The point, two-thirds of the way through your movie, where you said to yourself:
“Boy, these people don’t have enough odds stacked against them and I really can’t think of any interesting ways to kill them off any more. Let’s just turn it into a slasher flick.”
…yeah, that was the point where you should have gotten a second opinion.
Back in high school, I was an unabashed science geek. The requirements for graduation were, I think, 6 terms of science. I took 24. Chemistry, Biology, Physics, assorted applied sciences… I was pretty damn nerdy.
So I didn’t expect a simple CH100 class – better known as “Chemistry for People Who Can’t Do Math” – to be pissing me off quite so much.
I mean, the book work is great stuff, a little deeper than I expected from a 100 level course but I really won’t complain too much. Read a reasonably thick chapter, answer four or five pages worth of problems based on the text, take a weekly quiz, take a midterm. Been getting a lot of 9/10 and 10/10 scores.
The lab portion, on the other hand, is a godawful amalgamation of arts & crafts projects that aren’t being tied into the book work at all, and for which we’re getting bugger all feedback.
The first day of class, we all got a bag of chemicals. We got a lecture on chemical safety and wearing safety goggles and how to clean up our areas and keep the pets and kids out of things.
Our first lab involved mixing some chemicals in drop quantities and observing visual changes. We used 4 of the 20 or so vials of assorted chemicals we were given in our chemical bags.
The next three weeks were spent building small scale balances out of drinking straws and pins.
Then we built spectroscopes from cereal boxes and plastic knives.
Now we’ve been looking through the spectroscopes at various lights and coloring in little pictures of what we see with crayon.
I am given to understand that, as of week 8, we will be performing another lab that actually involves chemicals. Which seems like quite a novel concept for a chemistry class.
In the meantime I am having a really frustrating time building balances and coloring in spectrum, because I’m discovering a crucial hole in my abilities. My balance falls apart if you put anything heavier than a quarter-gram in it (it’s supposed to have a 10g weight limit) and my spectroscope turns everything into a blurry rainbow mish instead of the clearly defined bars I’m supposed to be seeing. I can’t even tell that there IS a color between “violet” and “blue”, no matter how many times I read about this mythical “indigo” color that goes in the middle.
Unfortunately, my general confidence that I’m doing pretty well on the “lecture” portion of the class doesn’t help much, because – even though the “lecture” represents 75% of the final grade – you cannot pass the class unless you get a 70% or higher score in the lab portion. That means, if you follow the math, that you can get a 92% in the class and fail.
And I’m not sure how I’m doing on the labs because the teacher hasn’t graded anything since our first lab assignment five weeks ago.
So, to hell with it. If I manage to pass the class, I will be happy to see it in the rear view mirror. I have no idea what I’m going to do for the other two terms of lab science I need to take to graduate, because this one class has managed to turn me from a science geek into someone dreading the thought of the next science course.
When you’re a 44 waist and rocking a 3XL shirt to be comfortable, there’s not a lot of places you can shop for clothes anymore.
You can find stuff at Old Navy, or Sears… sometimes Fred Meyer. Your choices are pretty limited though.
So, one of the things I’ve been doing since I slimmed down a bit is going into stores I couldn’t shop in before.
And that brings me to Hollister.
Yes, the “shopping here totally makes you a surfer, even if you live in Topeka” store.
They have three stores in Kansas. I looked it up. Carrying on.
I’ve bought a few shirts from Hollister, and I like them. I also like simply being ABLE to shop there, since their target market is the under-20 crowd and I’m, well, not in that demographic and haven’t been in quite some while.
One drawback. “Jake.”
Jake is their signature perfume, and they spray a hell of a lot of it throughout the store.
I’m told they have to spray it every 15 minutes, but that might be an exaggeration.
It might actually be a pleasant perfume if it wasn’t applied in such quantities, but – as it is – we have a policy now where any purchases from Hollister have to come in the front door, have their tags stripped, and go right into the washer while the bag goes out to the trash. After they’ve been washed once they are evaluated for integration into the general closet population.
