A few weeks ago, I pirated Lost Planet. The first few minutes of gameplay sucked so bad that I uninstalled it and deleted the ISO. It was a 7 gig download, and I'd heard good things about it, so I was sure I was going to give it a chance, but those few minutes of gameplay were just so repulsive it was like being tortured. Oh, yeah, it looked okay, graphically, but the gameplay was horrible.

I also got Stalker, the Chernobyl something or other. It seems kinda cool, a quest-based FPS that plays like an RPG. Unlike Bioshock, the game's not playable at the lower graphical settings, so I repeatedly died without knowing why. Basically, if you don't have a top-end computer, don't get this game. While it seems like a cool game, I can't play it, so it was another wasted download. I guess I'm lucky that Bioshock works as well as it does at the lower settings because I actually bought that one.

The other day I pirated is Two Worlds. Like Stalker, my computer does not run this game well. I could probably turn the settings down a lot, but on this game probably wasn't meant to be played with the keyboard and mouse. This game definitely feels like a console RPG (although not of the Final Fantasy variety). I didn't get very far in this one either, mostly due to all the clunky animation and really bad cinematic-like scenes. The first quest also made a really bad impression on me. You start off in an underground temple-like building, and it looks pretty cool, but all you do is open a gate, hit two things with a sword, open a door, and walk out. Seriously, I finished the quest within 5 seconds of learning what the goal was (I had to skip the opening cinematic, it was just so very bad). While it might be fun gameplay-wise, it was ruined by its artistic direction. You can't have bad artistic direction in an RPG. It's part of the game. Still, were I playing it on a 360, it might be fun just to run around the world, take in the sights, and kill things. Kinda like how in Grand Theft Auto you spend most of the time not actually following the quests, although GTA is a lot better for that sort of thing.

Since I'm quite bored, I'm going to go into something that's a mix of modern and old-school gaming.

I got one of those pirate carts for my DS, the R4 (I'll post a link when I can find one). It's one of the Slot 1 ones, where you don't need extra equipment to run it, and it uses MicroSD memory for storage which you can buy at most any electronics store, so upgrading the memory is really easy. Also, because it's legal, you get to go through less shady of dealers to buy it. The place I got mine doesn't seem to carry them anymore, else I'd link them for you.

Now, when I got my R4, I immediately loaded as many DS games on it as I could. I got it with the 1GB card, which I quickly realized isn't enough to carry the entire collection. However, upon trying out various DS games, I realized why I wasn't buying DS games. There aren't many good ones. So, I figured I'd just go get some emulators and play emulator games. While looking for the emulators, almost none of which work very well (if at all), I found a wealth of other stuff that was just as rewarding.

The two most important things I found were Lemmings DS and ScummVM. Lemmings DS is just the original Lemmings game for the Amiga ported over to the DS and modified to utilize both the dual screens and the touchpad. While there does seem to be a problem with the lemmings not taking commands sometimes (which I can mostly get around using the zoom feature), it is otherwise a flawless transition and plays beautifully. There are a lot of games you used to love back in the day that when you go back and play now you think "Ugh, I can't play this," but Lemmings is not one of them. It's as fun on the DS as it was back then on my PC.

ScummVM gets a new paragraph. This program allows you to play old LucasArts (and some others) PC games on your DS. I saw that it worked up to Sam & Max Hit The Road, which was coincidentally the DOS game I most wanted to get working on my DS. Since there isn't a port of DOSBox for the DS yet (at least, not that I know of), I was very happy to see that I would get to play the ol' Sam & Max on the DS after all. The only real drawback to playing it on the DS is that you don't get the mouse cursor icon change when mousing over items. This makes the game a little tougher than it used to be, and I've had to consult an online guide a couple times. It doesn't feel like cheating since I beat the game back in '94 when it was new, but it has been a while since then.

I got a NES emulator that works pretty well for my DS. I've tried a few SNES emulators, but none of them worked very well. I don't think I found a Genesys emulator, so my hopes of playing Herzog Zwei and the first two Langrisser games are on hold for now. Well, Herzog Zwei is only fun against a human opponent, anyway, but I did want to play Warsong once more after all these years.

