Stumpy Kitten

HOLY SHIT!!!!!

CNN reports that Video Games are becoming more popular, and post-secondary education are hiring people to teach people to become professionals at making them!

AND they are the most popular activity for teenagers in England! STUDIES SHOW IT!!!


In other news:

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
LAN!
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Reminder for Caitlin's Trip:

Money
Drugs
Buisness Cards

Shit, I wish I had disposable income to throw at webcomics.

I think this is the first game since Raystorm that has made me wish I owned a console.

Look out! It's one of the rare times I'll talk about music!
I downloaded the Amon Tobin Verbal Remixes and Collaboration CD. Unfortunately, it suffers from "Half the CD is good, the rest can be flushed" syndrom. That's actually pretty harsh for me to say since the tracks that I don't care for are simply mediocre IMO, whereas tracks four through nine are more to my liking.

I think the only way I will ever buy another music CD is if a lot of different artists come together in some sort of Frankenstein's Monster abomination and then did a live concert compilation. That'd be super.

What Is Your Battle Cry?

Yea, verily: Who is that, rampaging along the fields! It is Stumpy, hands clutching a bladed baseball bat! He grunts mightily: "I'm going to bludgeon you so hard, the Earth will spin twice as fast!"

Find out! Enter username: Are you a girl, or a guy ?

created by beatings : powered by monkeys

It reminds me of Rise of the Triad...not that I actually killed anyone with the bat, ever. There always seemed to be too much Na-(Vorgoisabitch)-palm.

Hmm....Do I play an Undead Rogue? An Undead Priest? A Night Elf Hunter?

I just pray to GOD that the rogue combat/stealth system isn't fucked up in WoW like in so many other games. Its supposed to be the advantage of that class and yet its always the most painful and poorly balanced ability. People seem to think that invisibility should come at the price of being the shittiest combat class in the world...but what's the point of it if you can't effectively sneak attack that warrior without him smiting your ass in a couple hits? It's also not always usefull. IMO, a rogue SHOULD be able to take ANY class if they can sneak up to them and successfully pull off a nasty sneak attack/backstab. But, that should be their crutch. Without it, they don't stand a chance against fighters and are even to poor odds with everyone else.

And lets not forget to give rogues some GROUP ABILITIES so that they are WANTED IN GROUPS and don't have to spend 90% of their play time hunting SOLO.

But, no one will listen to me.

Why is it that with no income for 3 years, student loans and okay credit, I get constant loan offers from Financial groups in Toronto and today a call from MasterCard offering a 5,000$ credit limit?

I had a very vivid dream that I was in the Planetside world. After knifing a guy to death, I took his Lightning (an ultra light tank) and went racing up this ravine/canyon after a bunch of other guys. They were all in these buggies, all slamming into each other and shooting. I caught up and peppered them with machine gun fire, then let loose with my cannon. A couple times when I hit a buggy, a couple guys got blasted off and left behind. We went down this steep hill as I was dodging some grenades, then we stopped, all got out and were talking about how awesome it was (guess we found the finish line).

This is what happens when I don't play a single game for a few days.

I promise that I will put future spoiler warnings in CAPS so that even Ian can't miss them.

I guess BMWs, like Buicks, are faster than evil.

Polearms are the biggest waste of paper in D&D 3rd Edition. You can't use them to strike enemies within a 5' radius of yourself because...well, they don't actual give a reason. They just seem to assume that if you are holding a 10' pole, that you can only hit stuff 10' away. I hate having to sacrifice functionality over style in FANTASY games. Hopefully 3.5 Edition will address that.

I shall now be known as the Teflon Tummy. I just had half a package of curly fries and noticed on the last fry that a lot of the coating on the pan had apparently peeled off and onto my food. I should be able to vomit with metal-shredding speed and my belches should cause sonic booms.

Still no phone calls.

"Chris Crawford on Game Design" is extremely bland. He spends a chapter on defining 'fun'. That's all the review this book needs.

