Witching at last

Posted on July 15, 2009 by baudattitude

I bought “The Witcher” back in December of 2007, paying extra for the UK edition because it wasn’t censored like the US release, then promptly failed to get around to playing it.

Part of that is because it brought my computer – which I thought was actually quite up to date – to its knees if I turned on all the bells and whistles, part of it was that I was scared of starting an 80+ hour epic RPG, and a very great deal was because the control scheme made no bloody sense.

Now that I’ve played through Dungeon Siege, the whole “you do everything in this game with the mouse!  hands off the keyboard!” control scheme is a little more sensible – stupid, maybe, but sensible – and I have a better video card and it no longer bogs down during the opening cinema.

That being said, I still needed to update the drivers for my X-Fi and install Creative’s Alchemy software (one reboot per) before I could actually start playing it, and then, when my video card started drawing serious juice – about halfway through the introduction – I overloaded my UPS and it automatically shut down the server as a precaution.

I can’t actually blame that last part on the game or anything about PCs in general, but I thought it was funny.

Anyway, I managed to get past all the technical hiccups and through the introduction, which took about 2 hours, and so far it’s pretty engaging.  In addition, waiting this long means that they’ve not only released several patches to improve the story and stability, they’ve even released a patch to remove the CD check, so I don’t need to have the disc in the drive.  Big win.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

The Look and Sound of Stupid

Posted on July 14, 2009 by baudattitude

I have carefully saved nearly every email I’ve gotten since 1996.

This is dumb, as I am coming to find out, because going through old emails lets me realize – I mean, really lets it sink in – that I’ve been an utter tool from time to time and that I’ve made an awful lot of really stupid buying decisions.

Case in point: I just found the 1997 emails where I pestered NCS to special order a Saturn MPEG1 / VideoCD decoder card, was estactic when they actually got it in stock, and then willingly dropped $149 + shipping so I could play VideoCDs.

oi vey

Anyway, I’m in the process of deleting an awful lot of old email, saving those that are actually worth saving, and moving over from Thunderbird to mail.app.  Slow slow process.

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Insanity, redux

Posted on July 12, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I didn’t have enough on my plate what with only having a couple of months until school starts and I’ve decided to take on a new project. Specifically, re-importing our CDs into iTunes as Apple lossless files. Moreover, and just to make things really exciting, I’ll be breaking compilation CDs into their individual tracks, hunting down the original album info and artwork, and tagging them appropriately. Doing this for one, 10-track compilation CD took about a half-hour, and I have 30 or 40 more assorted “Best of 198x” and so on albums to go through. One of these days, I’ll learn to leave well enough alone.

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Some random thoughts

Posted on July 10, 2009 by baudattitude

One of the things that got chucked in the recycle bin during the latest move was a run of 2600 magazine from roughly 1988 to 1993.  Hey, I was a geek and a teenager, I think I can be forgiven for being a bit more than healthily curious about the ways that phones and networks worked.

I never got up to much mischief, mind you, but it was fun to read about.

Anyway, the thing that struck me about 2600 magazine is that its name derived from the Blue Box, a homemade device that let you manipulate the phone system’s switching functionality back in the days before ESS switches became the standard.

The general use of a Blue box, apart from pranking your friends, was to make free long distance phone calls.

The general consequence, once the phone company figured out that people WERE using Blue Boxes to make free long distance phone calls, was to get your home – OK, your parent’s home – raided by the FBI / Secret Service / Men In Black.

Seriously.  Free long distance calls used to be the motivating force behind comitting multiple felonies.

The last year I can remember having metered long distance service was 1999, the year I got my first cell phone, and even my landline phone gives me all-I-can-eat long distance for 40 bucks a month.  Moreover, high speed broadband service is nigh-ubiquitous in this country, even if we can’t compare to the Japanese and South Koreans with their 100-Mbit home internet service. I remember being thrilled when the v.32 standard for 9600bps modems displaced the old Hayes and USRobotics protocols and brought prices down to a mere 300 bucks.

