Logitech Wingman Gaming Mouse Review at FiringSquad
CalBear at Thresh’s FiringSquad has reviewed the “new” Logitech Wingman Gaming Mouse. Logitech claims that this new mouse is “the first one designed exlusively for gamers.” Well, there are some nice new features to the mouse that I like a lot (USB baby!) but the physical design (shape and dimensions) of the mouse are exactly like the mouse I currently use, and have used and loved since late summer 1997, the good old plain Logitech MouseMan. I was mildly upset with Logitech because they quit making the model of mouse I have, and instead went to really funky shapes with those blasted mousewheels. Now, with the Wingman Gaming Mouse, the mouse shape and feel I know and love is back, and with USB support. This thing is definitely going on my mid-term shopping list. Ironically, the new mouse has a suggested retail price that’s a good bit less than what I paid for my MouseMan.

Glide Underground vs. 3dfx News
Yesterday, there was somewhat of a worry that Glide Underground might have been shut down, as their web server seemed to be inaccessible for a while. Today, I was relieved to discover that they are indeed up and running strong. In fact, Khalid Shaikh has started to speak out once more, and has started a sub-page on the site, entitled 3dfx: the last straw. This page goes into length detailing 3dfx’s legal maneuvering, and is a good read for anyone interested in seeing how 3dfx is conducting things regarding the entire wrapper issue. I learned there that, quite amusingly, 3dfx’s drivers for the Voodoo3 don’t work to well with the UltraHLE emulator, and people are having to run one of the Glide wrappers to get it to work right. *snicker* There’s also a petition on the site that you can read and sign if you wish. There’s over 650 signatures on it in less than 2 days of being up, and there is an option to leave comments on the petition – some of those are interesting reads.

3DGN Tomorrowland Update, Requiem Demo Review
Two new articles went up at 3DGN last night. The first is a semi-regular feature we call Tomorrowland. This latest installment of Tomorrowland takes a look at 3 upcoming games: Oni, Prince of Persia 3D, and Vampire: The Masquerade. Oni looks really cool to me . . . it’s a very anime-style 3D shooter, and not only can the main character, Konoko, do all the usual shooter weaponry stuff, you can also get into martial arts hand-to-hand battles. Any anime-like game has a huge potential to suck me into it, and I hope this one ends up to be cool. Vampire: The Masquerade also has some potential for coolness there, with the entire Vampire mythos behind it. One has to think back to id and DOOM for their demons, since there seem to be a lot of supernatural themes in shooters lately.

The second new article at 3DGN is an updated demo review of Requiem: Avenging Angel. Requiem is a new shooter where you play as an angel, Malachi, out to crack some heads and battle fallen angels and their minions. There’s a lot of standard shooter fare and gun battles, but it adds a fun element with spells that can be used with/in combat as well. One of the ones mentioned in the demo review is a Time Warp spell, where everything goes into slow-motion and you can pull some Matrix-like bullet dodging and other cool stuff.

3DGN Gangsters Demo Review
I have this fascination with Gangsters. Not the modern day street-trash gangsta-rap sterotype stuff, but the old classy 30s sort of pin-striped double-breasted suit sterotype stuff. Tommy guns and casinos and speakeasies. Carnage and brotherhood and payola. New 3DGN writer Thomas Soles has done a demo review of Gangsters that’s quite a fun read. The review makes me worry a little bit about Thomas though, so that means he’ll fit right in at 3DGN. My editor Rick tossed this release blurb my way:

I say, if you try and don’t succeed . . . kill every man in the room and proclaim yourself the victor, Dammit! This is the way of the Gangster. Now read 3DGN’s demo review or Andrew ‘Slim Guts’ Murphy will fit ya’ mama with heavy shoes!

25k Today
Judging from the LiveCounter this morning, yggdrasil.net should hit 25 thousand uniques on the news page today. Yay. Yippee! Anyone who wants to claim being the 25 thousandth visitor (not actually accurate, because that counter only counts sessions on the news page) that e-mails me will get a mention in my news. Screenshots help, but they’re easy to fake . . . so, I’ll post the most creative faked screenshot for the 25 thousand mark. Of course, I just won’t post any if nobody send any in or if they all suck.

