Baud Attitude

PSP Lemmings and the joy of bugs.

Posted on March 11, 2008 by baudattitude

So I’m chugging along in Lemmings on the PSP, and it’s going pretty well. I’ve had to look up the solution to a couple of “Mayhem” levels so far but I’ve gotten to Mayhem 23 mostly on my own.

And Mayhem 23 is a bastard son of parents who were also, themselves, bastards, and quite possibly the whole bastard thing goes back for bastard generation upon bastard generation.

Ahem.

Anyway, so I went and looked up a solution and found out that it wasn’t really me, unlike the last two levels I’ve had to go and look something up on.

See, it’s got a ramp – and here I am assuming that you have played Lemmings, and if you haven’t you’re simply not my kind of people anyway – it’s got a ramp that goes all the way up to the top of the play field.

On PC and Amiga versions – and probably all older versions of Lemmings – when your lemmings walk up the ramp, they hit an invisible ceiling and turn around, so now they’re going the right way to build a critical staircase.

On the PSP, they walk right through the invisible ceiling and fall into water, drowning.

So: not only is it a reasonably nasty level in the original, but a bug in the PSP version makes it even nastier. I have found at least one guy on the net who claims to have completed all of the classic levels on the PSP, though, so I’m going to assume it’s possible, but I’m going to bitch about it even so.

Posted in psp, videogames | 1 Comment

Lemmings: The Progress So Far

Posted on March 6, 2008 by baudattitude

When I last mentioned Lemmings, I admitted that, despite having purchased the game four times so far since its release back in 1991, I’d never gotten very far with it. As best as I can figure, I think I stopped about halfway through “Tricky” – at least, that’s where the levels stopped looking familiar.

I’m not sure what’s stopped me in the past. I don’t know if it was a matter of the levels getting too hard, or just having other stuff to do. Since the original game let you get to any level just by entering a password, I’m not sure if there just wasn’t any INCENTIVE to go through the levels in order.

Anyway. So I’ve been playing the PSP version. And I’ve made a little more progress, and thus far without having to go look stuff up in a FAQ.

I’m just about to that point, though, as the level I’m stuck on is a right bitch and a half. 🙂

Wish me luck.

Oh, and when I bitched about the music being wrong, I just hadn’t played enough. I kind of WISH the music was different now, after playing for longer.

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

She’ll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

It’s in my head and it won’t stop and it won’t let me die.

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So that’s what a “warranty” is for.

Posted on March 6, 2008 by baudattitude

Backstory: A little over a week ago – Feb 26 to be precise – I realized that my camera, my beautiful pink camera, was broken. A little bit. Well, the “up” button on the keypad wasn’t working, and this is also the button that controls flash settings so it’s pretty crippling for only being one broken button.

I was quite vexed. It’s not like I went out and dropped seven hundred bucks on a big ol’ digital SLR or anything, but it was still close to $200 for the camera and it certainly wasn’t anything I was going to be able to fix myself. I figured I was stuck buying a new camera, and that I probably wouldn’t be able to get it in pink.

Then I had one of those rare moments of inspiration and decided to look up just how long I’d had this thing, which proved to be the first time that I’ve gotten any practical benefit from keeping this site updated. I’d mentioned buying it in an earlier post. On March 11 of last year. Which meant that – after I did a little frantic googling to find out how long the warranty was – I had a little under two weeks to get it serviced under warranty.

The next day, I called the 800 number on the warranty and spoke with a very pleasant-sounding customer service rep, who walked me through resetting the camera and verifying that, yes, it was broken, which I suppose they have to do, and then issued me a work order number and gave me an address to ship it off to.

I shipped it off via priority mail on February 28th, got an email a couple of days later telling me that they’d received it, another email Monday night with a tracking number, and a UPS delivery today. And, yes, the button works again.

Total cost: Something like $5.00 to ship.

It is just conceivable that I’m a little too impressed by this. I’m sure that other people have things break and get fixed under warranty ALL THE TIME. This is just the first time I’ve actually had something stop working while it was still covered, so the general smoothness of the process was unexpected and a welcome surprise.

So: Sony Repair Service, two thumbs up.

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One Year Blog

Posted on March 2, 2008 by baudattitude

I don’t have much to say today but it seemed silly not to put something up for the first anniversary. 🙂

Since buying Trigger Heart: Exelica, I’ve gone on a little bit of an XBLA spending spree and picked up Omega Five and Rez HD.

Both look excellent – I’ve played Rez on the PS2, but seeing it in 720P glory is something entirely different, and Omega Five looks gloriously shooty in the tradition of games like Sidearms and Forgotten Worlds – and I hope to one day get to play them.

Problem is, we were at a friend’s place last night, and he had to go and show my wife an XBLA game called “Boogie Bunnies”, and now I may never get my hands on the 360 controller ever again.

On the topic of small-fuzzy-mammal-themed videogames, I have been playing Lemmings on the PSP lately. It’s a good fit – the PSP’s dual controls and wide format screen make it an excellent Lemmings machine, and I am hoping to stick to it long enough to play through the entire game. If I can pull that off, it will be something of an accomplishment, as I have purchased this game four times in the last 16 years – for DOS, Super Nintendo, Windows, and now PSP – and have never gotten past “tricky”

And not very far into “tricky”, at that.

