November 2002

+ Saturday - November 30, 2002

Went to Gameworks last night in the new Block E development in downtown Minneapolis. While it was similar to the one I went to in Vegas, I will say this one was a lot better.

The amount of new gimicks arcade games have these days to get people to play them is fairly amazing. From 360 degree turning platforms, to virtual horse racing, a lot of the setups for some games were just huge. I wouldn't doubt if some of the setups cost over $100k. Although for myself, I think I had more fun playing the old school games they had there, namely Cetipede and Pac-Man. Funny how they stuffed those two games off in a remote corner.

I also find it interesting how places like this use cards with "points" on them that you buy. You plop down, say, $20, and you get something like 1000 points to use. Each game then costs a certain number of points to play. This is fairly tricky in the sense that it's hard for the average person to figure out how much things cost to play this way. For example, one of the better games I played that night was a game called Hyper Bowl, which basically used a bowling ball as a glorified trackball to play a weird game of bowling. Anyway, this game cost 140 points. No problem, I've got plenty of points! Only I realized later when refilling my card, that $1 = 40 points. Thus Hyper Bowl cost me $3.50 to play. I doubt many people would be willing to jump at the chance to play a game like that if the price was clearly marked on it as such.

So basically, if you get the chance, go check i t out, it's great fun, just bring lots of cash. ;)

+ Friday - November 22, 2002

Well, I'm 5 hours into Metroid Prime, which according to my save data is 16% complete. This of course doesn't include restart time after I died for various reasons, so I've been playing a bit longer than that.

Anyway, my reaction to the game so far is one word: Amazing. Everyone who has a Gamecube should get it, and those who don't should seriously consider getting one for the game. Yeah, it's that good. And I hear the further you go the better it gets.

At first blush I was a little unsure about the game. I've played other Metroid games before and the move to 3D was a little weird at first. After a couple hours with it though, I got used to it and it actually makes for some really great gameplay. It's definitely Metroid to the core, but the move to 3D has brought up some similarities to other games (to me at least).

Some of the puzzels remind me a lot of Zelda: OOT on N64. Not in the sense of what you do (the puzzles are definitely Metroid inspired), but more the feeling behind it. It's hard to explain but I think it'll be obvious to anyone who's played a recent Zelda game.

The other comparison I keep making is to Marathon, that old 3D Doom-wannabe for the Mac. Two reasons for this, one is that it's first person perspective, and two that there is this sense of playing the role of the character, really being there and exploring. One of the things Marathon did so well was draw suspense by having computer terminals throughout the game. You would check them out and read the story and how things unfolded for the unfortunate crew of the space vessel you were on. Metroid Prime is exactly like this and it works wonderfully. By scanning various items you collect information and as you go through the game it slowly reveals the story.

This is great because it really lets you the player build up the story and get involved with the game at a personal level. So many games today are just CGI cutscene clickthrough games. No cutscenes here to speak of, just solid gameplay. It really makes you feel like everything is important and its up to you to find everything, instead of it being shoved in your face. I think this balance is what sets it over the top. The music and the graphics (both extremely well done) also add to the mood tremendously.

I still have trouble with the controls at times, but overall it handles very well for a first person perspective game. But that would really be my only nitpick about the game, and it's a very minor one at that.

Best of all time though? Naw, not at this point anyway (still got a lot to go ;). I would put it in my top 10 definitely, and it may move up pretty high depending on how the game plays out (usually the Metroid games end really really well). But it is definitely the best game I've played since Skies of Arcadia on my Dreamcast.

Hmm...maybe I should actually make a top 25 list again someday. We'll see. For now, I'm too busy bomb jumping around in a morph ball to care. ;)

+ Tuesday - November 19, 2002

Oh my. Nintendo today annouced the Gameboy Player for Gamecube. Plays all Gameboy Advance, as well as Gameboy Color and original B&W Gameboy games. I've been waiting for something like this for a while since I love the Super NES 2D quality of my GBA, but hate the screen. Now I can just sit on my couch and play everything on my TV. Too bad I have to wait until May (when it comes out) to do that.

In other news, I should be picking up Metroid Prime tomorrow. If the reviews on it are to be believed it should basically be one of the best games ever made. I'm going to reserve judgement until I actually play it, but needless to say, I'm pretty hyped.

