Of shame and…

Posted on April 4, 2007 by baudattitude

I have been pleased with myself – positively giddy, in fact – after finishing Battlefront II and Geist earlier this week.

Since I have some unexpected time off work, I decided to go for three, and started flipping through games to decide what was next up.

My criteria were this:

1) No RPGs. I can’t take 40 hours of grinding experience while some spiky-haired amnesiac comes to terms with his destiny.

2) No shooters. I would really love to see the end of Ikaruga or R-Type Final one of these days. This isn’t likely because I am horrible bad no good at all when it comes to shooters, and in fact it would be lovely if game publishers would just produce priced down versions of their shooters that include the first two end of level bosses and about the first half of level three, because that is about where I stop playing every shooter I own.

3) Something I can talk about without feeling too sheepish. For example… I own and have actually finished “Disney’s The Little Mermaid” for the NES. This is likely my only public acknowledgment of this fact. I am not calling it a major achievement. I have also finished “Let’s Meow Meow” and… let’s just stop right there. I think you may get my point.

4) It had to be a game that, while it may not have been the greatest commercial success, it was at least a critical success, one of those titles that reviewers always bring up when they want to feel a little superior. In short, a community experience as well as an entertainment experience.

With those in mind, I threw together a quick list of games we own that met the requirements.

I came up with:

Beyond Good and Evil

Psychonauts

ICO

Shadow of the Colossus

Killer 7

Okami

…and of those, Beyond Good and Evil seemed like a pretty good pick. We have it for the Xbox, but I wasn’t sure if it would work on the 360, so I threw some search terms into google looking for an answer. (To avoid any suspense on this particular question: It doesn’t as of the Dec 2006 update)

One of the results returned was a series of articles from Destructoid.com, one of which is about Beyond Good and Evil:

Another of the articles mentioned Panzer Dragoon Orta, which should have been on the first list but failed due to the no shooters rule, and yet another article mentioned Shenmue II for the Xbox.

Shenmue II I own. Not the Xbox version, but the Dreamcast version, which is why it didn’t make the list – Dreamcast games are shelved separately and I had forgotten to look at that shelf. “Come to think of it”, I thought to myself, “I own the first Shenmue as well and can’t remember how far I’ve played it.”

I went to the Dreamcast games. I looked through them. I found:

shrinkedmue.jpg

Yes, that is my shame. Yu Suzuki’s epic, revolutionary, (insert more adjectives) re-imaging of the RPG and Adventure genres…

…still shrink-wrapped and proudly displaying its price sticker from 2002.

At this point I would like to apologize to my parents for having grown up such an unworthy son.

I pride myself in my unreasoning devotion to Sega’s line of consoles. My first console to pull me away from the world of PC games and into a life of poverty was a Genesis. I bought a Saturn in April of 1995 with Panzer Dragoon and an extra controller and blew nearly $600 on the combination and don’t think it was money poorly spent at all. I even own two Dreamcasts, because I just couldn’t WAIT for the US release and HAD to have the Japanese model a few months early…

And even with this, I’d never played Shenmue.

And now I have. And it was good. I have only one small quibble, and I pray I will be forgiven for it.

I have heard many people talk about the glories of Shenmue. They mention the plot, the characterization, the drama, the beautiful artistic style and the way it pushes the Dreamcast hardware to its limits. These things are all there.

Nobody ever

ever

EVER mentions the five hours of forklifting.

And even though I actually had a lot of fun zipping around Yokosuka harbor making my crate quotas and occasionally being waylaid by goons, after the first three hours of forklifting I couldn’t help letting just a little frustration into my heart.

Please forgive me, Yu.

Posted in Dreamcast, videogames | 3 Comments

One Vista upgrade down…

Posted on April 2, 2007 by baudattitude

No, I wasn’t silly enough to actually INSTALL it yet, but Moduslink did actually manage to ship me out one copy of Vista Business to upgrade the generic Windows XP Professional that I bought with the new machine I assembled in February.  They still haven’t managed to ship out my Acer laptop’s upgrade yet, though.

So,  50% competence on their part.  You go, guys!

Posted in gadgets | Leave a comment

Fooooood

Posted on April 2, 2007 by baudattitude

First: I’m still under 200. This is a miracle, because this weekend was a virtual debauchery of non-approved meals.

Friday: OK, Friday wasn’t that bad. We went to Stanford’s and I had their Veggie burger with asparagus. I’m always tempted to tell them to add bacon to the veggie burger and see what kind of a look it would get me from the waiter.

Saturday… Saturday, we had a friend over and we decided he needed to go to Calamity Jane’s.

Calamity Jane’s is… well, it’s not a LOCAL burger joint, it’s in Dundee which is a good 20 minute drive, but it is a burger joint with some style.

Its menu includes “Pizzaburgers”, and, if you’re a guy, you should start drooling just at the word.

