My Panasonic 3DO Broke, So I Fixed It

Over the weekend my friend and I were playing some epic RoadRash on my classic Panasonic 3DO console.  A few minutes in we noticed that some of the textures weren’t loading.  Then, all of a sudden, the machine froze and then ejected the disc.  Afterwards, it wouldn’t play any games but it would boot fine and the CD tray would open and close like normal.  I tried using a CD lens cleaner but it wouldn’t play that either. 

So I did what any of you would do: I TOOK IT APART AND FIXED IT.

To make this easier on myself, I set the system up on my desk and then set my GameCube-with-built-on-LCD-screen next to it.  I disconnected video from the GameCube and hooked the screen up to the 3DO.  I thought this looked pretty freaking awesome so I began taking pictures.

Once I had everything set up where I could start to disassemble the 3DO and then easily test it out on the little GameCube-mounted LCD screen, I took off the top piece by removing four annoying screws on the bottom.

Next up was this gigantic metallic shield coving the CD drive. 

I popped it off fairly easily and then had a clean view of the CD tray and lens.  Cleaned the lens and tested again, but no luck.

Every time I’d test, I could tell that the lens’s sliding housing wasn’t moving along its rails.  I used a flathead screw driver to loosen where it seemed to be jammed against one of the rails and it came free, letting me slide it back and forth with ease.  I cleaned the railing as best I could, but I’ll likely have to go back in with a touch of WD-40 at some point.

I hooked everything back up and dropped a game in and guess what!  It worked!

Mission Accomplished.  Oh- and what was the game I tested it with?

Hell yeah.

My Spoiler-Filled Love Letter to Mortal Kombat (2011)

Go buy this game now if you haven’t already. 

The new MK game, simply titled Mortal Kombat, is a masterpiece.  The controls are spot-on, the graphics and animations are crisp and fun, and the Fatalities are hilarious.  This game has polish that can only be appreciated by those who have been finishing them! for nearly two decades.  I wanted to write this sooner, but I needed the time to truly see the game, and to travel back to my younger years and see the original games through fresh eyes.  There be spoilers ahead, so you have been warned.

***SPOILER ALERT***

I deliberately avoided much of the pre-release hype just so that when I started the single player story mode, I had no idea what I was about to get into.  I wanted to experience it the way the devs had intended.

What I thought was going to be a cheesy storyline with even cheesier voice acting just leading through a series of excuses to play as the game’s different fighters, turned out to be not just that, but so much more.  It only took me a few moments to realize that I was playing through the storyline of Mortal Kombat 1.  Some of the fighters originated in subsequent MK games, but the combat zones and structure of the plot mimicked MK1 perfectly.  I found myself LOVING the cheesiness because it was explanatory now- I was finally seeing WHY the brutal fight with Goro takes place just prior to what I always thought was the much easier final fight with Shang Tsung.  The levels were drawn with such attention to detail and reverence for the original game’s art design that I actually went back and played Mortal Kombat 1.  I noticed things that I hadn’t noticed before in the game because this new game bought it all to such vivid life. 

In 1993 I was twelve years old and in the seventh grade when Mortal Kombat landed on my Super Nintendo.  Today I’m 30 years old, but when I realized I was playing Mortal Kombat 1 re-imagined I felt like I was playing alongside my twelve-year-old self.  This is why I play video games.

Once I progressed the plot past that initial Shang Tsung battle, I realized I was deep within the plotline of Mortal Kombat II and I was utterly thrilled.  MKII is to this day my favorite fighting game.  This new Mortal Kombat is the first fighting game since that fateful release date in 1994 that I have considered being maybe better than MKII.  Just like the combat zones from MK1, the MKII arenas looked fantastic and full of life in the new game.  The storyline continued its B-movie style of cheesiness and I loved it. 

Surprisingly I hadn’t thought about it until this point, but it hit me that most of the characters remaining in the game were from MK3, with the exception of Quan Chi, and I realized that once I defeated Kintaro and then Shao Khan the game wouldn’t be over- instead I would begin the MK3 plot. 

This really shook me because as huge a MK fan as I have been for 18 years, I never liked MK3.  I’d never beaten its arcade mode.  I’d never perfected any of the new combos.  Or is it kombos?  I’d laughed at the poor graphics of the Animalities.  I just never liked the game.  And I knew that I was about to enter into an area of this new game that would hold value to only those who revered MK3 as much as I did with MK1 and MKII.  With great trepidation, I continued on through the storyline and loved it.  There were subtle changes that I did recognize, like Sub Zero becoming a cyborg instead of Smoke, but most of the plot here was new to me and I found myself enjoying it. 

