Wired: New Mod Lets You Use a Selfie Stick in Doom

New Mod Lets You Use a Selfie Stick in Doom

Just when we thought the year of the selfie was coming to a close, the selfie stick brought it all back. Now a modder is sending them to Mars.

InstaDoom is a new mod from DoomWorld user Linguica that adds a selfie mode to the 22-year-old first-person shooter.

Just the thing to introduce a new generation of teenagers to that ancient VGA-based FPS.

Now I want to go back and play it again, but I think I'll skip the Selfie Mod. If I don't go spamming them in real life, I don't see any reason why I should do it in-game either.

Atari 2600 Adventure

Today, I stumbled across the home page of Warren Robinett. For those who may be unfamiliar with the name, Warren was the Atari engineer who wrote the Adventure game for the Atari 2600.

This was a ground-breaking game for its time, and was the first adventure game ever made for a gaming console. Although incredibly primitive by today's standards, it becomes incredibly impressive when you realize that the Atari 2600 only had 4K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. Warren's home page has a page devoted to Adventure. In it is a PowerPoint presentation about the making of Adventure, including a quick summary of the Atari 2600's architecture. It is a great read if you're into legacy hardware/software platforms and the programming techniques needed to develop code for those platforms.

Interestingly, back in the 70's, when Adventure came out, my father and I found the Easter egg, learning all about Warren Robinett. We phoned Atari, hoping to be able to talk with him for a few minutes, but the receptionist claimed that no such person ever worked there. At the time, we assumed that he had been fired for wasting memory with the Easter-egg room which could have held another game room. In hindsight, I think it is more likely that we weren't the first to phone up, and Atari was trying to make the callers go away so their engineers could get back to work.

Dork Tower: May 22, 2013: Gaming Clubs

But more seriously, Matt (in the strip) is right. I find that the most fun I have with video games are the classic arcade games that I play today using the MAME emulator. Thanks to limited hardware and lack of prior art, the game developers were forced to come up with all kinds of original ideas and make them look good using relatively simple graphics.

Review: Dream Gear PS3 Move Quad Dock Pro

At home, we just got a set of PS3 Move controllers (motion and navigation.) Combined with our three existing Dual Shock controllers, that's too many devices to comfortably charge with USB cables from the PS3 console. And Reepi (the cat) can't resist chewing on wires.

To solve this problem, we got two of these Quad Dock Pro chargers. Using them, I can move all of the charging devices out of the living room and out of the cat's reach.

Read my full review on E-Pinions

PlayStation scare tactics

According to Sony's PS3 network troubleshooting page:

Use only an Ethernet cable compatible with 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX or 1000BASE-T networks. Do not use a cord for a standard residential telephone line or cables of types other than those mentioned here. Using the wrong type of cord or cable can cause more electrical current than necessary to flow through the LAN connector, which may lead to heat build-up, fire or malfunction.

(emphasis mine)

So if you use phone wire instead of a Cat-5 wire, it can make the PS3 overheat and catch fire? If that's true, then the PS3's network interface is a complete piece of trash. With any other network device, using phone wire will simply not work - you won't be able to move any data, but it won't make the device catch fire!

So, is Sony simply exaggerating reality, or is their network hardware really that badly designed?

Or are they worried that someone will try and solder a power plug onto the end of a phone wire and shunt 120vac into the Ethernet jack? But even then, it should just blow out the PS3's circuits. It still shouldn't catch fire.

I resemble that remark!

Today's Dork Tower strikes a chord here.

Or am I the only one who (like the comic) listens to music, thinking about if the songs would be good for Guitar Hero?

And am I the only one who really really would like to see Tempus Fugit as a Guitar Hero track?

Planarity

Here's a fun game to waste a few hours/days/lifetimes on....

Game review: Jewel Quest

A few weeks ago, some family members showed me a PC game called Jewel Quest. This puzzle game can be played on-line for free here or may be purchased here. I bought my copy on CD at a local store for $20 (this appears to be the list price.)

The concept is very simple. There is a grid full of objects. When you click on two adjacent objects, they exchange places. If there are three or more of the same type of object in a row or column, the objects are removed, the objects above fall to fill in the gap, and new objects drop in at the top to fill in the gap.

So far, this is the same as Bejeweled, another very addictive game.

Jewel Quest, however, adds a twist. Whenever pieces are removed, the background underneath them turns gold. When all of the squares have become gold, the level is complete. You score a bonus for time remaining and a new level begins. And the levels are not simple rectangular grids. They come in a wide variety of shapes, making some levels extremely difficult to complete within the time limit.

As the levels progress, additional twists are added. Like "buried treasure" - objects that you have to match multiple times before they are removed. And objects that will penalize you if they are removed directly (but give you a large bonus if you can remove them indirectly). There are 180 different puzzles, so you won't be able to finish the game quickly.

Like many other puzzle games, Jewel Quest may be played full-screen or in a window. So you can choose to either pay attention to what the rest of the computer is doing or choose to get completely absorbed in the game.

The system requirements are very small by today's standards (Windows 98, 32M RAM, Direct X 7), so it should run on anything that is even remotely modern. It installed and ran without any problems on my gaming PC (Athlon 64/3200+, Windows XP, 512M RAM).

The only downside to this game is that nobody has (yet?) ported it to the Macintosh platform. I prefer to play games like this on my Mac so they can share a desktop with the other things I work on. But I recognize the fact that it takes a while for people to port games to the Mac, which is why I have a gaming PC in the first place.