OK, so I don’t really think there are any such things as “Necessary” spiders, at least as far as video game enemies go, but these are particularly bad, not least so because of unfortunate timing.
I have been trying Dungeon Siege. I have heard it referred to as, basically, a prettier Diablo, and, yeah, from the 15 minutes of Diablo I’ve played, Dungeon Siege is kind of a prettier version. Except, you get to have a party instead of just one guy and the world has a little less of an “80s heavy metal music video” vibe.
If that makes any sense.
Anyway, it’s nice because I can pick it up and click things for a half hour or so and feel I’ve progressed and save. I’m not getting any long, uninterrupted periods of time to play games, so this is something I need – something I can play for a bit without any particular pressure – and it’s been working out.
Until, that is, tonight.
When I went blithely into the dungeon full of freaking spiders.
Before bed.
And I’ve been trying to get through this dungeon full of spiders for, like, 2 and a half hours, and it just keeps throwing more spiders at me and getting progressively more creepy-crawly , and I just want to get through so I can see something that doesn’t have 8 legs.
GAH.
At least it’s not Ravenholm.
Oh, as an aside, I got one of my party members killed and needed to look up how to resurrect her.
I was quite tickled to find out that this is the subject of a Microsoft Knowledge Base article.
They need another Knowledge Base article called something like “Dungeon Siege: How to make it so your skin stops crawling after fighting spiders for two hours when you’d really rather be in bed.”
…and, in fact, there’s nothing particularly special about this one, it’s just another cute girl-with-nekomimi wallpaper. If you are looking for more, may I kindly direct you to 4chan?
But, I saw the phrase “cat ear girl she is draw girl” in my search referrer log, and it bugged me because I KNEW I’d seen that exact mangled-english phrase on a wallpaper at some point, so I loaded up Picasa and scrolled through my “wallpapers, slightly naughty” folder until I found it.
So, whoever was looking for “cat ear girl she is draw girl”, if you throw that phrase into a search engine again, here you go.
Full disclosure: I do not ACTUALLY have a “wallpapers, slightly naughty” folder, but I think I am going to sort all my wallpaper folders in similar fashion very soon, because the opportunities for coming up with funny folder names are, well, endless.
“Wallpapers, slightly naughty”, “Wallpapers, not terribly naughty at all”, “Wallpapers, actually quite naughty” and so on and so forth.
I had to file a bug, a couple of weeks ago, which read something like:
“Monthly reports for xyzzy corp don’t seem to work; I can see data in the DB tables but when I try to run the reports I get an empty xml file.”
About a week went by, because the developer on the xyzzy corp project has a zillion things on his plate, and I get a response which can be summed up as:
“Are you sure you were doing it right? You’ll only get results under conditions x, y, and z. Please try to reproduce it, this time with debug mode turned on (here are instructions on how to do that), and give me (this particular log file)”
This is developer-speak for “I’m busy and don’t want to look at the code. Here’s some tasks for you to serve as a delaying tactic while I work on other stuff.”
Anyway, I did the stuff he asked for. The log file he wanted didn’t turn out to be very large, which seemed odd, but I sent it along anyway.
His response, and I give him credit for being man enough to admit this, was:
“Oh, I forgot. I commented the monthly reports routine out.”
OK, it’s probably only funny if you’ve spent time as a QA geek, but trust me, it was hilarious at the time.
Yesterday’s post was more than a little consumer-whorey, so I wanted to offer something up in my defense.
My first apartment, when I was 19 or so, was shared with Carmen Spray, who is, in addition to an accomplished fan artist, also very accomplished at living on the cheap.
We got a 2-bedroom apartment, I moved everything from my parents house into my bedroom, she moved the contents of her old studio into her bedroom, and we had a living room that was, well, pretty barren. We had a couch and a TV, a couple of drafting tables, and a whole lotta empty.
Anyway, to get back to the living on the cheap thing, one day she brings home a coffee table that she’s rescued from our complex dumpster, and suddenly we have an actual table that we can, you know, put food on, in the aforementioned barren front room.
When she moved out, I inherited the coffee table, and it’s lasted with me through the better part of two decades and several moves before being left out, today, in front of another dumpster in hopes that someone new will rescue it and give it a home.
And THAT’S what I replaced, with a shiny new LACK from Ikea, for the princely amount of $29.99.
“Like so many others, I had become a slave to the lkea nesting instinct.”
— Fight Club
Today was our third Ikea trip this week. It started out simply, with a pair of POÄNG chairs – black frames, red cushions, with matching footstools – on Tuesday, with a little MACKIS paper organizer for under the printer and some BUMERANG hangers for the hallway closet, followed by a FLÄRKE bookshelf, some sheets, some roll-packed pillows and black pillow covers on Saturday, culminating with some LACK side tables, a LACK coffee table, a KULLEN chest of drawers, and a whole mess of KASSETT DVD boxes today.
