nastybun

Or something like that. It’s been the week of Fable 2 - the game where you decide who you will become. Apparently. In short, it’s an RPG where you’re free to be a dick, should you want to. In long.. well.. it’s an RPG that plays on genre conventions while greatly simplifying the whole experience. And.. it works. Mostly..

First of all, it’s an Action RPG. This means you’re actively swording/shooting/burning band guys, rather than selecting actions from a list while waiting for the bad guys’ turn to smack you in the face. Much more preferable, for me. They’ve managed to pull off a combat system that’s both exceedingly simple to use, yet deep enough allow you to utilise many different tactics to slaughter whomsoever looks at you funny. A button to swing your sword/blunt object at them, another button to fire a bullet/bolt at them and another button to set them on fire/slow down time/make them scrub the floor. There are many moves you can build up to, and the experience system allows you to specialise in the areas you use more than the other ones, but still allows for improvements in other areas. It’s a very good system that I can see other developers borrowing. At least, they should do.

Storywise, it’s a little light on. Essentially, it’s a revenge story combined with saving the world. Nothing groundbreaking at all, yet motivation enough to go rough up the bad dudes. It’s actually the side quests that had me more motivated. Things like finding a farmer’s boy a wife, exacting revenge on a lover for a ghost and finding the sections of a body that have been scattered across the world for a gravekeeper aren’t your usual RPG fare, but this isn’t your usual RPG. It’s also all voiced by British people, which lends a certain air to the proceedings. Somehow it makes the slightly farsical nature of things more fun.

The biggest selling point though is the fact that you can choose to be nice or nasty, or just tread the middle ground. I went through mostly as a good person this time, but only when people were watching. I’m going to try it again as nasty though. This time I only stole things from peoples’ houses when they weren’t looking… Unlike most RPGs you can’t just wander into peoples’ houses and take what you want without them caring at all.. this time if they see you they’ll call the guards and you may have to do some community service if you can’t smooth things over. You can also have sex with pretty much anyone you want to.. or with multiples of them should you choose to. By the end of the game for me pretty much everyone in the game would swamp me guy trying to get me to marry them. There was a particular blacksmith guy that just wouldn’t go away.. even when my guy’s wife and kids were there. All in all it’s a fun mechanic to mess around with just to see what happens.

Another new mechanic in the dog that you have that will sniff out treasure and help you attack bad dudes. He’s a bit useless to start with, but you can train him up to be more effective. A bad dude kicked him once.. he died real quick. There’s also a glowing trail in the game that leads you do your quest’s destination. If you fixate on the trail you’ll miss out on treasures and whatnot, but it’s great to keep you on track for destinations. It’s billed as an open world game, but it’s not really. Most areas have clearly defined trails that lead to the important areas in them and the glowing trail will stick resolutely to them, but it’s open and non-linear enough for that not to be an issue.

All in all, it’s a game that has enough depth to entertain you for a while, but only if you’re willing to be sucked into it. Taken purely at surface level it’s really nothing special, but if you’re prepared to put a little bit of effort in to play with the various mechanics and experiment with what the world will allow you to do, then it’ll entertain you for multiple play throughs. It certainly managed to get me into another play through.. I’ll probably start that tonight in fact. I’ll let you know how evil I can get with it…

Dear reader.. apologies for the lack of posting lately, I know you’re feeling left out.. but tough. Bwahaha.

Anyway to make up for it, let me direct you to some good tunes. First of all there’s She, who is a Polish artist living in Sweden.. as they do. It’s glitchy, chiptuney electro stuff that’s a lot of fun. It’s free to download from that link there too, so no excuses.. go check it out. Highlighs are Coloris and Destination Luna4 (both off the Coloris album). The other is Ladyhawke, whom I bought today. It’s proficient dancey tunes, quite fun to hear and the cover art for the CD is excellent. Unfortunately either the website sucks, or it’s my PC being shite. Most likely the latter, so check it out and let me know if it’s tops. Highlights off the album are My Delirium and Love Don’t Live Here.

