nastybun

Recently I’ve been playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King. It’s a WiiWare downloadable game on the Wii, not an old game but a new one. It’s basically an RTS with little to no unit management combined with a very basic city building game. You start with a blank slate of a city, and you have to rebuild it one building at a time. This of course requires resources. Being a king, you can’t just wander out and start offing monsters left right and centre.. that’s just not cricket. What you can do however is recuit the residents of the houses that you build. Of course you have to make sure the residents are both happy and well equipt, so you can also make shops, parks and training facilities to accomplish this. The strategy for the town planning aspect comes from building everything in places that are streamlined to get to.. your little warriors and co will visit shops, training areas and taverns before venturing out into the world to slay the baddies, so if they have to criss-cross (will make you jump) the whole city before leaving, they’ll have less time to attack things. Your time during the days is spent planning and expanding your city, chatting to the locals to raise their morale and spending cashola on upgrades for training and kit for your little mans. It’s oddly addictive, and is rather more fun than I thought it would be.

All is not completely rosey though.. at 1500 Nintendo Funbux (A$22.50), it’s not the cheapest title available.. and you don’t even get the complete game for that. There are extra races to download, new duds for the king and a castle renovation.. as well as some more things.. (I didn’t really explore the options..) but there is still much fun to be had with the base product. That’s all I got, but if I give it another play through I’ll probably look at getting some of the expanded content. Another downside is that it feels like it was rushed to release somewhat.. there are a few little bugs around, and it suffers from some pretty horrible slow-down when building something big. Still, it’s nothing that breaks anything for you. Just make sure you put your parks exactly where you want them.. there’s no way I could find to dismantle them like you can other buildings.

When it all comes down to it, FFCC:MLAaK has been a fun diversion for a few nights.. it’s one of those games where you’ll think ‘I’ll just do one more day.. just one more day..’ and before you know it, your sleep cycle is being compromised. It’s a very syrupy sweet game though, so if you get sore teeth from that sort of thing you might be best looking elsewhere. Though there’s just something about sending children into battle for me that I like.. it must be my inner terrorist shining through…

I’ve finally got my twitter thing on here! I may even use it appropriately often! Mainly for random thoughts that only require a little line o’ text. I’m still telling myself that I’ll try to update this place regularly, one day I may even start taking that advice…

It came up somewhere that this will likely kill you before you have a chance to get old. It was then asserted that if combined with the Schadenfreude Pie, you’d likely not see the week out. I’m pretty sure these people have a point. As much as I’d make a Schadenfreude Pie, I’d probably not eat any of it. I believe I’d take it somewhere and attempt to goad people into seeing how much of it they could eat. This both sounds like fun, and a way to live up to the pie’s lofty aims. Brilliance.

Last Friday we put on a presentation. It was pretty easy really.. though all I had to do was organise everything around the conference room in the hotel. It went pretty smoothly, I reckon. Should get some sales out of it also, which will be nice. If anyone is curious, we was selling to people Check Point’s Eventia suite, and Tufin Securetrack. Both are technologies around monitoring, maintaining and improving security and networking installations. Sounds boring, but if you’ve ever had to clean up an old security setup or attempt to track things down through log files and poking at the rule base… they’re very handy. All in all, it was a successful day.

Rio de Janerio translates to River of January.

There may be a better translation though.. anyone?

‘Ello ‘ello ‘ello… wots all this then.

So, I’ve not had a good time of it lately. I’ve been ill for the past week or so, which has been putting a dampener on things. It started last weekend when I was nauseus and a little woozy. I ended up having to skip watching Batman and go home, which was unfortunate. I couldn’t face the bus, so I caught a cab home. By the time we got here (about a 7 minute drive) the cabbie was looking real nervous.. I wasn’t in a good way. Still, I made it upstairs and into bed without causing a mess. I steadily improved through the week, though a flu has set in good. I can pretty much go places without needing and escape plan though which is nice, as long as I have some tissues in my pocket. Sigh…

To make matters worse, my PC is dying badly. It takes about six months to open a website, which is irritating. It stills IRCs, plays music and plays movies though, so it’s only mostly bad. Also it seems to be ok accessing mapped drives and whatnot, it’s just webpages that mess it up. I imagine it’s the amount of TCP requests going in and out that’s tripping it up more than anything else. Still, it’s irritating. Very irritating. I’ve currently given up with it and am using my laptop here, which is far newer and functional. Still, a replacement for the ol’ boat anchor desktop isn’t far off. Speaking of that…

… My car is for sale. It’s official, it went up online today. It would have been earlier if I had managed to remember to bring all the papers I needed to the RTA offices the first time I went there, but hey.. you get that. Still, it’ll be a weight off the ol’ noggin once it’s gone. One less thing to think about. I imagine I’ll be transportless for a little while, then I’ll look into getting a motorbike license and a little postie bike or similar. They are very cool. Alls I’ll need then is an open-faced helmet and some goggles, and I’ll be all set!

