December 2003 Archives

Dave, Micah, Phil, and I got together on Saturday to play, and Top Spin (the new tennis game from Microsoft) was the clear videogame winner. We started off with some 2 Xbox Halo, and went on to play some Crimson Skies (I discovered this weekend that I don’t like this game). We were taking a little break, so we had Dave pop in Top Spin to check it out (none of us had seen it in action yet, including Dave).

We ended up playing 4-player “doubles matches” for hours!! The design of the game is ingenious; you can pick it up without touching the instruction book and play using 1 button to hit the ball. However, there are actually 6 different buttons that perform 6 different hits (different spins on the ball, lobs, soft hits, etc). It was a lot of fun for us to pick the game up and be able to play a decent game, and then learn the intricacies of game together. We *thought* we had gotten good at the game until Dave and I later went to play on Xbox Live… What a massacre, the guys we played against SCHOOLED us!! But that’s what’s great about these Live games now, you play the single player game so that you can get good enough to compete online. I’m definitely going to pick up Top Spin tonight.

I think the batch of new TV shows for this season all suck. However, I have found some excellent shows to fill the gap that the network crap-fest has created. These shows are American Chopper & Mythbusters, both on The Discovery Channel.

American Chopper is a REAL reality show (not the completely unrealistic crap they call reality on the networks) about a family business called Orange County Choppers. No, it’s not a show about a family of dentists, these guys build custom motorcycles. Now, I have little to no interest in motorcycles, so I wouldn’t have expected to enjoy a show about building them. But, I love this show!! It’s really amazing to watch Vinny & Paulie build a working machine (and a work of art) out of raw metal. The other interesting aspect of the show is the constant tension between the dad/boss and his lazy but talented son Paulie.

Mythbusters is a show where two goofy guys (who have backgrounds in special effects) go about testing outrageous myths. They are able to create special apparatuses to aid in the experiments and half the fun of the show is watching them build them. A lot of the myths (fortunately) involve explosions, and if the reenactment doesn’t give the desired ball ‘o flame, they’ll do whatever it takes to get the big BOOM! One myth told of a medieval town that built a cannon out of a hollowed out log. When the cannon was fired, it exploded and killed many of the townspeople. To test this myth, the mythbusters built a log cannon, and fired it off… no devastating explosion. So, they dumped twice a much gunpowder in the log and capped the top (in essence making a giant wooden pipe bomb). The resulting explosion was incredible… poor townsfolk.

If green is the new pink, and next year brown takes green's place, would you say "brown is the newest pink" or "brown is the new green?" Where are the Fab 5 when you need them...

My Xbox died yesterday. Every time I turned it on the harddrive made this horrible clunking sound and eventually a warning (in many languages) appeared on the screen telling me that my Xbox needs repair and that I should call customer support. I called them… $99 for repair, yeah right! They’ve already repaired it once for free because it was under warrantee, so there’s no way I’m paying $99 for a 2 year old, first generation, twice repaired Xbox. So yesterday I went out and bought a new Xbox for $179.

The possible silver lining to this dark, dark cloud is that SOMETIMES the hard drive does still work in the old Xbox. If I’m gentle with it (ie. Open up the Xbox case, unhook the drive, shake it around, and reattach it), sometimes the Xbox will start back up as normal. I was able to pull off most of my saved games (KOTOR’s saved games are too big for the memory card, which is the worst because I’m 36 hours into the game and I’ve almost beat it). So I started thinking about whether I can replace the harddrive with a copy of everything that is currently on the mostly broken harddrive.

A bit of googling revealed that you CAN do this, but you need a mod chip installed in your Xbox, and some special software installed on your Xbox harddrive. See, the mod chip makes the Xbox more receptive to software & hardware that it previously wouldn’t accept (think Xbox = woman, mod chip = alcohol). So, as long as my harddrive cooperates long enough, I plan on modding my broken xbox, replacing the harddrive and voila a second working Xbox!!! In the long run it’d probably have been cheaper to just send it to MS, but it would have been less fun! More updates on this topic as it progresses.