The next time someone tries to tell me how much better things were in some nebulous “good old days”, I’m going to, well, OK, I’m not actually going to bring up the days when making a long distance phone call was a luxury that you planned out in advance, but I’m going to THINK it while I give them an amiable smile and grunt of agreement.

One more thought, this from a couple of play sessions of “Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers” on our Wii:

This is the first Wii game I’ve tried out that features non-stop motion controls, because you need to swing the controller every time you slash or kick someone.  I can only play it in 30-45 minute sessions, because that’s about the point where my forearms plead for mercy.

Some poor bastards in D3’s QA department had to play this game, 8 hours a day, for weeks.  They must have arm muscles like braided steel cabling, or massive medical bills stemming from the worst case of RSI in recorded history, or possibly both.

That being said, I have to give Tamsoft – the developer, D3 is the publisher – some serious cred for building a game around waggle controls, but making it so they’re actually quite fun.  I’m playing through Saki’s storyline first, which means a lot of grabbing a zombie, throwing it into a horde of other zombies, then wading in with Massive Fekking Katana of Doom while they’re all getting back up, sending zombie gore flying everywhere and it all works very naturally, even the special moves and such that I never bothered to learn when playing the Xbox 360 entry in the same series.

It’s not terribly pretty, even for a Wii game, but I’m enjoying the heck out of it.

Posted in random, videogames, Wii | Leave a comment

Moving expenses, vexing:

Posted on July 9, 2009 by baudattitude

When we moved to our new place, one of the heavier things I had to move was the comic book collection.

Leaving graphic novels aside, this consisted of twenty-two “longboxes” – about 200 comic books each – that we previously had in a walk-in closet.

The closets in our new place aren’t quite as deep, so the old longboxes no longer fit.  I had a few “shortboxes” – about 100 each – that were being used to hold odd bits and pieces rather than comics, so I was able to press those back in to service as comics storage, but it wasn’t nearly enough.  I had to buy 34 shortboxes, at $3.50 each, just to be able to move the comics into the closet space we had available.

That’s not really all that vexing, though it meant quite a bit of work folding the flat-packed shortboxes into full shape and then breaking down the old longboxes for the recycle bin.  What IS vexing is that my long-term goal for the comics is to, basically, get rid of 80% of them before we move again, something which will neatly eliminate my need to have so many shortboxes.

So I spent $120ish on boxes that serve only to get them out of the way for the moment.

Still, it reclaims an awful lot of space on our living room floor that was covered by longboxes.  So that’s a win, I guess.

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Nintendo and I have an arrangement.

Posted on July 8, 2009 by baudattitude

It works something like this:

Every console generation, I buy the Nintendo console.  I buy some accessories for it, and a handful of games, and then I ignore it in favor of playing every other console.  I make sure to buy the Mario game for the console, and the Zelda game for the console, ignoring that I’ve never finished a Zelda title and I can’t stand Mario in 3D.  Eventually, I sell the whole shebang at a massive loss.

The exception is the DS.  I’ve finished a ton of games on the DS.  I’ve even bought and finished New Super Mario Brothers, which has the advantage of not trying to be in 3D.

Anyway, the worst example of this was the Nintendo 64, a system for which – when I sold it – I hadn’t finished a single game bought for the system.

Now we come to the Wii, which I lucked into buying back in April of 2007, when they were quite difficult to find, and a console I bought solely because there was a new NiGHTS game coming out.

For the record, I played the new NiGHTS game all of about twice and got stymied by the very first boss, which frustrated me enough that I haven’t gone back to it.

At least I didn’t buy either the Mario game or the Zelda game yet.

Anyway.  I’ve identified this pattern and my plan is to do something about it, and that something started with actually playing a Wii game to completion, in this case Klonoa.

Klonoa and me have a long relationship.  I didn’t play either the PS1 or PS2 games, but I bought the third game for the Game Boy Advance and quite liked it, enough to buy and play through the fourth game as well.  It’s a little cute even for me – and I have a massive tolerance for “cute” – but I really like the way you get around in a Klonoa title; you play very aggressively for a platform game hero and the sight of a group of enemies is less something to avoid and more something to charge at.

