Spend the last two weeks of the year driving relatives around, sleeping, and playing Rock Band and Mass Effect. I’m still trying to get everything together for this new year, but in the meantime I’ll throw out some really random stuff I hope you’ll enjoy.
Bunny Mario: The LOL Levels
Saw this on Neogaf a while back and had tears in my eyes. It’s a remake of the first level of Super Mario Brothers and it turns everything upside down. Unfair would be too kind of a word to describe it. Here is the second level:
You can actually play this game. download it at http://www.geocities.jp/z_gundam_tanosii/home/Main.html
Click, Save, and Run the first link. It’s a small flash game and you only have to use the arrow keys. I couldn’t pass the second level after spending half an hour on it, it’s just so sadistic! It’s a small game, less than three megs so give it a try!
While driving the relatives around Hollywood, we stopped by the Virgin Megastore and spotted a 360 in it’s natural state:
Why aren’t places like the Virgin Megastore dead? They are like Radio Shack, how the hell do they stay in business?
At a friend’s party I spotted this in the corner:
Wow. Rock band + Guitar Hero 3 + Guitar hero 3. For just two people. That’s some serious dedication. That or they are keeping five immigrant families under the floorboards that we don’t know about.
Goodbye Woochan, we waited a full two days before we gave up on you. It’s been almost a month since our hamster Woochan ran away and we haven’t seen her or smelled her. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the window was open and she went out the balcony and into the world, or a cat’s mouth.
Having tried hamsters (great pets, easy to lose), we decided to move up the food chain in the vermin world and try out guinea pigs. Our big draw was that they are more affectionate and don’t run away as easily. They also communicate with sounds, which was a big drawback with our hamster. Hamsters never say anything, most of the time you’re guessing by habit or posture. Guinea pigs have different sounds for being angry, happy, worried, hungry, etc.. That’s great because it makes them easier to take care of.
We went on the weekend and got Annie. I wanted to name her Columbia Ave but Oshiri didn’t let me. She said it’s mean to name our pet after the street we live on.
Once we got her home she looked very timid and always stayed in her home. She didn’t eat or drink much if at all. Some sites say that having one guinea pig is fine if you spend time with them, but we thought that we if got another one Annie would perk up much sooner. We went to the store that Monday and I selected the most active guinea pig I could see in hopes that she would rub off on Annie. I saw this little black guinea pig with light brown patches run, eat, and groom herself over and over while all the other pigs where placid or sleeping in their homes. Nice, pack this sucker up, this guinea pig is coming home with us.
It worked. Soon and we introduced them to each other Annie perked up right away. Within minutes Annie was butt-sniffing cuddling with her new friend. She also started to eat and drink in front of us. And that’s when the shit came in.
For the few days Annie was alone, she barely made a mess. Some poop here and there, but it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be cleaned every three to four days. But when Annie was paired with Patches it was like an eruption of waste! He’s a graph from the data I have taken over the last two weeks:
The graph is based on shits per week. As you can see, the hamster was very manageable at six hundred per week. When she ran away, we had zero for the next two weeks and a moderate increase when we brought Annie home. But pairing her with another guinea pig makes it look like the shit festival came to town. There are mounds and mounds of little shit everywhere in their cages. Around the food plate, the toys, behind their home, in their home, and something they fling those suckers two or three feet away from their cage. It is unconceivable how big of a difference have two instead of one pig can make. It didn’t double the weekly shit production, it went up tenfold! It’s like they are trying to 1-up each other. I did some more data research, on the internet and in my local library, and here is a statistical comparison between our two guinea pigs and other mammals:
Unable to believe my results, I called the Smithsonian to confirm my findings. It took several days to track get in touch with the correct research department, but in the end they were able to confirm my independent results that guinea pigs are shit fuckers of untold proportions. They were also kind enough to provide me with additional data, things I could have never research on my own. Here is their own data with a greater comparison range:
That’s astonishing! These guinea pigs must have shitted their enemies to death and must be somewhere near on top of the food chain, crapping on the other species below. Maybe if the T-rex crapped enough it would still be alive! Too bad there Rexxie, you just didn’t have the digestive system needed to survive.
