Nerdy And Loving It

Demons Souls is a game developed by From Software, the same studio that makes my favorite mecha series of games, Armored Core.  The game is published in the US by Atlas.

The premise of the game is that some king figures out a way to harness souls to become more powerful.  Everything is going great and his entire kingdom is prospering until he unwittingly wakes up the biggest baddest demon around called The Old One.  After The Old One is awakened a darkness covers the entire kingdom and it becomes overrun with demons. After a while, some guy escapes from the kingdom and lets the rest of the world know what’s going on.  You are one of the many warriors that have chosen to come to the demon infested kingdom to save it from The Old One.  Once you get to the demon filled kingdom you pretty much die almost immediately.  You are resurrected by The Lady In Black.  She tells you that she can resurrect you in soul form and you have a chance to get your body back (which gives you a full life bar instead of half life bar).  She also tells you that if The Old One is not forced to go back to sleep, presumably by killing lots of demon bosses, then the black fog that covers the current kingdom will slowly cover the entire world and everyone will be screwed.

I started the game as a soldier class because I wanted to mainly focus on melee combat and didn’t care too much about spells.  It turns out that your starting class doesn’t matter that much.  It just gives you different equipment to start with and slightly different stats.  Having more armor like a soldier or knight can make the beginning of the game more easy compared to starting with no armor like the barbarian.  Obviously some of the starting classes are intended to be used for magic type characters, but besides that, classes don’t really matter. Just so you know, the Royal class is the best for starting a magic based character because they start with a mana regen item.

So I started the game with my soldier, who I named Guts in honor of the Berserk Manga/Anime.  You learn all the basic stuff in the tutorial like how to move around, block, roll, and attack.  The button layout is a little different than most third person action/rpgs.  You attack with your right hand using R1 for normal attack and R2 for strong attack. L1 and L2 do the same if you have a weapon in your left hand.  If you have a shield then it will do a shield bash, which is pretty useless unless you time it for the exact moment that someone strikes you. The D-pad selects secondary weapons or shields with left and right for each hand.  You can have one extra weapon to switch to in each hand. Up is for magic and down is for items. O is run, roll, and leap back. Triangle is for switching to holding your weapon with both hands for more damage. X is for talking to people, hitting switches, and generally selecting stuff. Square is for using your currently selected item.  The button layout makes sense but I couldn’t help myself from accidentally hitting square to attack like most other games and wasted many healing items because of it.  The other thing I would do by accident is hit X when I wanted to use an item because on the screen it is the bottom selection in the four way display.  Again other games sometimes use the O, X, Square, and Triangle buttons to select powers and stuff like this.  It messed me up but it might not be as much of a problem for other people.  So anyway, I get to the end of the tutorial and am almost instantly killed by a giant demon.  It turns out that you aren’t supposed to beat him.  It’s a part of the story for you to die.

Then the real game starts.  You have to beat the whole first level (1-1) with half health.  If you search around in the level, however, you can find a ring that will allow you to have 75% health when is soul form.  This is a must for when you are in the beginning of the game.  One thing you may have heard about this game, it’s hard.  Really hard. Even the lowliest easiest enemies in the game are somewhat tough.  The dredglings will throw firebombs at you and leap at you. They will also sometimes lash out with their daggers a bunch of times in a row and can do some damage if you’re not careful. Also, don’t let them gang up on you because they can mess you up, even if you’re better equipped.  Besides the enemies being tough, the whole structure of the game makes it hard.  If you die you lose all of your souls.  If you get back to the spot where you died and hit X on your bloodstain, you can get them back, but if you died before you reach it you lose that bloodstain and start a new one with whatever you had up to that point.  Souls, by the way are the currency of the game and they are used for everything.  You need souls to buy weapons, upgrade weapons, repair weapons, buy spells, buy miracles, and buy stat points, which in turn level  you up.  So it sucks when you lose all your souls.  The other thing that makes the game hard is that when you die or leave the level to go back to town (The Nexus) all of the enemies respawn.

I started the game with my broadsword and shield.  I was having a tough time with them until I learned that if you use a spear you can hold up your shield to block, while you are attacking.  Now I have an upgraded shield and spear and the game’s a little easier.  Just expect to die a lot when you play.

I recently tried starting a magic based character instead of melee to see how they do and oh my god.  They make the game so much easier.  Enemies that would normally take a bunch of hits, and would block a lot of my attacks, followed up by healing themselves could now be killed in two hits with soul arrow.  Magic is so cheap.  You just stand from a distance and pick off everyone.  It doesn’t even matter that you’re just wearing cloth for armor.  You have to be sure to lock onto guys in order to shoot them, but you get used to it pretty quick.  The first boss was cake compared to when I fought him with my melee guy.  So, if you want the game to be much easier your first playthrough, my advice is to make a royal.  I haven’t gotten very far in the game yet, so magic being overpowered may change as you progress, but so far it rocks.

