| Lost Winds |
[May. 16th, 2008|12:07 am] |
What's up with everyone suddenly refusing to put a space between two words now, anyway? I refuse to comply.
Finished Lost Winds just now - took me three and a half hours, but I bet I get to four while I try and find the one statue I missed. (Dang. I don't even know if they do anything.)
This was basically level one of a much larger game, and since they've already announced a sequel, I guess it is basically episodic platformers. Frankly, if I got one game like this a month, I would never need to bitch about having shit to play.
This game was basically made for me, personally. I love platformers, particularly ones where you spend the bulk of your time exploring, looking in every corner - not only for the statues, but for the other powers and the bits of some dudes memories.
I also like games with absolutely no challenge whatsofucking ever, because I play these things to relax. Lost Winds has the most soothing music ever, and I think I took more damage from forgetting to slow my fall than from enemies. Even if you do die, the extra lives refill in minutes, since the world is filled with little spirits that refill those bars.
After a couple of minutes getting used to them, the controls work like a dream, and you'll soon be wafting yourself around with rather amazing dexterity. The one helicoptor plant would occasionally start spinning too soon, but once you get the cape you never really need those things again.
I also had a bitch of a time with the boss, since I had never actually worked out how to defeat the things on his hands, and it took ages for me to realize I had to burn them, then jump on top and pull it out. This is probably more my fault for not seeing the damn Pull Z appearing in the corner the first six times I jumped on his hands.
If you have a Wii, buy this fucker now. You won't regret it. |
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| Today's Rock Band failure |
[May. 15th, 2008|03:19 pm] |
Coming back to drums after a week or so off. Planning on spending most of it in practice mode, trying to beat a few bad habits.
Today was Train in Vain. I beat this just fine on Hard the moment I downloaded it, but uh, there are lots of places where you hit three times real fast and I was beating those out one handed, which...hurt.
So I need to learn to do that shit two handed.
I decided the basic three yellow triplets should be done L R L so I could hit the yellow after with my right hand and then the red yellow after that with both.
I ended up setting it on verse 2 to loop, since that one had a two red one yellow triplet just to fuck you up, and that one needed to be hit R L R.
After a half hour, I decided I can do this stuff up to 80% speed, but at 90% I get off tempo, and at 100% I just smash my sticks together awkwardly and fail.
Just found some dude on youtube hitting everything R L R, but he was playing expert, which looks like it complicates matters by adding another yellow yellow yellow AND red triplet before each of the three yellows, so this is probably the only way to play it.
Anyway, I suck. |
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| Today |
[May. 12th, 2008|03:47 pm] |
Yesterday was all about Speed. Walking to the Imax theater and realizing that I wasn't going to get there in time, seeing the fucking amazing Speed Racer movie, slamming through the end of Okami.
Today is all about being mellow. Soothing music and gentle breezes in Lostwinds - played a few minutes, looks amazing, will do more when I'm done with work for the day - and yesterday I randomly picked up a CD of Donovan's greatest hits on sale for $7.99, so listening to that while I work. |
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| Games |
[May. 12th, 2008|03:25 pm] |
So yeah, Okami only took 64 hours.
Despite quite a number of howlingly frustrating bits I can't help but call it one of the best games I've played; amazing ending really bumped it up a bit, and it even had a final boss that was a blast.
I got all the beads with a little help from gamefaqs, but what they give you is only useful if you seriously intend to play it twice and I find that notion largely hilarious. |
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| Disturbing |
[May. 10th, 2008|06:02 pm] |
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The dude next door is screaming in a voice that sounds like Donald Duck possessed by Satan. |
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| Baffling |
[May. 9th, 2008|01:22 pm] |
Heard voices outside my window an hour ago.
Look out.
There are two long tables on the street outside my house, and a bunch of cops and construction workers sitting around them, eating from the buffet to one side.
WTF? |
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| Stuck at last |
[May. 1st, 2008|01:28 pm] |
...on Hard Drums.
Fuck you, Queens of the Stone Age! Your song blows goats and has no tempo. Presumably it does have one, but fucked if I can find it.
Detroit Rock City is the same what the fuck pattern as Smokin' but constantly, so I can't limp through it. |
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| How the art houses kill themselves |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|07:30 pm] |
So all winter, maybe one damn thing I wanted to see at the art houses.
