n0wak

Uh. I'm not on the show, but I've beaten it. On the hardest difficulty. The only thing I didn't manage to do was complete all the challenges on the hardest difficulty. Holy hell are those insanely hard.

I got a new contract so I'm back to work on Tuesday and won't be able to make any of these anymore for a few weeks. Maybe I'll see y'all again in GTA XXVIII

RE: Western Games I'd love to see a good Western-styled game, but every game that I've seen (haven't played Outlaws) just takes it into generic gun-shootout realm but with more dirt textures. "Gun" was like this too. A great idea, but the execution was just lame and boring. The best Westerns out there are less about the shooting and the violence and more about the buildup towards it (95% of "High Noon" was the tension of waiting for the bad guys to come; "3:10 to Yuma", the original and remake, was also about the coming storm rather than any immediate action; and Sergio Leone turned this into an art form: the actual "gun fights" rarely last more than two seconds during showdowns that span many minutes). It's hard to translate this into a game when you place the trigger finger into an impatient user's mouse/controller and remove all consequence. Which relates to the larger "games framed by references to film" discussion. Making a good Western is more that just giving people shootouts and horses and saloons. It's the kind of superficial copying of other media that does a disservice to all those trying to make the next "Y of games". Like you guys said, making the "Godfather of games" is about more than just making a good plot.

My DS has been getting a lot more use lately thanks to a long train commute every day and it'll likely continue for the next few months. Been mostly back on the Civilization Revolutions bandwagon (a very small bandwagon it seems) but there's a bunch of games on DS I'm looking forward to playing. The DSi? Not right now. IF they get a proper Virtual Console service on there and add Gameboy Golf, Link's Awakening, Wario Land, etc. and maybe even some Neo Geo Pocket games, I'd be all over it. As it stands right now, a couple of DS Ware games aren't enough to make me fork over for the upgrade.

I've been playing with the fight pad (no joystick here) and while I still have a hard time pulling off double fireball moves with regularity, and sometimes the side to side double charges, it's helped a lot. My Vega is that much better thanks to the pad. Of course, I can't still pull off a lot of the Hard Trial combos (finally managed to get a few at least -- but I hear you, being able to skip them would be great) but with Vega (and Blanka) they're not really needed. Vega is fantastic against all the hadouken chuckers. I jump around, strike (often the double kick or fierce slash, couple of light/medium jabs) then backflip out. Most of the Kenryuakusagat players are annoying but not very good and I can consistently lure them into a Shoryuken which leaves them wide open for punishment. And when they stand back throwing fireballs I destroy them with the ultra. This was good enough to get me up to 1500 BP. I hope to get to 2000 in the next few days. I've been having success with Vega against Zangief and Abel too. They can't do their grabs when you're constantly backflipping out of the way. It's annoying, but effective. On the other hand, I fought a really good Balrog today that completely destroyed me. Having seen a few Balrogs, I have to say he comes across as overpowered -- but I thought the same of Sagat until I learned to counter him better. I guess he's a rare enough character that it just throws me off. But damn, those punch-chains are brutal.

This guy must have majored in Spamology.

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Bronstring Marek Bronstring's signature looks about equal to what I would have expected it to look like.

Rohrer Horror is the new Rural Juror.

British people, apparently. This is, of course, the country where, if you arrive at Heathrow and take the Tube, the first thing you hear is the destination: COCKFOSTERS.

Yeah. I don't think it's realistic either. Bandwidth might be better now than it was a few years ago, but it's still way beyond where it needs to be (not mentioning bandwidth caps ) This might work well for some types of games, but I can't imagine anything that requires good timing working. Can you imagine trying to play something like Rock Band on this? I can't. As mentioned above, the latency between console+sound system/tv is something that already hinders that game for some. I can't imagine adding internet latency to the mix. If anything, even if it does work with FPS games, I imagine there will be a lot of reports of massive motion sickness. Any lag between input, expected result, and actual result messes with the mind's balance system. I just can't see this working in the real world* for a few years yet. And for it to work, they're going to have to have these data centres virtually in every major city and I can't see the cost of that being recouped. * Outside of controlled demonstrations made specifically for the press/publishers.

