Monthly Archives: October 2009

Gaming Update

Wrath of the Lich King got so great! I did the Wrathgate event, which was wonderful. It was one of the best chains in the game. I then headed into Icecrown. I dinged 80 off of a level 12 quest that I turned in to Thrall! Lately I’ve been playing a lot of BGs, doing some arena, and running ToC. I’m almost done getting all my honor gear! I also joined the ChEeSeaNaTers!

 
On my iPhone I’m still playing Mafia Wars. It’s not really a game in which one can spend a lot of time. Activities in the game use points that regenerate in real time. It’s fun, and I enjoy checking it throughout the day even though there’s no real point.
I’ve also been playing Sol Free Solitaire. I had a game of the same name on the Palm. I wonder if it’s made by the same company. It has Baker’s Game (normal and easy), Klondike (draw three and one), Demon, and Spiderette. I’ve never played Demon or Spiderette, and they’re very interesting! I’m not very good at them yet. Sol Free Solitaire keeps track of lots of gameplay stats as well.
A Quest Of Knights Onrush is another very fun iPhone game. It’s a brawler (similar to Castle Crashers) and is based on Knights Onrush, an iPhone defend-the-castle-from-waves-of-attackers game. Sorry, I don’t know the name of that genre, but it seems to be a popular type of Flash game. Anyways, while I already compared it to Castle Crashers, it’s a little different because there isn’t an ending to reach. The point of the game is just to see how far you can get as enemies get stronger. It’s really fun! I should add that all of these iPhone games are free.
I’m still working on inFamous. Getting through the story is difficult because I’m drawn to all the side missions! I wanted to beat it before Uncharted 2 released, but I didn’t make it. I’m looking forward to that, but haven’t played it yet.
Someone on SelectButton wanted to do an SB Game Club of one of the games in the Donkey Kong Country series. I starte the first one, but it seems people weren’t really interested. Some people wanted to do Donkey Kong ’94, which I also had, but nothing became of that.
Lastly, I’ve played Harvest Moon DS a little bit. It’s fun, but I’ve effectively stopped playing.

UCI Zombie Invasion 2009



UCI Zombie Invasion 2009, originally uploaded by theuser.

Today a horde of zomies attacked UCI! There were about 15 people in the
group, with 5 or so in zombie make-up. They came up the stairs at the
front of the school and lumbered to the Langson Library. They walked
in, crowded around the elevator, and began to bang on the doors. When
it opened, they yelled, "brains!" and began to push into the elevator.
Two girls ran out, laughing but obviously a bit startled. I heard them
mumbling "what the hell are they doing" and similar things, but then
they said "let’s stay and watch." The zombies waited for another
elevator to come for a couple minutes before one yelled "stairs!" Then
they all began yelling "stairs… stairs?" It was obvious they didn’t
know where the stairs were. One yelled "stairs!" and pointed, and then
they lumbered towards the stairwell. I had to leave to go to class at
that point, but I heard startled yells coming from the stairwell as I
left.
The organizers want to make this a yearly tradition. I hope they do!

Indiana Jones and the Statutory Rape

Open Thread: George Lucas on Marion Ravenwood | The Hathor Legacy
According to a post by Jennifer Kesler on The Hathor Legacy, a transcript of Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan discussing the plot of Indiana Jones when designing the movie has been found. It reveals how they thought it would be “amusing” and “interesting” for Indy to have a sexual relationship with a fifteen year old girl. I have no idea if the transcript is legitimate, and I haven’t seen the movie. If it’s true, it’s interesting.

Ronk’s views on the Super Mario Bros. Series

These two posts are by Ronk from the thread “smw is fine but dear god super mario 64” on SelectButton. The subforum they were posted in, Forum Axe: The Duel, auto-prunes old threads and requires authentication, so I won’t bother linking to the thread. The link will be dead in a week anyways.
if smb3 is having awesome sex with a fit model, and smw is like having a 3 way with your best friends
then sm64 is like dreaming about the first time you made love on a floating ship, sailing aimlessly through the stars.
edit – smb is the first time you had sex, in the backseat your parent’s car on prom night. us smb 2 is like sex with the cute weird girl in the photo lab dark room and jsmb 2 is like the first time you had sex with a safety word.
– Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:02 pm
– Last edited by Ronk on Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:28 pm; edited 2 times in total
– Opening post of the thread
sunshine is like having awkward sex with a girl from your high school political science class.
galaxy is like having sex with your ex girlfriend on the hood of your old car, stopping every few minutes to ask if it’s ok and if everything is alright.
– Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 10:40 pm

