Finally getting around to posting.

[napoleonherself]

This post is actually two weeks in the making (and three times in the typing, because Internet Explorer keeps crashing -- it even cleared the clipboard when it went last time, losing me a post that was entirely finished except for one link that I was digging up), so I'm probably forgetting a lot of things. But I can always come back and post about 'em when I think of 'em.



First: On New Year's Day we went and had lunch with mechamom, mechastepdad, mechasister, mechasisterhusband, and mechastepdadmom. (Don't you love my habit of identifying people as mecha-related lists of suffixes?) Here is the place we went:



Heh heh. Dongs.

Yes, I did say the above line every single time the name of the place was mentioned during the week or so between the plan being made and our actually going there. I am, as always, a thirteen-year-old boy.



Flash forward to January 5th, Saturday, and Atomic Age Cinema. We knew that the movie was going to be When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, and mecha had an idea for a sort of present for our hosts: a poster for the movie, only with them in it. I thought the idea was teh awesome, and so I worked on it the week before, and then we spent twelve bucks to have it printed and laminated at Kinko's. It looks like this:


(Twice-as-big version here)

Of course, as it turns out, there isn't one damned T-rex in the whole movie. At least our hosts liked the poster enough to announce its existence to everyone, point us out and name us as the generous party, and then pass it around the audience. Which was... yeah, a bit more reaction than we were hoping for, but I look at it this way: Doctor Calimari said a while ago that every time we do something nice for them, it saves us from being eaten for another week. Maybe since they liked the poster so much, it will actually give us two weeks of continued living! Then, the eating.



School started on the 7th, for what will (barring catastrophe) be my last semester before I finally graduate. My courseload looks to be very easy, especially compared to last semester's UNBEARABLE HELLISHNESS where I pulled off a 4.0, somehow. Assuming nothing goes horribly horribly wrong, I might actually get a degree soon! Amazing!

(For those coming in late, I am 26, have never gone to school only part-time, and still ain't graduated. Ooooooold.)



I beat Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City yesterday. Well, the storyline missions. I doubt I will ever get 100%, since there are two checkpoints in the Dirtring that cruelly elude me, and the Firefighter mission is kicking my Ray-Liotta-voiced ass. Still, I got to kill all my enemies. That was sweet.



Over the last week, we went to the Vintage Phoenix (the local comic shop of awesomeness) four times. Do not even ask how much we spent on comics. By the end the owner was referring to us by name, because we just kept coming in and buying things. And mecha would have bought even more if I had not made him stop! Lemme tell you, someday when I'm actually employed and we've saved up a bit of cash, we are probably going to come back down to Bloomington, buy all the things we have ever drooled over in that store, and make the owner a very, very happy man. The entire runs of Transmet and Sandman alone will put us over anything we've spent there before.



Undoubtedly there are plenty of other things I meant to post about over the last couple weeks, but have now forgotten. Until I think of them, here, have a video that gives you some idea of what it is like to hang out with Doctor Calimari and Baron Mardi.

The End.

Comments

[vfc.livejournal.com]

Is that Doug?

[napoleonherself.livejournal.com]

I don't know any Dougs. Who do you mean?

[darnn.livejournal.com]

VC made a bigger impression on me than SA, probably because it's the first GTA3-generation game I played. I really felt bad for the blond moustached cops. I had a story I was going to write from the perspective of one of them that doesn't realize he's in a game. Hence, all the people throwing themselves under cars, all the senseless violence around him makes no sense. I was most likely going to have him die in a shootout with Tommy, the kind where you just get bored with the missions and start butchering cops around your mansion and refilling your health until you get sick of it. From the little bit I had actually written, he lived with his mother and had a bunch of turtle figurines on a doily on his TV. That he would write little poems about.

Anyway, I've made headway in SA for the first time in months. Where was it that you were stuck? Was it flight school? Basically anything with a plance was fucking terrible, but I'm proud to say I did pass flight school in a couple days. The circling the base part was the worst, but I persevered.

Then, when I did pass it, there was the goddamn staying below the radar mission. It was the best when by the time I did manage to get to the fucking corona and back, I'd explode on landing. And speaking of exploding on landing, how about that Liberty City mission! Minutes upon minutes of pointlessly flying the plane, a fairly easy slaughter, then minutes upon minutes of pointlessly flying the plane back, only to kill myself when I try to land. Some time before this mission I had resigned myself to using cheats, since I just did not want to waste a bunch of time dating people etc. So I just used the faster gameplay cheat and flew that plane over and over until at one point it managed to explode only *after* I got out of it.

