With my 20.1" widescreen LCD, I'm putting this together this week:

1      LIAN LI PC-61 USB Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

1     EVGA 122-CK-NF68-T1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail

1     Foxconn FV-N88SMBD2-ONOC GeForce 8800GTS 640MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Video Card - Retail

1     PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad - Copper EPS12V 750W Continuous @ 40°C (825W Peak) Power Supply - Retail

1     Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6600 - Retail

2     G.SKILL 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL6S-2GBMQ - Retail

1     Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

1     Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard - Retail

1     Logitech G5 2-Tone 6 Buttons 1 x Wheel USB Wired Laser Mouse - Retail

1     LITE-ON 16X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-16A7S-05 - OEM

1     Microsoft 66I-00010 Windows Vista Home Premium 1 User License - Retail

1     Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - OEM

3     MASSCOOL FD08025S1M4 80mm Case Fan - Retail

After months of searching for a job, I finally landed one at PLATO Learning. I am a Configuration Analyst, part of the development department under SCM/SQA. I've only been there 4 days, but that's enough to see that gaming is going to be a hard thing to do now. Half of the development team in in India, so on top of 11-14 hour days, I have to take conference calls at 9 or 10PM with the Mumbai site.

Hopefully I'll be able to wiggle a bit free from Metrics and focus more on automation and scripting. My current projects are to script data-gathering from Access, and to fully automate build/continuous integration/smoke tests. Er, yeah... Automation rocks, but this would be creating 4 or more build/test environments encapsualting .NET /CVS /CruiseControl /WinRunner /Bugzilla.... I think I got 20% more grey in my hair just WRITING that sentence.

Heh, at least I can retire in 20 years if I'm thrifty :)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Also, creating a Second Life Union. GameSpot really seems to have a hard-on against Second Life, so I want to create a Union to keep the SL namespace up to date. I mean, the videos GS has are from the initial lauch and have almost NOTHING to do with SL today. Time to put my writing and FRAPSing skills to test :)

No go for fear-based legistlators:

http://www.startribune.com/587/story/585838.html

I'd like to link to this, but GS has a big pooch they are scrooing...

Oh, wow, that sucked...   The suckitude was threefold: pre-recorded, dull, and a java chat box that added nothing.   Okay, so if anyone cares what I think, here is how Button Mashing should be done.   1: Schedule half an hour and go live!  Do the first two parts, and then, to fill time, include a live review or two -- and make one or both reviews retro! Review one of the games played in the first round. Dress up like you're a 1985 geek and review River City Ransom in 50 words or less! Good lord! That. Would. Be. Fun. The end result is to leave 10 minutes for the final round.   2: Get excited!  Right now, the gameplay is well done, but when the winner wins, Rich says "and the winner is this guy who we've all forgotten his name by now...yay...". Instead of that, DO ANYTHING! Seriously -- have you forgotten that the excitement needs to be portrayed to the viewers? Maybe everyone in the studio is excited, but no energy makes it's way to the audience. Seriously, at least hire a mariachi band to play when someone wins. The horrible part is that GameSpot is a gaming community, yet their own game show feels like it was made at ValuSoft. During this last episode, when the winner won, the boards were all yawning and off-topic. GameSpot, you managed to bore even your hardcore fans.   3. Finally, create a bet box applet. This last BM, people were cheering for their faves, but nobody knew the names, and the mods were about to kick folk for cheering on "the fat guy", which wasn't mean, we just didn't know enough to cheer CHRIS! Create a chat applet that includes the contestant's names, and allows us to interact by voting every 15 seconds on who we think will win.   There you go. 3 Simple Rules To Make BM Better.   Obviously, they aren't perfect, but this would be a motion in the right direction. And finally, I leave you with this -- GameSpot is a "gaming" site. Please remember that games are played for fun. Thanks.

nfo files. I'm a little gun shy to talk about anything that might get me suspended again, but for PC gamers, nfo files are as par for the course as rar and par files.

