rescind their previous scores.  I'm fairly certain this is magical thinking - neither Sony or Factor 5 will say with any specificity, and now that both our PS3s are updated it would be impossible to test.  Typically we don't take the traditional holidays off, nor do we take off non-traditional holidays, such at the Feast of St. Motherfucker - a holy day that I've only just now invented.  Gabe's father was around, though, and golf seemed like a good time investment.  Reading greens and choosing clubs for other people is about as far as I get, so for me the social aspects of the game are paramount.  Standing under the awning at the driving range, it's hard not to see where EA's Tiger series could improve.      This year's lobby system is much improved over last year's, but I'm not sure why the lobby itself couldn't be a driving range.  This is how virtually any actual round of golf starts, with every person hitting the bucket they bought and lamenting their performance.  A few of their minigames would work just fine in this context - don't create a custom game to play them, build all of the basic play into a casual, central experience.  From here, modes, courses, and wagers are established.  When new people pull in, carts can be heard.  Links for the 360 wasn't as complete as Tiger, but it had four player modes first - and it had a means to play Speed Golf that Tiger should loot from its fallen enemy.  Essentially, you play the round as normal.  Everyone else plays the round as normal simultaneously, and shots are keyed to a certain color so that the arc of each person's shot is visible to all other players.  They need to steal this - throw the name of each player on there, use the face, whatever.  This needs to be how it works.  You can play an entire course in a quarter of the time.  The RPG metaphor really worked the first few times I bought the product, but it's really lost its currency with me.  There's a point - and it may be with the '08 version of the product - where the number of courses are such that I don't actually want to pay sixty dollars again just to lose all of my character progression every year.  Gabriel's suggestion is to approach it more like a fighting game, which is to say like Mario Golf - with discrete golfer archetypes that have a suite of skills.  I'm wondering if Guild Wars doesn't have the answer - full priced expansions every year, with a perpetually tracked online experience where your prior purchase actually increases the value of the next.  Let all play - online and off - be a part of the core experience, let all play hone your ability.  Don't wall off online play into some purgatory as it is now, untracked, outside of the normal scheme of advancement.    With these thoughts in my head, excited by the sun-dappled future we had envisioned. we sat down to play a round online the next night.  After determining that one of us couldn't play at all or it would crash the game for everyone - a weird kind of crash where you can't play, but you're able to talk to one another about the crash - we were able to play eight holes, at which point it crashed before a victor could be determined.  They've only just made online Photo Game Face available for Tiger, for the first time since launch, but they had to deactivate online features for two other titles to do it.  So, no.  I don't have high hopes.
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Tycho:  I purchased twenty fluid ounces of Halo 3 "Limited Edition Mountain Dew Game Fuel" in the hopes that it would taste so horrible that we'd get a strip out of it. Â Before I read the ingredients in preparation for this post, I often found myself desirous of this strange liquid - a liquid the precise color of tubercular sputum.  I would trip over to Seven Eleven to obtain it, tipping a small portion onto the concrete for the Spartans we lost at Reach.  Once I discovered that the soda contained a compound called "Brominated Vegetable Oil," my ardor was diminished for some reason.  The flavor of the beverage is not unpleasant, especially if you like bromide.  The almost oppressive campaign that surrounds the product is, perhaps, more bitter.   It's one slice (or, perhaps, sip) of a ten hojillion dollar marketing campaign designed to project one of gaming's biggest brands to people who already know about it.  There is no way to escape the Goddamn thing.  Over ninety percent of the surveyed crustaceans were "aware of the launch" and held a "strong desire to purchase," even though their massive claws and aquatic habitat make using the product impossible.  Lemurs are less bullish, but then lemurs are a notoriously tough demo.    It took a third night of playing the Call of Duty 4 Beta for everything to sink in, but it's pretty much official: they know what the fuck they're doing.  A shooter can't merely be great to come out this holiday, and even amazing might be insufficient.  To go against the previously described fucking unstoppable media phalanx - to say nothing of Halo 3 itself, whose multiplayer offering is so broad on every axis that it must be called round - you need to drop something that be off the cheazy.       There are shooters that play with progression to varying degrees.  Battlefield 2142 does, but the infantry experience is one part of a whole.  Rainbow Six: Vegas does, but its reward scheme is largely cosmetic in nature, and takes place outside of the game proper - between rounds, in austere menus.  CoD4's leveling has the sharp inhalation of a WoW ding.  It takes place right there at the moment you earn the XP from a kill, with an onscreen celebration of the fact.  The reward structure earns you new playmodes, new weapons,  new slottable abilities, the right to build custom classes, the right to wear a clan tag.  You don't need to wait long to earn them, the schedule is not cruel, but you need to put in your dues.  It's not an onerous process:  in order to level up, you must simply play Call of Duty 4.  Trust me when I say this is something you will want to do.    I feel as though my knowledge of the game should be richer, so let me crack a few more levels and get back to you.  Hopefully a beta code will have dripped out to you by then, and you will know what I mean with visceral certainty.    Oh, and also: Â if you want to tumble down some fissure in the earth and wake up in the Japanese Madness Caverns, take a look at this video for Puzzle de Harvest Moon.  I watched it hours ago, and I am still haunted.
