Archive for category video games
8-Bit Mario
Posted by jdodson in offhandstrangity, tech, video games on March 15, 2010
Plants VS Zombies (Complete)
Posted by jdodson in video games on March 14, 2010
Cute? Check. Hip? Check. Good graphics? Check.
This weekend I completed Plants VS Zombies. It took me about a month playing it off and on a few minutes at a time. I want to give you two warnings: 1) this game is very addictive and 2) this game is very easy.
I died like twice during my time playing it. I figured out a good strategy in every level that worked out really well. The last “boss fight” was pretty fun. It was kind of challenging too which was nice.
I started playing it on the PC and then picked it up on the iPhone for $3. All in all it was a very strong purchase. My wife wanted it to have multiplayer so we could play it together. That would have been fun.
Brains!
Fallout: New Vegas Screenshots
Posted by jdodson in video games on March 8, 2010
I hope this comes alive!
Joystiq has a collection of new screenshots from Fallout: New Vegas. I loved Fallout 3 and New Vegas seems to be more of the same. Hopefully in a good way.
The Revival of a Classic
Posted by jdodson in life, video games on March 2, 2010
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.
Wolfenstein 2009!
Posted by jdodson in video games on February 26, 2010
I am usually much further behind!
Recently I purchased Wolfenstein on PS3. I loved Return to Castle Wolfenstein and of course, the orginal Wolfenstein 3D. The new Wolfenstein game is pretty good. I wouldn’t say its as good as Halflife 2 or Fallout 3 but it is a very well put together game. It also looks fantastic. The game is open world-ish as you can travel around Isenstadt, your “home city” from mission to mission. Occasionally you can pick between missions you can start. So there is a certain level or choice, that said its still a pretty linear game.
In the game you can collect gold for weapon upgrades. If you missed doing this entirely you could beat the game but the game gets much more fun as you upgrade your weapons. The reason is you start kicking tons of Nazi ass when you upgrade your weapons. For instance, I am upgrading the sniper rifle currently. Its great to pick off people at a distance with one shot as well as affixing a bayonet to the gun and watching guys drop in one hit.
In a total abandonment of tradition, I went online to play Wolfenstein in deathmatch! Since its the PS3 version, when went online to play there was only one server with 3 people playing online! 
So I joined it. I was ranked about 4th in the mix until things got interesting and we had about 15 people in the match. I was about middle tier when I cut out of the game. It was surprised to find that it was so much fun to play online. I did better than I thought and may come back to play it online. I didn’t experience lag or or jitteriness so that was good.
If you haven’t at least tried the demo, id recommend you give it a shot. Demo on the PS3 and I believe XBOX 360 as well as PC.
Free Software Nvidia Drivers Make Me Happy
Posted by jdodson in free software, life, tech, video games on February 16, 2010
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.
HL2: The Lost Coast
Posted by jdodson in video games on February 16, 2010
The coast was lost to any story but fun to play.
“Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is a small additional level for the 2004 first-person shooter video game Half-Life 2. Developed by Valve Software, it was released on October 27, 2005 through the Steam content delivery service as a free download to owners of the Microsoft Windows version of Half-Life 2. Lost Coast serves as a technology demonstration, specifically showcasing the high dynamic range rendering implemented in the Source engine. The level was designed with a variety of appropriate environments to emphasize these effects. In addition, Lost Coast was the first video game developed by Valve to allow developers to explain various elements of design as the player progresses through the level.”
Since I am on a new PC gaming kick and I downloaded The Lost Coast but never played it, I decided to give it a spin. It was really fun to go back and play Halflife 2. The Lost Coast is light on story, you just wake up and some sailor tells you to go up the hill and turn off a gun. I think this demo was trying to showcase some new dynamic lighting but my video card didn’t show anything I found impressive. Perhaps I don’t have the horsepower to run that sort of thing. Anyway, it was fun to play and if you have a Steam account it should be free to download.
Fun Games
Posted by jdodson in video games on February 15, 2010
I got a hand me down PC from my friend Jeremy the other week. It is a fairly high powered AMD 64 3400+. After putting 1G of RAM in it and a Nvidia 7600 I had kicking around its a pretty decent older gaming PC.
A few years ago my wifes brother gave me Halflife 2 and I installed it at the time and setup a steam account. I didn’t play Halflife 2 much then because I was using Linux and it was a pain to play that way. After getting this gaming PC ready I installed steam on it and downloaded a few demos of games I heard were really good.
I downloaded Torchlight and Plants VS Zombies.
Torchlight
Torchlight is a game where you dungeon crawl to kill bad guys and get loot. Its extremely similar to Diablo. Music and all. Tthis game is very well done and the game play is really fun. After playing through the demo I decided to pick it up. The boxed copy was $20. The download was $20. I opted for the boxed copy because I saw 0 benefit to paying the same for a digital download.
Plants VS Zombies
Plants VS Zombies is from the company that made Zuma, Bejeweled and Peggle. I warn you, Plants VS Zombies is addictive. I played through the 60 minute demo and immediately pirated it so I could keep playing. Later that day I went to the store and bought it. I love this game I also picked it up for $3 on the iPhone.
I can’t recommend this game more. If I were you id pickup the boxed retail copy because it comes with the Windows and Mac version and its the same as buying it digitally on the Pop Cap site. Oh wait, its less on Amazon for $15…. Anyways.
You can play the game on the Pop Cap site for free but id recommend downloading the demo to put it into fullscreen mode.
Beat Super Mario 2
Posted by jdodson in life, video games on January 24, 2010
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.
Will Play Is The Best Selling Game of the Decade
Posted by jdodson in video games on January 20, 2010
Wii Play Wii Play.
“If there’s a statistic measuring how well a game sold, you’re likely to find Wii Play lingering in it somewhere. It’s not only been the best-selling game of 2009, but also just recently made itself known as the top seller for the last decade. Now, according to NPD data (via GameSpot), the software-hardware hybrid has claimed another throne: top-selling non-PC US game ever. ”
Wii Play is fun. The wife and I had quite a bit of fun playing it back when the Wii was minty fresh in our hearts. I don’t play the Wii too often these days. Then again, I haven’t really played games that much over the last few weeks. I beat Fallout 3 and started Mario 2 but I haven’t played much recently.
Ill break out Wii Play tonight as its a fun game if only keeping my interest for only 30 minutes at a time. However it does do one thing that few games fail to do. Interest my wife in playing video games with me. Fallout 3 could never pull that off. Perhaps thats why Wii Play is the best selling game of the last decade. Well that and its a no brainer as it comes with a Wii Controller for the same price as a controller itself.