I'm planning to write some Harry Potter fanfic-screenplay. See, I travel to England and foil an attempt on Potter's life. The first scene is 40 minutes long and involves me with akimbo machine pistols killing hundreds of Death Eaters and Dementors in slow motion in Harry's house. I eventually run out of ammunition. Harry then throws me his wand while I pull out my own and then continue killing villains with dual wand style. Eventually, the last 10 of them catch Harry and force me to drop the wands or they'll kill him. I comply, but just before they kill me, my dragon familiar drives a car through the wall, killing a few of them and letting Harry get away. I then finish off the last Death Eaters with my brutal-acrobatic Kung Fu technique. We corner the last one and make him tell us what Voldemort's plan is. He says "Hahah! It's too late! We knew we couldn't defeat YOU so we just did this as a distraction while we killed off Harry's friends! AHAHAHA!". And then he bites down on his poison capsule-tooth and dies. I'm still working on the rest.

I have James Brown stuck in my head.

I read all of Mac Hall last night. It was excellent. The Weapon of Choice comic is hilarious, and the parellels between the people he knows and the people I know are terrifying at times. Oh, and his art is AWESOME.

I was talking with Shane last night about the lack of creative monster attacks in games such as Natural Selection or AvP. Why has no one thought to do a grapple attack so that you lock onto their body (the back would be best, ofcourse) and rake and claw and bite them while all they can do is stumble around and scream? Or how about dragging them back to your hive and feeding them to a brain creature and gaining their map intellegence? Or needing their 'raw materials' for creating certain upgrades? Or having them gooed up to a wall as a sort of cooler for when you and your alien buds need a HP refresher? Or how about a poison that drops them for 20 seconds but doesn't kill them? Why not have a fast regen alien that lets it's buddies canabalise it instead of just healing them directly? Too many FPS have direct damage weapons and that's it. No one thinks about stunning someone or harvesting bodies or in-depth team play. There should be SUBSTANTIAL bonuses for getting attacked by more than one person at a time. That would severely discourage people from running off and going Rambo. Wounded people need to act wounded, their friends need to be able to drag them off to save them. Deaths should not penalise you, but reward your enemy.

I'm straining to find something to do, so I'll throw out some predictions for the last books in the Potter series. Oh, spoiler warning:

Ron and Hermione will get it on. Its been hinted at a lot, but I'm very sure that they will at least start to hook up at the end. But, it would be much more entertaining if poor Harry got left all alone fighting evil while they were off 'snogging'.

Sirius isn't dead. I base this mostly on the assumption that the author has some clue to what she's doing. Otherwise, she's wasted a good character, and introduced Luna for no reason other than comic relief (since she wrote off the Twins and all the regular characters are so serious now). His death was so vague and so inconsequential that it seems that we are supposed to wonder why Harry is so stupid as to not ask what the fuck the Arch was all about.

Harry and Ginny sittin' in a tree. I've though this since book one, and I'm really sure about it now. The author is trying to throw us off by throwing some red-harring SOs around, but I know they'll hook up. Probably in the last paragraph of the last book, though (assuming she continues her one-school-year-to-a-book format).

I'm unsure if this will happen, but hopefully Neville will vindicate himself and defeat the torturer of his parents. I would be very happy if he killed her (which would only happen by accident as he was stopping her from killing someone else). Its funny how he snapped on Malfoy when he accidently and indictly insulted his parents, but when he was in the middle of a fray and not far from the woman who tortured both his parents to insanity, he was pretty normal. Mmmm, character inconsistancy.

Dumbledor has to die, and it will probably be at the hands of Snape. The only way Voldemort is going to have a chance of killing Harry is by getting rid of the massive protections around him. The heart of those protections is Dumbledor. When he buys the farm, Harry will be forced to fight. I am unclear where Snape stands in the whole scheme, but he is set up so that no one trusts him, and if something happened, Harry would think Snape did it. It'll probably just be some grand plot to make it seem like Snape was on the evil side so that he could infiltrate better, but ofcourse, no one will tell Harry anything and he'll probably almost kill Snape before he finds out the truth.

After all, everything in this series happens because someone doesn't think to tell someone else a bit of important information. Every incident occured because someone was ignorant, not because someone was ingenius.

I predict this trend will continue.

This series has been entertaining...a nice diversion until the next Drizzt book comes out. Now to find something else to criticize to pass the time...hmmm....