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The Hitachi 2400 Smart Windshield: You think you got clutter on your computer display? Ha! Screech! CRASH!
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Workshop Windows virus cleanup primer
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Chris Hartjes has posted an update on the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler package for the Zend Framework, including writing the unit tests to ensure it's complete functionality.   In my spare time I've been banging away at writing the required unit tests for the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler component that Derek and I had started. I finished all the unit tests for the user based functions, which is a nice milestone. Then I decided to go back and actually read the comments made from the proposal. Oops. I discovered there were a bunch of changes that the folks at Zend said needed to be made in order to accept them. I agree with most of them.   He also lists some of these comments/changes/suggestions for the package that were given to help it fit in better with the rest of the framework.
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Tycho:  Last year's iteration of Tiger Woods had a fairly serious glitch in multiplayer, in that the game could not be played in multiplayer mode.  Or, it worked sometimes, but there was no way to know how or when - what combination of dances and burning herbs would right this aloof mechanism.  It was most likely the rush of new owners securing tee-times on simulated links, but after a week of trying to use the product without success I decided that I had better things to do than try and contextualize EA's grave miscalculations.    The few times we were able to jump on and actually get in there were the kind of epic, unadulterated "guy fun" one sees lionized in hilarious summer comedies.  Golf as a sport (and as a videogame) has the strong undercurrent of shared misery that one usually finds only in dive bars.  The recently released demo for this year's product - on both PSN and XBL, now - recalled those moments to us, independent of the rage that bookended each round of powerfully communal spirit lodge golf.  This year's product has a huge focus on Gamernet, a kind of user created content initiative that will hopefully see them approach the performance of their online infrastructure with more conviction.     GameFace, their face making thing, has seen a significant jump this year as well - it can take pictures from your console's camera and create actual face geometry, and I understand that photos can even be uploaded online and then brought down on the console for processing.  We were able to get some pretty good results with the earlier versions of the tool, but this is very much appreciated.  Of course, in the wrong hands, every tool is a weapon.     Ubisoft is now saying that Haze is an exclusive exclusive for the PS3, and not one of them timed or partial exclusives one might see in the lesser houses.  Truly monogamous games are rare these days, and this is certainly a surprise, but this thing has been hopping back and forth for months.  There was even a leaked document that showed this "exclusive" being released a week later for PC and 360, though all traces of the document were soon obliterated.  Assassin's Creed was (as you'll recall) a PS3 exclusive as well.  For a week, at any rate.        I'm really excited for Haze, but I'm not sure if that's a universally held belief.  The writer made a good impression on me at E3 several years ago, and Free Radical makes a good impression on me whenever they make a videogame.  It's also a four player co-op experience with a unique, asymmetrical multiplayer proposition that you've probably read about.  But, as with Bioshock, I'm really in it for the story - and, also like Bioshock, I think anything that limits its potential audience is a serious mistake.
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Tycho: Two new shirts today. One based on the Broodax Strips, which can be found here, and looks like this:   And another shirt based on the control scheme for Starfire Saga V: Laserion, which can be found here, and looks like this:   (CW)TB
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&quot;Team America: World Police&quot; can declare mission accomplished in the war against tastefulness. Its pledge to hunt down and kill all political cliches has been honored; its promise to not stop
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A PC vest accessory that mimics the feeling of being hit by real bullets when playing first-person shooters will go on sale in November.
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The military is ordering more lightweight armor developed in Ohio that protects troops in Humvees from automatic weapons fire and grenades without slowing the vehicles. Unarmored Humvees have become targets in the war in Iraq.
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Critical bug-fixes ship for Internet Explorer, DirectX, and Windows Media Format technology.
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Some players spend too much time at the computer, but a new USB device freshens the atmosphere around your rig. Plus: Halo 3 button lets you mute whiney players. In Game|Life.