Category: Games

It’s been a very tiring long week. Had a lot to do at work. Was that the reason why I didn’t post on my blog? Nah…

You can blame Final Fantasy VII for that. I’m almost done with the game. I’m on disc 3 and I just defeated Hojo. Things I recently learnt was Lucrecia is Sephiroth’s mother and Hojo is Sephiroth’s father. Pretty interesting… Vincent was in love with Lucrecia. I was hoping he’d be the dad. Hehe.

Anyway, I have a bunch of interesting things queued up waiting to be posted. So stay tune!

New York mayor fires man for playing computer game – New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has fired a city employee after seeing the man play solitaire on his computer at work. … The man was fired last Tuesday after six years on the job with no warning or severance pay.

I had hope this story was taken out of context, but there was no context to take it out from. The new mayor was greeting his fellow workers when he noticed an employee playing solitaire. *Snap*, like that, he was fired. 6 years working for a job in New York that only paid $27,000 a year. Sigh…

I, along with many others, believe people need to take random breaks (doesn’t really matter what they do, as long as it doesn’t break any laws or company policies) to be more productive. I visit random websites (such as /. and bargain hunting sites) while others play Texas Holdem (yep, it’s going to be included in Windows Vista). But no matter what you decide to do for you break, always take one when you’re stressed or can’t focus anymore. It’d be terrible to burn yourself out. That’s when both the company and you lose out.

But it did get these interesting quotes from /. :

We were in the process of replacing our beloved VAXstations with high-end (60 MHz!) Pentium PCs running Windows 3.1. One of the big wigs was walking through the data center, and noticed a programmer playing Solotaire. He asks, “What is she doing?”. A co-worker in the neighboring cube notices the situation and defuses the crisis by spewing a load of BS: “She’s doing mouse calibration; they have you use this program, so the pointer on the screen can be aligned with the roller ball inside the mouse. It only takes a few minutes and it lines up the pointer for you.”

Back in 1998 I was working in a helpdesk and a user who was known to be a chronic complainer called saying that she couldn’t do her work as there was something wrong with MS Word. We were able to remote control workstations without users having to give permission so I connected to her workstation and what did I see?? Solitaire. Rather than let her know I could see what she was doing I kept asking her about her screen and what she could see on it – all she was doing was giving me ficticious error messages and she was actually continuing her game while she was talking to me. How I resolved the problem was to move her cards around for her and then open MS Office. Once it was open I asked her if there were any other problems she wanted to talk about. After a long silence she said “No- thank you for helping me” and hung up the phone. Needless to say we didn’t hear anything from her for a while.

Just downloaded an intro video for Final Fantasy VII – Dirge of Cerberus. I’ve re-encoded the video and uploaded it to my gallery: Final Fantasy VII – Dirge of Cerberus Intro. If you want to download the original 87.5MB video, you can bittorrent it with this torrent file. The video seems to re-use the animation and 3d models that were created for Advent Children, so it’s actually quite visually pleasing.

It appears there will be a new FF7 game with Vincent as the main character. Unlike other Final Fantasy games, this will NOT be a battle based RPG, but instead a RTRPG (Real Time Role Playing Game), sort of like Fable or The Legend of Zelda. The game I think will be released for the PS2. You can visit GameSpot for more info and media and downloads.

You can also see more videos at the official website. Just click on PV (located on the lower right) after the flash loads and there should be 5 different videos include a E3 Trailer, an In-Shop Trailer, and 3 commercials.

The song in the video is Gackt – REDEMPTION. You can download the mp3 here (from Advent Children.net). If that link is broken, you can try this (from Bootleg ver07). The tune’s pretty catchy.

Downloaded a different video that I thought I’d share: Final Fantasy VII – Dirge of Cerberus – 3D Scenes (direct download). This was released LiQuidCelL. It’s basically all the 3D CG scenes you saw in the trailer above minus the gameplay. It also used a different audio track, which I didn’t particularily liked. Enjoy!

*sniff* I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know it was going to be that fast… It’s only the end of the 1st disc! It sort of came out of the blue. I actually thought I was going to be able to rescue her again and then later she gets killed, but no… Sephiroth comes down and whoops, stabs her from behind. Is this where I’m suppose to sulk for 6 months and hide from all civilization while my broken heart repairs itself? Haha.

Final Fantasy VII – great game if you haven’t played it yet. I’ve gotten pretty good at winning the Chocobo races in the Golden Saucer, but I still suck at the 8 continuous battles. Is there anything worth getting there? I don’t even know how points work. Aeris seems to get more points than Cloud even if Cloud fights and wins more battles.

