May 2004
- 14 -
Time to go home
Finals are over, and I'll be
heading home tomorrow. First I'll have to get my stuff ready to go,
and that means turning off the computer and getting it ready for the journey
home, as well as doing something about all this dust. Maybe I'll
run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet a few times. I hope I can
do my laundry before I go like I did last time, and to make sure I have
a good chance of that, I'll get up early tomorrow morning. This summer,
I hope I can finally get my life together and find a job so I'm not such
a leech on my family and everyone else around me, but I also hope I can
still play all those games I want.
Tomorrow I take my last final,
but I'm starting cleaning up a bit early. I've put up all my books
and thrown away some old containers, but I still have to dust the room.
There's so much dust built up in here, it's not even funny. I wiped
off a lot of the dust about a month ago, and I tried to blow it out of
the room with a fan, but it hasn't gone away. There's not much time
left before I move out, and I'm trying to think if there's anything else
I can download before I'm stuck with a 56K modem connection back at home,
but I can't think of anything yet.
Four of my finals are done, and
I only have one left to go before I go back home. I still have to
take my Operating Systems final, and I hope I do better on it than I did
the midterm. This time I'm going to carefully read the lecture notes
and review the material, and I'll familiarize myself with the terminology.
The final will deal mostly with memory, file systems, and security, and
I've had enough experience with the homework to know how the memory and
file interactions work.
I've been thinking about making
more Drakan multiplayer levels to get me back in the Azenera editing mood,
and this time I might take a look back into my childhood and rehash some
old ideas. I remember that I used to make a ton of levels for a game
called Ultimate Wizard, and I also made levels in the Boulder Dash Construction
Kit. That's where I really got started with this whole level editing
business, and my brother made some levels too. Unfortunately, my
Commodore 64 stopped working some time ago and I am no longer able to play
the levels my brother and I made, so all I have are the memories.
I remember all the crazy names for levels we came up with. One Ultimate
Wizard level was called Entire Biudner, and it was nothing but a big block
filled with arrow tiles that took you on a long winding path to the end.
Another level was called Gosby Lasder Otrew, and all I remember about it
was that it was based on the original level 42, Aeropics, but it had more
slides or treasures added or something. There was also a level simply
called Vanessa, and it was purple with lots of ropes. I think my
brother made that one. Also, there were some levels that were nothing
but a row of up arrows at the bottom and down arrows at the top, with infinitely
spawning treasures on one side, and you spent the whole level teleporting
up and down, getting an endless number of treasures along the way.
When you went to the side and got the infinite treasures, the entire screen
would fill with rows of treasure in a rainbow pattern. Back when
I was a kid, that was the best thing in the entire world, but now that
I look back, it seems kind of pointless and lacking in challenge just to
get treasures all the time with no obstacles or enemies. Later on,
I started to make some levels with more cohesive themes. For example,
in Boulder Dash, I made a level series where you started out in the city,
and I used those Rockford clones to represent fellow citizens. The
next level took place in the same city, but it was after an attack by some
evil fireflies, so the buildings were destroyed and you had to dodge fireflies
and dive into a pool. The pool was actually just a bunch of blue
dirt, but in my imagination, it was water. In the level after that,
you had to swim through an underwater passage while avoiding aquatic butterflies,
and I made sure to set the time limit low to simulate actually being underwater
and needing to surface for air. I don't know what I did after that.
Maybe that was when my Commodore broke down. I also remember making
a level for Ultimate Wizard that simulated a reflective body of water.
The actual playing field was at the top of the screen, and the lower half
was a reflection of that, minus the sprites. The reflection was done
by looking at the block pattern at the top and drawing a flipped version
of it on the bottom half. Of course, nowadays there are games in
3D that actually implement complex water reflection effects, like Far Cry.
I look forward to what the future will bring for rendering capability,
but there will always be a place in my heart for blue dirt water and flipped-block
reflections.
Sometimes I think it might be
better if I just threw out my TV. Seriously, I need to study for
this macroeconomics exam and I can't be watching some show when I need
to know about aggregate demand and the money market and the price level
and all that stuff. I mean, I think I know it pretty well by now,
but there's always time I could spend making sure I don't get tripped up
by some tricky question.
