Seven Random Characters

Portal 2

2012-01-28T01:57:00.000-05:00

So over the holidays, I picked up Portal 2. There's actually a not-so funny story regarding this. In the days before the Steam Holiday Gift Pile started, Portal 2 went on sale. I bought it then. Then the Holiday Gift Pile starts. The first free task was "check your inventory". So I check it and what to I get? Portal 2. I later gifted it to a friend. Then on the very last day, where you could only get Valve stuff, guess what... I got Portal 2.

Anyway.

With any sequel, it's natural to be worried that they fucked it up. Generally there's less of that worry with Valve, and it shows plain as day here. Portal 2 retains all the core gameplay elements you knew and loved from the original. As an additional layer of cake (with some icing), they added a bunch more gameplay mechanics for us to use while solving puzzles. A small list of them includes Aerial Faith Plates, Hard Light Bridges, and three gels that do various things with the surfaces you splatter them on. In other words, Portal 2 is how a sequel should be done.

Portal 2 is much longer than the original as well. I recall thinking "okay, it looks like I'm almost done", only to have the game continue. I thought at first that it just felt tacked on until a few levels later when it all made sense and I realized that the game was really just beginning when I thought it was about to end.

At the beginning, you're introduced to a rather hilarious personality sphere named Wheatley. Eventually you get to leave the room you're in and you end up in a wonderful throwback to the original Portal. It's been some time since Portal took place, and the test chambers you go through certainly look like they've aged. Wall/ceiling tiles are strewn about the floor, it's beginning to get overgrown, and some of the doors are malfunctioning. It really makes you feel like the portion of the facility that the original took place in was just a small portion of what Aperture Science had available.

If that wasn't enough, it becomes readily apparent how massive the testing facility is when you get to the second third of the game where you learn about the Aperture Science backstory and go through some chambers that are done in an entirely different graphical style.

It's clear that they paid a lot of attention to the overall graphical feel of each section of the game as well as the puzzle design and overall gameplay.

With the core gameplay having remained the same, it should come as no surprise that the controls remain entirely identical to those of Portal. It's still just you and your portal gun solving puzzles, putting boxes on buttons, etc. This is a good thing, because it makes the controls tutorial a lot shorter this time around and let them focus on designing puzzles, scenes, and every other aspect of the game.

There are some new elements that enhance the controls and gameplay, though, and help quite a bit. If you middle click, or use your scroll wheel, you will zoom in and out, which helps when you're trying to place a portal on a far-away surface. The game gives you hints to use it on multiple occasions. The graphical enhancement is being able to see your portals through other surfaces, so you know exactly where they are.

In addition to the much longer single player, there's also co-operative multiplayer, which I have yet to see. However, I've seen videos of it. Basically, you and a friend can team up to solve chambers that require two players' worth of portals.

To satiate metagaming needs, there are plenty of achievements this time around. I instinctively started knocking cameras off of walls as soon as I had the portal gun, but Camera Shy is and forever will be limited to the original game. Its replacement is Smash TV, where you have to smash TV screens in the later levels of the game. A couple of them require dying, which meant that I didn't get them until after I'd beaten the game.

Overall...

I came.

Adventures in Anime Name That Tune

2012-01-27T01:52:00.000-05:00

CAINE played Name That Tune at last night's meeting. We've played it for the past couple of years, but this one was a bit different from the rest. The first year we didn't have teams, it was everyone for themselves, and there was a qualifier round to get in and a bracket from then on. The second year we were divided up into teams randomly. This year, we essentially got to pick our teams.

This led to the inevitable creation of the superteam. Which I so happened to be on. Partway through they even split one of us off, but we still managed to win.

For whatever reason I got my idea in first for our team name and we ended up being Namako Team. If you don't get it, go watch Azumanga Daioh. It's okay, I'll wait.

Back? Good.

I facepalmingly missed a few songs including the first K-ON!! ED and the Shinryaku! Ika Musume ED, but made up for it when I got the tiebreaker on the Azumanga Daioh ED because I knew the title, artist, and composer. This actually made up for a fail of mine two years ago where I completely blanked on the very same song in the finals.

Overall we discovered that the annoying kid actually knows some music, and that the other annoying kid only got like three songs and was forced to STFU for most of the night, which was much welcomed.

The prizes were kind of crap but I ended up taking Finger Bowling. It's basically a tiny set of bowling pins and two balls. Yeah.

YouTube Video Comment Breakdown

2012-01-23T20:29:00.002-05:00

In my experience both as a video uploader and as a regular user of YouTube, comments on videos generally fall into easily distinguished categories. I'm attempting to list them all here along with the typical reasons why they're posted and anything else related, but the list is by no means complete or statistically supported.

FIRST - typically multiple of these early on by different people, may or may not be deleted by video uploader
SECOND - fewer of these, but it does happen
Nth view - practically every popular video
30Xth view - YouTube video view counts freeze around the 300 mark for whatever reason, so people who think they're witty post about it
N views and GREATER_THAN_N comments - people not understanding that one person can make multiple comments on a single page load (thanks to AJAX)
Under 30Xth view club - elitist faggots
Joke related to video about the number of dislikes that it has - people who think they're clever
GAMEPLAY_HINT, thumbs up so he can see - on Let's Plays
USELESS_GAMEPLAY_HINT - typically left by people who haven't watched the complete video yet and don't see that the player actually does what's in question later in the video
GAMEPLAY_HINT (left recently on a weeks/months/older old video in an LP series) - idiots
Thumbs up if you agree on X issue - people trying to whore thumbs up to make the "Top Comments" section
Watched in 240p/360p/480p/"No HD?" - impatient faggots, also might be combined with "thumbs up if you watched before HD" or something similar
Comments about ads - people too lazy to install ad blockers
This wouldn't load on my phone - smartphone users
What did you use to make this video? - once every few videos per Let's Play, can be asking about capture software or editing software
Questions about game configuration - Fairly common in any given LP series
Random comment that sparks a flame war - trolls
Heated replies to random comment that sparked the flame war - idiots
Now I need to find TROLL's comment - everyone else, may also be in the form of "thumbs up if you searched through the comments for TROLL's comment"
Quote something in the video - useless comments go!
Asking a question that's answered in an annotation or in the video description - unobservant idiots
I AM UNSUBSCRIBING BECAUSE OF X ISSUE - attention whores
Generic comment that basically says to everyone who reads it that the poster didn't actually watch the video - idiots
random link to someone else's channel - channel promotion spam
Meaningful comments - depends on the video, but typically a lower percentage than all the rest of the above crap

Adventures in Guitar Hero Lag Calibration

2012-01-21T04:35:00.000-05:00

So all this time, I've been playing Guitar Hero on an old Commodore 1702 CRT monitor. I've basically sworn by CRTs for rhythm games for one crucial reason: no lag. Every LCD, plasma, etc. ever has lag that makes the game unplayable.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band are two of surprisingly few games that include a lag calibration utility. However, I've never had much luck with it. Up until last night.

At our usual game night we have on Fridays, I was trying to get GH Van Halen going on a friend's LCD monitor. I calibrated the lag, it came up with 52ms for video and 0ms for audio. I go and play a song, and it's still lagged. Such has generally been the situation for quite a while, that no matter what the video lag calibration setting is set to, it makes no god damn difference.

On a hunch, I set the audio lag calibration setting to 52ms and reset the video to 0ms. Played a song, and bam, perfect calibration.

Basically, how I think it works, is the video lag calibration setting uselessly adjusts the length of the timing windows to let you hit the notes later. This is because the audio and the video aren't desynced, they're just shifted so that the notes aren't where they should be relative to the audio. Setting your calibration this way lets you strum when you hear the note, but the physical representation of the note onscreen will have gone by the line at the bottom by the time this happens. This is massively disconcerting to me, because I'm used to strumming when the note hits the line. The other alternative is to strum when the note hits the line. This places you on the very leading edge of the timing window, essentially, making it very easy to drop notes that you thought you had hit. It also doesn't feel right, because you strum the note and then you hear it played.

So to summarize that paragraph: video lag calibration is useless.

The audio lag calibration works by shifting the audio so that it's essentially ahead of the note track, so that with the video lag induced by the screen the notes will play when you're supposed to strum them. This makes a fuckload more sense than simply tacking extra time onto the tail end of the timing windows.

So basically, any GH game without audio lag calibration is unplayable on anything other than a CRT. This would be GH1, GH2, GH80s, GH3, and possibly GH:A, at least on PS2. For the internet-supported consoles (360, etc.) the earlier games have the audio lag calibration patched in...

What I'd love to see is a console with a global lag calibration utility that it applies to all games. Because the lag isn't only there for just rhythm games.

Game review facelift

2012-01-15T20:51:00.002-05:00

If you've read, or have tried to read, any of my game reviews up until now, you'll know that they're mostly unorganized messes that ramble on and on and shift from one topic to another and back to the first.

I'm trying to change that. It's going to take a bit more time to write each one, but that's a good thing. I was essentially just crapping each one out as fast as I could write it before, acknowledging the structural problems present but not really feeling like devoting the time necessary to fix them.

Hopefully, with my new organizational practice I'm adopting, I won't have to fix structural problems because there won't be any to begin with. This mostly means I'll actually be properly outlining them and putting comments about the same aspect of a game (graphics, controls, gameplay, etc.) together.

With the added overhead time to properly organize each review, maybe I can also get in the habit of putting some screenshots of the game in question in the review, if possible. It's not as possible for PS2 games seeing as I don't really want to have to try and run PS2 games on an emulator just to grab a screenshot of whatever I'm talking about, but for PC games and games for older home consoles that are more easily emulated, it's a lot easier to do.

Also, I might try my hand at actually avoiding run-on sentences. My posts read much like they're being spoken out loud, because English speech hardly ever abides by every single rule of its grammar, and run-on sentences are one of the most common things in speech.

Hopefully all of this extra effort should make my reviews and the rest of my posts better.

Also, in typical fashion, I didn't outline this post at all, or take into consideration any of the writing style adjustments I spoke about. Yay!

Winter Season Anime

2012-01-13T22:24:00.000-05:00

So of everything airing, I thought about watching a grand total of six titles. I've actually watched three of them so far.

Aquarion EVOL - CAINE watched the original not too long ago. The first episode seems up to par with what the original had, plus its own theme of keeping male and female pilots separate for whatever reason. I've heard some people WTF at the 12000 year time difference, but if you've seen the original series, it makes sense. In addition to being about the fight against extraterrestrials that are abducting masses of people on a regular basis, its other major theme is peoples' identities in past lives. So basically, watch it for the mecha, random drama with peoples' powers, and orgasmic gattai.

Kill Me Baby - The comedy of this season, pretty much. I'm tempted to say "Nichijou with assassins", and that's after only one episode. It's pretty funny, though I'd rank it a bit below Nichijou in the grand scheme of things. But then again, it's unfair to compare anything else to Nichijou. Regardless, it's funny, and I'll keep watching.

Mouretsu Pirates - Basically, a girl finds out that her father was a space pirate and that she must succeed him now that he's died. It seemed a bit slow-paced for a show like this, given that it's more than one episode she quite obviously joins up with the pirates, but normally that kind of thing happens partway through the first episode. The OP and ED both show her wearing the pirate getup, so it's plainly obvious where the series is going. Regardless, it seems interesting. Might swap out for one of the other titles I'd considered, I dunno.

The rest of the titles I'd considered were more for potential fanservice value than anything else, and those series tend to suck. I'm thinking of R-15, Sekirei, and many others here that all had potential but squandered it to prioritize fanservice. Asobi ni Iku Yo! did it right, so why can't other series follow suit?

Typically I only watch three shows in a given season. I've found that even the simple addition of a fourth series, perhaps carrying over from a previous season, tends to mess things up and I end up falling behind. I managed okay when watching K-On!! alongside three other series though, so maybe I can toss something else in. Six seems a bit much, especially considering how low on hard drive space I am.

Guitar Hero: Van Halen

2012-01-10T22:42:00.000-05:00

Since I snagged a free promo copy of it at MAGFest X and have finished sightreading Guitar, it's time for some thoughts.

Very little, if anything engine-wise has changed, so there really isn't much to talk about other than critiquing the choice of songs and their charts. And for the most part, the charts are fine, though there are some bits that are rather awkward to play. Generally whenever there's chords and HOPO patterns combined with extended sustains.

Apparently the engine supports extended sustains involving slider notes, because extended sustains involving slider notes are all over the place. This comes off as being incredibly weird to me, because when the controller's receiver is plugged into a computer, the touch strip maps as an analog axis. But whatever, if it works, it works. It's not like I use the touch strip anyway.

The cheats menu had me a bit confused. One of the first things I did after firing the game up was go to ScoreHero's wiki page that has the button inputs for all the cheats and unlock all of them. Yet, after that, one of them was still locked, and the only one that remained is Black Highway, which for some retarded reason doesn't work on PS2. I did some poking around with various GH data structure viewing tools and found the missing cheat, which unlocks extra Van Halen costumes that can be toggled in the cheats menu, much like the extra Metallica costumes in GH:M. For what little it matters, the sequence to unlock it is RGBRGBYY.

Van Halen has a great mixture of songs ranging from fairly simple to quite difficult. Overall, I'm pleased with the difficulty of this game. After World Tour, Smash Hits, and GH5 having maybe three difficult tracks apiece (notice I didn't mention Metallica, which was actually difficult...), it's nice to have some challenge.

The non-Van Halen songs are pretty good overall. For a lot of them I had the reaction of "Hey, they included that! Awesome!". We're talking songs like Space Truckin' by Deep Purple, Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind, Master Exploder by Tenacious D, and Best of You by Foo Fighters (ever see the "THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST" meme anywhere on the internet? This song is what that's referencing).

It's interesting that they included Hot For Teacher, being that it's also in World Tour. The chart is entirely different, and thus it counts as an entirely new sightread. The difference of the chart actually caught me off-guard and I had to retry the song to get through the intro. Whatever.

This time around, the hardest song, without a doubt, is Eruption. It's one of Van Halen's solos they play at concerts and was a quite popular custom-charted song up until it was included in this game. It took me 12 tries to pass it, because it took me 12 tries to hit two star power phrases. Simple as that. Also apparently the bass part is charted and it has all of 4 notes, with a max score of just over 1300. Too bad the usual method of selecting songs that aren't normally selectable doesn't seem to work on PS2...

Poking around the other menus, the game has mode where it will play each song and let you scroll through the lyrics, and a soundboard mode. The soundboard mode lets you dial up various sound bytes of Van Halen songs with quick two-button sequences. It's kind of neat, but mostly overlookable.

The one thing the game does that I don't like is that it has this effect to make it sound like the crowd is singing along with the song as you're playing it. It sounds incredibly fake, and I'd rather just hear the track I'm playing. I turned down the Effects volume in the options, but haven't gotten a chance to test it and see if it killed the stupid effect once and for all.

At any rate, if you're into GH/RB, Guitar Hero: Van Halen is worth picking up. Being that GH is dead, you should be able to find a copy for rather cheap.

MAGFest X

2012-01-09T06:05:00.000-05:00

Got back from MAGFest a bit after 2 AM. If you've been following my Twitter, then you may very well recognize some of the stuff in here, as this post was constructed by taking each 140-character-or-less tweet and expanding upon it, and also adding extra information that wasn't in them to begin with. This post will be using a different style from last year's. Last year I based the post on the tweets, but paraphrased them. This year, I'm going to just quote them directly, in chronological order, and put blurbs of text offering further explanations and any omissions. Also, outside of the tweets, the entire thing is in the past tense, whereas I think I used present tense or an odd mixture of present and past tenses last year.

Wednesday

I left around 7 PM, after eating dinner, just to make damn sure that I wouldn't be involved with rush hour in either Fredericksburg or Washington D.C. Part of the trip involved being on 495, and 495 during rush hour is as close to hell as a mortal can get without dying. I would know, I've experienced it while trying to go to Katsucon in the past.

Also, after I got on 95, driving fatigue set in and I began yawning. Through a sheer stroke of luck, there so happened to be a rest stop on the stretch of 95 between Fredericksburg and the Mixing Bowl, so I stopped there. Walked around, relieved myself, and bought a Mountain Dew from the vending machine. I think the walking around and self-relief helped more than the caffeine, to be honest.

I am officially at the Gaylord National!

Found a spot close to the entrance of the parking garage, though in retrospect I should have gotten a spot closer to the elevators as every time I came back into the parking garage I walked around in confusion looking for my car.

Holy fuck, this place is ginormous.

The Gaylord National is a very big hotel. As I was crossing the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge I could see a huge building colorfully lit up across the river, and I said "that's probably the hotel..." to myself. Yes. It was. Once I was actually on that side of the river it was slightly difficult to locate it just because it was nighttime and the street signs were difficult to see. But I prevailed, and located the non-valet parking. Because fuck paying even more for parking. I just drove two and a half hours on the highway, I think I can park my own damn car.

Laser-engraved badge get!

Staff (and super supporters) got laser-engraved badges this year. The staff ones were green and we got to specify a name to be engraved on them. The super supporters got silver ones and didn't get to get their names engraved on them.

That awkward feeling when you recognize someone but can't remember their name.

Walking around talking to people before things really began, I happened upon people that I really thought I should have known their names. It's in the general MAGFest experience to be treated by everyone else as their close personal friend, but they seemed to recognize me and I'm horrible with names, especially when the names go with faces I only see once a year.

Thursday

No sleep occurred between Wednesday and Thursday. Even though I had a hotel room, I didn't actually check in until later Thursday. After sitting around LAN for a while with a friend, watching anime on his phone just for shits and giggles, we decided to go to the hotel staff cafeteria. This entails going through the bowels of the hotel, which is always an interesting experience, and the Gaylord didn't disappoint. Each hallway had "adopt-a-hallway" signs with varying departments' names printed on them. There was this weird picture of Inspector Gadget almost molesting a little girl or something as well. If I'd had a camera, I'd've taken a picture.

Ultra-cheap hotel cafeteria FTW

Seriously. I got two pieces of french toast, some bacon, and unlimited drink refills for just over $2. This is the only non-expensive thing at the Gaylord.

My 10am techops shift just turned into a LAN overwatch shift. Whee!

Starting what would become a theme for the weekend, Hachi didn't need me right away in Techops and sent me downstairs to do LAN overwatch for a bit. I ended up going back up after a while. LAN overwatch is rather boring, but it's my go-to shift for filling in holes in my staffing schedule since it's so easy to do.

Also signal here is awesome because expensive hotel can afford direct lines to cell networks and tons of RF repeaters.

Five bars everywhere. Enough said. Rant about the meaningfulness/significance/technical definition of a "bar" omitted for your convenience.

TechOps - Doing It Live (tm)

The very first thing that needed to happen was Opening Ceremonies in Panels 1. Fifteen minutes prior to the start of Opening Ceremonies, there was no sound system, no projector, and no projector screen. We worked feverishly and got the sound system done with maybe two minutes to spare and random attendees watching the entire time. We didn't think Opening Ceremonies was going to use the projector so we didn't bother with it, but then they ended up wanting to show a video and saying "if we had a projector set up in here..."

Friday

Legs already aching from walking around. Feet have hurt since sometime Thursday.

The Gaylord, as previously mentioned, is ginormous. There is a lot of square feet of space. Which equals a lot of walking around. Which equals sore leg muscles. My shoes don't really happen to be very good convention shoes. I need to fix this.

But at least I got my staff hotel room sorted out, so I have a place to sleep and shower.

I don't know if I missed an email or didn't read one fully or what, but it took a conversation with the head of Staff Operations (aptly abbreviated "STOps") for me to figure out that I could get my room key by going to the check-in desk in the hotel lobby. Went and did that, and dropped my stuff off inside. Note that my bag had basically stayed in my trunk, out in the cold, for over 24 hours. This is important because when I got up to the room (all the way up on the twelfth floor of the hotel), I took a shower. With ice-cold, very viscous soap and shampoo.

Guitar Hero Arcade is weird. It's GH3 with tracks missing, entirely new tracks, and heavy controllers with stiff strum bars and no whammy.

Mini Guitar Hero Arcade review: As tweeted, it's using the GH3 engine. Since there's no whammy bar, it auto-whammies star power sustains for you. Which fucks up some star power paths. Also, since there's no buttons on the controller other than the fret buttons, you have to tilt to activate. Oddly, if I tilted when there weren't notes around, it seemed to register an overstrum. The strum bar is incredibly stiff and doesn't give the same feedback as the console guitar controller, which makes alt-strumming harder. Also, the principle is great on paper but doesn't work too well in reality. Arcades have lots of background noise, which makes it difficult to hear the track you're playing. Which is very important. I dropped so much stuff because I simply couldn't hear the song. The machine definitely needs some headphone ports.

I got my first sleep here. Five hours of it. Total sleep so far: Five hours.

In line for the Jon St. John panel.

The big panels always have lines. Simple as that. Jon St. John is an awesome person and his panel was great. The Q&A had some extra flavor when it took a turn towards Alcoholics Anonymous. Basically, he had everyone who came up to ask a question introduce themselves, and then the whole room would say "Hi, <name>!". If a person came up again, it was "Hi again, <name>!". One specific guy came up twice and stayed up there talking for way too long the second time, and there were shouts of "Bye, Eric!". Some of them by me.

Also, I attended the panel previous to Jon St. John's, which was the Hey Ash, What'cha Playing? panel, hoping I could be clever and dodge the line by just staying in the panel room, but apparently it's now policy to clear the panel rooms between panels. Oh well.

That feeling when you realize you can either buy AVGN volume 5 or get out of the parking garage.

I was standing in front of the ScrewAttack table in the dealers' room ready to buy AVGN volume 5 when I realized it was going to take money to get out of the parking garage. The quoted figure was $11/day for staff. I looked in my wallet and realized after counting it three times that I only had $77 and was planning to be there six days. I had no choice but to go with the responsible choice. Even though parking ended up not actually costing me $66. That's okay, I can buy the DVD online, but there's something special about buying it at an event and talking to members of the ScrewAttack crew in person. Maybe it's just because they're awesome.

Just directed James Rolfe and Mike Matei to Panels 2.

After that, I wandered around a bit, which took me back up to the area around Panels 1 and 2. Not really finding anything of interest, I went back down the escalator, and who would I see at the foot of it but James Rolfe and Mike Matei, of Cinemassacre. As I got closer, Mike noticed my staff badge and said "hey, you work here, right? Where's Panels 2?". I pointed them off in the correct direction, thanks and small conversation were had (they were on their way to the Pat the NES Punk panel), and we went our separate ways. I try really hard to not be "that rabid fan", so I kept it short.

Realized I hadn't eaten since midday yesterday and fixed it.

Food at the Gaylord is a bit of a touchy subject. All of the restaurants (yes, plural) inside the hotel are expensive. To further complicate things, they don't like outside food, and didn't want MAGFest's chefs making any food for us during the event. We got around that... by ignoring it and keeping it on the down-low. Premade wrapped sandwiches and packets of mustard/mayo were delivered to various departments in conspicuous cardboard boxes, and the staff suite was basically salad, sandwiches, and soup. In other words, stuff that was both easy to prepare and clean up after. Hopefully we can get the Gaylord to actually let us do the whole staff food thing in the future...

Also, the reason why I hadn't eaten for over 24 hours is because MAGFest is so entertaining of an event that it makes you forget about basic necessities.

Everything drawn on this whiteboard that has a knee has an arrow sticking out of said knee. #OverusedJokes

Outside of the concert room was a whiteboard with dry-erase markers, available for people to draw on. This was, I guess, the replacement for the usual "blank slate" arcade machine from previous years that we got to draw on.

If you've been anywhere near social media since the release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, you've seen the plague that is "arrow to the knee" jokes. For the uninitiated, some city guards have the random quote "I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.". Well, apparently a fair number of Skyrimfags managed to tear themselves away from their computers (or consoles) long enough to come to MAGFest. I heard plenty of people shouting "FUS RO DAH!" and there were lots of people wearing the iconic iron helm with horns on the sides.

Also, I didn't tweet this, but I noticed a My Little Pony on it, and drew an arrow in its face. Fucking bronies.

I don't get how a mechanical bull is so insanely entertaining to these people...

It was my plan to stay inside the hamster habitrail for the entire weekend, but when you have friends at an event and they don't have such a plan, you end up walking to nearby restaurants for food. Also, having friends that are generous enough to cover your part of the bill is an amazing thing. Thanks, Jon!

Anywho.

We went to a bar/grill place and had some hamburgers. They had a mechanical bull there and there was periodic loud cheering as people would ride it and get thrown off. In retrospect, I think alcohol played into it.

By the way, I refer to the hotel as the "hamster habitrail" because it's where I sleep, clean myself, entertain myself, and eat during MAGFest. Which is exactly what hamsters do in a hamster habitrail.

Saturday

I got another solid 5 hours of sleep, bringing my total amount of sleep up to 10 hours.

In before live recording of ScrewAttack's Sidescrollers!

In case you've been living under a rock (or not following ScrewAttack), they have a feature every Wednesday called Sidescrollers, where they go through gaming news, current events, and other stuff in under an hour. Because ScrewAttack is video gaming news/reviews/etc. by fans for fans, they decided to record an episode live at MAGFest, a gaming event by fans for fans. It'll be up on the site on the 11th. Also, they gave all of us who attended the panel a code for a free month of ScrewAttack Advantage. Because they're awesome.

At the Ellen McLain panel. This is a triumph.

Among other voice roles, she's perhaps most famous for voicing GLaDOS. You know, the main antagonist in Portal and Portal 2. Very interesting panel overall.

Entire panel room singing Still Alive FTW

And how else could the panel end.

Just saw Waldo and Carmen Sandiego together.

So that's why we're constantly having to search for them...

Holy fuck, the line for the AVGN panel is long.

Whoever schedules the panels needs to put AVGN in Panels 1 or Panels 2 next year. Panels 3 was much too small for the number of people that wanted to attend the panel. Luckily, I got in at the beginning. AVGN will be on hiatus while the movie is in production, there will be plush Shitpickles, and James doesn't care for My Little Pony. There, panel summarized.

Mixed thoughts on Guitar Hero Arcade. It's neat, but sorely needs headphone jacks.

I can't live without Guitar Hero. I played the game every opportunity I got. It was split fairly evenly between GH: Arcade and Muchi Muchi Pork, actually. You know, the danmaku I spent almost the entirety of MAGFest 9 playing? It's apparently got an Xbox 360 release, and sources say it's region 3 which means it'll work on US 360s. If I ever get a 360 and have enough money, I'll have to look into importing a copy...

lol people standing still on a non-moving escalator

On my way from the game room to the Earthbound Papas concert (Nobuo Uematsu's band), we happened upon this group. It was like they were standing there expecting the escalator to move, except that it wasn't. It was kind of funny, actually. It played tricks with my brain whenever I looked over at it, because I would think that it had just stopped every time.

Nobuo Uematsu doing the Colossus roar lol

Yes. This happened. For what it's worth, his English was pretty good.

Sunday

Penultimate staff shift begin!

This shift was immediately after the Earthbound Papas concert. Meaning I missed their encore. Oh well, no choice in the matter really, plus it's up on YouTube so I can go watch it and see what I missed. Just search "magfest earthbound papas" on youtube and you too can see the concert. Except you weren't there live. Neener neener.

Anyway, the shift was supposed to be Floor Staff, which entailed walking around the room doing stuff, but it got immediately changed into inventory because they needed that more. It worked well for me because doing an inventory shift instead meant I got to sit down and my feet were already in great pain by this point. I described my walking to people as "limping with both feet" when they noticed how awkwardly I was walking.

Just noticed like 5 promo copies of GH Van Halen for PS2 sitting here... if they're free for the taking I'm totally snagging one.

GH Van Halen get.

There was a bunch of random stuff in the general disorganization of the table for the console room inventory, and I didn't notice the pile of GH Van Halen for a while. Asked around, apparently they were dumped on us by someone from Activision or something. After making sure they weren't there as prizes (having the PS2 version as a prize would be a strange thing, but I wanted to make absofuckinglutely sure), I snagged one. Which means I now have every Guitar Hero game ever released on PS2. Dubious accomplishment yay!

My console room Floor Staff shift has been changed to Inventory and now Checkin. Whee!

Checkin on Sunday morning... so boring. It's Checkout that gets all the traffic...

Apparently someone didn't show up for a shift or something because I got moved to checkin. Checkin on Sunday is a rather slow-paced job because not a hell of a lot of people have stuff that isn't already in the system. Stuff that's already in the system is retardedly easy to handle thanks to gerg's barcode inventory system, it just takes a couple scans with a barcode scanner (one on the badge and one on each item) to check something in or out. So yes, it was boring, but I wasn't complaining.

After this shift, I realized that I had plenty of time to get lots of good sleep, and did exactly that. I got 10 hours (!), doubling my total to 20 hours. I would get no more sleep at MAGFest.

After all the confusion surrounding staff hotel rooms, it's nice to know that yes, my room goes through tonight.

Some doubt was cast on this, so I went to the front lobby of the hotel and got it confirmed. Simple as that. I'm quite introverted, so this may come as a surprise that I'd go talk to people of my own volition who are wearing much nicer clothing than I'm wearing and want my money, but to paraphrase a lot of psychology-related stuff, and most recently Ellen McLain (since she talked about it in her panel)... introverts expend energy in large groups and recharge by spending time alone. MAGFest is my big energy expenditure of the year, essentially. And come to think of it, I didn't really leave the house much in the weeks leading up to it. See? Psychology knows its shit. I guess this means that convention-goers are disproportionally introverted? I dunno. That's something that would be interesting to run a study on. I already know that I'm a Meyers-Briggs INTJ.

My shifts keep changing... my techops teardown shift got turned into badge checking for the loading dock.

Which basically just entails making sure that only dealers get to go out there.

Plus, on this shift I get to watch over the shoulder of someone playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Oh and obviously hotel staff get to go through the door.

One thing's for sure, I wish I had my jacket. It's freezing outside, and every time the door gets opened, a cold breeze rushes through.