Now we are left to clean their cage daily. We do a mix of newspaper and bedding now to make cleaning speedier, but it’s still a big difference from having to clean the cage every five days like we used to with the hamster. That’s the two of them outside in their relaxed state, meaning poop output per second is reduced by half.
If any of you would like to use my graphs for your own personal research, studies, TV, or books, please contact me to work out a deal.
My sister is in town and yesterday she tried Mass Effect for the first time. She’s a casual gamer, likes Lumines and platform games. This year we introduced her to shooters like Halo 3 and Gears of War and she had a hard time navigating her character in a 3D environment. It’s more moving the camera around that is really the problem. She doesn’t move the camera while she runs and that creates really awkward viewing angles. In those types of games, unless you’re looking around, it’s good form to have the camera strait so you can see ahead. In games where the camera angle is determined for her she’s great.
I don’t know if she didn’t care or wasn’t paying attention at all, but her play through of her first mission in Eden Prime was horrible. Instead of looking around and figuring her location or exploring, she just started running strait wherever the indicator in the compass told her to run. Chalk a -1 to caring about atmosphere at this point. Once the first enemies appear, it takes her a more than a couple minutes to kill them. Usually, they can be killed in 20 seconds or less, but her aim was all over the place and often didn’t bother to readjust her aim, just waiting for the target to cross her path. She was playing on casual settings, so she took a lot of damage that would have killed anyone else in any other setting. I showed her how to take cover, which is similar to Gears of War, and she said she understood.
The next batch of enemies came, just as weak, and again it was a mess. She tried taking cover but she never got close enough to the walls to take cover and she would just stared at the wall like something magical would happen at any moment. Her computer teammates are the ones that actually dispatched the enemies.
The next part after a cut scene she became lost. She ran back towards the starting point. After I asked her why she did that, she blamed it on her computer partners, saying that they didn’t help lead her at all like they promised. I then told her that she’s the freaking hero of the game, they go where you go. She then went through several battles in the weirdest ways where she would just stand there or shoot the enemies long after they were dead. Almost all of the enemies where killed by her partners.
In the next part, there was a cut scene showing bombs being prepared and her mission was to diffuse them to get to the end of the mission. She ran straight through them. She didn’t even bother to disable them. She also ran by the ten or so enemies that killed all of her partners and went straight to the end of the mission: finding the beacon. With the clock winding down to diffuse the bombs and everybody shooting at her, she then proceeded to crutch and hide behind a locker. Lol. It’s like she went to a corner and went in to the fetal position hoping they will go away. There were no attempts at fighting, no trying to run away and she died.
After explaining to her about turning off the bombs this second time around, she finally got it right. She turned off the bombs, but again, it was really weird. She would run around awkward, miss a bomb, kill something, come back to the bomb, and then run around again. She finally finished the mission, and that’s where I went to bed. It was all just so sloppy but I was also really happy that she kept playing the game an hour or two after I went to bed.
I think I can see where casuals might be interested in games like Mass Effect or Uncharted but the controls might push them away. Things that are second nature to gamers of 3D environment games such as using both rotating sticks to look around is very hard for first timers. In these types of games you’re constantly moving while having to adjust the camera as you go, so that both your thumbs are moving your character and screen in a synchronized way. Add other game play elements like shooting or using skills while you’re moving your character and camera by using the 10 or so buttons on your controller, and you have a very complex situation.
While I think these games are the crème of the crop in video games experience, it’s hard to think that simplifying these games to make them more accessible would not decrease the experience. For example, let’s say that for Mass Effect they would fix the camera so that it chooses what you view, while also restricting choices to two buttons: fire and cover. This would make for very easy gameplay, but regular gamers would feel restricted.
