My first Videogame burnout | Buying a new 5.25 megapixel camera for $140 | My life after the 4th semester of tech college

I am going through what the average gamer goes through I call a “videogame burn out.” It’s where there are so many choices of games and so little money to get them. I’m actually pulling my hair out finding the best game out now. I didn’t think I would be in this position. I’ve always been someone who avoided “videogame burnout.” The term comes from when an airplanes engine’s stall…they’ll “burn-out” and then you’re in deep trouble to get the afterburners to “ignite” so the plane has power. Same way with videogames, I am so use to buying 2 or 3 videogames every week that off weeks seem like burn out. I’m not financially in trouble or anything, but it’s true I only have $70 cash on hand with check book. I’m allowing my check balance pass $400 so I can afford an Xbox 360 on launch day and one launch title. I want an Xbox 360, and I can afford it if I make some tough decisions now which will cut down purchasing game software by 50%. This year I’ve already spent a good chuck of dollars on Playstation Portable and PStwo. This purchase of a digital camera will affect what I buy the rest of 2005. I’ve bought the PStwo to ensure I have something to play on until Playstation 3 is available. This is my walking around money remember, and doesn’t include money spent on housing or food. I’m thinking of making a birthday list with Xbox 360 at the top of the list. I’ve had my eye on the $140 Vivitar ViviCam 3935! The Vivicam 3935 comes with 4x digital zoom, packaged with USB cable and 32 MB SD media card. I have $90 already saved up for games, but buying a camera instead. I’ve got plenty of games to last a couple months. Needs $60 dollars more to afford the camera! The one I’m using now is 3.3 Mega pixel digital cam with 6x digital zoom, and I’ve gotten 2 ½ years ago. You can bet that my future JPEGs will look nicer. After I get the camera, I think I’ll show everybody my 3 DDR sticks in my Dimension XPS (2x Samsung 512 MB DRR Dual Channel 400 MHz + 1 GB DDR 400 MHz over-clocking stick = 2GB DDR 400 MHZ SDRAM .) I have all day to think it over. I also should mention that I downloaded another 120 MB of MP3s off Kazaa over dialup over two nights so I have 120 minutes of new music added to my HDD.

Midway Games released M rated first person shooter Area 51 today for PS2 and Xbox. It reveals the truth about the Area 51 that has become a talking legend in recent years of government conspiracies. The FMV looks extremely realistic of the President and General of the Army, General of the Airforce, Admiral of the Navy, etc making a speech at a digitalized carbon copy of Pentagon in D.C. much like that Pentagon scene in the movie, “Independence Day” (it’s a rip off of that movie in my opinion.) The FMV is about the fictional conspiracy that the US Government is hiding aliens (the blue Marian type) in the Nevada desert, and they want to take over, etc, etc, etc, and we will send Marines to Area 51 to fight to the death, etc, etc, etc. I’ll be interested in this game for sure. I’m also going to put off buying Stella Deus for a couple weeks so I can afford the Vivitar ViviCam 3935.

All this week has been slow going. I’ve normally been doing nothing in front of the PC these past 6 days looking a various game reviews and writing them as well. I recently wrote a review on Metroid (NES) and it’s remake, Metriod - Zero Mission. I feel that I have to update Catharton Electronica more because I’m needed there. I like games so that’s what there in the first place for…always keep that in mind. I was playing a little Final Fantasy Dawn of Souls. The action replay I put in the game keeps me from opening some chests so I can’t go to the next area. I haven’t played a RPG for over 2 months so I’m rusty on my Final Fantasy game play. To put simply I am dieing regularly…all part of the game. The Gamecube controller isn’t that great for playing GBA games and has been less than helpful to me thus far.

Randy came over to my house on Sunday. We played Extreme G 1 and 3. He remembers Extreme G long time ago, so we played a couple races in that. He won a couple which means my skills aren’t very good. I let him look at my cherished Playstation Portable. He said his sister was bickering about PSP the day before. I feel good now I have one. Then I played my flute, but not well. Afterwards, we went to Fleet Farm (a hardware warehouse) in Hudson, WI so he could pick up a $110 tool box for his used white Chevy pickup he paid $900 for. It was the cheapest model of tool box in stock. We would have gone to Game Stop if I wanted too, but instead we did something more local. He commented how it was the first stick-shift transmission he owned.

I may be in some deep shit in school because I didn’t pass the 2nd visual basic class. Life is hard I know, but I didn’t get through the chapter so now I need to do well in industrial networking classes…somehow perform some additional 50% in school. Life is way too short though…can not let it bother me even though it’s well beyond annoying. I’ve taken one programming course to test what it would be like to program for a living besides a lot of hard work The book was indeed confusing. My college may put me on a 3rd term of probation if I’m that lucky!

