deKay's Blog

I completed Super Mario Galaxy 2 this week, and although it was very good, it was very, very easy. Easier than the first game (so far at least – I’m on 82 stars). It wasn’t so much disappointing than unexpected, as all the reviews have suggested it’s actually substantially harder.

Anyway, it got me thinking about difficult games, and how they don’t make them any more. Yeah, there are hard games, but compared to difficult 8-bit titles? Pff. Walkovers. All of them.

Take Army Moves, for example. It is quite possibly the hardest game in existence. I can’t even get past the first helicopter.
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I was trying to navigate round the Dell website today to find information on, then spec up, a particular model of PC. At every turn, on every page load, and every time I let go of the mouse for 7 seconds, this appeared:

I kept clicking “No Thanks”, but a page change or reload and it was back. This annoyed me a bit. Well, a lot. So I decided to chat with them.

Here’s the transcript (with the “Dell Expert”‘s name replaced). They were an expert indeed.

I am pleased that the Dell Zino can run imovie, and amazed that different colour computers are, as is the way with cars, different speeds! Amazing.

Oh yes, and the best bit was when, during the chat, this happened:

(Oh, and for those of you feeling sorry for the Dell Expert, I gave him/her a glowing customer satisfaction report.)

On Peppa Pig the other day, Peppa and George were playing their favourite computer game – Happy Mrs Chicken. It looked amazing.

So, imagine how excited I was when I found it actually existed! Yes, you too can play Happy Mrs Chicken in the comfort of your own home! Gasp!

Simply go to the Peppa Pig site, click Games, click Happy Mrs Chicken, and enjoy!

I’ve decided (just like that, obviously) to migrate my entire lofi-gaming site over to WordPress. Well, most of it. There are a few bits that will remain as Fabulous deKay PHP, but the vast majority of pages will see the move.

Why?

Because most of my site is never updated. I don’t get the time to fiddle with PHP and having a CMS instead makes updating much quicker and more likely to happen. It also means I can do it from any machine, and even my phone, so that’ll help. Probably.

What will this mean?

404-tastic! Sort of. I’m going to duplicate the folder structure with permalinks as far as possible, but that’ll only go so far. So to hell with you all, you’ll have to find stuff with the search box or the menus.

Have you ever bought anything from Deal Extreme? They’re the internet’s premier provider of shoddy Chinese tat. And quality Chinese tat, of course. Sometimes there are things I need to buy, and they’re the only place I can find it cheap, but then I end up adding other useless junk to the shopping basket while I’m there.

A couple of weeks ago, my cheap-and-shoddy iPhone dock (bought from Deal Extreme) died, so I needed another. So back on the site I went to buy another cheap-and-shoddy iPhone dock. And some magnets. You gotta get magnets when you shop with Deal Extreme. Lots of little 5mm balls of incredible magnetty powar. You have to wonder how magnets work. They are ace. I got a pack of 100, to add to the 20 I already had.

I also bought the fabulously named Gyu. I didn’t know it was called Gyu, but I’d been referring to it as “a blob of cleaning goo” so being called “Gyu” was just amazing. I haven’t dared to open the packet yet, as I’m far too excited.

Most exciting is that it says “Germany Formula” on the front. Perhaps this means it can get four goals past the Argentinian defence? (<- World Cup Joke). The ingredients on the back are interesting too, essentially being a mixture of chewing gum and isopropyl alcohol. I suspect it’ll double as teeth whitener. NOTE: Do not use as teeth whitener.

Finally, the Main Event: the iPhone dock itself. It’s the same as my old one, only black, but the packaging is a work of art/genius/a four year old:

Genuine accessories for my iphone 3gs callalar phone. And can also be used as a Media Plager! Amazing scenes.

If, like us, you have WebMarshal, and it’s tied to an SQL Server Express database, you may find it sometimes just… breaks. You’ll get eventlog messages like “3003:  Failed to write session to database” and “PRIMARY filegroup is full” and “Could not allocate space for object ‘dbo.DomainFileLog’”. Chances are, your database is full.

The Express version of SQL Server 2005 is nice because it’s free, but it does limit database sizes to just 4GB. This may sound huge, but for us, that’s only around 4 months worth of internet logs, and we need to clear some space every so often. I always forget how to do it, so this post is a reminder to me as much as anything.

Before you start, to make things easier, get yourself a copy of Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express. It’s free, and makes managing your SQL databases much easier. Once installed on your SQL Server machine (and connected to it), you can set about fixing WebMarshal.