Finished book five of the Potter series.

I hope six is better and maybe Harry will grow the fuck up.



/me runs off to bite Rogers employees

Anger.

I had a nice long rant typed up, but when I was reading it, I realized that most of it was typed in Caps.

I'll come back later.

I was watching Conan O'Brien...right before watching Conan the Barbarian. No, really, its not the first line of a joke, it actually happened.

Anyways, they did the sketch where they have a still shot of a person and then get someone to fill in the mouth. It was, ofcourse, Arnold, and he was supposedly touring to promote his campaign for California Governor.

Eventually the dialogue headed towards Fake-Arnold declaring that he would eventually run for President. O'Brien informed him that he couldn't be Pres since he wasn't born American. Fake-Arnold got pissed. He threatened to kill whoever came up with that rule. O'Brien said it was in the Constitution and that he couldn't kill the makers, since they were all dead. Fake-Arnold then said he would do like in his move, Terminator 3 (now playing at theatres) and travel back in time and kill them all. He briefly described how he would kill a couple of the Founding Fathers, but the best line was when he said he was going to hack Washington to death with an axe and then say "I cannot tell a lie: YOU'RE DEAD".

Bulletproof Monk was a bad movie. Not very bad since I have seen much worse, but it definately wasn't So-so and CERTAINLY was not good.

Do not watch it if you like Stiffler or Chow Yun Fat. This movie will make you dislike them.

And now for a rant about Codecs.

Here is the process:
I am some random guy who gets his hands on the source for DivX or some other video/sound compression software. I decide that I can use my programming powers to improve on the code, and thus I make my own compression/decompression software which is used by DivX to encode and then decode movies (for example).

I send it to a bunch of people, and despite the fact that it MAY have some better features than some more official or integrated stuff, its in an Alpha stage which means it incredible untested and unstable, for some reason people decide to USE it to encode stuff.

This prompts anyone who wants to view anything they encoded to have to hunt down and find every different codec. Ofcourse, all these codecs are made by random people, so half of them are impossible to find, and the other half DONT WORK. They aren't supported and almost always fuck up whatever software you had in the first place.

So WHY DO PEOPLE USE THEM? Well, it might save them that extra 10 megs on a 700 meg file! It might let them juice out that extra 10khz on the sound quality!

In my opinion, it is a BRAIN DISFUNCTION very similar to the one that those people who maintain that Linux is better than Windows are afflicted by. It is better, but not at everything. People like me prefer to trade UNIVERSAL FUNCTIONALITY over principals or a boost in a little, insignifigant feature.

Drama!

I hope this commentary enlightens instead of enraging, but I am compelled to respond to Lisa's Blog post on my Pope rant.

"...I wonder if I should be offended by josh's imitation of the pope or not. :)"

There are two outcomes when someone reads a rant: They will be entertained or they will be offended. I totally expected people to be offended, but really that wouldn't make sense. The Pope is a good guy, the Bible is pretty good, the Church is just a little rigid, is all.

"I didn't know that the pope accepts gays (just not them doing it)..."

Well, since I don't really know what the Pope thinks in his head, I kinda guessed. Since he's the spiritual leader of a religion that believes all people can be redeemed (up until they die, anyways), it doesn't make sense that he'd reject someone simply because of their sexual outlook. The Pope loves everyone just like his God does. It's his job to try and convince them to be better in the eyes of God, be them a cute little school kid, a vicious murderer, or some guy that likes guys.

"I wonder if that isn't a little [hypocritical]."

You think the Pope is a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion?

"...he [The Pope] isn't allowed to change the rules if he doesn't like them...He's just trying to do his job, I think."

That is exactly what I was saying. I'm 100% certain that he'd be all for Gay Marriage if the Bible didn't specifically say it was very wrong.

"If you want to be a good christain then don't be gay."

That is NOT what I was saying. You can be the MOST Homosexual person on the planet and still be a perfect Christian. The line is drawn at Homosexual sex. That is the described sin, not actually being Gay. You can talk about stealing something all you want, but until you actually do it, you haven't broken the Law.