Since finishing the storyline, and loving the moments after the climactic final fight, I purchased the Midway Arcade Treasures game for PSP which contains MK3.  After a good bit of cursing and improving my skills, 16 years after its release, I have beaten MK3.  And I actually like the game now.  It will never replace the grandeur of MKII for me, but I get it now, and I see how well the new game reflected its influence on the series. 

At that point I felt like my life playing Mortal Kombat had come full circle.  I grew up playing the old games.  I grew disinterested in the series starting at MK3, a score that I had never settled.  I fell in love with the new game and its great respect for what had come before it.  And that led me to a new appreciation of the third game in the series, which I had previously considered the beginning of MK’s descent into worse and worse titles.

And there were so many wonderful moments through that new story line.  Johnny Cage quips about calling him “crazy with a K” since all words starting with “c” in the Mortal Kombat universe are converted to k’s.  Motaro, the penultimate boss fight of MK3, who is widely regarded as one of the cheapest and most difficult bosses in fighting game history, is relegated to a background character who is killed off-screen.  His body is shown to the player via cut-scene as a means of saying, “Here, he’s dead, you don’t have to re-live this horrible fight too!”  There are subtle character animations that are reminiscent of moments from the Mortal Kombat film.  There are lines in the cut scenes that conjure memories of some of the other MK games, such as when a reference is made to a “deadly alliance.” 

I kould go on and on, but I’ll stop here.  I kan’t say enough good things about this game.  It truly is a flawless victory.

I Love Underrated Video Games

I truly love me some underrated video games, so please allow me to share some of them with you.

One of my favorite early current gen games was Just Cause.  None of my friends liked it.  My wife (gf at the time) couldn’t understand why I enjoyed it.  It’s a bug-filled, clunky game that is difficult to control and really enjoys freezing my Xbox 360 (the newer models work fine).  But I LOVED that game.  I saw such potential in the direction the creators, Avalanche Studios, were going- even if that game itself didn’t have much luster to it, the developers knew they were on to something and I could feel that despite the game’s shortcomings.  In 2010 Just Cause 2 came out, fixing most of the bugs and adding tons more to do, and the game got lots of critical acclaim and all my friends love it.   I did too, because I knew that was the game that those developers could produce.

After my Just Cause 1 fix, I got into Bladestorm.  I haven’t completed it to this day, the game takes FOREVER to beat and it’s quite repetitive.  It isn’t quite a strategy game or an action game or an adventure/rpg game- it’s a little of all of those, which makes it very unique.  It’s made by Koei, famous for the hack and slash button masher series Dynasty Warriors (I love those games too).  My wife bought me the game for my birthday simply because the DW guys made it.  She didn’t like Bladestorm herself, because it doesn’t play at all like the DW games and doesn’t offer co-op.  But there is something else there, while pillaging my way through the Hundred Years War, that I can’t help but get addicted to.  Go play this game. 

A couple years back I tried and failed to get into a beta for a game called Section 8 for PC, which heralded itself as a Tribes-esque team shooter.  They had me at Tribes-esque.  The game got released on PC’s and consoles to pretty bad reviews.  Not mixed reviews, bad ones.  Then a few months ago I saw the game on the Steam holiday sale for $5.00 so I grabbed it.  HOLY CRAP THAT WAS A GOOD DECISION.  This game packs some of the most fun and frantic multiplayer FPS action I’ve seen in a while.  It’s not as Tribes-esque as I would have hoped, but seriously, the game is great.  A sequel, titled Section 8 Prejudice is coming out soon on all platforms for $15.00 AND I SHALL OWN IT.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- Trackmania is the greatest racing game of all time.  All the attention goes to the Need For Speed series, and to Gran Turismo and Forza, but screw all those games.  Trackmania gives you full control to design and customize tracks, and then race them with some of the tightest controls I’ve ever seen.  The in-game options for sharing tracks with friends aren’t great, but if you set up a Dropbox shared folder with your friends to hold tracks and replays you’ll get addicted.  Trackmania Nations Forever is a completely free game, but the upgrade to Trackmania United Forever is well worth it.

