trust worthy traders

I've helped a few people out here, in paying less money for games, or getting a hold of games they otherwise couldn't get.

I want to start up a website, separate from GOG (love you GOG), where people who are verified as cool for doing this kind of thing, can aid people who want to buy games that they otherwise couldn't get due to stupid publishers or whatever.

Obviously as you all know, that this program would open itself up for abuse, so we'd need to figure out a way to punish those who would abuse and reward those who would use the program correctly.

What I'm asking of you, the GOG community, is to help me in fleshing out this idea, and to maybe help me get started in the right direction.

I don't have any information on web design, I don't have any information on hosting, or setting up a domain, or anything really, I just have an idea that I'd like to put to use.


this is a draft.

Castlevania "king" Igarashi

http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/gbadvance/file/castlevania_story.txt

fuck you, you goddamn sexist prick, a goddamn woman can kick ass against Dracula if she fucking wants, you stupid fucking idiot.

OK so

this post is going to act as two things: to give a summary as of events thus far and to discuss why I got where I am at now.

So, last Friday 08/07/09, I went to the First Friday event in Phoenix, to see my old band play.

I had a pretty good time too, I sang along, met some people, helped out, got "hired" back on as a writer.

I'm really looking forward to writing some more songs, and I have some ideas set aside right now that I want to develop.

Anyway, I get home at about 11:30, and I find Melissa there making out with some guy.

I was devastated, Melissa, with some dude, in my own house, so close after breaking up.
She says we never discussed that, but I CLEARLY remember us saying that was uncool.

And she goes "It's my house too."

No, no it's not, because you're moving out. This is my house - I will still be here when you are gone.

Anyway, I don't know if I was just stupid or being sentimental, but we slept together and I had a beer and a smoke, and then I went to bed.

I don't talk with her much now. Don't really want to. I don't even really like being around her.

I suppose I can't be blamed for it.

So anyway, She's working hard to try to buy a new car, and the dealerships want her to have a co-signer, I just told her good luck with that. I'm NOT going to let her have any more sway over me than she already has.

I am NOT paying for her car either. Now if we were together, it would be a different story, I'd be glad to help out, but as it is, I am not going to co-sign anything. If she wants to drive to the dealerships, go ahead, take the car, if she wants to get information about cars, sure thing, but when it comes to money, my money is mine and I have to watch out for myself, because she doesn't have my back. I have to be my own hero, because nobody is going to save me.


So today, I was outside smoking, and I was thinking about how she has said that she wanted romance, and how I'm not very good at it. When I think about it, we never really were romantic, we didn't have a song, we didn't really date so much. It was mostly ever physical.
Is it that I'm not romantic? I don't think so, I think it's just that I'm not inspired.
One thing that makes it kind of difficult though, is through living together, we're sort of sharing the same life. So it makes it difficult to communicate, because what has been going on in my life, is the same for her, and we literally have nothing to talk about other than really uninteresting boring stuff.

Especially when neither of us has much of a life outside our kids.

I really hope that in the future I'm able to avoid this strange sameness, this shared being. I mean, you have to go and do stuff, and when I got kicked out of my band I couldn't do anything like that, I couldn't feel like going out or talking to anybody.

Now that I have done that a little bit, it feels good, and I'm definitely going to do it again.

god damn it

ok so
I'm single again.

it's sort of a long story, but it starts with my band getting their first gig, I spent a lot of time practicing and trying to get better, and my stats at my job started to wane.

then after the gig, the band kicked me out.
why did they do that? because I don't know how to play bass, and they knew that, but still it hurt me anyway, because they knew that I liked hanging out and that I wanted to help write songs still.

So it felt like I had lost my friends.

then, when driving in Mesa to drop the kids off at the sitter, which I was completely and wholly against taking the kids to Mesa, and it wasn't even my turn to drive, I got a speeding ticket, oh well that's on me, I am the one who sped.

So anyway, turns out my license was not valid for the past 2 years. Yup, no license what so ever. So anyway, I go ahead and get that taken care of, and now I do have a license, but I'm going to have to pay $300 in fines to the Mesa courts.

GOD DAMN IT.

So anyway, I finally get a little money and I decide that I need a new phone, I buy a new phone, and guess what happens?
My xbox 360 dies, that's right, it's the dreaded red ring of death, mother fucker, go DIAF.

