Baud Attitude

This won’t help my GPA any…

Posted on April 3, 2008 by baudattitude

Started Puzzle Quest today.

I just lost four hours. It was just after 7 PM at latest the last time I looked at a clock and now it’s pushing midnight.

And my stylus elbow hurts like crazy.

I’m blaming aliens. If there’s one thing watching the “X-files” taught me, it’s that missing time means alien involvement somehow.

The mysterious pain in my arm – also probably aliens.

Can’t be that I’ve been playing Bejeweled against Giant Rats for all that time. That would be silly.

Edit: I like Bejeweled. Everyone likes Bejeweled. But after 8 hours of playing Bejeweled-the-RPG, I am SO very much done with it. The item-and-spell-crafting parts of the game, in particular, crushed my soul.

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Jumpin’ Jack Flash IS, in fact, a gas, gas, gas.

Posted on April 1, 2008 by baudattitude

One of the first Nintendo DS games I bought was Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, and it is a glorious game. I spent far too many hours playing it and then going back to songs and trying to get higher ranks on them.

I never managed to beat Ready, Steady Go on anything harder than the easiest level, though, which is kind of sad I guess.

Then I bought Ouendan 2 last year, a few months after it came out, and didn’t get quite as sucked into it. I beat it on easy and then put it aside in favor of starting something new.

At some point, I ran across a cheap copy of Elite Beat Agents and bought it – I resisted buying it at full price because, well, my reasoning was that it was just a localized version of the original game, and how good could it be after the conversion?

That’s sat around, untouched, for a few months while I was working on the PSP Appreciation Project.

I finally decided to get around to trying it out 3 days ago.

I have what I fear may be a permanent stylus groove etched into my tappin’ thumb now. It’s a much better conversion than I expected, and the gameplay – not necessarily the songs list or the storyline, but the gameplay – is much improved from the first game. EBA adds things like being able to skip through animations and get right back to playing a song after you fail it, and an “instant replay” that lets you see the part of the song where you failed so you can get a feel for how the notes are laid out without necessarily playing back through the song to that point.

It’s also a lot easier, which is nice for people like me who don’t do well with hard games. I’ve beaten the game on the easy and normal levels already and gotten through about half of hard. That’s where I took the cartridge out of the DS and put it away because I have homework to do and it will not get done if I can just flip open the DS and “try one more song.”

Bluntly: It’s a really good game, and if you can put up with a song list that is guaranteed to contain at least ONE song that will, no matter how diverse your musical tastes, annoy the heck out of you, you should give it a try.

Oh – there is one exception to the “easier” rule. Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a right bitch of a song to tap through. It is, however, a song that I can put up with hearing over and over again, so it’s not too bad that it’s the bottleneck. 🙂

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Evil in a can.

Posted on March 31, 2008 by baudattitude

I grew up in the 1980s, and if you weren’t around at the time, or if you’ve managed to block them out, people saw the devil at work in a lot of things.

Rock Music, Comic Books, Video Games, Dungeons and Dragons… all of these were considered to be fairly reliable indicators of Satan’s hand at work.

As a fairly jaded youth, this didn’t make an awful lot of sense. Any powerful, ancient evil force worth his salt would, I figured, make his presence known by stomping down the streets of New York City, leaving hundred-foot-long cloven hoofprints along Madison Avenue. He wouldn’t waste his time mucking around with consumer products, he’d get straight to the fire and brimstone.

Although, come to think of it, I did have an issue of “Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane” that featured the Devil trying to put the moves on Lois.

That one comic aside, I didn’t think much of the whole idea.

I was naive. I will now freely admit this. I was wrong.

No human – no creature with morals or scruples or even the slightest tinge of a conscience – could have come up with this:

Macaroni and cheese. In a can. With a pop-top, even.

Look, making Mac & Cheese isn’t hard. I mastered it by the age of ten. You boil water. You put the macaroni in it and watch the water fizz over the sides of the saucepan until you think the macaroni is probably soft enough, then you strain it and add the glorious yellow “cheese” packet, with some milk and butter, and then you eat the entire damn box, I don’t care if it does say “four servings”

This is enough cooking to sustain any man from the day he can first reach the stove burners until the day he gets his first BBQ grill.

Taking this… this small skill, this one tiny smidgen of kitchen self-confidence… away from a man, reducing it to “open can. put contents in microwave”… this is inhuman. This is, dare I say it, diabolic.

Also, it doesn’t taste anywhere near as good as the yellow powder cheese sauce. Evil should at least be tasty.

