Here is the second half of our opinions of the characters in Brawl, enjoy.

Ness
fink: I have never really gotten good with Ness and I really couldn’t care less. He has some sweet moves (love that bat and yoyo) but the rest is just ok. Final Smash is also looking pretty weak and easily avoidable
allonby: Ness scares me. No, really. Not the character itself, but the fact that anyone who can actually play with him seems to be able to pound my ass into the ground. Luckily there are only 2 people who can actually play as him, and I can take solace in the fact that they live in their parents basement. Also, YoYo FTW!!

Peach
fink: I fucking love hitting people with that frying pan and while at first look her final smash looks weak, it makes people fall asleep which means free hit with frying pan/golf club/tennis racket which makes me very happy.
allonby: Ah, Peach… How I love the way you float about tossing turnips at all who dare question your place as sole sovereign ruler of mushroom kingdom. Even going so far as to “show ‘em the toad” if they step further out of line, asking whatever happened to King and Queen Peach. I truly admire your choice of weaponry as you continue your revisionist crusade to hide the true history of the bloody military coup which lead to your seizing power, and the throne. All hail General.. er, I mean “Princess” Peach. (zomg frying pan, lawlz)

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Note: This is a rant and is meant in no way, shape or form to end any discussions about anything. These rants are meant to start discussion and (hopefully) open some minds to new ideas. Also, these rants are written by fairly seasoned pompous asshole who will not respond to comments or questions. Now here’s Tom with the weather.

Ann Coulter is possibly one of the worst human beings on earth. This hatemonger is to me the definition of a fascist. When it comes to Ann Coulter, I am by no means the first person to label her as fascist and I would like to think I’m not the type of person to use a word a strong as fascist lightly and in this case I think I’m completely justified. The first thing I ever heard Ann Coulter say is that America should bomb the middle east and convert the survivors to Christianity. Now if we are to use the definition of fascism that deals with superiority of race over individual rights and oppressive governments whose power is based in this racism, then Ann Coulter fits right in. Her suggestion of bombing the Middle East is genocide and she clearly believes that her race and religion is superior to others.

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After almost a decade of playing Smash Bros, allonby and myself are going thoroughly insane waiting for the Brawl to come out. In an attempt to quell our anticipation down to manageable levels we will be giving our opinions on the characters that made it into Brawl and the new levels we’ve seen so far.

Bowser
fink: Bowser was fun to play in Melee but with the potential for Gigabowser in Brawl…well, fuck yeah
allonby: Bowser is one of my favorite characters, so much so I intend to name my dog after the antagonistic sonofabitch. I’m extremely happy to see the spiked collar wearing koopa king return this time around, and the thought of terrorizing my opponents as Giga Bowser has me down right salivating.

Capton Falcon
fink: Falcon is a classic character and has always been fun to play and this wont change for Brawl
allonby: Falcon has always been fun to play, but he has never been one of my favorites (maybe cause he can’t swing a bat :P). I truly hope he still sounds like Napoleon Dynamite versus a tether ball while executing his up B. “YES!”

**UPDATE to Falco**
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Free open source games that I actually want to play are few and far between. Then there is Wesnoth.

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme.

Build up a great army, gradually turning raw recruits into hardened veterans. In later games, recall your toughest warriors and form a deadly host against whom none can stand! Choose units from a large pool of specialists, and hand-pick a force with the right strengths to fight well on different terrains against all manner of opposition.

The art is wonderful and the game play and story are captivating. Available on more operating systems than you can probably name, hours of free entertainment to be had from the the multiple campaigns that are available.

So of course I tried to get it running on my Eee PC.

Initially I had terrible problems with the resolution, font size, sprite size, tiles, all of it seemed messed up. I was trying to compile the stable branch.

I tried the development branch and ended up with a whole other set of issues.

My entire adventure can be seen in this thread over at the wesnoth forums.

Turns out not all the fixes for smaller screens were back ported to the stable branch, and the dev branch’s image resize script was broken, so nothing was actually getting resize when compiled with –tinygui.

They released a new version the next day and it works just fine now.

Still a bit tiny, but very much worth it.

So yeah, if you’re looking for a great game to play on your Eee, go for Wesnoth. You’ll have to compile from source however, just grab the dev brach and ./configure –enable-tinygui.

UPDATE:

I suppose in my haste to finish this post, I neglected to mention the build dependencies.

Prior to compiling you’ll need to make sure you have the required development libraries installed. First off, you’ll need to add the debian repositories to your sources.list file. Don’t let that scare you off, I wrote a friendly tutorial for that type of thing here. We need to add a source repository in addition to the ones mentioned in that post. Once we have access to some source packages, getting the appropriate development libraries installed should be a piece of cake. So, following the same procedure, add the following line to your sources.list.

