I recently beat this game, so I thought I’d give it a little review since it seems to be something of an unsung hero in videogame circles. The game I have on the Wii is in fact a port of the PS2 version, so I can only speak of this Wiified port.

Okami is a game about saving the world, indeed, but you are a god, but alas, a god that’s down on her luck, since you had died and lost your powers, but have been ressurected. I’m not entirely sure how a being (a sprite in this case) able to ressurect a god of any kind doesn’t have the power to go off and save the world herself, but whatever. You are a god, in the sort of greek way, one that isn’t necessarily all powerful or all knowing. If this was a game about the christian god trying to save the world, presumably the game would congratulate you and say Game Complete after first pressing the start button.

The first thing one notices about this game is the artistic style. It is sort of cell-shaded, like Zelda: Wind Waker (oh, and the zelda comparaisons won’t end there alas). But in the way that Wind Waker looked like a cartoon, Okami looks like Japanese art on scrolls, which is handy since that’s what it’s trying to reflect. The cutscenes look great, and you think, “The game can’t possibly look like this the whole way through”, but it does.

The second thing one might notice is the plot is quite deep and, er, verbose. You notice this right away unfortunately, since the opening cutscenes last about 20 minutes, if you read as slow as I do and choose not to skip them outright. There are other portions of the game that have similarly long cutscenes, but it really does help flesh out the story. The game was trying to be Epic, it is both a strength, and a weakness.

In the game, there are two ways of interacting with the world. The first way is through the normal physicality that one might expect from a free-ranging adventure game. At this point, people might be reminded of Zelda: Twilight Princess, since, well, both have heavily to do with Wolves. Oh well. As Amaterasu (the wolf) you can run around, jump, hit things with your head, etc. In battle, you can use one of three classes of weapons (each class has 5 versions of these weapons, with increasing strength).

The first is a Reflector, which is a mirror that sits on your back, you can whip it out and swing it around. Much later you get what they call Glaives which are basically swords that you similarly whip around from your back. The third type is the usable type, Rosaries, which you whip about. Why do I say “usable”? Well, I’ve found that Reflectors and Glaives were pretty hard to use at first (I’ve gotten a bit better).

See, you start with a single weapon, the weakest reflector. When in battle, you naturally do what Twilight Princess taught you to do, which is waggle the wiimote like mad. The attack cycle would fire, animate and then as it stopped, it would see that you’re waggling, and do another attack cycle. But not the reflector. The only way to chain attacks, is to waggle at the right time. If you don’t, you sit around like an idiot, unable to attack for about 5 seconds wondering what the hell is happening. I didn’t even know this was the problem until I was in an ingame dojo and bought an extra chain to the combo. It took me 10 minutes to properly do it to be released from the training session. The problem is that, on the PS2, the attack control was, of course, a button. Hitting a button with rhythm is relatively easy. But when the attack control is wagging a wiimote, you get no feedback that it actually understood what you did, and it makes it infuriating. Further, as far as I can tell, it never told me that this chaining combo thing was going on, only the dojo upgrade cleared that one up.

Glaives, gotten much later in the game, I never really figured out. You’re supposed to raise the wiimote to charge it, then swing down to attack. In practice, it seemed to do whatever the hell it wanted on it’s own.

So I stuck with rosaries, which are unfortunately the weakest weapon type in the game, but at least you can waggle like mad and it will work. I’ll probably try the reflectors again at some point, since the second way of interacting with the environment had it’s problems, but once learned, was much easier.

The second way of interacting with the environment, and the main ‘gimmick’ of the game, is the Celestial Brush. At basically any point in the game, and in battle, you can press a button and the world freezes and the camera pulls back and shows the world as if it was on a paper scroll. You can then paint using the brush (in actuality your own tail) onto the world and cause various effects. You can cause the sun to appear by drawing a circle in the sky, or slash your enemies by drawing a straight slash mark over them. The slash was one of the first brush techniques you learn in the game, and boy, is it infuriating.

