When Your XBox Smokes, Its Time to Go Buy an XBox 360
I estimate its almost exactly 5 years today that I bought my original XBox from the Wal-Mart in Kirksville while I was still in college, and the next day I went to work at the local Hastings and used my discount to buy a copy of World Series Baseball 2k3. Cut to 5 today I have played that game for 5 straight years and have amassed a overall record of 729-249 with 11 playoff appearances and 9 Championships all over 12 seasons (for a shortened 82 games a season) most of which on the “Expert” level.
Yeah, I like this game…a lot…and yes, I’ve tried almost every baseball game out since and none are as solid as this one.
With those stats in your head, you can imagine how sad I was when I sat down today to play the last few games of my 12th regular season and saw a wisp of smoke float out of my trusty XBox controller followed by that familiar smell of burning electronics. I looked for the source on my controller and then noticed that when I bent the cable you could clearly see sparks shooting out of a hole in the cable (see photo below). I’m no electrical engineer, but thats probably not good.
I know its just the controller and I do have a spare (though I hate it) but to me, this seems like a sign that after five straight years of use, its time for me to move on. I’ve been thinking about getting a 360 quite a bit lately anyway, and this might be the last straw.
I’m leaning hard about getting the $349 version with the 20 gb hard drive, the headset and such.
Any current 360 owners have thoughts on:
- How well Connect360 works so I can play content from my Macs on there?
- Any good baseball games?
- Is there any chance I can move my saved baseball game to the new XBox?
- What are the best shoot-em games?
I’m sad to see my XBox get old, but at least this way I can get Rock Band!
Hexen Lives On OS X (and so does Heretic, Doom and others!)
Who says Macs and OS X don’t play games? Sure they don’t play some of the new ones, but I have news for you: Those new games are just rehashes of the classics. By “classics” I mean of course: Doom, Doom 2, Hexen, Heretic, and Duke Nukem. Why screw with the new when you can rock out all night playing the originals on your OS X machine.
Yup, Nukem and the boys from ID Software are all playable on your mac. How? What’s the cost? Does it suck? All these questions will be answered below on a per-game basis:
1. Duke Nukem
What you need:
You need the Duke Nukem OS X install software (get it here). If you want to play more than just the shareware map, you need the retail edition of the Duke Nukem Atomic Edition. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve had a hell of a time finding a usable ISO anywhere on the net, and if you buy it from somewhere expect to spend $20.
Cost:
Free for the shareware level, $20 bones if you want the levels and you don’t already have a disk.
How is it?:
The shareware plays nicely for the most part. There were a few hangs, but very minimal. What can I say? Its classic Duke with lame sayings and pictures of girls dancing that I’ve found are less likely to give me a chubby all these years later.
2. ID Games: Doom, Doom 2, Hexen, Heretic…
What you need:
The awesomely named Doomsday Engine. Frankly, I don’t give a shit if this software is just a crappy alarm clock and has a dock icon of an erect penis, I’m downloading anything named “Doomday Engine”. You will also need the WAD file from any of the ID games you want to play. You may still have these in a dust covered floppy box and if not, a quick torrent search will give you a rar filled with all of them…or so I’ve heard.
Cost:
Nothing really. Just the time and bandwidth you are usually using to download and view porn.
How is it?:
Is “so bitchin’ I creamed myself” too strong? Maybe a little. I had a few jitters and one game of Doom found it freezing for a split second every minute or so, but I haven’t noticed it since. Other than that, the sound, graphics and everything play as smoothly as on a Pentium 100 with 24 Mb of RAM.
Quake and others?
I’ve heard things here and there that Quake(s) can be on OS X as well, but I haven’t been able to track down any installers or front-ends as of this posting, but please leave a comment or get a hold of me if you have the goods on getting Quake or any other classic game going on OS X.
So there you have it, classic shotem-up games rockin on OS X! In fact, I played them most of the weekend and the only side effects I felt were an increased sense of awesomeness and a strong urge to kill a monster that throws fireballs with a shotgun.
