A Winner Is Me

Posted on December 18, 2008 by baudattitude

So, there was a post on Kotaku a few days ago where they mentioned that x soft drink company was running a contest where you could win one of a few different digitally-distributed games, provided you gave them an email address.

Now, I haven’t won any game-related contests since Sega sent me a NiGHTS baseball cap back in, oh, 1996 or so, but I don’t think I’ve entered any since then.  So, basically I was batting a thousand and figured that the worst I could do was drop to five hundred.

As luck would have it, I wound up with a free copy of Braid for the 360, which I had been putting off getting – despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews – because it costs 1200 Microsoft Points.  That’s not me being cheap – everything I’ve heard suggests that the game is well worth the 1200 points.  Unfortunately, I only have 800 in my account, so I’d have to drop $20 on a 1600 point card to buy Braid and then I’d have 1200 points left over with no 2d shooters coming out any time soon.

So anyway, I have Braid, and I look forward to giving it a try sometime after I finish Dead Space, which will be in about a week if I can stick to my one-level-a-night schedule.

Oh, and the pudding last night was pretty much a failure.  The recipe I made a couple of nights ago used 2 cups of rice to 1/2 cup of sugar, and this was 1 cup rice 1 cup sugar.  I  finished mine and immediately went and brushed my teeth, and even after using some pretty damn minty toothpaste I could still taste the sugar.

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Pudding, Necromorphs, and the Yen Exchange Rate

Posted on December 17, 2008 by baudattitude

I gave rice pudding another shot, this time taking the leftover coconut rice from the other day and applying it to this recipe, leaving out the raisins, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

It worked really well.  I don’t know if I’m going to try duplicating it, because that would be an awful lot of work, but if I ever DO make coconut rice again, I’ll be sure to save a few cups.

I do have one more cup of the coconut rice and I’m going to throw it into this other recipe and see how that turns out.  That may be taking this whole pudding thing a step too far, I admit, but the worst that could happen is, well, some ruined rice that was going to get tossed anyway.  Oh, and I could catch our kitchen on fire and burn down the entire apartment complex, if we’re going to get into the ABSOLUTE worst that could happen, but I think I can probably avoid that.  I’ll try to keep it to this building and maybe one or two of the nearby garages, tops.

Oh, and I made some salmon, brown rice and assorted vegetables for the actual meal part of dinner, but that was all from frozen and everything but the fish was microwaved, so it really doesn’t deserve more than a sentence.

After dinner, I put Dead Space in the 360 – OK, I turned on the 360,  because I haven’t bothered to take the disc out since I got started – and played it for a couple of hours.

I’m happy to report that I got through the “asteroid bit” after only seven or eight tries.

I didn’t, mind you, know that the game included an “asteroid bit”, let alone one that was so bloody annoying.  My wife, who actually reads reviews, tells me that it is universally considered the game’s low point, and if that’s the case then all will be well.

As an aside, this is the first disc-based game I’ve played using the “install to hard drive” feature of the new Xbox dashboard, and it really is a whole different experience playing a game like Dead Space when you’re not warned of imminent attack by the sound of the optical drive loading enemy data.

At this point, I would like you to imagine a witty segue, because I don’t have one, but I didn’t want to devote a whole new post to this next rant:

The yen exchange rate is under Y90/$1 as of yesterday.  It hasn’t been this bad since 1995, which was a really crappy year for anyone whose hobbies revolve around Japanese pop culture, and, as it doesn’t look like it’s getting better anytime soon, it looks like this is going to be another crappy year.  It’s great for US exports, I guess, but I’m not really broad-minded enough to put that ahead of my own selfish interests.

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In Another Club

Posted on December 16, 2008 by baudattitude

This time, an official club, not an unofficial fraternity like the Brotherhood of the Dead Xboxen, which was the last club I became an – unwilling – member of.

