Tumiki Fighters is a completely and mind-blowingly insane side scrolling shooter based around the concept of adding the wreckage of other ships to your own as a power-up. Entire chunks of massive ships attach themselves to your ship giving extra firepower and absorbing damage. I’m also fairly sure that its entirely impossible, as it often fills the screen with ridiculous bullet barrages made even harder to dodge by the fact that you’ve got about 5 other planes hanging off of you at any given moment. However, that hasn’t noticeably decreased my enjoyment of it. The same developer has several other games, and its good to see that someone is keeping the super twitchy shooter genre alive. (via Penny-Arcade)

Comments

Comment by Phil on 2004-04-15 11:26:14 +0000

Wow. I can only get to the second level. I don’t ever remember a linear shooter being this crazy!

Having been overlooked for the initial round of World of Warcraft beta testing (no doubt due to a lack of 1337ness and h4X0Ring on my part) it looks like for now the closest I’ll get is this World of Warcraft Television site. By television they mean in-game screen caps updated every 20 seconds whenever one of 4 lucky bastards who actually got picked for the beta happen to be playing. Which is not nearly enough I should mention. In fact, the only feed that I’ve found to consistently work is this one. Still, its a generous sacrifice of bandwidth and maybe even frame rate on their part, so I guess I can’t complain too much. Actually, its not so much the screenshots that have me looking forward to this game but rather what I’ve been reading about it at places like the Penny-Arcade forums, where most people have been proclaiming it the most humane MMORPG to date meaning that it scales back on the amount of endless treadmill work that has been the staple of these types of games to date. Of course, games often are made more difficult after the beta ends but if this is really an online RPG that one can enjoy without spending 30-40 hours a week playing then I’m all for it and will likely be hooked.

Comments

Comment by Tobin on 2004-04-14 11:47:19 +0000

I’ve never played any MMORPG’s yet. If this is good, maybe I’ll try it. You’ll have to let me know.

Comment by Neal on 2004-04-14 17:43:45 +0000

I know that Dana is absolutely obsessed with WOW, but I’m betting that it won’t run on Linux (making it not an option for me).

My current MMORPG of choice is Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. (http://puzzlepirates.com) If you’re looking for an anti-level-treadmill MMORPG, Puzzlepirates is it. There is no leveling at all. Your performance while sailing a ship or fighting brigands is based solely on how well you do in the various Tetris-y puzzle games that you play to make the ship go, etc. You do get skill/experiance ratings in the various puzzles, but they don’t affect the game at all except for seeding when you enter a swordfighting or drinking tournament (yes, I said drinking tournament – drinking is a competative puzzle).

Comment by Kimmee on 2004-04-14 18:31:30 +0000

Will! I haven’t read your blog in so long! it’s redesigned! it’s updated! there’s PICTURES! i’m so outta the loop!

Comment by Will on 2004-04-14 23:27:41 +0000

Kimmee – Yup, I switched to a better hosting service a while back and decided it was finally time to resurrect the old blog. Glad to see that your latest jetset adventure went well!

Neal – I’ve seen banner ads for puzzle pirates various places and thought it looked pretty cool. If I weren’t playing so much Unreal 2004 and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow I would have given it a try by now. Can you choose who you play with in a game, or does it just random assign matches?

Comment by Neal on 2004-04-15 00:10:10 +0000

The main activity in PuzzlePirates is pillaging on the high seas. Most of your time pillaging is spent operating the “sailing” puzzle, the “bilge” puzzle or the “carpentry” puzzle needed to make the ship go – those aren’t head-to-head puzzles. Once you finally collide with and board another ship you play the swordfighting puzzle against the entire other crew. As long as there are multiple opponents on the other side of the sword fight you can choose which opponent to send your attacks to by clicking on them. (The ideal number of pirates to have teamed up on one opponent is 2 or 3. Any more than that is wasteful.)

