Satan Sam.co.uk

It arrived. The machine arrived and it’s very, very fast. The iMac is in my room. It trumps my Powerbook in every respect (though shamefully not in portability). As a little test I tried out the 2 latest PC games I care about – Doom 3 and HL2. Both games ran at their highest resolutions, everything maxed out and was as smooth as butter.
What else should I expect from a dual 64bit CPU? It’s just so damn good. The super high resolutions (1680*1050) actually make HL2 look terrible. Doom 3 is a beauty though. But we knew that 3 years ago!

I still can’t get over how fast this machine is. The iLife applications take a second to boot up, a huge triumph over my PowerBooks ridiculously long 20 second loading. Probably down to the Sata2 drive pushing all this data at a squillion times the speed of a laptop ATA drive.

I’ll be uploading pics and all that when I can be bothered. Right now I’m off to play HL2 Deathmatch on the fastest computer I’ve ever used.

Oh and before I forget – it’s a little daunting that this machine is near enough *silent*. even my fanless HDD enclosure makes more noise than this.

The title sounds so Secret Seven. I’ll be having my custard with lashings of cream next.

First off. I’m now a student of Salford University for my 3rd and final year. I really can’t wait for this year, I love meeting new folk and this should be a riot.

Secondly, and arguably the greatest news ever bragged about on a WordPress blog; I visited GameStation in Manchester today and purchased not 1 excellent NES game but 2. 2 semi-rare gems. 2 Pieces of history. We’re talking about Kirby’s Adventure and Ninja Gaiden (Shadow Warriors) here fellas. MINE. Not yours, you have your Xbox 360′s and the latest GTA clone. I have my dignity.

AND THIS JUST IN. My iMac has shipped. My super bloody machine (we’re back to Secret Seven) should be here in a few days, heck this is Apple’s shipping – make that minutes. I have a series of jolly nice posts cropping up over the next couple of days. Funny things.

The order for my upcoming iMac has been placed. A Core 2 Duo, 2.16ghz, 1gb RAM, 250gb HDD, Bluetooth keyboard and mighty mouse, iSight totting, Media Centre loving, Dualbooting, dual layer, dual core beauty machine will be here in 7 days time. Though if previous Apple purchases have been anything to go off – it should be here in 2-3 days. Heck my iPod Mini arrived just 48 hours after putting the order on.

What does this mean? My own dual-boot Windows machine will enable me to permanently work on my games. Of course the super smooth benchmarks from Doom 3 and co. are just the icing on the cake.

Core 2 Duo are supposed to be blisteringly fast chips too. I’m curious to see how they stack up against my most commonly used machines, my 1.5ghz G4 and my 3ghz P4. THAT IS ALL.

More graphics for my upcoming game

This has been in the making for the past 18 hours. Another “Jim and Tom” game, the spiritual sequel to Jetball.

I thought about colouring the original drawing last night, but that was about 3am. I was going to work on The New Johnny Devine but figured I’d love to listen to ELO and the Lightning Seeds and colour this in. Joy at its best.
CLICK FOR FULL SIZE PIC. It isn’t much bigger though.

Took me a couple of hours. First pencil drawing since my GCSEs about 5 years ago.

Gemma, Joel and Allen. Did a little bit of characaturing. I can’t escape my roots

Sorry I had to leave you all in the lurch like that. You all know I’ve been updating the site. So here we are! Some things you might notice -

+ New Paintball Series and Retro pages in the Games section
+ Linkage! You can now quickly add my posts, if the need should ever arise, to Digg and the rest. Of course you need to be a member of them sites. But the option is there.
+ New header! I wasn’t happy with the old one.
+ New name! Just to make finding this place easier for the Sam players.
+ Massively updated Gallery. All the pics now fit in the window and I’ve updated them.
+ Live Archives! It’s best to be seen really.
+ New boards in the forums to reflect the new games.
+ New art. Just a little update to fix left over graphics from the old theme.

I think I’m done updating now. I’m very happy with this place for the time being. What do you think? Again I’m really sorry for springing the downtime on you guys.

My Mac just crashed for the very first time. It was quite beautiful in a way, like seeing the needle marks on a flawless model, or realising that Hollyoaks isn’t that bad. Scrolling down a page using my mouse’s scroll pad it just zonked out. Froze. Held in the power button and we were back on in 30 or so seconds.

I first used this PowerBook on the 1st of February 2004. If this is indeed a pattern that began on day #1 then my next crash will be in 2008. Wish me luck!

Gotta say, I love the feeling coming home from anywhere, back to your own house… your own bedroom… your own bed. I missed my room so much. Yea that’s it really. For now! Carolines currently playing Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow… she just died again. bless her! she’s up to The Pinnacle but really isn’t at a strong enough level to have a pleasant enemy kill-a-thon. And she is so stubborn! She loves the Katana class weapons but they’re really not designed for these later levels. Give me the Claimh Solais anyday.