No, see, Nintendo finally launched their Club Nintendo points-for-rewards scheme, and it was even thoughtful enough to let me migrate over my “MyNintendo” account and gave me points for the games I’d already bought and registered…

…some of them, anyway.  Which is to say, I got points for the Nintendo-branded Wii and DS titles I’d registered, but absolutely nothing for the long list of Gamecube and GBA games I’d registered.  I understand that I bought them an awfully long time ago and that they represent the Old Nintendo, back when it was a distant also-ran in the console market as opposed to an all-crushing juggernaut, but it would have been nice to get some credit for them.

Anyway, I wound up with about 15 games that were worth “coins”, which is their pseudo currency, and in all I wound up with 600 “coins” with which I could buy…

…well, not a lot, really.  Some bits of fluff that are interesting until you work out that, at 600 coins, you’ve bought approximately $700 worth of DS games to get a Mario-branded DS game rack that looks to hold about a dozen DS boxes.

On the other hand, the coins don’t expire for two years, and they’ve already confirmed that there will be special merchandise around the end of the Club Nintendo year, which is in June, so I’ll just hold on to my coins until then.  The Japanese club gets neat things like Super Famicom-style Wii Classic Controllers, and I wouldn’t mind something of the sort.

One negative side effect of this – now that those little registration cards have actual value, I wouldn’t go buying any “It’s our last copy!” games from Gamestop, unless I wanted to see a lot of “this registration code has already been used!” when I went to go and register it.

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20 Months Later…

Posted on December 15, 2008 by baudattitude

One of my very first posts was me talking about how I’d gone through the backlog, picked out half-a-dozen of the most critically acclaimed games I owned, and then set all of them aside and played Shenmue instead.

To save you any click-through, the games were Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, Killer 7, and Okami.

I’ve played through the first five of those since that post, but it took me until this last weekend to start Okami.

I have been dreading starting Okami, but not for the usual reasons.  I have heard nothing but good things about the game since its release, which is why it made the aforementioned list to begin with.

What has worried me is that I’ve heard that it is a crazy long game and that you can spend as much as 80 hours on it.  That’s the sort of game you need to be able to put large chunks of time into, and with a school and work schedule that takes up as much of my week as it does, there’s no way I could have played through it in less than 2 or 3 months.

On the other hand, I had my last final exam of the term on Saturday, and I have the next three weeks school-free, with a few work holidays in there as well.

It seemed a good time to get down to it.

I’ve played it for, oh, 9 hours or so and I feel like I’m just getting started, so I think what I’ve heard about length is accurate.   I also think that, at least from what I’ve seen so far, every bit of praise I’ve seen heaped on this game is well-earned.  You just feel good after playing it – not just because the visuals are pretty and the music soothing, but because you generally feel like you’re being a nice guy.  Wolf.  Sun-god.  Whatever.

Your primary goal – the only one you can’t decide not to do, really, most of the goals in the game are strictly optional – is to restore a country corrupted by an evil dragon-thingy.  In the process, you plant an awful lot of flowers and feed an awful lot of woodland creatures.  Not terribly manly, no, but surprisingly satisfying.

Now, I’ve been playing Okami on our PS3, which is hooked up to the TV in our living room.  Since that’s a shared TV, I don’t always have access.

I DO always have access to our Xbox 360, which is hooked up to my monitor in the computer room, so I’ve been playing Dead Space on that, which was an early Christmas gift.

This is, so far, the second-freakiest game I’ve ever played, beat out ONLY by Fatal Frame II.  I’m finding that I can play it for about an hour before I need to find a save point and take a break.  🙂

That’s not a complaint by any means.  When I play a game like Dead Space, I’m playing it for the heebie-jeebies, and it’s delivering.

The two games complement each other almost perfectly; if I – when I – get too twitchy to keep shooting necromorphs, I can change gear and feed rabbits for a while. 🙂

And yes, I know, it’s an Electronic Arts games and I don’t buy Electronic Arts games.  It was a gift.  I can therefore retain my down-the-nose sneering in the general direction of Redwood City while still enjoying the game.

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I’m, uh, Coco for Coconuts?

