Messages

Ummmm...

I have never been to Germany, but it's probably do to a DNA thing more than anything else. Either that or Germany's still experimenting with steroids to make their female athletes better. 

Kidding.
- Huw

EDIT: It's a good thing they teach German in school. Otherwise I couldn't read a word of that.

I must be an oddity. That's probably the good parenting talking.

I have played (and own) games from every single gaming decade. I have a TV game from the seventies. If I look hard enough, I can find a couple of games from the 80's (Maniac Mansion eminating like a shining beacon here), I have a plethora of games from the nineties. And a helluvalot of 2000+ games.

You know what? Even as I stare at a screen playing tennis-pong in a black and white interface against my brother, I still smile and enjoy it as much as a seventie's teen would have. I had a space invader game once. Wore it out through overuse. I still play tetris on our GBA. : I have played through so many games from the nineties that it's hard to keep track. And I admit to having a gaming computer (the graphics card lets me down). I play quite a few PS2 games as well. But what stock my shelves? I'll note the things that are "missing".

1) Grand Theft Auto and other sencelessly violent games - Stupid, crap clone games played by immature, senceless morons that wouldn't know a good storyline if it came at them with a chainsaw, that only play these games because of the senceless violence and that it fills the timeslot between masturbating and screaming in pensioner's ears.
2) Most shootemups. Can I see Doom: The generic sequel on my shelves? Nope. Can I see Half Live: Kill aliens till you cry, bleeding through the wood? Nope. What First Person games can you see? Morrowind and Battlefield 1942. Both so well scripted and designed it makes you weep.

What's here? Games with a community around them. Age of Empires 2, with it's great community of honest, happy people that love to talk and help whilest using their brain cells to remorcely crush you. Adventure Games. Strategy games. Chess (somewhere). So many imaginative games that it's like being in a storyteller's heaven.

And do you know what I want on these shelves next? A MMORPG called Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, with such a tight gaming community, who even in the harshest conditions imaginable (being strung along by a senceless game company, having the original game cancelled, keeping together in the months that followed, and changing seemlessly into a new game) survived. I want to spend many evenings with these people. Spore. So, SO imgainative that I will positively hug the creator if I saw him.

Call me a hypocrite if you will, but honestly, I feel honoured to have had known so many great people while playing these games. Communities thrive on great games. Maybe once games accept that the path to eternal fame lies in it's community, we'll have an upturn.

And if you have played and *shudder* enjoy stuff like GTA, I probably wasn't refering to you. I was reffering to some kids in my area.

- Huw

I have avidly loved Discworld Noir for many years. To critisize it is to critisize the best adventure game which wasn't made by LucasArts or Sierra.

Also, seeing as it's Leuton telling the story, it's perfectly plausible that he could have changed a few things to make Vimes look bad. Same goes with the voice. 

- Huw

PS: A fan-sequel of Noir would be very very good...

You'll find that most people here object to the ripping of game sprites and backgrounds. Personally I'm one of them, as half the fun of making a game is drawing this stuff. 

- Huw

Eh. If I get bored, I just update my Blog.

And what if you can't stand tea? Coffee melts the chocolate too quickly. 

- Huw

I have to disagree with the ROM statement. I'm one of "today's kids" and I have played many of the old games on emulators. So I feel that statement is incorrect, or at least it's a generalisation.

The best puzzles are the ones with multiple logical (if difficult) solutions, IE I am in a room with the person I am trying to rescue on the other side of a electronically locked door. This electronically locked door is connected to a massive computer that is broken. There are three things I could do, all equally logical to different people. If you are the violent sort , you could simply grab the pickaxe off the wall and smash the lock to bits. Doing so would cause the guards to rush in, and you have to fend off the guards with the pickaxe while the prisoner escapes. If you were the technical sort, you could cross some wires in the lock by jimmying it open with the pickaxe and unlock it. This would then trigger a scene where you both jump out of a window into a truck below as the lock had an alarm. Finally, you could do the clever thing and do an elaborate puzzle involving using several parts scattered across the room and fix the computer (which you end up starting by hitting it with the pickaxe) open the lock and escape without persuit.

Of course, this leaves the reason, why would you do the hardest one? Well, a simple points system would suffice. Five points for the violent one, seven for the technical one and ten for the clever one.

This way, with some fancy graphics and a good control system, makes for a really good puzzle. Simple.

- Huw

I think my head is going to explode if I try and understand what some of you are saying without corresponding source matter, so I'm just going to say this.

As a catholic, I go to church every sunday and holyday.
As a teenager, I have alot of time to think about life.
As I like to think I have a pretty far above average IQ, I feel that thinking about these matters is good for your grey matter, so to speak. So.

