OK, I get the cake thing now
After about a zillion sightings of “the cake is a lie hah hah hah I’m so funny and referential”, I broke down and rented Portal yesterday. Well, I rented “The Orange Box”, strictly speaking, but really… Portal. And it was a good thing to rent. I’m not about to drop 60 bucks on the 360 version right now, and the PC version, while cheaper, comes with the spectre of “Hey, we can turn your software off, remotely, if we feel like it. See? ” that is Steam.
I know it puts me squarely in the tinfoil-hat-crowd to avoid Valve products because they require Steam to work, but I’m OK with that. Saves me money.
Anyway. Portal. Damn fun game. I get the cake jokes now, AND the obsession people have with Weighted Companion Cube, and the ending credits / song are all kinds of awesome.
Video game rentals are mighty pricey these days - playing Portal set me back 8 bucks for about 4 hours of portal-hopping puzzle fun. I suspect that will go up to six or so before I take it back, as I suspect I’m going to have to replay through the second half, the half that my wife couldn’t stay awake long enough to see, at least one more time. 
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: Episode 40/52. Episode 39 featured “Yan goes out, gets drunk, and gets in a fight.” I do love this program. I kind of wish they’d kept Mary Althaus as the host for the second season, but I’ve slowly gotten used to the new instructor.
Firmware hell
Last year my wife got me a really keen swissbit MP3-player/Swiss Army Knife gadget for my birthday.
It made a pretty darn good MP3 player for walking, since I didn’t have to worry about destroying a hard disk, and it made a pretty decent, uh, well, knife, nail file, and scissors. It doesn’t really have a lot of knifey bits, but it’s a swiss army knife that plays MP3s and that’s really good enough for me.
Swissbit, knowing that they produced a product that didn’t have to try very much harder to be cool, really didn’t try very hard after they came up with the “It’s a knife that plays music” concept, so I did have a couple of gripes - nothing serious, just the sorts of things that fall short of perfection.
It doesn’t have any kanji support, and I couldn’t use it as a drive under Windows (it was my first introduction to the concept of “MTP” devices, which was pretty educational) and if you plugged it in to a PC and launched Windows Media Player before it had a chance to charge for a bit, Windows Media Player would crash very very hard. It was the crashing Media Player thing that really vexed me.
Still, these are pretty minor gripes and I learned to work around them. Mostly just a matter of making sure to plug the player in at least 30 minutes before I wanted to sync anything to it.
Yesterday I decided to see if they’d done anything about these, and I found that there was a new firmware version that let you use it as a removable disk AND seems to have fixed the crashing media player thing. It also added OGG support and a bunch of general usability stuff.
It installed with no problems, and the player is greatly improved by it.
Still no kanji support, but I can deal with that.
Flush with the heady glow of success, I decided to see what else I could find new firmware for…
Yuno, I’m troubled.
I ought to be heading to bed soon, but I’ll probably be up for an hour or so.
In the meantime I am faced with a conundrum.
On the one hand, I should take this opportunity to study for the JLPT.
On the other hand, after finishing Exit, I decided to give Brave Story a spin in the PSP.
Inside the first half hour of Brave Story, you meet your first companion.
mmm nekomimi
So I’d like to play Brave Story for a half hour or so.
On the other hand, if I study Japanese, then I will be better able to understand future nekomimi-inside games, even if they don’t get translated.
So really I’m faced with the concept of catgirls-in-actus vs catgirls-in-potentia.
I DID have to look up what the opposite of “in potentia” was. I’m freely admitting that I’m not that big of a geek without reference materials.
I have to give the character designer credit for realizing - leather armor: not cute. Leather armor WITH A BOWTIE and a pink skirt: cute.
Maybe I’ll crack the JLPT book open and do ONE chapter.
Also, since I haven’t been tracking this every day: “Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 36/52.
Edit: One hour later: TWO chapters read and a self-test administered. Brave Story played: Zero. The things I do for education.
The PSP Appreciation Project continues…
I have been, at times, an utterly clueless twit.
Wait, stay with me, I’ll only be emo for a little bit and it has a purpose.
Way way way back when I had just discovered anime and was going through the everything-Japanese-is-inherently-more-awesome phase, I was talking to someone when the topic turned to the then-currently-airing Batman: The Animated Series.
In one of those “I’m going to build myself up by putting something else down”, I made an offhand remark that it wasn’t bad, for “limited animation”
I then got a well-deserved smackdown on what “limited animation” really meant, and how the fluid, minimalist style of Batman was anything BUT.
This was one of those moments that sunk in, and it tends to pop up every time I find myself really enjoying something that has similar design philosophies.
And now we come to Exit, which makes the third PSP game I’ve managed to complete… and, like the other two (LocoRoco, Me and My Katamari), it brought that one “Boy, I’m stupid” moment right back to the top for another viewing.
Exit oozes style. It doesn’t come across well in a static screenshot.
Trust me, though, seeing all the little bits of Exit in motion is a beautiful thing.
Also, your character looks really cool. If I had a job where I hauled people out of burning buildings and from flooded subway tunnels, I would die to look as good doing it as the hero (”Mr. ESC”) does in the course of his efforts.
It’s recently come out for Xbox Live Arcade, as well, for all of 800 Microsoft points (10 bucks, damn their deceptive exchange rate) which should open it up to the folks who don’t have a PSP or who haven’t picked it up for their PSP.
It’s almost a shame seeing it as a full console application, though, because Exit is one of the most portable-friendly games out there (each level stands alone and is quick to complete - in fact, the most time you’re allowed to finish a level is 14 minutes, and most are under 10) and has finally made me understand how to make decent use of the PSP as a mobile gaming system - something I have struggled with in comparison to the DS, and something that had relegated the PSP to second-class status pretty much since the week I bought both.
The secret: Never turn the thing off.
This is not intuitive. Well, not to me, anyway. I get done playing a game, I turn off the system and take the disc out, right? Then, the next time I want to play the same game, I put the disc back in the system, turn it on, wait for it to boot, wait for the UMD to load, wait for the developer and publisher logos, wait for the intro animation to load, hope I can skip the intro animation, load the last game… and by now it’s been 5 minutes. This is not optimal for “hey, I have a few minutes to kill”, which is the real killer app for any portable system.
When playing Exit, I finally learned to embrace the PSP’s sleep mode, something that has always felt just a little bit WRONG on the system and ever so RIGHT on the DS. There’s something about just closing the DS’s lid that makes the act of going into sleep mode not feel like shutting down, whereas the little quick flick of the power switch needed to put the PSP into sleep mode always used to make me cringe with the thought of losing whatever progress I’d made in whatever game I’d been playing.
After going into and out of sleep mode 70 or 80 times over the course of playing through Exit - I’m over that, now. I am now completely one with the concept that it’s all right to do a quick pause, sleep the PSP, and leave the UMD in for the next time I get a few minutes.
Also, I can do a bit more gaming when I’m out, and not feel guilty about it like I would if I booted up the 360 or PS2 for a couple hours of playing something off the backlog while I have classes and tests to study for.
All around Big Win.
Note for pure honesty: I say I “finished” Exit. By that I mean I finished the 100 built-in levels. You can download 110 more. Two problems there.
1) Exit doesn’t really have a “story”, but it does ramp up in difficulty and the environments get more and more interesting as you progress through the game. 110 more levels leaves me with the question: Where do they go from there? They are going to have hard shoes to fill if they want to keep ramping up the environments, but if they drop back to more mundane environments, it’s the Perfect Dark Zero problem.
2) I really don’t have the staying power to blow through 110 more levels and I have a bunch more PSP games to appreciate.
Dying gameworlds…
I spent the better part of 8 years playing Everquest. It’s not something I normally discuss in, you know, polite company, because it’s kind of like “I spent a few years doing, you know, crystal meth.”
