Logbook: Gaming
VD-W2 Wii VGA cable part III.
Over the weekend i picked up a few GameCube games, Metroid Prime , F-zero GX, Killer7and Need for speed Hot pursuit 2. Now i previously wrote about the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable, This is the first time I’ve had a problem with the cable. The first game i tried was NFS:HS the game starts up and the display on the monitor goes nuts. Typical, EA and more crap they put out, You would figure as the one of the “top” gaming manufactures, it would support 480p. The gamecube supports 480p , but theres a catch. in order to get the game in 480p you need to hold down the B button on the gamecube controller when starting the game.
this is a small problem in my opinion since i don’t play too many GC games. But, if you intend to play Game Cube games using the VGA cable There is a list too help you out at Mobygames.com .
Overall the cable in my opinion is worth it with the one minor downfall of not supporting GC in 480i , but Most of the good games are supported in 480p for the game cube.
overall i’d say the cable too me is a 9/10 with that small drawback (to me)
GTA Moronity.
Sheesh Im sick of the news lately about video games.. there newest plug is going after Grand theft auto 4, No i haven’t played this one yet. but what the hell, you have all these idiots on TV saying that GTA is going to make you… Kill people , beat up prostitutes, Drive drunk, Eat your parents , microwave your cat than serve it for lunch, brew Decaf at your office and watch everyone suffer.
The News has coined the term that GTA is a “cop killing simulator” That kids are playing the game to train to kill people.. bullshit. Last time i looked at a gun it did not have an Xbox/PS3/Wii Attachment to the barrel of the gun. Nor does the game FORCE you to kill people.
The news has been using the tag line of “GTA Morality” all week, the thing is its more like Moronity, 9 times out of 10 these news casters have not played these games. But saying a game is making kids go bezerk and killing a bunch of people is the furthest from the truth .. if you have watched most incidents that have *happened* surrounding some sort of video game, 9999 times out of 10000 the person who Killed people or has done something extremely stupid has some serious preexisting problems. Not only that the responsibility of the gamer and gamers parents should be called into question. Letting your kid play GTA 16 hours a day … THATS NOT NORMAL. basically thats waking up Playing GTA till you goto bed.. yeah something is fucked up right there.
Parents should often evaluate the title before handing it off to kids. Rather than letting your little snowflake buy what ever game s/he pleases, Start in one place.. Look at the bottem right or left corner of the box… right there is a small little sign of what the game contains.
That right there kids is in indication of what exactly your walking into. Its No harder than movie ratings and is actually simpler than TV ratings.
Heres a look at the TV ratings and why there nothing but a clusterfuck
Sure there are 7 ratings but it actually gets a fair bit more complicated. After those ratings you normally see something like “TV-14 AVS” because with the TV ratings it goes way beyond the 7 initial ratings. there are also 12 more subratings.
- V for moderate violence
- S for mild sexual situations
- L for mild coarse language
- D for suggestive themes
- V for intense violence
- S for moderate sexual situations
- L for coarse language
- D for highly suggestive dialogue
- V for extreme gory violence
- S for pornography/extreme explicit sexual nature
- L for strong coarse language
- D was used for TV-M until it was changed to TV-MA in 1998; although was used on of Tripping the Rift
Video games have become the hot topic of the media for one reason, it gets the pressure off them and they can produce all the crazy shit they want while looking like the innocent ones. they need to hold that bus up, because if anything the media has caused more shit than anything. As much as i would hate bring this up. The VT shootings, That guy was tapped, and I saw this one comming a mile away, the cho or whatever his name sent a video to the Media networks. by playing the video, they validated that idiots point.
Every time someone shoots someone , the media is there to suck it up and make it into news. sensationalize the fuck out of it and inject it into your brain till you vomit the Fox/NBC/ABC logo out. Its highly hypocritical of the media to go after games when they have the exact same shit on tv..
Lets look at tonights listings why dont we….
CSI: Miami – Crazy person kills people and they go looking for him .
Medium – person Kidnaps blah blah..
48 Hours Mystery – Murders and shooting.
DEA – Drugs Murdering and shooting.
geez all that is on and it generally shows how they murdered people who did and what tools and normally if you watch the news long enough, you will find the occasional footnote that some stupid ass tried to use something they learned on CSI etc to do a crime.
Hitting the A,B,X,Y Triangle Square Whatever the button is doesn’t represent the act of what your doing, and if you are taking games seriously as they are being labeled, You should stop being a hypocrite and also take concern of your TV , movies and music.
