Having given us the basic premise on the first two discs, the next disc is another variation on the same established theme.
Sousuke is still rigid, stoic, and fun to watch. He’s spent most of his teenage years as a soldier, so he doesn’t really know how to be a teenager. This makes him a bit inept socially. His attempts at being a gentleman usually go awry or are misunderstood.
Kaname is still tiresome and uninteresting as a female lead. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Full Metal Panic, Disk 3”
The world in Oblivion is really big:
Well, it’s big for a computer game world, anyway. It’s portrayed as a continent. The map makes it look like one, and the inhabitants talk about it as if it was one. There is a mountain range to the north, swamps in the south, and a costal region to the west. There are different cutures and climates within Cyrodiil and the game does a pretty good job of pulling the player in and getting them to think of the place as a large country.
But it obviously isn’t. It couldn’t be. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Oblivion Mod: UnLocate Cities”
I did this last week, and while it didn’t spread as a meme, I still think it’s a good idea. Pete agreed. So here are three more people whom I’ve never linked before.
Bonnie Burman Photography – Bonnie is a family friend who runs a photoblog. I really enjoy her work. I suppose it helps that my kids are subjects in a lot of the shots on her site. She specializes in child photography, which is one of the most challenging areas of photography in my book.
Byzantium’s Shores – Kelly Sedinger has been nice enough to send a few links my way and I’ve been remiss in not pointing out that the place is a goldmine of geek culture links and musings.
I just discovered this post by Jacob Pederson which talks about “gaming degrees” and working in the videogame industry. A great read for anyone who follows this subject or anyone thinking of getting a “gaming degree”.
LATER: Fixed the link to Bonnie, which linked her studio page and not her blog.
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This should not be taken as a sign of narcissism. I enjoy reading the bios of other bloggers, and I’m assuming I am not unique. So, it is for the benefit of other curious folks that I offer this collection of personal trivia.
I’m Shamus Young, a 34 year old software engineer and a happily married father of 3. I’m a Christian, although some might find me a bit unorthodox. In my free time I tend to play videogames, watch %Anime, play D&D, and write software of dubious value. I also tend to write about these things here.
You can probably extrapolate the rest by just looking around the site. I’m a stereotypical nerd. I’m also the author of this Cyberpunk novel.
Ten useless facts about myself:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Author Bio”
With over 1.7 million views on YouTube alone, this movie has been around and seen by nearly everyone, although I just discovered it yesterday. It’s a montage made by a man who has traveled the world and filmed himself doing a humorous little dance in some of the most fantastic and exotic places on earth. I actually found it to be quite moving.
The dancing man is Matt Harding, who was an avid gamer and game developer before getting sick of it all and shooting off to the ends of the earth.
Check out the story of his travels. Pretty interesting.
Alex has finished Last Exile and takes the time to enumerate the show’s various flaws, shortcomings, and missed opportunities. I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one who thought the show left the viewer in the dark on too many occasions. Some of the omitted details were so fundamental that I was starting to wonder if I just wasn’t paying attention.
At the end of the post are a few comments (from visitors, not Alex) that are supportive of the show. I found these arguments to be unpersuasive, but it’s nice to see some people were able to enjoy the show despite its flaws.
I spent most of the day surfing around, downloading user-made game mods for Oblivion. Some are just loose data files that you put into the right directories. Some are nice, self-contained files. Others have their own self-installing executables.
I messed around today, installing, uninstalling, downloading, and generally feeling free to run whatever the internet gave me.
Then later I rebooted and suddenly AVG (my anti-virus software) couldn’t start. One of the key files was missing. Oh crap.
ohcrap ohcrap ohcrap
I managed to re-install it and it is currently doing a scan. The system files seem ok but I’m still paranoid at this point. DLL files don’t erase themselves. That file was missing for a reason. Something I ran – knowingly or unknowingly – caused it to go away. One common tactic of spyware / malware / virii is to go after your anti-virus first, so I suspect foul play.
I have no idea if it is in any way related to the Oblivion mods. It could be something else. I was on some of those pay-to-download sites, like fileplanet. You know, the ones where you have to follow ten links that all say “click here to download” before they finally get around to giving you the page where you can join (for a fee) and download the file, or you can wait half an hour for your file. Not really worth considering for a 300k file. Anyway, while I don’t suspect those sites of being directly evil, they are bathed in dozens of popups and little ads, any of which might be trying to cause mischief. I don’t know.
I haven’t had a virus yet this century, and maybe I was developing a relaxed attitude towards danger. I think I need to rekindle my sense of paranoia and suspicion when it comes to downloading software.
Geeze.
AND LATER: So what happened? I have no idea. The system is clean and running fine, no further weirdness. It probably wasn’t a virus or other malicious software, but SOMETHING strange was going on. I’ll probably never know what really happened.
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
T w e n t y S i d e d
