Aleph Ersatz

I know where all my bandwidth is going this christmas!

That’s right, game’s, I’ve been playing them!  Or at least trying demos.

Tired the demo for the over-hyped Left 4 Dead 2.  While I’m a fan of Left 4 Dead, 2 doesn’t offer all that much more in the way of “new features”, just some new faces, voices and terrain.  The whole addition of melee weapons takes away from the dual pistol logic, pretty much cripling any interest I had in it.  Sure, a frying pan is fun to wahck zombies with, but what about being able to use a Mag Pistol and  Frying Pan?  Why do I have to sacrifice a pistol that is vastly supperior to half of the starting weapons for a stupid melee?  Why do I need limited ammo?  C’mon guys!

I have the beta of League of Legends, but have not played it yet.  Looks like a decent RTS game, with some fun multiplayer, I just have not started it up yet.  The beta is free to pay, so I’m sold on that for the time being.  The website feels far too much like a korean MMO right now, but that’s fine because most korean MMOs are actually rather fun, even if rediculously hard on the leraning curve.

Have my eyes set on Tortchlight in the near future.  $20 for a Diablo-clone by the same guys that made Diablo?  What’ not to love there?  Mayb be a single-player game, but for that price, a self-distributed game is probably well worth it.  I’ve heard many good reviews of it, and I’m hoping it holds up.  I’m a huge fan of Diablo, and with luck this litte pck-me-up will be just the thing I need while I’m waiting for Diablo III to show it’s ugly face in 2011.

I have tried 3 times to download the Mod verion of Dino D-Day, with no luck.  It is supposedly a HL2 mod and soon-to-be-full-game where you fight Nazi Dinosaurs.  (For anyone who has seen Idiocracy, this should not be a new concept)  The demo video looked fun but I have given up trying to download it for now.  I just cannot get an installer that works!  Maybe sometime in the future, when I feel the need to punch a T-Rex in the face, I will try again.

Lastly, I found out about a Startcraft AI competition.  Seems that this game just will not die!  Several APIs exist for developing bots for the existing game, adding on their own AI dlls to play against.  A very nifty concept and impressiv for a 10+ year old game.  Expressive Intelligence Studio is holding an AI competition with a dealine of September 2010 for entries.  They promote using something called the BroodWar API for programming it.  It’s a nifty and pretty straight-forward way to interface with the game, and allows anyone with basic C++ knowledge to easily work with the game and programming.  They are also working on a LUA interface for scripting that way too.

I’ve been poking at the BW API just a little and have decided I am going to go as far as making an AI that builds a basic base, and sends a single group of units to attack.  That’s all I want to do because making a proper AI is way way to hard.  Now if anyone wants to try and start a team to develop a SC AI, then I’d be glad to help, but by myself I just do not have the time, motivation, or knowledge to make a working, let alone competative level, AI for SC.

I have found a wodnerful site for tracking one’s anime and manga lists: http://www.myanimelist.net

I have disabled the Otaku List subpage off of this site and am switched over to using hat website instead.

You can check out my new pages here:

Anime List

Manga List

Hey look, another three weeks and not a damn post.  I swear, I’m alwamost ready to try that stupid Twitter thing.

Finish Scribblenauts.  The puzzles were not as hard as I expected.  90% of them have a pretty basic solution once you know how to use things like ropes, tractor beams, helicopters, and the occasional velociraptor.  After that, it’s all just easy wins.

Still have to finish GTA4 now, and return to Fallout 3 now that the GotY edition and all the DLC is comng out.  After that I’m planning to try Bioshock or maybe Borderlands, depending on what I can run.

Left 4 Dead 2 is almost out, and I’m almost ready to get it.  Seriously, frying pans?  Who doesn’t want to try using that against a horde of brain-hungry living undeads???  But I mean, barely a year after L4D came out, another $50 seems a bit much.  Maybe steam will have a deal soon …. or I can find 3 other suck…I mean, friends yeah, friends….

Anime evolution 2010 will be on for August 13 - 15 at UBC!  It has been confirmed on the forums!  Prereg will start in november, and I will be there, in costume!

And yes, I’m being link-lazy today.  You can “google” the stuff I mentioned, I know you can.

Okay, I’m hooked on Scribblenauts.  Now that the novely of creating damn near everything I’ve ever wanted is done, ‘m not trying to sole the puzzles and levels.  They are HARD!  But, I found an awesome resource I have been helping with some: Scribblenauts Wiki!  Not alot of stuff yet, but very organized and setup nicely!

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In other news, GT5 looks amazing.  I wonder if it’s coming out for the PS3 or the PS4?  I mean seriously, when will it be done?  Even if your not into the game, or cars, the music is damn awesome for this video.  That’s supposedly in-game rendering only, too.

Or check out the song by London Elektricity.  It’s called Just One Minutee (Apex remix).

I got my hands on Scribblenaugts today!  Very very fun, even after spending my entire lunch on the title screen playing with objects.

XKCD does not lie, the LHC does work!  As does a ton of other stuff.  I am going to start documenting what I’ve tried, used, played with, etc and how I beat each level because there are so damn many choices.

More on this later, though, because the baby kept me from the comp most of the night, and I need sleep!

If you havne’t heard of it, Scribblenauts just came out and I got to try it today for a little while.  Long story short: I want it!  Thus, I endevoured to find it today after work.  While everyplace is sold out, the most homourous place to visit was London Drugs.  You have to love associates that have no fucking clue what they are doing or what they sell.

My coworker P and I entered London Drugs, found the games section and browsed the scant selection of DS and Wii titles, hidden behind the Wii accessories.  While their selection sucks, they do have DS and Wii stuff there.  So we went to find an associate for help.

P: “Excuse me, do you carry DS games?”

SA1: “Maybe, over there my know.”

P: “We’re looking for a specific DS game, can you look it up?”

SA1: “Let’s go ask them.

We wander ove to the games section where another associate is busy with a  customer.

SA1 (to SA2): “These guys are looking for Nintendo DS, er Nintendo DS games or DS games.”

SA2: “We don’t sell Nintendo stuff here.  Sony and Microsoft only.”

SA1: “Oh ok.  Sorry guys.”

We proceeded to look at each other, thank them both, and walk a littl ways away.  We got about 15 feet, then burst out laughing.  We joked about going back and pointing out the Wii and DS stuff in the store, but man, how bad can you be?  It’s your department, you should know what you sell!  Unless, of course, Sony makes the DS, then man have I been working for the wrong people!

Ok to follow up on my two-day-old previous post.  I went to the Statio Square pub and got to see Distracticon / Jackie Treehork / Grapefuit (three projects with the same major players) and Damage Inc., a local Metallica Tribute band.  $6 ass kick and a half!  It was awesome.  Got a wee drunk and they were competing against the Festival of Lights, so there was like 25 people at the bar, but I’m glad I went.

I really like Distracticon and the crew, so that was what I went for.  Damage Inc. was icing on the cake, and damn was it good cake.  I highly recommend seeing all of them if you get a chance, and like those styles of musics.

After two and a half straight days of playing it, I have to say that Demigod is a fantastic LAN party game.  I wish we’d found it sooner!

Easy to pick up, easy to challenge oneself, easy to strategize and perfect.  Damnably entertaining in large groups or small.

Updated the Otaku List again.  Been far too long, had tons to add.

Found one of the best metal music videos ever.  Meshuggah is this really talented experimental metal band, with crazy math-metal esque licks, and they made the following their OFFICIAL video for their song.

Yes that is the real band in the video.