Critical Hit!

Turns out it actually can run Crysis

2012-02-11T02:47:00.001-07:00

If you’ve spent much time on the internet, you’ve probably encountered some variation of the “Can it run Crysis?” joke. The joke goes something like this:

“Check out this new computer I got! It’s the fastest ever!”

“Yeah, well can it run Crysis?”

(implied answer: “No.”)

The basic idea behind the joke is that no computer exists that is powerful enough to run Crysis on its highest graphical settings. Indeed, at the time that it was released (November of 2007), only the most expensive of the high-end computers were able to run it, and then it was a struggle to get it to run on the highest settings. Lower end machines ran the game at slideshow speed.

That has changed somewhat today, with computer components getting significantly more powerful, but your computer’s ability to run Crysis is still a good benchmark as to whether your computer qualifies as a proper gaming machine or not. It’s a demanding piece of software, and decent framerates are at a premium once you start toggling all the graphical options and ramping up the anisotropic filtering levels.

So, with all this said about the graphical demands of the game, two questions really stand out to me:

Is the game actually as good looking as you’d think with all these system requirements, and
Is the game any good?

For the first question: HOLY CRAP YES. This game looks so good that it’s hard to believe that this game is over four years old at this point. Here’s some screenshot candy for your eyes.

As good as it looks in stills, the game looks even better when you see it in motion. I don’t think I’ve ever seen water graphics that look as impressive as they do in Crysis, the motion blur adds a nice effect, and foliage actually looks realistic.

Now, is the game any good? Well, yes and no. I suppose if I divide the game into two parts, I could say that the first part is great, but the second part ranges from good to mediocre. Without spoiling anything, there is a point where the game kind of strays away from what makes it good, and the story kind of goes off the rails.

That’s not to say it stops being fun, it just changes the focus of how the game is played. For the first part of the game, it’s all about you. You are a special ops super soldier with a nano-augmented power suit that gives you incredible powers. You get dropped on an island and given objectives to complete, and in a Deus Ex sort of way you can accomplish them in any manner you see fit.

This freedom of choice makes the opening acts of the game a blast to play. Want to activate your super-speed and dash into the camp of enemies before they even see you coming? Go for it. How about switch on your armor abilities and move through the forest with your shotgun like a juggernaut? Not a problem. Are you the stealthy type? Just switch on your cloak mode and the enemies won’t have a clue that you’re even there until it’s too late.

This freedom of ways to approach situations, along with various paths to take and a massive, free-exploring environment for you to play around with make the first part of the game an incredible experience that I have trouble not recommending. It’s too bad the game doesn’t keep it up until the end.

I’m not going to discuss specifics that spoil the story here (although my opinion is that the story isn’t important and you could just as easily skip it), but the later parts of the game get much more… directed. You are focused down a specific path to take, given situations where there is really only one solution, and fight enemies that are frustrating and difficult. Most disappointingly, though, they hamstring you and make it so that, although you still have your super-suit powers, they don’t really matter.

They don’t matter, you ask? Yes, that’s the case. You can still switch to stealth mode, but enemies either can detect you easily, and you won’t be able to accomplish anything of value while cloaked. You are almost constantly under attack, so you’ll likely want to be in armor mode for the bulk of the time, but I found myself frequently switching to speed mode simply because it takes too long to walk from place to place, which would end up with me getting killed because enemies would come up and I’d forget to switch to armor mode.

The environments change from being beautiful island vistas to being primarily boring, indoor, twisty little passages (all alike?). This gets rid of one of this game’s big strengths, its graphics. Regardless of how many polygons you’re pushing, or how incredibly detailed your textures are, a grey corridor can only look so interesting.

They also change up the enemy types. Gone are the challenging yet fun enemies of the first half of the game, where you can take them out in whatever way you see fit. They have been replaced by enemies that move fast and hit hard, who cannot (reasonably) be hit by short range weapons and melee attacks. They also cannot really be caught unawares by your stealth mode, since they will see you the instant you uncloak and you can’t get close enough to them to do much before then. It’s kind of a messy disappointment.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think the game is worth playing, but primarily for that first part. If you don’t mind the later parts, that’s great, it’s just that they don’t show the brilliance that the earlier parts do.

And you were doing so well, too.

Reminiscing: Strategy Guides

2012-02-03T23:25:00.001-07:00

I purchased a strategy guide for Final Fantasy XIII-2.

I’m going to be clear about this: I don’t typically buy these. I have purchased a total of three of these, ever, including this one. The first was for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and the second was for Pokemon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition. So including this one, that makes three strategy guides out of hundreds (thousands? I really should count one of these days) of games that I have played.

I have distinct memories of buying the guide for Ocarina of Time. Well, actually only one memory of the actual purchase, and it’s actually a little vague. I remember when I purchased the guide (probably for full price, and also probably at the same time as buying the game) I said something to the effect of “This is the type of game where I’m going to need the help of the guide, so I’d be silly not to get it.” This was before the FAQ community became good enough that you could load up GameFAQs around launch day (sometimes on launch day, if the right people got the game early) and get answers to pretty much any question you might have.

I remember using that guide quite a lot, enjoying the pictures on its pages, gasping as I read spoilers when I read too many pages ahead, and thinking that the map and directions they provided for the infamous and insidious water temple weren’t quite good enough for me. I was glad when it led me to the hookshot in the graveyard (it would have taken me forever to figure that out on my own), and appreciated that it offered tips on how to defeat Bongo Bongo. The thing that it helped me the most on, though, was collecting all the Golden Skulltulla tokens and all the heart pieces. I thought it was so rad that I was rolling (in this case, quite literally, as I preferred it to walking most of the time) around Hyrule with all the best equipment and the maximum possible amount of life.

My memories of Pokemon Yellow are a bit different. I remember specifically lying on my couch in the sun (because on those old Game Boys you couldn’t see what you were doing unless you were in extremely bright light), playing my way through the first forest before you fight Brock the gym leader. I was training up a Caterpie so I could get a Butterfree to win the battle.

Pokemon Yellow put you in a unique situation compared to Pokemon Red and Blue, since it starts you out with a Pikachu (electric-type) instead of a choice between Bulbasaur (plant-type), Squirtle (water-type), or Charmander (fire-type). The first gym leader uses rock-type Pokemon, which, in most cases, are also paired with the ground element. This causes a problem in Pokemon Yellow because at this point Pikachu only can reasonably know electric-type moves (0% damage vs. ground-type Pokemon) and normal-type moves (50% damage vs. rock-type pokemon).

Because of this unusual (unfair?) setup, the strategy guide suggested catching a Caterpie and spending a little time grinding to evolve it into a Butterfree. The idea was that Butterfree learns Confusion, a psychic-type attack that would tear through most of the gym battles without trouble. So at its urging I spent a half-hour and leveled my Caterpie.

Then tragedy struck.

I was playing on my Game Boy Color, and at that time I didn’t have rechargeable batteries. My parents didn’t buy me batteries, so I had to provide my own. I would go to the dollar store and buy dozens of the four-packs of batteries they sold there. These were the cheapest, no-name, four-for-a-dollar batteries that you could come across, and I only used them because the total playtime to dollar ratio was pretty good, even if individual batteries didn’t last very long at all.

The batteries died, and I hadn’t saved.

When I say that I hadn’t saved, I mean that I hadn’t saved at all. Not once, since starting the game, so I was back at Professor Oak asking me what my name is and what his grandson’s name is, since he can’t be bothered to remember unimportant details like that. To the fourteen year-old me, this was devastating. It was a full day or two before I could bring myself to start over again, and this time I made sure to watch the batteries.

I loved those books, and I still have them today (well, at least the Pokemon one. I’m not sure about the Zelda one). I hope that I wind up forging similar memories here with this new one. We’ll see how it goes.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Autosave

2012-02-02T16:46:00.001-07:00

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIII-2 for the past few days, and I have really been enjoying it. However, I have a couple complaints about the game. Listen carefully as I list them off.
Read more »

Noise

2012-01-30T01:58:00.001-07:00

So, I replayed Final Fantasy XIII and just finished yesterday, and boy, I gotta say that that game looks great. Cutscenes are gorgeous, characters are rendered beautifully, and I absolutely love the graphical style of the monsters, machines, and various critters and such in the game. However, one thing bothered me. Noise.

I like to think that I am a smart guy with an attention to detail and an above average attention span, but during some of the more exciting cutscenes I found it difficult to focus on details. Sometimes, all the excitement and business of the scene just gets to be too much and turns into noise. There are a couple of cutscenes in particular that bothered me, like the ending cutscene.

It's too bad, since it looks so good, I almost want to step through frame-by-frame and savor all the delicious graphics-ness, but I guess I'll just have to make do with watching it full-speed and missing so many of the great looking animations.

Or, you know, I could do something else, since I've already played that game to completion twice. Maybe I'll do that.

Today for lunch I had…

2012-01-25T23:24:00.001-07:00

Trick question. I skipped lunch today.

Changes incoming

2012-01-22T21:18:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I'm going to change a little of the format of how my blog works. One of the big problems I've run into is that I don't feel that certain posts "fit" my blog quite right, such as some of my reviews or various game or tech-related things I post. I'm going to adjust it so that now this is my "personal" blog, where I post about "personal" stuff. It's a place where I'll bounce ideas off of the internets, or just put random ramblings on whatever is on my mind.

I'll make a separate place to post other stuff. I don't feel like my "reviews" or "articles" quite fit in with occasional posts about how I am annoyed at various things, or a rant about how I'm so enamored with Nethack lately. All the current posts here will remain, but I'm moving my posting behavior elsewhere. Heck, I'd be happy just to write regularly.

I'll post links when I have something to show for my efforts, hopefully within the week.

Yo

2012-01-11T19:40:00.001-07:00

It's been a whole since I've posted, but you probably didn't notice if you're just reading through my posts. I'm not making excuses, but I am disappointed with myself. I don't have much to say today, but I'll be writing more soon, on this blog or maybe another one. Check ya later.

Repaired PS3 Controller

2011-09-16T00:39:00.001-06:00

Today I found that my favorite PS3 controller (my white one) had stopped working properly. Of the shoulder buttons, only R1 was working.

“Oh no! It’s broken!” I thought. Fortunately, despite my lack of formal training in consumer electronics, I am foolhardy enough to open up things that aren’t working and tinker around inside.

Ok, that’s not really a good thing, but it has led to a few less broken toys (and a couple broken further). Today’s escapade turned out in my favor.

It was actually surprisingly easy to take apart. This isn’t like when I fixed my GBA SP and I had to order a special type of screwdriver (triwing) in order to open it up. I just flipped it over and took out five small screws (I used a #0 Phillips screwdriver). After that, it just opened right up. I’m glad it didn’t have pull any awkward snapped together parts, because those never go back together quite right.

This is what I was greeted with once I got it open. That grey box in the middle is the battery. Just so you know, if the battery on your controller finally gives out, it’s trivial to replace. Just order a new battery, open it up, and swap it out. Just a single screw behind the battery and the circuit board lifts out and you have access to the front.

Now, I was uhh, careless, and neglected to unplug the battery when I did this, so at this point the only thing that was working on the controller was the analog sticks, since they’re hardwired to the board. Everything else was connected via ribbon cables. If you’ve taken many newer electronics apart you’ve probably come across these cables, and if you’ve tried to put them back together, you know how obnoxious they can be.

And it turns out the ribbon cable was the problem!

It’s kind of hard to see on this image because it’s kind of small, so here’s what happened. The ribbon cable sits on a small plastic stand in the highlighted spot, and it has two small holes in the cable that slide onto pegs as indicated by the red arrow. Somehow, probably through some sort of dark magic, the hole that is indicated had come off of the peg and folded in over itself.

Because the plastic ribbon had folded, and since these ribbon cables rely on precise alignment of the contacts on the ribbon with those on the board, the shoulder buttons were unable to sent their signals to the board, hence the broken buttons.

Fortunately, the fix was easy: Unfold the ribbon and place it on the peg, and then press it down with the board and seal the whole thing back up. The shoulder buttons were a little tricky to get back in, but once I figured out that they snap to the little brackets they sit against it was pretty simple.

All in all, I’m very pleased with how the repair went, and although I hope I don’t have to do it again, I am confident that I can fix any minor problems that may crop up in the future.

As a (somewhat humorous) aside, I should tell you that you, uhh, really want to remove the battery and make sure the controller is off before doing stuff with the board. I neglected to do this, and while I was tinkering with the board I was setting off all sorts of controls to the game I was playing when I decided to fix the controller. Permanent damage? I hope not, but I should have played it safe.

There is only one

2011-08-30T22:47:00.001-06:00

It’s true.

MInecraft!

2011-08-10T22:14:00.001-06:00

Yup, that’s basically what happened to me the past couple weeks.

It’s like the world’s best box of Legos, and it’s almost unlimited in size. There’s more bricks to build with than you can possibly use, and zombies come out at night.

I’ve already build a supercastle, and my reign over my land is supreme. It’s great.

The only problem is oh, dang. There goes my time. I had to tear myself away from exterior work on my fire-moat in order to even write this.

I picked up Beat Hazard on Steam today, also, and oh man, that thing is crazy. Turning up the visual response all the way to 200% caused so much visual stimulation that I became incredibly glad that I don’t have epilepsy. Wow. Good stuff.

Anyway, I’m going to go and mine some more Netherrack now.

Yeah, whatever…

2011-07-23T16:49:00.001-06:00

Today I was planning on drawing something cool with my pen, but instead I ended up spending an hour drawing a circuit board and then threw together this animation real quick so I would have something to put here.

I started doing a “Mr. Perfect” game on Mega Man 10. In case you’re not familiar with it, Mr. Perfect is the trophy you get for beating the entire game without getting hit. It’s kind of ridiculously hard, so not many people have done it. I’m not sure I’ll be willing to endure long enough to get it.