Seriously these newscasters need to stop just making shit up and actually play the game through before even making one report about this. Rather than jump on the fearmongering bandwagon and make up stuff like people training themselves to drive drunk on GTA quote from gamepolitics.com
Savannah, Georgia TV station WSAV-3 reports that the Traffic Commander of the Savannah-Chatham Police Department is also concerned. Lt. Scott Simpkins told WSAV:
How many people are going to go ‘hey if I can master this, I can go out and instead of having a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, I can have 2 or 3 because I’ve been training how to drive intoxicated’? So these are the things that I have to worry about when stuff like this hits the market.
Whens the last time you drove to the store with an Xbox controller..? I thought so.. that does NOT translate to even making sense here. this comment alone is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. its like saying “HEY LETS GO HAMMER A FEW DOWN AND *TRAIN* TO DRIVE DRUNK!”.
They say that the Ratings are broken for Games.. Try watching some DVD’s .. watch any police academy , Airplane.. Countless other movies that swear up a storm and what rating do they have? PG , yes only PG.
what it basically comes down to.. is if you can not tell reality from game.. you shouldn’t be playing games. end of story .
How many kids ended up injured from watching power rangers because no one ever explained to them about violence and used the TV as a baby sitter? why doesnt the media go after that crap? Likely they have kids and if they take away the power rangers they actually have interact with there little snowflakes.
So before you blame some video game because your kids fed the cat to the angry pigeon that lives on your roof, Evaluate all things they do rather than scapegoat it because random newscaster said so.
Wii: Mario Kart impressions.
Well its another month and Another Good wii game comes out. As a big fan of Mario Kart for the SNES, I’ve not really played any mario Karts till i purchased the Wii, I had downloaded Mario Kart 64 for the wii and my reception to that was pretty blah..
Usually when it comes down to games I have an interest in , I tend to stay away from prerelease reviews and anything to do with the guts of the games. I have 2 reasons for doing that, I’d Rather figure out things for myself and I want an unbiased opinion of the game in my mind. Anyways…
Media… Completely fascinated with bored people .. and there wii’s
I find the media often gets fascinated with some pretty weird shit at times, weither its the next missing garden gnomes, or some star taking a dump… the media is there normally to smell it. Lately with the media getting involved with console gaming, they have been attacking it as the next WMD, to the Media it is something that beats your wife , kills your pets and makes your children into cannibals. When the media is bored i find thats when there at there most dangerous to themselves and others around them. So just doing my normal thing of looking at Fark.com , an article caught my eye and I clicked. the Title of it was “Growing a wii bit bored” from the Calgary Herald. but the dumbfuckery of this one gets to me. its a long write by me but I’ll take a stab at his stab.
read on for my silly take to this article of playing with numbers and attention whoring at its best from the calgary heralds department of pulling numbers outta there ass.
It starts
In an interview with gaming publication IGN.com, the president of Epic Games, which produces the incredible Gears of War for the Xbox 360, dumped on Nintendo’s Wii, dismissing the system that has sold 20 million units as a fad that will soon wane, and saying his company won’t ever be releasing games on it.
“The first time I played a videogame with my parents was on Atari 2600,” says Mike Capps. “The next time I played a videogame with my parents . . . was Wii Tennis. So it’s about bringing people together, families, Thanksgiving, all that. I think it’s kind of like a weird virus because I have not yet found a reason to play with my Wii since then.
“It’s a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so cool, I’m gonna go buy it. So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they’ve showed it to someone else who then goes out and buys it and so on.
theres so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. To Immediately just start dumping on something means your pissed off for one reason or another rather than taking a neutral bias to what your writing about. Also bringing the Asshat from epic in on the first line from and interview just starts this article all wrong.. I’m allowed to have bias here… gears of war? I couldn’t care any less for the game. I mean just how many times can you rehash unreal tournament. The comment alone is shortsighted, The reason people get the Wii is it is FUN…
As far the wii being a virus, i think not , Nintendo has realized that power is not everything. Generally i have one rule with gaming, the more eyecandy generally the shittier the game is for fun and replayability. I Do not play a game for eye-candy , I learned that lesson once too many that general focus on graphics tend to kill games, Or make the game so short its not worth it. Balancing graphics and gameplay is the key, people still play D&D… now theres some heavy fricken graphics for ya .. This guy is full of it .. by the looks of it this guy never played anything past Wii Sports. Continuing…
Console gaming and movie watching… When you dont have a TV.. Wait what?
When I got my Wii, it was a thought to exactly how i’d play the console since i don’t have a TV so to speak. Eventually I just ended up going to most efficient route for myself. I connect the Wii to my PC via an analog TV Card, it works fine for me. but there are little things you do notice between having the Wii connected to a TV vs connected to a PC through a TV card.
