Planet Sillicon

Okamiden

By blog on May. 21, 2010.

I’ve been looking at this upcoming game and it is quite appealing, I have to say.

There are elements from a few previous DS titles that seem very strong in the Capcom title. When I first viewed the trailer it immediately struck me how like Phantom Hourglass the game play was, as well as the cell shaded visuals.

Now, I’m not saying that any cell shaded visual game is like Phantom Hourglass because it’s cell shaded, but it’s the almost puppet show aspect to the visuals. The roiling waves in the background in the opening scene have that sort of feel to them. Of course, the actual game play is also very Zelda reminiscent. The collaboration of the wolf and the boy and the fact that it appears necessary for them to perform attacks together to get past certain parts of the game makes me think strongly of the game-play of Spirit Tracks. I suppose any fantasy DS adventure game is going to immediately bring to mind Zelda, and the comparisons made as a result. The audio of the voices actually reminds me very strongly of Animal Crossing, a sort of jumbled sped-up dialogue where nothing is discernible as a language.

From what I saw the game play looks quite fun, and though I’ve not played any of the Okami games before, it doesn’t seem to be something that’d hinder my enjoyment of the game. A quick read of the Wiki outline of the story and I’m set to go!

On a completely unrelated note, I was cleaning out my desk and found my and my SO’s old mobile phones, which we intend to sell, and I have to say, I love a service that makes it so easy to recycle these sorts of items. When it comes to recycling the energy saving light bulbs or fluorescent lights you’ve got to truck all those things into a local retailer, which in our case is the nearest post office, but that’s still not close. But with this, I just called them and they sent me the envelope! Now, I don’t expect much cash from this, which is why people often think these sorts of mobile phone x change things are scams, because they’re expecting more cash based on the site and it’s high figures for certain phones, but let’s face it, how many people are trading in top of the line products? So why should someone’s four year old mobile phone bring in more than a few pounds? I’m just happy to be able to recycle it without having to drive down to my local post office to do so!

Baldur’s Gate

By blog on May. 20, 2010.

That’s right, I’ve gone back even further!

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate II, as I said the other day, but it struck me that I’ve never actually played the original game. I’d actually bought both in a special edition collector’s pack, but upon instillation of the first game, was told in an error message that my copy of the game could only be played in North America.

Yeah, nice one. So I put it in a draw and ignored it for a few years. Well I felt inspired the other day, so I got the discs out – only two of them, as opposed to the original six or seven in total – and loaded it on up. I got the same error message, but I researched it this time and found that BioWare had released a patch to correct the issue.

So with the game patched, and my 3D acceleration on my video card turned down to non-existent, I’ve actually been playing the game. I’m playing it full screen on my 1920×1080 screen, in spite of it’s original resolution of 640×480. At that resolution, if I play the game windowed, it’s just too tiny to see anything. So it’s huge and pixelated, but it’s nice to be able to see everything.

So far I’m noticing that it’s a heck of a lot harder than BGII, for a start you begin at level one, as opposed to level seven. You also don’t get access to a full party straight away, and you can really suffer in fights. I’m playing a Mage, and I started the game with one Magic Missile. You can imagine how many times I’ve reloaded thanks to one or many of my party members dying!

It’s great to see the origins of great characters that I know from BGII, though. Minsc with his witch, Dynaheir, and Jaheira with her husband Khalid. Imoen is very different, too, and it’s sad to see what has happened to her in the later game. All in all I’m very much enjoying myself, and enjoying the tougher challenge!

Nintendo at this year’s E3

By blog on May. 20, 2010.

Nintendo is apparently planning a pretty good line up at this year’s E3.

It’s looking like it will be a pretty big year for Nintendo, and I’m interested to see the reactions after E3 is over. In terms of hardware, Nintendo is going to be showing the new 3DS, which will be great for those of us who are hanging out to see more details of this latest handheld. Nintendo is not the only company going for broke with the whole 3D thing, but theirs is the one that is portable and doesn’t require any peripherals. Quite frankly I’m still very leery of the whole thing, and hope I’m presently surprised.