Why I Hate Computers

(Last updated at on 10/5/09 at 10:51 PM. Jump to latest update.)
I just noticed that the “computing” category on WebPageless is just computer errors. This probably isn’t that interesting to anyone else, but I found that keeping track of PC errors and how I go about fixing them is helpful to me. Maybe someone Googling will find it useful too, or even better, maybe someone I know will be able to help me.
In a previous post I detailed how my computer was unable to play World of Warcraft. It would freeze while logging in after picking a character. Sadly, I never updated how I fixed it, and the problem is happening again.
More specifically, the problem never went away. Yeah, World of Warcraft would work, but when ever I rebooted, WoW would have the same problem. I could fix it by using System Restore to restore to a previous restore point. Not most recent restore point would not necessarily fix the problem. I would just keep restoring older and older restore points until the game worked. Unfortunately, none of the restore points I have fixed the problem after this last time.

 
Of course, this doesn’t really address the problem at all. What’s causing it? I don’t know. I do know, however, that a while ago I saw newer video drivers in Windows Update, but applying the update would cause this exact problem. How did I fix that? I used System Restore and never applied Windows Updates again. The strange thing is, despite disabling Automatic Windows Updates, I still see Windows Updates restore points in System Restore. Apparently, Windows Update is still running. I think what’s happening is that those video drivers, for what ever reason, are breaking World of Warcraft, and somehow they’re being applied every so often. Rebooting my computer allows them to finish installation. At least, this is my current theory.
Where do I stand now? I don’t really know. To be complete, let me talk about my computer here:

  • Windows Vista Business 64-bit, Service Pack 1, completely legal and verified
  • Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 @ 2.5 GHz
  • MSI P45 Neo-F mainboard
  • 4.00 GB of RAM
  • nVidia GeForce 8800 GT, drivers version 180.48 (7.15.0011.8048)
  • Rosewill 802.11b/g PCI

I bolded the most likely problem. After using the automatic scanning tool on nVidia’s site, they say my latest driver should be GeForce/ION Release 191, Version 191.07, from October 5, 2009. Hey, that’s today! I wonder if nVidia has got things together enough to make one that works now. I found an interesting article on engadget from March, 2008 saying that nearly 30% of Vista crashes were caused by nVidia in 2007, which makes it the most common cause. That is a rather old article as far as software is concerned, but assuming it’s accurate, does show that there have been problems with Vista and nVidia.
Update at 10/5/09, 2:48 PM
I played Team Fortress 2 for about 5 minutes, and there were no problems. I just made a restore point, so now I’ll update my nVidia drivers and see what happens.
Update at 10/5/09, 3:11 PM
I updated the nVidia drivers to 191.07. We’ll see how this goes!
Update at 10/5/09, 3:24 PM
World of Warcraft is working again! It looks like nVidia got some working drivers up finally!
Update at 10/5/09, 9:07 PM
After I found that World of Warcraft was working, I played for about an hour and then set a restore point in case anything went wrong in the future. A few hours later I rebooted, and now WoW has the same problem. I restored to that point that I had just made (that should have been working), and that didn’t fix it. I tried reinstalling the 191.07 drivers because it worked right after I installed those last time. Didn’t help. Now I’m going to restore the restore point I made this afternoon right before updating the drivers for the first time.
Update at 10/5/09, 10:51 PM
I restored that restore point, and WoW still crashed. I then installed the 191.07 drivers, and WoW still crashed. Now I’m going to try doing all the updates in Windows Update.
Last Update
Those updates fixed it! I’m still not rebooting after getting it working, because who knows how that’ll leave my computer. I’m glad Windows Update is finally fixing problems rather than causing problems.

Jet Grind Radio

Jet Grind Radio is a cel-shaded Dreamcast game in which I found myself rollerblading around the city, doing tricks and collecting spraypaint so I could tag specially marked locations. The game really seems to be about speed. Because I’m rollerblading, I can’t just stop whenever I want. The levels are designed so I can tag while blading past things. In this way I sort of just flow through the level; however, the police disrupt this flow. They chase me around, forcing me to put enough distance between myself and them so that I can tag without them stopping me. It reminds me a bit of Mirror’s Edge. It features an assortment of electronic music. It reminds me, at least in style, of The World Ends With You, although so far the music has been more mellow. It seems fun so far and is worth trying.
(I forgot to post this a while ago!)