Back on the bike…

Posted on November 3, 2008 by baudattitude

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.

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Nine freakin’ hours.

Posted on November 2, 2008 by baudattitude

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.

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Ugly First Level Syndrome, an Anecdote

Posted on October 31, 2008 by baudattitude

I was at work today and sort of casually eavesdropping on the gentleman in the next cube who’s recommending SOCOM to another of our developers, and the developer in question brings up Rainbow Six Vegas because, well, they’re talking about tactical shooters and it’s relevant to their interests.

Specifically, he brings it up as “It looks like a PS2 game” and warns the first guy, in no uncertain terms, to stay far away from it.

See, he has a PS3 and a 47″ screen and, as he puts it, likes to sit about 3 feet from the screen.  Which is going to kill his eyes someday, but he’s still pretty young and who am I to talk?

The thing is, as I listen to him talking about how ugly the game is, I realize something:  He didn’t make it through the first level, and everything he’s saying is completely defensible if you’ve only seen that level – the game IS godawful ugly until you get to the second level and actually get in to Vegas.

So I stuck my nose into the discussion, double-checked that I was right about that,  and then shared in his disgust about the opening level and tried to make the case that the game actually does get rather pretty after you get over the initial hump.

Anyway, he’s going to go home and push through it to see if I’m right or not and will report back.

So, two things.

One: This supports my “Guys! It’s OK to put a pretty level up front!” theory of Game Design.

Two: Ubisoft bloody well owes me one for trying to untarnish their image.

OK, Ubisoft really doesn’t owe me anything, but I can be smug in their general direction and that’s good enough for me.

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Oh, foo.

Posted on October 31, 2008 by baudattitude

No Xbox live gold subscription at the moment means no downloading the new Tomb Raider demo.

I really can’t work up much of a rant on the topic, but darn those, uh, people at Microsoft and their darned gold-subscriber-exclusivity windows.

Yeah.

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Izuna 2: A Cheap Win is Still A Win

Posted on October 30, 2008 by baudattitude

I’m going to start this Izuna-related post by talking about another game completely.

There is a particularly effective tactic in Everquest called “kiting”

No, really, this is about Izuna, I’ll get back to her in a second.

The tactic involves fighting something by hitting it with ranged attacks while running away from it fast enough that it can’t get you.  The thing you’re fighting follows after you like a kite on a string, hence “kiting.”

Most MMORPGs since Everquest have some sort of mechanic that makes kiting a less-powerful tactic, and EQ has gone back and added anti-kiting mechanics to most significant NPCs.

OK, now back to Izuna.

One of Izuna’s main points – and here I mean the game, not the character’s “main points“, you perverted bastards – is that it’s turn-based; every time you take a step or attack, everything else on the screen gets to take a step or attack.  This means that you can, for example, run away from things, but you can’t run away AND attack because that would take two turns.

This little bit of balance got thrown right out the window when they added “haste boots” to Izuna 2; they allow you to take two steps for every one step everything else gets to take.

These aren’t much help in most dungeon environments, because it’s very common to get surrounded in the cramped and narrow corridors that represent most of your dungeon-crawlin’ experiences, and then you’re pretty much done for.

On the other hand, they turned every boss fight into me running circles around the boss and peppering him with shuriken at range while he followed me, like the aforementioned kite on a string, until he fell down.

ONE boss was a bit of a worry, because she actually had a ranged attack, but she used it rarely enough that I was able to heal up between her attacks.

On the other hand, even though the bosses themselves became non-issues after I scored a pair of haste boots, the dungeon grinding to GET to the bosses was pretty consistantly challenging, and I went through an awful lot of escape talismans and near-death experiences getting leveled up adequately.

End result: Approximately fourteen hours of button-mashing, item collecting, and light side-questing culminating in a glorious, if seriously cheesy, victory with an enjoyable story payoff and a few bonus dungeons opened for me that I am going to ignore because they’re for the Hard Core Roguelike Fans and I am not a Hard Core Roguelike Fan.

Mind you, my normal playtime was on the order of 15 minutes per session, so 14 hours took me 20 days to play through.

Also, from the “relevant-to-my-interests” category: If you’ve helped a couple of minor NPCs out with side quests on your way through the game, they wind up building an onsen in the last town, which of course means a mildly naughty all-the-girls-in-the-onsen picture.

I would like to point out that, when I was helping out the NPCs, it wasn’t because I knew what the final result would be, just that helping them out seemed the nice thing to do.

Honest.

Addendum: 20 minutes of googling fails to turn up the reward image for finishing the onsen side-quest, so I can’t share it with you.  I am shocked, shocked I tell you.

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A Follow-Up to a Rant About Fatal Frame II

Posted on October 30, 2008 by baudattitude

OK, I have to cut Tecmo a little bit of slack now about that fight in Fatal Frame II.

