I am going to learn how to play the banjo someday. I simply have to. I have been reminded of this by a song called "Blood of a Young Wolf" by the artist Buck 65. You might call him Hip Hop, but i refuse to do so, because I associate "Gangsters" with Hip Hop. With Buck 65 I simply associate "I would". Hire him to write lyrics for me, I mean. He's like a poet who supports his words with beats and other instrumentals. And some turntable-action as well. I can assure, if you have heard Blood of a young wolf you haven't heard "his music" per se, pretty much every track is different. For the better or for the worse, depends on each track and each to their own etc.
When I saw him live just recently (for the first time, as well) I certainly enjoyed it quite a lot, but there was something I had to get used to: he moves like he's got Autism or Asperger's. Judging by his words the latter might just be possible (and is in a way a good thing), but if he danced like that in the crowd I doubt he would have got a prize. However, it was charming somehow. And he certainly is rather handsome (how do all the other musicians get rid of their spots and I am still stuck with them at the age of almost 23?? hmpf.)
Well. I should get back to my own lyrics again, I guess. (but seriously, I would.)
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
update
after some more issues with the update stuff i finally resolved it:
in the registry you can set the default installation path for third party programs (games and such) in HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion -> the value is something like "C:\Program Files" or so. I changed mine to D:\... which wasn't recognised by the programs i wanted to install but apparently by the windows update service. because when i changed it back to C... it worked all fine again. Stupid windows.
in the registry you can set the default installation path for third party programs (games and such) in HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion -> the value is something like "C:\Program Files" or so. I changed mine to D:\... which wasn't recognised by the programs i wanted to install but apparently by the windows update service. because when i changed it back to C... it worked all fine again. Stupid windows.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
IDE, S-ATA, Windows on 32 or 64 bit and "new computer woes"
Actually... it all kind of belongs together.
A little while ago my computer decided to stop working. For why, i don't know; i think it is a mixture of a motherboard getting old (and out of shape), my former USB hub which nurtured the computer with power (I used to think it was supposed to be the other way around but way, you live and learn) and a general dislike for S-ATA drives which started to develop. So a few days before I went on holiday I ordered a nice custom-built PC which was done the day before I departed. But since i had a lot to do i decided to just quickly check if it's working or not.
Which it wasn't... turned out that the USB hub is jealous enough to prevent it from working, too. God knows, why. Ah well. So two weeks later, when i got back from the island I wanted to install my computer. About which I thought: "mweh, two days of installation but then it'll be fine"... yeah... first of all i spent about a week with assembling / installing and mostly fixing my brother's new computer (=my old one); then I managed to get to my computer. There I spent about a week with installing XP X64 3 times a day because just after the fresh installation it would say "disk boot failure. insert system disk ..." ... oh great. I finally resolved that by unplugging the IDE drive. I should add that I have 2 IDE drives (HDD and DVD) and 2 SATA drives (both HDD). The installation was supposed to go on the new SATA drive, because the old ones are... well, old. But apparently Windows never quite managed to handle the MBR properly, it always put it on the IDE drive and looked for the NTLDR ond the IDE drive as well. or so it seems. Basically, after unplugging the IDE drive, the installation worked. Even when i plugged the IDE drive back in.
Drivers were a different matter. the nforce 560 chipset is simply too new for XP (either one), so I had issues even discovering what xp meant with "unknown device"... (even the unknown device software didnt help much).
At some point, due to the lack of 64bit support, i was thinking about moving to 32 bit XP. Which.... gave me continuous blue screens of death while attempting to install the (correct) ethernet driver or, after i managed that somehow, in the boot process. Sooo... back to X64. where now most drivers are installed neatly, i refrained from installing windows live messenger so far (the current release is a bit buggy, as the two other desktop computers in our household prove with vista and Xp x86)... i also installed a couple of updates... windows updates. But now it appears that I am unable to install any other updates. It just stops. No error message, nothing. Its all fully downloaded - even redownloading won't help - but it won't budge.
For once... if it just started working nicely for once I would be so happy.... But i see this as a nasty way to get customers to use vista, by making it so utterly hard to integrate newer hardware in an old operating system... hmpf.
A little while ago my computer decided to stop working. For why, i don't know; i think it is a mixture of a motherboard getting old (and out of shape), my former USB hub which nurtured the computer with power (I used to think it was supposed to be the other way around but way, you live and learn) and a general dislike for S-ATA drives which started to develop. So a few days before I went on holiday I ordered a nice custom-built PC which was done the day before I departed. But since i had a lot to do i decided to just quickly check if it's working or not.