Yes, I ate the stuff, and yes, these are the kinds of sacrifices I make for my beloved readers.

Posted in food, random | 3 Comments

Weekends, well spent:

Posted on March 30, 2008 by baudattitude

Oregon weather continues to be bloody pathetic for spring. It is, however, perfect sit-inside-and-veg weather, so I took it as a sign that I should do so.

Watched a little anime – “Spice and Wolf” and “Clannad”, watched some classic movies – “The Big Sleep”, “African Queen”, “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Lawrence of Arabia”, and played through the Agrabah, Monstro, and Atlantica worlds in Kingdom Hearts.

Spice and Wolf is another in the genre of “normal guy has his world invaded by a supernatural girl” shows. Horo is an awful lot like Hazuki-with-a-tail, at least from watching the first episode. It was interesting enough that I’ll check out the next couple of episodes, anyway.

I watched the first two episodes of Clannad and liked it. No surprise there, I haven’t yet been disappointed with a Kyoani production.

Shocked and depressed, yes, but not disappointed. Hopefully this won’t have an Air-esque ending.

Loved The African Queen. Liked bits of Lawrence of Arabia. Was quite disappointed by Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Liked The Big Sleep, but not as much as I expected to. These aren’t necessarily movies you watch for their own merits, though, you have to watch them because they’re part of the collective culture and seeing them helps you appreciate everything that has derived inspiration from them, if nothing else.

Oh, and Kingdom Hearts, while not the most manly game ever created, continues to entertain. The Ursula fight in Atlantica was a bloody pain in the arse, though. I had a terrible time getting the underwater positioning right throughout the level, so having to navigate in 3 dimensions while under the other stress factors inherent in a boss fight wasn’t fun.

All in all, a good way to cap off Spring Break.

Hope your weekend went as well. 🙂

Posted in anime, movies & tv, PS2, videogames | Leave a comment

I can has real ending plz?

Posted on March 29, 2008 by baudattitude

OK, OK, it could have been much worse.

The cliffhanger at the end of Half Life 2 wasn’t as bad of an ending as, say, Halo 2, and it probably won’t be TOO long until they get Episode 3 out and I can pick them up and finish out the story.

Still, it did make for a WAS THAT IT? moment. At least the box art for HL2: Episode 1 does kind of keep me from worrying too much about whether Alyx lives. 🙂

Griping about cliffhangers aside, an excellent game and I can see why it got hyped to high heaven and why everyone raves on and on about how cool the Gravity Gun is.

Next up: Finish Kingdom Hearts and enlist my wife’s help in bashing through Champions of Norrath.

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You bastards.

Posted on March 26, 2008 by baudattitude

Each and every one of you that read yesterday’s post, where I talked about how much I hated headcrabs and was at “Water Hazard” in Half-Life 2 and did NOT have the simple common human decency to send me a little one line email saying “hey, you’re kind of close to Ravenholm and you might not want to dive into it if you have to sleep afterwards.”

I’m still twitching.

GAH.

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I’m still a man, really.

Posted on March 24, 2008 by baudattitude

I try not to have multiple games going at the same time, but my wife and I started Kingdom Hearts this weekend. It makes a nice “together” game in the way that Half Life 2 does not make a nice together game. I don’t play FPS games in a way that’s watchable by anyone who doesn’t want to get motion sickness.

I fervently believe that you can be a full-blooded 100% male and still enjoy Kingdom Hearts. Running around Disney-themed worlds collecting dalmatian puppies with Donald and Goofy as your traveling companions is Not Really That Questionable, especially as you, uh, you, uh, you’re a kid with a big damn key as your weapon and a relationship with your best friend that has no doubt featured in a thousand doujinshi…

You know, I give up. I can’t really justify this one from a manliness standpoint, but it’s a good couples game.

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Sucking it up; Dealing.

Posted on March 24, 2008 by baudattitude

Back in January, I caught up to 1998 and finished Half Life on the PC.

Then, since I had a copy of the Xbox version of Half Life 2, which I’d acquired at a K-mart for the princely sum of $9.99, I tossed that into the 360 so I could see what happened next.

I played through the first half-hour or so and called it good. My plan was to wait until the Orange Box dropped in price, buy that, play Half Life 2 on that.

It took me a few months to realize that I was being a bit of a perfectionist, and in a way that costs money.

I have the Xbox version. It’s not as pretty as the Orange Box version but it’s the same game and I’ve already paid for it.

