I’m a casual Apple user/fan. Which feels somewhat ridiculous to say considering that they are easily the tech company I give the most money year after year. Every day I use multiple Apple devices and services: iPhone 17 Pro, Series 11 Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, an M4 MacBook Air (my work computer), and Apple Music and TV+ subscriptions.
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Treyarch’s adaptation of the first two Daniel Craig Bond films makes perfect sense in the context of the games they were developing at the time. In 2006 they released Call of Duty 3, in 2007 the tie-in for Spider-Man 3, and a week after Quantum of Solace, they dropped Call of Duty: World at War. Obviously the studio had multiple teams working on these projects, but licensed games and Call of Duty were what defined the studio in 2008. Which explains pretty much everything about Quantum of Solace.
(more…)I got my Xbox 360 about half a year after launch, in June of 2006. Here’s what I was playing, based on pulling up my achievements of that era:
I’ve loved Ninja Gaiden for as long as I can remember. When I saw the film The Wizard as a child, Super Mario Bros. 3 wasn’t the highlight for me, the brief showing and subsequent mentioning of Ninja Gaiden was. I read the Worlds of Power book cover to cover multiple times. And I, of course, played the NES game (and to a lesser degree, its sequels) over and over again (never finishing any of them).
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I’d had my eye on a ROG Ally for a while. My Steam Deck has been my primary portable gaming device, but it’s starting to feel a bit long in the tooth. Knowing that a price increase on ROG Allys is a very real possibility, I decided to bite the bullet and pick one up.
I went with the Xbox Ally X because it’s the most powerful of the ROG devices. I know there are portable devices with better specs, but they are more expensive and less-known quantities. I’ve now spent a few days with the device, and I have thoughts.
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As I mentioned in my Oblivion post, I got my Xbox 360 early in its lifecycle and absolutely loved the system. While I’ve had mixed feelings about Microsoft and Xbox for the past decade and a half, I will always have a soft spot for the Blades era of Xbox 360.
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In an effort to beef up the gaming capabilities of my WinXP machine, I recently grabbed this NVIDIA GeForce 745 GPU for twenty bucks.
It’s a slim, PCIe card with a small fan that does not require any additional power (its consumption max is 55W).
It slotted in to the motherboard nicely, and then the trouble began.
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I recently picked up some vintage Apple manuals, the most exciting being The AppleSoft Tutorial. Just look at that cover!
In case you’re not familiar, this is a manual included with Apple II computers of the era. It serves as an overview of the hardware and as a basic BASIC programming guide. Here are some highlights, presented without context.
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Morrowind was my first Elder Scrolls game and despite the myriad flaws, its weird, seemingly endless open world made me fall in love with the series. When Oblivion was announced I knew I had to play, but I also knew my aging PC (that could barely run Morrowind) would not be able to handle it without extensive and expensive upgrades.
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This HP Pavilion Slimline s5510f is a desktop PC that comes equipped with Windows 7 and one of the worst GPUs NVIDIA ever made. On one hand it’s slow and can’t really play most games released after the year 2000. But on the other you can pick it up and carry it with one hand so I don’t totally hate it.
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