http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/cats.htm
Check out this game!
See, this is why I haven’t looked too closely at web games. Who has time??
I’m not going to write much about it here, as I’m still trying to digest what happened, but let’s just say that over the summer the raid group I was a part of imploded in a huge drama fest. Additionally, on several occassions, talk between Harsh Winter officers and elders became heated. These two cases make an interesting comparison, where how the drama from one was handled eventually led to its demise while the other is still alive… though hardly satisfactory to some of the affected parties. Okay, this post is vague…. sorry. I’ll post more about it after all the crap for school is over. For now, there is a good read on guild trust and goals over at Terra Nova.
So, I haven’t been posting much lately. I’ve been really busy with the start of the school year because I procrastinated all summer on writing a book review (for T. L. Taylor’s Play Between Worlds which is a very good read, btw) and revising my paper on my World of Warcraft raid’s practices in Molten Core in time for a presentation I am doing as one of the sessions in a mini-conference of presentations that a ton of other College of Ed PhD students are also a part of on Oct 27. We have to do this to progress to PhD candidacy which lets us take our general exams and work on our dissertations.
The more I think about it, the more I think I should write more about navigating academia. But damn, it is just so tiring…
Here I was trying to figure out whether to publish videos to Google or to YouTube and then recommend something to the TEP class… Well, now it looks like I won’t have to decide. 🙂
Just got back from a trip down to CA. My sister Frances got married on Sat! Grats Frances!
Anyway, I’ll post some photos later. 😛
Well, I made the switch yesterday to gmail and google calendar.
All my email is being forwarded to my google account, and when I hit reply my messages appear to others to be coming from whichever account they sent the email to. That’s handy. Also, I found an app called Companion Link which lets me sync my PDA with google calendar.
Now that my email (and contacts) and calendar are online I am ready for the Opera browser for the Nintendo DS which is slated to hit the US in January. The only question is if I will miss the pdf viewer and, of course, the ability to see my calendar, etc. without a wireless connection.
Six more things I remember about Runaway which turned me off:
1. At the very beginning of the game, Brian/the player has no idea if he should believe Gina. Well, if that is so, why does he bother stealing medical supplies from a hospital storeroom which he gets to by climbing out the window and scaling the outside wall rather than using the freakin doors?? Sheesh. That doesn’t seem quite normal to me. “I am not sure I believe this person; I think she is delusional. But, what the hell, I’ll climb out the window. Who cares if I fall to my death? When I find a storeroom, hey, morals be damned, I’m stealing from this hospital!” Later on, when it seems she is telling the truth, rather than maybe calling the cops, Brian/player decides it would be better to set off the hospital fire alarm. Uh… doesn’t that seem completely lacking in common sense to anyone? How many patients just died from that act?
2. In the museum you/Brian discover that the janitor is stealing lab equipment to sell. There is no option in the game to report this illegal activity. I guess the main character really has no morals or something… and later defaces priceless artifacts.
3. I love how in Chicago, the car the main characters use is instantly recognized by an acquaintance of the bad guys in New York where the story began. Get this: the acquaintance is a midget. Why? Who knows? The midget must have crazy memory, visualization skills, and eyesight, though, to be able to recognize from a description a totally nondescript brown sedan. Or maybe there’s only one brown sedan in all of New York and Chicago?
4. Funny how over the top a video montage of Gina plays through Brian’s head after he thinks she just fell to her death is, especially given that he spent absolutely no effort to actually see if she died. “Oh she just fell through a hole. Guess she’s dead. Oh god, no! How can life be so cruel??”
5. At one point, you/Brian discover that some local ants in a desert in Arizona love peanut butter. How do you make peanut butter? Why, by mixing peanuts with butter, of course! Wow, do they really think that’s what peanut butter is? To top it all off, the mixture has to be cooked?? And to do that, you have to put the bowl of mixture in the sunlight coming in through a window of a shack. Uh… why couldn’t you just put the bowl on the ground outside?