Posted on December 14, 2008 by baudattitude

I continued my dessert making theme by trying to duplicate a dessert that my wife used to get at a thai restaurant that we no longer live anywhere near.

It is, basically, coconut-flavored sticky rice with coconut ice cream on top.  “Handmade” coconut ice cream, as the restaurant’s web site proudly proclaims.

Well, if they wouldn’t stoop to using packaged coconut ice cream, then how could I?

So not only did I make some Thai Coconut Rice, I whipped up some Coconut Ice Cream to go along with it.  Without, I’ll point out, an ice cream maker.  Ice cream takes an awfully long time to freeze, by the way, and you do have to stir it fairly often during the freezing process, but apart from that it really wasn’t too hard to do.

The sole downside is that we have an awful lot of leftovers; I’ll have to see if I can turn the rice into some sort of coconut rice pudding.

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Fear, Expanded:

Posted on December 13, 2008 by baudattitude

The basic premise behind an expansion pack, like FEAR : Extraction Point, is pretty simple and one which I approve of – if you liked a game, it gives you some more of the same thing, and then adds a little bit more.

I would argue that it succeeds admirably in this.  You get a few more environments to shoot clones in, a couple more types of enemy, a couple more guns… It manages to mostly capture the feeling that the ending to the original game was just a cutscene and that these are the logical next steps.

Which, since the ending of Fear left me with a “Wait, you can’t stop there…” feeling, was very appreciated.

Of course, it sets itself up with an open-for-a-sequel ending, just because resolution is, I dunno, BAD or something, and it’s being treated as non-canon for the purposes of Fear 2 : Electric Boogaloo*, which comes out next year, so it might be best to think of it as a surprisingly good fanfic where the author ends with “I’m still working on the next part and hope to have it up soon.”

Non-canonical nature aside, I liked Extraction Point.  It doesn’t overstay its welcome – I’m not fast at these things and it still took less than 7 hours to play through – enough that it didn’t feel rushed, but not stretched out for the point of being stretched out.

It also manages to re-use most of the graphics from the original game but toss in just enough new stuff that they don’t feel recycled.  Yes, the corkboards have the same TPS reports pinned to them, and the clocks are all still stuck at 1:15, but these are pretty minor nitpicks. 🙂

Most importantly, it really improves on the messing-with-the-player’s-head aspect of the first game.  I mentioned this before so I won’t go on and on about it, but it turns the freaky up to 11.

I was a bit surprised by the strain it put on my PC.  After playing through the original game – not to mention newer games, like Bioshock – in 1920×1200 with all effects up, I did not expect to have any trouble with Extraction Point, but I was seeing really choppy graphics, less than 20fps at times.  I had to drop the resolution down to 1440×900 and lower graphics quality one notch from maximum to get to the point where the game was really playable.  Just a natural, if depressing, indication that technology marches on, I suppose.

* OK, actually “Fear 2 : Project Origin”, but I liked the sound of this better.

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Pudding: Round 2

Posted on December 13, 2008 by baudattitude

The rice pudding from the other night tasted quite good, but had a very chewy texture that didn’t really go hand-in-hand with the whole idea of “pudding”.  I was willing to put up with it, but it didn’t go over so well with my better half and took an awful lot of work… so that’s a fail.

I have a couple of other recipes for rice pudding that I’ll try next – they have the advantage of starting with leftover rice, and we have a lot of leftover rice these days.

But, tonight, I went straight for the Grand Prize of pudding – at least, as far as I’m concerned – and made up a casserole dish of bread pudding, using an Amish bread pudding recipe I’d found on the net.

The inherent contradictions in the previous statement are the freaking definition of irony, as far as I’m concerned.

It was a little mushy – I didn’t leave the bread out to get stale, I think that would have made a big difference – but it tasted great AND went over well with my wife.

So that’s a Big Win.

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Spiky Haired Freaks And Me

Posted on December 12, 2008 by baudattitude

cloud_sm phoenix

It’s been a bit over a decade since my wife and I played through Final Fantasy VII, but one thing sticks with me.