More spoilers for the game follow.  You are warned.

After a few attempts on my own, I went looking for FAQs, and found about half-a-dozen, mostly for the PS2 version.

Every one of them commented on the fact that the last boss – the last boss on “normal” difficulty, anyway – could kill you in one hit and so on and so forth, but each and every one of them seemed to think that the fight was kind of a throwaway, that just getting to the boss was much harder than the boss itself.

Now, I pride myself on one thing: I don’t go to a FAQ for minor setbacks.

I may take games and set them to “easy”, but at least I try things for myself several times before giving up.

This means that, by the time I have to go to a FAQ about something in a game, I’ve usually gotten to the “nasty difficult bit” that EVERYONE has trouble with.

See also: “Meat Circus”.

This fight didn’t match my typical pattern.  It was, apparently, EASY.

I was very confused

Then I saw something that was almost an offhand comment in one of the six FAQs:

“shoot the boss in the head”

This made the lights come on.

See, I have the habit, and I’m not sure where I picked it up, but in FPS games, I aim for center-of-mass.

So, I went back for another go, and forced myself to aim just a little higher than I normally would, and, uh, won on my next try.  It wasn’t even a fight.

So, yeah, it’s easy.  That is, it’s easy once you know that, no matter how good your timing is,  the boss can’t be killed by shooting it in the chest.

I’m tempted to give the game another go and see if the same tactic makes a difference with other ghosts; it’s possible that I made the game a lot harder than it actually needed to be.

Follow-up to the above follow-up: I’m going to at least give Fatal Frame II a chance in hard mode, especially since, upon beating it for the first time, I unlocked these for the girls:

Pardon the poor quality screen shot.

Fatal Frame II : Now Even More Relevant to My Interests.

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A rant about Fatal Frame II

Posted on October 30, 2008 by baudattitude

I’ve tried to speak in general terms here, but the following is a wee bit of a spoiler for the final fight in Fatal Frame II, so you might not want to read on if you’re like me and still have games from 2004 you haven’t played through and are trying for the first time.

OK, if you’re still with me.

Dear Tecmo Developers:

When designing a game where the main character picks up, over the course of the game, lots and lots of healing items and occasional items that will miraculously step in and revive the character in the event of their untimely death:

Do not wait until the last boss to introduce an enemy whose touch is a one-hit kill, which kills you even if you DO have one of the rare items whose sole purpose is to restore you to the land of the living.

Furthermore, after designing a game in which combat is deliberately slow paced and consists of dodging attacks while waiting for the correct opening, do not wait until the last boss to introduce an enemy who regenerates unless constantly attacked, especially not when the only way the player can attack is by provoking the boss into attacking and then trying to riposte incoming, invariably fatal, attacks.

Lastly, if you’re going to do both of those, don’t put the last save point so far away from the last boss fight that every death and retry involves 3.5 minutes, at a dead run, of navigating a rather nondescript corridor so you can get back for another attempt.

To be fair, thank you for two small concessions to sanity you have made:
1) Thank you for letting me fight everything up until just before the last boss fight, then go back and save.  Not having to go through a bunch of small fights every time is very appreciated.

2) Thank you also for making the penultimate cutscene skippable.  That in itself is probably the only thing keeping me banging my head against this particular wall instead of just going to Youtube for the ending and calling it good.

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Pudding! Also, sheer abject terror.

Posted on October 27, 2008 by baudattitude

It’s been a nice few days in the Portland area.  After waiting until, roughly, June, to get even a hint of spring, we’re getting a very sunny and warm fall to make up for it.

Because it was so bloody nice out on Saturday, my wife and I went out to the local open-air-mall, or, I think they call it, “Lifestyle Shopping Experience”.

Which means a mall where you get rained on, also you have to dodge people in cars because, while there is a large central area that is pedestrian-only, there are several restaurants and shops and theaters that you need to cross streets to get to.

But I digress.

Anyway, we saw this store:

And my thought process went something like this:

1) What the hell is that?

2) It’s a… pudding store?

3) I must eat there.

Turns out they serve rice pudding, 20 or so different flavors of rice pudding, and crepes and frozen yogurt.

Ordinarily I would say that they have the prospective lifespan of, oh, you remember when there were all those sock-only stores in the malls?  They lasted a good couple years, right?

On the other hand, in the few minutes it took us to order and enjoy our desserts – pumpkin pudding for me, strawberries and whipped cream in a crepe for my wife – several other people came in for pudding.  So they might just have a niche going.

It was enough to get us to go back the next day for more pudding, anyway.

That doesn’t have much to do with the post-Star-Trek-Legacy game of choice, which is Fatal Frame II : Crimson Butterfly : Director’s Cut, or maybe Fatal Frame II Director’s Cut Crimson Butterfly or Crimson Butterfly : Director’s Cut: Fatal Frame II or…

Look, the subtitles aren’t entirely unambiguous, all right?

