Wot a Wizace!

I really really really like this video.

Reyn Ouwehand has been in the business of making music for videogames for years, and has released several albums of both his own compositions and that of others. Here, he plays the theme tune from Wizball, which was composed by Martin Galway. The tune was pretty good for the humble C64, but here it sounds amazing:

Some cool and relevant links:
● Reyn's Homepage (this page scrolls horizontally b.t.w.)
● Wikipedia entry on Martin Galway
● C64Audio.com
● C64-Wiki entry on the original Wizball game
● Retrospec remake of Wizball (a free downloadable game for Windows and Mac)

So Long, November

And so, another month runs away from us all. Only 25 days to Christmas, and 31 before the year leaves us for good. It really does feel like time moves so much faster now!

So, here's a quick-ish recap of what I got up to in the last month:

---

I slowly got the hang of my new job. The manager said that I was the fastest person they'd ever seen at adapting to the registers, which made them happy (they are essentially the same register system that they had at the last place). However, I only wish I could have translated that same success to the rest of the tasklist; it's been so damn difficult trying to work out which knowledge I need to keep, and which skills I'm better off forgetting. The good news is that I have been improving and getting more stuff done over the month, which makes me happy.

---

I went and visited my friend in Warragul twice - the first time I had to leave early so I could cover someone's "sickie" at short notice. (That in itself was kinda weird, since I was still in the middle of training at that stage and felt totally out of my depth, but it was only a short shift and I managed fine.)
...The second visit to my friends was much better. We spent most of the day fooling around like friends do; we had a go at making soft drinks with a Soda Stream system, which I'd never seen in action and was very curious (long story short - it's just fizzed up water with sugary syrup added to it).
Then we tried to figure out what kind of animal was making these small holes in the backyard:

We assumed that they were yabbies (small freshwater crayfish-type animals) except that these holes were too far away from a watersource for that to make sense; didn't stop my friend from trying to coax one out by ramming a big stick into the hole.

Needless to say, it didn't really work. Maybe they were yabbies on holiday, or something. Or maybe there are bits of crustacean mashed two-foot deep into the ground... who can tell?

---

I was supposed to go up and visit my Dad in Queensland near the end of the month, but had to defer it until January thanks to the new job - which I was happy with. I figured I'd have to put it off even before I'd had the job interview! (I hated putting my Dad out like that, but he didn't seem to mind so much; so long as I still go up and visit him... eventually.)

---

I'm still having some issues adjusting to the new hours I'm keeping. I'm meant to be working from 11pm to 7am, four days a week. That basically means I sleep through the better part of the day - unless something wakes me up, like the bloody phone ringing >:{ - so when my "weekend" comes up, I have the option of either keeping my nighttime schedule, or trying to break the cycle and get at least something out of the natural daytime. So far, I've been keeping the latter, mostly to fulfill the obligations I've been making to others, but also because it's damn annoying only doing stuff at night!
Also, I've been noticing a residual tiredness, which has been affecting my sense of judgement slightly.

---

I also caught up with my friends from the days of the mural project. It had been several months since we'd last gathered, and I wasn't sure how much longer I would be available now that I had a job again - as it turned out, no major problem on my part, but have you ever tried to synchronise the schedules of more than three people?
Anyway, I'd been meaning to ask the art director of the project if I could buy one of her works of art - specifically one of her ink-brush pictures, of which she'd done an entire series a few years ago - and so, after perusing her collection, she surprised me by giving me this:

I naturally went straight to the picture framing place and had it professionally mounted. It's now on the wall above my computer desk, and I'm looking at it right now!

---

I went to the Gem, Bottle and Collectibles Expo last week. It's basically a big room full of people showing off their wares, which happen to be items of a sought-after nature (gemstones, collectible books, vintage bottles, stamps, swapcards, etc.) and for some reason I felt it necessary to spend quite a bit of money in there. I came out with some old Coca-Cola glass bottles, of the kind I barely even remember (this is going back about thirty years, before soft drinks started being sold in plastic bottles); my uncle collects Coca-Cola stuff, so he will be very pleased when he gets those.
The rest of the stuff I got was basically ROCKS, but at least they were attractive rocks. If I'd been interested at the time, I could have asked what some of them were, but that takes away from the challenge of discovery, of course! What's the value of saying "Here's a nice piece of chalcopyrite" without having the research to back it up, anyway?

---

And... now it's December, and I turned 32 this year. When did this happen?!? insert sound of premature mid-life crisis
But seriously, though... this year my birthday was good.
I went out for lunch with my family, and then I helped my Ma out with her Christmas shopping, which basically involved following her around and acting as a sounding board for gift ideas - "Do you think your sister would like these pearl earrings? How about we get her a hot tub?" and so on and no, those were not actual ideas.
It was rather weird, though. While we were out and about, we kept running into people who remembered me from my previous job, and they were so friendly and asked me how I was doing [fine, thanks] and if I'd scored a new job yet [yes, actually] and about how those dreadful [people from country I won't name] weren't running the old shops very well, and so on...
And my Ma thought it was so funny that it kept happening wherever we went, it became a kind of running joke, to the point where people were just saying "Oh, hello Ben!" to me on the street!
Who knows, maybe it was some Birthday Mojo thing... Anyway, once we'd got back off the street and away from my audience, we cleaned up and went out for dinner at a bistro-type place, which was also nice. And then, we went home and had cake! And then tried our hands at Beatles RockBand! (once we figured out how to make it work in two-player, that is)
And then... well, I came online and posted about it all here! And so... goodnight!