I believe that there is a God. This God created the universe by sparking the big bang. There is a Satan, as Newton's third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For yin, there is yang and so forth. Free will flings us along this path as our consiousnesses are bound to this universe, but our conciousnesses are not of this universe. So we could be the mini programs inside the big program of the all encompassing computer so to speak. These external influences of Yin and Yang (I'm not using God and Satan here because of ease of discussion) affect our lives by giving us choices to follow. Maybe we make our own choices, following the middle path.

The point of my argument is this. These external influences are of other places. Same as our conciousnesses. We leave this universe and end up somewhere else after our deaths. And about free will? I would not be writing this now If I had none. I would be in a cave along with the rest of you going "Ug" and bashing each other with clubs.

- Huw

O_o

That is all.
- Huw

EDIT: Sorry, my pride dictates I make a longer post. This guy was starting a discussion, and it seems that it's got a little bit crazy... Go drink some fluids and rehydrate your brains people, your halucinating. 

If it's going to be a horse in a standard position, then it should have all four feet on the ground, rather than be bucking in the air....

Nice elemental though! 
- Huw

Why are we having this discussion? I'm confused. Somebody was asking about if anybody used an emulator extension, then it turned into a legal debate... anywho.

Let's just assume that these rules are perfectly acceptable and correct for the net. I can see an argument coming, and they're no good unless Helm starts them on the topic of hypnotism...

Anywho. Back on topic, I do not use Kaillera, as the emulator it uses (MAME) is a tad too clunky for my tastes... I prefer some of the more streamlined ones like VisualBoy Advance.

- Huw

EDIT: Come to think of it, I'll shut up about the 24 hour thing... eh.

This is standard american copyright laws. Anybody who has a copy of a game may make copies of said game for backup reasons, for having aditional copies for use over versus modes (ie the GBA) and so forth. When it gets illegal is when you vend or aquire these roms if you do not own the game in the first place. Also, a couple of factors:

One: If you do not own the game, you can still download the game and play it for 24 hours, then it becomes illegal to own it. Hence, downloading roms is not illegal.
Two: This man is CLEARLY talking about independent made games, that are released as freeware by people who code them. 

- Huw

EDIT: Also, this sort of thing is very, VERY hard to track or prove, and most companies don't have the ninja death laywers that Sierra and LucasArts do.

Umm... Shouldn't this go in C&A forums? I mean, this IS technically an activity. 

- Huw

I've heard of these before... I THINK there was a topic on this some time ago. Anybody got a link?

- Huw

My vote goes to MashPotato. Short, sweet and with a good eye for humor considering the topic.

The other two, whilst being much more conventional, were still of a good quality. Kudos to everyone. 

- Huw

Well, I fixed it by rolling back the driver. I didn't consider uninstalling the old driver first, so that was probably the problem. Me thinks I shall try that. The primary reason I was updating was display glitches in a certain game (Dawn of War), and they wern't artifacts, so it was the driver at fault.

Egad, I'm an idiot. 
- Huw

Yup. NWN worked fine before :|

... Or it's this new driver from nVidia... 

Basically, I installed the new driver for my very crappy graphics card (a Geforce 4 integrated), rebooted and all was fine. Some strange warning messages worried me for a while, but nothing bad occured until I tried running NWN. It refused to work after the opening movies. I check Display settings and I discover I have a second non-existant monitor I can't get rid of. THEN I discover to my joy that in Device Manager I have 4 monitors! (Two Defaults and two Plug and Plays)

Removing the driver is something I can't do, otherwise I would have done it. So....

HELP!

- Huw

EDIT: I have a bucket of rotten fishheads for the first person who suggests buying a new graphics card.

Oooh. A point. I'm on a BT phoneline. This inexplicably bumps up prices on various sites, so watch out.

- Huw

Here's the story:

For the last two years, I've been argueing with my parents over broadband. We currently, to my usual disgust, have an out-dated, over-priced and very, VERY slow AOL dial-up connection for £16 a month. The reason why we haven't updated the connection? Unclear usually. The reasons have been:

1) We can't afford it
2) We don't need it

and, their core argument,

3) Dad's computer can't handle it.

I also have a sneaking suspicious of a fourth:

4) You'd use it too much.

I'll make the situation clear. We have three computers, two of which have basic, but usable, specs. My dad's, however, was built in 1995. It has a mighty 44mb of ram, runs Win 98 and has no USB slots. So, my mission is thus. I need:

a) A cheap BB supplier which does not require a switch of phone line
b) Technical advice on a router and a modem (ideally, something that can run 3 computers at once, without ANY FORM of computer-opening)
c) Imcriminating evidence of Dial-Up being ferverently crap.

I do NOT care about speed. Just faster than this AOL crap-fest.
- Huw

You need something that can view FLV files for this to be any help...

http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php

Good luck.

- Huw