A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Went to Micro Center to look for stuff, didn't find any. But I did pick up Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, which is the third and newest game in the series. Besides the "it was there" factor, I skipped right to this one because of the online play feature.

( Some features made me think of Volity (which is half the point of me playing these games). )

Anyway, my first experience with R&C online didn't go too well. When I hit "quick play", I was dropped into a game setup screen with one other player, named "Ghost!!!!". When I left and re-selected "quick play", there I was again. Well, OK; I joined and waited. I got to see some people come and go, but didn't actually get to start playing; my ghostly friend never got around to hitting the start button.

However, I did have my USB headset plugged in, so I got to eavesdrop on my fellow players. And again, I am reminded that the video-gaming world is larger than me and my friends: every voice I heard was that of a little kid. I mean, young enough that I can't say if they were boys or girls. Kids playing video games? What next! Yeah, I know. Here is a partial transcript:

kid2: Ghost?
kid1: What?
kid2: Gonna start?
kid1: ...
kid2: [leaves]
jmac's deep booming voice: Uhhhn, are we waiting for more players?
kid1: ...
kid3: [enters]
kid3: Hi Ghost!
kid1: Hello.
kid3: Wanna buy a helmet?
kid1: How much.
kid3: It's worth 40K.
kid1: Yeah how much.
kid3: Eh, since you're [something] I'll give it to you for 35K.
kid1: That's still a rip-off!
kid3 and kid1: [Game-specific-lingo-heavy jibber-jabber about the value of this helmet]
jmac: [sets status to "unready", then hits the "exit" button]
one of the kids [from behind the "are you sure you want to leave?" screen]: I like waffles! Waffles are great.

Something about the timing of that send-off just made me bust a gut.

In the unlikely event that someone reading this plays that game, I am online as "Zendonut". Say hi.

Beat Ratchet & Clank. What a great game! I think it may have unseated Jak & Daxter as my favorite PS2 platformer. While I still love J&D, and would highly recommend either game for those who enjoy exploration-centric platformers, the cartoon-SF setting of R&C really appeals to me. It has lovingly crazy interpretations of everything from terraforming (and planet-busting) to nanotech, all as in-game elements.

For those who care: I never got the RYNO or any of the gold weapons. The end boss seems really tough at first, but I was able to beat him with conventional weapons by ( writing my congressman ). I've started to collect gold weapons and skill points in the post-game, but I'll probably end up loaning the disc to jhango before I hit 100%.

Also of note is this FAQ, both for being a nice FAQ and for its section on exploiting some spots in the game where you can rack up as much money as you want, given time. While I haven't tried any of these, I still note how they're capped with instructions (under the heading "COMPLICATED MONEY TECHNIQUE") for building a physical device that will hammer the necessary buttons for you while you go take a nap or catch a movie. While a cheat of sorts, it seems to be one that's completely in the spirit of the game: a crazy-looking Gadgetron upgrade for your controller.

I need one more person for another sub-feature of the pilot episode. It will involve playing the old arcade game "Rampart" (as emulated on a PS2 in my house). You don't have to know anything about the game, just be willing to play it against a couple other people and be recorded for TV while doing so.

I don't have a date set, but it's a technically easy shoot and will involve only three people, so we'll just pick an agreeable time once I know who my talent is.

Gimme a yelly-dell if you're interested.

Rr... I was in a good mood and really wanted to play Hot Shots Golf again, so I did, for the first time in months... and came within a hair's breath of smashing my last unsmashed controller.

I have to learn to accept that the whole genre of high-stakes sports & driving games is closed to me for the foreseeable future. Probably not until a non-neocon is POTUS. I wish I was joking.

