All posts by Pike

classic video game monday, video games

Classic Video Game Monday: The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse

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I know what you’re thinking. “Mickey Mouse? Really, Pike? Really?”

Yes, really. This is Capcom platforming at its best. Basically they took a Mega Man game and replaced Mega Man with Mickey Mouse. It sounds lame, but the awesome gameplay is still there, regardless of whether your character is a robot or a rodent.

You play as the Mouse himself as you travel through various worlds to find and rescue Pluto. Yes, your ubiquitous Fire World and Ice World are here, but there’s also a climbing-mountain world and a magical forest world that I found to be unique and memorable. That magical forest world had great music, too:

True to form with Capcom, you get to don a variety of outfits that change your fighting style… in this case, you can have a Wizard suit, a Firefighter suit, or a Climbing outfit. Of these three, the climbing outfit is the most gimmicky, but the other two are great (albeit fairly similar to each other). You can change the outfits whenever you want, including mid-fight… it’s kind of like Fisher-Price’s My First Mega Man.

Combine this with solid controls, hidden item shops where you can buy upgrades, and giant rolling tomatoes, and you’ve got a winner, Disney license or not.

So yeah. At first glance you might think this game has “Generic kiddie platformer” written all over it but really, it’s solid and comes with some great things that make it unique. When Nintendo Power released its first list of “100 Greatest Nintendo Games” back in 1998 or whenever that was, this game was on the list. You know, alongside stuff like Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, and Super Mario 64. Just sayin’.

P.S. yes, I have this game on Game Boy Advance. The final boss is hard.

animal geekery

The hardest part about working at a pet store is that I want everything.

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Even things I used to have no interest in.

For example: conures.

Conures are messy, extremely loud, and they engage in self-destructive behaviors if you don’t give them enough attention. (Conures: the original emo kids.)

So why would anyone want to own one?

…maybe because they’re the most intelligent animal I’ve ever had the pleasure of being around?

I’m not kidding. These things are smart. Never, ever underestimate the intelligence of a conure. I don’t treat them like I treat most birds; I treat them like I’d treat a small child. And you know what? They respond to it.

Recently I was cleaning cages and I had to get a conure from one cage to the next. So I opened up both cage doors, and told him to go over to the other cage. He stepped up to the edge of his cage and looked at me, as if to ask if it that was really what I wanted him to do. I assured him that it was, so he walked calmly over to the other cage and stepped inside.

I dare you to find another domestic animal that will do this when it has not been trained and/or there is no food involved. Go on; I’ll wait.

This is my favorite kind– the Green Cheek Conure:

They tend to be (a little) quieter than most kinds, and they’re also little clowns. They warm up to you nice and quick and soon they’ll run up to you and throw themselves to the ground and roll over and do all sorts of silly things because they want to play with you.

We have one at work whom I have nicknamed “Zero”– not sure why, the name just seemed to fit. Zero is a supersmart goofball who will jam his head between the cage bars and demand head-scratches if you approach him. He loves head-scratches. He also loves keys, belly rubs, and playing tug-of-war. He was sold recently, and I was depressed for like a week because he was my buddy and I’d always sneak away and play with him. Then, yesterday, lo and behold, he’d been RETURNED! …for some unfathomable reason. I’m happy that my buddy is back but with it is the urge to smuggle him under my trenchcoat and take him home with me. Bad, bad Pike! Bad! *thwaps self on the head with a rolled up newspaper*

I know, I want a loud and messy bird. Am I insane, or what?

I also want a Jackson’s Chameleon, because they are super sweet:

How can you not love that face?

And now I want a Russian Dwarf Hamster. This is a species that is normally Evil Without Fail, but once a year or so you find one that actually is halfway-friendly and we have one of those in stock right now and I want it so bad.

You know you want one too.

And don’t get me started on the kittens that the Humane Society brings in to display. Just… just… I… I’m going to go somewhere far away where I don’t have to look at all the cute fuzzy/feathery/scaly things.

