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Last week, I went to the McDonald’s near my office in downtown Boston to grab some lunch. Like I always do at fast food places, I ordered some food and a (free) water. The clerk asked me if I meant bottled water, to which I replied “tap water is fine.” His response? “Oh wow, you’re brave.” I did end up drinking the water, but very uneasily. I’m not dead yet so it can’t be that bad.

The results are in! I started with a list of 27 games that I and others came up with as candidates for Best Game Ever. I then gave each candidate a score between one and five in four different categories. I also assigned each game a unique award but these had nothing to do with the rankings. The rank categories are:

Screamability:
How loudly I am likely to scream if someone tells me they have never played this game.

Replayability:
How often I find (or found) myself going back to play this game again.

Holdability:
How well this game holds up to a modern audience. The first Zelda may have been excellent by 1986 standards, but frankly it kind of sucks.

Awe-Inspiration:
How likely I am to become baffled about how fucking awesome the game is while I am playing it.

The winners are:

10.
Game: Resident Evil 4
Award: Biggest Quality Gap Between Game and Prequels
Comments: The first Resident Evil was decent. But man, they really got their act together for this one. Well done.

9.
Game: Final Fantasy 3 (6j)
Award: Most Useless Multiplayer Option
Comments: Did you know that there’s an option in this game to make the combat two-player? To the best of my knowledge no other RPG has ever done this.

8.
Game: Super Metroid
Award: Most Broken Physics
Comments: The wall jump, and to a lesser extent the speed boots, allow you to get to places you are definitely not supposed to be yet. Watch the time attack, you’ll see.

7.
Game: Metroid Prime
Award: Least Creative Way to Take Away Samus’s Powerups
Comments: Additional award, most incredibly awesome way to find an invisible floating platform: noticing the rain hitting its surface.

6.
Game: Starcraft
Award: Most Skippable Single Player Mode
Comments: I really think this should have wound up higher on the list with the sheer amount of hours I pumped into it, but I stand by my scoring system.

5.
Game: Civilization Series
Award: Most Egotistical Designer
Comments: Sid Meier, you like the way your face looks. We fucking get it.

4.
Game: Super Smash Bros. Melee
Award: Most Unnecessary Details
Comments: Try having Mario hit you with his cape while you’re doing a taunt, or rolling around with Yoshi’s egg on Mr. Game and Watch’s stage.

3.
Game: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Award: Most Misleading Title
Comments: I must have beaten this game at least 20 times and I still have no idea what part of this game has anything to do with the past. Better candidates for this title include Ocarina of Time, Oracle of Ages, and Majora’s Mask.

2.
Game: Final Fantasy Tactics
Award: Most Confusing Plot
Comments: I was originally going to give this game “greatest number of characters” but then I remembered Suikoden.

1.
Game: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Award: Most Hilarious Voice Acting
Comments: What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!

Barely didn’t make the cut:
Fallout 2, Mega Man 2, Metal Gear Solid.

I’ve noticed that when describing certain video games, I tend to say it’s “one of the best games of all time”, without actually having any definitive sort of list of what the best games of all time are. So I intend to compile that list, top 10 style. Right now I am accepting suggestions for games I might not have already thought of. If your suggestion makes it to the top 10 (and I didn’t already think of it), you win a prize. Any video games are acceptable from the NES console era to current day, also handhelds and PC games.

In a week or so I’ll post my top 10. It’ll be great, I guarantee it.

Anyone who has played the Gamecube game Super Smash Brothers: Melee either knows that it is one of the best games ever or is stupid. My friends and I, particularly Nick and Mikix, have been playing this game so much since its release (at least 4995 two-minute matches, that’s about 7 solid days of nothing but Smash) that in order to keep things interesting, we have to invent new ways to play it. This past weekend Mikix and I invented a couple new ones, but I thought I’d document all the variants that I can think of, so that others might enjoy them too. And hurry up about it, because Smash Revolution is coming up somewhat soon.

Pentaform
This got its name from the Cosmic Encouter alien power of the same name. This is for any number of players. Set the game type to Stock with 4 lives. When any player has all 4 lives, he is only allowed to use the analog stick and the Z button. With 3 lives, you can only use the analog stick and the A button (you lose the Z button). With 2 lives, you switch over to using B exclusively, and with 1 left you get the C-stick.

Two-Fisted Kicking
This is the most popular variant so far that exclusively uses Luigi’s taunt. This is for 2 players each using 2 controllers and controlling 2 characters. Set the game type to Time using the special mode Sudden Death, and under the game options put the damage ratio up to 2.0, set items to Very High and disable all but the Super Mushrooms and Poison Mushrooms. Enable team play with team damage off. You are only allowed to use Luigi’s taunt to attack.

Hide and Sheik
For 2 players both using Zelda. At the start, one player should change to Sheik. For the remainder of the match, whenever one player changes, so must the other player, so that at any time the game contains exactly one Sheik and exactly one Zelda.

The Game and Watch Game
For any number of players all using Mr. Game and Watch. After every attack, a player may not make another attack until he has used his taunt to “clear” his character (akin to clearing the ball in half-court basketball).

Rampage
For 2 players. Set the game type to Giant Melee. One person plays as Bowser, and the other player plays as Donkey Kong. Play on the map Fourside.

Chicken
For 2 players, both playing as Mario or Dr. Mario. Turn all items off except the Super Scope. Set the game type to Stock (any number of lives). Play on any open, flat map such as Final Destination. Players go to opposite ends of the map facing each other. One player picks up a Super Scope and charges it up fully, firing it at the other player. Then, both players must alternate using the cape (over and B) to bounce the shot back and forth until either it disappears or one player gets hit. Continue until someone runs out of lives.

