DogsWithoutWings.com Blog

So this morning I was getting in my car to get to work and I saw the funniest thing. A dog ran at full speed past my house, then a man with a leech in his hand, then another dog, then an SUV with its door open. I eventually caught up with the SUV, which had now pulled over to the side of the road and this was the image I saw. One dog and the man at the side of the lake looking in. They were looking towards a few ducks swimming in a pack, then I noticed something. The dog's head sticking out of the water just behind the school of ducks. I wish I had enough time to watch and see what would have happened, you know, just trying to help. That made my day.

Yes kids, before your time we didn't have this automatic health regeneration stuff. The whole purpose of the game was not to get shot, at all. Now you just run into a room guns blazing, then you rest for 5 seconds to heal your wounds like Wolverine. But back in the Contra days, bullets could be dodged, like the hero had permanent bullet time. So this type of gameplay seemed fair (yes, Contra didn't have health packs). Resistance does a regeneration/health pack hybrid that can be frustrating on the harder difficulty levels.

There are 4 levels of health, regeneration only takes you to the top of that level. Each health pack takes you back up one level. Not so bad? It is. Even on normal difficulty it only takes a few shots to remove 2-3 levels of health. Then you are back to playing hide and seek, taking one shot before waiting 5-6 seconds to recharge. The sequel actually abandoned this for the Gears of War style red screen when you are hurt, which made it a much more enjoyable game to play.

Maybe today's gamers are spoiled, but I don't miss heath packs either. I even returned Prince of Persia because there was too much backtracking to collect orbs, but that is for another article. Easy to learn, hard to master. Do it the Nintendo way.

For some odd reason whenever I try to play a video in Windows 7 RC, WMP would open to a very tiny window. In previous versions, it would remember the size of the last time the program was closed, but this was not working. By accident I found that resizing the window while playing an MP3 would cause it to remember the dimensions. So in summary:

1. Open MP3 file.
2. Resize window.
3. Close.
   

I washed my zune in my pants. I tried my best to get it dry before turning it on, but in the end had to bury it. The good news is that I got another (blue 8 gig).

I added a now playing silverlight app you should see on the left column. I also improved the look of my video player which I actually like now. Also added full screen mode, still need to add seeking. So much to do!

So I rented Project Gotham Racing 4 to get my speed fix on, but I was surprised by the number of races that required me to slide around the track. Yes, they stop the time whenever you drift or do other stunts, and it is impossible to win without doing this on the straights. Yes you must drive slower to win. Forza didn't hold me longterm because the lack of tracks making the races too similar. Gran Turismo is still months (years?) away. Competition should be intense in this genre, Gran Turismo 4 sold over 10 million copies. Noone wants a piece of the action? I guess developmental costs are way above other games since hundreds of cars need to be licensed and modeled. They must pay a large legal team to oversee these deals. I wonder if lawyers in Japan make as much as they do in the US. Hmm. I hope the next game they ship to me is Resident Evil 5, I needs me some coop action.

In trying to test whether Battlefield 2 would eat up my 8 gig system (I think the game itself can only use 2gigs since it is 32 bit), I found out that Punkbuster would not work on Windows 7 beta. And they will not support it until it is released to the public, blah.

Here's what happens. I join a server (usually infantry only), and start to do some major ownage. Right as I am about to own some uber noob the server kicks me with this error message 'unknown api function.' Tried everything, even running as admin (which I did by default).

On a related topic, I just got my Battlefield Heroes beta key Woot! If the gameplay is too fast I will be disappoint (sic).

I finally threw in the towel. I watched about half of the latest episode and quit. It just doesn't interest me anymore, and hasn't since season 1.

After chugging along with my dual core AMD X2 4600 for a few years, I decided to make the leap to quad core. I picked up a Q9400 Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66ghz for a little less than I got the AMD for. I decided to also pick up 8 gigs of memory which cost around $100 (when did memory get so cheap?) and I moved into the 64 bit world with Windows 7 beta. The only other upgrade was to my power supply, I went from 420W to 650W. Now I have to figure out what to do with this old motherboard, etc.

