Earlier today, I went through and fixed the individual download description pages… they were quite outdated, and the backgrounds were even linked to the old S&L @ geocities! 😮 Also, I added my latest work, Loogie‘s Cyber RS Revision. Look for it by clicking “Downloads” on the nav to the left, of course.

Also, I would like to bring to your attention 2 things in gaming: there’s a new 7-map Rats CS pack out @ Planet Half-Life; also, Threewave is pretty cool. Snake bitched about me getting it all week… well, I haven’t played it much but I saw it @ his house. I like the menu system, and Coral CTF’s a great-looking map. And while I’m on the topic of tech news, Intel announced that it will no longer be using RDRAM (RAMBUS) in their motherboards. DDR all the way now 8) .

Finally… in the past couple of months or so, Snake and I have been getting songs w/ Audiogalaxy instead of Aimster, and here’s the main groups we (or either of us) get(s) now:

BT | Future Sound of London | Enigma | Adam F.
Tourach | NIN | Metallica

A funny thing happened to me the other day… my nearly new Visiontek GeForce2 GTS died! I’ve been having problems w/ this for a while now, but it is now officially dead. Here’s the story: about 3 weeks ago, while I was playin CS, I started getting artifacts everywhere. Closing and reopening Half-Life didn’t fix this, nor underclocking. Here’s what then happened, it’s quite funny:

So after that, things were fine, but yesterday, I started to get the same problem, in Windows. I restarted, then I was in standard display mode. Removed GF2, applied new paste, put back in, still standard display mode… then I hear the “BEEP, BEEP BEEP BEEP” when I turn on my rig… in other words, it’s dead. I thought there was a problem w/ my AGP slot, but anyway… now I’m using Snake‘s old Viper II (read his article on Viper II and VT6X4 tweaking here, or our article about our first video card upgrades here). I got the 9007 drivers, and I love it. I had some problems at first, but aside from the cursor, I think it’s just as good as my GF2, and it should do for a little while. [Chief’s Note: LOL, have fun with that POS! 😛 ]

Secondly and lastly, I trashed my IE HotBar, and got the Google Toolbar. It’s very useful for quick searching, rating pages, highlighting, and searching the site u’re on. Here’s an SS of it:

I just reviewed my second demo review in the past year or so… StarTopia. Yeh, u may remember Snake reviewing that at one time… well, we lost that review, so I redid it. Read it here.

Also, I added 3 quotes to the topframe. Find em by double-clicking the text over and over… and over 😛 .

I reviewed two very sweet demos today, Zombie Smasher X and Comanche 4. 8) Also, I’ve redone the way we rate demos. The ratings basically follow an earlier outline that I created in an unfinshed Column about demos, as seen here. The inclusion of more screenshots can also be seen.

It’s hard to find good demos sometimes, even good retail games can have shitty demos…which is why we gave the world the DemoBoard.

I finally reviewed a demo again!!! Snake said I should add some content to the site instead of going around fixing code like I have been. So, I reviewed Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza… I’m not gonna bother showing the screens here, see for urself.

Also site-related, we’ve finally finished… uh, fixing code… and so, we’re almost ready to make our next column(s)! Snake had the idea to make another Best of Gaming, so expect to see that soon. We also may make a column w/ help of Quelog about our common GF2 upgrades.

Yesterday and today, I rearranged my room’s PC/TV corner… got printer-TV-DVD-VCR-Satellite cart on the left, eating tray behind it, trashcan under it, joysticks dangling on tray, and PC in front and to the right 8) . I think that beats the recent room upgrade Snake made.

The rest of my news comes from things I learned about on TechTV today. First, they were talking about a program that combines IM apps into one, but for the MAC… so then I learned about Trillian. U’ve probably heard about it, but it’s a very nicely made program (got 93% user satisfaction @ download.com) that does MSN/AIM/ICQ/IRC/Yahoo into one. It takes about 2 hours to completely set up though. Also, I can’t use it for AIM, because those fags at AOL are in some battle w/ Trillian to keep users off through it. This SS is using the Odigo III user-made skin, from their site. I had to resize my buddy list window a LOT to get this SS to fit w/out needing a bigger pic:

Finally, I found this from going off of something else TechTV said: they were doing a caller’s help thing about how to make ur Control Panel cascade on ur start menu (like llamas like Snake like to do), and they gave a link to annoyances.org, a site that tells you how to fix a collection of Windows things like that. I found one that lets you change the text and icon of ur start menu button! 😛 Since I hardly ever the start menu anyway (I use TopLaunch), I named my button something stupid. Here it is:

Oh, and be careful doing this.

Happy Presidents’ Day… or something.

Another day, another lackluster demo reviewed. Sid Meier’s SimGolf is the subject this time. Find the review here and enjoy the screenshot.

Now, off the topic of demos: Threewave. What is it? It is the end of traditional Quake3. Never again will I play the lameness of vanilla Q3A, it’s all about 3W. I’ve only begun to explore it, but so far I’ve been very impressed. Check out their website here and the screenage below.