Day: July 3, 2006

10 manliest games of all time

(via 4ColorRebellion)

In a recent required reading post, the folks at 4 Color Rebellion linked readers up to a listing of the 10 manliest games of all time.  While what 10 games are manliest really isn’t worth knowing, the reasons behind the games making the list is sometimes worth checking out.  Here are a couple that caught my eye.

#3: Custer’s Revenge
System: Atari 2600
Developer: Mystique
Year of Release: 1982

Had Custer’s Revenge come out in the robot-heavy early 1990’s it probably would have been called “Rape Simulator 2000”. That’s right, this is the only game in the history of the interactive entertainment (to my knowledge) where the goal is to rape a helpless woman! While we don’t condone rape here at Arthur’s Hall, it suddenly becomes pretty damn harmless (not to mention hilarious) once you put it in the context of a Atari 2600 video game that was released over 20 years ago.

The gameplay is simple… you are a naked and horny General Custer with a big fat 4-bit boner. On the far right of the screen is a naked Indian maiden tied to a stake. The goal is to have sex with her as much as possible without getting hit by the arrows falling from the sky. The action button is the “rape button” and can be pressed once you work your way over to the maiden to ravage her. If you rape her for two long, you will no doubt be hit by the falling arrows. It’s best to move away and wait for an opening to rape her some more. You are awarded points for every thrust of course.

Yes, this is sick and depraved, and whoever programmed this game should probably be sent to prison. Still, who else would have had the balls to make a game like this? The whole concept is just insane. Custer’s Revenge just might be the most politically incorrect thing I’ve ever witnessed, and that makes it manly as hell.

Yup.  Sick and depraved.  I’ve never even played the game, but the description sure makes it sound tasteless.  Fortunately, the video quality of the 2600 wasn’t enough to really show this disturbing game in its full, um, glory.

#6: Ikaruga
System: Multi System (Arcade, Dreamcast, Gamecube)
Developer: Treasure
Year of Release: 2000, 2002, 2003

There is something really primeval and manly about those old-school space shooters. I’m talking about great games like R-Type, Gradius, and Sidearms. They were simple, impossibly difficult, and quite demanding when it came to old-fashioned pattern memorization… a very manly trait indeed.

Ikaruga is quite likely the greatest space shooter ever designed. It is impossibly hard, dense, and one of the greatest and most meticulously designed video games ever created. Ikaruga takes the ideas of decades of vertical and horizontally scrolling space shooters, improves on them, and then turns them on their head.

There is more to this game’s description.  Just in case you aren’t familiar with Ikaruga, know that it is considered one of the hardest old-style scrolling shooters ever made.  I’ve looked for this game, but never found it at a price I could afford.  Sadly, it wasn’t highly available in the US.

One final note about the article – Contra is listed as the #1 manliest game ever.  I won’t argue yes or no on this, but I will mention that the latest Official XBox Magazine includes the news that Contra will be available for the XBox360 in the near future.  I don’t have the magazine in front of me now to check the details (and I skipped reading it initially except for the headline), but I’m guessing it’s an XBox Live title, and probably available in classic (i.e., original) mode and some enhanced graphics mode.  So if you missed it first time around, you should have a chance soon to play this great game.

[tags]Manly, Gaming[/tags]

More potential problems for Sony/PS3?

I have not seen Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD videos, so I have nothing to say yes or no to this, but Robert Scoble is seeing techies suggest HD-DVD as the better format. What he has seen in the AVSForum apparently is making it to bigger tech news sites now. I should point out that at least a couple of comments in response to Scoble’s post suggest “WTF? Are you on crack” response from proclaimed techies. I’m just pointing out that if what Scoble says is true, then Sony may have just found an added hurdle to getting the PS3 as game console and center-of-your-AV-world device accepted.

I was hanging out on the AVSForum the other day and saw several posts from people who said that in their comparisons HD-DVD is far superior to BlueRay tests.

Today those posts are getting reported in CentreDaily.

See how the grassroots could be changing popular opinion?

And a snip of the Centredaily article:

Based on the first round of reports, the HD-DVD format is garnering praise, but Blu-ray is garnering almost universal scorn from reviewers and enthusiasts alike. Reviewer Evan Powell, of projectorcentral.com, commented of Blu-ray: “The image quality does not measure up to what we would expect from a high-definition source, and it certainly falls short of the hype.”

