Pineconeattack, or PCA is a semi-collaborative effort of sheer idiocy, perpetrated on teh interbutts for our own sick amusement, with articles about gaming, pop culture/fad and anything we find funny.
Seriously, escape while you can.
Alan Wake was a pretty awesome game. It had a decent story, a great fighting mechanic, it aimed smoothly and had moments of both humor and horror in equal measure, along with really pretty landscapes. Boy it had some great rendered trees. Mind you, the characters didn’t look so hot, but I was concentrating more on lighting up (enemies with flashlights, I don’t smoke. Much BEHAHAH!) and then shooting holes in meth-addled weasel men to really give a crap that Alan and his wife looked like hi-res classic XBAWX renders. Shit, I was usually too busy using a flashlight to clear out patches of nightmare tar and if you ever watched Ice Pirates you know what nightmare tar does – it makes you go POOF! right as your son is squealing like a burning kitten, ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! DON’T TOUCH THAT! It’s PURE EVILLLLLL!’ and those lousy midgets have already absconded back to heaven and God is like, shrugging his shoulders, because he hasn’t given a shit since ’78 when he had to wrestle an invisible alien who skinned and hunted and skinned and hunted to his wee alien heart’s desire and then someone was like ‘AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!’ and shot up the jungle.
No wait. That was Time Bandits. Ice Pirates has evil mutant children and space herpes. Either way, someone shorter than you did SOMETHING and you didn’t see either of those movies either, right? Fuck you.
It’s getting some nice reviews considering it takes place right after the end of the game which means the endboss you totally shot with a flashlight is all like ‘HAHHAHAHAHA It WUZ A DREAM!’, and I’ll have to fight some nightmare tar covered typewriters or something for two hours. Man I love this game.
Either way, Alan Wake now has some free DLC for those who bought the special edition and it’s ready to be downloaded. Wow right. Just wow.
So you’re like, ‘Hey Tenno! Why aren’t you downloading that super cool awesome DLC right now?’ Well, ’cause I had to disenchant my magic MOJO MACHINE and at the moment I can either type this article, live, for you; or else download that sweet sweet time waster of a DLC.
So once I do this, then I can get with that and I’m afraid I can’t allow that Star Fox!
Where am I even going with this anyways? Jango is like screeching at me over the phone, ‘Our readers need copy you addled fuck wit! We need DEADLINES! We need COVERAGE!’, and I’m pretty sure I can’t cross that bridge until I get what I need, which is either some barely legal Thai she-males or another beer from the cooler, slowly condensing below my feet as I type on this crap devil machine.
It’s way too hot in here and I’m pretty sure I’ll be a mummified corpse soon, hands wrapped around a beer bottle full of sand, just dead to the world.
This is the reason why I fucking hate doing RPGs for GOTM. I always have to cram at the end of the month and I don’t have time time play games that I really want to play, watch more Dr Who or at very least do articles. So here’s a quick run down of topics I find interesting.
This week we tackle Donkey Kong, starring the iconic and irrepressible Donkey Kong himself and the series of games he’s starred in, made cameos in and been a part of.
So if you have some love for the barrel tossing ape and his unsated lust for a carpenter’s girlfriend, join us as the PCA crew hunkers down and takes a big ole bite of the Kong banana!
As Wikipedia states:
An ape is any member of the Hominoidea superfamily of primates, including humans. Due to its ambiguous nature, the term ape has been deemphasized in favor of Hominoidea as a means of describing taxonomic relationships.
Under the current classification system there are two families of hominoids:
* the family Hylobatidae consists of 4 genera and 14 species of gibbon, including the Lar Gibbon and the Siamang, collectively known as the lesser apes.
* the family Hominidae consisting of chimpanzees, gorillas, humans and orangutans[1][2] collectively known as the great apes.
A few other primates, such as the Barbary Ape, have the word ape in their common names (usually to indicate lack of a tail), but they are not regarded as true apes.
Except for gorillas and humans, all true apes are agile climbers of trees. They are best described as omnivorous, their diet consisting of fruit, including grass seeds, and in most cases other animals, either hunted or scavenged, along with anything else available and easily digested. They are native to Africa and Asia, although humans have spread to all parts of the world.
Most nonhuman ape species are rare or endangered. The chief threat to most of the endangered species is loss of tropical rainforest habitat, though some populations are further imperiled by hunting for bushmeat.
So you, your mother and everyone you know is referred to as a ‘great ape’.
And since I have magic powers, if you read this sentence Donkey Kong Country now sucks.
Below is the commercial I cited in the show; easily one of the most horrifying things Nintendo has ever pulped out… thanks Rare. I blame you for this nightmare.
I noticed that I’ve been accumulating a few more sticks and I’m at the point now that it’s time to personalize them and give them that old Pineconeattack hurrah. One thing I hate more than anything is being an owner of a generic run of a mill mass-produced joystick. For the love of Mike, Madcatz and Hori has made it so damn easy to replace the artwork on these sticks, I still don’t understand why more people are not doing just that! It really did annoy me seeing so many generic sticks at EVO this year. I would be too damn afraid of having my stick stolen and have no recourse since most sticks just looks like every other damn stick. Whatever, I digress…
And, much like I suspected would happen, the allure of Bizarre Creations online racing and destruction game is kinda bumming me out.
