• Wednesday, June 09th, 2010
So I’ve been gaming a bit more than usual once again. I finished Red Dead Redemption the other day. For those that don’t know, it’s an open world game set in the old west around the border between the USA and Mexico in the early 1900s. You play a man named John Marsden and it’s up to you if you want to be a law abiding gunslinger or or as an outlaw. At the end of the day it doesn’t make much difference which you choose. The game’s made by Rockstar who are famous for the Grand Theft Auto series of games, and it really shows. Personally I found it a lot more enjoyable than the most recent Grand Theft Auto, GTA IV, but like that game it’s still a world made up of largely unlikable characters with the story held together by missions relying on very muddy and glitchy gameplay. My tolerance for this formula has been rapidly depleting in recent years.
I literally could ramble on for thousands of words about Red Dead Redemption’s myriad problems and glitches or the vast number missed opportunities, but when it comes down to it the game still manages to hold it’s own while remaining fun. This is something GTA IV didn’t manage for me. Fun is why many of us play games after all and I’m not about to waste time on something I don’t enjoy. I happily played this game to it’s end and I think that stands for something. I’d be more harsh on it if it wasn’t for it’s powerful ending which to me redeems where they took the story. I really have to give Rockstar credit here. Still they can’t manage to wield the emotional clout of another game I’ve been playing, Fragile Dreams: ~Farewell Ruins of the Moon~, but that’s a topic for a future post.
I kind of feel like I haven’t been watching much anime lately, but it doesn’t entirely ring true when I say it. I’ve still managed to get through a few random series with friends as well as Funimation’s Blu-ray of Evangelion 1.11 that I imported a while back. Very impressed with that I must say. Of course 1.11 is already old hat and the next movie in this new Evangelion series, 2.22, is the new hotness of the fansub world. Watching it in any format but Blu-ray though doesn’t appeal. Blu-ray revels in content like this and I’m prepared to wait for the full experience. While waiting though it’s probably best I keep away from places like CDJapan and Amazon JP. I swear they’re trying to bankrupt me with Blu-ray boxset announcements. I’ve had to draw the line at The Legend of the Galactic Heroes Blu-rays which I’d love to own being one of the best series I’ve ever seen, but four box sets at 50500yen each (NZ$833 at todays exchange rate) is far too rich for my blood.
• Saturday, April 24th, 2010
Argh, I’m feeling really tired. Haven’t slept that well for the past few days. What better to do at such a time than write a blog post? So what have I been doing lately? Not really any gaming for once. Well okay, I have slipped in a bit of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey on Nintendo DS in between other things. Good game and probably the best DS RPG I’ve personally seen to date. Lately I’ve only spent the odd half hour here or there playing the game though.
Oh, I’ve also been doing a bit of plumbing. Seems the tap controlling the water coming into the house developed a leak. Not a good thing to have extremely waterlogged earth under your house. It wasn’t especially visible because the pipe and tap were buried about 30cm under the ground. Seems the builders who constructed the place not only decided burying the tap was a good idea, but also that gluing the entire system together in such a way that that you couldn’t take any of it apart without physically breaking stuff was too. This made the job a lot harder than it needed to be, but to cut a long story short after spending $30 or so at Bunnings on bits and bobs the tap is replaced and everything is nice and dry again. Oh, and as a word of caution to anyone else thinking of doing something similar…new taps aren’t always assembled watertight when they leave the factory. You don’t want to have the replacement tap leak worse because the gland nut isn’t tight.
I’ve been keeping rather light on spending for some time now. Not completely by any means, I try and avoid extreme actions that I’d never stick to long-term, but more-so than usual. The biggest exception would have been the Westone UM3X earphones I needed for work when my Shure E5cs died. Yes, needed. For my sanity. But I digress. The improved cash flow may prove useful though given I’m eyeing up laptop upgrades. One of the new Macbook Pros specifically. Buying could either be viewed as canceling out all the good work of my reduced spending, or as an opportune “Just as planned” moment capitalizing on my cunning forethought . Currently I’m going with the latter.
There’s always the prevalent view out there that you have to be mentally incapacitated/gullible/rich/pretentious to buy a Mac when there’s cheaper and “better” Windows machines out there. In reality though there’s solid reasons to run any of the popular operating systems, and Apple hardware has some genuinely nice aspects to it that other brands lack. All of that aside though actually using Windows at least five days a week for a decade hasn’t made me like using it any better. Little frustrates me more than many of Window’s little party tricks. I’m not just talking about old stuff either; Windows 7 is no panacea. Non-Apple “Hackintoshes” running MacOS X have their place too (I dabble in this myself), but using one for my main machine when it could break with the next OS upgrade? No thanks. Honestly I’d sooner switch to Linux than use either of those (well technically I already maintain three Linux servers, but none even have a GUI installed). I may actually switch to Linux one day if Apple annoys me enough, which is entirely possible, but for now I want to always have at least one computer in the house that always works, has a responsive user interface, doesn’t interrupt me with inane dialogs all the time, and doesn’t get more convoluted with each release. And lets face it. There’s no debate that for those who aren’t afraid of the command line…Unix userland >>>>> DOS.