So, I may have told you a while back, may not have, that Melissa smashed a beer over my xbox 360 in an argument, so I mention to her, I say "hey, they may not take my xbox 360 back because of the beer on it. I may take up this friends offer to buy his." and she freaks out and says she's breaking up with me.

Why is she breaking up with me? Because I've been depressed due to all the things going on in my life. All sorts of shitty things like I've outlined here, through out all of it my work performance continues to suffer and I just feel like a complete piece of shit.

What the fuck?! am I right?

So anyway, going on past the break up, lately I've been having issues with my computer at work which have been really frustrating, it's really hard to get any work done when your computer is royally fucked. they even replaced it, and the new one didn't work, they did some work on it then, and it still didn't work.
I'm just getting beat on, and beat on, and beat on.

So I asked my buddy if he would send me his replacement xbox, and he is just going to let me borrow it, and usps shows it as being collected but I didn't receive a notice that it was dropped off or anything. It's fucking terrible, I think someone stole my friends xbox before I could even see it.

Anyway, now I suspect that Melissa has found someone new to love, her myspace says she's feeling amorous and she wrote this wonderful love poem about meeting a person she hasn't met for years.

I'm struggling to live, to make it through the day, I can't stand this, all I need it some love, and I can't get that any where, not from anyone.

I am alone, I am forgotten.

All I can do is sit here in my pain, I can't discuss it with anyone because no body cares to discuss it. I just want to die, I don't want to live any longer, I can't stand it! All this over bearing pain, it's a goddamn killer.

Zombies VS Martians

so, in a post apocalyptic future, where zombies have taken over the planet and only a few humans are left, constantly fighting for their lives, martians invade the planet earth.

at first the martians are confused at the human life, after seeing so many zombies, and the humans confuse the martians for some mutated zombies.

but in the end, the martians see the potential of the humans and help to eradicate the zombies.

the end.

Unskippable Cutscenes OR why Company Of Heroes pissed me off

hey everybody
so the other day I decided I'd try the demo for Company of Heroes.

Any it had two long cutscenes that I couldn't skip.

Now, you're probably going "but that had information that was really important!"
no, infact it did not. It was just there to create the setting, which I got from looking at the goddamn startup screen.

It's WWII and you're playing an RTS.

Is there really any more that we need to know? seriously!? what kind of information could they possibly bestow upon us other than "it's WWII and it's RTS."

I mean, sure I'm not new to storylines in RTS games, but is a story even needed for any WWII games anymore? I mean, we all know what happened. And the reason we're playing isn't for a historical recreation of events or even an engaging storyline (this is especially so for the case of RTS, as the story is few and far between for missions, also generally the missions are very much split up and non-fluid).

It's ridiculous!
I mean, there I was, waiting for an RTS game.. I mean.. sure the games aren't so much action oriented, but damn. Why can't I skip it? there's absolutely no point. Okay, Assassin's Creed had unskippable cutscenes, fine, that has an "interesting" story. Sure, maybe the newest Prince Of Persia, because hey, that has a story too, right?

but CoH? wtf!?
That's like putting unskippable cutscenes in DOOM.
Nobody fucking cares about the story. You don't care, I don't care, let's just fucking play. Or an Unskippable Cutscene in Team Fortress 2. Can you imagine if they played Meet The Scout every time you unlocked a Scout weapon? In game, Unskippable?!
It's inane, and game companies need to realize that unskippable cutscenes are total trash. Yes, sometimes people accidentally press that button and skip the scene, but that's why you either make the trigger for skipping the cutscene a combination of buttons or you have a library mode where people can watch the cutscene again!

Goddamn you ambiguous (it's not all ubisoft, okay?!) companies who put unskippable cutscenes in games that don't even need cutscenes to begin with.

Tetris Attack Addiction

I pick it up and can't put it down, for hours.. i should have gone to bed, but i spent all night on the john playing Puzzle League...

Thunder Stump

Hey, I'm the bassist for the band Thunder Stump, primarily I write, but lately I've been using my talents for bass playing instead. And it's a lot of fun, last gig we played was at the buffalo chip saloon over on cave creek, and it was fantastic.

we got there at about 7:00pm and the gig actually doesn't start until 8, but I wasn't on at 8, we were sixth to play, and it wasn't based on time slots, so I couldn't say exactly when we started playing. But anyway, the place is really country western.
the place we played before was country, but not country western.

the buffalo chip saloon was actually founded by a guy named kit carson.. if that means anything to you, I sincerely apologize.