A couple of small gripes, because I’m a fussy bastard:

1) The music is All Wrong on the PSP.

2) They took away the “nuke” button, so you can no longer let out your frustrations in an appropriate manner.

Posted in psp, videogames, Xbox 360 | 1 Comment

A short post today:

Posted on March 1, 2008 by baudattitude

I don’t care how broke you are or how bad you are at bullet-hell style shooters. I’m terrible at them myself, regardless of how many I buy and play.

If you have an Xbox 360, round up 800 Microsoft Points – that’s 10 US dollars – and buy Trigger Heart Exelica off the Xbox Live Arcade.

I paid six times that amount when it was released on the Dreamcast, and I do not regret doing so in the least.

It’s pretty. It’s frenetic. It’s short. You’ll finish it – if you make use of the unlimited continues – in less than an hour, and then you’ll do it again with the other playable character, and then you’ll do it without using any bombs because, hey, the “no bombs” achievement just takes another play through with a little self-discipline, and then you’ll start trying to do well enough to fight the secret bosses on level 1 and 3 and then you’ll start trying to beat your high score…

…and eventually you’ll go to bed with your hands cramped into barely-recognizable-as-human-claws and you will be fully internalizing, possibly for the first time in your life, the true meaning of the words “twisted” and “gnarled” as they pertain to the lumps of meat and bone you once used for sensitive manipulation tasks.

So yeah.

Buy it.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | 5 Comments

Stranglehold: Well, that sucked.

Posted on February 27, 2008 by baudattitude

I’m not going to claim outright that Hard Boiled is the best action movie of all time. There are an awful lot of movies I’ve never seen, after all, so that would be unfair.

I think it’s likely, though, that even when you take the entire film output of every film producing country on this earth since the first strip of cellulose went through a film camera… it’s got to be in the top ten.

So, hearing that they were doing an official sequel in the form of a game and both John Woo and Chow Yun Fat were involved with it? How much joy can one fanboy hold?

Of course, I’m cheap, so I didn’t pick it up on day one.

And I bought the PC version because, well, I have a decent PC, I’d like to show my solidarity with PC gamers and it will presumably look better than the console versions.

I understand the game is supposed to be fairly short. I’ve seen references to a play length of about 8 hours, which is not too bad for an action game.

I decided I’d install it last night, since I’d gotten home from my economics class early and had a little more time than I usually do on a weeknight.

I’ll run down the process for you:

1.) Install. This took about a half hour and took 13 GB of hard drive space.

2.) Download and install the 1.1 patch. About another half hour.

3.) Launch the game. Get a loading screen. Screen goes blank. Wait, that’s my BIOS screen. My PC just rebooted. What the hell? Probably just a glitch.

4.) After reboot, let’s try this again. I get introductory movies and menus now.

5.) Getting graphics options set is kind of odd. My mouse pointer doesn’t seem to be interacting with buttons. I can kind of use the keyboard to get things set up, though. It’s really jerky, and these are just the configuration screens. Oh, well, it’ll probably be fine once I’m playing.

6.) Start the game.

7.) Opening cutscene plays. Yay! It’s Chow. He’s going to go shoot people now. Opening movie stutters a lot. Weird. Oh, well, it’ll probably be fine once I’m playing.

8.) First level starts loading. Loading. Loading. Loading. Loading. Loading. Uh. Loading. Loading. Loading. Wait! The screen went black! The game must be starting.

9.) Uh, where’s the first level? Oh, there’s a picture of some buildings.

10.) It’s been a few minutes and I still don’t have a first level. Sometimes the clouds behind the buildings move. Sometimes the lights flicker.

11.) OK, it’s off to the official support forums… and when those fail me, it’s off to the web at large for advice. I’ll spare you the details here.

Long story short: It took me nearly four hours from the time I put the install disk in to the point where I could actually play the game, and even then I was only able to get decent performance in 1280 x 720… and you’re limited to mouse and keyboard play, even though the manual makes reference to using the “D-pad” to select things… and the manual also talks about some features that the official support FAQ admits simply aren’t in the game.

I think, instead of continuing to fight with it, I’m going to eat the cost of this and wait until I can get a cheap copy of the PS3 or 360 versions.

If this is the state of PC gaming, bring on our console overlords.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Kingdom of Paradise : Not the Movie With Orlando Bloom

Posted on February 26, 2008 by baudattitude

Among the advantages of having a wife that buys new gadgets before I get a chance to : I get her hand-me-downs when she gets tired of them.

So, when she got herself a PSP and a DS and then decided that carrying around TWO portable systems was just way too much purse space, I lucked into her stash of PSP games.

And she has good taste, so I didn’t mind at all.