So Much For The Weekend

NB. I changed the blog colour scheme again, in case people found the bright letters on dark a bit too hard to read. Is this current setup any better? Please let me know!

Well, what a weird week it's been. Actually, I refer to the past seven days, not the Sunday-to-Saturday.
I started off having three days off in a row, and by the end of it, I only had ONE. =(

I worked Saturday morning, and after only getting about two hours of sleep and working for about nine hours, I was pretty much ready for bed - unfortunately, Saturday night was also the night we had set aside for our second Games Night for the year.
Setting up the LAN was a little more complicated than last time, since we now had four PCs to hook up. One of the guests forgot to bring his network cable, which would have left him a spectator to the proceedings; luckily, we had one to spare, so he wasn't left on the sidelines.

Note to self: look for other games suitable for multi-player than Quake III. Shooting up my friends with heavy artillery is not something that makes me comfortable, even if they are disguised as pop-culture icons and running around a giant house!

I managed to stay up until 5am Sunday morning, when I suddenly remembered that I was incredibly effing tired. I shuffled off to bed and slept for about twelve hours. It is remarkably poor form to sleep through the productive hours of a day, even if it is the weekend. "Never mind," I thought, "I still have Monday and Tuesday free."

Now hang on, it gets better.

I got a phonecall at about 12pm Monday, asking me if so-and-so had got in touch with me about working that afternoon... did they happen to call? No? Would I be able to do it? Especially since absolutely no-one else can do it without somehow violating the law of physics (you know, the one that prevents an object from being in two places at once)? You will? Cool! Be here by 3.30!

"Never mind," I thought, "I still have Tuesday free."

I spent most of Monday night playing Ico, but I started getting sleepy around 4am. It was a reasonably warm night, so I tried to sleep with the fan going on beside me. Sadly, the only air conditioner in this house is in the living room, so I have to make do.
At around 4.30, the fan suddenly turned off. I tried to switch on the light to see what had happened - and when that didn't come on either, I realised that we'd had a blackout! (cue scrabbling around my room with my mobile phone, trying to find a reliable torch)

As it turned out, the power failure only lasted an hour, but it blacked out half the town; a couple of other nearby cities also lost partial power. I spoke to someone about it the next day, who said that it was strange driving through brightly-lit streets, only to enter darkness one street over.

Unfortunately, one of the places affected by the power loss was the shop where I work, and clearly the register did not handle the power failure very well.
The next day, when my co-worker came in to set everything up for the morning, he discovered that the register was completely non-cooperative. Apparently, the register's circuits must have either received a shock or not liked the forced shutdown, since nothing he did could coax life back into the thing. After several calls to the tech support, and in between attempts to actually serve people fuel and whatnot, he and the head office staff managed to scrabble together a workable system; basically, everything had to be done manually, just like in the old days before computers were thrown into the mix.

The problem with doing things manually is that they take a lot longer, and it is far easier to make a mistake. Unfortunately, customers have become used to receiving prompt and efficient service, and as such are no longer content to stand around and wait for paperwork to get filled out. So, in order to not inconvenience the customers too much, it would be necessary to have all the staff on site as possible, to make sure evrything went smoothly.

You know where I'm going with this. Phonecall at 9am: "Ben, you're not going to believe this... can you please come in?"

Of course, I couldn't leave people in the lurch; it would have been far worse NOT to go in. It's just annoying that, of the supposed "three-day weekend" that I had lined up, the only actual day I had free I practically slept through (though I did get to play a bunch of cool games with friends, so it wasn't a total washout).

Here's hoping next week works out a little better!

Games Night

As I write this, my friend Andrew is playing with my sister's PS2... We have tidied up the house after an inspection, and we used the opportunity to have company over, so naturally we made it a bit of a games night.
We had a few rounds of Buzz!, which was one of the gifts Santa brought my sister last month. The game is itself loaded with innuendo, but it makes for a much more surreal game if you give your character a suggestive name, and have the game announce "NIPPLES is the Winner!"
Then, we had a play at SingStar for my sister's benefit, because she hardly gets the chance to bring out the mikes; sadly, I'm the only other one game enough to play along with her, and my singing is not the best.

We also tried to get a LAN thing going, but it took a few hours before all the bugs got sorted out. There were more than a few swear words flying back and forth before the system was set up properly, but in the end it all worked out, and a few rounds of Quake 3 were had.

I managed to finish M&L: Bowser's Inside Story yesterday, and now my sister is having a go at it after bugging me for the past week. Now, I begin the journey into LoZ: Spirit Tracks, which is a very strange game indeed. Most of the Zelda series have been based in a "middle ages" environment, but this one features, of all things, a train as the central plot device. What next, a motorcycle?

