Saturday, June 21, 2003

Riven / Myst3

So... I finally finished Riven. Although, this time I just used two walkthrough sites to get past all of the puzzles that I had already seen in my prior attempts. (I had previously done about 90% of the puzzles.) Anyway, it doesn't run well enough on my WinXP system that it was worth figuring out the last 10%, so I just blew through that part as well using the walkthroughs. On the whole, I still preferred realMYST (a redo of the original Myst where they switched from slideshow to 3D engine, which made it much more interactive) to Riven.

Game Revolution's Walkthrough - the better of the two walkthroughs, has a complete map of the islands with all of the reachable locations.

Riven Walkthrough - Also a good walkthrough and will walk you through the optional bits as well (where you gather information to figure out the required puzzles).

Next up, I'm going to check out Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island series, but first I'm planning on finally tackling Myst3:Exile which has been sitting in my game bin forever and a day. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to take screenshots in Myst3. This site says it's Alt-PrintScreen - but either that doesn't work with the 1.22 version patch or it just doesn't work under WindowsXP.

posted by Wuphon's at 8:03 PM

Friday, June 20, 2003

MoHAA - Omaha Beach

Whee, went through the Omaha Beach mission and managed not to get shot once (lots of quicksaves F5 and quickloads F9 though). Killed 17 using 153 rounds of ammo (used up all of my grenades though) with 20.4% to the head, 53.7% to the torso. One of the tricks to this mission is definitely to make sure you load up on the grenades. However, since there are no grenades once you're actually in the bunker, you have to make sure to pickup the ones at the MG42 position that is guarding the trench (there's a box of grenades on the ground along with lots of other ammo).

Also, here's the best MoHAA guide that I've found so far: MoHAA Guides.

posted by Wuphon's at 8:31 PM

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

DVD Burning

Sony has released a new version of their firmware for my DVD writer (v2.0f) and Roxio has new software as well (v5.3.5.10). So I'm going to take yet another attempt at trying to write to DVD+R, DVD-R discs.

Update: Went 2 for 4 on using DVD-R media (hey! at least I managed to burn 2!) That's not to say that the Veritas software wasn't trying to burn at 4x speed (media is only rated for 2x). I'm 0/1 on burning to DVD-RW as well (again, not sure if the drive was trying to go too fast or not), so now I've manually set it to 2x speed and we'll see how it does.

Even later update: Had to back the recording speed down to 1x before I managed to get the DVD-RW to burn properly (it seems to have burned properly, but I'm running CDCheck on it to verify the DVD).

posted by Wuphon's at 11:58 AM

MP3 Economy

Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - The MP3 Economy The MP3 Economy
How labels and artists divvy up your MP3 dollar.
By Nancy Einhart, June 2003 Issue

The going rate for downloading songs from online music services like Apple's (AAPL) iTunes Music Store, MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody is about $1 a pop. Yet the economics of recorded music sales haven't changed much since the vinyl era -- despite the fact that digital files cost very little to produce and distribute. So how much of your buck makes its way back to the artists? Not much, though it's clearly a better deal than they get from piracy.

posted by Wuphon's at 10:18 AM