Applied Indifference

New regulation proposed to punish retailers for selling M-rated games to minors.

What the fucking fuck? Do you honestly think that Hillary would have the balls to do this to an industry whose members are actually liberals? Last I knew, there was no restriction on the sales of explicit CDs to minors. No jail time for Best Buy clerks that don’t get ID from the 14 year old trying to buy that unrated version of “American Pie 2″.

Talk about your double standards. Although it WAS a liberal that got the labels on music in the first place, the lefties never had the balls to push it any farther than labels. And the label became sort of a “Good Housekeeping seal-of-approval”, where you could be certain to get naughty words on discs with the little sticker on them.

So now these idiots in Congress, who don’t know a Playstation from a gas station, want to tell retailers “You’re gonna be in trouble if you sell these naughty games to kidlets”.

Well, if you want to do that, then let’s go all the way, eh? How about prison time for a parent that buys a game like this for their minor child. Let’s add an additional restriction - you can’t buy the game if there’s a minor child in the house! After all, if limiting exposure to the video game is the goal, then shouldn’t we make absolutely certain that these games aren’t present in houses where minors could access them? Oh, and video game storage safes. Can’t keep the kids TOO safe, right?

In fact, why don’t we go to every house in America, and if they have minors AND violent video games, then tell the parents that they can pick which one they want to give up!

Politicians. I have no use for them. Note to Donald Trump: Next time you’re in DC, could you stop by the Russell building and just do your whole schtick for each member of the Senate? Better yet, I’d pay real money if you’d do it while they were in session, right on the Senate floor. On C-SPAN 2. “You’re Fired!”

That would be great. And it might get these preening assholes to leave my games alone.

Tags: Politics, Video Games by Brian Corbino
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and get me a cookie.

Taken with Canon EOS Elan-7E, Canon 28-105 EFIII, Canon Speedlite 420EX.

Tags: Randomness by Brian Corbino
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That’ll teach me to not read the compatibility chart.

Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection support website at www.nintendowifi.com has a router compatibility chart. The WRT54GC is listed as not compatible if you use WEP. Which would explain a great deal. I switched back to the old WRT54G, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

Mario Kart DS is incredible. If I could only get the hole-shot…

Tags: Video Games by Brian Corbino
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Mario Kart DS.

This game seriously rocks. The single-player experience is exactly what you would expect. The graphics are at least on par with the Nintendo 64, the frame rate is solid, sound is excellent. The drifting is a cross between MK64 and MK:DD, and you WILL need to drift if you want to do anything other than lose.

Where this game holds its promise is the multi-player. Not only does it do multi-player like MK:SC on the Game Boy Advance (only without wires), it does multi-player over the Internet. Up to 4 players. It took some doing to get it to run with my admittedly non-standard network here, but run it does. I’ve not seen any lag other than at the very start of the race (there’s a random delay before the countdown). Frame rate stays rock solid throughout online play. It allows you to have it pick your opponents regionally, world-wide, or from your “friend” and “enemy” lists.

Oh, and it seems to have every track from every Mario Kart game ever in there, at least for multi-player. This is, of course, VERY cool.

I’ll have more to report after I’ve had a chance to play the other multi-player (in person) modes. I’ll probably comment more on the internet play after I stop getting my ass handed to me as well.

Tags: Video Games by Brian Corbino
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Actually, ALL networking pisses me off.

Allow me to elaborate.

The Nintendo DS has the ability to go on line via Wi-Fi. It uses a 1-2 Mbps 802.11b connection. Apparently my router decided it would be cool to play stupid last night, and require a restart to work with the DS. It was also showing 11 Mbps on the laptop, even though both are 802.11g, and the laptop usually connects at 54.

So, I power cycle. The DS finds it (finally) and accepts the WEP key. I played for a while and went to bed.

The fun begins today. I try to play, and it alternates between “I can’t see the access point” and “I can’t find a DHCP server”. Apparently my linux DHCP server no longer likes the DS. The logs show no errors, and shows that a lease was granted to the DS, but it DOESN’T ZARKING WORK.