Software is the key thing for Nintendo this E3, with more information expected on the Wii titles Conduit 2, Epic Mickey, Lost in Shadow, a remake of Metroid: Other M, and of course, the big kicker, Zelda. I pretty much don’t care one little bit about any of the games save Zelda, so I’ll talk about that a little. For the last year we’ve not heard anything on the game. At all. Pretty much since one piece of concept art was released, and a hint that perhaps Link won’t have a sword in this one, we’ve learned nothing in twelve long months. Now, I cherish Zelda games, so it’s pretty frustrating to wait that long with nothing… until now! Or, well, E3. Nintendo has said that they will be showing a great deal on the new Zelda title, including story-line, setting, and a brand new control scheme. I enjoyed the last Zelda DS title, even though trains weren’t really my thing, and I also enjoyed Zelda: Twilight Princess an awful lot, but I’d love to see a soul-sequel to Ocarina of Time, if perhaps with some of the grittiness of Twilight Princess thrown in.

The DS is set to get some groovy new games, too, with Dragon Quest IX, Golden Sun DS, Okamiden, Super Scribblenauts, and Pokémon Black and White. I’m actually quite interested in a few of these games. The Dragon Quest series has been a very enjoyable one, and Golden Sun has also caught my eye. Okamiden has some very cute visuals, but Super Scribblenauts has no interest for me at all. I found the first game tedious, so the second doesn’t seem like a great idea. The Pokémon games are a little interesting, because I do usually give the new ones a try. But I keep asking myself, why? Aren’t they essentially the exact same game? So not sure, but still interested in learning more about that one.

My old neighbour

By blog on May. 17, 2010.

He’s a lovely chap, but he’s currently worried about being sued, of all things.

Basically, I’ve got this great old neighbour, who must be sixty-five or so, but he’s still completely all there. He’s one of those neighbours that will just help out, without being asked.

Like on one occasion when my SO and I were unexpectedly out of town for a week – issues with her dad’s health – this neighbour picked up all our mail for us to make sure it didn’t look like no one was there all that time. On another occasion he saved me and a bunch of other people from getting parking tickets when the street was being patrolled by a particularly avid parking inspector. You know how they mark your tires with chalk? Well, one day, after pretty much everyone had been hit with a ticket for one reason or another over the past few months, he waited until the parking inspector had gone around the corner, and went with a bucket of water and a cloth and wiped the chalk marks of each and every tire on our block… on both sides. It was so awesome my SO and I bought him a big fancy new pot planter in the shape of a rustic wooden bucket. I wish I could have seen the look on that ticket inspectors face!

Anyway, he was out this week, and I was talking with him yesterday, and he tells me that he was at an event at the local retirement village where some of his friends are living now, and that on his way home he stopped at some traffic lights as they were turning yellow. Pretty normal. Well apparently a young ‘lady’ was behind him and she didn’t want to stop, apparently she thought they could get through the yellow light before it turned red, and in the course of this thinking, rear ended my old neighbours car.

Bad enough, but apparently then she got out of her car – after they’d both pulled over – and started shouting about claims for compensation because of the ‘car accident’. My neighbour told me about this and I’ve suggested that he see his solicitor just in case, but that this sounds like yet another car insurance fraud in the makings.

The ‘lady’ didn’t have insurance, but thankfully my neighbour does and it’s covering the small amount of damage to the back of his car, but still, it really annoys me to see him concerned about something like this when he did nothing wrong. Wherever you are chav girl driver, I point my finger in admonishment at you and hope you’re ashamed of yourself!

Those scanners

By blog on May. 17, 2010.

I felt the need to write about them again…

It’s interesting to see what can happen when these things are ill-used. We’ve had them for a while, but in America they’re only just starting to use them around the country. Two incidents so far have caught my eye, and make me think serious adjustment needs to be made.

In the Miami international airport, the technicians who are to view the images produced by the scanners were being trained to use the machine, and to do that, one of them had to step into the machine for the other’s to view the image. This lead to the supervisor of the fellow who stepped into the scanner made a comment to this fellow’s colleagues about the poor man’s small genitals. This lead to his co-workers griefing him for at least a month, every day, until he took a police baton to one of them in the car park.

Some news articles suggest the poor guy has been sacked, other’s that he’s on suspension pending an investigation, and that an investigation into the co-worker’s actions will also be going ahead. It’s no wonder why he didn’t report the issue when his damn supervisor started the whole trouble.

The other incident is closer to home, with a Manchester security guard telling his fellow female security guard that he ‘loved those gigantic tits’ after she inadvertently walked through one of the scanners. That man’s been issued with a warning by the police, but quite frankly, I don’t think that’s enough.

In both cases we’re seeing people who are entirely far too irresponsible being given access to very private information. The co-workers in Miami and the idiotic security guard in Manchester all give further credence to the idea that these scanners are completely messed up.