Finally, one of my favorite mixed-genre games is Battalion Wars for the GameCube.  It is simultaneously 3rd person shooter and RTS.  You control every unit on the battlefield by switching between controlling each of them in 3rd person mode whenever you like.  This gives you the ability to control infantry, tanks, choppers, bombers and turrets all in the same mission, and switch between them whenever you want.  The single player campaign is challenging but rewarding.  Unfortunately, multiplayer wasn’t added until the sequel on the Wii, but I love the game anyway, as well as that sequel.

I wonder what obscure game I’ll get hooked on next…

Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, and Windows 7 DirectX 10

Want to run Unreal Tournament ‘99, and games based on its engine, in Windows 7, USING DIRECTX 10?  You can.  Go here:  http://kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/

Last year I swallowed my pride and purchased a game off of Steam for the first time.  It was Unreal Tournament ‘99 and it cost me $2.00 on an 80% off sale.  How can you say no to that?  I owned the game back-in-the-day, but have since lost the discs by loaning them to someone I would later lose touch with.  When I saw the chance to get it back for two bucks, I jumped on it.

But then I played it and it ran like crap.  The framerate stayed high, but there were these weird slow-downs, almost like I was Neo and I was fighting the Matrix or something, only nowhere near as fun or interesting. 

After much Googling, I found that I could switch to OpenGL and change some settings in the INI file and the game would run near-perfect.  And it did!

Then last week I picked up Deus Ex off steam for $2.50 on sale. I’ve never actually played through the game.  Since so many folks on Shacknews claim it is the greatest game they’ve ever played, I figured I should pick up the cheap copy.

Upon running the game I noticed that the graphics setup screen was identical to that of UT ‘99.  Since it was the same engine, I just went ahead and set it to run in OpenGL and I made the same INI file changes.  No luck though this time, the slow weirdness persisted.

That’s when I stumbled across the aforementioned site.  On this site you’ll find an archive file full of DLL’s for Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, and even Rune (a fun game that I haven’t played in years!).  Copying the files into their respective games’ folders allows for DirectX 10 to be a selectable rendering option, and both games run fantastically for me.

For whatever reason, it took me a while in my Googling to find this page, so I hope that this blog post serves to direct more people to it.  Should the archive here or the page itself ever be taken down, please contact me in the comments and I will try to provide an alternative source.

Happy gaming!

Just Cause 2 Demo Doesn’t Suck At All

The best demo I’ve ever played (or at least, the one I played the most) was Crackdown’s demo three years ago.  It was addictingly simple to just jump in, blow things up, level up my character, and have a blast.  The demo limited you to one area of the city, and further limited you to 30 minutes of gameplay per session with the demo.  My friends and I probably logged over 8 hours on the demo alone before purchasing the finished game.

I downloaded the Just Cause 2 Demo for both PC and 360 as soon as it became available.  Both versions are essentially identical.  You are limited to 35 of the final game’s 400 square miles to explore.  And like Crackdown, you are limited to 30 minutes of chaos causing action before you must start over.

My one complaint though… let me just get this out of the way real quick, won’t take but a second… You can’t skip the intro and it has the worst voice acting I’ve heard in a while.  Annoying that I have to sit through that every 30 minutes of demo game time.

Now that that complaint is established, let me just say: EVERYTHING ELSE IS FUN AS HELL.  The controls are better, the targeting is more sensible, the graphics are phenomenal, and the grapple/parachute mechanics make me wish I could have them in every other game I play, especially Assassin’s Creed for whatever reason.

Tethering soldiers to gas tanks and launching them into the air is fun.  Tethering myself to gas tanks and launching them into the air is fun.  Tethering soldiers to passing cars, each other, trees, buildings, helicopters, and even the ground is just plain great.  Not sure why, but it just never gets old to me.

I beat the original Just Cause for the Xbox 360 and it was the first and only game in which I’ve ever successfully completed every single achievement.  I hope to do the same with the sequel, which I will purchase day 1 (March 23rd).

Command & Conquer 4 (beta) Sucks

I love Command & Conquer.  I’ve played every C&C title since the demo of the very first C&C game came out sometime around 1994.  Most of them have been terrific, and the ones that haven’t (I’m looking at you, Tiberium Sun) have still been enjoyable.  But now I’m part of the C&C 4 beta and everything has changed.

The beta consists purely of online multiplayer.  No campaign; no skirmish.

When I first entered the game lobby I announced that this was my first time playing.  I was immediately told by a rival player that since he’s a level 30 and I’m a level 1, that I should probably just quit and find a new lobby because this one won’t be fun for me.