I found a few more homebrewn apps for the DS. One's just a graphic of drums, and when you tap a drum it plays the appropriate drum sound. However, the real champion of the DS as far as music goes is Nitrotracker. It's not a game, mind you, it's an actual music composition program. All things considered (free, DS, homebrewn), it's pretty damn good. I composed a little something on it just for fun, but I wouldn't share that little something with the likes of you (it's pretty crappy, I just wanted to use the program and I didn't have any samples, so I composed it out of whatever I recorded with the DS microphone). It does allow you to record samples using the DS microphone, so if you don't have any samples handy, you can just record some and compose a song of whatever crappy audio the DS mic picked up.

The homebrewn DS application arena definitely has some room for improvement, and many people have already laid the foundation for its development with things such as DSLinux and some Windows-type front-end that doesn't seem to currently do much. There's also a media player. I haven't gotten it to play any videos yet, but it does allow the DS to double as an MP3 player. What I'm really hoping is that DOSBox gets ported over so I can play more old DOS games, and also something like Exult so that I can play Ultima 7 on the DS. People were saying that the DS doesn't have enough memory to run Ultima 7, but I recall its minimum requirements being 4 megs of RAM, which the DS has. I'm sure the DS has other resources that weren't available back then that could be utilized as well (maybe even using a swapfile on the flash memory?).

Anyway, returning to an earlier point, my pirate cart now has more homebrewn stuff on it than it does DS games. The more I check out the homebrewn scene, the less room I have for pirated DS games.

That's all for this week. Tune in next time as...

I've been trying out different cereals recently. I got tired of eating Grape Nuts every day. I've since tried Quaker Oatmeal Squares, Fiber One Honey Clusters, Honey Nut Cheerios (although I only got those because it was 2:00am and they had it at the Apple Jacks alternative that wasn't good, Good Friends, several Kashi cereals I don't remember the name of, and more recently several Malt-O-Meal cereals, and Golden Grahams. Of all these cereals, Golden Grahams has the highest percentage of sugar in it. Maybe this is why it gets soggy within 5 seconds of contact with milk. The Malt-O-Meal cereals are good taste-wise, and really good cost-wise ($1/box), but all they've got in the Cinnamon Toast Crunch rip-off, the Honey Nut Cheerios rip-off, the Crunchberries rip-off, and one other one I don't remember nor have tried. At least, that's all the local Shoppers Food carries (they kinda suck for selection, actually).

But to get back to it, Golden Grahams get soggy at hyper speeds. It's ridiculous. My brother long ago taught me a trick to keeping your cereal from getting soggy, but it's not working with the Golden Grahams. The trick is, you pour the milk first, then put some cereal into the bowl. You eat that, then put more cereal in. You put small amounts of cereal in so you can finish them off before they get soggy. Unfortunately, Golden Grahams get soggy in under five seconds. I can't eat that fast! I used to think that Crispix got soggy the fastest of all cereals, which is ironic considering they used to run commercials about how it didn't get soggy in milk *cough*falseadvertising*cough*. But now I know that Golden Grahams is it. Maybe there's a cereal that gets soggy faster that I haven't heard of yet.

I think the choice to go with sweetened cereals originated with my switch to soy milk. I've tried going back to cow milk and eating Grape Nuts again, but they're just so bland that I can't get back into that. This coupled with my lack of daily excersizes again has been making me a bit softer than I care to be. I need to start excersizing again.

I've noticed that a lot of cereals have a higher sugar content than many candies and cookies. I got some chocolate chip cookies out of a vending machine that were 20% sugar, and yet I've had numerous cereals that are over 30% sugar. I think parents need to really look out for that. There are some great-tasting cereals that are low in sugar.

I recently got the Cheerios berry thing that has the dehydrated strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries in it. The dehydrated fruits are not treated with sugar, which makes the cereal an interesting experience. I've only had one bowl of it so far, which didn't give me much of an impression, but the first thing I did when I got it home was I busted open the box, grabbed some of the dehydrated fruit out of it, and ate it. I wanted to see what it was like. It was very sour. I was also surprised that they weren't sweetened, which was a pleasant surprise. It's got me thinking that I should try some dehyrdrated fruit. You know, you can't carry around regular fruit for very long before it goes bad. I was thinking I might eat the dehydrated fruit like you would eat candy. It might be good.

