Hi from Dave, this is my homepage, with various emulators and other nonsense...
My e-mail address is
Teh Blog..
22 January 2006
I had to change my e-mail because it was being flooded with spam, I noticed it has appeared on a few websites as text, which is a bit dumb! The whole idea is that you obfuscate it or quote it as an image (as I've done) so it doesn't get picked up by spam spiders collecting e-mail addresses.
Anyway, thanks to one of the nice folks on the YakYak forums I now have an X2VGA+, so after about 6 months of not playing Xbox games (because of irritating lag on my LCD TV) I'm now catching up on what I've been missing :-) Which is about 20 or so really great games. And naturally I'm still playing Out Run 2
Speaking of really great games... Holy Mother Of God
20 September 2005
Still busybusybusy with work, but I did have time to upload the current Pocket PC version of PicoDrive in the mobile section, ready for porting to the Gizmondo (if we can actually dev for it!) and the GP2X one day too!
Just... need... spare... second... arggggh!
This month I has been mainly playing, PSP games!
3 May 2005
Oh my god how long since an update, I really need to sort out this page... But in the meantime, feast your eyes on the Xbox racing goodness that is Out Run 2. If you have an Xbox and don't have this, slap yourself in the face because you have no taste. In fact if you don't have an Xbox, slap yourself in the face for being in position where you couldn't play Out Run 2! (Unless you have a Cube and Resident Evil 4, in which case you can let yourself off.)
It was £9.99 recently on www.play.com so you really have no excuse. Ten pounds for gods sake, to own Out Run 2!
Out Run 2 and Burnout 3 have been described by someone I know at work as "Racing Games for people who don't like Racing Games". I like that quote, but at the same time I kind of disagree with it - to me racing games are about speed, the sensation of speed, 60fps, and capturing the thrill of racing. Now in reality I've never driven a Ferrari down a beach at 180mph, but I've done it in my mind! And in my mind it feels just like Out Run 2...
What's good about it? - it perfectly captures speeeeeeeed and driving for fun. Like Burnout 3 it's a dose of Daytona and Scud Race goodness for this generation. It's fast and it's looks gorgeous. Burnout 3 looks great, but Out Run 2 looks like it's been painstakingly modelled by 2000 Japanese Artists, each individually sculpting each polygon until it's perfect. Well either that or they just have a really good lighting tool...
What's average about it? - the music could have been better. I like the way they updated the music to F-Zero X, they just made it into Metal and it works perfectly. Why choose to update Out Run 1 into lift music/Panpipe Moods? In my memory the YM2151 themes didn't sound like they were Lift Music, they sounded great.
And also the crashing looks silly, but after about 10 or 20 plays you don't crash anymore so that stuff doesn't matter. The sliding looks mental (or just plain wrong) for about 10 or 20 plays as well, but stick with it - if you get bored put it away and come back to it after a few months (that's what I did) after that strangely you start to get used to it and it does seem right.
So Out Run has had a really good update, get it and stick it in your collection. I did, actually with no real intention of playing it much, just to stick it in my collection of cheap Xbox games, but I actually have been playing it quite a bit. Because it's just so quick and easy to pick up!
2 September 2004
Women take a shine to video games
Interesting article, partially the figures but also the demographic - typical male is 15-24 and typical female is 30-35 - who would have thought it!
Also the focus in games is different, with males it's all about more, bigger graphics, fast gameplay, bigger guns ... the Western games philosophy.
For women, it's about accessibility, games which you can play from a web browser, quick games to learn, something you can play in a few minutes. That to me sounds like a variation on the Eastern/Nintendo games philosophy.
Also, to put another way, to women it's a game, a short-term way to pass the time, whereas to men, it's f**king war! And there are certain game types which will completely alienate women - game types which aren't forgiving at all, like a FPS tournament.
In reverse, there are game types which will repel blokes for not being serious enough. Like theskeletonshop maybe - play it from any browser, quick to load, quick to get into. That's not a real game! Well it doesn't seem like a real game to blokes, but if you are having fun, then it's a game isn't it? Doesn't matter that it isn't loaded into your precious PS2! I think that's at least one of the types of games they are talking about women playing for seven hours a week - on-line games, games you can play when you are bored at home and have a PC around.
My point? Not sure really - interesting point about Prince of Persia scoring high 90s and still appealing to both men and women though, and the rewind feature being appealing since women don't like to 'die' in a game.
But I just think it'll be a interesting challenge over the next few years to make more games that appeal to both the 15-24 male demographic AND the 30-35 female demographic.
Whoa, finalburn.com vanished from existance for a couple of days. Thought it was going to disappear entirely just like DTMNT.com did! (DTMNT.com turned into porn amusingly!)
Fortunately it's still here!
Was just reading this from the NVIDIA GPU Programming Guide:
6.2. Disable VSync by Default
Enabling VSync artificially throttles frame-rate to the monitor refresh rate. Multi-GPU configurations are likely to achieve frame-rates (much) faster than monitor refresh-rates, due to their higher graphics-performance. These frame-rates are thus only attainable if VSync is turned off.
Excuse me but wha-? How exactly is a video card going to produce a framerate higher than the framerate of the monitor? Are NVidia cards so amazing that they bypass the monitor and jack into your brain directly? Not yet I don't think!
I think what they mean is, use triple-buffering instead of VSync. But that's not what this paragraph says, here they are telling people here to purposely make games with tearing! Huh?!
Speaking of which, how many computer games these days still exhibit image tearing in their release builds? It's like, hello, ever heard of page-flipping and triple-buffering? They are only about umpteen decades old now...!
Hmph. Rant over.
