An open letter to Calgary and Balzac.

 

Dear Calgarians.

I am a British Columbian that is in the graduated licensing program.

As such, I have to have a little green ‘N’ on the back of my car when I drive around.

Now, because this always has to be present on my car, I usually forget that you don’t need them in your oddly-shaped province of Alberta.

And for some strange reason, you have some odd fixation with taking mine.

Don’t do that.

I know it is a nice, fancy magnet, but it does not look good on any fridge.

Not even yours.

Thank you.

 

To the residents of Balzac,

You actually had nothing to do with the theft of my poor magnetic ‘N’ sign, but I couldn’t help but call you out for living in a town called Balzac.

You are nutz.

Nutz that live in Balzac.

Happy Cinqo de Mayo!

And a belated Star Wars day!

I don’t know what anyone else did for May 4th, but I totally went back and watched the Phantom Menace.

UGH.

It’d been years since I’d seen it, and I’d totally forgotten how bad it was.

Okay, so Qui-Gon is a total badass, and that’s cool.

Also cool to see Obi-Wan as a padawan.

But Jar-Jar? WHY. OHGODWHY.

And then the podracing was just so bad.

Why didn’t Obi-wan just kill the guy that owned Anakin? He’s a slimy, gambling, slave trader!

Or, even if somehow, it was still against his morals, why didn’t he just convince another store owner to trade his republic credits for the tatooine currency, and then buy the part after that?

rantrantrant

 

Aside from that, I also recently went and saw the Source Code.

I freaking loved it, but it’s one of those movies that is hard to talk about without spoiling anything.

In fact, I might have just spoiled something. 

What I use my iPod Touch for:

The sad truth.
I got the Free App a Day app a while ago, so I download all the free apps that look somewhat decent.
Then I use them once, then realize that I have real games to be playing.
And then the next day I download more.

In other news,I’ve fully recovered from my illness now, so that’s a good thing!
Girlfriend also got sick for a while, at one point, she had a frog in her throat and sounded like a pubescent boy. It was absolutely terrible.
In other other news, I went out and bought Lego Star Wars 3 for the 3DS¹. Aaaand it’s mainly responsible for the late blog post. Woops.
Well, and friends from around the province came down to visit, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with them as well².
In fact, being gluttons for punishment, my friend from Victoria and I started playing Star Ocean: The Last Hope for 360.

Frankly, the game is just absolutely terrible. So my next post will likely be a review/huuuuuuge rant.
To bide time until then, I’ll leave you with this awesome Tetris game.
It’s Tetris inspired by xkcd. 

Edit: This was posted right after.

  1. I was soooo damn sick of Monkey Ball, but I’m still reluctant to buy an FPS game for a handheld, so I ended up with Lego Star Wars.
2.Mainly Lego Star Wars though.

In which I get sick and review games.

I’m not sure what made me sick. It was probably taxes.

Yes I do my taxes in a sombrero.

Anyway, most of my illness was a pretty hefty fever. At one point, I took my temperature, and it was so hot that the thermometer shattered.

So then I had a fever and mercury poisoning.

And that left me too lazy to get up. So, I ended up playing a lot of xbox Arcade Games. And now I am going to review them so that you don’t make the mistake of going out and buying UNO.

First Game: Pac-Man Championship Edition: DE

This is the game I played the majority of the time. Mostly because I was pretty freaking good at it. Now, it’s not really even Pac-Man. Only the graphics are the same; it doesn’t play like Pac-Man at all. More like Snake 4.0.

So, it may not be your typical Pac-Man experience, but damnit is this game ever fun. There’s something insanely satisfying about devouring 90 ghosts in a row.

And the leaderboards are done really well, giving you a ranking right away that is generated by comparing you to other players. So if you’re in the top 10% of players, you get an A rank, 20% will net you a B rank, etc.

My score attack is in the top percentage of score attacks.

Overall, I’d say this one gets a solid 90 flashing ghosts/ 100.

 

Second Game: Torchlight

This one I got just out of pure craving for Diablo. It’s basically just a straight Diablo ripoff and a mad lootfest.There are plenty of randomly generated dungeons and such, but it all feels like grinding after a while. Also the fact that there’s no multiplayer really kills it. That was the most alluring feature in Diablo, so it’s weird that they didn’t throw it in here.

Another problem I had was occasional freezing. It always started working again after a few seconds but it happened quite a few times, and got a little annoying.

Aside from those few quirks, it’s still a fun little game that shows quite a bit of polish.

I’ll give it 6 randomly generated dungeons out of 10.

Third Game: Uno Rush

Now, I know what you’re thinking. UNO? Is that even a real game? Why do I even have this?

