Heath C. Ice

I attended the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX Prime) this past weekend. I was absolutely blown away by the attendance at PAX, 70,000 people. It was ridiculous! I had no idea it was that big. That is many times the population of the entire town I live in! There is a lot I can write about my experience at PAX, and I might get around to it this weekend. For now, though, let’s focus on some of the Cosplay I saw.

There was a lot of Cosplay that I didn’t get pictures or video of. The one that makes me saddest of is the exceptional Captain Jack Sparrow costume and role-playing that some asian gentlemen did. He played it up with the walk, the demeanor, the attitude, the voice, everything! Having said that, here is the Cosplay I got pictures of.

First, here is Princess Peach and a couple of her friends.

I saw Princess Peach at another point during PAX and decided I needed to get a picture of me with her. At this point I was asking for pictures with a number of the cosplay people, or at least the cute ones.

Speaking of the Mario Brothers’ world, I found Mario and Luigi enjoying some pizza for lunch on the last day of PAX. I figured it was fitting so I had to get a picture.

While walking around the exhibit area I found these three Robins.

Sadly, what convention would be complete without at least one appearance by everyone’s favorite bear! I saw a few other Pedobears, but this was the only one I had my camera out so I could get a picture.

Here is yet another reason I need to look into getting a TARDIS. Granted, I can’t help but look at a TARDIS dress and think it’s advertising “You’d be surprised just how much is packed into this seemingly small dress.” As much as I try, that thought just will not leave my mind. I think I’ll take my chances though. I wish I had found her again so I couldn’t have gotten a picture with her. Oh well.

I have to be honest, I have no idea what show the people in this next picture are from. I just thought they had nice costumes so I asked them for a picture.

This is probably my second favorite cosplay picture from PAX. Although I never saw Felicia Day at PAX, here is a lady who did a really nice job of dressing like Codex from “The Guild.” I couldn’t NOT get a picture with her.

My favorite picture is definitely of me with the two hot nuns! They were at a booth for the upcoming Frima Studios game “Nun Attack.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a picture when there were two girls at the booth. I had seen 3 working at various times. Somehow I will learn to live with only getting this picture!

Last, but not least, we have two good looking ladies dressed as Sub-Zero and Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. They were posing in various fighting positions so people could get pictures. My picture didn’t turn out to good, but the short video I took turned out nicely.

I am a lazy bastard and I have been meaning to test this for days. Last week, Apple released a software update as shown below.

I found this strange since Apple is typically pretty vague about what it has fixed in many software updates. Good job on the part of Valve and Blizzard though in putting pressure on Apple to fix it’s graphics drivers. Anyways, I was curious if this would allow my Starcraft II install to run better on OSX. Previously, I could not run Starcraft II on “Ultra” graphics settings without having a framerate issue on my quad-core i7 iMac. With this new update though, I am not able to run with “Ultra” settings! I am happy. Granted that when I ran this test, Blizzard also installed an update, so that could have also affected the results. Anyways, I am looking forward now to better and better graphics performance in games on OSX!!!

Starcraft II looks beautiful with all graphics settings at high, but many people have computers that are a few years old and cannot handle these higher graphics settings. While I was messing around earlier today I decided to get a screenshot of the same scene with high graphics settings and then low graphics settings.

Starcraft II with High Graphics Settings

Starcraft II with Low Graphics Settings

Even at the lowest graphics settings, the games was easily playable. In some ways, the lower settings were easier use because everything was very basic and it was easier to see many of the units against the background. At times, I have found myself distracted by all of the extra details and colors in both the background and the units of Starcraft II. I plan to play with my settings until I find those which give me the best gameplay.

A friend has been successful in playing Starcraft II on Windows XP with just a 2GHz AMD Athlon processor. His computer does meet the bare minimum for video card and RAM. I do not know his exact graphics settings, but they were a mixture of low and medium. According to him, the gameplay was smooth and he had no issues. So, if you have a computer that is close to, but not quite, the stated “minimum requirements,” you may be surprised at just how playable the game is without having to shell out $100s for a new computer right now!

As a final note, to those that look at the difference between high settings and low settings and think, “the low settings look horrible,” how many times did you play (and possible recently played) using the graphics settings shown below?

Screenshot from Original Starcraft

Blizzard, you almost had your Downloader for Starcraft II correct. Fortunately, you are one of the companies smart enough to use bittorrent to distribute your installers and patches. This is a fact that I love as it typically leads to faster downloads and I am more than happy to contribute most of my upload bandwidth towards allowing others to download from me, which eases to burden on your servers and allows more people to gain access at one time. Please note, though, that I said SOME of my upload bandwidth. For a reason that I cannot fathom, other than laziness on your part, you have failed to include explicit upload/download rate controls in your Starcraft II Downloader. After 3 hours of downloading and having issues with websurfing (due to your program saturating my upload bandwidth), I finally had to disable peer-to-peer downloading and instead burden your server with the full download of Starcraft II. I may decide to turn on peer-to -peer connections when I go to bed in a few hours, but seeing as my download is progressing at the exact same speed either way, I really don’t care. Please, for the love of god and all that is holy, IMPLEMENT throttling in your downloaders from now on! Every bittorrent client I have ever used has this ability, except for yours!

As a sidenote while I am at it, Apple, IMPLEMENT TORRENTING SUPPORT AND THROTTLING IN ITUNES!!! I am sick of large podcast downloads making my internet unusable for half an hour or more at a time!