The best way to address both audiences is to incorporate two settings, casual and regular. In regular, everything would be moved manually, and have more choices of skills to use. For casuals, have the choices and the camera views limited and self controlled. As it is now, casual settings just makes the game easier with more health and less damage taken, but does not address the gameplay, which I think would be the main problem with casuals. This is also true for most games. If you pick easy as the difficulty, it just simply means your character has more favorable stats and opportunities, but does nothing as to how the game plays.
It’s a nice game. In comparison to Guitar Hero 3 it’s hard to choose one because one is necessarily not worse than the other. GH3 is great and Rock Band is incredible. Both are good games. Some gamers pick sides and say one is better than the other. I think it’s good enough to enjoy both.
On the weekend, we had a get together at my uncle’s house. Long story short I brought Rock Band with me but I was unsure as to how it would be received. They loved it:
Apology for the picture quality, I wasn’t prepared to take pictures or video, so it’s only my cellphone camera(damn you 1.3 megapixels!). We played for a couple of hours and everybody tried most of the instruments at least once. Drums was the hardest for new people, but it wasn’t impossible. Here’s the breakdown of who played:
Sister 1: Extreme non-gamer. She loved singing, but I don’t know if we enjoyed it. I don’t think they knew about matching the pitch thing, because many like her just went nuts. She tried the guitar and surprisingly did well on it. This is a person that probably never touched a Nintendo controller and barely knows who super mario is. Once she understood that she had to strum to register the notes, she had no problem doing songs on easy.
Sister 2: Casual gamer. She has a 360, halo, loves lumines. It was her first time with a music game and it took her a song or two, but she got it as well. She did a couple of songs on easy and was a horrible singer just like Sister 1.
Sister 1 boyfriend: Sports gamer. This was his first time trying it, but he was hyped for it. He knew what it was and was deciding to get it himself. Did really well. Tried drums, singing, guitar, good guy. I approve of him.
Cousin 1: High school kid, too much energy. Almost killed my drums. He has GH3 so he was used to playing on medium and actually has drums in real life so he picked up the drum section of the game quickly.
Cousin 2:College age, comfortable with GH3 too. Did drums and guitar well enough, and i think at one point he sang and played guitar. I think he was/is in a band though. I think he’s the base player, but I feel sorry for whatever band has him.
Cousin 2 girlfriend:anonymous girl, met her that day. She must have been familiar with GH3 because she was playing on easy on a comfortable level. Sang too.
The wife: I hate her. I’ve been a video gamer for 15+ years and she has better skills than me in games like this? Divorce!
I’ve been reading here and there how people bring people over and play rock band and have this insane magical time and I agree with them now. When I play this game at home with Oshiri it’s more relaxed, but when you play with others it really gets crazy. Especially since it was their first time, there where mistakes and overreactions that elevated the moments we had to another level.
Oh and in the photo, from what I can make out:
Red shirt: Sister 2
Drums: Sister 1 boyfriend
Other guitar: Cousin 2
White shirt in the couch singing: Sister 1
There are more people in the couch but at this point they blend with everything.
Zadius is having a Rock Band party in two weeks with Carne Asada(that’s a hint there Zadius, you better take out your grill!) I’ll try to take pictures of that one. I know you guys love seeing countless pictures of people playing with plastic toys.
I didn’t think I would be able to see it with my own eyes. It’s something I knew impossible with the minimal power of the Super Nintendo, Playstation 1 and even the Playstation 2. Even in this PS3 and 360 generation, I really thought it wasn’t possible with the current technology. But it’s here, the future, and it’s everything I thought it would be:
Yes! About time! I’m so tired of searching for treasure chests and looking behind shelves and hidden passages for loot. I knew that many games went to waste because you could not search in the most fundamental of places: feces! Too bad they only give you two choices, but at least they give you that choice at all(Final Fantasy, MMOs, I’m looking at you)! I just wish there were more choices, my ideal list would be:
>Search it
>Smear yourself with it
>Give it a little taste
>What the hell, swallow it
>Lay a small poop next to it for companionship
>Gentle caress
>Fine, leave it alone, but remember its location
Maybe in the sequel for Blue Dragon they’ll incorporate these changes.