I just found out about this fine web comic, A Softer World. (via Carrie) It’s an interesting twist, using photographs instead of your regular hand-drawn comics. Often, the images work to give the comic that extra little poignant push from “Haha” into “Haha… Oh.” At other times, it’s more like just “Oh.” without the “Haha”. I likes it. Also they have a fine collection of over-the-top-with-cleverness cover letters, something that reminds me a little too much of the impulses I felt during my long job search a couple years ago.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-13 01:39:19 +0000

Yaaaay! Another asw fan is born.

Joey’s cover letters are freggin’ great … sad thing is he’s forgotten how to write a “real” cover letter. Lol.

Comment by Dan on 2004-04-13 10:18:21 +0000

Wow. I’m impressed. Thank you. You were right, sometimes it’s “ahhh… clever” and other times its “ahhh.. oh….. my.”

Alright, so the Blogging Across the Midwest thing didn’t really pan out. For one thing, since I was driving the truck the whole way that didn’t really present too many opportunities to update. Also, since the whole trip ended up taking about 15 hours, I lost interest in lugging out the laptop at our stops. I don’t think you can blame me for that. The good news though is that the trip went well and that we got all of Jolayne’s things unloaded fine at her apartment. Even her cat seems to be adjusting well to the new surroundings.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-08 06:04:19 +0000

Yeah I guess we can’t balme you for not blogging … But I still blame you for poverty and pestilence.

😉

Whats the kitty’s name, by the way?

Glad the move went well!

Comment by Will on 2004-04-08 21:43:38 +0000

The cat’s name is Cleo and she’s a nice enough cat, but scared of everything and not always too bright. For example, she’ll paw on a door forever to get you to open it, and when you do it freaks her out and she’ll run away.

Location: a Taco Bell in Indiana, about 41 miles from the Illinois border. That’s right, I brought a laptop into a Taco Bell. That’s enough to make me feel a little too dorky, which is obviously saying something. Jolayne and I are making good progress, or at least we were until I had to break out the laptop at lunch. We’ve got an unexpected extra passenger with us, her cat from home who she decided to bring along yesterday. It’s fine with me though, because we stopped by the vet and got that cat good and drugged up this morning. Right now it’s off in kitty happy land, and not meowing constantly. However, the drugs are only good for 6-8 hours and we’ve got a 12-13 hour trip so we’ll see how that goes. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make any more posts, but if I do I’ll try to upload something to my photoblog.

Comments

Comment by Sarah on 2004-04-03 16:55:43 +0000

If you aren’t driving you could blog every city, or would that be over your limit?

Jolayne and I are currently sitting in the airport in Cincinnati waiting for a connecting flight to Columbus. We’re going to Columbus because Jolayne is going to be getting her own apartment in KC after having been staying with her aunt and uncle, and we’re going to pick up a truck and bring her stuff out. And yes, I’m going be blogging the whole trip via cell phone modem in a piece I like to call “Blogging Across the Midwest”, just because I now can. How shamelessly self-indulgent and self-important is that?

Comments

Comment by Dan Thill on 2004-04-02 10:45:33 +0000

The Cincinatti airport is one of the weirdest I’ve ever had the fortune to layover in. There’s something disconcerting about taking a shuttle to another gate and being required to wait for taxiing planes to cross the road. Yeah. Someone forgot to tell the engineering company’s intern something.

Comment by Sarah on 2004-04-02 13:09:52 +0000

When do you get in?

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-03 01:51:25 +0000

How shamelessly self-indulgent and self-important is that?

Very. 😛

Comment by Tobin on 2004-04-05 08:16:52 +0000

When were you in town? Did I miss you somehow? Noooooooooooooooooooooo!

Comment by Will on 2004-04-05 17:50:54 +0000

Yeah, sorry for not letting anyone know that I was in town, but I wasn’t really in town. At least not for more than 30 minutes. We went straight to her parents house in Waldo. loaded the truck, and left the next morning. There was a brief stop in Columbus to pick up her papasan chair from a friend that had been keeping it, but since we had 13 hours left on the road at that point we couldn’t really stay to visit.

