Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in ProTH's LiveJournal:

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Friday, April 20th, 2012
8:01 am	Because it makes a difference to you what TV I used in 1993 So I'm in the process of upgrading my A/V equipment again. This got me to thinking back over the various upgrades I've had over the years. Pre-1988 The NES was just hooked up to the main/only television in the living room. Size escapes me, but certainly sub-20". Late 80s We moved out of the mobile home, allowing more flexibility. The NES got set up in the basement; probably using the same set from above. Early 90s When the TV upstairs was replaced, the old one got passed down to me and down the stairs. 25" Sharp, this guy lasted me a long time. It was through "reverse engineering" the way things were connected into this set I began to figure out things like how A/V equipment gets connected, and why RCA cables were better since they allowed for stereo sound. 1999-ish Same TV, but got an audio receiver. Pretty cheap thing that could essentially do Dolby ProLogic. It wasn't officially that, but it had the sub built into the receiver and did extrapolate the surround channel. So 4.1 sound, I guess. Early 2000s Sideways change. The receiver got replaced with another that wasn't really of better capability, but was less falling apart. Power overload zapped some equipment in the house including the old TV, but it got replaced with something very similar. 26", still SD CRT. Late 2006 This is recent enough you can go back to the LJ archives for late 2006 and see this stuff as it was happening. Being now an employed guy, I decided to upgrade things properly. This was by design a bridge setup--something that would be able to take full advantage of what Wii could output and a bit more, but not so much beyond that all SD content would look ugly. To this end I got a refurbished 30" widescreen CRT with 480p and 1080i support, and a refurbished Onkyo 5.1 home-theater-in-a-box that could do proper ProLogic II along with the Dolby Digital. Also a non-refurbished TV stand. 2012 Those purchases were solid, and have lasted me 5+ years. However, the receiver did not have any HDMI inputs, and only one optical audio input. This meant once I added in the X360 and PS3 I ended up with separate switchers for video (to go directly to the TV's HDMI input) and audio (to go to the receiver's optical input). A wire mess and not very expandable with future devices. I figured I'd upgrade things again later in the year, but when the optical switcher pooped out and necessitated manually switching things around to change between X360 and PS3 audio, I decided to push up that upgrade. Not wanting to go a complete sideways and get a new receiver with only HDMI inputs as the new ability, I went ahead and got a refurbished Onkyo 7.1 home-theater-in-a-box. Kind of overkill for the small room I use, and considering most new movies still don't go beyond 5.1, but hey. For a change I am ahead of the curve. Haven't replaced the TV yet, but I've got a pretty good idea where I'm looking. Now is not the time for an SD/HD bridge device, but an HD/3D bridge device. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
1:31 pm	Zombie time travel politics Just another crazy dream I think is worth jotting down before I forget it. I seem to be in an 80s movie, based on the way things look. I'm with a group of friends--not people I actually know; but do in this movie apparently. We do things, and then the zombie apocalypse happens. At this point I'm in my present-day driveway, and I can see shambling corpses down the road. Making things extra convenient, I am barefoot. The movie seems to be trying to teach a lesson, flashing back to events where if we'd acted differently we'd be in a better position now. Like befriending a guy with an RV. Anyway, I decide that if I go into my house the zombies will be able to break in pretty easily, so I should uhh... run across the fields toward the woods? One almost catches me, but at this point I start repeating a weird pole-vaulting move with a stick to help me move faster, which based on how it looked and how fast I moved must have been inspired by the parachute/hookshot surfing one can do in Just Cause 2. That's where the movie portion ends. Now, however, I'm on the set of the movie, with one of the actos who looks kind of like a young Newt Gingrich. Since I am a time traveler from the future (of course), I make him promise that in several decades he'll be in a movie about Newt Gingrich. So I go back to our present day, and see that he has in fact acted in a Newt Gingrich biopic. Mission accomplished. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 2nd, 2012
9:43 am	Top Games of 2011 New-to-me Games of 2011 These top two are the big favorites. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion PC, 2006 - I could not get into Morrowind. I tried a few times, but hassles from messing with mods, failure to get used to controls, easily breaking certain gameplay systems, and feeling like I was thrown into the deep end of a game world kept me from it. However, then everyone and their everyone else started gushing about Skyrim. It made me really want to try it, but giving this game I'd actually bought at the same time as Morrowind a try seemed like the cheaper thing to do. And this one clicked big. Such an open world, and so much shit to do even mostly ignoring the main storyline. I've now put nearly 100 hours into the thing, and who knows how many more are to come. Just Cause 2 PC, 2010 - Just Cause is a series I didn't pay much attention to. My impression of the original was just that it was another shooter going with a Che Guevara look for its cover. But I like an open world, and read enough superlatives on GAF about JC2's that I had to give it a try. And... yeah. I may not be able steal things from drawers in every house like Oblivion, but as a 32x32 kilometer area full of jungle, deserts, mountains, and cities, there's a lot of the outside world to mess with here, and a lot of things spread throughout it to blow up. Some others I quite enjoyed, but that didn't make as big a mark. Radiant Historia DS, 2011 - Finally a game from this year, at least in the US. A time travel JRPG with a fun combat system that compares favorably to the biggies I played on home consoles a few generations back. Fable III Xbox 360, 2010 - This could also go on a biggest disappointments list. It's the first time I paid attention to a Molyneux game before it was finished, so there were expectations to be missed. But even if it doesn't diverge from its predecessor as much as I'd imagined, I liked that predecessor a lot so I had a lot of fun here. The Godfather: Blackhand Edition Wii, 2007 - Nobody wants to put any goddamned open world games on Wii, so when I got a hankering for something with some motion controls, I had to go back to a few months after launch and pick this up. And while the motion controls are pretty cool, it's that open world aspect that kept me coming back, slowly doing the optional objectives and taking over every location in the city. Some not-new-to-me games that still got a lot of playtime StarCraft PC, 1998 - This game came out well over a decade ago. And thanks to StarCraft 2's inability to LAN nicely, I still play it every few weeks with Chester. Fieldrunners DS, 2010 - Aside from open worlds, I also enjoy a bit of tower defense. Fieldrunners comes very close to that sweet spot of simplicity, understandability, and freedom I want in a tower defense game. Also never-ending waves, so I can keep trying to best myself. What about...? As a big Nintendo nerd, it is pretty interesting to see a list dominated by PC games, and with no Nintendo-published titles. But this was definitely an off year. Little new content on Wii, and most of the early 3DS stuff passable but unspectacular. They hit big at the end of the year, but I haven't played Super Mario 3D Land enough to see if it deserves to make such a list, and haven't even started Skyward Sword yet--when choosing a new game to start I decided to hit Oblivion first. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 5th, 2011