Update: Just got it. Fuckin-A.

+ Thursday - November 14, 2002

MAME 0.62 is out (finally). Aparently the ROMs for this release add up to about 2.5GB. And while there are indeed a lot of new games emulated, 3 of the games take up 2.1GB alone (the Atari Cojag HD games). No way I'm downloading those baddies. I'm just going to have to wait on HD games until I get a new Mac and a several hundred GB HD. ;)

Though I think the coolest game emulated in this release is Bradley Trainer, which is a game that was used by the US military for combat training. Rumor has it that only two were ever made, and while there was talk about its existance, nobody really knew for sure it was even made until someone stumbled upon one. Now everyone can share the love.

+ Monday - November 11, 2002

Finally figured out the keyboard encodings for the arcade cab. Below are the encodings, along w/ the shifted keys (misc actions in parens):

P1S = 1
P1C = 5
P1U = Up
P1L = Left
P1D = Dwn
P1R = Rght
P1B1 = Ctrl
P1B2 = Opt
P1B3 = Spc
P1B4 = Shft
P1B5 = Z
P1B6 = X

P2S = 2
P2C = 6
P2U = R
P2L = D
P2D = F
P2R = G
P2B1 = A
P2B2 = S
P2B3 = Q
P2B4 = W
P2B5 = I
P2B6 = K

Shifted keys:

P1S = <SH>
P1B1 = F3 (reset)
P1B2 = Tab (config)
P1B3 = ` (adjust)
P1B4 = F11 (fps)
P1B5 = \ (ffwd)
P1B6 = ] (fullscrn)

P2S = 5
P2B1 = O
P2B2 = K
P2B3 = A
P2B4 = Y
P2B5 = Ent
P2B6 = Esc (quit)

For the most part this set up works really well, as there is no conficts w/ buttons and shouldn't be any ghosting. The only real problem is fast forward. For a few emulators I need to change the keyboard bindings on the Mac to make the different keystrokes work w/ the same key across emulators. Unfortunatley in MAME it won't recognize "\" while playing the game to fast forward. Not a huge deal, in the grand scheme of things.

+ Sunday - November 10, 2002

Did a quick mock up of how I think the controls will be laid out for my arcade cabinet (not to scale obviously ;). I'm not yet 100% convinced about putting the 4-way joystick and the spinner above the 1 and 2 player button sets, by my thinking on why I think this will work is three-fold.

One, most 4-way arcade games put buttons on both the right and left side of the joystick, thus using buttons to your left isn't a huge leap with a 4-way stick (as opposed to most 8-way games which have the buttons only to the right of the joystick).

Two, putting the spinner on player 2's side means I need to change less game configs in MAME since there are less spinner games than 4-way games. Also, like the first point, some spinner games had buttons on the left (most notably Tempest).

Three, moving the 4-way joystick and spinner above the buttons instead of above the trackball (like most people do) allows me to use the trackball for games with a lot forward trackball motion (ala Golden Tee) without ramming my hands into the controls.

We'll see how it pans out when I actually do a real prototype and play with it. Luckly the I-PAC that I will be using for keyboard encoding uses "shifted" keys, thus I doubt I'll need any other buttons (yet still be able to use all the config and misc buttons used in emulators). I'm still working on the actual button keycodes for use among all the different emulators I plan to use (it's a lot more involved than I thought). I'll post those when I settle on something that works and makes sense.

+ Tuesday - November 5, 2002

Double Damn. And I thought the Tetris guy was fast.

+ Sunday - November 3, 2002

No more Flash for me. I decided to uninstall the plug-in today. This is after a few months of thinking "why do I have this plug-in again"? The only time I ever see anything that is Flash are ad banners on sites. I hate ad banners. I hate ones that flash and animate even more. Today I seriously sat down and tried to think of any reason I would need Flash, and couldn't think of one. Bye-bye Flash, I hardly knew ye.

+ Saturday - November 2, 2002

I just updated my Game Console page to reflect a few new additions (thanks to some fine donations). At this point my 2600 collection is starting to repeat itself, so I figure I have one of two options. Hack the extra hardware I have and do something interesting with it, or sell it to a kind soul who would want it. I think you know what I'm going to do. ;)

+ Friday - November 1, 2002

Damn. And to think I could never beat 9-5.