Awesome MAME roms

I guess you could have seen this coming.

Being that I use a trackball instead of a regular mouse, I have intuitive input for trackball games.  Meaning I can play Marble Madness and feel like I'm in the fucking arcade.  (MAGFest's "everything set to Free Play" arcade of win had a Marble Madness cabinet last year, between that and the cocktail Pac-Man cabinet, shit was so cash)

One game that I keep going back to even after ragequitting from other games is Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa.  The story is kind of cheesy.  Moo Mesa gets hit by this energy beam from outer space, and all the cows on it mutate and become more...  anthropomorphic.  It's a western setting (well, duh), and you're playing as Marshall Moo and his party as they go around, shoot the bad cows, and try to rescue Lily Bovine.  It plays really well, movement is fluid and you can easily aim in any direction.  Kind of like Contra...  oh wait.  Both games were made by Konami.  No wonder.  I can beat the first stage and its boss without getting hit.  Not so much the rest of the game, but hey, at least I don't have to spend quarters...  Also, I love that beer bottles are your health powerup.

A classic that I loved in arcades is Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road.  I dunno who Ivan "Ironman" Stewart is, but the game is awesome.  Basically you race around dirt tracks in a truck and if you win you get to continue and upgrade your truck.  If you ever saw a cabinet with three steering wheels, that's what it was.  It supports the trackball in MAME, so I have fairly fluent control.

If you want decent arcade fighters, to be honest, look no further than the Neo-Geo.  There you'll find Last Blade/Last Blade 2, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Samurai Shodown, and more.  I actually own an import copy of Garou: Mark of the Wolves for PS2.  It's just that awesome.

Two non-Neo-Geo fighters that are pretty decent (and both made by the same company, Strata/Incredible Technologies) are Blood Storm and Time Killers.  Both have fairly similar gameplay.  Each character has a weapon, and with a well-placed hit (usually a counterhit) you can cut off your opponent's arms.  Everyone has a special move (that's damn hard to pull off too) that can decapitate the enemy and give an instant win.  Matches don't really last very long, but they're fun games.

Another classic: The Simpsons.  Konami brings us this beat-em-up which so happens to be the best Simpsons game ever made.  I remember dumping so many quarters into this in the arcades.

On the subject of beat-em-ups, we can't forget Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.  The arcade version is way better than the Genesis version.  You're going around blasting bad guys, synchronized dancing to the death, and rescuing kids.  This was before all the child molestation allegations.  Oh and if you find his monkey you can turn into mecha-Michael Jackson.  Sega...  you made some awesome games, and then this quirky stuff.

Now for weird games.  First up: Maruchan de Goo!  If the "Maruchan" part of the name made you think of ramen, you're on the right track.  It's a game about making ramen, eating it, serving it to customers, and other stuff.  It was made by Sega.

Next up: Dancing Eyes.  This is one of many adult-oriented arcade games.  You walk around on this grid which happens to be superimposed on the clothing of a female.  You can mark sections of it, and when you close off a section the clothing beneath disappears.  There's enemies and powerups.  ...Yeah.  Namco's responsible for this one.

Then there's Pachinko Sexy Reaction (and its sequel).  You're playing pachinko.  If you do well, you get to peek in on a female changing (you get caught, it's funny) and they put on a costume of some sort.  As the game goes on everything gets more suggestive.  The responsible company is Sammy (anyone who's played a Guilty Gear game knows of them).

There's plenty more, obviously, but that's a random selection out of what I've discovered at random/remembered from arcades.

Eye of the North dungeon time

So with nothing else left to do in Guild Wars on my ranger, I figured it was time to start doing the Eye of the North dungeons.

They're generally full of traps and hazards and things where you need to develop the right mindset to get through the dungeon in an orderly fashion.

I started with a one level dungeon that I knew I could get to without deaths, Ooze Pit.

Aside from one specific Ooze type (the Earthbound ones, which have powerful earth magic area of effect spells) and the very last battle, pretty much the entire thing can be C-spaced.

I've done it twice now, both times with heroes and henchmen (different party composition both times).  The first time part of my party (not including me) got run over by some rocks towards the end, and everyone but me died on the last fight a few times.  This was my first time entering the dungeon and my party build contained several skills that ended up being useless since Oozes aren't fleshy.  My burning poison build was just a burning build, and Koss couldn't ever apply deep wound because he couldn't apply bleeding (sever/gash lol).  The second time only one hero died (Livia got gangraped by Volatile Oozes using their self-destruction skill) and I had no deaths on the final battle.

I think I'm getting the hang of these things.  I'll have to look through the dungeon list on GuildWiki and see which one I should try next.

Oh and by the way, the new Blood Bond is fucking awesome.  Necromancer healers can be much more prevalent now.  Add Foul Feast and Plague Signet and you have the start of a build...

gonna get my MAME on

A long time ago I downloaded a full romset for MAME.  At the time it was 15 GB.  I think it was for MAME 0.110 or something (i.e. old).

I've been playing games with that romset for ages.

I finally got around to finding and downloading the full romset for the most recent MAME, 0.137.  I have MAME 0.137 sitting in my recently-reorganized download directory waiting to be installed.  Technically I could install it now but I'm waiting for the romset to seed the rest of the way back to 1.0 so I can stop the torrent.