Well, enough of this incoherrence. It's getting close to go-home time. Until next time... um... yeah.

So I didn't mention some of the bad things about Bioshock in my previous post. One of the things I'm hoping will be fixed soon is the subtitle timing. I turn on dialogue subtitles because, with the music and sound effects, I have a hard time understanding what people are saying. The timing on the subtitles is too fast, so the words come up in text before the people are actually saying them. It gets pretty bad to the point where the dialogue you're reading on the screen won't be heard for another minute or so. Also, I'm not actually reading the words while they're being spoken. Instead, if I can't understand them, I'll look down to see what it was they said. Since what's on the screen is ahead of what's being spoken, I can't do that with Bioshock. This is obviously a bug, so once that's fixed my major gripe with the game will be no more. Seriously, far and away that's my #1 problem with the game.

Here's another problem: The first level kinda sucks (at least in comparison to what I was expecting from these guys). The second level kinda sucks, too. Now, you'd kinda expect the first level to kinda suck since it's introductory, but the second level's just kinda dull. The game really starts to pick up on the third level, and then takes off after that. It makes sense why they introduce things slowly over time to you, because otherwise it would be rather overwhelming. While the game starts out like a regular FPS, it becomes more of a hybrid as it progresses. The first couple levels you're pretty much just shooting things. After that, combat starts to get kinda crazy, and you have to keep everything straight to pull through. Also, the first couple levels you barely get any abilities, but afterwards you start getting a lot of them, and you've got limited capacity for abilities, so you've got to choose which one's you've got. Fortunately, you can change which abilities you're using at these... gene stations (I forgot what they're called). There's not many of them, but it's not a really big deal to change them, although it's a rare scenario where you can go "Oh, I really need that other ability, I'll just go equip it now and come back to this." But, as I started this paragraph, you don't get a feel for any of that in the first level. What sucks about that is that the first level is the demo level. If they're not going to have the cool abilities and such in the first level, they do really need to have flash and dazzle in it. They don't have much of that, either. The first minute has flash and dazzle, but after that, there's not much until the third level.

Now, when I'm talking about levels, the game really is tiered into levels, although you can usually return to previous levels without any trouble, so if you missed anything you can go back and pick it up. However, so far it's still level-based, and unless you missed something, there's never a reason to go back. What's good about it though is that it's not linear. It is in the beginning, but as you go, each level is more and more expansive and less and less linear. So while you're going level to level, how you handle the order of events in each level is somewhat up to you. It's not completely open-ended, but it's still pretty open. What I really like is how it starts giving you options in how you handle situations.

So, like I said, it starts out as basically a slightly non-standard FPS. You walk around and shoot things. There's a few extra things early on, like shooting lightning at a broken control panel to open a door, or shooting fire at ice to melt it, but there's not much to it. Now, you've got limited slots for abilities, and at first you barely get enough abilities to fill them. Later on, you've got a lot more abilities than slots, so you have to really pick which abilities you want to use. You can buy more slots with the genetic monetary unit "Adam", but you can also use that to buy other abilities, or upgrades to existing abilities. I upgraded my lightning attack because the stuns were too short for some situations. In fact, I'll explain a combat scenario involving that to you. Keep in mind, there isn't really a "typical" combat scenario later in the game. Onto the next paragraph.

I'm in a hallway that's kinda like a miniature mall. Down the hallway, a room opens to the right. I'm going to assign directions to things now. Let's say the hallway's running north. On the southern wall of the room at the end, there's a security camera. If the security camera sees me, it'll send flying machine gun bots after me. In the northeast corner of the room, behind some kind of small obstruction so we can't see each other when I first enter the room, there's a machine gun bot. These track motion of enemies and shoot at what moves. Both the security camera and machine gun bot can be hacked and changed to work for me. The security camera you just have to sneak up on, but the machine gun needs to be disabled before you can hack it. You can disable it by hitting it with the lightning attack. That'll disable it for only a few seconds (which wasn't always enough time, hence the upgrade I got to extend the duration). Also in the room is a couple splicers, which are your generic bad guys. So that's the scenario I'm about to walk into. In a normal FPS, you would walk into the room and shoot everything. In this game, I'm going to walk into the room and shoot only one thing. Onto the next paragraph.

