Jay McGavren's Journal

Viewtiful Joe...

Yet another game I’m discovering months after I should have. I will never tire of punching bullets back at enemies. Hell, I even kinda like the dub.

The preview video of Product Number 03 included on the disc looks pretty cool, too. Gonna have to check that out next. Go, Capcom!

Oh, and by the way, this was a very good weekend. That’s all I’ll say for now.

OK, so here’s a weird but cool idea - I’ve wanted a simple replay editor for fighting games for a while now, but why not go all out and make a full movie-making suite? Picture this: Tekken Movie Maker.

They re-use the engine from a popular fighting game (wouldn’t have to be Tekken, but that sounds coolest in the title). :) They let you set up the scenery and a few basic props, and let you pick one or more character models to be in the scene. Then they give one or more “actors” full control of the characters’ movement, and allow them to enter “battle mode” with each other at will, where the normal fighting engine kicks in. Their movements are recorded to memory for later playback. Headphone mics (such as that used for XBox Live) record their speech as well.

Then they allow you to set up lighting, camera speed and angle (bullet time included, of course), and effects (fade to black, text, etc.). You can also go back and add in timed explosions, car crashes, and more. Your finished movie is saved to hard disk for further editing or playback. Networked systems would allow the finished product to be shared with (and edited by) the Net at large.

I know I’d buy it, and I think several of my friends would, too. It might happen; stranger things have been released.

We finally went to see -itis tonight… Holy shit, these guys can rock. I didn’t care for the album I heard, but it’s a totally different story live. Never seen a band incorporate dildos into their act, either. :P

During the show, they were offering up their albums for 10 bucks, “or have a friend burn a copy for you, we don’t care.” I went ahead and bought one anyway. Guess reverse psychology really does work.

OSs suck.

No, not just Windows. I’m currently writing this from my new $200 PC that I picked up at Fry’s Electronics, just so I could try out Linux.

It’s probably going back to the store.

I tried installing Linux on my old PC before, but Linux drivers weren’t available for any of the hardware I had in it. This one was ready to go for Linux right out of the box, and setup was fairly painless. But not only is the KDE design as abysmally bad as I feared, it’s even more sluggish than Windows. It takes forever just to bring up a freaking Web browser.

But I can’t just give up and go back to Windows. I am so fed up with screens randomly popping to the top 5 minutes after I press the key to open them, a command line interface that doesn’t work as advertised, and a jillion other niggling imperfections that snowball until it’s impossible to stay focused on a task because you’re so busy fighting the OS.

I guess there’s no help for it. I have to go buy a Mac.

But will even that work as advertised? I tend to push software to its limits; what’s fine for most folks breaks when I try to get maximum use out of it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to bring up a DOS prompt and type a command, only to find that Windows lagged in opening the new window, and my command is overwriting my unsaved Perl script. Most people don’t work at the pace I do; will I find that even OS X can’t keep up with me?

I need a way to try a Mac out for a week or so before I commit. Wonder what the average return policy is on something like that…