Category: media

…or I Shall Taunt You a Second Time! (…)

I am sick. As in, actually sick, not the “oh, i feel abnormal, TIME TO STAY HOME!”. I went home around 3rd period yesterday, although my mom didn’t pick me up until 6th period. Kind of defeated the purpose, although I did get some sleep in the nurse’s office. I stayed home today, and my sneezing’s gone, but I’m coughing a little more, and my head feels akin to cotton. I would have actually preferred to have gone to school, not for the fun of it, but because I still haven’t finished all the work in chemistry. Hopefully I can get it all done in the two days left. I’m going to school tomorrow, sick or not. Staying home has been boring (not completely boring, but I beat Chaos Theory, and nobody’s been around to play online with). Speak of which, I think I’ll give my thoughts on Chaos Theory’s Single Player.

[geek]

So, Chaos Theory. I’ve talked it about it a lot before, and I have to say it lived up to it. The SP is amazing in general. There’s always three or four ways to solve things, but that makes the game easier, since the designers can’t predict what you have to do. Compared to the first and second’s levels, these are a good bit longer (they usually take an hour to beat, but once you know them, you can run through in about 15-20 minutes easily). There’s more enemies, the enemies are smarter, the graphics are better, think of whatever you can and it’s better. With one exception. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

A short BULLETED!!?!?! list of what’s improved:

  • New Weapon: Knife….the indestructible coolness goes on…
  • Level Complexity: As mentioned before, the levels are longer, and more complex. There’s always 2 ways to get to one destination, if not more, and usually 3 ways to kill any given guard (besides shooting or running up and knifing them). The game allows you to play however you want, now that alarms only increase the difficulty of taking out any given guard. In pandora tomorrow, 3 alarms meant you failed, but here, 4 alarms is the limit. It just means the guards are super-alert and fully equipped with rifles, body armor, and helmets.
  • More Maneuvers: You can kill people from just about anywhere, in any direction. The new moves include neck-snapping from a pipe, pulling over edges, shoving over edges, 4 non-lethal attacks, 5 lethal stabs, the list goes on. In addition to more moves, there’s WAY more chances to use these moves. Remember in the first SC, where you got to use the split jump once? I used it three times total, and probably used the edge grab half a dozen times, at least. Ah, the satisfaction.
  • Smarter AI: Multiple enemies will breach rooms from multiple directions, move between cover, switch from pistols to rifles as they find more disturbed items in the levels, notice broken lights, opened doors, etc..
  • Opportunity Objectives: These are always simple, but add just a little more interest to the levels. It’s always about finding an X number of something (weapons crates, microphones, phone lines, whatev). While simple, they usually don’t make you go searching the entire level again once you’ve gone through (with one exception, heh), it’s just a nifty little touch. Obviously these aren’t required to beat the mission.
  • Success Rating System: At the end of each level, you are rated on your stealth skills, based on whether you killed enemies or incapacitated, alarms triggered, bodies found, and number of times identified as an intruder (as opposed to being suspected). A 100% requires no killing, no bodies found, no alarms, and never being identified as an intruder, as well as getting the opportunity objective. The non-killing objective is the hardest, as it takes longer to knock someone out, and nearly impossible to do when they’ve identified you.
  • OCP: The pistol is equipped with an alternate fire, which is an electrical distruptor. It distrupts electrical objects for about 15 seconds, so you can keep moving past. This is important, because cameras are now indestructable, and is also useful for attracting guards without them identifying you.
  • Gadgets Simplified: Certain gadgets are combined into one (like the noise camera and the sticky camera).
  • Better Graphics: Like, a lot better, these are some slick polygons *bonk*.
  • Better Sound: The sounds are a little bit better, but what I really mean here, is that sound plays a bigger role in sneaking around. There’s an ambient sound meter which tells you how loud the surrounding area is, so you can adjust your speed accordingly.

But of course, with the good, comes the bad

  • Plot Retardacity: I don’t know how to say this…but the plot? It sucks. It’s filled with a lot of unnecessary holes (things stop making sense after the 4th or 5th level), and it just doesn’t flow. The first two had an identifiable villian, you felt like the levels had a purpose. In this case, however, you just kind of do whatever the objectives are, instead of intuitively knowing what you should be doing. In addition to being overly complex and filled with contradictions, it also doesn’t make sense logically. A lot of key elements to it just would not happen in today’s warfare, or even 20 years ago. They invoke technology that we’re far from gaining, and vastly underestimate the technology we have now. EXAMPLE: You are transmitting data to the NSA, via a plane flying by. For some reason, this plane is flying directly above a war zone, barely missing the skyscrapers. In addition to this, the plane, still going x-hundred miles and hour, is shot down with an infantry’s bazooka. This wouldn’t have happened in Vietnam, let alone 2007. The connection cannot be so weak as to require the plane being inches away from the source. Gah, I won’t go on.
  • Poor Cutscenes: They may have been the same before, but I remember the cutscenes from the first two versions being far smoother. The model animations this time around are very robotic. They aren’t convincing, and add to the level of vaguery in what’s going on. The cutscenes are also usually cut short as a character is saying something, to try and give a “rushed” sense, but it just adds to the confusion.
  • Sporadic Retardacity: Two levels are very, very poorly designed. Level 8 and 9, to be specific. They both start out nice and fun, but towards the middle, something happens to completely change the goal of the mission, and you’re tossed into a situation that is not logical or fun. Example: after the plane crashes, you are faced with North Korean UAVs, invincible, flying, infrared-scanning cameras with spotlights and a turret. They follow you wherever you go, and they can always follow you because the level has only 1 direction to go. Another example: after fighting breaks out between the Japanese ISDF, you need to reach the main target, the instigator of this outbreak. Because these men are all combat-ready, they are wearing helmets, body armor, are super-alert, and have infrared nightvision goggles on. Three of these men are in one room, with two doors. One door in, and one door out. That’s it. It is impossible to not kill these men, or do it by stealthy means. I tried, for over an hour. That’s the kind of situation I mean, where the game’s purpose is stolen by an obstacle that cannot be bypassed stealthily. This were probably the product of crunch-time, and last-minute attempts to get 10 levels in. The last level almost redeemed them, but was slightly dissapointing in the level of fun it was. SC 1 and 2 both had incredibly fun final levels. Why were they fun? I don’t really know. They just were.

Beyond that, the single player alone was probably worth 50 bucks. If I’d gotten the collector’s edition, I’d still have the three original bonus levels from SC, but, such things are not meant to be, I suppose. Once I play through the Co-op I’ll post some thoughts on that, but as is, I have nobody to play it with. I probably won’t write much about Versus for a long time, if at all, because of the extreme complexity. It’s taken me about 4-5 hours of playing just to get fluent with the controls, but the strategy on what to use and when to use it is the real key, and the levels are so complex…you get the idea. Hopefully I won’t forget to write it up, though. Hehe.

[/geek]

My throat feels like a lizard.

EDIT:

I got the server set up (with considerable amounts of help from Benjamin). Go explore the files I have up at the moment! What does this mean to you? I no longer have to use photobucket, which was semi-unreliable, downgraded the picture size, more annoying to link to, yada yada yada. This also means I can resurrect the random templates, unless, of course, you do not want them. If I were to bring them back, it would be be random, it would start on blue, but you could set it to whichever color you prefer. I’d also improve the colors and backgrounds and such for the red and green, and maybe introduce a few other colors. We’ll see.

The Server Location

No. You Can’t Have A Sip. (…)

Or so the mug sitting on my desk says. This mug was used in the acting of our Macbeth scene in English today, for the porter. We did alright, but not fantastic. We all stumbled on a few lines, but we had “mad propz” as I like to say. Karel had a beard made of cotton balls, Karel and I had robes on, ben had a blanket, Jared had keys and the mug I brought, and a bell. It was kinda fun, I guess.

I have an orthodontic appointment tomorrow. If all goes well, I may get the braces off, I might not. We’ll see. Tomorrow is actually shaping up to be a good day. I shouldn’t have to stay after school (Wednesdays are department meetings), so I’ll have a lot less school than normal. Or at least, normal as of late.

