Acer & Vista Upgrade from Moduslink
Interesting tidbit from the PCWorld forums for those of us with Acer laptops waiting on our free Vista upgrades.
http://forums.pcworld.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=32036
It seems as though they may start shipping as of May 1. That’s progress, I suppose. Acer taking so long to get it handled is a bit disappointing, but since I won’t be installing it until fall at earliest it doesn’t make that much of a difference for me.
Things that are good
1) Shadow of the Colossus is washing away those Buffy related frustrations.
2) Some of the stuff I’ve put up on eBay has sold, been paid for, and shipped off. Less stuff in the apartment! More money in the paypal account!
3) Suchie Pai III is coming out for DS and PSP. This is my favorite mahjong series and it’s been PC-only since the Dreamcast game was released - the Dreamcast game being one of exactly two titles I have that do NOT work with the VGA cable. An outrage, I tell you. Also, in today’s climate it will likely be a more, hmm, “family friendly” mahjong game than previous Suchie Pai games, but it should still be fun. I’m thinking that the DS version is the one for me since it puts the mahjong board on the bottom screen leaving the top free for character art.
4) I have discovered “Lucky Star”, a new and very funny anime series that lots of folks seem to compare to Azumanga Daioh. It’s a little goofier and the characters don’t have a lot of depth yet, but I’ve enjoyed the three episodes I’ve seen so far.
Y Buffy Kant Swim?
So this week’s games have been P.N. 03 on the Gamecube and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for Xbox. I haven’t gotten far enough into P.N.03 to really talk about it, but I’ve seen a bit more of Buffy, enough to decide to put it aside as not worth finishing.
This is a harsh statement, particularly painful because the game starts brilliantly, the story is enjoyable, and the combat system is simple, but lets you pull off some really cool moves once you dig into it.
The problem is this: In about the second level of the game, you have to fight Spike. Sorry for the spoiler. He’s a tough enough fight on his own, and then you need to face off against a bunch of other vampires while you’re already low on health and short healing items.
This is the only time in the game where you are at any risk of dying to a vampire, zombie, or any form of demon. Seriously. The game throws healing items at you left and right - to the point where I kept having to skip picking up more because my inventory was full. From then on, it’s demon bashin’ fun with Buffy and an assortment of dangerous toys - it’s surprisingly fun to dismember zombies with a shovel or sledgehammer.
What’s left to provide a challenge? The environment. Buffy can’t swim, for instance. Levels have lots of water in them. If you fall into water - instant death. There’s lots of molten metal, too, in one level, but I don’t have any complaints about that, if it weren’t for the next factor:
Buffy is dumb. I mentioned Ico a few weeks ago, and if you’ve played that you probably have a few harsh words for Yorda. Buffy makes Yorda look like a genius.
“Hey, Buffy! In front of you is a bar you can hang on to, and also a pit full of molten metal! When I press the jump button, which will you choose?”
She seems to instinctively pick the lethal option. It’s worse if you have to do any combat near a hazard, because her combat animations tend to chain into each other and you can punch and kick your way right into the aforementioned lethal water.
Even with that, it was still worth playing, until I got to the next-to-last level. This is where the developers thought to themselves, “Wow, this game is actually kind of short. How should we make it longer?”
You get a level that, yes, has a few things in it to fight, but they’re never any real threat. Ignore them. What will kill you here is that the level is a series of platform jumps, where missing any of the jumps means an unrecoverable fall to your death. Miss one jump - or fail to jump off the platform you just jumped TO in time - and it starts you over at the beginning of the level. I will also mention that making Buffy jump in a straight line instead of at a weird angle seems to be a matter of pure dumb luck.
Buffy the fighting-vampires game is a really great game, and I recommend it. Buffy the platform game is a mess. It’s a shame that they come on the same disc.
The internet is a powerful and terrible thing
Set the wayback machine to 1997, when the Saturn ruled the earth, crushing lesser syst…
Oh, all right, it was already obviously on the way out in the US and all English speaking countries, but some of us didn’t buy into the whole Crash Bandicoot-is-your-god hype, and for us few, Saturnworld was one of the better news sites. Their URL directs to ign.com now, I suppose that’s better than one of those “buy this domain!” sites.
One day, Saturnworld posted a very bizarre little movie to their site. It featured a bunny-eared, busty, anthropomorphic Saturn console singing about things that were white. Given bandwidth at the time, it was a 160×120 heavily compressed Quicktime movie. And, in retrospect, it wasn’t anything all that special but it was weird and funny enough to stick in my head.
Today, I had the thought - what would happen if I went up on Youtube and typed “サターン” into their search box.
Page 2 of results. Who’da thunk?:
It turns out that it originated from a Tech Saturn Magazine demo disc. I only got one issue of Tech Saturn ever - it wasn’t a really common magazine to find in Los Angeles - and it wasn’t the right issue. I found Saturn Super much more often.
