Tag Archive for 'wii'

Rock Band 2 Is Going To Eat Me Alive

Published
by
jk
on September 15, 2008
in Video Games
. Comments

Harmonix, you brilliant purveyor of delicious time “occupying” goodness.

You guessed it, it came. Even though I read all these horror stories about Amazon being bad on game pre-orders, I knew my Store In The Clouds would provide.

I’ve been able to tear myself from this amazing gaming development feat to bring you this quick review of the whole shebang.

  • While I had owned and played through the Wii version of the game, I don’t really have a good reference point to compare it with its first revision, since the Wii dropped a lot of features. The lack of DLC as well as character creation/editing might have really angered some Wii owners, but it didn’t mind me.
    • DLC: I was fine with getting them in disc form. Heck, I could just rent them using Gamefly anyway. And besides, I love sightreading songs: It gives me quite the rush. (I guess I could have somehow threw in some pun with Rush, but I refrained.)
    • Character Creation: Funner than I imagined. I just like to play the songs, but being able to play dress up… but most importantly the guitars. I might find this more fun because I’m currently in the market for my first electric guitar, though.
  • The UI is slick. I love the revamped song selection screen. I might estimate that you can now see twice as many songs or more, with even more information on difficulty of the song across all instruments. Having the album art also helps to identify the song. If I feel nerdy enough, I’ll tear through this UI.
  • HOPOs (Hammer On’s and Pull Off’s) seem much more responsive than Rock Band “1″. But I feel this way about Guitar Hero 3’s ease of HOPOing vs GH1 and GH2’s near impossibility of it. I kinda prefer more ridiculous fretboarding than strumming: Makes me feel more like a rock star.
  • Song Selection: I like. I feel like there were more contemporary songs that I knew in RB2 than RB1. And with DLC, I’ll be able to pick and choose. As always, a couple songs will piss me off, but that’s expected.
  • Nintpicking, do you actually gain a tiny tiny bit of Overdrive as you whammy through a sustained white note while already being in Overdrive?? I don’t think this was the case in Rock Band 1, where your Overdrive bar would not increase or decrease.

Okay, that’s that. I hope to not touch this game until my drums arrive. I haven’t said a word about playing Rock Band 1, though… time to go unlock some Achievements.

What An Achievement Whore.

I know. And I just found out today Stack Overflow has badges, rewarding users for active usage of the system. So very interesting. Feels a little gimmicky, but hey, still a cool idea. Does anyone know if Atwood and Spolsky explained the reasoning behind this feature on their podcast? Can someone point me to it?

Okay, Back To The Verk Verk.

Screw It, Here It Goes

Published
by
jk
on July 6, 2008
in Personal and Video Games
. Comments

Hello? What the heck? Who is this?

Yeah, I know. It’s been a while.

While I have been developing a backlog of things to write about here on this blog, I’ve also been occupied with… okay, I won’t lie: Video Games.

A Three-pronged Attack on My Free Time

Across three “systems” (Wii, Mac, and PC), the attacks are as follows:

For the Wii, it’s been Rock Band. Horribly gimped. Definitely not worth the $180, in respect to the downloadable content-laden and better graphic’ed Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. (I would have bought it for cheaper gladly. Instead, I just bought it with lots of bitterness.) I still ended up going for the full set, because I know for a fact I’ll be selling it as soon as I master the drums in this game. I had a feeling it’ll sell better as a full set. Plus, I kinda wanted people to play with me anyway. Oh, and thirdly, I want to sing and play a plastic instrument at the same time. I feel like that’ll be yet another extreme and exciting challenge, let alone, hilarious for the onlookers. (Yes, I even bought a microphone stand. Yes, I’m insane.) I’m probably going to get Guitar Hero World Tour anyway, if I keep the Wii, that is.

On the Mac, it was Fallout. This game, my goodness, is amazing. Who would have thunk a post-apocalyptic world would be so much fun? I cannot believe I missed out on it during my middle school years. I guess back then, my life was too consumed with StarCraft to be messing with other games.

I ended up installing Boot Camp for one single purpose: Orange Box. Specifically, Team Fortress 2. It has consumed any free time I’ve had in the past couple of weeks. Steam will tell the truth. I think reaching a Steam rating of 10 - EAGLES SCREAM! means someting… 36.6 HOURS? Expect this number to go up as I play through Half Life 2. With TF2, going through enough achievements to get to all the new weapon upgrades was very enjoyable.