Daniel has, for the first time in history, beat me to the chase in getting a new game. How this happened, I cannot tell, but it did, and I am left in pure jealousy as he plays Chaos Theory to his heart’s content. Woe, woe, woe is me.

And now, more homework.

Why Doesn’t Food Rhyme With Good? (…)

That was a serious mistake, to whoever invented the English language.

So, Friday I did not attend school. Not because it was Good Friday (I find it bothersome that so many people do take the day off with that excuse), but to do 5 hours of make up work. I got all of my backlogged math work done, got more practice in on my English performance lines, and didn’t actually get to sleep in Friday. I figured since so many people would be gone, I could take the day off without drawing much attention. Hopefully that is the case. Anyways, this officially means Chemistry is the only subject left with work to do. I’ll be spending all my remaining days off working in Chemistry.

Saturday. The church youth (led by Greg) went to Lindseth at Cornell and did some climbing. It was pretty fun, despite my prognostication beforehand. I got to know Lincoln and Andrew a little better, which was cool. There’s a few kids at church I never really talk to, I dunno why, I just don’t. As for the climbing, I think I did okay considering I suck at it. I got to the top in two different places, but spent most of my time bouldering. My arms are pretty sore right now, but they’re almost back to normal.

Today was Easter (obviously), and the church, as usual, doubled in attendance. It’s kind of weird to see all these people come out of nowhere to church on Easter, and Easter alone. Dad actually taught a really good sermon, though. I normally don’t care for his style and presentation, but I definately learned something today.

Tomorrow? Not only is it Monday, but, Chaos Theory comes out. Speaking of which I need to go harrass my dad about Daniel’s money. If you haven’t read up on Chaos Theory, you need to. It’s gonna rock. 99 from OXM, 98 from Team XBox, 96 from IGN. Definately gonna rock. (btw Daniel, i just asked my dad, he said he lost the credit but will get more money for you tomorrow, i should have it by the time Scouts rolls around)

Finally, I’ve been experiencing a rather strange phenomonon recently. Food, in general, has stopped tasting good. Too much sugar? Not enough sleep? General stomache problems? They probably all contribute, but even my more preferred foods have ceased tasting as delicious as they should. My best guess is just a lack of sleep, because whenever I don’t get enough sleep, I find myself not seeing food as attractive. We shall see.

Trucker Hats and Zelda (O.o)

This week in general is not a good one. Productive, but not good in the least. The crappy grades which I’ve spent so much time fixing, Jonothan leaving, none if it’s cool. I had a glass of champagne with Jonothan and Brian Wednesday night. I’m not a fan of most alcoholic drinks, but it wasn’t too bad, nothing I would drink of my own accord, though. Jonothan left Thursday morning.

Friday was really nice and relaxing, exactly what I had hoped for. Saturday was too, but I had Kerry, Paul, Ben, and Jennie over around 7:30 to watch a movie (we couldn’t decide what movie, but Paul just shoved Zoolander in while nobody was watching, which sort of decided it for us). For whatever reason, Kerry was wearing this really large trucker hat, which she left here. Ben and Paul ended up spending the night, and left in the morning, and I walked down to church. For some reason, my mom’s been in Wisconsin. I can’t fathom what’s worth seeing in Wisconsin, but maybe some things are better left unanswered.

[geek]Beyond that, I’ve just been playing a lot of ZSNES games. I’m a good way through Yoshi’s Island, Mario RPG, Lufia II, Mario 3, Donkey Kong 1 and 2, and I already beat Zelda. I enjoy playing classic games a lot, it’s nice just to be able to sit down and enjoy a game without waiting for other players or dealing with complications and crashes and such. Playing the older games has resurrected my respect for Nintendo, which I lost upon release of the Gamecube. The Revolution may or may not be good, I can’t know, but one can hope. Speaking of which, I was enjoying the spoils of the GDC (Game Developer’s Conference). There was an Empire Earth II demo (sucked) a Chaos Theory Demo (looking good!), reports on a whole bunch of new games – Spartan: Total Warrior (from the makers of the Total War series, and I’m presuming using the Total War engine), Lego Star Wars (looked kinda funny, maybe one of those rental games), some stuff on Xbox 2 features (I was not left enthused), the PC version of Fable (didn’t look fantastic, but it said it had more quests, might be worth a download at least). E3 is on the way, though, which is supposed to have playable prototypes of all 3 consoles. I’m not really into console-hyping, but it’s good to know which system to go for first.[/geek]

At the moment, the house is empty and I’m blasting the Rome soundtrack at as high volume as my ears will allow.

It Won’t Be The Same (O.o)

I bring to you the fabled Colorado post, minus one picture (which happened to be the one I looked forward to seeing full-size the most) which my dad deleted. This is what I get for letting my dad touch that camera. *grumble* All my mom and dad’s pictures turned out like crap – they’re barely worth putting up. It ticks me off a lot – the scenery is completely ruined by a crap disposable camera and poor photography skills. *more complaining*

We left Sunday, landed in Denver about dusk, picked Christopher up from Clair’s (cousin’s widow, for those who forgot). We drove on over to the Johnson’s, which was a two hour drive with 20 lbs of luggage on my lap. It’d been years since the 5 of us had been in the same car, so this was something to be savored, in that bitter kind of way. We got there about 1 AM, greeted by the Weimeraner known as Tenzing (after the mountain climber).

Entrance:

Driveway (that’s our rental in there):

Tenzing (poor picture, apologies):

We slept, and spent Monday adjusting to the elevation of 10, 800 ft.. Christopher ran out and bought a Gamecube on a whim, and rented Mario Kart, which supplied Jonothan and I some amusement. He had a Gamecube, but it was stolen a little while back. Poor Christopher has a hard history with robbery – all his possessions were stolen from a storage facility when he was 18 and had just joined the Army (that was a lot of stuff). Not too long ago his laptop and other major appliances were stolen.

Yes, we woke up to this view every morning:

We stayed in the bottom portion of their house. Their house by the way, is custom, completely wood, and disgustingly nice. Not rich kind of nice, but non-standard kind of nice. Retirement kind of nice. The bottom portion has two bathrooms, two bedrooms, a den (with TV, VCR, DVD).

The downstairs main area:

The upper portion is wide, lots of windows, and shockingly bright in the morning. I took most of the pictures around dusk, so it’s not bright, as the mountain blocks the sun.

The living room (there’s a huge wall of windows to the right (you can see them on the east side picture), but for obvious reasons I can’t take a picture of that):

The kitchen (facing out the south side):

The entry (facing out the north/west side, with my back to the windows):

The outside is very much like a log cabin. Pictures tell more than words, though.

The north side (the outside pictures are going in something of a circle, you should be able to get something of an idea of what the outside looks like if you follow it):

The east side (this ones a jump, sorry):

The south side (you can see the porch that’s in the east side picture on the right, for reference):

I won’t supply many skiing pictures, simply because it’s a lot of work for something that isn’t going to tell much. So, skiing. We skiied Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I didn’t actually ski though. Christopher, Jonothan, and I all snowboarded for our first time on Tuesday, and stuck with it the entire time. It really hurt the first day – you fall down a lot, it sucks. You run out of breath so fast at 11,000+ feet, we were sweating up a storm that first day.

Tuesday was Copper, which is the biggest resort in the vicinity of 1.5 hours. It has about 125 trails, a dozen or so lifts (speed lifts, at that. if you didn’t hear this last year, they’re lifts that go about 3 times as fast as normal lifts. they detach onto an alternate rail at mount and dismount, which goes about half as a fast as normal lifts. the convenience of this is indescribable). We took a lesson that day (and only that day) to make sure we got the basic techniques and stuff. The lessons were so much better there – it’s amazing. Greek Peak’s instructors do this “do this, no you’re not doing it, you have to do this” kind of thing. Our instructor, Jeff, gave us all kinds of tips for how to do all the stuff, it was really nice. We found that when we applied the rules he taught us, everything worked, it was amazing. We just did the bunny hill that first day – and that was hard. It hurt. It hurt bad. When the lesson was over I decided to go attempt a green, and wow was that a mistake. Apparantly Copper stops grooming about mid-season, so on the mildly steep parts of greens, there are moguls. Understand, moguls are completely different on a snowboard. If you don’t know what you’re doing (me), you can’t do crap, whereas on skis you can at least run over the moguls and ruin them. I fell about 30 times on the run, and I wore myself out badly pushing myself across the straits. I was about ready to go back to skiing the next day, but some encouragement from Brian and the brothers kept me at it.