I’m also making good progress in Final Fantasy 9. I played it a long time ago, back in the day, but I gave up and stopped at some point, for some reason. I remember being disgusted by it for some reason, but I can’t recall exactly what. I seem to remember something about the anthropomorphic animal people driving me nuts, but from this time playing it I’m thinking it was just as likely that I felt like the battles took too long and was just using something as an excuse to stop.

Anyway, enough games for now, I’m going to go and do something productive!

(Also, that guy I drew ended up kind of creepy looking… and poorly drawn.)

Dr. Wily’s Castle

2011-07-21T00:38:00.001-06:00

That was harder to draw than I expected.

I didn’t have a lot of stuff to do today, so I played through the rest of my Bass Hard mode game on Mega Man 10. I spent about three hours on the game, probably two of which was on a single level of Wily’s castle.

It’s not that the level was crushingly hard or anything, it’s just that I was flat out sucking. Everything was failing, hard. I’m sure you’ve had the experience, where you seem unable to beat the level no matter how hard you try, and for some reason that first enemy that isn’t even hard keeps kicking your butt. Seems like every time I have one of those situations all I really need to do is quit for a while, and when I come back the next day I’ll do it flawlessly on my first try.

That’s how it goes sometimes.

Also, why purple for Wily’s logo? Well… These… Seems to tah be enahgy resources… But iahve nevah ceen dis type on Erth… You people call it… Evil Energy.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (on Netflix!)

2011-07-19T22:40:00.001-06:00

Yeah, it’s old news by now that it’s there, but I’m just getting started watching it.

I started with Season 1, Episode 1, and man, things are different back then. I never watched the earlier episodes when it was running on TV, so it’s all new to me. Ryker doesn’t have a beard, Wharf isn’t the security officer, and some annoying lady is doing his job (poorly) instead.

It’s still a quality show, and Q made sure to show up and pull his usual hijinks, but I suppose this is the first contact with Q in this episode. There were crazy space-jellyfish, and deceit among generally well-meaning alien people guys. Still the same good stuff we all love.

I’m not sure how far I’ll get into the series (I still need to finish Battlestar Galactica) but I’m sure I’ll enjoy it throughout.

Probably the Worst Thing Ever.

2011-07-19T00:47:00.001-06:00

Well, actually, it’s probably not, but I’m still pretty disappointed.

See, the news of the day is that Capcom has decided to cancel Mega Man Legends 3. That’s a huge blow to one of my favorite series of video games. I own Mega Man Legends, Mega Man Legends 2, and even the spin-off, The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. I’ve played through all of them at least once, and the ones in the main series at least twice.

Here’s the deal: Capcom announced that they would be working on something called “Mega Man Legends 3 Project”. They set up forums and a website where they took community input for the game, and managed to build up a decent amount of excitement for a decade old series for which fans have been calling for a sequel for.

Then comes the stupid part. To gauge sales interest, Capcom released a demo on to the 3DS e-Shop called Mega Man Legends 3 Prototype. This was a short demo showcasing what they were planning on doing with the game.

There’s two main problems that I see with their strategy of using this to gauge sales interest:

3DS is still a very new system. I mean, as of today (when the game was canceled) it has only been out for a total of 113 days in the US, and the first compelling game for the system (i.e. the system seller) came out only 29 days ago. This means the install base is still pretty small relative to other consoles and handhelds.
The other problem is that they charged for the demo. I know. Seriously. It wasn’t much ($2.50), but for that price you can have full games on a modern smartphone, or heck, I paid that much for Plants vs. Zombies on the last Steam sale. Anyway, charging money for something that is marketed as NOT BEING A FULL PRODUCT is definitely likely to drive down the number of people who will get it. There is a huge difference in the barrier to entry between a free product and a cheap product.

I’m severely disappointed in you, Capcom. You can do better than that. I guess we’ll just have to all play their incredibly awesome stuff they have been putting out recently instead.

fist pump

2011-07-17T23:46:00.001-06:00

Today I finally got around to cleaning up the folder where I dumped all the files from my old computer when I transitioned to this one. YES.

This is cause for celebration. I think I’ll go to bed early to show my excitement. *yawn*

Note: I stayed up ‘till 5:00 AM last night playing games / doing stuff, so I’m pretty beat.

Lazy

2011-07-17T03:55:00.001-06:00

But that’s kind of ok, isn’t it?

Yesterday I finished Megaman 10 with my friend, which finally means that we have played Megamans 1 through 10 consecutively (we did Rockman and Forte after 7). It was a blast, and we’re going to do more of something sometime.

I spent a good amount of time playing Lost Planet 2 today. It was a blast, and it was awesome.

Anyway, have fun, guys!

Final Fantasy IX is too slow

2011-07-14T13:52:00.000-06:00

That's right, it is.

If I were to be in charge of remaking the game, the primary thing I would change would be the speed of the game. I would speed up almost everything by at least 50%.

Battles are too slow. It's roughly ten seconds between the time you get the "OMG A BATTLE" swirly animation and when your ATB gauges start to fill up. That's unacceptably long. Battle animations take too long as well. Maybe I've been spoiled by the Disgaea series where you can flat out disable animations, but it seems like everything just takes too long. Gonna cast Cura? Well, you had better set aside a good amount of time for the character to step up to center stage and wave their scepter around a little bit, after which you get to watch a pretty, but unnecessarily lengthy, animation of swirly white stuff healing someone. It seems like I'll issue orders to all my characters, and by the time one of them has completed their orders the other three have filled up their battle gauges and are waiting for animations to complete before they do anything.

The world map is a bit better, but it would also be improved by some speed increases. The fun part of a game is rarely the "walk to the next area you need to be at" part. It would be nice to get there quicker.

It's not that the game is bad. In fact, I'm really enjoying it a lot. It's just that it always feels like things aren't happening fast enough. Maybe I should just go play some Half-Minute Hero and get my hyper-speed RPG fix.

Oh man, that was crazy...

2011-07-11T13:28:00.000-06:00

So, you probably noticed that I haven't posted much for the past couple weeks. Basically, the first week or so of July is absolutely nuts. Between the Independence Day celebrations and family birthdays, the whole first week is shot. And this year add in a family reunion that goes four days long, from the first to fourth, and there you go. I think I still have a headache from all the festivities.

That's not to say I'm making excuses for not writing. It's pretty trivial to sit down for five to ten minutes and pound out a post once a day. I've just been playing a lot of video games lately.

Yeah, the video games. I finished playthrough 2 of Nier (did I already talk about this?) and loved it. The next task I have to complete on that game is to collect all of the weapons. I hate collection quests, so I may or may not finish this one.

A friend and I decided that we were going to play through all of the Classic Series Mega Man games in sequence. We're up to Mega Man 8 now, and it's been a blast. I'm planning on making commemorative T-shirts when we're done.

I also bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet. I'm planning on learning to draw with it, or at least doodle effectively. It's kind of confusing at first to use because it's kind of weird the way the cursor moves if you're used to a mouse. I'll get the hang of it eventually.

Anyway, that's what's up lately. This is the first time in a long time I have used the web interface for posting on this blog instead of Windows Live Writer.

4th

2011-07-04T14:32:00.001-06:00

This weekend has been nuts. 4th of July weekend, plus a massive family reunion, plus three birthdays in my family. In addition, MASSIVE STEAM SALES. So, I haven’t written. Don’t look so surprised.

Organizing Files

2011-06-27T23:59:00.001-06:00

I have some bad habits when it comes to reinstalling Windows on my computer, or moving to another computer.

The migration method I’ve used the past few times is to hook up my hard drive from my old computer into my new one, and copy the entire disk into a folder on my desktop. This folder will remain my base of operations for… pretty much everything… until I manage to move everything around to its proper and prescribed place.

That’s what I did today, for a good chunk of my afternoon: organize my files.

I have this grand scheme that I will have everything organized and properly named so that I can find anything I need with only a minimum of effort. I’m a good portion of the way, but I always get only partway to my goal before I give up and just deal with folders full of files named things like “PIC2011_00003.jpg” and “Document 2.docx”.

I plan to put forth a little more effort toward this tomorrow, and hopefully I can get my desktop cleaned up from the dumping ground for everything that it has become.

Now for Nier.

Today I finished the first playthrough, and I’ve got to say, that was mind-blowing. Normally I can see plot twists a good ways off, but this one had several that completely sideswiped me. I’m pretty sure my brains got splattered on the wall behind me for a minute or two. It was that crazy.

At approximately $20 new (or significantly less if you go used), I can’t not recommend this game. It’s just that genius.

Back to Windows

2011-06-26T23:23:00.001-06:00

Sorry, Ubuntu, I decided that I really wanted native support for Netflix and Windows Live Writer, so I switched back to Windows 7. I am going to miss some of the nice features like virtual desktops, but I didn’t want to deal with dual-booting or virtual machines to be able to do the things I typically want to do.

Switching back to Windows was actually surprisingly easy. I just rolled back to a backup image I had made a while back, and it took about 20 minutes to go from 100% Ubuntu to a fully functional Windows 7 install. Unfortunately, the image was from March of 2010, so it was really out of date and didn’t have any software installed. So, after updating and setting up my stuff it was about 2 hours from start to finish.

I was going to talk about Nier in my post that I never got to write yesterday, but internet was terminated before I could write it all out. Basically, I can’t say how much I’m enjoying it. It’s incredible.

During the time I played yesterday, the game was an action RPG, a text adventure, and a isometric top-down dungeon crawler. Something as simple as changing the camera angle in the game has an enormous effect on the style of gameplay, and makes it feel very different.

I’m sure it only gets better from here, but I’ll have to wait and see.

Sonic The Hedgehog 2

2011-06-24T00:45:00.001-06:00

Is an awesome game.

It is from a bygone era when being a Sonic game didn’t have the stigma of being a “Sonic Game”. It had little to live up to, and does fine by exceeding expectations on every level. Secret areas? Check. Large, imaginative levels? Check. Little brother mode second player? Check.

I played through it today with… my little brother. I’ll let you guess which person played as Sonic and which one played as Tails.

We had all the Chaos Emeralds (only one of which is green, for some reason) by the time we had gotten to Aquatic Ruin Zone. We could have had them earlier, but we fumbled a good bit with the Special Stages. After that the game just went by super fast.

I also played Nier a little today as well, and I’ve decided that having Grimoire Weiss as a traveling companion is pretty freaking cool. I’m a fan of the concept of characters having a familiar that follows them around and helps them, and a book familiar is probably the most interesting and unique familiar type I’ve encountered.

My Dr. Pepper is getting warm, and it will be flat in the morning. Guess I can’t win them all.

Nier

2011-06-23T00:46:00.001-06:00

So, I played Nier for a few hours today. Here are my first impressions:

The graphics in this game sometimes suck, sometimes are ok.
The main character is ugly. Like, really ugly.
It’s a lot of fun.
The fishing game sucks.

Yeah, I tried the fishing game for about a half hour before I gave up. Maybe I’m missing something subtle, but I just can’t catch anything. I’m guessing it’s just me fumbling with the mechanics.

I also did a side-quest where I fought a boar. The boar was waaaay more powerful than anything I had fought prior to it. Like, even stronger than bosses. Luckily I found a large boulder I could stand on where it couldn’t get me and whittled it’s life away with my low level magic spell.

It’s a pretty fun game, and I’m sure once I figure out how to work the fishing game mechanics I’ll have some fun with it.

Oh yeah. And the soundtrack is pretty sweet.

Today has been tiring

2011-06-22T00:22:00.001-06:00

I bought a car.

I (finally) beat Black Phantom Garl Vinland.

My lips are chapped.

That’s about it.

Dear Old Spice:

2011-06-20T11:23:00.001-06:00

Over the past few years we’ve built up a great working relationship. You’ve given me great smelling deodorant, and I’ve given you money in $4 increments whenever I run out.

I’ve had the pleasure to work with your incredibly manly scents, and have had the sublime experience of watching my biceps perform hilarious hijinks as I apply your miraculous concoctions. I’ve been on a boat and a horse, and I’ve even seen it block out the sun.

I just want to use this opportunity to thank you for being the best dang deodorant ever.

-Ryan

The Hair of the Dog

2011-06-18T00:20:00.001-06:00

And no, it’s not the mission in Borderlands. I gave my dog a haircut today.

It got everywhere, and she was pretty traumatized by the time we were done. I personally don’t think she needed a haircut, but my dad was insistent, so I did it. Poor thing.

I’m about halfway through Devil May Cry 4 right now. It’s not a really long game, and I could be done with it right now if I had tried a little harder. I’m just playing it for fun right now, not trying to challenge myself or anything.

My brother has been playing I Spy Spooky Mansion all day. I’m not impressed with it in any way, but the game is not designed for me. It’s targeted at young kids, and it’s probably intended to be played by youngsters with their parents. It appears they tried to make it as tolerable as possible for an adult while still being playable by a six-year-old who can’t read.

Oh, and they sell it in the Scholastic book order things they pass around at elementary schools periodically. Yeah, I know. That is totally an indicator of a quality product.

Devil May Cry 4

2011-06-17T04:04:00.001-06:00

I pulled this game off of my shelf today and started playing it.

It’s a bit easier than I remember, but I think I may just have the benefit of having a vague recollection of the solutions to the puzzles from the last time I played it, a couple years ago.

But this game is nuts. Honestly, Capcom has some sort of affinity for over-the-top action sequences, and I love it. It’s just awesome to fight giant demons with nothing but a sword, a gun with unlimited ammo, and a massive demon-fist attack. That’s not even counting the second half of the game where you play as Dante.

And then there’s the jelly beans.

Well, technically they’re crystalized demon blood, ichor, and various fluids , depending on what color they are, but they look so much like jelly beans that it’s impossible to think of them as holding some sort of dark power. It’s far more likely that they hold cherry flavored tasty goo.

Hot Weather

2011-06-15T23:17:00.001-06:00

I am not a fan.

I don’t deal well with the heat of a blistering summer, and there are few things more unpleasant than getting into a car that has been sitting in the hot sun for the past four hours. Yuck.