I picked up Blue Dragon last week for the 360 along with Rock Band and Mass Effect. Blue Dragon is a japanese RPG that was released in August and promptly bombed in the US. The game isn’t bad, but the release schedule was horrible(it was released a week after Bioshock) and there was no marketing for it. I’m finally playing it a year after it was released in Japan and I have to say that it’s wonderful. The graphics are beautiful and simple with great art and environments. It’s also very quirky and fun. You could search the poo that monsters drop after you defeat them, or have monsters eat each other to get more interesting poo. There are poo monsters and if you’re unlucky, your character can stink, which makes him more discoverable to monsters. This of course, can be cured by using an item called deodorant. I got the stink status the first time by searching behind a pipe, it’s a moment i’ll never forget[small tear].
So far the game is fun. I’ve only played about two to four hours because we keep going back to Rock Band.
Oh and for the lost rat update: Nothing yet. Fish suggested it might be in hibernation, but I really think it cooked behind the stove and we’re a day or two from smelling it. Btw, Fish also told me he had squirrels for pets. Lol, poor Fish, he couldn’t even afford store vermin, he had to settle with what his parents caught for him.
This Thanksgiving marked her first anniversary with us, and we thought as a prize for her being such a good rat we’d let her out to roam freely. We put her in the living room and she ran around everywhere for about five minutes. We don’t know if she’s overweight or just healthy but she’s really round. If she was human, she’d hover around 328 pounds. Still, she has spurs where she runs extremely fast. We kept a good eye on her and after a while, we put her back in the cage.
An hour after, I let her out again and she went under the couch and went inside a small hole under it, so now she was inside the couch. I waited a couple minutes looking at the hole to see when she would come out again but nothing. I saw her moving around inside the couch so I just sat in the couch carefully, and watched some TV. Couple minutes later, Oshiri wants to put Woochan back but we can’t find her moving inside the couch. We ripped the bottom open, look everywhere inside the couch but couldn’t find her. Then we searched the apartment and came up empty again.
We’re guessing she’s hiding somewhere for a couple of days, ran away from the apartment, or is still dead somewhere inside the couch. If it’s dead we’ll probably smell it in a couple of days but my guess is that she’s hiding. We looked really carefully inside the couch, there are no pockets she can hide in. The window was shut and the door has this little thing at the bottom that I would think roaches would have an almost impossible time to get through, so I don’t think the hamster left the apartment at all.
We searched online and it looks like hamsters can survive just fine for a couple or days, so we’ve put some food on the ground here and there to see if she will eat it. We left the cage open with food and water just in case she goes back to it. I’m going to give her two weeks before we buy a new one. We really like her, so we’re hoping she turns up alive. Even though the above picture makes her look cute, here’s what we mostly see of her, her sleeping ass:
That’s her for about 18 hours a day. She’s only cute for a minute or two and then runs on the wheel for the rest of the time. Oshiri drew a picture of how Woochan looks like in her eyes:
ahhh… that’s cute. That’s a mother for your, always seeing their kids in the best light. Here’s how Papa Coverly(me) sees the the rat:
Isn’t that cute? Woochan has this huge mouth that’s really a marvel to look at when she yawns.
Well that’s it. She’s missing and we’ll let you guys know if she comes back or we smell her.
Got it yesterday and despite incredible expectations, it delivered.
Oshiri and I have played nothing else for the past day, everything about it is just so amazing. You can sing, play the drums, guitar, or base, there is just so much to do. Lots of character customization and options, and I haven’t touched the singing or drums yet. Actually I did try the drums, I did so horribly that I’m going to call myself bowlegged bob whenever I play them. Oshiri picked up the drums right away and is comfortable playing them on medium. We created a band called Waterballs. My character is Bubblebutt and she picked Woochan, the name of our rat, er I mean hamster.