This might actually be how they discourage returns. Hadn’t thought of that.
Anyway, I wanted to rant about “Jake”, but I thought to myself thusly:
“Self, you’re not the first person to have this complaint. I bet there’s thousands of people out there who can’t stand the stuff and who have ranted about it before. Most of them are probably better writers. Let’s look them up so we’re not repeating anything.”
What I found instead was:
People raving about Hollister perfume. People selling “retired” scents, and people trying to buy or trade for scents that have gone out of production. People for whom it is their favorite brand and they won’t wear anything else.
In short, example after example of how far out of touch I am with their demographic, which really shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise but still did.
So my options are to a) feel old or b) complain about how humanity has clearly passed the point where it’s still worth saving, and I’m going with b.
Since PC gaming is in rather better shape in Europe than the US, I’ve been ordering some budget games from UK dealers via eBay. This leads me to today’s rant.
British people:
I accept the fact that you get free health care, that your silly “pounds” are now worth well over two of our “dollars”, and that you get to feel all smug and stuff when you talk about “proper English” and how it lets you add extra “u”s to pretty much any word you feel needs an extra letter.
Do you also have to get way cooler postage than us? Is it fair? Is it just?
I saw “The Sum of All Fears” shortly after it came out on DVD, which was some while before I started watching “Alias”.
I’m also not very good at keeping track of actors, so I didn’t realize there was any overlap in the casts.
I watched the movie again recently.
Having Arvin Sloane as a presidential adviser was a very creepy thing, especially as he’s supposed to be the Voice of Reason in the oval office. Made watching the movie a very different experience; I kept expecting him to betray the main characters at any moment. 🙂
There’s a reason the latest PC in my apartment is named Vanity: I really didn’t need another PC. I certainly didn’t need a small form factor PC.
But… I kept seeing references around the net to the Intel BLKD201GLYL motherboard, which is a mini-ITX form factor motherboard with a 1.33Ghz Celeron M processor and integrated graphics, sound, LAN, USB, everything you really need for a basic PC.
It was also $69.99 from Newegg, which is much cheaper than other small form factor motherboards I’ve seen in the past. Mind you, you don’t get a fancy box or manuals for your 70 bucks:
But who needs that stuff anyway?
And here’s the thing: I have an old Athlon box I use for, well, leaving on for days at a time while it downloads huge files.
And when I’ve done a lot of that in any given month, I notice it on the electric bill. Athlons, while great processors for the time, are not exactly shy on the power usage.
Building a box around the D201GLY, with a 2.5″ HD, means that I have a PC that pulls less than 40W of power.
It’s also a lot quieter and doesn’t push out nearly as much heat as the Athlon.
So that’s my justification.
Getting everything together was trickier than I’d anticipated, and not just because I had to take the case completely apart to get the motherboard in. I’d expected to have to fuss about with getting components to fit, and I’d actually expected to wind up having to go out shopping for some essential adapter or another that hadn’t been included with the motherboard or case. It turned out that the iStar case came with a whole mess of cables, so the physical assembly actually went off all right.
The biggest problem was that, to save power – and also to save the cost of a slim-line DVD drive – I didn’t build in an optical drive.
I was booting from an external USB DVD-ROM drive and that didn’t work very well with the first drive I used, which was an I/O Magic external DVD-RW drive – I couldn’t get a Windows XP CD to boot at all.
I could get a Windows 98 CD to boot, but this motherboard doesn’t play nice with Windows 98.
I had the best results booting from a bare IDE drive hooked up with a Newertechnology Universal Drive Adapter, which is an essential piece of kit and one I strongly recommend to any geek who finds themselves having lots of bare drives lying about.
Once I switched to that, XP booted up promptly and the rest was a matter of partition, format, install, blah blah blah.