But at least I’ll always have my faithful (if slightly psychotic) guinea pig, Captain Nemo:

linux

Starcraft 2 on Linux/Wine: Part 2 and Some Thoughts

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I’m glad I was able to help some people out with my previous post on the matter. I’m still getting some questions and the like; here’s what I’ve been able to ascertain thus far from my own experiences:

The ALSA sound driver doesn’t seem to play nice with SC2. It will crash the game on startup and throw an error box in your face… at least, it does for me. The best workaround I can find for this so far is to go into the Audio tab in winecfg and set the sound to ESound. If you play WoW and have been running it with ALSA, as I have, you’ll just have to deal with manually switching back and forth (until I can figure out an automated way to accomplish this.)

There will be some sound glitches but not many. I’d say the sound is about 95% workable.

I have to run with the graphical settings all the way down but I think that is because of my own personal computer setup more than because of Linux/Wine. My computer is a self-built machine from about four or five years back and it’s definitely starting to show its age. Similarly, videos/cut-scenes are low-quality but run and are watchable. Be sure to make sure you are running the game in opengl mode. I accomplished this by adding “-opengl” to the end of the command on my SC2 desktop shortcut. There is also a way to edit it in the config file, I’m sure.

I experience slowdown on occasion; it helps to close most of your other programs in the background. Still, the game is very playable, and everything that I have tried works so far.

The game occasionally crashes on startup, at random. This is a kernel issue, not a Wine issue. (For the record, this is the same thing that now causes WoW to occasionally randomly crash on login, if you have noticed that these past few weeks as well.) I dunno about everyone else but this problem seems to be showing up less and less for me so I just suck it up and live with it. If you really don’t like it, though, you can patch the kernel. If you want to do that then I would recommend searching up instructions specific to your distro.

Some people still seem to be having problems with the installer, I am not sure how to help you with that, but I would direct you to the Wine subforum on Ubuntu Forums, or the Starcraft 2 entry in WineDB.

I’ve been having a blast with this game, and I’m constantly impressed with the Wine team for maintaining this software and making these great Blizzard games available to us ‘nix-heads. Between playing World of Warcraft on Linux for more than three years now, the original Starcraft, and now Starcraft 2, I think it’s safe to say that I basically owe the Wine people a good chunk of my soul, or at least my firstborn child. Much love, guys! <3

classic video game monday, video games

Classic Video Game Monday: H.E.R.O

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In this game, you play a guy with a helicopter jetpack, some dynamite, and laser vision.

Sounds awesome, no?

Yeah. It was.

This game gives you dozens of levels, which throw more and more obstacles in your way as you go on. Obstacles include: walls, which must be destroyed with your limited supply of dynamite, the lava-coated version of the same walls (which kill you), Evil Light Bulbs which turn off if you go the wrong way, reducing your visibility to zero, and a variety of animals like spiders, bats, moths, and snakes, all of which will also kill you if you don’t laser-vision them. (This game single-handedly justifies my irrational fear of moths, by the way.)

Then at the end of each level a guy tallies up your remaining time and dynamite and gives you points based on what you have left. At this point you’d be sent to the next level. As you progressed through the levels, the game would start sending more obstacles and various alternate paths at you, making what started as a simple game rather difficult after all.

One of my favorite parts of the game is the sound. There’s no music for this game, but between the copter-pack and the bombs there are a variety of fun sound effects which I will still launch into imitating without warning.

Choka-choka-choka…
chick… POOM
choka-choka-choka
choka-choka-choka
peeeew
tcccchhhhhheeeeewwwwwwww
POOM POOM POOM POOM POOM

Seriously that’s the first level. Check it out:

See, you can’t deny my sound effects aren’t accurate. You can’t deny it. You should hear me IRL.