It’s late, but for those of you that haven’t seen Guitar Hero or Rock Band, here are how the instruments look like:
The microphone picture is missing because it’s a stupid microphone. Google picture one, it looks like that.
Overall, I was kind of disappointed by The Next Iron Chef. On this show, a bunch of renowned American chefs cooking in different styles and regions are competing for the title of Iron Chef for the next season of Iron Chef America. (Iron Chef America is definitely not any replacement for Iron Chef Japan, but I like to get my fix where I can.) It never stopped feeling like a rip-off of Top Chef, and the fact that all the competitors were mature adults made for slightly less entertaining viewing. I mean, the most entertaining moments come from when Chris Cosentino is bitching out the cameramen for being in his way all the time.
I also didn’t like that the women and the minorities were the first to get kicked off. It seriously bugged me. You can tell me that it wasn’t like that at all, that it’s what the judging came down to, but if that’s what it was, then they needed to pick better comments when dismissing the candidates.
Anyway, after that, we were rooting for Chris Cosentino, because we’ve actually eaten at his restaurant a couple of times. (I’ll write about those meals soon.) His style is rustic Italian, and he’s also known for his obsession with offal. Also, he hates food bloggers. (I find the whole chefs vs. Yelpers/bloggers thing hilarious. But I digress.)
But then it was down to John Besh and Michael Symon, which presented its own controversies. Apparently, Michael Ruhlman, writer and trained cook, was one of the judges, and he was friends with Symon and some of his writing was about Symon. Ruhlman pointed out in his own blog that he was probably harsher on Symon than anyone. However, Ruhlman could not account for the fact that Andrew Knowlton, one of the other judges, came off like a complete tool. Blame the editing as much as you want, but what ended up on-screen was not very flattering. He came off like someone who wanted to show off his knowledge about food, but was clearly biased towards certain things.
Who won?
Symon - the Greek/Mediterranean dude. Draw your own conclusions, but it was pretty obvious from the last battle that he nailed it. Although it would have been nice to have John Besh win it, since he represented New Orleans and they already had a Mediterranean-inspired chef in Cat Cora. Oh, and in a small twist, instead of the judges rating the food, 3 other Iron Chefs - Bobby Flay, Morimoto, and Cat Cora judged the food. Although Morimoto was not dubbed this time, as he usually is, even when speaking plain English, they did subtitle him, which I guess is better.
One of the better things about this food show was that the chefs were not shy about cooking with organ meats, and totally showcased them as much as possible. You had people eagerly making stuff with tripe and lamb tongue. That was very neat.
45 frames - better than average, but needs more work.
Here is the video portion of Cliffs of Dover in GH3, go ahead and play a minutes worth. Then pause and play the next clip.
Now here is the video of Oshiri playing the song above. If I had the software I would blend the two into one, but I don’t so I apologize.
That’s the fun of guitar hero. Being in sync with the music and immersing yourself in the song is the main goal of the game. Take away everything else, the graphics, characters, ads, etc. And it’s just you, the song, and the notes. If all three don’t sync, then the game has failed. When a person connects with a song while playing, sublimity is reached and before you know it the song is over. Let’s take a look at the songs and the notes for them in several difficulties.
There are 71 songs in GH3, 42 regular songs and 25 bonus songs that you can buy from the store in the game. I went back to GH2 to count how many songs I actually liked to play over and over again, and got a total of 16 songs out of 64 (regular + bonus). In GH3, I counted around 18 to 20 songs that I can see myself playing repeatedly. While I like more songs in the new guitar hero, the placement of the songs that I like are all over the place. For example, the game is broken into eight different sections(sessions they call it), and you have to beat one before you go to the other. Each section has about five to six songs total that you have to beat in order to unlock the next set of songs. The problem is getting a bad selection of songs without any of the good ones. The first tier for GH3 is horrible:
Slowride (1975)
Talk dirty to me (1986)
Hit me with your best shot (1980)
Story of my life (1990)
Rock & Roll all nite (1975)
These are horrible songs to start the game with. The latest song in there is from 1990, I wasn’t even born in two of those songs! Story of my life isn’t bad, but it’s not incredible either. It’s not that they are bad because the songs are dated, it’s because they were bad even when they were new. Slowride was probably the Macarena of its time, but slower, and more painful. I wonder if a good portion of the songs made it into the game not because they were great, but because of marketing. GH3 is already selling ad space in their game (C’mon, they take money from deodorants, they’ve already hit the bottom of the barrel); it’s not too much of a stretch to think that a band manager or a record company might push the song to be in the game so that sales of their cds will increase because some of these songs are just awful to play(Anarchy in the UK, I’m looking at you). Weezer songs make me suspicious because they were caught in the 90’s buying airspace on radio to make it look like people still wanted to hear their songs. Sure they have great songs, but not more than I can count with one hand.