I go to the dentist on Monday, and hopefully go to visit my friend on Tuesday (assuming my car is up to the task); and then I'm back at work for another few days. Oh, rapture. Well, guess I'd better make the most of my free time!

I Should Be In Bed By Now

...but for some reason I'm not sleepy. Damn wacked-up sleeping pattern.

Right now I'm struggling to get Windows Media Player to rip some CDs so I can listen to them via my new MP3 player.
It works perfectly fine for CDs printed en-masse, which would therefore have an entry in the media player's on-line database; this saves me time when it comes to labelling each track, because the software just looks up the CD on the Internet and fills out the necessary details.
It's just that not all of my collection are so easily found. Some of them are magazine cover discs, which usually contain an odd assortment of tracks by various artists. Since they are usually a limited edition, there isn't anything for WMP to find about them online - so what it normally does is find the best match possible (which is frequently totally WRONG).

What's worse is that the version of WMP I have won't actually let you correct the false tracklist unless you are connected to the Internet! WTF? If it can't find the correct listing, why the hell do I need to go through that menu anyway just to fix the problem? Silly design, I don't know... I just hope they managed to fix that problem in the next version.

...I've also been accumulating a bunch of new DS titles, partly because I scored some $$$ over the last month, and also because a lot of them were really cheap:

• Impossible Mission - I remember playing this game on the Commodore 64. I had absolutely no success in completing the game, mostly due to being crap at it the first time (not having access to the manual didn't help). I managed to complete the game this time around, thanks to the far better interface that the DS offers - the only complaint was the apparent bug that prevented me from getting extra powerups in the puzzle-screen room. :(
  
• Rubik's Puzzle World - this is a puzzle title based on the eponymous brainteaser from the 1980s. It features the actual Rubik's Cube puzzle (with the original 3x3x3 cube, but also a 2x2x2 and a 4x4x4 puzzle to solve) and a bunch of other cube-related puzzles and games.
• Arkanoid DS - this is an updated version of another game I played on the C64. And yes, I was pretty bad at the C64 version too, but Arkanoid was so damned hard... This version uses the touch screen instead of a paddle/joystick, which makes it much easier to complete. A review I read complained about the "dead region" in the gap between the screens, where the ball is invisible, but I didn't have a problem with this since there usually aren't any obstacles in that space for the ball to bounce off, so...
• Puzzle Bobble Galaxy - oh, dear, I really am into the retro-themed games, aren't I? I had to take a break from this game after a while, because when I closed my eyes I kept seeing bubbles and patterns from the game scattering across my vision... Seriously, it's a very weird experience, and it's usually a sign that I've been playing a game for far too long. (And it seems to be related to the puzzle-type games; apparently Tetris is good for producing this effect.) Anyway, it's a really fun game.
  
• Super Monkey Ball: Touch & Roll - having never played a Super Monkey Ball game before, this was an interesting introduction to the theme. I totally suck at controlling the spheres through the levels (and some of those bananas are in really difficult places), but I guess it takes practice and a delicate hand.
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story - =D VERY HAPPY with this game! I was pleasantly surprised by the first M&L role-playing game for the Game Boy Advance - that, and Golden Sun: the Lost Age were both excellent titles to start my collection. However, the follow-up M&L: Partners in Time was rather lacking in the side-quests and secrets that distinguished the first title, and it made the game seem far too linear for most RPG fans. I am pleased to report that the third title is a stunning return to form, with recognition of what made SuperStar Saga such fun; plus new features (you get to play as both the Mario Bros. and as Bowser Koopa! Who gets to turn into a GIANT)!
• Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks - is one I don't actually own yet, but I still have some $ to spend yet, so...
  

Looking at the above list, and at all my games in fact, shows me that I have a very narrow field of interest, as far as my taste in games is concerned. Maybe I can chalk it up to my advanced years, but most if not all of the games I own are retreads of older titles. I wish I could say that it was trust in a brand name, but sadly Sonic the Hedgehog has shown otherwise. and I shall be looking at this Project Needlemouse thing very closely over the next year
Perhaps I'm just concerned that the newer titles won't be as good as the older ones? Am I a games elitist? An e-snob, stuck in an historical cul-de-sac of gaming genres? Or... is it just because the only alternatives available in the local stores are titles like My Little Pony, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and 101 Game Compendium? ;)

At any rate, stay cool folks, and keep gaming!

Work? Don't Talk To Me About Work...

Ahhhh.... Work is crazy, as per usual.
We still haven't upgraded our system yet at my usual haunt, but we've had a few problems of our own over the past week. Unfortunately, I don't feel like talking about them right now. Let's just say: someone quit over the weekend; half the staff are too ill to come in; and it will all be better soon - I hope!

I received my $900 Stimulus Payment last week, so I figured I should spend some of it.
I went and bought three new games for the collection:

• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS)
  
• Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) - which is awesome! I spent three hours playing it yesterday, and though the new control system takes some adjustment, it is mega fun!
• Super Paper Mario (Wii)
  

I am trying to think of other ideas for using this money productively. I really don't fancy having nothing to show for this but a handful of games and toys and other rubbish!

