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! ! Are you kidding me?? Are we talking about the same winless, and sorry-lookin' Buffalo Bills? The one minus Jim Kelly and Marv Levy due to retirement, minus Bryce Paup due to free agency, and minus Andre Reed due to injury? The same #1 total offense, undefeated 49ers here? Okay enough sarcasm. =) This is without doubt the number one upset of this NFL season so far. Thanks to the NFL record-tying amount of penalties by the 49ers, the Bills run up a commanding 23 - 0 score at the end of three quarters. They received a scare when the 49ers score three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, but hold on to win 26 - 21. That just proves, there are no such things as a "Lock of the Week" in the National Football League. A R O U N D --T H E --R I C E * 22:43 UPDATE: Even on Saturdays Gerry does not rest. Review of Ronin, starring Robert DeNiro, directed by John Frankenheimer. Go ahead and indulge.... you know you want to. =) What a slow weekend so far. Besides the hoard of demos, nothing very important is happening that is worth mentioning. Wrote up the review for Midway's "NFL Blitz". Go check it out in the "Reviews" section. Otherwise, go ballistic because of the excess boredom... like what I'm doing now. =) 3 1 --M O S T --B E A U T I
F U L --P E O P L E Be sure to check it out, Gerry Wang has published his exclusive "30 most beautiful people" list for Rice World fully loaded with 10 random pictures of them pretties, and is now posted in the "Articles" section. Does the guy never sleep? Good work Gerry. Wait a minute... who's the 31st? D E M O --M A D N E S
S ! Bored at home with nothing to do? You're in luck, because this weekend, a sack full of demos have been loaded up to the internet to fill your hours during your boring day! We'll start off with ... ... Monolith's highly anticipated "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division" first person 3D shooter (another one?!) now has a demo fried up for your tasting pleasure. Shogo is anime based, and heavy on single-player gaming instead of the traditional multiplayer deathmatch for traditional 3D shooters. Shogo is constructed by the Lithtech Engine, the same one that will be used for Monolith's "Blood 2" (Blood 1 used 3D Realm's Build engine, the one that Duke Nukem 3D made famous). I've been hearing a lot of praise for Lithtech, for its flexability and smoothness, etc... But then again, the meat of 3D shooters flagged to launch the 4th quarter of this year has yet to be released. Grab the demo at PlanetShogo here: Click! Racing fans get to enjoy two fast-paced arcade styled racing games this weekend, starting off with Dethkarz. If the name of the game gave you any indication at all, Dethkarz is one helluva awesome racing game. In the demo, you get to drive the Hyperon and race at mach "who knows how fast" speeds over skyscrapers with the teeming metropolis city below. Neato! Get it here: Click! The second racing game is developed by Sierra, called "Viper Racing". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what car this game features... none other than Dodge's own blazing-fast Viper. Not much info on this game yet, maybe perhaps this is only a preliminary demo. Want it anyways? Quick, click here! Rounding out is the --Civilization Clone-- category, featuring Bullfrog's "Populous 3: The Beginning". The previous Populous games have sold very well for Bullfrog. The game allows you, the player, to be God in the world of Populous. You control their destiny, very much like SimCity / Civilization / Caesar. Make your men build great empires and crush the opposition followed by their inevitable assimilation. In addition to the tradional Civ. clone traits, they feature real-time 3D game world (with 3D accelerator support) and 360-degree rotation. Click! You know you want it... N E W S . . . Y A W N . . . News has been trickling along lately... I guess the world's getting pretty boring now a days. Clinton shmuck drags on, baseball playoffs drag on, computer industry continues to crank out previews of "upcoming" games, etc... Oh well, at least Gerry should keep you fellows enternained for a while during this stalemate. NFL week 5 previews and picks are up in the "Articles" section, along with the review of Sierra's Caesar III in the "Reviews" section. Chow down! V I D E O --P I C K --O F --T H E --W E E K Gerry continues to plug away at the keyboard of his computer, and today, he cranks out his first "Video Pick of the Week", which you can go enjoy in the "Articles" section. This week is the little-known movie called "Dangerous Beauty". Personally, I haven't seen this before, nor heard of hit, but Gerry (a.k.a. mega movie-buff) writes a detailed review definitely worth checking out. Of course, you can always surf on over to Mr. Showbiz to check out its collection of thousands and thousands of professional reviews. F O R T U N E --C I T Y --P O W E R --O U T A G E Good ol' unreliable ultra unstable Fortune City server suffered a major power outage around 5:00 PST today. Don't know when it'll be resolved. Its so-called Engineers are supposedly working endless hours on this problem. Due to the fluctuating stability of Fortune City servers, I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. >=( As usual, if you can read this, that probably means it's already been resolved. Check out the neon-green numbers for the date and time I posted this, and compare to see how long their "college-educated network engineers" take to patch up Fortune City. A R O U N D --T H E --R I C E Every week or so I put up a topic called "Around the Rice", which basically means "what's going on with the website" or "I just don't know what to put down as the topic". =) This week, we honor the addition of Gerry Wang, a new staff member that will dedicate to writing reviews (since he has a nice fast connection at UCLA and a better computer than my poor ol' Pentium 100) and various articles on whatever he chooses. Mix in a delightful roguish humor and a precision grading scale, Gerry is a welcome addition. Already up is the Madden NFL 99 review, so don't hesitate to check it out in the "Reviews" section! For your information, staff spots are still available in Rice World, so if you feel you can contribute with your opinions and reviews, we would be glad to accept you. *Note: this is entirely non-profit, so don't hold your breath waiting to be paid. As a side note, I am still working on the Eastern Sierras article. It's quite lengthy, since it covers nearly 3 days of exploration and fun, so it'll be up as soon as I complete it. Just didn't want you to think I forgot about it. =) L I F E --R O C K S !