One nice thing about summer that I love is getting fountain drinks. Things around here aren’t too impressive, but in the midwest there is a store called QuickTrip. If you have been to a QuickTrip, you know what I’m talking about and where I’m going with this.

See, QuickTrip takes fountain drinks to the EXTREME. I remember one in particular that I visited that had a bank of oh, probably 24 flavors of fountain drinks. In addition, they had a quartet of Freezoni (Slurpee) flavors, another four flavors of non-carbonated Slurpee style drinks, and also these things called frozen Steamers. Steamers are a sort of milk based hot cocoa style drink that come in flavors like vanilla and S’mores (tastes like graham crackers).

With all this variety, it’d be hard to choose, right? Well, yeah, but they made it even harder by adding lines to their cups so that you can measure ratios of one drink to another when creating cocktails. I’m not sure if they still do this, but the last time I went they had little booklets full of recipes you can mix. One that I remember was to do 75% Dr. Pepper and 25% frozen Steamer, for a Dr. Pepper float. Sounds grand, eh?

They also have thsir own custom house flavors of drinks, like Quizzle, a cherry-limeade, and some energy drinks like Ram Jam, Dr. Dogg, and Rooster Booster. Some of these were pretty good, and, amazingly, were offered in fountains instead of just in tiny, specially portioned cans.

My absolute favorite thing to get at a QuicTrip is a Quizzle fountain drink with a topper of Rooster Booster Freezoni. The taste is just divine.

Or, at least, that’s how I remember it from the last time I went there, almost five years ago.

The Incredible Fighting Magikarp

2011-06-14T14:44:00.001-06:00

I’ve played through a few Pokemon games in my time, most recently finishing off the Elite Four in Pokemon Platinum, and I’m struck by the similarities between the games. Like, how every Pokemon game I have played is exactly the same game I played last time.

Ok, not exactly, but it’s so close it’s kind of uncanny. The starting towns follow the same layout, the exposition is identical (get a Pokemon from your local version of Prof. Oak, your rival picks whichever one is strong vs. your starter’s element, get a Pokedex and go collect gym badges), the endings are the same, and, ignoring minor details, the rest of the game is the same freaking thing.

So, it would make sense that my strategy for all the games has been the same: Gyarados. The game is a little broken because of the fact that if you are willing to train a Magikarp long enough to get it to evolve you are basically set for the entire game. On all of them I stick with my starter Pokemon until I get a fishing rod, then catch the first thing I fish for (it’s pretty much always a Magikarp), then level that sucker up.

Gyarados is kind of ridiculous for pretty much the whole game. It’s got more attack and defense than it has a right to, and it’s evolved from a super-common Pokemon, and it has a powerful moveset from the get-go. I suppose it’s a reward for dealing with a Magikarp, who can only learn spash (does nothing) and tackle (one of the weakest attacks in the game, with no special abilities), and it only learns the latter once it’s well on its way to evolving.

Once I get to the point where I have my mighty Gyarados the game becomes nothing more than a grindfest, with me returning to a Pokemon Center only to replenish the dwindling PP of my Gyarados’ moves. The only time I really feel threatened is when I’m fighting against electric types, because they do +500% damage to my Poke-Beast (+300% prior to Pokemon Gold/Silver).

The Elite Four, the most powerful NPC opponents in the game are only threatening because I essentially have to kill 30 Pokemon (ok, KO them, but whatever) in a row without returning to refill my PP. I suppose if I were to train my other members of the team I wouldn’t have to worry so much about running out of moves, but the game pretty much forces me to dedicate half of my team to HM slaves (no really, I actually name them that way [HM Slave 1, HM Slave 2, etc]) so that I can get around the world, thereby forcing me to have a bunch of Pokemon stacked with mediocre moves, locked at low levels.

I suppose I’m kind of being a little harsh on the mechanics of the games, but to me they kind of feel old fashioned, even the new DS ones. The games really are fun, and it’s kind of an adventure that you won’t get anywhere else. I just find it amusing that I can get by using a single Pokemon, and have it be the same one every time.

Back

2011-06-13T18:42:00.001-06:00

Missed a couple days, due to internet outages at unfortunate times. That’s fine, though. I’ll get over it.

I got my box of cables from Monoprice today. Turns out the “Deluxe” audio cables are FREAKING HUGE. Like, too big to use with my headphones. Good thing I decided to get a “basic” cable as well.

The Micro USB cables are a little shorter than I would have liked, but they work fine for what I need. The USB 3.0 extension cables are wonderfully long and sturdy, so I’m very pleased with them.

Anyway, I’m going to try to get posts put out earlier in the day if I can, so I can have them done when I need to go to bed.

No Internet

2011-06-11T11:45:00.001-06:00

One of the hazards(?) of not being the head of my household is that I am not in charge of the internet where I live. Sometimes, my dad will decide that it’s time for me to go to bed, and will disconnect me from the internet (like, he physically unplugs the modem). That’s what happened tonight.

I still can post, through the magic of Bluetooth data sharing from my BlackBerry, but anything that requires more than a slow connection is a no-go.

Anyway, he’s right. I do need to go to bed. But that doesn’t stop me from being mad at him for making me use my netbook when I wasn’t planning on it.

[After two failed posting attempts]

Stupid BlackBerry. :(

[Two more failed attempts]

This sucks. Ok, so apparently it doesn’t work over my BlackBerry with the current configuration. I’ll just post this first thing in the morning.

Oops… Stayed up too late again.

2011-06-10T01:44:00.001-06:00

Yup. It’s true.

And now, for your enjoyment:

Shopping for Speakers

2011-06-08T23:28:00.001-06:00

Today I decided that it’s finally time to replace my old Creative 2.1 set that I picked up in 2005. It still works fine, and it sounds great (always has) but the little satellite volume control pod has a short in the wires so it has to be in a very specific position in order to put out stereo sound (and sometimes any sound). So I headed to the Ultimate Destination For Online Shopping™, Amazon, to see what I could find.

I wasn’t looking for anything fancy; I’m replacing a $20 set I got at Wal-Mart six years ago. I did have some criteria for what I wanted, though. I wanted the speakers to have a grill (preferably stiff metal or plastic) to protect them, and I wanted a satellite volume control like the one I have, except I wanted a headphone jack.

I’ve got two sets of speakers at my desk, one for my computer, and one for my PS3. My Computer has a Logitech X-540 5.1 sound system, and I’m pretty pleased with it. I don’t use the surround functions, but the sound is good and I really like the volume control box. That’s what sold me on the headphone jack on the box.

The set I finally settled on was the Logitech Z313 system. It was really the only thing I came across that fit my criteria. I don’t care for the look, but they look like they are about as good as I’m gonna get with my price range.

I have also decided that the reviews for speakers on Amazon are much more worthless than they are for most products. The majority of people are clueless (5/5, These sound great, maybe even the best ever, but they wouldn’t work at first because I couldn’t figure out how to plug them in! L-O-L!!!) or self professed audiophiles who have a severe case of internet know-it-all-itus (1/5, These are awful, the bass is terrible, highs are tinny, mid ranges are muddy. I threw them away after five minutes because my ears started bleeding from how bad they sound.).

The problem is that there might actually be some people who know something reviewing these things, but they’re drowned out by the deluge of people who know nothing, and also by those who know nothing but act like they know everything.

Obligatory

2011-06-08T00:20:00.001-06:00

These past few days I’ve been super tired. There’s probably a reason (I stay up too late), but I can’t figure it out.

So here’s my daily blog post. Today I’m writing just because I’m committed to writing daily. I will write more at a later date.

Rake

2011-06-07T00:45:00.001-06:00

I raked dirt today.

I fell asleep in my desk chair again.

Another PS3 System Software Update?

I’m pretty tired.

Pravtive makes perfevt

2011-06-06T00:21:00.001-06:00

Or was it “Practice makes perfect?” Eh, whatever.

Today I rearranged my computer area. Here’s the deal: I like to put my feet up on a corner of the desk while I am using my computer, but with the way that it was previously set up I would hit my computer with my feet when I put them up. I arranged it so that this no longer happens, and I saved some room by mounting my speakers on the wall and using a shelf-thingy for various random things I usually have around.

I also rediscovered my DS this weekend. On a whim I threw in my copy of Pokemon Platinum, which I never finished. I suspect I’m near the end, but I lost interest at some point and just stopped playing. Having nearly forgotten everything about the game, I was pleasantly surprised at how good the game is. I’m thinking that I might actually finish the game now that I have had a good time away. Actually, it’s more than a little time away… The last time I played Pokemon Platinum was July 14, of 2010.

Of course, that’s all dependent on whether I bother to play it at all, what with the other stuff I’m working on at the moment. I’ll try carrying it with me for a while and see if I get some time in.

Retro-Review Friday: Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest

2011-06-04T22:10:00.001-06:00

Retro-Review Friday is a weekly series where I discuss a (typically older) game that I have had experience with. Be aware that these are heavily biased reviews, and you should consult your local physician before taking any advice given herein.

Today's game is Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest for the SNES. This game is the sequel to the wonderful SNES game, Donkey Kong Country. In this game, you play as Diddy Kong, and his girlfriend, Dixie Kong in their quest to rescue Donkey Kong, who has been captured by the evil King K. Rool. Read on past the break for the full impressions.

Fans (like, the kind that move air)

2011-06-04T21:40:00.001-06:00

Today, I cleaned the air filters on the air intake fans on my computer. They weren’t terribly dirty, but they were dirty enough that it was bugging me. I’m actually a little surprised at the difference in appearance now that they are clean. They look much nicer.

I played Super Metroid today. It’s not a long game, so I was able to finish it pretty quickly. That game is definitely one of my favorites. It does something very well that many games struggle with: Atmosphere.

Yes, the atmosphere in the game is spectacular. Areas feel remarkably real. The derelict spaceship feels like it’s actually been abandoned, the lava area feels like you’re in a volcano that could explode at any time, the secret lab area is terrifying. Music and visuals combine in just the right way to make you feel like you’re in the game.

It’s one of the few games that I have actually felt scared while playing. I remember moving through these dark caverns as a younger, more impressionable version of me, terrified that something scary would leap out and try to eviscerate me. Armed only with my arm cannon, and a dwindling supply of missiles, I pressed onward.

It’s one of those magical experiences that is hard to put into words. These moments are rare, and often difficult to find, but it’s worth your time to find them. That’s why I like this game so much.

BAH

2011-06-04T01:25:00.001-06:00

I missed my self-imposed deadline. Well, I’ll just post it a day late.

Also, my character in Dragon Age Origins is named Dyluck.

Fell asleep?

2011-06-02T23:56:00.001-06:00

How do I keep doing this? I fell asleep while playing Demon’s Souls. Yeah. The HARDCORE KICK YOUR BUTT Demon’s Souls. Well, I guess I just needed some sleep.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon today playing… Holy crap. I can’t get over how lousy the touchpad on this netbook is. The problem is compounded by the fact that I can’t disable tap-to-click easily under Ubuntu. I’m always accidentally clicking when I don’t mean to. If I can’t figure out how to make it work, this could be the thing that makes me switch back to Windows (again). I’d miss the virtual desktops, but I’m sure I’d get over it if everything just works like it’s supposed to.

In other news, my new phone is supposed to come tomorrow. I’m excited.

Computer, Input Blog Entry

2011-06-02T00:19:00.001-06:00

Tonight I wanted to type this up by just speaking into my computer. Unfortunately, speech recognition software just isn’t quite to the point where it can be used in so cavalier a manner without a lot of training, practice, and probably some premium software like Dragon Naturally Speaking. I don’t want to deal with all that. I just want my computer to do what I say.

I looked in the Ubuntu software repository to see if there was some speech recognition software, and there was something called “Julian” that looked like it might work, but it would probably take some time to get working, and when I got to that point I don’t have any guarantee that it’s not just some speech related library that a couple devs put together while making some other project.

This is the problem I have with Linux in its current state, and in the past. It’s significantly better than it used to be, but I still run into the problem of having a task that I want to accomplish and I know kind of what I need, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it things aren’t always what I want.

I’m fairly technically inclined, so I can figure out most things without much problem, but sometimes I just am left scratching my head. This is what is so exciting about the mobile operating systems of iOS and Android these days. They’re easy. As far as most people know, the shell that they work with *is* the operating system. Of course, this isn’t true, but for most people, if they end up seeing a terminal window, or are asked to type in some archaic build command that looks like it’s from the bad old days of MS-DOS 5, something has gone terribly wrong.

I’m not saying that candy-coating everything and super-simplifying user interfaces is always the best way to go about doing things, but there is some merit in having it be easy for a technological neophyte to use.

As an example, a cousin of mine had her computer stop working right before she went on a trip to California. She needed her computer to do some simple web browsing and Skype calls, so I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on there as a quick intermediary installation just so it would work for her while she was gone. Now, Ubuntu is widely regarded as being one of the easier distributions for users, as it is very simple to use and borrows heavily from Windows/OSX. She had Vista on before, and was used to that (though usually not happy with it).

I threw it on the night before she left, made sure the wireless was working, and put Skype/Chrome on there for her. Now, she was only there for about 4 days, but almost every day I had to do some sort of technical support (“Where did Skype go?”, “What is the keyring password?”, etc). If I had used a different distribution (say, OpenSUSE) and had not been available to walk her through things that I wouldn’t even think are difficult, it’s likely that she wouldn’t have been able to use her computer at all.

What’s my point with all this? Well, today Microsoft revealed some elements of Windows 8. It’s got a more touch friendly interface, and borrows heavily from their Windows Mobile 7 tile/Metro UI. I think that’s pretty cool. If used properly, with the right combination of hardware, it could work out to being super-cool.

However, with the heavy focus on touch interfaces, I have to wonder whether Windows 8 will have a significant role on computers like the monster I built a couple months ago. It’s designed to basically be a non-mobile workstation that I can use as a media device, work device, and whatever device. It has no touch input, and is not really in a position where I can feasibly connect a touch-enabled monitor, even if I were so inclined.

