schnapple.com

Okay, I’m taping over the Twilight Zone marathon. Damned SciFi Channel. Just when I was starting to like them, too.

Anywho, remember how I said that I don’t do this page for profit? Well, looks like I probably wouldn’t have even had a chance to. Seems that 2001 is the “put up or shut up” year, as the Gamecenter Alliance (which funds many sites through ad banners, like my sentimental favorite Stomped.com) is no more after February 1, 2001. For that matter, UGO is said to be scaling back payments to websites it has to do with, (perhaps including your-favorite-and-mine, Blue’s News).

Yeah, the World Wide Web began for all intents and purposes in earnest around 1995. That was the same year I went to college. I remember browsing it on my roommate Travis Arlitt’s 486/50. My 486/20 (yes, they really did make them that slow) was too underpowered to connect to TAMUNet and run Netscape, so I transplanted my 14.4K modem to Travis’ system (he still has it, btw). I was in an organization at Texas A&M called the Corps of Cadets. Picture a JROTC thingy. Now forget that, because it’s nothing close. More to the point, I was in the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band, so I had plenty to do. I constructed a website for my outfit, B-Company, on Travis’ computer using the limited HTML 2.0 and Notepad (it’s probably still on Travis’ hard drive, if his old system still exists), and while I saw the potential of this “Internet Thing”, it still seemed like a pain in the ass to have to do this much to get a little web page up and going. For that matter, the only reason that little web site never saw the light of the Web is that I had no idea how to upload things to the Internet or for that matter that we had any personal space for this sort of thing to be uploaded to.

More importantly, however, was the fact that I wasn’t too good at this “college plus anything else” thing. My grades have never put me in any danger of the Dean’s list, and while part of me thinks my Corps/Band involvement had something to do with this, most of me knows I would be looking for a different scapegoat if I weren’t involved in those aforementioned organizations. Consequently, while college kids around the world seemed to be starting the next Amazon.com or Napster, I sat idly by these last five and a half years and thought “I could be doing this!” I always figured that, if the market was right when I got out of College, I might look into something like this. Granted, I put that notion in the same pile that most of us place the “some day I’ll drive one of those” idea we get when someone with a luxury car speeds past.

The other thing I noticed was the “content page” and its increasing dominance. While Blue’s did do some good – I watch it religiously for game news – other pages merely have stuff to browse. This would be great, except that the race to win sometimes outdoes the race to be any damn good. I like PlanetQuake (one word, not two), but PlanetDaikatana has never provided me with more than a good chuckle (I actually own Daikatana, btw), and I occasionally visit PlanetBlood, PlanetKingpin and PlanetDescent to find out if they still exist, and to be utterly shocked to find out that they still get updates! I mean, Doom still has lots of active websites, but that’s in the wake of the Source Code’s availability, plus it has some retro quality to it.

Imagine what it must feel like to be the first to set up and maintain the ultimate site on a particular computer game (and while I know that all of the previous examples are GameSpy sites, there’s more where they came from), and keep maintaining that site for years before the game is actually released, only to discover that the game sucks ass. Then what do you do? While I’ve actually seen some sites close up shop to say “show’s over, nothing to see here”, others go on to adamantly claim that the game in question is good, and that the critics – all of them – are wrong. Some might actually believe that (and God bless them – some of these games need it), but others are just trying to prolong the magic needlessly. Meanwhile, visits have dried up and the ads aren’t getting served.

So what do you do when you go to a web page and you see an ad banner? You probably do like I do – ignore it. That’s not entirely true – I do notice them, but I will rarely click them (I close pop up windows before they even get a chance to load). I had a buddy at one point who adamantly refused to click any ad banner – even if he wanted to. He would open a new browser and find where that ad was headed and go there the hard way. I guess he thought he was “fighting the man” or that ad banners would go away someday if no one would click on them. While I think he was a little crazy in some regards (he was one of these who believe that if you don’t use Microsoft products/technologies exclusively, you were deluding yourself), he may have his way eventually.

So now I’m out of college and, sure enough, the market is changing and in some ways, drying up. Dot-coms based on moronic notions like shipping dog food UPS have gone belly-up, and most of the “me, too”‘s (of which I would have been one were I not in college) have gone elsewhere. For that matter, the investors in “Free(whatever).com” have had enough of “good ideas” and now want to see these things called “profits”. So now we have the steady demise of the “ad networks”, and with them me might have the demise of the content sites. Hopefully the networks will just wise up – no cheating, no thousand sites on Deer Hunter games, no 2 page articles spread out onto 12 pages with a “next” link at the bottom. Hopefully Penny Arcade will sell enough books and “WANG!” T-shirts to stay afloat. And hopefully the “let’s just put up several pages of bullshit, post some ad banners and watch the money roll in” pages in this world will shrivel up and die.