Now, I have a series that I want to write on nfo files, but for now, just let me share a few things...

1 - If you try to open an .nfo file and get a warning, you need to Wiki .nfo

2 - If you can't make heads or tails of an .nfo file, then you need an nfo reader. Not a good text editor, but a flat-out qualified, written-by-the-pirates-in-the-scene nfo reader.

3 - If you still don't get what you downloaded was all about, then get an x-box.

.nfo files rock, because they allow ascii artists to do their thing, even though ascii art and vector and plot() art are all dying or dead. In the same manner that trainers allow old school demo bit-crunchers to showcase their flair (for a seemingly uncaring audience), .nfo files allows artists to holler out with style.

Again, this is just a brain-dump, but check out this shot of an .nfo in Ultra-Edit versus Damn Nfo Viewer:



I can't wait to ask questions, pull favors, smooth egos, and surely get bombed to finish this report.  There are good reports out there, but American gamers don't know even a tenth of the scene behind nfos.

Give me some feedback on if I'm out of my gourd, or onto a good article.

Thanks friends.

-Mark/Postmark Jensen

...Mark.

God, I love MC Chris.

First blog entry here on GameSpot. Let me explain why I'm here as a Total Access Subscriber, and best to do this chronologically.

Late 1970s: I was still as smooth as a fattened Chihuahua. My best friend was this kid who was about 10 seconds away from the Rubik's Cube master's time. His dad ran the computing department at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, NY.

My friend, Kelly Sedinger, brought me into the lab one day to see this incredible "new thing".

For a few months after that, we MUD'd for hours a day.

To be honest, I was scared that I was interacting with other people in real time, so I usually just watched. (I'm still a SP fan to this date - real people suxxors).

After a while, Kelly's dad bought him a VIC-20, and we would play MULE, but mostly we would write text adventure games while trying to figure out sprites. His dad would also bring home these MASSIVE "personal computers" from college and Kelly and I would play these crazy text/graphical games on them that I doubt anyone else knows of. Well, outside of some Dracula adventure. Many of the other games we played were FRIGGIN' STUDENT MADE GAMES FROM AROUND THE WORLD!

Good lord, I had no fuzz, but damn did I have it good!

(During this time, we also spent a lot of time playing at my house with the 2600 or the original Pong home system. Later, friends would get Intellivision and Colecovision -- what is that D&D game where you shoot arrows in a mountain while a dragon roars? We also started acting out pencil and paper D&D in the foothills of the Appalacians using old clothes, sticks, and childish humor -- it wasn't until last year (at 34 YO) that I heard of LARPing. Those f'ing wannabes...)

I loved my buddy Kelly, but I wanted to up him one, so I had my parents buy me a Timex Sinclair 2068 (on sale for the holidays at the local AM&A's!)

Well, I got that computer and, as anyone with a good PC background knows, I couldn't get more than five F'ing games!

So I did two things: I bought a Spectrum 2000 ROM switch, and I wrote my own games.

Using "The Hobbit" as a start, I wrote many graphical text adventures, some with pretty solid imput hashing. I also made one of the first side-scrolling games. It was a jumping puzzle featuring an alien using four sprites (it was BIG), and the alien could walk in the center of the board, and the scene would scroll horizontally in and out. This was years before SMB. Unfortunately, using extended basic, this game took years just to scroll through an entire board. Decades if you jumped as you moved. Still, In a world of JSW, Ant Attack, and Beach Head, I think that I did a pretty freaking good job!

Unfortunately, my body became less smooth than before, and by the time I recovered from puberty, I had a mohawk, and tattooes, and piercings, and neat addictions, and a divorce, and a loss of 12 years.

Welllll... not quite. But that's enough for today. I just wanted to put this down as an intro to me -- mostly my lucky and ugly BG in gaming.

I'll write more later. Gotta get back to Fable or HL2E1.