Wednesday we went to Cooper – the smallest resort, but the highest at 13,000 feet. Towards Cooper is about the size of Greek Peak in terms of amount of lifts and runs, and even layout. The runs are still about twice as long, though. I forgot to mention – the runs at Copper are generally half a mile to three-fourths. The green path I took made for a 20-minute run, with a 4-5 minute lift ride. That’s about four to five times as long as Greek Peak’s. And about half to a quarter the lift ride. Amazing, yes? By the end of the day we braved a mild blue. Two days, and a mild blue!

Thursday we went back to Copper to meet up with Clair. We spent half the day floundering on these really bad greens – most greens had “traverse” zones, where snowboarders have to detach their back foot and push for a few hundred yards. This is really tiring, and just frustrating. We managed to get some advice from some seasoned Copper-goers and took a few nice and steep blues, which really made up for the first half of the day. The last run, though, we went to the top to try another blue to discover that it’s really, really steep and had moguls. We actually did ok, but we split when it came to a fork in the path. I went down first, and stopped at the fork. It forked between a blue and a black. The plan was to take the blue, but Jonothan and Christopher missed the blue and went down the black. Jonothan did ok, but Christopher wasn’t feeling too hot and just detached and walked back. Three days, and harder blues!

Copper, at the top (crappy camera):

Friday was Monarch, the middle-range between Copper and Cooper, but all the trails are of far greater difficulty. This is by far the best resort, IMO. It has a lot of unmarked forest trails which are really fun and challenging, they all have huge jumps, lots of powder, huge moguls, all created by skiiers. We did one trail, called “Turbo” 6 times. It’s about the equivelant of Olympian on Greek Peak, the hardest black on the mountain, and yet it’s blue. The first four times were pretty tough, we didn’t know how to handle the moguls. By the 5th and 6th time, we had it down to a science of jumping and braking, it was far more dynamic than it is on skis. FOUR days, very steep blues with a lot of moguls!

Snowboarding has it’s perks, but I think I’ll stick with skiing. Skiing has a lot of conveniences, like poles, seperated feet, and is generally more mobile. Also, you can’t really do back-trail snowboarding around here, as you’d have to push yourself everywhere. Anyway. Monarch had a few ok pictures. There was a professional photographer at the top taking pictures, so one is good.

That was our last day of skiing. Saturday was nothing, I just ran around taking pictures and such. There are a few left of views of the scenery. These are the good ones.

This is of Buena Vista, from the windows:

Night time:

View to the west:

View to the north:

We packed up and cleaned the rooms Saturday too. I ended up vacuuming with a vacuum older than my parents. So old, there was no date on it, anywhere. I took a picture to immortalize this antiquity.

The trip wasn’t just fun, though. It was (and this is said at the risk of sounding corny) a really good family bonding experience. Every time I spend time with my brothers, I realize how much alike we really are. It helps that I’m old enough to really have fun with them now, and not constantly be left behind. Our family sat down for about 3 hours just talking about problems we were facing and prayer requests, it was nice like that. It’s a little weird looking past the outside stuff that bothers me about the family and seeing what’s really worth looking at. It wasn’t gooey, soft, and pretty, but was definately heart warming. Anyways.

And a poorly taken picture of our final feast:

[2012 edit: lost forever]

We left Sunday morning to Denver airport, sent Christopher off to San Antonio, and moved on to Denver. We checked in at the hotel and just…sat, basically. We didn’t do anything until we saw Tim and Joyce Hume (this is the guy I’m named after, remember). It was really good to see them back together (they’d been seperated), and with a child no less. I really enjoy my time with Tim, he’s an awesome one. No pictures, for some reason. Monday was pretty boring, we just kinda sat around, had dinner with Clair, and that was it. We left Tuesday morning, and got back to Ithaca at 12:00 AM Wednesday. They lost Mom’s and Jonothan’s luggage though (after the flight was delayed, too), so we didn’t get home till 1:30 AM. For obvious reasons I didn’t go to school, and that was my trip. Exciting, to be sure.

While I’m Gone…(O.o)

I’m headed to Colorado tomorrow, I’ll be back Tuesday (not next Tuesday) or Wednesday. I didn’t get to all the site improvements I’d hoped to yesterday, and I probably won’t get to them today. I’ll conduct a list of all I did for you, not that you care. 😛

  • Aligned top sidebar border and top post border
  • Made the main column wider.
  • Moved main column higher
  • Divided sidebar into 3 sections.
  • Added Profile section to sidebar.
  • Removed that dumb blogger image at the bottom.
  • Changed title from “Of Tim” to “And The Lack Thereof”.
  • Made IE generally happier.

I also have a list of things I’m planning on doing in the future! Again, not that you care, but…

  • Get the profile area done.
  • Clean up my code a little more, it’s good as is but could be better.
  • Find a new place to put the comments. I’ve found that the current place it out of the way, and easy to miss.
  • Improve the color I have set for the post dates and blog title.
  • Test out some different border styles.
  • Improve for IE, again.
  • Get a better statcounter.

And a little bit further in the future, once I’ve learned PHP and javascript…

  • Set up a server and host the blog on it.
  • Remove the archive.
  • Bring back the multiple style sheet interface (the red, green, and blue templates)
  • Make an option for automatically emailing new posts to you.

I’ve got a lot of hope for this thing, I’ve been really enjoying slowly improving it throughout time. I’m glad to see how much I’ve improved this thing. It looked pretty darn horrid back in the day.

Anyways, I have some packing, and some burning to do. I need some music for the trip, and I don’t have a MP3 CD player (I really need one), so I have to convert everything to .wav and burn it, which just isn’t cool. Oh well. While I’m gone, go check out Aireline, Built to Spill, Muse, and Sunny Day Real Estate. Good stuff. Off I go to pack.

All That and a Bag of Chips! (O.o)

This week would not end. I beat it with sticks, clubs, pencils, and shoelaces, but it would not relent. I’ve had about 25 less hours of sleep than I need this week, and it’s been so very rough. The week in totality has sucked – at least three teachers are highly displeased with me, my grades have been awful (it’s weird, I have like an A+ in global and english, but i doubt i’m even passing in chem and math), and I’ve just been perpetually tired. I can say this for a fact: I have never experienced a week this long.

Tuesday was the Bible Study, which again failed to meet muster. I’ve promised Daniel I’ll go another time before I give up on it, so we shall see how things go in March. Wednesday was…nothing. Thursday was ski club, fun stuff, except for some damage I did to my trachea. I was attempting to grab Colette’s poles using my poles, and I pushed down a little hard and one of my poles stuck in the ground, and before I knew it I had stopped myself going rather fast by having a pole jammed into my throat. That hurt. Of course, in my delerium, I fell over standing up once I got to the bottom. Today was Ben’s birthday (technically tomorrow, but today was more convenient). We went to his house and laughed at Sho’s chick flick, The Notebook. The name is bad enough, but the movie was worse. This was either a case of major plot revision at the last minute, awful editing, or just retarded plot transition. Let me describe the general mood of this story.

Ben: “Something needs to explode.”
Tim: “Why hasn’t anyone died yet?”
Sho: “…”

[queue main character lamenting the absence of his girlfriend]
Narrator: After she moved, he sent a letter to her every day. After one year with no response, he gave up, and became an ensign.
[queue main character running across a battle field with lots of explosions for 10 seconds, and finds his best friend dead. without providing any emotional response and experiencing no emotional change, he returns home, his dad gives him a lot of money, dies, and he begins building a house]

This is in the space of 1 minute, and I am not exaggerating. Even though it was bad, it was most hilarious to mock. I call that a happy birthday.