I bought Gears of War recently.. I know, I know, I’m about two years late with it. Bite me… I’ve only had my Xbox360 for a year anyway! … Anyway, I’m enjoying it rather more than I thought I would. See, I’ve of the opinion that FPSes should only ever be played with a mouse and a keyboard, to give ultimate control over the surroundings. Turns out GoW is more like a second person shooter. They’ve managed to make it utterly acceptable on there. I still die a lot (on Casual mode too..) but then, I suck at FPSes in general no matter how I’m controlling them. But yea.. I’d describe it as Half Life 2 for the Halo crowd. No puzzles, more visceral, more shooting of things. It is a shame that they didn’t do some of the exposition in the same way.. not a cut scene, just people talking while you’re hanging around.

Maxwell Klinger (from the TV series M*A*S*H) wore a 36B Miss Highrise bra.

The things you learn from books… seems he was a little flat chested.

This what happens when you mix an engineer, beer and some magnets.

engineer, beer and magnets

I just watched Tron! It’s astoundingly not rubbish! I was expecting it to be an amusing subtext to the failure of the ancient times to appreciate the future of technology, but a better description would be ‘an homage to the appreciation of computing and technology available at the time’. It makes total sense without succumbing to the old trick of trying to anticipate the future while not knowing anything about it. I’d say the best way to describe it is a generic action film written by a programmer/gamer in 1978, then filtered gently through someone making sure the general public aren’t going to be put off by the programming/CLI side of it. If anyone ever tells you that every geek should watch this film, they’re not just saying that. Grab a nice bottle of wine and sit down with it.. it’s worth a peek. It’s kinda like the Matrix, only in reverse. With some Terminator for good measure. Only it was obviously before these two. Amazing!

Also, now that we know that Retro Studios can make a great adventure game (the Metroid Prime series) they should totally make an ‘inspired by Tron’ game. It could be staggeringly brilliant.

I’ve finally gotten around to updating thie place! Back and front, looks much shinier now. Gorgeous! Now alls I need to do is update it more often…

Ok, so it’s been a while… but you get that. Right? Right? …

Things that have happened lately.. I finally got off my arse and did an exam that I’d been ’studying’ for for a while, passed it sufficiently. The problem with studying from courseware that’s intended to be accompanied by a person talking is that there’s no one to tell you what to believe when the book contradicts itself, makes no sense or just outright lies at you. And it’s bleedin’ boring. Still, with some practice questions and help from an appropriately knowledged up oracle, it was adequately passed. And subsequently forgotten, as most of it is irrelevant for the current version of the software anyway. The fun of learning something that’s out of date. Still, it’s an easier exam than the current one, so I’m not complaining!

Me mate was in town last weekend, we went and saw the rugby that was on. Great game, we outplayed them and won. I won’t go into why, because most.. if not all.. of you aren’t interested. Or already know. Still, even though I was nauseus to the point of thinking I was gonna chunder earlier in the day, it was an enjoyable night out.

I’ve finally got the papers sorted for my car, all that remains is to head into the RTA office and swap the plates about. There will be times when not having it are inconvenient, but the three and a half odd grand I’m not spending a year on it will be more convenient. And I like it.. I’d rather it was being driven.

Onto more meaningful things. If you wish to pass some time and fondly recall times playing old school adventure games, or wish to know why some people fondly recall playing old school adventure games, check out Ben There, Dan That. It’s a little point and click adventure littered with in jokes and references to things you may recognise, and it also contains dinosaurs. From the site:

Written by and somewhat-narcissistically starring heroes Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, it’s bursting with bold cartoon graphics, laugh-out-loud dialogue, colourful characters, some frames of animation and nearly 100 different sound effects! There’s no need for hand-eye coordination or split-second reflexes here; it’s a fun game that anyone can play as long as they don’t mind a few naughty words here and there and the odd dabble of mild racism.

It’s fun, amusing and a pleasent way to spend an evening. Give it a go, it’s free! And then if you appreciate it, donate to the struggling developers! Get that warm, moist feeling in your pants that can only come from helping out those less fortunate than you. It’s not their fault that they’re poms, but at least we can try to make it easier for them.

