The Coop

I thought Sonic Adventure was decent, and the same goes for "2". Sonic Heroes was a bit iffy, and Shadow the Hedgehog, while not as horrid as some reviews made it out to be, was a mistake. It's like the same game engine kept getting used over and over again, as all the games have camera issues, control issues, and lack speed to the same degree. The only thing that changed, was the graphics aspect with the newer games. Maybe it's time for Sonic Team to let someone else have a 3-D go at it. And am I the only one who actually enjoyed Sonic 3D Blast? Sure, it wasn't as fast as the previous Genesis (and later, Saturn) games, but it was still fun.

But that's just it. Playing in the rain should have made for a far more interesting game, and in the first quarter, it did. Fumbles, stumbles, bobbled catches and passes... it was good watching. But once the second quarter started, the Bears died, and the Colts just took their sweet time getting points over a three quarter snooze-fest.

No, just over-hyped games of it that turn out to be boring, and one sided.

I guess every half-time show's going to be over scrutinized ever since the uptights of America were startled by a 38 year old tit... the scars from which still have yet to heal apparently.

New addition for the guide... How far can you push it? So now that you know about adjusting what are called "cycles" in DOSBox, just how high can you crank it? Well, there's a very simple way to find out... First, hit "Alt", "Ctrl" and "Delete" at the same time. This brings up the Windows Task Manager. In this new window, click on the tab along the top that says "Performance". Here you'll see four windows... two long, and two short. Pay attention to the short window in the upper left under "CPU Usage". With this window open, start up DOSBox, and run the game you want to play that's chugging a bit. Get it to an actual gameplay area (like say, the first mission in MechWarrior 2, or the first dungeon in The Elder Scrolls: Arena) and see where the percentage is under the "CPU Usage" window. The thing to take heed of, is what type of processor you have. If you have a Hyper Threading Pentium 4, or a similar dual core(ish) processor, know that the highest you'll be able to push the percentage is 50% (50% for each core or "Thread"). If you have a different type of processor that doesn't use Hyper Threading or have a dual core, your number will go up to 100% (note- even if a Hyper Threading processor says 50%, you're still getting full capacity. It's just the way things are read. You're not getting gypped in performance). Now, once you know what percentage you'll be able to reach, hold down "Ctrl", and begin tapping "F12" to increase the amount of cycles. As you do this, you'll see your CPU Usage level climb. Try not to go above 40% for Hyper Threading/Dual Core systems, and 80% for single core systems. You want to make sure you leave enough room for your CPU to grab power if it's needed, and you don't want your CPU to be constantly running full bore. As an example, when I run MechWarrior 2 and The Elder Scrolls: Arena, I can crank the cycles up to 30,000 with my Pentium 4 3.00E GHz Hyper Threading CPU. This makes those two games run very smoothly, and it still leaves room for extra power if it's needed during an intense part of the action. Doom and Doom II also run fluidly at this number. If you're on an older PC, you probably won't be able to push this thing much higher than say 10,000 cycles. But for those with faster CPUs, this'll be a godsend.

T2002 How many remember the Turrican series? Better still, how many remember playing them on an actual Amiga? Well, here's your chance to relive a little bit of that. T2002 is, in essence, a remake of Turrican II. Using graphics and music straight from the Amiga and PC versions (with permission too), this game basically makes Turrican II playable on today's computers. What little I remember of the second Turrican game, this game seems like a very faithful recreation. It also features a few tweaks here and there. Very good stuff.

I don't have any techno, but I've got the shits. Does that help at all?

I'll see your link, and raise you this one... http://www.joystiq.com/2007/02/01/castlevania-dracula-x-chronicles-unveiled-for-psp/ The entire first stage being played in the 3D version.

Compress the MP3s into zip files. MP3s have always given me problems there (both uploading and downloading), but a zipped MP3 can be downloaded just fine, since the extension is different. You could also just try changing the extension on your site itself, and leave a note for people to change the extension once they've downloaded it.

Why not ask DS himself? If he's no longer in charge of them, he should be able to tell you who is. Here's his page with contact info.

Vocals are always an interesting idea, even if there aren't actual words, and it's just someone basically "La la"-ing their way through. The hard part (usually) would be writing lyrics that aren't going to detract from the music. That would require a good amount of time and thought.