As for the rest of today, it’s been really, really nice. Not having school is just so delightful, I cannot express the emotion therein. I was watching Jonothan play Halo 2 (he played it for about 18 hours straight yesterday, he couldn’t sleep, so he just played), and he’s improved a lot. If you know my brother, he’s not a real gaming kind of guy, and we’ve never really shared a joy in playing these things, so it’s cool to see him get excited at learning and getting better at a game I really enjoy. We were also playing LotR Trivial Pursuit, while watching the LotR: Fellowship EE, with my dad, too. I haven’t played a board game with my dad in….ages. The last time we did was at least 4 years ago, so that was really nice. My dad went to bed, so Jonothan and I are in the midst of a game of Monopoly (we’re taking a break at the moment).

So, at 4:31 in the morning, Jonothan owned me in Monopoly. Took us three hours. Off to sleep I go.

Justice, the Product of Perspective (O.o)

An arguable statement, but at least partially true in a non-religious context. My recent days have been overly sober, not as spontaneous or as wantonly enjoyable as I normally keep them. Jonothan’s time here has been a reality check for me – recently, I’d begun reducing life to simple equations, which, if worked, Einstein would have found them already. Jonothan told me how the big things right now are really actually small – no matter how mature or how smart you handle matters or approach them. A quick glance at my past and those of my friends has proven his point. I’ve been struggling with this in how I treat these seemingly big matters – should I treat them with any less delicacy or ferocity? My postulate: no. They’re big matters now because there are no matters bigger than those I’m facing – you take things in proportion.

With this in mind, I was blown away when Rachel called Jonothan on his cell, and he picked up. When he was done with a short conversation with her, I asked him why he picked up. His reply: “We’re adults.”. You have no idea how much that scares me – I’m afraid to pick up the phone when my lawn mowing customers are calling to get me to mow their lawn one more time. I guess this is where that proportion thing comes in.

What do you do, though, when something out of proportion enters in the fray? Amanda told me about a friend of hers, who’s being abused, but nothing can be done because he’s about to turn 18, and his parents are habitual liars. It’s times like that I wonder “where’s the justice? no, really, where’d it go?”. When all I can do is pray for him, I’m reminded that God does have a plan here, and that plan may not include me saving the day. A frustrating concept, to be sure.

Saturday night Daniel came over and we watched the rest of Fullmetal, talked, etc.. Sunday was normal, Benjamin came over, we played around in GIMP (I made a few that I found particularly cool – 1, 2, and 3). Today, I stayed home sick (I do have that flu, you kn0w). I woke up to Jonothan handing me a plate of bacon and an egg + cheese + english muffin thing (they’d call them egg McMuffin’s at McDonald’s, but I dunno what they’re actually called).

Beyond that, my musical tastes have been expanded a little bit – I’ve grown keen on two bands recently. Aireline and Muse (I doubt anyone’s heard of the former, but Paul’s heard of Muse, so maybe someone else has heard of it). In any case, I still like the techno, I just like some other stuff too. *cough*

Set to the Tune of “Commercialization”

The TV is currently spewing out various noises and images related to football and commericals, as I download techno and talk to the few people on IM. I’m not a huge football fan – I can enjoy it in good company, and I know how the game works, but I don’t take time out of my days to watch it. I’m at least into it enough to be able to have a short conversation about it with the pizza delivery guy.

[geek] I spent all of Friday and Saturday building two alternate styles for the Boy Scout website I’m helping with. They wanted some alternate ideas for design, but I was faced with the issue of sorting through code I hadn’t written, and doing it in VI under the unix file system (which I wasn’t very familiar with). It took me about 12 hours to do, since I had to learn how to use chmod (all the files I ssh’d over to the server started with no read/write privilages), and then because of some confusion with the divs and paragraphs, it took me a few hours to figure out the percentages I needed to set (which were never really up to snuff). I also had to figure out a lot of stuff in GIMP (aka Photoshop), as I’ve never really been proficient in that. My second style didn’t work due to some problems in the PHP (that’s all I could find to be the problem in the 20 minutes I had to finish it). Definately fun though, learned a lot of stuff. [/geek]

Nothing else of astounding importance has really happened, though. I’m downloading a whole LOT of techno right now (14 different albums, amounting to about 30 or 40 tracks). During this process though, I’ve noticed something really, really creepy. All the techno forums (where I download the techno) are like…robotic, sort of like a ghost town. So far even the forum formats are the same (they both use phpBB, but the same style, different colors though). I’ve been 4 different places, all the same (including di.fm, which is the general go-to place for techno). All the music is in the same format – one track for each “CD”, with a 2 kb CUE file (i can’t figure out what these do), and usually there’s an option for a torrent or for direct dl. Maybe it’s just the industry standard, I don’t know.

Colette burned me the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack. She had me listening to it on the bus home from ski club, it’s pretty good. Some of it’s a little too…singy, but it’s not bad as far as musicals go. Ski club was pretty good, it was nice and warm, so there was room to have some fun. They had signs up telling people to hug the people monitoring the ski lifts. I was running around stealing everybody’s poles (mostly Colette’s, cause she was the easiest to steal from :P).

And, I can’t think of much else interesting to say, so I shall return to looking around for Superbowl commercials.

At the End of All Things (-.-)

The title refers to the final chapter of Lord of the Rings. Today’s been a rather active, mentally and emotionally. After the Math A (piece of cake) I went home, and watched the last 3 episodes of Fullmetal. I watched 23 episodes last night (that is, Monday, as this is 1:16 AM on Wednesday morning) in a row. Having finished it, I am wholly reminded of endings, particularly, the end of good things. Books, movies, shows, I hate getting to the end. If the media did the job correctly, I am left with a gaping hole where it once stood, and I grasp for something as a replacement. This is especially painful with this series, as the character of Edward Elric was…incredible. No, I won’t spoil anything for those who valiantly choose to watch it on TV, and by valiant, I refer to the utter frustration you will want to wreak on your television set when each episode ends, and another does not begin. And yet still, I feel the desire to wreak havoc upon my surroundings in the futile hope of recieving another episode.

Besides finishing Fullmetal, I jumped into the job of helping create the Troop 2 Scouts website. Benjamin’s doing the PHP, Daniel’s doing the CSS, I’m doing the content, and the three of us together decide what’s happening graphically. It’s a fun project – I’ve learned a lot about the Unix file system, SSH, and vi.

The true point of this was to express my utter…helplessness to the feeling I have after finishing Fullmetal. I just, argh, when something that good ends, I just wanna scream, and there’s nothing to replace that empty feeling I have. It’s no surpise, really, as I filled my last week’s nights with watching the episodes (heck, it only took me 5 days to watch 51 episodes, so less than that). I should stop ranting at this point, I suppose.

Monday was the first time I’ve been back to Boy Scouts for a good many months, they were rather happy to see me, and my timing seems rather good, considering the rather…inparticipative older scouts (coughBRANDONcoughPETERcough). I’m sort of obligated to go on the next two camp outs, I guess. I wish I hadn’t said yes for the most recent one, as the timing is inconvenient, but backing out would be rather, shall we say, detrimental to the amount of trust placed in my motivation to show up.

I think I may go re-watch a few episodes now, I’m not sure, but we’ll see.

So THIS is What Sewage is Made of! (O.o)

And no, sewage does not contain money or candy, it’s just as bad as the movies say. Our house has a bi-annual thing is does where some mythical object gets stuck in a pipe, and so the sewage backs up into this gigantic metal sink we have in the basement. Half the time we can plunge it out ourselves (boy is that fun!), the other half we are forced to call Roto-Rooter. This is the disadvantage of living in the basement by yourself. My room doesn’t smell, but whenever I walk out the door, it’s like getting trout slapped, several times over. If you don’t know what being trout slapped is, Google it, or have someone take a trout, and proceed to slap you.