FiringSquad FPS vs. RTS Face Off
Thresh and Kenn over at Thresh’s FiringSquad have posted a new Face Off, this time it’s FPS vs. RTS. For those of you confused with all the acronyms FPS is First Person Shooter – ala Quake – (in this context . . . it can ALSO be Frames Per Second. To really confuse things, FPS are frequently mentioned about FPS games.), and RTS is Real Time Strategy – ala StarCraft. The article is basically a good comparison about what’s good and competitive about both games. The conclusion they post is “diplomatic” (read that as “cop-out” if you wish), but I tend to side with Kenn’s point of view throughout the article. Now, if only Ilya would get the hint . . .

Small Site Additions
I’ve added a little bit to the space under the menu bar on the left. First up is a request for people to hire me, with a link to a page asking the same thing and offering two forms of my resume for possible employment prospects. This will probably be expanded a bit in time if I don’t find some work fairly soon through more conventional job-hunting efforts. Second up there are a few sites listed there that are on my daily reads list. If you see a site you’d like to see there, or if you run a site and you’re a friend of mind and you’re disappointed it’s not listed there, don’t despair, as that list is far from done, and it will grow over time. That list of sites also doesn’t include the two sites that have their buttons slapped on either side of my site title banner.

3dfx vs. the Glide Emulator Crowd
I went to check the latest news at 3DNews.net and noticed this poll they were running about whether or not 3dfx is doing the right thing in shutting down the web site of one of the Glide Emulator authors, along with a snippet from said author. I immediately checked Glide Underground and discovered that 3dfx has sicced legal counsel on almost all the Glide Emulator authors, and the ftp site which hosted the downloads for Glide Underground has had to remove all the files. Glide Underground has all the details on this, including copies of the e-mails sent from 3dfx’s lawyers. *GROWL* I find it particularly interesting, though it’s possible it IS just coincidence, that this happens shortly after a couple of the emulators actually start reporting usable results on PC games, rather than just with UltraHLE.

Attention: Marius
Yes, they’re out, but not the 3500 yet. If you’re going to get one, please tell me you’ll get the 3500. The TNT2s will be out soon though – are you going to want one of those too, or are you abandoning the as-yet-unreleased TNT2 Ultra?
(ERG-MAD.COM)

Two New Voodoo3 ‘views
First, TarLung e-mailed me about a new Gamespot Voodoo3 review. The e-mail amused me, in that TarLung says, “Given your feelings towards 3Dfx I wouldn’t have brought this up, but the reviewer mentioned this in his review:

“So, on a high-speed Pentium II or Pentium III system, there’s no clear winner in performance. The TNT2 offers a more robust feature set. With TNT2 cards slated to ship in mid-to-late April. A Voodoo2 owner looking for better performance might do better to wait for one of those products.”

“On a K6-2, the story is different. 3Dfx’s early work with AMD is paying off, with Voodoo3 way ahead of both Nvidia-based cards. Although Nvidia is working on 3DNow-enhanced drivers, 3Dfx enjoys a clear lead. So unless 32-bit rendering is a critical path item for a particular application, K6-2 and K6-3 users are clearly better off with Voodoo3 today.”

There you have it, another good reason to stick with Intel processors. Second up is a brand new Voodoo3 3500 Preview by Thresh’s FiringSquad. This preview gives a good overview of things leading up to the new top-end Voodoo3 3500, including a summary of 3dfx’s products from the original Voodoo Graphics up to their new toys. One thing I found interesting in the article that I’d forgotten about previously is that multitexturing capability was designed into the original Voodoo chipset, but wasn’t included in the original Voodoo Graphics due to cost restrictions. This to me means two things: that the original Voodoo was (and I haven’t disputed this point, despite the reputation my views on 3dfx seem to carry) one helluva good piece of work. It also further tends to reinforce my opinion that 3dfx really has NOT innovated much from their original Voodoo, and are relying more on leveraging the Glide API and name recognition (their $20+ million dollar ad campaign) than on innovation and superior product design. For 3dfx to win back my desire to own their hardware (away from NVIDIA) their next product after the Voodoo3 better be damned remarkable, AND will have to blow away the NV10.

