I couldn't sleep last night, so I finished Super Mario Sunshine. It was great. The final battle was kind of easy, but then so were all of the major battles. There were some pretty frustrating parts towards the end (like navigating that damned boat in Corona Mountain, and The Goopy Inferno episode in Pianta Village), so I wasn't too disappointed that the parts surrounding them were only mildly challenging :) I remember there being a general sense of disappointment when this game first came out, something about gimmicky (nozzles) hippie (cleaning graffiti) crap... But it really is a fantastic game, and a worthy successor to Super Mario 64 (they're almost identical in terms of their core gameplay).
Anyway, I'm now on to Wario World, and I hafta say I'm kinda disappointed. I've been disappointed with just about every Wario game since Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land (save for the first WarioWare), but this one is a real departure from the original portable series. It's essentially a simplistic side-scrolling brawler with hints of exploration and puzzle solving. I've only completed the first section of the first area, but I think I've got a pretty good sense of where they're going with this. It's fun, but it doesn't look or feel particularly polished; definitely not in the way that Luigi's Mansion and Super Mario Sunshine are. Apparently it's quite short though, so that means I'll be able to get to Metroid Prime sooner :)
I like Firefox 3. I hear Opera 9.5 is quite good as well, but I've never been a big fan of the interface.
I learned a lot more about Xerox multifunction printers and managing them over a network than I ever expected to at work this week. Up next is consolidating our servers (decommissioning the old one) and internalizing our MX record.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
They found me!
Finished Assassin's Creed. I enjoyed the game quite a bit and can't wait to see what happens next in the story, but the gameplay did get pretty tired by the end. Then again, I saved every citizen, scaled every viewpoint, and completed every intelligence gathering mission (almost completely unnecessary to finish the game), so perhaps being less of a completist would've alleviated a lot of that repetitive feeling. It's interesting that at the outset I couldn't wait to get into the 1191 gameplay, but by the end I was pretty impatient with the 1191 setting and looking forward to new developments in the near-future setting... I guess that's effective at setting up sequels :)
I've now moved back to Dead Rising. That game frustrates me. It's unconventional in its design, so the learning curve is steep... Initially, I had a huge problem with missing side missions and dealing with the save system, but now I'm getting comfortable with the idea of focusing on the main mission, managing my time and resources within the unfamiliar limitations of the game, and bothering no further than is convenient with side missions. It's a sandbox-style game with some pretty huge limitations, and that kinda rubs me the wrong way... But this could still end up being fun. I just need to remind myself that I'm playing this game for the zombie-bashing experience rather than the story or the achievements.
Still devoting a lot of my time to unlocking characters in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2; 13 to go.
Found a copy of Panzer Dragoon Zwei yesterday... Finally :)
I also grabbed the free demo of the Spore Creature Creator. It's limited, but still fun. After seeing the creatures that some people out there have come up with though, I'm thinking this is a product that really appeals to children, visual artists, and perverts... And I'm none of those things. Hopefully the full game offers something I can really sink my teeth into.
Anyway, I was downloading a build of Debian over BitTorrent the other evening, and noticed things were moving pretty slowly... 30kB/s, to be exact. I'm pretty sure that's not 7Mb/s, so I tried a few other Torrents; same deal. It was fast again around 2:00am. Looks like Bell finally got around to throttling its customers in the newly fibre optic-ified neighbourhoods :\ So... Do I wait to see what comes of this, or switch to cable and hope for the best?
Finally, I figured out what's been wrong with my main PC! Looks like one set of the front USB ports on my case (I have two sets of two) is the culprit. I'd been keeping my XBOX 360 controller plugged into one of them, and keeping it unplugged for a month solved the problem. Plugging it back in this week had things acting funny again. I tried my iPod on the port just above that one (same motherboard connector), and got the same result. That's annoying.
