Today Google launched Lively, a browser-based Second Life clone where users create avatars and rooms and can chat with complete strangers. It did not run very well on my gaming PC, and that does not bode well for it in my opinion. It is neat for about five minutes, but gets boring pretty quick. Unless you are into Second Life and/or chatting with random people with a 3D avatar that looks nothing like you, you will probably feel the same way. This could potentially give Second Life some competition, but at this point it is little more than a chat room. I’ll give it another go when users can actually create their own content.

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Synaesthete is an interesting mix of genres. It is part shooter and part rhythm. Imagine playing Geometry Wars but instead of pointing where you want to shoot, you have to press buttons to match the rhythm much like Dance Dance Revolution. If you are interested in trying it out, it can be downloaded for free here. Synaesthete is a finalist for the Independant Games Festival so be sure to vote for it if you like it.

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I added an Atari/Amiga/Commodore joystick port to my Xbox 360 X-Arcade stick today… Why you ask? Sensible World of Soccer of course! Although I never played the older versions, I have become very addicted to the recent Xbox Live Arcade release. The guys at sensiblesoccer.de seem to prefer an Amiga joystick over any other type of control method so I decided I would give it a shot. Since the Xbox 360 controller can be used on the PC, I figured this project would also be good for emulation.

The gamepad I used is a wired Xbox 360 MicroCon Game Pad Pro. I had to use a relay (TF2E-4.5v-1-H50  ATF20620) on the left and right buttons because they don’t share a common ground. If you decide to do this and just want a joystick port on the controller and not the X-Arcade stick, you should use an opto-isolator instead of a relay as they are smaller.

On my controller, pins 3 and 4 go to the following relays which connect to the left and right d-pad buttons. Other controllers may be set up differently. Any button that does not share a common ground needs a relay or an opto-isolator.

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During Amazon’s Black Friday sale, I stumbled across what I thought was the most pointless product ever… the Pistol Mouse FPS. It is basically a mouse that is shaped like a pistol. You are supposed to use it in first-person shooters to add an extra level of realism. It was $2.99 with free shipping at the time so I bought it just to mess with or use in a future project.

This thing is surprisingly heavy duty. I expected a flimsy little plastic gun that would barely fit in my hand. It looks and feels realistic enough. Hopefully no police officers are around to shoot me when I’m playing video games. Now for the good stuff…

I used Half-Life 2 to test it out on and it actually worked a lot better than I expected. There are only two problems with it. The big problem is that you have to slide the gun forward and backward to aim up and down. This sounds horrible I know, but it’s not that bad. The left and right aiming is perfect. The other problem, while almost impossible to implement, is a lack of rumble. This is getting extremely picky since most PC games don’t support a rumble feature, and I have yet to see a mouse that has a rumble feature.

Overall, the quality is great. I am not sure if I will use this as my main FPS mouse yet, but I will definitely try it on a number of games. If you love shooters, you should check it out. It is no longer being made, so if you want one you better get it soon.

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A NooberoUno Folding@home team has been created and anyone can now join. You will need to have downloaded the Folding@home software or own a Playstation 3 in order to participate. Once you have it up and running, just enter 91933 as the team number. If you have no idea what Folding@home is then read the following:

“What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.”

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Having recently upgraded my video card to a DirectX 10 card, I decided to give the Unreal Tournament 3 demo a try. Running the game with the max settings, it looks (and plays) a lot like UT2 to me. Hopefully the final release will look much better.

Visit the official UT3 site for more info.

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The Orange Box is Valve’s new compilation of five great games including: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress. If you have not played Half-Life 2 then that alone is a reason to own it. If you have played Half-Life 2 and/or Episode 1 already (most have), consider them a bonus. Portal and Team Fortress together are worth the price of The Orange Box.

Team Fortress is a multiplayer first person shooter where each character type plays a very unique role. For instance, an engineer can build turrets to defend an area while a spy can disguise themselves as a player on the other team in order to sneak past their defenses. It took me a while to learn the basics, but is turning out to be a very solid multiplayer shooter.

Portal is a first person puzzle game where you are given a gun that shoots portals too help you get through the levels. While the story mode may only be a few (extremely entertaining) hours long, there are many more things to do once you complete it. Unless you are a genius, this game should last between 10-1,000 hours depending on how smart you are.

The Orange Box is currently available for the PC and Xbox 360. It will be available for the PS3. To find out more about any of these games, check out The Orange Box site.

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Electronic Arts is offering the original Command & Conquer as a free download. If you are interested, you will need to download and burn the cd images.

“In order to give back to the fans for over 12 years of devotion we are putting together a 12th Anniversary celebration during the month of September. However, as any Command & Conquer fan knows, the true party starts today, August 31st, which marks 12 years since the original Command & Conquer launched way back in 1995.”

Download Here

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The newest version of Google Earth now has a built in flight simulator. This was kind of a no-brainer for them to throw this in since the hard part (creating a 3D version of earth) was already done. I have always enjoyed flight sims but since there is no point to them, I never purchased them.  Now I can enjoy flying over my girlfriend’s house and crashing into pyramids for the low price of nothing. The controls are pretty basic so it is not a flight “simulation” in the true sense, but who wants to learn how to fly a real plane anyway? Okay, many people would. That’s not the point. The point is, it’s free and it’s pretty fun. If only they would add multiplayer dog fighting, you could shoot down your neighbors and watch them crash into their own house. Awesome!

Anyway, try it out. I suggest using a gamepad; I hated the mouse and keyboard controls. I have a feeling this will turn into a full-fledged flight sim over time and will probably be the best one available. Hopefully it stays free…

Here are the full instructions

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Here is the first CamShots update. For those who don’t know CamShots is an application that allows you to capture screenshots from a video capturing device in intervals from 1-60 seconds. It is based on the InterVideo Home Theater software. For more information, see Home Security System For Under $50 - Part 2

New Features:

• Creates 3 folders in the CamShots directory to store picures from the last 48 hours.
• Every 24 hours the oldest folder gets deleted.
• Enabled fast capture (captures every .15 seconds). Can be used to make animated .gifs for signatures and icons. (can slow your computer down a great deal depending on the processor and hard drive speed)
• Shows how many pictures per folder based on the screen capturing interval.

Keep in mind you need the InterVideo Home Theater software (came free with my video capturing device) as well as the .NET framework for this to work.

Download CamShots - (freeware)

I hope to use something other than InterVideo for future updates.

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