Personally i use my PC as my center for media, Watching movies, playing games(PC), and playing the Wii. I don’t need a super huge screen, having one would be nice but eh… what can you do. I don’t watch enough TV to validate the idea of getting cable or anything, the way channels are these days its just all rehash of programs anyways… what are we on now “survivor 923 – Night with the power out” edition? About the only thing I tend to watch is mythbusters.
The only thing about having the wii through an analog tv card though is that the screen looks a bit fuzzy and lagged a bit. I’ve tried out many digital Tuner cards with no luck whatsoever, Either I have some sort of weird problem or perhaps my pc is getting a bit aged.
I have tried –
- WinTV-HVR-1600 – This card is ok, If you have an Via Chipset/Nvidia Video card you will run into an overlay problem, easily fixed but …. the Crashes are not, generally HD channels look spectacular but on occasion the software would crash on channels with a low signal or format difference. Using it to play a console through was worthless, Trying to play the wii on this was like trying to play the Wii underwater , You would move the cursor, and the screen would always be half a second behind becoming extremely annoying fast.
- Pinnacle PCTV HD Card – out of the box the card was purely annoying… the install software DEMANDED to have WinXP Service pack 2 installed, Nothing would progress unless you did that. as far as channels it did not have the problems that the HVR1600 had, but there was a noticeable unsynchronized Audio, For having the Wii hooked up , Again Display lag issues made this card useless.
- Visiontek TV wonder 600 – based off the ATI TV wonder 600, installation was painless, Installation of software was relatively painless, Operation was terrible. Trying to pull in any sort of digital channels was totally out of the question no matter the position of the antenna NO channels were received. I even Put the antenna outside the window in hopes of seeing some sort of life from the tuner itself, For the Input part of the card for the Wii, This card got the Worst of the ratings – Display lag was far greater than the other cards, Up to 1.5 seconds of display lag which made any sort of console gaming Completely out of the question.
These card were all tried through about a years time, and Likely in the future possibly there will be a Digital HD TV card that will serve my purposes for both a TV Card and a Console hookup. but I have discovered theres a 4th option that would remove the PC completely from the math , which hopefully will remove all my percieved points that i dont like about running my Wii to Tv Card to PC output. while its the cheapest of the options I’ve only heard and seen very limited reviews on this I’ve ordered the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable . This will skip having the PC as an intermediary and plug directly into my monitor , which thankfully has 2 VGA inputs and 1 DVI input.
My hope is this will solve all my complaints about having the setup i do and having a more direct setup which eliminates a device which the console Passes through
Rant: Gaming and DLC/unlocks for money crap
Back in the day most addons or mods for games were created for users by users to extend a games life , but now it seems that the big 3 have taken the idea. Nintendo, sony and Microsoft are all making room on there plates for these DLC micro transactions for content. Usually I’d not write about these things but in the last year or so its caught on to such a point where its bugging the hell outta me. if you want to know why this bugs the hell outta me click read more to continue.
Super Smash Brothers Brawl, post Solo Subspace.
had a short post up yesterday but got rid of it in order to put up a better post.
I’ve so far played out the subspace emissary through to the end, To be honest the way the story is told is kinda of amazing in one respect since not one word of dialog is used. that mode alone takes about 8 to 10 hours to complete and for the ability of having a second player join you is really a nice add-on. Also as far as the subspace emisary the stages age agravating but the good agravating where you dont want to eat your controller
So far my online experience with brawl is limited to a few sessions but they are rather enjoyable. Missing from that is chat but thats a double edged sword right there. If you have played any “on-line” game dealing with the never ending stupidity of certain types of people wear on you after awhile. you are limited to a few different statements you can put in while your playing but nothing huge. as for the lack of a full chat – i don’t mind it since its a console. Sure the Wii has keyboard support but it is very limited at this time.
Plus a full chat client would be worse than a cell phone text conversation. “how r u” “am gd” ect ect text shorthand has its places but it gets annoying after awhile.
Until i play out smash brothers brawl online I’m not inclined to make a total decision on how good this game is. really from a single player point of view i find that Nintendo made a really good effort to appeal to many different players in this game.
As far as the hype that brawl had when it was announce for the Wii I intentionally mostly stayed away from sites hyping it up so i could have an as unbiased opinion as possible with brawl, too which in the end i am in glad I took that road. What really surprised me was the use of the Havok physics engine thats used in half life 2. Playing through you can see the physics at work with items and knocking things around which made me quite happy.
As far as this post is concerned though its relatively a beginning post because later.