3:49 pm	Oblivious There's been a lot of recent gushing over Skyrim, which finally got me to playing Oblivion. I got Morrowind and Oblivion on Steam quite some time ago, but had only played Morrowind so far. I'd actually tried to play Morrowind twice, but never really got far in. I had a number of problems with the experience--many my own fault. 1. Overmodded. Not that there was particularly anything wrong with the mods I added in, but I spent too much time following guides on how to get the best mods going to not make it look so ugly versus actually getting into the game. 2. Overburdened. The game is so open that I found myself pulled in twenty different directions. Get to the first major town past the first and it's Here's the fighters guild! Here's the thieves guild! Here's the mages guild! Take our quests! Do me a favor! Check out this mine! With so much to do it was hard to both keep track of everything, and know which quests were appropriate for my level and stats. There's also that I started the game with both expansions active, and thanks to one of these a high percentage of the time when I'd go to sleep I'd wake up having to fend off an assassin. 3. Overprepared. Especially since my first time I ran across the above problems, I tried to read up on some things to get a good start going. However, I learned a bit too much, and instead of progressing in a normal fashion, I spent my days swindling merchants out of all their money and goods through abusing the way the game handled bartering, then spending the money getting people to train me to increase my skills. 4. Controls. Simply, it was a game built for keyboard and mouse. And though there was an Xbox version, I couldn't really get it set up to play with the X360 controller in a way that I felt really worked. For Oblivion, I'm trying to go about things completely differently. No mods at all yet, though this is the GOTY Deluxe version with the expansion and DLC already in there (which I started to regret a bit when it threw these DLC quests into my quest list very near the beginning). I haven't looked at any guides at all, and don't plan to--I'm making this very much an exploration experience, and even took the step of spending a buck on an Oblivion-specific notebook where I've been taking notes on things like where to find trainers, what I've seen in caves that I'll need to come back later to complete, things like that. My only outside source of information, really, is that my buddy Chester also recently started playing the game and we're swapping experiences; but I've put more time in than him. I'm still very much a weakling and pretty much everything past a wolf has a good chance of killing me unless I do something like trick it to an area where I can stay out of its reach while moving in for hits--but I am having a lot of fun. Though physically I'm weak, my security and sneaking skills are increasing fast, and today I started to bring in the big bucks not by cheating the game, but in a completely legitimate way--stealing from the rich and businesses. I was having a bit of trouble finding enough buttons to do everything in a decent way with Computer Nunchuk, but with my recent advent to Computer Nunchuk 2 the few extra buttons have made a lot of difference. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
7:04 pm	Computer Nunchuk 2 I have previously written about my love for Computer Nunchuk; in my case using the left half of the Xbox 360 controller with the left hand, and the mouse with the right hand. I've since come to realize I'm not the only one who does this, though it's still not very widespread and I don't think there's any better accepted term so I'm sticking with Computer Nunchuk for now. Anyway, some recent hardware acquisitions have improved my Computer Nunchuk experience a bit. First, the wheel click on my mouse went bad. Sometimes it would count as no clicks, sometimes one click, sometimes two clicks. Since I'd been paying some attention to GAF discussions about gaming mice anyway, this seemed like the time to give one a try. There seemed to be a couple that got the most attention and I felt like I'd be pretty happy with either one, but I ended up going with the Razer DeathAdder. My reasoning was largely that compared to the mouses I'd been using it added fewer but larger new buttons and was more about a comfortable shape. Coming from a decade+ of having 3 clicks, 5 seemed like a fine upgrade rather than getting 7 or 9 with many of them being very small. Then, Amazon had a lightning deal on PlayStation Navigation Controllers. I'd had my eye on one of these since I'd seen it discussed among other computer-nunchuk-type players--I hadn't previously realized it had become pretty easy to get them working on computers. Like the left half of the Xbox 360 controller it has an analog stick, a d-pad, a shoulder button and a shoulder trigger. However, while the X360 has only one other accessible button (Back), the Nav Controller has X, O, and the PS button. The other big improvement is that it's designed as a one hand device to begin with--no vestigial right half adding weight and creating imbalance. So going from X360 controller + standard PC mouse to Navigation Controller + DeathAdder, the overall gain is two buttons on the left, two buttons on the right, and more comfort on both sides. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
3:32 pm	New Jedi Order I have read, no joke, probably two hundred Star Trek books. However, while I gave Star Wars books a try I wasn't able to get into them nearly as much, for the following reasons. 1. Scope Star Trek has primarily been a television show built around one hour (with commercials) episodes. A book can follow the general template of an episode, but has more room to expand--perhaps it is more like a book has the chance to be a two-part episode. Star Wars, on the other hand, is primarily known for BIG movies. This means either the books tend to seem smaller than the original material, or they get stuck in the situation of pulling out new insane superweapons or threats each book. In my experience they did a little of both. 2. Action Star Trek has its action, but it's a more talky franchise that doesn't lose as much going to the written word. Whereas reading a description of some space combat dogfight or lightsaber battle just isn't going to match up to seeing it in motion. 3. Continuity Older Star Trek books were basically like episodes--very standalone, and you could usually count on the events not being heavily referenced again. Since all the shows are off the air, though, they've done more continuing storylines. So basically, the order either didn't matter, or it's easy to go linearly. Star Wars books from the start hopped all the hell around. I read the first few from the 90s in publication order, and checking them now, the years involved were 9 ABY (After the Battle of Yavin, from the end of Episode IV) 8 ABY 11 ABY 14 ABY 18 ABY 12 ABY Harder to get a sense of change this way, and I'm sure it was harder on the authors. Once someone wrote a 12 ABY book, your hands were kind of tied as to what was possible in your 8 ABY book, unless retconning is coming into play. 4. Characters Really this is related to scope. Star Trek having had multiple generations and spinoff shows, there are plenty of groups of characters to spread the adventures around. Star Wars, both the original and prequel trilogies focused around a small group of characters each. This means that when each new insane thing happens, out of everyone in the galaxy this same handful of people seem to get involved. There are many new characters who are written in, but this does make things more confusing for the non-expert, though. If I go into a book and Xilo Marmaduke is involved, am I supposed to remember who that is? Or will his origin story that takes place earlier be published later? ---------- But really this is all a preface to saying that I've started reading The New Jedi Order series and quite enjoying it; and in large part it's because these problems don't apply nearly as much. 1. Scope. Yes, it's something of huge scope. But it's ONE really big thing stretched out, so it's more like one of the trilogies in that respect. 