So this post was a little tribute to Aeris. 🙁

I “was” going to catch up on my blog work today, but I sort of ran out of time. Bunch of new anime post waiting for me to write about such as the new Fate/stay night (I haven’t been this excited about an anime since Bleach). Then there was the pya! catchup work which I’ve decided to postpone indefinitely while I play Final Fantasy VII as the title of this entry suggests.

FF7 sort of came out at the wrong time for me. I’ve personally played FF3 (SNES), FF8 (PS), and FF9 (PS). I’ve never beated anyone of them, though for FF8 and FF9, I did reach the final disc, but the enemies just got too hard and I got tired of leveling up. What basically happened for FF7 was that it came out before my Playstation was modded and although I ended up “getting” the game, I never really played it.

I actually got FF7 for PC awhile back, but I came to the conclusion it wasn’t compatible with Windows XP because the game wouldn’t respond to any keyboard input. Apparently I was wrong and Eidos was stupid when they were deciding on the keyboard configuration. If I had read the README and not be a dumbass and just go uninstall it immediately, I would’ve learnt that the entire gamed used the NUMPAD keys to play and navigate. Fortunately, a friend lend me the game again and I’m finally playing the game regarded as one of the best RPGs ever.

However, the game was not immediately compatible with XP right out of the box. You can download the Final Fantasy VII XP Patch 1.4. The title shows it as 1.3 patch, but during installation you’ll notice that it’s actually 1.4. Since FF7 was such an old game, it doesn’t even support the newest 3d rendering engines, but supports the likes of Voodoo and 3dfx. So basically, you’ll be playing with a software 3d rendering engine, which isn’t noticable at all, since they recommend that if you’re going to use the software rendering engine, you should have at least a Pentium 300MHz. One of the problems I noticed immediately was all the in-game movies were flipped, inverted, and upside down. This was okay initially, but it got annoying and was giving me a headache. It took me awhile to find the patch for this, since the game is so old, but I finally found the support document on it. However, the link it provides is no longer working. However, the UK site is still hosting the file needed to fix the inverted video problem: ff7betap1.exe (other patches available here too). A useful site with a bunch of patches are: FF7 Universe.

My first impressions of the game were well… I literally alt+tab out of the game and said this in an IRC chat room: I’m playing FF7 on pc and I can’t believe how bad the graphics used to be. Then again Eidos screwed up the keyboard layout for the entire game, forcing me to play with the numpad. However, as the game went on, I got really into it. I told myself I was going to stop playing at 2am because I needed to poop (pretty badly too), but after telling myself that I’d stop at the next save point, I continued playing till it was 3:30am. Krunk is SO CUTE!! Well, Cloud that is. I always named the main characters Krunk in Final Fantasy or any other RPG since I’m basically playing him. Tifa and Aeris are cute too! Cute in the sense like plushies and not like cute girls. I can see myself wanting Tifa and Aeris plushies now. Tifa in Final Fantasy VII Advent Children was a lot hotter. The gameplay so far is so fun and I’m pretty sure I haven’t even completed 10% of the game yet. I’m at the part where they’re about to blow up Sector 7 because they found out where AVALANCHE was and I have to warn them.

Here’s the comparison of in game Tifa and Advent Children Tifa.

Here’s the hot Tifa in Advent Children:

In game Tifa screenshots courtesy of Final Fantasy Shrine:

I did however see the scene where Cloud comes up to Tifa when her father was killed as shown in Last Order: Final Fantasy VII.

There goes my next few weekends.

Went to dim sum at Ocean Star with Cari, Decathanerd, and Ohfuee. I was shocked at how many people went to dim sum on a weekday! It wasn’t even a holiday for most people. Usually when I go to dim sum on a weekday, hardly anyone’s there. That day, we had to wait like 30mins before we got a table. For some reason, we sat in an area where no one really cared for us. Took us minutes to wave down a waiter to get us tea. Also took a long time to wave down a waiter to calculate our bill.

Thanks to Ohfuee for bringing this up, but I almost totally forgot about the shark fin soup lady. The shark fin soup lady that day (the lady that pushes the cart around with the shark fin soup selling for $10/bowl) stopped at our table. She literally stood there for a few minutes without saying anything. We had already told her that we didn’t want anything from her cart. All this time, she’s staring at me. I feel quite uncomfortable and start to slowly turn around to peak at what she’s doing. She suddenly starts talking. “How long have you had the tail?” ending with “It’s very cute.” I think my tail’s attracting attention from the wrong age group.