6. I found it annoying in general that you have to search things like bags over and over again at different parts of the story since you only realize the importance of things in the bag later on. The reason why it is annoying is that the game doesn’t tell the player what is in the bag, only that “there’s nothing I can use in there” so that there is no idea in the player that the bag might have something useful later.
After finishing Broken Sword 4, I’m extremely disappointed. I did not play the third game, so am not sure if something happened, but why are George and Nico so cold to each other? When they first meet up in this fourth game, how is it that George doesn’t recognize her at first? And there is no explanation of why Nico even shows up. Some of the puzzles were very difficult and I had to look at hint boards to solve them. I still don’t know the underlying logic behind those solutions, though. Also, the end of the game was… well.. rather abrupt. In fact, in the whole history of me as a gamer, I might have to say it was the worst ending ever.
Anyone who has not seen this movie… I dunno how available it is from rental places or Netflix, but it is worth watching (so is last year’s Crash, btw).
It’s basically the conversation a bunch of ethnically diverse men have during a weekend retreat over racism. It is emotional at times and rational at times. All of the Teacher Education Program TAs watched it today, but we didn’t have much time to discuss what we saw.
One thing I wanted to say was that I completely understand how one of the men felt when he said that he is tired of having to explain things all the time to white folk. It makes me think about how guarded I am all the time in an unconscious way and how when I go and visit my family down in California and we go to a Chinese restaurant and everyone is Chinese, I can almost literally exhale and just relax. Not that I feel much discrimination up here in the Northwest.. not explicitly so, but it is always there, like a shadow from a moving cloud which sometimes becomes very oppressive and other times is hardly noticeable.
I also remember talking to an African-American friend of mine once about how we just know. We were able to communicate a feeling that we had without even saying anything somehow… The conversation went something like:
Him: You know that feeling when… and it is always there… but in the background, sort of?
Me: Yes, I do.
And I’m sorry, but that is about as best as I can explain it to white folk.
But I do still have to wonder how much of the feeling is something I’m bringing to the table? In high school when I was rebuked by white girls, was it because of me or my race? That nagging thing… race is always a factor. I’d like to believe that it was me… or maybe not.. I don’t really know which is worse.
Well, the summer is over. What do I have to show for it? Other than some Teacher Education Program work, I played a lot of games. Heh.
I got into two main genres of games. One is my continual love of adventure games. This summer, I played 6 Nancy Drew games (haha yeah… some of them were pretty good, some not so much). Right now I’m playing Runaway: A Road Adventure with Robin and Broken Sword 4 on my own. Unfortunately, I really wanted to play Broken Sword 3 but could never get it to work on my computer.
Runaway is an odd game, but I think it ultimately fails in a lot of ways, most notably the sheer lack of research done by the developers about the settings they were portraying and crazy non-sensical physics displayed in the game. When I saw that we were going to go to Chicago and visit the natural history museum… well for some reason, I guess I’m crazy for thinking this, I thought we were going to check out the awesome Field Museum of Natural History which is basically a HUGE deal in Chicago and the museum world. It has amazing architecture and is located in a nice park area dedicated to civic improvements. Instead, we were funneled into some generic building. It was obvious the artists had never been to Chicago or at least that they just didn’t care.. or something. The same was true for their depiction of UC Berkeley at the end of the game. Ah well… It was also crazy of me to think, maybe, that their depiction of a catapult would be true to life in that heavier objects wouldn’t be shot as far as lighter objects… but nooooo… Newton’s Laws be damned. This was especially offensive since the main character was going to grad school in physics. Also, no fault of the developers, two of the characters were voiced by the same person who voices Nancy Drew. That was just coincidental weird.
Broken Sword 4, so far, has been excellent. Revolution has always made great games.
The other big genre I got into was space flight sims. I love this genre. But meh. See one of my previous post on some of my disappointments.
Also, some guildmates came up to visit (see the photos from that visit over on the right of this page) and we played a bunch of board games and a card game named Bang! Great game.