So anyway, having played the third and fourth games in the series, and having the second game sitting in my backlog, I was rather glad when they released a Wii remake of the first game so I could hop on board from the beginning, and even more glad when it came out at a wallet-friendly 30 bucks.

The price reflects the nature of the game – it’s actually rather short.  There’s a difficulty spike in the last couple of levels that sent me back to earlier stages to farm extra lives – and, honestly, it’s a good argument for abolishing the whole “lives” metaphor, as they’re in unlimited supply – but even with the crazy difficulty jump it was still, mmm, 12 hours or so to play through.  Anyone who was actually GOOD at this sort of game could probably do it in 8 or less, I’m sure.

Anyway, to cut this short: It was fun, it kept my interest until the end, I unlocked a bunch of stuff that I’ll probably never go back to (time trials? reverse mode?), and I have both finished a Wii game for the first time and opened the door to playing Klonoa 2.

A good day all around.

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We are moved.

Posted on June 27, 2009 by baudattitude

It took 2, 10-foot U-haul trucks, 1, 14-foot U-haul, and an awful lot of back and forth in our Mazda3, but our stuff is where it needs to be. Next time – more purging, less moving. Honest.

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Well, that wasn’t so bad

Posted on June 26, 2009 by baudattitude

OK, so, my Japanese placement test went extremely well; I was worried about being allowed into JPN301 in the Fall, and the person who did my interview not only approved me for that, she suggested that it might be too easy and offered me the option of jumping right into 400 level courses.

That would, however, be the very definition of hubris, so I’m going with 301 in Fall and am just amazingly relieved that I’m not being asked to take some review courses during summer term.

I’m going to chalk this up to an extreme case of luck, by the way; she kept asking me questions that were right out of exercises we’d drilled over and over again in my 100 and 200 level courses.  If she’d gone much off-script, I don’t think I would have recieved such a rosy evaluation. 🙂

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I watch bad movies (So you don’t have to)

Posted on June 24, 2009 by baudattitude

Well, I’m about one truckload away from being completely moved to the town where I’ll be spending the next two years, and after a bit over a week with no internet connection I’m back on line.  Life is good.

I do have an interview with the East Asian Languages and Literature department head tomorrow to determine whether I’ll be able to take the classes I want to in the fall, which I’m a bit worried about, but which I’ve been doing some studying for.

Part of that studying consisted of buying the class material for the university’s Japanese 203 course, reviewing it, and realizing that the 203 course I took, while using the same textbook, stopped about a chapter shy, so I’ve gone over that chapter fairly well and can probably fake it.

Another part has been watching Japanese movies, which I am defending as “supplemental study aids”, a defense which would probably be more practical if I hadn’t been choosing some really bad examples.

Warning here:  Most of these are several years or even decades old, so I’m not going to be too nice about avoiding spoilers.  If you are worried about seeing spoilers for In The Realm Of The Senses / Ai No Corrida, Dark Water, or the Eko Eko Azarak movies, you should probably stop after the following short comments:

In The Realm Of The Senses: Painful.

Dark Water: Rather good.

Eko Eko Azarak 1 : Wizard of Darkness : 90 minutes of your life you won’t get back.

Eko Eko Azarak 2 : Birth of the Wizard : Reasonably watchable

Eko Eko Azarak 3: Misa the Dark Angel : Another 90 minutes of your life you won’t get back, and a miserable DVD transfer to boot.

Now on to the more in-depth reviews.

In the Realm of the Senses / Ai No Corrida:

I bought this movie based solely on reading an article in which it was compared to Tampopo, which was an excellent movie with a bit of gratitutious nudity thrown in.

This is more like a lot of gratituitous nudity with a little bit of movie thrown in.  It wasn’t until after I had suffered through it and then gone to Wikipedia to find out what the hell it was all about that I found that it was based on an actual woman who had an affair, went bat-shit crazy, strangled her lover, cut off his man parts and carried them around in her purse.