I’m no market analyst, but I believe that Steve Ballmer wasn’t kidding around when he said that Windows 8 was going to be a huge risk. Once it’s brought to market, and I’ve had a chance to play around with it, I can give a little better verdict, but for now, I’m a bit skeptical.

New Phone! Goodbye BlackBerry!

2011-05-31T23:32:00.001-06:00

And good riddance.

Nah, I’m a little too harsh on my BlackBerry. It’s been incredibly reliable, and has been quite easy to use. It’s just that when I start looking at features… It’s kind of extremely short.

So, today I ordered a T-Mobile G2x, an Android phone. It’s gotten middling reviews, but the only point that seems to stick with reviewers is the software on the phone, which is upgradeable/replaceable. Everything hardware related seems to be top notch. So, I’m excited to see how I like that. It should be my phone for the next year or two, so I hope I’ve made the right decision.

My dog is sleeping in my bedroom tonight.

I’m writing this post from a XP virtual machine

2011-05-31T00:45:00.001-06:00

It’s true.

I got my virtual machine set up so that I can write blog posts, and I’m very pleased with it so far. Windows Liver Writer seems to work just as well as it did in Windows 7, and I’m quite happy about that.

I installed the virtual machine for two purposes: Windows Live Writer, and Netflix. Unfortunately, Netflix doesn’t look so promising. It loads and runs all right, but the framerate on the video is sloooooow. Hopefully that’s something I can tinker with to get working, but I’m not terribly optimistic. Worst case scenario, I’ll make the machine dual-boot for the sole purpose of using Netflix, but I hope it doesn’t come to that. I’ll post more details when I have them, but for now I’m just glad that I can write my posts from my netbook again.

Windows XP in a Virtual Machine

2011-05-29T23:41:00.001-06:00

Today I took on the task of adding Windows XP in a virtual machine on my netbook. I have a HP Mini 311, I got it with all the options: Bluetooth, 3GB of RAM, and the slightly faster processor. I know, the upgrades are only very slight, but I really appreciate the Bluetooth module.

Anyway, when Ubuntu 11.04 came out, I installed that on my Mini, and I have really enjoyed using it. Unfortunately, I’m hooked on Windows Live Writer and Netflix, neither of which works under Linux. So, I’ve spent a few hours today setting up a virtual machine on my netbook just for those two programs.

So how was it? Actually, not bad. The installation was pretty easy, and completely problem free. It runs fast, and everything works fine, at least for now. I’ve installed all the updates, activated Windows, and I’m going to make a copy of the virtual machine so that I can screw around and if anything has a problem I’ll just revert back to the old HDD.

I’m excited to try it out, and hopefully everything works just fine so I can do my bloggin’ and Netflixin’ on the road.

Did I mention that I have a pet peacock?

2011-05-29T00:44:00.001-06:00

No, seriously, I do.

Well, technically it’s my sister’s, but it’s essentially a family pet. Kind of a weird pet, but I didn’t pick it.

Anyway, Today I played Mega Man X2 with a friend. It was pretty fun, but I think I had more fun with Mega Man X, at least when playing with a friend. I seem to remember fonder memories of the game back in the day, but when I played it today it was a touch less magical than before. I think it has to do with all the collectibles.

The collectibles in the Mega Man X games are really cool. each body upgrade significantly expands your capabilities, and the life upgrades make you a little bit tougher with each one. Here’s the problem, though: the upgrades in X2 are very difficult to find.

See, there’s a special super-upgrade you can get if you have all the other upgrades. This final one allows you to perform the Dragon Punch from Street Fighter, and the move is super-powerful and can decimate almost any enemy in the game. In order to get it, you have to do a difficult moving platform puzzle, and then navigate some tricky spike rooms filled with enemies, and at the end of it you must have full life or the upgrade capsule won’t appear. This is frustratingly difficult.

And it’s not alone in frustration. A lot of the upgrades require backtracking, and are difficult to get to, even if you know where they are. There is one in particular where you have to use a certain special weapon from a boss on an unmarked spot of floor in an inconspicuous area of a level. I wouldn’t have found that one if I hadn’t looked up the location when I first played this game years ago.

I feel like the designers were deliberately trying to make it as difficult as possible while remaining reasonable, and I’m not sure that’s the appropriate way to have gone about it. Sure, it makes the game a challenge, but it’s not as fun as it would be if you didn’t have to use a half-dozen lives to successfully navigate the spike warren on the way to the bonus area, right before the end of the game where you won’t be able to really use it anyway.

Anyway, I think I’ll write up a review for X2 and throw it in the queue (I love that word) of Retro-Review Fridays.

6 Months

2011-05-28T02:09:00.001-06:00

Today I played Lost Planet 2 with my friends for the first time in eleven forevers. It must have been at least six months since I first played the game, because when I turned on the game I got a PSN trophy for a “six-month anniversary” with the game. That’s a long long time in game terms. Like, long enough that I had almost forgotten that the game exists.

The game is still just as fun as I remember, and the story still makes exactly as much sense as before (zero). I kind of wonder why we stopped playing it in the first place. I guess something else must have come along that looked (and probably was) more fun.

Mainly, though, I’m glad that PSN is back up in Japan. For the past month weekends have been hit and miss with free online games, so it’s nice to have all these fun and expensive non-free games available for playing again.

I need to finish my laundry now.

Retro-Review Friday: Mega Man X

2011-05-27T22:00:00.000-06:00

Today I'm going to kick off a new weekly series: Retro-Review Friday. In this series I will discuss an older game (probably from SNES era backwards, but not specifically limited to that). Sometimes I'll discuss a popular game, sometimes one that I (but not necessarily you) remember fondly, sometimes I might just pick a random one and go with it. I might give a star rating, I might just give a general feeling, and I might just tell you how many gummy bears I ate while playing the game. No one knows until it's all said and done.
Today's game is Mega Man X. Read on past the break for the whole rundown.
Read more »

Stepping it up a notch

2011-05-26T23:34:00.001-06:00

I’ve decided that I have reached the point with this blog where it is no longer a constant struggle to write something on a daily basis. This is good. I really wanted to reach this point. Now I want to actually start putting out content, if I can.

I’ve decided that I can definitely handle a single “article” per week, in addition to my daily posts. I’ve already got one ready to go for tomorrow, and I’ll have it post tomorrow evening. I’m going to try to set it up so I can be a bit ahead and not have to stress about having it out on time, so I’ve already written an extra one. If I can stay ahead like this, I can hopefully get to where I can write even more on a regular basis.

Wish me luck.

Mega Man X

2011-05-26T01:24:00.001-06:00

I’m getting started late tonight, so this’ll be short.

Today I played Mega Man X with a friend. We traded off whenever we beat a boss or when we got frustrated with something. That game is great. It took us a little over two hours.

I always want to write Mega Man as Megaman, but it’s apparently supposed to be two words. This bothers me. Does it bother you?

It is bedtime now.

DDR… As Exercise?

2011-05-25T00:05:00.001-06:00

I like DDR.

No, I’m not one of those sweaty guys you’ll see at the arcade doing the double-pad songs on the “Grand Supreme Master of the Universe” difficulty setting, their legs a blur of extreme skill specialization. I just like it.

I don’t like exercise.

Sure, it makes me feel great afterwards (assuming that I don’t overdo it, and I stretch properly before/after), and I love doing things like hiking and playing semi-competitive sports, but I don’t really like regularly getting down to business with a treadmill and a set of weights. I don’t think I’m unique in this aspect. Good thing DDR can work as exercise.

Wait… DDR is exercise?

Duh. Of course. It’s actually pretty good for keeping your heart rate up, if you make sure that you stick with a difficulty that’s a little challenging for you. I don’t pretend that it’s the best form of exercise out there, but the reason I prefer it is because I can actually make myself do it.

I’m a little dubious of the calorie counting in the game. It has you input your weight and it bases calories burned on your weight. However, it only counts calories when you hit correct steps, and as far as I know it could just be making up numbers when it comes to calories burned. I’m not too concerned about that though, since I know whether or not I’ve had a good workout. I suppose it is nice that it tells me that I burned 45.346 kCal on that song, but I’m not basing my exercise on that.

Anyway, if I can ~~get off my lazy butt~~ remember to exercise on a regular basis, I should be able to get fit enough to get back to climbing mountains again. I miss that a good bit.

Arrangement

2011-05-24T00:24:00.001-06:00

Now that my computer is in a different room than it has been for the last ~3 years, I notice that my day goes significantly differently. I base my daily activities around my computer, so the location makes a huge difference in my routine. This got me thinking a little bit about furniture and my routine.

Furniture locations in my living space dictate the way I go about doing things. They direct my workflow, and, in some ways, affect the way I think. I like to change things up occasionally, if only for the sake of getting a new perspective on things. Unfortunately, I’ve been working with an extremely limited amount of space in my bedroom, so the most I can realistically do is change whether my head rests at the head or foot of my bed when I’m sleeping. I switch that up every couple months, or so.

I’m nor sure how (or if) this relates to anything, but I guess what I’m getting at is that I feel like I have a fresh perspective because I have changed the location of some furniture, and have greatly adjusted the way my routine works. Is it currently optimal? Not even close. But I definitely feel like it’s not as bad as I initially thought it would be.

Early

2011-05-22T22:02:00.001-06:00

I’m writing early today, since if I write at my normal time tonight it’s likely that I’ll be late for work in the morning. Actually, right about now should be my normal time, if I were to pick a time that I consider optimal for me to be able to both write and get to bed on time.

Yesterday I moved my computer from my bedroom downstairs into a computer room upstairs. I don’t have a huge problem with it being here as opposed to being in my bedroom, but I don’t really like that I’ve lost most of my privacy. I also am not a huge fan of the fact that the rest of the family now has access to my hardware without my permission.

On the plus side, I now have actual desk space, instead of having to decide between a keyboard or a textbook when doing homework. That’s a huge plus. Another advantage is that we’re putting a couch in here, so when I have friends over it will be much more comfortable than moving a second office chair into my bedroom and trying to squeeze a little more room out of it.

Since the couch isn’t in here yet, I’ll probably end up moving it tomorrow, and since there’s not enough room between my desk and the door to get it in the room I’ll have to take my computer down again. That half-hour I spent setting up my speakers and monitor? Wasted. Well, that’s how it goes.

Moved my computer today

2011-05-22T01:40:00.001-06:00

Today I moved my computer.

It took all day to get it set up right.

My hands hurt from moving furniture.

Here is a haiku:

Just fought Air Man
Crash Man wants to chat
Time for Air Shooter

That’s it for tonight.

No Japanese PSN?

2011-05-21T03:38:00.001-06:00

I have a couple friends that I regularly play games on my Playstation 3 with, so the recent outage of PSN due to lame hackers has been particularly annoying. However, since PSN came back up this past week I was all set up and excited to play this weekend. Only one problem: one of my friends lives in Japan, and Japan hasn’t approved their PSN to come back up.

That doesn’t mean that we didn’t do anything together. Since PSN went down we have been experimenting with various multiplayer online games. We tried a whole range of games, from the serious MMO (Lord of the Rings Online) to the casual why-would-you-play-this MMO (AdventureQuest Worlds), and various simple shooters, a Tron game, and even online games of hearts. Since we couldn’t play Borderlands like we were playing, today we tried Armada Online.

I remember playing Armada on my cousin’s Dreamcast over a decade ago, and I remember that the whole game was pretty dang cool. Rose colored glasses, I’m sure, but I believe it did have some merit. I was surprised to find that this was a properly MMO’d version of the Dreamcast game, ported to PC.

Sure, it shows its age. Hard. But overall it’s still a pretty fun game, and I feel like it actually provided a good amount more enjoyment than I got from playing some more serious or more polished games the previous few weeks. Although it’s a lot of fun, I can’t wait for PSN to come back up worldwide, because I’ve got some Cat-G Akrid to kill.

Sleep well, Ryan

2011-05-20T02:36:00.001-06:00

Ugh, why do I always get a headache when I fall asleep during the day?

Today I got home from work at about 4:30, and went to play some Demon’s Souls, but the next thing I know it’s 7:00 and I’ve just woken up from sleeping in my computer chair, and I’m not sure at what point I fell alseep. I managed to stumble to my bed so that the sleep might at least be restful, and now here we are, I’m semi-awake at 2:30 AM and typing in my blog.

I did actually make some progress in Demon’s Souls today. I played the Shrine of Storms level and finished the first boss, the Adjucator. I’m good enough at this game now that the vast majority of my deaths are from being careless, as opposed to not knowing what enemies are going to do, or from anything like that.

There was something else I wanted to write about, but I’m kind of drawing a blank here, so I guess this is as good a place as any to stop for the day.

Freaking World Tendency

2011-05-19T01:16:00.003-06:00

Today I played Demon’s Souls for a while. I really like the game, but sometimes it can get a bit frustrating. My frustration today is World Tendency related.

I’m working on getting the Platinum trophy for the game, and I’m making pretty good progress. One of the trophies requires that I get all the “unique” weapons in the game. Gotta love them collectibles trophies. Anyway, one of the items I need is dependent on a specific fight with a specific enemy who only appears when World Tendency in a certain level is Pure White (Black Phantom Garl Vinland, Valley of Defilement).

World Tendency affects how much damage enemies do, how much life they have, and how many souls they give when you kill them, in addition to affecting certain events. When you die (in body form) word tendency moves toward black, when you beat a boss, it moves toward white. Basically, it makes the game easier if you’re doing well, or harder if you’re doing poorly. Counterintuitive, huh? At least the enemies have better drops when tendency is black.

The problem is this: I finished the final boss of the Valley of Defilement, so there are no more bosses to kill, but before I left the world via the safe method provided when you kill a boss, I managed to die in body form. The Black Phantom Garl Vinland only appears when you have Pure White world tendency, and since I died in body form, I am one tendency level below pure white, and there are no bosses to kill for me to raise it back to where I want it.