To be continued…..

UNIX in the hitcounter

I'm not kidding when I say that 1% of my views are Linux, but 7% is UNIX.

My visitors (7%) are using PC-BSD which is harder to use WINE. The 1990s era UNIX was supposed to be more secure than same period Linux. Old UNIX was harder to crash than old Linux. MAC OS 10 has its own spot at 3%. BSD doesn't use crossover Pro. MAC OS 10 would use crossover pro. Crossover pro is a front end for WINE.

I still would go with openSUSE Linux, because of Crossover Linux Pro available.

Look at the small white streamlined Xbox 360! | Dell replaced my bad monitor for free | joined new gaming board

Supposedly this is the real Xbox 360. The white image is an Adobe Photoshop enhancement where Microsoft cleaned up the distortion for its debut internet graphic. Xbox 360 looks so 21st century compared to Xbox. The controller is made before Microsoft assigned a logo to Xbox 360. It’s been on the Internet since December and it said Xbox 360 on it which Microsoft should confirm next month. Xbox.IGN.com and Gameindustry.biz confirm this is the real deal.


official logo


That black thing below the removable hard drive is a infrared sensor for wireless X360 controllers. The DVD-ROM drive is on top opened by a lid. Controller has a lithium ion pack according to Gameindustry.biz


Yes, it is smaller....barely!


This is no prototype.

The Xbox 360 specs you’ve all wanted :

1. Support for DVD-video, DVD-Rom, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-Rom, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 cd, JPEG photo CD
2. All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
3. Customizable face plates to change appearance
4. 3 USB 2.0 ports
5. Support for 4 wireless controllers
6. Detachable 20GB drive
7. Wi-Fi ready

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
- 3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
- 2 hardware threads per core
- 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
- 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
- 9 billion dots per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
- 256-MB GDDR3 RAM
- 500 MHz
- 16 pipelines
- 10 MB embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
- unified shader architecture

Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
- 700 MHz DDR

Memory Bandwidth
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s frontside bus

Audio
- Mulitchannel surround sound output
- Supports 48khz 16-bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32 bit processing
- 256+ audio channels

MISC

- 64 MB memory cards
- 802.11b
- uses same power cable as Xbox?
- Xbox controllers not compatiable. Microsoft will be selling wireless Xbox controllers for X360

Launch List (mid-November)

Call of Duty 2
The Darkness
Gears of War
Ghost Recon 3
Kameo: Elements of Power
Madden NFL 06
NBA 2K6
Need For Speed: Most Wanted
Perfect Dark Zero
Project Gotham Racing 3
QUAKE 4
Saint's Row
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

Today was exciting because I got a new Dell CRT monitor for free. The previous monitor lasted 16 months than the screen went died. I had my dad call order another one because he bought the personal computer in 2003, because he called from his office, he would have an easier time Dell giving it back.

Other not so exciting news is I played Mega Man 4 and I was horrible at it, but retried many times over. It happened yesterday. The game looks extremely clear running on PS2. This is good with a two year old RF adapter. The disc loads the game into PS2’s RAM and plays it.

As for my visual basic class, I’ve pretty much fallen behind for lack of interest. The instructor can only help me on Thursdays and Fridays. True, it’s not a part of industrial networking, but finishing it would allow new possibilities in VB programming. VB programming crosses with C++ programming in some areas. I only own Visual Basic .net 2003. I’ve got into the programming. I don’t like it, but I’m choosing to neglect my homework that’s due in 19 days. I forget college isn’t about setting around the computer and looking at the internet all day, it’s about doing Visual Basic on a computer for long hours. I’ve got dedication at computer thing right. I don’t play too many videogames instead collecting them (better than collecting movies). The problem is reading text in a book because I’ve horrible time reading books. I can read well, but the book doesn’t keep my attention well. I dunno. I give my best attention to reading game reviews, but working on questions and referring back in the book to answer questions takes my attention a way. I’ve done the first 4 chapters in 8 days, and it took me 5 months to complete the 5th chapter. Something is wrong…the book suddenly got uninteresting very fast. It’s odd I’ve aced my technical writing class!

I joined another gaming board called Cyberscore. I use the same avatar and nickname as Catharton. I already have one of the largest console collections and game lists on the site. I’ve just added another handheld now, the Gameboy Color, without owning a Gameboy Color.

