Something need doing?

An excellent article written by John Brennan (one of the IMD third years) about irony of Spore. I usually dislike analysis of mediums that are clearly intended for pure entertainment value, but this ended up being a compelling read regardless. If nothing else, you can scroll through the overview of what people are doing with the Spore Creature Creator… a fascinating study all in itself.

So we’re describing an explosion of virtual biodiversity that conjures the most fertile period of earth’s biological history. Of course, I think it’s more than relevant to point out that right now is also a noteworthy moment in Earth’s biological history - A biodiversity crisis, what scientists fear may be the fastest mass extinction in earth’s history. This is also coming to be known as the sixth extinction and most aptly as the Holocene extinction event (Holocene refers to the relatively brief age of humankind) …

My personal dream for Spore is a world populated by our collective guilty conscience …

Spore: From the Bottom Up.

BEWARE TEH POLITICKS.

This is actually about … uh, “complaints of liberal media”… but I read it for the Sarah Palin information. Yeah, you know, even the apathetic like to know who is in the running? Actually, maybe ignorance would have been bliss in this case, cause she is just scary.

Credit to Quad.

me: Wow. So Sarah Palin was picked because despite her inexperience, she has all the makings of the finest Republican despots.
quadoshock: yup
me: I think I’d like to move to Australia if this year’s elections don’t pan out.
quadoshock: Canada’s closer ;)

… or something.

I finiiiiiiiished. The main feeling I have coming away from this game? It’s the prettiest game EVAR. Just about everything was pleasing to look at, EXCEPT … for just about every humanoid model in the game. -__-;

Exception being Zelda. SHE WAS SO PRETTY. Midna (un-imped) would have looked pretty too, if she wasn’t wearing that bulky cloak. But the Zoran Queen BEATS THEM ALL. ZOMG SHE WAS PRETTY. XD

Actually, I really loved anything that had ANY water in it (very, very, VERY pretty water) and Zoras. The Zora model in this game was really amazing (even the fish helmed ones) and they swam so smoothly and they were easily the most compelling race in the game. Huge improvement over their lackluster N64 versions.

Um, wait, okay. Let’s try to organize this review more coherently, shall we. >_<

Story

Er, okay. It’s Zelda. Not expecting anything really groundbreaking here, but it wasn’t that bad. They did do a pretty good job of making Midna all mysterious and creepy and you didn’t know whether she was good or evil. And I did like the Zora side story (ooh, and that water armor was cool — I like how they actually made it functional instead of passing it off as magic… like there’s a cloth that actually covers Link’s mouth when swimming :x ).

The pacing wasn’t so hot, though… I was expecting more revelations halfway through and I got exactly… um, zero. ::lol:: That was kind of frustrating, but I guess it was mostly my fault for thinking it’d follow the traditional formula. Most of the plot was revealed in segments at the end.

Sound / Music

Man, Link’s … um, grunt track, I guess… it sounded so anime. :P Oh well. Interesting to note that Midna was the only one who got to speak the entire game, even if it was in total gibberish. I really did think the vast majority of music was very good, though, especially since you end up revisiting old music more often than not. They included stuff from the Gameboy versions, so I didn’t recognize all of it.

Wolf howling instead of playing an ocarina… ummmm. ::lol:: It was cute, but Link needs some serious howling lessons. XD

Gameplay

Hmm! One of my favorite things to do in the N64 Zeldas was firing mah laze— I mean, my bow and arrow, a mechanic that was completely destroyed by the upgrade to Wiimote aiming. Oh well. On the other hand, this game really developed swordfighting in its place and had — holy crap — mounted combat. That was immensely cool, to be able to use ALL your weapons on horseback and being given scenarios for doing so. The wagon escort was definitely a highlight of the game for me. :)

I do feel like the difficulty level was generally toned down by a ton. The hardest “fight” I ever had to do was (seriously) the sumo wrestling at the beginning… since I couldn’t always tell which way to dodge in time and I think I only got passed that section through luck. Everything else was fairly easy, after you figure out what exactly you’re supposed to do. I used some potions, but generally wasn’t low on life and I died way more to falling off when you’re not supposed to than to actual monsters.