Essentially, I’m screwed until I start the next New Game+. Wonderful.

Changes Inbound

2011-05-18T01:25:00.000-06:00

I've decided that I want to make some drastic changes to my blog here.

Change the First
I stopped syncing my blog with my Facebook "Notes" application, at least for now. The whole thing kind of seemed silly to me, anyway.

Change the Second
I'm going to try to post more often. I know, everyone who starts a personal-ish blog says this, but I mean it, and I believe that I can pull it off, because...

Change the Third
I'm drastically altering the type of content that I post. I'm not saying that the subject matter will be different (I'm hooked on the topics I've posted on), but I intend to focus less on lengthy articles and more on daily content. I have dreams of grandeur, and would love to be putting out movie, game, and tech reviews, but I don't (at this point) have the writing experience (or quite frankly, the ability to focus) required to do that. I'm thinking of starting smaller.

So What Now?
Well, to start with, I'm going to make daily entries. Even if the daily entry is just about some article I read on the internet, or about how I spent four hours watching progress bars as I installed software, I intend to write. A long time ago I set a reminder on my phone to write in my blog on a weekly basis, and that just wasn't enough to keep me going. Friday night would roll around and I wouldn't feel like writing, so I'd blow it off, and it became a habit to automatically dismiss the notification. Not gonna do that again.

Anyway, along with all this I'll probably spend a good amount of time tinkering with this page, so those of you who visit this blog might see changes. Maybe I'll even move the template off of whichever default it is that I picked.

jWin JB-TH130 Bluetooth Headset

2010-11-17T22:05:00.001-07:00

So what if I’m putting off homework and writing a review for this headset I got for “free” when I bought my last phone? Whatever.

If you’re familiar with the Aliph Jawbone headsets, you’ll immediately notice that it looks almost identical to them, albeit a little smaller. I think this intentional, and my suspicions are supported by the model number, which has “JB” as the first two characters. Unfortunately, while Jawbones are a premium headset brand, this guy is not.

This headset is a little guy. It hardly weighs anything. In fact, it’s so light that I forget that it’s on my head when I wear it. This is unlike my other headset, a Jabra BT8010, which is so heavy and bulky that it's impossible to ignore.

However, the light weight of this headset is a tradeoff. It has no features beyond the ability to pair with a device and raise or lower the volume. For what most of what people do with BT headsets that’s just fine, but I listen to A2DP audio regularly on my other headset, so the lack of that functionality is kind of a bummer. Oh, I forgot to mention another feature: It can turn on and off. Sounds great, eh?

Did I mention that this thing feels really cheap and fragile? No? Well, it does.

Another drawback of the extremely light weight and small size is battery life. I get only two or three hours of battery life out of this sucker. Strangely, from what I’ve seen I get the same battery life regardless of whether I’m talking on the phone or not. That’s a real bummer if you’re the type that likes to leave the headset on all the time, waiting for a call.

The battery life problem is likely because the battery is extremely small. I haven’t pried the thing open, nor do I intend to, so I can’t verify this without an unpleasantly large amount of snooping around. The upside to a battery that is as miniscule as one like this is charge time. It takes hardly any time at all to charge the thing to full. Maybe 20 minutes or so.

Speaking of the charger, it doesn’t have one, per se. It has a USB cable that goes directly into a small round power plug, like what you’d see on older electronics.

Overall, it’s not too bad for a freebie pack in, but if you’re considering buying a headset (i.e. actually spending money), don’t get this one. You’ll be constantly disappointed by the battery life and cheap feel.

The Social Network

2010-10-12T19:53:00.001-06:00

I watched The Social Network yesterday. I enjoyed the movie overall, and I’m not going to do an exhaustive review, but there was one thing about the movie that really stood out to me. The movie was very heavy on computers (which makes sense, seeing as it’s about the creation of Facebook) and I was pleased to see that all the computers in the movie used *real* computer interfaces (at least as far as I can tell).

Most movies you see have some sort of high-graphics multimedia interface that seems to have been designed by someone with attention-deficit disorder. Very effective for storytelling, but not realistic at all. All the screens in The Social Network were (unless I miss my guess) vanilla KDE, and one scene had a legit OSX setup, and they managed to make them work for telling the story. I found this quite pleasing.

Has any of you seen the movie? Thoughts?

Wordpress

2010-09-26T20:20:00.001-06:00

Today I signed up for a Wordpress blog. No, I don’t have blogging ambitions that are increasing beyond the ability of a single blogging service. It’s for my “e-portfolio” for SLCC.

It’s a new thing (just mandated this semester!) where you have to put a piece of your work from all your general education classes into a blog and link it to your SLCC account so you can show all the “cool” things you’ve been doing in school.

I’m kind of struck by how different Wordpress is than Blogger. I don’t use the online interface much because I vastly prefer desktop applications, but from what I remember it seems like the Wordpress interface is much more powerful (and complicated) than the Blogger interface.

Anyway, I have to go do some online things now so I can pass my classes.

My Audience

2010-09-23T03:39:00.001-06:00

Sometimes I wonder just who I write this blog for. Seems like I write it just for my own gratification, but I appreciate it when people read it. I guess my audience is me, but anyone is welcome and encouraged to read.

I’ve been trying to decide which direction I need to go in schooling/career. I’ve spent a good 15 hours today working on homework, and I need a break, so I’m thinking about something important instead of playing games or something.

This is my last semester at SLCC, and one thing I have definitely learned is that I am much better at the classes that I find interesting, or I am excited about than I am at classes where I don’t care.

Take, for example, my folklore class (one of two classes I took where I actually felt in danger of failing). Technically, the folklore class was an English class. This worked in my favor, because I have a strong command of the English language, and papers typically flow quite well for me. However, despite my proficiency with the medium, I did poorly at the class. Why? I hated the material.

Similarly, I’m currently taking a college algebra class, and I finally think I have my feelings about math sorted out. It’s *boring*. This means that it is something that I have to expend massive amounts of willpower to do. If I found it interesting I could do it just fine. I understand concepts (well, most of ‘em, anyway) and can do all the arithmetic and algebraic manipulation just fine, but I can’t stand it because it’s just so bone-splinteringly dull.

I just need to finish this semester up, so I can finish my associates and be done with SLCC. Hopefully I pass my math class, because I *really* don’t want to take it again. Yuck.

Final thought: I’m really tired right now, and I don’t know why I just spend a bunch of time typing up a blog post instead of finishing my homework that is due in four and a half hours.

Stupid math homework

2010-09-18T19:51:00.001-06:00

I’m writing this on Saturday night. Instead of having fun as is proper on the weekend, I am doing math homework. Lots of it. And I probably will be working on it for most of the coming week.

This is my first math class in a couple years. As you might expect, I’ve forgotten a lot since last time, but it’s not as bad as you might think. I can’t remember a lot of the little things (what does x^1/3 mean, again?) but for the most part I remember quickly or I just turn to the internet for a quick refresher.

Speaking of the internet, since my computers are busy being not easy to use with my super-small desk, I have been looking up the little tidbits of info I need on my PS3. I really appreciate how it has a web browser built in, but the browser is feeling really outdated nowadays.

Basically, I feel like the web browser on my BlackBerry is better suited to visit a lot of websites than the browser on my PS3 is, which is kind of pathetic because the BlackBerry internet browser is widely considered to be the furthest behind in terms of mobile browsers. One of these days they really need to update the browser in a system update so that it works with websites again. Facebook doesn’t even work properly unless you use the mobile version of the site. FREAKIN’ FACEBOOK.

The next PS3 system update is scheduled for September 21, and the major feature being added is 3D playback for Blu-Ray movies. I dunno about you, but I don’t really care about 3D playback, seeing as it requires a) special hardware (new/super expensive TV + matching expensive shutter glasses) and b) 3D movies to play, which are not readily available. Seems like everyone and their dog (at least among major technology manufacturers) is itching to move to 3D within the next year. I don’t think it’ll catch on anywhere near that fast.

The last big push from manufacturers was the transition from SD to HD. There have been minor transitions throughout the years for the TV, like the move from VHS to DVD, or the transition from analog to digital TV, but those all work with the same hardware. The last time there was a major hardware revision where you got new functionality from a TV prior to the transition to HD was when they moved from black and white to color. It’s just within the past few years that people even started to change their SDTVs to HDTVs, so I don’t think it’s too far off to say that people aren’t ready to trade in that shiny new HDTV with their fancy new high definition Blu-Ray players and high definition game consoles for something that offers identical functionality, only in 3D.

Anyway, I am totally putting off getting to work on my homework, which is a bad idea. Give me a shout if you have any thoughts about 3D, the PS3’s web browser, or how to get an A in a college algebra class without really trying.

Multitasking

2010-09-10T22:01:00.001-06:00

I’m the type of person who can’t focus when I have stuff to do. Even sitting down for 5-10 minutes and pounding out a blog post once a week on things I like to talk about is a tough thing for me to do. It’s hardly any content, but it takes me tow to three times longer to write it than it really ought to.

This weekend I have a fair amount more homework to do than I usually do, and it doesn’t help that I can’t focus worth a darn. So what do I do? Well, I have two main ways to deal with

Ah, forget it. I’ve got homework to do and it needs to get it done ASAP. I’ll write something more cohesive another time.

Frustrated With Calendars

2010-09-05T21:09:00.001-06:00

Ok, so I totally skipped writing last week. My bad.

I dumped Outlook a while ago. It did a great job with my mail, and it had a lot of cool categorization and productivity features (although a good portion of them would take a two-week training course to use), but it really just ran too slow for my liking, and it had a tendency to kind of go nuts sometimes and just not work.

I switched to Windows Live Mail (beta), and I love the interface, and it’s so simple without all the dozens of features that I really have no intention of using. I’ve run into two problems with the client, and I am frustrated because I *love* the way it handles the stuff it handles and really don’t want to switch.

The first is really a minor problem, and there’s no easy solution without switching to another mail/calendar client. It doesn’t have a to-do list built in. I know, I never used the to-do list in Outlook, but recently I have found myself setting goals, and lining up simple tasks that I want to have done at certain times. I can load tasks into the calendar, but it’s just not the same as having a dedicated “this is what I need to do” list.

The second problem is the calendar. This is the part where I get frustrated. The calendar in Windows Live Mail is (assuming you have linked your email account to a Live Account, as I have) automatically synchronized with your Windows Live Calendar and across all Windows Live Mail clients you have on all your computers. Sweet, right? Well, yes, except that there’s no easy way to sync that from there to my BlackBerry, or to Google Calendar, which I can then sync to my BlackBerry.

This problem is big enough that I am considering changing mail clients, despite the fact that I really love the one I’m using right now. Any suggestions on mail clients?

Final thought: Does anyone actually read my blog, or is it just the four people who read the Facebook note after it syncs mysteriously at 3:57 AM six days after I write a post, only one of which makes a comment?

Quick Update on Maintenance

2010-08-26T23:27:00.001-06:00

I finally got around to adding my shared items from Google Reader as a widget here on my blog. Took me a few tries, but it eventually worked. Now I’ll have to actually use the functionality when I’m using Google Reader so that something other than “StarCraft 2 Beta Client is now live” will show up.

Also on my to do list: get the blog to actually look the way I want it to. I tried a while back, but couldn’t get it to work easily enough and just used one of the defaults. I plan to fix this, but it’s not high priority for now.

ALSO on my to do list: Actually make a to do list instead of just saying things are on my to do list and never actually making a list of any sort.

Getting Ready for the Semester to Start

2010-08-20T04:28:00.001-06:00

I am totally ready to be done with Salt Lake Community College (SLCC).

This is my last semester there, and I have only a few select classes I have to take to finish up my associates degree. The big problem is that I waited too long to register for classes and ended up with a crappy schedule where I have to go for one hour on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I spend 12 hours at school on Thursdays. Lesson learned: Register as soon as possible after registration opens up.

At first I didn’t even get into the classes I need to finish up, and the professors weren’t willing to create overrides for me to join their classes. What I had to do was wait until someone dropped their class and then join. The problem is that the way I have to figure out when the classes are available is through a terrible website interface that looks up class availability. What I ended up doing was setting an hourly alarm for myself so I could remember to check the website and see if any classes opened up.

This method worked, and I ended up getting all the classes I need, but my schedule still is terrible. Hopefully I can get it worked out so I don’t have to be there all day on Thursdays.

Also: Textbooks are a freakin’ rip-off. How is a lame book that I’m not *EVER* going to use after I finish the class worth more than $100? The publishers want you to think it’s because of research, or materials, or writing, or something, but I have it on good authority that in some other countries at least textbooks cost $10-$40. Double-you tee eff.

Resurrecting my iPod

2010-08-14T15:52:00.001-06:00

I decided yesterday that I wanted to use my iPod for the first time in about a year. I pulled it out of the drawer and plugged it in, and started to try to use Winamp to sync it like I did back in the day.

Unfortunately, Winamp wasn’t recognizing my iPod (which, by the way, is a 1st generation iPod Nano) so I go to do a little troubleshooting. Turns out last time I used it I had installed Rockbox on my iPod so Winamp wasn’t liking it.

Rockbox is a neat little firmware replacement for older iPods (and a bunch of other MP3 players as well). It increases the abilities of the iPod by replacing the standard software with something much more flexible and powerful. It’s kind of like jailbreaking is for current iPods/iPhones, but that’s only a basic comparison, since Rockbox completely overrides all the software.

Rockbox is pretty cool, and all, and I like a lot of the capabilities (OGG Vorbis support!) but it has a wonky user interface, at least in the stock build I was using. I just wanted my iPod to play music, so I decided to reset the firmware back to the stock Apple firmware. To do this, you have use iTunes and reset the firmware using its proprietary download system and it will reset everything like it was after leaving the factory.

The problem: I don’t have iTunes, and I don’t want it on my computer.

I installed iTunes just for this, but I removed it immediately after. In my opinion, iTunes is essentially malware, particularly because it tries to get you to install Safari, which I also consider to be honorary malware.