Oh, and I forgot to mention earlier that I now also have Wario: Master of Disguise (DS), which is typical Wario treasure-grabbing fare. Lotsa fun!

Did the Earth move for you too?

Okay, stuff has happened since the last post.
Well, that's a bit bloody obvious, isn't it? It's not as if stuff stops happening when no-one bothers to update their blog!

• Krissy has spent the past fortnight attending classes at Tafe, and freaking out about the work she has to do. It seems that there is a tutor there whose method involves throwing the students into the deep end, ie. giving them instructions on what they need to do, and then basically telling them to do it without explicitly telling them how. Which I think is reasonable, but it can be disorienting for new students, especially those who have come into art with all the pre-conceived ideas on "What Art Is Supposed To Be". His aim is to get the students to learn these methods through exploration, rather than through rote learning, but it can be very stressful and confusing for the novice. Oh, and to those of you who have already been through GippsTafe's Art Department, you all should know exactly who I am {p.b.} talking about. :D
  
• We had an earth tremor here last Friday. At about 9pm, we experienced about ten seconds of the earth wobbling about us. It was a reasonably big tremor, too. The epicentre was in the Korumburra/Warragul area, but it was felt across most of the state, including Melbourne. It was all perfectly normal, and nothing got seriously damaged, but a lot of people were worried. It freaked the hell out of my sister; she was saying, "God, my chair moved across the room!!!" Yes, because that's never happened during an earthquake before.
• Also, Krys found two big spiders in her son's bedroom last week, though not at the same time. One of them was a huntsman (which is big and icky but not dangerous), the other a largish white-tail (which may or may not be dangerous, as I mentioned here). Both of these spiders are frequently found inside houses, especially when the weather changes from warm to cool, so we're trying to keep our windows closed as much as possible now!
  
• There's also a tropical cyclone threatening the Queensland coastline, not far from where my Dad and other family members live. Cyclone Hamish is presently heading south-east, away from where they are, and it seems to be weakening now, but there are still a lot of communities worring about this, and preparing to bunker down. I haven't called up my Dad yet, but I'll do that tonight, if I'm able to.
• Krys' man Andrew scored the part of Gaston in the local production of Beauty and the Beast - awesomeness! He's been practicing his singing in preparation like a good actor should. Also, they've been rehearsing for the other play that they're both in - more details as they come. I'll actually be able to post pictures of them this time, since I only had Dinkycam with me for the last one, may it rest in peace.
  
• It's been the Labour Day long weekend, which means two things: one, work at the service station/s has been really frickin' busy (doesn't help that we're short-staffed again) and two, we had a problem with the EFTPOS facility. Okay, get this, when I went in to work on Saturday, I discovered that we had a *new* temporary EFT console/pinpad thingy, which wasn't integrated with the register like the regular one was (and which, hopefully, will be fixed soon). Luckily, it didn't require a major in electronics to figure out how it worked - it just required a few extra steps, and I was able to cope with the day's trade.
  But, when I opened the shop the next day, I discovered that the *new* EFT console wasn't working, because something had tripped off the fuse on that particular circuit. Long story short, the AC adaptor some black box thingy that the power supply goes through had burnt out during the night, and I mean that literally - it had scorch marks on it. So... we spent the next two days of the long weekend filling out dozens of manual paper vouchers. At least the shop didn't burn down.
  
• Oh, and Krys wants me to mention this - A few nights ago, I spent two hours gagging on a piece of tuna. All that happened was that I ate some canned tuna, and it didn't go down well. I don't know, I guess it got stuck on the way down, though I wasn't choking or suffocating. This seems to happen sometimes when I eat something starchy, like bread or rice, and usually if I have a drink of water it goes away - but this time it seems the water didn't help.
  Anyway, I must have sounded really bad from the bathroom, because my sister could hear me from her room, and she asked me if I was okay. I said yeah, I just had something to bring up. She spent the next hour or so freaking out about me, thinking I'd got food poisoning or something, wondering if I needed to go to hospital, and then she promptly fell asleep! Sympathy fail?
  So, I spent an hour in the bathroom, sipping water and gagging into the sink - and then I spent the next hour in my room with a bucket, because standing in the bathroom was boring and I wanted to finish playing Twilight Princess.

My god, that sounds really sad. "I threw up tuna while playing Zelda." I have to get a hobby or something, I don't think the blogosphere was designed for such lame-ass postings.

Well, so much for my update. How was your week?

Paralooping

I bought a couple of new games last week. Yeah, I know, "credit crunch" and all that, but I have been working well the past few months, so I figured I'd be allowed to spend a little more than I used to...

Anyway, I found a copy of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, which is the sequel to Aria of Sorrow that I already own. Not that it would have mattered if I hadn't, because video game sequels aren't the same as movie sequels; keeping track of the plot lines isn't mandatory, unless it's a hard-core RPG like Final Fantasy. (As a matter of fact, I played Golden Sun: The Lost Age before the first game, and I finished Sonic 2 way before I even got to play the first Sonic.)