Update:

I’ve decided to play through the game with my melee guy and my magic character at the same time, alternating on levels.  I’ve been playing through the first level in each world and am currently at level 4-1.  I’m finally starting to see my melee character catch up to and surpass my magic user, so perhaps magic users aren’t as cheap as I thought.  Now that my melee guy has tons of strength and an upgraded shield, his endurance doesn’t go down very fast when blocking.  This allows him to negate all damage as long as he’s attacked from the front and has endurance left.  He has so much strength that he can kill the skeletons in the beginning of the level with one hit with his spikey club.  My magic user has more trouble.  The large shield that she carries blocks all damage like my melee guy, but her endurance drops like a rock when she’s hit, so the skeletons have an easier time getting a hit in.

I’ve found that the magic user has started to become a play-style where you keep shooting while backing up the whole time.  A melee character, on the other hand, can just hold their shield up, negate all damage for a while, and then attack when they see opportunities.  Now that my melee guy can hit pretty hard relative to the current enemies, I’ll start upgrading his endurance more so he can take even more attacks with his shield and can attack for longer with the added endurance.  It’s too bad that you don’t get the really cool spells until the end of the game.  I want moving soul arrow (3 spinning orbs spin around you and attack automatically) and firestorm (AOE fire damage).  I think I’ll be stuck with boring projectiles for a while.

I’ve been thinking about melee characters a bit and I think the best starting class for a melee character is either the knight or the temple knight.  I picked soldier, but now that I have the flutet armor and a good shield I can deal with enemies much more easily.  The knight and temple knight get this armor or it’s equivalent at the very start of the game.  This would be a huge help.  Also, you can’t use miracles until you get the talisman of god for most characters, so if you want heal and evacuate, which is very useful (instant teleport to the nexus and you keep all your souls), you could choose the temple knight just for that.  You would also only need 3 more points in Faith to get two miracle slots.  You won’t have much mana to use heal, but you’ll get tons of fresh spice in 3-1 from the scary prison guards.  I think those guys are scarier prison guards than dementors.

More updates to come later.

World of Warcraft:

• Read quests out loud – I absolutely love it when games speak the story and sidequests instead of showing text.  If the task of adding narration to all the quests is too daunting, then identify all the quests that are a part of the storyline and not just random collect and kill quests and have those read.
• Auction House advanced searches/filters – I want the ability to search for items by a specific stat.  i.e. only show items, within the category selected, that have a strength rating higher than x
• Mounts When in Ghost Form – everyone is used to having their 60% or 100% increase in speed when going anywhere.  It would be nice to have it when you’re running back to your corpse.

Xbox 360:

• Keyboard and Mouse Support – I know this one is a long shot, but I want keyboard and mouse support added to the Xbox 360.  If possible I would want to give developers the ability to add support to their games just like the PS3 does.  Since most developers wouldn’t utilize it, just like the PS3, I would want the console to create hardware emulation of the Xbox 360 controller and assign keyboard buttons and mouse movement/buttons to the controller buttons and sticks.
• Allow Splitfish Contoller – Splitfish makes a controller for the PS3 that gives you half of a PS3 controller in your left hand and a mouse in your right hand.  The mouse makes the two shoulder buttons be the right and left mouse buttons and R3 (right stick click in) to be the center mouse button.  The mouse portion also has the X, Square, O, and Triangle buttons on it’s side where your thumb can reach.  I love playing shooters on the PS3 with my splitfish controller and I wish I could do the same on my Xbox360.  From what I’ve read online, splitfish would love to make the Xbox360 mouse controller, but microsoft won’t let them.  My only other option is the XFPS and reconfiguring buttons every time I want to play kinda sucks.

Android:

• Fix Messages being marked unread error – I love my android G1 phone. That being said, there are a few things I find annoying.  One major one is that a lot of the time when I mark a message as read or read a message and go back to my inbox in for my spare gmail accounts in the secondary email app, messages are marked as unread. Do you know how frustrating it is to mark a message as read four or five times.
• Allow for storing apps on an sd card – I know it can be done.  It already is being done for those technologically minded enough to put custom firmware on their phone.  It’s kind of ridiculous that the phone memory and program memory are shared, so your phone moves to a crawl if you have too many apps on the phone.
• Stop Browser from auto reloading a page – Add an option to the browser to force it to stop reloading pages after they’ve been loaded once. Countless times I’ve started reading a big block of text, turned my phone off and tried to come back to it. When I get back to the article the browser thinks that it should reload the entire page since something majorly important must have changed. Internet connection speeds for T-Mobile aren’t very fast compared to my home connection. At home a page refresh is pretty quick; almost instantaneous. It’s annoying to have to wait so long to read a simple block of text on my phone.