Everything feels faster, but what was most surprising was alt-tabbing/quitting out of Red Alert 3 and not hearing the hard drive thrash around for a minute. Lots of memory FTW. I will have to try Battlefield 2. Even though it is an old game, it used a ton of memory.

I'm almost all my way through reading a book on Silverlight and have some ideas of projects to do in addition to finishing my video player (I will get that done first). I'm also doing some cool + complex stuff for work so that will have take precedence although I'm learning a lot doing my project. Just wanted to say Dependency Attributes are the ish. Looking to learn about the Model-View-ViewModel pattern before I go any further.

So there's this new show on Fox called Dollhouse with the sexy Eliza Dushku that I watched because of Eliza, and also it was created by Joss Whedon who I heard is some great sci-fi writer (never seen anything by him before). Maybe it's all going over my head, but the show is mega boring. I already want to quit after just 2 episodes. The only other show I didn't give more time to was Cavemen.

Onto other shows. Fringe still has me interested while I keep promising myself to quit Heroes every episode. I like Survivor as always, The Office, Idol, and the new show Homeland Security USA. Lost is lacking the mystery of previous seasons. I'm mildly interested in Sober House and still a regular Judge Judy watcher (her rules: don't sell/buy/loan/cosign for friends/relatives).

Yes, I love the APC. I know it's just a machine but it is a very convenient machine. Since the last time I sold my old games on Ebay, the USPS remodeled their post offices to include my new BFF (ignore that I wrote that), the Automated Postal Center.

It is available 24hrs (at some locations), weighs and prints postage for anything. Even during business hours, since most people don't want to use it, there is no wait time at all. So please do not use my APC, I want it free for me.

Here are the 3 best technology podcasts.

1. Security Now - Steve Gibson and Leo Laport discuss the latest security concerns in a way that anyone can understand.
2. Cranky Geeks - Hosted by John C. Dvorak. Discussions/arguments about the latest techno news.
3. This Week in Tech - Ex 'Tech TV' staff dissect the latest technology news.
   

Got my first real portable media player. Some things I like initially:   

• Subscription music - Hopefully they can get all tracks available, some are purchase only.
• Channels - A list of songs updated weekly based on a theme or recommendations. Downloaded and sent to zune automatically, can also be updated while away via wifi.
• Podcasts - You can pause podcasts and continue later at where you left off, even if you listen to other stuff.
• XNA - Created some stuff already, pretty cool.
• Future Proof - Updates will be available to my current zune (probably till a processor speed upgrade).

Only 3 weeks away.

One of the best games I have ever played. Still going strong for months, the trailer made me as giddy as a school girl. Doesn't matter what happens, I'm getting this game.

Diablo 3!!!

Wow, I loved 2. Too bad in its later life a lot of play styles were nerfed. The last game I bought for PC was the Battlefield 2 collection (I had B2 at launch, but went back to get all the expansions), wasn't really into 2142 because of the futuristic setting. Just for nostalgic reasons I installed D2 on my Vista laptop and got a Necro up to level 40 and it was a blast. I had to run the game as an admin, and it did crash once on me. But I've had it crash on XP as well. I'm still puzzled as to why DirectDraw gives me better performance than Direct 3D, even on my desktop. This game is 8 years old, I should not be having frame rate drops.

I just updated my site videos from Flash to Silverlight. I built the player myself so it looks very basic (ugly) right now. Most of the functionality I need is there but I will make updates to it periodically (mostly UI). I made this after reading a few chapters on WPF, which is the new XML based windowing framework for Vista. Since Silverlight uses a subset of WPF, I started the player project to test my skills.

Here's a video I captured at the zoo.

!Jordan (not Jordan = Kobe) was gonna lose anyway. The NBA could not have pushed it to game 7 since it was a complete blowout. Maybe Lebron should be pushed as the next MJ. At least he went out to Boston scoring 45 in the 7th game. That is what a superstar should be.!Jordan was never the goto guy, after hitting a few 3 pointers in the first quarter, he pretty much disappeared. As Reggie Miller did, if you are gonna go out, at least go out shooting.

-End of Season