Author Archives: TheUser

Arcades

Why are there so few arcades and such crappy games at the ones that do exist? I see less and less arcade games in public places. There used to be arcade games at laundromats, pizza places etc., but now the only arcades are basically those miniature golf / go-kart / bumper boat places.
The games at these places usually consist of fighting games, racing games, gun games, and ticket dispensing games. This assortment lacks variety. I’m not very interested in racing games and am not very good at fighting games. Gun games can be fun at times, but I feel that most of them are just plain ugly.
What happened to all the other games? What happened to all the arcade games? I want to love arcades. I really do. But they’re hard to find, and I can’t seem to love what I actually can find. I do remember playing the newest (at the time at least) Metal Slug in a movie theater back in Long Beach. William was with me, and it was downtown at the Pike, I think. William, if you read this, let me know if you remember any of this. That was fun. And I do play Qix and Donkey Kong at Dave & Busters. However, I want more Metal Slug and old beat ’em ups like the Simpsons and the Ninja Turtles games. I want the experience of playing games in a hopefully air conditioned room standing around with a bunch of other gamers.

Graduations, Roommates Left :(

Thursday was the last day of school. I stayed up pretty late talking to William that night, and Friday morning we went to Jackie’s Engineering graduation. It was fun! It was also Justina and Kevin’s graduations! Afterwards we ate with Larysa at Del Taco. After a nap, we went to Joann’s Social Sciences graduation! Ed and Mike made lots of noise with pots and pans when they called out her name. Afterwards we went out to dinner with Justina and her family. That was really fun, and Allison Tsao was there. Although I knew they were related, I wasn’t thinking about that fact when I got there so was pleasantly surprised to find Allison there too. Allison had completely moved out just that week too. Dinner was great! We at Traditions by Pascal. It was a very nice restaurant, and the food was quite delicious. I had garlic chicken and cr

New Roommates, New Room, New Job, New Games etc.

I got the entry title down, but finding the urge to write this post is proving to be a lot of work.

gem’s been looking for new roommates. Hana moved in a few weeks ago. She goes to Concordia and is pretty cool. Mike moves out of my place in a week, and I’m moving into his room. Duncan wants me to move into his room same day so he can move into my old room. Hopefully I can, but I have a project to do that weekend too. I recently started a part-time job as a software development engineer at Meridian Link. It’s doing C# ASP.NET web development.
We’ve been Mario Kart Wii a lot. It’s very easy to approach for non-gamers, which is nice because it allows a lot of people to play. I played it quite a bit until I finished the GP, and I participated in both tournaments, but lately I’ve stopped playing it alone. We also got Wii Fit last week; it’s a lot better than I thought it would be. It’s fun and approachable by non-gamers, and it seems to actually be helping. I’ve been a bit sore at least =D
Jackie, gemma, and I started a book club. Surprisingly William joined too. Antonio suggested I read Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony by John Scalzi. gem read them after me, and she recommended them to Jackie. After that we decided to start a book club and have since read Brave New World and Neverwhere. We’re going to read Jonathan Livingston Seagull next.
I got a Pirate Nero tokidoki flash drive. It’s a Mimobot designer consumer electronics USB stick. I repaired my PSP a while ago and have lately been playing Azure Dreams as much as possible. I really love this game but never finished it.
In Classics we read selections from Iliad and Odyssey. We just finished reading Argonautika and are now reading the Aeneid. I really didn’t like the Argonautika very much. The Aeneid is very entertaining.

Speed Racer’s Car at Irvine Spectrum



Speed Racer’s Car at Irvine Spectrum, originally uploaded by theuser.

The man who did the “original” voice of Speed Racer was there today too. Strange, I expected the original voice actor to be Japanese because the original voice acting was Japanese. I guess my definition of “original” is different. Still, it was cool.

Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day everyone! I hope people celebrated Mother today by playing one of the games in the series! I set up an NES emulator on my PSP to play Earthbound Zero. Perhaps I’ll actually get through it, but I’m doubtful. Yay Mother!

Myst (DS)

When I first heard that Myst was being ported to the DS, I was thrilled. A truly amazing experience was being brought to a handheld I love so I could finally finish it, playing whenever I had a free chance anywhere. I was very disappointed. Myst is more awesome than I remember, but Midway did a horrendous job with the port.
First, let me talk a little bit about Myst without concern for the port. Myst is a first-person point and click adventure. While most point and click adventures provide puzzles with clear goals in mind, Myst’s puzzles are usually quite vague and confusing. Across the island are various puzzles, and it is not clear what you are supposed to do with each puzzle or why. It is like walking into a room filled with technology with which you are not familiar. The only way to understand it is to begin to use it.
On the island of Myst, you solve puzzles gaining you access to linking books. These books transport you to other ages (basically Myst sized islands). I would not want to go into more detail because I would not want to spoil any of the game.
The audio consists mainly of ambient noises and fit in with the game very well. The graphics are dated now of course, but looked great at the time of original release. Myst was one of the first games to come on a CD-ROM, and many people bought CD-ROM drives just to play Myst. The game looks very realistic using beautiful pre-rendered graphics.
Now to my dismay, I must talk about the port.
The graphics are a direct port, without raising the resolution at all. The text is incredibly hard to read. To compensate, there’s a magnifying glass that when clicked, will magnify the middle of the screen and put it on the top screen. However, the resolution stays the same. At first the text is too small. Now it’s just pixelated and blurry. There’s a feature allowing you to jot down notes, but I have not used it. You can take screenshots to look at later, but they do not seem to work right. I flipped to the middle of a book, took a screenshot, and went on my way to a puzzle. When I looked at the screenshot, it was of the first page of the book, not the page I tried to capture.
There are also many graphical bugs. First, some images do not line up. For instance, if there’s a switch to pull, the screen actually consists of the background image and the image of a switch. When you select the switch, the image of the switch should change to the image of a flipped switch. However, it displays slightly off-center from where it should, resulting in a screen tearing-like image. On top of that, sometimes the switches will appear to be in a different state than they really are. One type of switch can either be red or green. In one case, the red worked fine, but the green displayed it at one quarter its proper size. Some areas of the game have the screen flash incorrect colors or distort when changing screen.
At one point, someone I was playing with saved and later reloaded. She was at a puzzle, but could not figure out what to do. When she tried to leave the puzzle, she could not. At first she thought that she could not leave until she finished the puzzle. However, I went there on my game and was able to walk away again. She was fully stuck and had to restart her save file. Horrible.
Puzzles also sometimes reset when reloading. Imaging working hard on a puzzle, saving the game, and turning your DS off. Later you come back and find that you have to do everything again. I realize some games do this, but other puzzles in Myst do save. Some of the puzzles simply do not save.
Myst is a wonderfully beautiful game. If you truly want to experience it, play on the PC. It is a little troublesome to get it to work on Windows XP or newer, but it can be done. It would work best on a Windows 95 PC. However, if you do not want to be bothered by that and really, really want a handheld version, then you might want to try this DS port. Keep in mind how many problems you will face. That said, I am playing it on the DS because I prefer being able to play in various locations. However, I have played the original and know how great it is. Please, if you play Midway’s horrible DS port of Myst, keep in mind that the game was much better in its original form.