A couple of weeks ago, while watching The Practice (in spectacular high definition), I made a comment to Kara about Rhona Mitra, the actress that plays Tara. I said something like "ya know, she could have played Lara Croft perfectly!" Later, I looked her up at imdb and was amazed to read that she was the original live action Lara Croft model at shows like E3. I guess I’m not the only one that saw the resemblance.

Today my team had a morale event where we went and played a game called Whirlyball. This game is "a combination of Basketball, Hockey and Jai-Alai played while riding an electrically powered machine, similar to a bumper car." I didn't expect to like it, but once we got to playing I was surprised at how much fun it was.

We played a round robin tournament and our team did awesome! We won every one of our semi-final games and were the only team to be undefeated going into the finals. The final game started off rough for our team, halfway through the game we were down 0-8. But then we got serious and tied the game up 12-12 with 1.5 minutes left in the game. While one of my teammates was trying to make a goal, another teammate rammed an opponent from behind going full speed! This is one of the major rules of the game, no ramming directly from behind (I assume because it can cause whiplash), and due to the speed my teammate was going the ref awarded the other team 4 points as a penalty. There was no way we could make up those 4 points in the remaining minute, so we lost 16-12... Too bad we couldn’t get 1st place, but still we had a LOT of fun!

Santa, if you are out there, here are some things I want for Christmas:

Video Games
Prince of Persia (Xbox)
Beyond Good & Evil (Xbox)
Midway Arcade Treasures (Xbox)
Max Payne 2 (Xbox)
Space Channel 5: Special Edition (PS2)
Tony Hawk Underground (PS2)

Board Games
Amun-Re
PitchCar and expansion

CDs
Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory
Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R
Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach - Painted from Memory

DVDs
Spaced - The Complete First Series
Spaced - Complete Series 2
(both Spaced DVDs are British, best bet for finding them would be amazon.co.uk)

Today I purchased my X-Ecuter 2.3 Lite+ Xbox modchip from system-mods.com for $55 (including shipping). Now we'll see if I picked an "honest" site to give my credit card number to...

Kara and I are thinking about getting a puppy as a practice baby... Since we don't yet have a fence up in our backyard it'll be mostly an inside dog. We don't want a giant beast tearing up our furniture, so we're thinking small. Our favorite breeds so far are Jack Russell Terrier and Beagle; y'all got any suggestions for other small breeds that we should consider?

One of the first GameCube games we bought was Animal Crossing. If you don’t know what AC is, it’s basically an offline persistent game world where multiple players can exist in the same world. One of the primary ways for players to “make their mark” in the world is letter writing. You can write letters to the NPCs (non-player characters) and also to other players. Unfortunately the text recognition for the NPCs is pretty sad. If you write much more than “Hi, you are cool, I’m glad we are friends” then the NPCs get confused. However, the best part of writing letters is that the animals will show off the letters they've received to the other players. So, if you write funny letters, the NPCs will not understand, but sometime down the road another person will see it.

Anyway, I’ve long since become bored with the activities that are available in the game, but Kara still plays it. So, I have started creating in game stories by writing letters and sending them to the animals. In essence I’m creating more content for Kara’ game, because these letters will be revealed to her as she continues to play. The most recent topic I’ve been writing about is Bill the Duck’s suspicious friendship with Huck the Frog. Bill is a cutesy character, so I’ve been spreading rumors that he might be, ya know, homo-duck-ual (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Poor Bill, I even talked to him until he let me change his catchphrase (which I changed to “FAB-U-lous!”) Only time will tell if there’s any validity to these rumors…

Don't you love tracking orders and deliveries online? Well I sure do, and I just got the link for my Xbox mod chip... Join in the fun and watch the package make it's way from Bryan, Texas to Redmond, Washington.