The only way that this can work, in my opinion, is if the UK and the US adopt the same scanning software implemented by the Dutch which eradicates the need for human eyes to view the images. The software ‘looks’ for anything that’s suspicious and then alerts those who need to know, but no person is viewing the images.

This is the only fair way in which these scanners can be implemented, in my opinion.

Red Dead Redemption

By blog on May. 15, 2010.

What an awesome game it’s shaping up to be!

So, the game is set to release on our fair shores in less than a week – May 21st – but I really want to play this game right now! Dammit! Well, in lieu of being able to actually play, I’ll write about it.

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly makes this game stand out… there’s a few things that really make me very excited to play it. For instance, it’s finally a sandbox style game from Rockstar in which you don’t have to be a bad guy. You don’t have to be the scum of the earth organised crime sort. Sure, you can still be a raving bandit who preys on the weak, but you can actually be the vigilant good guy who kicks that first guys ass, too.

There was always a special place in my heart for a certain aspect of Morrowind, which relates to this game as well. I really enjoyed searching for, and searching through, shipwrecks. I loved feeling like I was hunting down some awesome treasure. Now, sure, in Morrowind what was usually waiting in a shipwreck was pretty much crap on a stick and a Lich thrown in for good measure, but in RDR there are treasure maps, and you have to use your knowledge of the local landmarks to find said treasure. To me that’s an absolutely fantastic inclusion that I can’t wait to get right into.

Other aspects of the game that is very appealing is the grittiness. Rockstar seem to have really tried to recreate one of the most turbulent areas in American history, and I for one am looking forward to walking on in there and makin’ thing a little calmer. Maybe it’s all those awesome old Western films I’ve seen, but I really can’t wait to get in there and kick some serious ass.

Anticipating a new MMORPG

By blog on May. 15, 2010.

I’m in need of a new MMORPG…

I’ve gone through the MMORPGs available and the only ones that are interesting are ones I’ve played. LOTRO is a fantastic game, but I’m feeling like something not set in Middle Earth, something where I don’t know what will be around every corner. Something even more fantastical than Toklien’s world, which, whilst being fantasy as well, is one that I’m already very familiar with.

I decided to start looking into what’s going to be available in the near future, and Guild Wars 2 caught my eye. The game is beautiful, with better graphics than Aion which was only released a short while ago, but with the same producers, NCSoft, has a similar sort of look to the landscape. So far there’s not a heck of a lot of information about the game, but with what is available, I’m pretty much set to play this.

My SO and I both want to play the Elementalist class, which already has videos up on the GW2 site, and looks amazing. There’s been a real effort with graphics to make those magic effects really look amazing, and extremely enticing. I can’t wait for my SO to be able to get on there, make a great character each, and really kick some ass.

Guild Wars was very different to any MMORPG that was available at the time, and GW2 is looking like it’s shaping up to be similarly ground breaking. There’s a new feature in terms of questing called Dynamic Events, which sounds like a lot of fun. Basically, these will either randomly trigger, or something a player character does will trigger it, and it could be anything from a raid by the bag guys on a village to having to go into a bad guy base and rescue a bunch of people. Depending on how the event goes, too, there will be different chains of events that come from it.

A very interesting questing system, so let’s see if it pays off!

Animal rights rant

By blog on May. 10, 2010.

I’ve got another rant in store for you today, and this times it’s about animals.

I happened upon a news article today, a news article on Yahoo that tells how a recent study has found that ‘lab mice show pain with facial expressions’. Now, I’ve a few issues with that.

First off, no-bloody-shit-Sherlock. Of course they show pain on their faces. They’ve even gone so far as to say that this is “the first scientific evidence of facial expression of pain in a non-human species”. Are you bloody kidding me? Have you seen a cat in pain, a dog in pain, heck, a bird in pain? There are obvious signs, in the face, of animals experiencing pain or discomfort. There are also other physical characteristics for creatures experiencing pain, that are more specific to the species of animal. I just can’t believe that they’re kidding themselves with this crap, that because all previous evidence wasn’t ’scientific’ then it wasn’t valid.

Want to know how they figured this out? Yep, they tortured them. Heinous bastards. Here’s a quote as to just how they tortured the mice to record their facial expressions.

“This was done by injecting stomachs and paws with pain-inducing substances, including acetic acid, mustard oil, and capsaicin, the “hot” ingredient in chillies. Animals were also injected with a chemical that triggers bladder cystitis, and made to suffer nerve damage. The “pain faces” were identified by comparing video images of non-suffering mice with those in pain.”