I can stop whenever I want.
Honestly, the apartment is improved by the whole mess; it’s starting to look much less like a fanboy lair and a lot more like somewhere we could actually have company over to.
In the middle of satisfying all this Urgent Need For Current Consumer Goods, we took many of our Old, now Unwanted, Consumer Goods to the Goodwill, so we got to have the double hit of Buying New Things while at the same time Donating Old Things.
For dinner, we had Applebee’s. I honestly do not think you could have a more suburban day than we had today.
Tomorrow, I promise, I’ll do something to show that I’m not just a consumer whore. I might get wild and play some Madden with my homeboys while chugging Coors lights.
Note: Yes, I did go to Ikea today, and yes, for the third time this week, and yes, we had dinner at Applebee’s tonight, and I must say that the quesadilla burger is most yummy, but no, I do not and have never owned any version of Madden, don’t have any Coors Light in the fridge and never have had, and I don’t know anyone who I would ever refer to as a “homeboy”, except in a deeply ironic sense. If I ever do cross over that final line… someone shoot me if I don’t get around to it myself.
Followup to the Note: While I do eschew Madden, I quite enjoy the Halo series, which I know pretty much casts me as a pariah in the eyes of “hardcore” gamers. Somehow, I will learn to live with this.
OK, so in the course of organizing the apartment, I’m looking through some boxes that haven’t been gone through in a few years.
And I find a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks labeled “C: Drive Backup, 10/1/1994, Norton Backup Format”
Let me run my thought process down for you, as it went.
First, these floppy disks are 14 years old, and they’re “Pengo” brand. Not exactly premium media. The data on them is probably pretty far from readable anymore.
Second, Norton Backup used a proprietary format that relied on a custom compression scheme to pack as much data as possible on to each floppy. No other backup software is going to be able to restore the contents of these disks.
Third, even if someone was digging through the trash, happened to find these disks, happened to have a copy of Norton Backup lying around AND the disks were still readable – what are the odds that any piece of personal data from 1994 is in the least bit still sensitive?
I STILL spent several minutes breaking every one of them in half before throwing them away.
One of the things purged in last weekend’s organizational frenzy was a 24″ Toshiba TV.
It’s not that it was a particularly bad TV in any way, but it was, you know, a CRT TV, and big and heavy and all that – and since I got the Gateway monitor with all kinds of lovely analog inputs, kind of obsolete.
It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized the downside of getting rid of the last CRT TV in the apartment.
Virtua Cop, Virtua Cop 2, Area 51, Hakaider. All of ’em light gun games, all of ’em 90% useless now that I don’t have a CRT around. I mean, I could play them with the joypad, but that seems so… well, so very lame.
OK, so I really won’t miss Area 51 or Hakaider, but not being able to play Virtua Cop stings a bit. Guess I’m going to have to find an actual arcade with a Virtua Cop 3 machine to hang out in. Shame the only time I’ve actually SEEN a Virtua Cop 3 machine was on Odaiba, but I guess it’s possible that there’s one in Portland.
My wife and I have been going through a bit of a crazed organization phase recently, which has been helping enrich our local Ikea and Container Store to no end but which has also been making our apartment into a more livable cave.
This last weekend was a particularly good time for it; we had a couple of rooms that had become basically clutter heaps, but now have clear floors. Many books shelved, loose papers filed, homeless random crap given homes… We sat back after the weekend and felt like we’d DONE something.
Also I was in extreme pain for two days, but this morning I woke up and didn’t immediately go for Tylenol, so that’s an improvement.
On the other hand, there’s a point where you know you’ve gotten a LOT accomplished, and you think there’s probably a bunch to do, but you’ve gotten so many of the big tasks done that you look at your apartment and you think “Well, it’s a lot better, I don’t really see how it could be improved.”
Yesterday, I had the bright idea to wander the newly-organized apartment with a digital camera and just take photos of rooms, shelves, etc, from all sorts of angles and perspectives, and then browse through them when I was out of the apartment.
It’s amazing what you see when you look at your living space that way; you start saying things like “Wait, why do we have the boxes, carefully stored away, for the wireless router? And why haven’t I given that 2MP digital camera, again with the carefully stored away box, to Goodwill yet? And why do I have a bunch of gachapon figures tossed into a cardboard box, when at the same time I have a completely empty Milk & Cheese lunchbox stuck in a closet that should be on display and could co-incidentally hold all the loose gachapon figures?