This was the first game in the series released for the DS, and it shows, because they've made sure to use the "Touch-screen ability" in a slightly odd way. In order to properly defeat any of the mid-bosses, you need to quickly trace out a pattern on the screen to break the "seal" on the enemy. This is done with the stylus or the fingertip, but since the rest of the game is played with the traditional button arrangement, and the boss scenes are kind of fast, using this system is unwieldy. It smacks of "Hey, let's do this because we CAN!", when um, sorta, no, they shouldn't.
Nonetheless, the game is still excellent. It was also under $30 which is a good price for a DS title, even one from a couple of years ago. Now all I have to do is wait for Order of Ecclesia to come out, and that will be very soon!

The other game I scored was NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, one I'd been looking for since we acquired the Wii.
The original game of NiGHTS into Dreams was released for the Sega Saturn about ten years ago, and it became one of the few "must-have" titles for the under-rated console. I've never had the opportunity to play it, though I did get to play the Christmas edition; Ta Andrew!

Yuji Naka was part of Sonic Team, developer of the excellent Sonic the Hedgehog games duh! for the Mega Drive. He created the character NiGHTS so that the player could experience the ability of flight, allowing the character to twirl and glide around beautiful surrealistic landscapes. Though the lead character never achieved the recognition of his blue-spiked counterpart, he developed a strong fan base, and ever since then gamers have hoped for an official sequel to the seminal game.

Naka was at first reluctant to return to the game, explaining that he wanted the original experience to stand on its own terms, as a work of art. However, clearly he has relented, because I now own the excellent sequel.
It is beautiful - and tricky. I am using the Wiimote-with-nunchuk configuration, as the controls for the character are quite delicate. I'm finding it a little hard to steer NiGHTS in the correct direction at times, especially when I have to try and aim for a small target. Incidentally: the standard analogue controller for the Saturn was designed specifically for the original NiGHTS. But playing the main levels is fun, and I'm enjoying finding out the best way to make links and collect the blue chips.

My housemates had a look-in of the game while I was playing it the other day, and my nephew finds the game enthralling. He sat there quietly watching as NiGHTS paralooped and twirled across the screen. I thought, "This is better than those SpongeBob DVDs!"
The others gave it a positive grade, though my sister said that the cutscenes were rather overdone - Let's spoonfeed our players, shall we? Considering that the game is supposed to appeal to a wide audience (including younger children) , that is understandable - though why do I have to play through them every time I start the game from scratch, and I can't skip through them, ARGH?!? - oops, not the time and place for it...

Then my sister said that it was "obviously designed to appeal to young girls" - Whaa?
Okay, so I was playing as Helen at the time - I'd already played through the first level with Will the day before, you see...
Despite its appearace, the game is NOT easy. In fact it's quite tricky to get a good score in the game, and I said as much. Then I said that it wasn't the kind of game she would be into, because "you're more into the sandbox-type of game, anyway".
Eep. We launched into a big debate about the games we're into after that. Basically the pros and cons of the Sims, and Animal Crossing, etc. etc. etc.

I feel the need to say this on her and my behalf.
My sister is not necessarily into the "Sandbox" type, which implies the "free-form" game that doesn't have any specific goals. Rather, her preference is the "Non-Linear" game, that doesn't expect you to achieve a Gold Medal, but rather a free-form multi-outcome experience. This explains why she's also into the Pokemon series, and also certain RPGs like Golden Sun and Legend of Zelda (though GameFAQs comes in very handy with those)!

Whereas my favourites are:

• Puzzle games, like Tetris or Columns (or arguably Pacman)
• Puzzly Adventure games, such as the Myst series
• Role Playing Games, like Legend of Zelda or Golden Sun (something we have in common!)
• Platform games - Sonic and Mario Bros. fall squarely into this camp, of course!

There are of course others, like WarioWare which don't fit into those categories, but are muchly enjoyable. The point is, I don't expect everyone to take the same things from their gaming experiences. Where one person will get intensely frustrated at an obstacle, another will quickly see an alternate route; where one person finds a bunch of cool stuff to collect and trade, another will wonder what the hell they are supposed to be doing with this boring crap. It's all relative.

PS. Upon reflection, I realise that NiGHTS is, um, kinda gay. but hey, at least it's not Cho Aniki.

Stuff I'm Doing Right Now

Playing:

Castlevania - Portrait of Ruin (DS)

Reading:
The Lucy Family Alphabet, By Judith Lucy

Listening:
Past Masters, Vol. I and II - The Beatles

Watching:
...nothing at the moment - I don't really watch TV and movies as much as I used to

Wearing:
The T-shirts Ma made me for Christmas...

New Years' Eve, 2008

Another post-event post...

A New Year has begun... and unfortunately, I had to work for NYE (again!), but it was only for about five hours, and it was pretty dead at work after everyone had got what they needed.

We had a good time for NYE this/last year.
We had some friends over for a few Wii-ing contests in the living room, and played a few rounds of SingStar on a friend's PS2. I think my sister really wants one of those, now that she realises how much fun the game is!