I “overslept” for church today, again, but I believe it isn’t me that’s oversleeping. I have no problems waking up for school with no sleep, I should not face troubles with church. My mom also seems to stay home whenever I “oversleep”. To spell it out for you, I think my mom is just covering for herself.

Apparantly my dad’s coming home with KFC, and Jesse and Benjamin. I am determined to show them, and make them love Fullmetal. By the end of today they will have seen good anime. And they will be better for it. On that topic, my next 29 episodes are 54% done. I left it on overnight, so it should be done tomorrow if I do it again tonight.

The Chaotic Theorum (O.o)

I’ve experienced a rather excellent week, and next week promises to be equally excellent, as it is Regents, meaning two days lacking anything related to school, and two short and relatively painless tests.

After a full 2 weeks (approximately 150 hours of downloading) I got the first 31 episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist downloaded (I uploaded over 50 gb worth of data), and I’ve watched them all (it only took me 3 days), and the next 29 episodes only have 43 hours more left to go (keep in mind, each episode is 175 megs, it makes for 9 gigs total for the series). I introduced it to Daniel last night when he was over (he strolled in as I was watching it) and he ended up watching 12 episodes (remember that these things are 25 minutes each). I have deduced this to be the best anime, and even show ever created. The unique and creative genius of the plot, characters, and the world is astounding. The animation style and quality is akin to Trigun (which I should also download). Sick of the parenthesis yet?

I’ve also gotten around to playing Rome: Total War, and it is, to my delight, the best strategy game ever created. Ben and I keep talking about playing online, but we never get around to it, but it isn’t as if I don’t have things to keep me occupied. I still have yet to beat Neverwinter Nights, and all those SNES games.

In the mean time, I’ve also been tracking Splinter Cell 3 and Elder Scrolls IV (three new screens came out today, in fact). I had been on the look out for Jade Empire and KotOR II, but after having played KotOR and NwN, I’m not sure if the same formula of game would still be all that fun, as I tend to get over-manipulative of the system. I’ll stop talking about games now.

I was thinking to myself earlier about Macs in general – and why they’ve become comparable to PCs in the recent year. I did myself a Google, and discovered a number of things, from reading the most intelligently disguised Mac-PC flamewar, on a Linux forum.

Linkage

I have long argued over the inferiority of Macs compared to PCs, but recently much of my argument has blown up in my face, due to the de-retardation of Macs. It still hasn’t answered as to why I find them so awful (I use G4’s at school on a daily basis, just so my experience is not in doubt EDIT: apparantly my experience is in doubt. i’ve also used powerbooks on multiple occasions, and OS9’s fairly regularly, but i admit that i have not used a G5). A number of posters on the previously stated site brought up extremely valid points as to why the experience varies.

  • Macs are preferred for the software capabilities. PCs are preferred for the hardware capabilities.

An owner of a server put it quite well. His needs do not revolve around multimedia. His three PCs don’t even have sound cards, and use very low end video cards. In place of those, he needs massive storage. PCs allow you to do that infinitely, they don’t have a cap on how much of what you need. Macs cannot be built from scratch (technically it IS possible, but the amount of work and experience involved surpasses that required for a PC by far), you have to buy a pre-made from Apple. You CAN upgrade it, but that does not allow you to specialize in certain areas, but not sacrifice economics. Macs simply have superior software. Some of their formats have better, faster, higher quality compressions and decompressions (for video or pictures). That’s always been true.

  • Macs are inevitably more expensive for those who have special wants or needs.

Because you cannot just sacrifice in one area to add to another, you have to go for the more expensive package. PCs end up being cheaper for those with special needs. PCs may or may not be expensive when it comes to a rounded-out machine. Generally, if you build a PC from scratch, it’ll be cheaper than an equivelant Mac or pre-built PC. Macs have been known to be more expensive since the beginning – this has been studied dozens of times, results are neutral according to bias, but for the standard machine, Macs will cost more.

  • Benchmarks and power comparisons are inconclusive.

I’ve had several people tell me that the newest Macs would rip apart a Pentium 4 – this is meaningless, as the power of a P4 can range immensely, from < 1.0 to 5.0, and the clock cycles per operation between mac and PC procs vary as well. This also doesn't consider that AMD chipsets are far faster the P4's, (I have the evidence to back me up), and most benchmarks are run on Dells, which certainly do not run high quality hardware. Anyways. Skiing was cold. It was about 5, possible 0 degrees out, with a wind chill of like -5 or -10. Fun, but cold. The bus rides to and fro (the irony has just now struck me) are actually one of my favorite parts, I have to say. I was wearing so many layers – I had 6 on my body, three on legs, two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, two goods, a turtleneck, and earwarmers. I still froze. I had no goggles, so every snowblower was like “OH SWEET HEAVEN THE PAIN! AHHHHHHHHH!”, but was otherwise, just cold.

Now with a Smooth Marshmallow Core! (O.o)

This week can’t end soon enough. At this time, aI’m frustrated at the utter lack of time I have. I’ve been taking the bus home just so I can get more time at home (it gives me about an hour more), but that has a side effect of disconnecting me, but of course all my time at home is spent working or vegging as I play Halo 2 or my other newer games, so it’s a ruthless cycle of disconnectivity.

Speaking of Halo 2, I’ve gotten back into it recently, but I’ve found I have a 1/2 chance of either doing insanely well or sucking. I can’t figure it out – there are those games where the battle rifle is my baby – all my kills are headshots and no deaths, and then I have those Banshee moments, where I’m evading the rockets. And then I have those Banshee moments, where I hop in three times in one game only to be rocked by the rockets. And then I have those games where I can’t get the Battle Rifle, and I’m stuck with an SMG. I think I need to work on my strategy. I THINK the problem is my skill is too reliant on my team. If my team mates keep the rocket out of play, the Banshee is my home. I’m not sure though, as that doesn’t quite make sense when it comes to some weaponry (the battle rifle in particular). It’s taken me this long to realize it’s a team game, though. For all practical purposes, it’s a tactical shooter – you either work with the team or against the team. It’s actually that simple, too. If you aren’t sticking together and talking with your team, you end up dying, giving the enemy valuable weaponry, vehicles, and easier shot at the objective, more points, the whole basket and kaboodle. For so long I’ve been frustrated at how I can be better than the guy I’m fighting by a long shot, but still die, and now I understand. Anyways, no more video game talk.

Speaking of which, I wrote a report on video game violence for English. It’s technically the 1st draft, but it’s close enough.

Report – Video Game Violence

[2012 edit: lost forever]

I believe I sufficiently pwned that argument.

Speaking of pwnage, I had this crazy killing spree with the sniper rifle on Ascension. It was 4v4 Team Slayer – I had a fully loaded Sniper Rifle at my disposal, and they just kept on coming up the ramp, and out of the base, they didn’t stop coming. I was kind of toast when one of they shot me with the sniper after all my team had died at point-blank. I had two of those experiences actually, one on Burial Mounds at the base tunnel. I wish they had the headshot sound from UT. It would make it so much more satisfying.

Speaking of satisfying, I discovered my mouse has a battery life of like 5 days, with just one overnight charge. I am quite pleased, to say the least.

Also speaking of satisfying, we finished season 3 of 24. It was, to say the least, not satisfying. The biggest problem was that instead of twisting the plot, they kept extending it. The last 5 or 6 hours were completely unnecessary plot-wise, they just stretched things out for the last few hours, which is why they were far less interesting than the rest of the season. The season started off weakly. The first two discs were poor. The next two were excellent, but then the next two were poor. I have high hopes for season 4 though, especially with such a gigantically new cast (that should be a hint to how many people die). On a positive note, Kiefer Sutherland (the one that plays Jack) is an incredible actor. His skills really shine when you have a lot of bad extras and minor characters running around. I mean…bad. I could act better than some of these people. Oh well.

