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TPA5

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Posts posted by TPA5

  1. Posted

    Looks like everything has been sorted out, after the devs of Orion showed Activision pictures and clips from movies that also showed similar weapons Activision backed down. I swear, the greatest enemy to gaming are the gaming conglomerates like Activision and EA themselves. Or Activision just needs to justify the hordes of lawyers they keep on retainer. Shame on Steam for simply complying with the takedown without doing any kind of due diligence. Everyone's so goddamn afraid of being sued they'll do anything to cover their own stupid ass.

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    I'm in the same boat, we live in a small house and it's a shared office between my wife and I so space is at a premium. It's one of the reasons I downsized my collection dramatically over the past year, which was painful at times. Now that things are more organized, I'm getting ready to start collecting again but in a more focused way.

     

    Right now I do the switch-out, which can be a pain in the ass but is liveable if you're cramped for space. For instance my Atari 400 and the small TV I use it with lives in the closet when not in use, then will come out and sit on my desk for a few days at a time. My Gamecube sits in the entertainment unit in the living room, but the games and controllers have to hide in the closet as well. It's basically just being smart about organizing, you'd be surprised what even a small closet can hold. Retrocomputers can be trickier than consoles due to the fact they tend to "sprawl" more often than not.

    • Like 1

  3. Posted · Edited by TPA5

    Today I show you all 200+ Sony PSP games I have in my collection and highlight some of the more rare or interesting or fun games YOU should play too! This collection is grouped by RPGs, Racing games, Puzzle games, action/platformer, sports, flight, fighting and more!

     

    I've only recently started subscribing to your channel and I've been binging on your videos the last week and a bit (your intro song is stuck in my head). I'm digging them a lot, you seem a lot more genuine than many other U'Toobers out there and I can tell you actually care about these games (as opposed to pretending to care for views). Your guests are really interesting too, Reggie and Kinsey are very cool. Your game room has me wishing I lived in a house where I had a cool basement to play games and drink beer in.

     

    Anyway, this video made me miss my PSP. Picked it up for $10 at a garage sale years and years ago, modded it with a new case and such, then in one of those weird moments sold it because I thought I'd get out of video game collecting. Dumb move on my part, but this video might just encourage me to go hunting for one again.

  5. Posted

    Anime is bigger than ever, with even many North American cartoons taking cues from it. Gone are the days of otakus being the only creatures who could experience it, now even casual viewers who wouldn't consider themselves "geek" will watch anime. Since many of the games coming out for the 3DS come out of Japan, it would make sense that style is more popular. Like many things, this particular style is very "in" right now so it makes sense developers will jump on that. Personally I don't mind it, I like the style.

  6. Posted

    The problem is console manufacturers are trying to play catch-up with the rapidly advancing PC market after releasing under-powered consoles. It is cheaper and easier than ever to build a gaming rig that can whip modern consoles and play games in 1080p. Now with Microsoft announcing that Xbox One games will also appear on the Windows store, there would seem to be even less reason to purchase modern consoles. Heck, the one thing consoles used to have over a PC was that you could simply plop a game in and go. These days you have to suffer through the same bullshit on a console with endless updates, always-online DRM, poorly optimized games, and system software that is more about delivering a "media experience" to your living room than simply playing games. Regardless of what Sony and MS promise, the market will end up getting fragmented with the upgraded Xbox and PS4 systems. Isn't the idea of console gaming to be simple?

     

    Too much crap for me, I'll stick to my old consoles and PC games any day of the week, from an era where "DLC" was nary a twinkle in EA's eyes.

    • Like 2

  7. Posted

    After organizing my office, I seem to have lost my Advance SP charger (oh, the irony). I have a spare DS charger, wondering if someone was interested in trading their Advance SP charger for a DS charger? I know they're cheap on eBay, but whatever I figured if someone needs a DS charger this might be a better way to get it.

  8. Posted

    I think the massive flow of gamers from the PS2 to the XBox360 back to the PS4 shows that despite what it looks like, gammers will move brands to the best perceived console.

