Widget Workshop review is online

What kid wouldn’t appreciate a workshop full of widgets? No kid I’d approve of, that’s for sure. One of the lesser-known titles from Maxis Kids, Widget Workshop is a neat little introduction to science and zaniness!

Notes about live streaming: Quality vs content.

So this is another livestream, although for whatever reason several faceless Internet people are complaining about this one like crazy. Apparently, the video and audio quality are all of a sudden a huge problem to this rather vocal minority.

Whatever the case may be, what are your thoughts? Would you rather have sub-par a/v quality or nothing at all? Because honestly those are my only two choices now, and to me content is king. The a/v stuff cannot be helped at the moment since it is 95% caused by my current AT&T DSL service, which provides only 0.5Mpbs upstream. Until another ISP shows up on the mountain, that’s what I get, and I’d much rather have fun in the meantime than not do anything at all.

The other solution would be to just record these in the way I normally do: straight to a high quality MP4. But I can’t do that and livestream at the same time, at least not with non-choppy results or playing on another PC entirely (and I’d need another nice PC, which costs major cash I don’t have). I could forgo the live stream entirely, but that is kind of the point of doing these in the first place. Playing through and recording a game on my lonesome, not live, utterly bores me.

Oh well, whatever. Ultimately I’m going to do what I please and I’m just throwing things out there, this is all experimentation. It’s just annoying that some people take things like “low quality video/audio” so personally, when they were the same ones requesting I do this in the first place. It’s not like I’m trying to make low quality video, I’m trying to have fun and hopefully entertain with what I have at my disposal. I mean really, if it bothers you that much I suppose you can… not watch?

The Sims 3 Pets Create-A-Pet First Impressions video is online

This expansion, frick. I have never had more requests to review one thing! Ever since it was announced months ago the emails have come daily, just insane the anticipation for this in the Simming community.

So much so that EA released a demo today for just the pet creation tool. Here are my first impressions, if anything as a way to let people know that, yes, I am well aware this expansion is incoming.

New LGR Channel on Blip.tv!

The news is finally hitting the mainstream media that blip.tv is going through a complete overhaul/update due to their continued success, and I’m happy to announce my channel was one of those selected to partake!

Back in the beginning of April of this year, I was chosen as one of the channels to get the initial red carpet treatment on blip.tv:

While we will be reaching out to all of our users, only the recipients of this email will receive priority treatment and guaranteed elevated status.

email from blip.tv

As of today, my “new and improved” blip channel is now online! Complete with branding throughout blip and an awesome look on my channel page as well as a wider presence on affiliated networks. Good times.

Check things out here! http://blip.tv/lazygamereviews

Portal 2 Review

My reaction after playing Portal 2 all night

“How is it this good? I mean, holy crap. Inconceivable!”

Atarisoft Larger Boxes

First things first (natch, where else would they be?) I would like to thank everyone for the support regarding this page, blip, and LGR in general! Along with lots of kind words of encouragement, both public and private, I feel that I’m making a pretty solid move expanding the places to watch the show and experience stuff. And there were even a few donations thrown in as a result, of several different kinds, so I thank you all HUGELY for those – you know who you are, even if I don’t. It’s simply awesome and still catches me off guard when I see this kind of support and generosity.

In other news, my continued quest for Apple II-related knowledge is… continuing. Questly. I posted the other day on Twitter about how I found it strange that the Atarisoft games for the Apple II were so much smaller than the IBM PC versions I’d seen before. I had only seen pictures of the boxes online before coming into possession of Moon Patrol and was shocked to see it was so small! After making a joke about what it must have meant for IBM to have such a much larger package than Apple, I ran across this auction photo on eBay:

Odd. It appears Atari did indeed have the larger boxes for Apple II computer games! I wonder if perhaps the smaller ones are later editions? Or if perhaps they just started using smaller boxes for the later arcade ports, like Moon Patrol, Galaxian and Battle Zone. I’m really unsure, but I do know that around the time of those smaller-box games being released (1983) Atari was having some serious trouble as far as money and evil overlords. Could explain something… like maybe the boxes shrunk out of pure fear.

Hopefully I’ll find out soon enough, since I went and bought the whole lot. Seemed like an awesome deal for a sealed lot like that, and I simply adore Atarisoft games. Great ports, they are. Unless they’re one of the few that suck. And those brightly-colored boxes are simply rad to place around the room, like cuboid geeky Matryoshka dolls. Looks like I’ll be able to unbox a Moon Patrol box after all!