I installed iTunes just long enough for it to reset my iPod, and got rid of it right after. I hope it didn’t have enough time to reach through my computer and taint everything with it’s evil tentacles. We’ll see in the coming weeks whether it decided to screw things up or not.

Random Battles

2010-08-11T16:17:00.001-06:00

Over the past three weeks or so I have played my way through Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy VI. It’s the first time I’ve played either one of those games, and I can see where people are going with their praise and criticisms. I enjoyed each game quite thoroughly, but by the end of each I kind of was getting sick of random battles and just wanted to go beat the final boss senseless so I could be done with it.

They’re a staple of console RPGs. Walk for 10 seconds, then fight a monster, gain EXP and money, back to walking. It’s a time honored system that is pretty much a universally expected component of any RPG, but that doesn’t mean they’re the best way to go about it.

My favorite take on the random battle is from Tales of Symphonia (it’s probably elsewhere too, but this is where I’m familiar with it). Battles are not random, but you are pretty much guaranteed battles as you walk around the overworld and various maps. The way it works is there are monster creatures walking around maps that represent groups of monsters. Some of these are aggressive, and will actively chase you, some are passive and easily avoidable. When you tough one, the battle starts. This means if you are good at avoiding these you can greatly reduce the number of battles you fight.

I’ve got Final Fantasy XIII in my drawer right now, waiting for me to start another adventure, and I’m excited to play it. On the other hand, will I be able to put up with unavoidable random battles for another 30-40 hour adventure? Not sure, but I’m gonna find out.

(Man, I’ve been on a Final Fantasy kick lately!)

It’s been a while…

2010-08-05T22:13:00.001-06:00

So, I had completely forgotten that I had a blog. I mean, intellectually, if you were to ask me if I have one, the answer would obviously be “Yes,” but I have gone so long without writing that I might as well not have one.

A few things to sort out:

Yes, I know I need to finish the Top 10 Worst Games list. But I don’t want to. I figure that I don’t need to, and since this is my blog, it’s not going to happen. (If anyone’s interested, the #1 game was a toss-up between Solstice and LED Wars, but I only wrote the LED Wars entry and nudged that to #2 in the interest of having some content. Quite honestly, I should have had Solstice at #2 or maybe even lower. Also, I can’t find a GameFAQs entry for LED Wars. It must be rare.)
I have abandoned Outlook, which I once championed. Sure, it’s nice for business who need to have all sorts of super-advanced functionality, but quite honestly, I just needed an email client and a super-light calendaring utility.
I have been using the Windows Live Essentials Beta suite for all my email/calendar/photos/sync/blogging needs. It’s *really* well put together, and I like it a lot because it’s super simple and just does what I need it to. (BONUS! The Windows Live Writer Beta kept my blog information when I upgraded from the “stable” version, so I didn’t have to look it up and enter it.)
I’ve been off for the summer from school, but plan to finish up my Associates’ Degree this fall semester. From there, I tentatively plan to transfer to the University of Utah and pursue a Computer Science program of some sort.
I have been playing Ragnarok Online on a private server for the last few months. It’s my first “real” MMO experience. I did play Atlantica Online for a little while, but it was more of a collaborative multiple single player game, unless you PVP a lot, which I never had interest in doing. Note to self: do not let game eat life.
I plan to write more often. I’m setting a weekly goal to make at least one entry in my blog. I have followed several blogs in my Google Reader feed where the updates are so sporadic and far apart that I have considered ceasing following them just because there’s never any new content. I don’t want that to be me. (Then again, it’s likely that I’ve lost readers in my seven month hiatus. Not that I had many to begin with, but, ya know...)

I now will set a reminder in my calendar, a weekly one that will remind me that I need to write. This should work, but you might just get a rundown of how much I hate the homework for [class name]. Well, maybe. See you later!

Syncing Outlook Across Multiple Devices

2010-01-11T22:18:00.002-07:00

Here’s the scenario: I have two computers that I regularly use, one is a stationary computer functioning as a desktop, and the other is a small laptop that I can take anywhere with me. I want to be able to use Outlook as my email and RSS client on both machines, but I need to synchronize my activity between the computers before that is a viable option. Sounds simple, right? Well, not so much.

There are multiple solutions for synchronizing Outlook across multiple machines. I am not interested in putting money into this, so I am not looking for a commercial product, despite reviews that say they work well and seamlessly. I was able to find a free solution to the problem by using Google Reader, Google Calendar, and an IMAP email protocol.

Google Reader

Transferring the RSS feeds to Google Reader was the easiest of the tasks that I performed, but it was the one I liked the least. The reason is that I *really* like the way that Outlook handled my RSS feeds, so I was reluctant to move away from that. It was a simple process to export the feeds and import them. For those interested in how to do it, here’s a walkthrough.

Export Feeds from Outlook

1. In Outlook 2007, click File > Import and Export…
2. Click Export RSS Feeds to an OPML file, then Next.
3. Select which feeds you want to save, and click Next.
4. Select a save location and filename, and click Next.

Import Feeds into Google Reader

1. Open up Google Reader, and click Settings in the top right area.
2. Click on the Import/Export tab.
3. Select Choose File, and browse to the file you created with your feeds in it.
4. Click Upload.

At this point all your feeds should be ready to go in Google Reader, and there’s not much more to do other than delete the feeds from Outlook to reduce redundancy.

Google Calendar

Syncing the calendar between my computers proved to be the trickiest of the tasks that I did. This had another layer of complexity, in that I was also synchronizing the calendar with my Blackberry Bold 9700 in addition to the two computers. The solution that I came up with was to use Google Calendar as a central hub for all my devices, and have them individually sync with it. Fortunately, this is possible because Google provides a helper program for Outlook that syncs with Google Calendar, and also a Blackberry app that will do the same.

How well does it work? A lot better than I expected. I have tested my setup and all devices are able to add, delete, and modify events on my calendar, and they will be updated on the other devices. I have it configured to sync every 2 hours, so it could be a maximum of four hours between the time I add an event to one device and when it is on all of them. Fortunately there’s an option to sync on command.

Interested in the goods? Here’s the information.

Google Sync for Blackberry

The application for Blackberry that syncs the calendar is called Google Sync for Blackberry. It does the calendar, and also my contact list, so I can have a backup on my Gmail account. Here’s how to get it.

Visit http://m.google.com/sync on your Blackberry’s web browser.
That’s all. Just install that application and input your Google account info.

Google Calendar Sync

This is a tool provided by Google that will sync the Google Calendar with Outlook. It just does the calendar, so if you’re looking for contact sync as well, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Visit this link to this Google Help article.
Step 2 under “Get Started” has the download link for the Google Calendar Sync.
Install, input your Google Account information, and watch it go

Gmail IMAP

What is IMAP? IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It’s an alternative to what I was using, which was POP (Post Office Protocol). I won’t go into the complicated stuff about the differences, but the main one that I’m interested in is that IMAP allows me to synchronize my activity on Outlook with my Gmail inbox, and this will in turn synchronize with my other machine.

How to set it up:

Open Gmail and click on Settings.
Click on the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
Click the radio button to Enable IMAP.
Click on Configuration instructions directly below that for detailed instructions on how to configure Outlook (or another supported email client) properly.

IMAP is different from POP in that it requires an active connection to access your mail, unless you configure it to download all the mail directly. I don’t need this since 99% of the time when I’m using my email client I have an active internet connection, and the rest of the time I have my Blackberry.

Conclusion

I was really pleased with how well I was able to make the two machines (and a phone) synchronize. It’s too bad that synchronization isn’t built in as a feature of Outlook for home users, but I’m glad I was able to find a workaround. Have you had any experience with this? Were my instructions helpful (or unhelpful)? Let me know.

10 Worst Games I Own - #2 L.E.D. Wars

2009-11-02T20:46:00.001-07:00

It was a tough choice for my number two game. The top (bottom?) two in my list are both terrible and I arbitrarily picked assigned them numbers. So here it is.

L.E.D. (pronounced “lead”) Wars is a real time strategy game that is very similar to Command and Conquer. Resource gathering consists of a confusing farming and gathering technique that adds a small amount of variety to the game, but it doesn’t offset the lousy nature of the game.

What is so bad? Well, the game is very confusing to figure out. It’s not clear which units do what, and there is no documentation, in game, on disc, or in the box. I spent a good portion of time just trying to figure out how to get resources, which was very annoying.

The story is inane, the difficulty is high, and the acting is terrible. Just imagine Command and Conquer where the videos are terrible quality, everyone is wearing lab coats, and the script is written by a ten year old with severe ADHD who has been drinking Red Bulls all night.

There is one point where you reach a mission where the enemy has units that are insanely powerful relative to your units, and there’s no way to finish the scenario without destroying these units. Essentially, it’s the equivalent of taking out an armored tank with an airsoft pistol. I gave up at that point.

I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone, especially given that the compatibility was poor back in the day when I played it on my Win98 machine. I can only imagine how poorly it will play now.

What fun.

10 Worst Games I Own - #3 Sheep

2009-09-28T12:27:00.002-06:00

Sometimes I wonder what game companies are thinking when they make some of their games. I have to ponder whether they are actually intending to sell any copies of the game, or whether they just want to live out some terrible memory from their childhood that has been haunting them for most of their adult lives. This is kind of how I feel about this game.

The back of the case says it all:

They've traveled vast distances through space. They've colonized countless star systems. They've forgotten why they're here...
Can you guide the lovable -- but soooo stupid -- Sheep to Mt Mouflon without getting them bashed, boiled, blown up or blow-dried?
Wrangle 4 increasingly stupid breeds of Sheep, conquer 7 flock-busting worlds (with 4 levels in each), and confound the pure evilness of Mr Pear and his evil hench-cows! With the shear gameplay you've been craving, you'll be up night after night counting... Sheep!

Guide your flock through 7 worlds, including Technopolis and Jurassic levels

Incredible A.S. (Artificial Stupidity) actually simulates the unique stupidity of sheep

4 different herders; Bo Peep, Adam Half-Pint, Motley and Shep

6 bonus levels

Note the use of a shameless pun in the end of the third paragraph. *sigh*

This game has the distinction of being a game that I bought not for the game itself, but for the hardware that it came with. This is where I got my memory card for my PS1.

The whole premise of this game is… something about sheep. You’re supposed to herd them to a van or something. Seriously, it’s on the PSN, but… Don’t buy it. It’s lousy. Seriously. Usually I’m willing to play a game that I get for really cheap at least partway through, but this game I couldn’t even make myself play past the first level.

I’m done with this. Here’s a video.

10 Worst Games I Own - #4 Fester’s Quest

2009-08-14T20:18:00.001-06:00

This game is about as fun as… A fat bald guy wearing lipstick and a fur coat. Yeah.

The Addams Family is kind of fun, what with their creepy kooky ways and their altogether spooky mansion. Unfortunately, their ability to be amusing in their television and movie areas doesn’t transfer well to video games.

This game is probably the worst of the games related to the Addams Family, and I suggest that you avoid it unless you are looking for a lot of frustration.

Let’s start with the story. Uncle Fester is enjoying a glass of lemonade on his lawn chair, at midnight. Aliens begin terrorizing the city. Uncle Fester goes off to save the city and kill the aliens. That’s all. When you beat the game it just gives you a screen that ~~says “Congratulations!” or some such, and rolls credits (not really sure, I stopped paying attention about halfway through the final boss fight.)~~ is just a picture of the Addams Family surrounded by a bunch of people. I went back and checked.

Now we’ll move on to gameplay. Uncle Fester has two methods of attack: Gun and whip. You start with the gun, and you get the whip about halfway through the game. Now, I’m not sure why you would ever use the whip because it offers only one advantage over the gun, which I will cover later.

Your gun and whip can be upgraded by picking up little items on the ground that say “GUN” and “WHIP”. Unfortunately, there’s also items that look identical, but are differently colored that will downgrade your weapons. This means you have to be careful and watch which power-ups (and power-downs) that you walk over.

Here’s where the one advantage of the whip comes in: it doesn’t change attack patterns. The whip always attacks in a straight line. The gun, well, it gets kind of crazy. The first upgrade gives you long range (yay! The long beam!) but after that it’s nuts. You move through patterns of wavy attacks, circle attacks, criss-cross attacks, and several variations of each. This means that you can be shooting at an enemy and the bullets will literally just move *around* the enemy and miss them.

Another frustrating thing about the bullets is that any time they hit anything, they stop. This is quite frustrating when you’ve got the swirling black bullets, because they will often end up failing to hit anything before they disappear. It’s even worse in the game’s sewer levels because you will be in passageways that are so narrow that there is literally no room for your bullets to move a tiny bit to the side of you and disappear. Terribly frustrating.

Fortunately, the final upgrade of the gun just shoots straight. Sheesh.

There’s also the inventory screen, which confused me for quite a while (not as long as Rygar’s did, but that game is awesome). You have a bunch of items, but nowhere does it say how to use them. It turns out that the “A” button uses items.

By the way, if you get stunned, use the vice grips. It took me forever to figure that out. And I’m still not sure what to do with nooses.

There are a few bosses that will fight you, all are extremely difficult. Several are invincible unless they are attacking, and you will probably die at least a half-dozen times on each, unless you are supremely lucky.

Did I mention that if you die at any point in the game you go all the way back to the beginning? Oh, my bad.

Now, this game does hold a position of nostalgia for me, so I couldn’t make myself put it all the way as my worst game. I used to play this game with a friend in my youth, and it has the distinction of being the first game where I actually recorded the music and listened to it later… as music.

Do I recommend you play this game? Absolutely not. I played through the whole thing, and all I got was a sensation of being robbed of my time by Sunsoft. At least they made Blaster Master, which is an AWESOME game.

Angry Video Game Nerd did a video on his impressions of the game, and he hit it pretty spot-on. It’s pretty funny. WARNING: Video contains (a lot of) language that is not safe for work.