Which it wasn't... turned out that the USB hub is jealous enough to prevent it from working, too. God knows, why. Ah well. So two weeks later, when i got back from the island I wanted to install my computer. About which I thought: "mweh, two days of installation but then it'll be fine"... yeah... first of all i spent about a week with assembling / installing and mostly fixing my brother's new computer (=my old one); then I managed to get to my computer. There I spent about a week with installing XP X64 3 times a day because just after the fresh installation it would say "disk boot failure. insert system disk ..." ... oh great. I finally resolved that by unplugging the IDE drive. I should add that I have 2 IDE drives (HDD and DVD) and 2 SATA drives (both HDD). The installation was supposed to go on the new SATA drive, because the old ones are... well, old. But apparently Windows never quite managed to handle the MBR properly, it always put it on the IDE drive and looked for the NTLDR ond the IDE drive as well. or so it seems. Basically, after unplugging the IDE drive, the installation worked. Even when i plugged the IDE drive back in.
Drivers were a different matter. the nforce 560 chipset is simply too new for XP (either one), so I had issues even discovering what xp meant with "unknown device"... (even the unknown device software didnt help much).
At some point, due to the lack of 64bit support, i was thinking about moving to 32 bit XP. Which.... gave me continuous blue screens of death while attempting to install the (correct) ethernet driver or, after i managed that somehow, in the boot process. Sooo... back to X64. where now most drivers are installed neatly, i refrained from installing windows live messenger so far (the current release is a bit buggy, as the two other desktop computers in our household prove with vista and Xp x86)... i also installed a couple of updates... windows updates. But now it appears that I am unable to install any other updates. It just stops. No error message, nothing. Its all fully downloaded - even redownloading won't help - but it won't budge.
For once... if it just started working nicely for once I would be so happy.... But i see this as a nasty way to get customers to use vista, by making it so utterly hard to integrate newer hardware in an old operating system... hmpf.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
HameKomi/Neves
The package says Hamekomi Lucky Puzzle. It is a puzzle game, alright. The menu says "Neves". Possibly they couldn't be bothered to decide on a final title before the release. For playing through the levels, you basically tap on the screen, move, flip or turn around little pieces to fit in a shadow which represents a form or figure of some kind. There are two main emotions you get when playing the game: "Yatta!", or "Yessss!", when you managed to complete a puzzle very quickly, or grumbling and utter frustration, where you might call out (or whisper) words that should not be repeated here.
Gameplay:
Once you start the game for the first time, you are greeted with a tutorial, which explains how to play the game. So basically you learn how to tap the screen a little. The irony in this compulsory - but thankfully short - tutorial is that the controls are very intuitive. So you don't actually need to go through them in order to grasp what you have to do. But, as said before, the tutorial is very short.
You control the entire game with just the stylus, so even when you try to navigate through the menu with the d-pad it won't work. You will catch yourself a few times trying to choose an option with the "A" or "B" button, which will do nothing. This is a bit of a minus, but you get used to that eventually.
As for the difficulty... well. The whole thing is based on the ancient Chinese tangram games. So there imagine a rectangle which is cut into pieces and with these you have to "build" a number of different forms. There is no exact difficulty level. You might find the first puzzle itself quite challenging, but then you will see many many that are exceedingly easy to solve. Then there are more toughies again. The bad thing about this is that there is no constant rise in difficulty. The good side is that they give you a break from always difficult puzzles and allow some happy moments with easier ones.
You can freely choose from the puzzles inside each room and level, so as soon as you unlock the set, you can solve whatever you want in there. And also there are different playmodes, such as the main one, in which there is no time limit and no "step" limit, the mode in which you have to solve the puzzle within 7 steps and the one where you have to complete it within a certain time.
Graphics:
It is a puzzle game based on little bits of paper, what do you expect? It's 2D, but has nice colours.... it doesn't look crap or pixelated and it is ideal for its purpose.
Sound:
See above, the music doesn't really matter. It accompanies you while playing the game. It doesn't get overly annoying though, so you can decide yourself if you want to listen to it or turn it off. The latter doesn't hurt the gameplay.