It’s worth going through the band songs for the good songs like Paint it Black, Kool Thing, My Name Is Jonas, Holiday in Cambodia, Cherub Rock, Black Sunshine, 3’s & 7’s, Knights of Cydonia, Cliffs of Dover, Player of the Refugee, etc.
The difficulty of the game is unbalanced. Easy and Medium feel the same. Even on the last songs, which were supposed to be hard, are too easy. There are no crazy sequences or things that you can’t handle. Going from medium to hard difficulty is like someone peeing in your coffee between breaks. What’s with the insane rise in difficulty? Multiple notes with harder sequences right out of the gate? I was barely able to finish the first tier of songs after a couple tries for each of them. It was just much harder. Hard mode in GH3 is Expert mode in GH2. There is no smooth transition and either you get it right away or you don’t. Hard mode takes a while to get used to, with a lot of failures and retries, it just didn’t have to be this way. After you get used to hard mode, the game becomes fun again. Just wish it wasn’t such a steep learning curve. I will not try expert, it does not exist for me. My wife on the other hand, is three songs away from finishing that mode. I ‘am clearly not the breadwinner here. Take a look at the video below, the song is through the fire and flames, and that’s how hard and expert look like on most songs:
That’s insanely hard, but when you hit the notes correctly, it feels great. On easy mode it’s hard to feel the rhythm because the notes do not usually match the beat enough for you to get going. Medium is great in the later songs, when they become a bit more complicated. Hard and Expert are the best modes for getting a good feel of the songs. It plays fast enough that you feel like you’re playing a guitar and once you get used to Hard mode it’s hard to go back to Medium at all. The note placement is well done but sometimes they put too many notes in places where it shouldn’t be that hard. For example, there are many songs that turn in to clicking-fests because there are thirty double notes coming down in a few seconds all stuck together. You’ll be clicking the strum bar furiously just to get through that section that repeats itself forty times before the song is done. This tends to wear out your arm quickly. In GH2, the game was hard but it didn’t resort to this type of cheap trick. In GH2, there was difficulty, but not by clicking fifty times in three seconds, but by the variation of the color notes you need to hit. This requires more skills than reflexes, so I prefer it to GH3.
Finally there is Co-Op, playing with another person(one base, one guitar). It’s actually very balanced in that the base portions are not always easier than the guitar portions, so it really depends on the song. In GH2, the base was always easier. Co-op and battle mode is better and more fun in GH3. GH3 lets you do co-op career mode and battling against one another is something I never cared for in GH2 but find it fun in GH3. In battle mode you can hurt your opponents with broken strings, upside-down notes, bad wammys, etc. It’s actually a lot of fun to collect these power-ups and use them all at once to devastate your opponent. Zadius threw a GH3 party last week, and we did several hours of nothing but battle mode and had too much fun (only because I didn’t lose too much, otherwise I would have said the opposite).
GH3 is just as good as GH2 in terms of overall gameplay. My wife Oshiri likes GH3 better than two, while I prefer both without putting one on top of the other.
Overall it’s a solid 50/60 Frames per Second. Minus ten points for lack of characters, stereotypes, and overall variety, but everything else is just right (once you get used to hard mode and up).
