Recently in Games Category

So, at this point, I'm almost proud to admit that Kevin and I are still playing freakin' Mario Kart: Double Dash!! like crazy fiends. While we're not exactly playing daily, I would say that we're still playing about 5 hours a week on average.

One of the reasons why this game is still engaging us, now 14 months into our addiction, is that it still (even after all of this time) has new things to offer. I have prognosticated for awhile that one of Kevin's and my races might come down to a tie, but as of yet, it has never happened, because the timing for each race goes down to the millisecond level. We have had race times separated by as little as 2 milliseconds, but we've never had completed identical times.

Until today:

Identical 3:22:606 times on Rainbow Road in 150cc

And so, finally the question has been answered -- what will happen if the race times are tied? Will the game award 10 points to each player (declaring the match a draw), or will it choose a winner and loser?

Now we finally have the answer: it will declare me the winner (mine is the kart with the flying Koopa and Baby Bowser), and Kevin the loser (he favors the Toad + Koopa combination). Actually, the way that the algorithm appears to work (we had a long discussion afterwards about this, naturally) is that in order for the person who is in first place to go down to second, the other racer must not only meet the first-place player's time, but exceed it. And in this race, I went into the final turn ahead, and even though I didn't play it well, Kevin only managed to catch up to me, but not pass me. Therefore I held my first place position throughout the entire turn, and Kevin ended up getting second (even though he had the same exact time).

Of course, I got hit with two blue shells, so I would have had the moral victory no matter what happened. :)

-Andy.

Apparently, the Voodoo Music Experience festival was partially sponsored by Sony, who used the opportunity to pimp out the upcoming PlayStation 3. They had a truck which contained a bunch of PS3's, setup for play. After about a 10 minute wait in line, I got to spend about 5 - 10 minutes in there, messing around with some PS3's. I wasn't able to get Sara interested in playing, so she messed around with the camera. Here's a shot of me playing NBA Live '07:

NBA Live '07 certainly looked "next generation", in that the player models appeared to have a high polygon count. But I definitely noticed the "Uncanny Valley" problem. The faces on the NBA players in the game just looked disconcerting and strange. Aside from NBA Live '07, the other launch titles that they had on display included Madden '07, some sort of F1 racing game, a motocross game, and Resistence: Fall Of Man:

Of the games that I saw on display, that was pretty much the only one that I was interested in. The graphics sure did seem to be pretty good, but I can't exactly say that I was blown away. The control scheme was fairly standard for a console FPS - you used the left analog stick to move, and the right analog stick to aim. This is why I don't like FPS games on home consoles (with the exception of the Metroid Prime games, where the controls rock) - the controls just aren't as good as the keyboard/mouse combination on the PC.

So, at this point, the PS3 seems to be a little under-whelming. I'm sure that at some point, some sort of must-have game will materialize, which will make me lust after the PS3. But for now, the only thing that is even mildly intriguing about this console is the possibility of running Linux on it.

-Andy.