Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Let’s start with the quickies, and then we’ll talk gaming:

Reading: RunePunk
Wearing: Comfortable close-fitting clothes suitable for cycling. I love this weather.
Planning: The first session for the Sky Pirates game, this Sunday
Playing: Rule of Rose and Skies of Arcadia
Not Playing: The Siren: Blood Curse demo. Laaaaaaaaame. Tried it last night, and seriously, what’s with these crap-looking games not making the most of their platform’s hardware specs?
Writing: Some notes for various game design projects, mostly an Art List for the Cannibal Contagion book.
Listening: Pimsleur Spanish I
Watching: The Wire, Season 4. Man, the end of Season 3 almost brought tears to my eyes. One of the things that gets me the most is seeing people fail when they’ve worked so goddamned hard to succeed.
Anticipating: Dead Space in October. Read more

Reading: Nothing at the moment, sadly.

Wearing: The usual.

Planning: A long weekend with very few major activities, and hopefully some Savage Worlds excitement.

Playing: Parasite Eve and One on the Playstation.

Not Playing: The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness

Writing: Some notes for an upcoming city-building project with the game crew.

Listening: A crap-ton of electronica Chris uploaded to my FTP server over the last few months.

Watching: The Wire, which after two episodes is now possibly my new favorite TV show. Writing this good should be canonized and worshiped.

Anticipating: Massage tomorrow! Having a new home! Yeah! Bioshock coming to the PS3! Yeah!

Dreading: Packing, although thankfully I’m still mostly packed from the last move.

I recall a fantastic Playstation 1 game called simply “One.” It was one of the first third-person action games I’d ever played, and I thoroughly loved it. I want to find it again. So, guys, can you imagine how hard it is to actually search down and find a game called, simply, One? Yeah. It’s goddamned hard. EDIT: Nevermind, I finally found it on ebay. That was tricky.

Anyway, last night I tooled around with the settings of two pieces of Playstation Emulation software: PSX Emulator and ePSXe. The first one is almost perfect. It does everything wonderfully, plays without a hitch and a bare minimum of settings tweaking. Fabulous! Not really, though, as the graphics look pretty lame on a crisp LCD - this is because the software doesn’t make use of hardware acceleration, and thus the games look like they did originally. Not so bad, I guess, but… ePSXe, with the right settings, makes the games look a whole lot nicer, and greatly improves on the original appearances. This is great! Right? No, sadly, because no matter how I tweak the graphics, and no matter if I run from the PSX disks or from ripped ISO files, the cut scenes are always sped up a fraction and lack sound. That kinda blows. Read more