You never really miss something until its gone.

It’s been a heck of a long ride. From 2003 to 2011 with short bursts of productivity spread out between large spans of apathy and indecision.

The whole scene is pretty played out now. You can run MAME on just about any platform you can think of and certainly any game from back in the day that I ever held dear has long since been emulated to perfection. But I’m still glad I did it. It looks great in the garage and I go to it every other day for a bit of Gauntlet or Altered Beast.

The only question now is… do I build one for my brother-in-law?

Its just that I am time poor (aka lazy) and Twitter also keeps me concise and suits my short attention sp… OMG is that Bradie Webb from Short Stack?!? LOLz. nom nom. >.<

My brother arrived in town, so he was able to join The Devil Hates Kung-Fu on this night of the mega-teams. We had five but most other tables resembled small nation-states.

The host took too long this time, so even though we hung back I missed out on hearing the final score. I think we did well though and we were only 2 behind the pace at half time.

I should have fought harder on the Egg McMuffin question. But I don’t actually think the ‘sausage sandwich’ is on the menu anywhere other than Australia. It’s not even listed among the variants on wikipedia. Although apparently we had something called a Massive McMuffin once.

The plus is that my second-hand PC should be up to playing it with a semi-decent framerate!

The down side is that my gaming life resembles this xkcd.

They are still fast for trivia here but not fast enough for me to be there when our final score is read out. I think that The Devil Hates Kung-Fu did well. Maybe we even beat those pesky Well Hungarians. But does it really matter? Fun is the real winner.

I don’t know exactly how this site was being exploited but I hope that nothing malicious happened to any of my two to three visitors. You’re all reading on RSS these days, right? Anyway, I blew away the installs and got latest versions which (fingers crossed) have these vulnerabilities closed. I’m still in the process of bringing the DB entries over. Turns out there’s been a few schema changes since 2.0.3. So there may be some weirdness in the mean time.

First, thing I noticed were some really weird link-backs in the admin menu. Then I happened to see a strange HTML list of links inside a hidden div when I went to view the source of the ol’ blog homepage. I had a quick look at my WordPress theme files and saw this embedded at the top.

I sure as hell did not put that in any of my theme files. I checked other files and, would you believe, this was at the top of every php file on my web space. I decoded it, and it turned into some php very close to that in one of the posts in the link above (the path was a little different), which is then calling another function gml().

I couldn’t find this function’s definition. It obviously had something to do with the list of hidden links I saw but God knows what else it was doing. Again, I apologize if this has caused any badness beyond this little blog needing to be re-installed. But hey, at least the new theme is nice.

I was put in the mind of this again when playing Marvel Superhero Squad (also on PSP). A game should be challenging due to skills required to solve intentional parts of the gameplay like problem-solving and coordination. Not because the camera positioning is like a swooping eagle with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. This is something The Simpsons Game suffered from as well.

Many were the occasions that I died, because at the crucial moment the camera decided that there was something far more interesting for me to see on the side of a building or behind me as opposed to the enemy a foot away or the platform I was jumping toward. Why are we still having these kinds of issues when games like Grand Theft Auto perfected the third-person view long ago? Why!? And games like Batman: Arkham Asylum have shown that licensed games don’t necessarily have to be schlock.

At least The Simpsons Game had an amusing script with some (on occasion too apt) self-deprecating puns. Its like the writers knew that the game was destined to have these problems. But I don’t know whether that actually alleviated the frustration for me or enhanced it.

Still, I haven’t completed my own game yet, so I suppose I shouldn’t throw stones.

The less said about how The Devil Hates Kung-Fu performed tonight, the better. We were being outclassed at every turn by The Well Hungarians. I didn’t even stay for the final score.

But at least they run through the questions quick at this joint. It means that I get home only at a stupid time, instead of an absurd one.