Basically, I was supposed to assist in teardown of panel rooms and so forth, but I wasn't really needed and there was a need for some security on the door to the loading dock in the back of the game room/dealer room/tabletop/LAN room, which were all basically in the same room. This security was for the dealers' sake, so that no non-authorized people would be back there and thus nothing would get stolen. Badge checking is easy enough, plus holding doors for people so they can push their loaded-to-the-brim handcarts through makes them really grateful.

Hotel-supplied jazz on the PA system in con ops FTW

With the event over and teardown winding down, we got classy. Props to the hotel for having like twelve different PA music genre choices.

Sitting around with some other staff waiting for pizza to arrive.

A large order to Papa John's was placed, and pizza was had.

Hmm... I don't feel as tired as I thought I would... I might just drive home tonight.

The whole reason I had requested a hotel room through Sunday night was because of my very last shift, which was seven hours long. I hadn't anticipated being able to get 10 hours of sleep prior to it, and had instead anticipated being very tired afterwards. You could say I was thinking cautiously, but I prefer to say that I know my own tendencies and I tend to not get a lot of sleep at MAGFest. I ended up only having been awake about eight hours at the end of the shift...

Monday

...and yes, I decided to drive home. Stopped to get out and stretch in Fredericksburg.

I was going to tweet after getting out of the parking garage, but there wasn't a good place to stop and do so. So I drove to Fredericksburg, and stopped in a parking lot at the Central Park mall to get out, stretch, and post tweets.

I think I've learned the importance of stopping periodically on long trips with this MAGFest trip.

Conventionally I've used caffeinated drinks to try and stave off driving fatigue, but it doesn't really work. I need to keep myself active. In most cases this means I need someone to talk to, but this time I was the only person in the car. So instead, just like on the way up, I had to stop and walk around for a bit.

Also, I ended up not getting raped in the wallet for parking after all.

The parking payment machine first tried to rape my wallet, but I said "bitch, please" and tried again. Ended up only paying $11.

The Gaylord has an automated machine in the parking garage for paying your parking bill, that you only need to use if you're not going to charge parking to your room. You put in your card that you got when you arrived, it tells you how much you owe, and you can either put in cash or swipe a credit card. Once you do so, you get 15 minutes to GTFO. I wasn't about to stick around and find out what happened if you took longer than 15 minutes to GTFO, so I GTFO'd.

And I'm home!

You know I'm here because I'm typing this text that you're reading.

Actually, now that I read the receipt the parking payment machine gave me, the machine didn't actually try to rape my wallet.

It just presented a rather confusing screen that made me think it had applied an $11 discount and was asking for $85 for parking.

When in reality it was the other way around, it had applied an $85 discount and was asking for $11 for parking.

That screen was confusing. The $85 discount was printed higher up than the final price of $11, and the labels for each dollar amount it was showing me were smaller than everything else, and I wasn't quite sure what was what. Regardless, only having to pay $11 to park at possibly the ritziest hotel ever outside of Las Vegas is definitely not bad.

Gaylord National, thou art expensive.

Truth. My parking bill was going to be $96 before the discount... The room rate for attendees was $150 (with internet included!), but the hotel seemed like they would readily charge a lot more than that for a room.

Hotel ramblings

The Gaylord National is a rather ginormous and exorbitantly expensive hotel right on the National Harbor just over the VA/MD border. It's a very nice place for a variety of reasons, a few of which I'll mention here.

Being a large hotel, it's natural to think that one might get lost, but they've got these touchscreen maps to help with that. You can see a view of each floor, plus in the event list you could find a specific MAGFest room, named with its specific MAGFest name (i.e. Video room, Panels 1, etc.), and touch a "map it" button and the thing would tell you how to get to that room from the touchscreen you're currently standing in front of. I was referring lost attendees to it the entire weekend.
Since it's so expensive, they have a lot of money to throw around. This means that they can afford direct fiber-optic connections to all the major cell phone providers and can then blanket the hotel with RF repeaters to have perfect cell phone reception throughout the entire hotel.
They have tons of parking. TONS. It may be exorbitantly expensive to park there, but... you will NEVER, EVER need to worry about not finding a parking space.

Now, because I have mixed feelings about the hotel, here's the other side.

As mentioned before: it's exorbitantly expensive. Even the restaurants in the atrium area. I know hotel restaurants are generally more expensive than they really should be, but these are more expensive than THAT. As in, the "special MAGFest deal" for the sports bar/grill was $12 for either half a sandwich/cup of soup/beverage, or salad/cup of soup/beverage. Anywhere else, either of those combinations will be $8 tops, before any special deal.
The bathroom light. It was two round fixtures with a long fluorescent bulb mounted above them. It took at least a minute for it to reach full brightness. I've gotta piss NOW, not a minute from now...
The shower. Now, hotel showers pretty much universally suck, but these just... sucked more. I can't explain this properly with text, so instead you get a rather crudely drawn MSPaint image.

Also, the temperature zones shown above are only made more confusing by the extremely long amount of time it takes the shower to actually change temperature when you adjust it.

Ordeals

2011-12-27T21:57:00.000-05:00

So my dad mentioned at dinner that he had his USB flash drive set up to be bootable with some drive recovery software on it. However, there was something he didn't quite understand about it and asked me if I could help. So when we got home, I grabbed the flash drive, and it began.

First, I tried to be sneaky/clever and boot it in VirtualBox without having to reboot my computer. But that failed horribly. So, I rebooted.

After not finding an option in my BIOS specifically for booting off of a USB drive, I poked around some and eventually noticed that it showed up as a hard drive in the Hard Drive Boot Priority list. So, move it to the top, save and exit, and bam, it boots.

Now, I follow the standard tech support cheat sheet, and figure out how to do exactly what it was he wanted to do. It ended up being pretty simple, it hadn't occurred to him to double click on something. Whatever.

Powered down, gave him his USB drive back, and went into BIOS to set stuff back so I could boot off of my hard drive again. Except that now it insisted that my boot drive (the IDE Primary Master, remember PATA drives?) didn't exist.

I've mentioned before, maybe on Twitter, I forget, but anyway... My case fans died recently. The CPU fan is still good, but both of my fancy red LED case fans, that were in themselves replacements for older fans that had died, died. Rather than going onto Newegg and ordering more case fans only to have the same thing happen later on in life, I removed the side panel on my computer and pointed a small box fan at it. This is only relevant because recently I'd decided it wasn't needed and turned it off. Computer worked just fine without it, content with just the side panel removed.

I don't know if heat played into it, but the drive appeared again after I had the fan turned on for a while.

So now boot up and go, right? Well, wrong. It says "NTLDR is missing". Fuck. I mean, I've gotten this before, and a black magic three-finger salute has seemed to make it go away. Except this time it's persistent. Diagnostic mode, engage.

I get out an Ubuntu livedisc. Note to self: burn a more recent Ubuntu livedisc, as 6.06 is quite old. At any rate, it failed to start X or something, which I've never seen before. Even my shitty laptop with dead battery, hard drive, and LAN card can boot it. So then I whip out my Arch Linux install disc. Get into its install environment, mkdir /mnt/sda1, mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 -o ro (mounting it read-only because I still don't trust Linux NTFS tools), and ls the fucker. NTLDR is there. So obviously it's something else that's preventing it from finding that.

I boot back into the BIOS and inspect the Hard Drive Boot Priority list once again, and notice that the drive where Windows is installed isn't the first one in the list. Shove it on up there, save and exit, and bam, now I'm here writing this post.

post-Firefox 9 update reactions

2011-12-27T01:25:00.000-05:00

Hey wait what? All I did was click "Check for update" in Firefox 8 and it took that to mean "Check for update, download and install without prompting for consent to download and install"?

Oh well, at least all my extensions are compatible. Life as normal?

*sigh* yeah, life as normal. It still appears to crash several times a day and use over a gigabyte of swap (virtual memory).

If going from Firefox 8 to Firefox 9 was such a minor update, why the hell was it a MAJOR VERSION NUMBER CHANGE?

Christmas Stuff

2011-12-26T17:57:00.000-05:00

Another Christmas come and gone... In case any random passerby cares what I got, I'll go ahead and list everything. If you're a random passerby and you don't care, well, too bad.

Steam games, self-gifted:

Portal 2
Jamestown: Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot DLC
Dungeons of Dredmor, Realm of the Diggle Gods DLC (Resolving the Humble Indie Bundle issue where the "beat the average" Steam key for one of their bundles contained it as well as Aquaria and Crayon Physics Deluxe, which I already own from previous Humble Indie Bundles and won't get giftable copies of if I redeem the key.)
Double Fine Pack (Psychonauts and Costume Quest)
Chantelise

Steam games, gifted by friends (thanks!):

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale
E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
Left 4 Dead Bundle (L4D and L4D2)

RL stuff:

A bag of pistachios
$75 in Wal-Mart gift cards
$25 ABC store gift card
Four dentist appointments to get my teeth fixed so I can chew on the right side of my mouth and not have to live in pain

All the rest of that stuff is great and all, but the very last item was the only one I absolutely couldn't live without.

Sort of related, but the Holiday Gift Pile thing that's happening on Steam right now made me play Spiral Knights again, and I got a full set of two-star equipment and made it to depth 8 (Moorcraft Manor) finally. I actually got there in epic fashion by defeating Snarbolax solo. For what little it's worth, now I can start adventures from depth 8!

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai

2011-12-23T05:27:00.002-05:00

It just wrapped up, and since it draws a bit of a parallel to my own past life, I felt like I should post about it. Despite not actually wanting to post on the subject.

Two side notes:

The anime's name is abbreviated to Haganai. This is because of how it's written in Japanese.
Now that I've re-read it, it's actually a spoiler-free summary of the series with some extra crap about me talking about how much my high school life sucked.

A few seasons ago, when Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai was airing, a few friends of mine made blog posts about what it was like growing up as an anime fan in a family that generally hated upon the medium for no reason. I can draw a similar parallel to Haganai.

I never really had a lot of friends. I was that "unpopular one", the one nobody would ever talk to and everyone would find the most trivial of reasons to make fun of. The fact that I have a hard-to-pronounce-correctly last name didn't help.

My mom always assured me that once I went to college I'd make real friends who were actually mature and willing to look beneath the surface and see the person within and that sort of stuff. She was right, too. You definitely can make friendships that last in the years before college, but it's the years after graduating high school that you begin to discover who your real friends are. Except for me it took a bit longer because I didn't really find where I fit in until a few years after I joined CAINE, essentially once all of the old members had graduated and I was essentially among the group of people that had been there the longest.

So basically I was part of the group that hung out with each other because nobody else would hang out with us. We got along fairly well despite our differences, but there were still the trivial reasons to make fun of people. We even became hypocrites in senior year when we excluded someone from our group. To be fair, she was a bitch to everyone. I'm trying not to use names here but the wording is going to get awkward, so bear with me. Basically she was the girlfriend of a member of the group. I had known her from a long, looooooooooooooooooooooong (longcat long) time ago (we're talking preschool here) and didn't like her then.

Anyway, I'm drifting off topic. Haganai reminded me of my less-than-pleasurable high school experience. But even then, it takes a few things to extremes, because that's what anime does.

The main character, Kodaka, is pretty much an idiot. He transfers into this high school and is running late on his first day. Yet he doesn't bother to stop and catch his breath before walking into the damn classroom, which results in a scene filled with misunderstanding where he's branded as a delinquent.

He and Yozora, a girl in his class whom he discovers has an "air friend" basically start a club, which is this anime's version of "the group of people that hang out with each other because nobody else will hang out with us". Along the way they pick up a few extra members with the aid of a cryptically worded flyer containing a hidden message.

There's Sena, the daughter of the headmaster, who is the generic "oversized breasts" character, who generally has guys doing whatever she wants but doesn't really like that life and wants real friends. She's also massively into dating games.
There's my personal favorite, Rika, the genius child scientist who isn't required to attend classes and is only at the school to make the school look good, who continually tries to get into Kodaka's pants for "research".
Then there's Yukimura, the guy who's always picked on and is rather effeminate, who ends up dressed in female clothing for the rest of the series. Including the beach episodes.
Finally there's Maria, the child nun who always likes to call things she doesn't like "poopy", and Kodaka's little sister Kobato, who watches some anime about a vampire and is always cosplaying and acting as the main character, to the point of wearing a colored contact lens to gain heterochromia. The two are always at odds with each other because of the whole "church vs. vampires" thing.

Obviously, those sorts of extremes gathered all in one place don't exist in real life. Which brings me to my next point. The series seems similar in story structure to Haruhi, somewhat. Think about it. Main male meets main female, they start a club. They recruit a select few more members, including one who is essentially in cosplay for the rest of the series. I even think I recognize one of the music cues.

Remember how I said Kodaka is "pretty much an idiot"? Well, yes. He continually has Rika trying to get in his pants, and continually denies her. Come on, you have a girl who's only a year younger than you basically throwing herself at you (sometimes literally) and you turn her down every time? Seriously?

Regardless of the intelligence of the main cast, it's still a decent series overall. I've kind of sidestepped around a subplot that is actually a major part of the latter portion of the series, but whatever.

Top 10 Games of Recent Memory

2011-12-19T20:08:00.001-05:00

This was going to be a "top 10 games of 2011" post, but I never kept track of which games I played this year that were actually released in 2011. So instead, it's basically "top 10 games I played and liked in 2011".

This list is in no particular order. I don't wish to infer that any one of these games is better than any other one of them. So really, it's more of a "10 awesome games I played in 2011" post. You may very well recognize some of these titles from my previous posts, and may also very well see more in-depth posts about some of them later on.

1. Magicka

I'd been wanting something like this for years. A game where I can make custom attacks by combining the various properties that I want it to have. Magicka delivers on this. You get 8 elements and can conjure up to 5 of them in a single spell. The resulting spell's properties are determined by the properties of the elements you conjured and their priorities. For instance, adding Arcane to most elements produces a beam of that element, or an area-effect explosion. But combine it with shield and you get explosive mines. This spell system is incredibly deep and greatly rewards experimentation. It also helps that the game is incredibly challenging, which forces you to explore the spell system to figure out what's going to work.

2. Jamestown

A danmaku (bullet hell, if you will) shooter themed around American colonial times? How could that get any more awesome?

How about if it takes place on Mars?

Yeah. This game is, as would be expected of a danmaku, incredibly difficult. But once you get your bullet dodging reflexes in gear, it's also quite fun. You have different ships to choose from that have different firing patterns and special attacks, as well. My personal favorite is the Charge, which charges up a large orb that when fully charged will absolutely annihilate most regular enemies. I still haven't beaten the final boss yet.

3. Minecraft

A pure sandbox game, with blocky terrain that you can move to build stuff. Basically the epitome of "play it how you want to play it". You can craft all sorts of tools to assist your mining efforts, swords and a bow and arrows for weaponry, and much more. Weaponry? Yeah, there's monsters. The game runs on a day/night cycle and at night (or anywhere it's dark enough, such as in an underground cave), enemies can spawn.

I don't really need to describe Minecraft much more than that, do I? It's one of the bigger indie game hits of the past year, and took the internet by storm, so you've probably at least already heard of it.

One final thing though: If you want something extra out of the game that isn't in the vanilla experience, there's a pretty big modding community that's added all sorts of stuff.

4. Torchlight

This game was recommended to me by a friend when he saw me talking about Diablo 2 on Twitter. It's only single player, but the gameplay experience is solid and incredibly fun. It's the same sort of game as Diablo 2, i.e. a hack and slash RPG, but rather than a gothic setting, it's a steampunk setting. The three classes you get to choose from are your typical melee, ranged, and mage, but within each there is the ability to develop it the way you want. My favorite is the ranged class (the seasoned reader of my blog will be going "no, DUH" at this point), and my weapon of choice is the gun. I swap back and forth between a two-handed rifle and dual-wielded pistols depending on the situation. Also, regardless of class, you get a pet that helps you out in combat, can learn spells and equip a limited set of items, and most notably, can carry items for you. The pet's ability to carry items is awesome because you can send your pet back to town to sell its inventory with the click of a button. This keeps you in the action, and a game that keeps you in the action is a good game.

5. Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden

In a post-apocalyptic world where basketball is banned, Charles Barkley is the only person capable of performing the powerful Chaos Dunk. He gets framed for the crime of performing a Chaos Dunk that destroys Manhattan and kills 15 million people, and sets out to both clear his name and restore the former glory of basketball. The result is an over-the-top absolutely hilarious RPG adventure with absolutely no grind. I'm not even really a fan of basketball, and it was still fun as hell.

6. Aquaria

Set in a mostly underwater world, you play as Naija, a fish-person who wonders if she is the only person left alive. She sets out to explore and find answers, and gains incredible powers in the process. The game is free-roaming with a layout similar to Super Metroid, with areas you'll need to get a special power to access. Throughout the game you find decorative items that Naija uses to decorate her home cave, and some of which are actually armor that does special things for you. Also, throughout the game, you find ingredients, and you can cook up food to give yourself healing and stat boost items. As you progress you'll also gain different forms which give you different powers. The game is long and has a great story, great graphics, and a great soundtrack.

7. The Binding of Isaac

This is a randomly generated dungeon crawler with mechanics similar to the Legend of Zelda games. There is an extensive number of items you can find totally at random in the dungeon, and one way or another you have to make it to the end and defeat the boss. Sometimes the game is incredibly unfair to you, and other times you can waltz right through. It depends almost entirely on the items you get. Regardless, it's pretty damn fun.

8. Guitar Hero 5

How could there be a list of games I consider awesome without a plastic instrument game in it somewhere? I consider myself to have been extremely lucky when I stumbled upon not one, not two, but three copies of Guitar Hero 5, new in box with guitar controller, at Wal-Mart for $20 each. I bought two of them, and sold the extra copy of GH5 to a friend for $10. Basically, I got what would normally go for around $140 for $30. Plus, the game has a great soundtrack, and the guitar controllers are actually well-designed and will hold up longer than the GH3 ones did. It's a wonder that Guitar Hero died, being that it thrives on what most gamers loathe: each new game is essentially "same game, more levels". GH fans want exactly that, and will readily drop money for each new installment, plus, then there's DLC. My only remaining wish is that they had released GH: Warriors of Rock on PS2, so that the PS2 would have the entire home console GH library available. I'd even accept it stripped down, all I really care about is quickplay, practice mode, some options so I can turn off the tilt sensor and touch strip, and the ability to save my scores and options. Leave everything else out, for all I care.

9. Voxatron

It debuted via a Humble Bundle, it's still in alpha, and since its debut it's gotten a lot more playable. Active development will do that for a game. Plus, it's eternally extensible via its level editor and the integrated online level-sharing service. Custom levels can do a lot of stuff with the engine, which really adds to the replay value. I have no clue when the game will actually be released (or available for purchase), but if it keeps going like it is, it'll definitely be worth picking up when the opportunity arises. Oh, and the graphics. The game gets its name from the graphics. Everything is composed of voxels, which is short for volume pixels. Basically, picture a small, colored cube in three-dimensional space. There you go. The game takes full advantage of this by having fully destructible environments and a wide variety of weapons.

10. The Maw

While everything about it suggests it's designed for kids, i.e. the lack of dialogue, the cartoony graphics, etc.; it's still fun even for all us big kids out there. You play as an alien named Frank, who has a pet monster named Maw. Maw has an insatiable appetite and it's your job to feed him. And you feed him everything. As you feed him, he grows. Certain things he can eat give him special powers, such as the ability to breathe fire or break through rocks. The entire time, you're being pursued, because at the beginning the spaceship you were on crash-landed onto a planet and you and Maw escaped. There are three DLC levels which are all pretty good and worth getting. It's not a difficult game by any means, but if you need to relax and have some fun for a while, you can't go wrong.

I briefly contemplated adding an eleventh game to this list and making a typical "This is Spinal Tap" reference, but ultimately I decided against it.

Magicka: The Stars are Left

2011-12-19T05:14:00.000-05:00

Finally got my hands on this highly anticipated DLC campaign for Magicka. It offers three more chapters of adventure, with all-new enemies and magicks, more challenge maps, and two robes (one of which has to be unlocked).

It's set 20 years after the original adventure. Vlad appears and suggests, then tells, then basically forces you to go on this new adventure. Also, he's quick to remind you that nobody is to find out about his "little secret".

This isn't really a review, because I'll blatantly tell you right now: If you already own Magicka, GET THIS DLC. There, I said it. This post is more about impressions and strategies, and does basically spoil the entire thing.

There are 7 magicks available in The Stars are Left, in comparison to the original campaign's 23. Two of them are Revive and Haste, the other five are entirely new. There are some things that you can only obtain if you're using the Investigator robes: a weapon that polymorphs your target, and a magick.

At the beginning, break down the door that led to the very first Sherlock Holmes area in the original adventure. Shoot a rock at the tree, and a magick tome falls down. Get it to learn Tractor Pull. What does it do? Well, you stomp the ground. I think it makes stuff on the ground move closer to you. Not entirely sure. It's not all that useful.

The first boss is a giant spider named Parker, and when you beat him you get the achievement "No power = No responsibility". Yeah, a Spider-Man reference. A Magicka content update wouldn't be complete without more references.

During the second chapter, having the Investigator robe equipped will enable you to open a gate and get the Chain Lightning magick. Before that, when you reach the village where Gram's Workshop is, if you talk to the guy by the fire repeatedly, he'll eventually give you a magick tome. Stop talking to him when he says this (if you talk to him too much, he takes back his offer), then go to the shop nearby to get it. Sadly, just like Tractor Pull, it's not all that useful. So not useful that I forget its name.

The second chapter is also home to... Endermen. Yes, the ones from Minecraft. Except that instead of picking up terrain, they pick up you. And then eat you. They also teleport around. They're a lot more frightening than Minecraft's Endermen, quite frankly...

If you remember coming through the part with the Endermen in the original campaign, you'll know that you can freeze the river just after the checkpoint to get to a Sherlock Holmes area with the Sword of Masters (aka the Master Sword). It's still there, and it's one of the better weapons available, so you might as well get it. The cultists shoot Arcane at you (despite the fact that it looks like Lightning), so give yourself an Arcane shield and you can pick them off from afar with the sword's projectile.

The second boss is a winged demon that makes a couple appearances in the third chapter as well. Nearby where you fight it, there's a book for a much-needed magick: Levitation. I highly recommend grabbing this one, as it comes in incredibly handy in the third chapter. The boss isn't actually all that difficult, it just takes a while to wear it down. Basically he jumps around and tries to convert you into a cultist, which is an instant-kill attack. Luckily, it's at point blank range, so stay mobile and you won't even have to worry about it.

The third chapter is entirely the buildup to fighting Cthulhu. There are puzzles you need to solve to activate various mechanisms to enable you to reach his room. The orbs that activate the mechanisms are red, and what else is red? The Arcane element. What's its opposite? Life. Whack each orb with Life and it'll turn green and activate whatever it's linked to. Whack it with Arcane to disable again. The disable mechanic is really only needed in one room, where you have to bounce a life beam off of three mirrors (and all the way across the room in the process) to activate an orb that opens a door next to you. This door is on a timer and will close after a short period of time.

One of the rooms had me puzzled for quite a while, and it ended up having the derpiest solution. One room has a bunch of steam vents that will push you off of the walkway that goes past them. The solution? A rock shield. Apparently it gives you enough weight to prevent the steam from pushing you off. On the other side of the steam vents is the mechanism, activate it and the walls rise up and you'll have a fight on your hands. Unless of course, you have the magick I'm about to mention...

Also attached to this room is a platform with a semi-useful magick: Portal. Unfortunately, due to an oversight by the developers (or something) if you're not playing on a widescreen resolution, you can't use the stairway that takes you to this platform. Instead you'll have to Levitate and Haste over from the other side. Now that I think about it, I have occasional troubles exiting one of the previous rooms as well. It's the one with the unlimited numbers of enemies that Vlad so helpfully accidentally awakens for you.

Anyway, Portal is indeed a reference to the game of the same name. Predictably, you'll have to cast it twice to get any use out of it at all. Also, its usability is limited since you can only place portals in already-accessible areas. However, it can be used in the steam vent room to bypass the walled-in fight after activating that room's mechanism.

There's a sword you can get before you make the tentacles go away. Haste and Levitate yourself to the platform where the Portal magick is, and go through the door. The sword is stuck in the tentacle.

Partway through solving all of this, the winged demon will challenge you again. Just defeat him again and move on. Keep him frozen for an easy win.

All this buildup, and once you've got all three main mechanisms activated (the bridge, the door, and the water), you can finally exit the top of the main room and fight Cthulhu. While technically, yes, you can indeed enter the room without activating the water, you will die upon entry, lose your weapons, and the boss fight can't be triggered. Strangely enough it still shows the bubble effects where Cthulhu first comes up out of the water, even though there isn't any water.

Let me tell you now, Cthulhu is a really difficult boss. As in, Assatur is a pansy. Cthulhu really tests your knowledge of Magicka's spell mechanics and your ability to adapt to what's happening. Easily more difficult than the entire rest of Magicka combined.

I had two bulleted lists here containing all the stuff that happens in the fight and how to deal with it, but it was even more tl;dr than the rest of this post, so I removed it.

Now, for the actual strategy that worked.

Throw on a rock shield (self-cast ED) at the beginning, and refresh it whenever you have a free moment.
Stay at the very top of the stairs in the middle area, this way the tentacles can't hit you.
QFQFASA. Queue up the next one while you're hitting him with the current one. The DQRQRQRQR method may deal more damage than the full duration of the steam-lightning beam, but it's less repeatable than the steam-lightning beam.
The lesser demons that get summoned periodically will die to a single area-cast QFQFASA.
Once the winged demon is out, Haste yourself, get close, and cast EARAR on it. I prefer to put it on my sword to cast it, but it works just as well when regular cast. This will freeze it and keep it in place.
Throw up a shield (regular cast E) in the general direction of wherever Cthulhu is. Yes, we're ignoring Cthulhu for now. Whenever the shield gets taken out or needs to be relocated, put it back up.
Keep doing the frost-lightning shield attack on the winged demon until it dies. This will be tricky because it jumps across the room periodically.
When the winged demon jumps, make sure you're not beneath it when it lands, since you'll die instantly if it lands on you.
Resume steam-lightning beaming Cthulhu (and responding to his attacks, obviously) until you win.

After beating Cthulhu, the Cultist robes are unlocked. They come with a sword that inflicts poison, and a staff that can summon those weird fire things from Chapter 3.

As an aside to all of this, why can't I use any of the new weapons, staves, and magicks in challenge/versus modes? There's a rather awesome staff that allows you to conjure lightning while wet, and a sword that can fight on its own without a wielder (never used it, not sure how it works)...

SOPA and PROTECT IP: Why I fear for the future of the Internet

2011-12-15T22:19:00.000-05:00

Pretty much anyone who gets around on the internet has heard of these two bills by now. These bills, created for the purpose of preventing copyright infringement on the internet, basically set up the framework to allow our government to control what sites we can and can't visit, effectively turning America into China.

Never mind that there's already a system in place for dealing with infringement of copyrights on the internet. It's called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Under that act, any corporate entity who finds one of its copyrights being infringed on the internet simply has to send a takedown notice to the site with the infringement. That notice has to include the page holding the content and an assertion that the company does indeed own the copyright in question. If it's ignored or contested, legal action is the next step.

Unfortunately, rights holders, and specifically the American entertainment industry, don't see this as enough. You see, there's this thing called 'other nations', and they are sovereign, meaning they have different laws than us and aren't subject to our laws. Generally speaking, a website is subject to the laws of the nation in which that site is hosted, and not subject to the laws of any other nation.

Basically, what it boils down to is one simple thing. Right now, sites aren't responsible for user-posted content. This means that if a popular content-hosting site, let's say YouTube, has a user who uploads something that infringes on a copyright, they're not liable for that. All the copyright holder has to do is send them a notice (or use their Content ID thing), and they'll take down the infringing content.

Now, issues with claims verification aside, the system works as-is. But the American entertainment industry doesn't think that's enough. They want sites to be liable for user-posted content. This presents a very real threat to anyone who hosts a community with forums, no matter how small. In fact, I'd wager the smaller communities are at a greater risk because copyright holders know they have less resources to fight back. All it takes is one user posting an infringing link, and bam, your entire site is gone. I wouldn't put it past the entertainment industry to pose as regular users on sites, post infringing links, and get those sites taken down, either.

The chilling thing is, as I hinted at, that all it takes for any of this to happen is a mere accusation. You don't get your due process, your opportunity to defend, or anything. To the government, the entertainment industry is infallible. You see, entertainment industry, there's this thing called the Constitution of the United States of America. One of its amendments states that all American citizens have the right to a trial by a jury of their peers. Setting up a system like this that bypasses that is, well, unconstitutional.

Sadly, these unconstitutional bills will probably pass. Why is that? The entertainment industry has money, and that's what drives our government. Whoever has the most money gets their way. It's sad, but true. Also, another reason they will probably pass is because of the general public's ignorance towards all things technology and internet-related. A third reason is the fact that neither of these bills have been front headline material or even made the evening news, so the general public for the most part doesn't know about them.

I'm worried for a number of reasons that can be derived from the past wall of text. One, because I am the administrator of a community where any one of the links already posted could theoretically be considered infringing, since we revolve around comics and animation and frequently indulge in fan-translated manga and anime. Two, because unlike anyone in our government, I actually understand the internet and every word I hear about these bills tells me nothing more than that they are bad for the internet.

The entertainment industry has struggled to come to terms with what the internet lets people do, and has made all kinds of bad decisions while failing miserably at adapting to modern society. I believe they would try to pin anyone who dissents on the subject of preventing piracy to be a pirate themselves. Unfortunately for them, it's not their intended result that we dissent against, it's the method they're using to obtain that intended result.

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" --Thomas Jefferson

Edits/addenda:

Apparently I forgot to mention that one of the scariest parts of this is that the people in Congress who ultimately make the decision have readily and openly stated on the record that they know nothing about computers or the internet. They don't understand the implications of this bill, and they're only hearing one side of the issue: the lobbyists' side. They're not hearing the public outcry against it.

Also, here's a rather comprehensive video by TotalBiscuit on the subject. He says some things in better ways than I do, and since he's actually speaking rather than typing, he can convey the proper level of emotion to go with his words.