Now, when I think of this game, I invariably think of my mom. See, I come from a big gaming family. I was playing online games back before most people had a computer– we’d play them over the modem. Anyways, it was mostly my dad and uncle who would do the gaming every Sunday, but I guess one day my mom wanted something to prove so she sat down and memorized basically this whole entire game, twisty pathways and all. She owned everyone at this game. Nobody could beat her. It was ridiculous.

I can’t remember how far I got personally. Maybe level 12 or so. (This game got difficult.)

Regardless, this game was a blast. It was such a simple concept: fly around, shoot stuff, and blow things up, but they managed to add some sort of level of strategy to it and enough levels that would get juuuust harder enough to keep you playing for a really long time.

Oh Commodore 64, you rock.

linux

Penguin Post: How to Install Starcraft 2 on Linux/Wine If You Get Weird Permissions Issues

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I’d had Starcraft 2 on pre-order from GameStop since who-knows-when (I remember pre-ordering it at the same time as I did Wrath of the Lich King, so that should tell you something.) Anyways, this morning I ran out to GameStop, nabbed it, and prepared to install on Linux/Wine. The Beta worked flawlessly, so I was expecting this to be smooth sailing.

Not so! First half of the files on the CD appeared to be hidden, and then trying to get the Installer to run would tell me “Access Denied”, blahblahblah, and I couldn’t do anything even as root.

Apparently this is an Ubuntu issue and not a Wine issue, so if you are also afflicted with this problem, read on. This is a bit of a kludgy workaround, but it’s a workaround nonetheless.

Step 1: Make the CD Show the Files

Fire up a terminal and enter the following to remount the CD:

sudo mount -o remount,unhide /dev/cdrom

Step 2: Make a folder on your desktop called SC2 or something.

Step 3: Copy over the files on the CD to the folder on your desktop.

(Note: you may have to tweak the code a bit to get it working on your specific setup.)

sudo cp -r /media/cdrom0/* ~/Desktop/SC2

This will take a little bit as it does its thing, so give it ten minutes or so. Then fix the permissions:

sudo chown -R username:username ~/Desktop/SC2

You should now be ready to go. Navigate to the file on your desktop and install it that way. (Or do it via the terminal, since you’re already there:)

cd ~/Desktop/SC2

wine Installer.exe

And that should do it! I’ve got it installing as we speak, though I’ve got to run off to work now so a test run of the thing will have to wait until later. If I botched up some code or something let me know and I’ll fix it tonight when I come home.

classic video game monday, video games

Classic Video Game Monday: Tetris Attack

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Once upon a time Japan had a quirky but addictive little puzzle game named Panel de Pon. Nintendo took it, rebranded it so it was about Yoshi and pals, and released it as Tetris Attack, and life was suddenly a lot more awesome.

Tetris Attack operates on the simple idea of lining up similarly colored blocks either vertically or horizontally to make them disappear. Three in a row works, but you can do four or five for extra points. This sounds simple enough, and even a tad underwhelming, but where things really start to get exciting is with the chain reactions you can cause to build combos and score obscene amounts of points, and completely screw over your opponent if you’re playing multiplayer. Like such:

This simple little idea was stupidly addictive and the number of hours I spent playing this game is probably close to the hundreds. In fact, I even owned a Game Boy version of this game– not nearly as good, but you know, puzzle games are ultimately meant for long road trips, and this game was no exception.

The cute characters were a bonus and the catchy music was an even bigger one. All you need to do is hear all of Blargg’s Theme to become a believer in this case. I actually wrote lyrics to this song when I was 14 or 15 years old, because I am a dork. No, you don’t get to see them. Also, the credits theme is possibly the most relaxing thing you will ever hear in an SNES game.

Nintendo later replaced Yoshi with Pikachu and re-released this game for Nintendo 64 as Pokemon Puzzle League– the name change, perhaps, was because they realized that this game had absolutely nothing to do with the original Tetris. (And, you know, to get people to buy it, because this was at the height of the Pokemon Craze.) I prefer the Yoshi version, myself, although Pokemon Puzzle League did include a pretty ingenious “3D mode” where you spun your puzzle around a cylinder.