The PS2 version used the analog stick to control the brush, and so the straight line move was very easy. On the wii, using the wiimote pointing at the screen, it is quite a bit harder. There is a secondary button you can press at this point to ‘lock’ the brush to create straight lines, but even then, this is hard. You may get a line, but at an angle you’d prefer not having. This was incredibly frustrating for the first few sessions of play, but after 30 hours, I can usually manage all the brush techniques, even the slash without the straightness-lock.

One facet I enjoy about the game is that it’s not about killing things (well, you kills lots of demons and such), but about restoring the land. And some of the nicest cutscenes are when you bloom one of the guardian saplings and uncurse an area.

Another interesting aspect of the enemy battles is that they aren’t forced on you most of the time. Boss battles are, and some introductory battles, but the rest of the time, the enemy ‘encounters’ wander the areas as evil scrolls. When you run into them (or get close enough that they chase and touch you) you get trapped in an evil fenced off area and battle them. The introduction cutscenes are pretty neat, one of my favorites is for the yellow drum imp.

Xenophones need not apply. The game is filled with Japanese myth references, and untranslated text. Like the ‘praise’ bubbles that power you up are inscribed with the word for ‘Happiness’ or so the manual would tell me. The brush gods you encounter give have spheres with their names on them as well. The evil-fencing that encloses enemy arenas seems to be made entirely of japanese characters, probably unfriendly ones at that. When you slash at an enemy that is blocking such attacks, the japanese for Useless appears. Now that one, I wish I had known earlier. The sound effect seems to give the correct indication, but even then, if the text “Useless” had appears, I might have caught on sooner.

Even with the motion control flaws and annoying weapons, I still rate this game fairly high. I think I might have enjoyed it a teeny bit more on PS2, but watching speedruns, the brushwork is accurate, but really quite slow. Now that I’ve caught on, I think that aspect is much better on the Wii. The game is actually pretty easy, I died once and that was during the first semi-boss fight, when I was still struggling with the controls. It’s actually laughably easy if you use all the tools available. You can aquire what work as ‘extra lives’ effectively, and there are fairly inexpensive attack and defense boosters. There are also exorcism slips that you can spam (use in quick succession) that can take down bosses in less than a minute. A lot of these you get just through opening treasure chests, and even then you get quite a lot of money and can buy them. If you ignore using them (as I did) you can make the game a little more challenging. The dungeons were more puzzle based, with few enemies, but the dungeons were far less jarring with the rest of the overworld than in zelda. In zelda, you knew when you left the overworld and entered a dungeon. In Okami, it’s far less distinct, which makes it flow a lot better.

A couple more annoyances, but this time specifically with the port. There are a couple of bonus games missing from the wii version that could be done on the loading screens, but apparently Wii loads so quickly that they just took them out. I wish they could have left them in, maybe with a smaller requirement to ‘win’, since they give you fangs, a side-currency that you really can’t get enough of in the game, at least at first. Any source is a good source. More galling is the removal of the credit and epilogue sequence. Sure, without them, you don’t sense anything is missing, but knowing that such materials exist that you don’t have (other than seeing them on youtube or similar) is irritating.

But all in all, 9 thumbs up.

Addendum: One big addendum I have to make to this entry. One funny think about Okami on the wii is that it was hit by some controversy when the box art featured an IGN watermark that looked partially edited out, but still quite visible.

For me, the irony (if it’s irony, I don’t know anymore) is that the controversy was what I first heard about the game. Then I had heard about how amusing it was that a game that prided itself on being artistic would have a problem like this. And so that’s how I found out about vague details about the game. Then I spotted it in a nearby shop when travelling with Curtis and Alicia. One thing about Alicia is that whenever you show interest in anything, she’ll take note of it for a future christmas or birthday gift (note to self: never feign interest in anything I don’t actually want). So thanks to her as well.

It’s that time again, I’ll just post a few links to a couple flash games I’ve played recently that I’ve enjoyed.

Music Catch – Minimalistic but soothing little game, collect the shapes for points, get a high multiple, avoid the bad shapes… all set to a nice bit of piano music. Pity there aren’t other songs. Not really that challenging or exciting, but a nice wind-down game.