Nekomimi fan-service
It seems like about half the hits I get from search engines are people searching on “nekomimi” - so, in an attempt to give my readers what they want, which is not me griping about school or droning on about what 10-year-old game I’m going to play next, here is a picture of a Hazuki figure I bought in Akihabara on our December 2005 vacation. It was one of the ones that comes in a box with no indication of which figure you’ll get, and I was really hoping for the Hazuki-in-big-flouncy-dress figure, but I won’t complain.
Click picture for bigger version.
You know, when I was taking this, I didn’t even notice the nekomimi-Rei figure behind her. Double fan-service!
Stuff, the accumulation thereof
There’s one unavoidable fact about being a fanboy - you accumulate stuff.
This is a hell of a lot of fun. I think, for most fanboys, the act of buying something cool is in itself almost as much fun as the owning of whatever you’ve bought.
The slight downside is that you eventually wind up with a Lot of Stuff. And, unless you’re constantly upgrading your living space, eventually the Stuff is going to take over.
I did significantly scale back buying toys and statues and such a few years ago, with fairly good results, and we stopped going to thrift stores looking for cool vintage computer hardware and video games. Both of those slowed the Stuff Onslaught a great deal. Nowadays, most of what comes into our lives is in a DVD case, or a jewelcase, or a book. Those are pretty easy to store… and we’ve bought a LOT of shelving in the last couple of years.
The next step - getting rid of some of the stuff that’s not so easy to manage, while not getting rid of anything I’ll regret - that’s tougher, especially since a lot of it is vintage video game stuff and not-so-vintage toys, and while I don’t want to throw it away, the concept of doing ten thousand eBay auctions makes me gibber just a little.
So… in an attempt to save my sanity… lot auctions. Toss 30 or so Colecovision cartridges in an auction, put it up and pray that whatever I get from it covers the cost of putting it in a box and shipping it wherever it’s going. That kind of thing. Anything that doesn’t even make its minimum bid goes to the nearest dumpster and in so doing helps boost the rarity of whatever it was by just a little bit. I’m doing a service for collectors, really.
My first goals: Reclaim one quarter of one closet. If that goes well, work from there.
Defining “Success”
One of the great things about being a guy is there are whole industries devoted almost exclusively to pandering to you.
Hence we get games like Dead or Alive Xtreme 2.
Another great thing about being a guy is not having to feel shame when you buy a game like Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, and one of the great things about having a very tolerant wife is that when the game was released last year, she rolled her eyes and said “we’re getting a 360 now, aren’t we?”
On the other hand, it’s a difficult game to define “beaten” - and lately I’ve been all about finishing games to some level of satisfaction.
Most of the time I consider a game beaten once I get the ending credits and animation, etc. In DOAX2, you could do that by playing through the first day with your initial partner and then sitting next to the pool for 13 days. Not really a challenge.
For stuff like Mahjong games - see above reference to having no shame - I consider them beaten once I’ve unlocked everything, if they have unlockable stuff, or once I’ve played through the story with every character I care about if there’s nothing to unlock. The only Mahjong games I’ve managed to “beat” by the first metric are Super Real Mahjong Premium Collection for the Neo Geo Pocket Color and Super Real Mahjong Dousoukai for the Game Boy Advance. Mahjong is pretty well suited for portable game systems, as an aside.
DOAX2 has unlockable stuff, and to some people the unlocking of it all is “completing” the game, and that is a fair and valid point. The problem is that, if you use an exploit in the original, unpatched version of the game that allows you to get lots of money very quickly, “completing” the game takes a mere 300-400 hours.
If you don’t use the exploit, estimates are in the 1K hour range to complete.
That’s, uh, half a year of a full time job.
I set my sights a little lower.
In the end I decided that I would unlock the achievements for collecting all of Kasumi’s and all of Hitomi’s swimsuits, and call that good. This took 20 hours combined, though after I managed it with Kasumi and realized it was a lot quicker not to mess around with trying to make friends with anyone, I completed Hitomi’s in the last 7 hours of that.
There are 9 playable characters, so math tells me that if I decided to finish the collections for all the other characters (this would give me 180 gamerscore out of a possible 1000, by the way), that would probably take right around another 50 hours and the game’s soundtrack is not worth listening to for another 50 hours - after only 20 hours of it I am about ready to snap. Most of the songs were catchy and upbeat and likeable the first 5 or so times I heard them… I think I heard the same Hillary Duff song at least 50 times, and I can’t take any more of it.
So - DOAX2: Completed (enough)
Now to finish Buffy.
Attack of the Games from Western Developers.
For a bit of a change of pace after ICO, I decided to put Justice League Heroes in the Xbox and give it a try.
I have to give Snowblind Studios a hearty thumbs up for their accomplishment. I really expected to be annoyed with the game - how on earth do you properly balance a game where you can play the same level as, say, Superman OR Zatanna? - but after actually playing it I managed to put the fanboy geekery aside and just enjoy it. I was also quite impressed that they pushed the Xbox hardware a little bit and gave us a game that supported 720p and 16:9 wide-screen - with the Xbox “dead”, I would have expected shovelware at best.
It’s a sin that the thing is already discounted to 20 bucks - it’s a real bargain. I’m glad they decided to put Hal in as an unlockable character, because without that I never would have picked up the game and I’d have missed out on a good bit of fun.