I’ve played Portal, and if I buy the Orange Box with Episodes 1 & 2 on it, it leaves me open to feeling rather foolish when Episode 3 comes out and they put out a compilation disc with all three episodes and Portal 2. Because, if I buy the Orange Box, they totally WILL put out a single compilation disc with all that stuff on it, and they will snigger heartlessly at my wailing.

So: I will wait on that, and in the meantime I am playing the game I already own. I’m up to “Water Hazard” so far, and while it’s got some shortcomings from being shoehorned onto the original Xbox, it’s still quite playable and enjoyable.

I still hate headcrabs, though. Oh, how I hate them. I’ll take on armed security goons with nothing but the crowbar, but headcrabs mean it’s submachinegun time.

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My Chemistry Teacher Comes Clean.

Posted on March 22, 2008 by baudattitude

OK.

So I took an online chemistry course last term and it was an exercise in frustration, not the least because the instructor took his own bloody sweet time about getting our assignments graded.

Put this way: During the course of the term, we had nine lab assignments, nine bookwork assignments, a midterm, a final, and a term project.

As of the day of the final, we’d gotten grades for four of the bookwork assignments, two of the labs, and the midterm.

So: We all went into the final without having gotten any feedback on 2/3rds of our work for the term, and a couple of my fellow students quite rightly took the professor to task about this on the class forum.

His response, unedited:

“no i let it go too long and shouldn’t have. i knew alot of people were drop (statistically 50% do) so i knew if i waited a while, i would halve the amount or grading. But I shouldn’t have left you hanging like that. apologies.”

You know, I have tried several times to come up with an appropriately scathing slam. I just can’t do it. Every time I try, I get about a paragraph in and realize that it’s an incoherent mess of rage.

At least the class is over and I can look forward to next term… after my Psych exam today, anyway.

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The Maid Uniform and Machinegun

Posted on March 20, 2008 by baudattitude

I usually try to come up with clever post titles, but how on earth do I out-clever a game title like that?

Anyway: The Maid Uniform and Machinegun, #105 in the “Simple 2000” series.

Do I NEED to say this is a Japan-only release?

Awesome title aside, It’s actually kind of a fun premise. You’re a maid robot who’s been sent back in time to protect the child-self of the guy sending you back in time. You point out that there’s a bit of a time paradox there, but it doesn’t matter – you get sent back anyway.

In blatant violation of the Rules of Time Travel as set down by the “Terminator” movies, you arrive fully dressed. It’s Not That Kind Of Game.

You arrive with a basic maid outfit, a basic sword, a basic handgun, a basic sniper rifle and a basic assault rifle. If this sounds familiar to you… it’s sort of like HoiHoi-san. Same idea; you run around, do missions, win them and get points, use the points to buy upgrades.

Now, if it were me sending a maid robot back to protect my child self, and I was rich enough to afford maid robots and time machines, I would kit my maid robot out with some pretty nasty futuristic weapons and not make her scrounge up the cash to buy them herself. But I digress.

It’s not like HoiHoi-san in that HoiHoi-san actually has, well, production values. This game, on the other hand, is a Simple 2000 game, which means that you’re not really getting 2000 yen worth out of it, but it’s so cheap and has such a bizarre concept that you can’t keep yourself from buying it.

So: with your basic set of weapons, you set about trashing a bunch of vicious little doll robot thingies. After a couple levels of that, you get to pull out the sniper rifle and snipe at rocket-propelled doll robot thingies and Ominous Black Cars from a balcony.

After each of these levels, you get scored based upon your performance. You get better marks for using your sword instead of a gun, for doing combo attacks, for avoiding damage, that sort of thing. I was racking up the points fairly well and starting to look forward to upgrading my basic assault rifle…

And then I hit level 4.

In level 4, you fight through a bunch of little doll robots and mecha piloted by little doll robots and then meet the Other Maid Robot, because of course you need an antagonist.

She’s blond, by the way, I guess blondes are evil?

Anyway, the Other Maid Robot wiped the floor with me about a half-dozen times.

Now, to be fair, you DO get some points after you get the Game Over screen, and in theory I could save up these points and keep playing through the level up to the point where I get into the boss fight and lose… eventually I’d have enough points to seriously kit-out my robot maid self.

…But.

It would be a lot of replaying the same level over and over again in order to afford upgrades, and even with them I’m not sure I’d stand a chance.

So I’m giving up for now. Time spent replaying level 4 of this game is time better spent playing, well, just about anything else.