That’s all I can think of. I’m sure someone will let me know if I missed one.

Like we do, Jake and I had a very long argument today on AIM. As you may have gathered from the title, it was about the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights. The argument was about whether or not the Bill of Rights (hereafter referred to as BoR) is a positive thing or not. Since most people can already form a pretty coherent argument as to why the BoR is positive, here is my argument as to why it’s negative. (This same point was argued by Alexander Hamilton in 1788 around the initial inception of the BOR.)

The argument is that if rights and freedoms are specifically granted by the constitution, there is a subtle implication there that freedoms not specifically mentioned in the BOR are not actually granted to the people! For example, people often argue about whether the second amendment gives people the right to own guns, or whether they are only allowed to do that in the context of a “well-regulated militia”. Well, it doesn’t matter what the second amendment says, because by default people have complete liberty — this is the entire premise upon which our nation was founded! The only way people should lose this right (or any other right) isn’t if the BoR doesn’t specifically guarantee it, but if our body of laws specifically prohibits it, and such a law would have to be specifically allowed by the constitution. Alexander Hamilton puts it very succinctly:

[The Bill of Rights] would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colourable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretence for claiming that power.

The federal constitution was originally designed to grant powers to the federal government, with a specific clause — amendment X, the only acceptable part of the BoR in my opinion — that says that powers not specifically granted to the government in the constitution are prohibited by it. Granting freedoms and rights to the people is too similar to be comfortable. Why, when deciding the legality of a flag-burning law, should we turn to the 1st amendment? Shouldn’t we simply say, “the constitution does not specifically grant the federal government the power to make such a law” and have that be enough? For in enumerating certain rights that must not be infringed by the government, we have obfuscated the fact that the government is not allowed to infringe upon any of our rights.

Discussion welcome.

If you are anything like I was a few days ago, you have never heard of the VCache system employed by all versions of Windows since 95. Here is an overview of what it’s supposed to do. Reading from and writing to a hard drive is very slow relative to how fast computers can go. So, Windows uses a portion of system RAM to cache parts of the hard drive so that it can be read from and written to in place of the hard drive. In theory, this should greatly improve performance as it speeds up disk access.

Let me now remind you of another system that Windows uses: Virtual Memory. Virtual Memory is a system where Windows pretends a part of the hard disk is actually RAM, so that programs can use up more system memory than your computer actually has available. This also sounds nice in theory, as it should allow your computer to use inexpensive disk space in place of expensive RAM.

So, Windows has two systems in place, one of which pretends RAM is disk space and the other of which pretends disk space is RAM. Hmm….

Here is what happens in practice. When you boot up, Windows allocates most of your available system memory for VCache, because hey why not, it’s not like you’re using it right? Unfortunately when you go to load something up that needs the memory, it’s all taken up by VCache so it starts using virtual memory instead, i.e. it starts loading stuff into disk space instead of system memory. But now there’s lots of disk activity, so VCache kicks in and starts caching this area of disk to RAM to improve load times. But this requires more memory, so things have to start moving over to virtual memory that in turn gets VCached in a huge downward spiral that reminds me of the Ouroboros (thanks Jen).

There are some simple fixes to all this that I have found out greatly improve Windows performance. I recommend a program called Cacheman. There are some manual ways of fixing this problem too, i.e. this. I have noticed significant improvement. Also this fix lets your Windows 98 system use more than 512 megs of RAM which is nice if you have both Windows 98 and >512M and didn’t know that can fuck everything up.

Alternate Title – Why Castlevania and Fdisk Don’t Mix

Some of you may have noticed that I have not been on AIM for several days, which is unlike me. The reason for this is that a little while ago my filesystem got corrupted by either Windows Update or defrag or something and I had to reinstall Windows, but that didn’t fix my problem so I had to reformat and start clean. The nice thing about having a Windows drive and a Linux drive is that when one fucks up on me, I can back everything up to the other one, so I never lose anything important. So I copied all my important data to my Linux drive and carried on.

I struggled with DOS fdisk for a while to get it to do what I wanted, because some versions of fdisk (notably the one that came with my rescue cd) only support partitions of up to 2 gigs. Ugh. Eventually I got it to work or so I thought, and I started formatting my hard drive. I was very eager to just have the damn thing start formatting so I could get back to my game of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow so I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on. About 40 minutes later it tells me drive C is formatted. That’s a lot of formatting, but whatever. Yay! I installed Win98 and booted up.

I go to check out my partitions and notice that I have three, which is weird because I only wanted two. Windows tells me I have about 240 gigs of free space among all of the partitions, yet my windows drive is only 120 gigs. Wow! Two hard drives’ worth of free space on one hard drive somehow, isn’t that great? Then it slowly dawned on me what had happened. Fuck. I must have accidentally just reformatted my Linux drive. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck! You know what sucks? Losing about 6 years of stuff I’ve been working on. This feeling of impending doom slowly sank into me.

On a longshot I decided to boot up an Ubuntu cd and see if I could salvage anything from my now-empty Linux drive. By some miracle I was able to mount the partitions that used to be there, and recover all my stuff. Well, some of it. One of the partitions got pretty messed up, but luckily it was the partition where I keep my system files and not my personal data files. So I installed Ubuntu and now Linux is good to go again. Holy crap was I relieved.

Now things are pretty much back to normal. As it turns out, I spent the next 3 days struggling to install Windows 98 correctly only to remember that it can’t handle more than 512 megs of RAM by default (which I have).

=(

Sometime I want to play the game Nomic. The short version is that it’s a game where people modify the rules a lot. Kind of like a verbal version of Four Square that doesn’t tire you out or require a court to play.