Hydian

Completely disagree. Without even quibbling over what constitutes a "faithfull" port, many of the good PC games simply don't exist on consoles and likely never will. The PC wont stop being a viable gaming platform for the forseeable future. Starting with FPS, the PC has a great selection and nothing really beats keyboard/mouse control. The current crop worth playing include Doom, Quake, Sin: Episode 1, F.E.A.R., Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and some others I'm forgetting right now. Like strategy? Then we have Civilization IV, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, and Medievel 2: Total War leading the pack in that area. Neverwinter Nights 2 is the latest and greatest stand alone RPG (with co-op option) and it is getting great reveiws amongst the people I know who are already playing it. And of course there are the dozens of time sapping online games. That video card is a real buzz kill in an otherwise nice rig though. You definately want to upgrade that puppy when you get a chance.

http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/wii/clips-wee-golf-217224.php The clip does have a swear word in it as a warning to those who are at work or are offended by such things. Cute clip though.

I'm cleaning house. That means that I'm finally getting around to cleaning up my overage bins which have been overflowing for much too long. I really hate to ebay the stuff as I never got into the money aspect of things and ebay is generally a pain. Things have been pretty hectic around here, so I haven't had time to make detailed listings of everything yet. If anything, I've only scratched the surface. Anyway, here's a quick starter list: I'm pretty easy going and willing to take any reasonable offers. I suck at this selling stuff, but I'll try to figure out some sort of pricing if that makes people feel better. "Complete" means power supply, a controller (or more), and everything to hook the unit up to a TV. Everything works as far as I can tell (I'm not afraid to say when something is iffy) and will be retested before it is boxed. I will be out of town next week, so I'll have internet access, but be unable to ship until I return if things aren't settled by Friday night (unless you live between Pittsburgh and North Carolina in which case I can probably meet you someplace on my way down.)

I personally enjoyed MKII more than any of the others. Part of that, however, might be because of the meta game though. There were constant revisions as rumors and new elements were included in the game. There was more of a feeling of discovery with it than later games.

You want Net Hack, found here: http://www.nethack.org/

There were many online gaming services that predated Blizzard by a long time. AOL, GEnie, Compuserve were the first large commercial ones. MUDS and bulletin boards existed before then. Even online gaming services that weren't tied to a service provider existed before Blizzard in several forms both to allow games of Doom online and for online only games like Air Warrior.

http://pittsburgh.craigslist.org/clt/203104013.html 4 cabs for $700 and he's also got them listed seperately. If I didn't live 3 stories up, I'd be all over that In the Hunt game just for the JAMMA cab. There's just no way I'm getting a full sized cab up my stairs.

I see it becoming just like DVD +R and DVD -R. As long as there are players that handle both of the new formats, consumers wont care which your movie is on. Everyone will just produce on whichever format is cheaper and consumers will neither know or care what the difference is.

As George Carlin says, "Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are even dumber than that." Software patches are usually a sign that a product was pushed out of the door too soon. Unfortunately, that has become the way games are now made. They get them just good enough to shrinkwrap and then plan to patch the bugs later. The amounts of money and logistics involved in the process (along with the proliferation of broadband connections) have pretty much made it inevitable. The MMO genre has made it even worse. I don't have an express issue with patching the firmware, but requiring internet access to patch something that doesn't otherwise need to be connected is dumb IMHO. I didn't like it when they released Steam for the PC, but at least most PCs have net access. I've never even considered hooking my consoles up to my network. I use my PCs for network gaming. It's like requiring me to hook my TV up to the internet to patch its firmware. I'm sure that I'll eventually buy a 360, but I sincerely doubt that I'll be running Cat5 into my living room (and making the neccesary changes in my network security) just so I can patch it. I don't have an interest in homebrews or piracy...I just see consoles as something that you buy and it should work right out of the box. That is their main advantage over PCs. Just because something can be used for bad things, doesn't mean that everyone will do so.

They already are. There are no laws about movie ratings. The movie ratings are completely voluntary.

I was one of the few who didn't get into the beta (though I was in the combat engine alpha.) The game has promise, but I'm still on the fence about it. Not being able to solo combined with the need to complete a dungeon before getting experience just doesn't work out well with my play schedule.

The difference is that MMORPGs aren't playable without the monthly fees. The games offered on gametap are. I'm sure that gametap will appeal to those people who have no idea that the classic games are still easily obtainable or that don't want to bother. There are plenty of those people out there. That said, $15 a month is high for what you get and I doubt most people would pay that much.

We could take it a step further and set up a Frappr group to track them. www.frappr.com Edit: looking more closely at frappr, I don't think it is granular enough (ie, no addresses.) I wonder if there is something better?

I stopped in 2 stores yesterday (one near work and one near home.) The one was pretty much wiped out, but accurately priced. The other was not marked down, but did seem to have several of the games on the list (but still a small selection) and they did ring up correctly. I might wander back by there tonight with list in hand to see what I missed.

The first time I saw a left hand joystick was when Donkey Kong hit the arcade. I remember it because it felt more natural to me and a lot of people actually used to cross their hands to play it. While I think Nintendo did start that trend, it was before the NES.

Can't speak for consoles, but I've had no issues with either cable or DSL and I do a lot of online gaming.

I have some stuff for both that I was planning to get rid of eventually. I'll look and see what is actually in the junk box.

Uses the 2103 adapter.

My laziness overtook me. I probably would have turned it into a MAME cabinet, but didn't feel like hauling it upstairs.

Heh...no...I live on the 3rd floor and we have 12' ceilings so it is seriously a long way up. My friends learned to be scarce after helping me move in. If I had more space and fewer stairs, I could more easily justify getting a heavy project and letting it sit.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1 The guy said that it powers up, but isn't working due to the acid damage to the board. How difficult should it be to find a replacement main board and how much work would I be looking at if that is the only issue? He seems to think everything else is fine. It's a local pickup for me, but I live a lot of stairs from the street.

Heh...I have a large stack of the promo cards. I even put together a 40 card deck of them to play with.

When Infogrames bought Atari, they also got all of Atari's liabilities. Hasbro didn't cheat the guy directly, Atari did.

Always upgrade the slowest component. If you put a top video card in that system with that CPU, you'll see some improvement, but not that much because the CPU can't get data to the card fast enough. Once you have a 2Ghz or faster CPU, then the video card would be the better component to upgrade. Really, you need to upgrade both. Luckily the 9600XT and 9800Pro cards are pretty cheap and both are servicable.

I can think of reasons to play half life 2 without an internet connection. It *is* a stand alone game after all. We own a copy and Steam is pretty annoying. The studdering...when I first installed it, the studdering was horrible. I changed the mouse from USB to PS2 and the studdering went away.