I’ve being playing through GTA 4 again lately. It brought to mind the censorship issues that gamers here in Australia face, as the game had to be edited before it could attain rating and therefore be able to be sold and also to run in consoles. Console manufactureres won’t allow unrated (or in the US, AO rated) games to run, and also it’s illegal to sell unrated games. The stumbling block is that the OFLC doesn’t have a rating above MA15+, so anything that would normally be considered an R18+ thing just isn’t allowed in games. This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, one of which being that the average age of a gamer is about 30. I’m all for keeping inappropriate material away from the kiddies, but I believe that’s a job for the parents. It’s not hard to achieve control over what they’re playing, consoles have parental lockout controls for that very reason that will either prevent a game from playing or have it run in a self censored mode that will remove the more mature content from the experience. The most aggravating thing about the issue are the arguments that people come up with against changing the situation. One I’ve heard rather often is ‘well, the people who want to get around the censorship will do it anyway, so it’s fine the way it is’. Essentially, they’re condoning piracy. This is obviously stupid.

Not as stupid however as situation all this achieves. The main cut from GTA 4 is that you can no longer pull over and pick up a prostitute, watch your car rock from side to side for a moment and end up with full health. You can still shoot people in the face, run them over and have shootouts with the police. You can still take part in street races, drive home drunk and cause general mayhem in the city. Surely, if watching a car rocking from side to side is so bad then the rest of the stuff should be kept from impressionable youth. If there was an R18+ category for the game and others like it, then it would actually be easier to keep the nastiness away from the poor kiddies and have them grow up uncorrupted by the evils of videogaming. The issue’s not about to go away anytime soon either, though what’s more likely to happen is publishers just won’t bother to release games here (Sega have already stated that the lukewarmly anticipated Wii game Mad World won’t be edited for release in countries with stupid censorship issues), thereby ensuring more and more people resort to piracy. It’s all very very silly.

While I was in town today I also bought Fable 2… I’ll let you know how it is.

The correct response to the Irish greeting ‘top of the morning to you’ is ‘and the rest of the day to yourself’.

I wonder if any Irish people even use that anymore…

I just finished reading Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. It’s a funny sort of book.. I’ve tried three times to explain how I feel about it, but I keep deleting the words. I know I enjoyed it, but I don’t know why. That’s either a measure of how unique the storytelling is, or my shortcomings in understanding my own mind. A little of both, I think. A lot of the time I was reading it without really taking it in, but that doesn’t seem to matter.. it doesn’t require thought or analysis to be enjoyed, you just need to tag along with Mr. Okada and let him regale you with the slightly impossible things that happen to him.

On Sunday afternoon I found that my hot water system appeared to be borked. By which I mean I had no hot water. Further investigation led to the fuse box, from which I could hear the electricity. This is generally considered a bad thing. So I went to bed. Handily nothing caught on fire during my slumber, and as another plus it seemed that it had settled down and allowed the hot water system to produce me some hot water. So I had a nice hot shower. A few phone calls later and an electrician was on the way to fix it. Normally I’d have investigated the fuse for the water myself, but I don’t trust audible power. Four times is enough times to be shocked by mains power. Turns out the whole fuse housing was burnt out anyway, so there was nothing I could have done to fix it. On the plus side of having all the power in the place off to replace it, I could reset my microwave clock.. it had gained nearly five hours in the time I’ve had it, which I think is around six months. So now it begins anew its quest of confusing the occasional visitor that comes by my place with its fantasy time keeping… and I can have warm showers again.

Of a slightly more concerning note is the not inconsiderable hunk o’ cash that’s been charged to my credit card recently.. I’ve no idea what it was for, and its still just saying Authorisation Only. This isn’t the first time it’s happened though.. and every other time it has turned out to be something legitimate, so I’m not concerned enough to be putting a freeze on the card just yet… but I’m keeping a close eye on it until I know what it was for. Usually though I do remember what it is within two days.. not something that’s happened thus far. Still.. maybe I bought myself something nice as a surprise.. you never know..

I read somewhere today: “…Tiffany was certainly not my cat. And by that I mean that you can never truly love someone else’s cat. Cat owners, you understand what I mean.” I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but never really having been a cat owner (ours only lived for about two years, and spent most of her time outside or avoiding being patted.. she was supremely brilliant though) I’m not sure I’m qualified. Thoughs?

The tower of London has served many purposes, including a zoo.

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!

Some excerpts from spEak You’re bRanes:

“And don’t forget, if you really want to get the best out of your terrorists, pinch them out to encourage bushing. Once they begin to flower, start feeding them with a formulated terrorist-feed. If you water them frequently and keep them free from slugs, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t continue to enjoy homegrown terrorists until September.”

This entire thread.

“Awww. If I’d known there was an Anti-Establishment Proletariat Pseudo-Marxists and Anarchists rally I’d have gone down. As it was I ended up at a Crypto-Communist Envirofacist Morris Dancing Festival. Heavy police presence as usual. BURN DOWN BABYLON.”

Go have a poke through, very amusing.

Recently I was pondering what it would take to make a lobster costume. Essentially, a case of ‘if I was a furry and I decided I was a lobster…’ I’d make a carapace and tail using a 44 gallon drum (the main floatation devices used by contenstants on Scrapheap Challenge) as a mould, creating it out of fibreglass and painting it appropriately. How hard could it be? The drum would be about long enough for the main carapace part, the tail would be segmented as per an actual lobster, the feelers would be moulded around some fishing rod poles (just the bare poles, no hardware attached.. ever made your own rod? You know what I mean), and the claws would be an arrangement of levers and servos. Simple. The only difficulty would be finding a surgeon to reverse my knees… they’d need to be reversed in order to make the tail work. Once that’s overcome, a few little air tanks installed the main carapace would be all it’d take to go for a dip. It could be excellent…

Also amusing for anyone who’s worked in IT support is this… get right to the end.

I reckon I’m one of the few people in this world who has a (little) subwoofer and leaves it turned down almost as far as it can go. Unless my downstairs nieghbours are playing their shite music at times when I’m not trying to sleep and I want to drown them out. Then it comes up a little from the stopper. Fuckers..

Still going to sell my car. It’s occasionally useful.. but cash is more useful. Also, I feel a return to cheap, povvo motoring coming on. I was watching the Top Gear Botswana special again yesterday, there was a time when I nearly bought myself a Lancia Beta Coupe. Maybe I should have, I coulda gone anywhere… as long as I had a mechanic and a film crew following me. I think it may have been brown though… I’ll not own any car that’s Korean, (no offence, I’ve met some loverly Koreans and their food, TVs, monitors and.. most other things that Samsung do apart from mobile phones are great, but… not cars yet. Although, the Samsung cars are just Renaults with a different badge, so they’re actually the pick.. where was I?..) brown, or a Holden. Not that I’m a Ford fan, but at least the other models are German, rather than rebadged Daewoos. Sports Volvos ftmfw.

Bulls run faster uphill than they do downhill because of the bone structure of their legs.

So if you find yourself in Pamplona, you know what to do. Dig a hole.

I finished my first block of 99% cocoa lindt chocolate this afternoon. I have another. I think it’s the first block of chocolate I’ve had that comes with a warning label. Seriously. There’s a label over the tray of it that says you should probably start with the 70% (not enough) then progress through the 85% (wonderful) stuff before having a crack at this one. You actually only get half the mass of it, segmented into smaller squares, as you do with the other two strengths, which is more a reflection of its intensity than any money grabbing on their part. It also says to break off a small peice and let it melt on your tongue, which is a good thing to do. You don’t want to go scarffing this stuff down, it’s not a pleasent experience. Best to eat it slowly, with a cup of coffee (also good with green tea), letting the flavours of your cup of choice mix in with the chocolate. I find myself with tea and choc on the tongue, mixing and matching together. It’s very enjoyable. It’s also good for you, as it turns out. There’s a website and everything, and if it’s on the internet, it must be true. Not that if it was terrible for me I’d avoid eating it, but it’s a good excuse.

It also turns out that beer is good for you. Think of all the goodness I’m consuming! Wonderful. My dad has a perscription for a glass of red wine every day, just because he knows the doctor that perscribed him, I’m sure it’s legitimate and serious… I wonder if I can get one for tea and chocolate.

