Heh. Had to happen. Sony have developed a new controller for the PS3 which sounds remarkably similar to that of the Nintendo Wii – a tilt-sensing remote control.
This picture, sent to me by Jon, says it all.
Tag: video games
Vespers
Some time ago, I recommended Photopia as a great text-based adventure for both beginners and veterans: with a great, sweet story (with a slightly depressing ending) and a short play time, it’s just great to show people why text-based adventures are fun.
Here’s my latest recommendation: Vespers. It’s dark, cold, and disturbing – insanity, bubonic plague, and temptation in the face of heaven and hell… and a cool mix of biblical prophecy and murder mystery in a quarantined monastary.
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Download the Windows installer
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Download the Z-Code file (to play in your own Z-Code interpreter, e.g.
on non-Windows platforms)
There’s about 2 hours playtime in it for an experienced adventurer, but it’s got SAVE and RESTORE commands so you don’t have to do it in a single sitting. And of course I’ll be available for hints if you get stuck!
How To Repair A Nintendo GameCube
For the last few months, Claire and my GameCube has been broken. It broke at one point, which I attributed to the drive motor being jammed up with dust and hair and crap, so I opened the lid and wiggled a knife-blade around inside it for awhile, which seemed to fix it… but a couple of weeks later, it was dead again. I decided to have another look into this, yesterday, and a little bit of research online revealed that the problem was probably that the strength of the laser had degraded, rendering it unable to read any discs. This is, apparently, one of the most common causes of death for the GameCube (and I’ve seen a good number of ‘cubes go on eBay which would appear to have exactly this problem). Thankfully, there’s a really well-written guide on lens calibration for the gamecube, which helped a lot. However, the thing that’s lacking online is a photographic guide: so, as part of this ‘blog entry, I’ve written one.
Usual disclaimer: following this guide will void your warranty. Plus, if you do it the way I did it, you risk electrocution, exposure to laser radiation, and worse yet, you may break your GameCube beyond repair.
I recommend that you read the guide to lens calibration for the gamecube – it’s far more in-depth than this blog entry. However, this blog entry has prettier pictures.
Symptoms
- GameCube fails to load games – it claims that the disc is missing or unreadable, and will only load up as far as the “configuration cube” screen with the funky ambient noises.
- Open the lid and detach the clips under the lid to release the circular plastic Nintendo-branded thing that sits on top of the lid: this will allow you to watch the disc spinning while the ‘Cube is running, even with the lid closed. Try again – the disc will start to spin (so, it’s not a broken drive motor) but then stop (when the system finds it can’t read the disc).
Problem
The power output of the laser which is used to read the surface of the disc has reduced with age. This is a common problem in GameCubes, apparently, between two and five years old. It can be repaired by a Nintendo engineer, but the price is prohibitive (you might as well buy a working second-hand one). However, we can fix it ourselves. [if you can’t see the rest of this article, read it here]
Tools
I didn’t have all the tools to hand that the author of the guide I followed had, but I made do. Here are my tools:
- Screwdriver – this is a standard “size 0” (small, but not really small) Phillips-head screwdriver. This particular one cost me 45p from my local hardware store.
- Ball-point pen – mine was a WHSmiths-branded one with blue ink.
Method
First step is to prepare the tools as you’ll need them. The four main case screws that prevent you from taking a GameCube apart are a strange custom design deeply recessed within deep holes on the underside of the device. You can apparently buy a specialist tool for manipulating these screws, but I couldn’t be bothered, so I made one: remove the ink tube and nib from the pen, so you’re left with a long plastic tube. Then, using a hot flame (I used a gas ring) melt/ignite the end of the tube you’d normally write with (where the nib was, before you removed it). It will probably catch fire, but just blow it out while trying not to breathe in too much of the toxic black smoke you’re producing. It needs to be molten enough to be malleable. Then, once it’s hot, put it down into one of the four deep holes on the underside of your upside-down GameCube.
