The Save Spot

Power User: a guide to saving money

 

 

 

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an environmentalist. 

I am, however, someone who likes to squeeze every last ounce of efficiency from everything I do.  I may not be an engineer, but I really appreciate a clean design.  I especially like this in my computers and gaming systems.  Because of this philosophy, I’m always on the lookout for new ways to improve the usage of my time, squeeze out some extra gas mileage, or get a bit more performance from my PC. 

Frankly, it’s more fun to me to take an old PC, car, office and see how efficient I can make it than going out and buying something brand new.  But there’s one area that I’ve really been neglecting: power usage.  While I’ve always turned out the lights as I leave the room, I never really decided to get “energy efficient.”  It just wasn’t a major concern for me.

But as the economy tanks, and job prospects look grim, squeezing every nickel out of our lifestyles is becoming more attractive.  So while I may not be an environmentalist, I do like money! 

So how do we get more energy efficient?  Well a good place to start is Google’s power calculator.  According to this calculator, I could save close to $300 just by making a few changes to how I power down my computers and consoles.  Which means I could buy 6 brand new PC games, 30 used games, or 1 new console by this time next year. 

What’s not to like about that?

A couple of useful tips from Green Home Huddle:

• 1.  Unplug your devices
• 2.  Plug your devices and chargers into a power strip
• 3.  Remove chargers from the wall when you’re not charging

  

And then a few not so much from Climate Savers:

• 1.  Turn down the brightness setting on your monitor
• 2.  Use a laptop instead of a desktop
• 3.  Trade in a computer for a rock and some crayons

  

Ok, so maybe that last one wasn’t really their suggestion. 

If you want to turn down your monitor’s brightness or use a laptop instead of a PC, go for it.  But that’s just not for me.  Energy is made to be used, and so I intend to use it to power my entertainment.  I’m all for saving money and reducing the impact to the environment, but not at the cost of my gaming experience. 

How about you?  Do you have any good power saving techniques? 

 

Smashing Time Wasters

 

 

 

I’ve been playing Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for my xbox the last week or so.  And I want to like the game.  I really do.  But there’s something that has been keeping me from truly enjoying it: repetitive missions.

I can’t stand to repeat things.

Especially in games.

I have a limited amount of time in my life to play video games.  Work, friends, projects, and writing take up a huge percentage of time I used to devote to gaming.  Because of that I have to be selective with my time.  And that means avoiding games where you have to play through the same level multiple times.

If I want a feeling of accomplishing nothing, I’ll go to work.  (Kidding.) 

But in a way that’s true.  Our “normal” lives are filled with repetition.  Feeding the dog, taking out the garbage, eating a sandwich for lunch every day.  Whatever your routine is, it’s repetitive.  And that serves an important function.

The problem is that it’s not fun.  Repetitiveness is designed to produce stability and predictability - not excitement and thrill.  So why are these elements added to our video games?

I don’t find chasing after the same fast truck 15 times all that enjoyable.  Sure it may make the game more difficult.  But is that really the goal?  Should games be hard or fun?  Why are they even in competition?

Well I think you no my answer to that one, so I won’t repeat myself.

    

Guitar Hero 2: Hind Sight

 

 

 

As a kid Voltron was my favorite cartoon. Not even GI Joe or Transformers could compete. In fact, my love of that show left such an impression on me, I can still vividly remember watching it.

One day in particular stands out - for some reason I came home early from school. I don’t remember if I was sick, or had a doctor’s appointment or what. But I was home and I knew Voltron was going to be on.

The anticipation I felt knowing that I was going to sneak in an extra episode was intense. The irony is all I really remember from that day was my anticipation. But in many ways that’s all that mattered. I loved Voltron and I was convinced nothing could change that.

And nothing did. Until last year when Cartoon Network began airing the show.

Let’s just say it didn’t age well. In fact it aged so poorly that I’m in disbelief that I ever thought Voltron was good. How did I miss the gaping holes in the plot? The horrible voice acting? Even the animation was awful. In short, what was I thinking?!

That’s what I fear is happening to Guitar Hero 2.

Having spent 4 days playing Rock Band with friends, Guitar Hero just seems empty. It’s like I’m trying to play catch by myself. Sure it’s fun for the first few minutes. But walking across the field to get the ball gets old.

Don’t get me wrong, Guitar Hero was an awesome game. It’s simply been eclipsed by a much better game. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the way the video game industry works.

Everything I thought was fun and cool about Guitar Hero has been improved by Rock Band. The songs are better, downloadable content is awesome, and playing with friends is just fantastic.

I even prefer the Rock Band controller.

The problem is I don’t own Rock Band. I don’t even own a 360. And while I’ve enjoyed not worrying about the Red Ring of Death, now I find myself thinking about that green and white console. I just don’t think I can go back to playing Guitar Hero regularly.

Sometimes learning something new really ruins the old experience.

GAUGE VII Performance Report

 

 

Our gaming and entertainment extravaganza GAUGE VII is now in the books.  A fantastic five days in Seattle, we have all now returned to our ‘normal’ work and lives as busy gamers.  We wrote about our gaming goals previously, and since performance measurement and tracking is very important an update is warranted!  As you can see from this performance report, the overall success of the event can hardly be questioned.  We had base goals and stretch goals for each of our achievements, and scored ourselves up to 100% for accomplishing a goal and up to 150% for a strech goal.  Based on this scoring methodology, our GAUGE VII performance was 110.8% - in other words on average we accomplished all our goals and over 20% of our strech goals!  Considering the large quantity of goals we set for this year, we consider this a major success.  Some key performance highlights are noted below.

Rock Band:  Our band The Wutai Clan (guitar, bass, and drums) was formed and performing for just five days and achieved over 1.5 Million fans.  This met our stretch goal of beating the world tour mode on ‘hard’ difficulty.  You can bet we’ll be reuniting the band at GAUGE VII to play more on ‘expert’ difficulty.   

Futurama:  We successfully decoded the alien language in futurama over the first half-dozen episodes of the first season.  We overcame several obstacles in this project.  The first in-episode alien alphabet symbols, five of them forming one word, appeared on an advertisement for the beverage “Slurm“.  As a reasonable working hypothesis we tried to decypher other signs by assuming the alien word was also Slurm.  Several episodes in, however, this started to appear less likely.  A second obstacle, we watched several episodes with no alien alphabet appearing at all!  Finally, we caught a break when a sign on a shop door had the word “Open” in english and four alien alphabet characters below it.  Using these four characters as a key, we were able to puzzle out several other signs including “Venusians Go Home”, “Tasty Human Burgers”, and “Don’t Drink The Emperor”.  Looking back to that first sign, we see that the alien word was “drink” and not “Slurm” - doh!  With these signs translated, we feel confident that further signs in the game will be decypherable - we’ve got all the vowels and most of the common letters.  We’ll put it to the test in GAUGE VIII, no doubt!

A few points where we came up short are worth noting as well.

X-Men Legends II:  We had high hopes of finishing Act 5 of this game, which we started playing in GAUGE VI.  Unfortunately, we kept running into disk read errors on the Xbox I’ve had since launch in 2001!  We were almost able to cleverly circumvent the problem by booting up to the Xbox Media Center and loading the game to the hard drive, but unfortunately we couldn’t get the Media Center to boot again afterwards!  We had to pass on this goal after making it about 25% of the way through Act 5.

Gauntlet:  With so many other good games to play, we just didn’t sit down with this classic.  A failure of gaming or goal-setting?  Either way, we had to score ourselves 0% for this one.

You can expect more coverage of GAUGE VII in the days to come, and a facelift for the site as well.