3DGN’s Far From Ultimate Challenge Poll
It seems my editor Rick is determined to outdo my own Pointless Polls. Last time, they polled people on the merits and differences of orgasms and frags in Quake, and this time they’re dragging me into a showdown (for the record, I’ve sucked at Shooters ever since I moved back to Texas and had a lack of frequent competition and practice) against the staff of another major gaming site. The catch is that 3DGN is letting you, the readers, pick which gaming site is going to receive our challenge to a Quake 2 tournament by voting on a poll there. Here’s the spiffy release I got from Rick about it:

“Why waste time playing the game yourself, when you can watch people you don’t even know play it!? You all know that 3DGN is pretty wacked-out, but now we’ve finally gone over the deep end. We actually think we’re so damned good at games that we’ll challenge the best there is! And lose! Badly! Now we present to you a poll of gaming sites (we just picked them out of a toilet), and the unlucky winner will get a challenge from us to play in Quake 2 Tournament. There will be demos, screenshots, flying cats, possibly even have guest announcers! So, who do you want us to fight? We might win, we might tie, or we might get sorely whipped, but it’ll all be up to you.”

Personally, my vote is going for Thresh’s FiringSquad. I’d like to be able to say I’ve even played in a game with Thresh (yes, I know, dubious geeky honor there), and I still owe CalBear for the last thrashing he gave me in the original SC beta test when he demonstrated advanced Marine & Tank-fu on my poor zealots. So, get on over to 3DGN and vote!

New Lost Scrolls Diablo II FAQ
My bud Smoke’n’MirrorZ has added something new to his AlterNet’s Diablo II Crypt: The Lost Scrolls and now has a FAQ up with information that was previously in the NAQ (Never Asked/Answered Questions) list, but has now been answered in the latest Diablo II Webmaster chat. The Lost Scrolls also has a sneak peek of other information contained in the chat that will be explored in more detail over the next few days, and of course, as always, has the wonderful interactive Skill and Spell trees.

All Female StarCraft Clan
There’s a new all female StarCraft clan that was recently created named Mistresses of Blood. The new clan “is dedicated to searching out women players from all walks of life and giving them a unique opportunity to meet others like themselves while promoting fun and fair play!” Go check their web site out and help support this new all female clan, as we can never (in my opinion) have too many active female gamers. So many guys tend to be real jerks to women in online gaming (or simply refuse to believe that they’re really women) so I’m happy to see anything that encourages more female gamers.
Source:StarCraft Infoceptor

3DGN MechWarrior 3 Demo Review
3DGN has a new demo review of MechWarrior 3 up. My editor there, Rick, e-mailed me with this nifty release about it:

“This game has been in development for a while, and that can be either a good or a bad sign. Sometimes it means game companies are honestly concerned with the product and are working at making it the best it can be. Other times it means they’re lazy. Find out which is true for MechWarrior 2 in 3DGN’s newest demo review. Actually it’s MechWarrior 3, but 2 rhymed with true better.”

Yes, I Really Do Work at Tech-Base
Yes, with much evidence to the contrary, I actually am one of the staff members at Tech-Base. I made an effort to justify that position today, and actually spent some time this morning playing Newshound. Before any of you yell at me for seeing some of the news there cross-posted here, it’s stuff I’d post here at any rate because I like it or support it.

Hewlett Packard to Use TNTs
Hewlett Packard and NVIDIA announced yesterday that Hewlett-Packard Company has chosen NVIDIA’s RIVA TNT™ 3D graphics processor (in the form of the Diamond Viper V550) as an option for the HP Pavilion PC build-to-order program. You can get the full press release with all the details by downloading the press in release in MS Word form from the Planet Riva site.