Installing Windows XP from a pre-SP1 CD is fun, by the way. Windows Update doesn’t work when you’re starting from that far back, so I had to find a way to manually download SP2 from Microsoft’s web site, and after that was installed I wound up with 90 (!) updates to install from Windows Update.
Here’s Vanity, assembled, OS installed, and ready to be put to work:
Cute, no?
Movie-licensed games tend to be pretty dire.
Most people make an exception. They say “Movie games are crap… except Goldeneye, of course.”
And that is fair, because Goldeneye was a fine game.
Personally, I would add the “Batman” game for the Genesis to the list of Movie Games That Aren’t Crap, but moving on…
A few years ago, people started saying “except Goldeneye and Riddick, of course.”
And I had a bit of a hard time swallowing that. I don’t know why, it just seemed really unlikely.
However, I am always willing to give something a fair chance, so I picked up a used copy of the Xbox version of The Chronicles of Riddick from Gamestop for the princely sum of $4.50 and put it on the shelf where it remained unplayed for some while.
Then I saw multiple references to the PC version looking really quite nice, so I spent another $10 to get The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay : Developer’s Cut. I installed this and it refused to run, which is one of the drawbacks of PC gaming – I needed a patch, and Sierra no longer made the patch available on their web site.
Poking around the web scored me the patch, and then I put the game aside for a few months, until after I’d finished Prince of Persia and wanted a bit of a change.
I can report that the PC version does indeed look brilliant. The world it’s depicting is rather nasty and not pleasant to look at… but it looks damned good even when you don’t really want to be looking at what you’re looking at. It also supports 1680 x 1050 resolutions right off the bat and even works quite well with a gamepad, which I didn’t expect from a PC title. I had to go into the configuration and tell it that I wanted to move with the left thumbstick and aim with the right… but once that was sorted it was, well, pretty much like playing a console title.
And yes, as far as movie licensed games go, it’s pretty darn good. The middle bit of the game, where you’re running around some mines with virtually no way to defend yourself and getting shot a bunch, does drag on a bit, but once you get past that you get some real payoff.
I understand they’re remaking it for the current generation of consoles, and this is why the Xbox version isn’t backwards compatible, but if you have any kind of recently-built PC I don’t see why you wouldn’t play it on that instead.
I realize that I am roughly the last person on the planet to not yet have played the new Prince of Persia games. There is a reason for this:
Back in the heady days of my youth, I quite enjoyed Karateka. I spent many happy hours playing it on the Apple II computers at school, and I believe it may be the first game I ever managed to “finish”
The designer of Karateka, Jordan Mechner, went on to design the original Prince of Persia game, which may have the distinction of being the first game that ever hurt me so brutally that I gave up on it for all time. I tried to play it, I really did, but I inevitably died before even getting to the sword, and that’s about 4 rooms into the game.
With that kind of history, is it any wonder that I might be a bit skeptical about a modern 3D update?
On the other hand, it’s one of those games people rave about, so I bought it last year while Gamestop was having a 2-for-1 Xbox sale and it’s been sitting on my “play this” shelf ever since. I have also bought the sequels. This is a bad tendency of mine.
So anyway: I finished Brute Force a couple of days ago – and I will say that, as dull as the main character is and as repetitive the environments are, the two asteroid levels made up for the trouble playing to them and “Flint” is nicely easy on the eyes – and I needed something new.
My typical method of selecting a game is to look down the list of games on my backlog and Google for reviews, paying special attention to phrases like “too short” or “only 8 hours of gameplay” or “too easy”
Prince of Persia came with lots of reviews complaining that it was too short. Some reviewers added “and too easy”.
Sounded like my kind of game.
In what I will consider a personal homage to the original game, I died many, many, many times before I even got to the Dagger of Time that the whole damn plot revolves around. I came quite close to abandoning the game completely before I’d even passed the training level.
But I did eventually get the dagger and I have been happily platforming around and killing zombies for a couple of hours now.
