Rub IS Love
I didn’t jump on board the DS bandwagon until a couple of years after its release. Honestly, when it was announced, I thought that Nintendo had lost its collective mind, and by the time it became apparent that they’d actually had the right idea, they’d already announced the DS Lite, so I waited for that.
My exposure to the system, then, mostly came from seeing the DS software boxes next to the GBA section in stores, and being rather unimpressed with the lineup offered - titles like “Sprung” and “Ping Pals” and the like. I lumped them into the category of “launch year crap”, which is harsh but after you see a few console launches you get a bit jaded.
Anyone arguing that the first year of a console’s life is NOT 90% crap, I invite you to go and pay $60 for Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game and get back to me.
There was also a game called “Feel the Magic”, which I wrote off as probably just being more-of-the-same.
Fortunately, my wife isn’t quite so jaded. She bought it, tried it, determined that it was way too weird for her, and told me to play it.
That was a year or so ago and it’s been on my list as “at least try this once so she’ll stop asking me if I’ve tried it yet”.
After finishing Izuna 2, but not quite wanting to dive into The World Ends With You, I figured I’d at least give it a few minutes. I gave it those few minutes, and then every other spare minute I had over the next day, until it was finished.
It turns out that, kind of like I’d figured, it’s just a collection of stylus-based minigames, with occasional use of the DS microphone.
That having been said, it’s also hella fun, mostly because the minigames are so damn bizarre. Spray painting giant rabbits onto buildings, calming rampaging bulls, saving pedestrians from man-eating ant lions, bowling for humans with live bowling balls… And it’s all just to get a girl’s attention.
You are aided in this quest by a performance arts group called the “Rub Rabbits”, who wear bunny ears, ride unicycles, and apparently build Voltron-esque robots in their spare time.
There is a little bit of frustration in the aptly named “nightmare” level, but that is the only blemish on an otherwise glorious game.
Strongly recommended: A screen protector. This game abuses the touchscreen like nothing I’ve seen since Ouendan’s spinners.
More dead electronics.
There’s a Hole in Our Entertainment Center (Where Our DVD Player Used to Be) isn’t nearly as good of a country song title as the Xbox one, but I’m singing it today anyway.
See, a couple of years ago, we decided to replace the DVD/LD combo player that was starting to show its age with a modern DVD player. I was also of the mind that, if we were going to do that, we should get something really solid and built to last, but also easily made region-free.
So we wound up with a Denon 2910, which was, well, about six times the cost of just walking into Fred Meyers and grabbing a cheap Sony unit off the shelf, but probably worth at least some of the premium, and because I we were dropping far too much money on a DVD player, we also dropped the 45 bucks on the 4 year extended warranty.
That decision turned out to be prescient this weekend - it’s not like the thing exploded into a ball of flame or anything, and it’s not like there were any problems with DVD playback, but it stopped playing CDs.
That’s a little simplified. More accurately:
Occasionally, you’d put in a CD and the player would make a sad little whining noise and act like it didn’t have a disc inserted. It was consistantly bad for some discs, whereas other discs played just fine, and it wasn’t a burned-vs-original issue because all the discs we were trying were original CDs.
My wife noticed the problem when she put in a TM Revolution CD and it failed, and then she tried several different TMR CDs and they all failed.
I put in a disc of Caramelldansen remixes, and that worked just fine, followed by a MOSAIC.WAV album that also worked.
It couldn’t play the Video Girl Ai soundtrack, though, so it’s not like it was just TMR albums for some weird reason.
Then I put in Def Leppard - Hysteria, and it couldn’t play THAT, and at that point it got disconnected from the entertainment center and hauled off to the retailer we bought it, and its service plan from, because frankly any player that can’t play Hysteria is not a working player.
So, they say they’ll have it fixed in two or three weeks, and in the meantime we have to make do with the three other things hooked up to the TV that can play DVDs.
That brings the “stuff that needed fixing this year” count to three - my camera, the Xbox360, now this.
It’s been a rough year for electronic gadgets around here.
LittleBigPlanet - It was worth the rental.
I came extraordinarily close to falling for the LBP hype and dropping the sixty bucks.
Thankfully, I didn’t. I rented it from our neighborhood video store instead. This was $7.99, and the game was definitely worth that.
Let me be straightforward here: LBP is marketed as being all about creating your own levels and playing through levels other people have created. I’m not interested in either, so my point in renting it was to see how the out-of-the-box single-player game was.
It’s freaking gorgeous and oozes style.
