For those who love games, and remember the old BBS days, I just put up a new game at MidnightRyder.Com – BlackNova Traders. It’s like tradewars, but, Web based and lotsa new stuff. Really cool, check it out: BlackNova Traders at MidnightRyder.Com IF you’ve never played before, read the help files, and play for a week or so and check it out 🙂
OK, I have a minor addiction that I might or might not have mentioned before. Dance Dance Revolution, and games similar to it. What could be considered odd about this is the fact I’ve only played on a Pump It Up! machine two or three times – I was instantly addicted.
Unluckly, I don’t get out and about to the arcades anymore, so I don’t get the chance to feed this particular addiction.
Now, if ya don’t know what a DDR machine is, it’s pretty simple – you have pads on the floor, each pressure sensitive. You start the game, and select a song – onscreen, it shows you the pads that have to be hit to the rythm. It’s bloody simple. It’s also one hell of a workout!
Anyway, now I’ve found a way to feed the addiction – StepMania and DanceWithIntensity. Both of them are basically DDR and PIU simulators, and you can grab ahold of the original music from the arcade games or you can download entirely new stuff (both of them have construction kits to make brand new game files from existing MP3s.) Now the only thing I’m missing is a game pad or two.
I can’t decide if I need to just save up and buy two game pads, or, see about constructing two of them from scratch. In reality, the latter is a pretty simple trick – it’s not the first time I’ve constructed a digital joystick interface from scratch, or a PC parallel inteface for it. The only hard part is making it rugged enough to stand up to 200+ lbs dancin’ on it 😉
I also think this would be one hell for interesting thing to pull out at whatever the next party is – I’m thinkin’ drinkin’ and playin this would go hand in hand – well, with the possible exception of possible broken limbs. But if I put it in the living room, and throw some of our new pads down around it, it would be safe.
Right now, I’m downloading everything for it that I can get my hands on. Like I said, it’s an addiction, and I’m feedin’ it at the moment 😉
Puttin up BlackNova Traders gets me back to thinking about what I really want to do – Styx Crossing, a modern BBS. I keep thinkin’ about how to go about it, and I think I finally settled on a workable plan. Unluckly, it’s going to be quite a while before I can get to it. Too bad. But the plan is starting to form, and I think I can do better than the old ASCII interfaces and do something full 3D, but, still keep the compatability with some of the older games and older BBS concepts. This will be interesting.
One of the other things I’ve been doing in my spare time is playing Super Mario 64. Just realized I had enough horsepower on this machine (and pleanty to spare 😉 to emulate the N64, so I snagged 1964, a fairly good emulator, and some games. I’ve been playing Mario 64 a little here and there, and one thing that I think is incredibly cool about doing this – I’m playing it at 1280 x 1024 instead of ~640 x 480 TV resolution. If you’ve ever played games on a TV, one of the things that sucks is the resolution and sharpness of images. Doing it this way rocks 🙂
Didn’t work out today – stayed home to tend to a sick Heabo. It ended up that she never needed me anyway, but, I wanted to be here since her endomitrosis (sp?) kicked in – what a pain (litteraly) for her! This is one o’ those cases where I’d love to do something to help, but there’s not a damned thing I can do. *SIGH* Well, that’s how it goes sometimes.
The house wasn’t complete in time for the appraisal really – we didn’t make it to the point I wanted to. Oh well – I’m not sure I care really, I’m more interested in the fact that we’ve got an almost finished basement. Had a lot of help getting it done from some o’ our friends, which was a really great thing. They plan on doing something similar to thier basement, so we’ll probably end up returning the favor of they don’t hire a contractor to do it 🙂
OK, time for bed…