7/28/07
Holy cow, it's been six days since my last update! However, this should make it worth the wait...
I finished the design for the new Saturn review page, with a few changes to the mock-up I posted on the site a couple of months back. All that brushed metal was giving me a headache, so I replaced it with the gold trim used on the spines of Japanese Saturn releases. The steel in the original design has been relegated to the navigation bar hanging above each review. There are six blue orbs inside the bar... they'll be used to return to the front page and access photos of the reviewed game, once I've set up the necessary links.
So far, I've only got one review dropped into the new template, but you can rest assured that more are on their way! Maybe one of these days I'll even take a break from YouTube and write some new ones!
7/22/07
So, just how many new Atari 2600 reviews are on The Gameroom Blitz? Click here to find out!
Anyway, I just got paid, and decided to celebrate my newfound wealth with a handful of games. My booty included Astro Boy and Namco Museum for the Game Boy Advance (I keep misplacing Namco Museum for some reason...), Sega Superstars for the Playstation 2, and Me and My Katamari for the PSP. I've heard the latter game has more. Aggravating. Pauses. Than a William Shatner. Speech. However, for nine dollars, I'm more than willing to put up with them!
I also stumbled upon the DS browser that everyone's been hating lately. Hey, I couldn't resist... it was only twelve bucks! Besides, it's really not that bad, if you can accept a 20th century web surfing experience come ten years too late. There have been many advances in online technology over the last ten years, and the DS browser can't take advantage of any of them, even with the included expansion cartridge. You can't even play WAV files, for cryin' out loud! What is this, the friggin' game.com?!
There are many valid complaints you can make about this browser, but speed isn't one of them. Let's try to keep things in perspective here... this is a Nintendo DS, not an Alienware laptop. Frankly, I was surprised that it ran as quickly as it did, loading compatible sites at roughly 56K speeds. My beef is that many web sites DON'T run on the browser, and the ones that do are mighty fugly until you switch to the overview mode (which switches OFF all the onscreen links). In short, the DS browser is that "kind of sort of" Internet you've heard about in the Apple iPhone commercials. It works in a pinch, but it'll be a painful pinch!
7/17/07
So, just how many new Atari 2600 reviews are on The Gameroom Blitz? Click here to find out!
Anyway, I just got paid, and decided to celebrate my newfound wealth with a handful of games. My booty included Astro Boy and Namco Museum for the Game Boy Advance (I keep misplacing Namco Museum for some reason...), Sega Superstars for the Playstation 2, and Me and My Katamari for the PSP. I've heard the latter game has more. Aggravating. Pauses. Than a William Shatner. Speech. However, for nine dollars, I'm more than willing to put up with them!
I also stumbled upon the DS browser that everyone's been hating lately. Hey, I couldn't resist... it was only twelve bucks! Besides, it's really not that bad, if you can accept a 20th century web surfing experience come ten years too late. There have been many advances in online technology over the last ten years, and the DS browser can't take advantage of any of them, even with the included expansion cartridge. You can't even play WAV files, for cryin' out loud! What is this, the friggin' game.com?!
There are many valid complaints you can make about this browser, but speed isn't one of them. Let's try to keep things in perspective here... this is a Nintendo DS, not an Alienware laptop. Frankly, I was surprised that it ran as quickly as it did, loading compatible sites at roughly 56K speeds. My beef is that many web sites DON'T run on the browser, and the ones that do are mighty fugly until you switch to the overview mode (which switches OFF all the onscreen links). In short, the DS browser is that "kind of sort of" Internet you've heard about in the Apple iPhone commercials. It works in a pinch, but it'll be a painful pinch!
7/17/07
I just ironed out the issues The Gameroom Blitz was having with Safari, so Mac owners (as well as those PC owners crazy enough to eschew Firefox for that browser) can now surf the site with confidence!
7/16/07
Good news, everyones! I've redesigned the review pages for nearly all the classic game systems on the web site. The new Vectrex page in particular is a big improvement over the old model, looking great on Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and- HOLY CRAP! Even Safari can't break it! Now if only I could get that browser to properly display the index page...
Speaking of which, I've taken the liberty of posting links to all the videos in my YouTube account on the right hand side of the page. My love for writing has started to fade after fifteen years (as you could probably tell from the dearth of fresh content on this site...), but producing and directing videos is an invigorating new experience for me, with possibilities that just aren't available in plain text. Maybe it's just a phase, but even if it is, most of my creative energy will be devoted to making videos until it's out of my system.
All right, all right, enough about me. There's some exciting news from Belgium, the land of French speaking musclemen and... uh... what else are they known for again? Anyway, after many years of development, programmer Kristof Tuts has finally completed his clone of Galaxians for the Vectrex. Vectrexians actually looks better than the already awesome beta version of the game once offered on Tuts' web site, with a polygonal introduction (!!!) and aliens redrawn to better match their arcade counterparts.