2. Action. This one, not so different. 3. Continuity. Rather than hopping all about the timeline, this tells the events of a few years in pretty direct order. 4. Characters. ...Which allows us to properly get used to a large crew of extra characters. Many of which had their origins in earlier works, but which aren't necessary to follow them here. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
1:01 pm	Spreadsheeting for dollars Update on my stock market stuff. Obsessed? Iiiiimaybe. Coming in pretty fresh to this stuff, I keep learning new things that draw my attention one way or another. To start with, the plan was to get some Nintendo stock, and sell it some time down the road when it was not nearly as close to the five-year lows it's sitting around now. However, that was pretty long-term, so I ended up going with something that looked likely to rebound in a shorter term: Mad Catz. This much you may know from my previous message. Now, I have sold my Mad Catz, and did pretty good with it. *August 10, bought 450 shares of Mad Catz at $0.702 each. Multiply it out, add the standard fee plus the low-price surcharge for stocks under a buck, and it cost me $329. *It raised for a few days, but then went flat for a few days. Thought it might be time to put it into... something else. *August 16, sold 450 shares of Mad Catz at $0.9506 each. Multiply it out, subtract the standard fee and the low-price surcharge, and I got $414.67. So, $85.67 (26%) gained in 6 days. Nice. Then my searching around led me to cheap stocks. Like, really really cheap stocks. Found a site that specialized in stocks of a few cents or even less, watched it for a little. These fluctuate quite a bit, so the potential gains can be large. However, that also means the reverse. There's also that with that low-price surcharge, the site I was using gets pretty expensive for these. I'm trying to get things set up on another with lower fees so this will be more an option. However, I did decide to take the $50-ish sitting unused in my account (this is before selling the Mad Catz) and jump in to one that had been moving up a lot that day. So I bought 2500 shares of Tivus (TIVU) at $0.016 apiece, with which the fees added in comes to 49.95. Thanks to the fees and that I'd gone with such a low amount, to even _break even_ I'd have to be able to sell it at $0.024, a 50% price increase. It never quite reached that, and has been sliding down since. Now it's at about half the value it was when I bought it. So, I'm glad I didn't jump in with anything more than the $50. Since I'd get so little for selling it at this point, I'm just leaving it sit there. Maybe it'll have another good day some time and I can break even on it. Now even more recently, I saw people linking to some stocks with high dividends. Before I'd pretty much ignored the dividend aspect. The ones I was looking at, they'd maybe have a dividend at 1% of the stock's value every year, or something like that. Nothing worth paying attention to. However, the ones I started checking out were much more interesting. Quarterly or even monthly dividends, where the yearly sum has been 10% or even 20% of the stock price--of course, as the price fluctuates, so does that percentage. Set it and forget it appeals to me, but this seems like TOO easy money. I guess the thing is most with high dividends tend to either be riskier (maybe things head south and the dividends drastically drop) or don't grow much because so much of the money is going to dividends. So right now I'm taking a closer look at a few that both seem to give pretty decent dividends, and are also at or near yearly lows. That way hopefully I'd have the option of going with what seem like safe dividends (at least in the short term), as well as reselling it like Mad Catz if they stop hanging around the yearly lows. IVR, CFP, TNK, FSC looking the most interesting at the moment. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
11:36 am	Turnips So I've dipped my toe into the stock market. My initial plan was to buy some Nintendo shares while they're at a five year low. Even if Wii U and 3DS aren't as big as Wii and DS, I've got little doubt things will improve from the current situation of "3DS launches slowly, Wii slows down with old age". However, that was a bit of long-term thinking. Just browsing around and noticing things like the "Related companies" at Google Finance, I ended up going with, of all things, Mad Catz. They seemed a bit more fluctuating, near a recent low after quarterly results, but on the way up. If I'd got them when they were really at the bottom of this valley their shares would've been going for 56 cents, but I got them for about 70 cents. One thing I notice that probably shouldn't be surprising, is that there's less risk in a way if you have more money. Considering the transaction fees for buying and later selling the stock, what it boils down to is that for me to break even I'd need to sell this Mad Catz stock when it's worth 7.3% more than when I bought it. If somebody else went in with two thousand dollars, though, they'd be able to break even with an increase of only 2%. As things stand this minute, it looks like I could sell and make a profit of $12. All in a day's work? (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 24th, 2011
6:51 pm	Computer Nunchuk: Diablo II So 11 years after the game originally came out, and 10 years after the expansion, Chester finally has me playing Diablo II. Mostly to supplant our LAN play of one ass-old Blizzard game with a second. BUT what is important here is the control scheme. As I've made clear before: Fuck WASD. But Diablo II doesn't use WASD for movement; it moves based on mouse clicks. What it does want you to do is use the F keys and the number keys for skills and items, while frequently holding Alt to see what items are on the ground. With this hand position, I feel like I'm performing a mind meld on the keyboard. SO the Diablo II computer nunchuk setup with the help of JoyToKey is Analog stick: Different directions to toggle to different skills. Up is like hitting F1, Up-right like hitting F2, and so on. D-pad: Items. Up is like hitting 1, Right is like hitting 2, and so on. Left Trigger: Alt This leaves the Left Bumper and Back still available. Diablo II has plenty more than two sub-screens to pop up, though, so I wasn't sure there would be a definitive way to assign those two. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 21st, 2011