In the movie, as you might expect, she has an affair, goes bat-shit crazy, strangles her lover, and cuts off his man parts – in, by the way, extreme close-up.  I am given to understand that this movie has recently been released on Blu-Ray.  I don’t think this movie needs to be seen in 1080P, or for that matter even 480P.  This film might actually benefit from being watched on a third-generation bootleg VHS copy.

The movie has a bit of claim-to-fame in that it’s not available uncensored in its home country.  I think I should have taken a moment to remember exactly how liberal the Japanese are when it comes to certain things and taken that as a warning.

Moving along, we come to Dark Water, a movie which got adapted into a Major Hollywood Picture, which was almost certainly responsible for the release of the original film in a reasonably decent DVD version.

It’s quite watchable.  The movie’s pacing is, to put it charitably, slow, and you’ll want to slap the main character after about her third tantrum, but it delivers a good couple of stings toward the end that make the buildup worth it.

Also, it’s completely bereft of gore, which is surprising for something billed as a horror movie.  There’s one major “ewwww” moment, but it’s more in the realm of “wow, that’s extremely unhygenic” than “wow, her whole face just melted!”

Speaking of which, that brings us to Eko Eko Azarak 1, in which, yes, someone’s whole face does melt.

We find out in the first few minutes of Eko Eko Azarak that Misa – the main character of this trilogy of movies – is a grade-A mystical badass, the sort of witch you don’t want around if you’re up to No Good.  It’s good that we find this out in the introduction, because she doesn’t actually do anything that’s all that badass in the actual movie.

To summarize the plot, there’s a cadre of creepy guys in robes who want to summon nasty demons into our plane of existance in an attempt to blah blah blah blah blah rule the world.  This of course requires sacrificing young innocents at the local high school, and Misa transfers in with the intent of stopping the sacrifices, beating up the creepy guys in robes, in general striking a blow for Truth, Justice, and Mom’s Apple Pie.

I’m not entirely sure what the Japanese version of apple pie is in that last sentence, but roll with me here.

To sum up her actual effect:  All of her classmates die anyway, we discover that the whole reason for all the killing was just to draw Misa to the school, and the Big Bad Guy accidentally kills HIMSELF by trying to perform too powerful a spell.

Misa, on the other hand, casts a total of one spell with any effect during the movie, and all it does is give a perverted science teacher a really nasty case of intestinal discomfort, making him take a HALF-DAY off work.

Not what you’d call a really good day for a mystical protector witch.

The second Eko Eko Azarak movie is a prequel in which we learn how Misa changed from a Perfectly Normal High School Girl into a Badass Witch, and she actually demonstrates some Badass Abilities during the course of the movie.  I actually quite liked it, which leaves me with little to say.

It’s a shame that the third movie returns Misa to her status of “rather useless”

The last line of the blurb on the back of the DVD package reads, and I quote:

“Will she be able to save the Drama Club from the bloody slaughter that awaits them?”

Answer: Nope. If you were hoping for Badass Witch Mayhem, go back to the second movie, because Misa’s efforts to save the Drama Club are an 87.5% failure.

Oh, and to add insult: the DVD transfer is awful.  The first two movies at least got anamorphic transfers, the third is letterboxed inside a 4:3 frame and the movie is so dark in places that the only thing you see on screen is the actor’s teeth.

The Eko Eko Azarak movies DID have one thing going for them, from my point of view: The actors all enunciated fairly well, so I felt like I was getting some quality Supplemental Study.

Posted in japanese, movies & tv, school | Leave a comment

I are graduated

Posted on June 14, 2009 by baudattitude

Three years of night & weekend courses under my belt, I’m now the proud holder of an associate’s degree.

Well, the proud holder of a diploma cover with a “We’ll mail you your degree in a few weeks if you turn out to really have qualified” note in it, but at least I have that, and I got to shake the hand of the college president and walk across the stage and all that.

I did realize, during the ceremony, that I didn’t actually know anyone else who was having their name read off and didn’t know any of the college faculty who were introduced during the preamble to the whole marching-and-name-reading thing.  I’m going to have to try to be a little more connected during my junior and senior years.

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