January 11th, 2008 Jeremy
love to play games. So much so that I like to do other things while I play them. For example, while playing World of Warcraft, I often have to read up on something in the WoW Wikipedia or the official site. So instead of minimizing the game, I have it set to windowed mode.
World of Warcraft has really spoiled me, because it has excellent built-in windowed mode support. But most games don’t. The other PC games I play a lot are Sim City 4 and The Sims 2. Neither of which have any built-in support for windowed mode. This is quite annoying for me, because I’m one of those people that likes keeping an eye on their buddylist, inbox, etc. So I googled around to find the answer and now I’ll share it with you. First of all, find the shortcut to the game (or the actual .exe file of the game. Either will do) and right click on the icon. Then click Properties.
On your game there should be a little box with the path to the game in it (labeled as “Target:”). At the end of the path (after the final quote mark), type -window. Then click “OK”. This only works with some games, so you might need to try just -w after the final quote instead of -window. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just look at the above image. It’s the “final product” of this whole thing. Even with one of the two at the end of the path, it still might not work. I have no idea why, but some (maybe most) programs don’t have support for that. So if those don’t work, you can give 3D-Analyze a shot. Amongst other things, it can force games into windowed mode. To do this, unzip the files into a directory and run 3DAnalyze.exe. Then click “SELECT” and find and select the .exe for the game you want to run in windowed mode. NOTE: It HAS to be the .exe. Using the shortcut doesn’t work with this thing. After you’ve selected it, click off “Force Windowed Mode” at the bottom of the “Performance” column. Then click RUN.
This also may or may not work. But hopefully one of the two methods I’ve given will work for you. If not, actually check your game to see if it has it already. It’ll be under the graphics or display setting. I’ll be updated this article as I find new ways to force windowed mode.
Posted in Gaming, How To, Windows | 2 Comments »
December 5th, 2007 Jeremy
Do you know how frustrating it is to go a month without playing xbox (by choice) and then when you get that urge to play a game or two you can’t? Its VERY frustrating! I went a month or so without playing the xbox because it was beginning to bore me. I’d spent endless hours killing people in Call of Duty 3 and all my other games just bored me. But then my hunger to game came back to me. I fell victim to the hunger pains and started up the ‘ol 360 to play some Gears of War with my friend Justin. The loading screen comes up. “oh boy!” I thought, “I’m going to kick some ass.”. That’s about the same time that the xbox froze. “WTF?!?!?!” I yelled loudly. “JEREMY! Don’t say that!” my mom yelled back. So I frantically restarted my box only to find that it froze every time I started it up. So I called xbox tech support.
Now I’d heard nightmarish stories about how MS tech support is horrible. And how you’re always on the phone for like an hour. To my surprise, it wasn’t painful. I called the number and was introduced to the automated voice system. After chatting it up with that guy for a while, I was taken to real live, breathing human! I explained the situation to the guy and he pulled up my xbox’s info and informed me that I was till under warranty (Even though I hadn’t red ringed yet). But he told me to do something that red ringed it. Great! So he gave me some information and MS sent me an empty box and packaging material. I was kind of lazy and waited two weeks before I took it…but eventually I sent it off to Texas (that’s where MS fixes/replaces xbox’s). A week later I was freaking out and wanted my xbox. But I silenced that xbox hunger with a healthy portion of World of Warcraft. Swords, dwarfs, giant spiders, and the Defias Brotherhood.. MmmMmmmMmmm. Just like mom used to make.
The following week I had grown impatient, because I’m an impatient person. So I called up tech support and was like “BITCHES! WHERE DA FUCK MUH XBOX AT?!”. or something along the lines of that. :) The guy informed me that the xbox was scheduled to arrive today. OH SWEET JESUS HOORAY YES! No sooner had I gotten off the phone that the doorbell rang. I seriously made this face- O_O
So I got my xbox back and started it up. It scared me though, because I thought the audio was broken. Turns out one of the p.o.s. gaming cable “router” I bought from gamestop a year ago had a bad audio plug. So here it is two weeks later and I’ve had absolutely no issues with my xbox. It runs quieter, actually. Which means its probably one of the newer xboxes.
In conclusion, despite the rumors, despite the jokes, despite the despitefulness, getting a red ring of death isn’t as painful as it sounds. And getting your xbox replaced is very easy. http://xbox.com/support/
Posted in Gaming, Microsoft, Technology | 3 Comments »
September 23rd, 2007 Jeremy
I love the Pokemon games. That’s right. I said it. I’m a 19 year old that still enjoys a game targeted at 12 year olds. There’s something about those games that is hypnotically addicting. Pokemon grabbed me by the nuts at the age of 11 and hasn’t let go since. So I’m honoring the game with an article dedicated to pointing out and mocking its flaws.
