Nice Graphics, horrible gameplay and neat service

I don't know why, but about a week ago I started playing Odin Sphere. Muramasa was a cool game so i figured I'd look at other stuff VanillaWare made in the past.

Huge mistake.

Visually, it's along the same lines as Muramasa, however, the gameplay is, fucking, horrible. I don't wanna get into it because I know I'll start ranting way too much, just take my word for it, it's terrible.

I am still playing it because I'm too invested in it to quit now, and the story does interest me, but each fight, even against normal enemies, is fucking torture.

This game has been taking huge chunks of my time that i should had spent writing or doing shit to post on here.

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However I'd like to take the opportunity to mention Oovoo.

See, I've been playing Odin Sphere on the emulator PCSX2, and when I Skype with people, they sometimes wanna see, problem is, Skype limits this to 1 on 1 calls.

So me, Zach and our friend Shigoto tried Oovoo and I made a videochat room in it.

I gotta say, it was pleasantly surprised. For starters, We've been having problems in voice calls with 3+ people in them on Skype, Someone can't hear another person or breaks up, but only happens to 1 person and kind of randomly.

In a video call, we've had actually better sound quality and no problems on Oovoo, also, the video seemed to work rather well. I was streaming Odin Sphere from my desktop using ManyCam, and Shigoto was streaming Skyward Sword using his webcam (webcam LP, lol) and it all ran decently.

Oovoo's site says free accounts can have video conference calls up to 6 people, and premium accounts up to 12. Personally, 6 is way more than enough.

If you guys like Streaming yourselves playing games or doodling for your friends, consider Oovoo, I sure fucking loved it.

Darn cheating browser

I mentioned the Acid 3 test to a friend today and ended up looking for information on it on the wiki page, and found some intresting info:

In May and June, Google Chrome 2.0 and Opera Mobile 9.7 beta displayed a score of 100/100, but did not actually pass; release versions of these browsers passed fully later in the year. Security concerns over downloadable fonts delayed Chrome from passing.

As naive of me as it seems, it never occurred to me that the score on the test could not be accurate.

Based on Acid 3 i always considered Chrome to b an accurate browser, however, it always seemed to fuck up the layout work i do royally.

But then, if u scroll down the wiki page, there's something odd.

It lists all 4 browsers that passed the Acid 3 test so far, however, Chrome is marked as "dubious".

I am currently making a new blog and Wiki skin, and both show differently on Firefox (which is what i use to develop it) and on Chrome. So i decide to download Opera which is confirmed to have passed the Acid 3 test as well.

The result? it's nothing like Chrome. It's actually almost dead on like Firefox (which gets 94% at the test). Even IE looks closer to what it's suposed to be than Chrome. Chrome's "real" score might actually be way bellow 90%.

I'm suspecting Chrome just has specific coding in it to "pass" the Acid 3 test so the browser would get a good rep, which in honesty would be a really clever plan.

I'm officially no longer making my layouts support Chrome at all, I am pissed for having wasted so many hours, days even, trying to get a layout to show up properly on Firefox IE and Chrome when Chrome, who was supposed to be the accurate one, displayed everything all over the place like a drunken retard.

Fucking OS geeks

You know what i hate?

I hate people who are ignorant and affirm that their OS is clearly better than yours based only on the fact that's it's newer.

For starters, unless you know exactly what the other person uses, you can't say thier OS is worse. As long as your OS runs what you need and doesn't cash, that's all you need.

But then there's those asshole who say vista and win7 are better than XP. and i ask, why?

When XP came out I resisted it and held to win98se because XP was already starting to lose compatibility with older software and for the time, it was a resource whore. I was eventually forced to
change because hardware was made to run with it.

As of now, XP is still the fastest OS from the windows family. Win7 is good but still barely loses to XP in many aspects so there really isn't a point to it.

The real discussion is 32bit systems vs 64bit systems.

Again, 64bit systems lose compatibility, so for me it's not even an issue.

And I'm still fucking amazed at how retarded the concept of 64 bit processors is. Do you know what a 64bit processor's selling point is? it processes 64bit integer data in 1 go. Whoa... that's... kinda useless.

If u know a bit about programming, u know that those kind of variables aren't even that common.

When i had a 64bit operating system earlier this year, so much crap didn't run or crashed all the time it blew my mind. Trading stability for something so minor as processing fucking 64bit integers in 1 go. And people say that like 32bits processors couldn't process 64bit integers, BUT THEY CAN!

Unless you have over 4gb of ram, there is absolutely no point in using 64bits, it's asking for trouble. In the future i expect win7 to evolve, either into losing performance and losing it's ground to XP more, or into becoming efficient and stable enough so that i switch to it.

Otherwise, i still have hope in ReactOS.

I'm just pissed because i was watching Spoony's stream again, and it's still slow as fuck and Spoony was talking about how he couldn't get a game or 2 to run cause of his OS (win7 64bit), So i suggested he dual boot into a 32 bit OS for those things.

One asshat just kept saying that if it doesn't run on win7 64bits, it won't run on a 32bits OS, WHAT THE FUCK, that was the most ignorant statement i ever heard! I easily got 10 apps that i can run on my computer that will NOT run on a 64bit system.

Spoony is always digging older games to review, so all the more reason for him to setup an older OS. Bleh, people piss me off sometimes...

Tof's 2 cents: ATI mobile cards

Having the amazing ability to read, and an internet connection, I'm sometimes asked to fix people's computers. This can involve reinstalling a OS, troubleshooting weird errors and all that crap.

As a lil backstory, I've helped my cousin's BF by installing XP on his Toshiba Satellite A200-21T lappy cause Vista was burning a hole into his brain.

Recently, my cousin told me her BF was having trouble playing recent games: a blue screen of death showed up every time he tried. I suspected it was a driver problem with the graphic card so i asked her to bring the damn thing here, sure enough, the file causing the error was called ATI something, so indeed that was it.

Here's what was fucked up though, ATI doesn't seem to release drivers for their mobile graphic card models. Toshiba's lappy drivers are fucking 3 years old, which is why i hate laptops to begin with: drivers seem to always suck. And this was a classic example why:

The laptop is a Toshiba, but the graphic card is a ATI, however, neither seem to really support the damn drivers for it. Seems like a common problem for laptops though.

So after doing research, i found out that ATI doesn't really make different drivers for the mobile version of their graphic cards. For example, the drivers for the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600 and the ATI Radeon HD 2600 are praticly the same save for minor details that identify each card.

Luckly, someone picked up on that and made a tool to do the minor changes so that u can use normal drivers as mobility ones here. Mmm...actually, where's my laptop? i think that one had a ATI card too...