anti-stereotype.info

it’s been a little over a month since i finished school. at this point i feel like i haven’t done much of anything, including blogging. whoops.

i’ve played some games, applied for a bunch of jobs, settled into my new living space and have been trying to figure out what to do with myself. seriously.

over the last couple of days i’ve been toying with the idea of running a star wars campaign. having never actually gm-ed a game before, i think i’ll just take the epic dawn of defiance campaign up on the wotc site and try that out with some folks. also a good excuse to buy a bunch of star wars minis.

well, i made it through school. on saturday, december 12, 2009 i graduated college with my b.s. in electrical engineering. whoo!

now i need to get my grad school apps together, study for the gre, and find a job. i did recently find a new apartment so i need to start packing too. i am also still working on my senior design project. i want it to be up and running. i also have a few projects in mind that i would like to work on. those can come at a later date though.

when this is all said and done, or maybe at some point in the meantime i will catch up on my comic books, video games, and tv shows/movies. honestly, i don’t think there will be a point where i will become too bored. i am SO BEHIND on everything. i visited my local comic shop last week and picked up the stack of comics that had been in my pull list for the last 6 weeks. yikes. i missed a lot of good stuff. i’m kind of bummed that straczynski wont be doing thor anymore.

i also decided it was time to finally sit down and watch all of boogiepop phantom. i have had the box set for about 6 years now and have never watched all 12 episodes. it’s time. also, a lot of my books will be going into storage shortly so i thought it necessary to pull out a few and have lying around so i can actually get around to reading them. yeah!

on the videogame front. i recently purchased a wii. so basically i have to catch up on all the good games that came out for it since launch. i have yet ot beat any of the ps3 games i own…and i just bought a few more. i started dragon age: origins on the xbox 360 but had to stop when school started getting intense again, so i do wan to finish that up…and i got an early copy of bayonetta. whoo! and then the slew of psp and ds games that keep coming out. man, oh man.

i should be polishing up my resume but i feel kind of sick and out of it. i should probably go to bed. i think i’ll just read a few comics first. i almost forgot they were sitting in a pile.

leads to productivity in areas where it’s really not needed. i started on a list of games last night. still need to add more ds and psp games. and snes. and gamecube.

GAMES!

(and it being the weekend) is having an excuse to not do anything productive. this morning i went and took the practice gre exam and completely bombed. stupid me didn’t have any breakfast, just coffee. the only food i brought with me was a banana, and that sure as hell wasn’t enough to get me through until well past noon. needless to say, throughout the test i got shaky and fuzzy headed and slightly sick. :\

after the practice gre, went out to the ramen shop and inhaled a bowl of kimchee ramen and some delicious gyoza. it had been too long since visiting the ramen shop. after ramen came tokyo! on blu-ray and some much needed ginger/lemon/honey infusion for my throat. all in all, i have to say tokyo! was…ok. the second film just about ruined it for me. all the dialogue in the language nobody understood without subtitles….wtf. seriously, wtf. it was many many minutes of painful sitting.

so after movie, i took a nap. woke up and ate more noodles…took a shower…and then i thought i would watch another movie, and then decided against it. thought i would catch up on season 3 of 30 rock…but then thought perhaps i would like to finish reading the first wreauththu book but then got sidetracked by the internet.

while on the internet i came to realize scribblenauts had been leaked onto the interwebs. my god…the game is great. the tutorial was kind of slow and long and i thought the rest of the game would follow in the same fashion. boy was i wrong. this game is FUN. FUUUUUUN. and i made a cthulhu! only it attacked me and i died, so i ended up riding a unicorn instead.

well, it’s 1 am and i am up again. super tired, but cant sleep. booo. tomorrow is a day full of errands, hospital,  homework, and a class. class from 6-9! should be interesting.

i learned that we have a new computer lab policy. students are only allowed to print 10 pages a day. wtf? some of the articles and documents and notes we need to print out are 40 pages long, easy. i had lab write-ups that were longer than 10 pages. it makes me a little bitter and angry about my exponentially increasing lab fees. like 300 – 800 in a span of a couple of years increasing. fucking lame.

gearing up and looking forward to a D&D 4.0 campaign with a bunch of mo’s. which should also be pretty interesting.

i guess i’ll listen to a robot podcast or two and hopefully pass out.

since purchasing persona 4 back in december, it has not been taken out of my ps2. in fact, i decided on getting a ps2 when persona 3: fes came out, and that was the only game that stayed in there until persona 4 came out…even though i had purchased TWELVE other ps2 games that i had been meaning to play.

but back to persona 4. when i moved, before all of my other stuff moved with me, i played quite a bit of persona 4. once the moving/baby happened and shortly thereafter, the beginning of spring semester, my game playing time dwindled down to almost nothing. but in the last few weeks, i’ve been picking up an hour here and there. last night i played for a couple hours and thoroughly enjoyed myself (and was slightly mortified by kanji tatsumi’s dungeon in the tv). tonight, when i turned on the ps2, the persona 4 disc wouldn’t read. i thought perhaps the laser FINALLY died.