I just remembered that there's
going to be a spinoff of Friends that stars Joey as the main character!
Now I won't have to delve into the depths of fan fiction in order to determine
what happens to Joey. Will this spinoff last a long time like Frasier,
or will it go the way of After M*A*S*H? Only time will tell.
I just hope it lasts long enough for the Friends cast to come and visit
Joey once again so they can all be reunited! What would they all
do? I think Monica would chide Joey for not using a coaster when
he put his drinks on the table, and Chandler would say, "Could this house
be
any messier?" and Phoebe would sing a song or say something dumb and Rachel
and Ross would, I don't know, stand around and talk about how this time
they were really on a break. I'd better not do any more speculation
like this because I promised a month free of sarcasm and irony and I'm
already treading on dangerous ground.
Most of the games I've gotten
for the GBA have been all the Metroid and Castlevania games that were released,
as well as some Zelda games for the Game Boy Color and a Namco arcade game
pack. Now, Metroid and Caslevania are good series but I can't live
on those games alone! Well, technically I could live without any
games at all, but I want to find some more good GBA games. I've been
thinking about trying some role-playing games, and I've seen mixed reviews
of Golden Sun. It seems like most of the games people recommend are
turn-based strategy games like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance,
so maybe I'll try to get into that genre.
As you've probably seen last
month if you've been keeping up with my site, I have taken an interest
in a little game called Beyond Good & Evil. However, I am at
an impasse regarding which system would be the best to play it. It's
going to take a lot of soul searching, as well as searching the Internet
for comparisons and opinions, to figure this one out. With Halo,
it's an easy choice because I don't have an Xbox, but Prince of Persia:
Sands of Time is another game that forces such a tough decision.
I wish that in each copy of a game sold, there could be a version that
works on every system for which the game is designed. For example,
a game for both the Playstation 2 and the Gamecube could contain both a
PS2 disc and a Gamecube disc in the box. Of course, this wouldn't
be so good for Xbox players of Halo because they would have had to wait
for the PC and Mac versions, and of course, the Morrowind expansion packs
on the PC would have had to wait until the special edition game for the
Xbox was released. Since games are often released on multiple systems,
I think it would be a good idea for someone to create a Web site dedicated
to comparing all the different versions of games and giving their opinion
on which one is best.
Tonight marks the end of Friends,
and as we look back on the past decade, we inevitably think of our favorite
Friends moments. I remember when Phoebe sang "Smelly Cat," and when
Ross tried to wear leather pants to impress his date, and when nobody could
remember what Chandler's job was. Those were such memories, and those
were such Friends. I don't just think it's the Friends on TV who
are saying goodbye tonight. I think we're all saying goodbye back
at the TV screen, thanking the characters for the wonderful memories they've
given us. Thank you Ross and Rachel, thank you Monica and Chandler,
thank you Phoebe, and thank you Joey. Say, did anyone else think
Phoebe and Joey would get together? That way, all the Friends would
be paired up amongst themselves. As the series ended, Phoebe was
with Mike, and I like to think that Joey will find someone someday, but
sadly I'll never know unless I add some particularly heartwarming piece
of post-finale fan fiction to my personal canon. Goodbye, Friends,
and thanks for the memories.
I mentioned Onslaught yesterday,
and that's relevant to today's topic because another game I want to get
is Unreal Tournament 2004. In case you're wondering, I already have
UT2003, but I picked it up at a lower price because I heard it wasn't as
good as the original Unreal Tournament. Now, I got a lot of value
out of the original UT, especially with the multitude of mods and the feature
that let you play the original Unreal using UT weapons. For UT2003,
however, the base game wasn't as good as I hoped, but the bonus packs that
were released later made up for it with new game modes such as Mutant and
Invasion. One thing I'm wondering about is the fact that you can
spawn vehicles in UT2003 with the console and drive them around, but none
of the levels included with the game or any of the bonus packs use the
vehicles at all. It's probably no big loss, because none of the levels
or playing types would really benefit much from vehicles, but the large
outdoor Onslaught environments of UT2004 look like they're just made for
tearing around in a Scorpion truck or a Manta hovercraft.