Should Sony throw a hissy fit and completely refuse to give these guys the Ghostbusters license, I'm sure the game will surface as an original IP. If it was far enough along to make videos, then chances are Zootfly would just redo the character models, replace all the Ghostbusters references with something else, and go from there. You know, a new game in the "spirit" of the Ghostbusters franchise... so to speak.

Don't you love bosses that at first seem defeated, only to come back in a far larger, and nastier form? I found just such a boss, in a PC game called The I of the Dragon. I can't remember this thing's name, partly because I missed the cinema mentioning it, and made a save after said cinema. But basically, it's a big evil looking thing (kind of like a Diablo knockoff) who terrorized the world before and came back to try it again. You fight him the first time in the final "normal" land of the game. You pound on him, your town pounds on him, and he goes down without too much trouble. Then you learn that he escaped to some other place, and to truly defeat him, you must follow him. So, off you go. At first, there's a battle cinema, and this completely decides how strong the boss is going to be. If his troops beat your troops, he won't be as strong as he would be if your troops won, and he had to kill them off. This battle is completely random, which make getting ready pretty tough... especially since if your troops win, he gets seriously stronger killing them off before turning on you. His attacks are semi-varied. One, is a projectile that follows you like a heat seeking missile. It does a lot of damage if it hits you, and it only takes about three to kill you. Another attack, is also a projectile, but this one explodes on contact, and bombards the area with lightning blasts for about ten seconds. These too, do a lot of damage. Another attack, involves him literally destroying any ground you might be hiding behind... which makes the concept of a safe spot impossible. If he has other attacks, I don't know. Those three are all he needed to kick my ass quickly. And if you try to summon troops or monsters to your aid, he kills them in about two hits as well, then returns to hunting you down. Oh, and I forgot to mention, he heals very quickly. But since you can't do any kind of steady attacks, this makes doing any real damage nearly impossible. Why? Because even if you hit him with a big spell, by the time you cast it, you're already nearly dead. This means you have to flee, heal, and come back... by which time, he's all better too. It basically looks like an impossible to win fight. His spells do serious damage, he heals quickly, and any shots you get in are basically inconsequential... especially if he had to beat your troops. Even SNK bosses seem fair compared to this.

Right here is all I could really find right off the bat. The one thing I found for $250 was a 2001 article, and the company seems to be gone now. It's pretty expensive with a 4 slot external set up being $799. I can't imagine that there aren't cheaper versions out there, but I didn't come across any with my first search.

So which format are you? PC or Mac?

I'm not certain, but with a little searching I found external PCI slots, but they were pretty expensive (one was $1,399). One would think that unless your motherboard was a type that had empty slots where PCI plugs once were, but were removed for a lower cost version of the board (thus making it so you could possibly add those missing slots yourself), adding PCI slots isn't going to be cheap. I found some things for a Mac that added a bunch of external things (PCI slots, USB ports, etc.) that was $250, but it didn't say how many slots it added. I have a feeling it's going to run you at least few hundred bucks.

Not to come off as sounding like a jerk, but I honestly couldn't care less about an online StarCraft. I don't usually play online games, let alone RPGs where you can only play it online while paying a monthly fee (that's why World of WarCraft has never interested me). Having to basically repeatedly pay for the game over and over just doesn't do it for me at all gaming-wise. And in truth, I'm just not all that interested in a sequel to SC. The original was fun, but I never shared the "be all end all of RTS games" attitude that many have applied to SC over the years. Frankly, I'd much rather have the long rumored Diablo III come to pass, or perhaps see WarCraft IV.

