SameOldSchmidt

Great site for messin’ around: Atari 2600 Label Maker

Happy Halloween! I hope you all have a safe night and score a lot of awesome candy. As for me, well, Tina is taking Genny back to Aurora/Hampton to trick or treat with our families so I’m on my own. In true lazy slob style, I’ll probably just microwave my dinner. I’ve got some Jalepeno Steak & Cheese Hot Pockets that have been calling my name for weeks; hope they’re not freezer-burned…

I don’t have too much in the hopper. I’m gonna go to a couple places to look for some dual-layer blank DVDs. Those boogers are hard to find! I should just order them online but whatever, this’ll give me a little something to do. If you know a place here in Lincoln to get dual-layer blanks, please leave me a comment.

Then I’ll try to put a few more hours into Manhunt 2, which I started playing late last night. I’ve got that infamously leaked Playstation 2 version that’s supposed to be totally uncut. I don’t feel too conflicted about playing the leak because I definitely intended to buy it, and still may pick it up on Wii some day. I support Manhunt and want it to succeed. I bought the original game twice: once on PS2 and once on Xbox. I want to support this new sequel, but I don’t want to pay for a crippled, watered-down version. I’m frickin’ 27, nobody needs to protect me from violent content in a video game.

And of course, I’ll have to pause the Playstation when South Park comes on. I’m really interested to see where they go with this 3-part arc that’s concluding tonight.

I picked up Urban Chaos: Riot Response brand new for $4.99 in one of those little video game bargain bins at Best Buy a couple months ago. It came out back in 2006, as the original Xbox platform was winding down and the Xbox 360 was taking the spotlight. I just finished the main campaign mode of UC today and had a lot of fun with it.

The game is a first-person shooter set in a large city in the near future. A hyper-violent gang is running wild and the city has become a war zone. You play as a member of a special anti-gang squad that is authorized to use extraordinary force.

There are a few interesting play mechanics that set UC apart from the plethora of FPS games on the Xbox. Most prominently is the riot shield: a transparent, bullet-proof shield that you can raise by pressing the L shoulder button. Using the shield is crucial to success in UC. With the shield raised you can withstand almost all enemy gunfire without taking damage. As the shield is used, it becomes riddled with bulletholes, cracks, blood spatter, etc so that the more you rely on the shield, the worse your visibility becomes. You can’t fire a gun while the shield is raised, but you can thrust it forward and knock an enemy off-balance, giving you a chance to lower the shield and get some shots off.

Another prominent mechanic is the use of supporting NPCs. Sort of like a squad-based game, I suppose, but a little different because your squadmates in UC are firemen, paramedics, engineers, etc who you’ll need for various specific tasks throughout the game. There are often a couple other police officers running around with you through the missions as well. Thankfully almost all of these NPCs are smart enough to not get themselves killed and, in the case of the police officers, they actually do a good job of helping out in a firefight.

The graphics in UC are perfectly acceptable, in my opinion, for a last-gen shooter. The urban environments look good, although they do sort of blend together from level to level. The enemies all look very similar; they’re all dudes in hockey masks, except for a few gang leaders who look a little different. I would have liked some more visual variety to the enemies; it would have been cool if each of the 10 or so gang leaders was more of an individualized character.

There’s a lot to do in the game, with multiple goals in each of the 10 or so main levels, as well as 6 timed “emergency” levels that you can unlock by apprehending gang leaders alive. Overall I thought UC was very fun and most definitely worth the bargain price I paid.

Editor’s Note: screenshots ganked from other sites via Google image search, credit goes to whichever sites they were

That’s Sailor Mercury punching Akuma in the face. Pretty cool, huh? The weird text is debugging info that can be toggled on and off. I’ll act smart and say that I’m actually crunching those numbers for… um… scientific MUGEN purposes.

Tina was giving me some guff for piddling around with this so much lately, but customizing my own MUGEN setup has really captured my imagination. I guess it’s because I like sorting through things, categorizing and organizing them. And when we’re talking about sorting through 1500 fighting game characters and choosing ones that I like, well that’s like the perfect timesink for me. It’s totally sucked me in.

There’s this guy, montyoum, who makes pretty awesome video mash-ups of video game characters. He got a lot of buzz for his “Haloid” video featuring Master Chief and Samus Aran. He’s just put out a new video called Dead Fantasy 1, which features characters from Dead or Alive and Final Fantasy X. Very cool.