The video that led me to TotalBiscuit's is this episode of Far Lands or Bust. Kurt discusses the issue for most of the episode and makes a few points that TotalBiscuit doesn't. They both slip up and name Activision as a supporter when in fact it's EA, though. Just FYI.

I personally will boycott any company that supports either of these bills.

Fewer Complaints About Flash Cookies

2011-12-08T01:20:00.001-05:00

So, after updating Firefox, installing a newer version of BetterPrivacy, and managing to accidentally delete all my flash game saves before hacking BetterPrivacy again, I decided on a whim to keep the settings cookies around this time.

The settings cookies store your settings for each domain that has ever tried to set a flash cookie on your system. They're stored in a separate directory structure from the actual cookies themselves. In the past, I kept deleting them, but as I've found through experimentation, they're important.

I'm not sure what else they store, but it doesn't matter. They store one critical piece of information: whether or not you want to allow that domain to set flash cookies.

Yeah, how could I have overlooked that? lol

You access a menu either by right clicking on any given Flash object and selecting Global Settings, or by (at least on Windows) going into your Control Panel and selecting Flash Player.

This settings dialog has four tabs, but we're primarily interested in the first one, titled Storage. There, you can click one all-important button: Local Storage Settings by Site.

In here you can see every domain that's ever tried to set a Flash cookie, and set each one to Ask me, Allow, or Block. Don't want a flash cookie from a specific domain? Select Block. Want them? Select Allow. Rather get a question from Flash asking for each individual cookie? Select Ask me. There you go.

Honestly, once you get this set up for all the Flash-using sites you visit on a regular basis, there isn't much need for BetterPrivacy. Set Flash to ask you when a new site wants to store information, hit Deny when that new site wants to store information (or Allow if you'd rather allow it, lol), then open the settings and configure for that domain. There you go.

Now I've got Newgrounds automatically allowed and all the other domains ever blocked. And it hasn't affected my use of Flash games or video players at all, unlike the "disable third-party flash cookies" option that's only available if you somehow find your way to the other, more obscure settings page buried on Adobe's website.

I haven't yet tested this with locally-run Flash games, including the titles I previously mentioned: Machinarium, TRAUMA, and The Binding of Isaac. Therefore, I don't know how configurable that is. But internet-wise, I'm set.

Just remember: keep the settings cookies.

Seeking a Real Solution

2011-12-05T03:59:00.001-05:00

So I just accidentally deleted all my flash game saves again. This so happens to include saves for Steam games written in Flash, like Machinarium, TRAUMA, and The Binding of Isaac.

I'll definitely re-hack BetterPrivacy again, but that's only a temporary solution in that it only affects me. The real problem, as I've stated before, is that the mass deletion confirmation dialog is completely unintuitive.

This has to stop. I've just submitted a bug report on the author's website, we'll see what happens.

Also, while it's on my mind, I'll bring it up. Blogger really needs an easy way to cross-reference a previous post. To do so I have to open another tab, go to my list of posts, find the one in question, copy the link, and paste it into the "create link" dialog in the post I'm working on. There's all that empty space in the column on the right that plays home to all the post settings, they could stick it there.

post-Firefox 8 update reactions

2011-12-04T19:30:00.001-05:00

Holy crap, I can layer the tab bar over the title bar! Space saved, plus I can have the location bar visible all the time for a net screen space usage change of zero! *uninstalls disablemenu*

App tabs? What are these? *investigates* Oh cool! *pins GMail as an app tab, uninstalls GMail Manager*

Hmm, that orange button for the menu is a bit big, imma use Stylish and make it smaller.

Okay, I forgot, Firebug doesn't let me inspect the browser chrome. *installs DOM Inspector* *after four hours of pulling my hair out because I had overlooked min-width on a couple things* There we go, 25px wide orange button!

Weird, even with all the domains involved allowed, all my external javascript on my blog isn't working... Why's that? *tweak miscellaneous things that don't change anything* Well, it's not some weird obscure NoScript setting... *on a whim, replace my dynamic script inclusion with regular old <script src=""></script> tags* Oh hey, I could have sworn they filtered out src attributes on script tags before! *tweak the twitter widget slightly so now there's a link to my Twitter page there if the relevant script is blocked*

Oh yeah, the status bar is now the "add-on bar" and link URLs are now shown in a manner similar to Chromium... *hides add-on bar, removes GreaseMonkey "Link HREF in title attribute" script*

*as I'm browsing around, I notice that the stop and refresh buttons automatically swap places as need be* For-fucking-finally! I had to use an extension to get that on Firefox 3.6, and you only ever need to see one or the other anyway...

*goes to Google Documents* Tell me I'm using an old browser now, bitch!

So overall it's been a positive experience. Now to leave it running for a few days and check the memory usage... Especially because I haven't yet watched any YouTube videos after making the switch and doing all the configuration.

Updating Firefox

2011-12-03T15:32:00.001-05:00

The time has come. It's technically been "the time" for quite some time now. I remember hearing about Firefox 4 and all the stuff it was supposed to have, then I ran a few of the betas and the first RC in a VM to try them out, then it was released and the "wait for extensions to be updated" game began.

Except I kind of lost track, and some wise guy at Mozilla decided it'd be a great idea to unveil Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 shortly thereafter. Seriously, what are they trying to accomplish by releasing so many major version updates so quickly? Other than fuck with extension developers, that is.

Anyway.

I went to Mozilla's site to download Firefox and it offered me 8.0.1. So I set that up in a VM, on a brand new profile, and went about my business checking extensions and trying to find equivalents for things that weren't updated. I think I've got it all sorted out, because at some point I stopped installing and configuring extensions and started using Stylish to fuck with Fx8's user interface.


The combined title bar/tab bar before I fucked with it...	...and after I fucked with it.

As it turns out, almost everything I use or rely upon on a daily basis has been updated, and there were one or two things that I found acceptable substitutes for.

My four staples: AdBlock Plus, NoScript, GreaseMonkey, and Stylish, all stay on the Firefox bleeding edge anyway. So no problem there.

In fact, pretty much everything was updated. I was honestly surprised.

The only thing that wasn't updated was Screengrab!. The flurry of Firefox updates claimed that. But sifting through the sea of "oh just change the maxVersion" and "I changed the maxVersion but stuff doesn't quite completely work", I found a comment that recommended a different extension, Abduction!. Installed that, and it checks up nicely.

Tweaking settings made me realize that disablemenu, which would auto-hide the menubar and statusbar, is no longer necessary. Ever since Firefox got that mode where the tab bar gets merged with the title bar, basically. Combine that with Classic Compact and its options extension having the option to have the tab bar always merged with the title bar, and it's available all the time now, even on the rare occasion where I don't have Firefox maximized.

I sifted out a few extensions I wasn't really using anymore and were just eating up space/memory/etc. as well.

Also I derp'd. I couldn't find Fast Dial in the add-on search built into the addons window, and briefly had another "new tab = bookmarks" extension installed. But then I investigated the extension's page on addons.mozilla.org and realized it was indeed compatible, I just had to download a different version that wasn't available from the nice big blue install button.

Also, I'll need to hack BetterPrivacy again, as the mass deletion dialog is still horribly ambiguous.

So, yeah. Updating Firefox to a new major version number for the first time in forever. Feels kind of weird.

I Miss Melty Blood

2011-12-02T20:27:00.001-05:00

Talking with Honya on Twitter about Melty Blood made me realize how long it's been since I've played the game. There's a few reasons for this. Other than stating those, I'm just going to cover some of my favorite stuff to do with certain characters. Note that I'm in no way actually decent at the game, so likely very little will apply to tourneyfags and will probably make me look like a total n00b (or as the fighting game community likes to say, scrub).

Technically I could fire the game up at any time. I have it, the PS2, a screen, speakers, a controller, and a save with everything unlocked on my memory card. There's no real physical barrier.

But what's infinitely more fun than playing fighting games by yourself, against the AI? Playing fighting games against real people. That's what I haven't had the opportunity to do.

The reason for this is due to something simple yet mind-bogglingly unexpected. Every Friday I'd get together with friends and we'd play games. Board games, card games, and since I was bringing my PS2, console games. This took place with a subset of CAINE, in one of their dorms. However, this semester, our host and all five of his suitemates somehow forgot to bring a TV. No TV, no PS2. Simple as that.

Now, of course, there is a solution, though it takes a lot of effort. I've done it once, and it was more hassle than it was worth. Basically, take my screen, PC speakers, and assortment of audio cables necessary to route the audio from the PS2 to my PC speakers. Due to space limitations it had to be set up a fair distance away from the rest of the gaming action and was sorely underused. Also, I'd just gotten Guitar Hero 5 at that point and was obsessed, so that's what I was playing, and hadn't brought enough regular controllers for anything else.

With the reasons out of the way, we move on to discussing fun stuff to do in Melty Blood. I'll start with Kohaku. I don't really have a "main", but she's the one I have more playtime with than any other character.

I love abusing her molotov cocktails. They build magic circuit like crazy, she's invulnerable while dropping them, and if they're blocked they offer enough blockstun to be completely safe enough for me to land and try something else. Since this is stealthily Actress Again we're talking about, whacking bombs around the screen with Half-Moon style Kohaku is also quite fun. Basically, I play Kohaku as a troll character.

Mech-Hisui has a ton of fun stuff including a wide array of projectiles to spam. My favorite thing though has to be her 4B flamethrower. People think they're going to be jumping in, and surprise! You're on fire!

Back in Act Cadenza I really annoyed the shit out of a friend with Nero Chaos' summons, specifically the deer. Once you get that shit started it's hard to get knocked out of it. I haven't really played him much in Actress Again, but they can't have changed him all that much.

Even though I play Kohaku as a troll character, the game has two troll characters built in. Yes, I'm talking about Neko-arc and Neko-arc Chaos. They're much smaller than the rest of the cast and have a wide array of moves to cause much annoyance, including screen-wide beams and a teleport move for easy mixups. Word to the wise, stay away from their air dash, it's slow as balls. Neko-arc has an aerial move that I use in place of her air dash, I believe it's j.214B. I don't really feel like firing up the game or looking up a move list just to check, though.

The tag team of Hisui and Kohaku is always fun to play, just because of the combos you can make while using the sisters in tandem. Couple that with being able to switch which one you're controlling to completely change your available move list and having access to both of their arc drives regardless of who you're controlling and you get a complete experience. I spend most of my time controlling Kohaku, so I can abuse the Hisui assist where she runs forwards and knocks the opponent into the wall. Following up on that (or just using it repeatedly for trollolols) is pretty fun. Sometimes though I'll switch back to controlling Hisui and go in for some beatdown.

There's three versions of Akiha in Actress Again, and they all play slightly differently. Oddly enough, the settings menu claims that Akiha Vermillion is my best character. I think that's just based off of Arcade mode, though. Regardless of which one you choose, she's got options for beatdowns.

I kind of feel like there's someone I'm leaving out that I used to play a fair amount. Since I can't think of the name I'll just end the post here. If I remember I may edit it in, but that's unlikely.

Since it's on my mind, can't wait for the last four episodes of Carnival Phantasm.

mmm, hard-boiled eggs

2011-11-30T14:25:00.000-05:00

I got some random noodles a while back in my hunt for something similar to ramen but without all the sodium, and the package suggested serving the noodles with a hard-boiled egg. That got me started on this whole thing. By the way, the noodles appear to be Korean, as there's Korean all over the package.

Hard-boiled eggs aren't all that hard to make. You just need a pot, a bowl, some water, a stove, and some spare time. To make sure I did it right, I Googled the subject and brought up a few different sites. Curiously enough the directions were all slightly different, so I did what they had in common.

Basically, stick the eggs in the pot and cover them with cold water. Put the pot on the stove and bring it to a nice rolling boil. Then cover the pot, turn off the burner, and remove the pot from the heat. Twelve minutes later, use a slotted spoon (or drain the pot) to get the eggs out. I recommend the slotted spoon, that way you don't waste water if you decide you want to make more, or are making them in batches. Stick them in a bowl of cold water for a few minutes, this stops the cooking process and eliminates that grey ring around the yolk.

There, done. Of course, you'll want to peel them. Lightly smack both ends of the egg on a plate, then roll the egg on the plate, applying just enough pressure to crack the shell. Now peel. The large end of the egg is a good starting point, as there's usually space between the shell and the egg white there. Dunk the egg in the water periodically to remove bits of shell, make sure you get that film just beneath the shell as well.

Now you've got hard-boiled eggs, ready to be served. They go great on salads (slice them so you end up with a bunch of reasonably circular slices), or you can slice them in half lengthwise. Then you can make deviled eggs if you want, though you'll need a small bowl for mixing.

Simply apply gentile pressure around the edge of where the egg white meets the yolk, then turn the egg over the small bowl and apply a small amount of pressure to the underside of the yolk to pop it out into the bowl. Repeat for all the eggs. Now mix in some mustard. There's no real set amount, just do it until the yolk-mustard mixture reaches a consistency you can live with. You don't need a lot of mustard, though. And as always, why use yellow mustard when you can use dijon mustard instead?

Now get a spoon and spoon the mixture back into the yolk cavities in the eggs. Being that you added mustard, you'll have more stuff than you originally did, so it'll heap up. If you have it, sprinkle some paprika over the top when you're done. There you go.

Apparently, according to the internet, peeling hard-boiled eggs works best with eggs that aren't brand-new. I don't know how long the eggs we have have been around, but they were pretty easy to peel once I got a system going.

And there you have it. Easy food that makes you look like a better cook if you so happen to rely a lot on prepared and instant foods.

Munchkin Quest

2011-11-29T05:02:00.001-05:00

A bit of a break from computer game reviews, and showing that there is more to my life than computers (but not much lol).

A few friends and I played Munchkin Quest a couple weeks ago. I meant to get something up right then since it was still fresh on my memory, but I forgot. First off, I'll answer the typical first question to answer in any given review: What exactly is Munchkin Quest?

Munchkin Quest expands upon the formula that's worked for years: a satirical card-based tabletop game where you race your fellow players to level 10 by defeating monsters, collecting treasure, and screwing your friends over right as they're about to defeat monsters or win the game. It expands upon this by defining the dungeon that you've been kicking doors down in all this time. You have dungeon tiles, door connectors, and a wide array of extra materials including player figures and level counters.

I'd been thinking that something of this formula would be really neat for a while, and then it happened. The key would be making it work without being too complex, because Munchkin's greatest virtue has been its ease of play.

To be expected, it's more complex. That's going to be a given. You and your friends can expect to spend the entire first game with your faces buried in the rulebook. Each class and/or race now has a d10 ability: where you have to roll the included ten-sided die and have to roll under your level to successfully use the ability. Each monster in the game now has a card that represents it within the dungeon. You roll a colored die to determine who owns the monster, it gets that colored base. The colored die is also used for monster movement between turns, and has six sides. Being that the game is four players only, what do you do when you roll one of the other two colors for determining monster ownership?

You get to decide. You can throw the tough stuff at your friends if you want. Fully in the spirit of Munchkin.

However, you may want to take it for yourself, as there are certain benefits to defeating a monster you own.

You have health tokens as well, that represent your life. When you lose a battle, you lose one (and flip it over to the side that shows it empty). When you lose all of them, you die. There are ways of recovering health as well.

There are three card types this time around: Monster, Treasure, and Deus Ex Munchkin. Deus Ex Munchkin cards can be races, classes, and extra cards like potions and Super Munchkin, for example.

Winning the game has a new twist. Just like before, you still have to get to level 10. But now, once that happens, you have to get back to the dungeon entrance and successfully defeat a boss monster to win. In a way that makes sense, what kind of a dungeon-crawling experience doesn't end with a boss fight? Plus, it fits right in with the cooperative-competitive nature of Munchkin: Your friends can still try and screw you over as you're making your way back to the entrance or while trying to fight the boss itself.

I feel it's important to mention that the cards are not compatible with other Munchkin games. So no Space Munchkin Quest or Munchkin Cthulu Quest yet. The cards in the game seem to be based primarily off of the original Munchkin, but with changes and updates for the rules brought in by Munchkin Quest.

I don't want to delve too deeply into the game's mechanics in a review of it, but some of the new stuff did warrant some explanation. There's far more I haven't even mentioned.

What we noticed while playing:

The level of complexity was startling for a group of first-time players.
Monster movement can and will result in a clusterfuck that moves together after a while. We had a group of four or five monsters that everyone avoided because you have to fight all of them at once...
The dungeon crawling element did have some advantages: different rooms affect you or your combat in different ways. The dungeon definitely felt like a typical role-playing game dungeon; full of rewards, but with plenty of hazards between you and those rewards.
A "reasonable amount of time" is still defined in the rules as "about 2.6 seconds".
You'll need a big table to play the game, since the board expands as you play.

I don't want to judge the game solely on our less than favorable first time experience, because it seems like it's pretty well thought-out. It's just that the level of complexity really did startle us and make us want the game to end more and more as we were playing. I could imagine really getting into it if our group had the time to read and fully understand the rules.

Overall, I'm going to say that it's fairly complex, but if you can get into it, it looks like it'd still be incredibly fun, and that it would give some definition to the gameplay style you've enjoyed in previous Munchkin games.

Magicka Challenge Mode

2011-11-27T21:33:00.001-05:00

Outside of Magicka: Vietnam, the rest of challenge mode is the same. Pick an arena and a set of allowable drops (which can be unrestricted...), and battle against 20 waves of enemies. You can bring up to three allies with you, but so far I've just been going solo.

The format and scoring system is fairly similar to the Last Stand mode of Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2. Enemies enter the arena from fixed locations. You have a multiplier that goes up as you kill stuff and goes down as you suffer deaths. The difference lies in the drops I previously mentioned. During each wave, one or more chests will spawn. They then grow legs and proceed to wander about the arena. They can bite you and deal damage to you as well. Destroying the chest makes it drop an item or a magick. Thus, you're at the mercy of Magicka's random number generator concerning what you're going to get.

That said, it's very possible to develop working strategies, that change depending on the drops you get. My staple for the very beginning when I have nothing is ARSE mines. They allow me to play a game of control, where the enemy can't kill me because they can't get to me. As I gain magicks, I'll adapt as necessary. On several occasions I've gotten both Invisibility and Summon Elemental. If that happens, anything's possible.

As far as weapon drops go, Invisibility can be rendered less necessary if I'm fortunate enough to receive the Scepter of the Troll King, which makes enemies prefer other targets. However, that only works if I can summon other targets for them to prefer. Fortunately, if I don't have that ability yet, its active ability allows me to charm an enemy, which comes in handy even if I have Charm, seeing as how it just takes one click to charm something with the active ability, compared to inputting WED spacebar to use Charm...

My suggestion is to find the stuff you prefer, and then turn off all the categories that don't contain it, so you have a better chance of getting what you like.

I'll give a rundown of spells, magicks, and weapons I've found to be useful.

Spells

ARSE regular cast (or area cast if you have Teleport) - I used to use this on weapon cast as well, but...
QREASR weapon cast - Be very, VERY careful with this one. As in, come to a complete stop when you swing your weapon to actually cast it. And then high-tail it in the other direction. This spell deals massive damage. Doing any other cast method with this spell is suicide. Also, it'll get you the achievement for having 5 elements in one spell if you haven't already gotten it some other way (using Steam...).
QFASA (or QFQFASA...) regular cast - Go-to beam for killing chests. Also works wonders on anything that's been frozen.
QFQFQFQFQF area cast - If you have frost elementals around and you don't have Rain, support them by area-casting this. It will wet down your enemies, which the elementals will then freeze on their next hit. What's better than an enemy that moves very slowly? An enemy that can't move at all.
EQRAF self cast - Inputting the F at the end melts the Ice back into Water, allowing you to have a shield that protects against both Water and Lightning. Handy for casting Thunderstorm and then being able to conjure Lightning while being immune to the lightning strikes from Thunderstorm at the same time.

Magicks

Haste/Teleport - Mobility is king in this mode. If you can avoid the damage, you'll stay alive. Simple as that.
Invisibility - If they can't see you, they can't target you. It doesn't render you impervious to damage, and doing anything other than movement or conjuring will make you visible again. Still, it's nice to have around.
Charm - Temporarily turning one of your enemies into an ally is not to be underestimated. Especially because you can charm a powerful enemy, then wet them, freeze them, then lightning beam them without having to worry about retaliation...
Summon Elemental - What's better than killing things yourself? Summoning magical beings to do it for you so you can sit back and relax for a while. I prefer frost elementals myself, because of my aversion to playing with a control strategy. There are a couple waves you have to look out for with frost elementals though, so it's not perfect. I would advise against summoning more than one type of elemental, because the dominant type will kill the minority type. Also, if they're all one type, they'll heal each other and you'll only need to worry about them on the waves with the grenade guys (11? and 20).
Blizzard - If you have Summon Elemental and want to produce a bunch of frost elementals quickly, cast this and then spam Summon Elemental (well, as fast as you can type SEDQFS and hit spacebar...). Blizzard will automatically turn them into frost elementals for you. Toss up a quick ER self cast before casting so you won't freeze yourself.
Rain - Wets enemies, letting frost elementals freeze them in place. Affects the entire arena, so you don't have to worry about it not hitting something. Toss up a quick EQ self cast before casting, so you can still conjure lightning.
Raise Dead - Not as useful as Summon Elemental, but anything that puts targets out there that aren't you is worth having around. Note that some enemies are immune to poison. They won't damage those enemies, but they will still surround them and block their movement, which is still useful.
Conflagration - Spiders absolutely hate fire. Just so you know.
Thunderbolt - When it hits what you want it to hit, it works wonders for eliminating a single target. It can get confused with lots of elementals about though.

Staves

Scepter of the Troll King - Active charm ability, plus the passive ability of making enemies prefer other targets, makes this staff precisely what you want if you can summon anything at all.
Staff of War - Double HP plus physical resistance. Need I say more? The active Arcane Bolt ability recharges pretty quickly and shouldn't be forgotten about.
Daemon Arm - While it's one of the best in Adventure, it's not as useful here, because you'll need to be moving a fair amount of the time. Still, when you've got it down to that one last enemy, you can pop off a beam and let 'er rip. Only marginally useful, just mentioned it so I could say that.
Gnarled Staff - Active ability summons trees to fight for you. Great if you don't have any magick that summons anything and you're not up against a wave that deals fire damage. The summon ability has a long recharge though, so you'll have to support them. Note that you can heal them. Area cast heals work best, but risk healing your enemies at the same time.

Weapons

Knife of Counter-Striking - It took me way too long to figure out what this weapon was referencing. It's referencing the knife in Counterstrike, where if you're carrying it you can run faster. Having this weapon essentially gives you a permanent Haste, which is indispensable. Especially considering that you can still Haste yourself while wielding it, and the effects stack...
RPG-7 - Don't underestimate the value of 3000 damage in a single spike. True, some spells can out-spike this, but it's a worthwhile weapon nonetheless. Just make sure you've got some distance on your target, and don't forget about the manual reloads (and the length thereof...).

I've gotten to wave 20 twice solo, and died on wave 20 twice solo for entirely stupid reasons. The first time I stepped on one of my own ARSE mines by accident and couldn't thaw, heal, and cast Invisibility fast enough, and the second time I was trying to cast Blizzard and summon more elementals and got hit by stray grenades.

Magicka: Vietnam notes

2011-11-23T02:25:00.001-05:00

The Vietnam Rescue Mission DLC for Magicka is a bit of a challenge. Not only because you play it in challenge mode, but also because it's fairly simple and straightforward up until the very end. I've got notes about the entire thing though, so here you go.

I mention spells with their default keybindings, if you've changed yours, you're weird. Also, this is entirely for singleplayer. I'd imagine it gets easier in multiplayer. Furthermore, I stick with the firearms theme and use very little magic.
Staple spells/magicks:

ED self cast - rock armor. Given how there's lots of them and one of you, and they all have automatic weaponry, without this you'll find your health skyrocketing in the wrong direction quickly. You'll want to keep this on at all times.
EDDDD self cast - full rock armor, for the end. You're waiting for your evac, and whaddayaknow, the Vietcong are after you in full force.
EDQ self cast - rock armor with water resist thrown in, useful because I always forget that I'm standing in water and can't hit A to cast Haste...
ARSE weapon cast and/or regular cast - Best. Mines. Ever. Launches enemies high into the air, deals lots of damage, and freezes them so they take forever to get back up. If you're trying to outmaneuver and outsmart a large-ish group, these will help tremendously, since you can basically keep an entire group at bay. I don't recommend area casting mines since you don't get Teleport in this mission. If you get hit by your own mines, make your first self-cast Fire, not Life. Either that, or combine them. You get one cast before you have to go through the slow recovery, you see.
ASF spacebar - Good old Haste. With the rock armor reducing your speed, you'll need it. You don't get it until partway into the first area, head to the left at the first opportunity.
QFDWFF spacebar - Napalm. Great for taking out fortified positions, giants, etc. Use of this is crucial to surviving the holdout at the end.

You might as well use the robes that come with the DLC, these grant you a gun that shoots three round bursts and the Patriot Staff, which has Liberty Grenades as its active ability. Here's a hint: Liberty Grenades can set off your ARSE mines.

After you're no longer being rushed by enemies, head to the left and up a bit to claim the spellbook for Haste. This will come in very handy for getting into and out of trouble.

You get Napalm a certain amount of time after the mission begins. There isn't any other trigger for it other than passage of time.

Napalm always sets fire in a line perpendicular to the direction you're looking when you cast it. Use this to your advantage.

The fortified position near the Haste spellbook has a heavy armor enemy. All the heavy armor enemies carry the RPD gun. Grab that.

There are enemies that become priority targets whenever they're nearby. The guys with RPGs, the guys with mortars, and the giants. These guys can kill you with considerably less effort than any of the other enemies you'll come across. Fortunately, there's very few of each.

The first area contains an ammo building and a radio tower. RPG guy at the ammo building, and two mortar guys at the radio tower. Both can be Napalmed if you so desire.

The second area contains an ammo building, a radio tower, and the five prisoners. Two RPG guys and one giant inside. Giant near the well, one RPG guy near the exit, and the other near the side entrance. Watch your fire near the prisoners. There are barracks buildings dotted about that spawn enemies, destroying them predictably stops the enemies from spawning. John will attack enemies if they're nearby once you free him, so either be prepared to follow him and heal him, or kill everything first.

The third area contains the military plans. They're in a fortified area guarded by a giant and two mortar guys, with plenty of regular guys as well. A well-placed Napalm can take out the giant, since he won't move if you don't fire at him. When you leave, a group will attack that includes an RPG guy. Just after that is the spellbook for Time Warp. Grab it if you want, I've never found it to be all that useful. It seems to slow me just as much as them... I guess since it doesn't affect the speed at which you can conjure and cast spells, that alone makes it useful. I dunno, I beat the mission without using it.

After getting the intelligence and Time Warp, the area opens up to a large clearing with a creek. As soon as you cross the creek, Vlad will radio in, and the holdout begins. At first it's just the small fries, but then the cavalry shows up. Plenty of offscreen mortars, the occasional offscreen RPG, and one giant. Give yourself breathing space with Napalm, and shoot away at anything that makes it through alive. Once the giant is dead, it shouldn't be too much longer before the helicopter arrives to get you the hell out of there.

In multiplayer, you can get some diversity in your weapons. Someone may want to partake in some friendly fire to get the M60 at the beginning, there's AK47s all over the place, and an RPG is fine too. 3000 damage a pop is worth the manual reload and long reload time... Also, since you have multiple people and the death of a single player doesn't mean the end of the mission like it does in singleplayer, you have a bit more freedom to play around with using spells during the mission. Especially because you'll need to heal. A lot.

After you've beaten it, then all that's really left to do is complete it faster. I'd imagine a group of four people could do it faster than singleplayer. Though weirdly I did it faster in singleplayer than a two player LP I saw on YouTube... Speaking of YouTube, searching "magicka vietnam speed run" doesn't actually return any speed runs of this mission...

Voxatron

2011-11-22T23:04:00.001-05:00

Technically this game is still in alpha. I have a copy because I donated for the Humble Voxatron Debut.

Voxatron is an arcade-style shooter where you move from room to room blasting bad guys and collecting powerups. What sets it apart from its competition is that its graphics are made up of voxels. Voxels, for the uninitiated, are volume pixels. Basically, make a pixel a three dimensional object. There you go. To emphasize the voxelly goodness of the graphics, the environments are fully destructible.

There are three main modes of gameplay.

Adventure - Takes around 1-2 hours to complete
Arcade - Basically just a "hold out as long as you can against wave after wave of enemies" deal
BBS Levels - Browse through and play user-made levels. This provides the majority of your gameplay once you've beaten the adventure. While browsing around, you can favorite levels you like so you can just go to your favorites list to find them later. Levels can do all sorts of fun things, including changing the player model.

As the BBS Levels would suggest, there's a level editor. I haven't used it, but from having played the main adventure and then a few user-made levels, it seems like it's powerful enough to be worth doing things in.

Now, we get to discuss the controls, and for this I have a little story.

In the beginning the controls were keyboard-only, and couldn't be configured. You could face different directions and fire, but while you were holding fire, your aim was locked. So basically to re-aim, you had to stop firing, look a different direction, and start firing again. This was extremely unintuitive, and made the game unplayable for me. However, since the game is still under development, an update was released that added keyboard+mouse controls and gamepad controls, as well as the ability to configure the controls any way you want.

In the control config, you can set buttons (or joystick axes, for the gamepad controls) to both move and fire in different directions. Doing this basically un-cripples the controls and turns it into a twin stick shooter, and I highly recommend it. The keyboard+mouse controls offer the same ability, you'll simply fire at wherever you're pointing with the mouse.

So it has mouse and gamepad support now, but one small thing is lacking. You can't use your mouse or gamepad to navigate the menus. For gamepads, a quick JoyToKey config solves this, but it really should be implemented into the game directly. If you're making a JoyToKey config, you'll need to bind the arrow keys, Enter, and Escape to buttons. For mice, I don't know of a solution unless you have a mouse with tons of extra buttons and a utility that lets you re-bind them per program.

I have no clue when the full game will be released, and I don't really feel like searching the internet to find the website for the game. Google isn't that hard to use anyway.