There are so many games I want
to play, I just don't know where to begin. Let's start with Halo.
I've played the demo, and it seems like a good game, even if the PC version
doesn't have cooperative play. Many people are upset about that,
but I hardly ever play games with other people because cooperation tends
to be difficult, so I won't be missing out too much. The idea of
a ring-shaped world, like in the book Ringworld, seems like an interesting
idea, but from what I've seen in the demo, I think it would be good if
there were a game that let you explore the entire surface and inside of
the ring structure. I know it would take a lot of work, and there
would have to be interesting places all around the ring, but I think it
could be done. It would be sort of like the exploration of Morrowind
crossed with the action and environments of Halo. From the early
videos of the game, it kind of looked like Halo was going to be a more
far-reaching game with vast environments that you had to take control of,
like in a real-time strategy game or an Onslaught match in Unreal Tournament
2004, rather than a straightforward first-person shooter.
Yesterday I talked about how
nostalgia makes us forget all the shortcomings of games we played in the
past, and it turns out that it's already happening for me with the game
Unreal, which is not supposed to be old enough for nostalgia to be kicking
in yet. When I think back to the time I played through Unreal, I
remember it being this great experience in an immersive, complex world,
with intense combat and an incredible storyline. But now, I'm playing
through the game again, and while overall it's still a more satisfying
experience than Unreal 2 (mostly because in the latter game, your character
moves so slowly), it still has frustrating parts and moments of tedium.
There are times when I keep reloading because I lose too much health or
ammo during a battle, and in some places, I have to run across a vast,
flat field toward a destination in the distance, which can become quite
boring. Also, some of the items that I remember being interesting
are in fact kind of useless. The force field, for example, just puts
an immobile barrier in front of you, and I haven't found much use for that.
Also, I haven't gotten much use out of the invisibility or voice box.
I remember the storyline in Unreal as being this fascinating epic that
is revealed through logs and notes written by the recently deceased, similar
to System Shock 2, but when I play it again, I notice all the errors in
spelling and grammar and the attempts at juvenile humor. However,
even with its problems, Unreal is still fun to play, especially since it
runs at such a high frame rate on my system.
I've read video game message
boards and seen people pining for the good old days of video games.
For example, one of the things that people complain about in the new Metroid
games is the fact that you can't get lost as easily as you can in the first
two games, which don't have maps, and a complaint specific to Zero Mission
is that it isn't as open-ended as the original. Now, I can understand
where people are coming from. One of the things I remember fondly
is being lost in Norfair, and trying to find my way around Kraid's lair,
and feeling like the world is so vast and that you never know what new
secrets you might find. However, even though my memories of it are
good, I'm not sure that my actual feelings at the time were entirely positive.
I may have been on the verge of boredom, or perhaps I was very frustrated.
In fact, I was often frustrated at video games, and I would get angry whenever
I failed repeatedly, so I suppose my experiences with video games were
not really a nonstop roller coaster of fun. However, when I remember
playing those old games, the nostalgia and memories of good times come
flooding back immediately, and it takes some deeper thinking to remember
the frustration and anguish of missing a tricky jump or losing my last
life on the final level. Maybe in ten or twenty more years, I'll
remember only the fun, memorable parts of a game like Mario Sunshine, such
as battling the manta ray shadow on the beach, and I'll forget all about
the time I kept falling to my demise while trying to finish one of those
"secret" levels.
At first I only mentioned this
on the Surreal-News forums a few times, but I made a William
Hung version of Sky Island. I'm not going to provide pictures
or give support for this level in any way, because this kind of joke is
worn out by now. This gesture is the first step of my theme for this
month. I've decided that for the rest of the month, I will keep the
front page of the Sine Wave free of obvious irony and sarcasm. It's
going to be tough to do, but I think that if I just keep from breaking
into a lunatic grin and thinking I'm so clever while typing these updates,
I can do it. All topics discussed here will either be about video
games, or they'll be serious musings on the world and life in general.