But, after the clock ticked over to midnight, we went outside to see if there were any fireworks happening. I think someone might have let off a flare... but that was it.

It was at this point, when everyone was standing around on the front lawn in the dark waiting for stuff to explode, that I remembered I had some glow stick party favours reserved for this occasion...
They were a bunch of glow-bracelets, which eventually got turned into mini-frisbees, and we flung them at each other on the front lawn! I took some photos, but they were all dark and minimalist... so I turned them all into a composite image. This is it:

I think this picture best sums up the bedlam that took place out the front of out house!
We played for about half an hour on the front lawn, then came back inside all sweaty and grotty from running around the garden. Hey, it was better than watching that stupid Village People movie on Channel Nine. O_o;
We then continued the video-gaming, along with consumption of a ludicrous amount of food and confectionery (I'd brought some old Xmas stock that was RTC at work). And then, eventually, to bed, though I was one of the last standing (mostly because I didn't have to work the next day)!

As for the glow sticks, they all wound up on the shrubbery just outside our front door (those that didn't end up on the roof or in the garden). Most of them were still there for about a week afterwards, and some of them still had a bit of "glow" left in them!

I hope everyone has a good New Year!

The Making of Mii

Okay, we've had the Wii for about a week now, and I've discovered something interesting: Making realistic representations of your friends and family from memory is a LOT harder than I expected.

One of the features of the Wii is the ability to create miniature in-game versions of yourself and your friends, which are called Miis. These work a lot like the avatars used in chatrooms and web forums, such that you have a graphical representation of yourself instead of just a bunch of anonymous text.

Because the Miis are used extensively in some of the games, it is useful to create not just one for yourself, but as many recognisable Miis as you can think of. I've gone through the list of just about everyone I know, starting with all the people who are likely to come and visit us to play the Wii.

But, there is a problem. The interface for creating Miis has many different customisations for face shape, hairstyle, eye type and etc. but it never seems to have exactly the one you want. Getting a recognisable hair style is hard enough (would it have killed them to include a curly hair setting?) but when you get to subtle details like how the eyes are set on their face, or the actual eye colour... Gah!
The worst part is having your subject take a look at your handiwork... and go, "Oh come on! I look nothing like that!!!"

Anyway, I found a Flash program that lets you design a Mii on-line - though you can't actually use your created Mii with your Wii games. It's basically a demo version of the real thing. And I've used it to create an approximation of my actual Mii. The real one looks very much the same, except the eyebrows are fuzzier and my eyes are not solid black. I think that black eyed look is really ugly.

I have also acquired a copy of WarioWare: Smooth Moves, and have played through most of the challenges. The only two bad points of the game are:
a) the non-intuitiveness of the mini-games. "I have to do WHAT?"
b) the random sensitivity of the Wiimote. "I'm waving the thing at the screen, what more do you need?!? OH NO! Now I've LOST!"
Now I know why so many Wiimotes get damaged... >gleep<

Being Thirty (Part Three)

I did mention that I had one more birthday celebration coming up, didn't I?

My friend-ish party was originally scheduled for last Friday, but I had to reschedule because a) I hadn't time to organise anything, and b) I was really too tired to do it after having worked several early shifts that week. I was knackered...

So, I postponed it until the 12th. Which meant I had ample time to tidy the house and prepare the food. Yeah, right. Have I ever been well organised?
Turns out, I have. I even managed to clean up the kitchen and living room, and prepare some foodstuffs including a lovely little plate of crudités. ie. those little sticks of carrots and celery and cheesy lumps and whatnot.

I only invited a handful of people over for the gathering - basically, the people I used to live with, a couple of friends from high school and one from the mural painting project. I told everyone to show up at around 5pm. Yeah, right.
I had to wait until 5.30 before I could even leave the house to collect one of my friends (who has no personal transport and lives two towns away), and en route the weather decided to break, and dumped a whole bunch o' rain on me - and it was this time that the windscreen wiper decided to stop working properly!
I had to pull over and fix the wipers three times between departure and returning home. GRRR!!! I made sure I fixed this problem before I returned my guest to his place!

But, once I'd come back with friend in tow, I learned two important facts:
1) one of my other friends had shown up in the meantime;
2) we now had a Nintendo Wii! (bought from a friend of a friend for $350!)

So, we ordered pizza, ate snacks, drank fizzy stuff, played a few rounds of Mario Kart: Double Dash for the hell of it, and then tried out some of the WiiSports. Bowling was a hit, as were Golf and a very dangerous game of Baseball (Slink, you really don't have to swing the Wiimote that hard).
While we were playing, two more of my friends showed up a little late, but they stuck around much longer than they expected 'cause we were having so much fun. They had to bring their two kids along as well, but they were both young and very easy to look after. One of them stayed asleep pretty much most of the time anyway - how hard is it to look after a sleeping bub?

And Ma even came over for some birthday cake - another sponge, but this one had flakey chocolate frosting... mmm! Cakey cake, but I'm glad I waited a week before I had another one, because three cakes in one week is seriously pushing your luck, birthday or not.