In terms of how beefy of a computer you'll need to run the game, it seems like it's fairly light on resources. I never ran into any lag or anything, and I built this computer in 2004. If you're having issues, make sure that 2x Antialiasing is off (turning it off doubles the framerate for me), and set shadows to hard. If all else fails, run it windowed.

Overall, it's a pretty fun and challenging game. Once you've exhausted the main adventure, the BBS Levels are your friend, and there's a bunch of decent stuff up there.

yeah, yeah...

2011-11-22T02:00:00.001-05:00

If you don't run an ad blocker you may notice (up to three) ads between my blog posts now. A while back YouTube offered me the ability to monetize my videos (all three of them...), and I figured what the hell, sign up. I still have to manually enable revenue sharing per-video and they have to review it before it gets enabled, but whatever. Anyway, with that having gone through, I got an AdSense account that I could link this blog to. So I did that.

That's the entire story.

Still feels kind of weird running ads even though I'm so vocal about using ad blockers. I doubt I'll get much money from them, but you never know...

Edit: I did some customizing so that they look better. As you can tell by looking at them, they're now centered within this column and have a border below as well as above.

Magicka

2011-11-19T23:13:00.001-05:00

Remember when I played the Magicka demo and made a post about it? Well thanks to a free weekend on Steam, I've beaten the full game now, and I'm back to offer my thoughts again.

The demo is an older version of the game, and several things regarding how various elements work have changed since then. The area cast Shield, then spam heal mines trick no longer works. Earth and Ice armors no longer hold you in place when you cast them, but you do move more slowly. That's really about all I noticed.

The game is set in a satirical fantasy setting. It makes references to a lot of things. Just the ones I noticed, in no particular order:

Star Trek - There's an enemy you fight named Khan, and NPC dialogue just before the fight concludes with "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"
Back to the Future - you get sent back in time partway through the game, when this happens you get the achievement "88mph"
Monty Python and the Holy Grail - The druids shout "Shrubbery!", "Ni!", and "Ecky!", and there's an achievement called "Blue! No... Yellow!" that you can get while selecting your robe color. I got it by selecting blue, then yellow (lol).
SkiFree - Remember that old Windows 3.1 game? Where once you got past a certain distance a yeti would come and eat you? Well, that happens in the game. A soldier skis down a hill, goes over a rainbow colored ramp, lands, and gets eaten by a yeti. Then you have to fight the yeti to avoid being eaten yourself. Here's a hint: fire.
Guitar Hero - Believe it or not, there's a staff in the game that grants fire immunity and a resistance aura, and in its description it says "'Through the fire and flames' - 100% guaranteed".
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - When you use your first checkpoint, you get a fairy. This fairy will resurrect you if you die (only once, the second time you go back to your last checkpoint), and periodically gives you useless gameplay tips after saying "Hey! Listen!". Also, a general reference, you can find the master sword, and it shoots a projectile when you're at full health.

There are a whole host of weapons available in the game, which you can switch to as you come across them. I didn't really pay attention to them past a certain point, because I settled on a weapon setup that worked well for me. So well, in fact, that any time I died and lost one or both of them, I'd purposely die again to load back at the last checkpoint.

Rather early on in the game, a village that manufactures gunpowder gets attacked, and if you save it without any of the five houses being destroyed, you get the M60. It's a machine gun. That takes your melee weapon slot. It doesn't deal a heck of a lot of damage, but you can just keep firing. A lot of enemies are vulnerable to it, or can be made vulnerable to it.

A fair distance after that you kill an enemy that has a Staff of War that doubles your HP and has an Arcane Bolt active ability. I used this up until I got...

...the Daemon Arm. It doesn't offer any active ability, but it gives your beam spells infinite duration. Without it the beam will just stop after a while and you'll have to recast it. With this, you can just keep on beam spamming.

One of the things I like about Magicka is its lack of a mana bar. This makes each fight more about skill and knowledge of the elements, and less about "oh I wish I could cast the spell that would end this but I don't have enough mana". It helps greatly towards the end of the game where it starts getting really frustratingly difficult.

On that note, the game does have a decent difficulty curve. At the beginning it's easy and you have a lot of opportunity to play around with the elements and what spells you can make, then as it progresses you start encountering more and more enemies with elemental resistances, immunities, or armor that needs to be destroyed, and you need to know exactly what you need to be doing at any given moment. Giving yourself elemental immunities becomes very important towards the end of the game, especially so in the final boss fight (both phases of it!).

A rather fun thing I had to do towards the end was effectively dropping enemies into lava. You're going through a room with tons of lava that you have to use aoe frost spells to solidify so you can cross it, and there's enemies waiting for you on all the platforms. Including the annoying guys with the instant kill rocks. I would get their attention with my M60 and lead them back out onto the solidified lava, then shoot fire at them to un-solidify the lava and drop them into it. It might be cheap, but hey, if they're going to spam instant kill rocks at me in an area with limited room to dodge, I declare free license to drop them into lava.

One of my go-to spells when there were lots of enemies around is the ARSE mines. Yeah, those are the keys you press to make the spell. They could be in any order, but it's more fun to call them ARSE mines. Anyway, they have lightning and frost in them, so they deal a fair amount of damage and slow enemies down, which helps as you're trying to run around dodging instant kill rocks.

One of the great things about this game is that there isn't really a set method for getting through most of it, leaving you free to experiment with the magic system. You know, the magic system that was designed to be experimented with.

Throughout the game you get Magicks as well. These are specific element sequences that you enter and cast by pressing the spacebar. These range from being overlookable, to helpful and useful, and finally to required to get through certain parts of the game. I came pretty close to getting them all (for the vast majority you have to find books to learn them, which can be hidden).

The game offers up a lot of achievements to get, some of which contribute references (as I previously mentioned). A fair amount of them can be obtained just through normal gameplay. Others I got because of repeated failures meaning I racked up more kills (the "overkill 1000 enemies" and "kill 1000 enemies with firearms" achievements).

When you begin you can select a robe, and the different ones do different things, including affecting your starting weaponry. I beat the game with the Vanilla Robes that don't do anything special, and I have another game started up with the Space Marine robe, just so I could get the "have trouble choosing a robe color" and "die while wearing a yellow robe" achievements.

Normal post ends here, spell bullshit after the break.

ARSE - as previously mentioned, lightning-frost mines. Useful any way you can cast them. Especially in the goblin aristocrats fight, area cast them in the middle before the next wave comes and then teleport out of the ring. The next wave will get blown up, pick off stragglers and re-lay mines for the next wave.

QFQFSAA, staff or area cast - One of the highest damaging beams in the game, the steam-lightning beam. Steam wets the enemies and lightning gets a damage boost by shocking wet enemies. Area cast, it's a great way to kill stuff around you, though a bit cumbersome since you have to type it in repeatedly...

QFQFEAA, sword cast - The cousin of the steam-lightning beam, the steam-lightning shield! I use it from behind a regular shield to dispatch those annoying eye things.

DQRQRQRQR, charge cast - high damage ice ball. Can take out stuff in one or two hits usually, when fully charged.

DSQRQRQR, charge cast - slight variation of the above, but with an explosion radius.

Magicks:

QFASA - Great for dispatching single enemies. Spamming this is how I got through the mind battle with Grimnir. Use a water shield (EQ) since the druids in the second battle like to make it rain.

I don't remember the keys for it, but Summon Elemental - Don't even bother trying to get through Fafnir's place without this. There's too much bullshit. It's in a side room after you get past the yetis and the groups of dwarves (the room where you get yelled at for intruding). Defeat the eyeball thing and go in the room behind it. After summoning it, hit it with the element you want it to be. This excludes Shield and Earth (and maybe the advanced elements, Steam and Ice?). You'll also fight these guys when you get sent to the area where you encounter Death, and you can choose their element there as well. If you don't choose one and walk close enough, it will gain a random element and come after you.

Death strategy:

Two words: Healing Mines.
Two more words: Area Cast.
One last word: Constantly.

Grimnir/Assatur strategy:

This fight gets a lot easier if you have either the M60 or the Daemon Arm. Prefer the M60, as it lets you ignore Grimnir's shield he uses periodically.
After beating Vlad (again), scroll through your list of magicks until Corporealize is shown. You have a small time window to cast this to shift the fight to its second phase, so you might as well have it up to remind yourself how to cast it.
Now, before running up to Grimnir, self-cast EFA for a fire-lightning shield. Sometimes he'll make it rain, but it doesn't always happen. Keep this shield up at all times during the fight, even if it means having to quickly put up an EQ water shield so you can conjure lightning safely.
Engage Grimnir. Use your best spells on him and avoid getting knocked off the side if at all possible. If you don't have the M60, watch out for when he uses a shield. The M60 will just tear through the shield...
You're immune to everything that the ghosts are going to throw at you, but you'll get knocked around a bit and that will damage you. So don't forget to heal periodically, and watch out for tornados.
Once you get Grimnir's health all the way down, it's time to use Corporealize. Cast it quickly enough to fight Assatur. Otherwise, the fight starts over and Grimnir's health gets refilled.
As soon as you can move, get your shield back up. Continue to keep it up during the fight with Assatur.
Quickly run over to just below the place where Grimnir was "hanging out". This will provide a physical barrier against the uncounterable blue spell Assatur uses. You should take 300-400 damage from it at most.
Use your best beam spells on Assatur (or lay into him with the M60).
After taking damage, renew your shield and heal yourself. He uses the spell often enough that your shield shouldn't run out, but make sure to keep an eye on its bar and recast it if necessary.
You'll need to thaw yourself with fire after he casts Blizzard. Shame we can't get frost/ice immunity in with fire immunity...
It may take a while, especially if you don't have either the M60 or the Daemon Arm, but eventually he'll go down. You'll get two "level complete" screens, then the credits roll. Make sure to examine the moose in the credits for achievement progress!

Giant Foods Free Sandwich Coupons

2011-11-17T09:51:00.001-05:00

So for quite a while now I've been getting the deli sandwiches from Giant. They have this deal where if you buy six of them with your bonuscard, you get a coupon for a free sandwich. I typically make the free sandwich one of the more expensive ones just to save money, and this has worked up until today.

Today, suddenly, without warning or notice, there's now a price restriction on the sandwich that you can get for free. This restriction isn't listed on the coupon, or anywhere else. In fact, the only restrictions listed are "Participating stores only, limit one per transaction", which I happen to be totally fine with because both stores around here participate and I only ever spend one coupon at a time anyway.

But to suddenly say "these coupons only work on the cheapest sandwiches" when they've been working on the more expensive ones all this time feels like a massive bait and switch to me.

I will reiterate. All the coupon says is "This coupon is good for one free sandwich on your next visit. Participating stores only, limit one per transaction". It doesn't mention anything about a maximum price threshhold. At all. Which is why I feel justified in complaining about there suddenly being a maximum price threshhold.

Stop your shenanigans, Giant. Either make this price restriction publically known, or remove it. As it is currently where it just "exists" but isn't listed anywhere isn't fair to the customers that are trying to redeem the coupon.

It did kind of work out. They wouldn't give me the sandwich I'd picked for free and honor the terms printed on the coupon, but they did take the "maximum sandwich price" off the cost of the sandwich. That doesn't make the lack of notice of a maximum price forgivable, though. In fact, it just might make me stop buying the sandwiches altogether.

On a side note, the coupons don't actually say "limit one per transaction". They say "limit one peoooransaction". Somebody failed somewhere, hard.

Advanced Renamer 3.15

2011-11-15T23:38:00.001-05:00

So after 3.10 had issues and I switched back to 3.05, I checked the site recently and noticed in the update notes "Fixed incompatibility issues with Windows XP". I downloaded the installer (at that point, 3.14 was newest), and then promptly forgot about it.

Until today.

I installed 3.14 and this time it happily converted all my presets from the old format to the new one. Then I check the settings dialog, and no more access violations upon closing it. Awesome. Next, I inspect the preset list, and find it to be empty. Oh well, it moved all my presets out to external files, so I go and load one back in.

This is when I discover that it polluted the converted preset files with methods from other presets. So then I got to go through and delete all the methods that shouldn't have been in each preset, and re-save them. With that bit of "I shouldn't have had to do this" out of the way, I noticed it was still saying "Update available" at the bottom, so I downloaded 3.15.

A bunch of new stuff has been added since 3.05, which I may or may not actually end up using. One method (or possibly tag) I wish existed would be for CRC32. Being that I remux anime a lot, I end up with files where the CRC32 no longer matches what's in the filename, and I'd like to be able to easily update it. I've got a ghetto setup now where I use a command-line CRC32 tool to calculate all the CRC32s, and then manually rename the files, then go back to the command line and verify that I typed them all correctly. I'd very much like the ability to just chuck the files into Advanced Renamer with a rule that replaces 8 characters starting at the 5th character going backwards with the file's CRC32, hit Start Batch, wait a while as the CRC32s are calculated, and have it just be done.

Yeah, I know, CRC32 is a rather useless data integrity checking algorithm these days, given that it's so easy to forge one and that the files I have with them in the filename are distributed via BitTorrent, which has its own data integrity checking. But it's useful on a case-by-case basis, I guess, and the case I made above is one of those.

Another thing that I wish existed would be a way to remove a preset. Even with the new format, once you load a preset, it stays there. No way to remove it from within the program. You have to go into the Data subdirectory of its directory in Program Files and edit both methodlists.ini and settings.ini to remove it. methodlists.ini is technically the old format, which I edited just because I felt like it, and the settings.ini just points at a bunch of .aren files that you've used. The new format is really just taking each preset's method list out of methodlists.ini and putting it into its own file, which doesn't explain at all how the presets got polluted when I converted them.

Overall, it's still a very useful program for renaming tons of files at once.

Backlog Gone!

2011-11-15T19:49:00.001-05:00

The one remaining thing was the Gundam 00 movie, which I watched last night along with a metric fuckton of other stuff. Seriously, my computer was decoding video for 12 hours straight (with breaks for food/bathroom, duh).

That 12 hours contained:

Carnival Phantasm 5-7
Fate/Zero 7 (Rider = most awesome servant ever)
Gundam 00 movie
and the last six hours of the Far Lands or Bust livestream archive. My guess for the contest ended up being pretty close (the extra four hours added by donations helped), we'll see if it was close enough to win eventually, once Kurt organizes all the entries.

Also, because of the CAINE theme showing last Saturday, I picked up a new series. The theme was "Srsly, wtf am I watching". Someone brought an episode of Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai. I'd been thinking about watching that from the start, and was confused when all the fanart I saw go by on Sankaku Channel was just the series' female characters in bathing suits. But this one episode sealed the deal, so to speak. It introduced the character that I already know will be my favorite. Meganekko science girl with no social inhibition. So, I downloaded the OAV and what's out so far, and I'll probably watch all of that later tonight.

Overall I'm glad my backlog is finally fucking empty. I hope to keep it that way.

Oh, what did I bring to the theme showing, you ask? Yuri Seijin Naoko-san, which I immediately thought of when the theme was announced, and Rejected. Yuri Seijin inflicted bouts of WTF on everyone for its relatively short six-minute runtime, and Rejected is just awesome and needs to be shown periodically, and I figured it might be wtf-inducing enough to bring it.

Backlog almost gone!

2011-11-11T03:54:00.001-05:00

So, rather than pointlessly marathonning early seasons of The Simpsons, I decided to buckle down and work through this shit.

Since the last post I've watched everything on my backlog except the Gundam 00 movie. Yes, including Tsukihime. Since I'm curious why the internet collectively denies the existence of this anime, I think I might just track down the visual novel. To me, who hasn't experienced the actual story, it seems like a case of "it's a semi-decent story on its own, but given the name it carries it delivered less than was expected of it" or something to that degree. We'll see, I guess.

I remuxed Ghost Stories to turn on the dubtitles by default. For the uninitiated, when ADV dubbed Ghost Stories (original name: Gakkou no Kaidan), they basically threw out anything that wasn't the bare shell of the plot and just had fun with the rest. The English language dub is therefore quite hilarious. The dubtitles add a bit, as they captioned some sound effects in creative ways, like "[Leo screaming like a little girl]" or "[Keiichirou sob™]".

Later on they start throwing in foreign languages. There's a bit that's entirely in Spanish, they bring some Japanese in (as in, the English VAs are speaking Japanese), and there's one scene where Satsuki and her dad are speaking in Pig Latin. There are many third (fourth?) wall breaking moments, and they point out when the anime rips off various classic horror movies (like The Ring, about four times). I highly recommend watching it dubbed, and the dubtitles help for verifying that they really just said that.

The only series on the list that I didn't watch was Sekirei. I instead deleted it. From both my hard drive and my MAL anime list. It had potential, but squandered it in favor of ecchi fanservice, then rushed a plot in the last few episodes, didn't conclude it, and ended with a "to be continued". Then they made us wait two years for more, only to go back to the ecchi fanservice. I no longer have any desire to watch the series.

I went into Asobi ni Iku Yo! knowing very little about the series. All I knew was that it was something about catgirls and probably had some fanservice. Well, I was right on both counts, and it was a pretty decent series overall.

I'll get all this into my MAL account eventually, I've been focusing more on getting through the backlog as well as not falling behind on current stuff.

I'm intentionally leaving out the re-watch list for now, as it's less important. My first priority is making sure that I've watched all the anime I have on my hard drive.

Also, since CAINE's showings wrapped up all three series for this semester, I got to give Seto no Hanayome the treatment it deserved. I marked it on MAL as Dropped at 26 of 26. I'll be using the Dropped section for stuff that really isn't worth watching that for whatever reason I've watched.

TRAUMA

2011-11-06T22:30:00.000-05:00

TRAUMA is a point and click exploration game. The story is fairly simple: the main character is hospitalized after a car accident. You're playing through four dreams she has while in the hospital.

The game is available on Steam for $6.99 outside of a sale. I got it through the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle.

Each dream has its proper ending and three alternate endings. The proper ending is usually the easiest one to find, but on a couple of occasions I got an alternate ending first. This is due to the photos you find in each dream. Some of them give you gameplay hints or clue you in on the main character's life before the accident, but a few of them give you hints for obtaining alternate endings in other dreams.

Gameplay is mostly point and click, but with a twist. There are some mouse gestures you can use as well. There are some for moving around, which are necessary from time to time to get a certain point of view and find a photo. The others are hinted at in each dream, and do special things within all the dreams. I messed around with it and discovered two of them before finding where they're hinted at.

The dreams can be played through in any order, as many times as you like. On the main menu, each dream also has a button you can click to show what endings and photos you've found. I would stress getting the endings first if you can, because getting all the endings for a dream gives you the ability to sense when you're nearby a photo. Once you have this, when you bring up the photo panel from within a dream (simply by moving the mouse towards the top of the screen), hovering over a photo you haven't found yet will tell you how far away from that photo you currently are. It doesn't blatantly give away the location of the photo either, so you still have to look around and exhaust your navigational options to find them. On more than one occasion this meant I had to find a viewpoint I'd never found before, and usually required the mouse gestures.

Time-wise, the game is fairly short. I beat it and got all endings and photos in, according to Steam, 2.3 hours. After you get everything, there isn't really much replay value. If you want to view the movies again, there's a menu for that.

The game is done in Flash, so if you run some form of Flash cookie control you'll have to make sure it won't delete your save file.

Overall, it's a pretty decent way to spend a couple hours racking your brain looking for that last freaking photo or trying to find the exact viewpoint you need to trigger an alternate ending.

And Yet It Moves

2011-10-27T07:34:00.000-04:00

For whatever reason, this post sat here as a draft for a while. Enjoy.

This is the first game I got from the Humble Indie Bundle 3 that I've beaten.

And Yet It Moves is a puzzle platformer. You need to find the level exit, and in doing so, you need to traverse all kinds of terrain and hazards. To aid you, you can rotate the level. All of the levels require extensive use of the rotation ability.

The graphics themselves have torn paper edges, and the main character appears to be made out of paper. This is made clear in one of the levels where there's lots of fire, where getting hit by the fire makes you burn up.

As you progress through the game, the puzzles get harder and harder. Towards the end, levels were taking upwards of half an hour or more for me to get through. The game itself is actually pretty short, I beat it in a single sitting. The credits are presented in the form of a level, and getting to the end of them unlocks an optional level (and an achievement). Finishing this optional level without dying unlocks another achievement.

Some of the achievements are pretty crazy, like the one that requires you to fall through an entire level, never landing, and die from fall damage at the very end. There's another that's similar that I actually was able to unlock, where you simply have to navigate the level using only the level rotation buttons, and can land as much as you want.

Overall I'd have to say it was pretty fun, but short. I might go back and achievement whore a bit, but overall it doesn't really have a lot of replay value. And no, I don't consider achievements to add anything to replay value.

More anime backlog

2011-10-27T07:01:00.000-04:00

Finally getting to the last few bits of it. I honestly don't know why I keep putting this stuff off. There's going to be some stuff from my re-watch list in here as well. Everything that's on the re-watch list will be noted as such. The re-watch list is less prioritized than the backlog, for purposes of maintaining sanity. Also, because clarification is good when it's needed, I have notes below the list to hopefully accomplish that exact purpose.

Also, jump break, because why not.

Stuff I've watched so far, in the order I watched it:

Minami-ke (the only season that exists) (re-watch list)
Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu Matsuri
Kiss x Sis OAV (see note below, note encompasses this and the TV series)
Kiss x Sis TV

Stuff still left to watch, in alphabetical order:

Asobi ni Iku Yo!
Boogiepop Phantom (re-watch list)
Ghost Stories (waiting on myself, to remux all episodes and set the dub+dubtitles as the default)
Gundam 00 movie (everyone says it was disappointing, but I finish what I start...)
K-ON! and K-ON!! (also quite likely Ura-On! and Ura-On!!) (re-watch list) (see note below)
Love Hina (re-watch list) (see note below)
Lucky Star (re-watch list)
Sekirei (the whole thing) (considering dropping, see note below)
Serial Experiments Lain (re-watch list)
Shingetsutan Tsukihime (the anime that the internet collectively denies the existence of, in the list due to morbid curiosity, also disclaimer I haven't read the visual novel)
Solty Rei (re-watch list)
Steel Angel Kurumi (re-watch list)
To Aru ______ no ______ (I have this in the list as "To Aru Anime no Marathon") (re-watch list) (see note below)
Vandread (re-watch list) (see note below)

Kiss x Sis: I wanted to watch this ever since I heard about it, and after having watched it, I honestly can't say why it took me so long to get around to watching it. It's absolutely hilarious. The main theme is non-blood-related wincest (Keita's father married Ako and Riko's mother), but that works its way around the other theme of Keita studying to get into the high school his sisters go to. It seems they achieved the right balance between the two. The OAV and TV series actually take place concurrently, and I haven't yet worked out exactly what goes where chronologically. Also, it has a small harem element, which is small because it's so heavily skewed towards Ako and Riko, but it provides enough laughs to be notable. One thing I really like is that Keita isn't spineless and will put random background female characters wanting to start shit in their place, as he does in the beginning of the OAV.

K-ON! et al: I have Frostii's subs of the entire thing. For anyone who wasn't aware, their BD release of the first season contains two subtitle tracks, one localized, and the other not. I've gone through and remuxed all the episodes of the first season to swap the default subtitle track to the non-localized ones. Because reading "Mentor Yui" when Azu-nyan says "Yui-senpai" just feels wrong.

Love Hina: This entry encompasses the main season, episode 25, both movies, and Love Hina Again. Basically, it means I'm just getting out the Love Hina Perfect Collection DVD set.

Sekirei: This entry encompasses all of Sekirei released to date. Both seasons, and that crappy little 10 minute OAV. That said, I really want to just not bother. It was over two years between the first and second seasons. On top of that, I waited for the Blurays of the second season because it was just being massacred by censors. Now, I don't really feel like watching it because it seems like the somewhat decent, if cookie-cutter plot they set up just got thrown to the back so they could do more fanservice, and then in the last few episodes go "oh shit plot right" and rush a half-assed ending with a "to be continued" message at the end. Plus, I hear that the second season ends in yet another "to be continued" and I don't feel like waiting 2-3 years for another season only to discover that I'll have to wait again, and so forth...

To Aru Anime no Marathon: I haven't yet decided the order in which I'll watch these. Should I go with the order they were broadcasted in, i.e. Index, Railgun, then Index 2, or should I watch Index, then Index 2, and finally Railgun? I believe some things from Railgun were referenced by Index 2, at least in passing...

Vandread: Whenever I mention Vandread I'm referring to both Vandread and Vandread: The Second Stage. It's not complete without both of them...

Overall, I'm very motivated to get through the rest of the backlog, so it ought to be done in the next week or so.

lol

2011-10-26T00:50:00.000-04:00

So, I've been playing around with the Twitter feed in the sidebar over there. I think I'm done now.

I had briefly updated the Blogger-approved Twitter widget to its most recent version, but it had that annoying "add this to your blog" image at the bottom that I couldn't get rid of and had tooltip text in some other language.

I don't know why I didn't know about this sooner, but Twitter has an official widget thing. Which is what you see now. I guess it's because of the fact that since I use TweetDeck, I don't regularly visit twitter.com anymore.

I sincerely hope that this one will show retweets...

Also, just because I am who I am, I grabbed a copy of the widget Javascript that the widget remotely loads from Twitter's server, and put it up on my site, where it won't ever change except when I want it to. So there won't be any unexpected "congratulations, this thing now looks and/or operates different(ly) and you have no option of going back to how it used to be" bullshit.

I'm tired of this

2011-10-18T22:38:00.001-04:00

Harem anime almost always have some element of "main character does something that gets misunderstood, female cast member punches him", but some shows just take that too far.

Furthermore, when there's some sort of secret that needs to be kept, the worst possible thing to do is to introduce a "referee" character who constantly keeps tabs on how well the secret is being kept secret and threatens something horrible if it gets out. It removes all sense of fun from the story and only results in that one character being annoying.

What series am I talking about that has both of these elements? Seto no Hanayome. I'm watching it because CAINE is showing it this semester. We're currently 17 episodes in. It seems like it's a pretty funny show, but these two elements detract from it and make the viewing experience less than pleasurable. Let's run down the list of characters whose names I remember or whose roles I can uniquely identify even while not being able to remember their names.

Mawari - aspiring cop, but just annoying. Provides some of the funny "we're yakuza, she's with the police, but we're in an informal semi-friendly relationship" element. However, "Do I need to teach you the rules of society?" repeated several times an episode just makes me feel like I'm listening to a broken record. Does she have any sort of dynamic personality, will her character ever be developed, or does it just stay static, boring, and annoying? "Do I need to teach you the rules of society?" could be extremely sexy if implemented right, such that some characters in the show and some viewers of the show would respond "I'd let you teach me the rules of society...". Too bad this isn't the case.
Saru - Just annoying. He's supposed to be "the funny pervert", but he's too ready to shift a misunderstanding onto the main character.
Runa/Lunar/however you want to romanize her name - seriously bitch get off your fucking high horse.
The "referee" girl - At first I thought she was pretty cool, because I tend to like sword-wielding female characters. But then she revealed her role as referee and immediately went into the routine of annoyance.
San's dad - I can understand a father not wanting his daughter to grow up, and I can understand him being a bit aggressive with the main character given that he's a yakuza boss, but still... every goddamn episode he goes batshit crazy because of one tiny thing that gets overblown.
Maki - always trying to kill the main character, with or without a reason. Annoying dual personality.
Main character's parents - I feel like I've used the word "annoying" a bit much in this post, but... their inability to stand up for their son is very annoying. They just agree with every single insult flung his way like it's nothing.

That's all I can really remember. I was assured that the show abandons the first element of people always beating up on the main character, but I haven't seen that happen yet. I've already rated it a 2 on MAL, and I hardly ever rate a series before I finish watching it. This is the series that got chosen for a full slot over Azumanga Daioh? Give me a fucking break. This is shit in comparison.

Fall 2011 Anime

2011-10-17T05:51:00.002-04:00

I'm only watching two shows this season.

Shinryaku!? Ika Musume - The followup to the very well-received first season, and it's still got the same humor it had before. I'm enjoying this season thoroughly. The only downside is that the new OP/ED aren't as good as the ones from the first season. The EDs in this season maintain the tradition from the first season, of being different per episode.

Fate/Zero - Set in the fourth Holy Grail War. Other than that, fairly similar to Fate/Stay Night. Seven masters, seven servants, fight to the death, winners get the Holy Grail. The masters are different since this takes place ten years before Fate/Stay Night, and some of the servants are different as well. In fact, most of them are. The only one that's the same is Saber. The first episode is 45 minutes long. You'll want to watch Fate/Stay Night before this.

I was thinking I might watch one or two other things, but nothing else really jumped out at me and all the series I hear people talking about are generic fanservice series with only a bare shell of a plot. The only other series I'd considered was Gundam AGE, which I'm hearing mixed opinions about.

I seem to say this every season, but maybe I'll go through some of my backlog...

posting with my voice

2011-10-13T12:45:00.000-04:00

Just because I can I'm writing this post by talking to my computer

It's kind of balls

There doesn't seem to be a good way to make it do, as are periods

I see I'm going to have to provide a translation of this post because it's not interpreting things quite correctly but generally it's getting it done

voice recognition is kind of weird I guess maybe I should train this thing Moran I don't know yet that more and was suppose to be I don't know what the five fuck fuck shit this case pays and this thing doesn't recognize the word P. I. S. S. -K. had been teaching fuck because there is no way it was ever going to recognize it otherwise hello alok O. L. L. O. L. their radio ads of three attempts by finally got it face palm

villa when a train this thing Italia to tighten rules speech pattern that it's really hard to do that natural speech pattern OK took in that time the trouble is this became too quickly for this thing I am speaking to quickly for this thing ended types the wrong version of the word to and continually gets things wrong in the hosts giving away as possible OK with the shit what the shit

I think I will disable this now and just type in the translation because this is seriously flawed to a flock fuck fuck to a whenever mind oh and never mind I didn't say and all I said was though never mind face palm

Translation (with somewhat correct punctuation as well)

Just because I can, I'm writing this post by talking to my computer.

It's kind of balls.

There doesn't seem to be a good way to make it do commas or periods.

I see I'm going to have to provide a translation of this post because it's not interpreting things quite correctly, but generally it's getting it done.