It reminded me a lot of a mix of Clockwork Knight and Exit, with the graphics turned up to 11 and music that never once got old. Your character, when you start the game, is boring as all hell, but that doesn’t last very long. By the time you’ve played half-way through LittleBigPlanet’s story mode, you have a schoolgirl dress, glasses, nekomimi and a two-ponytail wig with which to dress your Sackgirl, and that should be enough for anyone.
You’ll also have played for about three hours, and another three hours will get you to the Bunker stage, which is the third stage from the end of the game, and then another two hours will see you through the Bunker level, unless you need to go out and buy another controller having snapped yours in half, and then another 30 minutes or so will see you to the “ending.”
I will not spoil the ending here, largely because it would take longer to type out a spoiler than it takes to watch the ending. It’s a 10-second affair that ranks right up there with Quake and Sudeki, and it came as quite a dampener to the experience - they got Stephen Fry to narrate the introduction and the tutorials, would it have killed them to have him record some sort of congratulatory voiceover?
Still, this is not the first time that Sony has bet the farm on a platformer that I didn’t really “get”, and it worked out pretty well for them last time, so who am I to criticize?
Measuring progress
The nice thing about a stationary exercise bike of the sort we have in our apartment’s exercise room is that it gives me quantifiable progress.
See, the thing has twelve resistance settings, 1 being awfully lightweight and 12 being, I don’t even want to think about 12.
Sunday night, when I first got on the thing, I spent a lot of time at 2, with a little time at 3 and a minute spent at 4.
Monday night was less 2, lots of 3, a little 4.
Tuesday night, I managed to split the time between 21 minutes of 3 and 9 minutes of 4, with no 2.
Wednesday night was 13 minutes of 3, 15 minutes of 4, 2 minutes of 5.
Tonight was 8 minutes of 3, 14 minutes of 4, 6 minutes of 5.
I’m not seeing any real movement on the scale, and I don’t think I should expect to in the next week, but I think I’m on the right track as far as getting my metabolism going again.
For the record, back in early 2006 when I was biking a lot, I think I got to the point where I was doing mostly 5, with occasional flurries into the 6 and 7 range. So I still have a little ways to go there, but… not too far, really.
Enhanced vocabularies
So, Tuesday, in the space of about 60 seconds, I found out way more about a Japanese classmate’s vocabulary, fetishes, and imagination than I ever expected to.
See, we were covering a new grammar point, basically “Have you, in the past, done x?”
And to practice this, we were doing drills, from the textbook, in pairs.
And it’s mostly stuff like “Have you ever eaten octopus?” “Have you ever taken a train?” and we’re supposed to answer with the answers from the textbook, as provided. It’s repetitive but I think it’s good for you.
Anyway, I’m doing this grammar practice with another guy from the class, who is a decent sort. He’s a little advanced beyond where the class is, which makes him a good partner; he corrects me if I flub which is really handy.
Anyway, we’re going back and forth, and it’s his turn to ask me a “have you ever?” and he gets this big-arsed grin on his face, because the question is “Have you ever been a waitress” and the answer is “Yes, five years ago.”
So he asks me if I’ve ever been a waitress, and of course, I answer yes, five years ago, and that’s when he decides to get cute and - in mock surprise - ask me if I’m being serious.
I answer yes, of course, I’m serious, and switch to English to say “in frilly uniform.”
He gives a derisive snort and replies “Yeah, I can just see you in a hadaka apron.”
There was a pause, as if the universe were holding its breath.
Then he unleashed a wail of pure agony and buried his face in his hands.
Apparently he’s cursed with a vivid imagination.
And apparently I don’t look very good in a hadaka apron.
Fatal(er) Frames
After finishing Fatal Frame 2 : Crimson Butterfly : Director’s Cut at the Normal difficulty, I had two endings unlocked in the game’s gallery mode, with two endings still locked.
Since the normal mode ending is a little depressing - gosh, it’s a Japanese horror game, who would have thought? - I decided to do something that I have never done before with a game.
Play through it, again, on Hard.
I didn’t quite know what to expect - other than, well, it was going to be harder, I assumed.
This turned out to be the case, but not quite in the way I expected.
See, as you go through the game, you have one weapon available to you to use against the undead: A special camera. As you fight ghosts, you are scored based on the quality of the pictures you take, and you can use the points that you get from this to purchase upgrades for the camera.
In hard mode, not only are the ghosts you fight tougher than the ghosts in normal mode, but there are fewer of them.
