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2007 Nov 28 terra


Guy Blade Guy Blade---09:59:00


Too many Dots
So, over Thanksgiving I played through S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a decent game which plays rather like what would happen if you took a lousier version of Deus Ex and set it in the Fallout universe. Unfortunately, this means that you have large open areas with little to drive you particularly. Some people call these types of games "sandbox", but as there are only 4 types of quests in the game this is a slightly suspect labeling. Your four quest types are: (1) kill thing, (2) kill camp of things, (3) fetch thing, (4) defend place. Of course, there is also the obligitory "go place" quest which is necessary for the plot to proceed, but that is neither here nor there. The game itself has a steep learning curve mainly due to the fact that it is a first person shooter that actually puts you in a reasonable situation at the start of the game: most people in the universe are better armed and armored than you and they come in groups. This makes the standard FPS strategy of running in and shooting everything while soaking piles of bullets something of a non-starter. This is further compounded by the fact that you begin the game with weapons that can handle the loser enemies (bandits), but will essentially bounce off of real threats (military soldiers). I said the game was Deus Ex like, and it is to a limited extent. Unfortunately, this pedigree mainly shows in two areas: "realistic" weapon accuracy and limited inventory space. The former is exactly like the original Deus Ex, complete with crosshairs that narrow when you stand still or crouch. The latter is accomplished by setting a maximum carry capacity (50kg + 10kg at a slower movement rate) that is small enough that you spend most of the game limited to two (maybe three) weapons and the ammo for them plus a supply of healing items. The game provides very little in the way of character improvement, though. The improvements available mainly consist of better weapons, better armor, and cybernetic implants radioactive artifacts. Overall, the game was OK and I did go ahead and get all of the available endings (though apparently there are more if you bother to play through it multiple times). The key to playing the game is to get out of the starting area early so that you can get decent equipment otherwise you will be repeatedly dying to 2~3 bullets from machine gun weilding soldiers.

Oh, and as long as we are on the topic of Deus Ex, apparently there is going to be another sequel

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2007 Nov 19 aya


Guy Blade Guy Blade---11:01:00


Minor Update
SMG: 122 Stars down; 118 to go.

Damn you Nintendo.

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2007 Nov 16 terra


Guy Blade Guy Blade---10:57:00


Roll up
SMG: Fifty stars down. Seventy to go.

Drakengard 2: Two endings remain.

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2007 Nov 14 celes


Guy Blade Guy Blade---09:59:00


Curve
I started playing Super Mario Galaxy today after work. The thing that struck me most when I started playing it was that, for approximately 5 minutes, I was hoping that they would give me a movement tutorial. Large portions of the game take place on globes which are small relative to the usual dimensions of a 3d platformer. Although a 2d control system can translate from eclidean to spherical (surface) space, it takes some getting used to in order to really get used to it. Perhaps the greatest achievement of SMG is that, after those 5 minutes or so, I was able to control the game with a relatively high degree of precision. The trick is to not try to think about it too much or else you'll only get confused.

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2007 Nov 13 rinoa


Guy Blade Guy Blade---07:07:00


A Day in the Life
Today was a strange day. This morning, right before I got to my building, I wiped out on my bicycle. It wasn't very bad; I mainly scraped up my knee. My labcoat didn't even get dirty because I ended up sliding on my stomach. After I had bandaged my knee using the little medkit that was in the project office, I left it alone for a while until I finally decided that it would probably be good to put some antibiotic and new gauze on it. Our office was lacking in both these areas, so I went to the medical center that is on JPL's campus. I had to sit and wait for a doctor who basically did exactly what I had done to my knee except that he had a topical analgesic/antibiotic that was helpful. The strange thing that happened though was that I had to have my line supervisor (as opposed to my project supervisor) fill out a NASA mishap report to report the incident. He later told me that there was no category that fit the injury that I received (skinned knee/minor abrasion), but that the form required detailed explaination as to where the injury occured on my body (right knee as opposed to left).

After all that was sorted out, there was a guest speaker on lab giving a talk about "The Methanol Economy". This guest speaker was George Olah--the Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in 1994. The talk was somewhat interesting, but ran over by half an hour (for a one hour talk) which seems a bit excessive.

After work, I found that my bike chain had come off (probably in my little crash), but I put it back on and biked home. I noticed when I was about a block away from home that the the shifter was acting strangely when I was going into lower gears on the back tire, so I shifted it all the way down to see if that would clear up the problem. Instead, it caused my bike to get stuck in the lowest gear and stop responding to my shifting. I believe this is another piece of fallout from the crash. Luckily I was only two blocks from home else I would have just walked with my bike (it would have been just as fast).

Unfortunately, the bike shop (which I thought was open until 7pm) was closed by 5pm when I got there, so I won't be riding my bike to work tomorrow.

I did, however, manage to get to Gamestop in order to pick up my copy of Super Mario Galaxy that had been on preorder. I haven't had a chance to play yet as I am trying to finish off Drakengard 2 because I'm rather close to the end.

While I was playing Drakengard 2, but before I began this post, there was a knock on my door that sealed the need to record this day. I walked over to my door and saw a scrawny man of Middle-Eastern descent. He was carrying a large cross: at least 3 feet high and 2 feet wide at the 't', each piece of which was made from two-inch by two-inch wood cut to a rectangular pyramid on the ends with a small notch directly below it. In his other hand, he carried a bible. He asked if I wanted to read a few verses from the bible with him. I responded by saying something akin to, "No thanks, I'm an atheist." He seemed taken aback by this and asked me if I really didn't believe in god to which I responded in the affirmative. He further queried as to "where I came from" then. I pondered for a second over the rather significant aspects that the question might cover: did he mean 'where is your hometown?', did he mean 'who is your mother?' or 'who are your parents?', did he mean 'where did humanity come from?', was he simply confused as to the operation of a door and was amazed that I seemed to appear from a hole in a wall? Since I did not feel particularly inclined to spend more than a few moments attempting to tease out his
true intentions vis-a-vis my origins, I waved my hand dismissively and said something about "millions of years of evolution". He accepted my dismissal and left without incident, leaving me to write this message.

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2007 Nov 04 rinoa


Guy Blade Guy Blade---10:56:00


New Tool
So, I was driving back from CAS when I suddenly heard a thumping noise coming from my left front tire. I quickly pulled over and found, after some inspection this stuck in my tire:



This, for those who cannot tell due to the blurry camera-phone picture, is a multitool. Specifically, it is a hex-wrench multitool. The largest of the wrenches on this tool was the one sticking into my tire, and its removal caused my tire to go flat within 3 minutes. Luckily, my car has a compact spare and I am reasonably competent at changing a tire, so it only delayed me perhaps twenty minutes (plus another 10 because you aren't supposed to drive at highway speeds on a compact spare, so I took the main roads).

Unfortunately, this will probablly mean that I have to purchase at least one new tire. It may be possible to patch the hole in my old tire, but I have some doubts.

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