Next on the agenda are some tweaky bits for Windows XP. Wonderfully timely I know, but these may be useful for some of you. They’re all from the Powertoys page, so they’ll be old news for some but there may be people for whom this is useful. There are three that I’m currently using, and I’m going to miss all of them when I eventually can afford to bin this boat anchor masquerading as a PC and get something worthwhile. They are:

Tweak UI: “This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.” Essentially, you get more options to make little changes to your PC that can be handy. Things like removing the little arrow from shotcuts. Or trimming the crap from the New (file) submenu. Some very nice little things that add up to a much nicer XPerience. (Yes, that’s truely why XP is called XP)

Open Command Window Here: “This PowerToy adds an “Open Command Window Here” context menu option on file system folders, giving you a quick way to open a command window (cmd.exe) pointing at the selected folder.” This one isn’t of much use to normal users, but for those who will find it useful… well, it does what it says on the tin. Something that should be there already, frankly.

Image Resizer: “This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.” Read that again. How brilliantly handy would that have been back in the days of dial-up? No more tooling about with photoshop to debiggen a picture for someone. It works excellently, it’s super fast, and it just lives in the right-click space on picture files. Definately useful for everyone, if someone has ever broken your e-mail my sending massive pictures tell them to get it and install it. No more excuses!

Unfortunately… these are only for XP. There are image resizers for Vista, I’ve not tried one (and lost the one that Blake found for me) and I’ve no idea what they’re like but if they’re modelled after the powertoy there.. brilliant. I’ve no idea why these little things weren’t tooled into Vista, they’re stupendously handy and add basic functionality to the OS to make living with it so much nicer. Give em a crack!

Ninety-eight per cent of all life forms to exist on Earth are now extint.

I guess if you think about it then… we’re not so bad after all!

Welcome to the official trailer for the reinvention of Apogee. You may remember them from such classics as Commander Keen, Rise of the Triad, and of course Duke Nukem. You, my reader, may remember that before Duke Nukem 3D came out in 1996 there were two 2D Duke Nukem games. They were good, I enjoyed them thoroughly. Recently, those that be have announced that Apogee as a brand is back (they have existed in the public eye as 3D Realms since the late 90s) and as a major release to wow the world, they’ve announced some new Duke Nukem games for the DS! Wow! Remember how awesome they were damn near fifteen years ago? This’ll be brilliant! Once this takes off, we may even have some new Commander Keen games! How brilliant will that be?! Never mind that they’ve been ‘making’ a new Duke Nukem game since 1997. Duke Nukem Forever (possibly a pisstake title?) has been ‘in development’ for ELEVEN YEARS. I could make a game in that long, and I’m useless with anything like that. Still, this new Duke Nukem title must be being created by different people who have nothing to do with the team who have obviously been hard at work for ELEVEN YEARS cranking out… well, apparently some people have seen it running. Nothing official worth noting though. Still, the new trilogy (it’s traditional.. games from fifteen years ago came in episodes….) has a trailer! Check it out!

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYTHING THAT BAD EVER IN YOUR LIFE. HOLY FUCKING SHIT BATMAN! ‘Scuse me if not adding a break has ruined how astoundingly bad that was, but if you’ve read to here and haven’t watch at least the first 30 seconds of it, please just watch it that far. There are no words for how amateur it is. There are vids on youtube made by mentally challenged pygmy lemmings (no offence meant) that are far better than that. People with no limbs could create something approaching Cannes brilliance compared to that. My scalp has exuded… well, you get the picture. The voice clips, the fonts, the circular ‘OMFG RADIATION’ logo, images of Duke.. probably all the rest of the assets.. are from Duke Nuken 3D (or previous Duke Nukem games)bumph. From, at the latest, 1996. In videogame terms… well, lets say that Noah wouldn’t have bothered allowing that onto the ark. And then there’s the total rubbishness of how all the assets were used. If it wasn’t for the fact that this was an official video shown at E3, I’d have written it off as a pisstake. In fact.. a pisstake couldn’t have been that bad. It would have been written off as a mentally challenged limbless pygmy lemming who is a fan of the original Duke Nukem 3D wanting to make a case for it appearing on XBLA (there’s a rumour that that may happen.. it was fun back in the day.. may be worth a shot again) and failing miserably. There is no stating how bad that video is. I cannot imagine someone stepping back and thinking ‘Yea, I’ve created something that’ll really make people want to purchase this brilliance. This oughta generate massive interest in this title.’ Good god I hope anyone who had anything to do with the creation and approval process of that thing has been fired. From a cannon. Into a very very solid wall. And then incinerated for good measure. I’m just… there’s not words… yea. You get me.

On the plus side, we’re getting a new Wolfenstein game. Mmm.

See if you can spot the part that they probably wouldn’t be able to do nowadays without someone shrieking. Not the paint…