This past weekend was my division’s holiday party which took place at the Westin Hotel. A lot of us met up beforehand at the apartment of Ritchie, Carlton & Rich, and then we crammed into a couple of taxis to get to the Westin. See, the drinks were free (and the party lasted from 7pm-1:30am) so it was a safe assumption that no one was going to be drivable by the end of the night. We didn’t really DO that much there, a lot of hanging out, drinking, and talking. There was a cigar lounge on one floor, so a bunch of us went down there to check it out. Here’s a pic (though my eyes say otherwise, I assure you that the tobacky in my cigar is not wacky). They also had a casino with fake money, but it was always packed! Toward the end of the night I tried my hand at a little blackjack… I started out with $1000 and slowly lost $500… so I put my remaining $500 on the final hand and won my fake money back… WOO HOO! When the party finally ended we needed a ride back to the apartment so we stood on the street and hailed a cab. Kara and I ended up spending the night at the apartment… I used two shot glasses for a contact case… classy.

Hey fellow me-ites I'm going to need a DVD burned for the great Xbox mod of 2003 (or probably 2004 judging on how fast the mod chip is making it's way across the country). Do any of you have a DVD burner or know someone who does?

I updated my current movie to Return of the King in anticipation for my company taking us to see it tomorrow (Best…. Company…. Ever). However, I have a confession to make: I’m not at all excited to see it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed the past two LoTR movies, but only just. Meaning, I’ve only seen each movie once in the theater, and that’s it. I don’t own either of the DVDs (or should I say I don’t own any of the 82 DVDs), I haven’t watched the extended versions, and I sure as crap haven’t bought any LoTR toys (yes, that includes board games).

Is there something wrong with me? I mean, I read the books back in ’96, so it’s not like I’m some unlearned bum looking for an entertainment handout. I’m also not in the bitter “the movies are not as good as the books” camp either; I feel that the book to movie conversion was done very well. I just haven’t been thrilled by these movies, maybe because it’s 9 hours of viewing a story that I already know so well?

I just went to buy a snack from the vending machine and (of course) the bag got caught between the spirally metal thing and the edge of the machine. I shook the machine a little, but no luck. I had enough money to buy the same snack again, so I figured I’d just buy two and keep one for later.

This time the first bag fell, but the second bag that I just paid for got stuck... grrr! The question is, is it better to pay $1.25 for nothing, or $2.50 for a $1.25 item? Either way I’m out $1.25, but I guess, at least this way I have something to snack on!

This past term, I’ve been attending a game development night course offered by UW. It’s actually a four term course, and tonight is the final class of the first term. Our last assignment (which is due today) was to take our existing framework and create a game out of it. This was assigned to us the week before Thanksgiving, so we’ve had nearly a month to work on it… I started last night.

Since I knew that I would never touch this codebase again, I hacked it to bits. This was a pretty new experience for me and I realized that you actually have to be fairly good at coding to write code this bad. By that I mean, bad code usually makes buggy programs, but if you can hack your code in and get a solid program out of it, you must know what you’re doing.

So, last night I got the core gameplay finished, but there was no ending to the game (a la Atari 2600 games). Since I knew that my work was nearly done, I did what any good procrastinator would do… I stopped working on it. I was getting sleepy, so I went to bed with the plan to get up a little early the next morning and finish it before work. This morning I awoke with the determination that comes only with a deadline so looming that (to quote the poetic lyricists of Metallica) “nothing else matters.”

My main problem this morning was I needed to quickly add beginning and end menus to the game, but I didn’t have the time to learn DirectX text stuff. I decided that I’d go with the super cheesy and quick solution of message boxes!! (they’re good for everything!) Once I hacked in a scoring system and header & footer message boxes I was done!! Download my game from here if you want to see it in all its wondrous crappy glory. A few notes, you’ll need at least DirectX 7.0, and you control the tank with the mouse. If you can’t get it to run, oh well, you aren’t missing much.

We got a Jack Russell Terrier pup today, and he's insanely cute!! We think we’re going to call him Copper, but we’re still debating (y’all got any suggestions?) Anyway, here’s a bunch of pictures of him.