The torrent is on a ratio tracker, so I have to play by their rules.  Not that I was ever intent on hitting and running, but since they have fairly stringent rules I figure it'd be a waste to get myself banned for downloading one torrent.  I generally seed things to 6 anyway.  Larger torrents like this one I usually only take back to 1 because 6 * 23 GB = holy fuck that would take forever.

Yeah, the full MAME romset is now 23 GB.  I really don't need all of them, but it's great to be able to just browse through the list and pick a game at random.

AVGN on hiatus

I can't help but think I called it.  He says he's burned out and is taking a break until May.  His last several reviews, while all good, have been notably less angry.

Maybe when he comes back he'll actually be drinking beer instead of water in a beer bottle.  It's been way too obvious in recent episodes.  On top of that, he's not even drinking in some of them.

I like the Nerd, so I hope he comes back from his hiatus full of new material and toting a 12-pack of Rolling Rock (though honestly I prefer Yuengling).

well, kinda...

I used a combination of Stylish, the DOM Inspector, and changing some Tab Mix Plus and Classic Compact settings in about:config to get label-less tabs.  Had to change settings in about:config because neither extension would let me lower the tab width below 22px and I wanted it at 18px.

I dunno how this will act when I restart firefox, but it's working now.  Also I dunno if opening either extension's preferences will auto-revert to 22px.

Anyway, I have tiny tabs now, which means I can fit every single tab I usually keep open in a fraction of the horizontal space they normally take up.  This will make it a lot easier to keep them organized.

Edit: well, if I open the extensions' preferences, it's fine, but if I change anything, the tabs get set back to being 22px wide and I have to change things in about:config all over again.  Weird.

firefox extension bullshit

First off, update notes.  Firefox has a nice button that will show what the extension author provides for update notes when there's a new update.  However, some fucktarded extension developers like Firebug's just say "oh lol you can read update notes here" and give a URL.  That isn't ever clickable or selectable.  Then they have the nerve to add "oh I understand that you can't actually do anything useful with the URL we put here, but tough shit".  Well, not that exactly, but that expresses the sentiment I feel.  Fuck you.  Put the fucking update notes in the fucking box they're supposed to fucking be in so I can fucking read them to see whether or not I fucking want to update your fucking extension.  Until then, I'm not updating.

Second.  I updated DownloadHelper and NoScript just a few minutes ago.  When Firefox actually appeared, some of Tab Mix Plus' settings had been changed.  Specifically, my tab bar had a close button instead of it appearing on a tab when I hover my mouse over the tab. The tab bar had scroll buttons.  Lastly, the all tabs dropdown was visible.  Going into TMP's options they were still set the way I had them, which makes me think it was something else entirely.  Changing them and then changing them back made it revert back to the way I wanted it.  I know that TMP has some issues with Classic Compact/Classic Compact Options that are as of yet unresolved, but I thought those were mostly due to the fact that the two have conflicting settings.  I set both of them to the same settings and went on with life.

Third, why does Mozilla permit extensions to open web pages on install/update?  I've got all the call home pages blocked using BlockSite, but I shouldn't have to do that.  The fact that extensions can do this is kind of a security hazard, especially if the extension has some extremely obfuscated malicious feature.  At least NoScript doesn't do that (well, it does, but it can be disabled in about:config, set noscript.firstRunRedirection to false), seeing as how its developer likes to update anywhere from once a week to four times a week.

There was this whole thing a while back with AdBlock Plus and NoScript.  NoScript's author has always tried to make sure his sites' ads are visible.  To further this, his four sites and his advertisers are in NoScript's default whitelist (along with a bunch of other questionable default whitelist entries).  It used to be much more difficult to remove them because they were marked as "protected" and you had to dig around about:config to remove the fuckers, but enough people bitched at him (including me) that he conceded.

Then he got his panties in a bunch about AdBlock Plus blocking his sites' ads and decided to fuck with AdBlock Plus instead of taking, you know, an ethical route to a solution.  For a while, every time you started Firefox with AdBlock Plus and NoScript installed, NoScript would add exception filters for its developer's site.  He eventually got pwnt by Mozilla and forced to remove his malicious code (which he had run through an obfuscator), but he still blamed the entire thing on AdBlock Plus even though he made the first move.

Firefox really needs a secure extension model.  One where each extension can't fuck with other extensions unless those extensions define a set API.  In the current extension model an extension can basically do anything it wants.  I encountered this issue a while back when I was still using Tabbrowser Preferences.  It makes some questionably legit changes to Firefox that, among other things, result in GMail becoming unusable.  These changes persist even after the extension is uninstalled.  To revert them you have to reinstall Firefox.  Luckily there's Tab Mix Plus which does everything Tabbrowser Preferences ever did and more.

As far as my compact setup goes, there are a few things I still want:

• The ability to collapse the tabs to just the favicon
• If I had this I'd use a tab bar close tab button
• Firebug won't let me inspect the browser chrome... Perhaps its only weakness? I could make a style for Stylish to do exactly this if I used the DOM Inspector
• I mean, I can cheat and load chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in the location bar to inspect it, but everything's just congealed into a single tabbrowser element and I can't get at the tabbar element at all
• Automatic grouping of tabs into a menu by domain or subdomain
• Should be configurable per-tab
• Each tab would have a dropdown arrow to show the menu
• If the tab is clicked instead it should show the last site on that domain/subdomain that was shown instead of showing the menu
• You can kind of do this if you cheat and load chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in a tab, but it's not at all what I'd like