Push it down firmly but evenly so that it points directly up, and hold it there for a minute or so while it begins to take shape. What you’re doing is moulding the shape of the screw head into the molten plastic of the pen, so that when the plastic sets you will have a tool that exactly fits them. Of course, if then pen snaps, you’ve buggered any chance you had of ever getting into your GameCube, so be careful! Once it’s standing upright by itself, leave it for four or five minutes to finish cooling. Now’s a good opportunity to read the rest of this guide, if you haven’t already.
You should now be able to use your new tool to unscrew the four screws that hold your GameCube together. That’s the hard bit over with. Flip your GameCube the right way up again, put your hands on it’s sides, and pull upwards to remove the cover. If there isn’t one already, put a GameCube disc onto the spindle. This will serve two purposes: it will allow you to test the GameCube without reassembling it, later, but more importantly it will help to protect the laser lens from damage when you turn the drive mechanism upside-down, later. Next you need to remove the front and rear panels. These are attached by small plastic clips in the corners of the cube, as shown below.
Be careful not to detach the cables that connect the front panel to the rest of the GameCube, as these ribbon cables are very difficult to re-attach without damaging them! Now you’re ready to start removing the chassis screws (which are holding the fan in place and preventing you from getting at the underside of the disc drive. There are 14 screws to remove, in the areas shown below, but 3 of these are concealed underneath the fan and the 2 holding the fan in place will need to be removed to reveal them. Why did Nintendo see fit to use 14 screws where 6 would have done is beyond me.
By now you should have something that looks a lot like this:
A GameCube with the top, sides, and fan laid bare, and the screws removed from the main chassis. Now’d be a good time to have a closer look at what goes on when your ‘Cube turns on. This is optional, but I think it’s interesting. If you look near the back of the GameCube, on the right-hand side, you’ll see two plastic forks. This is the switch that detects whether or not the lid is closed (as a safety precaution, the disc will not spin and the laser will not turn on if the lid is opened).
Danger: laser radiation – do not do this! Connect the GameCube’s power (it connects to the back of the fan module) and output (where it normally is, albeit without
the faceplace), to test it. Hold the “lid switch” (above) backwards to tell the GameCube that the lid is closed and press the power switch (it’s on the fan module). You should see the
following happen:
- The power LED will turn on.
- The disc will start to spin.
- The laser, under the disc, will turn on. You should be able to see it shining through the disc. Now stop looking at it; you’re irradiating your eyes.
- The laser will move back and forth to try to “read” the disc.
- At this point, the laser will probably turn off and the disc will stop spinning – this is because the GameCube you’re using is broken. If it was working, the game would load. You can use this test later on to see if you’ve successfully fixed the device without having to re-assemble the entire thing!
- Don’t leave it running too long, because by this point the fan will be in the wrong place to help cool the unit.
Next, you need to remove the four long screws behind the ports (above the memory card slots).
This will also release two strange bits of metal which are held in place by these screws. I don’t know what they do, but I’m sure they’re probably important, so make sure you put them back after you’re done! Right; time to detach the disc drive. Lift the entire upper part of the system up and away from the base: there’ll be a little resistance as a plug becomes detached, but if you find you’re having to pull hard, you’ve probably left a screw in somewhere. The whole metal plate with the drive on top will come away in one piece. This is the bit we’ll be working with. Flip it over. Now, you’ve got to remove six small screws, highlighted in red on the photo below. I’ve also highlighted (in blue) the connector that links the drive to the bottom half of the console.
Removing the screws allows you to detach the metal plate and gain access to the circuitboard underneath. This is what we’re looking for. Again, I’ve highlighted the connector port in blue to help you navigate.
