Last week I blogged about this cool Asteroids jacket Ty Pennington was wearing. Well, thanks to my friend, Meredith managed to track down a picture someone posted on Flickr of a guy wearing one on a subway, In the comments, someone found out where to buy the jacket.
So unless you buy me one, dear reader, I don’t think I”ll ever be able to buy it. Won’t you help this young man’s dreams come true?????
A couple of months ago I bought a used version of the Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death game for the PC. I know the game didn’t get very great reviews but it was dirt cheap.
So I tried to install it and no dice. The damn game just would NOT install. Put the disk in and an error comes up. You guessed it: copy protection. Way to keep your customers from playing a game they actually paid for…
I even tried things like isobuster and still couldn’t get it to work. Of course I would have called tech support — except that the only tech support phone numbers on the game were numbers in England. The site of the US publisher didn’t even have the damn game listed on their website. The UK website didn’t have any useful information, either.
So I turned to that last resort of the desperate man: piracy. The game is kind of old and it wasn’t that popular to begin with and so I couldn’t find it on any bittorrent sites. So I searched and searched and finally found it on edonkey. Three days later I finally had an ISO of the game I bought and paid for more than a month ago…
So the only way I could play a game that I legally bought was to pirate it. And they say piracy is what costs media companies sales…
Anyway, so I finally got to play the game. I thought it was a little better than the reviews led me to believe. It was nice and straightforward shooting. There’s an interesting feature where you are supposed to arrest people rather than kill them that I found fun. It was a nice challenge to shoot perps enough to make them drop their weapon but not kill them. Then there were the zombies…
I love zombies. I even own the Uwe Boll masterpiece House of the Dead. So I also liked shooting zombies in Dredd vs. Death.
Sure, the game is pretty much by the numbers with the standard plot of horrible mastermind behind all the evil and the boss battles, as well as the disembodied voice that tells you where to go. However, I found it charming.
The graphics are rather dated. This isn’t surprising for a game whose copyright is 2003. There is one thing that the game’s maker, Rebellion should be damn proud of. Like their last big game, the original Aliens vs. Predator, this game loads nearly instantly. After playing games like Half-Life 2 which have lengthy loading times, I am amazed at how quickly Dredd vs. Death loads. If Rebellion can do it, why can’t the other companies?
Since I’m tracing the genealogy of Rebellion’s games, in addition to the super quick loading times, there is another trait that is carried over from AvP: the saving. When Aliens vs. Predator first came out for the PC (Rebellion had actually released an Alien vs. Predator game for the Atari Jaguar back in the day) there were no in-level saves or quick saves. If you died, you had to start the level all over again. Like AvP, Dredd vs. Death has not quicksave. AvP had in-level saves and quick saves added in a patch and for the gold version, so I was surprised that Dredd vs. Death didn’t. At least it has checkpoints and you can escape out of the game and save it, so it isn’t that bad. However, it is interesting to see the traits common to the two games from the same developer.
Overall, I’d give it seven thumbs up. If you can find it for 5 dollars, and your system doesn’t have a problem with crappy copy protection, or you don’t have any problem with pirating it, I would say it was worth it.
Now, I’m not one to wear an Atari shirt or something, but i just saw a really cool article of clothing. I don’t usually watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (Is Extremem Makeover: Body Mutilation Edition even on any more???), but I flipped it on to see the end. Ty Pennington not only actually had a shirt on, but also had a jacket on. The cool part of the jacket was that it was a black raincoat-style material but it had outlines of while circles on it. Then they showed a close-up of Ty. It wasn’t a white circle pattern — it was an Asteroids pattern!!!
I totally want one!!!! I haven’t been able to find one online, so if anyone sees one you have to leave a message!
I got a bit of cash for Christmas, so I hit up ebay for some retro gaming. I am not much of a console gamer and so although I’ve had a Pong machine, an Atari 2600, 7800, NES, PlayStation and XBox, I’ve never had a portable system so I got myself a gameboy advance sp and a few games. While I was at it, I went ahead and got an N64. Goldeneye was such a talked about game, and I hadn’t ever played it, so I’ve wanted to get it for a long time. Well, now I’ve finally got it — just when I’ve got grading to do!!!! Noooooo!!!!!
While it seems that , for now, Vi Simpson’s Videogame Violence Bill is dead in the water, according to the IU newspaper, Simpson hasn’t given up hope of getting the bill passed into law. According to the article, Simpson said, “I’m hoping we’ll have an opportunity to re-introduce the bills in November, and generate some additional interest in them.”
Of course, let’s not forget that most anti-videogame crusaders are basing their claims on misinformation. For example, take Simpson, who issues a press release about her videogame bill that stated:
“Right now kids can walk into just about any store and get their hands on a video game in which they can shoot police officers, use drugs, steal cars, rape women or even assassinate a president. That’s frightening to say the least,” said Simpson.
It would be frightening — if it were true. But it isn’t.
As Game Politics points out:the notorious JFK Reloaded is not – has never been – available in any retail store. So, unless there is some other game about assassinating a president, she is wrong and her bill wouldn’t do anything (not to mention that there’s no law against a child buying JFK or the Manchurian Candidate, so why should videogames be any different?).
Of course, also in that statement, is that other straw man: rape. In this, SImpson isn’t alone. Our other good buddy Joe Lieberman also seems to think that Rape Master 3000 is a best seller because Lieberman has also said that there are videogames featuring rape. On that webpage there is a videoclip and about 35 seconds into is, Lieberman says, “It’s a crime to sexually abuse or rape a woman. Yet repeatedly in these video games the players are being rewarded for doing exactly that.”
No. No they aren’t. I first said that there are no American videogames that feature rape in them back in January of 2004 — more than TWO years ago! You would think that such a stupid misconception would die by now. Unless someone is still out there selling Custer’s Revenge, then people who say that there are videogames on store shelves that feature rape, they are just plain wrong. I know it, you know it, isn’t it time our elected officials knew it? Even Grand Theft Auto’s Hot Coffee features consensual sex. If you don’t want your kids playing games that feature sex, then fine, but don’t make up things to make is sound worse than you think they are!
So it seems as if we have two options here: Either our elected officials are misinformed and ignorant or they are lying. Isn’t either alternative unacceptable?