Afterwards, we went bowling at ABC. Bowled two games, both horribly. I think my scores averaged to about 60-70. Decathanerd had the best score for both games, breaking 100 on both.

Ohfuee needed to get some snowboard wax, so we headed to a sports shop close to Montebello mall. Guess who we saw there! MsticAzn! He apparently was looking at getting some laceless snowboard boots.

We went to get ice cream afterwards. It’s been awhile since I’ve had rainbow sherbet. That’s my favorite ice cream flavor when I was a kid. I’ve switched to chocolate chip later because you can’t ever find rainbow sherbet in the supermarket.

Afterwards, we headed back to Cari’s place and we played hours after hours of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The game sells on Amazon.com for $20. The Link in this story is cute, but not as cute as the Link in Minish Cap. The cutest scene is when Link wakes up after sleeping and shakes and tries to wake up the cap. Can’t seem to find the animation online, maybe I’ll capture it later for you. Anyway, back to Wind Waker. I always thought I disliked 3D Zelda games ever since the first one was introduced on the N64, but besides the tedious sailing, this one’s pretty fun. You actually have a dragon boat which is pretty cool because you can shoot bombs from a canon on it. I still prefer the 2D Zelda games because I really only have 4 directions to move in: up, down, left, right. In 3D Zelda games, it’s so hard to correct the direction, in the case where I need to jump and stuff and the focus button doesn’t exactly know which direction I need to go. One good thing is that the GameCube controller has more buttons to associate weapons with instead of just 2 on the GameBoy Advance. The charging of the sword required to do the spin attack is also no longer needed.

Also, the graphics totally remind me of The Emperor’s New Groove, especially when the bombs explode and smoke comes out.

We went to Noodle World for dinner and once again, we had bad luck with the waiters. I swear they tried to ignore us on purpose. Several waiters walked past our table, I was waving the menu, but they had their heads turn the other way, when there was nothing there! They were slow in bringing our plates and water and when we were trying to get a waiter to give us chopsticks. Hopefully, the patrons next to us who had already gotten thier chopsticks and not their food yet were nice enough to give us their chopsticks.

We then went back to Cari’s place to play some more Wind Waker. Decathanerd took a nap and we left around 2ish. I couldn’t believe it was that late already!

Been playing The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap for the past few days. It’s the real cause of why I haven’t updated my blog much recently. The game sells on Amazon.com for $30. I first played this game at Best Buy sometime my senior year in college and fell in love with Link (he’s so cute!!!). Zelda is cute too, but Link is cuter. This break, I decided to ask my brother to let me borrow his gameboy and I’ve been playing pretty much non-stop. The only reason why I’m blogging right now is because the battery died when I was in the Ice Dungeon so it’s recharging right now.

(from Video Games Media Network)

(from Ganon’s Tower)

(from Nintendo-Difference)

Did I mention how cute Link is?

Welp, as you might’ve known, the Xbox 360 launched today. There’s been so much buzz. People who had it preordered were even in line late last night or early this morning just to get it. People who preordered even got calls apologizing and that their order will be delayed by a few weeks. The interesting thing is that many of the Xbox 360s are being sold on eBay for much much more than the retail cost. The highest one I’ve seen was sold at $5,100. These aren’t cheap consoles either, with the core system at $399 and the starter system with the hard drive and the extra goodies at $499. You should read the article at Ars Technica and see how absurd the shortages are.

---

Random Crap:

Quarter Stacks (from deadlock) – taken from stileproject, but I’ll spare you the *cough* ads.

Dog with long tongue (from deadlock). Video is hosted on stileproject, so be careful.

Sweet Christmas Lights (direct link) (from msticazn). I first saw this on the Microsoft newsgroups and was planning to upload it, but then msticazn sent me this link, so I’m decided to link you to it instead. UCSD can spare some bandwidth. It’s basically christmas lights dancing along to the song, but really awesome. The song’s really familiar, but the title slips my mind for now.

Police Hit Man in Genitals With Taser – But one of the gun’s prongs accidentally hit Miljour’s genitals and got stuck, Chitwood said. … “The Taser is relatively accurate, but when someone is moving like that, it doesn’t matter if you have a Taser, or a pistol. (Officers) can’t aim,” Chitwood said. Ouch! and we already knew officers can’t aim.

Town votes to rename itself Secretsanta.com – Officials in the northern Idaho town of Santa, Idaho, on Monday voted to rename the 115-person hamlet Secretsanta.com to hype an online gift exchange management service. … In 2000, Halfway, Oregon agreed to call itself Half.com after an Internet retailer later purchased by eBay Inc. I didn’t know Half.com had a city named after it.

