sugardeath

Post Spring Break Recap

This post is huge.  I have decided to write a huge ass post about every recent thing that I can think of since my last "real" update.  This covers ALL of Spring Break.  Other topics include work, TimeSplitters 3, the LAN Party, the PSP, and maybe another topic or two if you're lucky.

Spring Break

Spring Break was...  what it always is...  Quiet.  Empty.  Nothing to do.  Almost Perfect.

Work

I worked during break.  Friday and Saturday, the first weekend; Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning during the week.  It was so boring.  The first clean was at 1:47PM.  I was on the clock at 11:30AM.  Lots of time for lots of nothing.  Same with the Sunday after the LAN Party.  Boring!

TimeSplitters 3

Er, TimeSplitters Future Perfect (herein out referred to as TS3).  So I have had this game for little under two weeks now (we got it the day after it came out), and I haven't really said anything about it.

Short: It rocks.

Long: It totally rocks my socks.  It's everything TS2 was, and more (well, except for the exclusion of Flame Tag, but I can live).  The single player mode is MUCH better than TS2.  TS2's single player was kinda random, but it was very fun nonetheless.  TS3's single player has quite a bit more story, but it still retains the whole fun aspect.  The cinematics are amazing.  First, they're real-time.  Second, they run smooth as freaking butter.  And not that cheap margarine crap.  Actual butter.  In fact, most of the game runs at a pretty smooth 60fps!  It's amazing, I didn't know the PS2 had that much power!  Free Radical added a nice touch to the single player: humor.  This is definitely one story that does NOT take itself too seriously.  Cortez (the main character) is actually a pretty funny and exaggerated guy (all the characters behave in rather exaggerated ways though, and it's awesome).  It's expressed in how he talks, what he says, and how he moves.  Oh man.  Single player, while kinda short, is pretty amazing.

But that's not why I got this game, now is it?  Lemme tell y'all one thing: I played TS2 for the multiplayer.  I played against bots, but it was fun nonetheless.  I don't play against bots as much anymore in TS3.  Why?  Online.  Online rocks.  Every game mode, every map can be played online.  Voice-chat is alright (some people just can't speak coherently into a microphone), but a keyboard option would be nice (if not at least for data entry!).  There is no real lobby, per se, but how it is is nice, it helps one find and enter a game quicker.  It's so nice to actually play against someone else (I did play with David and Brian in TS2, yes, but not often), especially someone that's better than the bots.

Another great feature of TS2 was the mapmaker.  With the mapmaker you could, wait for it, make your own maps!  It was awesome!  There was a whole game logic thing to, for scripting events and such.  It was a very simple graphical interface that replicated a very simple ifelse programming language.  You could actually do a lot with it.  Well, in TS3, the mapmaker is back, and better than ever.  First: You can do outdoor maps.  Well, outdoor as in you're missing the roof and you can add weather affects, but it still adds GREAT atmosphere.  Then there's the fact that they upped the max story enemy count.  It used to be limited to eight story enemies (same amount as the multiplayer bots).  However, it is now unlimited!  I've actually heard that it's limited to fifty, but I've only tested it up to twenty or so.  Either way, it is MUCH better.  I would always run into problems in TS2 with the eight character limit.  There are now stackable pieces, so one can create towers and such, as well as pits.  There's also a nice death room (instant kill) that one could put at the bottom of said pit (there's no falling damage unless you're five or more stories high, and five stories is the max).

I downloaded this great map-- downloaded?  Yes!  You can share custom maps ONLINE!!  You can play custom maps ONLINE!  It's AWESOME!  Anyway.  I downloaded this great map.  It recreated one of the best maps of all time: the Complex from Goldeneye.  It is so freaking awesome.  VERY accurate, yet still unique (you can't recreate the map PERFECTLY, but this dude made it VERY close).  Oh man.  It is now my favorite map =P

As if there wasn't enough multiplayer with the bots and the inclusion of online (no bots online, sorry), there's two player coop for the story missions as well as split-screen online (kinda makes the no bots online thing alright, eh?).  Now, this is not a first.  Tribes: Aerial Assault (PS2) allows two players to play online on the same console.  However!  This IS a first because it's not limited to two players!  I have seen FOUR people from the same console in a game at once!  I first found out about this a little after David and I started playing.  We first chose coop, but after a bit of coop, I wanted to do the arcade mode.  I saw that Network wasn't greyed out like Challenges was.  Why is this?  Well, we hit network.  A menu popped up: Online Game, LAN Game.  We chose Online, got connected, joined a game, and saw two player entries: Raldios and Guest 1:Raldios.  Sweet!!  Needless to say, we've enjoyed this feature quite a bit.