Let’s stop for a moment and think about everything that is wrong with that.  First, upon starting the game I’m told by a fan that I won’t have fun.  Wow, that’s encouraging.

Second, I don’t expect to win my first round of an RTS unless the person I’m playing against is also playing his/her first round and I just happen to click faster than they do.  That’s not the point though- the game should be fun EVEN FOR THE LOSER.

Finally, the reason he stated it wouldn’t be fun isn’t that these guys are all experienced and I’m not, but because they are all around level 30 and I’m not.  So now the level of player enters into it- this means that lower level, under-experienced players don’t have access to the same tech trees as higher level players.  It used to be in C&C games, starting with Generals I believe, that you level up throughout the course of a given round of the game, gaining access to better and bigger means of destruction, but this game has introduced a mechanic that allows for the leveling to occur over the course of many rounds, persisting your rank and giving you more advanced tech the more you play.  Modern Warfare anyone?  This isn’t C&C.

The gameplay of a given round is different, too.  No more harvesting!  The means of resource gathering used in every C&C ever (except Renegade!) is gone in favor of control points, ala Dawn of War 2.  In fact, this game plays JUST LIKE DoW 2, except with cartoony graphics and persistent leveling in multiplayer.

When C&C Generals was released, it was a pretty direct response to Warcraft 3, another great RTS.  The GUI was altered to work a little more like WC3 and the construction was centered around engineering units rather than a generalized build menu.  So now we have a C&C4 that is a direct answer to the success of DoW2, just as Generals was an answer to WC3.

The largest complaint I’ve heard against the C&C series is how little it has changed over the years.  I complained a small bit when C&C 3 came out and it was just C&C 1 and 2 with a fancier engine.  It’s still a fun gameplay style though so I quickly got over it and enjoyed the game as well as the Kane’s Wrath expansion.

At this point in the core C&C series though, the gamers who pick it up are traditionally going to be the hardcore fans who have given up on change.  What they want is the classic C&C gameplay with yet another fancier engine.  It’s nostalgic, modern, and fun all wrapped up together.  But what they’re giving us is innovation (even though its Relic’s DoW2 innovation) in the fourth and final entry in a long running epic series that has never known innovation.  We don’t want that now!  It’s too late to change the game so drastically!

What they could have done though, is keep the C&C4 experience the same as the others, making the long-term fans happy and released this style of game play under another name… Generals 2.  That way, they could continue the awesome universe established with C&C Generals and use the DoW2 gameplay to combat Relic, all while gracefully ending the Tiberium saga with a more traditional and separate C&C title.

Oh well.  I’ll probably still buy the game when it gets cheap, if for no other reason so that I maintain my status of always owning every C&C title.  But I won’t be happy about it.

Mega Man 9 is Harder Than Crap

I’ve loved the Mega Man games for nearly 20 years now.  I collected all six original NES Mega Man titles.  I have beaten them all, along with three of the Mega Man X series games.  But right now, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I may never beat Mega Man 9.  

I purchased it yesterday afternoon for the Xbox 360.  Probably a poor choice since the 360′s d-pad sucks, but whatever.  Hindsight would have me purchase the game for the PS3, but then I wouldn’t be able to boost my GamerScore on Live.  Oh wait, most of the achievements that Mega Man 9 offers start with the phrase “Complete the game…” and then tack on something crazy like “…3 times in one day,” or ” …in under 60 minutes.”  

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game.  The 8-bit graphics and sound make me feel like a kid again for all the right reasons.  It is truly a wonderful accomplishment on Capcom’s part to have created so perfectly a new NES game.  

But the years of modern gaming have spoiled me on easier difficulty levels.  Games are just so much easier than they used to be.  I’m guessing its the effort of game designers to cater to casual gamers.  Few games live up to the default difficutly attached to most retro games.  Beat Halo 3 on legendary?  Done.  Beat Gears of War on insane?  Done.  Beat Resistance on hard?  Done.  Beat a single boss in Mega Man 9?  Whoa hold on a minute!  Give me an hour or so with the level and then we’ll talk.

In my one-and-a-half-ish-hours of gameplay I’ve defeated one boss.  One.  That’s it.  To be fair, I don’t remember picking up the original games and just blazing through them.  It took patience.  It took replaying levels.  Some I’ve replayed so many times over the years that if I close my eyes and concentrate hard enough I can relive large portions and even hear the music (I’m not even joking, the music has always been amazing in these games and 9 is no exception).  So maybe its not that I’m not used to a game this hard, but it’s that I’m not used to a game that isn’t designed to be intuitive on your first attempt with it.  