They take a hamburger – 1/3rd, 2/3rds, or 1 full pound of burger – put a layer of pizza sauce on it, put cheese on that, and then add pizza toppings.

The one I got was pepperoni, canadian bacon, olives, mushrooms, pineapple, onions, sausage, and… oh, right, there was also a burger patty in it somewhere.

It was Love on a Bun.

They have a full lineup of custom burgers, if you’re not in the mood for a pizzaburger. Some of them are very odd… the George Washington, for example, is a burger with Sour Cream and cherry pie filling.

Sunday morning was brunch at Mother’s Bistro in downtown Portland, my first visit there. It’s unfortunately a good restaurant that everyone knows about, as opposed to a good restaurant that’s a secret known only to a few… so it was pretty crowded. Fortunately, the organizers of Sunday’s outing got us a reservation, and Mother’s was able to squeeze the 11 of us in.

Their “schtick” seems to be comfort food for the most part, with a notable menu item being the Mac and Cheese du jour… Sunday’s was Southwestern Mac and Cheese, which was basically mac and cheese with your normal tex-mex flavors added… guacamole, jack cheese, that sort of thing. Although I went with a less interesting (but still quite good, and very filling to the point of being slightly uncomfortable) plate of blueberry pancakes and apple-pork sausage, it did make me want to stop in again just to see what kinds they make other days of the week.

Sunday evening we went to Zao Noodle Bar and I had their Curry Vegetables – one massive bowl of noodles, veggies, and curry. Their menu is a little sparse for me but they make a fine dish of carbohydrates. I was really astonished to hit the scale on Monday morning and see that 199.x 🙂

Now back to being a good boy again, I have to get back to the push for 189.

Posted in food, weight | 3 Comments

So, what, am I still employed?

Posted on April 2, 2007 by baudattitude

Being a contractor has some advantages.  You get paid hourly, and usually make more per hour than your Full-time cubicle neighbor.  You usually don’t get grief for sick days or vacation because, well, they don’t have to pay you for them, and when you work overtime, you actually get paid for it.  It’s a great equation : hours at desk = money in bank.

It does have some down sides.  For one – lack of paid vacation or sick time does show up pretty prominently if you’re not at that desk.  For another, even though it’s fairly rare, you do meet the occasional person who thinks of contractors as second class citizens.

I’ve been told to take a week off and that, in a week, they may or may not know whether they want me back.   It all depends on the budget; we’re losing a large chunk of ours and we’re not sure there’s space left in the remaining budget to support me.

I suppose I should be grateful for the “we might want you back” aspect of the thing, but on the other hand it’s really frustrating to be sitting at home trying to decide if I should be filing for unemployment or not.

I’m also not sure if this is just an attempt to get me to leave without being told to.  My boss seems to have an issue with employee dismissals – she prefers to be elsewhere when they happen.  She was “out of town” Friday, much like she was “out of town” the last time someone got a call from an HR person telling them, thanks, but don’t come in anymore.

grouse, grouse, rant, rant

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…but the stars have to align just so…

Posted on April 2, 2007 by baudattitude

All my griping about not finishing games has had a productive side!

Saturday a friend came over and we finally finished Battlefront II in co-op mode. We’ve been playing through this game for several months now, doing a level or two every few weeks.

We’ve been at this long enough that we played up through the Tantive IV mission on my Xbox, then my wife and I bought an Xbox 360, then I played it through in single player mode again on the 360 so we could finish off the last couple of missions cooperatively on the new system with all the little graphical tweaks it adds. It is a better looking game when played on the 360, so I have to give Microsoft some credit there, and it was fun enough to play through basically twice, so Pandemic gets a big thumbs up for a fine experience.

That was one down.

Then I finally finished Geist this evening – the most workout our Gamecube has had in quite some time. It’s a nine “chapter” game and I went through chapters four through nine over the course of about twelve hours.

I could see being pretty disappointed with the length of it if I was a more hardcore type or if I’d paid $50 for it, but paying $9.99 for it AND actually finishing a game? I’m pretty happy with that combination. I missed a bunch of collectibles that I suppose I could go back for on a second round if I wanted to get more value for money, but those are mostly to unlock options for the multiplayer mode and I don’t see ever sitting down for a rousing four player game of Geist deathmatch.

If you a) have a Gamecube or wii and b) don’t already own Geist and c) can find it for a reasonable price, I think it’s worth the time invested. It’s a good mix of adventure style puzzle solving and FPS… though the last couple of levels do seem to focus a little heavily on the shootin’ side of things.

I’m almost inspired to sit down, take another game that hasn’t seen much love off the shelf, and try for 3 in a week… but that’s just plain madness.

Posted in gamecube, videogames, xbox | 1 Comment

I’ve done… questionable things.

Posted on March 29, 2007 by baudattitude

And I got to make up for a couple of them over the course of the last few days.

Short version:  My angering of the Apple gods resulted in me having to re-rip an awful lot of CDs.  For most of them, thankfully, this was easy enough – open CD-ROM drive, put in CD, push button, it looks up tracks, rips CD, ejects tray for next CD.