I didn’t expect that part. I expected rampaging hordes of the undead.
After I thought about it, I realized that it makes perfect sense and is a much better way of balancing the difficulty than just throwing more ghosts at the player. If they had taken the “hard = more fights” approach, it would have been a more action-oriented game, which just wouldn’t have made sense.
It also helped to maintain a little bit of tension - having seen all the gotchas the first time around, they didn’t make me jump as high on the second pass, but walking through rooms thinking to myself “OK, I got jumped here before… am I going to get attacked again this time?” kept the tension level up.
End result was: Playing the game again, on hard, was actually pretty fun. It was also considerably faster - I played through the first time without using spoilers, so I spent a lot of time backtracking trying to find the next thing I was supposed to do.
Then I finished it, and found that you get the same ending as playing on normal mode, and that’s when I admitted defeat and ran to youtube to see the #3 and #4 endings. There ARE two modes above “Hard” - “Nightmare” and “Fatal” - and I am just not man enough to try them.
Exercise mixes, accidental:
I made a happy discovery last night, and repeated it tonight:
If I select “Mosaic.wav - めがねでねっ！” in my PSP’s “Music” folder and let it play sequentially from there, I get a half-hour of Mosaic.wav, Hamada Shouko, SweetS, and Round Table Featuring Nino, with my half-hour bike workout ending just as Groovin’ Magic is starting to come to the end.
It’s a pretty damn energetic set of artists.
By which I mean, if the aggressively-girlish-voices-at-high-volume genre of music is your thing, this is the sort of thing you would like, if you don’t get diabetes first, which is definitely a possibility.
Biking every night, even for only a half hour, is probably a little aggressive, but here’s the thing:
1) I’m officially not letting myself drive to work - it’s only a mile! until I see the scale say, at most, 188.8 in the morning. I need to lose 2.2 pounds for this.
2) It’s coming up on Oregon’s official “cold and wet” season, which is different from our other three seasons in that it’s slightly colder and slightly wetter.
3) The combination of (1 & 2) is awfully motivating.
More Cat Ear Girl
This post gets quite a few hits, and I’m not above pandering to my audience, so when I was looking for a new desktop background and found that I had another “wallpaper, slightly naughty” from the same artist, I thought I would share it with you.
It’s at least a little more interesting than the kvetching about school and exercise, I hope.
Back on the bike…
BMI is an annoyingly arbitrary scale with plenty of room for exceptions; it doesn’t take into account things like body type or muscle mass when assigning you to “healthy” or “overweight.”
But, it is awfully convenient, even when it’s saying things I’d rather not hear.
As an example, I’m 6′1″. If I’m 189 pounds or over, I’m overweight.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing numbers in the 191-192 range in the morning. It’s been a little too consistent to blame it on a temporary fluctuation, and I haven’t been able to get back to normal just by being careful about what I’m eating.
From previous experience, I need to kick my metabolism back into gear, and once it’s going again I’ll be able to manage my weight just by moderating food intake. Unfortunately, that’s the part that means I need to actually do some work. 
So, last night, I queued up a half hour of Caramelldansen remixes on my mp3 player and got on the sole exercise bike in our apartment complex’s exercise room, fully expecting to wake up in agony this morning.
And, yes, there is some agony.
The thing I can’t quite explain is why it’s my arms that are killing me, while my legs are just fine.
Nine freakin’ hours.
Nine hours being the amount of time that today’s Geology homework took, and this actually being the quickest all term that I’ve finished my week’s homework in the course. I started at noon, as usual, and I’m actually going to be able to do something BEFORE bed.
This for a rocks-for-jocks 100-level course that’s only going to get me four credits.
Basic’ly, science courses are all screwed up in the effort-to-return ratio. This is not the first time I’ve bitched about it, but every time I do, it helps me cope.
Sociology is going rather better. Granted, it took me five hours on Friday night to finish up my midterm paper - OK, I should come clean, it took me five hours to start, write, and finish up my midterm paper - ending with me finally getting to go to bed around 2AM, but it was more than made up for by being one of about five people - 20% of the class - who actually had their papers done. About 40% of the class elected not to show up at all, and the remaining 40% all showed up with various excuses on the theme of “but it was Halloween last night! How could you expect me to finish a paper?”
I got some enjoyment out of the teacher telling them that he perfectly understood, and that they were welcome to turn the paper in later the same day, or at any time during the week, or even as late as next Saturday’s session…
…at a cost of one letter grade.
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.