The finale made me dislike the entire show more, precisely for this reason: it feels as though Ron Moore was pulling stuff out of his ass as he went along with no real "plan" to it. The text in almost every BSG intro since season one said "the cylons have a plan" -- and what was it exactly? It seems as though they were making things up as they went just as much as Ron Moore. And I would no have a problem with that if it were sold as an episodic show rather than a vast, sprawling arc. But it wasn't. All the prophecy and "foreshadowing" all seems haphazard and lazy in hindsight. There was no destination for it and, in the end, it just feels like he was trying to clumsily fit new plots around previous prophecies (the whole Hera running off to C&C/temple dream thing was awkward). It's like he wrote himself into a corner. There've been a lot of issues around it this season (the most obvious of which was the whole HotDog/Chief thing). I'm glad this show's over, because it had already jumped the shark. Also: yes, the colony is destroyed. But weren't there other baseships around? And in other locations in the galaxy? What happens to them? You'd think given 150,000 years they'd have found their way to Earth to exact revenge.

WE HAVE A NEW CANDIDATE FOR BEST OF 2009 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25239454-601,00.html

Paris is in there now too. I was doing some wistful Google traveling this morning going through all my old haunts from last summer in Paris and London.

"Syfy" does NOT read well in Polish

You do know that not everyone in the world is on Daylight Savings Time now, right?

It's not just hard to describe, it's also just downright hard. I'm stuck on fucking level 3. Love the aesthetic though. It's very much rooted in the processing/vj/motion design community more so than the game community, which is refreshing.

Boxxy for the uninitiated http://boxxystory.blogspot.com/ Also, my favourite of all YouTube subscriptions has updated recently (again!) S7cXWrdHshE

I might show up again for once myself! I've had a nasty flu since Saturday morning and I'm working from home today so I might have some time to spare (except for the flu part, that's )

Oh man. I've had the rarest of occurrences today: I played against Dahlsim in a ranked match! Just played a bunch of matches online, all with Vega, and I encountered a few Akumas. The thing with Akuma is that most of the people online using him aren't very good with him. They tend to play hyper-defensively, chucking fireballs and air fireballs with impunity. With Vega, it's super easy to either jump over them or backflip out of the way. Was playing with one guy that was doing that and after fifteen seconds of it, without scoring a single hit, and a couple of taunts he got the message and started to attack. Not very well. I got perfect I was surprised to see the guy not disconnect. I've definitely been improving my Vega though. Still get frustrated as fuck when I lose because I couldn't pull off a move (stupid charge moves, and zig-zaging ultra), but my annoy-the-fuck-out-of-the-opponent style is working well. I can hold my own against Ken and Ryus and Akumas, and fairly regularly defeat Abel and Zangief. Which, basically, accounts for about 90% of all ranked match characters

Yes, both of these things are stupid. I've said it before, but the online ranked mode is a clusterfuck. Here's how to do it fair and square: 1) let the system pick who you play against, not the player. 2) players pick characters blind 3) make it a best out of three out of three 4) after each fight, winner stays with their character, loser can change. 5) any disconnection gets automatically counted as a loss, battle points are still calculated (maybe with an extra penalty) You'd think that on their third attempt (this is the third SF game on XBox Live), Capcom wouldn't make so many idiotic mistakes.

Pretty crappy, really. Nice art, but no game design to speak of. Pretty much like most advertising games conceived by ad agencies. Advertising Creative Directors make for poor game designers. Not that I'm bitter or anything

Yeah, that's about right. It's a game I liked for the idea and the mechanics at the time, but it was, for some strange reason, a game that just weirded/creeped me out. I was nine though, so that probably had a lot to do with it. I don't know what it was. The atmosphere of it or something. But this new one is just charming. It looks even better in motion http://www.offworld.com/2009/03/wiis-a-boy-and-his-blob-in-mot.html Although I am filled with an improbably amount of annoyance over his "falling through a hole animation". Everything is so nice and smooth and that is just... clunky. But it is early.