Before I went to bed last night I FTP’d into my Xbox and copied over the QOF characters along with the definition file I had edited by hand. I booted up the game and, to my surprise, everything seemed to work fine. This Xmugen stuff will probably be a fun thing to play around with, adding new music, customizing some graphics and junk like that. I don’t see myself getting really deep into it, but I’ll have some fun tweaking the setup here and there.

So, if you want to play a B-grade Street Fighter clone with 600+ characters, including topless cartoon chicks, just drop by the crib some time.

So I got Xmugen, or X-M.U.G.E.N. or however it’s supposed to be spelled, up and running on my Xbox. I had to FTP into the console with a crossover cable and copy the game files onto the Xbox that way. I have a laptop, so it’s easy enough to hook that up to the Xbox for file transfers.

The game doesn’t run quite like other games that I’ve loaded onto my Xbox hard drive. Xmugen has to load up a linux distro and then run itself inside of that environment. It’s sort of a lengthy start-up process, and you lose the soft reset that all my other Xbox games and apps have. Kind of irritating when you’re used to quick loads and the ability to jump back to the dashboard (main menu) of the Xbox at will. But then, how important is it, really? I’m griping about a freeware video game!

The game itself? It’s pretty cool, fun to piddle around with but definitely a novelty thing. The schtick is that it’s got 500+ characters and you can load in more, take others out and customize your game in a lot of different ways. For example, I definitely want to try and integrate the Queen of Fighters characters into my Xmugen setup. As a game, it’s nowhere near an official Capcom or SNK fighter in terms of play quality or overall tightness, but some day when I actually have some friends over I can see this being a blast to play for a little while.

I’ve been looking at stuff for this freeware fighting game engine called M.U.G.E.N. It’s pretty cool, different people have put together all sorts of different characters and stages for it. I’m trying to set up a version to run on my Xbox, but it’s a little complicated.

But, anyway, one rather… interesting… M.U.G.E.N. game I came across is The Queen of Fighters, made by some guy in Argentina.

I love this site called Hardcore Gaming 101. It must be affiliated with GameSpy in some way, but it seems to operate as its own entity for the most part. The design is sort of plain-jane but that works fine since there’s so much great content available. They do these exhaustive articles that are full of awesome screen shots, like a 9-page piece on the Samurai Shodown series. It’s a great site to check out if you want to piddle away some time.

I used to have a black Game Boy Micro but I gave it away when we moved from Missouri to Nebraska back in May. Tina was kind of mad at me, but I thought I was doing something nice at the time. I gave it to some kids at church because they were into GBA, but they only had the original model, that atrocious thing with the impossible-to-see screen.

That’s how my mind works; I see the starving African kids on TV and I’m like “whatever” but I see some kids playing a first-model GBA and I feel it’s my duty to help them out. The Micro’s backlit and it’s got a built-in rechargeable battery, so they won’t have to bug their parents for AA’s all the time. As we were moving, I was on a big “get rid of stuff I don’t need” kick, so I gave away the Micro and I felt fine about it.

But just lately I’ve had an urge to play some GBA games that I never finished. Stuff like Zelda: The Minish Cap and a dozen or so others. I gave away the Micro because I have a DS Lite and I figured it would be just as good for playing my GBA games. Turns out I just don’t like playing GBA stuff on the DS, though. The main thing is that the buttons aren’t placed quite right. It would be pretty cool if you could map the DS buttons however you wanted for GBA mode (put L & R on the face, for example) but unless I’m missing something, the DS doesn’t have this feature.

So, I went looking for a replacement Micro, specifically the retro-styled 20th Anniversary one that I had seen in stores some months after I had bought my black one. The anniversary edition is meant to resemble the controllers of the old Japanese Famicom system (basically the Japanese version of what we knew as the original NES).

I believe there are still several stores that have Micro’s in stock, including the Famicom version. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them recently at both Wal-Mart and Best Buy. I decided to go eBay, though, because I have a PayPal balance and that always feels like play money, plus I could replace what I spent by selling some PS2 games. I got over $30.00 for my PS2 MGS2:Substance disc this weekend, which was more than half of the $53.95 I ended up spending on the Micro. Cool beans. My PS2 GH Silent Hill 2 only went for $8.95, though, which kind of surprised me. I mean, I have it for Xbox so I don’t really care, but… oh well.

I guess I’d say it’s an aesthetic toss-up between the 20th Anniversary edition Micro and the black one I used to have. Black is undeniably sleek and always classy. The 20th Anniversary is very shiny, in a red and gold scheme that’s a bit more “blingy” than I might normally care for, but the retro chic trumps the gaudiness for me.