(no subject)

I let myself be talked into buying Shadow of the Colossus a couple of days ago, and I think this may have been a mistake. It was very expensive and I am not convinced that I am enjoying myself. It's damn hard -- only experienced gamers are going to get past the very first stage -- and very time-consuming. After an hour of play this morning I've got the current guy I'm fighting down to maybe two-thirds of his hit points.

The big timesink is that making one slip-up with the controls can result in losing several real-time minutes of progress. This fills me with hate. Seriously, I'm sometimes standing in front of my screen, loudly cursing out every character on it, because I mischorded the buttons in such a way that my guy fell off the damn colossus's back once again, forcing me to start the whole climb over from the beginning. I curse out the colossus, I curse out my guy, I curse out my guy's horse. It's pretty bad. I fear for the health of my one last working controller.

You know what would have been a vast improvement on the game? Removing the grip meter (which gives you a time limit for how long your guy can hang precariously, in a game that's all about hanging precariously). Seriously. Ico didn't need no grip meter, and the protagonist here is a youth in his prime, not a little boy... was it the horns? I don't know.

(no subject)

OK I killed the sumbitch. The source of my frustration was, I have deduced, external: when radiotelescope, who has gotten through about half the game, was giving me advice on how to beat this particular guy, his understanding of how to get a necessary prerequisite event to happen was a little off-kilter. (Or maybe he was giving me obscure advice on purpose, hmmgrumble.) The result was that I have been spending minutes running back and forth trying to trigger this event and getting no results... actually, even worse, getting occasional accidental results.

I finally figured out the correct trigger, and even though I fell off a couple more times I still sliced 'im up in short order.

So I no longer hate the game, at the moment. But I maintain that it's friggin' hard.

Go Maine

My former home just turned down $161,000 of federal education funds because they're tied to a requirement for abstinence-based sex ed.

A state official on NPR just explained that the decision comes because Maine's teen pregnancy rate has been dropping over the last 20 years, and is now one of the lowest in the nation (really? well, that's what she said); the state is concerned that the praise-jebus approach to sex ed would make it go up again. Hee hee hee I love it.