I think I’ll drop things here for the time being. That bed’s looking mighty alluring right about now.
• Friday, April 02nd, 2010
Well Dragon Age Origins: Awakening was a little disappointing. I still enjoyed it, but it didn’t build on any of the aspects I liked best in the original game. Instead there was a heavy focus on being a “Grey Warden”. In a way I’m not surprised in that this seems to be how Bioware rolls these days. Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect like to lock characters into belonging to a faction, and honestly I don’t see the need for this. In Mass Effect 2 the way they forced your character to change allegiance between such factions came across really awkward and implausible. In ME2 it could have been done better and made to work, but even then I don’t see why it’d be worth the effort. Where’s the payoff?
DAO: Awakening thankfully didn’t try any major changes like ME2, but also had problems related to factions. The big one to me is that they didn’t establish why the player (or the player’s character) should even care about the order of the Grey Wardens. So warden membership is low within the region? Who cares. The story already established there were plenty of other wardens elsewhere in the world. Why would a character who’s had little freedom in their life (mages and elves being two such groups within the game) want to sign up with another organization that’s going to order them around and keep track of what they do? Even if they were forced to sign up which is how it came across for certain “origins” in the original game, what would be their motivation for sticking around once the danger had passed and the compulsion had gone? None of this is considered by the game as the player is forced to go through the motions and be led by the nose to the predictable ending.
It’s hard to take Bioware’s disparagement of the linearity of their competitor’s games seriously when they can’t manage to do better themselves. Ironically Bioware’s own much maligned Jade Empire managed a tad better in this regard. It was still a very linear game, but at least it didn’t force you to sign on with club of crazies down the road, take on their goals as your own and defend them to the death.
Unfortunately that wasn’t the only issue with Awakening. It definitely felt like it was made by a different team than the original game. The pacing was overly fast and the characterization felt quite inconsistent and shoddy. The set pieces and plot twists came across as having been decided rather arbitrarily. One especially damning point is that the two “Blood taint” skills you could obtain in the previously released Soldier’s Peak DLC actually break when you import an old character into Awakening. In game it looks like they should work, but the skill dialog shows an error message instead of the category name and when you try to use them from the command bar they do nothing but trigger some buggy character animation. It’s not just me that sees this problem, Bioware say the two are simply incompatible. I certainly expected third-party mods wouldn’t work, but having such a visible problem with Bioware’s own official DLC really smacks of a lack of care and effort.
It’s a shame really as some of the core ideas and new characters really had a lot of potential. A few of the new elements work quite well. Having to make executive decisions as the region’s Arl being a case in point. Some of the environments were more dynamic and varied too. I certainly don’t mean to make this expansion sound terrible because it isn’t, but with a little more polish and a bit more thought it could have been substantially better than it is. I hate to see such wasted potential.
• Thursday, March 18th, 2010
So the news has been doing the rounds that Hamilton’s ITM 400 V8 race hasn’t been doing so well financially. Ticket sales are slow even compared to last year. A year which apparently didn’t make a profit and certainly didn’t bring into the region anywhere near the business that had been promised. Supposedly the council took out a $7,950,000 loan in the first year to help fund the initial setup. Now that may not look like a lot of money in this day and age, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this loan lasts for 25 years and is accruing approximately $500,000 in interest annually. In other words over the 25 years the interest alone will add up to $12,500,000, and that’s without even contemplating repayment of the principal itself. That’s another $300,000 every year. Nice one guys. The race organizers are now busy trying to scare people into buying tickets with the threat of us potentially losing the race in coming years. Well cry me a river. Or that’s what I would say if it wasn’t the rate-payers who are going to be left holding the bill for this mess.
But enough about that. I managed to hurt my right hand/wrist/arm recently and have been doing my best to let it recover. Don’t really know what the cause was, but there were a few things I’ve done lately that could have led to me pulling something. At it’s worst it felt like that moment just after someone has punched you really hard in your shoulder, only it felt like that 24-hours a day. Thankfully it’s much better now and seems to be on the mend so I’m just going to keep going easy on it for a while.