And the Cow Says, “Moo” (O.o)

My recent days have been filled with a lot of KotOR, Halo 2, and 24. I’m almost done with KotOR, I’m on the last planet, so, anyways. We’re on the 19th episode of 24 now, and as usual, the writers of 24 have outdone themselves. The first two discs just plain sucked – the script was boring, the plot generally lack-luster,and the characters inconsistent. However, toward the end of the third disc, things start picking up (as in, important characters started dying). If you haven’t watched 24, you really really should. It’s probably the most suspenseful show ever created, and the quality of the acting, the plot, etc., surpasses that of your standard movie.

I should probably explain exactly what 24 is. 24 is a show (on Fox) that plays in real time – there are 24 episodes, each spanning one hour of time, and the season consists of one day. Because of the whole “real time” thing, people don’t just miraculously jump back into action and people don’t just appear at the destination. This will obviously require multiple threads and plots running simultaneously – generally about 3 different situations are running at once. 24 is notorious for killing off all the characters that are even slightly expendible. I thought a lot of people died last season (2), but even more have died thus far, and more are going to die in the future. But I’m getting of track – the real-time element is the first essential part of the formula that is 24. Then you have lots of death and gore. Then you add excessive suspense and multiple plot lines. And last, but not least, you have a major threat to America. The first season was about an assasination attempt on the primary presidential candidate (there were about 3 other plot lines, but that’s the main driving plot), the second was about a nuclear threat (again, there were more plots intertwined), this time it’s about a weaponized virus. Overall, it’s very realistic. There are some dramas that would no longer occur with our current technology (like tracing calls – they still use the standard required amount of time to track the source of a call, even though it can now be done instantly, and various indescrepencies with military policy, but otherwise it works quite well). Just go watch it, we have all 3 seasons on DVD if you want to borrow them.

In other news, school has been highly standard. Nothing special, beyond that my grades are fixed. I really enjoyed that snow day on Thursday (I slept until 3:00 that day). Today I overslept, and missed church, which really sucks. The problem is, Fullmetal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell are on at 12:00 and 3:00. I always miss the first showing, so I have to wait until 3:00. Fortunately my download of FMA is 57% done, and reporting 30 hours left till it’s done, so that shouldn’t be a problem by the time Sunday rolls around again. I’ve grown tired of Ghost in the Shell – it’s a good anime, but the animations can be distracting (they are not of stellar quality), and the plot makes, well, no sense. The most recent episode was 20 minutes of listening to 6 people discuss the main antagonist, in a chat room. It was obvious they did this to try and help the viewer understand what exactly was going on, but none of it really made any sense. They spend too much time using big words and complex phrases and too little time on making the plot logical. I suspect the movies or the manga would be far better, but I currently have no money with which to investigate such ventures.

Oh well.

The Final Fantasy (O.o)

[edit]Oh, and Merry Christmas everyone![/edit]

Ah yes, Christmas. I truly enjoyed mine, I hope you enjoyed yours. Christopher’s here, he’s been giving me all kinds of phat l00t for my comput4r. He’s loaded a few thousand dollars worth of programs, music, and stuff onto my computer in his few days here so far. He still has yet to supply me Nero, some Moby, and Windows XP Pro (it’s isntalled, but we need a serial key). It’s pretty amazing – his song collection outgrew his 40GB mp3 player – he now has a 120GB External USB2.0 (Seagate) for his song collection, which is clocking over 16,000 at this moment. Yes, that’s a whole lot of songs, with which I am partaking in the love. My cousin John (28?) just arrived, which is cool. He’s not a geek, he’s actually an actor, or rather, in theatrical college of sorts. He’s pretty cool.

I woke up at 11:00 today, did the presents routine, ate our tradition Christmas breakfast (we don’t do Christmas dinner, we do Christmas Eve fondue, which beats any Christmas goose by a mile) of Sour Cream Eggs (best breakfast ever, it may sound gross but it really is good). We watched a few episodes of Arrested Development (hilarious) and some Season 3 of 24 (so far it’s the worst of the three, but still quite good).

Yesterday Christopher and I went to get my present, which happened to be in the vicinity of Best Buy. We were originally getting a hardrive, but my dad called Christopher in the middle of the searching process to inform him that he already got me one. So we decided to go for the Logitech LX700, the sexiest peripheral to ever exist. It’s a wireless keyboard (About 2 dozen extra programmable buttons, black, soft-keys, solid, all around awesome) and mouse (7 buttons – technically 5, as there are only three “buttons” that are extra, persay, but the mouse can press down and tilt from side to side, useless, but hey, whatever. the battery is rechargable – you just stick it on the charger when you’re not using it (most important to do when you turn it off), it has at least a 12 hour life, if not more, i have no clue, but it’s Logitech, so, i expect a lot). These rock, which is good. To make life simple I’m making a bulleted list.

  1. Logitech LX700
  2. Western Digital 80GB IDE Hardrive
  3. KotOR
  4. Doom 3
  5. Rome: Total War
  6. 2x Sour Altoids – Apple
  7. Blue S-Type XBox Controller
  8. Barnes & Nobale $25 giftcard
  9. Blockbuster $50 giftcard (this came from my grandparents, which is actually probably a miracle of epic proportions. you see, my grandparents are probably the worst giftgivers known to the world. their most famous gift was a plastic statue of liberty AM radio – that’s ALL it did. it was that nasty copper-green. they gave them to my parents before I was born, so I never got to see them. the next year they got the same thing. in the same way, my grandparents have completely failed in getting me logical gifts. for the past 5 years, i got model cars. they came in variations, sometimes like hot wheels, or sometimes in wooden versions. suffice to say, i don’t even like cars. i never told them I did. we could never figure this phenomonon out. they also have a 15 dollar limit. my grandparents aren’t poor – they aren’t rolling in the green, but they aren’t strapped financially, so it was always amusing to see what they managed to do within those limits. we were disapointed in a sick sort of way when we discovered my present to be, well, good. even if we don’t have a Blockbuster within 15 miles of us, it’s definately a milestone for my grandparents.)
  10. Every album from about 10 or 15 artists (I asked for Coldplay and Modest Mouse, but Christopher gave me a few others he thought i’d like).
  11. A lot of programs (Microsoft Office 2003, Outlook 2003 [which, for the record, is better than Thunderbird, Eudora, or any other POP3 client], SSH Tunneler, PGP Encrypter, and eventually Nero, Visual Studio.net, XP Pro, and the Pro version of ZoneAlarm)
  12. Fuzzy Slippers!!
  13. Fleece Robe
  14. A picture frame + scarf (from Colette)
  15. ZSNES + a bunch of games (from Ben)
  16. Two chocolate turtles (from Jared)

My Uncle will be here tomorrow, and apparantly is bringing his gifts along to save the expense of unnecessary shipping.

Now, about this whole Final Fantasy business, I’m gonna have to smack a few people up who don’t think FFVII is the best of the Final Fantasy series. Best game ever? Purely my opinion. The thing about FFVII is that it’s not actually overrated. The fact that 5 people just said it in my comments proves me point. Outside of the RPG realm, the entire Final Fantasy series is looked down upon, even though most people have not played them. The strange thing about Final Fantasy and RPG’s in general is their scope is limited, hype is minimal, the general audience of small. Despite this, they receive no less shame and humiliation from those who have not even played them.

Why is FFVII the best in the series? Graphically, it’s visual diahrrea. The cutscenes and battle graphics were good, but most of the time you were in the world map or running around and such, and none of the models were rounded – everything was at right angles. It was good in its time, today it just sucks. It was THE FIRST 3-D turn-based-combat (TBC, also referred to as classic) RPG ever. Few people grasp this, but it was not done before FFVII. That’s why the graphics sucked – it was an experiment visually. If you STILL try and knock the graphics, go back to your hole. It also had the disadvantage of being an early release on the console. The PS, if you remember, came out before the N64, and lacked certain anti-aliasing technology and other minor things that gave the N64 a graphical edge.