Voodoo3 Officially Available
I got an e-mail this morning from L. Kraven (Hiya Khore) informing me that Best Buy was selling Voodoo3 cards today. I did some checking, and Voodoo3s are now “officially available” according to this 3dfx press release. The Voodoo3 2000 looks to be just the 2000 version of the board with driver and utility software, whereas the 3000 includes a bundle with “Interplay’s Descent 3™: Sol Ascent™, a free upgrade coupon for the much-anticipated Unreal Tournament from GT Interactive and Epic Games, the complete version of Unreal, and Electronic Arts’ driving genre smash Need for Speed III specially optimized for 3dfx.” I wonder precisely how this “optimization” for these games works – I suspect that they’re merely Glide-only versions of the games (if anyone out there can tell me differently of the specifics on this, I’m curious).

3dfx also announced today (press release) that Packard Bell is going to be shipping PCs starting in May with Voodoo3s in them. They’re using the Voodoo3 2000, of course, which is the low-end, least expensive Voodoo3 card. This is an interesting development consider the recent NVIDIA/Hewlett Packard announcement.

Team Fortress Classic Today!
It’s about time. Sierra/Valve made an announcement on the release of Team Fortress Classic yesterday evening. You can check out the press release more all the nitty gritty details, but the basics are that it is supposed to be up for download at 9 A.M. PST today (in about 2 hours by my watch). It’ll be about 18 megs in size, and includes not only the Team Fortress mod for Half-Life, but is part of the 1.0.0.9 patch for Half-Life. Other things in the patch other than TFC are supposed to be better support for 3D accelerators, better network performance, and a MOD browser. Valve is also releasing a Linux dedicated server for Half-Life, and the final version of the Half-Life SDK (software development kit). When it’s released for download, you should be able to get it from the Team Fortress Classic web site, as well as a large number of mirrors.

Glide Underground Gets New Layout
Glide Underground, the site of hope in the development of a Glide to Direct3D/OpenGL wrapper, got a snazzy new layout yesterday. I e-mailed them about it, as it was initially unfriendly to 800×600 resolution users (yes, I run in 800×600. Quit yer snickering, I have a pathetic little 14″ monitor. Other things have been more important, like food, gas, and the TNT card.), and wasn’t the only one to e-mail them apparently. They updated it to be considerably more 800×600 friendly now, and I really like the new look a lot. There’s also a new wrapper comparison table up with wrapper comparisons for 4 different chipsets (interestingly enough, 2 NVIDIA chipsets and 2 ATI chipsets), as well as some new versions of a couple of the wrappers in ongoing development.

Dave Perry Interview Thingy, Heavy Gear II Preview
The other guys over at 3DGN have been hard at work and have put up two new items. The first is an “Interview Thingy” with Shiny’s Dave Perry. If you’ve never read one of 3DGN’s Interview Thingy’s, be forewarned, they’re not a serious, straightforward interview. They’re generally pretty funny, though some people have termed them as “juvenile humor.” (I only mention this because my sense of humor, and senses of humor in general, seem to have been called into dispute ever since I decided to write a certain Mini-Raving).

Second up, 3DGN has a new preview of Heavy Gear II. If you liked any of the MechWarrior games, or the original Heavy Gear, Heavy Gear II is looking as if it’s going to be quite a cool game. Eric Rasmussen (fellow 3DGN Staff Writer) gives us the low down on this soon to be published game, including plenty of screenshots from a beta version of the game that 3DGN was able to coerce Activision into giving us. Oh, and something about flying pink monkeys.

Pointless Poll Topic Suggestions Wanted
It’s overdue for a new Pointless Poll topic, but I’ve been more concerned with the entire job-hunt situation lately and haven’t had any really creative ideas for it hit me, and the usual suspects (Bas and Smoke) haven’t been able to come up with any good ideas either. So, I’m going to beg you all for ideas. If you have an idea for something that might a good pointless poll topic, e-mail me and let me know. I can’t offer anything for your trouble other than your name being posted to the news page with my profuse thanks and gratitude.

