kisrael

That whole "Dig Dug has a family, and the son is Mr. Driller" is kind of odd!

Bleh, that game always froze on me :-(

if (big if) you can find it, Bangai-O for old school 2D shooting fun, multiplied by the power of the DC's ability to put bajillion of enemies and missiles on screen at once. Also full of Japanese weirdness.

yeah, I think of DOOM as the most important example of this. I remember that one where it's a big arena that you can run on the outside edge of, and you pretty much have to get the Cyberdemon fighting w/ the big mama spiderbot... great stuff. BioShock, one of the powerups looks like a tomato that causes bad guys to go bezerk and target each other.

Oh, seriously? I hadn't run into the "no saves for you" issue. If so, that F"IN SUCKS. God damn it, I paid for my game, don't force me to play though whatever byzantine unlocking scheme you have if I don't want to! M'Fers. And also, god damn you Nintendo for letting that kind of copy block happen

haven't had time to peruse the Wii collection and think of a competition. Though what if we tried to leverage the virtual console there? Some kind of multiplatform tourney? I'd be willing to buy some games. i was going to say we should watch The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters but i guess it hasn't been DVD released yet...

The collision detection etc on that game really sucks.

I think in part I got jealous hearing about some other regional group working in part on that "I am 8bit" pseudoport of MegaMan -- in batariBasic w/ some ASM but still...

Do you need a receipt for the thing for the repair? I guess though I shouldn't be too worried, I got mine in February, and I think it's more a first year or so model issue...

We need a meet sometime!

Heh, someone was asking if I could add something like this to my PlayerPal tool... it's tough w/ 8 pixels across, that's the main thing :-(

I bought mine around the time crackdown came out. Should it be ok or am I doomed?

Gary W. wrote me about my Playerpal sprite drawing tool for the 2600 ( http://alienbill.com/2600/playerpalnext.html ) and wondered about rotations finer than 90 degrees, namely the compass points (45 degree) and maybe full 16-stop rotation (22.5 degrees) Now this ain't gonna be exact, unlike 90 degree rotation (and even then a purist might point out that non-square pixels could be an issue) The box just doesn't fit, so you have to fake it. Theoretically, you only have to do the mapping once for each rotation, and find the "source" pixel location in the original for each pixel in the rotated version. (Thought: it might be best to do this unique for each of the "3" rotations, 22.5, 45, 37.5, and then derive every other rotation from a 90 degree turn plus one of those, since doing a 22.5 degree rotation twice would probably cause the fudge factors to accumulate.) So, is this a solved problem? I guess there are two ways of attacking: look to games I like that do this (like Combat, and also Batari's avatar) and hand reproduce what they're trying to do... Or I could try and look up the math, though the rounding errors will be attrocious.

DK Jr Math actually has a somewhat amusing mechanic.

The King of a generation tends to stick around, same thing w/ the GBA. And the main reason I personally don't think of the PS2 as a VERY good system is that they cheaped out and still required a multitap for having more than 2 controller ports...

Well, color me duh. I find the screen layout of the Xbox menus kind of weird and confusing. I was looking under the "games" screen and not "marketplace", thinking it was more like how I usually get Xbox Live Arcade stuff.

I would say Wii is definately stronger if you have company, otherwise unless you have either of the 2 games that supports multiplay online, you're SOL I'm not so sure that makes it stronger in the multiplayer field. Sorry, right, "company" "splitscreen" or "couch" gaming is what I think of by "multiplayer", not "multiplayer online". heh, I guess multiplayer online still feels more like single player to me... it'd still be me, alone on the couch, but with random strangers voices on my headphones rather than just sound FX. So for the most part I don't get the appeal of multiplayer online, but obviously lots of other folks dig it, and I should have been more specific in what I wrote.

So, did I miss my chance to play a bioshock demo? I haven't been paying much attention to demos before. I'd really like a bit of try before I buy...

Right... amazing experiences, but so-so games...

Wow, what a self-defeating strategy. For my money, most things that are over-hyped are actually quite good. I might not like it myself (ala Tony Hawk) but usually I can see what's good about it. God of War and Shadow of Colussus, I couldn't really get into either. I think it was jumping type puzzles in the former and in the latter, I thought the graphics made it unnecessarily irritating to di the "search for a handhold game". In both cases I wish I liked the gameplay itself more, because what I've heard of the stories sounds great.

Thought I'd weigh in. I have a Wii and a 360. For me the main difference seems to be the focus on multiplayer vs single player gaming., with Wii being stronger in the former, and 360 in the latter. I think some gamers appreciate Wii forging a path besides "faster, prettier". For one thing, Wii is a great system to travel with, its super-portable, and that complements its multiplayer and pickup and play emphasis. I give Xbox live arcade the nod over VC, but sometimes it seems weird to me that it's one of the major draws of both systems. Suddenly, that prediction of "eventually games will skip retail stores and go straight to D/L" doesn't seem so unlikely.

I might still have those Compuserve/Bix/Genie offers that came with old modems. Wonder if they are still valid I wish I had saved some of those. Would be amazing if they still worked.. ..Al Heh. I missed out on Compuserve, but I (weirdly) read a thorough book on it, talking about all the CB Channels and all of that

Does anyone still have problems connecting with the Virtual Store? I remember having some problems, but not lately, at least until Sunday evening... then I tried to do an update and that failed... it seemed like it made the connection to know there was an update, but then couldn't actually grab it...

It's a design flaw, or at least a compromise. There might be ok reasons for it, but to release a retro-billed controller that seems to have every feature of the last Gen's controller, and then not make some kind of passthrough for the old hardware... it's lame. (I mean it's a little odd that a N64 title can use the GC or the classic controller, but the GC doesn't have the option. Sure, that's because of hardware vs software emulation, but still.) That said I don't like the classic controller that much. It goes back to that SNES when you had a hunk of buttons that were all the same. Playing Starfox 64 was a real pleasure with the GC controller, and difficult with the classic controller.

http://alienbill.com/2600/101/ is a tutorial I wrote. Friendlier in some ways, but less deep.