Anyways, regardless of how you play the core game, you should. I’d do pretty much anything to have this game on my cell phone. Seriously, Nintendo. Tetris Attack. Cell phone. Kay?

See, I’m not kidding about the credits theme. Don’t listen to this if you don’t want to fall into a blissful sleep. Just a warning.

life of pike, rambles

Pike vs. The Carnival Rides – aka Pike is a Wuss

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I went to the fair yesterday and went on a few rides. Here is my objective analysis:

Exhibit A: Tilt-a-Whirl

Concept: You spin around in a circle basically at random (seriously, read the bit on chaos theory) while spinning around in an even bigger circle. Meanwhile gravity plasters you to the wall. It’s loads more fun than it sounds.
Verdict: This is my all time favorite ride. I go on it every year and it never gets old. So obviously it was my first stop this time around, before it was on to bigger and better things!
Grade: A+ !

Exhibit B: Star Trooper

Concept: You fly around in the air, first forward, and then backward. Or the other way around, depending on which side of the seat you’re sitting on. You also go up and down and stuff.
Verdict: Going forward is tons more fun than going backward. The Going Backward experience on this ride basically just consists of not being able to move, breathe, or talk, because you’re stuck to the seat. It was an okay ride I guess.
Grade: B

Exhibit C: Pharaoh’s Fury

Concept: Giant swinging ship that sticks you at a 90 degree angle at its zenith.
Verdict: I had a bad feeling about this one and initially I refused to try it, but then I was talked into it with various arguments like “It doesn’t look that bad”.

Big mistake.

Now, before I start on this one, I need to clarify that I am not afraid of heights. I’m that person in most other rides who twists around in the seat to stare at the ground, usually much to the chagrin of my ride partner when this causes us to bounce all over the place. But this is different. This ride is gravity hating you. Do you know what it feels like when gravity hates you? It’s an interesting feeling that can best be described as feeling like you are about two seconds away from floating out of your chair and over the safety bar and plummeting to your death below, but the boat thing swings the other way riiiiight before you do. If you want to experience this feeling for yourself, my advice to you is: DON’T. I spent the bulk of this ride with my eyes shut, praying to every potential deity I could think of for the whole thing to end.

I should note, though, that the guy behind me was completely smashed and sounded like he was having the best minute and a half of his entire life, so Beer Goggles may make this ride slightly more bearable. Your mileage may vary.

Grade: F for FREAKING TERRIFYING AND I AM NEVER RIDING THIS THING AGAIN.

Exhibit D: Spider

Concept: Tilt-a-Whirl, except in the air, basically.
Verdict: This ride works by lulling you into a false sense of security and then pouncing upon the unsuspecting victim that you become. It starts out tame enough, it’s a nice spinning ride and you think “Oh this is actually kind of relaxing”… and then you hear It. “It” is a comforting noise that sounds something like creeeeeeeeeak CACHUNK CACHUNK CACHUNK creeeeeeeek, and by comforting I mean terrifying. This noise is accompanied by whiplash inducing spins and both of these things combined quickly send you into WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE territory. Then, just as quick as it arrived, it’s over, and you’re back to thinking this is a nice relaxing ride.

Just beware the CACHUNK CACHUNK CACHUNK.

Grade: Pretty good overall, even if the ride itself is in dire need of some WD-40. B+

I also went on the Ferris Wheel and the Carousel. The Ferris Wheel involves standing in line for 45 minutes to get to a ride that lasts about 5 (4 of which are spent loading and unloading the cars), and the Carousel involves me complaining that the stirrups are set to a rather inconvenient length, because I’m a nerd like that.

Sadly that was all I had time to experience. People were trying to talk me into the Zipper, but, um, no.

