Over the weekend I have been looking around at a lot of social websites, largely due to the fact that I have really enjoyed Twitter. I have found a lot of good ones and bad ones, and a lot of cool uses for sites. I thought I would sum up some of the better social websites that I have found.
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
I’m right now in the process of changing how this site acts I guess. What I want to do is make it a little more professional looking. I feel it is too plain right now and I want to change that. One thing I want to start doing is incorporating more multimedia in posts to kind of break it up. I want to widen the page a bit so it isn’t as narrow, change adds so there are some in the main body, and ads that aren’t the same on every page (so some pages would be in the body, some would be in the side, and some wouldn’t have any). I want to better incorporate some of these other tools I am using like Twitter, which I like but i think is kind of ugly as it is. I feel that I should be better incorporating other blog indexes and also better suiting my site for search engines to pick up what’s important better. I want to change the header to be more graphic, have fewer categories listed. Show less of a post on the front page (currently, I put up the entire post on the front page, I would like to make it so that only the first paragraph or two shows so that people can skim through what I’ve been posting better).
Continue reading ‘Some site rearranging’
I went to see Iron Man yesterday, going in on a rather mixed note. My roommate had seen it at work, where they go see a movie once a month, and said that it was terrible. Yet I had high hopes on the other side as it looked amazing in the commercials and I loved Iron Man, who was one of my favorite if not the favorite Marvel character of mine. After all Iron Man was essentially Marvel’s answer to Batman. The guy with no super human abilities, except his extraordinary amounts of money and ingenuity. And Batman is like my favorite comic book hero.
So I went to watch it, and overall I have to disagree with my roommate. I thought it was pretty darn good. Was it the best super hero movie out there? By all means no. I think X-Men 1 & 2 were far better, as was Burton’s Batmans as well as Batman Forever. I did find this movie better than Spider-Man and The Hulk however, and X-Men 3 of course (which was just hideous), and certainly better than all those crap ones that people don’t even remember being made (like that newer Punisher movie). Daredevil I think is just below it, I know a lot of people didn’t like that movie but I think it was pretty good all the same.
My real big complain about Iron Man was that half the movie was Iron Man researching and building the various versions of the suit. It got really boring through much of the first half because of it. I also thought this idea of putting Stark in the terrorist hands at the beginning of the movie then going back in time to see how he got there and then going into it was counterproductive and out of place in the movie. I think the only reason they did it was because early tests of the original movie didn’t bring people into the movie fast enough so they decided to throw action into the first part even if it didn’t really fit. All it really did was made me confused for much of the first 20-30 minutes of the movie for no particular reason that I can summize.
Once you get past this stage, the movie got much better, but unfortunately this was too late in the movie. They did end well which I think is how you generally want to leave a story. But in essence you got like a 30-45 minute movie which is kind of sad. The animations were great, but most of it you had already seen in commercials. In fact I think 85% of the Iron Man shots had already been advertised, which shows you just how little Iron Man was actually IN the movie.
I must give props to the acting however. Jeff Bridges did a suitable job, nothing special, but boy did he look different. If you showed me a picture I wouldn’t be able to recognize him. Robert Downey, Jr. was phenomenal, the part was made for him. It was as if the cartoonists watched his acting 20-25 years ago when they first started imagining this character. It was uncanny. Paltrow did a suitable job as well, she did what she could with a part that was almost completely irrelevant to the movie, but the charm she brought to the part really did it justice.
Overall, I can’t give the movie higher than a B and it is bordering on B-. I did really enjoy the movie, but they really needed to speed up the pacing of the first half of the movie, have less convulited scenes and they were a little too over the top in some of the dialog (the line from Stark saying “they say the best weapon is one that doesn’t need to be fired, I respectfully disagree” or whatever that is always on the Iron Man game commercials has to be one of the worst lines of the movie, and really cheesy but there were a lot of such cheesy lines that we could have really done without).
Minor props on a sidenote is the Star Wars reference in there. I am not a huge Star Wars fan, but I found it to be funny as hell… far more funny than many of the jokes in the movie.
Ok so due to this game having what may be the longest name in the history of games, I will be calling Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles: My Life As the King… Final Fantasy WiiWare (or FFWW). The original title so long in fact that if you tried to shorten it to acronym form it is still longer than 2 or 3 words. The naming of this game was completely ridiculous and someone needs to go to the Squinix developers and smack them upside the head.
Onto the game. The game is fairly simple in premisis. It is essentially a city building game taking place in the Final Fantasy world. So instead of building a modern city like you do in SimCity, you are building a castle city as in the mideival times which actually is quite a nice change of pace for the genre. There doesn’t actually seem to be many similar sims and I think it is a fresh perspective. On top of that, by making you the king (or mayor) in a more real way than say SimCity (where you are more god than mayor), it makes the game feel more involved I think. And I also like being down on the street level, actually exploring the town instead of up from above (don’t get me wrong, I love simcity but this is a great change to the genre).