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

Next, open up a console (ctrl+alt+t) and type in:

sudo apt-get build-dep wesnoth

That will pull down all the stuff required to build wesnoth. There are a few more things we need to install to get the development branch of the code working on the EeePC however. One of these they decided not to mention on the wesnoth pages, which was quite a pisser when I was trying to get this working, and that is the imagemagick package, which is used when compiling with –tinygui to resize the images.

Some of the stuff in the following line may not be needed for it to compile, and I don’t have a machine to test it on right now. The first part (python-dev) you may be able to omit and have yourself some space on your EeePC. Same thing goes for libboost.

Try this:

sudo apt-get install libboost-iostreams-dev imagemagick

And then give it a try. If you get errors give this one a try:

sudo apt-get install python-dev libboost-iostreams1.33.1 libboost-iostreams-dev imagemagick

Then do your ./configure, make, make install.

I hope that helps, if anyone experiences problems with that please let me know in the comments.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I am a whore for Valve. A total whore. And I love it.

When I got my Macbook Pro when they first came out, the only regret I had was that I wouldn’t be able to play Half Life 2, or any of the episodes, on it.

Well, the orange box finally hit and I caved. First attempt was using parallels. Disaster. 2nd attempt was bootcamp, and while it did work perfectly I actually had to boot out of my beautiful OSX and use fucking Windows to play it. I needed a windows install, and software license for it, and i had to tie up all that fucking space just to touch the greatness of Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. And that was OK, because i’m a whore for Valve.

But then the day came where I needed that hard drive space back (OMG BattleStar Galactica!!!), and i decided to wipe my Mac clean of bootcamp and windows, and I could whore no more.

And for a time, all was quite.

Then came CrossOver Mac, and I could be a whore again.

…

CrossOver Mac is essentially Wine++. Wine was initially meant to run windows apps under linux. Apple switched to intel and OSx is basically BSD underneath. Perfect. I tried Darwine, a Wine implementation for OSx, but it just didn’t have the speed. CrossOver is where it is at.

This thing just works. They have install scripts setup for lots of popular applications, Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 among them, which lead me to believe they are also whores. Excellent.

The only “downside” is that CrossOver is not free. But it is worth the $50 they want for it, because it delivers exactly what they say it does. (to keep up a trend) Go buy it. Now. They have a free trail (one i’m still using, I’ll be buying it when it’s up) that you can test out to make sure it works for you, which it will.

So you download CrossOver Mac, install it, select the app you want to install from the list(Steam), pop the Orange box CD in, or just let it auto download the steam installer. Once steam is installed you can get everything else installed and running as you normally would. The only thing is, Steam itself is slow as hell to load. I’m not sure why, but it takes /forever/ to load up. Once it’s up and running however it’s business as usual. HL2, Portal, TF2, all run flawlessly. At native speeds. With no windows install. No license key. No eating up the rest of my hard drive.

So, I’m a whore again. Singing Still Alive while sipping pretentiousness from my Aperture Laboratories coffee mug and cursing the wretched Combine.

The cake is a lie.

So there I am in the middle of doing prep for the extravagant valentines meal I’m about to cook when I realize I don’t have any “mood” music to go with that candle lit dinner. A quick google and i come accross SomaFM, a commercial free internet radio station with a variety of channels to choose from. They are supported entirely by the people, so donations and subscriptions are appreciated. $50 gets you a subscription and a great t-shirt. Go support them. Now.

They have all kinds of music to choose from, here is a taste:

• Groove Salad - A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves.
• Secret Agent - The soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life. For Spies and PIs too!
• Drone Zone - Served best chilled, safe with most medications. Atmospheric textures with minimal beats
• indie pop rocks - New and favorite classic indie pop tracks.
• Illinois Street Lounge - Classic bachelor pad, playful exotica and vintage music of tomorrow.
• cliqhop idm - Blips’n'beeps backed mostly w/beats. Intelligent Dance Music.
• Boot Liquor - Americana roots music with a bit of attitude. For Cowhands, Cowpokes and Cowtippers.
• Doomed - Dark and scary industrial-inspired music for tortured souls.

Thats most, but not all of the excellent stations these guys are serving up.

I chose Groove Salad to go with diner.

Taking cues from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and movies like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, and SwordFish, Uplink from Introversion Software is an amazing “hacker sim” that brings to life the campy hollywood concept of hacking we often see on the big screen.

…

Your trace tracker is beeping like crazy as you’re bouncing your signal all over the planet to avoid being caught as you hack away at a corporate firewall, intent on destroying a database as outlined in a contract from a shady employer. Sweat beads on your forehead as a storm of packets fly by. Bypass the firewall, wipe the database, remember to delete the logs! BEEP BEEP BEEP! Time is running out! Hurry, the trace almost has you pinned down! Hurry it’s-

…

Anyway, I love this game.