Defend- OCR has a simple mission- if it's on the site, it's "good". By "good", that means it passed the written (and any unwritten) standards of the site in terms of arrangement, production, etc. (or at least, balances those areas out). There are no 10s or 1s here, no ratings, no "favorites" play lists... just remixes that passed judgment. And really, that's all the OCR higher-ups want it to be from what I've gathered. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll like the genre chosen, or even where the remixer went with it, as that's going to be opinion-based. But favorite "remix/remixer" threads do exactly what this site doesn't... it divides up the remixes into rated groups. If the people running this site don't want this, why would they let the posters do it? If folks want to break up this site's remixes into personalized "bad" and "good" sections, people can do that on their playlists. If they want to say how much they love a remix or remixer, they're more than able to do so via PM or in the given remix's thread. It's not about keeping people from saying how much they like a tune or person's style, but rather about keeping the site from becoming a mass of threads talking about nothing but. Plus, one of the things about favorites threads is that frankly, they've been done to death. Unless the topic is about a movie, game or what have you that just came out, the same points come up every single time (and the same insults too). And when you're dealing with OCR remixes and remixers, the same people and songs come up over and over and over. And as somewhat unlikely as it may sound, after a while, these kinds of threads may even lead to people ignoring any remixes that weren't mentioned in any of the "OMG BESTEST" lists... and that pretty much defeats what the whole judging thing's about. Basically, it keeps the bullshit to a minimum. No one's being silenced, or told to not say what remixes they like. They're just being told to put those comments where they belong. That's all

Open Office Microsoft Word costs a nice chunk of change to use, doesn't it? That's a lot of cash to fork out to be able to type up your paper for college, or whatever else you'd do. But there's hope. Open Office is a freeware program that gives you many features... too many to try and list. But if you need a free, "fully-featured office suite", here ya go. It's quite good. It's available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, and a few others OSes. Be warned though, it's pretty big at 93MB to 121MB (depending on the one you need). The Elder Scrolls: Arena Here's a nifty bit of old gaming. Bethesda made their old DOS game freely available on their website. Since it's a DOS game, running it on modern systems it pretty tough. So unless you have an old version of DOS on your PC, you'll need this next bit of freeware... DOSBox So, how many remember those classic PC games of old? Wing Commander, Doom, the many Dungeons & Dragons games... stuff that not all got to play, but a good number may remember. Well, here's a chance to play them again. DOSBox is a DOS emulator. By that I mean, it creates a DOS environment for running older programs that require a DOS environment. It's a quite good, and depending on your PC, can run some of the more demanding DOS games well. For a little help on how to get DOSBox set up, head over here for a guide I put together.

Thus far, the buttons are showing up for me, so I don't think any code was changed (at least not drastically anyway).

Right now, things look fine. But I have seen the occasional instance where a different looking button pops up (a previous version perhaps? One from another skin?).

Much like the last Nice Work thread, the previous Freeware thread got the axe only a short week after being made. But, since Off Topic is here, it's time to avenge the premature death of "Freeware V", and continue. So let's get back to sharing those great freeware games and programs... The Ur-Quan Masters This little game, is basically Star Control II. Toys for Bob, who made SC II, released the source code for the 3DO version of the game, and a group of fans began working on porting it to the PC, since the PC versions' code had been lost. Right now, the game is basically complete. All the graphics, voice, music, sound effects and gameplay are intact. It's also huge at 300MB. But trust me, it's worth it. These guys did a great job of bringing an old classic back to life again. Doom Absolution This is a total conversion for Doom II. Basically, it's Doom 64 for the PC. These guys did one hell of a job bringing it over, right down to the last secret. The graphics, the sounds, the music, it's all right on the money. You do need to own the full version of Doom II to play it though (you need the WAD file). Castlevania Quest and Dracula's Shadow These are two homebrewed Castlevania games by Archimedes & Soleiyu. I kid you not when I say these games look and play like they were taken from some forgotten vault of Konami games. The graphics are straight out of the NES, and the gameplay is too. The music is actually a bit better than what the NES could do (some samples that were used are beyond the NES' capabilities), and each game is put together very professionally. If you loved the NES games, you need to get these. Typhoon 2001 Remember Tempest 2000 for the Jaguar? Here's a "remake" of it, though the intent is to simply recapture what made that Jaguar game so fun. The trippy graphics and such all seem to be intact thus far, and thankfully, the author upped the difficulty over previous releases. So go grab it, and see what the handful of Jaguar owners got to enjoy.

My sig gif? About 30 hours.

Correction to the correction- "DJPing" is moving your head forward/left/right at a roughly 45 degree downward angle, then back to the starting point. pixplzkthx- Pictures please, Okay? Thanks.