In order to build your cities, you need to hire adventurers and send them out to get crystals in order to build more buildings. These new buildings enable you to hire new types of adventurers, upgrade their equipment and abilities, and thus allow them to go out and get more crystals from harder dungeons. And thus the loop continuously repeats itself.
In between all this, they intersperse some random storylines to keep your interest in the game. I am currently in day 60, have academies to all 4 adventurer types, and have one adventurer who is almost 20. I have also found, that though you may have high level characters running around, you still are still dependent on equipment fairly hard. That level 19 warrior, can’t tackle a level 10 boss because I only have level 15 weapons (which seems really odd, you think it’d be able to work well that way but no) and i need to go back to a level 2 dungeon to get more material to research higher level weapons. This is actually a fairly good way to keep using those old dungeons in the game and gives you more stuff to do as well.
I do enjoy the game quite a bit and I can get sucked into it really easily. I’ve always enjoyed city builders and like I’ve said multiple times earlier, this game really brings a fresh look at this genre. I really like what they’ve done with it and they have made it really fun to sit and play. Not only that they’ve made it really easy to just put it down whenever. You don’t have to save ever in the game, it saves at the end of the day automatically and it continues at the previous save point when you leave the game.
My negative to the game besides the name of it is the look of it. I don’t particularly enjoy that all the characters in the game look like 5 year olds. While I don’t mind having 5 year old characters, I don’t like that ALL of them are 5.It makes me kind of sad to think that all these children are running around without parents apparently and have to fight off monsters by themselves in order to survive.
The graphics are really great otherwise, and it is obvious that Square really concentrated on this aspect of the game. It looks like a complete game that could have been put in retail chains. And this kind of leads to another downfall, and that is the price. at $15 it is really expensive, and I fully believe that at least $5 is going straight to graphics. The game itself is really just a $10 game being sold at $15 because they put so much money into graphics, which is their choice I suppose. I think it is unfortunate because while I do believe this game will sell well, it would have sold better and would have undoubtably been a must have game on WiiWare. As it stands I think only city building gamers and Final Fantasy gamers will really partake in this game. Which I really think many others could get into it.
The downloadble content they have for the game is a nice extra too. I haven’t bought any but I could see a potential of putting some extra credits into some. In particular I think the dungeon pack (11 dungeons for $3) seems somewhat valuable. Many don’t seem worth the money (like 1 costume for $1 or a new race for $3). I could see the costumes being more worth it at maybe 5-10 new costumes at $1, but even that would be a stretch. The only benefit I could see putting in money towards the new races is that I do get bored looking at dozens of humans running around and it may be interesting to see another race every now and then. But again this is mostly cosmetic (each race is supposed to have bonuses for particular classes too but I can overall live without this). I think these things aren’t really worth the money right now.
Still, this is a pretty good game. Definitely a great start to the WiiWare service and really showcases the potential of this service in nearly every way (except online, but honestly I don’t think there is a way to add online content to this game).
The Wii has sparked a lot argument about the worthiness of the system due to the wealth of the casual games on the system. Many feel like there just isn’t staying power on the system due to the lack of core games. Because of this the system is largely dismissed as a system not for the core gamer.
Of course I personally feel I am more of a core gamer than other core gamers (as I’m sure all core gamers do) largely because I don’t limit myself to just FPS games (as many core gamers do). In fact, FPS tends to be the one genre I don’t even tough (largely because I’m not a huge fan of the first-person view which tends to give me motion sickness. The few shooters that tend to come out that aren’t first person I tend to enjoy. The few non-shooters that are first-person that come out I tend to not like (Elder Scrolls series tends to fall into this category really well, though a caveat to this is that older games like Might and Magics, I don’t mind as much, it is just when it goes live action). So I like a lot of casual games, and yes I like “kiddy” games, not because they are casual or kiddy but because they are good. I like Animal Crossing, I like Pokemon, I like Brain Age because they are all great games in and of themselves besides what they are.
I know plenty of gamers who won’t touch games like this because they are too cute or because they are so simple. But unfortunately for most gamers, these games tend to be the better games on the market (and not just from Nintendo either I must add). Casual games are largely more innovative and more enjoyable than most “core” games which more and more are looking really generic and really stale.
