So the GameSpot Hardware team was kind enough to loan me a Radeon X800 Pro card over the Thanksgiving break. Holy jeeebus that thing ROCKS. Playing Half-Life 2 on that spoiled me rotten in about 13 seconds. I could finally run everything at 1280x1024 (the native res of my LCD panel) with every effect cranked to the highest setting and still get silky smooth framerates. Giving the card back on Monday was painful. I can't swing $500 for a card of that caliber at the moment. So the good news is that it looks like the fan on my old card is probably just dead or not turning fast enough to generate proper cooling. A replacement fan should set me back about $10. The bad news is now I'll be constantly saying, "boy, this sure would be nicer with an X800 card!" Oh well, I'll wait a few months for the prices to drop. Meanwhile I still have a stack of console titles about a foot high to play through.

Hey guess what, I lied when I said Doom 3 worked fine. Well, it used to, at any rate. Now no 3D games work at all. It's not just apps either, it's any 3D application at all. (I tried some Winamp visualizations that use 3D accleration.) They all seize up and stutter like mad. I guess my video card is dying. Excellent! Just what I need - another expense... Great timing! (On the other hand, my card is an aging Geforce 4, so maybe now's the time to upgrade to a DX9 capable card.) I did a completely clean install of Windows and added no drivers at all except for DirectX9 and the mobo, video & sound card drivers. Exact same results. Well anyway, apologies to Valve, I don't actually know if your program works or not since my computer is clearly messed up. (Although I have read that many people are having other sound stuttering problems with HL2.)

After waiting hours and hours for Half Life 2 to download, I eagerly started it up. "Rise and shine, Mr Freemanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanmanman...." Yes I have the dreaded audio stuttering problem. It makes the game completely unplayable. Every 10 seconds or so the game completely seizes up with the last 1/2 second of audio looping like a bad nightmare out of Max Headroom. Those of you who know me know that I am not a neophyte when it comes to Windows. I have a handle on drivers, codecs, and so forth. I spent hours this morning trawling steampowered.com and halflife2.net looking for ideas. I've tried everything, but it's no use. The game simply doesn't work on my machine. I've never had a problem like this before, even Doom 3 runs fine. So now I'm totally screwed until Valve releases a patch. Who knows if that will even fix it. Screw it. Back to Halo 2. At least with console games you don't have to worry about hardware incompatibility. Angrily yours, -jsd-

Maybe it's just the people I tried to play with, but I could not get a smooth running fight to save my life. Nothing more frustrating than unleashing a killer combo and then watching the video go glitch... glitch... jerk... crawwwwwllllllll.... I wonder if my upstairs neighbors were downloading a ton of porn and thus blocking my DSL line?

As an older gamer I often feel really out of step with today's game scene. Lately I've got a chance to spend some time with Fable, a game rated very highly by many people. I just don't get it. Storywise it seems very much like any other high fantasy RPG, and gameplaywise it's just run around, pound the attack button, dodge, kill monsters, get gold, buy better weapons which you use to kill bigger monsters, etc, etc, ad nauseum. I mean, yeah it's pretty, but the load times are horrendous. I even copied it onto my hard drive to make it go faster and it's STILL really slow. Imagine how much more immersive it would have been with disk streaming. The whole good vs evil thing is nice but it doesn't materially affect the game much at all. You look different. The quests are slightly different. I dunno, back to the box with you!

That's one of my all time favorite quotes. Depending on where you look, you can find it attributed to Picasso, Dali, Stravinsky, Steve Jobs, maybe others. JSD's corollary to this fine rule is: If you're going to steal, go all the way. And this brings me to my real topic: the Puzzle Kombat mode of Mortal Kombat: Deception. Puzzle Kombat fulfills a long-standing desire of mine: an online-enabled Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo game that isn't the import Dreamcast version. Kudos to Midway and the MKD team for including Puzzle Kombat. As some have noted, it's almost a direct steal of SPF2T. Unfortunately "almost" in this case is not quite good enough. Countdown blocks (blocks that take a while to become breakable) aren't in there, unless your opponent is Sub-Zero and he hits you with a Freeze move. For some unfathomable reason, there are not nearly enough breaker blocks. This slows down the pace and eliminates a lot of the last minute knuckle-biter comebacks. The super moves are also a little weird. It takes a long time to get them and if you don't get them at the right time, they might not even be useful. For instance, if you're Scorpion and you acquire the Shuffle move, but your opponent has a mostly-empty board, it's useless. It will just time out on you before you get a chance to deploy it. Why not just keep it around forever? I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but there are very few instances of massive chain explosions. I think when opponents drop blocks on you they are fairly differentiated. The reason for that is most likely because of the elimination of the countdown timer on blocks. If an opponent in MKD drops a big glob of hate on you, you can break it instantly, so the game designers probably said, well, we can't have instant retribution, so we should just make it really hard to come back from a big penalty. If they had just stolen the countdown block idea this wouldn't be necessary and they could have retained the fun "OH CRAP I just got dumped on but if I can just survive three more turns PAYBACK WILL BE MINE!!!" gameplay aspect of SPF2T. This may sound like a lot of whining, and it is, but that's only because I take my Puzzle Fighting seriously, and MKD is so close to the Holy Grail that to see them fall short of perfection by a gnat's wing is depressing. That said, I still enjoy the Puzzle Kombat mode quite a bit, and I look forward to challenging any GameSpot readers on Xbox Live. My gamertag is "bass kitten" and I'm generally on between 10PM and Midnight, Pacific time.

