Metathought: Weblog

OMGWTF Sony

(Temporal) — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:56:20 GMT

So I finally decided a couple months ago that my boycott of the PS3 had lasted long enough. Sony has already clearly lost this round to Nintendo, and me buying one wouldn't make a difference. So I did, mostly out of curiosity, and partly because my PS2 is breaking down.

Well, a month and a half after buying it, I finally decided to crack open a PS2 game. And guess what? It won't play.

It turns out that newer models of PS3's do not have any PS2 compatibility at all. By design.

I feel dumb now for not knowing this before buying, but I thought that backwards-compatibility was just assumed these days. The original PS3 models had it, even. But apparently Sony decided to remove it to "cut costs".

Meanwhile, after playing the couple of games that made me most interested in buying the system -- ironically, both download games (Flower and Noby Noby Boy) -- I'm faced with the realization that there still are no interesting games for this system. Why did I buy this again? Goddammit.

Metal Gear Solid

(Temporal) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 04:56:56 GMT

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.

Deep Space Nine - Done

(Temporal) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:52:17 GMT

Finally finished Deep Space Nine. I watched every single episode all the way through...

Awhile ago I posted a table of episodes from season 1, tracking which ones were worth watching. I said that I would extend it with later seasons as I went, but from season two on, there were very few episodes that weren't worthwhile. Even the episodes which I did not find enjoyable usually included some important piece of character development. Each season was better than the previous, although the introduction of Vic fucking Fontaine in season 6 came close to ruining it. God damn I hated that character. Ahem...

Deep Space Nine is kind of like a soap opera. There is a lot going on, and missing the right episode could easily leave you lost. Watching it the way I did -- straight through in relatively rapid succession -- is probably the best way to do it. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the depth and complexity. The political stories were very interesting, and I was amused at how often I saw parallels between things in DS9 and recent events -- especially considering that DS9 ended 10 years ago, before any of those events occurred.

On the other hand, was it worth 6 months of free time? After work and girlfriends, I have about 1 day a week for single-player entertainment, and I've pretty much devoted it all to DS9 since September. It certainly was entertaining, but I'm pretty much resolved not to watch another TV series like that ever again. I missed video games.

My bath tub was draining slowly

(Temporal) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:33:26 GMT

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

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

This man wastes no time

(Temporal) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 03:02:16 GMT

http://www.change.gov

Finally back on track

(Temporal) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:56:27 GMT

Quote from me, June 3rd:

I have a hard time imagining this being anything other than a landslide come November.

Yep.

Quote from John McCain's concession speech:

This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.

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.

Sarah Palin

(Temporal) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:44:13 GMT

Ouch.

Ballot Propositions

(Temporal) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 05:58:35 GMT

I received my California ballot guide. As usual, there are a slew of wacky propositions for voters to decide on. Many of these proposals are very complicated and I personally have neither the time nor the expertise to evaluate them. We should really have a system where instead of forcing people to spend time considering each crazy idea individually, we elect some sort of representatives to worry about this stuff for us. Oh wait, we do have such a system: it's called the "legislature". So why the hell am I expected to do all this work myself!?

Generally, I have a strong a priori bias against any proposition made by petitioners. If it is actually a good idea, then let the legislature approve it. Giving it directly to the people seems like a great way to provoke an uninformed decision. On the other hand, some propositions are actually proposed by the legislature. I assume there is some sort of legal requirement that anything involving selling bonds be put on the ballot. In these cases, I will generally defer to the legislature's judgment and vote yes.

Beyond Good and Evil

(Temporal) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 23:58:56 GMT

Holy crap! Why didn't someone tell me about this game sooner!?!

At some point I overheard someone saying this was a good game, so I picked it up and had it on my shelf for some time. I had absolutely no idea what the game might be about; all I knew about it was the cover. I finally got around to playing it last weekend, and it only took a couple minutes to realize this was a winner. The rest of the game did nothing but reaffirm this notion over and over and over again.

This is the best game I've played since Xenogears, and I'm not even sure how to compare it with Xenogears. Xenogears was all story whereas this game does a huge range of things and does them all well.

Things this game has:

Story: Intriguing, engaging, emotional, and powerful, yet the dialog never gets in the way or becomes boring or annoying. Most of it is voice acted, and pretty well.
Puzzles: Most of the gameplay takes the form of Nintendo-adventure-game-style puzzles, but unlike Zelda they move very fast. A lot of the puzzles involve sneaking around, trying to accomplish things without being seen, which is incredibly fun.
Action: The main character fights with a staff. Fights often involve her beating down a swarm of enemies. The controls are extremely intuitive; it's easy to make her look like Neo fighting the army of Agent Smiths. Which is freeking awesome.
Varied gameplay: In addition to puzzles and fights, there are several mini-games, including various forms of vehicle-based gameplay. All of them are done extremely well. Usually mini-games have crappy controls because the game devs don't spend much time on them, but this game's mini-games were all perfectly polished. I actually liked the racing scenes better than many actual racing games.
Directed treasure hunts: I hate treasure hunts... unless they are directed, e.g. by marking the general locations of treasures on a map. Then I think they're lots of fun. This game is full of interesting side-quests, all of which were easy to find by just going for the marked spots on the map.
Originality: The game is set in its own detailed world. Everything is original; nothing is borrowed.
Art and Music: The art style is not as unique as Wind Waker or Okami, but is still interesting and generally pretty. The music integrates well with the gameplay and there are even a couple of very memorable pieces.

Basically they mixed together a lot of things, nailed them all, and integrated them beautifully.

The game only took me 13 hours or so, and I pretty much cleared out all of the side quests. I wish it were longer, but apparently a sequel is coming soon!

Hang Gliding

(temporal2) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:47:23 GMT

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. :)