Category Archives: Geek

Confessions of a horrible game player

Here is a great post at Lost Garden. It’s called “Confessions of a horrible game player“. He has some great ideas that developers should incorporate into games. If you haven’t read it before, Lost Garden is an “ongoing game design document written as a blog”. He is designing and building a game called SpaceCrack and documenting it in his blog. He used to work for Epic Megagames and worked on the shooter Tyrian so he knows what he is doing and it shows. He’s an excellent and interesting writer – well worth reading if you are a gamer. I have him linked in the sidebar.

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Nerdcore Hip-Hop

Nerdcode Hip-Hop….ever heard of it? It’s basically geek rap (nerdcore…like hardcore…..get it?). Why do I like nerdcore? I like some (not all) hip-hop/rap (mostly old school), I am a geek, and most nerdcore is really FUNNY.

My first contact with nerdcore was from via Brad Sucks (who also has some great, non-nerdcore music for free download). Brad had a link to MC Frontalot on his site. All of Front’s stuff is available for free download from his website. From Frontalot’s site, I got a link to Optimus Rhyme. They have a CD out and they have some of the tracks available to download on their website. Then I found MC Lars – he has a few tracks to download from his website.

Just a few weeks ago I found MC Plus+ (get it? M C++) and ytcracker. MC Plus+ is a programmer geek and I think you have to be a bit of a coder to “get” some of his stuff. His whole album “Algorhythms” is available for free download. If you write code at all, you need to listen to his album at least once. REALLY funny. ytcracker has his latest album “Nerdrap Entertainment System” (N.E.S.) for download on his site and he has a BUNCH of other tracks available too. I don’t like his stuff quite as much as the others, but it’s still good.

Gizmo recording works (on Windows, not Mac)

As follow-up to my last post on Gizmo, I just talked with Rob from Podcast411 for a while using Gizmo and it worked great and recorded the conversation easily for me (I’m on Windows). He is on a a Mac, and he tried recording too, but just got a garbled/garbage WAV file out of it. I did notice the wav I got was in an odd format that Foobar wouldn’t play, but Audacity played it just fine. I sent the WAV to him and it played on his fine too so it looks like Gizmo recording on a Mac is currently fubared (I’m using beta 8)., but I now have a way to record conversations on Windows! Oh – and the Map feature is really cool!

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Geekiest Board Game Ever? Computer Rage from 1977

I went to my local thrift store today to see what I could find. Every now and then I can find something really good. Today was a good day. I found this UNOPENED, still shrink-wrapped, board game called Computer Rage that is copyright 1977 by Creative Computing Magazine. Click on the image below to see all the pics I took:


Computer Rage box

It has classic, retro art on the front and the gameplay itself is so incredibly geeky! How many games do you know that have a space labelled “Output Queue”? It even uses three binary dice (so you can roll 0-7)! Here is the description of the binary dice (click for a larger image):

Description of the binary dice in the Computer Rage board game

Binary! How many non-computer geeks do you know that can handle binary? Maybe the math geeks can handle it too, but not many other people.

So how much did I pay for this near-pristine piece of classic 70’s retro computer goodness? $2. What a great find. I love thrift stores.

Oh yeah – I also picked up Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Platinum Edition for $1 and it included the box and everything was in it. Also a good deal. I played the demo when it came out a long time ago (I think). I probably won’t get to it anytime soon (or ever) but I couldn’t pass it up for a buck.