Firstly, you need to purge a load of old records from the log. Chances are you don’t need to go back more than a few months anyway. If you do, you might want to backup your database, name it as a “snapshot” of today’s date, and then restore it if you need to have a look at old entries. How you purge depends on the version of WebMarshal you have, but for either 3.x or 6.x you start my clicking open the WebMarshal database from the object explorer on the left.

Now, on the pane on the right, you’ll have an empty command window. In here, you need to paste one of the following commands:

For WebMarshal 3.x:

exec dbo.PurgeLogData @NumDays = 'n'

Where n is the number of days to keep. So, if you want to get rid of anything more 60 days old, replace n with 60.

For WebMarshal 6.x:

exec dbo.PurgeLogData @PurgeDate = 'yyyymmdd', @MaxRecords = 0

Where yyyymmdd is the date from which everything older is deleted. So, if you wanted to get rid of everything from before 10th April 2010, enter yyyymmdd as 20100410.

Whichever command you use, after typing it in, click the “! Execute” button to perform the task, which may take some time.

Unfortunately, all this does is remove the data. It doesn’t shrink the data files, so your 4GB database will still be 4GB. Thankfully, there’s an easy way of doing this.

Back on the object explorer pane, right-click the WebMarshal database and choose Tasks > Shrink > Database, then click OK. Again, this may take a while. Once finished, for good measure, choose Tasks > Shrink > Files, then click OK.

Now your database should be much smaller! To check, right-click the database once more and choose Properties. In the General section, there’s an entry for Database Size. If this is way below 4GB, you’re done. If not, you might want to do a bit more purging!

A couple of weeks ago, we took receipt of a shiny new iPad at work. And I’ve been testing it. And it is very shiny.

Did I mention it was shiny? Because it is. Very.

The haters are quick to point out that it’s just a big iPod Touch. Which it is, only that’s missing the point. Other haters (or the same ones) say it’s very expensive. Which (again) it is, and (again), that’s missing the point too. Others too say it’s less useful than a laptop. Which it is. Once more, missing the point.

What it actually is, in fact, is something that wasn’t really there before. It’s a simple to use, lovely to operate, sofa-based web browsing device – which does a lot of other things pretty well too. There’s nothing else that does comfy in-front-of-the-tv internetting quite this good. Yeah, this good, as I’m using it now.

And it is very shiny. And now I want one of my own.

I was sent a Wii SD Card this week (actually, three), and last night got to try one out. So, here is a review. Yes, a review of a piece of plastic and silicon the size of a postage stamp! Amazing.

The first thing you’ll notice is that, unlike most SD cards, the SanDisk for Wii card is white. Like the Wii. Little known fact: the Wii itself, its power supply, the  SD card shaped. Check yours – I’m right!

Other exciting features include a write protect lock switch – ideal if you’re paranoid about Nintendo’s system updates deleting your Wii’s homebrew stash. This sort of thing is pretty standard for SD cards anyway though, and you could just remove the card when you update…

Anyway! In use, it performs about as well as my usual SanDisk Extreme II card. I couldn’t tell any speed differences when transferring channels and saves to and from it compared to the Extreme II. The Extreme III is supposedly quicker, but I suspect a lot of the speed issues are down to the Wii’s transfer methods and not the cards themselves. Apart from that, it’s an SD card and it works. You can even use it in cameras and stuff – it’s not fussy about only being for the Wii. There’s even a sticker on it declaring DSi compatibility. Wow!

You can get these fine items (and other similar things) from MemoryCardZoo. The 2GB SD Card is £5.99.

Competition!

Now, of course, you want to know how to save yourself £5.99 and win one, right? Of course you are! So what do you need to do?

Simply reply in the comments with Things You’d Put An SD Card Slot In And Why. You can email me pictures (the worse the better) to andyk @ lofi-gaming.org.uk if you’d prefer. Closing date, ooooh, close of day Sunday 4th July. One card each to the two suggestions or pictures I deem best. Or worst. Go!

I pretty much ignored the original Mass Effect on release, but somehow acquired it anyway (then forgot I’d done so). Then, when the sequel came out, it sparked interest in the first game. How lucky for me, then, it was on my shelf all along! I played through it earlier this year, then a month ago I got the sequel for my birthday.

I hope to play it soon, once BioShock 2 and Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Zelda: Twilight Princess and stuff are finished

For those of you um’ing and ah’ing about it, there’s now a demo of Mass Effect 2! And very nice it looks too: