Stranglehold: Well, that sucked.
I’m not going to claim outright that Hard Boiled is the best action movie of all time. There are an awful lot of movies I’ve never seen, after all, so that would be unfair.
I think it’s likely, though, that even when you take the entire film output of every film producing country on this earth since the first strip of cellulose went through a film camera… it’s got to be in the top ten.
So, hearing that they were doing an official sequel in the form of a game and both John Woo and Chow Yun Fat were involved with it? How much joy can one fanboy hold?
Of course, I’m cheap, so I didn’t pick it up on day one.
And I bought the PC version because, well, I have a decent PC, I’d like to show my solidarity with PC gamers and it will presumably look better than the console versions.
I understand the game is supposed to be fairly short. I’ve seen references to a play length of about 8 hours, which is not too bad for an action game.
I decided I’d install it last night, since I’d gotten home from my economics class early and had a little more time than I usually do on a weeknight.
I’ll run down the process for you:
1.) Install. This took about a half hour and took 13 GB of hard drive space.
2.) Download and install the 1.1 patch. About another half hour.
3.) Launch the game. Get a loading screen. Screen goes blank. Wait, that’s my BIOS screen. My PC just rebooted. What the hell? Probably just a glitch.
4.) After reboot, let’s try this again. I get introductory movies and menus now.
5.) Getting graphics options set is kind of odd. My mouse pointer doesn’t seem to be interacting with buttons. I can kind of use the keyboard to get things set up, though. It’s really jerky, and these are just the configuration screens. Oh, well, it’ll probably be fine once I’m playing.
6.) Start the game.
7.) Opening cutscene plays. Yay! It’s Chow. He’s going to go shoot people now. Opening movie stutters a lot. Weird. Oh, well, it’ll probably be fine once I’m playing.
8.) First level starts loading. Loading. Loading. Loading. Loading. Loading. Uh. Loading. Loading. Loading. Wait! The screen went black! The game must be starting.
9.) Uh, where’s the first level? Oh, there’s a picture of some buildings.
10.) It’s been a few minutes and I still don’t have a first level. Sometimes the clouds behind the buildings move. Sometimes the lights flicker.
11.) OK, it’s off to the official support forums… and when those fail me, it’s off to the web at large for advice. I’ll spare you the details here.
Long story short: It took me nearly four hours from the time I put the install disk in to the point where I could actually play the game, and even then I was only able to get decent performance in 1280 x 720… and you’re limited to mouse and keyboard play, even though the manual makes reference to using the “D-pad” to select things… and the manual also talks about some features that the official support FAQ admits simply aren’t in the game.
I think, instead of continuing to fight with it, I’m going to eat the cost of this and wait until I can get a cheap copy of the PS3 or 360 versions.
If this is the state of PC gaming, bring on our console overlords.
Kingdom of Paradise : Not the Movie With Orlando Bloom
Among the advantages of having a wife that buys new gadgets before I get a chance to : I get her hand-me-downs when she gets tired of them.
So, when she got herself a PSP and a DS and then decided that carrying around TWO portable systems was just way too much purse space, I lucked into her stash of PSP games.
And she has good taste, so I didn’t mind at all.
One of the games she handed down was Kingdom of Paradise, and I finally finished playing that tonight. I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to play games on the move recently, so I wound up stretching out a 20 hour RPG over something like two and a half months. I was strong, however - I have 3 PSP games sitting, shrinkwrapped, on the shelf, and I told myself I wasn’t going to break them open until I’d completed this one.
It’s a pretty decent game. It’s a lousy portable game. I’ll explain:
First off, the good: This game does not feature the generic European setting that fantasy RPGs seem to be stuck in. Your hero is, instead, running around a fantasy world built mostly on Chinese legend, particularly the Four Symbols (Plus one!) that most western anime fans are familiar with from either Fushigi Yuugi or Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Already, this is a plus. It adds a definite touch of awe the first time you go toe-to-toe with one of the four gods.
The graphics are a nice bit of work, the characters are multilayered and interesting, and the story doesn’t pull any punches.
Also it has a cute girl with glasses. I’ll let a random NPC sum up my thoughts on that issue:
The downsides:
I don’t have any significant beef with the majority of the voice acting, except that every single proper noun is mispronounced. If you’re used to the Japanese pronunciations of words like “Byakko” or “Seiryu”, you will be wincing constantly. If you’ve never heard them said properly, you probably won’t notice.
Leaving the voice acting aside, here’s the biggest complaint I have with it: The developers tried to make a console RPG, just shrunk down for the PSP. It’s full of loading times, long fully-voiced cutscenes, and boss fights that stretch out forever. The last fight in the game took me over an hour. This is not portable-friendly. When you’re making a game designed for people to carry around and play whenever they have a few minutes, you need to cut back on your cinematic aspirations and grueling boss battles.
It takes a certain degree of faith to pause in the middle of a boss fight, hit the power switch on the PSP to put it in sleep mode, and pray that you’ll be in the same place when you get back and you won’t have to re-do the fight from the beginning.
I should not have played this AFTER Brave Story: New Traveler, because Brave Story does all that stuff right.
It does, at least, feature a running log of “You need to go do X next”, which is really handy when you have to go a week between play sessions. AND you can save anywhere, except in the middle of scripted events. These are features that all portable RPGs should have.
And now for a random screenshot, taken completely out of context, that gives an entirely incorrect impression of the game’s storyline:
Let’s hear from Yuno on the issue.
Yeah, that about sums it up.
Super Real Mahjong P7
…Finished, or mostly finished, anyway. I can’t figure out what I’m missing to complete the gohoubi:
Obviously I’m missing two of Etsuko’s cinemas, but I’ve played through Etsuko’s scenario twice and everyone else but Yurina’s scenario at least twice. If it were just a matter of playing through the mahjong storylines, I should be done by now.
I gave the omake game a few tries, but it was just a little too much memorization, so if the final two cinemas are hidden in there somewhere, they’re hidden for good.
As much as I’m a fan of the Suchie Pai series, I have to give the Super Real Mahjong series some respect. There aren’t any little pop-up windows telling you when you can make a move, there’s no “panel match” style game… if you get a winning tile, you can cheerfully discard it and never get a warning. There aren’t any power-ups that let you snoop on your opponent’s hand, or stop them pulling a win of your discard - you have to play mahjong and win. It’s not a good beginner’s game, especially not for a westerner, which makes every win just a little more satisfying.
P7 was a fairly late release in the Saturn’s life, so it’s been censored in accordance with Sega’s newer policy on nudity. This means no naughty bits are shown, so you don’t need to feel TOO much like a dirty pervert while you play.
However, a word of caution: Should you be trying to explain to your wife or significant other that the mahjong game you are playing is completely innocent and in fact quite family-friendly (well, this is a lie), watch what terms you use while trying to explain its innocence.
I am now banned from using the term “jubblies” in conversation ever again. I will not bore you with the details.
Internet, you have failed me.
Why was I not told before now that there was a working and highly compatible Sega Saturn emulator?
One on which I can play my Mahjong games,
and my bunny-girl-with-mallet platform games,
and my post-apocalypse RPGs,
and my licensed shooters?
I have far too many Saturn games still, and I fully intend to play through some more of them, but my Saturn is 13 years old and I’ve been, you know, worried that it’s going to die soon.
Now I can relax a bit about that.
Still, this has obviously been around a while, and the Internet has failed to bring it to my attention. Bad Internet!
2007 JLPT Scores
I’m getting an awful lot of hits recently from people who, like me, are waiting impatiently for the Japan Foundation to finish running our answer sheets through a scantron reader and let us know how we’ve done, already, sheesh.
So if you’re in the same boat as me, I recommend going to the “your account” page on the Japan Foundation’s web site and logging in occasionally. The scores aren’t up yet, but they’ll show up there a couple days before they come in the mail.
Last year’s scores were posted on the last day of February, by the way.
This doesn’t apply to people who happen to be in Japan and already have their scores. Lucky buggers.
Edit: Apparently posting this was a good idea, as scores came today! 291/400 is not as good as last year’s level 4 score, but still a passing grade.
Dear Director of “Sunshine”
The point, two-thirds of the way through your movie, where you said to yourself:
“Boy, these people don’t have enough odds stacked against them and I really can’t think of any interesting ways to kill them off any more. Let’s just turn it into a slasher flick.”
…yeah, that was the point where you should have gotten a second opinion.
Screw it, gimme a “C”
Back in high school, I was an unabashed science geek. The requirements for graduation were, I think, 6 terms of science. I took 24. Chemistry, Biology, Physics, assorted applied sciences… I was pretty damn nerdy.
So I didn’t expect a simple CH100 class - better known as “Chemistry for People Who Can’t Do Math” - to be pissing me off quite so much.
I mean, the book work is great stuff, a little deeper than I expected from a 100 level course but I really won’t complain too much. Read a reasonably thick chapter, answer four or five pages worth of problems based on the text, take a weekly quiz, take a midterm. Been getting a lot of 9/10 and 10/10 scores.
The lab portion, on the other hand, is a godawful amalgamation of arts & crafts projects that aren’t being tied into the book work at all, and for which we’re getting bugger all feedback.
The first day of class, we all got a bag of chemicals. We got a lecture on chemical safety and wearing safety goggles and how to clean up our areas and keep the pets and kids out of things.
Our first lab involved mixing some chemicals in drop quantities and observing visual changes. We used 4 of the 20 or so vials of assorted chemicals we were given in our chemical bags.
The next three weeks were spent building small scale balances out of drinking straws and pins.
Then we built spectroscopes from cereal boxes and plastic knives.
Now we’ve been looking through the spectroscopes at various lights and coloring in little pictures of what we see with crayon.
I am given to understand that, as of week 8, we will be performing another lab that actually involves chemicals. Which seems like quite a novel concept for a chemistry class.
In the meantime I am having a really frustrating time building balances and coloring in spectrum, because I’m discovering a crucial hole in my abilities. My balance falls apart if you put anything heavier than a quarter-gram in it (it’s supposed to have a 10g weight limit) and my spectroscope turns everything into a blurry rainbow mish instead of the clearly defined bars I’m supposed to be seeing. I can’t even tell that there IS a color between “violet” and “blue”, no matter how many times I read about this mythical “indigo” color that goes in the middle.
Unfortunately, my general confidence that I’m doing pretty well on the “lecture” portion of the class doesn’t help much, because - even though the “lecture” represents 75% of the final grade - you cannot pass the class unless you get a 70% or higher score in the lab portion. That means, if you follow the math, that you can get a 92% in the class and fail.
And I’m not sure how I’m doing on the labs because the teacher hasn’t graded anything since our first lab assignment five weeks ago.
So, to hell with it. If I manage to pass the class, I will be happy to see it in the rear view mirror. I have no idea what I’m going to do for the other two terms of lab science I need to take to graduate, because this one class has managed to turn me from a science geek into someone dreading the thought of the next science course.
Faith in humanity fading
When you’re a 44 waist and rocking a 3XL shirt to be comfortable, there’s not a lot of places you can shop for clothes anymore.
You can find stuff at Old Navy, or Sears… sometimes Fred Meyer. Your choices are pretty limited though.
So, one of the things I’ve been doing since I slimmed down a bit is going into stores I couldn’t shop in before.
And that brings me to Hollister.
Yes, the “shopping here totally makes you a surfer, even if you live in Topeka” store.
They have three stores in Kansas. I looked it up. Carrying on.
I’ve bought a few shirts from Hollister, and I like them. I also like simply being ABLE to shop there, since their target market is the under-20 crowd and I’m, well, not in that demographic and haven’t been in quite some while.
One drawback. “Jake.”
Jake is their signature perfume, and they spray a hell of a lot of it throughout the store.
I’m told they have to spray it every 15 minutes, but that might be an exaggeration.
It might actually be a pleasant perfume if it wasn’t applied in such quantities, but - as it is - we have a policy now where any purchases from Hollister have to come in the front door, have their tags stripped, and go right into the washer while the bag goes out to the trash. After they’ve been washed once they are evaluated for integration into the general closet population.
This might actually be how they discourage returns. Hadn’t thought of that.
Anyway, I wanted to rant about “Jake”, but I thought to myself thusly:
“Self, you’re not the first person to have this complaint. I bet there’s thousands of people out there who can’t stand the stuff and who have ranted about it before. Most of them are probably better writers. Let’s look them up so we’re not repeating anything.”
What I found instead was:
People raving about Hollister perfume. People selling “retired” scents, and people trying to buy or trade for scents that have gone out of production. People for whom it is their favorite brand and they won’t wear anything else.
In short, example after example of how far out of touch I am with their demographic, which really shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise but still did.
So my options are to a) feel old or b) complain about how humanity has clearly passed the point where it’s still worth saving, and I’m going with b.
OK, c’mon now.
Since PC gaming is in rather better shape in Europe than the US, I’ve been ordering some budget games from UK dealers via eBay. This leads me to today’s rant.
British people:
I accept the fact that you get free health care, that your silly “pounds” are now worth well over two of our “dollars”, and that you get to feel all smug and stuff when you talk about “proper English” and how it lets you add extra “u”s to pretty much any word you feel needs an extra letter.
Do you also have to get way cooler postage than us? Is it fair? Is it just?
Creepy actor coincidences.
I saw “The Sum of All Fears” shortly after it came out on DVD, which was some while before I started watching “Alias”.
I’m also not very good at keeping track of actors, so I didn’t realize there was any overlap in the casts.
I watched the movie again recently.
Having Arvin Sloane as a presidential adviser was a very creepy thing, especially as he’s supposed to be the Voice of Reason in the oval office. Made watching the movie a very different experience; I kept expecting him to betray the main characters at any moment. 
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.
