This game is so good it makes me want to have my own country.

Recently I picked up a few PC games to get back into the whole PC gaming thing. When I was at Frys electronics I noticed they had Age of Empires and Age of Empires 2 on sale for $10. I picked it up immediately because thats such a good deal for both Age of Empires games. Now Age of Empires 2 was released in 1999 making it 11 years old(yes Virgina, I can maths). In gamer terms that might as well be ancient. The graphics are 2D and a little rough compared to the airbrushed 3D glitz we get these days. However this game has one thing going for it. It is so much fun to play.

This weekend jdubb, Adam and I played 6 LAN games of Age 2 and had a blast. 11 years later fun is still fun and you don’t need ultra high res graphics to have a great game. Not saying ultra amazing graphics are bad, they just don’t totally make a game.

When the Age of Empires 3 pack comes down in price some I will pick it up. Hopefully its as good as Age 2 LAN.

Finally, my old hardware wont suck to use!

Last week I got a PC from my friend. I decided to make that something I play PC games on and use my other PC for home development. So I moved the Nvidia 7600 from my Linux desktop to the new PC and my old Nvidia 5400LE back to my desktop Linux development machine. This usually goes fine as the proprietary Nvidia drivers are first rate and the installer is easy enough to use. Well, turns out, its not as easy as it once was.

Nvidia seemed to deprecate my old 5400LE video card in the up-to-date proprietary driver sometime in the last year so I have to use the old legacy Nvidia drivers to get it to work with the proprietary driver. OK well that should be fine right? No it wasn’t. The old legacy driver didn’t auto configure xorg like the old one did. So basically, I installed the old video card ran the legacy driver setup and was in 800×600 land. Yippie. So it was a fun hunt to track down how to set the display resolution. Long story short the legacy driver doesn’t seem to really work well and I don’t have 3D on the card. I have the amazing 2D from the in kernel Nvidia driver but the rendering artifacts are annoying and font smoothing doesn’t work.

My choices at this point involve more pain of screwing with configs, hacking kernels and doing stuff I don’t want to do or reinstalling everything and having the setup process of Ubuntu work it out. I bet that would fix it all and I have backups, that might be less pain than the “magic config file hunt and change scenario.”

However, the long term fix in my opinion for Linux is to STOP using hardware that requires so much manual work. Which means, stop using hardware that doesn’t have relatively useful drivers in the mainline kernel. Which is why the recent inclusion of the Nouveau drivers that can do useful 3D is so sweet. Since I am not gaming on Linux anymore due to the pain involved in that(sorry, spent the last 5-8 years in Wine and thats not really fun) I don’t need super bling cutting edge 3D in Linux. Which is why the recent work in the free software Nvidia space is so cool. Its the long term fix for a problem that I hate dealing with in Linux.

I dubb this gallery “Alien: The New Meme“. I will only feature a few of the pictures here, check the entire gallery for the full set.

Your addiction is known to me.

Standing amongst greatness.

Jesus doesn't want me for birdseed.

The limitless potential.

I can’t tell who bought what, its pretty secure in that regard, but its nice to know people do actually buy things based off what I say. Its as if I have some influence on people in some capacity that I didn’t realize I had before. Its a cool feeling.

Thanks for reading.

Now buy this product.

Beat it. I just beat it.

Today I beat Super Mario 2 with no warps all the way through. Overall this game is much harder than I remember it being but quite a bit of fun.

I recently made my way through Legend of Zelda Links Awakening and I just pieced together that those games both are dreams. Mario 2 being a dream in Mario’s head and Links Awakening world being a dream of the wind fish.

Sleep well.

These are not screenshots from my game. However, my line up was princes like 22 times, Toad and Mario once. I believe the Princess is the best because she can float. Its a nice thing because platforming games like this see you fall into pits often and you can just float over them most of the time.

I had quite a problem beating the crab boss of world 6.3 but I watched someone do it with Mario in a YouTube video and that seemed to help.

Whats next on my video game plate? I am going to nickel and dime the remaining Fallout 3 quests and expansions as I have time. However the next big thing will see me moving on to Super Mario Brother 3.

The biggest most exciting mario yet!

One thing down on my things to accomplish it 2010.

Know the tricks.

“
Brian Krebs’s “Krebs on Security” features an ATM skimmer that is chillingly well-camouflaged. After seeing photos of early, crude skimmers — devices that capture your card number and work in concert with a hidden camera that records you punching in your PIN — I assumed that I could rely on my own powers of observation to keep from falling victim to one. Now I don’t think I can be so sanguine. Be sure to follow some of the links in the post for some hair-raising examples of the form.

This particular skimmer was found Dec. 6, 2009, attached to the front of a Citibank ATM in Woodland
Hills, Calif. Would you have been able to spot this? This is fairly professional job: Notice how the bulk of the electronics fit into the flap below the card acceptance slot. Also, check out the tiny pinhole camera (pictured below), ostensibly designed to switch on and record the victim’s movements as he or she enters their PIN at the ATM.
“

Beat Super Mario 2 start to finish using no warp zones.

The world needs to get out of the way of my goals.