1:11 pm	Doctor Two I became a fan of Doctor Who with the revived series when they started airing it on SciFi in 2006. I'd seen a few bits of Doctor Who on PBS (and Fox) as a kid, but at the time it didn't do much to me. However, as an adult the prospect of having sooooo much legacy content from the 60s through the 80s to check out was quite appealing. So I grabbed a torrent containing the episodes of the first man to play the Doctor: William Hartnell from 1963-1966. Watching them went pretty slowly, for a few reasons. One, that's simply a lot of file size to be downloading with some often pretty iffy speeds. Two, I didn't want this to be something like Stargate where I blew through 8 years of content in one year of view time. Three, it would've gone slow even if that wasn't a goal of mine, because frankly, a lot of it was pretty dull. It's not exactly a shock that the content of a show from 40 years prior was quite a bit different. Less humor and action, many stories that were purely historical without any sci-fi elements, and everything paced much more slowly. As different as the show's format, though, was the Doctor himself. In the beginning, he was very much an old man: grumpy and slow. So after 4+ years of watching through his 3+ years of episodes, I finally recently got to the end of the William Hartnell episodes. This is when they introduced the now well-known idea of the regeneration, where the Doctor's body is able to cheat death by transforming into a new actor. I was not expecting much of a change in personality. Due to the facts that this was the first time it had been done and wasn't such an established trait, that I guessed the changes from 60s-type to 2000s-type show would happen gradually, and simply that unlike other regenerations he didn't go through a radical clothing change--so I figured it'd basically be the same type of Doctor, but less slow and likely to get sick and cause production problems. HOWEVER, replacement Patrick Troughton has been a pleasant surprise so far! He runs! Disguises himself and uses fake voices when necessary! Defends himself! And plays a recorder for kicks. The First Doctor would not pass himself off as a German doctor to gain access to a military leader, then manhandle the guy when in private. He wouldn't then dress in drag to help stay unnoticed while trying to find his companions. I can see the Second Doctor getting into the messes seen in the modern episodes and handling himself pretty well. An additional factor that makes these episodes more interesting is that the purely historical episodes have pretty much been dropped. The worst bit is--most of his episodes don't actually exist anymore. A lot of old BBC content was lost over the years when preserving such things wasn't seen as useful, and his were the hardest hit. So most of them I'm seeing are the reconstructions, which pair up surviving audio with things like surviving photos from the production. Which is, yes, quite a bit more boring to pay attention to. But not bad to pair up with a grindy RPG. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
11:08 am	Because Origins I first paid much attention to Just Cause 2 in a GAF thread about the largest game worlds. It is my wont, though, to go through the earlier entries in a series first if possible, and since the original was much cheaper to buy on Steam anyway, easy choice. However, it was full of hassle. Being a game from 2004 or whatever, it was lacking modern sensibilities. No option for resolutions over 1024x768. Strange flickering and OS visibility issues I imagine due to some combination of the much newer types of hardware/OS/drivers at play. And last, no gamepad support; nor keyboard/mouse controls that could be easily mapped with JoyToKey. And of course thanks to WASD, no analog movement. Still, the hour or whatever I actually played of it seemed pretty fun, but not worth putting up with all the shit when there was a modern sequel I could wait for a sale on. And soon enough I got it for $5, and added it to the incredible Steam backlog. Then I played The Godfather, and thinking of the reasons it appealed to me reminded me of why Just Cause 2 had sounded interesting to begin with. So once I became Don of NYC and completed everything I was going to there, I started up JC2. Controls And was at first worried for control reasons again. It supports the X360 controller natively, but the right stick suuucked for aiming, but using the mouse would mean losing access to many important buttons. Luckily I've come to realize what I thought was shit controls was some unknown glitch which I've only had repeat once. The speed of up and down reticule movement based on the right stick was wildly asymmetrical, making zeroing in on anything a big chore, especially while standing in the open being shot at. Without that trouble, things are fine. No lockon like I'm used to, but the autoassist is very generous so it works. Movement in the game is really fantastic once you get the hang of it. Running and jumping are expected, but just as important in this game are hookshotting and parachuting. Pull yourself up a wall. Pull an enemy down from a ledge. Grab onto a passing car to hitch a ride. Repeatedly hookshot your way up a steep rock face. And at any time while hookshotting or falling or riding a vehicle, hit the jump button to get your glide on. While gliding, use the hookshot to pull yourself along. It's very Spidermany or reverse Tarzany, swinging through the air on your own vine. I do really feel this is a game that would benefit from something like the Wii Remote, though. More precise aiming than right analog stick would be nice without losing all the advantages of a controller. And I really think motion would come in useful with the hookshot ability. I can easily enough grab onto an object, but it would be nice to have more control afterwards. Once something is grabbed on, it would be handy to have the ability to yank it in various directions, rather than the automatic "pull back". The World The game world, the island nation of Panau, is indeed huge. The game boasts 400 square miles, though this does include large areas of water in a 20x20 mile square. As you may expect from such a game not made by all-powerful beings, there's a lot of repetitive content. The game may have dozens of villages, but they're mostly going to be the same buildings and shacks arranged slightly differently. I think this works for the game, though, as I'll get to a bit later. With the hookshot/parachute abilities, pretty much no place in the game is out of bounds. Scale buildings, cross ravines, or if something still seems out of reach find a plane or helicopter. It's been said about other games but here is really true: If you see it, you can go there. and what to do once you're there The main thing you want to do in this game is cause Chaos, capitalized because you get it numerically. More Chaos opens more missions and store options. You mostly gain it by destroying government property, which beyond the level of barrels does not regenerate. Also spread throughout the islands: hundreds of health/weapon/vehicle upgrades, each which makes very little difference individually. So while there may be a lot of repetition, designing it as a series of singular objectives is at least to me more appealing. Some RPGs (particularly MMOs) may have you perform a repetitive task like killing X monsters, or collecting X pelts which have a small chance to drop from monsters. So what you generally end up doing is walking around an area, rekilling a bunch of these things as they spawn. The Just Cause 2 way would be more to say: OK, there are 200 of these monsters in the world. But once you clear it out at one location, that area will be monster-free. And I'm giving you 20 grand objectives like this and rewarding you for each individual kill anyway, so don't worry too much about finishing any individual task. In practice, this means that for the 15+ hours I've played, I've been able to pretty much go a random direction and be sure to run across some more upgrades and objects to destroy that count to the total. Then get chased away by the military, and find myself in someplace else to do the same. Get everything in a town or base, and it gets checked off on the world map. Appealing to me in the same way seeing the map of NYC fill with the Corlene emblem did in The Godfather. There are also story missions and faction missions, but past the first two missions they don't hassle you about them. They'll give you a change of pace, though, and allow you to gain more strongholds: safe places to stop by and pick up ammo or vehicles. Crack Thanks to the many upgrades, superheroey movement, go-anywhere nature, and game-world-wide nonlinear objectives available from the start, perhaps the game I'm most reminded of is Crackdown. Crackdown was one of my surprise favorites in 2009, so this is a Good Thing. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