     

     

     

    Yes, although there has yet to be a mass gamer migration from alternative consoles. Moving from Sony to Microsoft and back to Sony consoles is moving between similar offerings. If indeed NX is a "new way to play," then it's not reasonable to think said gamers would necessarily move off one of the other two platforms. It's definitely not a bad idea to offer an alternative to two mostly similar platforms, but of course that alternative needs to be compelling. The alternative approach worked with the Wii, but didn't work with the Wii U. We'll see what result trying that for a third time yields.

     

    I was going to reply with something exactly along the lines of what Bill said. Moving from one "hardcore" (for lack of a better term) console to the other isn't the same as moving from something like the Xbox 360 to the Wii.

  10. Posted · Edited by TPA5

    Sierra was a big part of my childhood, especially Kings Quest and Roger Wilco. Gabriel Knight was another really good one ("What can you tell me about voodoo?"), though I never finished it (I own it on GOG so it's on my list again). Of course they also had great non-adventure games as well like The Incredible Machine. I vaguely remember my dad playing Police Quest but I never tried it as a kid, I have it now and have started playing the first one. Those were the games that evolved into the excellent SWAT series. Sierra and Lucasarts (along with some Accolade titles) made up the bulk of my early PC gaming.

  11. Posted

    We hear it every generation that Nintendo needs third party support, and it's true, they do. But, I hate when people try to piss up my ass and tell me it's raining and act like Sony and Microsoft customers are just gonna abandon their Xbox and PS exclusives and leave those franchises in the dust and hop on the Mario train if Nintendo did go that route. That logic is absolutely full of shit. If you're a hardcore gamer, you need more than one console. If you want one consoles, you pick between a shooter console or a Nintendo franchise console and it will be like that until Nintendo or its competition goes out of business. If you think if the NX was stronger than the Neo that developers would flock to it if it wasn't the leader sales wise, you're full of it.

     

    The way Nintendo operates and the way everyone else operates just won't co-exist, ever. It's been 25 years since they've done right in the mind of the hardcore gamer, despite making billions in the process, why would someone think anything is going to change now? Lord knows Nintendo has fucked up so many times, but I feel it's also unfair to drop "if my aunt had a cock she'd be my uncle" scenarios just to dis them. IF they didn't have such a loyal fanbase, IF the Wii wasn't a "successful gimmick", IF their handheld market didn't dominate. It's like getting into a fight with someone and telling them "well, you're really good at boxing, so you can't punch me, but I can use my black belt jiu-jitsu skills all I want. Or, you can't write an imaginative script because I can't write worth two hoots and just put 300 million dollars of effects in my films to impress people.

     

    Oh god, this. The bizarre assumption that if Nintendo released a magical console that shits rainbows the "hardcore gamers" would flock en masse from Sony and MS to anchor their ships in the big N's harbour is ridiculous. As far back as the N64 Nintendo was not exactly known as the place to go for "hardcore" games (It could even be argued this has always been the case). Sure there have been some stand-out titles, and the 64 got Goldeneye which was an important milestone in console shooters but Nintendo hasn't really ever been about catering to the hardcore-gamers (whatever that even means). So for those holding out hope that the NX will be rife with games that appeal to that demographic can keep hoping.

     

    As for third-party developers, yeah Nintendo cocked that up for their consoles the last couple generations. But the thinking that 3rd parties won't touch Nintendo as a whole at this point is deluded, just look at the DS series and the staggering amount of excellent games. This means that it isn't developers "hating Nintendo", it's the fact that with the number of DS systems in the wild there is money to be made. Developers need to make a game as easy, cheap, and hopefully good as possible. Thus they develop for the systems that are easy and cheap to do so on. It isn't about Nintendo making the NX some diamond-ejaculating wonder that dazzles the world so utterly that all the fanboys lay down their consoles and stand in a circle to give each other reach-arounds in a show of unity. It's about Nintendo making the NX easy to develop on, cost-effective to develop on, and having enough market share that there's a reasonable expectation of good return on investment. This is the way for everything. If there's money to be made, people will show up.

     

    For now everything is speculation and rumour. Is the NX likely to be more powerful than the PS4/Xbox One? Personally I doubt it. Will the NX sell well? Who the fuck knows. If someone has a crystal ball (as so many on the internet apparently seem to) and can tell that the NX will be the console to sink Nintendo, they should really be using that power to figure out tomorrows lotto numbers. Until then I'll see what it looks like and decide if it's something that would entice me back to consoles.