Chronotron – Collect the time item and return to your Tardis, but of course, you can’t, so you need to revisit yourself in the past and have your past selves help you. This idea has been done before, but this version is pretty neat. But buggy, since your past selves sometimes fail to do what they once did.

5 Differences – Given a left and right panel, find and click on the 5 differences. Seems pretty boring, but the artistic qualities are engaging, for me anyway.

6 Differences – The sequel, which adds really nice sound, new effects, weird mirror image rounds, generally kind of spooky (for some reason, it reminds me of Egyption Jukebox, imagine that with “spot the difference”). Art here is really interesting too, it’s like the game is trying to tell a story, but I’m not sure what it is. Some of the differences here are frustratingly subtle, or are so dark (on my monitor) that it was quite frustrating. But for a “spot the difference” game, this is one I’ve played more than once, as seemingly silly as that sounds.

Procrastination would have be my middle name, but my parents never got around to it.

My First (and likely last) Restaurant Review

My friend Curtis writes lots of restaurant reviews, some of which I’m featured in (as Male Friend mostly, except I think once where he referred to menu as, or as not, ‘Shawn Friendly’, making reference to my many food aversions). So I thought I’d do one of my own.

The Restaurant I’m reviewing is called Bamiyan Kabob, it’s near Don Mills and Overlea. It serves Afgani food, and I’ve been there a number of times for lunch.

The place itself is kind of crappy, it’s a small place, tables are close together and I find it kind of clausterphobic, difficult to move around. That wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t as popular as it is, with quite long lineups and we often get there early for lunch because of it. The tables are quite small given the foodprint of the trays and baskets, we often put the plates on the table and dispose of the trays immediately.

The ordering is done first, and then you sit and wait for your number to be called. With the ambient noise level, it is sometimes difficult to hear if your number has come up. A little led-light sign would do a lot to make this less irritating.

The food itself though, I find quite good. I can only speak for the chicken kabob, since that’s what I always get, but I beleive the others who’ve ordered beef and lamb based kabobs have enjoyed them, given our repeat visits.

The chicken kabob itself is off the skewer and layed out next to salad, a small dollop of salsa-like food, sometimes rice, and with it comes a little basket with naan. The chicken I’ve always found to be flavourful and, this is the interesting bit, I have no problem eating all of it. Normally when it comes to meat, any meat, I’ll trim and trim and trim, sometimes significant percentages of meat are removed along with the gristle (whether it is merely perceived or real). It reminds me of a Barbecue that Alicia held several summers ago, she made kabobs, with chicken ones for me, and I really enjoyed them. Of course the spices were different, but I was still reminded of them, probably because that’s the only other time I had kabobs to that point.

The Salad that comes with the meal is sort of tacked on, it’s nothing particularly good, just lettuce with basic dressing, I often don’t eat it since usually the rest of the food is quite filling and the salad is the best candidate for dismissal. The naan is probably the best part of the meal, it always seems very fresh and warm and compliments the meal nicely. The only thing that’s missing is something to dip it in, but maybe that’s just a travesty, heh.

That’s what you get with the lunch, which comes to 8 dollars which is kind of high for lunch perhaps, but it’s worth it. The dinner is actually the same thing with quite a bit of rice. That comes to something like 10 dollars which doesn’t seem worth it either, but the rice is actually quite good and makes it a very filling meal.

So I endorse it heartily, it’s got good food but is suffering the effects of being a dinky little location that is overly popular for it’s size. Cramped conditions, moderately slow service, but food even I can eat. I call that a win.

Yeah, haven’t posted in a while, alas. Stuff has gone on, but I haven’t felt like writing.

But it’s april fool’s, and this is a pretty good effort:
Zelda The Movie
I mean, it’s a bit cheesy, but still, I hope one day something like this is actually made, and I hope they follow the Ocarina of Time to some degree as is suggested in this movie.