Anywho, diatribe over. I’m turning 24 tomorrow. Have fun 🙂

I was a bit bummed to learn that the Twilight Zone marathon doesn’t include all of the episodes, just a lot of them. There’s 77 episodes in 42 hours, so some of these episodes are an hour long. I found this page which is extremely obsessive about anything and everything Twilight Zone. Turns out there are 156 episodes, so the 77 being shown in this marathon make up roughly half of them. I had always thought there were 79 episodes – I read that in a magazine somewhere, but perhaps they had it confused with Star Trek. Star Trek had 79 episodes (3 seasons) before NBC pulled the plug. The SciFi Channel plays 80, since they count the unaired (in the 1960’s) pilot “The Cage” as an episode (though they place it last in the rotation).

To make things worse about this marathon, the episodes are played in no particular order and appear to be something of a smattering from the five seasons. Whereas Star Trek was cancelled at the end of its third season, Twilight Zone mainly ran out of steam. After its third season, Rod Sterling began teaching at a University. The fourth season was used as a mid-season replacement (thus it had less episodes) and expanded to an hour-long format. Even after the fifth season reinstatement of the half-hour format, the show had simply lost steam (Sterling’s involvement was still limited). On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter what order the episodes are in – there are no persistent plotlines or characters, so this less important than, say, having all of the Cheers episodes in order – but not having all of the episodes involved and in the proper order means that you can’t look at the evolution of the show and pinpoint the moment of deterioration. In case you haven’t guessed, I have the vast majority of the Cheers episodes on tape and you can pick the point at which, after Sam and Rebecca have decided that they’re not going to “hook up” that the plotlines began to suffer – the series of episodes in which Sam and Rebecca decide to have a child (unmarried) is the lamest sequence in the run. Things perk up, ironically, once it became apparent that Season 11 would be the last.

So, I’m not sure if I want to try and start taping the Twilight Zone episodes I missed – not sure if I’m that ambitious. It would mean that I would have to figure out which episodes I’m missing (which I have already done) and figure out when they are coming on the air and tape them. I would at least like to think I have more important things to do. Perhaps I’ll wait a while and just buy them all on DVD.

One of the Christmas presents I got was the Logitech iFeel MouseMan. Since I’m such a late adopter of optical mice, it’s cool that I’m a relatively early adopter of force feedback mice. Unlike previous efforts (effort, actually), rather than trying to emulate the force feedback found existing in some games for joysticks, it uses proprietary methods. Consequently, games must be programmed to take advantage of it. MDK 2 does it quite well, I’m told, but Soldier of Fortune disappoints. Someone tinkered with the Quake (1) source code and made it compatible, and mods for games that use .DLL’s (like Half-Life) are available as well. Additionally, it vibrates over hyperlinks and Windows items as per “schemes” (like “spongy” and “steel drum”) I’m going to have to tinker around to see what schemata I enjoy best.

I’m taping the Twilight Zone marathon on the SciFi Channel – all 42 hours of it. Always did like that show. It’ll take 7 tapes to do it, but compared to the 20 it took to get Star Trek‘s 80 episodes (like 4-5 months of dedicated nightly tapings) it’s a breeze.

I assembled a page of Quake 3 ramblings. Also, I updated my Sister’s…erm…sister site with info concerning a public singing appearance she’ll be making in January.

I’m working on a forum and a page with columns and general ramblings.

Tired now. More later. Happy new year.

Oh, and there is a God… Wayne Brady is getting his own show next year. Maybe now people will remember his name.

Okay, to update: I have graduated. I did get that much done. Also, I got SSX for the PlayStation 2. Pretty cool. I don’t think it’s gonna change the world (Metal Gear Solid 2 will do that). One of these days I’ll break down and buy a memory card.

For graduation, my wife got me a Handspring Visor, which was downright eerie, since I got her the exact same thing for Christmas. We exchanged Christmas presents yesterday (yeah, we were a little early) and she was thrilled to get hers (though she already knew what it was since it shared the same box size as the one she got me). Now I need to figure out the proper way to use the damn thing. First thing I did was to sync it with Outlook, and it filled my 2MB of memory with 800+ email messages. Looks like I’ll need to get into better email deleting habits. However, it took me no time to fire up DREADling, a freaking FPS on PalmOS! Granted, it did lock my Visor up once, but there’s three different types of reset, so no biggie. Not too practical, though. I prefer ChessGenius, though it means I’ll actually have to learn how to play Chess.