I even went so far as to get a wired NIC for the Tivo, thinking that my problem was there, and that’s when I found out (the hard way) that the DS can’t even SEE the access point in G only mode.

Updated firmware, returned the NIC (sorry, guys), Tivo’s back on wireless.

The DS works, but I’ve had to hard-assign it an address. It shouldn’t be this difficult. I suspect that if I had a more “normal” setup (DHCP runs on my server, not on the access point, and the access point is not connected to the DSL, it goes through another router first) that I would not have had any of these problems.

Such is life.

Tags: Computers by Brian Corbino
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Arcadia Supercharger (they changed their name to Starpath in 1982 or so). I never knew anyone that had one when I was a kid. But we read about it in the magazines, and saw the promises.

This device plugs into the cartridge port, and it has a bunch of RAM in it, and a cable coming out. You plug it in to a standard cassette player, and the games come on cassettes. Takes about a half a minute to load on the slow side (10 seconds on the fast side, if you have a good tape).

I can attest to the statement that the games ARE, in fact, much better graphically than their ROM-based counterparts. Without actually knowing how they are coded, I am guessing that some of the RAM is used as a frame buffer, which allows for much more complex graphics.

For those that don’t know, the Atari 2600 VCS had only 128 bytes of RAM in it. There was no video RAM, and so no frame buffer like we are accustomed to now. The 2600 programmer that I spoke with told me that you had to repaint the entire screen every frame, which didn’t allow time for much in the way of complex graphics. But with a frame buffer, you can take longer than one frame to draw the whole screen, and the parts that don’t need to be refreshed every frame can just kind of sit in the buffer and be redrawn by an interrupt routine.

Anyhow, I have two games for it, and it is pretty neat. The graphics ARE much higher resolution than most of the ROM carts of the day (1982). I’ll need to play more to get a better feel for it, but it seems that they had something there. From what I can find, there were less than 20 games ever released for this monster. Even 20 years ago, any hardware that didn’t come with the system was unlikely to enjoy any major support.

Well, the next task is to acquire the rest of the Supercharger tapes. And there are programs out there that let you put ROM games into the Supercharger, so I may try my hand at Stella development too.

Tags: Video Games by Brian Corbino
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Castle Crisis - Atari Age - 2004. For the Atari 5200 SuperSystem.

1-4 players.

While I’ve never seen an actual Warlords video game machine, I’ve played the game in MAME, so I know what it plays like.

This rendition is PERFECT. I have an actual 4-port 5200, so I’ll get 4 people together to play it and get back to you on how well it plays, but I suspect it will be equally perfect.

That’s all I really have to say. Unfortunately, the game is not available in the online store, and may not be available much longer at shows (I got mine at vgXpo neé PhillyClassic 6), but if you have a 5200, you owe it to yourself to own this game.

Bryan Edewaard - thanks for a perfect rendition of this game. Keep up the good work on the 5200 homebrew front.

Now I wanna write a 5200 game.

Tags: Video Games by Brian Corbino
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Well, I put the bike into storage for the winter. A bit of Sta-bil in the tank, took out the battery. It’s away from the weather, so it should be happy.

2050 miles. Not a bad season. Didn’t take nearly enough trips with it. I will next year, though. That much I can promise.

I can’t wait for March.

Tags: Randomness by Brian Corbino
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Why do I want her? The more she pushes me away, the more I pine for her. There is no reason. We have nothing in common. Which makes me want her more.

I fear that I am losing my mind.

Tags: Randomness by Brian Corbino
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OK, so I didn’t get my name on too many machines. Made the daily list on Joust, with a paltry 38k or so. Got owned by the Robotron machine. Actually did OK on Star Wars. Tempest still kicks my ass, and I still go back for more.

Got some more stuff for the Intellivision. Didn’t get some of the rarer carts - $100 for Diner? Thank you, no. If willingness to buy things at that price is the mark of the “true” collector, then I’ll stay a wannabe.

In any case, I spent more money than I should have on things that I don’t need.

Which is kinda the point. (although I intend to play all of these, I don’t think I’d ever touch a cart that I paid $100 for).

Tags: Video Games by Brian Corbino
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