Plaidophile

Today I decided to restart MGS4, and in 3 hours I passed through act 1, finally. Then in another hour or so I finally got through all the long-ass cutscenes before act 2.

What the hell, Kojima.

So, the inspiration for the Wii Fit comic is that, after about a week of daily weigh-ins, I started to feel like Garfield in his Sisyphean struggles against the talking bathroom scale. I have a feeling that Nintendo's designers really weren't thinking things through when they designed the daily body test component.

The big problem with it stems from that it uses BMI's ridiculous classification system (which is good for a casual statistical clustering of body types but is not in and of itself a useful diagnostic tool), and that it disregards progress and only tells you how you're doing based on where you are in the BMI.

So, my copy of Wii Fit arrived today.

So, my latest foray in entertainment-based weight loss has shipped from Amazon (I was smart enough to preorder it a month ago). In a few days I'm sure I'll be all "oh wow this is so much fun!" and then within a week I'll have stopped doing it regularly, just like what happened with DDR after I finally invested $600 in a pair of Cobalt Flux pads. (At least Wii Fit is only $80 though, and has a lot more variety. I stopped playing DDR just because it got so boring.)

On the other hand, people have already been reporting success with it, so maybe this time will work out better for me too.

Last night I played a bunch of TF2. Then I played a bunch of Portal's advanced maps. Then I went to bed, and in something like a Tetris effect, I couldn't get certain imagery out of my mind: two pyros (one red, one blue) running around various Portal maps, with a flamethrower and a portal gun.

It seemed like a lot of fun.

I was feeling depressed and irritated at work today (gah stupid proprietary remote debugging crap), but when I got home I found that two overpriced online purchases arrived! First was the pair of Weighted Companion Cubes. Next was the Alesis ControlPad drum controller which I got so I could record "live" drums again without needing a huge amount of space.

It's a bit distressing that buying things makes me feel better.

The other day, the Orange Box patch for PS3 finally went out. Now loads are much faster! This makes everything a lot less annoying.

Of course it's annoying that the game shipped in a less-than-optimal capacity, BUT it had been delayed quite a lot as it is, and I'm glad we got to start playing it a few months ago instead of having to wait until now.

Well, I was going to spend the night finally playing the PC version of TF2 (which I bought a week ago or so), but instead my copy of Smash Bros Brawl arrived! So I will be playing that instead.

First gripe: It doesn't say which buttons to push to continue on the initial startup screens. The A button doesn't work. Turns out you have to press +. Weird. Actually a lot of the stuff in the UI is pretty whack.

Second gripe: Too many friends codes. I really must do something about that. Anyway, mine is 1032-0942-8357.

So, my copy finally arrived today. I had a few hours to play it tonight, so I did.

Portal is a lot of fun. Half-Life 2 is also pretty good though it's making me a bit motion sick. The controls are definitely the best console FPS controls I've ever had... unlike, say, The Darkness, the controls on this actually feel natural and responsive. Not quite as good as keyboard+mouse, of course, but they did a good job of at least making moving and aiming feel somewhat natural.

HL-2 suffers from feeling very linear but also very "find the one little tiny clue needed to go forward" which is a bit annoying. Hopefully it'll get better soon. (I'm only to the part where you're trying to escape the city after the transporter fails to work right.)

Unfortunately, I have to go to bed early for an all-day "cultural training" thing down in San Jose tomorrow. Ugh.

So, I've been playing Metroid Prime 3 in fits and spurts. I play games because I want to be entertained and because I like solving puzzles and generally being challenged. I do not play games to be utterly frustrated by the challenges involving a long series of miniboss battles with no save points in between them only to culminate in an action-puzzle sequence where you have to pull four levers while fighting off bad guys who can also fly quickly and undo the lever pulling, and the bad guys respawn too quickly for you to just go around and pull all the levers before they come back.

It's not like I want it to be trivially-simple or anything, but fucking HELL at least make it POSSIBLE. STOP MAKING ME THROW MY CONTROLLER. (Especially since on the Wii you have to go to a pretty big effort to throw it down in disgust, what with the wrist strap and so forth.)

This is the most addictive platformer I've ever played. Holy cow. It's also pretty funny, and the voice acting is great, and the graphics are amazing (the only I you can really tell the difference between the realtime game engine and the FMVs is the FMVs have a lower framerate and a little bit of visible artifacting, though some of the lighting/fur/etc. effects are a bit better in the FMVs too). The difficulty level seems to be just right for me, and the storyline is pretty interesting even though I never got through the original Ratchet and Clank (and never played any of the sequels).

Some of the non-mainline gameplay bits are a bit fiddly and obnoxious (like, the Starfox-esque rails-shooter segments could be a bit better), but so far I'm very impressed with this game. I totally recommend getting it, and a PS3 to play it on if you don't already have one. (Which you probably don't.)