What the hell are these people, socio-paths? They had to compare the expressions of mice who weren’t being tortured to those who were to notice that their expressions changed? The poor mice exhibited the following facial expressions. “Orbital tightening (eye squeezing), nose bulge – a rounded extension of skin on the bridge of the nose – bulging cheeks, ears drawn apart and back, and whiskers held against the face or standing on end.”

How could anyone deliberately hurt these creatures and then watch film footage of their pain? This makes me angry, and I have to say, this study better be put to extremely good use. Otherwise they were torturing these lab mice for no reason at all.

I dislike my entire family

By blog on May. 9, 2010.

Today is one of those days when they all annoy me.

Ever have one of those days where your family is so incredibly irritating that you’ve no desire to ever see them again? I’ve had one of those days. First let me set the scene. I don’t talk with my extended family all that much. My mother was the odd duck of the family and as such I wasn’t ever really close with the rest of them.

She did get along with one of her sisters, however, and I used to be fairly close to my aunt and uncle. Well, you know how when you grow up, you notice over time that your aunts, uncles, and grandparents no longer seem to care for you as much? Now that you’re no longer five years old and toting a toy piano they don’t think you’re cute anymore and therefore don’t want to talk to you? Well that’s always irritated me, but I suppose it wasn’t until today that I realised just how self-absorbed my family really is.

Over the past few years I’ve stopped talking to all those aunts, uncles, and, in this case, grandmother who I’ve never really gotten along with. I did still, however, talk to the aunt and uncle that my mother was fairly close with. I happened to ask for my old children’s books from my aunt – since my mother moved into her retirement home they’d decided to keep such things at my aunt’s and uncle’s house as they had more space – as I wanted to go through them again.

My aunt said I could of course have them and that ‘we only took them because we knew you were going to throw them out’. That’s a complete and utter lie, by the way, I would never throw out a book. Ever. They took my books from my mother’s book shelves when they were packing up all of my mother’s books when she sold her house.

Anyway, so today they happened to be coming to the next town over from my city as they wanted to go and see my grandmother. My aunt called to say that they could drop the books around, so I said that would work out well. They said they’d arrive ‘late’, which meant somewhere between 6:00pm and 7:00pm. At around 5:00pm I called to ask if they were close as I had to go to the supermarket to grab some essentials for dinner tonight, to which my uncle told me they were ‘just leaving now’ and that they wouldn’t be at my house until around 10:00pm to 10:30pm.

This is something the two of them do – due entirely to my aunt thinking it’s acceptable to keep people waiting hours for their visits – quite regularly. They arrived at 9:00pm, by the way, and barely said much of anything to me, and what was said was completely lack lustre and completely uninterested in anything going on in my life of my SO’s life. That was, of course, until I asked my aunt about her Second Life gaming.

She’s an older lady, but somehow got caught up being a host for social events on Second Life, and once I asked about that my aunts face lit up and she yacked away for quite a while. My uncle never even bothered to get out of the car.

Yep, gotta say, love my secluded life just the way it is. I hate visits from family.

Greater perks

By blog on May. 9, 2010.

My workplace is considering offering us greater perks. Hmm…

I suppose they’re trying to combat the lingering economic crappiness and the not incredible rates of pay they give us, though to be honest the pay isn’t bad at all and is still competitive in the field.

It’s a small company, with two offices and some of us who work from home. I’m a web designer, and it’s good work that I enjoy and I can do it from home, which is fantastic, and as I said, the pay rate isn’t bad at all. Basically, they’re saying that at the beginning of the new economic year they won’t be able to offer us a pay rise – a small pay rise each year is the general norm for this company, usually just matching inflation rates – because of the world economy woes, but they do want to offer us a greater group health insurance package as well as better pension schemes for those of us with the company long enough.

I have to say, it’s a fair enough offer. I didn’t expect a pay rise this year as we’ve normally had the last few years, as we didn’t get one last year and I figured they’d address it at the beginning of the financial year after this one. It’s been common water cooler talk for the last few weeks – when I go into the office, anyway – that something other than a pay rise was going to be the incentive to work that little bit harder for the company, and honestly I like the two plans they’re offering us.

I’m hoping that, at the onset of the 2011/2012 financial year the company once again offers pay raises to match inflation rates, as that would just be nice and tidy and, well, they can’t really offer another even better health care plan every year. I think by that point the world economy should have bounced back fully, or at least well enough to justify our little company going back to their regular business practices.