10 Worst Games I Own - #5 Megaman Battle Network 4 Red Sun/Blue Moon

2009-08-02T12:30:00.001-06:00

Yes, I have both versions. Yes, they’re both pretty lousy.

If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know how much I love the Megaman Battle Network series. The games were great, up until this one, which is absolutely terrible.

First off, they decided to pull a Pokemon with this game, and release two versions which are exactly identical story-wise, but have slightly different content as far as bosses, items, and so on. This worked well for Pokemon because the game was popular and it encouraged trading and multiplayer aspects of the game. All it accomplishes here is making the game impossible to complete 100% without buying both versions.

This isn’t the first time that Capcom did this with the Battle Network series. Megaman Battle Network 3 had two versions, Blue and White, but it was possible to finish the game completely, with the exception of a couple special bosses and a small amount of high level items, without both versions. Also, Battle Network 3 had a good story that wasn’t a pain to play through.

The story on this game is… Lousy. In addition to being written poorly, it overdoses on talk about the power of friendship and love. Hardly an interesting reason why you win against opponents that are clearly more powerful than you.

In a nutshell, here’s the story. See if you can spot any recurring themes…

Cut scene about an asteroid that is going to hit Earth.

Lan (the main character) is going to school, when there is a tournament announced. He fights in the tournament, and wins against all odds. Cut scene about an asteroid that is going to hit Earth.

Lan travels to the next round of the tournament. He fights in the tournament, and wins against all odds. Cut scene about an asteroid that is going to hit Earth.

Lan travels abroad for the tournament. He fights in the tournament, and wins against all odds. Cut scene about an asteroid that is going to hit Earth.

Lan travels to the final round of the tournament. He fights in the tournament, and wins against all odds. By winning the tournament, Lan is selected to stop the asteroid. Lan sends his cyber-pal Megaman.exe into space and stop the asteroid that was going to hit the Earth.

World saved, everyone is happy. The end.

That’s some high-quality writing, there.

The fact that the story is so inane wouldn’t be quite so irritating if, in order to get all the power-ups, you didn’t have to play through it five times. FIVE TIMES! That’s five times through the tutorial, five times through the annoying “chase the cyber-bat” mini-game, five times through the “stop ShadeMan.exe in the amusement park” scenario, and five times of fighting LaserMan.exe.

And if you bought both versions so you could 100% your carts, like I ~~did~~ tried to, it’s ten times through.

Now, this game isn’t all bad. The battles are pretty fun, even if they did tweak the mechanics a bit too much. You can now fight normal Navis (Navis are cyber-residents), which is a huge improvement over the previous games. And, there is a side quest involving Solar Boy Django from the Boktai games, which by itself is almost enough to merit playing this game.

Sadly, Capcom has a habit of overdoing games, and straying too far from a formula that was popular. In conclusion, if anyone out there has any of the Battle Network games, please tell me. I’ve always wanted to try the multiplayer. Just not so much on this one.

10 Worst Games I Own - #6 Megaman Xtreme

2009-07-29T01:54:00.001-06:00

I originally had another game slated for the #6 spot, but after a bit of research I decided to shuffle the order a little bit.

Megaman X had some of the best level designs and character designs I’ve seen in an action game. The series may have petered out in later games, but the first three were pure gold. This game is (in most aspects) a rehash of half of the first two Megaman X games.

Why is this bad? A lot of it is due to the Gameboy Color’s limited capabilities. On it’s own, it stands out as a decent game with playable levels and a little bit of control problems, but when taken as a port of SNES games, it becomes a much worse game.

As I said, much of the problems are because of the limited capabilities of the platform this game is on. The limited color palette makes the graphics look dull and uninteresting. Sprites are too small, and it can occasionally be hard to see.

Controls are also a problem. Quite central to the Megaman X games is the ability to dash. This is accomplished by pushing a button on the controller (usually the A or B button on the SNES controller). The GBC just plain doesn’t have enough buttons to support this. There are two options for configuring controls: use the start button to dash, or the start button does nothing. (Dashing can also be done by holding down and pushing jump, or double-tapping forward. These make jump-dashing quite difficult,)

X gets various upgrades through the game. One is a leg enhancement that makes you able to jump further off of walls. Central to the X series is the climbing of walls to get around obstacles. In the original, you could hold the dash button and push jump while on a wall to get a larger jump off of the wall. Unfortunately, in this version of the game the dash jump is always active, making it difficult to fine tune some of the smaller jumps you need to make.

The story also gets in the way. When playing through, you have long, slow, unskippable story sequences that you have to watch over and over. They’re so annoying that I have vivid memories of pushing the “A” button repeatedly and doing something else while waiting for the story to end. Fortunately, there is a “XTREME” difficulty mode that allows you to skip all story, making the game significantly more enjoyable.

Speaking of difficulty modes, there’s three: NORMAL, HARD, and XTREME. There are a total of eight robot masters in the game, four from Megaman X, and four from Megaman X2. Normal has four of the eight bosses, two from each game, and Hard has the rest. This is terribly annoying because it makes it so that you can’t get all the weakness weapons unless you’re playing on XTREME mode.

Overall, this game is a relatively weak presentation of what were originally great games. I’ve definitely seen better.

Bonus! An animated gif of the intro story. The start frame is the all white one with black “widescreen” bars. Enjoy! (Or not. Your choice.)

10 Worst Games I Own - #7 Mega Man Starforce Pegasus

2009-07-24T14:46:00.001-06:00

NOTE: Sorry about the delay for #7. It’s been a busy week.

In recent years the Megaman game series has taken some serious hits in quality. Need proof? Look at this game.

I’m a big fan of the Megaman Battle Network series. I think they’re a great balance between action and turn based RPG games, and they have a great twist on some of the classic bosses from the original Mega Man series.

The Mega Man Starforce series is the spiritual successor to the Battle Network series. It borrows… basically everything. This would be fine except that they removed the good parts that I loved.

In the Battle Network series, you play as Lan Hikari, a boy who lives in a futuristic world where everyone has a device calles a PErsonal Terminal(PET) that has a cyber Navi inside that acts as an alter ego of sorts. Lan’s Navi is Megaman.exe.

You would explore the Cyber-world, which was closely tied to the real world and things you did in the Cyber-world would affect the real world. For example, at one point in one of the games you enter the water company’s network because the water is frozen in their pipes. In the Cyber-world there are cyber-pipes that are frozen. Thaw the cyber-pipes, and the real pipes also thaw.

Megaman Starforce follows this pattern, except that your character is a depressed kid named Geo Stelar, and he gets pseudo-possessed by and alien named Omega-Xis, transforming into something that is supposed to be Mega Man.

The Cyber-world has been replaced with the “Wave World”, which is exactly the same as the Cyber-world, but it’s… wireless, I guess. And more difficult to navigate.

The story is your typical low-budget story. Emo kid secretly gets powers, fights, makes friends but can’t tell them about his powers. Earth gets threatened, he saves it, Everyone won’t stop talking about the powers of love and friendship. Ugh.

Now if all that wasn’t bad enough, the battle system takes what was, in my opinion, the best aspect of the Battle Network series and just destroys it. In the BN series, you would fight on a 3x6 grid of squares, divided between your squares and the enemy’s squares.

Attacks would have a shape associated with them. Swords cut directly in front of you, cannons shoot in a line, bombs that you lob will explode in a pattern. This, coupled with fast turn-based card-based action made a lot of really fun battles.

Starforce ruins this by making the playing field instead a 5x3 grid, with only one row for you, and four for the enemies. That’s right. You only get one dimension of movement. Most of the rest is the same, but the lack of movement makes the battles quite lame. Sure it’s 3d, but no one really cares about that anymore.

Mega Man Starforce is an excellent example of what happens when a company just takes a series of games and makes too many changes to the formula. It has excellent roots, but unfortunately, it went the wrong direction with it’s ideas.

10 Worst Games I Own - #8 Monopoly Party

2009-07-18T20:32:00.001-06:00

It’s a party and (unfortunately) you’re invited! The number eight game on the Ten Worst Games I Own is Monopoly Party.

Chances are that you’ve played Monopoly before, but if you’re unfamiliar with the game here’s a basic rundown of the game. You and some of your friends are multi-millionaires who are competing to become to sole owner of a large number of properties, including several railroads and utility companies. The objective of the game is to bankrupt all of your opponents and become the owner of all properties, and own a “Monopoly”.

Monopoly is a classic board game, but unfortunately it has the tendency to stretch out into extremely long games, lasting hours, days, or in extreme cases, weeks.

Monopoly Party is a new spin on this board game. It has what it calls “Party Mode” where you play the game… but there’s no turns. Everyone rolls at the same time, everyone buys property at the same time, everyone does everything at the same time. This makes the game less strategy oriented, and usually degenerates into all players just mashing the “A” button to get through as many turns as possible so they can just finish the game. Not fun.

The one thing that keeps this game from being banished from my collection and used as a coaster is the fact that there’s an option to play regular Monopoly, without the moronic lack of turns. It has several themes, such as a medieval and a prehistoric theme, but I prefer the vanilla Monopoly board (it’s the only way to get the iron as a playable piece).

I’m not sure why I bought this game. It didn’t even look fun at the store, and I think someone must have cast some sort of confusion hex on me when I was browsing Gamestop back in the day. Oh well. Too late to sell it off now.

Overall, this game would be completely worthless if not for the fact that it has regular Monopoly included, but to be entirely honest, you’re better off playing it on the actual board game. It’s more fun that way. Rich Uncle Pennybags will thank you.

10 Worst Games I Own - #9 Megaman X5

2009-07-15T15:57:00.001-06:00

Number nine on the list of the 10 worst games that I own is Megaman X5. It’s a game with good prequels, but it fails to live up to their legacy.

Megaman has had it rough over the years. His first few games were very well done, and were quite popular. Sensing a Huge Sack of Money, Capcom made sequel after sequel, spinoff after spinoff, and eventually they strayed from the roots of what made Megaman good in the first place.

The Megaman X series is the first of the spinoff series. Megaman X revolutionized the Blue Bomber by giving him the ability to climb walls just by jumping on them, it gave Megaman a dash that allowed him to move quickly, and it introduced upgradeable armor that gave Megaman increased power.

X2 and X3 added incremental enhancements, with better dashing and mobility, and the ability to play as Zero, another Character who uses a beam sword. They also were well written and had a minimum of story sequences during levels, and set the action level to MAX.

X4 was the first one on the Playstation (not counting a mediocre Playstation port of X3). It offered the new ability to play as Zero through the entire game instead of just for a brief segment during a level. This was exciting, and made for a good game.

So where does X5 go wrong? First of all, it’s the terrible writing of the script. Throughout the rest of the series, there has been almost no dialogue between characters, and this helped to make the games more action oriented, even if it did make the characters one dimensional. There was just enough writing to advance the story.

X5 has more dialogue, but it’s not necessarily a good thing. It falls into the area where there’s enough writing to know that the characters are supposed to be deep and dynamic, but there’s not enough to make them that way. For example, when you get to the bosses they all will have a brief conversation with you, but it’s kind of lousy.

Next, there’s the armor situation. when you start the game you can choose X or Zero. This is misleading because you can switch between them before any level. However, if you choose X at the beginning you start with the super powerful Fourth Armor, which is the final armor available in X4. If you choose Zero, you don’t get this, but you get a little blaster instead.

In the levels you can find pieces of armor, making up two suits of armor for X (sorry Zero, nothing for you). One allows you to fly and become invincible, and the other makes you immune to spikes. In short, there’s just too much going on.

The story is retarded. There’s a space colony called Eurasia. Oh noes! Now it’s crashing into earth so you have to get parts to build the “Enigma” cannon to destroy it first! If you succeed, then it turns out that the colony was full of the Sigma virus, a computer virus that makes robots go crazy, and it is now covering the earth so you need to go and kill the end boss to make it right.

There’s also a “time limit” system on the levels. You have 16 “hours” to stop the space colony from falling. Each level attempt takes 1 “hour”. If you fail, then… you don’t get a bonus item.

There’s also a ranking system where you don’t get certain items unless you fight certain bosses at certain times. I don’t understand it, but it makes the game harder.

All in all, this game is a poor addition to the X series, and it’s not a good game. I’m just glad I don’t own Megaman X6.

10 Worst Games I Own - #10 Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

2009-07-13T15:30:00.001-06:00

Recently, my friend Mike made a list of the worst games he owns on his blog. I was intrigued by the concept and decided to shamelessly rip off his idea and make it my own. You know what they say, “Emulation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

I’m going to kick off my list with Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. I’m a big fan of the Castlevania series. The wallpaper on my phone is the NES Castlevania box art, for a while my ringtone was Dracula from Symphony of the Night’s discourse on what a man is, and even now I have a brief quote from Alucard as my Facebook notification.

This Castlevania game starts off innocently enough, but goes downhill rather quickly. If you’re like me, you love the music from games, and, while this is a GBA game and I’m not expecting a full symphonic soundtrack, the music is rather… atrocious.

Here’s the theme music for the two main characters, Juste and Maxim.

If you listened to those (especially the second one), you’ll get what I’m saying.

Another major problem that I have with this game is that it is trying to be Symphony of the Night. Your main character, Juste Belmont, is supposed to be a member of the Belmont clan, a family of vampire hunters. However, if you look at him, he looks like Alucard, Son of Dracula.

He looks like Alucard, he dresses like Alucard, he moves like Alucard, but he’s not Alucard.

And there’s just some things that I can’t help but notice are a DIRECT RIP from Symphony of the Night. Like the save room.

And the doors between areas… (it’s hard to see in the screenshots, but they’re *identical*.

And a large percentage of the enemies. Now, these are from the same series of games, but I would expect differences.

All in all, it’s like a toned down, low-res, poor port of Symphony of the Night with lousy music and a poor excuse for a main character. And seriously, who decided to make the secondary character named Maxim?