I’ve kinda all Zelda’ed up since I’ve been playing Twilight Princess. yeah, I finally got a Wii and bought Metroid Corruption (which curtis has been playing the hell out of at every opportunity), Mario Galaxy (which has been mostly sitting by the wayside) and Zelda: Twilight Princess, which is pretty cinematically awesome, but I’ve had some difficulty getting used to the controls.

Threw a surprise birthday party for Alicia a couple weeks back, only a few of us were available on the easter weekend. She enjoyed it, but I think I shouldn’t ever plan anything again, since I’m sure it could have been better, but I suck at planning. And she had her own event last weekend, did karaoke, apparently no one knew there were words to the M*A*S*H theme (also known as Suicide is Painless). Also, I’m not as familiar with some of these songs as I once thought I was, hehe. But hilarity was had by all.

Work sucks too. But for new reasons. So tired, taking a week of vacation soon. I won’t be doing anything, just relaxing.

Sleep…

As is now well documented, I now have a dual monitor setup. Multi-monitor setups have been available since windows 98, and yet things still screw it up. But I somehow think they weren’t as prevalent, I mean, now even I have it, and I rarely do any upgrading unless it’s particularly easy or just can’t be helped anymore. And so here we have it.

But programs have to make sure they don’t screw it up. Raymond Chen in his book The Old New Thing calls this a kind of tax. There are lots of taxes that have to be paid by software that wants to play well. Like handling low battery conditions, games working with Alt-Tab, and working properly with multi-monitor setups.

I’ve discovered at least a couple of things that seem to mess up on that front.

PowerDVD, that came pre-installed on my computer, has worked for me relatively faithfully for years. However, when I try to run it on the secondary monitor, it just crashes, right out. And it’s not even using hardware overlays.

WMP seems to work okay (I should hope they pay their own taxes) but once you start playing in one monitor, you can’t drag it to the next one. It is using hardware acceleration, so I presume this is just a limitation, not terribly painful, whatever.

VLC is my new DVD playing software since it doesn’t crash. Well, it does, sometimes. It will just blank out and then die, but what is far more irritating right now is what happens when I play a file in it and have it on the second monitor. When it’s done, the gui shrinks back down to nothing, but then nestles up against the top-left of the screen (still secondary monitor). I can drag another file to it and it plays there, I can drag the window away, but when I double click the titlebar to maximize the window, it acts like a Restore, and just gets a little bigger, I have to doubleclick again to get it to maximize.

But why maximize it, why not just run it fullscreen? Well, that works, but it also creates another entry in the taskbar for VLC hardware overlay. Now if I accidentally touch the original VLC task in the bar, it will appear as an empty gray VLC window overtop of the video. I minimize it, phew.. but then if I doubleclick the fullscreen video to get it back into a window, it does, but the video is now black, and I have to stop it and start it again. I think it’s because when I minimize the parent window, it moves back to the primary display (or thinks it does anyway) and then we get back to trying to move a hardware accelerated playback between monitors. Oh well.

Another sub-tax that VLC violates is keeping dialogs close to the parent. If I put VLC on the secondary monitor and then File – Open Disc, the dialog pops up on the primary monitor… ugh.

I tried Doom3 with the new card, it seemed to be okay (but managed to crash Nvidia’s own Temperature Guage control panel applet afterwards), but since it takes over the primary monitor and drops the res, and the desktop spans, then a bunch of windows suddenly get flung to the secondary monitor. When the game ends, not all of them make it back.

I’ll explore further to see what other programs can’t cope.

I guess I am in one respect like the typical male (well, two respects) in that I like gadgetry. Though I ride very late on the technology wave, I still like getting useless stuff sometimes, when I feel like I really really really want it (harken back to my impulse buy of the PS2).

Anyway, what I felt like getting now was a Dual Monitor setup. I had gotten one last year just after new years, when I was desperately sick, my first flatscreen. What a day it was. But that was all part of the plan, as I eventually wanted to get a second monitor. I knew something else was in my way though, as my video card only had one vga output. Drat.