1. Apparently you need Pokemon, or you pass out
In a battle if you run out of Pokemon, you black out (or in the case of Silver/Gold/Crystal “white out”) and magically reappear at a Pokecenter where a nurse will fix your Pokemon. What the hell? One minute you personally are healthy and perfectly capable of living, but the second your beloved little Squirtle gets pwn’d, your brain stops receiving the necessary oxygen and reboots. I’m sure you love Squirtle very much, but if it gets K.O.’d and you follow suite, you need help. That’s a very unhealthy poke-addiction. Amazingly, however, you have enough strength to dish out a couple hundred $$$ to the guy that beat you.
2. Villains use Pokemon to take over the world
Apparently they’ve never heard of guns. Team Rocket and the bad rip-off teams that followed in G/S, R/S, and D/P all have a grand vision of how the world should be. And to make this vision become reality, they use Pokemon to get the job done. The obvious thing to do if a little kid was invading your fortress would be to shoot the brat in the head and hide the body. Do you realize how man world visions could come to be if those morons would just kill the kid?!
3. Noobs can pwn the hell out of adults
The Elite 4 are trained veterans who have been training their Pokemon since they were your age. For some thats like 50 years. And their pokemon have been with them through thick and thin. But you, a young lad who has had your Pokemon for an in-game few months can come along and destroy these veteran’s Pokemon with 1 or 2 attacks.
4. Colors are good names for children
When you start up a new game, you can pick from a few pre-made names, or you can make your own. In each color version of the game, the default name is the color of the game and your rival is the “opposite”. For example (since that last sentence was a run on that made no sense) in Pokemon Red, the default name is Red and your rival is Blue. Fortunately they’ve done away with this, because I don’t think Diamond is a very good name for a boy. At least he’d be a girl’s best friend. </bad joke>.
5. Apparently a bird 1/5your size can fly you away to a city miles away
According to my Pokedex in Pearl, Starly is 1 foot tall, while your character is nearly 5 feet tall. I got a C in Physic, but I’m pretty sure that unless Starly is half ant, it can’t lift something like that. To make matters worse, Starly weighs 4.4 lbs and the character weights 84! Eventually it does start to seem possible, because birds like Pidgeot, the Legendary birds, Fearow, etc are all equal to or greater than your size.
6. Why the hell is there a truck near the St. Anne?!
Okay so there’s 6 things, not 5. But seriously…I know it was the center of the massive Mew-catching hysteria, but seriously. Why was there a truck on an island next to the cruise ship?! I don’t get it! It does nothing!
Posted in Funny, Gaming | 2 Comments »
August 4th, 2007 Jeremy
Update (May 30, 2008): I’ve since lost all of the blog post images for this entire site (up until 2008). So I don’t have any of my pictures for this anymore. I managed to find one website that re-posted this story with one of the pictures. Check it out after you read the story here.
I was bored and I had an oldish Dell Dimension 2400 lying around that was collecting dust as a nice foot rest under my desk. So I decided I stripped it of all its parts and make a Lego computer! Before I began construction with the Legos, I figured I should make sure I could put everything back together properly. After a few minutes of reassembly and trying to remember where exactly that one plug went, I got it to boot to the BIOS. Unfortunately like an idiot I had wiped that harddrive clean earlier in the day. So I had to make a choice: Kubuntu Linux or Windows XP Pro. I figured the last thing this computer would need is something that heavily worked the processor (melting plastic isn’t a good smell). So I went with Kubuntu Linux (I completely pulled the idea that Linux would put less stress on the processor out of my ass. I have no idea if that’s true or not). So I installed Linux onto the computer and made sure everything perfectly worked after my little reconstruction. And amazingly it did! So the first thing I did was mark where every piece of the computer would go using a permanent marker on one of those large Lego pieces (1.5 foot by 1.5 foot ones). But like an idiot I forgot to make sure all of the cables from the power supply could reach the motherboard, and all of the motherboard’s cables could reach the CD player, Harddrive, fan, etc. So after a bit of repositioning, I screwed the mother board into a few 2×4 Lego blocks (to keep the motherboard about 1/3 an inch off the bottom of the Lego board.) and attached it to the board.
After that I just placed the harddrive, power supply, and cd player on the board and built legos up around it. The Lego case isn’t complete yet, but the computer’s parts are installed permanently and its just a matter of building up.