I did run into a couple of glitches. In one of the final “rescue all the civilian” missions, I managed to find all the civilians, but one of them wouldn’t go into “rescued” mode, so I never got credit for completing that objective. I was able to complete the level, anyway, but it worried me. Also, the end credits are in 4:3 aspect ratio, but my TV (and, I think, most HDTVs) don’t support 4:3 images in 720p - they get stretched to fill a 16:9 window.
Those were not nearly so annoying as the glitches I’m finding in today’s game. Ranty bit ahead.
One of the reasons my wife decided we needed an Xbox in the first place was the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. Yes, my wife decided we needed an Xbox. She’s actually the motivating factor behind a lot of the cool electronics that come into our apartment. To answer the next question from all the guys out there … no, she doesn’t have a sister.
Anyway. So, she’d heard that the Buffy game was really cool, so we bought an Xbox - this would be 4 years ago? Whenever the game was released - and until now we haven’t actually sat down and played it. She’d gotten through the training mission by herself but had not progressed far into the actual game, and I’d never picked it up.
After I finished Justice League Heroes, she picked it off the games shelf and handed it to me, and I realized something. It’s an Electronic Arts game. I don’t usually let them into our apartment. I’ve been boycotting EA since the mid 80s when they dropped support for the Atari home computers in favor of the Commodore line and they haven’t done anything in the interim to make me any more fond of them. I could go extra ranty here, but I will spare you all. At any rate, it snuck into our house without me noticing. At least I have the defense that the case doesn’t have their logo on it, just a subtle bit of text on the back. Also, the manual is printed in ink made out of babies and kittens. I should have noticed that.
It’s actually a pretty enjoyable game, mostly because the writing is sharp and they got almost the entire cast of the TV series on to do the voice work.
Unfortunately it’s a bit buggy in spots.
I’ve had the voice and sound effects cut completely out at the start of a cutscene and then be gone from that point until I rebooted the machine, and I’ve had a rescued vampire victim walk into a door, get stuck in a door, and then not be able to move, which meant I couldn’t get through the door, couldn’t progress any further in the level, and had to suicide to start over.
I am running on a 360 in backwards compatibility mode, but it’s much easier to blindly hate on EA than it is to acknowledge that some of the glitches might be related to running it on the 360. So, bastards at EA, I hate you again.
Rant over.
This makes two in a row from American developers, and if we stretch it to “Western” developers I’ve also put Beyond Good and Evil and Tomb Raider Legend through their paces lately. Very unusual considering how Japan-biased our games collection is.
Online classes am hard!
It’s 3 weeks into the term and I feel like I may finally have my feet under me with my online courses.
I went all-online this term because my former employer told me that I would have to do some overseas travel for them and as a result I couldn’t take conventional courses. Then they laid me off the Friday before the new term started, but I’ve stuck with the online courses anyway - trying to get into anything useful at the last minute would have been impossible, and online courses don’t interfere with my job hunt.
So - English Literature 104 and Technical Writing 227. It’s a good thing that English Lit is pretty easy, because Technical Writing is a bear - the material is mostly stuff that I’ve picked up over the years anyway, but now I’m learning that there are names for things and that most of the techniques I’ve learned on-the-fly are techniques that have been known for absolutely ages… so I’m getting decent grades thus far, but I have trouble thinking in “correct language” - I want to say “tricking the boss into thinking that the decision you wanted is one he’s making on his own” and my textbook wants to call that “Reader-oriented persuasion.”
As for literature class, I think that my classmates should be banned from using adjectives, particularly “beautiful”, “moving”, “touching” and anything of the ilk. From reading the classroom discussion, some of these prats would burst into tears from reading the side of a cereal box. I’m getting good marks in this course as well, so I think I’m successfully masking my natural cynicism.
This morning’s weight, 192.4, and my 36 waist jeans are comfortable enough that I think I could try on some 34s without too much risk. I won’t go buying any right now, since it’s not like the 36s are falling off me or anything, but considering I started out at a 44 waist it’s a hell of a nice thing to be thinking.
I-co, I-co, un-day
ICO joins the list of games I ought to have played ages ago and am only now seeing why everyone was mad about them.
Short, charming, and only slightly maddening - platform style jumping with the PS2 analog stick is something I’ve not had occasion to learn how to do before, and the bit of the game that got lifted straight out of Castle of Cagliostro was bloody nasty hard as a result.
I’m looking forward to Shadow of the Colossus now. That doesn’t mean it’s next off the stack, of course, we’ll see what happens.
Game mechanics-wise, it’s an interesting process going from Tomb Raider Legend to Beyond Good and Evil to ICO. They’re honestly all find-the-switch-pull-the-box kind of games, just trussed up with different stories and styles, but they differ wildly in how much the designers took the seatbelts off - it’s really very difficult to fall to your death in BG&E, for instance, but it’s the normal course of affairs in ICO, and Tomb Raider is more of a “you CAN die here, but we’re going to give you lots of chances to save yourself” game.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