I would not ride this for any less than $10,000. Just so we’re all clear.

thoughts

Balance!

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“Balance” is an attribute that I find really important to my life.

Not that kind. Although BRB, dying of cute.

In wandering through life I have often found that most things do not work best in absolutes, but rather, in a gradient between said absolutes. I think it’s just sort of how I operate: I look for the middle ground. At worst, this makes me a wishywashy fence sitter who can see both sides of nearly every argument, but at best it gives me an interesting and possibly unique view of the world.

I am, in fact, going somewhere with this, and it mostly has to do with my thoughts on technology. I’m a bit of a techno-fiend. I think progress and new inventions are great. I love tech, all tech– old tech and new tech. It speaks volumes to me about optimism, ingenuity, and creativity.

And robot suits.

I love when we use technology to figure out how to make something better. (Or how to make a robot suit.)

Anyways.

Sometimes this gives me a bit of a dilemma. Since I love old tech as well as new tech, it’s occasionally hard for me to say farewell to something old in order to embrace something new. We live in an interesting time. There is so much that I’ve seen fall by the wayside over the course of my own short lifespan that thinking back to my childhood is like thinking back to an alien world that somehow managed to get by with landline phones, fax machines, snail mail, and these newfangled things called VCRs.

So I’ve seen a lot of things change in just two and a half decades. As I see things change I pause to kind of contemplate what it means (I was that middle-school kid who actually stopped to think about the impending repercussions of DVD), but then I move on, because that’s life, right? Change and improvements! Awesome!

But occasionally something changes that I’m close to. Like film.

Between my love affair with the darkroom in college (a place to which I’d happily sneak away to after hours, to print my own non-assignment-based pictures) and a year-long stint of working in a One-Hour Photo Lab, I know a lot about film processing. I think it’s a fascinating and amazing process that combines my love of chemistry with my love of art and my love of, well, a lot of things. But who uses film anymore? When I worked in the One-Hour Photo it was a big deal when the percentage of digital orders we processed surpassed that magical 50% mark and usurped traditional film. And that was in… 2006, I think? I sort of don’t want to know how the number looks now.

That’s not to say I’m anti-digital-photography. Au contraire, the digital camera is an awesome technological achievements in and of itself, offering unsurpassed convenience in a variety of ways.

But there is something in that magical darkroom that I don’t want to lose. Just as there is something in my mechanical watch that I don’t want to lose, either.

Or maybe I’m just being a nostalgia geek. That’s possible, too. In the meantime I’ll continue to balance the best of the Old with the best of the New, because I don’t want to limit my love to just the New and Shiny.

classic video game monday, video games

Classic Video Game Monday: Stunt Race FX

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The SNES was great for racing games. You had Super Mario Kart, F-Zero, the Top Gear games, and this quirky, super-polygon-filled title called Stunt Race FX.

All the cars in this game have eyeballs. So it’s kind of like The Brave Little Toaster or something. Which, by the way, is a movie that I hold solely responsible for how absolutely terrible I felt when my first car fell by the wayside and had to be towed away. Rest in pieces, dear 1990 Chrysler LeBaron!

(The guy in the TV cracks me up though.)

Now Stunt Race FX is one of those games that never got as much attention as it probably deserved. Sure, it didn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, but when it retread old ground, it did so very solidly. The controls were tight and the tracks were fun. And the 3D was a big deal back then. I mean, I could be wrong, but I remember just this game and Starfox as being the only games of this kind on SNES.

The music was pretty good too. I found a Stunt Race FX remix on OCRemix this one time and I was like “OH EM GEE” because I had almost forgotten about this game. It sort of made my day.

You gotta admit, this 3D is pretty good for being on a freaking SNES.

Anyways, the point is that Stunt Race FX is a pretty unknown game, and that’s really too bad. Sure, it’s not gonna be on any “SNES Top Ten” lists anytime soon, but that’s more of a side effect of the SNES being the best gaming platform EVER than anything else.