New games to add to list:

• Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons (©2001: Capcom/Flagship)
• Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages (©2001: Capcom/Flagship)

Look at my small Videogame center sectioned off

Unlike two months ago when I had two TVs. I had to give one a way to my dad because now we have seperate DirecTV recievers, we need the extra TV so I have 8 consoles chain-linked using RF adapters while 1 is using the Svideo input jack (Gamecube) because my RF adapter is very bad. This image's pixelsize is resized for your convenance. The DVD player and DirecTV reciever are using the remaining Svideo inputs.



Notice under the Gamecube there is a Gameboy Advance add-on called "Gameboy Player". This adds a nineth console to my TV. Gameboy Advance games are played using the Gamecube controller.

Me quitting Catharton Electronica forever? Could well be the case!

This time, I’ll make it short…none of this three pages long crap. I knew Doom 3 for Xbox was 3rd best First Person Shooter (FPS) after quality Halo 1 and 2, and I started it like I was confused, but that’s false. I’ve this game for PC and it fucking has better graphics than the Xbox. I wanted Knights of the Old Republic because I’m not stupid and that’s what I had bought. Graphics are always better on PC unless it’s an old game.

I’m thinking of quitting Catharton Electronica. The whole place is full of Nintendo fans, and you can’t tell them that the game sucks or they’ll go crazy on yeah. I had a War online…it only lasted 6 hours, and I was outnumbered by Nintendo fans. You must understand in the UK Nintendo is doing very badly except for maybe Gameboy sales, so they like to favor Nintendo any way possible. I had created a Playstation Club where Playstation owners can go and be a part of a club. You feel like a compelling force when there is a club. I don’t know….I’ve been there a long time…and posted a lot of gaming knowledge, time spending on my PC wouldn’t be the same!

Then I back to Toyriffic to buy more games like Vectorman 2 and Streets of Rage 2. The case looked very good so that’s why I bought it. My second choice would have been Ecco the Dolphin, but the manual was torn up, therefore, no good to me. Ecco the Dolphin is a dolphin simulator; a spin-off genre of the adventure games. Streets of Rage II got a 9.5 at Gamerankings.com, best in the series so I picked that up for $40. Then I’ve bought Star Wars – Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords for personal computer (IBM-PC) at Target today. It doesn’t look like I’ll play it anytime soon with school going on. Why did I buy it? It’s the sequel to my favorite Star Wars game! I don’t buy every game I want…really! I met someone here who seems to know games well. It seems that the Xbox version got better score by about 3 – 7 points, but I don’t need that game for Xbox. The graphics are better on my PC. It looked good six months ago. I’ve played it yet.

Anyhow, my Genesis RF adapter is almost junk…works enough to play Genesis games. It worked by loosing extra RF Adapters before it in the chain of RF adapters, and the picture quality of Gunstar Heroes got slightly better, and watched the demos. This time there wasn’t white pixel interference on the LCD TV. I knew my NES came with a bad RF Adapter so I’ll connect that last. Anyways, I enjoyed playing the game. It seems like there is 4 levels in it….is that it? That’s $10 per level….expensive for an old game.

In this PNG, you can see my computer specs are indeed 2048 MB. It’s blazing fast, and I don’t think about it…because everything with 1024 MB was still very fast, it’s just a tiny bit faster, unless you’re loading games, they load a couple seconds faster.


Yeah, I remember back in the day I had 64 MB of SDRAM.....those were the days :)

PS. I’m getting either Doom 3 or Project Snowblind for Xbox at midnight or tomorrow. Project Snowblind is published by Eidos Interactive and developed by Crystal Dynamics. I’ll take a picture tomorrow of my new games because I can’t find my digital camera right now, and it be easier just to take one picture now.

I am so tired….it’s almost midnight. Tomorrow, I’ll revise this post. Maybe I’ll post my dad and my research project online which is about financial advisors’ client planning. Haven’t decided yet if I want too.

Yawn....must stay wake bit longer.....Zzzzzzzzzzzz.



[One day later] Today, I’ve gone to Toyriffic and picked a Doom 3 for Xbox. Then when I found out I couldn’t afford it, I’ve brought it back to Toyriffic, but found out the store only gave in store credit towards new games so they can sell it for $50 again and rip me off on a used game I buy from them. Last time I’ll buy new from them ever again. The little brat said he’d buy it from me used when it’s not opened so I took the game back avoiding screwed about of $20! What I could do is bring back KotOR II and get cash back. I don’t care if I own KotOR II anyhow. I’ll drive to Target in Hudson once I find the receipt I’ll reimburse myself. Final word, I decided not to quit posting at Catharton.com…it’s a long story. Been there and I have more posts than anyone. I would regret deleting it for that reason

Add new games to my list for v1.31:

• Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II – Sith Lords (©2004 Obsidian Entertainment)
• Doom 3 (©2005 iD Software)
• Streets of Rage 2 & Vectorman 2 already added