Fugitive murder suspect found – on TV – An eagle-eyed investigator’s wife ended a Russian manhunt by spotting a murder suspect’s name in the credits of a television show, a newspaper said Tuesday.

Lightweight Ninja – downloaded the demo and the game was easy and fun. Somewhat like a mix between Sonic and Mario.

Ready2005.com – not really too sure what the flash video is saying, but it seems to be advertising Visual Studio 2005 in Korean. The tune’s catchy though.

PhotoBlocker – got this from a Microsoft newsgroup. Interesting things to prevent the cameras from catching your license plate #.

Throw another Skippy on the barbie? – How do you like your kangaroo — medium rare? Doesn’t sound too appealing, does it? So in a bid to make Australia’s national icon more palatable, Food Companion International magazine and the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia are running a competition to find a more palatable culinary name for the meat of the hopping marsupials.

Semi-naked models drive motorists to distraction – Almost a quarter of British motorists admit they have been so distracted by roadside billboards of semi-naked models that they have dangerously veered out of their lane. I wonder what would happen if there were fully-naked models. *whistles*

Free school breakfast menu to offer coffee – Brazil’s coffee industry has brewed up a plan to serve up to 1 million schoolchildren a free breakfast — complete with a cup of java. That’s right! Get them addicted when they’re young.

That’s incredibly beautiful…give me a hammer… – If you thought art galleries were quiet havens of contemplation, think again. Looking at great works of art can inspire a strong, sometimes irresistible urge to destroy, Italian researchers have found. I don’t think it has to be art. I personally like destroying stuff. Give me a hammar and something to break, and I get tons of fun outta it. How many times have you wanted to be in one of those big wrecking ball cranes and knock buildings down? Or is that just me…? It’s like fire. It’s so cool! Yet so dangerous! If I didn’t know how much things cost, taking all my stuff to the 20-story building roof and dropping them down and see them go SPLAT sounds like something I’d have a lot of fun doing.

Metal Gear Solid 4 – HD Trailer (direct download) – got this off bittorrent. The quality is amazing, but it seems like this is probably going to be an in-game movie. I wonder how the quality of the actual game play is.

So I finally beat the game. ungsunghero beat me to it though. I actually beat it yesterday, but was too tired to make a post last night. The game was really fun and they actually let you continue finishing your quests after you defeat the last boss, but they put you through a torturous 15mins of credits. One thing interesting in the end where it was like Lord of the Rings, was you had to decide to throw away the mask or wear it. By wearing the mask, like the ring, it would give you tremendous powers, but you’ll turn evil. I threw my mask away, but I’m really itching to replay the game where I’m always evil. I’ve been always good this time around.

So I’ve only spent 20hrs and 57mins in this game. Though I thought it was closer to 30, but oh well. One thing I noticed was that the other NPC (non-playing characters) never got old. Whisper was always pretty young. So was my sister. Even my wife never got old and I married her when I still had black hair! Now I’m age 50-something and all my hair has turned gray, and they’re still so young looking. Ungsunghero also pointed out the Village People somehow got into the game too. How? You’ll just have to play to find out.

I found some cool looking fable drawings while searching the web:

---

Random Crap:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CARI!!!

火垂るの墓 – Grave of the Fireflies (from MSDL) is having a new movie, with REAL PEOPLE. I wonder how it’ll turn out. The pictures look pretty similar to the anime. I can’t wait to see this!

Flash Earth (from MSDL) – lets you switch between Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth. For some reason, it’s A LOT FASTER than either of those two and I spend a few minutes playing with it. hehe.

House With Bride for Sale for $600,000 – Deborah Hale, 48, has placed an ad on eBay offering to sell her home in the Washington Park area to a compatible man who wants to spend his life with her. She also has her own Web site outlining the deal.

my four dollar exhuast (from deadlock) – pretty funny video where his car exhaust is whistling.

Ultrasonic Songs of Male Mice (from /.) – Previously it was shown that male mice, when they encounter female mice or their pheromones, emit ultrasonic vocalizations with frequencies ranging over 30–110 kHz. Here, we show that these vocalizations have the characteristics of song, consisting of several different syllable types, whose temporal sequencing includes the utterance of repeated phrases. Individual males produce songs with characteristic syllabic and temporal structure. This study provides a quantitative initial description of male mouse songs, and opens the possibility of studying song production and perception in an established genetic model organism. Check out the music they make modularized to the human ear.

Friends Forever (from ladydevilot) – although this is a chain mail type of link, I thought it was sweet. This goes out to all my friends from Berkeley and Mark Keppel. =)