Of course, installing Windows opens myself up to all these games that I didn’t even think about playing. Also, it opens myself up to wanting better hardware to run everything oh-so pretty. Too bad the iMac isn’t really up to the challenge in this area… (even if I go up to the 24″)

Sidenote: Where did my Air go? Sold it. Long story short: I didn’t see the value in being mobile anymore.

The State of the Blog Address Post

I’ve been experimenting with a little app called Chyrp. For awhile, Twitter filled my desire of posting short status updates and other interesting links. However, plagued by downtimes and other issues, I decided to start looking for some distributed or self-hosted alternatives. While I will continue to use Twitter to follow the heavy hitters and as a tool to supplement the blogging insanity, I have a feeling my traffic will die down. Actually, It’s been happening.

Twitter Stats

As I started to use Chyrp more and more this weekend, I feel as though it’s got a lot of potential. I just don’t see myself fiddling with any blogging platform for too much: I want the darn thing to work out of the box, as advertised, with very little, if not, no programming intervention. Is this too hard to ask? Yes, I’m a lazy programmer who’d rather be just a little bit less lazy about his own projects.

A New Deadline?

I kinda had a feeling this was going to happen this weekend. I took off the day on Monday due to a possible trip to Philly. After that got cancelled, I had four days ahead of me to create The World’s Next Best Thing (TWNBT, as some refer to it). However, not a whole lot happened. A LOT OF FREAKING GAMES happened.

But somehow, I found enough time between the TF2 and the Rock Band to write this slightly coherent update. Oh, there’s even more I could write about.

Status of Health

Quickie, because I don’t want to seem weak to everyone when I freaking have to go through my condition.

  • Weird sleeping issues
    • I’ve woken up in the middle of the night twice, at around 6:30. Randomly. I still don’t know why this happened.
    • These days, I feel really really tired. Could it be the lack of exercise? Could it be something even worse?
    • Takeaway: Start exercising to see if it’s some other problem.
  • Excruciating eye soreness
    • This started very recently. I might need to see a doctor, but chances are, it’s the 36.6 hours of gaming after the day job I do in front of a monitor. It might be the TV shows/Movies I see on the iMac.
    • I need to pick a day and not use the computer at all.
    • Okay, maybe a bit extreme. More on this later in the goal making section.
  • Wrists
    • Overuse? Maybe. A month ago, I was given a set of harder braces to use. Kinda hurts more to use while I type because it restricts the natural way I use my pinky and ring finger to type. Also, I was told to take Alleve twice a day… really didn’t do much.
    • Once again, I need to start taking huge breaks. HUGE breaks. I’m not sure what I can do that doesn’t require the wrists… I guess I could start back up on the Korean Hanja/Japanese insanity.
    • This is probably reason #2 as to why I don’t blog as much anymore.
  • Ribs (Fibromyalgia)
    • No doctor has figured this out. The soreness/tenderness all across my lower rib cage. Some thought enlarged liver after the sonogram, but after the CT scan, some idiot lab technician was found wrong. I had a MRI of the brain to see if all of this could maybe possible be caused by MS. Came back negative.
    • I guess this is good news, although still no one knows what’s wrong with me…
  • Ankles
    • Feels a lot better. Physical Therapy worked. There’s still some residual pain on the outside of the soles and ankles, but it might be from actively correcting my gait. Hope I don’t have to see the podiatrist anymore. I’ll give it a week for my ankles to be awesome again.

Overall Takeaway From My Health Issues and EVERYTHING else in the past couple months AKA Goals

I’ve miss making goals. I’ve gotten weaker in character, not being able to follow through with a whole lot of things I’ve been wanting to accomplish. I’ve let past (uh oh, this is where it gets kinda dramatic. RUN. RUN! He’s opening the “past” folder) things muck up the present. Actually, it really hasn’t. You know what, now that I think about it, I look to the past mistakes as awesome. Or wait, am I just soothing myself?

And…. Scene.

That kind of thinking gets me nowhere. I feel like my gift of memorizing things is quickly fading. Sometimes, two people will tell me I’ve said something that I completely do not remember saying. This has almost never happened before.

Is there an eraser in my head? (For those of you that got this reference, have a cookie.)

But really: I’m kinda sick and tired of old-me. New-me kinda wants to kick old-me in the face with the Awesomedary Boots.

One Small Sidenote: Becoming Someone Else Who I’m Not

It’s kinda hard to define who you are. Do you do it with respect to others? Or do you not care at all about what people think, and just make you you?

For some reason, I’m like an electron (fermions) in the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Like a 0 or a 1 (dang it, I keep thinking about the Gary Winston speech from Anti-Trust), I cannot have that widely- and socially-accepted view on this matter.