Dungeons? I was impressed, actually. I usually really dislike dungeon crawling, but I found the ones in Twilight Princess to be pretty well done. The one exception being Arbiter’s Grounds… which wasn’t really a bad dungeon, but it really freaked the crap out of me. (spiders and invisible rats FTL. also… hate quicksand.) I was also super glad that the water temple involved only raising the water level, rather than going up and down and up and down… XP

Favorite dungeon by FAR is the Temple of Time, which was a significant throwback to Ocarina of Time. The place just looked so amazingly majestic and I absolutely loved the Dominion Rod. XD Second favorite was the Snowpeak mansion… I liked that it wasn’t your traditional dungeon, plus the soup making was amusing. (And the snow wolfos monsters were reaaaaaaaally cool.) Third favorite dungeon… mmm, not sure I have one, but I really liked the concept of the Goron mines… using magnetism for the iron boots. Unrealistic because Link should have passed out from the blood rushing to his head all those times, but hey… it was fun. XD

Bosses were my ultimate favorite thing to do in Ocarina and they were SO NERFED IN THIS GAME. ARGH. But there were still some memorable ones, though they were all just a little too easy… I really think the hardest boss in the entire game may have been the first one. -_- Zelda bosses generally follow a pattern of (1) disable and (2) slash slash slash and these did not disappoint. I like it though, since it makes you do more than just button mash the entire time.

Morpheel, though… was a total Shadow of the Colossus rip. Seriously. One of the Ganon phases was a little SotC-y too. >_> In fact, a LOT of the game felt SotCish at times as far as scale and architecture. (and the other half of the time it felt like Okami cause of Wolf Link! ::cough:: I mean…)

I have to say, my favorite fight was probably Armogohma… Gohma’s ancestor, I suppose. It wasn’t really any more challenging than any of the others, but taking control of a huge statue and squishing the oversized spider boss with a giant stone hand was extraordinarily satisfying. :X

Ganon fight? Not impressed. ;_; The horseback part wasn’t so bad, but everything else was just too short and easy. Final swordfight with Ganon… I’d had better duels with those heavily armored black knight mobs. Though the “chance” sequence was kind of nice, but the rest of it just felt a little too random and my strikes felt like they landed because of luck rather than skill. Kind of sucky when the system had generally worked so nicely up til then.

Ending was all right, nothing special. I was let down by the fight, which felt so anticlimactic, so wasn’t expecting much from the ending itself. I suppose it could be considered satisfactory. :P

Overall score? Hmmm… A-, I suppose! I really enjoyed myself for the most part… “too easy” is not really something you can honestly mark a game down for. (mebbe I just has skillz.) It was a gorgeous, gorgeous game and I really wish there were more screenshots on the web to do it justice!

::goes to hijack the soundtrack::

Spark and I have earthquake avoidance powers or something. On July 29th, Los Angeles experienced a fairly decent sized quake of 5.2, but we were up in the SF Bay Area and didn’t feel a thing.

Now that we’re back in LA, just now, the SF Bay Area got a 4.0 quake. Missed it again. ::lol::

Especially six hour long ones! At least we get an hour lunch break. -_-

The stranger thing is that there’s going to be this whole month and a half where we don’t have classes at all… we just meet up / work on a film project and some other thing called a photographic notebook for the second half of the semester… and then we just meet on the very last day of class and screen our films. O.o So that will be nice, I guess… when we get to that point and I don’t have to attend six hour sessions anymore…

The more annoying thing is that the last actual lecture day is Oct 11th, which is the same day as BlizzCon day two, so I won’t be able to go to that. To BlizzCon, I mean. ;_; Oh well. Though I could still go to the concert thing at night, if everyone wanted to go to that. Myeh.

At least it seems like an interesting class. It’s called “Visual Expression” and we really got slammed with information… but it’s all about the composition of shots and framing and stuff. Some of it was just common sense, but there was a lot of other theory that was totally new to me.

And horror of horrors, I actually TOOK NOTES. O_O Largely because … I dunno, I felt like it. And the lecturer’s speaking style really lent itself very well to notes. Plus he likes to draw on examples on the whiteboard and they’re amusing so I copied a number of them. :X And he’s a funny person in general… seems to know a lot of what he’s talking about. This is him on IMDB: Bruce A. Block. (remember the benefits of classes near Hollywood? XP )

So we learned about like… deepspace and flatspace and all the ways to get one or the other… and there’s ambiguous space and limited space… and and… yeah. TONS and tons and tons of terms. XP Hope the class stays interesting, cause six hours is really killer. ::lol::

… a link to Joust Venture, Dev’s latest machinima piece. Iiiii kept forgetting to link it sooner, but now I get to link it with the added bonus of mentioning that it won second place in the contest he made it for. :P

Joust is an 8-bit game NES game, for the record, so just for that it’s amusing. It’s made better by his brother Sander’s outlandish voice acting, which I find to be absolutely hilarious and perfect for what Dev was trying to accomplish. ::lol:: I didn’t have a hand in making this one at all, but so much the better, imho. XD

On a not entirely unrelated note… Dev went and put up director’s commentary on the YouTube video for Frame of Mind, in case you’re interested in that kind of thing.