    • Like 1

  12. Posted · Edited by TPA5

    I have seen Wii in Pawn Shops for $25 or so, and some Thrifts stores too, did you check where you live?

     

    I live rural, so the only thrift store near me has nothing like that. Even if they do get a donation of some kind of major electronics or gaming stuff, they don't put it out on the shelf they sell it on eBay instead. As for pawn shops, the closest pawn shop is over an hour away from me and I know for a fact they sell just the Wii, no cords or controllers, for $75. That to me seems quite steep.

  15. Posted

    Hey ya'll.

     

    I'm on the hunt for an inexpensive Wii, the gen that supports Gamecube games. It doesn't have to have any games, just as long as it has the cables and a couple controllers would be sweet. Any additional peripherals like the classic controllers would also be fantastic. My local classifieds prices are way out to lunch on these consoles, so I thought I'd check here to see if anyone has one they are looking to sell.

     

    I'm in Canada, so preference would be given to my Canuck brethren due to the crummy exchange rate to US dollars and expensive shipping.

     

     

    Cheers.

  16. Posted

    Here's an E3 demo, not the live one I saw on the Nintendo Treehouse stream but still shows some great stuff:

     

     

    Like Jin said a few posts above this one, it has the feel of Zelda meets Elder Scrolls. I try not to get hyped about things because I find it almost always leads to disappointment. That being said, this game looks like it could be the killer app for the NX, and would definitely be the reason I would buy the console seeing as I don't own a WiiU.

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    Just watched the E3 demo for the new LoZ game and I gotta say, I think this is going to go down as another Nintendo masterpiece. It looks absolutely stunning, in a graphical style that reminds me of the best parts of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. As far as gameplay, there is a lot that is breaking the Zelda conventions. I saw changeable outfits, a fully-voiced NPC character, chopping down trees to harvest resources, a more technology-driven lore, a jump button (so awesome), Prince of Persia-esque free running, items that wear out, improved combat physics, and a frankly jaw-dropping open world. It looks very, very, very cool.

     

    Up to this point I hadn't been getting very excited for this game, but I am fully on the hype train at this point. It's supposedly going to release in 2017 for the Wii U and the NX, so if Nintendo comes out with a few more games like this I definitely see an NX in my future.

    • Like 4

  22. Posted

    I've never understood the complaints about GOG's emulation, I've never once had a single problem with any of the 100+ games I own. Guess I'm just lucky. GOG forever, yo.

     

     

    Anyway, Cities Skylines is on sale on Steam for $10 this weekend. I just picked it up yesterday and it's awesome, highly recommend it.

     

     

    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

  23. Posted

    Hmm, another Kickstarter that's failed to deliver on its campaign promise. This did look fun, I had been thinking it would be fun to do a driving cabinet build around this game. But no PC release means no dollars from me.

     

     

    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

    • Like 1

  24. Posted · Edited by TPA5

     

     

     

    OK. This is going to be a long post. I almost never talk about my job so this will be interesting to try to type out.

     

    So this is how normal gas chromatography works. Generally speaking, you have a small vial with a volatile solvent in it. In that solvent are going to be your chemicals-of-interest. You probably got them in there by extracting whatever environmental media you were interested in into the solvent. It's kind of hard to explain in theory, so here's an example. This is going to be overly-simplified because you probably don't want to hear the tedious details.

     

    So let's say that you have some cabbage, and somebody wants to know what kinds of pesticides are present on/in it and in what quantities. You would take the cabbage and shred it (like just with a knife), weigh out a sub-sample of say 100g, and add an appropriate amount of some extraction solvent like ethyl acetate (maybe 50 ml).

     

    You'd then homogenize the sample in a laboratory blender. Organic compounds like pesticides would rather go into the solvent than stay with the cabbage, because they are relatively non-polar and are therefore more soluble in a non-polar organic solvent than in water. Let it sit for a while so the solvent can do its thing (maybe but it on a shaker or something), put it in a centrifuge to separate the solids from the liquid, pull of the supernatant liquid and concentrate it all the way down to 1 ml (the solvent evaporates while your target compounds stay in the liquid), then shoot it on the GC.