Moving on. The thing about FFVII was the plot, the characters, character development, and mood of the game. Unless you’re an FPS or action-ish gamer, you can agree that FFVII had a near-perfect plot and implementation of the storyline. The plot, if described to you in person, would not make sense, it would seem corny and silly. Play the game, my friend, from start to finish. Tell me you weren’t sad and surprised when Aries died, tell me you didn’t find at least one of the characters really cool, tell me you didn’t get bored of the game at any point. If you’re a gamer who doesn’t like Final Fantasy or RPGs, don’t go and tell me you think otherwise, because I don’t really care.

To be a little more specific, let’s look at the choices you have with each character when it comes to magic, equipment, and attacks. For only have three equipment slots, the system is highly complex. Your armor and weapon both have “slots” which can hold materia. Materia are magical items that are either a spell, skill, or stat modifier. You put the materia in these slots to use the materia, or allow the use of the materia. That’s not the complex part. It starts getting thicker by the fact that all materia change your stats. Magic materia make you physically weaker, and magically stronger. Skill materia will increase a stat related to the skill. The stat change doesn’t do much until you get stronger materai – which end up changing stats by 15%. That’s still pretty simple, right? Here’s where it starts really getting cool. The materia have levels of growth. They grow by gaining AP from battle (just a different form of exp). Growing allows you to use the magic more times in a battle, gives greater stat bonuses, or just allows you to use the spell. Weapons or armor may be set to let your materia grow at a double rate, or at no rate, so some weapons may seem better but not actually be. Now, here’s the final piece that makes the materia system awesome. Each slot is set one of two types – linked or single. Single materia are unaffected by other materia and do not change the result of other materia. Linked materia can add to the other materia, or change what happens. For example: If I have the “Counter-attack” materia, and i put it into one of two linked slots, and put the “Poison” materia in the other slot, I have a chance of poisoning the enemy on the counter-attack. The rate of success is dependant on both materia. If they’re both mastered, I’ll always counter, and the counter will always poison (succesfully or not is dependant on the enemy). You can come up with extremely complex combinations – it’s what makes the magic system so cool. It’s really complex.

Battle in generally really rocked (I can safely say, that if you really played the game, you would agree that it’s better than FFVIII or FFIX, again, I cannot speak for the PS2 games). As for the plot? Play it. The characters? Play it. Just play the game. Another specific thing I should mention is the length of the game. You could probably beat the game from beginning to end in 25-30 hours, if you really wanted to. However, you would miss out on 90% of the game. The game has tons of stuff to do, explore, and find everywhere in the game. Even at the very end, there’s loads to do. You can breed chocobos, you can race chocobos, you can play dozens and dozens of little minigames, you can level up your characters, get the ultimate weapons and final limit breaks for your characters, you can find all the materia, you can get the Knights of the Round Materia, its hard to describe how much there really is to do just at the end of the game. There’s just as much during the middle – you can get characters early, you can do side quests, the game easily has 100 hours of stuff to do in it. I have the clock maxed in my game to 99 hours , 59 minutes and 59 seconds. I aint joking.

Why would GameFAQs have more FAQs and guides than any other game, some of which have been added THIS YEAR (this game was made in 1997, folks)? Go find out, and play it.

As for FFVIII…

I consider it a black sheep of the series. Why? The characters were highly unoriginal and extremely unlovable or stereotypical. The plot was fine, I hold nothing against it, but it wasn’t superb. The combat was boring, as was leveling up. That’s actually what I hated most. The combat was so slow, so boring, leveling up was just so easy. I had Squall to level 80-something on the third disc. Why do I find that wrong? Leveling up should be a challenge, it should be hard, I don’t want it handed to me on a silver platter. Not to mention, there was no reward for leveling up. If you got stronger, the bosses got stronger, meaning you weren’t payed off for your work. There was nothing “inventive” about the gameplay – I saw nothing new or innovative about the implementation, only a poor attempt at mixing things up. The graphics were at times, more frustrating than FFVII. The textures were so low-res, so pixelated and bad, I can’t describe the amount of squinting I did. It hurt my eyes. At least FFVII was simple. The game was overall okay, but I really just did not enjoy it at all. I got to the third disc, and decided I had put up with it long enough.

And FFIX?

I consider just behind FFVII. It was a good game – the graphics were solid, the movement and feel nice and smooth. The general gameplay was akin to FFVII, in that you had a main, driving storyline that you could jump onto at any time, but there were always minigames you could go play or you could go level up or just have fun. That’s what I look for in an RPG – leisurely, go-at-your-own-pace gameplay. FFVIII forced you to jump ahead at points, simply out of boredom or otherwise. There were no side quests or minigames, for the most part. They had a bad version of the card game that was made in FFIX (which i still didn’t really enjoy, but I had a little fun with it), and that was about it. FFIX had a lot of funny moments – it was the lightest, most humorous of those I’ve played (FFVI – FFIX). I especially enjoyed the chocobo quests – I had a LOT of fun playing Chocobo Hot&Cold. The FFVIII version was also far more boring and didn’t even reward you for it.

I’ll end my rant now, but I hope you understand my view on the Final Fantasies a little better.

Woof Woof (O.o)

I have spent my week almost completely seperated from my friends, excepting those that have been playing Maple Story. I can say for sure that this is the best free game I have ever played, beating even the incredible Infantry. Yes, even Infantry. For those of you aghast at my lack of Halo 2-ing, I must state a fact that has remained true throughout my life: I am, at the core, not an FPS gamer. The first game I ever played and truly understood and enjoyed, was FF7 (this at the age of 7). I play FPS because I’m good at them and thus can enjoy them. I still maintain that FF7 is the best game ever created, and thus the upcoming movie FFVII: Advent Children has peaked my interest. I have found no easily accesible trailers to be downloaded, only streamed, unfortunately. Just do a Google for Advent Children. The CGI is outstanding, although the file itself or the actual animations suffer framerate issues for obvious reasons. In any case, I patiently await the arrival of the movie.

I feel like reminiscing about Infantry, so I’ll do that. Infantry was a third-person (bird’s eye) shooter. It was simplistic, yet really awesomely cool. It was set in the future, so you had your special doodad-taculars. Originally it was really boring – there were vehicles you ran around in and you just tried to hold these points in a boring King of the Hill form of a game. This changed once they introduced a very loose RPG system – you gained money and rank from kills and flag captures in these CTF-type games. You used the money to buy weapons, armor, or ammo. Most importantly, was the class system. There were dozens of classes, all unique. There were Heavy Weapons (not demolition, they used higher-powered rifles and grenades), Infantry (they were boring and noobular), Jumptroopers (Fast, Maneuverable, Light), Scouts (i think i may have the name wrong, but they were capable of being invisible and used the sniper rifle most), Engineers (they built turrets and defenses, which got their kills), Medics (infantry with healing), and a few others, as well as leveled up forms of those guys. Unfortunately, a few months after that version came out, it went p2p. It rocked.

O.o

This week has been pretty good. It started out meh, but it gradually just got better and better. Gwen’s, Paul’s, and Ben (Feldman)’s birthday party was last night, which was pretty fun. Other than that, I’ve spent a lot of my time doing make up and retakes for school. On Wednesday I discovered I had an F in Chemistry (this was gonna go on the 5-week report, and that just wasn’t gonna happen) which I resurrected to a B, possibly a B+ depending on the grade of an extra credit paper I did. I was frustrated many times by my English teacher. I had to make up this essay we did that I missed, so I told him I’d come after school on Monday, and then he wasn’t there. I told him I’d come after school on Tuesday, but he wasn’t there again. Even on Wednesday, he wasn’t there, but he left the door unlocked, so I had to go through the papers on his desk to find mine (he finally let me do it during class that day, for a whole 20 minutes *grumble*), which for some reason was labeled “never showed”.