The game has a pretty smart checkpoint / save system. It works something like this: Every time you manage to get through a particularly hairy sequence of the “I can’t believe I survived those whirling blades” variety, you hit a checkpoint. Every once in a while the game throws a bit of platforming at you that is going to require new techniques and make you die over and over again, but just to be nice you get a save point first.
Save points in Prince of Persia can be assumed to come with a blinking red sign: Frustration ahead.
This makes them a great way to know when to take a break.
I do, however, have a minor quibble with a design decision as far as the checkpoints go.
I will describe.
Last night I met the first boss fight. It’s the scene where you meet your father again and catch up with Farah. If you’ve never played the game, it consists of fighting 16 zombies and then a boss. The boss is actually kind of pathetic, but the zombies can wear you down through sheer numbers, if nothing else.
When I got to this boss fight, I had just had some whirling-blade-related mishaps. I was running on a tiny sliver of health and one full tank of sand. That won’t make any sense if you haven’t played the game, but as I’m the last person on the planet to play it, I feel confident that I don’t need to explain about the sand. “Tiny sliver of health” makes sense to anyone, and I am confident that we can all visualize what kinds of mishaps one can experience when whirling blades are involved.
Anyway: I looked at the mass of zombies in front of me. I looked at my health bar. I said to myself:
“I hope there was a checkpoint just before this fight.”
And there was, and it was a good thing, too, because the zombie horde killed me without breaking a sweat.
Not that zombies sweat, I guess. Anyway, they only had to land three hits on me to kill me.
So I get the “you died! retry?” screen, as expected, and it puts me right back into the boss fight, which I didn’t entirely expect but I’m glad not to have had to go back through the platforming bits, and…
…I still have a sliver of health and one tank of sand.
I had to kill all 16 zombies, and the boss, while taking fewer than 3 hits. This took, I do not want to think how many tries, but it turned my “I’ll just play a little bit more and then I can get to bed by 12:30” into “I hope I don’t wake the wife up coming to bed at 2.”
But, damnit, I feel good about winning that fight. I got really, really, REALLY good at blocking, I will tell you that. 🙂
OK, so:
Back in 2002, early 2003, Microsoft rolled out the Hype Train for an upcoming game called Brute Force. In retrospect, they probably poured the hype on a little TOO strongly, as it got a bit of a backlash when it came out and wasn’t the Next Halo… but I digress.
I’d played the demo version included with a magazine and quite liked it, and it came out shortly before my birthday, so my loving and thoughtful wife made sure that I had a copy.
Keep in mind, I hadn’t played Halo, or really any similar games on the Xbox up to that point. I’d spent an awful lot of time playing Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball and Panzer Dragoon Orta.
With those as my gaming foundation, Brute Force was Hard. I died over and over again just getting through level 3, then finally gave up on the game as a lost cause thanks to an escort mission on level 4 where I simply couldn’t keep the guy I was escorting from running in front of me and getting to enemies before I had a chance to clear them.
It didn’t help that, while the game looked great, the main character had all the personality of a rock.
Not an interesting rock, either.
Four years later I decide: Yeah, the main character is still pretty damn uninteresting, but I’m going to man up and and least TRY to play it.
I got through the first six levels in a sitting. I barely even noticed the escort mission this time. I’m not going to do anything silly like complain about this; I’m just going to feel a little silly about all the bitching I’ve done about how I really wanted to like this game, but they had to put in a stupid impossible escort mission and blah blah blah blah.
3 months ago – October 26, to be precise, I made up a list of 45 games to put at the top of the backlog. Everything else went into plain white storage boxes so I could concentrate on titles that were either highly regarded, or that I’d played through partway and been distracted, or that, well, just had a cute main character.
Finishing Kameo today brings me up to having finished 7 of those, so that’s some decent progress.
I’ve also played through, well, six games that weren’t on that original list, so I pretty much suck at sticking to a plan.
Still, it’s keeping me off Everquest. I get the occasional twitch now and again, but whenever I consider resubscribing, I remember that if I do that I’ll never get anywhere with the backlog. 🙂
Baud Attitude 