I know when the camera is looking my way by the light it shines on the ground, so I wait until it looks the other way. I run into the room along the southern wall and get under the security camera so it can't see me when it turns back. While running, I turn to my right and zap the machine gun bot with lightning as it starts up (you can hear it warm up before it shoots, which gives you about 2 seconds of warning, which is enough). I look up and hack the security camera. While hacking, all else freezes in time, so I don't have to worry about the splicers or machine gun thing during the process. I get that hacked, and now it sends security bots after my enemies instead of after me. I jump over a countertop and quickly get to the machine gun bot before the lightning stun wears off, and then I hack that so it shoots at my enemies instead of me. Then I hide. I didn't attack the splicers, so as long as something else attacks them, they'll go after whatever that is instead of me. Of course, the machine gun bot starts shooting them, so they go after that. I just need to stay out of the line of fire. The security camera also sees them, and in fly two flying machine gun bots which also start shooting them. With bullets flying everywhere, I'm just trying to stay out of the line of fire until the splicers are dead. Then, there's more splicers outside. I go run up to them so they see me, but I don't attack. Instead, I bring them back into that room and hide behind the machine gun bot, which combined with the flying bots, quickly takes them down. So I've eliminated 6 enemies after firing only one shot. Yeah, I'd say it's different from an FPS at this point. It's more like an action strategy RPG, which is good, because that's what I signed up for when I bought the game.

That's actually one of the less complex combat situations you get into later in the game. They can get a lot more complicated, especially when you start involving the Big Daddies. Also, one of the RPG elements is the Research Camera. You take pictures of enemies with it, and it automatically researches them, giving you damage bonuses against them, and occasionally passive upgrades, some of which you don't have to equip so you don't have to use one of your precious slots to use it, you just get it.

Well, that's enough for now. I think I've covered Bioshock well enough now, so I'll move onto other topics next post.

So I picked up Bioshock the other day. I installed it, ran it, and played it. For some reason my internet decided to stop working the instant I installed it, which was unfortunate because it has to connect to the Internet at the end of installation, and if it can't, it backs out of the entire installation. That really pissed me off. Why'd it have to go and remove the 4-5 gigs of data it had copied over just because it couldn't load the release patch? It took a good 10-20 minutes to copy that over, and it was a process I was not happy to repeat.

So I got the game up and running after restoring Intertron access to my computer. Saw the flying logos that it starts with, which are less than stellar. Then there's the menu. I immediately know something is amiss when the mouse cursor lags. I later come to realize that my computer is in no shape to run this game. Fortunately, they allow you to turn a lot of settings down to the point where the game is playable on my computer. It doesn't look anywhere near as nice as it should, but I'm more there for the game than the pretty pictures. Later I'm going to look up hacks to improve performance, because it's still less than pleasant. I would love to see the game on a performance monster computer. I'm not so jazzed about seeing it on the 360, though. I want me some high-res Bioshock goodness.

From a gameplay perspective, so far it plays more like an FPS than System Shock 2 did. It's more SS2 than it is Quake 4, but it's still more of an FPS than I was imagining it to be. There's still the elements of hacking and customization, although so far not to the level there was before. The levels also feel very linear so far, but I'm still in the beginning of the game, so there's still hope that it expands out.

I can't say much about the gameplay having only given it a few hours so far, but I will talk some about the setting. It really has that 1930's and 1940's feel. It takes place in 1960, but it doesn't feel 60's-ish. Well, I guess 1960 didn't feel 60's-ish, either, so I guess it should feel more 50's-ish, although Rapture must've been built earlier, and considering the age of the character who built it, the time feel is rather appropriate. Then there's the whole matter of the city being entirely underwater. Now, being at the bottom of the ocean, you migth think "What would happen if parts collapsed, or it started leaking?" Well, that starts happening in the first 10 minutes of gameplay, so you pretty well get to see the effects of that. Quite exciting moments of gameplay there, I must say. I'm currently in the Medical Pavilion, and it feels a lot like Half Life 2 for the moment, although I expect much greater things about 2 more hours into it. Prior areas of the game really do draw you into the whole old city underwater vibe, though.

