As it looks at this point with 12 games to go this season is probably in the books for the Maple Leafs and they will most likely miss the playoffs again this year being 6 points back from 8th right now. Sure they could technically get to that 8th position but in order to get there The Hurricanes, Sabres and maybe even the Rangers need to stop winning and statistically that looks unlikely. Now while this is of course this is once again disappointing for us leafs fans there is some hope to be taken from this season.
Improvement
This year is the first year since returning from the lockout that the team has actually shown improvement. Since the lockout the team has progressively gotten worse until hitting rock bottom last year. Right now the team has 4 players with over 20 goals, 3 of those players may finish over 30 this season and we have seen the 3rd and 4th lines become a contributing force to the team. Grabo’s line has been phenomenal this year scoring several hero moments over the year to help pull us out of the bottom and into the playoff race we were just in.
James Riemer
This kid has been stellar since coming up in January. I know his last few games may have been a bit rough but we have been riding him pretty much this entire half of the season and I am not surprised that it has caught up with him a bit. This kid will finish with a better winning record than Giggy this season and I expect to see him back as the #1 guy next season. If he can survive the pressure of Toronto it should be a whole different game next year. What gets me the most about this kid is he always seems happy. Most goalies have traditionally looked criminally insane and I suppose having a job where you are pelted with rubber for 2 and a half hours would require a level of Insanity but James is happy, cool and willing to take ownership of his mistakes. I look forward to seeing him next season.
So while yes, this season is most likely another playoff wash for us Toronto fans we have seen actual genuine improvement this year and if this trend continues into next season we will be back in the playoff game next season and hopefully serious contenders the season after. There are good times ahead
Share your thoughts
As anyone with a Mac has noticed. It isn’t like windows as far as games go. These days you can get most popular PC games on the Mac as well but what about those old favourites that keep begging you to play them from your shelf? Well for me I wouldn’t switch to a platform that couldn’t play all my old Wing Commander games but that was not a problem at all with the Mac.
DosBOX
This multi platform gem makes all your classic DOS games enjoyable and fairly easy to get started on. I have been using DOSBox for about 4 years now mainly to play all my Wing Commander games and it fufills this task with ease from WC1 all the way to WC4. If you want to use custom configurations it came be slightly irritating as you have to go digging in your ~/Library/Preferences looking for the Dosbox.conf but in most cases that is unnecessary
BootCamp
Dual boot you Mac, Have you cake and eat it too. On my Mac i have Windows XP on dual boot which I have used for new and old games, the latest being when I beta tested Lego universe (it’s actually quite fun). This one takes a bit of work and also having to put up with Windows problems on your fancy Mac like viruses, slow boots, crashes. Optimal performance but the most hassle.
Virtualization
This one is nice for low power games because you don’t have to reboot and if your VM has those annoying windows problems develop you can revert to snapshot. I used to use Parallels Desktop for the longest time it had the best integration and graphics performance however since VMware Fusion 3.0 I have switched (not just cause I work there, it actually has improved). My cons for this are anything more recent takes a performance hit because obviously you are running a computer inside a computer.
Wine
This is really why I am writing this post in the first place. All the above methods I have used in the past (DosBOX I still use for dos games) but more recently I have been playing games directly in Mac OS X with WINE. This originally started because of Worms Armageddon which since Windows XP Sp2 has been the biggest pain in the ass to get to work on any version of windows. Team 17 has released several patches to counter this in the past but still, big pain in the ass. A few months ago I installed Wine on my Linux system at work and tried Worms armageddon and to my surprise it worked absolutely perfectly. Finally I had found a way to play the best Worms game that ever came out and to top it off it still worked multi player and people still played it multi player. So After this blazing success I decided to try out some other classics I enjoy and I have had some big hits and misses
- Star Trek Elite force: Works great and runs better than the Mac native version I have
- Star Trek Bridge commander: Flawless, every aspect of this game runs beautifully
- Star Trek Armada II: Single player skirmish and campaign run perfect, the menus getting to the game are a tich slow and multi doesnt work but I enjoy this for the single player aspect
- Train Simulator: At first I didn’t think this worked but when I updated it to the latest version of the game it runs fairly well and allows me to train sim it up without suffering through booting into windows and updating virus software. This one is good news for railfans who might like to try a different platform or computer.
- C&C Red alert 1 and 2: Ooooh yea
Essentially for the classic gamer DosBOX and WINE give a great 1 2 punch now for playing your favorite games without the hassle of setting up a second OS. There’s no reason your old favorite games have to keep collecting dust anymore after switching to a new platform.
Share your thoughts
Been awhile since my last post, things got busy in the last few months and now as of 2 weeks ago I have twin boys so even less time than before. I managed to update my galleries with the rest of my 2010 photos and added brand new 2011 photos.
The following albums are updated:
2010
Kentucky 2010
Scale models
2011
Share your thoughts
A new round of Doomsday has begun with the launch of new version 1.3
Changes:
- Static accounts: your account remains after death and between rounds
- New time based game: An asteroid will hit the Earth at a specified date regardless if someone has won or not which will increase pressure on the players to advance the game
- Shuttle limitation: No more spamming shuttles, should lead to an interesting end game
- New research item: A new research item has been added to improve your nations efficiency…find it and gain the advantage
- More random events! The random event list has gone from 8 to 18 this round
- E-mail notifications: with the new setemail command you can add an e-mail address to your player which will be notified whenever you are attacked or bombed
Clients available:
Web: https://www.philtopia.com/?page_id=22
IRC: irc.blitzed.org & irc.slashnet.org #doomsday irc.undernet.org #conquest
Telnet: philtopia.com
Help page: https://www.philtopia.com/?page_id=34
Good luck!
Share your thoughts
Doomsday 1.2.6 has been out for almost a year now and after about 5 or 6 rounds last year it has somewhat stalled (usually does) and I disabled winning after Frenzi played and won by himself 10 times after it stalled so it is time to plan out the future and get another set of fresh rounds rolling!
Planned Features:
Accounts:
- Static user accounts: Your user account will remain between rounds. If you are not part of a round and log in you will be newplayered.
- E-mail notifications for any live messages you would get logged in
New game Modes:
- Time based game: You will have X days to escape or everybody dies including whoever may think they are in the lead
- Shuttle limited mode: One shuttle in space at a time, we’ll see what happens
Game mechanic improvements:
- New lifestyle improvement, do more with less but I will not be specific about what it is going to be as it’s a suprise.
- New Random events, the event system has worked great since creation but we could use much more random events to keep things interesting including the use of the lottery system that was implemented in the background years ago but never used
WordPress Plugin
Doomsday already has a web client, telnet and IRC and I am planning to include a WordPress plugin for release. This will integrate similar to as my web client and is mainly going to be to get the game revived nerd attention.
The big change will be the game modes and static accounts which I think will greatly improve the game. With this public list of goals I now have something to work towards and hopefully will have this done in a short amount of time. Feel free to prod me if there doesn’t appear to be any progress.
6 Comments
