Monthly Archives: June 2008

3DO


I stubbed my toe
on a 3DO
I think it may be broken;
The machine’s confused
from being misused
it wants me to insert a token!

– Mikey, Select Button

Windows XP

Good bye little friend! When you were a newborn, I preferred your older brother, 2000. Now young Vista is your parent’s favorite.
For those who don’t know, today is the last day retail stores can purchase Windows XP from Microsoft. If you want to buy a copy of XP, do it soon. Copies are still purchasable from retail stores, but once they run out, they’re out.

Diablo III

frothfrothfroth
I was worried it was going to be a Wrath of the Lich King announcement or something, but I had been thinking it would most likely be Diablo.
Blizzard, you didn’t fail me. Thank you so much.

Pyro Fortress

Pyro Fortress came out last week! In other words, the Pyro update for Team Fortress 2. With its release, players were obligated to play only as pyros with epic, flaming battles!
The Pyro’s achievements were much more easily attainable than the Medic’s, and they were actually things you might want to do as Pyro as opposed to the Medic’s achievements that required you to do things a Medic shouldn’t do. The three new weapons are the backburner, the flare gun, and the axtinguisher. The backburner replaces the flamethrower, adding health and always scoring crits from behind. However, it doesn’t have the airblast that the flamethrower now has, which can repel enemy rockets and grenades. The flare gun can light enemies on fire from a distance. Lastly, the axtinguisher is a melee weapon that scores crits always on enemies that are on fire. You also no longer need to get all the achievements to unlock all weapons. It was a lot of fun, but I unlocked all the weapons in about two days.

Mega Man 9

Mega Man 9 to come out on WiiWare!
After 11 years, Capcom is releasing a sequel to the Mega Man series!
More information can be found at RockmanPM and Select Button!
The game will apparently be in the style of the old 8-bit games, which is even more retro than the later entries in the original Mega Man series. It looks like an NES game, which could be pretty cool if they make the game correctly. The fact that it’s in that style but not actually an NES game means they’re able to break any boundaries the NES had while still making a game in that style.
Too bad I’ll have to play through 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 to get ready for this!

Getting Vertical Scroll Position in a Div to Persist Across Postbacks

I’ve been working on this for a little bit now, and it was surprisingly easy. I just didn’t know all of the syntax.
First, any element in a webpage that scrolls has a scrollTop attribute that’s equal to the number of pixels it has been scrolled. When it’s scrolled all the way to the top, scrollTop is zero.
To cause this to persist, you can store it in a hidden input.
<input type=”hidden” name=”whatever” id=”whatever” value=”default” runat=”server”>
Name and id should be equal, and making sure runat=”server” is present is important. Now this should persist automatically. The only other thing that’s needed is to store and restore the value. You can use an onscroll=”nameOfJavascriptFunctionThatStoresThePosition()” attribute in the div in question to call a function whenever the div is scrolled. Then in your Javascript section, set window.onload equal to whatever function is going to restore it. Parentheses aren’t needed at the end because you’re mapping onload to a function.
The last thing to remember is that in your storing and restoring functions, you can’t simply refer to the id of the hidden input because your codebehind might, and most likely will, change it. You’d have to use <%=idOfInput.ClientID%>. You can use document.getElementById(‘ blah ‘).value, where blah is that previous tag. To restore the value that value should be set into the div’s scrollTop (again, you can use document.getElementById(), but you won’t need to do ClientID stuff because the div’s not runat=”server”. To store the value, you just set the scrollTop into that hidden input using that same method. Pretty simple!
Of course, if you’re not concerned with a div but rather the whole document, you can do a similar thing using body’s scrollTop or just enable SmartNavigation if the page is being designed for InternetExplorer.

Arcades

Why are there so few arcades and such crappy games at the ones that do exist? I see less and less arcade games in public places. There used to be arcade games at laundromats, pizza places etc., but now the only arcades are basically those miniature golf / go-kart / bumper boat places.
The games at these places usually consist of fighting games, racing games, gun games, and ticket dispensing games. This assortment lacks variety. I’m not very interested in racing games and am not very good at fighting games. Gun games can be fun at times, but I feel that most of them are just plain ugly.
What happened to all the other games? What happened to all the arcade games? I want to love arcades. I really do. But they’re hard to find, and I can’t seem to love what I actually can find. I do remember playing the newest (at the time at least) Metal Slug in a movie theater back in Long Beach. William was with me, and it was downtown at the Pike, I think. William, if you read this, let me know if you remember any of this. That was fun. And I do play Qix and Donkey Kong at Dave & Busters. However, I want more Metal Slug and old beat ’em ups like the Simpsons and the Ninja Turtles games. I want the experience of playing games in a hopefully air conditioned room standing around with a bunch of other gamers.