Well, a few things, really.  Chocobo racing, giant nasty sandworms, flower girls meeting unfortunate ends… but mostly what sticks with me is the frustration factor involved with maneuvering Cloud around some of the spiffy pre-rendered backgrounds.

When you got to a new screen in FF7, you could press a button to see where all the exits were on the current screen, and this was a big help since they weren’t always obvious.  The problem was that, once the exits were pointed out, you then had to maneuver Cloud to get to them, and the game got awfully finicky at times.

This lead to occasional shouts of “go where I want you to, you spiky haired freak!”

“Spiky haired freak” has become one of those phrases that’s outlived the game.

This brings me, somewhat awkwardly, to the latest game I borrowed off her DS shelf, Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney, which features a spiky haired, sometimes-clueless,  lawyer and endless variations on the old adventure-game play mechanic of “I have a dozen things in inventory.  One of them MUST be the thing I need to proceed.  Oops, that wasn’t the one, is it this one?

I will be pedantic and nitpicky here and point out that it’s actually not an adventure game, but a “visual novel”, a genre dominated by the sorts of games you probably wouldn’t want to be seen playing in public. This, however, is one of the rare non-adult examples of the genre, though I’m sure you can get no end of Phoenix Wright doujinshi, if that’s your thing, and who am I to criticize you if it is?

But I digress.

Phoenix Wright, surprisingly enough, manages to make being a lawyer look kind of fun.  You get to go out and question people and gather evidence and break into safes and all sorts of things that I’m not actually sure lawyers do, and then you get to take all this information to court and try to pick holes in testimony with it, generally in order to prove your client innocent and coincidentally convict the Real Bad Guy.

Fortunately, the Real Bad Guy is usually a thoroughly vile person and your client is usually innocent.  I’m not sure I’d like a game where your goal was to get your obviously-guilty client off on a technicality.

It does sometimes veer into “damnit, I KNOW this is the right evidence, why are you not letting me present it, you spiky haired freak?” territory, particularly at the start of the final case, but the ratio of “time spent nailing people to the wall with evidence” compared to “time spent trying to figure out what the heck I need to do to next” is favorable on the side of nailing people to the wall, and if you like the sound of that, this is a good game for you.

And, yes, the fact that it has three sequels and a fourth on the way DOES sort of suggest that it’s a decent game, but now you have my word for it as well.

Just don’t let the final case grind you down too much when you start on it.  There’s a sticky point you have to get past pretty early, and then it’s pretty much smooth sailing until the end credits.

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I mades me some pudding

Posted on December 12, 2008 by baudattitude

Then I eated it.

I keeping with the “cooking with rice” theme, I made rice pudding tonight, a very straightforward endeavor involving milk, sugar, salt, vanilla, and cinnamon… oh, and rice of course.  Actual INGREDIENTS, not a mix or anything.  Quality, donchaknow.

I’ve never made pudding from scratch before, but the experiment turned out pretty well.  I did manage to set off the smoke alarms when I discovered exactly how fast milk goes from the  “is it boiling yet?” to the “boiling over” stage, but that’s all part of the learning process – in this case, learning that milk nearly explodes when it boils.  It’s pretty impressive, it goes from a fairly placid fluid to a mass of rapidly expanding foam with no warning.

It DID take a good half hour to make, and you can’t leave the stove for a minute while it’s cooking, but I think the end result was worth the time invested.  I may have to double the recipe, though, because when all was said and done I only had enough pudding to fill a pair of 6oz dessert cups.

Fortunately, I was only cooking for two. 🙂

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Then came the expansion…

Posted on December 11, 2008 by baudattitude

I made fun of F.E.A.R., earlier, for not really being all that scary of a game.  I stand by my statements there.

The expansion pack, “Extraction Point”, however – THAT is pushing all the right buttons in making me jump.  I get the distinct sense that the designers of the expansion pack took note of whiny gits like me complaining that the first wasn’t scary enough and decided to crank it up a notch.

Well done, gentlemen.  Well done, indeed.

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