Ofcourse, Christianity is a funny religion in that there really is always a safe way out. If you commit a sin and then repent for it, you are CLEAR. That's why there's confessional. It's actually a real thing that people use and not just a lame plot device for stupid movies. If may seem hard to believe, but its true.

"I hope the pope does not change that newly made law about gay marrages though."

He can't and he wouldn't. The Church can do nothing about the Law. They made sure of that a LONG time ago. The best the Pope can do is point out that it is wrong and that you shouldn't do it. It's up to people to make the choice...ofcourse, only now is that choice really available. The whole "People have to make their own choices between good and evil" is pretty much on every page of the Bible. It's the same with any other sin according to the Bible. There's no Bible Police to stop you from lying, but ofcourse, there certainly is Local Law to put a stop to anything really bad.

"What if [Hindu], or [Buddhists] believed in gay marrage. The law would be infringing on their religious rights."

Actually, that's interesting. Being such a specialist on Catholicism, I only know the suface beliefs of religions so far removed from Christianity. Since those specific religions are so easy going and probably would have no specific rules against Homosexuality, I would assume you are correct and that they have been technicaly oppressed. Ofcourse, the Atheist population is a totally different story. Since they aren't affiliated with a religion, the old Governmental Law just didn't make any sense at all.

"...let society choose wether they want to be good christains or have a gay marrage outside of the church."

That is exactly why the Law has been changed in Canada.

Canada rocks.

Lookit me! I'm the Pope!

Here I have this massive book called the Bible, the book of God's word. God is everything, I like totally love Him since he made everything, so His Word is insanely important to me. Without God himself coming down and speaking otherwise, I - the Interpreter of His Word and Mortal Leader of His Flock - have to take it at face value and assume that everything in here is EXACTLY what He meant.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of contradictions, but in the matter of Homosexuality, it's really really really clear. There's nothing wrong with being Gay, BUT according to the Bible (and thus God), sexual acts between Homosexuals are very wrong. Infact, God Nuked an entire city with His Holy Might because of it (and some otherthings, like Gambling, but we let that slide for some reason).

Now, marriage is the nice way of the Bible saying "You are now allowed to have sex with each other" in addition to ect. Basically, Marriage means that you have proven to each other that you like each other enough to make a commitment FOREVER and that the rest of society thinks it's acceptable. So you can see the contradiction: Gays getting Married means that society sees them as being ready for it (which Gays are...hell, they put up with so much shit from us) BUT, it also means that they are now allowed to have sex. The Bible says that kind of stuff is WRONG.

So see the position I'm in? I'm crushed between Equality and the Bible. In the end, Equality will win, but for now my job means that the Bible has to prevail.

As the Pope, I want to say 'be righteous people, follow your hearts, be who you want, but be good about it'. But what I have to say, as a GIANT figure-head is "Gay Marriage is WRONG."

Ofcourse, the Church saying something is wrong hasn't stopped you from doing a lot of things anyways. It really shows that the Chruch is losing its power and will probably finally collapse due to its mostly unwavering ideals. Most of them are good and have lead society through some bad crap, but hell, its been responsible for some of the WORST fighting ever!

Well, I'm old. The new Pope should be showing up soon. He'll have a couple choices. He can do what I did and follow the Bible pretty closely or he can start everyone down a new road of leniency. Maybe he'll surprise us all and come out of the closet when he gets ordained! All of us in Heaven will be laughing our asses off.

Anyways, Gay is fine, Gay Marriage (and thus sex) is bad. According to the Church. I couldn't care less myself, but hey, we all have to cope with shit in our jobs.


Wee! Pretending to be the Pope is fun!

Oh
My
God

The US Army has decided to BURN OFF their chemical weapons (which they made and still have a lot of, by the way, 31 thousand tonnes). Stuff such as NERVE GAS and BLISTERING AGENTS. They are doing this near towns.

As part of an international treaty they must have it all disposed of by 2006. Ofcourse, CNN never elaborates of WHAT treaty that is or how STUPID it is that the US can have Weapons of Mass Destruction while they invade another country for maybe having them.

Update: AOW:SM is still super good.