We recently consumed some tasty tasty foods, I’ll give you the recipe here:

3 tortilla rounds (soft tacos, burritos.. like that)
16 cloves garlic
2 cups parmesan cheese, grated
2 cups mozzarella, grated

Basically, you roast the garlic in the oven until it’s all nice and soft, spread it on the totillas, add the cheese, lay them atop each other and oven the lot until the cheese is as cooked as you like it. I go for golden brown. We also added sauce (whatever Dolmio you prefer, slack and tasty) and salami chunks. Obviously any recipe that has 16 cloves of garlic in it is pure genius, but it’s one of those things that you can add whatever you like to. Think of it as layered pizza with thin bases. I think I prefer pizza like this… which means it’s probably good that I don’t want to test my crappy looking oven out. I’d eat these far too often… Comes from the 4 Ingredients recipe book, my mum sent it to me. Great book, but a quick flick through seems to have revealed that most of the recipes require trust in one’s oven or grill… maybe one day…

Ancient Romans ate flamingo tongues and considered them a delicacy.

Good with a nice dry white…

It’s been dark and overcast today, barely raining. Cars had their headlights on. I still wore my sunglasses. A conversation with myself follows.

“Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

“It makes the world seem darker, more oppresive, dark like my heart. It keeps people from seeing my eyes, seeing the tortured soul inside them. Keeps the anquish within, from spilling out into the world and bringing everyone down. It’s a sacrifice I make for the unwashed scum out there, though they don’t deserve it. No-one understands me. If my hair was longer, it’d be in front of my face.”

“… Are you taking the piss?”

“Yes.”

The nice thing about talking to yourself is that the responses are always timed right for comedic purposes, and always attuned to one’s own humouratic senses. Funny how many more people stare at you when you’re smiling for no obvious reason…

Apparently the price of butter has risen 700% in the last 4 years. This is bad, because it’s the reason why I couldn’t get some tasty, properly made pasta today. I shake my fist to express frustration!

There’s a bagel joint near my place. It’s called Bagel House. A bagel and cawfee lunch is possibly the greatest lunch I’ve had. If ever you’re in Rozelle (it might happen..) go there.

I thought there was more to put here.. oh well.

Remember this? Turns out someone is actually making a pac-man film. Horrifying, I know. It’s not the guys that made that frankly brilliant trailer, which I think is a mistake. Anything else would only be unfavourably compared to the masterpiece that is the original, frankly. I think it’s time for a letter writing campaign, on a scale the world has never seen!

I am now going to gush about a bit o’ softwares wot I stumbled upon recently. Upon discussing the drab and dreary boredom putting up with having the same imagine on all screens in a multiple monitor setup, a googling of different wallpapers on each screen led me to stumble upon something I had found. Bing bong billy bong. It was DisplayFusion, software that not only allows one to have multiple background images, but the sheer power of it conjoins words together. It goes beyond that though, there are hot keys to flick your programs about monitors, tile things, resize things.. alla that funky shiznat. More funky though is that it integrates into flickr (for those wot got an account there) and if you cough up the measly ten bucks for the pro version, you can have your images randomly selected on timed changes. So yea, if you have multiple displays and suffer from the not so rare and surprisingly deadly ‘Gee, having the same desktop background on each monitor is so boring, I wish there was a way to have a different image on each one, maybe two images that complement each other, maybe even two completely different images, wouldn’t that be zany, I’d be the talk of the town and the ladies really dig that shit, maybe I can put sanskrit on one of them too’ syndrome, then this is the product for you!

In other news, is it just me or does healthy eating really not satisfy the hunger pangs. I ate two oranges and an apple for lunch yesterday and I ended up hungrier than when I started. Not sure if that’s my body rebelling against it or if that’s just what happens, but a dosage of steak and Coopers down at the pub fixed me right up. Tuesday night is cheap steak and trivia night! Lotsa fun, last night we join forces with a couple who wandered in and sat at the end of the table we was at. Unfortunately our combined forces didn’t help as much as we were hoping and we only ended up coming fifth, but it was fun anyway.

Anyway, I’m off.. going to get 6 oranges and 14 apples… that’ll learn my stomach..