And what did I get for all my trouble? A jetpack. Big whoop. If I'm playing by the rules I can only get it at the air strip, so it's not like it's going to help me travel much more efficiently. And it's slow. Bikes are probably faster, even with environmental limitations taken into account. Aaaand, it won't even get me to a height that's actually fun.

In the mission where you had to blow up an airplane for Toreno and parachute out, I felt for the first time like any of the flying stuff paid off. Here I was, looking at this landscape I usually had no wade through, but I was above it all. A great feeling. The sort of feeling games should inspire. It should always be a design goal to take something familiar and make it amazing. But, you can't go that high with the jetpack. I mostly cheat to get it and speed up gameplay if I really want to use it to travel, which I usually don't. It's just so stupid you can't have it in every safehouse, though. Again, it's a matter of wasting time. You could have it wherever you wanted, if you could be bothered to fly there from the air strip.

That's what's great about PC games. There are a bunch of Half Life 2 mods that change minor aspects of gameplay without affecting it too much overall. So if you've played it once, you can play it again with this particular annoyance removed. I'd totally make the jetpack like three times faster, with different heigh limitation and available anywhere.

The missions themselves, more and more, are becoming exercises in futile repetition devoid of any fun or challenge. See the Liberty City thing above. There has so far been one mission, one mission in the entire game, where you can skip a trip you need to make if you've made it before. That should be in every mission where there's a long, pointless trip to make!

I didn't plan to exceed the comment lenth limitation with this, but oh well. Anyway. Where was it that you got hopelessly stuck with a plane before? And if I remember right and you passed it, where are you stuck now, if at all?

Also, to end on a lighter note:

How do pilots like their pizzas?

Plain.

[napoleonherself.livejournal.com]

I had a story I was going to write from the perspective of one of them that doesn't realize he's in a game.

You should totally do this.

For the record, I've thought off and on of writing something either from the viewpoint of a random SA NPC, or one of Carl's girlfriends. I don't know how much you've actually gone through with the dating, but once you've sat through a couple total hours of dates, you notice there's a real pattern where one of his girlfriends says something kind of callous or horrible, and he gives a not-listening non-answer... "I'd shoot you just because I could, Carl!" "Wow, you're an amazing storyteller." Naturally, I've started to wonder how a conversational model like that would work in real life. Maybe she's realized that their relationship is a sham, that he's just using her, that he doesn't care at all. Maybe she's just trying to get a reaction, any reaction at all, out of him. Trying to make him actually notice her. Trying to make him care, even for one second. She wonders whether she's just wasting her time. She wonders whether she should just leave him... but somehow she can't.

Come to think of it, I did write a very short bit of fiction based on SA, but it's under another name so I can't link it here. I'm trying kind of a Richard Bachman thing, you see, though so far it isn't working very well.

Where was it that you were stuck? Was it flight school?

Yeah, but I got it eventually. Then I got stuck on something else, but got through that. I think I'm on the final storyline mission now; I went through it about three times, getting stuck for various reasons, and giving up for a while to do the firefighter mission because being fireproof makes the middle part about a hundred times easier. I think I just have to manage to follow a certain vehicle and then I win teh gaem. But I'm kind of putting it off because I'm worried that once I finish it I won't have anything more to look forward to.

Also, gasp, cheater. I never use cheats unless I'm either A) running through a mission I've already failed a bunch of times, to see which way I should go while the fifty guys shoot at me without effect because I made myself bulletproof; or B) just fuckin' around for kicks. Either way, if I'm playing For Realz, no cheats. I read that they might mess up your save, plus anyway it just doesn't feel right to save something that I did with a button cheat. Of course, a "the mission says to do it like this, this and this, but it's actually easier to just bazooka everything in sight" kind of cheat is a different story.

How does Jenny like her pizza?

MADE OF KNIVES AND JAMMED INTO YOUR FACE

[wing-zero-ew.livejournal.com]

OW MY FACE

[napoleonherself.livejournal.com]

Isn't your face supposedly made of metal? Why would knives actually hurt you any?