At the AVS Forum, home-theater buffs had even harsher reactions. A sampling of their comments: “There’s no getting around the fact that, at this time, BD is not as good as HD-DVD”; “I watched one and a half movies when I realized that they look horrible. … needs to go to the scrap heap”; “This has to count as one of the greatest AV disappointments I can remember!”; “I took it back after two days. … I just couldn’t justify keeping the Samsung when I considered what I’m getting from the Toshiba at half the price”; and “Too much money, too little performance. It went back!” You can read these and more comments under the Blu-ray player and HD-DVD player forums at www.avsforum.com.

[tags]Robert Scoble, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, PS3[/tags]

Worlds first instant camera

Well, I don’t think this idea of nearly instant viewing of your photos will ever catch on, but the folks at Modern Mechanix have a scan from an old article trumpeting this new-fangled camera from Polaroid that gives finished, dried photos in 60 seconds. Why, in my day, we had to wait days – sometimes weeks – to get our photos. All you crazy kids and your instant-this and instant-that.

cropped-polaroid.JPG

YOUR present camera performs only one of many steps—developing, fixing, printing, and so on—involved in making a photograph. Edwin H. Land, 38-year-old president of the Polaroid Corporation, has invented a one-step process in which the camera does everything. With his camera, you snap the shutter and turn a knob; 60 seconds later you have a finished, dry print. The Land camera takes its pictures in the conventional way, but inside it, in addition to the film roll, there is a roll of positive paper with a pod of developing chemicals at the top of each frame. Turning the knob forces the exposed negative and the paper together through rollers, breaking the pod and spreading the reagents evenly between the two layers as they emerge from the rear of the camera. Clipped off, they can be peeled apart a minute later.

Ordinary chemicals are used, but the negative is not transparent and light is not required for printing. The unexposed portions of silver halide are transferred from the negative to form the positive image.

Land says that ordinary transparent film can be adapted to one-step photography, but he sees no need for it. If additional prints are desired, the easiest way is to make additional exposures. If necessary, the original print can be rephotographed.

[tags]Polaroid, Instant camera, Modern Mechanix[/tags]

Massive (well, massive-ish) list of freeware utilities

(via Freeware wiki)
Here is a list of 450+ freeware utilities to solve many of your pressing (and not so pressing) software vexations. Everything from anti-spyware/anti-virus to audio/video tools to office work to programming tools and plenty more.

protect the computer against viruses : AVG Free

password protect a text file : Steganos LockNote

view images in an album folder : Irfanview

see 3d space simulation : Celestia

That’s just a tiny sample of the variety of freeware you can see on the page.

[tags]Freeware, Utilities[/tags]

US updates Iraq “Most-Wanted” list – no playing cards this time

CNN has a story about the US making a new Iraq’s most wanted list.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraq unveiled a list of the country’s most-wanted fugitives Sunday, including Saddam Hussein’s wife and daughter.

Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri tops the list, which Iraqi officials said contains 41 names.

Al-Duri was deputy commander of Iraq’s armed forces under Hussein and was No. 6 on the U.S. military’s list of 55 most-wanted Iraqi officials that was released in 2003. He is the highest- ranking figure from that U.S. list not to have been captured or killed.

At only 41 people now, this isn’t enough to make a new deck-of-cards. But now we get Hussein’s wife and daughter in the list.

Hussein’s daughter and first wife — Raghad Saddam Hussein and Sajidah Khairallah Tilfah Hussein — are Nos. 16 and 17, respectively.

Raghad Hussein lives in Jordan, where she and her sister were granted asylum. She has been helping orchestrate her father’s defense as he faces war crimes charges in an Iraqi court.

I don’t see an easy way around that Jordanian asylum thing, though. That lady might be tough to get.

[tags]Iraq, Most Wanted, Hussein[/tags]

Good God, Microsoft image “viewer” is retarded

While looking over some of my pictures from Ireland, I rotated a couple of them in the Windows image and fax viewer program (a system on which I cannot load new, better software for this task, so I was using the default).  There was a warning about the image possibly losing visual quality as a result of the rotation.  I said that was OK, looked at the re-oriented image, and moved on.  When I closed the image viewer, I found my thumbnail images were actually updated/changed by changes I made in the viewer program!  Upon opening the images again, I see that they are indeed changed from the originals.
I never said that I wanted to save the images after roatating them, as far as I know, but they were saved any way.  Fortunately, this is a copy of the directory containing the original images, so I haven’t lost anything.  Still, even with all the stupid things I suffer through while using Microsoft software, I never expected an image viewer to overwrite an image after I changed the displayed image so I could see it better.

[tags]Microsoft, Image viewer[/tags]