What’s The Best Part About Brawl?
So I've owned Super Smash Brothers Brawl for about a week now and I feel that I've logged enough hours in it to state what I believe is the best aspect of this game. I have not unlocked everything yet, mind you, that'll take ages. Anyway. What would you say is the best part about Brawl? The fact that it has ten more characters than Melee? That there are no more clone characters? That all the characters are way more balanced than in Melee? That there are more stages than Melee (I am unsure of how many)? The fact that you can play with people online? The stage builder so that you essentially have an infinite amount of stages? The fact that stages can be shared via SD card AND via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection? Or howabout the picture mode? In Melee if you wanted to snapshots you had to go into Camera Mode, which was lame. There was also no way to get them off of your Gamecube memory card (well, no easy way, the PSO exploit worked, but it was a bitch and a half).
In Brawl you can take snapshots anywhere and anytime except for online matches (can't pause an online game). You can share snapshots with friends via SD card or the WFC. Did you know there's a third-party tool to convert the snapshots into jpeg files? Sweet, eh? You can also take replays of matches if they're under three minutes long! These are also shareable via SD card or WFC. Oh! Everyday, if you connect to the WFC, you'll receive a brand new custom stage, snapshot, and replay make/taken and submitted to Nintendo by another Brawl player. I like this part a lot. I've already seen a few ridiculous Home Run Contest replays.
OK, maybe you've played with all of that. Have you taken a look at the story mode? It'll take you at least seven hours to complete and has some absolutely amazing cinematics. Basically, it's Kirby Super Star on steroids (the Great Maze is the Great Cave Offensive). Once you finish that, there's Boss Rush mode. All-Star mode makes a come back. Multi-Man Brawls, Home Run Contests, Event matches; it's all sure to keep you busy. Oh, and everything but Classic mode can be done in coop. COOP HOME RUN CONTEST. Terrifying. Coop Break the Targets? Piece of cake!
How about the actual multiplayer part? Where most people will spend 90% of their time. It took us maybe a few months to unlock all of the stuff in Melee. I'm guessing we hit that in March of '02, or so. I could check, but I'm lazy. Well, we thought we got everything. Just last month we were playing Melee here at school and we got a new notification: "You've played 4,995 Vs. matches! That's one cent per match!" Looking at the notifications list in Melee, you'll see a ton of '01 and '02 ones, and then a lone Feb '08 one at the bottom. It took years of multiplayer games to get that last notification. The game is smooth as ever. A few glitches were fixed, new items were added (and old ones taken out.. sadly :cry: ), the bumper from the first Smash Brothers made a return, many new stages and characters, old characters reworked to be more fair/less dumb, overall awesomeness.
Oh! If you're playing online with a friend, you can have more than one person locally on your Wii in the online match! Neat! I love it when games do that! Regarding the online mode, if you're not heavy into the brawlin' you can also spectate matches and bet coins on who you think will win. Spectate mode is really awesome and I've somehow spectated more than forty matches already. If you're not heavy into the brawlin' and don't feel like going online, you can play the Coin Launcher mini-game to collect trophies and stickers. This game is quite fun and I often lose much time to it. There are a ridiculous amount of both trophies and stickers to collect in the game. Trophies are collectable in the Coin Launcher, Subspace Emissary (the story mode), as well as the All-Star and Boss Rush modes. Stickers pop up all over the fucking place, which is a good thing because you'll want to use them to upgrade your characters in the Subspace Emissary.
But no. Fuck all that shit. None of that shit is what stands out as the best part in my mind. Not at all.
It's all about the motherfucking music, my friend.
Someone ripped all the music from the Japanese release of the game when it came out about a month ago. I have been listening to it pretty much nonstop for a month. I have the OST loaded into Amarok right now and it tells me it is three-hundred twelve tracks long. Two-hundred eighty-five of those are actual song songs (the others are victory musics and the like). Two-hundred eighty-five songs. Songs from a ton of different games (many that I have played, many that I have not played) featuring many different styles of music. All of this music is featured in the game, many of them as unlockables. All of the songs are available for use as background music for your custom stages. Most of the songs are fully orchestrated. There are some heavy rock songs (F-Zero, I'm looking at you), they even took a Donkey Kong song and turned it into something you'd expect to hear at a rave! And it doesn't suck! I have yet to find a terrible song in here!