Voice recognition is kind of weird, I guess maybe I should train this thing more, I dunno. That "Moran" was supposed to be "I don't know". What the fuck. Fuck. Fuck shit piss. Piss. Piss. This thing doesn't recognize the word P-I-S-S. I think I had to teach it "fuck" because there was no way it was ever going to recognize it otherwise lol lol lol it took three attempts but I finally got it *facepalm*.

oh god this paragraph I don't even. I was mentioning how difficult it is to train the voice recognition thing because it tells you to speak in a natural speech pattern as you read the text it provides, but doing so is difficult when you're on the spot like that. I also mentioned that I was speaking too quickly for it, which seems to make it mess up.

I think I will disable this now and just type in the translation because this is seriously fucked up. Fuck. Fucked. Oh never mind. Oh never mind. I didn't say "and", all I said was "oh never mind" *facepalm*.

Overall, all I can say is, lol @ the Microsoft Speech Recognition program for Windows XP, which you have to install the Speech Recognition SDK to get on WinXP. I only installed it because UT2k4 has voice control options for bots, and you can make them get the fuck out of a vehicle they just stole while you were running towards it. If the bot's call sign is "charlie" then all you have to say is "charlie get out" and it's like magic. Too bad there's no commands to tell the bots to take or defend a numbered point on an Onslaught map...

Hey, TweetDeck...

2011-10-11T17:53:00.000-04:00

... I'm not updating you. Not because I disagree with any change that may have been made, but because of this:

Thanks to that, not only can I not see the changelog, but there's no update button. The information might be visible elsewhere (say, their website), along with said update, but... I'm lazy, and your shit should actually work.

Edit: well, I can probably get the new version off of their site, but the changelog isn't there. So no, until there's a changelog visible somewhere, I'm not updating.

Flash games!

2011-10-10T06:04:00.004-04:00

It's been quite a while since my last post on the subject, and the internet being what it is, naturally, there's more flash games to be had.

This is the Only Level 2 - You've gotten through level 1, and now you're on to level 2. Can you beat the level?

Achievement Unlocked 2 - The original had 99 achievements. This one has 250. That are also Newgrounds medals. And when you unlock them all (which is necessary to beat the game), they make a picture. What is the picture exactly? You'll have to find out for yourself. This game features not just one, not just two, but five main areas to move around in while getting achievements. Plus, a hidden Hot Coffee mode!

Upgrade Complete 2 - More upgrading action! Lots more upgrades, more ship parts, and you can still outfit your ship exactly the way you want! As usual, you have to buy upgrades to get started. The grid system on the ship eliminates my gripe about the first game, where ship parts would move when I clicked on them with the intent of upgrading them. They stay locked into the grid now and won't move unless you drag them elsewhere. Also, just like with Achievement Unlocked 2, the Newgrounds medals form a picture when completely unlocked. Also, this time there's a final boss that appears once all the upgrades from the upgrade menu are purchased, instead of just endless waves of regular enemies. Better all around than the original, or should I say... an upgrade of the original? Only complaint is that the character avatars get colored weirdly at the high levels.

Elephant Quest - From the same guy that's responsible for the This is the Only Level and Achievement Unlocked games. You're a blue elephant (surprise, surprise), whose hat was stolen one day by a wooly mammoth. You really like your hat, so you set out on a quest to gain the power necessary to defeat Wooly and get your hat back. There's side quests too. When you level up you get credits to spend on stat boosts in a grid similar to the sphere grid system in Final Fantasy 10. Except that here it takes a lot less time to progress through the entire thing.

RPG Shooter: Starwish - A decent story combined with side scrolling shooting action and a level up system that lets you power up your ship so you can kill stuff more better. Plus, New Game Plus, so you can keep upgrading and become even more broken, and multiple endings!

Well, I only have five this time around, but... Quality over quantity? I dunno.

Guitar Hero 5

2011-10-05T22:35:00.002-04:00

Now that I'm done with Expert Guitar Career, it's time to sit down and discuss my thoughts on the game.

There are some graphical improvements over previous games, as always. The venues look great. But that doesn't really matter when you're only going to be looking at the fretboard the entire time. The best graphical improvement is thus the fretboard itself. Gone are the busy, distracting designs. It's simply black. It has a design, but it's black. Contrasts well with the notes and doesn't get in the way. For-fucking-finally. Though honestly we had the "Black Highway" option in Guitar Hero: Metallica, it was strangely gone from Smash Hits.

Gone is battle mode. At least in the PS2 version. I do know that the PS2 version is tremendously stripped down from the versions for current-generation consoles, and to a certain degree that can be expected. Party mode ships without its ability to make a playlist and the drop-in, drop-out play that was touted in all the promotions. Also, the "play with any instrument combination" bit of hype is "play with 2 guitarists or 2 bassists" on the PS2. The game will only let you use two guitars. And by the way, that's actually exclusive or. Once you have two guitar controllers joined into the band, the game won't allow any more.

The controller itself is great. The only problem I've had with it so far is the location of the star power button. I can activate with it, but I can never get my front-end activations right. It just feels awkward. I'd love to have it where the GH3 Kramer had it. Also, despite their effort to prevent you from hitting one of the two start buttons accidentally, I still find myself doing it. The controller is actually the very same controller that ships with the PS3 version of the game, and has a USB receiver. The receiver also has a two port USB hub in it, which is important for connecting a microphone for vocals, since the PS2 only has two USB ports.

Also, now that I have a controller with a touch strip, I've had the opportunity to try it out. All I can say is: it's pointless. Beginners don't use it because slider notes come up with no warning and it's difficult to shift up there and back down to the fret buttons, and advanced players don't use it because it's inaccurate, it's impossible to tell where you are on it, and the "tap it to strum" feature interferes with tapping fret buttons in solos. So just turn it off in the options and forget it even exists.

Even though the controller still has a detachable neck, it looks like they learned their lesson from the GH3 ones and actually have proper male/female connectors for it now. The connections are solid and the neck doesn't wiggle. I can't really complain.

Just like with the GH3 controllers for PS2, the receivers are keyed to the guitar they came with. Also, just like the older controllers, you can press the sync button on the receiver to force it to look for any guitar.

Back to the game.

In addition to the standard modes (Career, Quickplay, Head to Head, Training) and Party mode, there's also Free Play. It's basically equivalent to the Party mode, except you get to choose your song instead of it just being on shuffle with an option to skip in the pause menu. Both Party mode and Free Play turn on no-fail and remove star power and scoring points, but the difference is that Free Play lets you make six-song playlists.

Actually, that's one of the best features that the current generation console versions of Guitar Hero have had for a while that the PS2 never got until now: making a six-song playlist in Quickplay (and in Free Play lol). You scroll through the list selecting songs with the green button, and when you're satisfied, you hit start to play.

In terms of other new features, we have hammer-on/pull-off chords now. Which can be confusing when they're really close together. Overall they're pretty fun when you can hit them. Check out the intro to Judith by A Perfect Circle, which has some pretty fun HOPO chord sequences.

There are some new cheats this time around as well: with the HOPO chords comes the Always HOPO cheat that turns any note it possibly can into a HOPO. It disables your ability to get high scores, but it's fun nonetheless. Try it with Always Slide on and you'll only ever need to strum repeated chords. There's also Free Drum. I don't have a drum controller, so I haven't tried it out, but since it disables high scores, I can pretty much infer what it does. It most likely turns the drum part for any given track into a freestyle part where you can just play whatever the fuck you want.

The most useful of all of the cheats, however, is Focus Mode. It disables the venue in the background, so there's less stuff to distract you from the notes.

Playing through the game, you'll notice that something isn't there. Something that all previous Guitar Hero games have had up until now. What could it be? Money. You no longer get money for playing a track, and unlockable things no longer cost money. This is a good thing, it means that all the clothing options that are available are unlocked, and whenever the game says "You've unlocked more stuff!", you don't have to pay money for it. It's just there, ready to be used. The whole "infinite money" system from World Tour and its derivatives was a step in the right direction, and this was the ultimate solution.

Soundtrack-wise, the game is fairly varied. It's a combination of oldfag music, 90s music, new stuff, metal, and weird stuff. Also, why did it seriously take them until Guitar Hero 5 to put Smells Like Teen Spirit in a GH game? Also, for some reason, there's a rap song. Yeah, it's got Zakk Wylde on guitar, I don't care. Rap in Guitar Hero? Seriously?

In terms of overall difficulty, it's a pretty good game for newcomers. There's only three truly difficult tracks. Some of the rest have complex bits in them, but overall they're way less difficult.

Overall, other than the fact that the game lacks the features that were stripped out of it for the PS2, I can't really complain. It's a decent addition to the franchise, and it's exactly what any fan of the franchise wants: more levels.

10-bit h264 vs. 8-bit h264

2011-10-03T00:13:00.000-04:00

Everything's going to shit right now in the fansub world because groups are moving to the 10-bit color profile for the h264 codec. The claims are better quality with smaller file sizes. But how much of a difference will it really make?

First up, there's no point. The source video is still 8-bit. No matter what you do, describing an 8-bit color in 10-bit won't make that color look any better. You can't add information that wasn't there to begin with. It's the same reason that transcoding music from a low bitrate to a high bitrate doesn't result in an increase in sound quality.

Second, using more space to store color is supposed to save hard drive space? How exactly does that work? Plus, with the general "just buy more hard drives" sentiment that asshole fansubbers give to people complaining about file sizes, how exactly do you justify now suddenly caring about file size?

Third, anyone who complains about a release being 10-bit only is met with insults and rude remarks about upgrading codecs. Yes, I've installed the version of CCCP that can handle 10-bit. Yes, I have the version of CoreAVC that can handle 10-bit. That doesn't mean I want 10-bit releases. My graphics card can't decode them, which means I will have to rely on software decoding, which is unreliable even with CoreAVC and means I'll have to close Firefox, Steam, and TweetDeck just to get enough system resources for smooth playback.

Fourth, I can't upgrade my hardware. No money, unemployed. Besides, I don't know of any graphics card currently on the market that has support for hardware decoding 10-bit h264.

Fifth, not that I'm in this boat, but anyone stupid enough to use a set-top box or video game console to watch anime can no longer do so with 10-bit releases.

What brought on this rant? UTW's lack of an 8-bit release of Fate/Zero. Yes, they submitted one to TT, but it goes to a page on Nyaatorrents saying that the torrent ID is invalid. Assholes. Also, they didn't specify "hi10p" in the filename, so it's impossible to tell that it's 10-bit unless you visit their site or read the torrent comment. Being that I RSS download things, it's entirely possible for me to end up with something 10-bit that I never actually knew was 10-bit. I'll be renaming all of UTW's Fate/Zero to replace the "h264" with "hi10p".

Minecraft 1.9 Prerelease

2011-09-26T05:20:00.003-04:00

There's not much I can say about this one.

Literally.

I can't get it to run with an acceptable framerate.

Even setting the render distance to Tiny and the graphics to Fast. I can run 1.8.1 on Far/Fancy.

I have difficulty killing a single cow with a wooden sword.

I think I'll sit out this prerelease and hope it gets fixed.

Tell me about shit that involves me, OK?

2011-09-23T17:14:00.002-04:00

Last summer, apparently, all sorts of stuff happened. It was being talked about by everyone involved. Yet I knew nothing about any of it until I heard about it after the fact and wasn't invited to anything. My own summer was pretty boring.

Then yesterday, I found out for the very first time that apparently it had been planned to have a birthday celebration for one of our friends at a local alcohol-serving establishment. Today. A Friday. When it would be crowded as fuck. I would be needed to drive people. The other person who has a car and can drive people wants nothing to do with it, because of a couple reasons, for which he was branded as a douchebag and that assigned as the reason.

So let me get this straight. A birthday event has been planned for some time now that I'm just finding out that I'll have to drive people to less than 24 hours before it happens? And if I say no I'll be branded a douchebag regardless of my reasoning? Fuck that.

Friday is game night. It's supposed to be fun. I don't really find sitting in a cramped, presumably smelly bar on a Friday evening fun.

My friend's reasoning:

He doesn't want to be in a cramped, presumably smelly bar on a Friday evening.
The person celebrating their birthday is in fact his ex-girlfriend.

My reasoning:

Same thing about not wanting to be in a cramped, presumably smelly bar on a Friday evening.
Being told of an apparent obligation to drive people to an event that had been planned for a while less than 24 hours before having to drive people there.
The sheer amount of talking behind my friend's back about him after the fact. This happens all the time anyway, about pretty much everyone. I can only presume that shit's being talked about regarding me behind my back as well. To attribute this to a reason, I give one simple word: females.
Since when does anyone ever pay me back for gas these days.

Fuck it, I'm joining a couple other friends for a suitably less cramped evening food experience. If they want to call me a douchebag, fine, but it won't be true.

The Flash Cookie Solution

2011-09-18T02:31:00.000-04:00

I'm tired of every single Flash object on the internet adding Flash cookies to my hard drive that can't really be controlled in any way by my browser. It's a huge privacy concern, since they tend to use them to track you from one video to the next. I have BetterPrivacy installed, so at least I get notified when they get shitted onto my hard drive, and I can go clean them up; but it gets annoying scrolling through, say, FailBlog on Google Reader and having to delete their Flash cookies every 5 seconds.

Flash has a preference to disallow third party Flash cookies, which is exactly what the doctor ordered. The only problem: Flash objects can detect that you have third-party cookies disallowed. Thus, disallowing them is pointless because everything will refuse to work without them enabled.

What Flash needs is a "cookie box". When a Flash object creates a new cookie, it would go into the box, which would occupy space in your computer's RAM. Flash would then pop up a notification informing you of this and giving you some options. One would be to make it session only (this would be the default if you disable the notification), so that when Flash is uninitialized (i.e. you change pages) the cookie will be automatically deleted. Another would be to allow it to be stored on the hard drive.

While a Flash cookie gets placed in the box, as far as the Flash object that placed it there is concerned, it would act like any other Flash cookie. However, each Flash object would have a randomly generated UID that gets automatically assigned to the cookies it places in the box, and Flash would only let the object read/write to the cookie with that UID. This UID would be generated when Flash is instanced, and would thus be different for each Flash object on the page in the case of multiple Flash objects being embedded in the same page. This would prevent one Flash object from reading the values set by another unless the cookie is allowed, at which point the UID would be erased and it would be stored on the hard drive, where it would have full permissions.

Furthermore, it needs some way of seeing what values are stored in a Flash cookie so the user can determine what's being tracked. Have this information presented in a read-only fashion to prevent save hacking on Flash games (which you can do anyway with a hex editor...)

Also, there would be the option to whitelist cookies from a specific domain, for instance, Newgrounds. So that all your game saves automatically get stored to the hard drive. Whitelists are more secure than blacklists, only n00bs want blacklists (i.e. anyone who uses YesScript instead of NoScript is a n00b)

Local Flash objects (for instance, the game Machinarium, which is written in Flash/ActionScript and thus its save files are Flash cookies) would be given full permissions and would bypass the box.

The main Flash settings.sol would be tweaked so it no longer contains a list of all sites that Flash has loaded on that any site that uses Flash can access. Browsing habit tracking is already in Flash, no need for any external influence!

Writing third-party Flash cookies would be completely disallowed as well. Flash objects would only be allowed to set cookies for the domain the Flash object is loaded from. So if I embed a YouTube video on my blog, the YouTube player would only be allowed to set cookies for http://xt-8147.blogspot.com/. Reading Flash cookies would be limited to one of two possible secure cases: The URL the Flash object is embedded on, and the URL the Flash object actually exists on. This would mean that any YouTube video I embed here would be allowed to read cookies for http://xt-8147.blogspot.com/ and http://s.ytimg.com/. This would allow their player to hierarchically prefer the volume cookie set on an external site that their player is embedded on over the one for their site, for instance. It would also let the user manually specify this preference. Flash embedded on a secure page (HTTPS) would be limited to reading and writing cookies set only from the secure site, and unsecure (HTTP) sites wouldn't even know the cookies for secure sites exist.

At any time, the user should be able to pull up a dialog within Flash that will show the cookies stored both in the box and on their hard drive, and this dialog would allow the user to delete any cookie.

Last but not least, Flash objects should no longer be allowed to set cookies when the object is deinitialized. I've had to delete so many Flash tracking cookies that got placed when I navigated away from a page with a Flash object.

All of this needs to be implemented in a way that isn't detectable or preventable by Flash objects. This is designed to let the code that places the tracking cookies think everything is working their way when in fact the user isn't being tracked at all because the cookie gets deleted when they navigate away, and if they can detect or work around the system, it's pointless. This system, if implemented as designed, would put the user in control of how information about their browsing habits, even when "anonymously" gathered, is used.

More Guitar Hero Woes

2011-09-16T07:55:00.001-04:00

After I got the two functional guitar controllers from a friend and hardwired the GH3 Kramer, I went about my merry way playing the game. I'm still nowhere near the level I was at previously, but I've managed to knock a few 5*s and FCs off of the list of stuff I was close to, including a 5* of B.Y.O.B. Expert Bass for my second Full Game 5*, and in the process accomplishing my goal of FG5*-ing Guitar Hero World Tour on Expert Bass with at least 50% FCs.

Just recently, that Kramer has started having its fret buttons flicker. I've been trying to narrow down the cause, but every time I think I'm close to figuring it out, it happens in some other circumstance entirely. It seems to be related to when I strum and whammy near-simultaneously, as I normally do on long notes within star power phrases. The result of this is that the long note in question gets hit and then instantly dropped.

But that's not entirely it. For a while it seemed like it only did it whenever Blue or Orange were involved. But then it started happening on Red, Yellow, and Green. I opened it up and checked my hardwiring job. Everything still looked good, though I adjusted the blue wire a bit (it was looser than the others) and repositioned the electrical tape. It still flickers and insta-drops long notes, though.

At one point, it seemed like it would happen consistently if I twisted the neck in a weird way, but that went away as quickly as it came.

Regardless of anything, what I'm left with is an unreliable GH3 Kramer and a GH2 SG whose strum bar bounces back up and causes an overstrum.

This is all relevant because I was with CAINE last night wandering around our local Wal-Mart after midnight and happened upon three copies of Guitar Hero 5 for PS2 with the guitar in the games section for $20. Unfortunately, I only had about $14, so I put it back, but I was forgetting about my check card which has the money for what was once the New Case Fundraiser that I had the progress bar over on the right for a while back. I've kind of been spending that money ($20 or so of it bought me a TracFone card recently), so... I think I'll go back there and nab one of those copies of GH5. Hell, I could grab two of them, sell the extra copy of GH5 to Gamestop, and have two completely untouched guitar controllers. (and a game full of tracks to sightread)

I have confidence it'll still be there, they had multiple copies and who the hell else is buying shit for the PlayStation 2 these days?

Much later edit: Picked up one GH5+guitar bundle. A friend wants to go halfsies on another, where I get the guitar and he gets the game and pays me $10, so I'll be doing that.

Minecraft 1.8 Prerelease

2011-09-10T10:41:00.000-04:00

Since Minecraft 1.8 was officially leaked (and branded as a prerelease), I totally downloaded it (from here). So far, it has not disappointed. Take note, Terraria.

Now, rather than food replenishing your health directly, your health regenerates. You have a hunger meter. When it's full, you're well fed, and as it goes down, you get hungrier. The speed at which it goes down seems to be reasonable. Food items now replenish your hunger meter rather than directly replenishing your health. When you are well fed, your health will regenerate. To eat food, you must now hold down the right click button while it's selected in your hotbar.

Also, when you kill things (even animals) you now get experience orbs, which fill the bar above your hotbar. I've filled mine once and nothing happened other than that it emptied and started filling again.

Animals will now run away from you if you attack them. This is quite fun, as nothing is quite like hunting down and slaying your prey so you can reap the rewards. Notch has also noted that as an unforseen side effect of this, when wolves attack sheep in the wild, the sheep will run away from the wolves, which is also pretty cool.

I disagree with using the term "mob" to refer to a single enemy. Look up the word "mob" in the dictionary, you'll see that it refers to a large group. Stop using it incorrectly, internet.

Endemen appear to burn up when the sun comes out. I went out exploring again after the first night, and found two Ender Pearls and a tree missing some blocks. Creepy~~~~ I have no idea what the Ender Pearls are used for. Killing an Enderman yielded an Ender Pearl as well, and they drop at a fairly high rate, but only one per drop. I don't know if this is just because of the pre-release nature of the update, but Endermen seem to make zombie sounds. Hopefully they don't pick up player-placed blocks. Also, they don't drop the block they're holding when you kill them.

Chickens and Cows now drop food (Raw Chicken and Raw Beef, respectively) when killed, in addition to their old drops (feathers and leather, respectively). These can be cooked like any previous food. Food now stacks, by the way. Cookies now stack past 8 (presumably to 64, I only currently have 32, having found two skeleton dungeons each with one Cocoa Bean). I have yet to see how this affects Mushroom Soup, which needs to return a bowl when used.

Incomplete food reference:

Raw Fish restores one hunger.
Bread and Cooked Fish restore two hunger.
Cooked Chicken restores three hunger.
Steak restores four hunger.

Killing a zombie now nets you Rotten Flesh, instead of feathers. It can't be cooked in a furnace, but if eaten, it replenishes a bit of your hunger bar, and it turns green (indicating you're poisoned). I used one to return to a well-fed state and saw my health go up rather than down. This gives a reason to hunt and kill zombies, and build drowning traps on zombie dungeons. I have yet to find a spider dungeon in the world I generated for the test.

The spot I chose for a house happened to be next to a pile of gravel that when mined through led to one of the brand new terrain features: a ravine. I haven't explored this ravine much, but it looks cool. I seem to be sufficing on an endless supply of charcoal (smelt one wood using two sticks to make one, and you can continually turn one charcoal into eight after that by smelting more wood, which of course is a renewable resource).

Bows have been reworked slightly. If you just right click and release immediately to fire, you're not going to get a lot of range. Hold right click down for a while to charge the shot. Not only will it go farther, I believe it will also deal more damage.

The new dynamic lighting is very well done. Torches give off an orange-ish glow (with a slight flicker), and the night sky has a blue-ish white glow. It definitely looks better than before, and adds a lot more to the atmosphere. I have yet to find anything that gives a different-colored glow, but I haven't explored much.

Running around the world I generated, I found two skeleton dungeons in relatively short order. One was connected to the ravine right behind my house, and the other far underground, but I tunneled diagonally down to it from my house. Sadly, you don't get any experience for breaking a monster spawner.

Options-wise, you can now change the FOV, up to a maximum of 110, which it calls "Quake Pro". The brightness is also adjustable, and defaults to "Moody". In the controls section, the Attack and Use item commands (left and right click) can now be changed, and there's finally a configurable control for listing players on a multiplayer server.

When making the world to test out this update, I ran across the new world generation options: You can now choose whether or not your world is Survival or Creative. Creative enables flying, instant mining, and infinite blocks, and Survival is what you're used to if you've never played on Peaceful prior to this update. The world seed option is still present, but slightly buried. Also, there was a greyed out button for "World Type", which I guess means there will be more terrain generators to generate different types of worlds in the future.

There is also one new achievement, which requires Monster Hunter. To get it, you must kill a skeleton from more than 50 meters away with an arrow. Fairly doable if you have the high ground and some terrain separation (so it can't run for you). Also more easily doable in multiplayer, just get a friend to shoot one four times, then lure it suitably far away and you fire the killing shot.

Also, now pressing F3 will reveal your world seed, which is handy in case you get an awesome world and want to let others experience it first-hand. I didn't enter a specific seed for the world I generated, so it ended up being -4562346595972390193

I've spent several hours now playing the pre-release update, and I totally like it.

Minecraft Wiki tweak

2011-09-04T23:01:00.000-04:00

The column on the right side of every. single. fucking. page. that squishes the page content together and makes everything difficult to read finally annoyed me enough that I made a style in Stylish that gets rid of it.

Since it's rather simple, I'll just paste it here, and anyone who wants it can just hit "Write New Style" in Stylish, paste it in, give it a name, and save it.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);@-moz-document domain('minecraftwiki.net') { #bodyContent2.en { margin-right: auto !important; } #curse-panel { display: none !important; }}

Enjoy.

Holy crap, post draft backlog

2011-09-02T16:50:00.002-04:00

I've got 21 draft posts sitting here that I started varying lengths of time ago. Some I know I won't bother with finishing up and posting, as they need images and I don't really feel like going through the trouble of obtaining images for them, but others I think I'll finish up and post here in the near future.

So, what you can look forward to:

A few game reviews
A food review (that I still need to actually write)
Some other stuff

Short post is short.

Fuck You, DownloadHelper

2011-08-29T20:19:00.001-04:00

YouTube recently changed some crap so that DownloadHelper wouldn't work correctly anymore. First it lost the ability to find the different quality versions of videos, which meant that you had to first set the player to the quality you wanted. There's a fix for that, but there's one lingering fatal issue.

YouTube now does some bullshit with third-party cookies, probably also in an effort to fuck with people downloading videos. Honestly, why not just provide the fucking option legit? Videos can get taken down by various means, why not let us save what we like so we never have to worry about not finding it ever again?

DownloadHelper was no help in traversing this third-party cookie issue. It basically just popped up a dialog saying "you're going to have to enable third-party cookies for this to work". Why not just enable them? Because enabling them is a privacy hazard. Essentially, you're letting one site set cookies for another, which lets the first site tell that other site things about you, your browsing habits, what you're currently wearing, etc. If you don't think this is a big issue, you're ignorant.

So what did I do? I browsed around for another extension that would actually perform its advertised function without added bullshit like search toolbars I don't want. I'm mentioning that last bit specifically because the first alternative extension I found added a bing search bar. Um, hello, Firefox doesn't need search toolbars, it's got a fucking search box. Even though I have it removed and use bookmark keyword searches instead, it's still there.

So to anyone who hasn't already done so, the extension to use is Easy YouTube Video Downloader. It makes a dropdown in video pages that looks like all the other buttons below each video, and you just drop it down, select what you want, and choose where to save it. No added feature cruft like DownloadHelper's unnecessary conversion feature or any of the other useless things DownloadHelper had. If you have CCCP installed and use Media Player Classic Homecinema, you can play FLVs directly without having to convert them, and if you still save FLVs instead of going for the MP4s instead, you're an idiot.

The only real downside that I can see is that it only works on YouTube. Which isn't too much of a problem for me, as that's where I the majority of the videos I want to gank come from. I did occasionally save the odd video from blip.tv, but that's rare these days because pretty much anyone who produces anything you'll want to save uses YouTube.

As far as shortcomings go, it could use an options panel. Specifically so I can re-order the dropdown to put all the HD MP4 options at the top. That's the only thing I can think of.

Negima Final

2011-08-26T08:54:00.000-04:00

The awaited movie comes out... tomorrow!

Chapter 335 contained some full-color promotional material for it.

Also, the Magic World arc is done. Totally awesome from beginning to end, if you dropped before it, or early on, pick it back up and read it. I'm looking at you, Honya.

Let's see, since I have the American release of the volume where the Magic World arc began... Well, they go into the portal to the magic world in chapter 186, and the arc ends with chapter 335, so that makes this one story arc 150 chapters. Easily the longest arc, and also easily the best. It may be long, but there's plenty of action, character development, true identities and back stories revealed, plus a lot more twists, turns, and overall awesome.

I'd say more, but I don't want to spoil anything.

Trying the Magicka Demo

2011-08-24T05:54:00.000-04:00

I've been watching ArchmageMelek's Let's Play of Magicka for a while now, and it looked quite fun. Then I looked on Steam and noticed it had a demo available. One download and install later...

Playing through, it gives you the basic tutorial for each element and some basic ways to combine them, and sets you loose. The meat of Magicka's spell system is experimentation. You have eight different elements available, and can cast spells that use up to five of them. What you use is up to you. Certain elements will define certain characteristics of the spell you're going to get, and each has a priority level. Learning those characteristics and priorities is a must.

For instance, Arcane by itself is a beam that causes an explosion when your target dies. Combining Arcane with any other element makes a beam of that element. Shield, as one might infer, makes a shield. Combining it with another element makes a shield of that element. Now what if you combine shield, arcane, and another element?

You get mines. What those mines do depends on which element you conjure in along with it. For instance, add fire, and they'll deal fire damage when they explode. Add lightning, and they'll deal lightning damage. You can actually add both, and go Shield-Arcane-Fire-Lightning, and get mines that deal both fire and lightning damage.

Each element also has an opposite, that it will cancel out. For example, Arcane's opposite is Life, and oddly enough Shield's opposite is Shield. There are also two advanced elements you can create by conjuring their component elements. Steam is Fire and Water, and Ice is Cold and Water. Since Lightning and Water are opposites, Steam is your way to douse enemies in the same spell that you use Lightning to damage them, giving you a nice damage boost. If you get hit by Water or Steam, you'll become wet, and trying to conjure lightning will damage you.

Also, as you go through the game, you'll find books (some are hidden) that teach you special Magicks that you can cast. In the demo, you can find Haste, Rain, and Nullify. You're also flat-out given Revive even though multiplayer is locked in the demo. The neat thing with these is you can use your scroll wheel to scroll through them, and the necessary elements for the Magick will appear below you, so if you forget one you can scroll through, find it, and then now you know what it is. These are also cast with a separate button, so you can cast that combination of elements as a regular spell if you want to.

Haste makes you run faster, Rain makes it rain, which makes you and enemies wet, and Nullify cancels pretty much all active spell effects, like shields and mines. There are plenty more in the full game.

I could go on, but you can already see that the spell system has a lot of depth to it. So now I'll conclude this post by listing some of my favorite spells. Note that you can conjure the elements in any order.

Steam-Steam-Lightning-Lightning-Arcane, staff cast - the highest damage beam in the game. The Steam gets enemies wet, and then the Lightning can get its damage vs. wet foes bonus.

Steam-Steam-Shield-Lightning-Lightning, weapon cast - Creates a straight line of Steam that shocks enemies. Enemies will be stunned, so it'll get a chance to do lots of damage. Has a minimum range and can be used from behind a shield.

the above spell, staff cast - Same effect, but in an arc in front of you. Great for using from behind a shield. This spell is also decent when area cast, but it doesn't give you much room to move around in, so I'd advise not area casting it.