I won’t go through the whole list of “Wait, why do I…?” because it had something like 30 entries. None of them are particularly huge things, which is how they escaped notice during what I’ll call the “macro” organization, but combined, taking care of them has already started to make a notable difference in clutter levels.
I very nearly started Final Fantasy III – it was in the DS, even – but I decided that maybe a long RPG wasn’t a great idea.
Then I realized that I had been playing a disturbing number of Nintendo products lately, and that I was in danger of losing my credentials as a Sega fanboy.
So, the obvious answer was to go back a couple of generations and play Sonic the Hedgehog 3. It’s one of those games that got released at a time when I was flat broke, and with one thing and another I’d never gotten around to going back and playing it.
Decision made, I carefully made sure to have my copy of the Sega Genesis Collection in my manpurse, along with a PSP on which to play it, for the next time I had a few spare minutes to devote to a portable game.
I don’t know if it’s quite serious enough to fall under the category of “the universe hates me” or not, but it was more than a little annoying, when that time happened to come, to boot up the PSP, load up the Genesis Collection, and find out that it only has Sonic 1 and 2.
I DO have it on the Gamecube Sonic Collection, but that’s less than portable.
In desperation, I fell back to the shelf of GBA games that have accumulated in our apartment, and wound up with Super Mario Brothers 3. Apparently I’m destined to be Shiggy’s bitch.
It is, by the way, kicking my arse.
When playing through New Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario World, I never actually saw the “Game Over” screen. I suspect both games HAVE Game Over screens, because they must have, but it was so easy to stockpile extra lives in both that I never wound up at it.
I’ve only just made it to the third world in SMB3, and I have been abusing the hell out of the unlimited continues. It took me well over twenty lives to get through ONE of the stages in world two, and by the time I was done I was shaking with barely controlled Nerd Rage.
I may just have to hunt up a NES cart and see if it was this difficult in the original version – because, if it was, I have newfound respect for any kid in the 80s who put up with the pain.
Oh, and whoever made the decision to add voice samples whenever Mario gets a powerup or dies, with no option to disable the voice, can just… they can just, well, go on with whatever they were going to do anyway, but I’m thinking unkind thoughts in their general direction.
Edit: I went and looked up reviews, and was glad to find out that, yes, it’s supposed to be nasty hard.
It’s my assertation that titling your game “Densetsu no Starfy 3” (“The Legend of Starfy 3”) sets certain, possibly unrealistic expectations for your main character, particularly when he’s, well, a starfish.
Not to say that there aren’t legendary starfish.
Starro comes to mind,
and I can’t help but give Fuuko a little page space here.
However, echinoderms in general are not typically the stuff of legend, not even those obscure legends that get trotted out occasionally by anthropologists trying to write a thesis that nobody’s done yet.
That being said, I am given to understand that the Starfy series, while perhaps not of legendary status, is quite popular in Japan. It hasn’t been released in the US – either Nintendo thinks we’re just not ready for it, or perhaps they really don’t want to translate all the text.
Because, well, this is an awfully talky game for a platformer. Pretty much every level opens with a conversation between the main characters as they discuss the obstacles ahead and how they’re going to overcome them. Being the third game in the series, you also run into lots of characters from previous games. Not having played any of the previous games, the assorted cameoes were more-or-less lost on me, but that’s what you get when you start with a “3”
The plot, even not really knowing anything about our for-the-sake-of-argument-Legendary hero and his past conquests, didn’t take much going over. The game opens with your Arch Nemesis escaping from the – brittle, ceramic – prison in which you sealed him, presumably LAST game, and flying off to wreak havoc, after which you take control of the plucky young starfish who’s going to go bring him back.
I would add something about maybe trying to find a better place to stick your Arch Nemesis between games, but honestly, good guys are dumb.
In this quest, you are accompanied by a sort of grouchy clam thing who will serve as your mentor.
Also accompanying you, and new to Starfy 3 is Starfy’s kid sister, Starpi.
Not being familiar with the Starfy-verse, I wouldn’t have known that she was a new character if I hadn’t found the TV commerical for the game on Youtube.
It features Perfume, everyone’s favorite all-girl band that will be dropped like a hot rock as soon as the next set of idols come along.
I don’t say this to disparage them, I’m a fan. I have several of their albums and one of their performance DVDs.
Honestly, though, idols have a lifespan measured in mayfly years.
Getting back to Starpi, she’s the “Tails” of this game; a slightly-cuter character thrown in to complement the main character.
Because she needs more of a hook than just “the girl starfish”, she speaks Osaka-ben, fairly rudely.
This is actually kind of fun.
Anyway.
