The good news is I’m back to gaming a little more.  Well I will be in a few more days.  I have a fair amount of painting and work around the house/farm to do to get ready for a family reunion here in May, but I can playing through my backlog again without stressing out over not doing my school work.  I need to work through some quickly since I can’t be lucky enough to have no “must have” games in the stores forever.

Now if I can just get my drums reassembled and get back to practicing everything will be back to normal.

My question is, since this is a singing contest why are they lip syncing the opening number?

I still love my MovableType (it’s what I still run the blog for S. on) and I still am more comfortable with MT, but upgrading MT requires you to manually upload files and that can be a recipe for disaster.  Normally it goes off without a hitch, but there is still that possibility.

I don’t really have much of an opinion on the other WP stuff since MT and WP are similar in features, and comparing them is nearly pointless.  It’s six of one and a half dozen of another.  The automagical upgrades/install, however, are just about the coolest things I’ve seen in a while.

I thought I still had about 5 classes left so that I still had time before I really got into it, but since I have to take the research portion this quarter I’ll be having to cut back on a lot of my other activities and gaming is the first thing that will get cut back.  I’ll still play, but I won’t be able to put the same amount of time into it.

*Since there is only one person I know who will get the significance of the title of this post (and I love her because of it), I’ll go ahead and explain.  It’s part of a poem from Robert Burns called ‘To a Mouse’.  In the original Scottish it goes ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”, but most people would probably recognize the English translation “The best laid plans of mice and men, go often awry”.  Read the whole poem (in English and the original Scottish) here.

R-Type, Peggle, and now Arkanoid?  All is right in in the world.

It seems that in creating a difficulty curve for CotW, Infinite Interactive decided to give the computer the advantage by allowing it to influence the outcome of the AI moves.  In essence, the computer cheats.  Instead of giving higher level NPC’s enhanced stats to compensate for the player improving, they allow the game to cheat.  All but the final boss do the same amount of damage as the first rat you encounter.  The final boss however has the benefit of improved stats, much higher hit points, AND it still cheats.

This has some battles coming down to luck, and leaves the player feeling frustrated when the computer gets turn after turn of good moves and then they are left with turns that don’t give them anything they can actually use.

I’m disappointed that more time wasn’t spent in designing the NPC’s so that cheating isn’t necessary.  I’ve heard that the PC version of Galactrix suffers from the same problems although the game has been designed to alleviate it a bit.  It doesn’t remove the cheating but allows the players more tools to combat it.  That’s not much better, and now I’m not sure if I want to give my money to a company that feels it is okay to cheat the customer.

I think part of what holds me back is that I’m such an avid reader.  I love books, and while technically graphic novels are books, the illustrations tend to hinder me.  My mind’s eye can’t see past the illustrations.  I only see what the creators want me to see, and that takes away part of what I read for.   I can’t escape to my own little world if I’m being told where to go.

All that said, I did fall for some graphic novels, but not really the ones most people flock to.  Watchmen is big right now with the movie coming out recently, but the whole super-hero thing never appealed to me.   I read the graphic novel it’s based on, and it was good enough that I’d like to see what they did with it cinematically, but it’s not what I would call one my favorites.

I went more for the quirky ones.  Like Bone.  I fell in love with Bone very quickly.  It has the traditional quest in a vaguely “fantasy” setting that has always attracted me in my regular readings.  But it adds some characters in ways you might not expect.

On a recent trip to the bookstore to spend a couple of gift cards I had I found the all-in-one Bone collection.  I couldn’t believe it, I hadn’t thought about Bone in years.  Since I never finished the series, it wasn’t finished when I started and I fell out of trying before he finsihed, I went ahead an plopped down my gift cards for it.  1300 pages of graphic novel gold was mine, and I will finally be able to finish the series I had all but forgotten about.

I’ve played both Peggles on the PC so I already know I love the game.  Sigh.  I was able to resist R-Type (due in part to the overpricing), but Peggle is coming in at 800 points so it’s going to get me.

Source: MajorNelson

What really interests me are the unusual search strings that people use and end up here.  This weeks unusual search term is ‘monkey hobbies’.  Given that the site is “Monkey-Shines” I get the monkey portion, but it’s hobbies that throw me off.  Are they looking for hobbies that monkeys might enjoy?  hobbies involving monkeys?  I don’t get it, but I’m sure I’ll get stranger ones as time goes on.