May 9th, opposite Speed Racer?
http://www.sonoframbow.com/
http://www.sonyclassics.com/redbelt/
Either of which I'd have been up for, but which we stand no chance of making plans for in fucking May.
It comes down to excitement. Speed Racer, Iron Man, Indiana Jones, and maybe Narnia? Pretty dang excited.
Both of these...could be good. Could be great. I've heard good things or they have people I really fucking like. But they could also suck a lot. And if Speed Racer is shit, I bet I still get more out of it than I do if Son of Rambow's reviews are filthy lies.
Counterprogramming only benefits people who don't like blockbusters. Doesn't help those of us who'd be willing to take chances on smaller projects sometimes.
And it's not like I catch up on stuff on video any more. I don't even watch the stuff I actually buy. |
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| Hmm. |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|02:39 pm] |
Green Grass and High Tides on Medium? Not impossible, but man, I couldn't keep that speed going long enough. Had to cheat.
On Hard? 98%, five stars, first try.
Electric Version, on the other hand...
Possibly could have four starred it if my foot hadn't locked up (got to work out how to warm up better, always rough the second song I play) |
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| Spring anime |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|02:12 pm] |
Probably time I mentioned it here.
Several of the shows I was looking forward to turned out to be just boring, so I'm not even mentioning them.
Three shows need to be watched.
Kaiba - Sci-fi epic by the director of Mind Game and Kemonozume, and even better than both of those combined. And I liked those a lot. I initially compared it to Barbarella and Flash Gordon; sci-fi that went out of its way to be as crazy as possible in an awesome way. But the second and third episodes were brutal affairs, and it looks like the shows is going to be a lot more nihilistically visionary than I expected.
Kure-nai - I pretty much had no idea what to expect with this, and only watched because it had the same animation staff as Baccano. The structure of it is intriguing - there seems to be some massive plot going on behind the scenes that the show is complete uninterested in, so instead it is entirely about the main character looking after a little girl. A really well done script, and voices that were recorded before hand, allowing them to do all kinds of naturalistic things like overlapping dialogue that you just never see in anime.
Soul Eater - The manga is ludicrously good, and the anime is absolutely nailing the style. So far, they've only animated the three short stories that proceeded to actual series; I recall it picking up a lot as he shedded shonen cliches and struck out boldly where he wanted to be. Right now, it is mostly selling itself on style and budget, with insanely well done action scenes liberally applied. Ending credits are also the only decent song in all three shows. |
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| Discouraging |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|02:37 pm] |
But not cripplingly so.
My quest to conquer Expert Guitar and Hard Drums has advanced to the point where I am failing out a bit.
Paranoid on Hard Drums is basically one thing over and over, and sadly, that one thing is something my foot can only do for about a third the length of the song. It just fucking stops. I got through it the second try by giving up the moment I stopped making it - I think you loose less points for missing the second kick than you do for kicking too late.
Or maybe I just waited long enough to fire overdrive and was able to get through it that way.
Guitar is really starting to get brutal. Chord mashing from hell, and more and more occasions where it is just impossible to play without flicking the strum bar up and down, which I have yet to work out how to do. The Hole song defeated me last night; I'd been unable to play the chorus in Hard as well, and with an extra bit of difficulty in the verse, there was just no way. Then I did the Electric Pornographers song and that just flat out killed my hand. Pretty much only hit enough of them to stay alive, because fuck, is that thing fast. I bet I could do it easy at 80 or 90% speed, but at full speed, my hand just lags.
It's always sort of been the plan to get as high up as I can and then come back to the earlier songs. Either nail them because of the added experience, or take them apart and work on the bits I'm struggling with. Hopefully I'll be able to get a bit higher on sheer stubbornness. If I could just work out the timing of the quick triplets in the Hole verse... |
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| Okami |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|11:13 pm] |
Done little else in my free time this week; christ, I'm at 17 and a half hours, and the table of contents on gamefaqs suggests I have reached part 16 of 47.
I am entirely unsure where the 30+ hours MASSIVE UNDERESTIMATIONS come from, unless speed runs.
A good chunk of them time comes from near constant backtracking. One of my favorite things to do in Zelda games is walk all over the place again finding the stuff you couldn't do before because you couldn't do that yet. Okami carries to the motherfucking extreme - there is shit in DUNGEONS I can't do yet.