I think people have a higher opinion of furry fans than they do EQ players. And, well, I can’t fault them there.
Anyway.
So I was a EQ junkie from roughly, July of 1999 until this spring, when I realized that I just couldn’t do EQ and work and school and I had a bloody ton of excellent single player games I should try playing instead.
So I stopped logging in, and eventually canceled my account.
Periodically, Sony sends me “come back to EQ!” e-mails where they say they’ve activated my account for a weekend, or a week - or even sent me a free 2 month subscription to Everquest 2, although that one was more related to my having tried and canceled Vanguard.
So I logged in a character I’d left camped out in the Bazaar.
This is the zone where, if you have things to sell to other characters, you can leave one of your characters here and they can sell your stuff for you while you’re asleep.
It has a limit of 550 characters, and it used to be that it was constantly at-limit and if you wanted to set up a bazaar trader you had to sit there waiting for someone to log out and hope that you got their spot before anyone else did.
Since those days they’ve had to merge servers, combining the populations of two different servers into one.
Last night, on a merged server, it had a whopping 219 characters.
But that didn’t have quite the impact of the next thing I saw.
I had a level 16 (pretty low-level for Everquest, which has levels up to 75) monk sitting around in Qeynos.
This is one of the very first game cities. It’s next to an outdoors zone, “Qeynos Hills”.
Qeynos Hills was one of the first places you went just after the training wheels came off your character - stuff can get aggressive, run for help when wounded, and there are a couple of high level NPCs who are normally NOT aggressive but will lay a smack down on you if they catch you messing with one of their friends.It has a bunch of low-level gnolls in it, and some snakes and giant bats and rats and a ruined standing stones circle with an undead infestation. Standard RPG cannon fodder.
It’s also got a little fishing pond, and there’s a fisherman named “Hadden” who hangs out there.
Hadden has a little problem.
When you kill him, sometimes you’ll find a piece of loot that gives your character the ability to breath under water.
Furthermore, after he’s killed, he will come back to life exactly six hours later.
Hadden’s life expectancy used to be measured in seconds.
You’d run by this little fishing pond and there would be at least a couple of characters hanging out and waiting for him… and since loot rights in Everquest are dictated by who does the most damage, not who got the first shot in, when he would pop his head out into the world it usually resulted in two or three people trying to get the kill, and therefore the loot. He also sparked massive arguments between people who’d been sitting there waiting for him for hours and people who knew how long it had been since he last died and were just coming back because it had been almost six hours since then.
I ran out to Qeynos Hills last night, and he was just standing there.
We talked, I left him alone, and then I logged out of the game and got back to real life.
I think he looked a little sad about the whole thing.
There had to come a point where he went from “god damn it, every time I try to get some fishing in, two or three jokers fight over who gets to kill me” to “wow, I lived a few minutes longer that time” to “uh, doesn’t anyone care enough to come kill me any more?” to “is anyone out there?”
Trusting souls…
My statistics class is the single strangest math class I’ve ever been in. Day one of class, we all got put in to little 4-person groups and we’ve been doing 90% of our work in these little 4-person groups. The only time we’re not doing everything as a group of 4 is during tests, and even then we get to take the test a second time as a four-person group which can improve our individual scores if we do better as a group than individually.
This is a math class. I’m kind of used to them being intensely solitary classes, so this is weird, but at the same time it’s working pretty well.
I get an e-mail from one of my group members tonight. We’ve got homework due tomorrow, and it’s 20% of our final grade, and she’s not sure she’ll be able to find a printer, so could I please print it out?
It’s in OpenOffice format. A .odt file. I do HAVE OpenOffice installed, so I could open it - and, yes, I printed it for her because I’m not a bastard - but, really: OpenOffice can save .doc format files. If she’d sent that .odt file to someone without OpenOffice, about all they could say tomorrow would be “uh, I couldn’t open your file. sorry about that.”