I've now moved back to Dead Rising. That game frustrates me. It's unconventional in its design, so the learning curve is steep... Initially, I had a huge problem with missing side missions and dealing with the save system, but now I'm getting comfortable with the idea of focusing on the main mission, managing my time and resources within the unfamiliar limitations of the game, and bothering no further than is convenient with side missions. It's a sandbox-style game with some pretty huge limitations, and that kinda rubs me the wrong way... But this could still end up being fun. I just need to remind myself that I'm playing this game for the zombie-bashing experience rather than the story or the achievements.
Still devoting a lot of my time to unlocking characters in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2; 13 to go.
Found a copy of Panzer Dragoon Zwei yesterday... Finally :)
I also grabbed the free demo of the Spore Creature Creator. It's limited, but still fun. After seeing the creatures that some people out there have come up with though, I'm thinking this is a product that really appeals to children, visual artists, and perverts... And I'm none of those things. Hopefully the full game offers something I can really sink my teeth into.
Anyway, I was downloading a build of Debian over BitTorrent the other evening, and noticed things were moving pretty slowly... 30kB/s, to be exact. I'm pretty sure that's not 7Mb/s, so I tried a few other Torrents; same deal. It was fast again around 2:00am. Looks like Bell finally got around to throttling its customers in the newly fibre optic-ified neighbourhoods :\ So... Do I wait to see what comes of this, or switch to cable and hope for the best?
Finally, I figured out what's been wrong with my main PC! Looks like one set of the front USB ports on my case (I have two sets of two) is the culprit. I'd been keeping my XBOX 360 controller plugged into one of them, and keeping it unplugged for a month solved the problem. Plugging it back in this week had things acting funny again. I tried my iPod on the port just above that one (same motherboard connector), and got the same result. That's annoying.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Forgot how much fun MvC2 was...
New acquisitions: Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, Skies Of Arcadia, Resident Evil: Code Veronica (all for Dreamcast), and Wario Land 4.
I've almost completed Assassin's Creed. I'm about halfway through Memory Block 5 and the gameplay is really starting to drag here. The story's taken some really interesting twists leading up to this point, but the designers decided that throwing even more of the same tasks and enemies (because your character has apparently become quite well known to the enemy) was a good way to ramp up the difficulty... Yeah, not so much in an already repetitive game. Being noticed every 30 seconds and having to fend off ten enemies, while not particularly challenging, isn't exactly fun and organic; I've gone from a master stealth assassin to a street fighting swordsman... Wasn't the point of this whole experience to re-learn the value of subtlely? The game's still fun, but just a little less so now. The ending had better be worth it!
Speaking of worth it, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - Episode One was totally worth it :) It was a little easy and a touch repetitive, but it was fun throughout. The combat was great fun, the story was engrossing, the writing was top-notch, and there were a few real laugh out loud moments for me... Which are generally pretty rare.
Anyway, I've been learning my way around some rat's-nest of a dated Nortel phone system at work these days... I wonder if my predecessors - who designed and deployed the various networks here - even cared about what they were doing, or just wanted it to kinda work so they could do something else :\
I've almost completed Assassin's Creed. I'm about halfway through Memory Block 5 and the gameplay is really starting to drag here. The story's taken some really interesting twists leading up to this point, but the designers decided that throwing even more of the same tasks and enemies (because your character has apparently become quite well known to the enemy) was a good way to ramp up the difficulty... Yeah, not so much in an already repetitive game. Being noticed every 30 seconds and having to fend off ten enemies, while not particularly challenging, isn't exactly fun and organic; I've gone from a master stealth assassin to a street fighting swordsman... Wasn't the point of this whole experience to re-learn the value of subtlely? The game's still fun, but just a little less so now. The ending had better be worth it!
Speaking of worth it, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - Episode One was totally worth it :) It was a little easy and a touch repetitive, but it was fun throughout. The combat was great fun, the story was engrossing, the writing was top-notch, and there were a few real laugh out loud moments for me... Which are generally pretty rare.
Anyway, I've been learning my way around some rat's-nest of a dated Nortel phone system at work these days... I wonder if my predecessors - who designed and deployed the various networks here - even cared about what they were doing, or just wanted it to kinda work so they could do something else :\
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