What you need to do is to turn the screw (highlighted in red) about 3 or 4 degrees anti-clockwise. This will increase the power given to the laser and fix your problem. If you turn it too much, your laser will overheat and burn out. If you turn it too little, the problem won’t be fixed. I recommend that you turn it a little at a time to find how short a distance you can turn it (anti-clockwise) to have the console begin to work again (i.e. so it “barely” works)… then turn it an extra 2 degrees or so to be sure. Be gentle!!! When you’ve made the adjustments you want to, re-assemble the thing so far as you need to to test it. You don’t need to put any screws in or even put the fan or panels back on – just hook it up to the TV and try not to look directly at the laser lens. If it still doesn’t work, go back and turn the screw a little more anti-clockwise (to boost the power some more). Hope that helps you get your GameCube back up-and-running again: it did mine! Feedback is welcome, but if you need more information I still highly recommend Lens Calibration For The Nintendo GameCube, which also has pointers on some of the other things that could be wrong (if this fix fails), what tools you need to do it without melting pens, and tips from somebody more-experienced on how far to turn the circuitboard screw. Good luck!
More Madness From Super Bust-A-Move
I don’t get it. To prove to myself I could complete Super Bust-A-Move in Classic Mode, I did it again, by a slightly different route (you have some degree of choice over the levels you do as you progress through the game). I finished on a different level set, and got this final screen.
It’s not as weird as the last one I saw, but I’m still finding these at least a little confusing.
Claire and I are moving tomorrow, so if you can help out, please do! We’ll be kicking off at about 9am at The Flat and going on for most of the day. Drop in to The Flat or The Sharp at any point during the day, or give us a call, and we’ll give you a job to do. Thanks in advance!
Super Bust-A-What-The-Fuck?
Just completed Super Bust-A-Move in Classic Mode. When you win, you’re presented with the following screen (the text slowly fades in a line at a time):
What the fuck?
Claire’s Birthday, and Preston
Well, Claire and I are in Preston. We travelled up here last night (after a few false starts, including getting to Mach before realising we’d left the Green Day tickets blu-tacked to the wall “so we don’t forget them” in Aber and having to turn back). Claire’s been made out to be a bookworm again, with a heap of new reading material to keep her occupied for the coming year.
Visited my mum’s house. My sisters are typically hilarious. They’ve got a new chicken (after the last ones were eaten by foxes) + chicks, and a new guinea pig (called Pork Chop, which I think is a fantastic name for a guinea pig), and the puppies have grown up so it’s complete mayhem of the excitable 3-month-old doggy variety. They’d decorated a cake for Claire’s birthday, which read “Happy Birfday [sic] Mini Melton” and had an (anatomically correct) picture of her, with an arrow and the word “You” pointing to it.
This evening, we’re off to see Feeder and R.E.M. at the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, which’ll be fab, and then tomorrow, we’re travelling down to Milton Keynes to see Green Day (& friends), then we’ll spend Sunday in London before returning to Aber. This puts Troma Night in the hands of those of you still in Aber. Bryn has a key to the flat, and I’ve changed my password on Duality to something you’ll be able to guess: to determine it, look at the large yellow sign in the kitchen – there is a mis-spelling on it, and there is a number on it. Type the mis-spelled word (in lowercase) as it appears on the sign, followed by the number. If you have any trouble, text me. And if somebody could record/download the Dr. Who episode (as Claire and I will miss it), that’d be great.
I mentioned to my family that the computer game that’s occupied me most of late is Microsoft Train Simulator. My dad seemed pleased, but the rest of my family seem to want to award me an anorak. Once she’d checked to see that I wasn’t joking, the dialogue with Becky went as follows:
Bex: Microsoft Train Simulator?
Dan: Yup.
Bex: Trains?
Dan: Uh-huh.
Bex: So… what? You plan train routes, manage finances, that kind of thing…
Dan: No, it’s not like Transport Tycoon. You drive trains.
Bex: You… drive trains.
Dan: Yeah; you drive different kinds of trains along real-world routes to a schedule.
Bex: So… do you like; earn money and you can buy better trains? Or unlock secret areas?