! Apologies for non-updates. Have been very tired lately. Got back from Lake Arrowhead Saturday night, and to tell you, it was a great experience. A group of us guys (seven including Mr. Nichols) drove up to where Big Bear, California is, and spent Friday night and Saturday morning at Mr. Nichols's one million dollar cabin. To tell you the truth, the outside of the two story cabin was not much of an eye candy, but inside was warm, cozy, with a nice large fireplace and comfortable carpeting and beds. Spent the night talking and playing some cards, basically relaxing in front of the fire and the humming of the television tuned to ABC's 20/20. We had dinner outside, and for me, it was very cold weather. I managed to load up with 4 jackets and a t-shirt underneath. =) The next morning, a couple of guys headed off with Mr. Nichols out the cabin to do an early hiking. I, being the big sleepy-head I am, slept in until about 10:30 a.m. =) After a nice breakfast which consisted of way too many waffles, we headed off towards Lake Arrowhead, where the freshest mountain spring water is bottled and sold at Ralphs supermarket for 79 cents. The wind was biting cold, but the lake itself was warmer than the air. We proceeded to take a tour of the lake in Mr. Nichols's boat called the "Sea Ray" at a whipping 50 miles per hour. A lot of us (including myself) managed to get very wet. In addition, we toured around the lake looking at the mega cabins that line the shores. Two, three story cabins with exquisite docks and vegetation are reputed to be worth over 5 million dollars each. That's an impressive sum. The main event, water skiing, took place afterwards. 3 out of 6 of us tried (I stayed out of the water), and 0 out of 6 of us succeeded. Valient attempts were repeated over and over again until near 5 in the afternoon. By then, everybody was cold and shivering, but pumped up about nearing success even though they failed. Snap shots were taken of people struggling in water! Once they are developed, I will post them up. =) The trip ended at Hometown buffet somewhere on the San Bernadino freeway where we stopped for dinner. I wish all of my weekends were spent like this! G A M E S --A N D --S H M U C K
. . . A couple of updates ago, I mentioned about the new SiN demo. Well, it's out now, so those of you with strong enough computers go grab it! The new 2.16 patch for Epic Megagames's hit "Unreal" is out. Unreal is another one of those 3D first person shooters (aren't you sick of those by now?) but it's not just another... it's the best 3D engine out in the industry as of yet, and if you've ever played the game, the graphics are absolutely breathtaking. It was released a while ago, but internet multiplay was a total joke with Unreal. People with Cable Modems had problem playing with the extreme amount of lag! Anyways, I digress. The 2.16 patch is supposed to fix all that internet lag shmuck, so Unreal fans, don't hesitate, head on over to your favorite gaming site, or PlanetUnreal, and stick your chop sticks in. R E G U L A R --S E A S O N
--B A S E B A
L L ... has just ended! Mark McGwire sets an unprecedented record of SEVENTY home runs in a season! When Babe Ruth slammed 60 many moons ago, it was told that he exclaimed, "Sixty, count 'em sixty! Let's see some other S.O.B. match that!!". Boy, I wonder what the babe would say if he were alive today. Sammy Sosa lags behind at 66 but... The Chicago Cubs are in a wild-card tie with the San Francisco Giants, and they will play a tie-breaker game Monday at Chicago's Wrigley Field in the afternoon. This should be an exciting game (what? baseball? exciting? I think not)... or at least a meaningful one. In other notes... The New York Yankees has ended the regular season at 112 wins, that's over 70% wins. A new American League record... Bernie Williams of the New York Yankees wrestled Mo Vaughn of the Boston Red Sox for the Ameriacn league batting title (highest average). Williams comes out on top with a solid .339 average... Larry Walker of the Colorado Rockies ran away with the National League batting title with a .350'ish average. What a season huh? Isn't baseball great? I can't wait for the playoffs to start... |