Commercial Ponderings
Two TV commercials I saw tonight got me thinking, then laughing, in that order. Perhaps I’m just in a really strange state of mind today, but the new Shedd’s Spread Country Crock commercial really made me wonder. In this commercial the two voices and the hands and arms of the man and woman are commenting on this massive blueberry muffin the man made. The commercial ends with some suggestive innuendo about the woman being able to make “her own fire.” I saw this, and it struck me as somewhat odd . . . just what does it mean about our society that they’re using sex to sell butter spread?

The second commercial just struck me as pretty funny. It’s this guy ice fishing, and this platter of cheese appears. He bites into one of the little cheese samples on a hook, and it’s got a fishing line attached to it, and the fish try to reel the fisherman in. Yeah, I know, typing this it sounds lame, but it’s pretty funny at least the first couple of times you see it.

Extreme Hardware Metabyte PGC Interview
Extreme Hardware posted a new interview with Kerry Philpott from Metabyte about their PGC technology (the so called “TNT SLI”). The interview talks about the current stage of the technology, when the first PGC board might hit the market, the kinds of performance increases you can expect, and pricing speculation. There’s also a lot of links to more information on the technology, including white papers and benchmarks. The interview consists of a lot of questions that Mr. Philpott was unable to answer, but I learned a few new things. If you’re interested in the PGC technology, go check out the interview to read up on it.

Sharky’s Extreme Memory Guide
Sharkey’s Extreme has a new Memory Guide up. It’s a good read, and is an excellent guide for someone who doesn’t know that much about the technical details of computers or memory. Personally, I was hoping for a more technical details, but it’s a great guide to familiarize yourself with RAM – I’m almost tempted to call it a good “newbie guide” for memory.

Minor Update to About Page
I’ve made a minor update to the About page on the site. I finally copied in my response/reason to where my gaming name (ZealotOnAStick) came from. I was interviewed and asked that like 4 months ago, I’ve just been a slacker and haven’t bothered to include that on the page until now. Go read it if you’re curious.

Cali Girl Poll, Interview
Cali Girl News has a new poll up on “Which games do you feel really don’t matter what type of ping or pc you have to know if you are a better player?” Currently, Command and Conquer (blech), StarCraft, and EverQuest seem to be the most popular options. Go give Cali Girl’s site a visit and vote on the poll. Speaking of Cali Girl, I found out something I didn’t know, that Tarsonis did an interview with Cali Girl last year. You can check out the Tarsonis Cali Girl Interview for some insight into the girl who provides not only an excellent gaming site, but also works on a ton of other web sites.

The Secret Truth About The Easter Bunny
One of the things I’d planned to post yesterday, and simply forgot about while I was working my way through the forum, is a very peculiar and amusing web site for the Easter Bunny Hunters of America. This site reveals the secret truths behind the Easter Bunnies, tips on telling Easter Bunnies apart from a regular lepus, reccomendations on hunting them, a game, and even a bit on seal-clubbing. Check it out if you’re curious, or if you simply share the morbid sense of humor I tend to have.

Final Thoughts on the April Fools Fiasco
Yesterday was fun and slightly frustrating for me. I simply had no clue that my mini-raving on the SC.org April Fools prank would generate the response it did. I spent, literally, hours yesterday reading and responding to things. In fact, that’s about ALL I did with the site yesterday, though I had some stuff intended (some of which I’ll post today anyway, some of which I may drop altogether) for Easter.

All in all, I’m glad for one thing about all this: opinions were exchanged and shared. As with all opinions, they differ amongst different individuals and are very personal things. While there was perhaps an excess of flaming (I came VERY close to deleting a couple of the posts in the forum, which would have been a first for this site, but I left everything intact), the yggdrasil.net Forum got a lot of activity, and things generally came down to this: Some people agree with and support my “take” on the situation, and some people disagree with it. This is precisely what I expected (the volume of activity was merely a bit unexpected, but not at all unwelcome) and is precisely the reason why I ask for people to share their opinions on the forum at the end of my recent Ravings.