Dan: No.
Bex: Wh… bu… <disapproving silence>
Well; I’m guessing she won’t be wanting a copy, then.
Finished Psychonauts
I’ve just finished Psychonauts, so I can have my life back. It’s a surprisingly good third-person platform/shooter/RPG from for the X-Box and PC, from some of the minds of people who made Full Throttle and Grim Fandango.
Taken at it’s simplest level, it’s a jolly 3D romp through twisted landscapes in the style of American McGee’s Alice, but it’s a particularly well-balanced one: a wide variety of “psychic powers” – levitation, psychic blast, invisibility, psychokinesis, and pyrokinesis, to name a few – ensure that there are always a variety of ways to solve any given puzzle (climb the ropes, or bounce up using levitation, or float down from elsewhere on the map, or find another way to get the object you need…). Sadly, it suffers in many of the ways that console games – and many modern games – do in that the scope for adventuring is still somewhat limited: there are no puzzles, for example, based on persuasion of the NPCs, or on solving mazes, or on finding unusual uses for objects or combining objects. What puzzles exist are typically of the “find item”, “take key to door”, “deduce riddle” and “spot pattern” varieties.
But on another level, the game takes a deep (and, sometimes, dark) look into the human psyche, in a way that’s sometimes as funny as the political mentalities of Beneath A Steel Sky, and sometimes as chilling and disturbing as Eternal Darkness. You play a young psy-cadet at a psychonaut training summer camp (the psychonauts, it is barely explained, are mentalist crimefighters). At the start of the game you find yourself running around the real world, but as the game goes on you begin to spend an increasing amount of time in the “mental realm” (inside people’s heads), and that’s where it starts to become a little more clever.
Early in the game, during an exploration of your characters’ own repressed memories, you encounter ‘interference’ from another psychic, and there’s an interesting intermingling of character presences which isn’t fully explained until far later on, resulting in strange, dreamlike, fractured scenes. Later, you find yourself inside the head of a conspiracy theorist who’s driven himself mad with his incessant paranoia: in his mind, running through his subconscious, you find yourself surrounded by objects that seem to be watching or photographing you, and agents in disguise track your every move. In another mental realm – the mindsphere of a manic-depressive actress, you witness her life re-enacted on a stage, where the changing lighting reflects the mood swings through which the pictures of her history are repeated. In one scene, turning the lights to the “happy” side reveals the freedom the young actress felt at being able to leave home and do her own thing: turning the lights to the “depressed” side shows the suicide of her mother, throwing herself from a tall building… and later, as you’re clambering through her memories and fears, if you fall from a particularly treacherous ledge – if your volume is high enough – you hear her “depressed” voice mutter, “Just like mother.”
It’s sweet, and funny, and dark, and it plays like a dog on all but the beefiest of PCs. But it’s a wonderful little jaunt and a fun little adventure, despite it’s somewhat linear storyline and slightly repetitive puzzles. It’s got reasonable replay value, too, as there’s always the option to go back and “do things better”, although this doesn’t help relieve the game of it’s image as just another console platform game (which are infamous for trying to increase gametime by encouraging the player to redo things “for a better score”).
Photopia, Again
I wrote the other day about Photopia, one of the most brilliant and unusual pieces of interactive fiction I’ve ever experienced. Finally, JTA gave it a go, and loved it too – and he and I have been spending the last few days discussing some of the really, really clever bits and putting our own explanations to them. There are so many questions left unanswered, even after having completed the story, and I’m sure we’ll both be going back and playing it again.
Why hasn’t anybody else played yet? Well; it’s possible I just didn’t make it quite accessible enough. So I’ve packaged Photopia into a single-file executable. Just download and run it, and you’ll have it installed on your system. It takes up less than a megabyte of space and it’s brilliant not only as entertainment but also as a work of fiction.
Download Photopia – it’s self-extracting, self-installing. All you have to do it play it. Windows only. Click here and give it a go.
