JOURNAL: dokidoki

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  • zub zub 2002-05-21 00:16:11 blah. Didn't get much done this weekend.

    Well, CuteWendy ended a little over a week ago... The second strip remains one of my favourites:
    http://www.wendycomic.com/cute/20000901.html

    It seems the WWF (World Wrestling Federation) changed its name to WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) a couple of weeks ago, but I only noticed recently. I wonder if the WWF (World Wildlife Foundation) laid the smackdown on the WWF. :) And I wonder if in the WWF, uh, WWE, people have been going "blah blah World Wrestling Federation ah crap retake!" (in the non-live portions, that is)

    One thing I forgot to mention about Sakura Con... I helped count the AMV ballots (no, I didn't enter, if you were wondering), and two people placed their checkmark in the line that said "CREATOR -- TITLE OF VIDEO". :)

    This was for the "original animation" section. It had four entries... The last two were rather abstract, and kind of looked like they had "stock objects" in them, to be honest. The first was Paul Dostal's entry, which won, if I recall. While I do appreciate the work put into it, I didn't like some of the shading in the video, and the sound was pretty bad. The second entry by Tipatat Chennavasin had cel-shaded 3D which I thought looked good, and decent-looking 2D character art, which showed they could pull that off too. Unfortunately it was a "to be continued" kind of video which may have counted against it in the voting. <shrug>

    Anime North in a few days w00t! GTA3 mo. 
  • Gaming news... 2002-05-16 02:34:35 ...that I care about, anyway.

    Everybody's probably heard by now, but nyah. PS2 and XBox have both dropped to US$200. I'd been waiting for the PS2 drop for a while... Until then, I've played one at work from time to time, and if I really wanna play XBox, I could borrow that from work too...
    Penny Arcade had a comic about the drop here:
    http://www.penny-arcade.com/view2002-05-15.html
    but funnily enough Toys R Us will give rebates on previously bought machines (as noted in the news for the same day), so I guess the store in the comic isn't TRU. :)

    E3 next week. Woop woop woop! <insert images of game companies working overtime>

    Matrox unveiled their Parhelia 512...
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/14/1320257&mode=thread&tid=152
    I recall NVidia led the way with vertex shaders in their GeForce cards, as supported in DX8. The P512 has hardware assisted displacement mapping, to be introduced in DX9.
    - Has "Fragmentation Antialiasing"... a kind of edge detection so only the necessary portions are antialiased. (as opposed to FSAA)
    - Supports three monitors. (mmm... three-monitor FPS)
    - Supports 10-bit per colour channel. I'd be interested in seeing how some current games look with this. Even though textures might be stored with 8-bpcc colour, information such as lighting which uses a floating point range 0.0-1.0 could take advantage of it.

    I just hope for Matrox's sake that the card comes out on time with good drivers. They've had some problems with that in the past.

    Grand Theft Auto III PC next week! http://pc.ign.com/ is having articles all this week about it. I've played the PS2 version a lot at work (and home, when borrowing the PS2), and made it to the second island, even though I haven't done all of the missions on the first yet. (and have spent a lot of time just messing around)

    I found a funny thing in the AI... There are some bridges that are four-lanes, but with a gap with no guard rail in the middle. At first I started ramming cars into the water, but then I set up a roadblock and tried something. You can steal a car, point it towards the gap, let the AI steal it back, and it'll drive it into the water! Hilarious. There's another area where there's kind of a cliff edge, and if I drive up on the sidewalk just right, I can get pedestrians to jump off the cliff into the water. :) I hope these things aren't "fixed" in the PC version. :)

    I mentioned some of the new features in a forum thread (saveable 30-second replay, MP3s as radio station, new control scheme, higher-res textures, etc), but I recently read that now limbs can be blown off. ;)

    I saw GTA (not sure if it was 1 or 2) on PSX years ago, and it looked fun. I bought GTA1 PC pretty cheap, but couldn't get past the lousy graphics. GTA3 has a lot of detail, and I've been enjoying it. It's the game I've been most anticipating in a long time... but then I don't play games as much as I should. 
  • stuffs 2002-05-07 19:07:23 Well, Sakura Con was okay. It was good meeting some new people. Anime North (in a couple of weeks) should be good... I know more people there...

    Yay:
    - TechTV is playing Max Headroom. Despite having a few episodes on ancient VHS, and trying to catch a run or two on Bravo, I still haven't seen it all. I caught the first episode (and taped the second), which I hadn't seen before. The "origins" ep was a little different than the British "movie" version I rented once.
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/29/206215&mode=thread

    Boo:
    - A game I'm waiting for has been delayed again.
    http://www.theycamefromhollywood.com/news.html

    This past weekend was an All Night Anime event at a local club. There was a bar mitzvah next door, which actually brought in a tiger to their event at one point. There's a picture at the bottom here:
    http://www.geocities.com/ottawa_anime/soap/ana2002pics1.html
    (if the site hasn't gone over its transfer blah blah)
    It's a poor picture... I didn't take it.

    I made an "opening video" for the event. It was... interesting. ;) One of the things they played was Metropolis, which I skipped since it's playing at an arthouse-type theatre at the end of the month. (I grabbed some clips from it for the video though)

    My friend and I did "Weakest Otaku" at the event, our second time doing it. (We've arranged to do it at Anime North) This time was a little better... I didn't make any input mistakes (two last time, and I haven't programmed an undo, unlike "Who Wants To Win Stuffs"), and the audience wasn't as noisy. (except one girl who I was about to throw out of the room -- she was distracting me from input) This time they banked $5.50 (out of a possible $100), as opposed to $8 last time. (we had anime stuff for prizes)

    Unfortunately something was funny with the timer on the laptop, and the microphone didn't work. (it was a small room though)

    Minor chaos at work... Only a couple of weeks until E3, and a number of people are being moved, and almost everyone was given new machines with WinXP. (which I think I'll reserve judgment on for the time being :P) 
  • Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!! 2002-04-26 02:16:13 re: title
    I haven't actually seen the show... I'm just quoting from the cartoons here: http://www.oddtodd.com/

    I'm so tired. I shouldn't be this tired. But I have to get up in a few hours to go to Sakura Con. Stupid time zone crap making my departure/arrival times all crazy. boo. 
  • Cartoon Network's March Specials 2002-04-01 09:20:13 Eltingville: good
    Yogi Bear/Jetsons remakes: wretched
    Scooby Doo sendup: on tape somewhere, haven't watched
    Cowboy thing: The bad side of average
    Lectures thing: The good side of average. Barely. (it was short, anyway)
    At least there's new Sealab and ATHF next week. woo.

    http://www.fiction.org/www/ddp/ddp-betavideo.zip 
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