Anyway, look at this: http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rjagnow/research/
It looks great - 3D textures synthesised based on 2D sample data. Very cool indeed.
This week in my spare time I have been playing quite a lot of 2-player Burnout 2 and this totally underrated game: Mashed... with 3 players. Mashed is a great little game by SuperSonic, it probably makes the worst 1-player game of all time but that's because it's a 2-4-player game. In fact the reviews are probably skewed because of this - if they have played the game with 4 players for a week they would have given it much higher ratings.
It is, basically, Micro Machines with better graphics, and that in itself should sell it. And it's a nice breath of fresh air with games like Riddick, Driv3r, Spiderman 2 all over the charts.
Have we forgotten that there are 4 controllers sticking out the front of the Xbox just begging to be used?
So come on guys, get off your asses and start marketting this thing, otherwise the charts are going to get very stale indeed!
Anyway, I've found a few more great websites:
http://www.metacritic.com/ - The Rotten Tomatoes of games! Yey!
http://www.the-magicbox.com - News on Japanese Games as well as European and USA ones I think
http://www.dslzoneuk.net/ - Find out if you have ADSL or SDSL in your area
The great thing about Metacritic is it makes you realise how much crap there is in Game or HMV these days on the games shelves - now all you need to do is look down this list and you can cut straight through 99% of the stuff out there and just find the stuff that is actually any good. It's just like the old days of C+VG and Mean Machines - i.e. you can actually believe games reviews, given enough of them:
http://www.metacritic.com/games/xbx/scores/
Have to admit though, I've played Riddick for about 5 minutes or less, and Ninja Gaiden wouldn't even run on my Xbox :-(
I've got two games on order though - Max Payne and Prince of Persia Sands of Time.
15 August 2004 - Good Game Good Game
I got an Xbox about 6 months ago now, and have actually been pleasantly surprised by it. Especially when you can mod it and develop for it dead easily, and even turn it into a bit of a Media Centre. The loading times are much better than PS2 as well. And you can easily take screenshots from it - you just need to connect a PC and hit 'Capture Screenshot'. No messing around with odd/even fields like on PS2. Hence all the groovy screenshots on this page!
This week I has been mostly playing...
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the first one) on the Xbox - it's actually pretty good!
I spotted this a few weeks ago when I was looking to see what games are out on Xbox Classic but are actually any good - and there are so many TV and movie tie-ins I figured one of them had to be good, just by the law of averages, so I thought I'd pick up the best one.
Common sense teaches me not to trust magazines, especially not official magazines! But Gamespot to the rescue. Fingers crossed so far, Gamespot has been pretty accurate with the ratings on games.
Alias, Dark Angel, Robocop and Terminator, blah blah, all looked pretty rubbish, but one which didn't score too bad was Buffy, so I picked it up. I think it was about £15 new. I don't know about anyone else but I prefer buying games for £15-20 new instead of £10-12 preowned. It makes pretty much no difference, I mean the media doesn't really decay that badly, but there's just a nicer feeling from buying something new - and also I've been thinking about it... does a 2nd hand purchase actually go to the publisher/developer as a sale? Probably not. And when I buy a game I do like to think that I'm adding another vote to the developer - "More games like this please! Less buggy games like Driv3r please!"
Speaking of which why is Driv3r doing so well in sales? Hmmmmm.
The Buffy Review is here if you want to read it.
So what's good about it? Well, these days whether a game is good or not seems to depend on the opposite - what isn't bad about it. Nothing kills enjoyment on a game more than there being something incredibly glaringly bad. And in the case of Buffy there is nothing I can think of which is bad about it.
Are the graphics outstanding? Not really, but they work, and it doesn't exactly kill the game if Willow happens to look like the Joker.
Are there any problems with the control method? Well occasionally there are a few platforms you can't grab - does it kill the game? Not at all. If there were heavy platform elements to the gameplay, it would murder the game, but there aren't so it's fine.
Buffy looks the right way where you move the right thumbstick as well - pet hate of mine when I get a game and you rotate the right thumbstick and the camera rotates the 'wrong' way. When I push right, I want the character to look right dammit! And invert up/down is off by default as well, which is great because I hate inverted look too. I have endless religious arguments at work about invert up/down. I've come to the conclusion that you do need an invert look option because so many people are used to 'airplane controls', but I really think it should be off by default! This means you Rare/Free Radical!
Me personally, when I push left, I want to look left.
And when I push up, I want to look up.
The levels load quick. There's no fancy streaming loading - but who cares, does it really add to a game? I'd rather developers just went for standard methods and didn't create the possibility of nasty bugs which could ruin gameplay. Ahem Spider-Man2 Ahem
So yeah, it sounds strange, but Buffy is good because everything about it is average or above average. The frame rate isn't too bad at all (about 30?). And they've done some nice things with it - the combat system is really good fun, and even reminds me a bit of the Soul Edge series at times. A,X and Y are Punch, Kick and Stab respectively, and you can combo together moves. There's some great moves like kicking a vampire against a stake and destroying him that way - which reminds me a bit of TMNT. The end result is that like the Enter the Matrix, combat is really good fun. The difference is that in Enter the Matrix, too many things were just baaaad.
The other nice thing in Buffy is that they've captured the dialogue of the series really well too, again reminding me of the TMNT "They ain't getting any prettier" / "Watch your mouth, slimeball!" dialogue exhanges. Only here time it's stuff like "Get ready to spill your guts, Slayer!" or "Killed by a cheerleader, I'm so ashamed!" It repeats a lot, but there's simply no way around that in a computer game.
Next classic game I'm going to get (after Riddick of course) is probably Max Payne (the first one) - I've never played Max Payne and it sounds pretty good.