In other school happenings, I have an Economics midterm coming up - 50 questions, all multiple choice, 36% of our grade for the term, but I’m finding that Microeconomics, at least, is pretty damn common sense stuff. Not too worried about that. I also have an English midterm, which a little more worrisome because it’s, you know, creative writing, but less worrisome because I seem to be on the teacher’s good side - and, with stuff that gets graded subjectively, that counts for a lot.
I did get to meet some of my English classmates recently - unusual since it’s an all-online course - as our teacher arranged for us to go to a local theater production of “Grace”. It wasn’t to my normal tastes, seeing as I usually confine myself to the comic-sci-fi and light-fantasy end of the literary world, but I thought that it was a good play, that the ending was a little depressing, and that it presented the matter of finding faith in what I thought was a pretty positive manner…
…and then I logged on to the classroom discussion board and find that it set one of my classmates off into a frothing-at-the-mouth rant with Randomly capitalized Words and All CAPS emphasis about how anti-Christian it was.
It was weird to have gotten such completely different messages from the play, so I’m left wondering if I missed something, or if he missed something, and - of course - which interpretation the teacher is going to look upon more favorably when we have to do the inevitable paper on it.
I think I may dodge the issue and talk about the technical direction, because whether you see it as a pro-faith or anti-faith message, the lighting and sound work were both excellent.
Katakana is a untrustworthy friend.
Normally, I like seeing words in katakana, because normally they’re nice friendly English words.
Then, I hit a word spelled in katakana, like, oh, I dunno, “ホーム”, and this of course makes perfect sense. Ho-mu. Home.
And then I hit a sentence in my JLPT study manual like “ホームにならんでいます” which means “Standing in line at… home(?)”
I’m standing in line at home? What does that mean?
And after trying to figure out if there’s a different meaning for ならんで that would possibly make this make sense, I find out that the Japanese use ホーム for the English word “home”, yes, as in “home plate” or “home base” but they ALSO use it for “train platform”
Standing in line at the train platform. That makes sense.
“ホーム” instead of “乗り場”, that doesn’t bloody make sense. I just have to remember it and it will all be good in the end. Right?
Endings, quite satisfactory.
Finally managed to catch up to see the end of Lucky Star this last week. With shows that don’t really have an overall story arc, it’s hard to say when a good “end point” really is, but I really liked where they closed it out. I fully expect that, if I hopped onto niconico RIGHT NOW, I would find a half-dozen versions of the Big Dance Number recreated by assorted fan groups, with another dozen or two in the works.
Having the ending credits song be… admittedly, a horribly sung version of… the ED from Beautiful Dreamer, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, was a nice touch. I was a little annoyed, though, when I put in the US-released Beautiful Dreamer DVD and found that the ending credits were actually cut a little bit - you hear the ending song, but you don’t hear the Tomobiki high school bell ringing. As a result, if someone hadn’t ever seen the movie on VHS or laserdisc, they wouldn’t understand why the heck Minoru is making bell sounds at the very end of the Lucky Star ending credits.
OK, so, minor quibble that doesn’t have anything to do with Lucky Star so much as it has to do with a very early domestic anime DVD with a bit of a sloppy release. I understand they even re-released the DVD, maybe the newer version has the full ED. I don’t think it’s worth buying it to find out, though.
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 32/52.
Back on the horse.
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 29/52
I started the second season back in August and watched 27 & 28… then got off track. Posting here to keep myself in-line. It’s not directly tied to the material covered on the JLPT, but I think it will still help me.
It’s a little bit odd to be watching footage shot in Japan, see a pan shot over the river that includes a 水上バス (the ferries that run along the river in Tokyo), and have it evoke a “hey, that’s familiar” feeling instead of a “that’s foreign” feeling.
To-do: Renew domain
Got a message from WordPress warning me about my domain expiration - putting it here so I remember to do it sometime before 2044.
I so bet I’m not the only one making this exact same joke at their expense.
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.