Anyway, I rented this game back in, oh, November of 2004, and played it for about 2 hours.  I got up to the point where you meet the first hostile ghost you can’t actually fight with the camera, which meant that I also died a horrible painful death.

Then I returned it, because in 2004 I was in the heights of Everquest addiction and I was able to justify paying seven bucks to rent a game and then only playing it for 2 hours.

Then I got a $50 gift card for Fred Meyers for Christmas, and I spent it on a copy of, and let’s just avoid the whole name issue by just saying “Fatal Frame II”, Fatal Frame II to call my very own.

Oh, and I didn’t actually put it in the Xbox or anything silly like that, I put it on the shelf and went back to Everquest.

Flash forward to my post-playing-Bioshock-in-the-dark self, and suddenly I got the urge to take it off the shelf, open it – yes, open the four-year-old-shrinkwrap, I’m pathetic – and put it in the 360 and give it a spin.

I’ve been playing after dark, with the lights off, using headphones, and I believe that this is the Right And Proper Way to play this game, because it has managed to give me the serious spine crawls on several occasions.

I have gotten considerably past the point where I got back when I rented it, after devising an absolutely wonderful strategy for dealing with that ghost that I couldn’t damage with the camera.

I will share it with you: Run, screaming, like a little girl.

In addition to satisfying my sudden craving to play games that will make me jump, it also lets me try to get some of my Pervy Cred back.

It’s got twin sisters who run around in lacy outfits with short skirts, it’s got stairs, and it’s got a camera.

I spent several minutes of my valuable time trying to get the perfect panty shot for you, my faithful and perverted readers.  I didn’t have a lot of luck at it, and no way to transfer the in-game-photos to the PC, so I gave up.

You’ll just have to go and play it yourselves.

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Trek Nostalgia: Satiated.

Posted on October 25, 2008 by baudattitude

I can now confirm what I’d heard about Star Trek Legacy’s length: It’s a pretty short game, especially if you’re playing it on easy.

About the time you’re starting to feel really comfortable with the controls and flying your ships around and commanding your small fleet, you get a whole bunch of achivement points and then you get to watch ending credits.

Still, I paid 8 bucks for it.

It was definitely worth 8 bucks, once I got past the “Enterprise” missions, anyway.  The Kirk missions were great fun, and four out of five of the “Next Generation” missions were also great fun.

The exception being “Revelations”, which was mindbogglingly annoying and which is also the very first mission in the Next Generation storyline and which has a really long cutscene for you to sit through every time you restart the mission, which in my case was about 8 times.

It actually sent me running to Xbox forums to get tips, which I am somewhat shamed to admit because of the whole, you know, playing on Easy and everything.

On the other hand, “Revelations” starts with Picard assuming command of the Stargazer, which is one of those total-fanboy-glee-moments, and the storyline takes you all the way through until after the events of Nemesis and the end of Voyager.  It’s a neat way to bookend the whole Next Generation timeline.

OK, now I’m going to stop with the whole Trek thing; I’m starting to scare myself.

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Be the Captain…

Posted on October 22, 2008 by baudattitude

It is no coincidence that the last Star Trek licensed game I played was Star Trek : Strategic Operations Simulator, a vector graphics arcade game released in 1982.  For some reason, the series has a reputation for attracting the worst sort of cash-in games, and I haven’t really been a fan of the show since Next Gen went off the air.

That having been said, when Next Gen WAS on the air, I used to watch it with a near-religious fervor every Saturday, and that explains the brief and compelling moment of nostalgia I experienced when flipping through a clearance bin at Sears several months ago and finding a copy of Star Trek Legacy for the 360 marked down to $7.97.

I’m playing it now because I’m actually running a little short on 360 games and it’s the most convenient system to play.  It’s this, Sneak King, or Eternal Sonata, really, unless I want to try another driving game or go insane and try to play through Viva Pinata.

It has a reputation for being pretty short, which I can appreciate even though I can’t corroborate it yet, and for having nice graphics, which I can report is also the case; at least, the ship models are quite nice looking.

I have a hell of a time actually controlling my ship, but it seems to be OK because I have three other AI-controlled ships on my side and they do an OK job of killing anything I can manage to target.

Unfortunately, every one of the three missions I’ve played thus far has some sort of “protect” element to it, but at least the game is somewhat forgiving if you let the occasional medical ship go down in flames while you’re protecting two other medical ships halfway across the map.

Also unfortunately, the game makes you start out playing through missions from the “Enterprise” era, which is not doing anything to feed my sense of nostalgia, but I understand that there are only 5 missions per era so I should be on to Classic-Trek-era missions soon enough.

After this, I’m going to need to play something REALLY naughty if I’m to have any hope of restoring my pervy-fanboy cred.

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