One of the great things about Introversion software, is that they simultaneously release all their games on all 3 major OSs. We’ve got Windows, Mac, and Linux, right out of the gates. Pretty damn nice for “The last of the bedroom programmers”. Uplink costs $20, but you can also get it in a 3 pack containing the other amazing games these guys make, Darwinia and Defcon, for $40. Go buy em. Now.

So, what we’re interested in here is the Linux release, and how perfectly it runs on my EeePC. I’ve also tried the other 2 mentioned above, but since the Eee has no graphics card, they aren’t any sort of usable.

Basically you’ll want to unzip the linux version to a location of your choosing, download the latest patch and install it. Then you may need the code card, depending on where you got the game. At this point it should be ready to run, and it should run flawlessly.

One of the things I really dig about this game is that there is out of game content that you need to “hack” to get access to, the game extends beyond the executable. Just as an example, you need to decrypt a series of images using a hex editor so you can get more info from them and move onto the next challenge. There was additional content to be hacked on the bonus CD which you can’t really get anymore, but has been made available here. Also there is a developers CD available containing the source for Uplink, which has led to all kinds of user made mods and expansions for the game.

Uplink does it all just right, and with a tag line of “Trust is a weakness”, it really brings the paranoid campy fake hacking of the movies to life.

Note: This is a rant and is meant in no way, shape or form to end any discussions about anything. These rants are meant to start discussion and (hopefully) open some minds to new ideas. Also, these rants are written by fairly seasoned pompous asshole who will not respond to comments or questions. Now here’s Tom with the weather.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people? During my failed attempt to get Super Tuesday results while avoiding over the top and needlessly in depth news channel analysis, I overhead several pundits addressing the issue that John McCain isn’t really a conservative. Furthermore, some of these people called him a liberal. This unfathomably ignorant discussion was spurred by some conservative talk show hosts and critics saying that they would rather see Hilary Clinton in the White House then John McCain. I have a short response for these people and a longer one; Shorter Response: You are idiots and you’re wrong.

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A public demo of Renoise is now available for Linux. I love this tracker, especially for beat slicing madness, and I’m very excited to see a Linux release. It’s something like 50 euros to buy the full version.

Now, hopefully I can get it running on my Eee, and not run into the kind of issues I had with window size while working with wesnoth.

I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes.

UPDATE: So, as it turns out it the minimum window size for renoise is 990 x 700, which presents a slight problem on my 800×480 Eee PC…

So aside from being rather cramped on my tiny new toy, we are still looking at a fully functional tracker for Linux. We’re talking ALSA and JACK support for MIDI and sound routing excellence, aswell as support for both LADSPA plugins and native Linux VSTs(link to renoise forum listing currently functional ones, also check out jucetice). So, overall I suggest you pick this thing up and go play around with it since you can finally enjoy it’s /massive greatness/ under Linux. Actually if you’ve never used it you should give it a try no matter what OS you’ve got running, you may come to love it’s unique approche to music making, especially if you’re a techie and a musician.

Aside from Linux, there’s been a variety of additions and and bug fixes in the 1.9.1 release, including a great “Draw Mode” in the sample editor that you can use to quickly edit out pops and clicks in your samples (or however you want to change them), as well as the ability to create new samples on the fly by drawing thier waveforms.

There are a few bugs lingering in the Linux version, but it mostly seems to be with multichannel sound cards and ALSA. Also there are a few things I’d like to see added, namely DSSI support for native Linux synths, better integration with the Jack transport, and the ability to load mp3s. Then again this is just a beta.

Overall I give this a rating of awesome sauce or, if you perfer, sawesome.

This thing is crazy.

It’s basically a huge interactive kinetic sculpture. It moves and ripples and generally acts very un-wall like. I’d very much like to see this in person one day. Here is an except from the site:

This project was developed for a competition for an interactive art-work for the foyer of The Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre. The piece is a facetted metallic surface that has potential to deform physically in response to electronic stimuli from the environment (movement, sound, light,etc). Driven by a bed of 896 pneumatic pistons, the dynamic ‘terrains’ are generated as real-time calculations.

The piece marks the transition from autoplastic (determinate) to alloplastic (interactive, indeterminate) space, a new species of reciprocal architecture.

Mmmm… 896 pneumatic pistons

Here is a very low quality movie of it in action.

…Wow.

So I’ve just now found out that they’ve commercialized this thing and you can buy them (or rent maybe?) at this site. The fact that Coke and the McDonalds are using these things has somehow cheapened this whole experience for me. No, really. I’m more cynical and bitter now than I was when I began to write this post. Especially since the mass production of this thing has somehow resulted in a movie of it in action that is of no better quality. At least this one is on youtube.