I think the coolest thing would have to be the fully orchestrated Tetris theme song. No wait. The two fully orchestratred Tetris theme songs! All of the Kirby songs stand out as being way more fucking awesome than everything else. The Metroid ones are awesome, even though a couple of them were ripped from Metroid Prime (they were good songs, though, so it's all cool). F-Zero's Mute City has been redone gloriously. Epic guitar. Piano. Can't go wrong. Another of the Donkey Kong songs is extremely epic sounding. All of the Fire Emblem music is amazing. Fully orchestrated, some songs with a chorus.
A few Melee songs make a return, which is acceptable because they were already pretty awesome as it was.
The songs composed specifically for Brawl are top-notch as well. Again, fully orchestrated, the main theme is sung in Latin by a chorus. It is a very epic theme, especially when listening to it while reading the English lyrics (which are actually pretty sweet) and watching the sun set on all thirty-five characters after having beat the final boss of the Subspace Emissary.
Yeah. Fuck all that gameplay and shit. Give me music! Games these days tend to overlook the audio part of the audiovisual experience that is a video game. Game developers wank over their new graphics and physics engines and then just dump in some shitty sound effects and background.. noise. Give us real music, guys! Not only will it draw the player into the game even more, it may have a chance of being memorable! Everyone recognizes the Super Mario theme. Good music is important to a game!
Now I just gotta complete some of these ridiculous challenges to unlock the rest of the songs...
I think if I were to go deaf, I would shoot myself.
I'll be off in Carbondale for the day as well as part of tomorrow. It's castle time, bitches.
Victoly
King PoppelDoppelous led the People's Right to a swift domination of the galaxy based not on warfare but on having the planets of other nations choose to be under the King's rule. It took a paltry twenty years to accomplish this feat. The King's treasury was a mighty three million billion credits by the time the galaxy fell to him. Tourism really is a lucrative business. Throughout his reign, the King did not war on anyone that did not deserve it. A rogue group of pirates that destroyed every ship in the galaxy shortly fell to a single one of the King's warships, dubbed the PooperDooper II. The I model was inadequate and the III model was merely security incase any of the various despicable aliens that also occupied the galaxy decided to step out of line. The Jagged Knife, a group that proved expertly able to persuade entire planets to betray their leaders, were flattened by the King's mass drivers and swept up by the more than capable soldiers. It was decided that the King would take after the Jagged Knife and merely influence planets to join his nation. It was peaceful and laughably easy.
The King has since drained the oceans of PoppelDoppelonia and made them his money pits. He enjoys a good money bath every morning, ala Scrooge McDuck.
(Money is measured in bc, billion credits. So, yes, I did have three million billion credits. Also, this is a different game than the Squirrel one. I just seem to be good at breaking the game and bringing in buttloads of money, I guess.)
I’ve got the touch
I haven't started that essay yet... Ugh. They probably took down the 'Now Hiring' sign. Poop. I can still submit anyway. They keep applications on file for about three months, I believe, so if they're ever hiring again... I might have a chance.
I talked (on AIM!) with Alyssa the other night. It was fun. I was in a really good mood for some reason, so I was acting kinda silly.
Team Fortress 2 is so good. I was playing CTF on this map as a Medic. I made the round winning cap (as a Medic). When the next round started, my entire team was hitting their "Medic!" voice binds. It was awesome. I also had the highest score on the server :D
(caution: 1440x900)
In that screenshot: Assists are how Medics own in points. That said, however, killing someone as a Medic is one of the most empowering things ever. Wild Samich was a very cool guy. I often spent my time following and healing XTJmanXT. Wii Todd was a newb, but willing to learn. Gave him some tips on how to use the syringe gun (the syringes fall FAST, gotta aim high with that thing). Justice was a dick >:( WhyMe?'s avatar is not a woman, it is a turkey. Or a chicken.