Iiiii got an internship. It’s at this tiny little company called Blindlight. I’m a little mixed over it… simultaneously interested and curious, but also a little afraid that I won’t enjoy myself. There’re definitely going to be slow days, but hopefully not so many.

It’s twice a week for the full day for the full day, so that’s going to eat up my Tuesdays and Thursdays now. Unfortunately it’s unpaid, but I was feeling the pressure to get an internship so that I could fulfill the grad requirement and be free to teach next summer. For now, I will probably just do this for a semester and then next semester — if my schedule is still lightish — find a design internship for fun / experience / resume-padding / money.

Tomorrow’s my first day, so we’ll see how that goes. >_>;

In the meantime, I’m obsessed with this song I found while researching last year’s BlizzCon “original song” contest winners. It reminds me a lot of “Canta per me” for some reason… think it’s the percussive strings. This guy has a whole album, actually, of really Celtic-ish music with really nice chorals. Very purdy.

(arrggh I wish I could turn off you-spelled-that-wrong mode in Google Chrome. -_-)

Swamped with work this week… so frustrating…

In case I ever want to find it again, cause these are just gorgeous. http://dp07116007.lolipop.jp/wanda.htm

I love the Wander+Mono picture.

This commercial’s awesome… aired during Super Bowl XL, but I don’t watch those, so.

Stunt City.

>_>

So work yesterday was kind of fun. Some actors came in and they recorded auditions for voice over parts and the guys let me listen with the spare headphones. :x They have a nice padded-room sound booth with a high quality microphone and everything. (they made me go in to test it for levels before the actors got there.)

And then they sent me a document that detailed a bunch of stuff that they wanted me to look over and get my opinion on, since I’ve been taking design courses… and that had me thinking about lots of stuff.

… okay, so that was all pretty vague. So now I will mention that I had to sign an NDA before starting to work there and therefore I will never be able to write about anything in detail. XP Gotta love them NDAs…

Bwahaha, D&D was so much fun today. XD

http://kass.jottit.com/ctin_532

Finally got that out of the way… hopefully my motivation ends up being sufficient and I create something I like, rather than something I’m only mildly interested in. :\

… is our food!

Almost missed flip. (no comments plz.)

I retconned my world! x_X; I hadto. First one just wasn’t gellin’. I already like the current one quite a bit more…

I feel like there’re goldfish swimming around in my stomach.

I got better… and then I got worse… and now I’m a little better again… ::cry::

… 100% today, but at least I haven’t felt particularly sick today.

SOUP! :D :D

Been regular for a couple days now and my appetite has more or less returned to normal. Whoo-hoo. Let’s hope the next few days of stress won’t throw everything out of whack again. ;_;

Bwahaha.

[edit] Okay, first off… what?

And then… second off… what??

Thirdly… WHAT??

Fourthly! … … well, you get the idea.

At least it’s shaping up to be more interesting than season 2! XP

This is cute. ::snerk:: This website has all the number 1 songs for every day in history reaching as far back as 1892, so you can look up and see what the hit song was on the day you were born or any other semi significant date. Totally trivial, but amusing nonetheless. Plus links to the music in iTMS so you can listen to it if you’ve never heard.

I’m “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” by Phil Collins. >_>

I imagine this’ll be more amusing for the younger kids born in the 90s, cause then we’d actually get to make fun of someone who was born to an N’Sync hit… XD

[edit] Nice… I made this entry and forgot to actually link the site. ::stupid:: http://www.joshhosler.biz/NumberOneInHistory/SelectMonth.htm

Not the first time we’ve seen something like this, but this one is extraordinarily well done. :x

Wario Land: Shake it!

… I really wish I didn’t like eating so much. :P

::… more druid PvP videos::sigh::

Felt so snoozy during class today, even though I got seven hours of sleep last night… should have been plenty. Ended up visiting Starbucks at lunch for a pick-me-up, but half an hour before class ended, I was yawning again. Nyargh.

Can’t get lowerrrrrr. Waaaaah. I’ve been going up and down in the same region for weeks now… grrr.

Downloaded latest Heroes episode only to find that the .rar file was password-locked. ARGH.

… are tasty.