For Christmas, my wife got me The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. This one game in the one hour I got to play it, has more or less renewed my faith in Nintendo as a game developer, if not as a console manufacturer. Mask was developed by a team at Nintendo that did not have Shigeru Miyamoto in tow, and yet it completely kicks ass. My wife even got me the hard wrapped package that had the Collector’s Edition in the Gold Cartridge and the cool but headache inducing lenticular label, and the strategy guide which I will try my damndest to use sparingly. I’ll elaborate more on this game later, once I get a ways into it.

Finally, and this is the most important part of today’s posting, I have made a special sub-page of sorts. This page is to showcase the singing talents of my sister, Amy Kidd. At http://amykidd.schnapple.com/, I have a brief description and the MP3 files of a demo tape put together by my sister this past summer. She has one hell of a singing voice, so do yourself a favor and check it out.

Emulation news site Zophar’s Domain has posted a news story that, suspiciously, I haven’t found anywhere else (though I did just submit it to Slashdot. Apparently some ambitious (or bored) individual has ported Linux (not sure which distribution) to the Dreamcast. Screenshots (taken with a digital camera) can be seen here, here, here and here. You can download the kernel from this FTP site. Oh, and if you’re ambitious enough to want to attempt to create a DC CD-R to run this, you’ll need to follow the instructions on this page. Now, I haven’t tested anything to check the validity of this so this could be all an elaborate hoax (these screenshots don’t give any real indication that the Dreamcast in the shot actually has anything to do with what is on the TV). Imagine – the console famous for emblazoning the Windows CE logo running Linux! Granted, I’m not sure – outside of the tech demo nature of it all – how useful this is, but it’s still neat in theory. Perhaps if someone out there could check it out to see if it’s real or not…

Got the PlayStation 2. Got no games still. Until I get a job after I graduate from College (~1.5 weeks) I really can’t say for certain when I’ll have the “money to spare” since new jobs have this nasty habit of not kicking in money-wise for a few weeks. Joy.

At any rate, when I can buy a game, SSX is the one I’m gonna get. Not that I’m hugely big on Snowboarding Games or anything, but it looks cool, plus I don’t care about football.

In the meantime, here’s my impressions. The DVD playback is lots better than my APEX AD600-A, but it’s still not as good as my DVD Encore from Creative Labs is. Oh well. Haven’t tried any “problem” DVD’s (Terminator 2: Ultimate Edition, The Abyss Special Edition) but I’ll probably rent one soon. I might use it as my primary DVD player, except for that whole “Macrovision” thing. I don’t know what I’ll do about working around that – I’ll probably just rig a second switch on the way to the TV, but man it’s a pain. Can’t gripe, though – were it not for Macrovision I surely would copy these things.

I could attest to the “texture smoothing” bit the PS2 does if I had ever played PSX games extensively – don’t expect Bleem! though – these games are still elegantly crappy looking (the two demo discs I have, that is).

Ironically, what I really find myself wanting to do is get Intellevision Classics and fire that up (or even better – the Atari 2600 disc) – now that’s an abuse of technology!

Aesthetically, I was surprised – this thing is a lot smaller than I thought it would be. It’s like 12-13 inches long (wide, whatever). It’s smaller than my Sony VCR. Somehow I thought this thing would be standard DVD/CD player/component width (which would make sense – it’s skinny, it’s black, it turns off in the back – it’s a piece of stereo equipment!) but nope – it looks pretty small on top of my APEX player (its temporary home).

There’s a piece of equipment calling itself the “horizontal stand”. There’s a “vertical stand” – a blue wedge dealie which holds the thing up and keeps it from falling over when it’s on it’s edge, but this “horizontal stand” is for looks only – it has no chance of falling over in its normal position. But I get the thing out of the box and all hooked up and I realize – it looks naked without the stand – kinda like a “racing stripe”. So I’ll probably get one. Yep – I’m a sucker.

Remember back in the Nintendo 64’s heyday (yes, it did have one) when people griped about games costing $60 and $70, due to the cartridge format? Well when I buy SSX, I’ll pay $50 or less. That’s all. Nothing else. Unless, of course, I want to save my game. In which case I’ll have to fork over $35. That brings the TCO of this game to $85. Progress!

“But you can use the card for multiple games!” true – so over the long term I will save money. Except for those game that take up the whole card (NFL 2K on the Dreamcast comes to mind). Plus, the PS2 DVD cases have a slot for a card, so they’re encouraging you to get a lot of memory cards. It’s akin to the “our console is cheaper!*” *but it doesn’t come with a game notion that became the norm a while back.

All I know is to hell with the parents – I want a damn demo disc, not a flier to send in for one (which is what I got). When the parents of America griped to Sony that anything they put on the PSX demo disc was too violent, Sony decided to wash their hands of the demo disc pack-in idea. Bastards.