So I had been toying around more recently about finally getting the videocard and second monitor, but I had no idea what kind of videocard I needed, since I wasn’t really sure of what I had, and what had changed. See, I’m interested in computers in the sense of what you do with them after they are on. I’m more into the software. I used to be interested in the hardware, but I never had money to buy stuff, or got magazines, or anything, so now my information is desperately out of date. I remember when RAM had to be balanced between the two sticks. Nowadays, wanting to upgrade my RAM, I have no idea what crazy acronymed RAM will even work with my 5 year old computer, it’s hopeless.

Which brings me to the first painful realization of the evening, I suck at hardware, always have, probably always will. I tend to let my brother handle hardware installations, usually because I’d rather have someone else to blame. Now, at work, it’s another matter. My department rolled out some Dual Monitor setups (which also required a new video card) and I was ready and willing to install it myself. Why? Because if something went wrong, we had a whole other department to help. But with my computer, not only am I on my own, but being my only computer, I can’t get online to check out error messages and such in case something goes very very wrong. Plus my computer’s information has become like another vital organ, if it dies, so does a part of me. Pathetic.

Anyway, I went to my friendly neighborhood futureshop and spent some time looking at the video cards. I had been purposely looking for a GeForce 8600, from previous discussions with people at work. However, imagine my bafflement when I saw things with strange prefixes before the name, and more weird shit after the number. Wha wha what? One card at 8500 was priced much lower than one at the 7000’s, and I assumed the higher numbers meant better. And I saw the 8500 priced significantly less than the 8600 hundred. Like over a dollar a unit in the difference, the memory of the 8600 was less, what? Then I saw, though it was less memory, it was DDR3 memory, so I guess the 3 makes it better than the DDR2 in the other one, by at least a couple of factors of memory capacity itself, I had no idea that sequels to Dance Dance Revolution held so much sway (I jest, of course, I know there is a difference, it was just hard for me to spot).

In the end, I picked the 8500 some such. But I noticed that it was for PCI-Express. Did I have PCI-Express… I know I had PCI… was it express? Are they all Express?…. Should I have looked inside the computer before coming? Yes. Alas, I figured I’d just ask the guy…. my computer is around 4-5 years old, but it runs a P4 processor, knowing the motherboard would have to be compatible with that, is it likely I’d have a PCI-Express slot? The answer was “Sure”. I think it was unlikely for them to answer anything else. I also somehow assumed I was using on-board video, somehow forgetting the mini-fiasco of getting Proteva to replace the card they put in the box with the one I actually ordered, some other GeForce card. All I remembered about that one before going to Futureshop was it was 64M, meaning virtually anything I got would be better. But did I have PCI-E…. seemed every video card there was either PCI-E, or AGP. Someone told me once that AGP = bad, so I just figured.. of course, I have that slot. And bought the thing.

Oh, and I also picked up the second monitor as well. I stood around the monitor/computer area trying to look like I needed to be served, but no one ever approached me. They all looked too busy trying to sell some other people some apple products, claiming Windows couldn’t do the things they wanted to do (some of which seemed to me to be flat out lies, or half-truths, but what the hell, iMacs will probably keep them out of harm’s way). I had wanted a standard-aspect ratio monitor, as in, non-widescreen, because fullscreen games don’t seem to understand that throwing the monitor into 640*480 just isn’t going to work out the way it thinks. But for some reason, those monitors were all crazy expensive, compared to comparable widescreens, so I just grabbed one from a stack, which is how I got the first one, and it worked out okay.

So I get home, ready to power down my computer and do the magic swap. I could install a harddrive, or another PCI card okay most likely, but I’d never done anything like a videocard. It worried me, because if I screwed it up, I’d have no display to help me figure things out. I opened up the case, saw the old card there. Turns out it was an Nvidia GeForce MX440, from good old 2002, piece of crap. It was dusty, I used the can of dusting gas to clean it off (not a can of air, it contains asphyxiating explosive gasses, presumably for my comfort and safety), and then I saw… that doesn’t look like the slot that can handle the pins in the new card. I took a closer look and compared it with the new-card’s quick setup sheet. That looks like AGP… god dammit. I boot the computer and go to the device properties for the display, and it confirms it, definitely AGP, and not even good AGP, but 4x, which I didn’t learn until later. Basically, all those good cards are out of bounds because my computer sucks. As I didn’t feel like even entertaining the possibility of getting a new motherboard, I packed it all up and went back to Futureshop and returned it. They asked if it was defective, I said I was, my computer couldn’t handle it. I saw them type in that the card was defective, so I’ve learned never to be funny with these people. Presumably they will work out that the card is fine.

