It has been awhile since anything has been posted on Geekronicity, our little geeky experiment. We still have to get our first podcast up and then record our second. Should get it up quick as I think that some of the topics are now outdated. Anyway, I have been busy lately. Started a new job and I am still getting my feet wet. I'm also in charge of maintaining another site for a local non-profit community organization in which I am one of the Vice Presidents, so that is taking some of my time. I just love to make up excuses. I suppose I should talk about the title of this article...
I started using the site Goozex.com to trade games since December and so far it has been absolutely great. I was very skeptical of it at first but now I wish I would have stumbled across it a lot sooner. Because Goozex has a loyal following they have a "fan site" called GoozerNation.com. I just wanted to say that I submitted a bad attempt at writing an article to them. We'll see if it gets posted. It's a review on the PS3 game, White Knight Chronicles. Until some other time, I am out. Hopefully we'll get that podcast up soon enough.
UPDATE: My review did get posted to their site. You can check it out here.
We discussed this during our first podcast. Jimbag was correct that Duck Hunt does not work on an LCD. This Penny Arcade forum posting provides a reasonable explanation as to why this is.
"Duck hunt and other light gun games don't work on progressive scan devices. The reason is how the game is designed to work. Here comes some science. When you pull the trigger in duck hunt the ducks are redrawn as white boxes on a black background. If the white box is seen by the light sensor, you score a hit. Now in order to tell which duck you hit the CRT aspect comes into play. A CRT works by drawing in Pixels starting at the top of the screen moving from left to right. When you pull the trigger the NES also takes note where in the clock cycle of drawing on the screen it is. This lets it calculate how many lines have been filled in and where on the screen the white box the gun saw is. So it should work if you have only one duck and sufficient contrast, but two ducks will screw with it, you'll get strange effects like shooting both ducks at once (or just missing depending on how the game is coded)."
For more on how Duck Hunt works, check out this article. Oh, and watch the below Youtube video and let us know if you believe that this person is actually playing on an LCD.
Fellow Geekronicitite, Chief, has long been talking about doing a podcast. In fact that is how the idea of this site came to be. We were talking about doing a podcast and Chief was super excited about it...and we were going to do it...but never did. Hopefully some day we will. Anyway, through the magic of Facebook, I found that my second cousin and a buddy of his started their very own podcast. I wanted to use our little site that no one goes to to give them some props.
The name of their podcast is Gamephiliac and they have just recorded their first podcast.
I am not sure what exactly Nintendo was thinking when they made Dr. Mario. The reason I was thinking about Dr. Mario was that I was playing it the other day and sucking it up on it as usual. For some reason girls seem to be better at this game then guys...just like Tetris as well. I think it is because they have better hand eye coordination. Anyway, here is the story of Dr. Mario...
He throws pills at viruses. Match the colored pills with the colored viruses. Repeat. Don't let your girlfriend/wife beat you.
For something more enjoyable, check out "What if Dr. Mario had lyrics?" by Internet sensation, brentalfloss.
Lately, I have been consumed by a Nintendo Entertainment System game collecting fix. I have been going throw my old games and picking up some new ones by way of eBay. Dusting them off, cleaning off some grim and NOT blowing in them. Never liked to blow into the games. If I ever do, I always put a cotton filter over it...cotton filter being my t-shirt that I am wearing.
Anyway...Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos on the NES is completely ridiculous. B-Rye was over and I was hoping that he would want to play some Mega Man 2 or some TMNT 2, but no. He picked Ninja Gaiden 2 off of the shelf. I couldn't remember getting past the level where the wind changes directions on you as a kid. Anyway, he started playing it and did pretty well. Handled the controller off to me and I hit start and apparently you have continues...I think it is unlimited continues. So we just kept trading the controller off. I will admit, B-Rye did must of the grunt work. I beat one of the bosses by doing a cheap move. After a lot of close boss battles that went in our favor, we were all the way to 7-2 (7-5 is the final boss). I was ass terrible at this level. Took me a lot of tries to get the timing down right on where the enemies come from. But this was our doom. You can get all the way to the first boss on your first guy of the continue and if you die at the boss, it does not send you back to the last checkpoint (there are 2 checkpoints before the boss). It sends you back to the beginning of the entire level so that you can get violated by all the ninja psychopaths and crazed green birds all over again. Needless to say, after a couple of hours victory was not ours and we did not get to see the glorious final cut scenes. We got owned. 'nuff said.
