My Brute on iPhone

By Josh Highland in iPhone, video games

Lately I have been consumed by an iPhone game called “My Brute”. My Brute is an RPG fighting game based on the popular MyBrute.com. It works like this, You create a character, pick their body, their clothes, their hair and skin color. You pick an animal to represent your dojo (snake, fox or bear… I’m the bear of course). Once you have this all set up, you enter the arena, pick a person to fight and then WATCH your character fight for experience points, bonus weapons and award, and honor. Notice I said WATCH and not control. You have NO control over the actions of your brute. It basically turns into a spectator sport where you cheer your character on and hope he kicks the crap out of the other guy. It also adds stress when you only can fight 5 times in a 24 hour period, very stressful.

I am completely hooked on this game. On top of trying to make my brute the best he can be, you can recruit people to join your dojo. To join my dojo, enter in the following secret code when you are asked: HGHHFHFE

I think this game is worth the $4 I spent on it. My Brute is awesome to watch, and it totally draws you in despite the fact that you don’t control the action.

Check out the screen shots below

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My Dojos code is HGHHFHFE, join me and together we will crush the competition!

Spore fever

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, software, video games

Yesterday spore was released. I have been waiting for this game for years, literally. Mostly because I wanted to see what the hype was about. I am a casual gamer. I got into computers through games, but I don’t have time to play them for days on end like I used to.

If you dont know what spore is:
Spore is a multi-genre massively single-player online game. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has a massive scope, and is very open-ended. Basically no two people will ever have the same expience with this game, and its completely different frm any other game you have played before.

Riding on the hype of the game, I secured a copy and installed it. Before I could start playing spore, it made me update my nvidia graphics card drivers. Odd, but ok. After a quick reboot, I was up and playing. Instantly was blown away with the visual intensity of the game. It was very easy to figure out and learn to play right away with out any primers needed.

I selected to be an herbivore (I am a vegetarian you know!). I started off as this little swimming creature, hanging out and sucking up plant particles in the water. After I ate a few, I grew, well… actually the world got bigger. Everything that was around me in the water got smaller, and faded to the background. I was in a larger class of organisms now. This continued until I had acquired enough points to mate. This is where the game gets wild. I was able to design a new creature, selecting the body shape, orientation of the tale and mouth (In my case I had 2 mouths and 3 tales!). I also grew horns so I could ram other creatures trying to eat my veggies! Once the design was done, I got to play as that creature. Amazing.

After being in the water stage for a while, you grow legs and come onto land. I could go on and on about this game, but to sum up the land stage of the game, I grew taller, got gnarly claws and spikes. I had a sissy mouth (duck bill) for biting things because I was an herbivore (a decision i had made in the micro organism stage). I grew thick skin to protect me. I started to hunt in a pack, and I killed everything that was in my path. I could have made friends and built up relationships with the other creatures, I actually did that once, then I ripped them to shreds with my gnarly claws and duckbill.

Now I have the ability to start using tools and forming tribes with my duckbilled herbivore velociraptor rhinos

That’s how far I am in the game right now. I’m totally amped on it. From my understanding my tribe will become a society, and keep evolving and eventually be able to travel through space to other planets to set up trades and relationships with other cultures, or most likely in my case, freely handout beatdowns with my duckbill and raptor claws to anyone who wants some.

StarCraft, still cool after all these years

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, software, video games

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In 1997 I was really getting into computers. I had started to program, and I was graduating high school. Video Games were a huge part of my life. I didn’t play many PC based games, with the exception of DOOM, Duke Nukem, Warcraft, and Warcraft II.

In 1997, Blizzard released StarCraft. My life was forever changed. StarCraft is a real time strategy game with 3 alien races, terians, protos and zerg. I myself was a protos specialist. In 1997, it was the peak of PC gaming winning th game of the year.

It is now 2008, 11 full years after the release of StarCraft. We are in an age where my cell phone has enough power to run games like DOOM. Video games have reached limits that are astounding. I don’t play many games now. I miss playing games sometimes though.

The other day I was hanging out with my good friend Jason Keller and he says “Lets play some StarCraft”, so we did. After nearly 6 hours and many successful campaigns, our wifes came home from shopping, so we had to stop playing, or I imagine we would have been there for another 6 hours. It was so awesome that I want to set up a StarCraft LAN party at my house. If you want to join in, let me know!

I think this goes to show that good design can carry something well past its prime and still be very relevant, making it a classic. I cant wait for StarCraft II though! HOT DAMN!

Nintendo Wii WiFi problem FIXED

By Josh Highland in hacks, video games

Last Saturday, Massive mat and I stood inline with a bunch of other geeks to get Nintendo Wiis. I will write a blog post about that, and about how fun the Wii is to play, but for now, im going to bitch about it for a minute…

One of the big reasons that I wanted to get a Wii was the fact that you are able to play EVERY nintendo game format on it. NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and now Wii games! To play the old games you have to join their version of XBox Live, and buy them.