Actually, let’s bust out the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle. Actually, let’s not. I’m boring myself, even.

Back to the point of this sidenote: I’m in the state of not caring about anyone else. Or at least, a very few people very very passionately. Much more so than any stage of my life, I bet if I let one extremely respectable and legendary person into my life, I could end up doing their bidding. And because I said this publicly, I’m going to end up going the opposite way.

The JK way is to always keep them surprised: I cannot stress how much I have to continue to innovate myself. I cannot be. I have to keep moving. If I am just existing, I might as well not exist. I have to create.

I have to punch someone in the face. I have to love someone to death.

With all these lists, “How To” guides, and massive trivia in my head, I hope to live life and experience something new each and everyday. I say this, but I have a feeling none of my past experiences will amount to jack squat in the future. I say that, but I have a feeling it’ll all come together and make sense in the end.

DANG IT, STOP IT WITH YOUR CIRCLES.

And… Scene.

I’m totally not editing that last section. I’m not even going to look at it anymore.

Yeah. That last section was the insanity that’s brewing in my head every freaking single day.

I feel like occupying my CPU with actual work is better than all having all those JMPs muck up the pipelines. Which leads into one of the many goals I’m going to be making.

  • GOAL: Stay off the information firehose that is the Internet.
    • AIM. Twitter. Even Feeds. (Phone? Heck, I rarely use that crap these days.) These sources of constant communication just eats up my time. No: I am not a freaking processor: I do not multitask.
    • I will set a block of time to do all of this. Which means… I will probably be behind on the news.
    • SIDENOTE: Need to talk about how I get offended if people bring me news I already know or link me to something I’ve already read and how this offense is completely retarded on my part but how I can’t deal with it.
  • GOAL: Back to 145-ish lbs.
    • You won’t believe the gut that I’m currently sporting. I took a picture of it, so that when I become awesome again, I’ll be able to use it as a reminder to never ever go on fast-food laden WoW binges again. I don’t blame WoW, but I blame the eating out.
    • Back to cooking, a lot. I enjoy it, and it’s an art form I’d like to master. It’ll be another way to rest my aching body.
    • Will need to go grocery shopping weekly. I mean, weekly. And probably will have to up my equipment a bit.
    • The gym daily? Maybe pushing it, but starting today, the routine begins again. Biking sucks, but ankles will have to get better.

SIDENOTE: Wow, I feel like I’m in the zone again. You know, that zone I was in when I had my last blogging explosion. Gotta keep going. Bawls, keep me awake and my cornea blood vessels enlarge so it doesn’t hurt as much.

  • GOAL: TWNBT announced on the 8th. Probably gadgetget. Maybe not.
    • Come on. You’re supposedly not going to Business School. Make sure of this by making the doubt about making the right choice nonexistent.
    • Will require only a couple of hours each night.
    • DO NOT GO EXTREME. Or even, think about going extreme. Extremeness will come with awesomeness.
    • Extremeness in moderation? Is this a T-shirt?
    • Need to start chronicling this. Blog? What am I doing with Wordpress?

That’s all: Stop Multitasking. Focus on Health. Go Be Awesome.

  • GOAL: And blog all of it. ALL OF IT. Keep yourself accountable to the world. Or at least, for the poor people that read this mess.
    • Seriously, what are you still doing here? Hehe.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this ridiculously long post. I guess I’m posting this on the 6th of July CST. This date means nothing to me.

And so, it begins. The Legend of Josh Kim.

Let Me Try This Again, Part 3.2: Entertainment: Video Games

Published
by
jk
on May 14, 2008
in Personal
. Comments

A Sidenote

If this post makes it up successfully, I will have made three posts in a 24 hour period. If people can define a recession as an economic downturn for two quarters, I can define the “return” to blogging as more than two posts in a 24 hour period.

Or something like that. And now for something not all too completely different.

World of Warcraft

This game has been a… “game changer” in a couple of instances in my life. It has made me a hermit, lost me the A in a very A-able engineering class, and helped me keep friendships across state lines. Needless to say, the online phenomenon that is WoW has changed my life for the better and for the worse.

I recently picked up the game a couple months back with the intention of enjoying the game’s content from 60 to 70. Which I did. A bit too much. I even started the insanity that is the 25-man raids. (I had run a 40-man before, but it was quite a while ago.)

I had quite the fun. But then at one point, it started to become work. I had to get the items. It started to become that addiction that I had once gotten rid of.

And this WoW business… it’s amazingly addictive. Take away everything… the professions, the pvp, the thinly veiled dress-up game… but keep the social always-on aspect of it, and it’ll still be extremely addictive. This is, of course, assuming you have actually passed the tipping point of knowing other people that are willing to play as much or even more than you.