Okay, that’s just what I’m thinking.

Well, I was going to spend the points on Portal, but apparently I missed the sale. UNO was on sale instead, so I bought that.

And regretted it.

It was fun for a while, but there were just a few things that frustrated me as a gamer.

Firstly, the rules for calling UNO are BS when playing with computers. Sometimes they won’t call UNO at all, and you can just challenge them right away, giving them extra cards. Then other times they’ll call it so blindingly fast that there’s nothing you can do. The same applies to when they try to challenge you.

You end up just mashing your controller like a madman.

The second major problem I had was that those f*^&ers work against you. They’ll use their wildcards just to screw you over, or to let the other computers win.

And third was the general lack of control over gameplay. I’m used to games where if I lose it’s my fault. In this one, you can go an entire game without ever getting a turn, or when you do, you can just not have any cards to play because you’re just not getting dealt them.

Rantrantrant.

Naturally, UNO is a party game anyway, so it’s most fun when you’re playing with other people. Unfortunately, the learning curve on this one is pretty high, so it takes a while for new people to grasp the controls, and the game goes by too fast to really explain it to them.

If you couldn’t tell by now, I didn’t really like this one.

Also I swore more while playing it than I did in Ninja Gaiden 2.

Overall, this one gets 3.5 blindingly fast cheating double-teaming two-faced rude jerk-headed computers out of 10.

 

Maybe I’ll actually play some disc-based games now.

Also I could not be sick anymore.

The problem with driving a crappy car.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ll know that for the longest time it was solely about my Mazda 323, and how bad it was.

If you haven’t been reading the blog for a while, then you’re in luck! You only have to read this and this, and you’ll have read pretty much every early post!

Anyway, I drive a less bad car now. It’s a ‘95 Civic, and it doesn’t have any exhaust problems or any other bad things.

So the titular problem here is that driving a crappy car that could break down at any second has ruined my driving experience.

If, at any time, I hear a noise that is out of place, my first thought is “Oh crap what now!”

This is especially bad on days when there is lots of construction.

Picture my horror when I hear things like this.

The same goes for smells as well.

It’s just terrible.

The other day I went to a store and bought things.

The other day being yesterday.

Anyway, some friends and I decided to break out Rock Band again. So we did.

And that’s all for this week, folks. Come back on Friday!

…

Right.

Anyway, we were playing Rock Band for quite a long while, until we were all mostly hoarse and tired from singing and playing drums. This is when we decided to go buy Rock Band 3 and a new keyboard!

So we drove to the nearest Wal-Mart, which is at least half an hour away, just to discover that they didn’t have any Rock Band keyboards or the new guitars.

So instead, I decided I’d buy a shiny new 3DS.

But more on that later.

I still had my friends with me, so instead of breaking out my new toy and completely ignoring them, we started playing the new Kinect game I grabbed instead. Yoostar 2.

The name absolutely killed me. Being a writer, that disgusting yoo felt like a knife to the gut. The only reason I bought it was because it sounded interesting- it gives you a script, and Kinect films you as you act it out, then it puts you in the movie. What got me was the movie list. 300, The terminator, the hangover, Zoolander, and the matrix. THE MATRIX.

Anyway, shenanigans ensued.

We did Norbit and 300.

And good times were had by all.

And then I got to break out my new DS!

Wow. Just wow. The hardware and built in software was absolutely fantastic. I’d get some pictures in here, but you really just can’t even understand it until you’ve got it in your hands.

 

The AR games, coupled with the 3D is just freaking astounding.

And then the new StreetPass features seem like they’ll be pretty sweet. When the 3DS is in standby, it acts as a pedometer, and you get coins depending on how many steps you take. So you’re encouraged to get your DS outside and start walking around with it. Then also while it’s in standby, it’s an improved version of Tag Mode from the regular DS. It’s constantly looking for other DS’s to trade information with, and different games can use that in different ways.

I don’t live in a very populated area, but I could see it being amazing if you lived in a city. Bodacious, even.

Aside from that, there isn’t a very wide selection of games available out now. Pilotwings and Street Fighter were sold out, so I got stuck with Monkey Ball as a starter. It’s alright, but I definitely can’t wait for the Ocarina remake, or for whatever Mario game they come up with for it.

 

If you couldn’t tell before now, I’m kind of a gamer.

A day for serious news and things.

This is a thing that I found that is real.

Also it is my birthday, and uhhh… A new press release dictates that instead of putting red stop signs on places where you have to stop, the government is putting green go signs on places where you have the right of way. This is to reduce the stress of today’s busy world.

Yes, that.

Also this. And this.

Alright, that’s enough of that. Good luck surviving April Fool’s Day!