Anyway, went back to the wall-o-computer-stuff and looked just at the AGP ones. Oh, wait…. AGP-8x… what the hell is that? Sides of boxes say helpful things like “Required: AGP-8x compatible slot” and “Some motherboards violate AGP standards, card may not physically fit”. This does nothing to build my confidence. What the hell should I get? At least having seen the card already in the computer, it had 3 sections of pins, do these look like that? No. I finally find one that has the features I want, while being old enough to work with my computer (for XP, no mention of Vista), and yet is far more expensive than the one I just returned, with is all newy and Vista-ready-y. *sigh*. I buy the smegger. I end up at the same cashier to whom I returned the first card, she gave no indication that she recognized me. People are strange, when you’re a stranger.

I get home, uninstall the previous card’s drivers (or the manual says demons will devour my soul) and shut off the computer. I slowly and carefully remove the old card, and slowly and carefully install the new one. Ah, the next step… attach power. What, this thing needs a power feed? The old one didn’t… I guess it needs more to pump out all those triangles, yeah. Well, I knew higher end ones needed more power, but I figured all it needed was a good enough PSU and pulled it from the socket or something. Oh yeah, turns out my new PSU is just good enough to handle this thing, the first card wouldn’t have worked even if I had a PCI-E slot. Of course, I only remembered to check this once I found I had to plug the thing in. The card came with it’s own power lines, but I found a spare lead from the PSU and plugged it in, hoping for the best.

After rebooting into glorious 640*480 mode, installing the drivers off the CD, rebooting again, and changing the display mode myself (somehow I figured it would pick a good one once the drivers were there), I was set. The one downside to the card is that it’s not DVI-DVI, but DVI-VGA or whatever. On my old card, I was on the bad connector anyway, so I never knew DVI regardless. So I took the new monitor (and given it’s number, assumed it was better) and plugged it into the DVI port, and the old monitor into the second. The old one apparently could handle DVI (as all flatscreens I think can, by their nature), but it didn’t provide the cord, at least I think it didn’t… it’s been a year, leave me alone).

So now, I’ve got the dualscreen goodness, and for my own reference, here is what I’ve got
Card: Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS OC (512MB DDR2)
Primary Monitor: LG L206W 1680*1050 DVI
Secondary Monitor: LG L204WT 1680*1050 VGA

Games still don’t understand it. Neither does GotoMyPC, at least, not natively, but I can make the window span and it sort of works, except since my dual screens are widescreen, while work ones are non-widescreen (Pan and scan? heh) then I have less than optimal screen useage, alas)

I think the next upgrade to my computer should be system ram, I have a paltry 512M, and I’ve been meaning to get another stick. While I was in there I did see that it was just on one stick, and I have 2 more banks to play with. But I wonder what friggen alphabetsoup kind of ram it is.

I guess I’ll just listen to the beepcodes.

---

Edit: I have my motherboard manual, it’s an Asus P4B533, and says this about the memory:
3 x 184-pin DDR DIMM sockets for up to 2GB memory
Supports PC2100/PC1600 unbuffered ECC/non-ECC DDR DIMMs

Which is great, except CPU-Z tells me that my memory is PC2700 (166 MHz). What? Looks like I’ll have to crawl in and see for myself. But what if CPU-Z isn’t wrong? Hate.

Burroughs has died.

I only really heard something was wrong on Sunday, and even then, it was a suspicion. Then he was taken in to the vet on Monday where they apparently took a lot of fluid out of his chest. The vet said it was one of two conditions, one of which treatable, the other not, but didn’t elaborate further and said that my mother had to wait for the lab results on the fluid. She heard this evening that it was Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is, for a cat, a death sentence. She opted to have him put down rather than struggle trying to breath a few more weeks of life. Only two weekends ago he was fine… I’ve also heard that apparently he had an abnormally large heart that may have been the cause of this and the virus was some ancillary thing, I don’t know….