Then, of course, there's the whole horror element. There are some scenes that are pretty freaky. There's one scene involving a large television that's supposed to creep you out, but fails when you realize those guys that come out to get you are behind glass and you don't have to fight them. Kinda disappointing there. I'm sure the game is a lot spookier with a more powerful machine. I've got all these special effects turned off, so it still looks computerized, which removes a lot of the spookiness. As far as overall spooky levels, so far it doesn't live up to System Shock 2. That game had a lot of good spookiness right up front. Bioshock seems to favor the retro feel and mood of desperation over the feel of isolation and spookiness.

Overall, I'd say it's a game worth the purchase. If you're in the market for a new game and you've got either a 360 or a well-powered PC, and you don't hate FPS games, then it's something you're going to want to get. I mean, it's a single-player game, and I bought it instead of pirated it. That should say something about it.

Somehow I forgot to mention, when I was talking about new albums the other day, that I also got the new Rush album, Snakes & Arrows. I got it after I saw them in concert in June. This year's concert wasn't as good as the 2004 one, particularly the first set. Fortunately the 2nd set was madd kick-ass so it was still worth the money, time, and effort to go. I don't go to many concerts, but I'm getting used to Nissan Pavilion. Almost every concert I've been to has been there. I'm really glad Disney scrapped their idea for a theme park there.

So while looking up Nissan Pavilion on Wikipedia, I see there's word that it will be closing this year so homes can be developed there... Somehow that strikes me as a poor business decision.

Alright, I'm going to put some Wikipedia links in the posts that are still on this page. I should've been doing it all along, but I been lazy.

It's not that I don't have an interesting life. I do. At least, I think I do. It's just that I don't read people's blogs about their day-to-day lives, and I don't feel the need to subject anyone to something I wouldn't read... which, now that I think about it, leaves little ground for me to cover. I'm not big on reading.

So Bioshock comes out Tuesday, as I'm sure anyone who will pick it up that day knows. I don't buy a lot of games. I haven't bought a game in a good long while. The last game I bought was either Burning Crusade or Portrait of Ruin. I'm going to say the Castlevania game's the safer bet, because Burning Crusade isn't actually a game, it's just extra content for an existing game. The next game I buy will be Bioshock, which comes out Tuesday. This is made by (some of) the people who brought us System Shock 2 so many years ago. I remember being completely enthralled by the original System Shock, which I consider to be barely playable today. System Shock 2 fixed pretty much everything that sucked about the first one, and is still a joy to play today. If you never played it before, you should either be able to pick it up for $5 somewhere, or, if that avenue is unavailable, pirate it. It's worth the money/effort combined, so doing just one should prove quite rewarding. I don't think I want to put down the time and effort to pirate Bioshock, so I'll be buying it. Even though my WoW account doesn't expire until next month, I feel that I'm already in the market for a new game.

Bioshock will essentially be much like System Shock only in an underwater city instead of a space station. The location would of course include the fact that there's lots of water. Much like System Shock, something's gone wrong, and you have to figure out what. At least, that's what I'm assuming from what I've heard. I honestly don't know much about the game except who made it, but that's enough for me. If they felt it was good enough to put "shock" in the name, it's probably good enough for me to buy.

The game is also on XBox 360, which I can't imagine having fun playing it on. But, then, people seem to really like Halo and Gears of War, so... yeah. I was actually considering getting an XBox 360, because Mass Effect will be on it, as will Dead or Alive Xtreme 2. For the latter, they've taken "volleyball" off the name because they've added other games to it, thus removing the large focus on volleyball. That and the improved graphics make me drool. I think there's a new character or two as well. As much as I can praise Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for giving me a fantasy-generating game, I would probably give more of my soul to Mass Effect, which is brought to us by the wonderful Canadian doctors at Bioware. What I'm hoping, though, is that Mass Effect will come to the PC. I know DoAE2 won't, but there's a chance Mass Effect will, as Jade Empire eventually did. Mass Effect is another one of those games where all you need to know about it is who made it, and that's enough to justify buying it. With the exception of Neverwinter Nights, Bioware hasn't let me down yet.