I received this e-mail this morning (it was, from the timestamp, sent last night):

Well, I’ve just finished reading your response and I hope that we can now bring this issue to a close. I would like to apologize on behalf of SC.org for the trouble we may have caused Blizzard, however there was no malicious intent and the repercussions were more than unexpected. That is all done and gone now anyway, and I hope we can move on, with no hard feelings. As you said everyone one has a right to their opinion, and I think now that we have both cooled down a bit, we can see that we are on practically the same page. So, with that said, I hope we can close the book on this and move on without any harsh feelings toward each other. 🙂

– DrLazardo

Fine by me, and no hard feelings here. I want to move on and find some other thing to spout off about and have my forum again flooded with posts with varying opinions. As a final thought on this entire “fiasco” I find that one of the entries from my “Though of the Moment” file to be appropriate: “The facts expressed here belong to everybody, the opinions to me. The distinction is yours to draw…”

E-mail Notification Feature of the Forum
Folks, if you choose to enable the option for e-mail notification for responses to your posts in the forum, please enter a valid e-mail address. If you don’t, the option doesn’t do YOU a bit of good, as you’re NOT getting informed of responses, and it’s irritating me as I get messages from my mail server complaining about undeliverables.

Response to the Response . . .
Ok, a new Raving, which is really a response to DrLazardo’s response to my previous Mini-Raving, is up now in the Ravings of a Zealot page. There are also a lot of messages in the forum on this, and those of you so inclined may wish to read those messages and/ord their responses.

For those of you who don’t seem to “get it” or don’t visit my site regularly, my Ravings are intended to be fun. I have fun writing them, and people often have fun reading them. As the term “Ravings” implies, they’re not necessarily rational or serious, though they do sometimes deal with real issues. All in all, a lot of people have gone just as overboard as they seem to think I did with my Mini-Raving in taking that Mini-Raving way too seriously.

Oh, So THAT’S Why . . .
Ahh, as I started reading the messages in the forum, I discovered what caused the huge influx of posts. DrLazardo of SC.org posted a response to my Raving, and it’s apparently made site news at a lot of the other SC fansites. I’m writing a response to his response (I will try to keep this from turning into a never ending chain of counters, however) and it will be up here in the Ravings of a Zealot page once I complete it.

Uhm, Wow: Forum Activity
All I can say is “Uhm, Wow.” There has been just a huge amount of forum activity (for yggdrasil.net’s forum) overnight. The most messages in the shortest amount of time I’ve seen yet. Coolness. I’d love to see this type of activity kept up as a constant, but I suspect I’ll have to piss people off again to see it happen.

To The Gas Chamber
Dakota Smith, fellow Texan and 3DGN Staff Writer, has recorded a song entitled “To The Gas Chamber” which he says is “A song about the hardships of having a relationship in WWII.” It’s very funny, I liked it alot, even with the slow download time I had with it over my pathetic dialup connection. It’s 2.3 megs in size, go check it out at http://www.mp3.com/artists/15/dakota_smith.html and I hope you laugh as much as I did. It’s the current hit single at 3DGN.

SiN 1.04 Patch Released
The 1.04 patch for SiN has just been released (like 10 minutes ago). Ritual doesn’t even currently have a link on their web site, but it’s available for download from Ritualistic. The 1.04 patch will update SiN from 1.01 to 1.04, and adds SinCTF in its final form as well. You can grab it at http://www.ritualistic.com/cgi-bin/file.pl?filename=sin104.exe&dir=sin/official/.

3DGN Game Night
It’s 3DGN game night (supposedly, I’ll see if we really get many people there to play much of anything) so I’m doing mainly that tonight. I’m also doing some catchup stuff on the MUD I play, so not much news from me today.