I haven’t been playing many games lately. Partly due to the sore arm, but I’d also finished Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth about two weeks back. Now I’m mostly waiting for the Dragon Age Origins: Awakening expansion (why do we get this three days later than the rest of the world?). I was planning to buy Yakuza 3, but it seems when it came to the western localisation SEGA decided to phone it in and cut significant content from the game. Elements of the dialog don’t even make sense any more with the cuts. It’s a shame as with Yakuza 3, and Yakuza 4 just released in Japan, the series looks to be finally getting beyond the “low budget Shenmue” vibe that it’s carried since it’s inception. I can’t say I’m too surprised though with SEGA once again making it clear they are their own worst enemy, but it would be nice if they at least tried to do right by their customers. On the whole it’s a big month for games, but I have no interest in Final Fantasy XIII and only a passing interest in God of War 3, so it’s looking rather quiet for me. Gives me a chance to catch up with highly recommended items on the back-burner like Batman: Arkham Asylum.
• Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Well the latter part of 2009 and the start of 2010 just blew past me. I did my usual trick of having a half written post or two lying around, but they aren’t significant enough for me to feel the need to poach anything. I’m not one to buy into the idea of years being “lucky” or “unlucky”, but quite a few of my family and friends seem to have been having a hard time at the start of the year in various ways. Broken limbs, infectious diseases, expensive stuff breaking or just general bad times. Certainly hope that doesn’t last.
In my gaming time lately I’ve been playing Bioshock 2. Finished it last night and I was impressed with what they’ve done. I finished Mass Effect 2 fairly recently as well and it was good, although not as good as it could have been. It improved on the first game in numerous regards, but fell down in some other key areas. The dialog was rather shoddy for a Bioware game which was made all the more obvious given it was released so soon after Dragon Age: Origins. ME2 definitely wasn’t the 10/10 title many of the reviews suggest. Then again it’s by no means the first time professional reviewers threw similar accolades at flawed games (e.g. Grand Theft Auto 4). I’ve got plenty more to continue on with time permitting. Got a copy of Ace Attorney Investigations for the DS on the way, Heavy Rain is due late February, Dragon Age: Awakening in March, Persona 3 Portable in June. Bound to be others I’m forgetting.
There’s not a lot of interest in the current anime season. So far certainly nothing I can imagine wanting to pick up on Blu-ray. I’m sort of casually watching a few things to see if they go anywhere, but odds alone would suggest most won’t. Fine by me really as it’ll be nice to have a couple of months of smaller CD Japan orders. Well once the current series I’m picking up are done with anyway.
I was going to write some more personal stuff here, but the words aren’t flowing and persevering with it would probably doom this draft to oblivion so I think I’ll let it pass for the time being.
• Thursday, November 19th, 2009
In regard to my last post, yeah, I wrote that ages ago and then left it sitting in drafts for a few weeks. I didn’t make any changes to it before posting it just before so it’s probably best to view it as a message from the recent past despite things moving on since then.
What exactly has happened since? Let’s see…dentist visits went well. Eating is much more pleasant now. The anesthesia sort of…didn’t work…on the second visit but the pain wasn’t unbearable and I’m very glad I didn’t put it off. Despite how much time has passed I’m still not entirely well and still have a cough. Yay.
I found I couldn’t wait for Dragon Age Origins to come out on the PS3 as friends were buying it left, right and center and I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid spoilers. I picked it up on the PC instead which to my surprise turned out to be a really good idea. Essentially the PC version is outright better than the console releases, and on top of that it has none of the annoying DRM or online checks that have been plaguing PC games in recent years. It’s a really good game, but in a few regards I feel there’s wasted potential in there. With some small enhancements I think it could have been more immersive. I have actually finished the game already, but plan to go through it at least one more time since there were quite a few things I missed or didn’t do to my satisfaction. Assassins Creed 2 coming out tomorrow will probably eliminate any such thoughts for the time being though.
My next batch of anime Blu-rays should be shipping in a few days. “Bakemonogatari” and “Umineko no Naku Koro ni” aren’t really coming out fast enough for my tastes as I really want to see what extras show up on the later discs. Bakemonogatari has some episodes only released via webcast so I’m hoping these end up in full quality on the Blu-rays when the time comes. The last disc of Tayutama will be in this lot and I’m starting to think about what I might want to pick up from this season. White Album series 2 is a given considering I not only like it a lot but also have the entire first season on Blu-ray. Outside of that though I’m not sure. 11eyes is a maybe. Kampfer, Sora no Otoshimono, A Certain Scientific Railgun and Seitokai no Ichizon have all been okay, but don’t grab me in that way. Kobato has been disappointing. Ironically the second season of Queen’s Blade and the unfairly written-off Yumeiro Patissiere have been some of the better shows, but worth picking up on Blu-ray? Hmmmmm. I guess a few months of smaller purchases would go down well given I’ve been importing a few discs a month all through the recession. ^_^;
There’s a few more things I could talk about, but I think it’s probably enough for one day. Might as well leave some things for another day.