The only person who couldn't make it (caught that damn flu that's going around) sent me a birthday card with $30 worth of scratch lottery tickets inside. I won $16, which is slightly more than a 50% return (and kinda made me wish they had just given me the cash instead! :D )

We all had a lovely time.
I got to catch up with everybody I'd missed at the other parties, and we all had lots of food and fun, well into the night. Luckily I don't have to do an early shift on Saturday!

And, now that it's all over:

To all of my friends and family who helped
make my 30th Birthday so much damn fun,
I give you all my love and extra special thanks!
And to those who missed out on the action, I offer you...

Enjoy!
And may I hope to see you all at my 31st,
whenever I get around to celebrating it...

Pikmin!

I recently found a copy of the Nintendo Gamecube title Pikmin.
It's excellent! It plays a lot like Lemmings, except you have slightly better control over the little helpers.
You take the role of an alien whose rocket ship has crashed on an unfamiliar planet. You encounter a number of small beings, the "Pikmin", who follow you and perform directed tasks (like destroying walls, building pathways, etc). You also use the Pikmin to collect the missing parts of your rocket ship, so that you can rebuild your ride and escape from the planet before your life support systems fail.
My only (minor) complaint is the camera control. Many times I've tried to navigate my player through the landscape, only to struggle with an unfortunate viewing angle because I keep forgetting to reposition the camera. I suspect this is because the game came out early in the console's lifetime, and the designers didn't have the familiarity with the controls to come up with something more comfortable.

I played it for about three hours last night, but realised that I couldn't save my progress because my memory card was too full! On the other hand, I'll be better equipped to do the first few stages now that I know where all the parts are hidden... ;)

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Yep, I got it.
I actually went and bought it the day after my last posting about it... :)

IMHO:
It's a good game.
It took me about a week to complete.
It's a pretty good RPG, and the world of Sonic lends itself to the genre well. Sonic and his friends each have unique abilities, like Sonic's spin dash, Tails' flight, and Knuckles' wall-climbing skill, and these lend themselves to both the adventuring aspect (navigating obstacles in the field) and the battle scenes.

The landscapes have a cute hand-drawn look, and you use the stylus to control Sonic's movement in an intuitive manner (similar to Phantom Hourglass). There are plenty of familiar STH elements in the levels, like loops, springs, and those ubiquitous Gold Rings.
The scenes are inhabited by enemies and people, both of which can be avoided or confronted at will - no sudden random battles here, thank goodness!

As for the actual battle scenes, the attacks are customised depending to your character's abilities. Knuckles' attacks involve his fists, Tails' are robot-oriented, Amy's involve the use of her disturbingly-huge hammer, and so on. But there are special POW moves that require you to trace patterns on the touch-screen with the stylus, and these have a necessary degree of awkwardness. You ever played one of those Dance-Dance games, where you have to use your feet to match the falling arrows? Well, it's a little bit like that.
(incidentally, my worst nightmares are full of sliding arrows... ever... approaching... arrows...)

It's not all happy-happy, though.
The battle scenes are well rendered, but applying the special moves is a little tricky because you have to try and remember their effects (because you don't get reminded mid-battle). Also, supplying your party members with "armour" and power-ups is a little difficult, because you can only organise a maximum of four characters at a time. Too bad if you missed a character before an important battle, hey?

There are plenty of references to the original STH titles (look carefully around the ruins of Eggman's Metropolis level!), and most of the background tunes are reworked versions from the vintage games, which I thought was a nice gesture for friends of the older games. It's a case of "Spot the Reference"!

It's a reasonably good RPG, but I don't see it becoming the essential DS title that Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga was for the GBA. I'd recommend this for the hard-core Sonic fan, but the hard-core RPG fan will probably find this over way too soon.

Incidentally, this game carries a PART ONE WARNING - sequel to follow...

Find out more about the game here. You can also find some desktop wallpapers and game hints here too.

...work, con't.

More work to come... mutter grumble...

Last weekend was, um, fiascotastic. Turns out I had to work a bit longer than expected, but it also meant that I got to leave work and go straight to sleep, instead of having to go home and then back.
I did an eight hour close on Saturday, and an eight hour open on Sunday... with ten minutes sleep under my belt. And I was getting really worried because I noticed myself making really stupid little mistakes, like not giving customers the right change (though luckily it only happened twice, and I picked it up both times).
I was waiting for a co-worker to show up to relieve me, but she got delayed at her other job... which meant that she was working a FULL day as opposed to my eight hours. So I make no complaints, even though I'm still working nearly a solid two weeks.

When I eventually got home on Sunday, I slept for eighteen hours.
I woke up just in time to make my next shift... o_o

In other important news: Hawthorn won! Family happy! PS. Must call Dad.

Also: Noticed that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is now available... Want, but not just yet (will wait until next payday). Hopefully my next post will tell you all about it.
And I still can't find a copy of The World Ends With You anywhere around here, though I keep looking...

What's Up This Week?