I didn’t honestly expect this to work, at least not as well as it did, but I grabbed a data cable for my cell phone tonight and gave it a try for using my phone as a CDMA modem. But it worked! It really, really worked! The company that makes the cable made a big deal out of how it required their software (sold separately) in order to work, but I didn’t think it was worth having to get a cable and software. Fortunately as it turns out, you can use the cable just fine with regular good old windows networking. Nice. Now I’ve got an anytime, anywhere (ok, anywhere inside of Sprint’s network) internet connection for my laptop, lack of Wi-Fi hotspots be damned! I seem to get about 14-17 KB/sec which isn’t bad at all. Plus as part of my cell phone contract, I have unlimited PCS Vision (Sprint’s data plan) usage so it shouldn’t cost me anything extra. This brings me so very very close to my all time number one geek fantasy of being able to stream my music collection from anywhere. Unfortunately, all my music is at a higher bitrate than this connection would be able to handle. If I could find a streaming server that could re-encode files to a lower bitrate on the fly though, I think I’d be in business.

Comments

Comment by Phil on 2004-03-31 00:51:26 +0000

I’ve said it many times, but I think it bears repeating:

You are one smart bagel.

Er, cookie.

Er, something.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-31 02:01:08 +0000

Neeeeeeeeerd 😉

(Built to Spill rules, btw)

Comment by Neal on 2004-03-31 11:31:41 +0000

The OGG format is designed to allow it to be stripped down to lower bitrates on the fly. Not sure what software actually does this yet, but it’s a possibility.

In the future, everyone will be connected to the Internet all the time. It’s just too darn useful for us to accept anything else!

Comment by Sarah on 2004-03-31 15:10:31 +0000

I think you are a good canidate to test out those nifty wearable computers, you might as well already have one.

Comment by Ash on 2004-04-15 21:30:21 +0000

YES but can you WRITE on your SCREEN???????

muaha

Ok this is going to be my last zombie related post for a while, really. I just wanted to point out that the original Night of the Living Dead is available in its entirety, for free, over at the Internet Archive. Apparently, when the film was first distributed there was a mistake made and the copyright notice was left off of the film, which meant it entered the public domain and George Romero never saw dime one for it. Raw deal for him, free movie for you. (via BoingBoing)

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-30 22:15:40 +0000

Sweeeeeeet!

Jolayne’s finally back from her week long Disney cruise for her mom’s birthday. Not a minute too soon either, last week just kinda dragged by. Of course I’m thrilled she’s back, but it doesn’t hurt that she came back with gifts either. She picked up some coconut patties (shaped like Mickey Mouse, naturally) for me, and this book about Miyazaki from the Epcot center. It looks pretty interesting. Apparently she still feels like she’s on a ship and hasn’t gotten used to not having the ground moving under her constantly quite yet. It probably doesn’t help that I keep yelling out things like “Aye aye, sir”, “Hard to port!”, and “We’re taking on water, cap’n!”

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-28 19:33:00 +0000

Poor Jolayne … she’s gotta get her land lubbin’ legs back! Arrr matey! Savvy! (Its really fun to talk like a pirate).

That Miyazaki books looks sweet! Pretty pretty pictures. 😀

Comment by Phil on 2004-03-29 13:04:05 +0000

She got you a Miyazaki book? She’s definitely a keeper.

Take for example, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow which I just picked up today. The single player game has a just few minor improvements over the original, plus another captivating storyline (at least so far). The new multiplayer mode though is, well, awesome. Pitting 2 vs 2 teams of spies against mercenaries in a game of hide and seek with guns, this is the best application of stealth based gameplay I’ve ever seen. In all single player stealth games, you can always fool the AI and hide out virtually in plain sight from time to time. When you try that against a human opponent, not so much. Every one of the gadgets available to both sides are critical to play, so there’s a pretty steep learning curve but it’s insanely fun. The very first time I played was as the mercs, and one of the spies dropped down out of the darkness behind my teammate and grabbed him to use as a human shield, gun to head. After a few tense moments of staring at each other and dodging around I did the only thing I could: I took the shot and nailed him in the head (the spy that is). And things like that that I’d never experienced before in a multiplayer game just happen all the time. It’s brilliant.