NEON MERCURY's ++ ps360ii Lite ++ thread -weaning you off WoW since 07

[polkablues]

looking for an old SNES game.
I played this game when I was in 4th grade, a wee boy in Taiwan, it was quite similar to other side scroller beat them ups like finalfight and streets of rage 2.  you could choose between I think four or five characters, and at one point you fight on the wing of an airplane.  it's a bit more difficult than streets of rage 2.  but it works the same way--you can punch, kick, jump, and do the special move.
does anyone know what I'm talking about?

I don't know, but the forum at everyvideogame.com has a section for exactly this sort of question.  You might try asking it there, and failing that maybe just browse around the site for a while and see if anything rings a bell.

[pete]

so I just gots myself some kinda genesis emulator.  if anyone wants to team up for streets of rage 2 with me lemme know.

[polkablues]

Never had that one, but I did have the NES Power Pad, which was fuckin' awesome.



I never did get the stupid glove contraption, though, despite seeing The Wizard on opening day.

[Reinhold]

i started a character on Muradin the other day when Uther went down. It's a lvl 12 night elf druid now. i'm trying to do a quest for a priestess in the moon temple... i've got to go find a spider and kill it.

she says it's supposed to be in along the northern border of teldrassil near wellspring lake.  i've swept the entire area and surrounding areas thouroughly. i can't find her. i even went to a web site in a foreign language and found a map with an X for where she should be. she's just not here. wtf? can anybody offer some advice?

i thought it might be that somebody else had the quest and killed her, so i waited around for her to respawn and then checked again. giant webwood spiders keep spawning in the area where i am... so it's like they're protecting something that isn't there. is it possible that this is a day-only quest?

[Jeremy Blackman]

My advice: Get to Westfall ASAP. (And don't get too hung up on quests.)

http://wow.allakhazam.com/
http://thottbot.com/
http://www.worldofwar.net/cartography/
http://www.worldofwar.net/cartography/worldmap/easterncont.php
http://www.worldofwar.net/cartography/worldmap/kalimdorcont.php
http://www.wowwiki.com/Main_Page

You'll need to have a mage in Darnassus make you a portal to Stormwind. (Then you'll run to Westfall.) This may take some time, and some cash (no more than 50 silver).

Or you could fly to Darkshore, take the boat to Menethil, and try to get a portal there.

[Pubrick]

i can tell JB is better at WoW than Formareinhold cos more (if not all) of his sentences make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

[NEON MERCURY]

hey gang!   .......i am sorry that i haven't been posting alot lately...but i figured this thread would be the perfect choice to explain my absence.......i purchased an xbox 360 and bought this game:



while i do have a nostaglic weakness for [snes] final fantasy III as my RPG of chioce, oblivion is  the greatest console RPG i've ever played...the sheer amount of hours you can put into this bitch is incredible...it shits on anything the GTA series can do ...plus fans of the elder scrolls are dorks while GTA fans are douche bags...and i think its better to be a dork than a douche bag ......if any of you guys have played this or can give me tips on what to purchase/lookout for on the 360 let me know....or for those of you that dont really care about video games but want to say something nice to me since i haven't talked to you guys in a while...please feel free......but if you say something mean to me..that wouldnt be cool....b/c i do take 40mg of prozac and there's some fuzzy red yarn behind my bed.....

[polkablues]

Actually, although I typically abhor RPGs the way nature abhors a vaccuum, I've been playing this a little bit on PC, and it's pretty fun.  I decided I would completely ignore the actual story of the game and just become a professional assassin, which has served me pretty well so far.  So my advice to you would be: don't bother playing the game, just kill people and take their stuff.

And if you ever disparage GTA again, I'll murder you in your sleep.  As a member of the Dark Brotherhood, I can fuckin' do it, too.

[MacGuffin]

Commodore Computer Devotees Tinker With the Past
The company ruled the PC world in the '80s. It's gone now, but devotees of its machines are still coaxing life out of their kilobytes.
By Terril Yue Jones, Times Staff Writer

FRESNO — Robert Bernardo spent a week this spring traveling the Pacific Northwest, trying to save part of yesterday's future.

