Thursday 23 August 2012

Waves Soundtrack: Extraction How-to


I was playing Waves near launch, after snagging it in one of the first sales. I loved the soundtrack, so I tried hunting some of the tracks down. First, I hit up the Waves Steam Forums and did some digging, and apparantly only Microcosmic and Disco Just Won't Cut It This Time are released. Since Squid in a Box's plans to release the soundtrack don't seem to be going anywhere, I figured I'd just extract the files myself. I looked around the game files (the game is relatively small) and eliminated files that wouldn't contain audio. Eventually, I figured that one area with content files was the only one that could contain any music.


Monday 20 August 2012

Western Digital: The Supreme Customer Support Saga


Here begins the tale 'Western Digital: The Supreme Customer Support Saga,' also known as 'The Long Distance, Double HQ Migration Hard Disk Drive Swap'





Around June the 15th, 

my data drive starts to get slow and my games installed there start having visual glitches, like the pavement in GTAIII being transparent. I try to get Steam to verify game cache, which is too intense for the HDD and crashes my computer ever time I attempt it. I eventually download a 3rd party HDD diagnotic tool and WD's diagnostic tool. The 3rd party tool, like Steam, somehow manages to crash while testing the HDD (My OS is on an SSD, I don't even understand how that's possible), and the WD tool confirms that the drive is broken. Time to send it in.


Monday 30 July 2012

Android: Where's My Video Games? Pt. 1: Tap Dragon Park Special


It's time for biased and absolutely correct thoughts on Tap Dragon Park!~

My proposal for Tap Dragon Park's new promo pic
You might ask why I am playing Tap Dragon Park. I don't and won't like Tap Dragon Park. I wouldn't have reccomended it and I will never reccomend it to anyone I wouldn't reccomend Boku No Pico to. As in, I mean the game is a mild psychological hazard to most of the population. So why am I playing it? I'm playing it because I realize I shouldn't be talking about social games without firsthand knowledge about what they are.

Tuesday 24 July 2012

Android: Where's My Video Games? Pt. 0: Cleaning House


Being a gamer, I often end up discussing mobile games, and any discussion of mobile gaming I have tends to include some declaration that iOS has better games than Android. Since I just can't get behind what Apple does, I bought a Galaxy Nexus to keep me company. But, for a hardcore gamer, what does mobile gaming on Android hold? When I initially bought the device, I was surprised by the sheer lack of quality topping the games charts, so it took me a little digging to find tolerable stuff. Android gaming isn't just Skinner-box games like Farmville, or the (much) less evil casual playthings put out by the guys at A Thinking Ape, even though that's what most of the stuff tends to be. Take the recent ports of traditional games like Max Payne and Spacechem, for instance.

But even though games like that exist, the hardcore have been turning their noses up at the platform. Just Google anything related to "Top Android games" and you'll mostly find another article that cites Angry Birds as the must-have game and goes on about free casual games it would be faster just to download off the top 10. If I bring up Gamespot, the Android gaming section is filled mostly with user ratings (hardly any text reviews). If I bring up IGN, you get some coverage, but there's apparently no Android section as of yet, and everything's being given 8s as usual. Metacritic's Android coverage is nonexistent-- probably because there just aren't enough critics talking about the platform's games.

Android isn't even on the radar over at Metacritic
So, what do you do when other people can't give you any help deciding on your video games? You decide yourself, of course.