Some of the word counts, according to WordPress, of my post-convention posts:
MAGFest 8/The SDA Charity Marathon: 3631
Connecticon 2009: 4125
Game UniCon: 2315
MAGFest VII: 1379
Connecticon 2008: 2786
MAGFest VI:1578.
Yeah, I tend to write a lot about conventions. Connecticon 2010 will be no exception.
Indeed it does. Ideally, I’d like to have something resembling a very unfinished demo out by the end of April. Currently, I’m working on getting in the parts of the overworld needed to finish the first “quest” you’re sent on in the game. There’s a lot of other stuff to take care of, too (Properly implementing spells, for one, and really anything besides just “Attack” in combat for another), but that’s where it’s easiest to find tangible progress.
The somewhat good news on that front–and I say “somewhat” because I’m a terrible enough programmer that I made the pseudo-mistake in the first place–is that I saved myself a couple hundred lines of code by realizing I was making a redundant setting of room coordinates…after you were already in the room. I tried removing that second set, and everything seems to be in working order, which is nice.
In less mitigated good news, I quickly threw together an unstable-but-works-for-my-purposes location debugger, in short allowing me to teleport to any square on the map rather than having to walk there manually. This almost immediately paid dividends as I quickly realized that, due to my sloppy coding, I was changing monster regions quicker than I should have been. The “unstable” part comes from the fact that the debugger–and the entire game–crashes when you feed it input it doesn’t expect (IE anything other than a number). Again, though, since I’m currently the only one using it, I’m not overly concerned about that.
That’s been my main project of late.
You know, for as much as people rag on George W. Bush (Deservedly so at points), I’m pretty sure he didn’t flub the Inauguration Oath either time he took office like I just watched Obama do (If anyone has footage proving me wrong, please provide it, I’d like to see).
Hopefully this was a one-off, caught up in the moment thing, and we didn’t all misoverestimate (As Dubya might say) Obama.
He was a Japanese guy in Sayonara. He did commercials for the Chrysler Cordoba in the ’70s. More recently, he was the grandfather in the Spy Kids movies, and the voice of Senor Senior Sr. on Kim Possible. He’s probably best known as Mr. Rourke on Fantasy Island.
To me, though, he’ll always be Khan.
Montalban was 88.
That’s really all I wanted to say. A big post-MAGFest update will be coming. Really.
With the popularity of The Comics Curmudgeon, one thing that people have realized is that the traditional “Funny” comic strips you see in newspapers aren’t really that funny at all. For the real wackiness, you actually have to look at the daily “serial strips” that try to tell an ongoing plot.
It seems counter-intuitive, but actually try following one for a few weeks and you’ll more than likely see what I mean. In the past, I’ve discussed Gil Thorp as one such example, but today I’d like to show you another example: The daily version of “The Amazing Spider-Man”. Let’s take a look at the strips for December 18th and 19th, shall we?
First, the strip for Thursday, December 18th.
The hard way, huh?
Let’s start at the second panel and work backwards on this one. The villain, a man calling himself “Big Time” who has an obsessions with clocks (The concept can work–the Batman: The Animated Series version of The Clock King was actually pretty freakin’ cool), says to his fake-Spider-Man accomplice, a guy named “Lefty”, that it’s time to do things the hard way, pulling out a gun as he does so. And what, you ask, was “the easy way” that his Plan B of “Shooting my enemies” is so much harder than?
Did you guess “Trying to drop a giant clock on my ex-wife, the execution of which involves luring said ex-wife (A woman named Maria Lopez, by the way) to the clock and having her stand directly under said clock for about 25 minutes, not taking so much as one step in any direction?” If so, congrats, have a giant clock-shaped cookie.
Yeah. How shooting her would have been harder than an elaborate plan of which your average 1940s movie villain would be proud is beyond me.
So what about Thursday’s first panel? Well, Spider-Man is stopping the aforementioned giant clock from crashing into a wall. Said giant clock has J. Jonah Jameson, Maria’s current lover (And nemesis to Spider-Man) tied up on the back of it. For sheer insanity factor, this pretty much speaks for itself, but if you really want the whole story, go here and click on the entries from the bottom up, starting with “In Which Jonah Gets Punched in the Face“.
Now for Friday, December 19th.
This man hasn't been paying attention for the past 3 weeks or so.
No “man tied to giant rolling clock” antics this time around, sadly, although you’ll note that Spider-Man is just standing around in a heroic pose despite a complete failure to this point to apprehend Big Time (Or even locate him for that matter) in panel 1. Again, though, panel 2 is really the kicker here. Lefty heroically rams into Big Time, causing his shot to go astray. Why? Because he doesn’t want to be an accessory to murder. This would be fine, if he hadn’t already been very close to being an accessory to murder twice over (1. Dropping giant clock on boss’s ex-wife. 2. I’m guessing Jonah was not supposed to survive the fall either), and stood by and did nothing about it. To be fair, in one of the Sunday strips, Lefty/fake Spider Man thought bubbles about how he’s about to become an accessory to murder, but…suffice to say that even earlier than this, Lefty knows perfectly well what’s going on and goes along with it. Others have theorized that the reason for this is that he knew there was no chance of the giant-clock-on-woman gambit actually working, but now that the guns are out, it’s serious. And really, this is about the only thing that even makes sense.
