I swear I did not intend for this to be a gaming-only blog — maybe it's just an exciting gaming time? I've got other stuff to talk about, too! Ah well. Here are three miscellaneous gaming tidbits I wanted to mention.
LocoRoco Joy
Holy wow. I haven't felt such genuine "fun" playing a game in a very long time — probably not since Katamari. Have you played LocoRoco yet? If you own a PSP, and you've upgraded to the 2.70 firmware, download this free demo, and place it on your Memory Stick in PSP > GAME > UCJS10041. (You'll have to make that folder. Japanese instructions here.)
Watching my happy yellow blob merrily sing the (very catchy and great) in-game music, then hitting the "break apart" button and having 15 tiny guys pop-out and start singing the same song in three part harmony, instantly ranks as one of my top gaming moments. Watch "Bits of Blob Fun"!
VS. Brightness Bros
To gently address the concerns of the latest e-dingus over my DS Lite vs. PSP brightness comparison — the PSP screen wasn't white! if it was white it'd blow the DS Lite out of the water! — I will only present to you my final thought on the subject, in pure white. I assure you no witchcraft or ancient german sorcery has been performed here: check the raw file.
Wiird
By now, you've likely heard all about Wii. In general, I'm not a fan of your Viiv's and your Wega's. And, sure, it's joke-packed and awkward for now. But, my friends, I'll tell you this: having lived through some initially-awkward names in my life ("Mac OS X" springs to mind), I know that, eventually, it'll settle in, we'll all be at peace, and it really won't be all that bad. I think. Chris Morris has more on the topic. First, though, we've all got to collectively work through the snicker-zone — particularly here at the Panic office.
(One last note for the curious: here's what your bandwidth looks like when a video post gets Dugg! Ka-zow!)
Sure, it's been a month, there wasn't that much left to talk about, I still cringe hearing my own voice, and my ever-more-bizarre sound effects and jokes are reaching an almost-freakish velocity. No matter! None of that could stop the sweet, sweet inevitable:
The third and final DS Lite video review is here!
Packed to the gills with information — and non-information — this tour-de-force video should cover just about any remaining DS Lite questions. I genuinely hope you enjoy it, and thank you for watching it.
Here's a convenient YouTube mirror for you Quicktime-busters and link-sharers.
While I can't promise more "vlogging" in my future (these things take forever!), you never know where this blog might take us. Also, thanks to Nicole for valuable on-location filming assistance!
If you have any more Nintendo DS LIte questions, I'll do my best to answer them in the comments!
Recently, Nintendo began rolling out Nintendo DS Download Stations to a variety of retail stores. The idea is simple: you stroll into your favorite store, avoid the strategy guides at all cost, flip open your Nintendo DS, and quickly and easily download one of many Nintendo DS game demos into RAM over WiFi. Heck, you probably don't even need to go in the store at all. Then, as long as you don't turn off your DS (hooray, sleep!), you can enjoy — or not enjoy — a free game demo. Nice idea.
So, when my local store got their mysterious white Download Station, I was intrigued and excited, thanks to a life-long instinct to always, always want to see what's inside the box. So, what magical Wi-Fi game distribution technology could be waiting inside?
Was it a dedicated tiny PC? A souped-up wireless router? An exhausted, drunken leprechaun holding magic leprefoil?
Nein. It's just, perhaps unsurprisingly, a Nintendo DS.
It obviously has a special cart that acts as a basic server. It keeps stats on every successful (or unsuccessful) download, presumably for later rep review, and supports up to 15 simultaneous connections/transfers. The options page let you reset the statistics, among a few other things. And that, kind folks, is ds_demo_server.srl rc1.
I realize I may be the only person on earth to find this interesting. So don't even bother bustin' my chops!
(And yes, my final DS Lite video review — not that there's much left to talk about, but hey — will drop on Monday!)
Things have been awesomely humming here at Panic HQ lately, and over the last two weeks almost everything we make got updated in some way. This is all thanks to our awesome team, of course. As they say in Belgium, hiring employees is like being punched with a chocolate glove — at first terrifying, but ultimately delightful!
So, for those of you who are interested, here's what's new with Mac software and beyond!
A great update to our workhorse FTP / SFTP / WebDAV file transfer client. We added a new global editor preference (for those of you who don't like the new per-extension editor system), include skEdit as a supported editor, wrapped up a ton of bug fixes and improvements, and more. (And yes, there was a 3.5.2, but it wasn't long for this world.) Free upgrade for all Transmit 3 owners, of course.
Our cheap and cheerful icon-changing utility, produced in partnership with our friends at The Iconfactory, is now a Universal Binary for Intel power. We also rolled in some nice tweaks and improvements. It's also a free upgrade.
Our curious but cute stats-on-your-desktop utility is also now a Universal Binary. We also added a RSS/Atom capsule, and updated our code to take advantage of hardware graphics acceleration. If you're looking for a Dashboard alternative that doesn't involve stuff flying all over the place, and is, umm, non-interactive, check it out! Also a free upgrade. Our bank weeps.