6:18 pm	Computer Nunchuk So I've mentioned this briefly to a few people, but I thought I'd explain a bit more about my current favorite way to play PC games: Computer Nunchuk style. My gaming past is mostly as a console gamer. So when I played a PC game that wasn't some sort of overhead sim or strategy, my inclination was to use a gamepad. However, that doesn't work out very well all the time. Some games, even ones that were on consoles and multiplatform, don't offer good pad support, and even things like JoyToKey can't make it work perfectly. Other games never touch console, and are just plain designed around mouse/keyboard. Thing is, that usually means WASD for walking, and a bunch of other random letters and F keys for actions. I HATE WASD. Perhaps if I were some sort of teen-aged mutant ninja turtle this would be a competent way to give me directional control, with my three fingers. However, this is not the case. For a while, what I did was basically try to map things to gamepad as best as possible, but switch over to mouse+keyboard when necessary. Often this would involve making the right analog stick and a few buttons act like a virtual mouse anyway. However, in some games I ended up switching so much that it became inconvenient. And since I didn't always need keyboard access, I was often still holding on to the controller with the left hand while my right went for the mouse. So eventually I decided to just ditch the right side of the controller. So either by way of in-game settings or JoyToKey if necessary, I'll map movement/WASD to either the left analog stick or d-pad of the Xbox 360 controller I use as a PC pad. I can then control most of a game using the left half of the Xbox 360 controller and the mouse. In addition to the WASD counterpart, that also leaves either the analog or d-pad free, as well as the analog trigger and bumper buttons to be applied to other common uses. If it wasn't already obvious, the reason I call this Computer Nunchuk style is because it's really very much like playing a game with Wii Remote and Nunchuk. With my left hand I've got directional movement and a couple shoulder buttons. With my right hand I've got a pointer control with two major buttons and a little more. The biggest difference is that while with wiimote and nunchuk the d-pad is on my right hand, with computer nunchuk it's on the left hand. Also complete lack of any motion possibilities, of course. If only there were better solutions for making the wiimote pointer act like a mouse, it too would be a pretty interesting solution for PC games. Example X360 control setup for Star Trek Online Analog stick: Movement D-pad: Up/down to increase/decrease speed (ship) Bumper: Jump (character), Fire All Phasers (ship) Trigger: Run (character) Example X360 control setup for Dragon Age: Origins Analog stick: Movement Bumper: Pause/unpause time Trigger: Toggle between the two weapon modes (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 3rd, 2011
2:10 pm	The Godfather: Smooth Moves So I've been playing The Godfather: Blackhand Edition on Wii the last few days. Mostly I picked it up because I'd heard it used as a good example of wiimote/nunchuk controls in a GTA-style game. And that is done pretty well. You can aim freestyle with the pointer, or lock on to enemies and still use the pointer to aim at specific areas for different effect. Different types of punches are accomplished by different motions with wiimote and nunchuk. Wiimote and nunchuk actions also come into play for things like strangling, garroting, or bashing people into walls. Story is based on The Godfather, though with liberties. You control an up-and-comer in the Corleone organization, and you find yourself taking part in familiar scenes from the movie, or expansions on them. If someone got killed in the movie, maybe you end up doing that. Or if it was one of the "good guys", maybe you witness it and have to retaliate or escape. Thanks to several voice actors being straight from the movie, it does feel pretty authentic. Other than looking like an old-timey GTA3 that got beat by the ugly stick. I don't recall the movie having buildings appear a few street down. But what's really grabbed me are the large amount of little things to do. In a GTA game they give you things to do outside regular missions, but it's stuff like "FIND A BUNCH OF THESE HIDDEN OBJECTS." or "KEEP DELIVERING THIS THING FOR MONEY UNTIL YOU FAIL." In this game I feel like I'm actually making progress. For one thing, there are experience points in the form of Respect, and when you've gained a level you can spend it on various categories of improvement. More health, better aiming, more speed, cheaper bribery, things like that. You gain Respect by completing objectives or defeating people from the other families. Where are these people hanging out? The businesses they control. There must be well over a hundred in the city, though the building templates begin to repeat. You can go in, threaten the business owner, try to intimidate them by smacking them around or destoying their belongings, but you'll also have to fight off the people from the controlling family. Once that's accomplished, you'll start receiving money from that business on a regular basis. So I keep getting that feeling of "Maybe I'll just... extort one more business!" Then it's "If I get some money, I can afford that new weapon upgrade!" or "I can almost afford a safehouse in a new part of town!" (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
11:10 am	Wiimote/Nunchuk Plus Plus So rumors regarding the next Nintendo home console are hot and heavy. And the weirdest is the "frankentroller", which sounds like some sort of hybrid of old-style two-handed gamepad and large touch screen. Motion control is said to still be included, though the fate of the wiimote/nunchuk themselves is uncertain. Until now I've felt safe assuming the next Nintendo home controller would be an improved wiimote/nunchuk at base, even if there was some other new trick too. To hear that it might not is disappointing. I mean, I'm sure the frankentroller will get put to good use, but it would be disappointing to see a new style of play introduced one generation and then be left for stagnant or dead the next. SO it has put me back in mockup mode. While most others are mocking up this touch-screen frankentroller, I'm mocking up what I'd like to see in future wiimote/nunchuk type setups. ---------- First a word about the control drawbacks of the original wiimote/nunchuk combination. Pointer and motion control are things not found in older controllers, of course, but when it came to buttons there was a lack. This was by design, but it does make the setup lacking in some ways. For simplicity, I'll use the Xbox 360 gamepad as the basis for comparison. Comparing nunchuk to left half of X360 pad: -No analog trigger, turn it into a digital trigger -No d-pad -No clicking analog stick ~No reaching for the Back/Select/- button or Home button found in middle of pad +Accelerometer Comparing wiimote to right half of X360 pad: -No analog trigger, or even a digital replacement -No analog stick -Minus three face buttons ~Back/Select/- button can be reached +Accelerometer +Pointer +D-pad +Gyroscope (if MotionPlus controller) ---------- So for this first mockup, I've taken a fairly cautious approach. That is, trying to make improvements to wiimote/nunchuk without going overboard or harming their existing functionality. So no removing or drastically moving parts already found on the wiimote, leaving Wii compatibility and NES-style sideways play intact. Nunchuk Plus Plus changes: Make Z into analog trigger, preferably with GCN-style click Add d-pad Make analog stick clickable For symmetry: Rumble, speaker, gyroscope Wiimote Plus Plus changes: Instead of just B, mirror the nunchuk's analog trigger w/click + digital shoulder Add two bean buttons to the side of A Add 3DS-style analog pad under A Rechargeable battery would be nice, too, but since it made no difference I didn't bother altering the battery cover on the wiimote image. A few explanations: Why only the two bean buttons next to A rather than also the equivalent of the GCN B button? A few reasons. One, I think the symmetry of the wiimote is a good thing. Easy for right and left hand to use. So adding one would mean adding two, and then regardless of whether you're using right or left hand you'd be stuck with a button you'd probably accidentally be hitting a lot. Two, even the beans are located differently than their GCN setup; having one located above like GCN's Y would put it into territory that would interfere with d-pad use, so I horizontally mirrored the X button location. Why 3DS style analog pad? It doesn't make for perfect equivalence with the nunchuk analog stick, but should be good enough for things often more troublesome on wiimote, like camera manipulation. Also, thanks to its very low profile it shouldn't get in the way of thumbs trying to use A. So now how does this Wiimote/Nunchuk Plus Plus setup compare to X360 gamepad? Comparing Nunchuk Plus Plus to left half of X360 pad: ~No reaching for the Back/Select/- button or Home button found in the middle of pad +Accelerometer +Gyroscope Comparing Wiimote Plus Plus to right half of X360 pad -Minus one face button -No clickable analog ~Analog stick replaced with a less awesome mini 3DS analog pad ~Back/Select/- button can be reached +Accelerometer +Pointer +D-pad +Gyroscope Not exact feature parity, but it takes care of most of what was lacking before, leaves everything that was an improvement before, and adds a few more goodies. Please excuse the relative shittiness of the Nunchuk Plus Plus mockup. It's amazing how difficult it is to find a nunchuk image that is large or face-on, let alone both. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
2:15 pm	An organized mind Depending on the situation, I can be a very sloppy or very organized person. But one of the things I definitely like to keep organized is my media shelving. Shows in alphebetical order (unless grouped into a series), Blu-ray with Blu-ray, games split by system, and so on. Anyway, as I gain new things this eventually leads to a need for more shelving. I recently decided to take the alternate step of unshelving one particular category of thing that was taking up an abnormal amount of shelf space: Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the related projects its writers have gone on to do. Most of my shelves are pretty close to this, and MST3K/RiffTrax/Cinematic Titanic sum up to about half of one right now. So I decided instead to go this route, and get a high capacity disc case for movie riffs. I figured it would theoretically be enough even if every single MST3K episode got a disc release, and RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic both went on successfully for many years to come. ANYWAY, the case should arrive later today, but I was amused when I realized how much pre-planning I'd done for how I'll arrange things, so I decided to post that here raw. ---------- 4 per page per side, so total pages of 8. 40 pages of 8 = 320 198 MST3K would fit on 25 full pages, but for things like Shorts discs and miscellaneous, let's give it 26 pages KTMA (1) starts on Page 1, Disc 1 Season 1 (22) starts on Page 3, Disc 6 Season 2 (35) starts on Page 5, Disc 3 Season 3 (48) starts on Page 6, Disc 8 Season 4 (72) starts on Page 9, Disc 8 Season 5 (96) starts on Page 12, Disc 8 Season 6 (120) starts on Page 15, Disc 8 Season 7 (144) The movie should be #6 of 7, I guess. Starts on Page 18, Disc 8 Season 8 (151) starts on Page 19, Disc 7 Season 9 (173) starts on Page 22, Disc 5 Season 10 (186) starts on Page 24, Disc 2 Season 10 ends (198) Page 25, Disc 6 Before Film Crew comes Night of the Living Dead (September 7, 2004), Reefer Madness (April 20, 2004), Carnival of Souls (March 29, 2005)?, House on Haunted Hill (September 6, 2005?) Plan 9 from Outer Space (June 27, 2006?) Little Shop of Horrors (June 27, 2006?--Put this one last for now. People seem to not know it exists in Plan 9 discussions.) Film Crew Stooges things: "The Three Stooges in Color" Swing Parade Film Crew = 4 movies, other pre-RiffTrax Film Crew order: Hollywood After Dark, Killers from Space, The Wild Women of Wongo, The Giant of Marathon That colorized 3 stooges So 2 full pages of Film Crew/pre-RiffTrax, up to page 28 of 40 now RiffTrax currently has 21 DVDs, and 2009/2010 average of 9 per year. Cinematic Titanic currently has 10 DVDs, and 2008-2010 average of 3 per year. So 12 being left, and RiffTrax seeming to nearly triple CT... 9 pages for RiffTrax, 3 for Cinematic Titanic (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
10:37 am	Cancellation of my button-swapping plan So I have been saying I wanted to get a black 3DS and blue 3DS and switch buttons on them like I've done with wiimotes. However, fiddling with $500 of equipment is a bit more of a risk than messing with wiimotes. I had more than four wiimotes, and rarely need all four anyway, so the worst case scenario still wasn't very bad. So I decided I should practice on some more complicated stuff, work my way up. Game Boy Advance SP This one actually went pretty well. I took two GBASPs, opened them up, switched buttons, and closed them back up. Then only one of them would actually display an image on the screen. However, I reopened that one up and figured out how to solidly reconnect the ribbon connecting the motherboard to the screen, and things are fine. A bit of trouble, but a good learning experience and overall success. DS And old Phat from 2005, silver worn down to bone white, and now mostly used as an alarm clock. I didn't have another one to switch buttons with, but I thought I'd just take it partially apart, and see how much more complicated things get with the bottom screen and all. Took out a shoulder button to see how it connected (differently than the GBASP ones), and actually lost the spring from it--it kind of sprung away. However, the shoulder buttons were already shitty enough that this made surprisingly little difference once I put the rest back in. However, when I sealed things back up and turned it back on... the touch screen was not responding to touch. I figured it was another case of a ribbon being knocked out. And I was correct. Trouble was, it was a little ribbon, underneath a larger ribbon that was sealed in place using a different method than the one I'd figured out on GBASP (and which the little ones underneath ended up using). I finally figured it out, reconnected the ribbon, and now the touch screen was working... but the image wasn't there. I think in my failed attempts to get the top ribbon loose so I could access the bottom one, I knocked off a bit of plastic on the side. So while it's connected, it's not connected in exactly the right place at exactly the right angle, and things are bad. SO now I