I sunk the better part of the last two days into Baldur's Gate. Yesterday I found myself wrapped up enough in it that, while riding on the T, I continued to feel real existential dread over my decision to accept a ranger and mage into my party over a probably stronger cleric. (The game limits your party size to six characters, so when you make new friends who wish to join you, you must kick people out. The dialogue strongly implies that the game will give you opportunities to reunite with these ousted characters later on, though.) Thankfully, I'm at a good break point right now, having completed the first dungeon (along with a goodly number of side-quests), and confident in knowing where I'm supposed to go next, thus not leaving me slavering for More Carnage. Watch as I Take Out The CD and Put It Away For Now.

Meanwhile, in the world outside of my head, things move along. Matt Sargent, arguably the most powerful voice in the world of Perl & XML, has responded the book draft, um, a little too late for our tastes, but there you go. We (which is to say I, assuming Erik is still feeling overburdened) now have today to decide whether it merits changes drastic enough to pull the book from production. I have not read it yet. I do this thing now.

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First I say that last night was cool. Went to the MFA to see Outstandingly Entertaining Short Films, in a party led by cthulhia and populated by a sizable subset of the usual cthonic posse. I was nervous about seeing "Bullet in the Brain", because I had heard the original short story read on the radio show "Selected Shorts", and as the title suggests it involves, um, massive neurological trauma, which is a squicking point for me. I ended up enjoying the very nice film, of course, though I question the filmmaker's decision to flesh out the main character a little more with an introduction that makes him seem more contemptible. Was it meant to cushion the blow? Shrug.

There are no photographs of me wearing the 5,000 admission collar clips that cthulhia pinned on me as we wandered the museum, picking them up off the floor as we admired ahht. Sorry. magid thought that it looked like an urban interpretation of a shark's teeth necklace.

I bought Baldur's Gate yesterday for about $25 at MCenter. The knowledge that BG2 was OS X native lured me into the store, but that game was also twice as expensive. BG runs OK under classic mode. My main complaint is that there's no obvious way, perhaps no way at all, to background the game; to get to anything else on your machine, you must save and quit. Enh. This game has a 1998 copyright date on it; this was well into the days when many, perhaps most computer users expected to have one window on their desktop dedicated to continual information flow from the Internet. Then again, this was back when very few people had broadband access at home -- I didn't -- so the idea of isolating one's machine from the Net for awhile wasn't completely alien. But now, the game asks me to forget about my incoming email while I'm playing. Foo... if I wanted to do that, I'd go play a human-enabled RPG.

Also, having a broken CD drive latch makes a painful experience out of playing games that rely on disk swappage. Sigh. I'll fix it when next I get money, maybe.

I distinctly remember reading a magazine review of a computer game some dozen or more years ago which opened with the reviewer sighing about the 15 floppies that poured forth from the box upon opening, and his prediction that games would have to start moving toe CD-ROM as a standard format pretty soon. Well, that happened, of course, and it's been the norm for a long time -- no longer do you see boxes with 'Super CD-ROM Graphics!!!' splashed across them. So then: where are the DVD games, eh eh eh?

Anyway: I am so far interested in how the game's story seems to be evidence of a feedback loop from Japanese CRPGs, which of course are based around the game mechanics of earlier Western CRPGs. But compared to, say, "Pools of Radiance", this game plays a lot like a "Final Fantasy"-type game. You start off with a single, young protagonist (though you get to make any flavor of AD&D2E PC for this, where a J-CRPG would just hand you one) under the tutelage of an elderly master, when Disaster Strikes, and you must Flee the Village where you have spent All your Life, and then the game's master baddie shows up to stomp the both of you. (Dollars to donuts says that the master baddie actually isn't the endboss, who is a much greater evil than the master baddie is working for.) You flee, and quickly make Quirky Companions, and so on. This is like every pre-1990 Jackie Chan movie I have ever seen.

Right now I'm at a part where a bad guy is killing me repeatedly. Maybe I should have not picked a 4-HP gnome illusionist as my hero? No matter; the frequent death reminds me of the more important things I've been lining up for myself. Let's see what else I can do today.