Anyway, we were a little worried, the place is so country western and we're so punk. We were expecting to see The Blues Brothers all over again. And if that was the case we were in some trouble, because we were without a chicken wire fence.

Anyway, after hearing a few people play, they played something a little Jazzy, so we decided to start out with something they might like, Speed bump. But ultimately we couldn't stick to it. Half way through it, we said "awe forget this!" and switched over to "1,2,3,4" which I'm sure many of you have no clue what I'm talking about, but I won't give the song away, you'll just have to see us perform it.

Anyway, lucky for us we ended up making them laugh their asses off. Our drummer met a lady there who said she was going to give us information on all the punk open mics in town. Which I think is really going to help us, because we're going to get a fanbase that would enjoy our stuff for more than just an evening.

Anyway, we've done really well for ourselves and we need to write some new songs. We're going to work hard at it!

Spell o Play

hey, http://www.spellofplay.com/ is having a contest, and it happens so frequently that the last time I posted, I didn't win, but they're holding it again for every ten entrants!

taxes

i owe a lotta money. :"(

taxes

i owe a lotta money. :"(

STREET FIGHTER IV VIDEO APP

Indie Games

hey guys, this weird dude on twitter started following me, and I noticed he was a part of Spell of Play, which is this indie game website, it looks like they have a lot of arcade based titles, and to be honest with you, I like arcade based titles. :D

anyway, it's worth checkin' out, here's the link again: http://www.spellofplay.com

Windows 7 Tweaked Tests

so I tweaked windows 7 a little bit on my macbook, and got it down to where it only takes 400mb of ram idle. I disabled some services, removed some windows features, went to the "Classic skin." I have a page file of 3018mb.. etc..

I played the same games.

UT3 - 18 fps
Bioshock - 4 fps
Left 4 Dead - 23 fps

As you can see, with the comparison of my previous post, UT3 and Left 4 Dead both got slight boosts to FPS and Bioshock didn't have much of a change at all really.

Well that's it for my windows 7 tests, my sound has stopped working so I think the driver for the audio in boot camp may be malfunctioning. I'm thinking about trying win2k on this here macbook, but I am not certain how it'll run or if bootcamp will take to it. I'm leaning more towards just putting XP on the thing, because I really want to start playing some games I got recently. It's worth noting also, that I did further attempt to tweak both UT3 and L4D so it's possible that may be a part of why they performed better as well. in UT3 I reduced the FOV to 80 and in L4D I decided "Since i got more memorah, i'll add this memorah useage to high."
And I think it helped.

XP vs win 7

Using a 2.4ghz dual core Macbook with 2 gigs of ram, and an intel 965gma chipset, I did some tests in the two operating systems to prove which was better.

I used fraps to determine my FPS.

on default settings

Program XP Win7
Bioshock fps 4 2
UT3 fps 5 *
Left 4 Dead unplayable 5

one thing worth of note, is that you cannot change the screen resolution lower than 1024x768 in bioshock. although, after lowering the settings to the bottom most level, I got it in widescreen somehow (1200x800).

on reduced settings (lowest)

Program XP Win7
Bioshock fps 14 5
UT3 fps 20 15*
Left 4 Dead 10 20

results incoming...
I also am actually able to get l4d running about 25 fps on xp, however that requires hacks that the general user may not be aware of, for more info check out the tweak guide on hl2 (google it holmes).

surprisingly, left 4 dead actually runs better on 7, but that could be because of direct X, and because I used some diferent features that I hadn't used before (turning up film grain, disabling multicore rendering). This probably would have mean a better score for L4D on XP with reduced settings, but it is still unplayable on normal settings via xp.

It's interesting to note that Unreal Tournament 3 automatically changed my settings to something that would run faster in win7, but this could have been because recently UT3 was updated via steam and my intial test was done prior to the update on XP.

Anyway, I heartily recommend trying out vista for yourself, now I'm going to see how far I can get with tweaking the hell out of it.

All of my tests on win7 were on the base installation, and what was necessary for the game. XP was tweaked, and probably isn't a pure test either. I'm going to do the same benchmarks in windows 7 after tweaking it appropriately.

Happy New Year

and it's been pretty good so far!