[And here it comes: the obligatory reference to some web application] It’s like Facebook. But prettier. And instead of profiles or other personal information, you have… the Frozen Shadowweave Set.

And there you go. And so I quit. Maybe I’ll return with the next expansion. I don’t doubt that it is a possibility, but I hope to have something even more exciting to look forward to in the coming months.

And no, not Rock Band. Well… maybe.

Rock Band is delicious. The question is about the Wii version of this game.

Ever since I played Guitar Hero 1 on PS, I’ve loved the series. And it didn’t matter that I didn’t know the song: I liked the one-to-one mapping of notes to some strange finger combination on the fret buttons. I actually found more musicians and bands to listen to through the entire process of playing 1, 2, 80’s, and 3.

Disclaimer: The only song that I cannot beat on expert is Through the Fires and Flames. And I feel like if I really really practiced, I could. It’s just I don’t feel like dumping so much resource into it. Some people would say “lamer”, but I’m okay with myself. Maybe not.

Sidenote: Moving along, the whole point of this series is to get all this personal crap out so you guys can actually get some meaningful content. Let me continue for just a bit longer.

Fast forward to recently when the Wii version of Rock Band was announced, as well as the news about the whole gimpedness of it all. No DLC. At all. But then, a glimmer of hope was found in the form of a song pack disc, Track Pack Vol. 1.

So it seems like I’ll be buying this. Another $170 thrown towards “Entertainment”. (I’ll most likely be renting the song pack from Gamefly, though.) I better start saving now because my budget just doesn’t allow $170 for “Real-Time Interactive Music Simulation”.

What else… What other “games”

Scramble? No. I hate that game.

Other Wii games? Boom Blox will be coming very shortly. Zack & Wiki is amazing. WarioWare, as I said before, was an incredible party game.

Yeap, that pretty much sums up Video Games.

One More Thing

Right. Portal.

That was one of the most disgustingly amazing games ever. I still do not understand to this day the infatuation with the Companion Cube, but it was like eating sticks of butter. Hmm… butter…

And that ends. Video Games.

And that ends, the three part series on the three of most pertinent things of my life: Twitter, Health, and Video Games. It’s kinda sad, really, but at least I got the ball rolling.

I think now that the ball has started to roll, I need to make sure there’s enough ground for it to roll. The blog is in disrepair (category structure is screwed up, commenting is also screwy, older/newer links are not working correctly) and I intend to fix it. Maybe this week.

Closing

I like sidenotes, tangents, and disclaimers. But I’m realizing how much they break up the flow of the posts. I have to figure out how to do prettier footnotes with little superscript numbers. Bah, more work to do on the blog itself, I guess.

Guitar Hero Disc Replacement Process

Published
by
jk
on February 11, 2008
in Video Games
. Comments

Some random things came from Arizona today.

Guitar Hero Replacement Disc Mailer

Guitar Hero Disc Replacement Form

Looks like I won’t be playing Guitar Hero for 3-4 weeks. I sure hope my groupies don’t leave me… sad. At least when the discs come back, it’ll be awesome.

Wal-Mart: Super Smash Bros. Brawl deal was a lie…

Published
by
jk
on January 11, 2008
in Video Games
. Comments

The cake was one, now this too? Which reminds me, I really need to play that game…

After hearing this from Kotaku, I headed over to the Wal-Mart site as soon as I could…

A letter from Wal-Mart…

Dear Han Kim,

We have received your request to cancel the item(s) listed below from your order (#2677303169700).

We will attempt to cancel this order, however, we may already have processed your order for shipping. If you need to contact us about this order, please call us at 1-800-966-6456 between 6 a.m. and 1 a.m (CT), seven days a week.

ITEM(S) REQUESTED TO BE CANCELED

Order Date: 11 JAN 2008 07:29 Order Number: 2677303169700

ITEM QTY PRICE TOTAL

Super Smash Bros. Brawl Wii 1 19.82 19.82

Returns If we are unable to cancel your order because it already has been processed, then you can return any unwanted items to us after you receive them. You will have the option of returning the item(s) to us via mail or directly to a Wal-Mart store, whichever is more convenient for you. Instructions on how to return items will arrive with your order.

Help If you have any questions, please visit our Help section:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=5436

Sincerely,

Customer Service at Walmart.com http://www.walmart.com

Sadness. I guess I’ll have to buy it the old fashioned way.

By redeeming the $25 Toys R Us gift card I got with URMRGAY, I mean, Super Mario Galaxy.