…luckily for her, I have no idea where Rosie O’Donnell lives.
Quinn Is Back, Now With ‘Snarkiness’
Quinn is truly the Minesweeper counterpart on the Mac. That one addictive game that while using that OS I have to make myself not play it in between tasks. (For the uninitiated, Quinn is a beautifully designed port of tetris to OS X.) The difference being that Microsoft installs Minesweeper by default on all Windows machines, and Quinn is was is distributed by a third party developer, Simon Haertel. Last month, Quinn was ruthlessly shot down in its prime by the god dammed Russians, I mean the Tetris Company because it infringed on its copyrights. Well, its back and here is the wonderfully bitchy description that the site now carries. Emphasis mine.
Quinn is an implementation of a popular falling-blocks game, which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here. Written specifically for Mac OS X, it features a neat user interface, perfectly integrated with Aqua, and a smooth look and feel for best user enjoyment. The goal was not to reinvent falling-blocks games with yet another modification of the rules, but to preserve the simplicity of the original idea. Still there’s everything you might expect—including a two-player mode, network play with Bonjour support, an onine server list, and five different multiplayer rules.
Nice work Simon. Stay strong brother!
If you are running OS X, and you don’t have Quinn, go get it.
Via Daring Fireball
Windows Mobile Nintendo Emulation
I’ve just spent the past hour searching the net for a good NES or SNES or GameBoy emulator for my T-Mobile MDA running Windows Mobile 5. PocketSNES mostly worked playing Super Mario Cart. No sound, and the buttons didn’t set well. gnuboy looked promising, but I couldn’t get it to install.
Does anyone know of an opensource game system emulator for Windows Mobile 5 phones? I would love some help on this one.
Geek Test: Name Nintendo Games From Their Covers
Think you’re the Classic Nintendo (thats “NES” for the cool kids) master? Think you can name all the games by just looking at their box and a screenshot? Well here’s your chance to proove it…its harder than it seems. I got most of them, but there were some where I was really pressing my brain to hop in the way back machine to figure some of these out. Turns out, I’m a “Nintendo Noob”. Bummer.
I’ve giving myself a penance of 10 hours of NES game playing this weekend.
Link: DESTRUCTOID >> Flash Game: Test your Nintendo Trivia
Via Best Week Ever
Flickr Babes and Games
Flickr keeps getting better and better and all of the new great things aren’t even made by Flickr. Two of my new favorite Filckr additions are fastr and FlickrBabes
Fastr is a great game that pits you against the other users at currently at the site. The game is images that are slowly displayed on the screen and the users much each guess at what the common tag that is shared by all of the pictures. Its a fun, extremely addicting game. Be warned: Don’t start playing this at work.
FlickrBabes isn’t much of a “service”, and its not exactly “Web 2.0″…but it is fun. These guys just crawl flickr and pick out the “babes” and post them on their site. Simple and effective. How can you not love it? They even make sure to tell the user that posted the original image by leaving their tag in the comments telling the user that this picture has been found by FlickrBabes. Nice touch.
Make Yourself a Monopoly Mafia
Hasbro allows you to print more Monopoly money on your own, as much as you want, for free. Very cool. You can click on each denomination and its opens a PDF of the bill that you can print out on your own. Yeah for the internet!
Thats all. You’ve probably already heard about it, being on Digg and BoingBoing and all, but I just thought it was cool.
I Cheated On “Grow Cube”
Everyday at Download Squad they have a little something called “Today’s Time Waster.” Ususally this is some odd flash game I look at for a second and then go back to my usual time waster, kicking small animals and children. However, today’s selection, Grow Cube is pretty entertaining.
You are shown a blank cube to which you add differnt items (they are preselected and displayed around the screen) to the cube. Each addition causes the whole cube-verse to grow. The goal is to get every object to grow to its max potential.
Grow Cube can be a bit tricky, which is why I cheated. If you are fed up and want the answer, its posted after the jump.