     

    The way the GC works is it draws 1 or 2 microliters (1/1000th of a milliliter) of the solvent and shoots it into a hot glass tube called an inlet liner. A fairly normal inlet temperature is 250C, which is about 480 degrees Fahrenheit. This instantly vaporizes both the solvent and the chemicals that you extracted out of the cabbage. If you're looking for chemicals that have such a high boiling point that they don't vaporize under say 300C, then you have to use a different technique (called liquid chromatography). There's a "carrier gas" (almost always helium) blowing through the inlet that carries your now-vaporized compounds onto what's called a "column". A gas chromatography column is usually (but not always) 30 meters long (so about 100 ft), is a very thin (0.3 mm I.D) tube made out of glass that's coiled up on a cage so that the whole thing is only about 6 inches in diameter. Even though it's made of glass, it's so thin that it's very flexible. This column runs out of the inlet, and the cage hangs in a programmable oven. Generally you would start the oven off at a low temperature, say 50C. This is so that as soon as the compounds are on the head of the column, but have cleared the inlet, they re-condense and stick to the inner walls. The inner walls of the column are lined with a VERY thin layer of material called the "stationary phase" (the helium carrier gas is the "mobile phase"). The oven is programmed so that it slowly heats up according to whatever temperature program you set. As the oven heats up the column, your target compounds begin to partition between the mobile and stationary phases and in doing so they make their way through the column. How long it takes each compound to reach the end of the column depends on it's boiling point, polarity, and size (all three of those are inter-related anyway). So while you injected a mixture into one end of the column, you will (ideally) get each compound coming out the other end separately.

     

    Normally, you'd have the business end of the column feeding into some kind of detector. An example of a simple and common detector would be a flame ionization detector, in which the column effluent exits the column at the base of a flame. Helium of course doesn't burn, but organic compounds all will. So as each compound comes out of the end of the column, it burns in the flame. This combustion creates ions, and you can measure the conductivity across the flame. When there are ions, the conductivity of the flame increases, allowing more current to pass through it. The system can plot the conductivity of the flame as a function of time, and you will see a peak every time something comes out. Looks like this:

     

    gc_ph00860.png

    There are all kinds of detectors for looking at particular classes of compounds. You can also have the column go into a mass spectrometer, which is what I mostly deal with at my job. How that works is a whole different kettle of fish.

     

    So to go back to the cabbage example, you would have a standard mixture of target pesticides that you would run on the GC, and then compare it to what came out of the cabbage sample. If you were using a modern mass spec (which these days you totally would) then you could identify compounds without needing a standard, and the standard would be used only to quantify them.

     

    So preparatory GC. Look at the picture in the craigslist ad. See how there are 6 little glass thingies at the bottom of that GC? What those are doing are collecting fractions of the column effluent, rather than sending the effluent into a detector. So the point of that system is to take a sample, separate out the compounds in that sample according to their boiling points, and collect them in up to 6 different fractions in glass vials. You can then take those samples and analyze them in some other way. There are a number of reason that you might want to do that, and they're kind of too complicated to try to explain here. Preparatory GC is actually really rare because it's generally unnecessary, especially with modern technology. I've done preparatory LC work, but have just kluged together a system like that on a benchtop (because it's simpler than a GC).

     

    That system in the CL ad is really old (as if you couldn't tell by the fact that it's run by a Commodore.) That thing almost certainly doesn't even use the kind of GC column that I described because they weren't in common use yet. It uses a much shorter, wider-bore "packed" column that does a much crappier job of separating things. That may be why you'd need a preparatory GC back then. Separate your sample into 6 fractions based on their relative volatilities, then send them back through a GC column with a less aggressive temperature program in order to get better separation. It was kind of the wild west back then. Now technology is so advanced that you don't have to do stuff like this, and a lot of the "art" of chromatography has been lost. Kids today are spoiled.

     

    Anyway, that's about it. Maybe I should start an "ask a chemist" thread in OT. I'm sure no one would read it.

     

    That was fascinating, even though I didn't understand half of it.

     

     

    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

    • Like 1
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