Game Review: Hydrophobia: Prophecy

I'd heard some stuff about Hydrophobia: Prophecy, not that I could remember what any of that stuff was, but it was stuff! You know, stuff. It wasn't a game that I hadn't heard any stuff about, like Toki Tori was when I got it as part of the pre-Portal-2-Potato-Buntle. No sir, there was stuff that had been heard.

So anyway it was like three bucks as part of a Steam weekend sale, so I picked it up at some point. This weekend, I finally played it.

Here's a plot you may have heard before: a bunch of cultists attack during a big ceremony and steal an artifact that they plan to use for nefarious purposes. The unlikely protagonist at first just tries to survive the aftermath, but eventually decides to stop the cultists' evil plans. In the process, the protagonist is exposed to the artifact and gains mysterious powers that turn out to be necessary to save the world.

Despite using Fantasy RPG Template #2, it's a dystopian-future sci-fi set on a sinking boat.

Unresolved plot threads? Check.
Implausible final boss fight? Check.
Awkward controls that don't work correctly if you remap them? Check.
Total play time: 4 hours according to Steam, which admittedly runs on Valve Time but sounds about right.

Verdict: it's a decently competent tech demo for a watery physics engine. 5/10.

Vacation of delayed travel

LAX -> LHR flight: Dec 22. Flights into Heathrow canceled due to snow, actually left on Dec 25.

LHR -> LAX flight: 3:15 PM. Airplane door failed to open, actually boarded 4:15. Inbound runway closed (weather again?) so inbound planes used outbound runway while we sat and waited. Actual liftoff time: 5pm.

LAX -> home: left airport terminal at 10pm. Car battery was dead, actually left parking lot 11:30pm.

Despite all that, had a great (if abbreviated) time in England visiting family. And now I'm back home!

Open Thread 1: Jury Duty

Unexpected!

I had jury duty today. It was kind of different from last time!

The last time I did this, around two years ago, I got called in to the Supreme Court downtown, and in the first ten minutes my group was called and I was put on the jury for an attempted-murder case. Interesting stuff, seeing how the system works. So I was actually looking forward to doing it again.

This time they didn't even call me in on the first day. The second day (today) I did have to go in, but it was to the municipal court, which apparently mostly handles misdemeanors, and primarily traffic tickets at that. The staffers in charge of the pool of jury candidates said there were seven cases today, but apparently they were all uncontested or something because none of the groups got called and they let us go home at noon!

So I had a nice day of shopping (Valkyria Chronicles 2 came out today, as did Metroid: Other M, but I can't play the latter yet because I don't have RCA or composite ports on my monitor D: ), made an early dinner and had a nice couple of rounds of Starcraft 2 co-op with Z.

Dodge Boollet

Ball cooldown = 0
Multi-jump limit = 999

Result:

Major, you've done it again!

So I'm set up at a friend's house temporarily while I look for a new apartment. Good news: he has wireless internet set up, and it's pretty good. Bad news: my desktop doesn't have a wifi card.

Solution:

Yeah, my netbook's named Motoko, and on top of feeling brilliant for thinking up this solution in the first place, I'm also super happy that she's acting as an interface between two networks. You guys do know about Ghost in the Shell, right?

While we're talking about computer names, I should explain the other one; my gaming rig's named Jaeger, for the eponymous Sin Eater of FINDER: Sin Eater. I wish the early FINDER stuff was easier to... find, these days; other than that single book, I haven't been able to dig up any of the pre-web stuff. FINDER: Torch is online though, so go read it and then buy the Sin Eater book, you guys; I want Ms. McNeil to do as well out of web publishing as the Foglios have.

I made a thing!

I've been planning this for a while, and finally here it is!

So what is it? Well, I had this idea when I was playing Persona 3: FES a couple years ago to write a blog for the protagonist, in character and with posts on the actual days matching the ingame calendar. I didn't do it at the time for various reasons; the game runs April 2009-2010, so the posts wouldn't have shown up for months, but mostly I just didn't have the idea until I was 70 hours in and I didn't want to start over.

I ended up not even finishing the game, making it to September-ish before my roommate moved out, taking the game and PS2 with him. I'd kind of lost interest by that point anyway.

Two years later...

Persona 3 Portable finally came out today, with the option of playing as a different protagonist, who has different dialog and social interactions because, well, she's a girl. I figured that and the fact that it's been a couple years since I played it would mean that it would be worth playing again. Supposedly they've also cut out a bunch of the timewasting cruft, so I'm hoping I can get all the way through it this time.

So I present to you: Alice in Tartarus, a blog by Alice Sakuraba as she transfers into Gekkoukan High School for the start of her junior year. No savescumming, and I don't know how the game ends, so here's hoping it has some literary merit...

It is, of course, spoilertacular.

That's Great, Guys...

So apparently there's this new whiz-bang template designer that you can use on Blogger. Except when I tried it out, Noscript started popping up warnings about possible cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

A while back my bank sent me a survey. No sarcasm, it really was my bank. But they used a third-party surveying company to do it, and the URL looked like http://baconbank.supersurveys.net/survey?id=sdhaljksdhklajsdhklasdhkjas

All you designers out there, seriously, pay attention here:

Spend the time to understand the technology you're using, and don't use known hacking techniques to do cool things with your design. It doesn't matter that it makes it cooler! OTHER PEOPLE USE IT FOR HACKING. It makes me not trust you.