Now don’t get me wrong, the game itself boasts some nice graphics, a real sense of speed, bitchin’ music and can be a real fun experience when you’re playing with a large group online, or even just having a drive fest with your friends; but in reality it feels like the gas tank is already running low on this game just a few weeks in.
The first night I threw the disc in expecting to get a few matches, I was already worried by the number of people playing online. 353. That isn’t 353 people in my state, area, or even in the North American region. This was 353 people playing online in the whole world, including -presumably- the very employees who created the game in the first place.
Shit.
So that’s some suck right out of the box. On top of that, I found myself waiting forever to even find people to play with, players like me who you’d figure would leap at the chance to get some races on. And finally, yes I got my game on. But holy shit. Halo 3 is old as the hills and still pulls almost 175,000 players online every night.
Pictured: What I wanted my experience to be.
What my experience was...
Now, I’m not really that doom and gloom about it. I picked it up at a reasonable price so I’m cool, hell, I’m playing it and typing this up in-between rounds so I can’t deny how addictively FUN this game can be. If you can find the game that is.
Now there is a real visceral thrill in picking the right car for the right track and the right loadout for your personal flavor, and smashing the shit out of an annoying asshat never get’s old. So maybe this will be a slow burn of a game, picking up cred as time passes… but I have to wonder that if it still hasn’t amassed a following when you could get it for cents on the dollar, if this game is going to have much road ahead of it.
- Tenno
UPDATE: So here I sit. This game has that kind of retarded online connectivity that is so horrible and is almost exclusive to consoles. On a PC game, I could just look at all the servers, pick the one with the most people, least amount of lag and get driving. But nope. Not consoles. I’m just sitting here in an empty room, waiting for some people to join. 1 shows up, waits 2 seconds, then leaves. And again. Annnnnnnd again.
My NAT is open… my connection a cheerful green… What the hell BLUR? Your servers are fucking stupid. Your online is a garbled mess of a joke.
Judas Fucking Priest. Finally. 4 people at once… Only took 8 minutes.
One of the greatest advantages of being a cab owner is that you, on rare occasion, find stealer deals on arcade hardware and boards that are so damn tempting, you jump on them before thinking. I have this rule that I for the most part follow religiously: DO NOT suicide boards.
I have a nice collection of boards, carts and GD Roms and for the most part, 80% of my collection fits within this rule. I’ve deviated from the path with my first CPS2 board but after replacing several batteries, I’ve overcome my fears with Capcom’s suicidal board set. Of course, in the back of my mind, I knew that if any of my CPS2 boards decided to go tits up, I could always resurrected them by shipping the e-proms to be re-flashed or what ever they to do them.
Now my CPS3…
A deal of a life time that was so tempting, I was able to score the JPN board set for 3/4 less then the current market price back when Third Strike was going for about $600-800. At the price I was getting the working board set but I had to make sure I would get me moneys worth in play time. I was willing to deal with the inevitable truth that this board will die. There is no resurrecting this motherboard once the cart goes dead and as every year ticks by, finding a good working cart will get harder and harder.
The first thing I ever did was to ship my cart out, in good faith, to a forum member and he modified the cart and made it so the battery could easily be replaced without having to ever open the cart. I’m not a fan of this kind of mod because I feel the battery is more secured if soldered directly onto the board but the CPS3 battery is a big pain in the ass to swap. Ultimately, convenience over practicality prevailed.
In theory, all I would need to do is keep the cart running and do a hot swap of the battery with everything turned on. The very idea of doing this freaks me out since so many things can go wrong. The board could short out or there can be a black out. The only thing going through my mind was this: if I break something while doing this hot swap, I’m going to kill this cart forever… (or at least have to wait years for someone to actually reverse engineer the programming to resurrect this CPS3 security) With power on the cart can survive with no battery since there is power running through the motherboard.
So here you go.
This is my first ever attempt at removing the old battery and installing a fresh new battery. I decided to record myself doing this because good or bad, the final result should hopefully be entertaining.
If you are in need of a walk-through, then head over to Razoola’s walk-through on his personal site. It has the most detail in the walk-through and the photos are nice too.
Gather round kiddies as we circle around the digital campfire as we reminisce the ‘good old days’ of gaming when cassette tapes and 5 1/4 floppy discs were viable media for gaming and 6kb was considered a SHIT TON of memory. Do any of you remember playing games off of your VCR ? Or playing Legend of Zelda off of a floppy discs or even swiping cards into a device to play old Nintendo games? Well we all did and boy does this make me want to embrace my hard drive and welcome digital media with wide-open arms.
Gaming in this generation is amazing but deep down I still miss the day when 30 minutes to load up a 40kb file and blowing into dusty NES carts just to play 10 minutes of some random game I found at the local swap meet or shooting cowboys on a big screen at the Circus Circus arcade. Hell, does anyone even remember Captain Power? Or what about the Laseractive?
Sigh, I’m old.
Well, join Decepticreep, GR Sean, Baldy, Jedah Doma and myself as we discuss magnetic storage devices and 8 bit porn. Yeah, we rock.