The high school English teacher swung through Portland and Astoria, Ore., and then on to Ethel, Wash., to drop off a collection of antiquated computers — a PET8032, three VIC-20s, an SX-64 portable and a Commodore 128D.

Then on his way home to the Central Valley town of Visalia, Bernardo packed his white Crown Victoria with three more SX-64s, boxes of software and a couple of printers.

With any luck, this agglomeration of decades-old circuit boards and dusty disk drives will allow Bernardo to reboot a handful of computers made by the long-defunct Commodore Business Machines.

In an era when a home computer's power is measured in gigabytes, Bernardo still counts kilobytes as a devoted Commodore user 12 years after the last machine was assembled.

Once the largest personal computer maker in America, the company behind the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 introduced millions of people like Bernardo to the digital age. The company went out of business in 1994, but its legacy survives in dozens of Commodore clubs around the country.

Bernardo presides over the Fresno chapter.

Never mind that the VIC-20 has so little usable memory — just 3.5 kilobytes — that it can store only a couple of pages of text in its buffers. Or that Commodore hardware was notoriously clunky and buggy. Bernardo still manages all his e-mail on a 1980s-vintage Commodore 64.

"I've never considered the Commodore obsolete," Bernardo said. "I can still do many things with it — e-mail, browse the Web, word processing, desktop publishing and newsletters. I still do games on it: new games that are copyright 2006, ordered from Germany."

Like classic car fans, Bernardo and other Central Valley Commodore devotees lug their gear every month to the Pizza Pit restaurant and put the hoods up, so to speak. For many, a Commodore machine was their first computer. They cherish their machines the way some guys pamper their high school hot rod.

The tinker mentality pervades American culture, from guys who fix their lawn mowers to computer geeks who build the next big thing in their garages. Commodore clubs are "about preserving a particular era in computing — just showing that you can make it serviceable takes ingenuity," said Robert Cole, a professor emeritus of technology management at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Commodore computers are rudimentary enough that enthusiasts with a little technical know-how can repair them themselves. They also can be programmed with relative ease using the BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) computer language. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the popular Linux computer language, cut his teeth writing code on a VIC-20 in the 1980s.

"It wasn't just an appliance. I liked it because it was open and it invited you to play with it," said Mike McDermott, a Commodore fan who co-founded a website that ranks building contractors. "You didn't just do what it told you. It invited you to tinker with it. They really did encourage you to go write programs for it."

And that, in turn, made people passionate about the quirky machines.

Bernardo, who sometimes sports a button that reads "I Adore My 64," says that every room but one in his three-bedroom house contains Commodore equipment. In the other is his "Star Trek" collection. But there is crossover between his dual passions. His prized possessions include six pieces of Commodore hardware and software signed by "Star Trek" star and former Commodore pitchman William Shatner.

If Bernardo and his ilk keep the memory of Commodore alive, they also may hold the key to its future. The Dutch company that owns the Commodore name is planning to resurrect the brand in the United States with devices that act as digital entertainment centers.

"The Commodore 64 was the biggest-selling computer in the world," said Patrick Olenczak, vice president of global sales for the company now called Commodore International.

But that fan base can have drawbacks.

"It's going to be difficult to fulfill their expectations of being a computer company because we're not," Olenczak said. "What we're doing is bringing new forms of computing into the living room.... We are not into computing the way we used to be."

And Commodore used to be in computing in the biggest way.

Few companies illustrate the ruthless evolutionary efficiency of the high-tech economy better than Commodore. Founded in 1959 as a typewriter company by Polish immigrant Jack Tramiel, it later moved into adding machines and then calculators.

Commodore purchased a small chip foundry and built computers around the processors it manufactured itself, the first being the PET, Commodore's first desktop, introduced in 1977. In 1981 came the VIC-20 that could do color graphics and generate simple music.

ADVERTISEMENTThe company's biggest hit was the Commodore 64, introduced in 1982 with 64 kilobytes of memory, high-resolution graphics and an impressive sound synthesizer. It was followed in 1985 by the Commodore 128 upgrade and the Commodore Amiga, a desktop with phenomenal graphics at the time.

But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, IBM Corp.'s PC clones gained supremacy.