Well the Xbox mod was a STUNNING success!! It took me a lot of hours to get it done, but everything went perfectly! I had a lot of fun doing it and it really brought me back to the hacking days of my youth. Here goes part one of my modding experience:

I got home on Thursday night around 5pm to find the package sitting on my front porch. I grabbed it and rushed downstairs to open it up; 3 cute little boards, 2 wires, and 1 screw… NO instructions. I’m not one to rush into things uninformed, so I had to spend at least 30 minutes tracking down instructions (and even then they were for a different chip). The chip I bought was solder-less so it relied on me aligning the pins on the chip to the exact position on the motherboard. It took me HOURS to get it in place... I mean HOURS! And the worst part was there were no actual instructions to work from, so I really didn’t know if I was doing it wrong or if the chip was broken. Finally after tons of sliding the chip around on the board, the box booted up under linux… WOO HOO.

Stay tuned for part 2…

Ohhh, I get it… The Lord of the Rings was a trilogy! It appears I spoke too early in my previous entry about my apathy toward the first two movies. I see now that I wasn’t able to appreciate them until I’d seen the excellent conclusion that is Return of the King. Now that I’ve seen the entire story, I AM excited about the past installments. In fact, I’ve even considered buying the extended version DVDs so that I can watch them before going to see RotK with Kara. My one complaint with the first two movies is they didn’t seem emotionally engaging to me, but the finale does this SO WELL! The physical and emotional exhaustion Sam & Frodo go through toward the end is truly believable. As is the hopelessness the men feel about the impending battle. Peter Jackson really did something amazing with these movies, now on to The Hobbit???

And now the continuation of my modding story…

Installing the chip was only the beginning… to avoid legal issues the modchip is shipped with a legal BIOS. However, all that BIOS does is eject the DVD drive and wait for a BIOS flash disc to be inserted. I was not aware of this step beforehand, so I had to go read up on where to get this fancy new (illegal) BIOS. Turns out I had to go to an IRC chat room and type a special command, which would give me 1 time access to an FTP site. I ended up having to visit this FTP site a bunch of times, because I needed many utilities and all of them seem to be illegal. After I updated the BIOS, I then needed a special boot disc called EvolutionX which sets up an FTP server so that I could access my Xbox from my computer.

Each new application needed to be burned on to a CD and booted up like it was a game... Most tutorials said that this was the most painful part because the Xbox DVD drive doesn’t read CD-Rs. Fortunately I discovered a while back that a certain brand of CD-RW discs work just fine with my Xbox. So, this “huge hassle” was completely avoided because I just used (and reused) a disc that I knew worked. Anyway, with EvoX running, I was able to browse and copy the contents of my Xbox hard drive to my computer’s hard drive. Once I finally had the HD backed up, the stressful part of the operation was finished (remember, my Xbox HD only worked occasionally and I was constantly afraid that it would die before I was finished with this whole process).

Come back soon (if you dare) for the exciting conclusion to this mod-tacular trilogy!

Our puppy Cooper is settling nicely into our home; we’ve given him the downstairs bathroom as his doggy lair. We bought one of those baby gates to put up in the doorway to keep him confined when we’re not here (or sleeping). The gate has worked fine... until last night. It appears that all this time Cooper has been plotting his escape route, and last night he decided to make the break.

This morning when Kara came down to take him outside, he was standing by the gate... on the wrong side. It appears that once Cooper had full reign of downstairs he proceeded to have a puppy heyday (which as far as we can tell consisted of pooping and peeing in every place possible). I guess we’ll have to start using the door to confine him when we’re not present... I’d toss the gate, but I keep getting reminders that we’ll need it in the near future…

My lack of entries the last few days is due to me being in Portland for Christmas. I'm currently at Billy's house, and we've got to figure out what we're going to sleep on because he doesn't have a spare bed. Such is the life of a wandering Nomad.