the ps2 actually didn’t read any discs when i got it (from some douche on craigslist i traded my gba + games for) but it turns out i just had to adjust the power going to the laser. so, in anticipation of it actually dying i went ahead and bought another laser….which i haven’t had to use yet. ok…so no big deal. but before i decided to take everything apart, i put in another game to test. works fine…another game…works fine…FOUR GAMES LATER, i realize there is nothing wrong with the ps2 but the persona 4 disc itself. FUCKING BUMMER.

so tomorrow, i will go out and get another copy. but god damn it…this sucks.

i told myself i wouldn’t play any more games until finals were over. or read comics. come friday, i will be picking up persona 4 and my stash that came in this week from the comic shop. i suspect no one will see me until school starts again.

i cheated a little bit today though and purchased everyday shooter for the psp. i played it a little bit at work and a little after work to calm my mind before a final exam.

wtf. talk about being taken by surprise. i am COMPLETELY addicted to this game. aside from a few small details (like having to run over the dots twice to pick them up) this game is absolutely amazing. i still have yet to make it past the third stage…mainly because i don’t know what the hell i’m doing, but i’ve unlocked it, as well as the fourth stage under single play mode. the music intertwined with the game is fucking fantastic! i have a feeling i will be playing this one for quite some time above other, more high profile titles.

yeep! i should study at least a little bit.

that week off for fall break has really done a number one me. it’s finals week and i have absolutely no motivation to study. NONE. zip. ZILCH!

in an effort to procrastinate studying for my next final, which is tomorrow, i’ve  done some reading around on the internet looking up old pc games that i might find interesting to play. of course, there were a couple i already have…in a corner…unplayed for god knows how long. so i ripped images and installed them.

first up: call of cthulhu – dark corner of the earth. erm…it looks scary. first person survival horror game of lovecraftian influence? i’m sure this will make me scream like a little girl…even though the graphics are not as “realistic” as today’s games. giant mickey mouse hands for all!

second: planescape: torment. so, i remember playing this game. i don’t remember finishing it. oops. it was fun, and it seems to be on the top of the list of all time games on all of the all time games lists…so you know, why not? it seems to run in vista…i just started it up and went through the menus.

games that i have thought about playing and will get to eventually…

- neverwinter nights…the first one. i played it…partially and eventually wanted to go through and make my own dungeons…but you know, short attention span. now, i have lesser expectations of myself (i’ll make levels in little big planet ) and will go online to find other people’s dungeons to play through. should be fun!

- system shock 2. um, i’ve never played it. i know…bad gamer. considering i LOVE bioshock, i figure this one might be worth my while.

i’m also kind of preparing for the week i have taken off of work to move. i don’t actually know how long i will be without internet and knowing myself, i will probably hop on some sort of instant message client on my phone in some sort of pathetic attempt to keep open lines of communication with the outside world. yeah, i know, shut up.

i do have tons of games yet to be played for the consoles as well…just in case. throw in all of the ‘i’ll want to read it one day’ novels and stack of back issues of comics and i think i’m set on the entertainment route. not to mention all of those tv/anime shows i’ve been meaning to watch the last few years.

i might leave the condo…maybe.

so very very excited for this game to come out. pre-ordered it and counted down the days.

first off, the pre-order bonus messenger bag is pretty hideous. i looked at it and then folded it up and stuffed it under a chair in the corner. really ugly.

now, on to the game…

i played the demo over and over and over. i thought i had mastered the controls through the tutorial and part of the first level. i actually ended up deleting it so i wouldn’t overplay it. there were still moments where i couldn’t quite get the hang of the sequence of button presses.

i started playing this saturday night. got through about 80% of the game saturday night, and finished up the rest of it today. the story was alright, nothing too gripping. the visuals are AMAZING, the camera seems to work exactly how i want it to most of the time, and the controls…are ok.

controls are always a big issue for me. a lot of the time when i would try and jump up onto something, it wouldn’t connect and i would be jumping right in front of it and onto it repeatedly until i was gunned down. fucking suck.

also, it seems whenever a game has a wallrun feature, i never can master it. this is problematic in a game that requires several skilled wallrun/jump combinations to further progress in the game. i died a lot.

in fact, i died more times in the first two chapters of mirror’s edge on easy than i did playing four chapters of gears of war 2 on insane. serious. it was bad.

it wasn’t until the final chapter of the game where i realized i really really love the puzzle aspects of the game. the combat…not so much. seriously, it is def no fun. the right path is also not always very obvious, but it could have been worse.

the soundtrack, is amazing. the music playing while running through the puzzles and dying every five seconds was good fun. unfortunately, the story is very short. i’m not interested in completing time trials or finding all the messenger bags so after beating it, there was nothing much left.

i do wish the game was longer, the control was tighter, and the cutscenes didn’t look like e-surance commercials. then it would have to been totally top notch.

xbox recently launched their new live service.

likes: avatars, installing game to hard drive, streaming netflix

dislikes: menus buried under other menus, having to scroll with large pictures of crap rather than a text list, SONY NOT HAVING THEIR MOVIES AVAILABLE FOR STREAMING VIA NETFLIX?

so far, it’s alright. the new look is snazzy, but sometimes you cant get to things as easily as you should be able to. bummer…

eventually i’ll put together a more thoughtful and coherent post about the service…

when putting together my avatar i discovered they had little pre-done things that matched me. hair, glasses, digital wristwatch…