Update: Fileplanet still pisses me off, but at least its free as opposed to the shit that is Gamespot and IGN. Lionheart demo at 2% again.

Update: The XCOM war has been put on hold while I play other stuff.

Update: Keys are now considered as weapons in regards to having them on planes in the US. Supposedly they will now snoop your electrical equipment such as laptops, electronic keys, radios, headphones, ect ect ect because you can pack explosives into them. This time next year, people will be allowed no luggage except for the clothes they wear (no shoes) and will be shackled into a kneeling position with chains and a black hood placed over their head.

Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic is excellent.

This is the 3rd standalone game of the series and they've once again kept everything good and improved (even if only slightly) on anything wrong.

The strategy is vast, the customization is huge. There's so many races (Humans, Undead, Firecats, Frostlings, Halflings, Orcs, Goblins, Archons, Dwarves, Draconians, Wood Elves, Dark Elves, Syrrons, Normads and Shadow Demons...think that's all) each with about 8-10 very distinct units and special abilities. Then there's a legion of heroes you can convert to your cause and level to your whim, each with their own class and race and special abilities. There's seven different schools of magic for your wizard to pick combonations from. The spells range from unit buffs to global effects which can alter the terrain.

The art ranges from insanely detailed to hilarious to extremely moody. The animations and detail of terrain and units is excellent (IMO they can spend more time on it because its a 2D game and so its much better off because of it). Some of the animations of units are comical such as the Leprichaun which does a little ditty even while dishin' out Irish death, and the Water Dancer which looks like he's getting down at a freaky disco. The rest of the art, mainly the still portraits are excellent and full of character. They are all done in a very similar style so it doesn't jar you when different portraits pop up (*cough* NWN *cough*). Best of all, most of the portraits are just small samples of the full work which is made available at the end of missions when you can check out full sized pics of your wizard opponents. The most stunning artwork is behind the main menu, though. Opening the game and seeing that feels like someone picked me up, 'put on my robe and wizard hat' and threw me into the game world.

The sound and voice are good, and sometimes over the top. Some of the combat and spell noises can really be grating (the teleport noise really gets me sometimes) and some of the spell effects get a LOT louder when they effect more units. Couple that with the distortion of the Shadow World and you might as well as be listening to some Mogwai. A lot of the sounds are reused but such sounds are pretty unobtrusive anyways. The music is excellent, but I wish there was a little more variety. When you play a game where a turn takes 20 minutes, the music is going to get repetative, but at least its good music and definately fits the game.

The cinematics are well done and well placed. When your are being instructed on the situation for your next step in the campaign, a narrator speaks while an animation loops in the background. A few of them loop seamlessly which is an excellent detail. A couple of them are pretty corney (such as the intro) but the game never really takes itself too seriously. In more than a few spots, the game goes out of its way to make bad jokes (re: halflings and midget wrestling, Oompa-loompas, references to Gladiator and LoTR) which usually results in some sarcastic remarks from some of the other story characters.

The story so far is interesting, although some things have not been explained and will likely result in 'dramatic' twists later on. Currently it revolves around the capture of the main character from previous games at the hands of murderous Shadow Demons who are invading the fantasy world through rips in the dimension which lead to the Shadow World. The player takes on the roles of a small band of Wizards who are trying to fight off the Demons but have been chased out of town by a very Inquisitor-ish human who is the main villain. He's leading the Humans on a Crusade against magic under the belief that the Demons have come to feed off of it. Ofcourse, he's just a big asshole and isn't really stupid. He's just making the best of a chance to overthrow the other races then fight off the Demons and be sole ruler of the world. You continously clash with him and he always pulls a teleport out of his ass and gets away.

The Shadow World is the major addition to the game. Its a new layer on the battlefield, making the total three: the Surface (a typical TBS game map with trees, mountains, rivers, ect), the Underground (tunnels, rivers, and digable walls) and now the Shadow World. It has a lot of plantlife and structures which all blend together making it very hard to see things and it also distorts the sound massively so things echo in a weird way - kind of like a dream. Obviously this dissorientation is intentional since almost every mndane creature gets sick when they visit the Shadow World. Everyone gets increased movement speed (some of the really fast units can cover the entire tactical map in the Shadow World) but anyone who isn't immune to the Shadow Sickness gets their combat values halved. Ofcourse, there's a lot of items, spells and monsters that are immune or can give immunity. The Shadow Demons are nasty on the surface, but in the Shadow World, they are truely bitches.