I do wish a few more of the beads were in clever hiding places, instead of glowing spots on the ground at night, but now that I can make night fall at will (if the wonky hit detection lets me) it is less of a pain to search for them.
I ended my first two nights in a rage, as celestial brush quick times events were proving quite a thorn in my side. The Wiimote makes it hard to draw straight lines, and Capcom made it hard to find out that the Z button lets you draw straight lines. It does not help with circles, which is not the Wiimote's fault, but the immensely erratic hit detection. Drawing five circles in a row took a good 45 minutes, all told. I pray you may be luckier than me - most people seem to sail right through it and don't know what we're talking about when we say that bit was impossible.
But after that it has been pretty fantastically great all the way through. An increasingly amusing supporting cast, neat shit like gates you can pass through to another area, but if you go around the gate there is only a cliff wall, secret passages, water spouts, flower and vine grappling hooks, lots of dog finding, and kidnapped sparrows. |
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| Hadn't happened in a while... |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|07:32 pm] |
Whoever decided to put a button on your keyboard that instantly turns off your computer needs to be eaten by lions.
Anyone know how to deactivate these things so I never accidentally shut down when I mean to backspace? |
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| Hard Drums Tier 4 (minus DLC) |
[Apr. 17th, 2008|01:45 pm] |
Man, so much DLC in this tier.
I was all being frustrated; leg throbbing, wouldn't keep up; should have been able to play that Foo Fighters song better than that, it should have been fun, but not, the damn leg couldn't keep the double kicks going even though they were nice and slow.
Then I decided to wrap off today's session with Day Later, Dollar short, my nemesis in Medium.
Nailed it first try. It really didn't seem particularly fast any more. Guess I am getting better... |
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| Out. Of. It. |
[Apr. 16th, 2008|02:14 pm] |
I just bought a drink at a corner store.
Was two blocks away before I realized I did not have the drink with me.
Had to go back. |
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| Bioshock revisited |
[Apr. 13th, 2008|07:37 pm] |
Took me a while, but I sunk another chunk of time into it yesterday and today, getting up through the second boss and a bit of plot beyond that.
I was briefly annoyed by cameras out of reach, then realized I can just destroy them. Man, are they annoying those. I rarely notice them in time. Guder claims you can hear them, but maybe you need surround sound.
There is one seriously frustrating bit; I got a message telling me I hadn't found all the little sisters on the floor. I proceeded to tromp all over the floor without finding one. Literally went everywhere; killed a couple of Big Daddies that were unaccompanied, but not luck finding the damn thing. Of course, I've got 340 points of adam and fuck all to spend it on; the machine was mostly things that seemed useless or would probably have been worth it if I weren't playing on easy mode and not really feeling the need for health upgrades. I suppose I could buy a forth power, but since only two of the four I have are any good at all, I haven't bothered. Looking for additional slots on the other upgradable things.
So I just gave up and went on. I suppose I could have gone back to the medical area again, and hacked the doors I couldn't get through now that I've noticed you can hack doors, but I'll get to it later.
I'm not completely annoyed by going back over the level a couple of times, since I did find a few more voice messages, and those are really the best things about the game; really well written. |
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| Sweaty |
[Apr. 13th, 2008|04:01 pm] |
Just played through the entire second tier of Hard Drums - that includes bonus songs and DLC, I always pop over to quickplay and write a list down, play in turn. Makes the learning curve a little less steep.
Dang, it certainly ramps up the difficulty. Bits I managed to get the hang of, bits I could do slow but not fast, bits I could do but not sustain, and bits that just completely sailed right over my head. Fun, but like yesterday, the weather being warm enough to open windows now also means I'm starting to seriously work up a sweat. Wouldn't it be awesome if Rock Band drums counted as an aerobic exercise and we all lost weight? |
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| Downtown Paradise |
[Apr. 12th, 2008|04:24 pm] |
Managed to discover everything downtown in Burnout Paradise.
They have you smashing bullboards, finding gates, and doing superjumps, and the last of each was a mother fucker.
I found the last billboard, bit it took ages to figure out how to get to it - you had to go up a ramp onto the elevated railway, off that into the second story of a mall, and off a superjump onto the ledge of an under construction building, and follow that around a corner to hit it. Problem was, if you hit the superjump at the speed you had to be going to get into the mall, you would overshoot; brake too hard in the mall and you wouldn't go far enough, and not aim enough to the right of the superjump ramp and you wouldn't be going in the right direction. I skidded right over the ledge on two wheels twice and missed like, twenty times before finally hitting it.