Then it got tricky.  I have quite a few CDs for which there are no track listings… or for which there were no track listings when I originally ripped them.  I’d like to say that I’ve always been careful about how I entered data for CDs, but that wouldn’t be true.  There have been a few CDs I’ve entered the track names for as follows:

Fushigi Yuugi Singles Collection Track 01

Fushigi Yuugi Singles Collection Track 02

…and so on…  which is absolutely useless information but at the time I just wanted to get them ripped and I couldn’t read the track names anyway.  And these got uploaded to whatever database Windows Media Player uses.

So, as I was re-ripping CDs, occasionally one of my old “Track 01” style entries would pop up as I put in a CD, and this time I took the effort to go and look up real track names.  Hopefully they’ll overwrite my old nasty entries, so the next time some poor schlub puts one of these discs in their PC they’ll get… well, they’ll get some track names.

I’ve done my part for world peace.

As an aside, I’d like to go through the CDs for Saturn, SegaCD, Playstation and TurboDuo games next… lots of them included CD-audio tracks of the game music, and some of them had quite good music.  That won’t happen any time real soon, though.  Something for the to do list.

Posted in anime, organization | Leave a comment

And another bit about school…

Posted on March 27, 2007 by baudattitude

Classes done and pulled out a pair of As.  Books cheerfully sold back, and $150 worth of books bought for next term.  Also 8 credits @ $67 each + $20 a class “online fee”…  And I know full well I’m still sitting in the cheap seats.  The real pain comes after I finish up the Oregon transfer degree and start working on the real degree.

One of the books for next term is “1984”.  I read this in 1984.  Most of my classmates for next term probably weren’t born then.

I’m really glad it’s an online course, I feel old enough.

Posted in school | 1 Comment

My cdjapan order came in…

Posted on March 27, 2007 by baudattitude

I got my “Linda, Linda” single, and the Honey and Clover Complete Best album and uh…

Seven Haruhi character singles.  I happen to know there are people with much worse obsessions.

haruhicds.jpg

Posted in anime, haruhi | 2 Comments

The revenge of Apple, Inc.

Posted on March 27, 2007 by baudattitude

Apparently saying something against the Steve is just bad karma.

Let me sum up.

There’s a bug in Front Row. Not a big one, really more of a nuisance. Front Row will occasionally claim that you don’t have a license to play your unprotected mp3s. They work fine in iTunes, but not Front Row. So I go looking for a fix.

Simple fix found in mere moments. It seems all I need to do is select all the music in the iTunes library and tell iTunes that I want everything to have ID3 v2.4 tags. This churns for a while – overnight, actually – but when it’s done I seem to have fixed the problem. All my mp3s play fine in Front Row.

This feeling of satisfaction lasts until the next time I try to play an mp3 from a Windows PC on the network. Then I discover hell.

See, I have a lot of mp3s with kanji song titles, artist information, album information, so on. And the Mac represents kanji internally just a little differently from PCs. Just enough different to completely blow away all the kanji when these tags are viewed on a Windows PC, since MediaPlayer can’t figure out what’s going on and thoughtfully tries to rewrite them out…

After a few attempts to fix the problem automatically I wind up truncating all fields in the mp3 header to 30 characters and losing all album art, to say nothing of extended character sets. Time to give up. Last backup… October 2006. I guess it could have been worse, I’ve only gotten… uh. Quite a few CDs since then. Maybe 40? Mostly Japanese. Those Haruhi character singles do pile up.

Also, while I’m at it, I really ought to re-rip CDs that didn’t come in with proper track names, or had their track names tweaked to work on an old mp3 player that didn’t speak kanji either… and I should try to fill in some of this missing album art… So a simple disaster recovery becomes something more of a project, as occasionally happens.

Life would be a lot easier if I was studying, I don’t know, Spanish or something and had a bizarre obsession with wrestling instead of anime. I would have fewer problems involving kanji support on US hardware and software, for a start.

And, as an aside, I’m never letting the mac touch the network shared music folders again.

Posted in gadgets, mac, organization, 日本語 | Leave a comment

Milestones

Posted on March 25, 2007 by baudattitude

When you start off at 290 pounds, it’s important to set reasonable expectations for weight loss, and then set new goals as you hit them.

My first goal was basically “climb the two flights of stairs in the parking garage without needing to stop at the top to rest”

Then it was 270, then it was “get 250 before going to Japan” (August 06 – I was 252 when I got on the plane but 247 when I got back to the US a week later)

Then 220 by New Year’s.

Then “break 200”

This morning was 199.6.  Seeing the first digit on the scale change is, well, pretty damn cool.

I have a little ways to go… I still have to hit 189 to be a “healthy weight” for my height… but it’s looking pretty possible to hit, which isn’t something I’d have said 16 months ago when I started this whole lose weight thing.

Posted in weight | Leave a comment