I dreamt I was living in a piece of "edutainment" software. My job was to help the two young goldfish (who were living in a deep river) keep their ecosystem in balance. Apparently they liked burying the Chaos Emeralds (which they stole from Sonic the Hedgehog) under giant planks of plywood which they couldn't lift and so I had to solve their dumb puzzles to know where to position this specialized plywood-sheet-lifter. Also I lost the clues for how to unlock the padlocks they put on the last plank, but fortunately the locks were cheap and/or there was a bug in the game so I could force them open by just putting the key into the second hole first.

Apparently, when goldfish get all seven Chaos Emeralds, they are rewarded with electric guitars. Their electric guitars are tiny and hard to play and have built-in cheap reverbs which you can't turn off.

• The PS3 really likes being on a lot. It'd be nice if you could turn it off (well, to a power-saving mode, obviously) and have it still finish up background downloading
• It's way too easy to accidentally turn on while moving the box, and then you can't turn it off until it finishes booting
• It'd be nice if you could turn the console off from the controller (like on the Wii) Oh, okay, you just hold down the PS button for a few seconds and it prompts you.
• It'd be nice if the controller were to turn off automatically after a period of inactivity (like on the Wii)
• In PS2 mode it always tells the game that you have a 16:9 screen, which would be fine, except the few games on the PS2 which pay attention to that do the totally wrong thing; for example, Beyond Good & Evil letterboxes it on a 4:3 frame. This wouldn't be so bad except that in upconvert mode this means I always have a border around it (just like on a mis-encoded DVD), and while I can get my full screen used by just turning off upconverting, then it looks even worse than on a real PS2
• Also, Beyond Good & Evil seems to have some framerate and shader problems, and occasional timing weirdnesses. (Yes, on the 1.90 firmware.)
• Okay, you know how the Wii's games are mostly the same gesture-based minigames with different skins? The PS3's downloadable games are mostly just Robotron with occasional tilt controls.

I am not a hardcore gamer. I also don't play many console FPSes, because the controls tend to suck. FPS controls don't have to suck; look at Metroid Prime, for example. Metroid Prime has great controls on a controller which essentially only has six buttons and one analog stick, as far as the game is concerned. It also ramps up in difficulty as you progress and familiarize yourself with those controls.

Even if you insist on having controls which are basically a direct port of WASD and a mouse to two analog sticks, please don't make the tutorial impossibly difficult. Good games ramp you up in difficulty, especially when the controls are a bit tricky. Tutorial segments in particular should be fairly easy to get through, since the whole point to them is to learn the controls. Additionally, tutorial segments more than any other should be free of sequence bugs (like being able to fall off an elevator which you can't recall), and if you're going to make deaths restart at the most recent checkpoint, it sure would be nice if there were checkpoints other than the very beginning of the tutorial.

While you're at it, if you're going to put such a focus on dialog and close shots on characters' faces while they're talking, you should try to make their mouths move at least remotely convincingly. It would also be nice if the characters had motions other than "talk while gesticulating wildly" and "die." (For bonus points, learn to write dialog which is intense without relying on every other word being a profanity. Yes, I realize they're mobsters, but I'm not exactly Miss Manners but pretty much every line in the intro made me blush. Consider the concept of dynamic range.)

I was really looking forward to your game but now I'm thinking I wasted $60.

Love,
fluffy

I now have a PS3. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My PSN username is 'plaidfluff' (same as on AIM). Add me as a friend. Or don't. Whatever.

Spoilers within.

Yesterday, finally started playing it in earnest. I'm glad I managed to get past the annoying fishing thing towards the beginning because very soon after it becomes really awesome.

Also, Midna is totally cute-hot.

What an odd genre fusion. It's definitely more Paper Mario (RPG) than Super Mario (platformer). It also took a little while to hit its stride but the first major boss fight started out with the trademark Paper Mario humor which got me totally into it. (The really sad thing was I understood every single reference that I noticed, though there's always the possibility that I didn't notice all the references.)

The actual gameplay could use more game and less exploration leading to cutscenes, though. Really it just feels like they took The Thousand Year Door and replaced the battle stage with the quasi-battles in exploration mode. Of course I'm also playing Yoshi's Island in parallel (on GBA) and that's the diametric opposite, with a lot of fast-paced dexterity challenges, which Super Paper Mario definitely is not.

There's something about the Zelda games with how they almost-but-not-quite fit together that leads to a hell of a lot of Internet beardiness in trying to piece it together. There are multiple factions in the fandom who argue for different specific theories, like the "multiple timelines" camp, and different groups who discount the canonicity some of the games for various reasons, and it's almost like a religious war.

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