In addition to the standard Story mode, there's also the offline arcade matches (multiplayer games with bots and/or humans), the arcade league (pre-setup arcade matches that have goals/certain time/score limits that you must complete), and the challenge mode.  Challenge mode is awesome.  It's a bunch of random things and you are rewarded with a Gold, Silver, or Bronze award if you meet the specifications for each award.  There's also a Platinum award, but its requirements aren't listed.  One of my favorite challenges in TS2 was the first Behead the Undead.  Your goal was to shoot the heads off of zombies with a shotgun, it was awesome.  Another great one was where you had to smash the windows in the first area of the first level with bricks.  Well, they brought both of those challenge types back, but with totally new objectives.  Instead of zombies, for example, it's zombie monkeys, or burning zombies.  Instead of windows, it's dishes and windows in a chinese restaurant or bottles of booze in a disco rink (?).  There's another one where the monkeys are running by holding melons above their heads (melons were quite common in TS2 as well, there was a player stat that counted how many melons you've smashed).  Guess what you have to do: Snipe the melons without hurting the monkeys.  It's hilarious, but hard.

I do believe that covers way more than enough of the game.  There might still be several things I forgot to cover, but that's alright, I think I've covered enough.

Toldya it was long. :tongue:

LAN Party!

We had a LAN Party on Friday, April 1st.

April Fool's.

It was pretty cool, but Paul, Andrew, and Raul were on WoW the entire time.  Ryan was on WoW quite a bit, but not as much as they were.  Heather got inducted into the WoW cult.  Even Tim played WoW, for several hours!  And he doesn't even own the game!

It was also Andrew's Birthday Party.  There were some real gifts, but there were also some ingame WoW gifts.  And a dead goldfish.

Greg got Andrew a dead goldfish.  It was frozen in a ziplock bag.  It was hilarious.  But then I fell asleep (from about 10AM to roughly 10:50AM), and they had some fun with the fish at my expense. :sad:

During the LAN Party, Josh was playing God of War (PS2) for 17 hours STRAIGHT.  He beat the game, needless to say.  While he was playing, however, I got a little PSP action in.

Pictures up! soon (including frozen fish and sleeping Tony!).

Josh's PSP

Let me just start out by saying: I want a PSP.  I do NOT, however, have $250 to spend on the base system.  That's just wrong.  Mom and I (well, more like Mom) calculated how much spending money I have from work (so much of it is being saved for college and such, but I get a little to spend on stuff).  I have about $350 to spend on whatever I want, at least $640 (?) some is saved up for college.

Anyway, the PSP.  It totally rocks.  I only played Lumines, but it was AWESOME.  The music and the sounds were awesome.  Basically it's a tetris type clone where you have to match up rectangles of the same color (there are two colors) in order to get points.  The bigger the rectangle/the more rectangles there are when the little sweeper bar comes around, the more points you get.  As you play, the music and backgrounds and such respond to how well you're doing.  The graphics were pretty simplistic, but that's alright.  Even with this 2D game, the screen looked so damn BEAUTIFUL!  It's so freaking huge, it sucked me in.  I want one.  Too bad, as I said, I am not going to spend an ungodly amount of money on such a system.  Maybe if it were a console that hooked up to the TV or something, but not on a handheld.  That's insane.  Also, since the screen is so huge, it can be easily scratched and otherwise damaged.  I felt like I was holding something that belonged in a museum.  Not because of how it looked (granted, it does look amazing), but because of how fragile it felt. 

I did try to ninja launch a UMD from it, but no such luck...  I think Sony may have fixed that problem for the US release.  The square button, though it didn't get stuck, did feel kinda weird, like half of it wasn't being pressed down all the way.  None of the other buttons felt this way.  And the analog nub?  Lumines, to my knowledge, doesn't use it, but I did mess around with it a bit.  It feels really cheap and doesn't seem like it would be too useful at all. 

Still, all in all, I think I want a PSP.  Using the free PSP game promotion posted earlier, I could easily get me a PSP and a game or three like so:

1. Buy a bunch of uber cheap games (read: less than $5) from a place such as Gamerush
2. Turn them in and get a free PSP game
3. Return free PSP game for in-store credit
4. Repeat steps one through three until you have enough in-store credit to buy a PSP
5. Should your desired games not be part of the promotion, repeat steps one through three until you have enough in-store credit to buy said desired game(s)
6. Buy PSP + games with in-store credit
7. Optional: Sell PSP + Games on eBay for inflated prices
8. Profit!!!

What's left?

Um, there's not much else to really talk about.  Lacy and Andrew broke up late last month, the Pope died, not much else.

This post has been in composition since Saturday.  It's about time it got out here.