seem stuck with a DS with a completely white bottom screen. Through memory, a bit of guess and test, and what it shows on the top screen I can still get the alarm clock going, though. DSi Well, I figured, it sounds like 3DS is a lot like DSi and DSiXL, so just taking a look in there should give me an idea of what to expect from a 3DS. However, it was more trouble right from the start. Once I got all the screws removed from the back and went to remove the case, it felt like something came apart that shouldn't have. As it turns out, where the back part of the GBASP and DS Phat was nothing but plastic and battery holder, for DSi it also has the SD card slot and a ribbon connecting it to the motherboard. That got disconnected. Without reconnecting it, I held the back of the case back on to see if this affected the system working in general. It still came on, but the top screen was washed out and seemed even a little staticy. I was able to reconnect the SD card line and see that it worked again, but the screen was still wrong. I wondered if knocking the wire away from its normal position had created some sort of unusual intra-system interference, so I actually started up the system without the back case on at all, just holding the battery in the right spot. The top screen looked fine for those few seconds, so it did seem that SD ribbon was part of the problem. Tried again to connect the SD ribbon, thinking maybe if I got it solidly like it was before, the problems would go away. However, after a few failed attempts that that, the thing stopped turning on at all, and won't even show any lights if it's plugged in. So I seem to have screwed the pooch here too. SO SO while I'm pretty amazed and bummed at how I screwed up two of my DSes in one night (luckily the Lite has been on a long-term loan, so was protected from my madness), this is a lot easier way to find out I'm not entirely qualified than if I'd jumped right into it with 3DSes. I could always get replacements for these, but with 3DS days away that's probably not necessary. The biggest loss is this probably means no transferring my DSiWare library over to 3DS. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
10:53 am	Luminous Antiquia So I have been playing Radiant Historia. About 13 hours in. It's not one I paid a whole lot of attention to until shortly before release, but what I did hear were about similarities to Chrono Trigger. It doesn't quite feel like Chrono Trigger, but I'll use that as a basis for comparison. If you have not played Chrono Trigger, go play that instead and then come back. Time Travel In Chrono Trigger, you use natural tunnels and man-made devices to go to disparate times throughout history. Radiant Historia does not do things this way. Your main character, Stocke, gets a device that allows him to travel back through his own personal past. So it's more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where you're expected and encouraged to go back and try a different choice. Unfortunately this is more limited than it at first seemed. There's one major branching point near the beginning of the game that splits between "Standard History" and "Alternate History" lines you'll be using throughout the game. From then on most of the choices you make have a right choice or a wrong choice. That is, the Choose Your Own Adventure choice that gives you a The End. You can then go back and try something else. Sometimes neither of the choices will work, though, at least as you are. This is where the two histories play out. Since Stocke can travel to points of his own history since getting ahold of the White Chronicle, he can travel to points on both branching sides of that major decision. Find you need a new stealth skill in one history? You probably need to continue on in the other history at least until you earn such a skill over there. So in practice your path through the story ends up looking something like this, going back and forth from side to side in overlapping bits, with the occasional short jump back on one side if you gain some knowledge that would be useful. Like, say, there's an ambush ahead. Though for simplicity I didn't attempt to illustrate it above, there are additional optional things you can do with this time traveling ability, which in the game's display of the storyline are shown to the sides of these main lines. To give away one of the earliest, in a cave you can see an area blocked off by rocks with a soldier from your side in there. Later you learn the ability to blow up rocks, but if you go to the cave you'll see the trapped soldier has already died. Go back to an earlier point in the game, though, and you can rescue him in time. With this time travel ability you'll be seeing a lot of the same story scenes multiple times. However, they allow you to go through them extremely quickly by holding down the X button. The only trouble are scenes with pauses or lots of camera movements, as those aren't sped up like the text. Now for nitpickiness. As a time travel guy, there are two things that don't jive with me. The first I'm willing to forgive because otherwise gameplay would be a pain in the ass. That is, it's only supposed to be Stocke physically traveling through his own timeline. So it doesn't really make sense that if you go back to the beginning of the game, the earlier versions of the other characters in your party will be level 30. But they are. The other is that occasionally something in "Standard History" will have an effect on something from "Alternate History" or vice-versa. Even in something like Chrono Cross where it's established these are two unique universes coexisting, that can make some sense. But since this game handles it purely in a time travel sense, only one of the existences should be active at a time. A guy who met me under one circumstance shouldn't have a vague recollection of me if I go back in time and meet him under completely different circumstances. Battle Like Chrono Trigger, there aren't random battles. Instead, you run into enemies on the field. Really, though, it's more like a Mario RPG, in that you have much more of a chance to run away, and how you interact with the enemy changes the way battle begins. Slash them with a sword a few times until they get stunned, and you'll be sure to go first in battle. Have them run into you from behind and they'll get to go first. The battle system I really like. At first, it reminded me of Final Fantasy X, in that it is character turn-based, and the top screen shows a list of which characters will be taking the next 10 turns. However, it allows for more interesting trickery in that you can trade turns with anyone following that character on the turn list, friend or foe. Why? Mostly because it is advantageous to have your characters attacking together. Though your characters are placed on a single row, the enemy characters are on a 3x3 grid. Your characters will have moves that might push an enemy character in some direction, including onto a square already occupied by an enemy. In that case, the rest of your characters to attack any of them (until any enemy character's turns) will harm all of the characters in that square. So if you're willing to take a few lumps and let the enemy have a few extra turns, you might be able to set up something like... 1. Stocks uses Push Left on an enemy in the right-front, moving him to center-front. 2. Stocke uses Push Right on an enemy in the left-front, moving him to center-front. 3. Raynie uses Push Back on the enemy in center-front, pushing them to center-center. 4. Marco attacks center-center, hitting 4 enemies at once. 5. Raynie attacks center-center, hitting 4 enemies at once. 6. Marco attacks center-center, hitting 4 enemies at once. Which is a lot of fun in itself, but there are additional things tossed in making enemy placement important. They might put a buff on the ground, so any character standing there will get healed, or maybe be stronger. Of course, this gives you a reason to push them out of said spot. Some enemies can't be moved. Some enemies take up 2 squares in the grid instead of one, so by knocking them to the side you will have them overlap multiple enemies, all of who will get hit by the next attack. Other Other than that... well, it's really not worth going into. Not that the rest is bad, but I don't think the graphics, music, items, enemy design, characters or other such things are going to make this game stand out from other RPGs. They're competently done so far, but it's all about the time travel and battle system. (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