A huge, exciting update in the Panic Goods store! Not only are tons of cool t-shirts back in stock, including the most popular Katamari Damacy t-shirts, but we've also added women's sizes, introduced a new Army "Adventure Dragon" shirt, and introduced a sale section with $10 t-shirts! Get 'em while they last! (We're also migrating from sewn-in fabric labels to cool tagless screened labels for your comfort, so that's new too.)
In other news, I also finally mounted some additional clocks on the office wall. Steve had been bugging me about them for a long time. So that's nice.
By now, I'm sure all of you have already discovered and absorbed all there is to know about today's new Boot Camp Public Beta — Apple's official solution for truly dual-booting native Windows XP on any Intel Mac.
Upon hearing about Boot Camp here at Panic Labs, we immediately and excitedly downloaded, installed, and documented, and by "we" I mean "me, while everybody else in the office did actual work". Here's what I found.
Boot Camp is basically comprised of three separate pieces, like so much delicious neopolitan ice cream. First, a friendly installer (dropped in Applications/Utilities/) that helps you easily repartition your hard drive without having to reformat (a feature I'm hoping will sneak into Leopard's Disk Utility). Second, a CD-ROM of native Windows drivers for Intel Mac hardware (burned by said installer). Third, a brand new firmware for all Intel machines that will now happily boot and run any legacy BIOS-based Intel boot CD. Take these three pieces, roll them together and sprinkle them with a little cardamom, and you have a declicious and amazing multi-platform pie. Yes, pie and ice cream. Mmm.
After you've made your driver disk and repartitioned your drive, you simply boot the Windows XP SP2 install CD, just like you would on a PC. This process isn't very noteworthy, and is in fact really soul-crushingly long, so instead I'll just drop in some pictures here, and we can all share a good chuckle about the "most secure version of Internet Explorer to date". (Technically correct, I suppose!)
Once installation is complete: you've got Windows.
What next? First, you'll need to install the many drivers from the Boot Camp-generated CD, which happens automatically. Windows gripes about the Mobility Radeon driver not being "logo tested", but, like any good Windows user, you'll hit continue anyway. Once that driver installation is complete — and after the obligatory reboot — you'll probably notice a whole lot of new tray icons. One of those — the display-looking one — is unique and actually from Apple, as it controls the brightness of the LCD display.
There are a few more surprises in Control Panels. First, Apple has created their own Windows port of the venerable Startup Disk, which makes it very easy to switch back to Mac OS X booting without having to use the ol' Option key. You might also notice a weird SigmaTel Audio control panel for the built-in audio hardware: I only point this out because it contains this stunning piece of user interface design that we all sat back and admired for a few minutes. Arctic Tundra Groupbox! Jack Needs Attention.
Other than these bits and pieces, it's basically just Windows on a Mac, y'know?
Wait — what am I saying? It's Windows, running on a Macintosh. Seriously: whoah. It's like taking a freaky-bus ride to surreal-town while wearing rainbow-dipped trip-o-glasses, but it's also genuinely exciting. Look at it this way: if I keep a crappy PC around the office for one or two tasks (checking websites in IE and MAME management, basically) — and I'm a Macintosh software developer — then I can only imagine there are a lot of people out there in the world with their one or two PC hang-ons that find this software as exciting as I do.
Basically, there will only be one brand of computer in the world that will run both Windows and Mac OS X: a Macintosh.
Nice.
Anyway, this is all well and good, but I know you only care about one thing. And that's really the entire purpose of this post. So how about we both stop pretending to care about all this blah-blah and just get right to it?
"Cabel," you ask, "how well does Half Life 2 run on an Intel iMac?"
Shockingly well. And I bring video proof, filmed right off our Intel iMac screen!
(And here's a lower quality YouTube mirror for those of you with Quicktime trouble.)
It's in my nature to be generally Apple-excited, but still I must say: hooray, Apple. If this is but a sweet, sweet taste of Leopard — eww — then August can't come soon enough.
Wow, what happened? Last thing I knew, I was flying to Austin to be a panelist at SXSW — an awesome experience and genuine honor for which I owe Rands and the other panelists many thanks — then I return to work (which is a little more intense than usual) and BAM it's all weeks later up in here!
Before you ask: yes, I am preparing a (final) Part Three of my DS Lite video review series!
But today, I'm here to talk about Harriet Carter.
I have no idea why I get her catalog in the mail. The primary focus seems to be novelty clocks, trains, pets, pet mobility, relief, convenience, and old.
But it's totally awesome. You should order it! Most importantly, the pictures are incredible: sometimes illustrated, sometimes photographic, surreal, amusing, bizarre, and often terrifying. When stripped of the accompanying item description, even more so.
So, dear reader, I present to you: my favorite Harriet Carter catalog items/illustrations.
(PS: If you're wondering what to get me for Christmas, might I suggest a freaky-ass tree-face?)
posted at 1:41 PM
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