I fear for my cat now, who has been staying with my parents for a little while. The vet apparently said that there was no chance of transmission, but the websites I’ve visited suggest otherwise. In any case, I think I’ll make good on my offer of Midnight to my mother, they’ll both be happier.

Hobbes and Missy lost to coyotes most likely, and now Burroughs, who probably had enough wits about him in the forest to evade those predators for life, felled by some apparently rare disease, from where I wonder. In any case, if there is a higher power, it apparently is most interested in killing our cats.

I think it’s sad that this blog even has the entry where we first got him, it was one of the first entries of the blog… 2.5 years of the big-faced cat. I wrote another entry once when we thought he was lost to the woods, and that we would wait long for his coming…we will indeed wait long for your coming,

Goodbye Burroughs

Alicia came over tonight, to get together, and she gave me birthday presents. Went to a nearby Starbucks where I opened them. She gave me a card where she wished me a 27th birthday, which surprised me since I was 26 (she added a disclaimer to the card when I showed her), hehe. She also got me a copy of the last Harry Potter book, as a pre-order, so I along with untold thousands of people can finally finish the books (it’s amazing how I can casually read the first one on a bet, and then go on to own them all, hah). And a touching gift of a portrait of me in a nice frame. She caught my flattering side, which is no *actual* side exactly, but an imagined side, as I think her rendering made me look thinner. I’m going to hang it on me wall so the cat doesn’t get it.

We watched Knocked Up, which I enjoyed, Alicia thought it was so-so. The trick is all these types of movies have typical plots, which is sort of what makes them romantic comedies. Though my favorite of this kind I think is Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (which seems to have a lower score, whatever). Then we had dinner and I took her home (that is I went on the TTC with her and watched, including a very very packed bus with a driver experimenting with instant acceleration).

It’s starting to get hot here, I think I need to get a few bottles of Drysol, put it in the tub, and soak in it (and eventually scream, I think).

I never used to play stupid flash games, never. If I played a game, it was a full on proper game dammit. Sure, I played a few things in the past for like 20 seconds. Or occasionally joined a friend in some yahoo game (technically java, but same difference for my purposes). But as a single endevour, I never played the things.

But recently I’ve been tapping the relatively large resource of Digg’s playable web game category, and playing all sorts of interesting games that have totally destroyed my productivity whereever I may go.

So here are some of them so you too may suffer:

Gateway 2 – a spooky puzzle game

DiceWars – risk with dice, never before have I been so angry

Motherload – a game of ore excavation and, confusingly, battles with Satan

Winterbells – winter and bunnies and bells, very cute

Bugs – from the maker of the previous game, this one is a charming bug scaring game

Quest for the Rest – very short but interesting looking and sounding proof of concept puzzle game

Gridlock – a familiar puzzle game I’ve suddenly become decent at, level 35 is where I got stuck

Anyway, that’s just a few. I’ll see you in hell dicewars.

EDIT: Flow, how could I forget flow, it’s a really nice one.
flOw – a game of eating and evolution, no instructions as it’s meant to be intuitive, but eat red thingy to go down a level, blue to go up, and basically eat everything else. This is kind of what I wanted Zygote to look like when I originally conceived it as a 2D game, the style is minimalistic and perfect in a cellular biology kind of way.

EDIT2: 3D Logic Cube – view 3 sides of a cube and connect the colours, interesting

EDIT3: All Hallow’s Eve – one of the more fun survive-the-zombies flash games I’ve encountered, add house defenses, buy new weapons (from who?, oh well), and kill the advancing armies of zombies crying for brains. Easy is far too boring, try normal difficulty, and hard for any thing resembling a challenge.

EDIT4: Sprout – A coconut dreaming of being an oak tree, acquiring new forms to passively move across the countryside. An entirely too short puzzle game that has a lot of potential.