So there you have it. You have to go to the “serious” strips for the real laughs. Remember this.
On the eve of the release of Axl Rose’s Daikatana Guns N’ Roses’s Chinese Democracy, I have to say that I’m surprised that there was a never of list of “things that have come out while we were waiting for this album to be released” like there currently exists for the video game Duke Nukem Forever.
That is all.
I’ve decided that, contrary to my previous stance of absolutely despising the New England Patriots–I’m pretty sure there were very few people happier than I was when they choked hardcore in last year’s Super Bowl–I’ve decided I want them to make a 2001-esque miracle run to a Super Bowl victory.
Why my change of heart? Not because I suddenly like the Pats, mind you–I still can’t stand the media love fest for them, and I still think 90% of their fans are worthless bandwagon jumpers who couldn’t name their quarterback at the start of the 2001 season (More on that later). No, I just decided I want the Pats to win so that everyone will love Matt Cassel and go “Tom Brady? What’s a Tom Brady?” like the bandwagon jumpers did with poor Drew Bledsoe (He’s the answer to the little trivia question posed above, by the way) seven years ago. I’m of the opinion that Big Babychick Bill Belichick isn’t the coaching messiah that so many see him as (Look how the Wildcat absolutely confused the heck out of the Pats during the Dolphins game this season. Gimmick plays aren’t supposed to work more than once or twice, but the Dolphins kept running them, and the Pats–led by the supposed defensive genius that is Belichick–bit every single time), but rather just got really freaking lucky that a sixth round chump selection got some playing time thanks to a freak injury and turned out to be one of the best quarterbacks of my generation. I’ll remind everyone once again that after two games of the 2001 season, Bledsoe was out for the year, the Pats were 0-2, and everyone had proclaimed their season D-U-N Done. I’ll also remind everyone that Brady’s record through his first five games was 3-2, the same as Cassel’s record. And yet everyone who follows the Pats, apparently forgetting how their Golden Boy QB came to prominence in the first place, has apparently just given up on this season and are waiting for Brady to come back. Wrong attitude, I say.
Well, no I’m not. Indeed, according to Score Hero’s Rock Band Section, I seem to be only the 350th best (As of this writing) fake cover band singer ever. But really, I’m writing because last night, I score my first “legitimate” 100% on Expert vocals. What does “legitimate” mean? Does it mean I’ve gotten previous 100%s by cheating? Well no, but let me explain. In the original Rock Band, there were two types of phrases–singing phrases, and what have come to be known as “talkies”. The singing phrases are self-explanatory: The game detects your pitch (It doesn’t care about pronunciation) and compares it to the correct pitch, and awards you points accordingly. Talkies are essentially the opposite: The game it looking to see how well you pronounce the words, and doesn’t care what pitch you’re pronouncing them at. You see a lot of these in rap songs, and some of the metal tracks that aren’t “sung” so much as “growled” or “shrieked” or what have you.
Thing was, the talkie pronunciation system was pretty much broken on certain phrases–it became impossible, even on easier difficulties, to figure out just what in the heck kind of diction the game wanted on certain phrases. So for Rock Band 2, Harmonix tried to compensate for this…and went way too far in the other direction, to the point where the talkies no longer care about pitch or pronunciation. As long as you’re doing anything at all with your voice during talkie sections, you’ll get credit for it, even on Expert. This is best illustrated by this video of someone getting a full combo on the Beastie Boys’s “So Whatcha Want”….via reciting the Declaration of Independence. So I had gotten a couple 100%s on songs like this, but last night I actually sang my way to a Full Combo on Nirvana’s “Drain You”. It’s a pretty easy song to sing, but it still felt good to exhibit something resembling actual skill in the game, as opposed to just reciting stuff and getting rewarded for it.
A few “U Fail It!” awards to hand out today.
First, a “U Fail It!” to Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama for insinuating that John McCain would be the Robin to George W. Bush’s Batman…and thereby playing right into McCain’s hands. The implication, as the link says, was that McCain would be another four years of what we as a country have had since 2000. Only problem: As this comic points out (And as anyone who even watched the great Batman: The Animated Series would know, let alone anyone who’s a hardcore comic fan), Robin actually does get mad at Batman pretty frequently–one Robin actually quit entirely and went on to become Nightwing. Whoops! Barack Obama: Wrong on Batman, failure at analogies.
The second “U Fail It!” probably marks the start of my descent into becoming a Stop Having Fun Guy, but oh well. It concerns my recent obsession, Rock Band, and more specifically, the album version of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” that you can buy at the XBOX/PS3 store. Suffice to say that roughly half the bass notes (On Expert) are simply missing, and the ending is, as a result, a lot easier than it would be on an actual bass (Which is something I have some experience with, both in a general sense and in the specific case of “Tom Sawyer”). Granting, Harmonix have said before that they place “having fun” over “100% musical accuracy”, but considering how utterly ridiculous some of the Expert charts are for other songs, would it have killed them to get this right? I submit that it would not.