As for gripes, I have few. The major one is common to all the AOW games, and that's with the programming. The game has a very sluggish feel to the interface, scrolling and particle effects. There still seems to be a big memory leak in the particle effects which can get annoying with load times after 4 or so hours of being in-game. Its much better in this game, though, than previous ones. By AOW7 they should have it running perfectly! The second gripe is also one common with a lot of games: the AI. I spent several hours trying to get some Frostlings and Dark Elves to form an Alliance with me. It was at the point of the game where I controlled the entire map except for their territories and was several times more powerful than them combined. Despite how much gold, mana, items, spells, and cities I offered, they would not accept. I went so far as to offer the Frostlings EVERYTHING I OWNED and they wouldn't ally with me. This DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. Eventually I killed them all which seemed like what I was expected to do anyways, but the mission objective stated that I could ally with them. There needs to be some realistic Diplomacy instead of the constant butchery.

As usual, my problems with a game are more or less standard problems with the entire genre, but this game more than makes up for a couple tiny annoyances.

Dear Developers,

Why must you be so retarded? Why must you ruin your own games?

Planetside was glorious. I played the Beta a lot (A LOT) and played the various empires (Vanu, Terran Republic, New Conglomerate) almost equally which is pretty rare for Specialist-Me. The sides were almost balanced, each having their areas of advantage.

But then it went Gold and they started to 'patch' it.

You see, the balance of the game revolves around vague generalisations that they make about each Empire's combat style. Vanu rely on manueverability, TR rely on fast-firing weapons and NC rely on heavy damage.

Ofcourse, then they go and fuck it with a patch.

The Vanu now have a rifle that can clear entire rooms of soldiers with one clip. It has range, splash damage, speed, accuracy and a fairly large clip. Ofcourse, the game was fine for a while after the patch since not a lot of people used previously because the damage was low. But now not one Vanu soldier can be found that doesn't carry it. They run in mobs through bases killing everything before it can even get a shot off.

The NC have an upgraded shotgun which can kill an average soldier in 2 shots (a total of 1 second since it's fully auto). It's impossible to miss with the shotgun at close range. This gun, at least, has a range limit, but bases are death traps for fighting vs them.

The Vanu also have a hover tank which doubles as an infantry mower. It can skim across water to attack or escape and has a pretty powerful cannon. It's power is supposedly limited by the arc of the cannon which is fixed forward, but since the tank HOVERS, it can simply strafe all it wants, dodging shots easily.

The NC have a tank with a cannon so powerful that it can 2 shot anything short of another tank its weight. It also has really good armour despite the description saying otherwise and also is almost as fast as the Vanu tank.

Those two Empires are set for some great battles with their gear...ofcourse, here's the screw up: The TR have dick all. Their equivalent infantry gun is extremely fast firing and does okay damage, but it can't hit anything except at point blank. Their tank? It takes an extra person to run than the other two. Its slower, has weaker guns, is MUCH easier to hit...BUT at least it has more armour! I have never seen one defeat either of the other two tanks one vs one.

So what does this do to the gameplay? Instead of Vanu and NC fighting against themselves, they don't bother and just rape the TR since that nets them faster kills and more experience.

What happens when an entire Empire gets raped for a week straight? Some of the players stop playing the game, but most of the mother-fuckers go and CHANGE SIDES like in any other First Person Shooter.

I WAS having fun in the game up until today. But tonight when I played, EVERYONE was exploiting all the weapons and vehicles. There also seems to be a problem with the cloak since I was magically spotted four times tonight when I was crouching, in a corner and they weren't using Darklight. Hacks? I wouldn't be surprised. A bug that everyone is exploiting? I'd say that's also likely.

A fucked up game? Why yes.

Hopefully by the time I get a JOB (HINT, HINT, WINK, WINK) they will have fixed their moronic mistakes and maybe impliment future changes with something called "moderation".

Then I will play it again.