The Wii is so futuristic, that it doesnt have an ethernet port on it, no no, wifi is the way nintendo wii rolls!

I wanted to buy some of these old games and play them, but you have to connect to a wifi connection first. Not a problem, I have a Linksys WRT54GL router upstairs serving out some 802.11g love.

The Wii would see the access point, I would enter the WPA password, then the Wii would think about connecting then spit back and error, "ERROR 52230 contact support.nintendo.com". SUCK!

Ok, so I go to the nintendo site, search forever and then find a place to enter my error code. It returns something stupid about trying changing the channel that the router broadcasts on. Weird, but I try it… no LUCK.

I searched up and down the web seeing people with similar problems to mine. I couldnt figure it out for the life of me. All my other wifi gear worked fine.

I did a little research on what was actually inside the Wii as far as a wireless card. Thats when I found this site,
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=677908&seqNum=2&rl=1 where they actually took a Wii apart.
I found my answer there in the form of a simple statement "The 802.11 card only operates in the 2412-2462GHz range. In 802.11b mode"

802.11b MODE! WTF!

I dont own any 802.11b equipment, only 802.11g. 802.11b is shitty and slow compared to G. NO WHERE IN THE NINTENDO MANUALS OR ON THE NINTENTDO SITE DOES IT SAY THAT IT ONLY OPERATES AT 802.11b.

Why would nintendo do such a stupid thing? B is 5 times slower then G! Who the hell rund 802.11b equipment? My Damn cell phone has 802.11G support in it! Im more pissed that they didnt print it anywhere in the manual. They talk about WEP and WPA, but not the fucking protocol they use for the connection!

So I logged into my router and put it on Mixed (B/G) Mode, and what do you know, the Wii was able to connect to the nintendo server and get the updates that I needed to connect to their store.

So if you are having problems connecting your Wii to some WiFi. make sure that the router is set to mixed mode.

Nintendo, thank you for a great machine. Screw you for putting in a slow wifi card and not telling people more details about it.

I hope someone else can finally get their Wii online after reading this post.

Recently I have started to play video games again

By Josh Highland in video games

When I was younger I would spend days on end playing video games. When I was 7 got my first Nintendo, it was 1987. I played the hell out of it, I fell in love with Zelda. Years later Super Nintendo came out. I was older and had more patience; again I fell in love with the SNES Zelda game. I like the character development and the epic story. In 1994,
Final Fantasy III was release in the United States. I ate the game up instantly. The game play was turn based fighting, meaning that I tell my characters what to do, attack, use magic, use an item, or defend. The enemy would do the same. We would trade attacks until the fight was over. Characters gained experience from the conflicts and grew over time. The story was epic, something out of a legend. The company that produced the game, Square, knew how to build a great RPG (role playing game).

Fast forward 12 years. I havent seriously played video games in about 7 years. Sure I have dabbled, but what geek doesnt play a game here and there. I know that I am behind the times, but I only have an XBOX (not-360). I decided that I wanted to play a good role playing game, turned based preferably like the final fantasy games. The FF series is only available on play station though. I looked and looked and couldnt find a good game to play, every one i tired just sucked. Frustrated and out of luck, I turned to my good friend the Super Nintendo.

With the magic of computers its possible to turn you computer into a Nintendo, or a Super Nintendo by using an "emulator" and a "ROM", which is a back up of the game. Most SNES games are smaller then a single mp3, and most NES games are smaller then an average Microsoft word document! Sure emulators and ROMS are technically illegal, but there is no other way to play most of these games anymore.

I have a windows media center computer in my living room, so I downloaded my favorite SNES emulator, ZNES, and loaded up a game that I remember loving, but I never beat, Super Mario RPG.

Super Mario RPG was released in 1996, and was an effort from Square (makers of final fantasy) and Nintendo (makers of the Super Mario). The result was a game that felt like Final Fantasy, but had the charm and good feeling of Super Mario World.

The game is 10 years old, but is so fun that it doesnt matter that the graphics are pixilated and the music is MIDI based. Super Mario RPG is proof that you dont need a cd quality sound track, full motion video, forced feed back controls, and 16 button controllers to produce a great game that holds up through time. I think that game developers and companyss have gotten to mixed up in the power of the platforms they are working on, they forget about the roping in the players imagination and selling them on the story while making them want to play to find out what happens next, instead of just throwing eye candy at them at every turn.

I have great hopes for Nintendos next platform the "wii", I hope that they bring back the love and magic that make video games like Final Fantasy and Super Mario RPG feel good to play even if they are relics from a simpler time of gaming.

If you want more information on emulators and roms, leave a comment and I'll get in touch with you.

What older games did you think still hold their own today? Please leave a comment, I'd love to hear what you think.