Yes, that's me in the current installment of Button Mashing. Note how I cleverly wore my Bass Kittens t-shirt (a special Jhonen Vasquez design). Note also the blatant plug for the band. The Band, now that's something I have been meaning to document for posterity one of these days. It freaks me right out to think that I've been doing music semi-pro for over 10 years.

Simon Pegg is my new short-term personal saviour. For some insane reason, my wife convinced me to watch "I, Robot" with Will Smith. Despite the fact that I really can't stand Mr. Smith, I agreed, because it was directed by Alex (Dark City) Proyas, and anybody who can make a film like Dark City gets cut a big chunk of slack in my book. I, Robot both sucked and blew. Big time. So the next day I said, "I've got to rinse the taste of that thing out of my brain. But how?" Fortunately I remembered that a few people I knew had really been pushing "Shaun of the Dead." Thank god for crazy wackjobs like Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. The comparison has been made many times but this is the best horror/comedy since An American Werewolf In London. Shaun is a quintessential British product, with a sense of humor so dry you can get dehydration just from watching. I fully expect a lot of americans simply won't "get" the style of humor, but that's their loss. There's still plenty of gags that will play anywhere in the world. The scene in the trailer where the lads debate which Prince albums can be used to decapitate zombies is a good example. Pegg & Wright got their first taste of fame with the Channel 4 UK sitcom "Spaced". They are currently airing the entire run (only 14 episodes, in true british fashion) on the Trio network. I've only seen a few eps so far but what I've seen is great. These guys are true originals and they deserve your support. Go forth and consume. JSD commands you!

Simon Pegg is my new short-term personal saviour. For some insane reason, my wife convinced me to watch "I, Robot" with Will Smith. Despite the fact that I really can't stand Mr. Smith, I agreed, because it was directed by Alex (Dark City) Proyas, and anybody who can make a film like Dark City gets cut a big chunk of slack in my book. I, Robot both sucked and blew. Big time. So the next day I said, "I've got to rinse the taste of that thing out of my brain. But how?" Fortunately I remembered that a few people I knew had really been pushing "Shaun of the Dead." Thank god for crazy wackjobs like Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. The comparison has been made many times but this is the best horror/comedy since An American Werewolf In London. Shaun is a quintessential British product, with a sense of humor so dry you can get dehydration just from watching. I fully expect a lot of americans simply won't "get" the style of humor, but that's their loss. There's still plenty of gags that will play anywhere in the world. The scene in the trailer where the lads debate which Prince albums can be used to decapitate zombies is a good example. Pegg & Wright got their first taste of fame with the Channel 4 UK sitcom "Spaced". They are currently airing the entire run (only 14 episodes, in true british fashion) on the Trio network. I've only seen a few eps so far but what I've seen is great. These guys are true originals and they deserve your support. Go forth and consume. JSD commands you!

Simon Pegg is my new short-term personal saviour. For some insane reason, my wife convinced me to watch "I, Robot" with Will Smith. Despite the fact that I really can't stand Mr. Smith, I agreed, because it was directed by Alex (Dark City) Proyas, and anybody who can make a film like Dark City gets cut a big chunk of slack in my book. I, Robot both sucked and blew. Big time. So the next day I said, "I've got to rinse the taste of that thing out of my brain. But how?" Fortunately I remembered that a few people I knew had really been pushing "Shaun of the Dead." Thank god for crazy wackjobs like Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. The comparison has been made many times but this is the best horror/comedy since An American Werewolf In London. Shaun is a quintessential British product, with a sense of humor so dry you can get dehydration just from watching. I fully expect a lot of americans simply won't "get" the style of humor, but that's their loss. There's still plenty of gags that will play anywhere in the world. The scene in the trailer where the lads debate which Prince albums can be used to decapitate zombies is a good example. Pegg & Wright got their first taste of fame with the Channel 4 UK sitcom "Spaced". They are currently airing the entire run (only 14 episodes, in true british fashion) on the Trio network. I've only seen a few eps so far but what I've seen is great. These guys are true originals and they deserve your support. Go forth and consume. JSD commands you!