Shield-Water-Water-Ice-Ice, staff cast - Freezes enemies in an arc in front of you. Great for getting a bit of space or buying time to conjure up something else.

Shield-Life, staff cast - Heal mines! Lay some of these in an area, then advance forwards and get the attention of some enemies. If you take a bit much damage in your fight, retreat to them and walk over them to get healed. Also handy later in the game when undead show up...

Stone-Ice-Ice-Ice-Ice, charged staff cast - the most single hit damage in the game, can make bosses easy so long as you connect with it. Kills pretty much any regular enemy in one hit.

Interesting ways to exploit game mechanics:

Ice-Lightning-Lightning-Lightning-Lightning-Fire, staff cast - This exploits how conjuring the elements for spells works to allow Water and Lightning in the same spell. You basically "hide" the Water inside Ice, conjure up the Lightning, then "melt" the Ice with Fire to get the Water back. The Water won't go away if you don't conjure any more elements. You can also do this with Steam, by adding Cold later on in the spell.

Shield, area cast (so that it surrounds you), then repeatedly area cast Shield-Life - Not only does this boost the strength of your shield faster than mashing spacebar, but it also boosts the strength past the maximum. Using this, you can leisurely deal with the foes that accumulate outside your shield. If you notice the shield strength bar going down, spam the Shield-Life area cast some more. To get rid of the shield, either use the Nullify magick if you have it (Arcane-Shield, spacebar), or simply cast another shield that intersects with it and both will disappear.

Random gameplay tips:

If you're wet and need to cast Lightning, normally you need to use Fire on yourself. But that damages you... So, combine some Life in there. When you're wet, use Fire-Life and you'll dry yourself off and heal the damage in the same spell.

You can conjure elements and then walk to where you want to use the spell, but you'll walk really slowly. Unless of course you Haste yourself (Lightning-Arcane-Fire, spacebar) before conjuring the elements. Doing this lets you do hit and run with spells.

If you self-cast Shield, you won't be able to heal your actual health. Self-casting Shield again will turn it off and let you heal yourself. Combining a self-cast Shield with another element also lets you give yourself elemental resistances, which can come in handy when used strategically.

Defeating U3 with Linux

2011-08-22T21:23:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine lent me a USB drive to copy some stuff to that he needed. I bring it home, plug it in, and... "Initializing Launchpad..."? WTF is this shit? Unplugged, and End Task'd.

Basically, this SanDisk drive has some asinine setup where it's got multiple partitions and tricks your computer into thinking the first one is a CD drive, with an autorun on it. This trick even gets Linux, as that partition showed up as /dev/sr1.

I didn't want to deal with this Launchpad bullshit, I just wanted to copy files. So, as I've unorganizedly mentioned and hinted at, I plugged the fucker into my server, running Arch Linux. The two partitions showed up, /dev/sr1 (the CD partition), and /dev/sdb1, being the place where all the data goes. If you know anything about Unix-based OSes, the solution should have popped into your head already, but for the lesser-informed, this blog post exists.

This is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, since U3 isn't designed to work on Linux at all. Also, I'm not sure how portable these instructions are, they may need to be modified for your preferred flavor of Unix-like operating system and the number of storage devices you have.

Basically, all you need to do is figure out which device name it's using for the data partition. As previously stated, on my server, it was /dev/sdb, with the partition itself being /dev/sdb1.

Now, simply mount that partition. If you've got your /etc/fstab set up right, you won't even need to be root (or use sudo) to do it. I made a mountpoint for USB devices on my server a long time ago at /mnt/usb, so I just used that. The final command should be mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb or something similar (it can be shortened to just the device if you've got things set up correctly).

Do a cd /mnt/usb, and then ls.

Bam, all the files show up. To get the amount of free space, run df -h /mnt/usb. Do whatever you need to do, then unmount it (umount /dev/sdb1) and go about your business.

Yeah, this isn't one of those typical "how to remove U3" posts. There are plenty of posts covering that, so if I wrote one it'd only be redundant. This is because the drive isn't mine and I didn't want to mess with it in any way that might cause data loss.

This file copying is going to take forever, not because it's the device's fault, but because my server's built with old hardware and thus only has USB1.1. I'll check on it in a few hours and see how it's doing.

JavaScript's window.getComputedStyle() method is safe, right?

2011-08-20T03:08:00.000-04:00

WRONG!

Its output can and will differ from browser to browser.

I encountered this because I was trying to fix my image script's in-page popups so that they appear in the correct area of the screen. I have code that's supposed to center them both horizontally and vertically, but they have padding around the edges that throws this calculation off. So the fix would be to get the size of the padding on each side in pixels (to account for browser rendering differences), add those values to the width and height (respectively), then position the box with my already existing code and the new width and height values.

As it turns out, the values returned by the window.getComputedStyle() method are mostly similar in standards-compliant browsers, so long as the element exists within the DOM. But what if, like me, you're trying to position it correctly before inserting it, and thus need the padding value before the element is visible?

You get all kinds of crazy shit. Ideally the same value should be returned in both cases, but unfortunately this is far from the truth.

I could mention some sample output here, but an example test you can run in multiple browsers is better. Fortunately for you, I've made such a test.

Now of course an easy workaround is to temporarily apply display: none; to the element, insert it into the DOM, correct its position, and then set it back to display: block; or whatever, but I shouldn't have to do that.

By the way, if anyone from the W3C so happens to be reading this, CSS really needs a box-align selector, to let you align element boxes themselves relative to the browser viewport. It would be shorthand for box-align-vertical and box-align-horizontal, which would accept percentages as well as "center" as a value, and user-agents would try their best to align the center of each side according to the specified style. That way, we wouldn't be dependent on buggy and inconsistent implementations of getComputedStyle() to position something relative to the viewport and keep it there.

Terraria Sucks Now

2011-08-16T20:08:00.002-04:00

I fired Terraria up a few days ago, and was involuntarily moved to the 1.0.6 update. After playing for a while I realized how crap the game has become.

Healing potions, in the tier they're obtainable in at the beginning of the game, are absolutely useless now. They halved the healing amount and increased the delay for using any other healing item to 60 seconds. It was already really hard to stay alive in some areas of the game before with the short delay and potions healing 100 health. I haven't yet managed to find one of these glowing mushroom things underground that lets you craft the next step of healing potion (which I also believe was nerfed in healing capacity).

60 seconds between health items? That spells death. I don't care how good your weapons or armor are. I had finally worked up my health, weapons, and armor to the point where normal enemies were easy, and the corruption enemies were annoying because the never ever stop spawning ever, making it hard to go anywhere solo. I was fighting the Eye of Cthulu, had a good rhythm going, and got it down under 1000 health, but the healing potion delay got me killed.

Tell me, how am I supposed to progress to the next tier of items if I can't get them? Demonite does spawn in very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very small veins extremely rarely, but the primary source of it is killing bosses.

Terraria was once a nice, fun casual game that I could just start up and have a good time with, running around killing stuff and mining ores. After this update, playing it is more of a chore than anything else.

The game already had balance issues, and 1.0.6 made them worse. How is making the early to mid game phase harder supposed to keep the game fun? It's like the devs listened to all the hardcore faggots with all their endgame gear whining about how the game is too easy, and decided to make the early game harder so all the hardcore faggots could go jerk off to the suffering it's caused people who are trying to get out of that phase.

I've got an idea. The potion tiering as it is now in 1.0.6 is fine, but make glowing mushrooms easier to find, so that at about the time players are progressing to silver/gold gear and have over 200 health (where I am now), they can actually obtain the healing potions that they need to support the amount of health they have. Lower the delay to 15 seconds, and make the delay per health item, so drinking a potion for 50 health doesn't prevent me from eating a goldfish for 20. Unless it already exists, add a third tier of health potion that heals 200 health.

I realize that tons of potions were added recently. I still haven't found all the materials required to make the ones that the hardcore faggots are suggesting those of us with lives should use instead of rightly bitching. Plus, one specific hardcore faggot seems to be a broken record saying "oh once you get the harpoon you can solo any boss no problem". That's a pointless statement. I'll just generalize it to make it clear. "Once you get a weapon that's far above your current tier of weapons, the stuff you previously thought was difficult will now be easy". See what I mean? I don't even know how to make (or find) the harpoon.

I haven't been wiki-fagging this game. I'm trying to play it without external documentation, so I can experience the game's natural learning curve. And that curve was just turned into a brick wall leading up into outer space.

I'm glad a friend gifted me this game on Steam, because if I'd purchased it with my own money, I'd want it back. Oh, wait, Steam doesn't do refunds. Your money is theirs forever. This is why I'm stuck with Real Myst, which is so buggy I wonder how it even got past the testing stage of development.

Configuring Surround over S/PDIF in FFDShow

2011-08-14T15:14:00.000-04:00

Normally I'd put some sort of hypothetical story here, but I'm going to skip that and get straight to the good stuff.

This guide assumes the following:

You're using the Combined Community Codec Pack, which includes FFDShow. If you have some other setup using FFDShow, modify step 1 accordingly. Also, I use Windows XP, so step 1 might change in the newer Windows OSes.
You want a 5.1 surround setup. If your sound card and sound system are both capable of more channels, modify step 5 accordingly.

Stuff you'll need:

A computer
A sound card capable of outputting S/PDIF
A receiver with S/PDIF input, and of course an S/PDIF cable.
Some form of entertainment with surround audio, for testing. When in doubt, grab a DVD with 5.1 audio.
A few minutes of spare time.

Now, without further ado, the instructions:

Go to Start->All Programs->Combined Community Codec Pack->Filters->FFDShow Audio Decoder Configuration
Click Output, all the way down at the bottom of the list on the left. You may need to scroll to find it.
Check AC3 (S/PDIF encode mode).
Click Mixer, and check the checkbox next to it.
In the Output speakers configuration dropdown, choose 3/0/2 - 5 channels.
Check the LFE checkbox, the Expand stereo to center checkbox, and the Expand stereo to surround checkbox. LFE will enable your subwoofer, and the other two are for compatibility with stereo audio streams.
Click LFE Crossover, and check the checkbox next to it. Configure this page to suit your needs/tastes. When in doubt, the defaults work.
Click Apply.

The actual setup process is done, but of course you want to test it, right? Fire up Media Player Classic Homecinema and load something that you know has 5.1 audio. If you aren't sure, right click in MPCHC and get the properties on it. The Audio line on the Details tab should tell you, among other things, the number of sound channels. Set your receiver to use the S/PDIF input, and start playing. If you set everything up correctly, your receiver should show that it's getting a 5.1 Dolby Digital surround signal, and you should hear audio from the center and back speakers (and the subwoofer if it has low enough frequencies to trigger it).

Enjoy.

"New" monitor = resolution down

2011-08-14T06:19:00.000-04:00

So a few days ago the monitor I was using (a black Dell CRT) bit the dust. As in, the screen went blank and it continually made clicking noises like it was changing video modes. Nothing I tried (I'm not a hardware guy) could fix it, so I tapped our reserve of spare monitors, which actually only contained one monitor.

It seemed like it was going to work, but then came the smell. The smell and the sizzling noise. That monitor wasn't going to remain functional for much longer. So, to prevent setting the house on fire, I turned it off and unplugged it.

For a couple days I used our plasma TV as a monitor. It's actually just a monitor and not a TV, it has no tuner. This is the way to go for buying an HDTV, as monitors have better built-in controls than TVs do, and these days odds are you've got some variety of set-top box to do your channel tuning for you. Anyway, that was awesome. Given that our sound system is 7.1 surround, I ganked the S/PDIF cable from the DVD player and tweaked some things to get my computer to output 5.1 surround (the best my sound card can do). I really liked using it as a monitor, because games, anime, and YouTube videos looked great on it.

Unfortunately, that couldn't be a permanent solution, so my dad and I went out to my granddad's house (he now lives in a retirement home) and grabbed a couple of the monitors he had lying around. I played with them to see if they worked and what video modes they could run, and decided which monitor to use. Unfortunately, neither monitor can run 1280x960 at higher than 60Hz, so tl;dr I'm back on 1152x864.

I'll probably get a 1920x1200 LCD whenever I get around to building a new computer, and that'll be that.

The Maw

2011-08-06T08:46:00.002-04:00

I saw this on sale on Steam, and after reading the description, I thought it might be fun. I downloaded the demo, and that confirmed to me that it was fun. So, I plunked down the sale price of $4.08 for The Mawesome Pack, which includes the game and its three DLC levels that it refers to as "deleted scenes" that you'll play through as you go through the game (rather than at the end, or as a separate selection).

The premise is simple. You're some weird alien thing named Frank, and you have a purple blob with an insatiable appetite named Maw for a friend. As you progress through the game, you'll need to feed various things to Maw so he'll gain the powers you need to complete each level. The game is fairly straightforward in its layout, so generally when you can feed Maw something that will give him a power or change his power, it's time to do so.

The graphics are cartoony, and the game has the sense of humor to match it. There isn't any real dialogue to be had. The music is pretty good and changes when you use Maw's abilities.

As for length, it's fairly short. I beat it in less than 8 hours. I played for a bit over 8 hours going around doing things that I'd missed for achievements, though.

The control is pretty good. Mouse and keyboard are pretty proficient, but it plays better with a gamepad. Unfortunately, it wouldn't recognize my gamepad (a PS2 controller plugged in via a USB adapter), but thankfully, I solved that with JoyToKey. The game's page on the Steam store specifically mentions being compatible with Xbox 360 controllers, so if you've got one of those, you should be good to go.

This game isn't very complex, so there's not really much more I can say about it. If you can, go buy it before the 66% off sale ends on Steam (a bit over 4 hours as of... NOW!).

This Post Is About Anime

2011-07-30T00:23:00.001-04:00

Because I haven't posted about what I'm watching each season in quite a while. So here are some quick review blurbs about everything I'm watching, summer season or continued from spring. I'll also include the number of aired episodes and the total number when known.

Spring Season:

Nichijou (17/26) - An absolutely hilarious comedy. The title translated means "everyday life". One character rides a goat to school and has a butler. One character has a mohawk, but only because that's the only place on his head that hair will grow. One character is a robot with a key sticking out of her back, designed by a child scientist who eats snacks all day. I could go on, but the point is, there's a wide range of wacky characters, and the resulting show is completely hilarious. My daily routine stops when an episode comes out.

Summer Season:

Mayo Chiki (4/?) - Main character is a guy who is constantly used as a punching bag by both his mom and little sister, who are both great martial artists. As a result of being beaten up so much, he's developed a bit of a condition: any time he touches a girl, his nose bleeds. One day he discovers that his school's headmaster's daughter's butler is actually a female, something she's trying to hide. After all that exposition happens, the headmaster's daughter (who is a bit of a sadist) decides to cure him of his condition. Cue fanservice. Honestly it's been pretty funny.

R-15 (3/12) - The main character goes to a school for geniuses. He himself is a genius novelist, with a slight twist: he writes romance novels. The majority of the female cast prejudges him as a total pervert because of this, and constantly hates on him, something I think has been a bit overdone in anime. It seems to be getting a bit better with each episode, so hopefully this trend will continue. Also, cue fanservice, because even though the main character isn't really a pervert, he does have an imagination.

Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu Ni! (3/13) - Sequel to the original. Still funny. Starts out with the main cast on a beach vacation, then it's back to school. Somehow it feels a bit different than the first series. We'll have to see how it compares.

Aquaria

2011-07-26T02:19:00.000-04:00

Aquaria is a 2D, sidescrolling adventure game by indie developer Bit-Blot. You play as a fish-person (her exact lineage is revealed as you progress through the story) named Naija, who has lost her memories and wonders if she's the only person in all of Aquaria.

The vast majority of the game takes place under water. Your basic controls are movement, a dash ability, and a "verse ring" that lets you perform various abilities and interact with various parts of the game. Each symbol in the verse ring has its own color and tone, often you'll have to match them to something you're shown to solve a puzzle.

In terms of the abilities gained from the verse ring, you have a defensive shield that protects you from enemy projectiles, and there are a variety of forms that Naija can take on that have their own special powers. For instance, the Energy Form can fire bolts of energy at your foes, but the Beast Form lets you eat them to replenish health. Those are just a few of the uses of the verse ring. Each ability has to be unlocked before you can use it, so random experimentation won't find you anything.

The game is laid out in an expansive environment that you can freely roam about. Some areas will of course require you to have certain abilities in order to be accessed. This ensures that there's always a reward to re-visiting an area you went through previously after you gain new powers, and also that there's always an immediate use for each new power you gain. It reminds me of Super Metroid, and that's a good thing.

One area I'd like to highlight in particular is called The Veil. Three paragraphs ago I said that the vast majority of the game takes place under water, right? Well, this is where you find the surface. There are land masses you can hop about on and traverse to get to other parts of The Veil. Naija isn't nearly as maneuverable out of the water as she is in the water, so you're limited to hopping around and wall jumping to reach places. In addition, there are these mysterious water bubbles you'll find if you head to the right part of the game. They float in midair, and you can jump between them to go higher.

To help you find your way, you have a small radar in the lower right corner of the screen. It will have pulsating dots on it that indicate area exits and save points. Some areas of the game are dark, and nothing will show on the radar while you're in one of these areas. You gain an ability later on that allows you to light the way and see where you're going both onscreen and on the radar. In addition, while you're in a dark area, you won't be able to bring up your map screen.

The ring around your radar shows you how much health you have. You start out with a half-circle's worth of health, and throughout the game you will find verse eggs that will increase your maximum health. There's actually a pretty long dead period between the first one and the second one, so don't get frustrated thinking you're missing them left and right. The first one is pretty much given to you, and the rest require you to use specific forms to reach them.

As far as items to get, there is plenty to be found. Scattered throughout the game are various artifacts that Naija will add to her home cave when she finds them. Some are decorative, but others have a purpose. Also, you'll find costumes you can equip to change what Naija looks like when she's not in any of her forms. Some of these costumes also confer benefits, so they're not all just for show.

Naturally, with all these enemies to fight, you're going to need to replenish health at some point. Part of the item collection is food and ingredients. You will unlock recipes as you find new food, and the ingredients you find will let you make more food. Each food item has a different benefit. There are plenty that simply heal, but others provide temporary stat boosts or cure conditions like poison or blindness. The game doesn't go too overboard with these conditions though, being inflicted with them can usually be avoided.

As far as inventory space goes, it appears to be infinite. As soon as I filled up what I could see of my food storage, the next unique item I picked up caused the game to make a second page. Once I overflowed the second page, a third was created. So even though you can throw things away, there's really no reason to do so. However, you can only hold a maximum of eight of any given item, so this gives you an incentive to cook often so you can gain ingredients in the most efficient manner. Your inventory can be sorted by clicking the dotted icon, I believe it has three different sorting methods.

When you go to make a food item, in most places of the game, you'll have two cooking slots available. Yet, some recipes require three. How do you make those? You find a kitchen. There's one in Naija's home cave, and I've found two others. Also, in a fairly well-hidden area of the game, you can defeat an enemy to obtain a third cooking slot, and then you'll be able to cook anything on the go as long as you have the ingredients.

As for finding the ingredients themselves, they can be obtained in a variety of different manners. There are glowing colored plants throughout the game that if you sing the correct note (as denoted by the color), the colored pod will release an item for you. Also, be on the lookout for leaves in grassy areas, as they can hide things. You'll need a specific ability to get items out of these. Also, meat and meat-related items like oils and eggs can be obtained by killing fish, crabs, and other underwater creatures.

As you explore, you'll probably run across various optional bosses. Defeating these bosses will give you a pet. In three of the four cases, this pet will attack for you. The last pet provides light, which is handy for the dark areas of the game.

With the free-roaming aspect of the game being so huge, you might struggle to remember where certain places you wanted to revisit are, right? Well, wrong. The map screen allows you to place markers on the map. You can give each marker a name to represent what it's marking, and regardless of where you are in the world you can see all the markers on the map screen by scrolling around or zooming out. So if there's something blocking your way, but you can see that there's somewhere to go beyond it, you can mark it so you can return later after gaining a new ability.

The graphics and music are excellent. The music really enhances the underwater feel that the graphics give off, and it's a pleasure to both look at and listen to.

Overall, I'd have to say that this is one hell of a good game and you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't own it.

Advanced Renamer 3.10 Issues Braindump

2011-07-15T20:40:00.003-04:00

Just in case my post on the dev's forum didn't go through, I'm going to essentially recreate it here. It'll be missing some critical information, but whatever.

So I started up Advanced Renamer today to rename some stuff, and it said at the bottom that there was an update available. I clicked it and read the changelog and it looked like some pretty neat stuff was added, so I downloaded it and installed it.

One of the things that was changed has to do with your renaming method lists themselves. Rather than being stored in one file, now Advanced Renamer will store them in separate files that are more easily distributable from one computer to the next.

That's relevant because it has a dialog that comes up when you run it with an old methods file in the folder that basically says "hey, we're going to convert this so it'll work". So, I click OK. Then I get an error that says that TFileOpenDialog only works on Windows Vista or newer. Great. So I can't convert my methods to the new format.

There were a bunch of new settings added, so I went to the settings dialog to check that out. After inspecting what was available, I closed the dialog and got an access violation. I don't remember the exact addresses, but it happened regardless of whether anything was changed, and regardless of whether I hit OK or Cancel. There was a slightly different one that I'd get if any tab other than the very first (leftmost) one was selected, as well.

Having seen that 3.10 had some issues, I didn't feel like having it rename anything, so I clicked the X in the upper right corner to close it, and I got another access violation.

So basically, to ensure proper functionality, I've downgraded back to 3.05. I hope these issues are fixed and that the dev doesn't just go "lol you use Windows XP" like he did for someone else posting issues with Windows 2000, which he still states compatibility with. As much as I want to use Windows 7, it would kill this computer.

Team Fortress 2

2011-07-11T06:22:00.001-04:00

I know I'm late to this party, but that's how I roll, I guess. Let's just call it "fashionably late" and move on, shall we?

After the recent introduction of Free to Play games to Steam, Valve decided to make Team Fortress 2 a Free to Play game.

And holy crap, it's officially the best Free to Play game ever. Admittedly, this wasn't a hard title to earn, but it just got a lot harder.

You actually get decent replay value for it, plus they can still make money off of you via the Mann Co. Store. When you start playing as a new player after the F2P update, you will initially be limited in certain ways, but that changes if you buy something from the store. Best part: unlike any other F2P game where the change would only be temporary, this change is permanent. Essentially, everyone who had previously paid for TF2 was given a "premium account" that gets better drops, has more inventory space, and can initiate trades. Anyone first starting out has a "free account", which lacks these things.

My account is now premium, because I got one of their summer camp promotion crates that expires after the sale ends and requires a special key to be purchased from the store to open it, and these keys turn into regular keys after the sale ends. Fortunately, it wasn't too expensive to buy said key, but I don't think I'll bother with any more crates unless someone randomly decides to trade me a key, which they probably won't. Also, when I made the purchase, Team Fortress 2 Beta popped up in my Steam game list. I don't know what this is, and I don't want to infer something incorrect...

Now, what makes it the best Free to Play game ever? I actually mentioned it two paragraphs ago: TF2 has plenty of replay value. Every map, every server, every class, and every set of players is an entirely different experience. The same can't be said for Spiral Knights, which essentially stagnates in gameplay in under an hour after initial character creation. I guess the best way to sum it up is that since TF2 wasn't an F2P game and then became one, it actually had serious development resources and time put into it, as opposed to your typical F2P game developer just going "hey, let's shit out the bare shell of a game, and then charge exorbitant amounts of money to people that actually want to get anywhere in it!"

So, what are you waiting for? Go install TF2 today! You've got nothing to lose!

(also install Alien Swarm while you're at it, as it's completely free and was released long before F2P games were added to Steam.)

Beat Hazard Ultra Achievement Guide

2011-07-11T05:38:00.002-04:00

Since I've now gotten 100% achievements, I thought I'd type up a bit about what you might need to know to get each. Most are self-explanatory, but a couple are tricky. I've categorized each by what portions of the game they can be earned in, so you'll know exactly what you can get without touching the new features, or without buying Ultra.

Any of the ones that don't technically require the new features or Ultra can of course be done with the new features/Ultra. They may be more difficult, and my suggestions are written assuming you have Ultra. If an achievement that can be done in Classic is just too hard in Ultra, you can always step down to Classic (Just choose Beat Hazard Classic when launching the game). In that case, be aware that Ultra changed the enemy wave generation (to factor in all the new enemies), so the song will play entirely differently. It won't even have bosses in the same spots.

And of course, if you're playing with mouse and keyboard, please be aware that this game plays a lot better with a dual analog stick gamepad (like a PS2 or Xbox 360 controller). Wired Xbox 360 controllers are plug-and-play on Windows, by the way, and there is an official receiver for the wireless ones.

Jump break here for convenience.

Achievements that can be done in Classic (25/43)

The First Step - Install the game, find your music, and play a song. Did you level up at the end? Yes? There you go.
1st Track Cleared - You'll get this one either at the same time as The First Step, or before it. Why it's less globally achieved, I don't know.
Millionare - This is cumulative, so just play tracks and you'll get it.
Perfect - Well, it's restricted to 3 minute tracks or longer, so if you're unsure of yourself, pick a 3 minute long track. Set your perks for survivability rather than points.
Half Way There - Just keep playing the game and ranking up.
x100 - Perks: Chart Topper, The Devil Pays Well, I Don't Die, Multiplier Rain, Spawn More Multipliers, Goodie Bag, Pump up the VOL, POW POW POW. Notice a theme here? You get two extra perks to play with, I recommend against taking weapon perks, as taking any weapons will replace Goodie Bag multipliers with weapon powerups. Daredevil a bit, don't die, get that x5 from the Multiplier Rain (at the very least), and don't forget about the occasional x10 multiplier powerup. With any luck you can get close to x100 while you're still dodging asteroids.
The First Hour - Play for an hour, just like it says.
Multi-Millionare - Just like with Millionare, this one is cumulative. You'll get it if you keep playing.
A Real Dare Devil - Do this at the beginning of the track, and pick one that's relatively slow-paced at the beginning. The trick is that it needs to be fast-paced enough for the gauge to fill at the proper speed. Dodge stuff until you get it. Don't forget to go in on Normal. No sense making it harder on yourself than it needs to be. Do it in Classic where the daredevil gauge doesn't change fill speeds according to the music if it's just too hard in Ultra.
Dude of Hazard - Just like with Multi-Millionare, this one is cumulative, and you'll get it eventually.
Go Platinum - Pick a song you're decent at, set your perks for score, and have at it.
Pwnage - Don't die. As a last resort, do the "death blossom" technique, where you spin around scattering shots everywhere. Don't forget about bombs or other powerups.
I'm Just Starting - The first and easiest of the Survival mode achievements. Set your perks for survivability. It may be best to go for all of these in one sitting.
Brutal Boss Kill - This sounds difficult, but it's really, really not. Do it on the small bosses that come at you in pairs. Often they will rotate onto the screen one turret at a time, so focus fire on one of them. Turrets that aren't on the screen can't fire, so as long as you take out the visible turrets quickly, it's easy. Your best friend here is the Ultra Beam, which can flat-out kill one of the small bosses in one or two deployments when it's fully on screen. If all else fails, do it in Classic where there's fewer turret types to worry about.
Elite! - Just like with Half Way There, just keep playing the game and ranking up.
25! - You'll probably get this in the normal course of gameplay. If you really feel the need to cheese this series of achievements, play shorter tracks.
Don't Panic - If you're smart, you'll realize you can get it 10 seconds after getting A Real Dare Devil.
Don't Stop Me Now - The second of the Survival mode achievement series. Just like before, set yourself up for survivability. If doing this in Classic where the soft parts can mean death, remember the mantra: "bomb the transition". Otherwise, Ultra Beam or Micro Missiles or something. The transitions are what the Ultra Beam was designed for anyway.
Boss Slayer - By "in one game", it really means "in one song". Pick a long song that's fairly active. Remember that the two small bosses count as two bosses, so if you have a song where you encounter them four times, then there you go.
50! - Just keep playing the game.
High 5 - This one's all in the description. 5 hours of total playtime.
Coming Through! - 15 minutes in survival mode. Just don't die.
Survival Champion! - 20 minutes in Survival Mode. This is the last Survival milestone, after that, it's just pride.
100! - Just. Keep. Playing. The. Game.
Veteran - Just. Keep. Playing. The. Game.

Achievements that can't be done in Classic, but don't require Ultra (7/43, for a total of 32/43)

Perk MAXED - Save up a bunch of cash, then upgrade a perk all the way. If in Ultra and you still don't have it, pick one of the ones that needs less upgrading, just to make it easier on yourself.
Tug of War - The stalkers are the ones whose beams push and pull you around the screen. Pick one, get caught in its beams, and resist for 10 seconds. Don't fire at the stalker you're doing this with. There you go.
Cool Tracks - Bring up the credits screen, scroll down to the first URL, click. Done.
Completely Insane - If you're unsure of yourself, take a track that's exactly 4 minutes. Set the visuals down to 50%, and set your perks for survivability. If you know what you're doing, adjust accordingly. This doesn't stack with the Suicidal one, sadly, so you'll have to do two runs. They can be the same song, though.
Tough Guy - See notes for Completely Insane. And yes, they really don't stack. If you do Completely Insane and Tough Guy back-to-back, you may have to play Chill Out mode for a while to relax and let the adrenaline rush go away, like I did.
Cash Grab - See those triangular $10 powerups? Keep collecting them. Don't spend them. Eventually you'll get it. Now go buy a bunch of stuff.
Music Tour - I did this on 50% visuals, on Normal for most of them, stepping up to Hardcore or Insane when Normal or Hardcore wasn't enough. So basically, it's easy. The only hard part: most of the tracks are terribly generic techno.