Likewise, the last gate and jump - I had to superjump off a parking lot at high enough speed to vault the street and land on the building opposite, then smash the gates fast enough to land on the next building, where there was another superjump, which I had to hit at full speed again to vault a statue.
So this shit is all pretty awesome, really, all though they could have made the mall to billboard jump a little less obscure. On the other hand, they have a public sculpture that is a giant ring with water falling from the top. And I can't jump through it. What the fuck? |
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| Driving |
[Apr. 11th, 2008|10:40 pm] |
In Crackdown tonight, I passed two dudes zooming towards me, sitting down. Apparently the game forgot to include the car. Wish there was some way I could repo the invisible car.
For reasons I can't begin to explain, I randomly decided to get the Repo Man achievement tonight. Generally speaking, I am of the opinion that achievements work best when they provide a set of suggestions for different ways to enjoy the game. The achievement for killing people with the observatory globe, for instance, reminds you that you can have fun with things like that, and would be nice if the controls for picking things up and throwing them weren't erratic bullshit. Likewise, the Repo Man one looks like one of these; pull a hundred dudes out of cars. But it is bullshit. Partly because there is nothing to do in a car once you are in it, unless it is one of the ones on the car collection list; they all control like beached whales, so don't dream of actually running anyone over in one. Likewise, the people in them have a tendency to see you coming; they then get out and start shooting. So you have to get next to them while they are slowing down (or you'll get run over) and jam the Y button in the hopes that it will notice and let you actually do it. Which it frequently does not.
Which means trying to get it was more a matter of stubborn obstinacy (a word I could have sworn was obstinance) on my part. Probably not a healthy trend. I don't see myself becoming a massive achievement whore, largely because many of them are for impossible things, and I can't be fucked to go lining up cars and trying to shoot 25 tires in 60 seconds, especially when I can't tell if I'm shooting at the tires or not on my tiny TV. But apparently, I will run around the block a few dozen times throwing people out of cars and annoying myself.
But not half so annoying as trying to get the fucking SUV to not crash into the walls in the tunnel so I could emerge with enough speed to do a front flip.
Crackdown driving AI is a beautiful, beautiful thing. In that it sucks, but awesomely. Cars near you will randomly panic and swerve wildly around, crashing into you or oncoming traffic, or cop cars. You can often stand looking down at traffic and just see spontaneous 20 car pile ups. Without you even needing to drop anything down on the highway, although that is also fun. My personal favorite this evening was a bad guy car that had pulled over to the side of the road to get out and shoot at me, but when I ran away they hopped back in and took off at high speed...directly over the wall and into the river on the other side of it.
But driving anything yourself is really a battle with the controls, and is part of the reason why I'm up to a B license in Burnout Paradise. Venting frustration. I would totally buy Crackdown 2, but they need to fix the driving, or at least make pedestrian maiming not bad. Also, if they could allow you to turn off the totally bullshit thing where clicking the right analog stick makes you fucking jump like a cunt when you don't want to, that would be swell.
I also managed to beat Hard Guitar and Medium Drums in Rock Band this week. Started on the higher levels for each. Hard Drums is clearly going to be an even bigger work out; all three songs I played to day were double bass drum happy, and Say It Ain't So, of all things, had surprise syncopation. Expert Guitar is clearly going to be a mix of fun and possible and what the fuck. Maps is clearly the easiest song in the universe, and I only missed two notes; will probably be the one to get the 100% guitar achievement (already have it for bass on that same song.) Should I Stay or Should I Go has some crazy double strumming that I totally can't do. Will have to work out a new way of strumming before I can master that, apparently.
I tried Expert Singing again, but failed out of Blitzkreig Bop at 40%. Pretty much what happened the first time. Clearly, it is for people who can sing. I think I'd better go through hard again and get more than three stars on everything. Assuming I care about learning to sing. |
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| It can't seriously be that easy |
[Apr. 8th, 2008|07:40 pm] |
I've spent months and months now working weekends and late into the night and cursing how much slower I was working and how poorly I was concentrating.
Yesterday I read this.
What the hell, I tried it out.
Finished my pages before lunch.
What?
Went on and finished the damn chapter. Still a good three or four hours before I usually stop for the day.
Guess I can catch up on reading!
Man, I hope this works every day. |
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