Posted in Fun, Legos, Technology | 5 Comments »
June 12th, 2007 Jeremy
Ask some web designers about Dreamweaver and most will tell you that anyone using it is a web design noob that wouldn’t last a minute without their precious little WYSIWYG editor. Well I’m here to say they’re dead wrong. Sure, there’s tons of people out there that got ahold of the program and created a million table-based designs that look like crap, but there are those (myself included) that use or have used Dreamweaver as a way to learn. A year or two ago, a friend of mine gave me his copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004 because he already knew how to code everything by hand and at that point, I couldn’t code to save my life. Because of my inabilities, being able to create a website by just clicking here and there was a Godsend. And being told by my highschool’s computer teacher that “Most web designers these days use Dreamweaver” was even more reason (or so I thought) to use it. So in one night I created six or seven table-based templates to put on OSWD using nothing but Dreamweaver’s design view (absolutely no code is involved with design view. Just clicking and typing your content). I sent them off to OSWD, but they got rejected because they didn’t validate (something I had never even heard of). So after a while I came to realize that I really needed to learn how to hand code. So I downloaded all of Andreas Viklund’s templates from OSWD and played with the code through Dreamweaver. In a couple of weeks I had taught myself XHTML and a CSS.
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Posted in Reviews | 5 Comments »
April 19th, 2007 Jeremy
If you’re a gamer, then you’ve probably heard of Jack Thompson. If you haven’t, well he’s an attorney who is obsessed with getting rid of violent video games and blaming everything that happens on them. His latest push of his anti-video game agenda was a short time after the Virginia Tech massacre. Before they knew that Cho Seung-hui was the shooter, before they knew why, and pretty much before they knew anything specific about the shooting, Jack Thompson was called upon for his expertise (He’s not only a anti-video gaming advocate, he’s also a school shooting expert…). Basically he blamed violent video games for the shootings. Let me state it again…this was before ANY information was known about the killer/motive/etc.. Basically Jack Thompson is so sure that video games are the root of all things evil in the country. Someone with that much of a bias shouldn’t be allowed to present his opinion as a professional one.
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Posted in Apple, Gaming, News, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
April 11th, 2007 Jeremy
All you have to do is take a composite video cable and plug it into my iPod and TV. Pretty simple. I’m not exactly sure what kind of video cable it is (other than that its composite), so I can’t really help you out on finding one. I can, however, offer you a picture of it.
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Posted in Apple, Technology | 1 Comment »
March 26th, 2007 Jeremy
Note: Updated June 22, 2008
There’s a lot of hype about this game. It has won a ton of awards from a ton of different video game magazines, sites, companies, etc. and all for a VERY good reason. The reason is that this game is amazing. From the time I picked up the controller to the time I put it down (which I admit was only like 10-15 hours later), I was amazed. This was my first XBOX360 game, and I went the extra mile and bought the collector’s edition (or was is special edition…I can’t remember). And boy am I glad I did, because if I hadn’t I would have no idea why the hell I was fighting ugly orc-like things that crawl out of the ground.
Now you may be wondering what I mean by that. What I mean is that unless you read it on wikipedia or buy the $70 version that comes w/ a little book, you’ll have no idea what’s going on. The game does little to unveil the shroud that covers the main character’s past, the planet’s past, the locusts’ past, etc. That being said, you don’t really need a background to know that these locust guys are a pain in the butt and its your job to blow ‘em up. And that’s definitely something you’ll be doing a lot with this game. The main argument against this game is length. With enough dedication/food/caffeine, you can beat this game in one sitting….on easy. But that’s what the other difficulty settings are for.
The game comes with three different difficulty levels, each one much more difficult than the previous. When you first play the game, you can choose between the easiest mode and the middle-difficulty mode. Beating one of those two modes will unlock the third and most difficult mode. That, added to collecting COG tags, getting achievements, etc. makes for an okay-length game. Another argument against the game is online play. To me online play sucks. It pretty much consists of either jerks that are REALLY good at the game pwning you left and right, or 12 year olds who found the shotgun or found a sniper rifle/good snipers nest that call you a noob. Between the two you’re not left with much fun to have. That being said, online has a good half- Co-Op.
Co-Op is a LOT of fun. Especially during big battles against a lot of enemies or against more difficult enemies that require strategy. All in all, Gears is an excellent game. the graphics are breathtaking and if they’re any indication of what’s to come later on in this generation, we’re all in for some awesome gaming.
I gave it an 8.8/10 at gamespot.
Posted in Gaming, Microsoft, Reviews, Technology | No Comments »
