Fuck this piece of shit. I refuse to play games designed by sadists.

Sadistic bullshit this game puts you through (in the first 5 hours, at least, after which I stopped):

• There is a boss which is "psychic" and evades your attacks because he sees them coming. The solution? You have to plug into the second controller port. Apparently it is port 1 that he is reading, so if you plug into port 2 he doesn't read you anymore. The game gives you no hint whatsoever about this until you have died and restarted several times, at which point it just tells you outright. How the fuck is anyone supposed to figure this out? By my theory of puzzles, this rates among the wost puzzles imaginable -- it's something that no player would ever consider trying because it's fucking ridiculous.

• For most of the game, any time you die you simply go back to the beginning of the room. You also generally have the ability to save the game any time you want. However, there is one scene where if you die, the game exits. You are warned about this, but you are not given the opportunity to save *after* this warning. Yeah, I hadn't saved in probably the last hour since I didn't think saving was very important. FUCK YOU HIDEO KOJIMA!

Needless to say, I stopped playing at that point. I decided that my time would be better spent on a game that isn't designed to cause me pain.

The game wasn't even any fun aside from the above bullshit. Based on the description I was expecting gameplay similar to Beyond Good and Evil -- sneaking around, trying to figure out how to navigate each area without being seen. Well, yes, that describes Metal Gear Solid, but the thing is, in MGS there is no thought involved. The areas aren't set up to be like puzzles. They're just simple, bland rooms with various things you can hide behind. Avoiding being seen is really quite trivial. Comparing this to BG&E is like comparing a beat up old Honda Accord to the fucking Batmobile.

And the boss fights. Ugh. In modern adventure games, boss fights are puzzles -- there's usually some trick to harming the boss that you have to figure out. But in MGS, aside from the bullshit psychic (and even including him once you switch controllers), it's really just a matter of shooting the guy a lot. In some cases it really confused me because each shot generally takes off a very small portion of the boss's life bar, making me think that I have the wrong approach and there's actually some sort of trick that I'm missing. But, no, the boss fights are really just painful attrition.

Maybe I'm expecting too much from a 10-year-old game, but for a game that spawned such a well-known and well-regarded series, this really fucking sucks.

So I bought one of these -- which, incidentally, my uncle invented.

Click "read more" to see the absolutely disgusting results. You have been warned.

Yep.

Wow.

Yeah, uh, hey John... Being the first western nation to elect a minority leader is actually pretty significant even to people who aren't black, and even many people who aren't American. America has proven that we are still the world leaders in democracy and civil rights. We have once again set an example for the world to follow, and we will be setting many more examples in the coming years. Around the world, the contempt for America created by the Bush administration is already reversing and turning back into admiration. We should all be very proud of that.

On a sad note, California's Proposition 8 passed, stripping gays of their right to marry. But America will correct this mistake too. I predict that within ten years, we will have a national constitutional amendment banning discrimination against gays, rendering any remaining state amendments null and void.

I went hang gliding on Friday. I would have posted earlier but I was waiting for pictures. Turns out no one got a good picture of me, though. Oh well.

In any case, I never got more than a few feet off the ground, being a first lesson, but I liked it a lot better than skydiving. It seems actually very relaxing. Once you're in the air, you don't really have to do any work at all; you can just enjoy the view. Landing is actually pretty easy since the glider doesn't move very fast. It actually seems very hard to injure yourself since the glider will naturally tend to glide mostly horizontally and slowly. If you totally let go of the handle, you'd just glide to the ground and have a slightly rough landing. The only big worry is colliding with objects.

I'm trying to decide if I want to do more of it.

UPDATE: Me, hang gliding! FYI, the instructor told us to keep running while in the air, since beginners tend not to know when they're about to hit the ground. I'm not just doing it to look like an idiot. :)