One of the games she handed down was Kingdom of Paradise, and I finally finished playing that tonight. I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to play games on the move recently, so I wound up stretching out a 20 hour RPG over something like two and a half months. I was strong, however – I have 3 PSP games sitting, shrinkwrapped, on the shelf, and I told myself I wasn’t going to break them open until I’d completed this one.

It’s a pretty decent game. It’s a lousy portable game. I’ll explain:

First off, the good: This game does not feature the generic European setting that fantasy RPGs seem to be stuck in. Your hero is, instead, running around a fantasy world built mostly on Chinese legend, particularly the Four Symbols (Plus one!) that most western anime fans are familiar with from either Fushigi Yuugi or Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Already, this is a plus. It adds a definite touch of awe the first time you go toe-to-toe with one of the four gods.

The graphics are a nice bit of work, the characters are multilayered and interesting, and the story doesn’t pull any punches.

Also it has a cute girl with glasses. I’ll let a random NPC sum up my thoughts on that issue:

The downsides:

I don’t have any significant beef with the majority of the voice acting, except that every single proper noun is mispronounced. If you’re used to the Japanese pronunciations of words like “Byakko” or “Seiryu”, you will be wincing constantly. If you’ve never heard them said properly, you probably won’t notice.

Leaving the voice acting aside, here’s the biggest complaint I have with it: The developers tried to make a console RPG, just shrunk down for the PSP. It’s full of loading times, long fully-voiced cutscenes, and boss fights that stretch out forever. The last fight in the game took me over an hour. This is not portable-friendly. When you’re making a game designed for people to carry around and play whenever they have a few minutes, you need to cut back on your cinematic aspirations and grueling boss battles.

It takes a certain degree of faith to pause in the middle of a boss fight, hit the power switch on the PSP to put it in sleep mode, and pray that you’ll be in the same place when you get back and you won’t have to re-do the fight from the beginning.

I should not have played this AFTER Brave Story: New Traveler, because Brave Story does all that stuff right.

It does, at least, feature a running log of “You need to go do X next”, which is really handy when you have to go a week between play sessions. AND you can save anywhere, except in the middle of scripted events. These are features that all portable RPGs should have.

And now for a random screenshot, taken completely out of context, that gives an entirely incorrect impression of the game’s storyline:

Let’s hear from Yuno on the issue.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

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Super Real Mahjong P7

Posted on February 25, 2008 by baudattitude

…Finished, or mostly finished, anyway. I can’t figure out what I’m missing to complete the gohoubi:

Obviously I’m missing two of Etsuko’s cinemas, but I’ve played through Etsuko’s scenario twice and everyone else but Yurina’s scenario at least twice. If it were just a matter of playing through the mahjong storylines, I should be done by now.

I gave the omake game a few tries, but it was just a little too much memorization, so if the final two cinemas are hidden in there somewhere, they’re hidden for good.

As much as I’m a fan of the Suchie Pai series, I have to give the Super Real Mahjong series some respect. There aren’t any little pop-up windows telling you when you can make a move, there’s no “panel match” style game… if you get a winning tile, you can cheerfully discard it and never get a warning. There aren’t any power-ups that let you snoop on your opponent’s hand, or stop them pulling a win of your discard – you have to play mahjong and win. It’s not a good beginner’s game, especially not for a westerner, which makes every win just a little more satisfying.

P7 was a fairly late release in the Saturn’s life, so it’s been censored in accordance with Sega’s newer policy on nudity. This means no naughty bits are shown, so you don’t need to feel TOO much like a dirty pervert while you play.

However, a word of caution: Should you be trying to explain to your wife or significant other that the mahjong game you are playing is completely innocent and in fact quite family-friendly (well, this is a lie), watch what terms you use while trying to explain its innocence.

I am now banned from using the term “jubblies” in conversation ever again. I will not bore you with the details.

Posted in mahjong, Saturn, videogames | Leave a comment

Internet, you have failed me.

Posted on February 22, 2008 by baudattitude

Why was I not told before now that there was a working and highly compatible Sega Saturn emulator?

One on which I can play my Mahjong games,

and my bunny-girl-with-mallet platform games,

and my post-apocalypse RPGs,

and my licensed shooters?

I have far too many Saturn games still, and I fully intend to play through some more of them, but my Saturn is 13 years old and I’ve been, you know, worried that it’s going to die soon.

Now I can relax a bit about that.

Still, this has obviously been around a while, and the Internet has failed to bring it to my attention. Bad Internet!

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2007 JLPT Scores

Posted on February 20, 2008 by baudattitude

I’m getting an awful lot of hits recently from people who, like me, are waiting impatiently for the Japan Foundation to finish running our answer sheets through a scantron reader and let us know how we’ve done, already, sheesh.

So if you’re in the same boat as me, I recommend going to the “your account” page on the Japan Foundation’s web site and logging in occasionally. The scores aren’t up yet, but they’ll show up there a couple days before they come in the mail.

Last year’s scores were posted on the last day of February, by the way.

This doesn’t apply to people who happen to be in Japan and already have their scores. Lucky buggers.

Edit: Apparently posting this was a good idea, as scores came today! 291/400 is not as good as last year’s level 4 score, but still a passing grade.

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