Another unfortunate fact for the core gamers is the very definition of what “core” actually means. The sad fact of the matter is that Nintendo is drawing in far more gamers than just the traditional core. And if you think that Microsoft and Sony aren’t desperate to try to catch a piece of that action, you are sadly mistaken (hence why both companies try to take the motion capturing, the mii idea, etc.) They see the dollar signs just as much as Nintendo does. And what is really happening is the definition of core is changing. What is currently called a “core” game is going to be a niche game in the future whether gamers like it or not. I remember when a lot of genres were core and are now niches (look at fighter games, flight sims, turn-based strategy, etc). I can’t help but laugh at people who are talking bout GTA 4, a classic game that is meant for the core…. yet even in its own launch can’t beat the sales of Wii Fit’s preorder… a game the core gamer despises for its casualness. Yet I’m not entirely sure what is new about GTA4 outside of prettier graphics, whereas there is nothing that is old about WiiFit.
I also find this odd desparity when considering some of the classic designers… Miyamoto himself has designed many of these classic games, Nintendogs for instance. And you really can’t get much more core than Miyamoto. If it weren’t for the original Donkey Kongs, Marios, Excitebikes, F-Zeros, Zeldas, and what not, gaming as we know it wouldn’t even exist. Then there is Will Wright, who between SimCity, SimEarth, and the Sims has yet to create a core game but is one of the most respected designers in the industry. Even Spore isn’t really a core game. After all it is cute, accessable to everyone, simple, and pointless… the very antithesis of what a core game tends to be these days.
Not that it even matters. The basic fact is, if you are a core gamer, you play games because they are good period. Not because they are “serious looking” not because they have super complicated controls that my mother couldn’t figure out if she spent hours studying a manual, not because they have in depth story lines. But because theya re good. Some of the best games in the history of the industry are not those games. And I think people need to just get over it and accept the industry for where it is going or get the hell out of it because you are getting left behind. And there is no room for artifacts in this industry. Both as a developer, and as a gamer.
I have yet another project now on my table. I decided after I had already bought my mom her mother’s day present that I should take her recipes and turn them into a cook book. Now the next gift giving holiday I have for her is Christmas, but instead of wait and likely forget the idea. I decided to steal her recipes and go ahead and do it myself.
So over the last week, in between reading up on how to start my own RPG up, I started digitizing all her recipes. Some are funny, some are good. I’m not sure if I will put this book up for sale, I might. I thought at the very least it would make a good gift for her. If did put it up for sale, I’d likely only keep 10-15% for myself and give my mom the rest since they are her recipes after all.
The reason I wouldn’t is because a lot of the recipes are rather plan, if not darn near useless in today’s day and age. A lot of them are canning and pickling, which people just don’t do as often anymore. Still if I could make money off of it, it might be a nice way to help me through some tough times in between jobs/books in other formats.
Ok so Scrubs hasn’t been good in recent years. That we knew. The last two, maybe three, have been really bad and what was once a show that I’d take time to go see, in recent years has turned into a show that we have watched reality TV over. The show was great in its day, but like many shows just became too weird in recent years. I think of The Drew Carrey Show, News Radio, and Northern Exposure in particular which had phenomenal episodes the first few years and then swiftly went into the “over the edge” area in the later years (for News Radio this I think largely had to do with the death of Phil Hartman). I think this is always a danger for quirky shows like these, and Scrubs suffered from it as well.
That being said, the past few episodes have been pretty good. Almost to the quality of the earlier seasons that made us very happy that we saw them. This all ended last night with the season finale that included a fantasy episode. We’ve always hated this type of theme show. Scrubs has done it a number of time with sitcom episodes and musical episodes and such (I’m sure a few others as well). I also have not been fond of most of the “other person’s point of view” episodes where they take another cast member as the narrator. It never seems right, although it has worked at times.
Now usually I tend to just stop watching these episodes that I know are just going to be bad. But I didn’t because I honestly thought this was the series finale. And this show has had a significant impact in my television watching over the past several years. So because of this I sat through the show because I wanted to see the end of it. After all, the entire season NBC had been advertising that this was the final season and we should be there for the final moments.
But then I was confused. The show did not conclude anything, even the episode. It didn’t feel like a season finale. I looked at the info and it said season finale… so I looked it up online and sure enough, it had another season. Apparently during the writer’s strike, the production company made a deal to move the show to ABC for season 8. So this all was in the last few months that occurred. So poo, I sat through a really bad episode just because I thought incorrectly that this was it.
You may have noticed something new in the sidebar. I joined up with twitter because I think it is a cool idea, and it is complimentary to my blog anyway. I plan on adding new twitter posts via my mobile phone from time to time to update what I’m up to while I’m away from the computer.
That isn’t the only change though. I’m also now trying out posting on a new firefox add on called scribefire which allows me to make posts without visiting the sites. This is to just make it easier for me to make posts on the site and at the very least is kind of interesting to do.
On the underbelly, I’ve updated my theme to work with wordpress 2.5. So if you were having problems accessing parts of the site before, this should be fixed. I’m also looking into a few more features to really fill out the site. But hopefully everyone enjoys these additions at the very least.
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