..cause I don't pour money into my system (I'm not actually a hardcore gamer). I'm gonna buy a new system, and I'm poor as shit, so I will carefully deliberate my purchase. It needs to be expandable (don't want to buy new major components), stable, and cheap.

I am *told* that the Core 2 Duo processor is the "best proc on the market". So I figure I'll get one of those, along with a mobo that supports fancy multi-graphic-card-linking-thingees. Since I'm poor, I'll initially be putting only one in, but a second may follow, later.

Any tips on purchasing and comparing parts is appreciated. I'm under the impression that a) building from parts will be the cheapest, b) newegg is pretty much the best place to get parts and c) high quality parts are worth the premium.

ROCK ON!

The scrolling game development TWO was just released. The SDK handles everything: graphics, sounds, and music. All you need is DirectX, .Net, and a little C# experience.

The SDK takes the sharp edges off making a basic game. No fancy graphics, just a 2d scroll, but the SDK does the heavy lifting for you. The included demo projects are also a fun play.

Hop to it, destructoid!

Unless they know martial arts and can kick your pasty, overweight ass. Then they're hard, and terrifying, a la MMA girls.

Tonight, a noob college student showed up with a clipping from Ladies Home Journal showing an ad for the Wii, which said something about "getting off the couch", and showed Mom and Grandmom playing enthusiastically while the kids watched in silent admiration.

My reaction was WTF LOL FAG READS LADIES HOME JOURNAL. Then I did a double take and wondered if nintendo is tapping the old folks market? Can you imagine how many of those fuckers they would sell if they convinced Baby Boomers (that's mum and dad to most of you) to buy them? I take back anything I ever said about the Wii being an underpowered white piece of shit niche machine. Except the part about it being underpowered. And a white piece of shit.

Probably should be "fuck you, elephant". I posted a lengthy comment about the law and various legalities on THIS POST. You fuckers ate my comment. I hope the responsible party is raped by a razor-dicked pikachu, so they get electrocuted as they get raped. Bleeding out is a bonus.

I started playing Fallout 2 last thursday. It has eaten my entire weekend. Despite the kludgy graphics, the occasional inverse color problem, and the crappy interface..Fallout fuckin' rocks. I can't put my finger on it: I don't really care for RPGs/turned based stuff, though I did like KOTOR. I guess there's just something about getting a 95% chance of a headshot, and blowing out a mini-trex's brain with a fucking .44 magnum.

And they put in the 10mm, too! I personally love the 10mm, it got scaled down to .40S&W, because FBI agents are pussies and can't handle recoil. Also, there is only 1 9mm weapon in the game..

But fallout got me thinkin' how I'd make my own game? I idolize Deus Ex as the almost-perfect FPS/RPG crossover. I thought it'd be nifty to let players switch between game systems, even though that could introduce balance problems..let the players decide how they want to play the game. Then I found out that someone tried, and their game got cancelled :(

I'd probably make the worst game ever. Gamers would fume as their .223 gets blown apart because they used 5.56NATO ammunition. They'd scream in agony as they were taken down again and again, by legions of russian babe snipers. They'd curse my children when enemy scouts would call in air support rather then engage with small arms. Then, at the end, they'd whimper like children, as whatever heroics their character undertook (taking down a nuclear-armed mech, blowing up a doomsday weapons plant, insert cliche) would be reversed by bureaucratic assholes.

Every gamer does this, right? "If I was hired to make a videogame.."
- Shitloads of small arms. Real, fake, rare, common.. depending on what faction you played for, you'd get access to the finest weapons ever made, or just an AK-104.
- Make ammunition scarce. I enjoy making people spend precious minutes hunting for ammo.
- Get it rated AO, to avoid parenting groups.
- On death, enemies would do one of the following: a)spontaneously combust b) spray blood from every orifice, kill bill style c) cheerily dig a grave and bury themselves
- Ducks would be sacred
- Make all voiceovers, text, and instructions, in Lojban, or some other excellent, but not-english, language. Oh, and if the gamers don't speak Lojban, they have to use the crappy in-game translator.
- Build intricate characters with delicate, complex relationshits..
- ..then kill them off in the sequel
- Allow the player to "paint themselves in a corner". He might be down to ten rounds, on the seventh jungle mission STRAIGHT with no ammo refills..and have to make do.
- Make the game notice if the player isn't having fun. If the player loads 5 times from the same save..and is killed by the same enemy..maybe that enemy starts missing on the next load. Maybe a random friendly drops in for moral support. Maybe Patton shows up in a motherfucking tank and GANKS that campin' sniper bitch!
- If the game has any RPG-ish "stats", and they set their character to have very high intelligence..the character's head would be enormous. Occasionally, such characters would pass out from athsma/panic attacks
- High intelligence characters must solve complex, multi-variable calculus problems instead of making a saving throw.
- Certain characters would have difficulty distinguishing between real life and hallucinations.
- The player can surrender
- The player can PRETEND to surrender, then spaz out and pull a fuckin sword out of his pants
- The perspective is third person over the shoulder, so you can watch the badass spaz-outs
- All bossfights are dance-offs
- If the player has a headset, he can get stat bonuses/pump up his character by swearing profusely. THe game will have a literacy engine to determine the creativity of naughty words, including those which the player MAKES UP. THe literacy engine will update itself with a central server, to determine how common swears are, and to prevent every gamer from using the same swears.
- The final boss is god. This fight, too, is a dance-off.
- If the player kills god, the game engine will attempt to divide by zero
- And then the game will crash.

So, I need a dev team! Modeler, skinner, level designer, artist? Bring it on! Some of these ideas aren't very well fleshed out, but I think we can work them over.

DarthFredd is a full-time college student who describes himself as "unrecognized genius". He lives in Delaware, which is totally not cool. His top three games are Deus Ex, Morrowind, and Fallout.