Tramiel was known for aggressive advertising. But he also took manufacturing shortcuts that sometimes put dud computers on the market.

"Jack encouraged the environment where shortcuts were overlooked and rewarded," said Bil Herd, the chief engineer of the Commodore 128. "The attitude was get it under the Christmas tree — there is always time for them to return it for service in January."

Tramiel was ousted from Commodore in 1984.

Commodore found itself expanding in too many unprofitable directions without Tramiel's ironfisted stewardship, and although the company had a few subsequent hits, such as the graphics whiz Amiga, it also had a number of costly flops that forced cuts in the workforce and closure of plants.

Reached at his home in Monte Sereno, near San Jose, Tramiel, now 78, would not comment on the business while he was running it or afterward, but allowed in a brief conversation that he was "very happy" that enthusiasts kept the Commodore name and machines alive.

"Today's computers are definitely more advanced than Commodores," Tramiel said. "But at the time it was the best computer for the money, because I was building a computer for the people at a price everybody could afford."

Commodore dissolved in 1994, and its name went through a succession of owners. In its place rose Apple Computer Inc., Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., and industry experts don't think the resurrected Commodore has a future in the U.S. PC market.

"History's passed them by," said Tim Bajarin, who runs Silicon Valley consultancy Creative Strategies and has monitored the PC market for more than 20 years. "It's a blast from the past with no future. You've got HP and Dell, and Apple's picking up tremendous steam. It's basically pushing a boulder uphill."

Commodore enthusiasts don't deny the Sisyphean nature of their hobby. It's not clear how many Commodore clubs there are, but they are scattered around the country, with devotees collecting and restoring the computers for old time's sake.

"User groups are there for the camaraderie and friendship," said Herd, who now runs a handful of small companies including an Internet service provider in New Jersey. "They remember the times of this really cool computer, but it's more about the people."

At Pizza Pit in Fresno, club members say they enjoy trading stories about keeping their machines running.

"Fifty percent of the time when we set things up, the hardware fails," said Bill Terry, a former math teacher in Tulare. Interrupted by a group of children singing "Happy Birthday" at the next table, Terry said the school district paid for him to take computer lessons to upgrade his teaching credentials.

Hobbyist developers continue to build applications for Commodore machines. Most write games, but enthusiasts also have developed ways to read Windows spreadsheets on Commodore or access modern CD-ROM drives. The efforts recall the earliest days of computing, when most applications were home-built.

Jeri Ellsworth, a self-taught computer engineer in Portland, developed a joystick that sells for $30 and contains about 30 old Commodore games. The joystick's popularity lies with "all the 30-, 40-year-olds like myself who are trying to relive a little bit of their past," Ellsworth said. "The toy is priced low enough that people don't hesitate purchasing it just to play a few games they remember from their childhood."

It's a natural instinct: holding on to the past at a time of great change, said Cole, the Berkeley professor. If not with Commodores, something else.

"I suspect the iPod at some point will perform that role," he said. "Thirty years from now, old people still using old iPods — it's absolutely plausible. People are so in love with their iPods that a lot of them will resist change."

[cron]

this whole week i played:


and mexico fucking won it

now i'll start playing:


while also playing this:

[GodDamnImDaMan]

I'm calling it now, the Nintendo Wii will dominate the console war this generation.

[RegularKarate]

I'm calling it now, the Nintendo Wii will dominate the console war this generation.

Wii agree

[polkablues]

I'm calling it now, the Nintendo Wii will dominate the console war this generation.

I agree.  I totally agree.


....



Wait, did you say "dominate" or "make people look like painfully awkward douchebags"?  Because it's the second one that I was agreeing with.

[Chest Rockwell]

I think the Wii could be a lot of fun, but you'd have to be alone....preferably uin a dark room with no windows or vent system through which people could see your awkward remote-fighting.

It'll take me a while to buy any console though. Most of the games I have to have are coming in 2007 anyway.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

You could get an Xbox 360 and a Wii for the price of a PS3.

The only real reasonable purchase seems to be the Wii right now... God knows how Nintendo has managed to stay afloat this far, fucking up with the N64 and Gamecube.