Bad grammar gets on my nerves…

2009-07-11T01:17:00.001-06:00

I process a lot of classified ads for a website on a regular basis, so I get to see a lot of text that people write. While most of it is well written, I have a lot of people who just don’t seem to understand how to properly operate a keyboard. Here is a list of common errors (and annoying trends) that bug me.

People who can’t spell (I nede the bakc glas four my mahcin)
Unnecessary apostrophes (Contain’s lot’s of new part’s. Thank’s.)
Heavy reliance on the period key (I can deliver………………give me a call……………Im available anytime………………)
CAPS LOCK IS BROKEN (I THINK YOU GET THIS ONE)
Overuse of Exclamation points (Nice! Great shape! Home use only! I can deliver! Or ship! Pictures available!)
Putting their contact information in the body of the ad, in addition to the contact fields (this is a good way to get harvested by spammers, by the way)
Repeating themselves (HUO. This game has been owned by me since it was new. Home use only.)
Usage of wrong words (Plastics came from they’re manufacturer)
Silly dyslexics (new light blubs)
People who try to use HTML (<bolded>BEST<bolded/> machine in this condition<<br><<br><<br>)

*shudder*

It seems like there’s just something about the internet that brings out the worst in people when it comes to the English language. Do you have any things that bother you about grammar, especially on the internet?

The Internet is Back On!

2009-07-09T15:23:00.001-06:00

It’s hard to quantify how much better the internet is when you’ve got a decent connection, but it’s a lot better.

For the past month or so I’ve been relying on my phone as a tethered modem for internet. While it does work, it’s slow and unreliable.

I just (yesterday) fixed this problem by the acquisition of an inexpensive wireless router. It’s the cheapest one I could find, and it only supports up to 802.11g, but it’s more than sufficient for my needs.

Here is a list of things that I can do now that I was not able to do before on my ultra-limited internet:

Internet radio
Download files
Surf the internet
View my Facebook profile in a timely manner
Watch youtube
Post to my blog on the first try
Download emails and RSS feeds into Outlook
Browse the PSN on my PSP
Trade Pokemon over the internet
Update programs
Update the virus definitions for my virus scanner
Edit data in PuTTY
Play on Battle.net
Play games online in general

As you can tell, it’s basically everything that I’ve been wanting to do, but have not been able due to my obscenely ridiculous connection. It’s so… relieving.

RSS Feeds and YOU

2009-07-05T00:37:00.001-06:00

Have you ever had a newspaper subscription? How about a subscription to an embarrassing magazine, like Nintendo Power? If so, you enjoyed content being delivered right to your door, on a regular basis.

The internet, with it’s many media outlets, provides many sources of information, but for a long time it operated much like a newspaper stand, requiring you to go to the site you wanted to view on a regular basis in order to get your news. Not so anymore.

What I’m talking about is RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What this means is that you can have a program (or in some cases, a technological gizmo) that will act as a sort of mailbox that the latest updates to your websites will appear in.

It’s outrageously convenient for people who love to get the latest news. I use it to follow all my favorite blogs, but many other sites have feeds that you can follow, like news sites, or sites that post deals on goods/services.

There are several programs that you can use to do this. My favorite is Microsoft Outlook, but many people use Google Reader, because it’s convenient and available online.

Do you already use RSS? If not, consider giving it a try, and you might find you are more up to date on your favorite subjects.

I crave the internet…

2009-07-03T00:46:00.001-06:00

I want fast internet. I have access (obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing this), but it’s slow. I’m using my phone as a tethered modem with my laptop, and I have trouble downloading things. My emails don’t download half the time, my RSS feeds will only update every few days (if I’m lucky) and browsing is slow.

I love that I can use my phone as a tethered modem. It’s great for being on the run, but when I’m relying on it as a primary form of internet access it suddenly becomes quite lousy.

I’m not worried about incurring overage charges, because the internet is so slow, and I have an unlimited data plan. I’ve been using my phone for internet for most of a year now, off and on, but I really want to move away from such a lousy way to get my interwebs.

Well, that’s my rant for now. Enjoy my post, if it manages to upload correctly over my BlackBerry Flavored Interwebs.

Nothing more frustrating than…

2009-07-02T01:48:00.001-06:00

A leprechaun with a wand of digging.

I’m a classic gamer at heart. There’s nothing more satisfying than playing an old classic and showing up those youngsters by beating a game so old and hard they wouldn’t even know what to do.

The game I’m referring to here is one of my favorites: NetHack.

It’s a DnD style game where you venture into the Dungeons of Doom and search for treasure, adventure, and, if you’re good enough, immortality.

This game lacks something that most modern games do not: graphics. You’ll hear debates over whether good graphics make a big difference in the immersion factor of a game, but when playing this game, the arguments just don’t apply. There’s nothing but letters, numbers, punctuation, and the occasional IBM ASCII character.

This game is far too deep to cover in a single post (or in a hundred posts, for that matter) so let me say this: this game is fun, deep, HARD, and immensely replayable.

What it is not: forgiving. It’s brutal. Most games have some sort of save mechanism so you can play later or restart if you lose. No such luck here. While you can save the game for later, if you die then the game is over. You must start from the beginning. No continues. No more lives. Nothing.

I love this game, and have been playing it for years (I started in Jr. High, almost 10 years ago). During this time, I have finished it *once*. That was one of the most enthralling experiences I have had.

Are there any games that you feel this way about?

So my monitor came…

2009-07-02T00:09:00.001-06:00

And I love it.

It’s amazing how much bigger a 23” 1920x1080 monitor is than a 17” 1024x768 monitor. You just haven’t LIVED until you’ve played NetHack in FULL HD!

And yes, my desk is a mess. Thank you for noticing.

How much I love my Xbox 360 controller

2009-06-29T19:41:00.001-06:00

A lot.

I’ve never owned an Xbox or an Xbox 360 (though I did have an Xbox in my possession for long enough to beat a Splinter Cell game when my cousin went on his mission), so I’ve never really gotten into the whole Xbox culture. Most of my gaming is on portable consoles like my PSP or DS or on my computer.

For a long time I’ve had an adapter that lets my use one of my PS1/N64 controllers on my computer as a joystick, but just recently my Mad Catz PS1 controller finally died, so I bought an Xbox 360 for Windows Kit.

These kits are usually sold in the computer section of the store, and have a little dongle (I *love* that word) to connect the controller as well as a stock wireless 360 controller.

Because it’s the same controller that a 360 uses, I have a controller to use in case I end up buying a 360, and if it ever dies, I can replace it easily, with something identical.

One cool feature of this set is that I can add up to four controllers so I can have easy multiplayer on supported games.

If you are like me and you love using a controller when playing games, then I would definitely recommend getting one of these.

Props for the fix

2009-06-29T01:33:00.001-06:00

I gotta give props to this guy. He had the fix I needed to get that last post working. Apparently there’s a problem with Windows Live Writer and Blogger when you try to upload a picture with your blog. The solution is to create an album named “Windows Live Writer” in your Picasa account. Why does this work? Not sure, but I think it has something to do with the way Google handles their files.

http://hian-zuana.blogspot.com/2009/05/windows-live-writer-error-403-forbidden.html

Thanks, Peter.

I Wanna Be The Guy

2009-06-29T01:29:00.001-06:00

Ever played that game? Chances are that you haven’t. It’s a snarky satire on other video games, and it manages to be one of the toughest games I’ve ever played.

You play as a kid who is on a journey to become “The Guy”. It’s not clear from the beginning what this is, but it seems to be pretty epic, judging from the levels. You must navigate impossible rooms full of spikes, lasers, baddies, and bosses. This is made quite difficult by the fact that a single hit will kill you. No exceptions.

Your character is quite small. Here’s a comparison shot between you and the Bowser boss.

Since you’re so small, and your weapon shoots single pixels that do nothing to enemies (except really weak ones), you have to be creative on how you fight your way through things. Very rarely is a straight up fight the way to win. In fact, commonly you will want to run past enemies or wait for them to die.

This game is not really a standard game that I would recommend to someone to play for fun, but it is a blast to play if you don’t mind dying a lot and can handle tough scenarios.

Now if only I could beat Dr. Wily…

I’m a fool. Or am I?

2009-06-26T02:47:00.001-06:00

It’s interesting the way things work out, sometimes.

I love technology. That’s all there is to it. Unfortunately, my current job as an ice cream man is unfulfilling as far as my desires to work with tech go. The most technologically advanced item there is a freezer. Lame.

Now, I work as an assistant manager at the ice cream shop. This means that I work all sorts of hours, and I work most days. I open the shop in the morning on occasion, but most of the time I work at closing time. This means that I get home late, usually after 11:00pm.

Because I work late, I usually am up for a good portion of the night doing various activities on my computer, or playing games on one of my game systems. I spend a lot of time online, reading news on the latest tech and video games, or compulsively checking Facebook every 15 minutes to see if there’s a little red notification bubble in the corner yet.

Because I spend so much time on the computer, I have been wanting to upgrade my monitor for some time now. I am currently using a dual monitor setup with my laptop screen and some old Dell monitor I dug up a while ago. I ran into an HP monitor at Sams Club a while back and absolutely fell in love with it, so I have been looking at them as a replacement.

Here’s where I get into trouble. This isn’t a necessary expense.

Like I do with many things I might be interested in buying, I priced out the monitor I had my eye on, the HP w2338h. After shopping around, I found that I could get one for $239 + a $10 HDMI cable to use with it. I toyed around with it, added them all to my cart on NewEgg, got all dreamy eyed, and closed my browser and went to bed.

I wanted them, but I knew that it wasn’t to be (yet, anyway). Several days passed, and I was up late again after work. Tonight was special, because Microsoft just announced the pricing of Windows 7. They also announced that there would be a special deal on pre-orders, selling copies of the OS for half (or less!) price.

I am interested in this. I have been running the Windows 7 Release Candidate ever since my laptop got back from being repaired about a month ago. Let me be blunt in my assessment of the operating system. It. Rocks. Period.

I did my usual looking around and found that the OS was being offered for $50 on NewEgg (Home Premium). How could I pass that up? So I clicked to buy two copies. I am taken to my cart, and… BAM! There’s my monitor and HDMI cable that I had fantasized about.

It was too much.

*click* Proceed to checkout.

*click* Confirm order.

*click* You’re $350 poorer.

Wait a second… D’oh!

I’m not entirely mad about this, just disappointed in my ability to resist the temptation when it was presented to me. I really wanted everything on the list, and I was prepared to buy them.

Oh, and while I was writing this, I just got the “Newegg.com – Payment Charged” email. Silly me, silly me…

And that’s the tale of how I spent my Thursday night.

Still rating my songs…

2009-06-18T14:20:00.001-06:00

I’m still working on adding ratings to all my songs in my list. I am now down to 654 songs that still need a rating. I keep running into the problem where I’ll be rating songs and end up working on something else and I miss a few (dozen) songs. My systematic method of rating them is slow, but effective.

Am I the only one so obsessive about having everything just so in my music library?

Not Writing as often as I want to…

2009-06-15T00:34:00.001-06:00

I started this blog with the intention of writing (almost) daily in it, as a way to express my thoughts. However, I find that I am not writing as often as I want to. Here is a list of the reasons I am not writing as often as I want to:

1. I am busy. I know, this is kind of a lame excuse, but I have been quite busy lately with work. I still have time, so this is only half a reason.

2. I can’t get excited about the color scheme on my blog. I am currently using one of the default schemes provided by blogger. It’s not bad, but it’s so…generic. I want something with a bit more personality. That will help me feel like it really is *my* blog.

3. I’ve been playing a lot of video games. Yes, I know this is ultimate lame, but they’re what I’m interested in, and are (supposed to be) one of the topics I cover on the blog. The problem is that I started playing too many at the same time, and several of the ones I’m playing are rather involved RPGs, which seem specifically designed to eat HUGE chunks of time.

So there you have it. I plan to post more frequently in the future, but for now I’m going to try and simplify things on my end so I have the time and motivation to do this.

Music Ratings

2009-06-04T01:47:00.001-06:00

I have a fairly good sized music collection. I have about 4,000 songs, and a large portion of them are video game remixes or video game soundtracks.

Ever since I moved to Vista I have been using Windows Media Player to play my music. It used to be that I hated WMP, but suddenly it was no longer terrible once I had Vista. In fact, I have ceased using Winamp (my old favorite) altogether except to sync with my iPod.

The problem I have been having is that I want to have a rating (1-5 stars) on every song in my library. This is quite a task with so many songs, so what I did is to set up a playlist that had all the songs that did not yet have a rating and would systematically remove them as I gave them ratings. This ensured that I would not miss any songs, but it was not very… fast.

There’s no quick way to do this that I know of, because what I want is to tailor it to my tastes and enable auto-playlists based on rating.

*sigh* Only 900 more to go…

First post from Windows Live Writer

2009-05-31T05:21:00.001-06:00

This is my first post from Windows Live Writer. I came across this little tool in my pre-blog research, and I decided that I wanted to use it. It has a simple interface, but is really quite powerful. It does make me notice that I’m not a huge fan of my current color scheme. Oh well, one thing at a time, right?

This is really just a test post, but I find it difficult to just write the word “Test” for a post on something that people will actually be viewing.

Hello World!

2009-05-31T04:17:00.000-06:00

That seems like an appropriate title, given that I have interest in programming, and the first program that many novices (and experienced people, too , when learning a new language or platform) is often a program that will display the text "Hello World".

I'm new to the blogging game, and I have been meaning to jump in for some time now. It's just been a matter of getting past that intial hurdle of starting a blog. Now that I've done that, I need to figure this whole thing out. I really look forward to writing on a regular basis and sharing my thoughts with the world.

This blog will *probably* focus on my interests. That is, it will probably center on my love of all things technology, and my interest in video games. I may create another blog for my other interests, but for now I plan on lumping everything together for the sake of simplicity. Well, simplicity for me, not necessarily you, the reader. All in good time, friends.

I guess that's all for now, so until next time, (when I attempt to learn this blogger thing better) peace out.