Regardless, the game feels hard.  Harder than any game in a long time.  But I’ve loved every second of it.  Go buy it now, on whatever system you can (beware the 360 d-pad though), and enjoy it.  Playing it will make you feel 9 years old again.  If only more things in life had that effect.

Tiger Woods 09 for Xbox 360 – I Can’t Copy My Player To Another Xbox!

Its been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted anything, mainly because I’ve been busy playing EA Sports’ Tiger Woods 09 on my Xbox 360.  Its a terrific golf sim and EA has out-done themselves on quantity and quality of content.  The real-time feedback on swing mechanics, added courses, improved graphics, improved chipping, alternate control mode, simultaneous online play, and dynamic player attributes are but a few of the improvements that all add up to make this the best Tiger Woods game ever.  But…

I want to take my awesome custom player (ChosenOne) from my home Xbox to work with me and load him up on the office system.  Three of my coworkers are wanting to do the same.  To solve this, I picked up an Xbox 360 Memory Unit (256MB) off Ebay.  I was easily able to copy my player to the memory card in the Xbox 360′s dashboard, but loading the player at work was a different story.

If I try to simply copy the file back to the hard drive off the memory unit in the dashboard, I’m told that it can not be copied across profiles.  Why is my profile attached to the memory unit?  I don’t get this.

If we go into the game’s interface and try to load the character from the memory unit, the game tells us that no valid users were found on the memory card.  This is most troubling.

At this point we deduced that there must be some means in the game’s interface to “save” off the player to the memory card or for exporting to a different profile on the Xbox… wrong.  There doesn’t seem to be any command for this.  

So now we’re stuck.  Not sure what the next move is, if there is one.  Searching forums has not proven helpful since it seems we’re the only people in the world trying to do this.  

Please let me know if you know the way around this issue!  This is a truly great game and I hate to see it suffer such an obvious shortcoming!

Xbox 360 DRM Sucks Less Than Previously Thought

Earlier this week I blogged that Xbox 360′s downloadable content model sucks.  I was quite happily proven wrong last night through a discussion on Shacknews in which user kkolk8 sent me a link to this Microsoft page.

After following the instructions on screen, We were able to resolve completely the issue I previously blogged about.  Many thanks to kkolk8!!

I still feel that MS could do a far better job making their RRoD victims and and other 2nd (or 3rd) console owners aware of this process.  However, I’m happy as hell to learn that my initial complaints were unjustified!

Xbox 360 DRM Sucks

Back in the Spring, I purchased the expansion pack for Call of Duty 4 on my Xbox 360 so that my girlfriend, who was/is addicted to the game, could benefit from the additional maps.  I downloaded the expansion pack with my Xbox Live profile.  She then logged back into the Xbox using her profile and played online with the new maps.  All was right with the world.

Then one day, the Xbox 360 console that I’d come to know and love died.  It presented the Red Ring of Death (RRoD), a sight feared by all Xbox 360 owners.  Fortunately, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into replacing systems under 3 years old that show the RRoD, and I was able to receive a free replacement system within a couple of weeks.

Happily, my girlfriend resumed her online play of Call of Duty 4.  But after a couple of days, we realized that the new maps had vanished.  I can access them when I log in to play online, but she can’t anymore.

The technical explanation behind this is that downloaded contect gets bound to both your Xbox Live account AND your console.  If for any reason you wind up with a new console, you have to be logged into your Xbox Live account to access your downloaded content; other logins on the new console will not have access. 

This blows.

 I found a work-around for it, but it isn’t fun and I’m sure it doesn’t apply to all games where this is an issue.  First, I delete the expansion pack off my hard drive.  We start the game up under her profile, then at the title screen, we log out of her profile and log in as mine.  Then I redownoad the entire expansion pack while the game is running and I’m logged in.  As soon as the download is complete, we log out of my profile and back in with hers.  Bear in mind, this has all happened while the game is running.  If we do that just right, the maps are playable again, but only for as long as she’s logged in.  As soon as the console is turned off, this will have to be done again to enable the maps once more.

I’ve seen where others are experiencing similar problems with other Xbox Live content such as the XBL Arcade games.  There is a petition online right now to get this fixed, which I have happily signed, but it will need many more signatures before the DRM is made usable.  Please visit http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/XboxLiveDRMRevisions and sign the petition.  Your support is appreciated by everyone else in the Xbox Live community.