Aside from seeing my nephew in a play (see last post), I've done this stuff, in no particular order:

• I sent my Dad a Father's Day parcel, and hopefully he's got it by now... basically the same old stuff I usually send him, but it's usually well appreciated - at least I've never heard any complaints from him... :)
• I worked 20 hours over the weekend due to a serious lack of staff... most unfortunate, but this only happens very rarely I keep telling myself.
  
• I found a copy of Zork: Grand Inquisitor that just refuses to run. At all. mutter grumble...
• I also purchased a DVD-ROM burner drawer for the computer. After a bit of fiddling around with the master/Slave settings I managed to get it working just fine! at least SOMETHING I bought is working...
• I went and had more dental work done this week, to the tune of $250, entirely out of my pocket because I don't have private health cover yet. I have however paid up my Ambulance membership - I don't fancy paying over $1000 for an ambulance trip when it only costs me $60 to join.

One of the things I would like to do this week is attend my friend's 30th Birthday dinner, but, sadly, I can't thanks to my job. Oh well...
Happy 30th Birthday, Slink!
Hope you enjoy the new PS2 game, whatever you pick!

Games (not mine)

And now, a couple of game links!

Back in the early 90s, the most sophisticated games console that we had at home was our trusty "educational" device, the Commodore 64. I spent many lost hours playing heaps of games on that old thing, time I ought to have spent on looking after my future, developing a career, getting a social life, and so on, but... oh well.
Now, even though I still have the old C64 (and assume that it still works even though it's been sitting in storage for the better part of a decade), I haven't played any of those games in ages. Mostly because the whole procedure of dragging all the bits out, finding somewhere to set them up, plugging them in, loading up the games, etc. etc. just seemed too much trouble.

I was at the Retrospec website the other day, and realised that not only one but two of my all time favourite C64 games have been remade by dedicated programmers - and what's more, both of them were totally free!

My first favourite was the surreal shoot-em-up, Wizball. This is a truly unique gaming experience. You play as a Wizard manipulating a bouncing ball, and you have to shoot enemies to collect green pearls, allowing you to upgrade and gain new abilities. You also have to use your pet cat(!) to collect coloured droplets scattered through each level - once you've mixed up the correct colours, you get to go to a bonus game, and the colour is painted into the landscape you just left!
Okay, so it sounds like something someone would have made up while under the influence. It probably is. But it is a fantastic game, once you get past the difficult controls in the beginning, and once you get the hang of it you will be better for the experience. It also has a great 2 Player Co-op feature that lets two people work together to try and figure out what the hell this game is about.
It's a very slick package (both original and remake), and I highly recommend it.
Click here to read the Wikipedia article about the original game.
Click here to check out and download the Retrospec remake.

The other game that held my mind at the time was the isometric puzzle game Head Over Heels.
The game revolves around two dog-like animals, each named Head and Heels, and each with his own abilities. The aim was to try and reunite the two characters by navigating them through an enormous pseudo-3D maze. Once the two were in the same room, they could both link together and become a single playable character, with both their abilities combined.
But there were a lot of surreal touches to this game as well, with things like a donut-shooting weapon, platforms made of puppy dogs that could disappear, miniature Daleks, Prince Charles effigies, gorillas, elephants, and stuffed toy bunnies as collectable power ups! In amongst all of that was some story about five crowns that had to be rescued, which the authors admitted was a plotline added at the last minute. :)
I wasn't the first in our family to try this game. I remember clearly my younger sister's first attempt to play the game - it resulted in her bashing her hands against the living room floor, tears flowing, and eventually, being sent to her room...
You could say puzzle games aren't really her thing. ;D Meanwhile, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and managed to get all the way through with all five crowns, thank you, so if you need any advice, drop me a line!
Click here to read the Wikipedia article about the original game.
Click here to check out and download the Retrospec remake.


If you're at all interested in vintage video games, check out the Retrospec website for more remade games that have been created purely as a labour of love... ie. they're all free, free, no-payee no-cashee. They have heaps more games than the two I've mentioned, so have a look and see what else tickles that part of your memory locked up with bad 80s fashion and the Reagan era. Go on, off you go!

Also...

In other news...

Today I went to the Sunday Market, for the first time in a few weeks. And this time, I actually managed to get there before they started closing up for the day, for a change!
I found a few appealing items (well, they were to me, anyway). A few vintage Mega Drive games (Zoom!, Chaos Engine, Cool Spot, and something called "Greendog the Beached Surfer Dude", whatever that turns out to be), a couple of CDs (Fleetwood Mac and Oasis), and some junk food.
I also ran into Will and Rox, who were there with Will's mum and brother, running a new stall at the market. I'm going to visit them some time next week.

I picked up the latest issue of Retro Gamer today (in a manner of speaking, since we get it about two months behind over here). Not a bad read, in fact it's about the only magazine I bother picking up these days. I only wish Andrew would finish with the ones I loaned him about a year and a half ago... [end obvious hint]

I called in to work on the way out to the market, only to discover that EFTPOS was down - BIG SURPRISE! It always goes offline on a long weekend! God knows why it keeps doing this, but back on Friday I knew it was going to happen.
(Damn you Crusty, you jinxed me again!)

Speaking of, I really ought to go to bed now, since I'm opening in the morning. See you soon!