I have called this a “platformer” and the creators would take issue with this. Nintendo officially calls this a “Marine Action” game, which is really just a platformer in which you spend far more time than usual swimming.
The Starfy games have a solid reputation for being colorful, charming, cutesy, and above all easy.
Here’s the box art for Starfy. If you’re a bit sketchy on understanding the crazy moon-man language they speak in the land of Legendary Starfish, the bit of text in the upper left proudly proclaims that it comes with a “big, sparkly” sticker enclosed. That should pretty much nail the target age group for you.
Oh, and it should pretty well describe the average state of used games in Japan to note that the sticker was still present when I bought it for a whopping Y1000, five years after release.
I’m considering sticking the sticker on my laptop; it could use a big, sparkly sticker.
I like easy games. Honestly, I LOVE easy games. Sometimes, when I want a crazy challenge level, I’ll start a game and set the difficulty to “Normal” just to make myself sweat a bit before I laugh at my own foolishness and ratchet it back down to a level I have a hope in hell of defeating.
Starfy’s not just easy because your enemies have predictable patterns and don’t move too terribly fast, it’s also easy because the game itself is one of the best-designed games I’ve played this year.
Both characters you play during the course of Starfy have special moves. Jumps, double-jumps, glides, crawls, wall springs, floor slams, dashes, spins… You have different move sets for underwater and out of water, and you switch back and forth between land and water frequently during a level.
You’re controlling a pair of pretty talented and agile starfish here, is the point I’m trying to make, and the move sequences you can do with them are quite complex.
Even with all the things you can, and are expected to do, this game deftly avoids the Heavenly Sword frustration factor, a term which I will now define having just made it up.
Fair warning: I’m about to leap off on a major tangent here.
Your character in Heavenly Sword – well, your main character, the one on the box and all that – has several moves revolving around hacking, slicing, and chopping her enemies into oblivion.
To do these, you just mash buttons.
I’m good at mashin’ buttons.
She can also reflect enemy attacks back towards them. This is a little more complicated than just jamming the button for “hit guys with my swords”. It takes careful timing and attention to the sort of attack you’re being hit with, and you don’t actually ever NEED to reflect any enemy attacks during the course of the game so it’s something you can pretty much ignore after you do it the requisite one time in the tutorial.
Well, until you get to the very final boss fight, where all of a sudden, you can’t finish the game unless you’ve learned the proper timing for attack reflection.
It is perhaps unfair to single out Heavenly Sword in this regard, but it came to mind and it’s not like anyone is about to jump to its defense, unless of course you work for Ninja Theory, in which case you should stop reading blogs and get back to work on Heavenly Sword 2: In Which You Play The Entire Game As The Crazy Chick With The Bow.
Getting back to Starfy, Starfy’s not like that.
Well, it’s entirely unlike Heavenly Sword in almost every possible way. Nariko doesn’t speak Osaka-ben, for instance, and Starpi doesn’t have six-foot-long red hair. Also, Nariko wears SOME clothes, while Starpi is comfortable naked.
I just threw that last sentence in there to get more page hits.
But in addition to all the other ways in which the two games are complete opposites, they have a different philosophy to learning the moves of your characters.
Starfy’s made up of 10 “worlds” of four levels each, and every world comes with a new move or a new vehicle that you need to learn to get through the world.
Each and every one of these moves will be used, almost as soon as you get it, in a very low pressure environment, before you are able to progress any further in the level.
Shortly after that, you’ll have to use it again, but a little trickier this time, and then again a little trickier.
By the time you get to whatever boss you needed the special move to defeat, you’ll have used it enough times that it’ll be second nature – the game forces you to practice it, over and over again, so you don’t ever hit the wall.
You’ll also get periodic reinforcement of moves you learned in previous worlds. There’s no “you need to learn a wall spring to get through this world, and you’ll never use it again.”
Put simply, you’re never cursing the screen because you never needed to learn how to reflect attacks and you only actually did it like 5 hours ago when the game made you do it successfully once before it would let you out of the damn tutorial level and get on with hacking up hordes of minions.
So, to sum up, it’s cute, well designed, not frustrating, and generally entertaining.
So, of course, it also has a downside.
Remember Sonic the Hedgehog? Where you’d beat the game and then you’d get the annoying little screen where Robotnik was juggling Chaos Emeralds because you hadn’t Caught Them All ?
Well, when you finish Starfy, you find out that the only way to REALLY beat the game is to go back to all the worlds you’ve ALREADY been through, but this time you need to collect “Evil Crystals” from each one.
Even so, you still get a very flashy congratulations message about how you’ve cleared all the levels, and the end credits scroll, so the whole tedious fetch quest is completely optional.