Photopia
Ever played a text-based adventure (interactive fiction) before? If so, this is a must-see. If not, now’s the time to start. I’ve just finished playing a short IF called Photopia, which won two prestigious (in IF circles) XYZZYnews awards back in 1998.
It’s not… great as an adventure game, but it’s amazing as a story. It’s… so amazingly clever and well thought-out. If you’re an experienced text-adventurer, you’ll be able to
see it all in under an hour (and there is, of course, a SAVE and LOAD function). Wow. Just… just go play it. Go on.
Two good ways to get it:
- Option 1: Download photo201.zip, packaged for Windows – download, extract to a folder, run the batch file (“play_the_game”, or something) – do this if you’re not experienced with setting up your IF enviroment.
- Option 2: Get Photopia 2.01 (Glulx Edition) and a Glulx interpreter for your favourite operating system. You’ll work out the rest.
The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches
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Bookmarked via del.icio.us: The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches.
Hide & Seek
Following the success of our last game of hide & seek in the Castle, Paul, Bryn, Claire and I went for another game last night. Ah; the simple joys of childish fun – legging it around a darkened ruin at night. Right up until silly screaming girls filled the area. Then we left.
In other news, I’ve been playing far too much The Ur-Quan Masters (a.k.a. Star Control 2). If you like retro space exploration and trading games, give it a go (it’s free). Fantastic soundtrack, too.
Parallel Parking For Dummies
Have a go at the parallel parking game – let’s so how good you lot are. I’ve managed to beat the rest
of the folks at work with a stunning score of 87.72, parking in 5.7 seconds flat… not bad for the only non-driver!
Reb, Hell, And Unreal Tournament 2004
After I saw Faye’s weblog post about her own design for hell, I couldn’t help but leave an anonymous comment. If you’ve ever met Reb, my ex-girlfriend from a few years back, perhaps you’ll appreciate.
In other news, I spent far too much of the weekend playing the demo of Unreal Tournament 2004. I haven’t had so much fun with the demo of a computer game since about 1999 (I never have time for demos any more). Wow… it really is something stunning. They’ve really put a lot of work into making it accessible by anybody, too – the hardware specifications aren’t so horrible, and it’ll run on Windows, Linux, or MacOS X! Hell; it doesn’t even require a 3D card (although I wouldn’t like to try it without one!). It’s a doddle to get it running on a network (Bryn and I had a couple of LAN games – driving a tank right into an enemy base with one of you sat on the top with a minigun is sooo much fun), it’s fast and furious, and relies heavily on teamwork. It’s just fab. Have ordered a copy from Amazon.
Is There Anything More Romantic?
Claire and I stayed up late and played multiplayer Civilization 3: Conquests together. When the Carthaginians picked on her, I stuck up for her and razed one of their cities. We’re hoping that by working together, we might be able to get a spaceship to Alpha Centauri before 1900.
We played until it started to get light. Then we went to bed and rolled around, laughing. Then we had sex as the sun rose.
A long multiplayer games session followed by a shag. Is there anything more romantic?
Wargames As Public Acceptance
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[more of this post was recovered on Friday 24 November 2017]
There’s a lot of defence for wargames, as Command & Conquer: Generals to see how far this can be taken. In Generals (set in the near future), the United States unite with a (reluctant) China in order to suppress terrorism in (you guessed it) the Middle East. All sides have weapons of mass destruction, but the wording is clear: while the American WMDs are called “Superweapons” the Chinese have “Nuclear Weapons” and the arab states have “Biochemical Terror Weapons”. And that’s not all – the American soldiers all say things like “Doing the right thing,” and “Defending our people,” in true American Hero voices. Meanwhile, the other sides are made to sound insidious and crafty. The Armerican tanks have names like “Crusader” (yeh; let’s make a reference to Jerusalem, shall we?) and “Patriot”, while the global …