• Thursday, November 19th, 2009
I’ve been meaning to post something here for a while and today felt like the day. I’ve been a bit sick since getting back from the Armageddon expo and spent about three days in bed recovering at the worst of it. It’s improved a lot now thankfully, but as is often the case the last dregs seem to hang on a long time. *coughs*. Armageddon itself was a bit of a waste of time, but it was good to catch up with friends and the weather was beautiful. In regard to Armageddon I don’t feel that it’s me that’s changed at all. I’m still into the same sorts of things (perhaps moreso in some cases), but Armageddon today feels far more parochial to me. The event is technically bigger, but feels smaller if that makes any sense. There’s a world of interesting things out there, but Armageddon seems to be limiting itself to the staid, predictable and boring. 10 seconds browsing my RSS feeds provides more stimulation. Really meeting up with friends is the only reason I feel like going anymore. I kind of regret not staying an extra day or so, but had quite a lot going on at the time and had a dental appointment to come back to. I ended up delaying that due to getting sick so didn’t really need to rush back as it turned out.
I haven’t really found any time for gaming lately. I want to play more Aion, but simply haven’t been able to find the time. It’s not that I’m playing anything else instead even though I do have a bit of a backlog currently. That said, I’m finding the wait for the PS3 release of Dragon Age really painful. Really looking forward to that one. It seems there’s not much on the pre-order lists currently as hardly any games want to go head to head against Modern Warfare 2. I disliked the previous game in the series personally so have zero interest in this one, but thankfully Assassin’s Creed 2 has bucked the trend and should be out late November. I really enjoyed the original Assassin’s Creed faults and all so am really looking forward to this one.
I’m still a bit unsure what I think of the current Anime season. It looked very weak based on the early information coming out, but there’s a few I’ve been enjoying. Most feel like that could fall of the rails at any time so I don’t want to get my hopes up. I’ve been having some Blu-rays of shows from the previous season turn up. The anime companies are really starting to hang of Blu-ray mastering I must say. Putting their extra content on DVDs though does nothing for me. Nothing makes DVD look worse than watching it straight after finishing a Blu-ray.
It’s really been the time for new Operating Systems with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 all coming out in the last month or two. I’m using all of them in some form. Ubuntu 9.10 was a bit disappointing with as many backward steps as forward ones, but the other two were reasonably solid upgrades.
• Wednesday, September 02nd, 2009
I’ve really been feeling tired the last few days. The last month or so has been crazy busy and even thought it’s eased up now I’m still feeling really drained. Plans are looking a bit more relaxed for the next 2-3 weeks though so I think I’ll just take it easy as much as possible. Probably could do with a bit more sleep too. *looks at clock*
Been a bit preoccupied to fit in too many side activities although in my spare time I’ve been up to the usual shenanigans. Any gaming time has been spent playing BlazBlue on PS3 and Mana Khemia on PSP. I want to get back on to Persona 4, but that’s not a game casually when you have 15 minutes to spare. Anime-wise I’ve had a lot on the go although in it hasn’t required much time investment as I haven’t let myself fall behind. Umineko no Naku Koro ni, Bakemonogatari and Saki have been the favs, but even some of the seemingly B-grade shows such as Princess Lover and Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan have turned out much more entertaining than expected. I’m still importing discs directly from Japan for shows I like and it’s getting to the point where almost everything is getting a Blu-ray release. They’re all coming out region free so I’m happily grabbing them. The last disc of a few shows came out in August though and many from the next season don’t start until October so I’m going to enjoy a nice cheap September.
My Japanese language study has been going fairly well. I’m not making giant leaps or anything, but I’m pretty much constantly picking up new things and getting more proficient at the things I already knew. I’m am occasionally surprising myself too like how I recently found myself five minutes into an anime episode before I realised I didn’t have any subs turned on. Also been doing a little Manga translation on the side for practise. Incredibly slow going and there’s no way I’d put any deadlines on myself , but it’s all helping with the learning.
Installed the new MacOS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) on my laptop. I may talk about it more later, but on the whole it’s about efficiency and speed. Everything feels substantially quicker. Most of the changes are under the hood and there’s some cool new technologies hiding in there.
• Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
I’m kind of tired of just showing up here every once in a while and doing a hit-and-run post on whatever’s been happening so instead though I might get back to doing the occasional ramble about other things instead.
I haven’t really been using LastFM recently for various reasons. The major one being I hadn’t synchronised my iPod in about a month. While it still doesn’t seem completely clear if they actually handed out user data or not I’ve always had a bit of a dislike for their closed and inflexible architecture, and I don’t really like companies who want to be a single source for my data. It was with this thought in mind I stumbled across Libre.FM, an open source system aiming to provide much the same service. Being open source they claim you can just download it and put it on your own server if you want. This ability is mentioned often in blog posts, etc although in every case I’ve seen no one actually tried. Needless to say I tried to do that very thing.
After a lot of fiddling around I did get it mostly up and running, but came to the conclusion it’s just not ready for use like that quite yet. I downloaded the “stable” version, but actually had to fix a small number of code bugs to even get it to install successfully (SQL code referencing non-existent columns, etc). There’s also no documentation whatsoever for installing it that way. It’s more a case of just trying to use it, have it fail, and then hunt around in the Apache logs to find why. In doing this I found some rather interesting dependencies, bugs and some shonky code. I don’t want to be too hard on Libre.FM though because it’s a fairly new project (It looks like it really got underway in April 09) and has come a long way in a short period of time. Using the official server it functions fairly well. It’s not pretty or especially feature packed, but no doubt that will come in due time.
One side effect of playing with Libre.FM is that I found they have a tool capable of ripping the play history from a Last.FM account and dumping it into a simple file. The idea being that you can import that file to migrate your data across to Libre.FM. Even if you don’t do that though it’s a way to extract that data either for as a backup, running your own stats on it or just to do whatever you want with it. I’m still tempted to write my own web app for this at some point and this data would prove helpful, but another project is the last thing I need now.
• Thursday, June 11th, 2009
I think I’m finally starting to shake whatever it is that’s kept me sick for the last few weeks. I’m still coughing a bit, but on the whole have been feeling substantially better and my energy seems to be returning to more normal levels. One strange coincidence is that since I got sick the curries and other spicy food I’ve eaten have not really been hot enough for my tastes. For a few years now I’ve typically asked for “hot”, but lately I’m just not enjoying anything less than “extra hot”. There’s no pain, no sweating or any other negative effects. It just tastes right. I’ve found this to be the case from various sources including homemade food as well as restaurants and the like so I can’t just write it off as one food outlet skimping on the chili. I have no explanation for this whatsoever.
In the last few days I’ve made the jump to Telecom’s new XT Network which after switching my internet to Orcon a while back means I no longer have any dealings with Vodafone. It’s not that I like Telecom per-se, but I’ve had enough bad treatment and poor service (even total lack of service) from Vodafone over the years that I have no intention of giving them any of my money where it can be avoided. That makes Telecom the lesser evil so to speak as at least they . So far the new network seems quite impressive. Txt messages arrive in a timely fashion and I actually have full strength coverage at home. Voice calls are nice and clear. Not high expectations to meet perhaps, but it’s nice that they seem to have the basics working well. Porting my number over took some time (Yes, I’m now one of those evil people whose 021 prefix is not what it seems), but that’s to be expected really given how busy Telecom stores have been since XT went online. The cost for my usage is cheaper than with Vodafone too so it’s win-win.
On the downside I’m once again finding that my portable in-ear monitors (IEMs, aka earphones on steriods) don’t like winter. I’ve already had one pair die out of warranty due to the cables cracking in the cold, and now the older backup pair is heading the same way. I think this is the last winter they’ll survive. These are about 3-4 years old now so I’ve had a decent run out of them given most cheaper earphones break within a year. I’ve been doing running repairs with heatshrink tubing, etc to keep them going, but there’s a limit on what’s repairable. Supposedly the manufacturer of the pairs I own (Shure) has changed their cable shrouding compounds to something more robust now too, but I’m leaning towards going down a different path. I use my IEMs almost daily at work and home often for a few hours at a time so it’s not a hard thing for me to justify spending some cash on.
I’m actually looking at “customs”. In essence they take a mold of your ear and make a matching earpiece for an IEM that’s a perfect fit. Customs almost always sound better than universal fit IEMs according to those who have heard both. For years I’d been interested in Ultimate Ear’s UE-10 Pro and UE-11 Pro but that company’s founder, Jerry Harvey (he pretty much created the custom IEM industry), has now formed a new company JH Audio, and I’m leaning towards one of their models. Given the prices of these things though I won’t be buying any time soon. Hopefully the exchange rate will be more favourable by the time I have cash on hand.