12:54 pm	What the hell just happened? So yesterday with the storming and all, I come home to find power was lost at some point nearly 12 hours back, and the computer (Geordi) was off. So a missed night of automatic downloading of stuff, but no biggie. UNTIL I turn it on and it starts yelling about something being screwed up, and what kind of recovery/testing things I want to do. Well, ouch. None of its automatic testings and fixings seemed to be working, so it looked like I'd have to run the recovery thing that would wipe the main drive and put things back to factory settings. An inconvenience, but I figured I had enough tools at hand to run some sort of boot disc, copy the important files to a USB hard drive with a few hundred gigabytes free, and pretty quickly get things up and running again. So my first thought is to go to the boot disc I used the last time a computer was REALLY failing. This was Gingerbread, 2-3 years ago. I ended up using some Linux boot disc burned to a CD, to try and copy as much from the failing hard drive as I could. Well, me being me, it happened that Gingerbread's rotting corpse was only a few feet away. So I plugged it in, hoping to get that same CD out and make use of it again. However, the disc drive wouldn't open. Hell, I couldn't even get the thing to turn OFF when I held in the power button for a few seconds. So after unplugging it and noting how damn rusty it got, I figured there was no harm done in disassembling/demolishing it to get my hands on the CD it still contained, even if I felt like male model Hansel. "It's IN the computer!?" So I did, and got the disc out. However, it did not seem to run perfectly. I don't know if it was a problem with the disc after sitting in a rotting computer for so long, or that an old CD-booting version of Linux wasn't hep to all my more modern hardware, but it would only get partially through the boot process before seeming to get stuck. However, I was at least able to get the name of it (Slax) so I could use Gingerbread's still-alive replacement of Mitchell to get a newer version. I did so, and put it on a small USB drive. I wasn't sure it would boot properly from it, but I put it in the drive, started up Geordi... and THIS time Windows seems to have started up fine? And I am typing this a few minutes later? My mind wants to put this in some sort of legal terms. It's like once the computer problem saw that I was serious about suing its ass, it decided to settle out of court? EDIT: I guess it's not quite happy yet. To make room for that USB drive I unplugged my Kindle cord and wired X360 controller from the front of Geordi. Plugging the X360 controller in a few minutes ago, one of the error screens I'd been getting when trying to turn on the computer came up. A blue screen of death different than I'd seen before, talking about how it was shutting things down to prevent the computer from damaging itself. Ooookay. So I wondered if my X360 controller had somehow become toxic? But trying to start it again with it still plugged on, things seemed to go fine again. I guess I'll just have to wait and see whether USB changes in the future cause it to flip the hell out. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 31st, 2011
1:57 pm	Internet! Now in gray! So as I have been using the Kindle browser quite a lot while away from home, I have come to appreciate mobile sites, or at least sites that adapt well regardless of screen resolution and ratio. I myself had in the past taken Garaph and made versions with settings tailored for DS and PSP in the past, so additionally adding a Kindle version a few months ago wasn't much trouble--basically a hybrid of the PSP and plain versions. Today made a friendly-ish version of JJSWiki as well. It's... well, slightly to do simple browsing with. The original doesn't work too bad, but cutting some fat like the sidebar would make a lot of difference when we don't have a full monitor of space to work with. What I've done is taken the printer version of each page that could already be accessed, and slightly modified it so the links will go directly to further printer pages rather than the originals. This keeps the page contents pretty intact, but does cut out major major things like Search and Editing. Which is kind of a big deal, since the number one user is the one guy who can edit it. I've also begun tinkering with fixing external pages. Fairly simple stuff--have a script that reads an external page, knows how to search for the beginning and end of The Important Part, and just displays that. For instance, Final Fantasy XIV has a decently informative Character Profile you can view for anyone, but the way it's stuck in the middle of a lot of other content makes it more trouble than seems necessary to get a decently zoomed/centered version, along with some time wasted loading up a few hundred kilobytes of superfluous images used for things like header and site navigation. So I made a script that just cuts out the middle part and sends it along to the end user, along with the original page's CSS information so it gets formatted properly. Original Smoo Smoo profile Mobile-friendlier Smoo Smoo profile. To view anyone else's, just take that ID number from the original page and move it to the mobile-friendly one. (Comment on this)
6:21 am	New Years' Resolutions IT IS WORDPLAY. Game nerd math follows: 3DS's resolution is an interesting thing. On the one hand, it is pretty low compared to other modern portable devices. On the other hand, it's still a bigger increase than that seen in any of Nintendo's previous portable generation shifts. It can get a bit complicated to think about, though, since there are so many ways to look at it with the different screen types present on 3DS. First, just a calculation of how many pixels their various machines would display. Game Boy / Game Boy Color 160 x 144 = 23,040 pixels Game Boy Advance 240 x 160 = 38,400 DS single screen 256 x 192 = 49,152 DS both screens 256 x 192 x 2 = 98,304 3DS bottom screen 320 x 240 = 76,800 3DS top screen, 2D 400 x 240 = 96,000 3DS top screen, 3D 400 x 240 x 2 = 192,000 3DS, all combined 400x240x2 + 320x240 = 268,800 Now a look at how that all plays out as percentage increase. So from GB/C to GBA, there was a 67% increase in pixels. From GBA to a single DS screen there was a 28% increase, or a 156% increase if we compare GBA to both of DS's screens. From DS bottom screen to 3DS bottom screen there is a 56% increase. From DS top screen to 3DS top screen (2D) there is a 95% increase. Comparing total DS pixels to total 3DS pixels there is a 173% increase. Or the biggest difference comes from comparing DS top screen to 3DS top screen in 3D, a pixel increase of 291%. For comparison, PSP2 is a clean quadrupling of the original PSP resolution, so a 300% increase. I guess one could look at it as the 3DS top screen keeping pace, while the bottom screen lags behind. PSP 480 x 272 = 130,560 PSP2 960 x 544 = 522,240 (Comment on this)