And c’mon. Cars with eyeballs. Never gets old. (Just ask Pixar!)

free/open source software, linux, supergeekery

Geek Wars II: The Revenge of Geek Wars

27 Comments

I got some more questions in the comments for last time. Rather than just answer in the comments, I figured I’d make a new post.

Ahem!

Coke vs Pepsi: I actually don’t drink either, I’m a Dr Pepper/Mountain Dew kinda person.

iPhone vs Android phone: No real interest in either. My current phone is the cheapest one I could get at the phone store. I use it to make calls, check my e-mail when I’m bored at work, and, since I lack a digital camera for some reason, take crappy pictures. I don’t really need or want anything else. (Except possibly a twitter client.)

If I had to get one I’d probably go with Android if only because I am not a big Apple person. The one product of theirs I had was an (old) iPod, and my experiences with it were pretty iffy.

Edit: I have been informed that Android runs Linux; that’s another reason I’d go with that one. /fangirl

MS Office vs OpenOffice: Seeing as I am a Linux and F/OSS junkie I’m pretty sure this one is a given. Open Office for life!

Laptop vs Desktop: I have both. I use the desktop the most– better screen resolution and I can play more games on it. I used to use the laptop a lot more than I do now, but these days it’s mostly been relegated to the role of backup computer if something happens to my desktop and I need to Google the problem.

I have to give my laptop credit, though; it was the first thing I ever installed Linux on! It has run Kubuntu and only Kubuntu for three and a half years.

Yahoo Messenger vs. MSN Messenger: I use Pidgin. Back in the day I used to have AIM, MSN, and YIM all hooked up to it but I dropped YIM a couple years back when the last holdout on my buddy list who still used it switched to MSN.

Back when I was on Windows I actually liked the MSN interface. But yeah, haven’t seen it in years; I just use Pidgin now, so all the messengers look the same to me…

Gmail vs. Yahoo Mail vs. Hotmail: Gmail, obviously. I do have fond memories of Hotmail and my first e-mail address (this was back before they were owned by Microsoft), but I have since moved on. Yahoo Mail I never used.

Picasa vs Flickr: I don’t use either. =X

WordPress vs Blogspot: I actually have a pretty strong opinion on this. It goes WordPress Self Hosted > Blogspot > WordPress.com.

I honestly, truly, do not understand this trend where people switch from blogger.com to wordpress.com. WordPress.com has less customization, in my experience, and doesn’t let you use javascript (so you can forget your fancy WoWHead links or whatever.)

The only reason I can think of to pick wordpress.com over Blogspot is if you plan on switching to self-hosted later.

Anyways I know I’m going to get all the “But I love WordPress!” comments, and you know, I love WordPress too. Self-hosted WordPress. But yeah >.>

Facebook vs Twitter: I signed up for Facebook five years ago or so. I lurked around for about a month, then got bored and quit using it.

I logged in again about two or three years later, looked around, still had no interest, and logged out again.

A couple of days ago I logged in for the first time in two-ish years, primarily because I’d had some 50 friends’ requests in that period of time and I felt bad about ignoring them. I logged in, added (most) everybody, left some sort of “I never log in” notice and tossed up a couple of pictures, and then disappeared again.

I guess I just figure: I’ve got LiveJournal (since 2004), DeviantArt, two blogs, and a Twitter… I don’t really see anything that Facebook has that I don’t already have elsewhere!

So yeah, my vote here goes to Twitter.

Star Wars: What order to watch the movies? IV – V – VI – I – II – III. Honestly when I have kids they’re not gonna see the prequels until they have the first three good and memorized. *cough*

Asimov vs. Heinlein vs. Clarke: I’m an Asimov junkie. “The Last Question” is the greatest short story that has ever been written. Ever.

Hmm, think I got everything there…