Achievements that require Ultra (11/43, of course rounding it out at 43/43)

Striptease - This could conceivably be done without Ultra's Boss Rush mode, but Boss Rush is the perfect place to do it. Strip those turrets with the Ultra Beam and then forget about the bosses. This depends heavily on the bosses that spawn after the ones you strip. Also, avoid reflecting projectiles, using micro missiles, and using bombs while going for this one.
Boss Dance - You can very easily get this by accident, simply by not defeating bosses fast enough. As the waves progress and you have less and less time, it becomes more and more likely you'll get it.
Reflection - Stockpile Reflect Shield powerups, then when there's a lot of projectiles, use them all. Wait until you start buzzing to use each successive powerup. Your goal is to just keep the shield active until you've reflected 150 projectiles. Depending on the turret configuration, bosses can make this really easy.
Perks! - Save your money and buy every perk. Simple as that.
Boss King - Set your perks for survivability, and play it smart until that wave number reaches 30. Then you can suicide if you want.
Death By A Thousand Cuts - The easiest of the "10000 kills with X powerup" achievements. Micro Missiles are so nice that you can just fire and forget, and you'll have it in no time.
Untouchable - The mid-range difficulty of the "10000 kills with X powerup" achievements. While going for this, you'll discover how awesome the Reflect Shield is. Some bosses, depending on their turret setup, can be defeated with one or two deployments of the Reflect Shield.
Mad MAXED - Get lots of money and max out all the perks. You can do this while going for the play time and songs played achievements if you don't already have those.
Death Star - The hardest of the "10000 kills with X powerup" achievements. The Ultra Beam is great for transitions and ripping boss turrets off of bosses, but you need to remember to turn your ship slowly if you want it to be useful. Use it on the smaller enemies for the purpose of getting the achievement, as it takes longer to kill the bigger ones.
Ultra Beam of Death - Just like with Reflection, stockpile Ultra Beam powerups, then use them all. Don't let the Ultra Beam stop until the achievement pops up on the screen.
A Real Mine Sweeper - This one is really tricky. First off, what the heck is a mine? Well, it's those things that when you hit them, rather than killing you directly, they just prevent you from firing. You have to hit 50 of those in one song, and finish the track without losing a life. Don't try to hit too many of them at once. Some songs go absolutely nuts spawning these things, so find one that does that and purposefully fly into some every time they come up. The achievement won't unlock until you finish the track. If you die once, it's all over. Good luck.

Yes, I know I spelled "millionaire" wrong. These are the verbatim achievement names. Also, it seems a bit weird that some of Ultra's achievements don't actually require having purchased Ultra, but it's true. Anyone who owns Beat Hazard but not Ultra can get some of Ultra's achievements and perks. The perks that can be obtained without Ultra reasonably approximate what you get by ranking up in Classic.

Steam Summer Camp Sale

2011-07-07T00:49:00.000-04:00

Steam's having its summer sale right now, and there are daily achievements you can get to obtain tickets. For every three tickets you get, you can redeem them for a prize, which is basically a small bit of DLC in a select few games. Extra characters, new maps, random goodies, etc. You get the deal. Best part: No Purchase Necessary.

The nice thing is, since there's the whole "No Purchase Necessary" thing, every day of the sale has had one achievement you can get without spending any money. A few of the days have had achievements in games I own, so where possible I went ahead and got those, exceptions going to the Super Meat Boy one, because it's fucking impossible and I'm nowhere near the area of the game I need to be in to unlock it, and the Facebook one, for obvious reasons.

The mysteriously added 43rd achievement for Beat Hazard, Striptease (Strip two bosses of their weapons and keep them alive for 60 seconds) ended up being one of the summer camp achievements, and I got that earlier as well as the last achievement I needed (Death Star, 10000 kills with the Ultra Beam) to get back to 100%.

Some days have had two free ones, like the day that had a regular free one and then a Team Fortress 2 (which is now Free To Play) achievement. So yeah, I've sacrificed 6 GB of hard drive space to install TF2. The game is hella fun, but I'm still uninstalling it after the sale ends. I've gotten the achievement, which I had to set up with a friend just because I always got killed trying to do it in actual matches.

The achievements I've gotten so far and how to go about doing them:

Bit.Trip Beat - Sunbathing: Just don't suck. This one is fairly easy. Play Transition on the lowest difficulty, since the achievement doesn't have a minimum difficulty. You don't even need to finish the song for it to unlock.
Steam - Welcome To Camp: Join the Summer Camp official group on Steam. This one is derpaliciously easy.
Team Fortress 2 - Escape The Heat: As the description says, get set on fire and then jump into water. The tricky part is doing it without dying, since 99% of the time on random servers people aren't going to go "oh sure let me stop playing how I'm supposed to be playing and help a member of the opposing team get an achievement". It's easiest to find a relatively unpopulated server running a map with water and get a friend to help you, for mutual benefit.
Steam - Introduce Yourself: Have a friend on Steam? Good. Go post a comment on their profile. Achievement get. Next.
Steam - Write Home: Click that Recommend... button next to a game in your games list, and type something short about why the game is awesome. Submit, and there you go. Next.
Trine - Summer Dip: I thought this one was going to be difficult until I realized each character has their own separate breath meter. Dive into some water, and when one character's breath meter gets low, switch to the next. Eventually you'll get the achievement. Just don't leave yourself with the knight as your only character with a breath meter left, because he can't swim up. When I got it, I didn't have the item that lets one of your characters breathe underwater, so I don't know how that affects it. If you have that, it could be balls easy.
Steam - Say Cheese: Start game, press F12, upload screenshot. Achievement get. Next.
Beat Hazard - Striptease: Two words: Boss Rush. Pick a song that has an early boss wave that's the two small bosses. Each of them counts as a separate boss, so strip them of their weapons and then ignore them. Can be tricky, since bosses like to camp on other bosses and force you to fire at them. The Reflect Shield can work against you here as well. The Ultra Beam is your friend here, as it makes short work of turrets on bosses, and then your main cannons can take the boss out once it doesn't pose a threat. So in terms of perks, max out the Ultra Beam, and go for survivability on the rest.
Steam - Play Time: Go to the Steam Store. Click Demos. Pick a demo. Install, run. Achievement get. Next.
Spiral Knights - Star-Spangled Bomber: Yes, the Firecracker bomb costs 3000 crowns at the vendor. Don't pay more for it in an auction. See if you can borrow one from someone and then trade it back to them, there are people on the Steam boards for this game coordinating exactly that. Or if you'd rather get it legit, do what I did. Go to the recipe vendor and buy the recipe for a nice 250 crowns. Grind the dungeon until you've got the materials you need, and then craft it for 200 crowns and 10 energy. There you go. You don't even need to equip it, so now you can sell it for profit, and if you get more materials, you can make more to sell!

As for prizes redeemed, first up was the gold ship in Beat Hazard. It's just a graphical change, but it looks cool. Then I got some absolutely ridiculous looking sunglasses in TF2 that I immediately equipped on all classes, and some DLC characters for Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter multiplayer, which I don't yet own but plan on purchasing at some point.

I'm left with a dilemma. I estimate I can get enough tickets for two more prizes. It kinda depends on how much I can do on each of the remaining days. If I'm sitting there one ticket short of a prize on the last day, I'll do the Facebook one with a sockpuppet account or something. However, I own zero of the games I have left to redeem prizes for. Along the same line of reasoning as with the Serious Sam, I'm thinking of grabbing the Magicka one, but that leaves one... a bunch of my friends play Dawn of War 2, perhaps I should get that one?

Also, there's going to be a random drawing at the end of this. Each ticket you earn gives you an extra entry into the drawing, and each of the winners get the top 10 games on their wishlist. I had to expand my wishlist out to 10 games to be eligible, but... yeah. Random chance I'll get Terraria for free! I'm not holding my breath for it. Some people out there have probably gotten every ticket so far and thus the drawing will be massively skewed in their favor, so... yeah. Probably not going to be winning anything.

To use my most-used phrase on this blog, ever... So, yeah. That's about it.

Bill S.978 - Fuck you, America

2011-07-04T00:00:00.012-04:00

This bill, while not targeted at the gaming community, will incredibly adversely affect us. It will make it a felony to upload footage of copyrighted material to the internet. It's targeted primarily at movies, tv shows, etc., but video games are copyrighted material as well.

Technically, the copyright holders already have all the tools they already need to stop any individual from doing this. It's called a Cease and Desist. Think about this: why haven't game companies been sending out Cease and Desist orders to let's players, people who host livestreams, people who post video reviews of games, etc.? It's because they recognize that we as gamers can perform a very important aspect of advertising their game. Watching a let's play isn't at all the same as playing the game yourself. It may be a fun series of videos to watch, but an aspect of let's plays that adds to the experience is the person playing the game. In most games you don't always have to do the same thing to get through the same part of it, whereas, TV and movies are completely static experiences.

I myself am watching several Terraria let's plays and it's only making me want the game more. Whenever I get my check from the city for jury duty, there's a bunch of stuff I'm grabbing on Steam and Terraria is one of those.

This bill as it stands is too broadly worded. It would basically make it so anyone who wants to do a let's play or whatever would have to contact the publisher and/or developer and ask for permission. Given that these companies are most likely swamped with emails and phone calls all day every day anyway, it would be difficult to get through the cracks and even be noticed by the company you're trying to obtain permission from.

The easy way out would be to simply modify it to exclude video game footage. Then 90% of the internet would stop caring about this problematic bill.

What are the odds that our government is going to listen to us anyway? They probably consider anyone who opposes this bill to be a criminal anyway. That's how things work. Presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Also, happy Independence Day, or something.

Giant Brand Macaroni and Cheese Bites

2011-06-27T05:19:00.002-04:00

Continuing a foray into freezer aisle versions of pub food, I now bring you a post that took three weeks to write.

Why three weeks?

Because the directions on the box are wrong. At least, the oven directions. I don't have a deep fryer, and oven > microwave, so I just stuck to the oven directions.

I'll postpone talking about the incorrect directions so I can focus on the actual product first.

Essentially, these are breaded and fried triangular bits of macaroni and cheese. They're pretty good. They have plenty of cheese, a fair amount of macaroni, and a fairly quick cooking time, even in the oven.

Now, back to the directions.

The directions on the box say to preheat your oven to 450, then cook for 5 minutes, flip, and cook for another 5 minutes. However, if prepared this way, every single one will burst, and macaroni and cheese will float about the pan you're using. In addition, they stick.

Here are my modified directions:

Preheat oven to 450.
Spray your pan with cooking spray so that they will stick to it less easily.
Place them on the pan in a single layer.
Cook for three and a half minutes.
Flip them over (ignore this step if you hate bullshit cooking steps like I do)
Cook for three and a half minutes, for a total of seven minutes.
Crefully separate them from the pan as need be. Try not to rip them open in the process.
Eat up, they'll be at the perfect temperature by the time you remove them from the pan.

Following my directions will result in very few to zero of them bursting. They won't be as crispy, but at least you won't need a fork to eat them.

Alternatively, try the microwave directions. I know I never prefer them when oven directions are present, but given that the given oven directions are completely wrong, it'd be a lot easier to just warm them up in the microwave. I tried to experiment with finding a lower temperature that would work with the given times and which might make them a bit more crispy, but they burst when I used the given times at 350, so it's hopeless.

Or you could just go to the pub, where they'll undoubtedly taste better and will be prepared for you. Just sayin'. Speaking of which, I need to go to the pub...

Mini-Ika Specials

2011-06-23T14:10:00.004-04:00

FFFpeeps finally resolved whatever it was that had the Ika Musume blurays delayed for so long, and released volumes 3, 4, and 5 yesterday/today. Volume 6 is to be released tomorrow.

With volume 5 comes the first Mini-Ika special. I don't really want to spoil it, so I'll just say that it maintains the level of cuteness that one might expect from having seen the third part of episode 5, and is pretty funny. To support that, I'll leave you with a picture.

Edit (June 26th): well, in typical FFFpeeps fashion, Volume 6 is being delayed. Who knows why.

Edit (July 11th): They released the BD batch, which included Volume 6, several days ago. Mini-Ika 2 is just as funny as the first. Both of them kind of remind me of old classic Tom and Jerry cartoons, and that's a good thing.

Spiral Knights

2011-06-20T22:01:00.002-04:00

Recently a bunch of Free to Play games got released on Steam, and after seeing some peer pressure via my friends list, I tried out Spiral Knights.

First off, Free to Play games generally have very little content, limit gameplay in random and arbitrary ways, and then charge you real-world money if you want to exceed those limits. Spiral Knights is certainly no exception. You have an energy bar on your screen that maxes out at 100, and goes down with nearly everything you do. When it reaches zero, you can't play anymore unless you buy more energy, or wait for it to slowly recharge on its own. This would be okay if you could get a satisfying amount of gameplay in with that 100 energy, but it lasts maybe an hour.

Now, let's actually talk about the game itself. It's written in Java, so hello massive resource usage. The graphics look pretty decent though. Being an MMO, there's a bunch of different equipment to get and a few different places to go, and everything looked pretty good.

When you start the game for the first time, it kicks you straight into the tutorial, which covers all the basics like movement, attacking, defense, and various gameplay things like explosive blocks that you might not want to destroy at melee range. This tutorial is fairly short and to the point, and then you reach a small town.

Really all you can do in this town is talk to NPCs and then progress further through the next area. Once you leave this town, you can't get back to it. Ever. Once you progress through the next area, which is easy enough, you'll be in the main town of the game. Congratulations, you're at the end of the game. All that's available to do is grind the same dungeon over and over for money to buy better equipment and repeat.

Well, there's also the Advanced Training Arena. This provides you with a refresher course in various gameplay mechanics, and covers some stuff that the tutorial didn't. Surprisingly, it's more fun to run around and play in here than it is to grind the dungeon. While you're in here, other random players will come in and leave, so it's essentially just an extension of the town that you're in.

As for actually grinding that dungeon, it works fairly well. You can manually put together a party if you want to grind with friends, or if you don't really care, you can just hit the big blue button and get put in with a random party. Combat is fairly intuitive and fluid, and can be pretty challenging at times. The game supports voice chat, but with a few caveats: there's no push-to-talk, and there's no sensitivity adjustment. No matter what I do, I can't get my microphone to stop transmitting. My only recourse is to mute it with the switch on my headset, or by clicking the microphone icon in-game.

To make your gameplay experience seem like it's worth it, there's a load of achievements to get. Most are pretty easy, and some are unavoidable. One of them unlocks an item in Team Fortress 2, which I gather is the reason a lot of people pick up the game ever so briefly. It's about the third or fourth achievement you have the opportunity to get, and it can be obtained easily within an hour. I have no clue what it unlocks as I don't have Team Fortress 2.

The game, for what it's worth, is a fun experience until you realize that once you're in the main town you can't go anywhere else. One of the things people expect of MMOs is being able to explore and reach new towns and stuff, which this game completely lacks. If it was fleshed out with a lot more content, it might be worth paying a small monthly subscription fee to play, but as it is, it's not really worth trying to get extra energy to continue playing the game, even though you can buy energy from other players with in-game money rather than using real-world money.

Just to reiterate, paying real-world money to continue playing a game with very little content is incredibly stupid, and I question the judgment of anyone who has done so.

The verdict: Avoid, as with all other Free to Play games.

Minecraft Nether Portal Adjustment

2011-06-20T02:54:00.003-04:00

Recently I finished the first project I'd ever decided to do in Minecraft: turning a mountain next to my base in my singleplayer world into a tower. I put a Nether portal in the tower and activated it.

Then I sailed to my second base and built a Nether portal there. My intention was to connect the two resulting portals in the Nether with a covered walkway, so I could safely travel from my main base to my second base via the Nether. However, when I entered the portal in my second base, I came out the same portal that the one from the first base generated.

Lots of people have encountered this, and there's a simple solution.

The Nether is "compressed", every step you take within it is the equivalent of eight steps in the overworld. If you figure out the distance between your portals in the overworld, you can figure out approximately where the portal should be in the Nether. The problem that causes two overworld portals to link to one portal in the Nether is that when you use a new portal for the first time, it won't create a portal in the Nether that isn't safe. It will move the portal to the nearest safe area, where once you go through the portal you can move and so forth.

In my case, the nearest place happened to be close enough to the already existing portal that I guess Minecraft decided to just re-use it. However, while this worked brilliantly for fast travel back from my second base to my first, it wouldn't work the other way around.

The solution is to go to both of your affected overworld portals and press F3. Stand in the same place relative to each portal, preferably right in front of it, and write down the X, Y, and Z coordinates of each. In my case, the two sets of coordinates were:

Main base:
x: -93
y: 66
z: 80

Second base:
x: 44
y: 59
z: 205

The distance between these coordinates can be found by simple math. Start with the coordinates from your original overworld portal. Subtract each respective coordinate of the second overworld portal from these values, and take the absolute value of the result. You won't always need to take the absolute value, for instance, if you go in a negative direction from one portal to the other. In my case, though, the absolute value is necessary. I'm sure there's a much simpler way to explain this, but it escapes me at the moment. It's almost like you really should be multiplying the result by -1, except that I can see that not working in some cases.

The math so far:
Δx = -93 - 44 = -137, abs( -137 ) = 137
Δy = 66 - 59 = 7, abs( 7 ) = 7
Δz = 80 - 205 = -125, abs( -125 ) = 125

Now, divide your results by 8. This gives you the distance you'll have to walk in each direction in the Nether to find where the missing portal should be. You'll want to round everything down (the floor() function in most programming languages).

More math:
Δx_nether = 137 / 8 = 17.125, floor( 17.125 ) = 17
Δy_nether = 7 / 8 = 0.875, floor( 0.875 ) = 0
Δz_nether = 125 / 8 = 15.625, floor( 15.625 ) = 15

Now, enter the first portal you created (the one that goes to the correct place). Press F3 again, while standing the same distance from the portal as you did from the two in the overworld. Write down its coordinates.

In my case:
x_nether: -3
y_nether: 81
z_nether: 12

Add your Δx_nether, Δy_nether, and Δz_nether values to these coordinates. This will give you the distance you'll have to walk in each direction to find where the portal should be. Bring a pick, because you'll probably need to burrow through netherrack to reach the spot.

My target coordinates:
x_nether: 14
y_nether: 81
z_nether: 27

Mine out the area around this spot and build a portal there. Remember that these coordinates are also relative to the distance you're standing in front of the portal, as they were in all other calculations. Activate it, enter it, and it should take you directly to the second portal in the overworld. Now re-enter the second portal in the overworld, and it should take you back to the newly created portal in the Nether.

There you go. If this seems like too much to do, come back when you aren't being completely lazy.

Beat Hazard Ultra

2011-06-16T23:04:00.000-04:00

There was another small update that fixed some stuff, most notably the volume bug, but then I saw that Ultra was going to be released today rather than on the 27th.

So, I grabbed that shit.

And holy shit, is it ever worth the $5.

New enemies. Enemies made of visual effects that don't damage you, but rather disable your ability to fire. Other guys that fire little homing blobs that do the same thing. These weird plus-shaped things that constrict your available screen space until you shoot them to move them back. Homing asteroids. A ship that mostly just sits there, but when you kill it, it unleashes a bunch of homing missiles. Attractors and Repulsars, which either push you away from them or pull you closer to them with their beams. And a tiny serpent, with a turret on each segment.

New bosses. The serpent, which is a much larger version of the regular enemy (or perhaps I should say that the regular enemy is a much smaller version of the boss). The spider, which for some reason only has six legs, and an annoying invulnerability state that it likes to stay in for upwards of 20 seconds at a time.

New boss turrets, including one particularly cruel one that fires regular enemies.

With all this stuff, naturally, you're going to need more weaponry, and boy, does Ultra deliver.

Micro Missiles: One touch of a button launches a bunch of small red missiles that hunt down the higher-priority targets, letting you focus on the small guys.

Ultra Beam: Your regular beam obeys the energy of the song. This doesn't. It only fires straight forwards, however.

Reflect Shield: Invulnerability at the touch of a button, plus the ability to use your ship as a battering ram and reflect projectiles. Reflected projectiles turn on the enemies that fired them.

And of course you still have your trusty Superbombs.

There are also plenty of perks available in Ultra. Each additional new weapon has a set of three perks associated with it, one of which is required to use the weapon. Plenty of good perks for high score runs, including Multiplier Rain, which causes extra multiplier powerups to drop from the top of the screen to the bottom periodically. Pick them up before they leave the screen, or forfeit them.

New Gameplay Modes. Boss Rush, which just spawns bosses, and last but certainly not least, online multiplayer, in both co-op and head to head formats. The only catch: to avoid a massive copyright issue, both players need to have the track you want to play. Which, unless you're lucky, means that if you play random matches you're going to be stuck with the default songs.

I think that about covers everything. To sum it up, I'll repeat something I said previously: Beat Hazard Ultra is so incredibly worth the $5 DLC cost. Go grab it (and the game, if necessary) today.

Beat Hazard Pre-Ultra Update... Update

2011-06-10T03:55:00.003-04:00

Another update came out, and it adds a startup screen to let you choose between the new gameplay and the classic gameplay.

Also, now it seems you can have five perks active without Ultra, rather than three. The Instructions still say three.

Speaking of the instructions, I should have re-read them, as they've been updated for all the new stuff. You get a perk unlock point (just one) whenever you go up a rank. If you go up multiple ranks, you still only get one point. Early on this is unavoidable, and with the songs I'm playing and the perks I have active, it's unavoidable later too. It doesn't make much of a difference to me anymore since I have all the non-Ultra perks unlocked now, but it'll matter once I plunk down that $5 later this month.

I wrote that bosses can't be circle-strafed anymore, and that's not entirely true. It depends on the weapon set. Also, I haven't seen the lasers lead me since the second update, but I haven't played the same songs over again yet.

The perks make powering your ship up a lot easier than the old rank-based system. I got to the point where I have Beat Hazard at the beginning long before Elite, which was the old point where that was unlocked. I'm still not Elite yet actually, but I'm closing in on it quickly.

The instructions also mention that all the perks are active in Chill Out mode, so if you want to check out the new stuff before setting about unlocking it all (I'm guessing once Ultra is actually released), head over there. I wonder if the "use bomb = track change" bug is fixed yet in Chill Out mode...

There's also some new leaderboards. Somehow I got an update saying I'm now at rank 300 on the 7+ minute leaderboard. I dunno how that happened, I'm guessing it's a combination of new scoring system and fewer people playing.

I also never mentioned that the game now has Twitter support. If you let it, it will post updates when you get new high scores and so forth. Annoy all your Twitter followers today!

Also, now when you start a song it starts louder than the sound effects, so much louder that it drowns them out, and the first time you die it gets quieter and stays that way for the rest of the song. VOL powerups still don't affect the volume of the music.

I think that's about it for this addendum post.

Edit (7 AM): Back at Elite, all non-Ultra perks purchased and maxed, 30/42 achievements, and the only achievement left that I can get before Ultra comes out is the one for getting a million points on all the built-in songs.

Edit: (9:50 PM): Got that last achievement. Ready for Ultra!

Beat Hazard Pre-Ultra Update

2011-06-08T22:37:00.003-04:00

Beat Hazard Ultra, the $5 DLC for Beat Hazard, the game I've previously written about, is coming out close to the end of this month (on the 27th, to be precise).

In preparation for this, we were told that there would be a score/rank reset, which Cold Beam Games wisely pushed out in an update a couple days ago. Along with this update is a fair amount of content, even without having Ultra available. Pushing the update now means most people who play the game regularly will have time to get back on their feet from the stats/rank reset before Ultra comes out. It also means that the leaderboards are reset and people like me can easily claim a 600-something rank on the 4-minute to 5-minute leaderboard. Wheeeeeee...

This list obviously doesn't reflect any of the Ultra content, so it makes no mention of the new powerups that Ultra will be adding.

New Stuff:

Perks - Kind of like in Call of Duty. You can unlock, purchase, and upgrade various perks that change the gameplay around.
Powerups - +5 and +10 multiplier powerups, as well as $10 cash powerups. Cash is used to purchase and upgrade perks.
Controls - Additional buttons for the additional stuff that Ultra will add.
Music - More music in the default Beat Hazard album. Sadly, most of it seems to be generic techno, but I guess you gotta take what you can get with the money you have to license music...
Achievements - More achievements have been added, taking the game up from 25 to 42 achievements. Some of these can only be unlocked in Ultra.
Audio - New sound effects for various things.
Options - You can turn off the RSS bar at the bottom, and the Steam community stuff so it can't pop up over a corner of the screen and get you killed. There are also toggles for some of the sound effects, should you wish to turn them off.

Tweaks:

Bosses are actually challenging now. In that you can no longer just circle strafe around them to kill them easily. Many of their attacks now expand out in a circle around the boss. The dreaded cheerios now have a different pattern, and there's some new boss weapon turrets to help you see the capabilities of each boss as it comes out. The most interesting change though is the bosses' laser cannons. Occasionally they will just fire straight, but when they actually track you, they will now lead you, meaning if you keep moving you'll get hit.
I can't say for sure, but it seems like there are new enemy waves as well.
Enemy movement speeds seem to react to the music now, I can't remember if they did that before or if I'm just seeing things or what.
Ranking up no longer upgrades your ship, it looks like you'll have to use perks for that.
Seems like the ship coasts a lot less, even with a gamepad.
Regular enemy shots are now red, to try and help them stand out.
Visual intensity and difficulty can now be adjusted independently. This means you can play on Suicidal and actually be able to see what's going on now.

To clarify, the game will not re-lock any achievements. I was at 25/25 when the update hit, I was at 25/42 after the update, and now I'm at 27/42. One of the achievements I now have is for maxing out a perk, and the other is for visiting the website of one of the musical artists in the credits. There's a few more you can get without having Ultra (getting $10000, for example, which isn't cumulative, by the way), but I haven't unlocked them yet.

Perks! Perks are the replacement for upgrading your ship as you go along, so it seems fit for me to talk about them. I'm not sure how the game decides when you get perk unlock points, but occasionally after you complete a song, you'll have one and must spend it right away. Thankfully, the game tells you which perks require Ultra to be unlocked (your clue is that they all have a graphic next to them that says "Ultra"). Without Ultra it seems the maximum number of perks you can have active at once is three. With Ultra, you can get one that will let you have up to eight.

Some perks are better for certain players than others, or perhaps may be better for getting specific achievements, or even to ease the difficulty of ranking up. The three I bought right away that you'll probably want to get as well are the Goodie Pack, POW at start, and VOL at start perks. Maxing out both the POW and VOL at start perks takes the place of ranking all the way up to Elite, granting you the Beat Hazard weapon right away. It's an interesting choice, and one that's sure to spice up the gameplay.

Graphically the game has changed slightly. I mentioned that the regular enemy shots are now red, but powerups are bigger and the bomb powerup graphic changed.

The sound tweaks are interesting. Some changes I'm indifferent towards, some are cool, and there's one in particular that I wish there was an option for. The sound effects are all changed now, plus there are additional ones for when your ship fires and when invulnerability wears off. The one change I don't like is that now, regardless of how many VOL powerups you have, the music always plays at maximum volume. I miss the old behavior. It added a little extra punch to deaths, as the music would get really quiet. It was a neat effect, and it's no longer there. I don't play the game to listen to the music, I play the game to play the game. If I wanted to listen to the music, that's what I've got foobar2000 for.

Last but not least, the level generation has changed, so you'll have to relearn all your music. I was saddened when Galneryus' Owari Naki, Konoshi didn't trigger a boss immediately when the quiet part at the beginning ended, like before.

Speaking of quiet parts, quiet songs have reportedly been made more possible to play. I haven't loaded up any Bush to see yet, but I'll take their word for it.

TiddlyWiki

2011-06-06T05:15:00.000-04:00

While browsing around for Javascript code that I could re-use in my image script, or at least learn from and reimplement, I happened upon a site that had another article that suggested that all developers should have a TiddlyWiki.

What is a TiddlyWiki? Well, it's a wiki. Contained within a single file. Intrigued at the possible simplicity, I grabbed a copy.

They boast that you don't even need a web server for it, which is neat, but I'd much rather have each of my computers specialized for purpose. No content hosting should happen on my desktop box. So, I dropped the file on my server, which for the uninformed runs on my local network.

Browsing around I noticed they have some custom terminology in play. Specifically, your wiki articles are called "tiddlers". TiddlyWiki works differently from most other wikis in that you can have multiple tiddlers loaded in the page at once. It also has some slightly different wiki markup, but there's a pretty good reference for that. They also don't like to use spaces in tiddler names for some reason, even though they work just fine. I guess I'll just use it as "no spaces, camel case = system page", and title all of mine so they're more easily readable.

Initially I was very confused. The GettingStarted tiddler says "oh yeah you'll want to go to all these places and change stuff", so I went to those places to change stuff, but everything was read only. After much searching of documentation, I found that there was an option in the AdvancedOptions tiddler that when disabled enables editing via HTTP. So I enabled that and went on my merry way changing things and documenting my image script.

Then it came time to save. Apparently by default it doesn't save your changes permanently as you make them, rather, there's a link you have to click to do a "master save", and an option you can enable to make it automatically save. Clicking the "save changes" link to do the "master save", I was confronted with a confusing error dialog that said I would need to save my TiddlyWiki to a file before I could save. Once again, I went searching to figure out how to "save my TiddlyWiki to a file".

This is where I ran into the biggest case of fail. Apparently, even though I have the extra and optional TiddlySaver.jar, it can't save changes when the file is loaded from a web server. So essentially, I lost everything I'd worked on, all because I don't want a copy of it on my local hard drive that I actually edit, and then a copy of it on my server that I just ignore because there's a copy of it on my local hard drive.

TiddlyWiki supports plugins, so I figured "hey, maybe there's already a plugin to make this work." After a while of browsing plugins I came across one that would use WebDAV to enable saving server-side, all without me having to have files on my desktop's hard drive or add anything extra to the TiddlyWiki directory. The only trick: you have to be able to save to the TiddlyWiki in order to install it.

I solved that by quickly chucking my TiddlyWiki into a network share on my server that I have configured as a network drive in Windows. Loaded that up in Firefox, and now of course it would let me save. I installed the plugin (which is as simple as copy/pasting the code into a new tiddler and tagging it systemConfig), then put it back in the original directory I had it in. After refreshing and having it still not work, I derp'd and enabled WebDAV in my web server (and set it up for the directory), which wasn't too difficult. Now I finally have the ability to save.

If you use it as it's originally intended, to be loaded off of your computer's hard drive, via the file:// protocol, it will work as intended without this extra step. But if you're like me and have a personal server you want to install it on, you'll need to do it.

