Monday, September 15, 2003

Jedi Academy Modeling Tools -- 5:02 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

With the full game scheduled to hit shelves on Wednesday, Raven has released the tools for making skins and models for Jedi Academy. Raven's James Monroe has all the details in his .plan update.

In a related note, I've been playing the Jedi Academy demo at increasingly higher difficulty settings. I've found that on the second level, it is easier to push enemy Jedi to their death than to fight them. It is almost too easy to convince them to plummet to their demise. Valiant? No. Effective? Oh, yes.

Sunday, September 14, 2003

NFL Week #2 So Far -- 10:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

With Monday night's festivities left, Eeyore and I are tied at a tolerable 9-6. I'd have another win if I would have gone with my head instead of my heart and picked the Lions. Oh well. Someday I'll learn. My Fightin' Wombats have scored the most points in my fantasy league this week, mainly on the strength of Jamal Lewis' amazing 295 yard, two TD performance.

Barry Annoys Telemarketers (For a Change) -- 3:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A recent Dave Barry column prompted a deluge of phone calls to the American Teleservices Association. I find this to be completely hysterical. Telemarketers getting whiny about being called! Go figure! Thanks Slashdot.

Bleh-Steam Boiler Explodes -- 9:18 am CST, Update by The Master

Tried out Valve's Steam client last night. Was finally able to DOWNLOAD the bloody thing (I am truly beginning to hate subscription-only download services) and got it running. The installer launched fine, the initial registration was fine, then the thing started converting my games. Not good. It wants to talk to the Steam servers CONSTANTLY (and most of those are at constant meltdown status from the load), so it borked most of my games up, failing to convert them altogether, and then it locked up while processing Counter-Strike. I am NOT impressed by this pile of garbage. About 10 billion percent more error checking, a little less dependence on the Steam servers, and possibly a tripling of available backend resources and this thing might be cool. I'd just stay the heck away from it right now tho.

A.T. Hun comments: Gee, I never would have guessed that something like this would happen. And just think, this is even without all kinds of users simultaneously trying to download Half-Life 2, which will certainly be a multi-gigabyte endeavor. Steam is a nice idea, but practically it needs work. Can you imagine what the bandwidth charges alone are going to be? Plus, it's ridiculous that you have to go through someone other than Valve just to download the client. Worthless. I don't know how much money a company like Valve "loses" through the retail channel, but I find it hard to believe that they will make up their money this way.

The Master comments: This thing would proabably work well, but it looks like the large majority of servers in the system are not available (their numbering skips all over the place and is missing a LOT of entries) and the majority of the ones that ARE listed are either outside of the US, or down--the Ausgamers one is down more than it's up, and the Speakeasy server hasn't been running at all since I started trying to use the client. They need to at LEAST triple the number of high-speed US servers, and do it last year at the latest. I'd also like to see the server listing split into a US and non-US list, since the US users are going to beat the heck out of the few operating local servers, and the non-US ones are NOT going to be useful to take up the slack. I think the "available bandwidth" meter is highly misleading for US users.

The Master comments: Update 7:28pm Now their website appears to have been driven into the abyss as well. This was well considered technology kids. This must be the gamer version of the Slashdot Effect. I'm also seeing a LOT of other people with the exact set of complaints I have. Wheee.

Past Two Days' News

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