Anyways, that’s about the peak of the excitement I experienced. In other news, due to an anonymous tip from Mike, I learned of a secret game that everyone plays called Maple Story. In essence, it’s a free MMORPG, with Gunbound-style visuals. It’s mucho fun, especially when you’re running around with a party of people and stuff. It’s well balanced, and all character classes are unique from eachother. Definately worth the 170 MB download, IMO. My Halo 2 fanatacism has waned for the moment. I still maintain it’s the most fun multiplayer game I’ve palyed, but my mood recently hasn’t been suited for it. As in, I haven’t been in a good enough mood to handle getting owned from time to time. I don’t like the ranked games enough to really want to play them alone, either. I just don’t enjoy the settings. I much prefer custom games, they’re more laid back and enjoyable.

My first Christmas present has appeared under the tree! Not a clue what it is, as my parents are really good at disguising stuff. They’ll usually stick easily guessed items (CDs, games, movies, etc.) in bigger boxes with lots of padding. Oh well.

O.o

Christmafying step III!

This is an ornament Jonathan made back in his elementary years, which is a favorite of mine:

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Elvsers!!!

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I’ve always like this one…

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Before…

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And a some light-room after pictures!

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And some dark-room pictures…

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That’s about it. That’s just the livingroom, I decorated the rest of the house too, but that was the main piece.

O.o

Update stuff:

New Christmas List is up on the archive, and my Halo 2 stats are up over there as well. A note about the list: it’s not a guideline for what you should get me, it’s just there for my own amusement and to see what you guys thought of it. I don’t want you guys to get me anything as I can’t give you anything back, if you really want to, go ahead, but that’s just my personal preference.

Don’t be stupid on the comments, post however much you want, but there needs to be a point to the post. I will present to you my step-by-step process of Christmafying my house through pictures! Step 1: the tree and boxes.

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Step 2: tomorrow!

O.o

I was in a great mood, until, randomly, I recieve this.

[15:00:12] TheMysteriousMrZ: www.gamerankings.com so, i see that half-life 2 has remained in the top five while halo 2 is conspicuously absent from the top ten altogether.

[15:00:25] *** “TheMysteriousMrZ” signed off at Sat Dec 04 15:00:25 2004.

THIS is why Half-Life 2 sucks. THIS is why Half-Life sucks. I didn’t want to have to make a post about this, but I’m gonna have to if I’m gonna get my point across.

Sure, four weeks ago I was confident that, according to Gamerankings, Halo 2 would have a higher score. In reality, I didn’t care, it was just a fun bet with BEN (not Zach, mind you). I would have liked to see Halo 2 stay up there. The retardacity of this is that somehow the ranking score has turned into a numerical value of how good a game is. It’s a summary, not a statement. I find it enough that IGN, Gamespot, and GMR all found Halo 2 to be a better game. I could care less about “Boomtown” and “eToyChest”‘s ideas. You know why Halo 2 has such a low score? Because 6 sites, none of whom I’ve ever heard of, decided it’s a bad game. I read them. As reviews, they SUCKED. If quality of reviewers could be measured, they wouldn’t be included. Nonetheless, they are there, pulling Halo 2’s score down a full percentage point or two.

That being said, HL2 has a higher score, fair and square, I suppose.

As for MY opinion of HL2 and why I think it sucks, I’ll try and convey that now. I’ve seen HL2. I watched Zach play it for an hour, and to be honest, I was not amazed. From what I’ve read (I’ve read 3 or 4 reviews on it) and seen (I’ve watched a number of movies and screenshots), I can make some pretty fair statements here.

Graphics: Yeah, they’re good. That is, if you have a good rig. Zach’s machine definately isn’t bad, (It’s like 2.2 AMD with a 9600P, right?) but it didn’t look outstanding on his rig. Good? Yes. Personally, I don’t find the recent graphics of Doom 3 and HL2 all that amazing, they look dreary and dull. Elder Scrolls IV? Now that’s beautiful, and it’s not even a finished engine.

Physics: Get ready for this: Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 use the same physics engine. They both use the Havoc engine – HL2 uses a slightly more advanced and souped up form that allows some water effects (bouyancy) and just a little more detail all around. Personally, I could care less if the world I’m playing has realistic physics. The physics in Halo 2 are detailed enough that I can have loads of fun just screwing around rolling barrels and rocks around. Ben said something about the ragdoll not being good in Halo 2 – I beg to differ. Watching myself die is almost a treat – it’s like a reward for doing badly. If I’m sniping and I get sniped back, my guy will fall backwards (not doing the flailing thing) and roll down the stairs slowly. So far I’ve never seen any unrealistic poses (think back to when ragdoll had just come out) or anything annoying and stupid. Yes, every now and then when you get blown up your guy will flail around, but so what?

Storyline: Keep in mind, I speak from ignorance and base what I know off of the Gamespot review. According to them, the storyline was weak, and not very good in general. The end was anticlimactic and ended with you fighting a weak enemy with an overpowered weapon. This is just what I read – don’t look at me for innacuracies. Halo 2’s storyline owned. I have to say, it was really good. Did the cliffhanger ending suck? Absolutely. I wanted the game to keep going very, very badly. That just raises the bar for Halo 3 – I expect a lot from its story now (Bungie has unoffically announced it in the recent Q&A). Apparantly HL2 still doesn’t have any cutscenes, or third-person events for that matter, and Gordon Freeman never speaks. That doesn’t seem like much room to make a plot. I don’t think I’d like the entire story being told by people talking to you.

All that being said, there is still more to mention. Halo 1 had a higher average review score than Half-Life 1. When I compare HL1 and HL2, I don’t see much difference. They look the same, they feel the same, they even SOUND the same (they didn’t even put in new sounds for some parts of the game). HL2 = HL1 + graphics and physics. That’s all I see. When I look at Halo 2, I see worlds of difference. H2 = H1 + much improved storyline/single player in general + huge gameplay changes (new weapons, vehicles, maps, dual wielding, no health, I could go on and on about the fundamental differences) + xbox live + graphics + physics. When I say HL2 sucks, I don’t mean it’s a bad game. I mean that by my standards, compared to what I enjoy playing, it is not a fun game that is worth my money. Steam alone is enough to push me away – I read the Game Revolution review, and that was a big enough factor to really change their score. Anyone with a non-state-of-the-art computer will have to deal with loading times and general annoyances. The implications of Steam are awful – if every company did this, PC gaming would go down the tubes.

That’s just what I have to say.

O.o

In light of Half Life 2 being released, I need to make a statement.

Half Life 2 is not compareable to Halo 2. Halo 2, while intended to be a single player game, is really a multiplayer masterpiece. Half Life 2, while it has mod potential, is in essence, a single player game. Halo 2 has the most amazing mutliplayer I’ve ever seen. Half Life 2 will probably have the most amazing single player I’ve ever seen.

I understand the extreme mod potential, but in reality, most of these mods will suck. It’s a fact of life. Maybe a handful will be pretty cool, but in reality, none can compare to a system that has a) been tested for bugs b) been tested for balance and c) been tested for everything else you can think of. The fact is, Halo 2 MP combines anything and everything that’s been good about any other multiplayer. Voice, the party system, dual wielding, vehicles, assymetrical maps, and hijacking. You can’t beat it.

Half Life 2 has the graphics, the physics, the story, and the mods to make the SP equally mind-blowing. Neither of the games introduce much anything new – it’s all improvement on what’s already there.

I’m sure both games are worthy of a 10.0. But my Halo fanboi-isms remain, and in my mind, Half Life cannot redeem itself of Counterstrike.

O.o

Today was eventful. I haven’t actually played Halo 2 today, my will was crushed by still not getting a headset, I really want one. I’m also really tired as it’s getting late, and I had a busy day in general. I went and saw the Incredibles, it was funny. I like Pixar. After that I got dropped at Sho’s house, at which Sam, Kerry, and Colette were at. We talked and played Apples to Apples (funny game), and watched Farenheit 9/11, which made me want to strangle Michael Moore.

Why, you ask? That’s why.

Beyond that it was fun, I got to spend an hour or more talking to Colette and Sho after Sam and Kerry left as they played with my hair. (I guess I smell like Jing? Supposedly that’s a good thing…) Colette’s mom drove me home, and now I sit here about to sleep. Good day. I’m hoping I can get my headset thing all sorted out tomorrow.