It’s high time for various bits and pieces!
This Friday I take the big plunge into total self-sufficiency: apartment, food, utilities, the whole deal. The apartment search took three weeks and ended up — as it usually seems to for me — with the choice being the first option. Since the final word for taking the apartment was given last Thursday, much furnishing-thinking has taken place with reasonably successful results. So far, I’ve bought a toaster, a wireless router, a wireless network adapter, and a $5 phone. Things yet to buy: furniture to sit on to watch TV and the TV itself. And a microwave, which I just realized. Damn. I’m thinking that my new frying pans are going to get a lot of use — good thing they’re non-stick.
The choice: DSL, with a phone line you’ll never use except for the DSL, or cable on a crappy connection? DSL? Yes. Correct. The only service available in the soon-to-be-home Ann Arbor area is Comcast, who, after reading the reviews, evidently gets bandwidth and reliability about on par of a guy stuffing little notes into sausages and shoving them through an inner tube with a dowel rod into your home. Sometimes the guy eats the sausages instead of sending ‘em down the tube, and then the guys in India have to get a few phone calls about the service. Kinda weak.
I was fairly sour about having to get another phone line, destined to be little-used due to recent reliance on my cell phone, but since Comcast charges SIXTY DOLLARS A MONTH for their crappy service, I think I’ll take the DSL and an extra phone line for $20 less, givin’ Comcast the ole’ bama. Satisfaction.
Two super-short adventure game reviews — GO!
- Syberia: Beautiful and exquisitely detailed visuals, gorgeous environments. Decent voice acting. Boring story. Boring characters. Simple and easy puzzles. Recommended, but only to enjoy the incredible, almost tactile graphical atmosphere.
- Myst IV: Revelation: ATRUS DIES. There’s your revelation if you haven’t played the game. Kidding. Sort of: the game, while gorgeous in the coolest muddy 2D graphics you’ve ever seen, is just maddening. MADDENING. This is the first game I’ve ever played where I printed out a walkthrough a little over a third of the way through to finish it, which should give you some idea about what I thought of the gameplay quality.
Even though I haven’t played it in several years, I regard Riven as the peak of the Myst games and one of the best adventures I’ve ever played. You didn’t solve puzzles — you investigated an environment to discover the culture. Everything from the landscape to the machines to the “puzzles” — which were things like discovering the Rivenese number system — were beautifully intertwined and completely realistic within the context. Discovery, while not easy by any means, was interesting and satisfying.
Myst 4, on the other hand, features a guy who gets trapped on a big foggy mountain and builds the equivalent of the Chicago transit system using his bare hands. And then, even though no one would even think about setting foot in his little domain — it’s a Prison Age, after all — he installs elaborate security systems onto everything. BRILLIANT. So there goes the immersive factor, along with the idea of puzzles that feel less like manipulating a wonderous world and more like linking out into Windows to crank up Minesweeper. Sadly enough, this is the state of the modern adventure game.
Strangely enough, the final Age, Serenia, is like a totally different game in that it’s actually kinda fun. Serenia still has that goofy toybox feel that the Myst games have had since Riven, but the puzzles are decent, the setting is “reasonable” and wonderfully surreal, and the story actually shows some progression that doesn’t take place in a book for once. Unfortunately, all this is trapped inside the world within a big maze, with all the little puzzle pieces scattered about, but the walkthrough takes care of that fairly easily.
Bring on Myst 5, and let’s put this beast to rest.
That was a little not-super-short. Oh well.
As of last Friday, Paul and I were almost two months behind on our Naruto-watching, most likely due to us being separated by 130 miles. Sure, we could’ve watched it individually, but 1) Paul doesn’t have bittorrent access from his apartment Internet connection, the poor sod, and 2) after watching 140 episodes with a particular setting (i.e. with Paul), watching it alone just isn’t quite the same. So we caught up this past weekend — and here’s what Naruto has to offer these days:
And the answer to what happens when the manga author, from which the anime garnered its previous 140 episodes of content, takes a two-month break and leaves the animators to their own devices is revealed: friggin’ West Side Story mountain men, that’s what. And they actually are giving this guy a saga — the Mountain Man saga, of course, as Paul and I have dubbed it. You reap what you sow, in this case.
I still like Naruto, but Bleach took the lead for favorite a while ago. Mmm, Bleach.
Cindy Sheehan: please go home. This whole thing is just sad.
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