Month: February 2006

Anyone who follows gaming sites has probably read their fair share of stinker rumours recently. I’ve amalgamated a few of the recent ones into a generic format below and included a few links to the stupidest ones.

First the general structure:

My [ friend’s | father’s | mum’s ] [ friend | father | mum ] works at [ Nintendo | Sony | Adobe | Electronics Boutique | Microsoft | unrelated graphics card manufacturer ] and they said that the new [ PS3 | Revolution | PSP | Nintendo DS | stupidly large Microsoft handheld ] is going to have [ implausible 3D projection technology | dual analog joysticks | an internal HDD | flash memory | touch sensitivity ]. This will undoubtably make it a [ PS3 | Revolution | PSP | Nintendo DS | Xbox360 ] killer !!!

Sincerely yours,

[ l337 | MS | SoNy | Nintendo ] [ fanboi | grrl | Gamer | H4x0r ]

BTW: [DS | Xbox360 | PSP] [ rocks | sucks ] !!!

And now an example:

My friend’s dad works at Nintendo and they said that the new Revolution is going to have implausible 3D projection technology. This will undoubtably make it a PS3 killer !!!

Sincerely yours,

NintendoGamer

BTW: PSP sucks !!!

On a serious note though, what is so implausible and funny about a “mom” working at Nintendo? I had hoped we’d be over that sort of gender stereotyping by now. 🙁

http://www.palgn.com.au/a…a225b7e178d8fb9

The complete Singstar Rocks! tracklist has been posted over at PAL Gaming Network Australia (It’s a good site for Australia specific gaming news).

Well, they may have posted the entire tracklist and they may have done it first, but I’ll be the one to only post the new bit of information that really matters:

• The Scorpions – “Wind of Change”

“Take me to the magic of the moment. On a glory night…”

In an effort to beat the heat, I made some jelly yesterday. They are mostly port wine flavoured with peach slices, but there are a few Passiona (pronounced: Pash-huana) flavoured ones with some real passionfruit.

Stop by and pick one up before they are all gone!

Update: Apologies to everyone not in Perth!

It’s been uncomfortably hot the last few days, but most people I know work in an air-conditioned office (or have air-conditioning at home) and can’t really empathise. Well, damn you all!

We’re waiting on a an air-conditioning unit we bought on eBay and it’s taking its sweet time getting here. The eBay page was fairly informative, but I poked around the internet searching for more details. That’s when I found this:

Behold the plastic wood-grain! The logical conclusion to any industrial design question! Bask in its magnificence! Needless to say, we immediately contacted the seller to see if we could get it in “Luxourious burlwood”! However, they don’t have that style and it looks like we’ll have to be happy with standard silver.

We’re not quite sure exactly if this sort of cooler works very well, but the specifications look good and we will find out soon enough. Actually not soon enough! We want it now!

Although completely unrelated to the recent onetwenty downtime, I’ve had fairly intermittent internet access since my last post.

Most of the problems have been with the telephone line itself. We’ve had quite a bit of crosstalk and the ADSL has been unable to synchronise. I called amcom and (after waiting on hold for 20 minutes) spoke to someone who clearly knew their stuff and was very helpful.

We found that phone calls made with our landline came up with caller ID from some unknown number, so we called Telstra and they sent someone over. After they fixed that problem, the crosstalk remained and they sent somone over again.

It all seems to be working now and I’ve pretty happy with the service from Telstra and very happy with amcom. They even called back today to confirm that our problems are resolved, and the 8Mb/1Mb connection with static IP at no extra charge is great! It’s definitely much better than our previous experience with iiNet and Telstra.

We spent our first night in the new place last Saturday and have been cleaning and organising things since then. The kitchen is usable, the plumbing generally works, and (most importantly) our ADSL was connected today. So I’m back online and getting back into things.

Thanks to Tone for his impeccable furniture arranging advice and to Minh and Jason for “felting” the dining set.

Update: added photo of the view. There’s not much to see inside 😛

http://the-magicbox.com/0602/game060215c.shtml

According to The Magicbox, this is the new look for Bomberman on the Xbox360:

What? For comparison, here is an image of the original bomberman that I pulled from Wikipedia:

What is going on in this crazy, crazy world?! I mean… (ahem)”this new visual aesthetic marks a distinct new direction in style when compared to the classic Bomberman art”.

Musings on the possible appeal to a western gaming market and the problem of continuity after the jump!

Update: Looks like insert credit feels the same way!

Continue reading “Bomberman goes badass”

Alternate title: Be the early career Michael Jackson of the video-gaming world!

If you haven’t heard about it yet, the controller for the next generation Nintendo video-game console is a doozy. It looks fairly modest, like a television remote control with only a few buttons. However, it has possibly the coolest feature ever to grace video game controllers: it knows where it is and where you’re pointing it.

The game developer and game player communities are ablaze with anticipation! What interesting, wild, crazy, and zany ways can games use this unique controller? What gaming wonders lay beyond this precipice of user interaction? My answer to both questions: not much you didn’t see coming.

Continue reading “Don’t forget the “obvious” games!”

It looks like my XboxMove mockups were picked up by xbox360fanboy. Of course… I submitted it as possible news… but I’m glad that it was interesting enough to warrant a post on their site!

I appreciate all the comments and hope to see this model in 3D sometime soon (ish). Even more so, I hope to see it on shelves… with a big fat design royalties cheque made out to me! Mwahahahah!

Between the spam e-mails that litter my csse e-mail account, I found a couple of messages from a Microsoft recruiting officer. At first I thought that they were spam, but upon inspection they seem to be legit.

The end result? I missed a scheduled telephone interview with Microsoft. Since I’m not really looking for work at the moment I sent them a polite response to that effect.

It looks like they just searched for resumes and sent out e-mails. Did anyone else receive something similar?

Update: A big correction! Changed “really looking” to “not really looking”!