Verdict:
All in all it is a fun game. And it captivates you very fast. Not only you, but also everyone who you might ask for help when you get stuck somewhere. There were times in which I even didn't see my DS for ages because of that game. The fact that you HAVE to control it with just the stylus is a bit of a downside, as well as that they always provide the same set of pieces. There are many different kinds of tangram out there, so they could have at least included the classic one if not more.
8/10
+ loads of different puzzles
+ various difficulty levels
+ ...which are mixed
- lack of d-pad control can be annoying
- always the same tangram pieces
- which aren't even the "standard" ones.
Gameplay:
Once you start the game for the first time, you are greeted with a tutorial, which explains how to play the game. So basically you learn how to tap the screen a little. The irony in this compulsory - but thankfully short - tutorial is that the controls are very intuitive. So you don't actually need to go through them in order to grasp what you have to do. But, as said before, the tutorial is very short.
You control the entire game with just the stylus, so even when you try to navigate through the menu with the d-pad it won't work. You will catch yourself a few times trying to choose an option with the "A" or "B" button, which will do nothing. This is a bit of a minus, but you get used to that eventually.
As for the difficulty... well. The whole thing is based on the ancient Chinese tangram games. So there imagine a rectangle which is cut into pieces and with these you have to "build" a number of different forms. There is no exact difficulty level. You might find the first puzzle itself quite challenging, but then you will see many many that are exceedingly easy to solve. Then there are more toughies again. The bad thing about this is that there is no constant rise in difficulty. The good side is that they give you a break from always difficult puzzles and allow some happy moments with easier ones.
You can freely choose from the puzzles inside each room and level, so as soon as you unlock the set, you can solve whatever you want in there. And also there are different playmodes, such as the main one, in which there is no time limit and no "step" limit, the mode in which you have to solve the puzzle within 7 steps and the one where you have to complete it within a certain time.
Graphics:
It is a puzzle game based on little bits of paper, what do you expect? It's 2D, but has nice colours.... it doesn't look crap or pixelated and it is ideal for its purpose.
Sound:
See above, the music doesn't really matter. It accompanies you while playing the game. It doesn't get overly annoying though, so you can decide yourself if you want to listen to it or turn it off. The latter doesn't hurt the gameplay.
Verdict:
All in all it is a fun game. And it captivates you very fast. Not only you, but also everyone who you might ask for help when you get stuck somewhere. There were times in which I even didn't see my DS for ages because of that game. The fact that you HAVE to control it with just the stylus is a bit of a downside, as well as that they always provide the same set of pieces. There are many different kinds of tangram out there, so they could have at least included the classic one if not more.
8/10
+ loads of different puzzles
+ various difficulty levels
+ ...which are mixed
- lack of d-pad control can be annoying
- always the same tangram pieces
- which aren't even the "standard" ones.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
back to life
I haven't been here in quite a while, and this has got many reasons. Some of which are university-related, some of which are tech-related and as hukl himself said recently, if you have something to write then you usually don't have the time to write it down. And when you do have the time (this is my addition now) then it doesn't seem blogworthy anymore.
So there I am, getting off my own bum and finally posting something again; the guy behind the matoushin blog (assuming Matoushin really is a guy ;)) sort of inspired me with a number of his posts to revive my blog again. So what happened? That i will press into other, separate posts. What's gonna happen?
Well, I am kind of in the process of making a review site for DS games, I guess meanwhile i may just as well post my reviews here for a while. Also some other rants are going to happen. I was even considering to post my latest findings related to my studies here, but I won't risk posting wrong stuff here, otherwise i might be held liable at some point. What i will add again though are the horrors my computers put me through sometimes. They possibly don't like me because I put them through mean things like a windows/linux dualboot in 64 bit.... so yeah, lets hope this blog will stay alive for a bit longer this time ;)
So there I am, getting off my own bum and finally posting something again; the guy behind the matoushin blog (assuming Matoushin really is a guy ;)) sort of inspired me with a number of his posts to revive my blog again. So what happened? That i will press into other, separate posts. What's gonna happen?
Well, I am kind of in the process of making a review site for DS games, I guess meanwhile i may just as well post my reviews here for a while. Also some other rants are going to happen. I was even considering to post my latest findings related to my studies here, but I won't risk posting wrong stuff here, otherwise i might be held liable at some point. What i will add again though are the horrors my computers put me through sometimes. They possibly don't like me because I put them through mean things like a windows/linux dualboot in 64 bit.... so yeah, lets hope this blog will stay alive for a bit longer this time ;)
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