The Medic character is German. One of his cheers is "Oktoberfest!" I laughed at that one. My favorite is "I am the Ãœbermensch!"
Team Fortress 2 is neat in that it pulls your name and avatar from the newly launched Steam Community. The Steam Community also logs all of my TF2 stats. I love the fact that whenever I kill someone, their view will zoom in on me, freezeframe, and say
You got killed by
[Dexter Glaring] Sugar Death!
What's funny is that I despise playing healing/support classes in any game.
This linked list lab that Beckman gave us confuses the hell out of me. The array list we did last semester was easy. Linked lists confuse me :( Also JUnit is a bitch. Joy says she'll help us (Corey and I) when next we work on it, so maybe we'll do that after class tomorrow. Today.
I went to bed at eight-thirty last night 'cause I was dead tired. Woke up somewhere between three and three thirty (?) and.... will be taking a nap very soon before precalc. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but I told Jourdan that I would call her last night, so.... crap. I should probably do that tonight.
Freaking A
I finally got mysql-server and mythtv to play together (and with me, and not sexually)! I wiped the old Debian install on Din and tried to install Knoppmyth, but it wouldn't install LILO properly. I never did like LILO, Grub has always handled booting better in my opinion. Easier to use, too. I was then gonna try MythDora, but a Fedora / Red Hat system has never appealed to me... I like Debian-based distros too much, which explains why I just reinstalled Debian and gave it another shot. Worked fine this time. I got the thing running mythfrontend on bootup and everything. Now I just need a TV card to test things with.
I have a slight problem where Debian dumps me to an "oh shit" shell (what's the real name for that thing?) because it can't find /dev/hda. Everything is on /dev/hde, and it knows this, yet one step during bootup is looking for /dev/hda. I can make symbolic links for it and it works fine and everything, but they never stay.. so I have to do this on every bootup. There must be some permanent solution.
The differences between Debian and Ubuntu are amazing. I find that even if I chose to install all the extra Debian things I still had to do some work to get the system useable. Ubuntu, despite being based on Debian, just works. Then again, so did SUSE for the most part.
I uploaded photos of the Delta II rocket launch to Facebook. They'll find their way here eventually, and when they do they'll be in their full 2592x1944 resolution, not the crap by crap res that Facebook scales them too. Not that it matters much, though.. The shots didn't really come out too well.
In other news, I added about eight hours of play time to my KOTOR save. I have become so dark sided that on my character sheet I don't have just have a red glow behind me, I have a red glow that sort of explodes into a fiery.. thing. Black smoke all over the bottom and these hot ember like particles floating up. It's neat. I wonder what it looks like when you become just as light sided.
My car died on me when I was on my way to pick up Dad from the Chevy dealership. Wouldn't start until after Brian came to get me and we had picked up Dad. Thankfully a nice couple helped me push it into the Speedway at Riverland and Van Dyke. It died in the left turn lane JUST before the Riverland driveway. Started up just fine for Dad on his first try and gave us no more problems. He's borrowing my car for the day tomorrow because apparently the van has this big electrical problem and will be at the dealership all day. I hope my car doesn't give us anymore shit.
I just had to make a change to the pipe link plugin.. The regular expression was using \w to catch alphanumeric characters. "/" is not alphanumeric. A quick search on Google revealed that \W will catch nonalphanumerics. Just copy and paste what I had.. change one set of \w's to \W's and all is good.
Knights of the Old Republic
I just started playing this game, despite David owning for a year or two already. I had no idea it was so heavily based on the d20 system. Right now I'm trying to go as far into the Dark Side as possible. Maybe after I beat KOTOR 2 I'll play through the first again on the Light Side. I find it amazingly awesome that I am able to lie to the Jedi Council and have them believe me. These aren't [Persuade] or [Force Persuade] options, just straight up [Lie] options (though I assume my Persuasion skill helps with [Lie]s).
hehehe :D