The sad story for PS3 owners is that Grand Theft Auto 4 has been pushed back to next year so they can gimp the game so that it'll run on an XBox 360 sans hard drive. This really sucks to me. Not only is it coming out later, but they're making it worse so a few retards can buy it. Seriously, they should just put on the box "requires hard drive". At least they shouldn't gimp the PS3 version. They should have the good PS3 version and the gimped 360 version. At least Metal Gear Solid 4, which has also been delayed, will not have this same problem, as it will not be on any other system. Of course, the problem with that is... who owns a PS3? I know one guy who owns one, and he lives a good 20-30 miles away, and in the city, where traffic sucks, so I have to take the train to his place. All in all, it's a good hour-long trip to his place. Hopefully by the release of these two games, someone more local to me will own a PS3 so I can go over to their place and experience what is sure to be incredible games. Oh, and Little Big Planet was also delayed to next year. I don't know what to make of that one. I'll just have to play it to see if it would've been worth getting excited about.

Dragon Age, which is made by Bioware (remeber them, the Mass Effect guys?), still doesn't seem to have any sort of projected release date. It's been in development for quite a few years. To put it in perspective, it won Best of Show at E3 2004. Yes, 2004. I don't know what's keeping them, but the game damn well better kick ass.

More coming soon! Yay video games!

Well, it's been quite a long time since I made a post. I think this is the longest I've gone without posting anything. I remember years ago when I had planned to have so much content on this site that people would want to come here. I started to add it, but then I stopped adding stuff. It wasn't intentional, it just didn't happen. I guess it was laziness. I've been too lazy to go back and add it. I had plans for this site. I'm not sure if I remember them anymore.

Just an update on me. I've still got a girlfriend. I've still got this job. That's about it for me. From Sept 14th until the next expansion comes out, I'll be off World of Warcraft. It just kinda got boring. No interesting content. When the expansion comes out there'll be new stuff to keep me interested for a while, but until then...

Seeing as that I'm running out of stuff to do, I'll probably start posting again. I don't know if I'm going to do any more convention reports like the big 3 I did before (two for Katsu and one for AMA), but I hope to start posting again. Maybe then I'll get traffic that's not spiders again. I'm sure that by now all my regulars have stopped coming by. I can't blame them, there hasn't been anything new in 4 months. That's a long time to keep checking. I wouldn't keep checking if I were them.

The new Die Hard was entertaining, although the scene with the plane was bit... well, dumb. Transformers had its problems, but overall it was entertaining enough and didn't bastardize the franchise like some movies have done to their subject materials.

I got the new Tori Amos album, American Doll Posse last night. I didn't know there was one, I just kinda stumbled upon it. It has a lot of songs. I also got the Sting album that came out last year, Songs from the Labyrinth. I only listened to one track as of yet. It sounded like old Medieval party music. It seems appropriate for Sting. Earlier in the year I got the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, back when it really was new. I haven't heard much of it (all these new albums just get assimilated into the playlist and I'll hear new songs as they're randomly selected), but what I've heard is good. I also got the new Kula Shaker album, Strangefolk. From what I've heard of that, it's as good as their previous stuff, which is good times. I can't honestly recommend the new Tori album, but the other three should provide a good listen.

My cousin Daniel got me into Flight of the Conchords, a folk parody duo from New Zealand. You can find their stuff on Youtube and I highly recommend that you do. They've actually been around for a while, but this past June saw the start of their TV show on HBO. I haven't seen much of the show, but their old live performances are great. My favorites are Humans Are Dead and Jenny. They've got an EP and live album or two out, and there's a studio album expected next year.

That's all I've got for now. Hopefully I'll actually to continue posting this time. I don't see what else I'm going to do at work.