Friday, October 1, 2004

Wayback Machine -- 11:33 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I was just reading through some old Haus news posts and I came across this one from March 2000. I linked to an article about Daikatana crunch-mode written by David Kushner, who later wrote Masters of Doom. Of couse, we know how the story turns out. It's a shame to see guys burn themselves out for a dog of a game. For kicks, you can also check out my review of the Daikatana demo. Ahh, memories :)

J.t.Qbe comments: I've always liked the last line of your review.

Firefox Security Fix -- 8:13 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Mozilla team has released a new version (0.10.1) of the preview release of Mozilla Firefox to fix a security bug. The problem could allow someone to delete a file from your download directory. A patch is available for those who already have the preview release installed. Check this Mozilla news page for all the details.

Thursday, September 30, 2004

Sold My Soul to a Squeaky Vole -- 8:47 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Long ago--actually many times long ago--I swore that I'd never spend my own money another Microsoft product. Today I pushed the edges of that oath: I drove over to Best Buy and plunked down an Xbox at the checkout (along with some Tic Tacs for the boys). Technically I didn't spend my money on it, since I was able to pay for the entire purchase using gift cards. But I still felt sort of dirty afterwards.

"How could you do such a thing?" you're asking. Well, I had several reasons. One is Morrowind: it runs slower than molasses on my PC. The bigger reason, though, is that my PC is getting old and I don't want (or need) to spend the money to upgrade it. And also, since I became a telecommuter 3 years ago I've had less and less desire to spend my leisure time in my office, even for games. That's why I got a Playstation a few years ago, and why I've spent more and most of my gaming time playing a console. I used to disdain them. But the Dark Side is a fun place to be after all. Console games can't produce the same depth and visual quality of PC games, but for me they're good enough right now.

A.T. Hun comments: Oh, how the mighty have fallen. To quote TMBG, "Can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Pondering the Imponderable -- 11:42 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, I bought a Belkin USB 2.0 card at the same time as I got my new hard drive. It has an NEC chipset as opposed to my old card with a VIA chipset. I've had my computer running with the card reader plugged in for almost exactly two days straight and I haven't had a single lock-up yet. Hopefully, that will put this problem to bed permanently. Several USB forums that I read were in agreement: avoid VIA (and ALi for that matter)-based USB 2.0 cards like the plague.

I also just finished playing DOOM2 via the Doomsday port. Now I can see why I never finished the game back in the day. While the level design is much more interesting than the original DOOM, it is also far more annoying (nasty monsters around corners, behind secret doors, etc.). You end up getting killed, not because of a lack of skill, but because the level designer pulled a dirty trick on you. Back then, you couldn't look up or down either which made the dirty tricks that much worse.

The Master comments: I remember Eeyore and I blasting through a lot of Doom(x) levels by switching off a level at a time. I also remember spending a lot of time playing coop Quake 1. Which reminds me, I need to play some Q1 again and see if I can improve my insane memorization of the monster locations in the E1 levels :-)

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