However, this added polish comes with a heavy price... the game will retail for forty Euros when it's released on cartridge, which comes out to a whopping fifty-five dollars for us poor Americans. And that's not even counting the shipping costs from Belgium! Here's hoping that Tuts finds a more economical alternative for us cash-strapped US gamers, because as good as Vectrexians looks, it's hard to justify spending seventy plus dollars on it when designers like John Dondzila and Alex Herbert have released equally fantastic games for a small fraction of the cost. As much as I love retro gaming, I'm not paying Xbox 360 prices for Vectrex-grade action.
7/13/07
Now that it's all over, let's take a look at the major announcements from this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo...
THE REAL SLIM SHINY: The two years of speculation from Kotaku turned out to be true... more or less. Although it doesn't feature a built-in flash drive, the slimline PSP does offer most of the other cool things that the rumors had promised. The UMD drive is faster, thanks to extra RAM in the unit. The battery life has been doubled despite a reduction in size. And here's a shocker that nobody expected... the PSP's shoddy D-pad has been greatly improved, and there's a video port at the top of the system that eliminates the need for those kludgy third-party television adapters. The only problem is that the system, despite all the improvements, hasn't really changed in appearance at all. It's even shinier and a little bit smaller than before, but practically everything else is exactly the same... not a bright idea when you consider how radically changed the top-selling DS was in its Lite iteration.
CAN YOU DRIVE STICK?: Soon you will thanks to Hori's arcade sticks for the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii! These guys have been making arcade-quality joysticks for game consoles since the days of the Super NES, so they know their stuff ... and they certainly know how to make it better than MadCatz or Pelican. The Wii stick matches the system's blue and white color scheme, while the Xbox 360's own controller includes a Virtua Fighter 5 theme, just in time for that game's August debut. Both sticks will come in handy for those retro gamers who can't stand playing their old-school arcade favorites with the wimpy Wii wand or the awkward Xbox 360 pad.
THE FALL AND RISE OF THE PS3 PRICE TAG: Just when you thought Sony was coming to its senses, along comes sneering SCE executive Kazuo Hirai to raise the price of the Playstation 3 back to $599. Yes, yes, the new unit boosts the hard drive up from sixty gigs to eighty gigs, but it also drops the Emotion Engine chip that makes playing PSOne and PS2 games such a breeze. Now Playstation fans will have to settle for software emulation, the same rotting albatross that had been hung around the neck of the Xbox 360 from the moment it was released. Even without Ken Kutaragi at the helm, it seems like Sony's video game division just can't catch a clue about the repellant price of its latest console...
PERIPHERAL VISION: Not much software was announced for the Nintendo Wii, but hardware is another story entirely. In addition to the previously mentioned Hori arcade stick, Nintendo itself will release two new peripherals for its popular console. The first is a 21st century update to the Zapper, a gun-shaped shell which houses both the Wii remote and its nunchuck accessory. The second is a rocking board designed for use with WiiFit, Nintendo's latest out-of-left-field game designed especially for adults. It's a risky gamble for sure, but then again, so were Brain Age and Nintendogs...
There's also the unconfirmed rumor that all models of the Xbox 360 will drop in price by a hundred dollars by the end of the month. I'm not holding my breath on this one, but if it does happen, that will make the core model fifty dollars LESS expensive than the current cost-cutting king, the Nintendo Wii! I'm all for it, man. Cheap consoles are a good thing for everybody... unless you're Sony, of course.
7/7/07
Cool, check it out! It's seven, seven, oh seven! We're not going to see anything like this until... uh, August of next year.
And now, some bad news. It looks like the video review will be late this week. However, when you take a look at these two pages, you'll understand why. It took much of the Independence Day weekend to finish this design, but it looks like it was worth the time and effort. Looking back, it's hard to imagine how anyone could stand the previous layout, including the guy who created it!
That about does it for me, folks. Hopefully there will be more to discuss in a week, after the Electronic Entertainment Expo has run its course. Personally, I'm hoping for more news about that supposed slimline PSP that's been rumored for over a year now. Will flash memory be built into the new handheld? Will the screen's refresh rate be improved? Will the speed of the UMD drive be given a boost? Or is it all just a bunch of crap? We'll all know in a week.
7/1/07
As I was adding Mandi Paugh's review of the underground hit Puzzle Quest to the site, it suddenly occured to me that the review pages on this site are a total mess. I have a funny feeling that before the year is through, I'm going to have to give them the full Web 2.0 treatment, adopting a layout that's attractive and loads quickly no matter what hardware you use to view it. I'll also need to divide the review pages by system rather than manufacturer, because as it stands now the pages are so enormous that they take entirely too much time to edit.
Before I go, let's have a word of silence for Tips and Tricks. I loved that magazine, especially during its golden years in the late 1990s, and it will be dearly missed. Hmm... all right, that ought to do it. Stay tuned, folks... a new video review is just around the bend!
