The creator of Prince of Persia Jordan Mechner is returning to his roots by bringing back from the dead one of my first fighting games I played on my monster 386 I built back in the day. Karateka was simple and yet frustrating as it was easy to die and thus returning you to the start the game since there were no saves. Heck even when you finish the game and rescue the princess, if you approach her in a fighting stance, she will kill you. That was the beauty of the game, it made you scream “NOOOOO!” at the top of your lungs just when you figured you were done. Yes, I did not walk away from my computer untill I finished this abomination.

I am looking forward to the remake, I am sure Jordan will polish it up and make it as frustrating as I remembered it. Wow, it seems like the 80’s are making a killer comeback. First Tron and now Karateka. It is time to jump up and dance!

What is fun? Singing at the top of your vocal range, exhausting your lungs, and still not be able to hit those crazy high notes of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” on Singstar. Keyla and I stayed up to one in the morning earlier today trying out all the new 80’s songs we purchased on Singstar. Many memories of my youth was sparked as well as the realization that singing is hard! Breathe I keep telling myself, I must learn to breathe. Continue reading

Well it seems that the linux-uvc drivers are working as advertised and Adobe player support is just not in the cards. It seems, as far as I can tell, Adobe Flash does not support V4L2. The UVC drivers only work with V4L2. I guess if I need to record a seesmic session, I will need to boot into my Vista partition.

My Optoma HD72 is up and running minus the bright mode. It seems the bulb ballast is outside the tolerance for the projector to run it at full capacity. I still need to get a new bulb but I can hold that off for a bit as running the pj in low mode is not that noticeable. Blu-Ray movies are back!!!

On the gaming front, I have yet to get MGS 4 but intend to when I get a little spending money for myself. On purchasing PS3 games, I notice that Target throws at the end of the isle sales, a couple of games at astoundingly low prices. They are buried but so far I have picked up Ninja Gaiden Sigma, and Fight Night 3 for $14.95 respectively and they were new. I am not sure if this is company-wide but the local stores around here have them with the red stickers. It is interesting to see that a week later, those games return to the main display back at the regular sales price of $29.95. Keep an eye out when you are walking around the electronic department section of Target.

I won the original Xbox in a Taco Bell contest and that unit only lasted a year.  My father purchased another xbox that can only run for about three hours before it shuts down.  Microsoft for me had a very bad track record for gaming systems that I did not want to invest in their next iteration.  When reports start pouring out on failures with the 360, I felt a sense of relief that I was not one of the users frustrated with the lack of QA Microsoft seems to have with their hardware.  Now a report is out discussing how MS cut corners with the design of the 360 in hopes to save money only to give the public a shoddy piece of tech that will fail.  Say what you will about Sony’s PS3 but the investment in design did pay off, even if they are losing money left and right from each sale.  Hey mine is a killer BD player that plays games, wait shouldn’t that be the other way around?

As some of you know, I am an avid online multiplayer gamer and love to game every chance I get.  With kids, that is a bit hard to do but I do have a very understanding wife.  I had a chance to see the development of RedPanda’s work and was impressed at how far they are coming along.  Who is RedPanda and why should it matter to me?  They are a student run game development team at Southwestern University.  Three of the programmers work for me at NITLE to help develop our web applications.  Tommy, Stephen and Bob are by far the most talented group of programmers I have ever worked with.  It takes very little input from me for them to unravel the problem and compose a solution for which I test against.  NITLE is forever grateful for their efforts.

In their free time, they decided to create not only a game but a methodology for how we should play.  Their mission is to give the gamer control over their interaction in the game by supporting unforesseable emergent properties as the development team calls it.  That means if you wish to leave a quest and jump into a red corvette and drive across the rugged terrain, you will have the ability to add that property to the environment.  This basically gives the gamer two hats to manage, player and creator.  The guys are fun to work with as they have great attitudes toward problem solving.  Heck these guys make up team “SU Root” For the comp sci department that took sixth in the ACM South Central Regional Programming Contest at Texas A&M.  These guys are good!

I wish them well in this project.  Keep an eye on this team.  This game may well be a historical marker of a team that may one day change the way we interact with our games.