Anywho, something else with the PS2 bit I think is funny is the whole memory card management concept. I don’t remember how many bytes was on a PSX memory card, but let’s say it was 30K. Well, Sony divided this up into 2K “blocks” (15 per card) so that they could just say how many blocks a game took up, and save the user from having to do math or worry with base 2 numbers. On the back of a PS2 game, however, is a measurement in kilobytes. So now you have to just figure out or remember how much memory you have left. Can’t decide if this is good or bad…

No time to update. Been busy with school and job hunting and yadda yadda yadda.

At any rate, barring a major incident, today is the day I finally get a PlayStation 2. I would have had one on launch day (had it pre ordered and all) but finances prohibited me. Actually, I wouldn’t even be able to get one now had it not been for the fact that my parents kicked me a graduation wad (yes, I am spoiled). I guess I had better graduate, then.

As for availability – it helps that when you quit a retail software store you don’t sever ties. Tee hee.

Having said all that, I don’t plan to get any games for the system just yet. Main reason is that I have a ton of homework to do (next week is the last week of school, and then finals) and I don’t need the distractions. Just the idea of my PS2 with its blue LED humming and playing all the DVD’s that my APEX AD-600A can’t play too well (like anything from Total Movie magazine – plays fine just with bad artifacts, or anything with Seamless Branching) and maybe popping in a PSX demo disc. The PS2 comes with no demo disc, and why is that? I mean, it could. Of course, I guess I just answered my own question. You place a demo disc in a system to help sell it. Sony’s not trying to sell the PS2 – the PS2 sells itself.

Yep, Sony did everything they could to bung this one up. They scaled back the shipment. They had no first party launch titles. They even lost developers (like Oddworld Inhabitants) and exclusive properties (like Crash Bandicoot). To top it off they launched what was essentially a DVD player with PSX/PS2 capabilities built in (but so that you don’t forget that it’s a game machine they make you control the DVD’s with a Dual Shock controller or make remotes unintuitive). And yet they had a better launch day than Dreamcast did – 500,000 units sold (all of them) as opposed to 9/9/99’s 400,000 units.

I guess they figured it might look bad to have a million units out there and not all one million sell. It’s a kick to Sega’s groin that Sony had a better launch day despite scaled back production. Actually, I don’t know what the real reason is – I really believe it might be as simple as difficulties producing the Emotion Engine chip – but it does all seem suspicious and convenient.

There’s a guy at the office who said “hey man, have you seen the PlayStation 2? Madden 2001 looks awesome!” Looks awesome. Nevermind that NFL2K1 has better play (or so I am told – not a football guy myself). Nevermind that the graphics are only marginally better than Dreamcast. Nevermind that Dreamcast has been around for over a year, and has lots more titles, and is actually available this Christmas. Madden 2001 looks awesome. That’s the reason the Dreamcast will go down – Sony has the masses going for it.

Granted, I’m fueling the fire. I’m part of the reason that that particular unnamed software store will be out of PS2’s by the end of the day (I stiffed someone out of getting their pre-ordered unit today, no doubt). I have a slew of Dreamcast games, but I’ll probably play the hell out of SSX (the only game I see worth buying immediately). Hell, I’ll probably plop down for a PSX (PSOne) game or two.

Am I addicted? Perhaps. No, definitely. But anyway, I never owned a Saturn or a PSX and I’m getting a PS2 today. I’m gonna fire it up, play a few games (next week) and sit back to watch the console wars. Me and the other 700,000 people who were lucky enough to get their paws on a PS2.

Obee Kaybee. I finally got off of my duff and made this page. Well, sorta. Yeah it’s hideous and such – but I did it for free. I don’t intend on making money off of this site (if I move it to a better server it’s gonna be out of pocket) – not because I believe that “commercial sites are evil” or some crap like that – mainly that I don’t want this to turn into a Job that encompasses too much. I love Blue’s News as much as the next gamer, but it seems like they cover so much stuff there now that I couldn’t give a damn about.

Anywho, I plan on putting something here worth reading at some point, but in the meantime, here’s a Lame FAQ. Actually, since few people have seen this page, it’ more like “Anticipated Questions” rather than “Frequently Asked”.

Why is this page so ugly?
No time to make a pretty one. I’ll elaborate more on why as the time comes. Don’t worry – a better one is coming.

Why is this page actually hosted on Tripod.com?
They’re free. I’ll probably move it later. I used NameZero.com to register the domain and it redirects you to this page. Later I’ll work on a more elegant solution.

So what’s the point of this page?
A home for all my ramblings and rantings. Mainly on the video game community. Kinda like Penny Arcade, without the graphics or comics.

I hate that pop up ad.
So do I. If you have any suggestions, email me.