Now, excuse me while I go rebuild my documentation for my image script.

The verdict: Setup may be tricky (as I described, and for that reason only), but overall it looks incredibly useful.

Ten Reasons Why Streaming Video Sucks

2011-06-02T11:52:00.000-04:00

Of course, by streaming video, I mean video provided by popular sites like YouTube. Sites like Ustream also apply.

First: They depend on a browser plugin to play the video and control playback. True, HTML5 video is being implemented, but it's far from commonplace and has problems of its own. For some idiotic reason, there are codec licensing issues that make each browser manufacturer have to license a decoder. Why not just use the much better decoder I already have installed on my system? You could sidestep the licensing fees entirely by leaving that up to the viewer, and by being able to choose a decoder that performs well on their system, they'd have a much better viewing experience. You'd still have a default decoder there just in case some Amish person just got a computer and thus feasibly doesn't know enough about anything relating to configuring it, but give the option for a system-installed decoder.

Second: That browser plugin's decoder for the video sucks. You're stuck with it, too. It usually chews through your system resources. If a 2GHz AMD64 3200+ processor, 2 gigs of RAM, and an nVidia GeForce 6800GT graphics card aren't enough to get smooth playback of a 480p YouTube video, something's wrong.

Third: Some of us like to archive things for future viewing or continued enjoyment. Not having that option means potentially losing access to a good video because of the whim of its uploader or a copyright holder that doesn't understand that free advertising is good and that Fair Use applies to copyrighted content. Also, not having that option assumes that your site is going to exist forever. Let's face it, streaming video is one of the latest tech bubbles, and bubbles can only get so big before they pop.

Fourth: For content in other languages, you're stuck with hard subtitles. This means that the subtitles are encoded directly into the video stream as opposed to being a separate stream of their own that can be disabled. Modern video container formats support this, the communities that use them call this feature "soft subs".

Fifth: For longer content, if you want to skip to a certain part of the video, you have to do the dance with the seekbar, if the player the site is using even supports that. Modern video container formats support chapter stops in a manner akin to DVDs, where hitting Next and Previous in your player will go to the next or previous chapter. They also support having an individual chapter common to all videos encoded to a separate file that is referenced by all the videos, so that the space required to store the video is reduced with no difference in playback. This is called "ordered chapters".

Sixth: You don't get to choose the player. You're stuck with what they provide. Since you essentially have to download the video while watching it, it'd be nice to have an indication of how much has loaded, but not all plugin-based video players provide that. If it's not downloading fast enough to be played while it's downloading, you get to have that awkward "pause and do something else for a while to let it load" period where you'd much rather be watching the video in question, but can't.

Seventh: The site you upload a video to has to "process" the video, which is actually transcoding it and applying a set of filters to it that you have no control over. This can make your video appear darker than it did when you encoded it, or blockier, or any manner of not how you intended it to look. They also do this transcoding to downscale the video to crappier resolutions. Transcoding never makes anything look better, but they have to do it since any number of different formats could be used to submit a video in the first place.

Eighth: It's inefficient. Sending a video over HTTP could be better used for downloading said video, not streaming it. Even then, there are better protocols written specifically for downloading files. There are also protocols designed specifically for streaming video that could be used instead. They often sacrifice audiovisual quality to get the job done, but when did anyone ever expect a streaming video to be pixel-perfect to its original? I just don't want it to be a blocky, blurry mess.

Ninth: I realize these sites exist for user convenience, but for many of us, we already have a video playing setup that we vastly prefer that has the capability of loading videos from the internet. Why not allow us to do that easily? Then we'd get a viewing experience favorable to us on your site, and our opinion of your video site would go up because of your better flexibility.

Tenth: Your sites often try to integrate many other features with the video playing feature. Things like annotations, comments, "related" videos, suggestions, etc. Those things all have their place and aren't inherently bad, but they often drag down the overall performance of the site when all a user really wants is to watch the video. Why should I have to load all that other page content just to see a video? Most of the time I'm not going to want to rate, favorite, or comment. Subscribe links, that is, static links to make you subscribe to the user who uploaded the video and not anything dynamic that would require an entire scripting infrastructure to be loaded client-side just to enable the feature, are about all that really needs to be there in addition to the title, username, description, and the video itself. All that excess stuff we don't care about takes valuable space in our computers' RAM that could be better used for other things. I know RAM is getting cheaper and cheaper and that today's computers support having tons of it, but that's no excuse to be inefficient.

Anyone wondering why I don't watch streaming anime when it's available should just refer to this article. Also, anime-specific, sometimes your only choice is the dub (i.e. Netflix). For newer stuff that's fine but not perfect (i.e. user choice is king, many of us prefer the Japanese audio with subtitles), since dubs as a whole have gotten a lot better over the years, but for older stuff where the dubs universally suck, it leaves people looking for any other possible means of getting the content the way they want it.

Also, Netflix's player isn't taken into account because I don't have a Netflix account, and I refuse to install Silverlight. Anything I say about Netflix is based on verbal accounts of user experience from Netflix members, and my own experience watching stuff over at their respective places on their respective accounts.

A Weird Dream

2011-05-29T08:02:00.001-04:00

It began with a news report of an island where a rare species of bird was rumored to live. This bird was special because it was immune to bone cancer. Naturally, science wanted to study it to see if its immunity could somehow be harnessed for humans. The news report had one of those typical shitty CG flyovers of a 3D model of the island. Since it was so shitty, the camera clipped the terrain a few times, and inside it looked blocky like Minecraft, even though the outside wasn't blocky.

Then suddenly, I was there. I had a companion. He had just gotten run out of the area of the bird's nest by the mother bird itself, and was trying to devise a tactic to sneak back in there. Somehow it involved face paint, and me. I painted my face green and went in.

Then suddenly shifting locations as my dreams often do, I was back at home, looking for something to help me remove the face paint. I discovered that if I placed my hand on the dresser in my parents' room that I could lift my legs into the air and just hover. After a while I started chancing the timing, pushing myself upwards, then clapping, then getting my hand back on the dresser to catch myself.

Shifting locations once again, I was now in an auditorium. It was either a convention or a talent show, or the combination of both. Up next was a two man metal band. For some reason the guitarist had a really, really long audio cable that he plugged into his guitar, and for some reason plugged the other end into a keyboard that was offstage. The other member was a drummer, who only had a snare drum. The music they played was hardly metal. For some reason I ended up on stage, but I felt really weird since I didn't belong up there, so I went back to the seating area.

This is when I met up with @miki_sei, who was just about to sit down and was wearing a white bathrobe. We talked about stuff for a bit, notably who we were there to see. Apparently I was there to see the Angry Video Game Nerd. Then a friend of ours came up and sat down in the row in front of us and started talking to us. I got a high five about something. She asked me if I'd cut my hair recently, which I haven't. Then she asked about the face paint and said "there's probably a story, I won't ask", but I began to tell her anyway. "I woke up with this in my pocket", I said, pulling out a folded up piece of graphing paper that had a bunch of equations on it. @miki_sei immediately recognized it and pulled a similar piece of paper out of his pocket (bathrobes with pockets?).

I then got a text message. Opened up my phone and discovered that it was a blank text message, apparently from someone who had spam IMed me the day before and had somehow gotten my phone number. Then in the process of trying to back out of that, I discovered my phone was in some weird mode that I didn't even know existed.

That's where I woke up.

And now, let The Day of Racing 2011 begin!

Minecraft 1.6

2011-05-27T20:17:00.001-04:00

This was mostly a bugfix update, but did change a few things and introduce some new stuff as well. I won't go through the entire list of fixes and changes, just because of how ginormous it is, but you can read all of them over on The Word of Notch.

I'll be focusing mostly on the things I was looking forward to, or that I'm glad they were fixed, as well as the new stuff and anything that affects me.

First, players looking to start wheat farms now have to go about it differently. Newly generated chunks have a chance of having tall grass spawn on grass blocks. Seeds can now only be found by destroying tall grass, the old method of using a hoe on regular grass no longer works. A lot of people are QQing about this, but I think it's better. In addition to adding some welcome graphical variety, seeds can be gained from tall grass without the use of a hoe, or through the primary (left click) action of a hoe, which won't reduce its durability. So basically, you can make hoes out of much cheaper and more easily obtainable material now, since you'll only need them to till the soil of your farm.

I started up a brand new world to test it out, and found plenty of seeds in a patch of tall grass near my spawn point. So in terms of how easy it is to get seeds, I don't think it changed very much. Tall grass is also approximately everywhere, but it would make sense for it to be rarer or nonexistent in some biomes.

My one complaint about seeds is that the only use for them is planting them to grow wheat, which after a while of harvesting generates a huge surplus of seeds. In most cases it's not feasible to continually enlarge your farm to accommodate all the seeds you get from each harvest, so you're left with chests full of seeds that you're never going to use unless you start a new settlement elsewhere, but even then a single stack of seeds is more than good enough to get started.

Moving right along, the next addition is dead shrubs in desert biomes. These are brown plants that are, well, dead. Punching them destroys them, and you can't pick them up to replant them. So you'll have to inventory hack to get shrubs to place around your sandstone houses in the desert. There are also living versions which I guess are more accurately classed as a variant of tall grass, that spawn in the more foresty biomes. These have a chance of dropping seeds when destroyed, and once again cannot be obtained to be replanted elsewhere.

Now, the first new craftable item, and the one possibly more hyped, is the map. By surrounding a compass with paper in a workbench, you can make a map. Each world can have up to 65535 maps. The center of a map is where you crafted it, and by default starts out unexplored. You'll have to explore the area to get it to show up on the map. When you select the map and look straight forward, you can only see the top of it, but if you look down, you'll be able to see the map. This is both neat and disorienting at the same time, as you basically can't see to go down hills while you're holding the map. Supposedly there will eventually be a way to clone maps, and to place them on walls. Cloned maps in multiplayer will also supposedly show the locations of other players with that same map.

The next craftable item is the Trapdoor. The recipe is the door recipe turned on its side, and only works with wood planks. They get placed in the bottom of a block and open upwards, and are a little tricky climb through around ladders, which would be the primary place where you might want to have one. They essentially act as a door in the ground. They also work with redstone, so you can use that to make drawbridges and redstone controllable animal/enemy traps. The only noticable difference between trapdoors and regular doors, aside from the size, is that you can't attack enemies through trapdoors. Hopefully Notch will fix this, because otherwise, an underground base can become not safe to exit if a creeper decides to camp out on your trapdoor. I was trying to kill a spider through one when I discovered this.

Now, some of the changes. Apparently there are some bugs with occlusion culling (the Advanced OpenGL option in the Video Settings menu) that caused Notch to disable it, which is a shame because it greatly improves performance on my computer.

Also apparently Notch removed the ability to place blocks in the top layer of the map, which is a workaround method for getting rid of a ton of bugs related to the top layer of the map, but if you were building something up there, you might want to finish it before updating. Kind of like we are on the multiplayer server that I host. Which is the precise reason why I'm not updating the server to 1.6 yet.

A welcome change is a nerf to fire. It now spreads less quickly and no longer spreads infinitely. Hopefully this means that if a wooden structure gets set on fire, you'll actually have a chance to put it out, rather than losing the entire structure.

There were a whole host of multiplayer fixes, but none more important than enabling the Nether. Now it's possible to legitimately obtain Netherrack, Glowstone, and Soul Sand on a multiplayer server, as well as, of course, entering the Nether and killing Ghasts and so forth. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, I won't be updating my server until we finish our project which for some reason is at the top of the map. This project is a really long minecart track so we can get the "Ride a minecart 1km" achievement. I really have no clue why it's being built at the top of the map, I didn't start it. I could update just to be a dick and force a one block downwards altitude shift in the structure, but I don't really feel like doing that.

That means that for the forseeable future I won't be updating my client either. I actually did download the client update, but I made a copy of my 1.5_01 minecraft.jar first. Hopefully in 1.6.5 or sometime similarly soon Notch will fix whatever's wrong with occlusion culling and re-enable it.

Now, for the fixes and changes I'd like to see that didn't make it in:

Texture packs should be able to override the language file, so they can correct item names to more accurately reflect their appearance in the texture pack. For instance, I'm using the Painterly bacon textures, and it looks weird pointing at cooked bacon and having it say "Cooked Porkchop". I can (and do) solve this by editing minecraft.jar, but I shouldn't have to.
Fix lighting on Wooden and Stone Stairs when smooth lighting is turned off. Smooth lighting doesn't belong in Minecraft in the first place. It just doesn't fit with the intentionally low resolution, blocky look, and makes it harder to gauge block distances while constructing, and light levels when trying to make sure that an area is light enough to prevent monsters from spawning.
Fix the server-side lag issue that basically prevents me from playing on my own multiplayer server from time to time. I know it's server-side because I'll open up the server console and send a chat message, and it'll show up in the console immediately but not be echoed back to me for at least 30 seconds. Can you imagine what mining obsidian is like when the server lag is several times longer than it takes to break a block of obsidian with a diamond pick? It's also confusing because mined blocks reappear client-side until the server catches up. This also affects approximately everything else in the game. Doors will reopen themselves, placed torches will disappear, etc.
Add a toggle for weather in multiplayer. Just because rain is annoying and lightning can start fires, which will burn down wooden structures. Yes, rain puts fire out, but it's still possible to start a fire in the rain if you do it right, and lightning can do that.
Add the whitelist commands to the server /help command. Because I didn't know they existed and had to restart the server to add someone recently.
Fix right-side-hinged doors so that they don't let monsters in while you sleep. Now I know why that was happening in my Quesadila adventure, which I never actually continued...
Make it so we can right click placed paintings to change the painting. I'm aware that there's a mod to do this, but having it be official would reduce the number of clicks it takes to get the painting you want... Either that or add a menu that comes up when you place a painting that lets you just flat out choose the one you want it to be.

Freaky

2011-05-27T16:54:00.001-04:00

So last Monday, @miki_sei and I got together and played some Rock Band 3 to break in the RB equipment he just got.

There's a little bit of relevant backstory here, but it can be summed up by simply stating that I like K-On! and have seen both seasons of it.

Since I'm worst at drums, I figured I'd start with them. So we start up the game, I log in on my profile on his 360, and go to make a character.

He mentioned that there was some "Ritsu hair" available (Ritsu is the drummer in K-On!), and indeed, when I went to change the hair, it had defaulted to it. I looked through the other options just to see what was there, but selected the hair it defaulted to.

I didn't really care about the rest of the clothing (I figure I'll go back and change that up later), so I changed her eye color (which didn't default to being correct) and then went to go enter a name.

It gives you a suggestion that's already in the input field with it brings up the 360's onscreen keyboard, and the suggested name was Juliet.

I start laughing, and end up explaining to him that Mio and Ritsu played Romeo and Juliet, respectively, in their class' production of, well, Romeo and Juliet.

RB3 defaulted to both the Ritsu hair and the name Juliet for the character I was making so I could play drums.

As a side note, it looks like we might make a regular thing of playing Rock Band.

Birch House: Inspiration Slowing Down

2011-05-24T23:13:00.002-04:00

I built the two rooms I knew the house still needed, and now I'm left with a large, empty space in the basement that I filled with torches so Minecraft would stop making the creepy "unlit area nearby" noises.

The first of the two rooms I built was a laundry room with two washers and two dryers. The washers and dryers are both the same essentially, except that the washers have water in them. lol.

And finally, I built what I originally intended on being a "rec room", but it ended up just being a room with a makeshift pool table constructed out of cloth and signs.

So... now what? I figure the floor needs a bathroom since there's a pool table. The pool table is actually a bit close to the laundry room for my own liking, so I might end up moving the whole thing. If I don't get any inspiration for anything else, I'll just fill the rest of the basement with bedrooms and extend the sleeping capacity beyond the current 13. I really don't know what to fill the remaining space with. The pool table does need some semblance of a bar nearby, but that's really simple and can be in the same room.

The rest of the stuff I have left to do is going around plopping beds down everywhere, and placing decorative items which will be incredibly texture pack-dependent. The "home improvement" paintings from the Painterly Pack offer a range of nice things from liquor cabinets to drawers and even a grandfather clock, with extra paintings for the sides of it. I do plan on using those at some point, but for now I've left them out.

Also, the bathrooms present another problem entirely. How does one construct a decent looking bathroom in Minecraft? As much as Notch wants all blocks to be 1 meter cubes, they're really, really not. The scale is all messed up in Minecraft. We really need a whole range of new blocks to facilitate making bathrooms. End of story.

Birch House Update

2011-05-22T23:59:00.002-04:00

This time I remembered to turn smooth lighting on before taking screenshots.

More screenshots after the break.

I've worked on it a bit more. Added lighting to the front deck so that nighttime cookouts will have plenty of light.

While I don't have a good design for the bathrooms in mind yet, I went ahead and added privacy windows. This way, you can still see the outside world while at the same time preventing embarrassing moments and frivolous indecent exposure charges. (link possibly NSFW)

Inspiration came alive for the entry level, and I built a kitchen, complete with fridge, stove, and plenty of counter space. It does lack a sink, but I haven't quite figured out how to get a sink in one block of space. I plan to add windows in here, but for whatever reason I haven't yet. That mass of iron blocks with wooden doors is supposed to be a refrigerator. It doesn't quite look right, but iron doors require power to be opened and double doors behave in a counter-intuitive manner...

After I finished the kitchen, I started work on the dining room. But the first thing that came to mind was "fuck yeah, let's build a bar!". So I built a bar. The entrance to the back side of the bar is through the kitchen.

Vacationers can't be reasonably expected to have cookouts every single night of their vacation, so I built a table with a small chandelier for lighting. Minecraft needs a way to place wooden steps on a wooden slab to make better chairs. Either that or a way to place wooden slabs in the top half of a block. Either would work.

I had planned to build an entertainment center, so I went ahead and did that. What I ended up with is completely awesome. Balanced lighting at all times of the day (i.e. no windows), a giant screen, and a state of the art 8.1 channel surround sound system. The rear channel isn't visible because it's on the back wall. I cheated note blocks for the speakers, but the middle of the subwoofer is actually a jukebox. In before Minecraft rains on my parade by not letting jukeboxes with a block on top accept the music disks. The random glowstone block in the ceiling was how I decided to resolve the mid-room lighting issue. It would look a lot better embedded in the ceiling, yes, but I only made the floors one block thick and don't want glowstone in the floor above.

Finally, the one completely unfinished floor in the place: the basement. I know of a couple more rooms I need, so I'll probably place those down here, but who knows what I'll do with the rest of the space. I probably should put windows down here to help with lighting during the day as well. Which will be tricky, considering that the back and side walls can't be guaranteed to be unobstructed by terrain, and in fact, I expect them to be at least partially obstructed when I place this in the server world.

Minecraft stuff

2011-05-22T09:28:00.003-04:00

This post has two distinct subjects, both related to Minecraft.

Building Project

I'm constructing a massive beach house to be built on the multiplayer server I'm hosting at some point. This thing is so massive that there's simply no way I would even bother to get the materials legitimately. The total footprint is 65 blocks wide, 53 blocks deep, and not counting the ground layer that has blocks in it, 24 blocks tall at the peak of the roof. I can try to describe it further through text, but fortunately I've already made some screenshots, so I'll just post those.

You can tell how massive it is here, given how far I had to back up to make the screenshot. Also, I forgot to turn on smooth lighting, so the lighting on the stairs is a bit glitchy. Hopefully Notch fixes that in 1.6, which he's previously stated to be a massive bugfix update, as well as enabling the Nether in multiplayer.

With a structure this size, lighting is a challenge. Especially for the main hall, which is opened up to the floor above it and has a balcony. Fortunately, my creative senses came alive and I built a chandelier to provide light.

Also, here's a view of the chandelier from up on the railing on the balcony.

The house is called the Birch House, primarily because I'm using the birch wood texture as a theme to accentuate things, but also because I can make a really bad pun about the house being on the beach. The reason I made it so large is because I was trying to go with a roomy feel that would generate a casual and fun atmosphere among the structure's inhabitants and make it a great vacation destination.

Because I can, I'm going to talk a little about how I created this. As I previously stated, it's so big that getting the materials to build it legitimately would take a prohibitively long amount of time and storage space. I designed the exterior and floors in Minecraft Structure Planner. I quickly discovered and came to not like some of the things it lacks, most notably such important things as stairs, doors, and torches. I also quickly discovered that it would be terrible for doing the interior design, so I stopped at the exterior and just added the floors.

The next program I used was MCEdit. It's a very powerful world editor with a rather steep learning curve. Minecraft Structure Planner has its own format to save in, but it can export to the schematic format that MCEdit can load. So I generated a world in Minecraft, thankfully got spawned on a large sandy beach (actually a desert biome bordering a large body of water), then saved, opened the world in MCEdit, and plunked down the house.

The next step was to build the interior, and to facilitate that, I used INVedit to put various materials and tools into my inventory. The best way to build the interior was spawning into the world and walking around the structure. Looking at it top-down in Minecraft Structure Planner just doesn't trigger the same creative impulse as actually walking around the shell of a structure in three dimensions. I went in with a vague idea of what I wanted the top two floors to look like, and I think I've gotten pretty good results. The structure is nowhere near done yet, as I still have to work out a couple rooms on the top floor where the bedrooms are (which will likely become bathrooms), figure out where to build the kitchen, dining room, entertainment center, etc., and then figure out what the hell I want to do with the basement. The structure is truly massive, but once you add walls to the interior it feels a lot smaller.

Once I'm suitably satisfied with the interior, I'm going to use MCEdit once again to save the entire completed structure as a schematic file, so I can load up the server world and plop it down somewhere. It needs a massive beach area just for the sand beneath it, and having the stairs dump you straight into the water would be lame, so I'll have to hunt around for a good spot to drop it.

Playing Around with Mods

For the past while now, I've been playing around with a few client mods for Minecraft. I've been mostly steering away from the ones that massively change the game, add new monsters/animals, etc. The ones I'm using for the most part just add graphical variety. The first one I installed was actually Single Player Commands, though. It's basically a massive infrastructure for cheating in single player, as it enables you to fly, become invulnerable, spawn creatures, give yourself items, and adds the server mod WorldEdit to single player, letting you change blocks and make giant structures with ease. Along with that is WorldEditCUI, a client user interface that shows you your current selection area for WorldEdit, which is massively helpful.

The first graphical variety mod I added was FlowerCraft. It adds six new colors of flowers, each craftable into its respective color of dye. Rather than the vastly inferior MoreFlowers, it focuses on giving you easier access to the dyes that you have to craft from other dyes. Anything that's obtainable directly elsewhere you still have to obtain from its original source.

The next one, which I've seen in Season 2 of ArchmageMelek's Let's Play, is the Coral Reef mod. It adds, as one might infer, large underwater coral reefs. Some species of plants that grow on the coral do different things. The green ones will replenish your oxygen when you swim through them. The brown ones are spiky and actually hurt you if you touch them. The blue ones provide light, which lets you see the reef glowing when you look down at it from the surface, and especially so at night. There are six different plants that grow on the reefs, as well as the reef blocks themselves. All the plants are craftable into dyes, or can be replanted on coral underwater. You can use this to pick up a few blue coral plants and redistribute them underwater so that you can see stuff.

The final one, by the same author as the Coral Reef mod, is the Scuba Gear mod. I installed it because Minecraft desperately needs some method of increasing breathing time underwater. It's fairly balanced, actually. It adds three crafting recipies. One for a scuba helmet, one for the tank, and one for an air compressor. Crafted scuba tanks are empty by default, and must be filled in the air compressor, which operates similarly to a furnace except that it requires redstone dust for fuel. One redstone dust will fill two tanks. In order to use the tank, you have to have both it and the helmet equipped in your armor slots. It's important to note that the tank will deplete even if you're not in the water, so long as you have the helmet equipped. When a tank empties, you can refill it with the air compressor, and annoyingly enough you can't refill a partially depleted tank.

One massive oversight/bug that I've found with it is that when a tank runs out, you get zero warning before you start drowning. Your air bar depletes immediately when the tank empties. If you're quick, you can swap out for a second tank without taking any damage, but there's only a very tiny time window to do so. Another, less annoying bug is that the air compressor doesn't face you when you place it. It always faces east.

I was thinking of installing More Trees, by the same author as Coral Reef/Scuba Gear, but it requires a mod to modify the tool usage tables that causes incompatibilities with all other mods that don't use it. Which is a shame, because I really wanted to explore and find apple trees, cherry blossom trees, and the elusive hollow sequoia tree. All the trees added by it, with the exception of the sequoia, drop their own individual saplings that can be used to regrow that specific tree. It would add a lot more graphical variety, but I can't have it breaking tool usage with other mods. That won't do. Which is a shame, because I totally wanted to build a tree house in a sequoia tree. I mean, I can construct one with wood blocks and hacked in leaf blocks, but it just wouldn't be the same.

teh moniez

2011-05-19T16:08:00.000-04:00

You may or may have not noticed this, but the progress bar indicating my progress saving up money for a Cooler Master HAF 922 case is sitting at 100%.

Yes, indeed, I currently have enough money to purchase the case. I will be doing so in the next few days.

The case is destined not for a new computer, but to replace the shitty case I built my current computer in. The case I'm currently using is total shit in terms of air flow, which I think is contributing to how my hardware no longer acts like it used to. Actually, right now, both of the replacement case fans I got a while back are dead. I'm running the computer with the side of the case removed and a box fan blowing air away from it.

The progress bar only reflects the cost of the case. I'm planning on getting some more thermal compound to replace the old stuff on my CPU, that should help things as well. To be honest I probably have enough money for that, but we'll know for sure by the end of the weekend.

Furthermore, there's a slight upgrade that could be happening. A while back, a friend of mine who moved away put all the random computer hardware he had up for grabs. A few of us rooted through it and I found an nVidia GeForce 8800 GT, which I promptly claimed. My current graphics card is an nVidia GeForce 6800 GT, so it would be a small but noticeable step up. Who knows, I might even be able to run games fullscreen again. The only thing that could be a problem is that I haven't tested the card to make sure it actually works. But, being that we found it in an antistatic bag and the friend who had all of this was pretty good at taking care of computer hardware, I expect it to work.

I don't even remember the name or manufacturer of my current case. All I know is that I bought it solely based on looks. Lesson learned, that's a horrible idea. From now on, I'm considering airflow first, then looks.

Jury Duty

2011-05-16T19:41:00.000-04:00

I just finished up my most recent involuntary obligation of jury duty, and actually ended up on the jury for one case after being excused from another case earlier in the court term. I was excused for reasons that weren't mentioned because it was during the phase of jury selection where the attorneys can excuse people without having to give a reason. Since the case I actually served on a jury for is over, I can talk about it.

It was a criminal trial involving the sale of cocaine. With the way criminal cases work, burden of proof is on the prosecution, and the jury has to figure out beyond a reasonable doubt if the defendant is guilty, otherwise they're innocent. Between a really poor defense and some evidence from the prosecution that was iffy at best, we couldn't say beyond a reasonable doubt that the guy was guilty.

It left all of us on the jury with more questions than anything else. Why wasn't the wire transmission recorded? Why were there 7 months between the alleged incident and the arrest being made? Why was so much of the video that the prosecution was depending on for evidence missing? Why were we first told not to rely on the informant's testimony, but then later told to take it into consideration? Why did the suspect in the picture (which was a still from the video) look nothing like the defendant? Why did phone records show that no calls had been made or received by the number that the audio recording said they called to set up the drug deal in an entire three day period surrounding the date in question? How did the officers know that the guy their informant talked to on the phone was indeed the guy they charged with the crime?

All those inconsistencies really hurt the prosecution's case. But still, why did the defense not even try to establish an alibi for the accused? At least call him to the stand and ask the classic "where were you at this date and time" question.

All the things that would have answered a few of those questions for us were settled while we were ordered into the jury room where we can't hear anything happening in the court. At one point the prosecution even mentioned wanting to move to declare a mistrial, but the ensuing argument was also settled with us in the jury room.

Overall, the legal system is weird.

Negima ~Mou Hitotsu no Sekai~ OAV: Magical Girl Yue

2011-05-09T00:41:00.000-04:00

After a while of waiting for Aquastar's subs, I finally broke down and watched Mamiko's subs that I'd already downloaded. I've had thoughts of doing the QC that Mamiko obviously didn't do (spelling and grammar errors all over the place!) and releasing a patch under my [subfiXT] tag, but I think I'll just wait patiently for Aquastar's release and watch it again at that point.

I must say one thing. These OAVs recently have all been based 100% off of the manga. No filler, no deviations, nothing but the original source material in animated form. Even though we have eight of these manga-based OAV episodes now, they're easily far better than either TV season.

Even though I'd read the relevant chapters already, the OAV was still quite enjoyable. Negima has been in need of a proper animated series for a while, and as previously mentioned, neither TV season really does the job. The Magic World arc, which is where these recent OAVs have been set, could easily be turned into several TV seasons' worth of material if given the same level of attention that has been given to the OAVs. While the arc hasn't yet ended in the manga, it's moving towards it quickly, so even if they started with a 100% true-to-manga TV series next season, it'd take a while for it to catch up, and the arc would probably have ended by that point anyway.

For anyone who hasn't been reading the manga and is trying to follow these OAVs, you're missing out. Basically, in the Magic World arc, Negi decides to go to the Magic World to look for more clues to his father's whereabouts. Naturally, some of his students want to go as well, since the trip is disguised as a trip to his home country of Wales. The stronger, more magically-inclined students (basically anyone Negi has a pactio with) actually get to go into the Magic World, whereas the rest just get a vacation in Wales. Of course, shit happens as soon as they get to the Magic World, and that's where the most recent OAV picks up.

This arc has revealed a ton of information regarding the back story and certain people's identities. I really can't say much without it being a spoiler.

This last OAV episode, as you might infer from the title of this post, focuses on Yue. After shit happens when they get to the Magic World, she loses her memories and gets taken in at a magic academy, where she studies magic while trying to get her memories back. The episode centers on the competition to determine who gets to go to New Ostia as guards, and I could delve deeper but it would be directly into manga spoilers.

All I can really say is, the episode is great, and if you're a fan of Negima you should be watching these recent OAVs. Especially since the manga's on a bit of a break right now...