Hardware

What’s Good:

• The keyboard is great. It’s responsive.  I haven’t missed a key press yet.  My old phone, a Samsung i760, would miss key presses all the time.  I also love that they have dedicated number keys at the top of the keyboard.  You don’t have to push a function key to get access to numbers like on other phones.
• The search button. The keyboard has a dedicated search button that changes what it searches for depending on what you’re doing on the phone.  In the home screen it searches google.  In contacts it searches your contacts.  In Android marketplace it searches apps in the marketplace.
• The rest of the phone keys are simple and easy to understand. You have a green call key and red end call key, which also locks the phone if pressed once and turns off the phone when you hold it down.  You have a home key to go to the home screen and when held brings up the six latest programs that were opened so that you can either open up stuff that you opened recently or you can use it to switch between applications.  The back key is used to exit applications, exit a menu that you have entered, or to go back on a web page.  Like the search button, the back key changes what it does based on where you are at in the phone. There is also a menu key to bring up things like preferences for an application or setting for the phone.  The menu changes depending on where you are at in the phone.  The phone also has a scroll wheel like most new blackberry phones do.  It’s nice to have when you need more precision than your big finger to select stuff on the screen.  I find myself using it the most in the browser when selecting links and moving around in text.  It is much easier to scroll to the link you want than to zoom way in so that you don’t click on the wrong link with your (relatively) giant finger.
• Alt + scroll left/right. This is like your home and end key.  It’s nice to be able to move to the end of a line of text without having to scroll through every letter or poke the screen with your finger and interrupt your text entry.
• Mini USB charging/data port. This seems like it’s not that big of a deal, but to me it is.  I don’t ever have to buy some special data cable to connect my phone to my pc.  There are tons of devices out there that use mini usb, so odds are, that if I need to charge my phone and either my phone charger has died or I am staying over at a friend or family members house for the night, there will have a cable or charger available.  Also, if I want a car charger I can use the mini usb car adapter that came with my gps.  I wish more phones would standardize like this.

What’s not so good:

• The battery life is terrible. I haven’t had as much of a problem as I’ve heard other people have, but perhaps I don’t spend as much time online as they do.  I have tried all the tips I’ve found online like turning the brightness all the way down (something I normally do anyway), turning off the gps, turning off bluetooth, setting the screen timeout to the lowest setting, turning wifi off and I still have problems with the battery dying.  I just read today that T-Mobil might be sending out replacement batteries to G1 owners.  That would be nice.  It’s really too bad that this is such a big problem on the first Android phone.  It kind of takes away from the fact that Android is so awesome.
• The squeaking/creaking. When you slide the phone open to get access to the keyboard, you can hear a squeaking sound because of plastic rubbing together.  I’ve read on some comments and message boards online that some people are bothered by this, but it doesn’t really bother me.
• No 3.5″ headphone jack. In fact there isn’t even a 2.5″ headphone jack.  You have to use an adapter that comes with the phone that connects to the mini usb slot on the bottom of the phone.  This is rather annoying.

Software:

The T-Mobile G1 phone has the Android operating system from google on it.  It is open source software, which means it is free for anyone to use and modify.  It also means you can view all of the code yourself.  It also means you can easily create your own software for the phone, assuming you are a programmer already.

What’s good:

• Everything syncs with gmail. This could be considered a plus or a minus depending on who you ask.  I use gmail as my main email provider, so this is a good thing for me.  Not only is your mail synced, but so are you contacts and your calendar.  If you don’t use gmail, you are basically forced to switch.  Technically you could just create a dummy gmail account that you never use and then disable the ability of the phone to sync your contacts, calendar, and mail, but this seems like overkill to me for a phone that targets gmail users.  The nice thing about all of this is that you don’t have to backup your phone to your computer any more, unless you’re into that.  The downside is that you have to trust google with all your information.  Some people don’t like this idea, but it’s fine with me.
• No stylus needed. The entire operating system has been designed with your finger in mind as what’s going to be poking the screen.
• Android Market. It’s nice to have an app store like android market because then you don’t have to search all over the web to find good applications for your phone/organizer.  You can find some cool apps by simply sorting them by most popular.  If you need something specific you can search for it.  They have some really cool apps for the android like ShopSavvy, which allows you to l0ok up the prices online and stores nearby of any product by scanning its barcode using the camera on the phone.  There’s another one called SnapTell that will do the same using the front cover of a book, cd, dvd, or video game.  I also like one called 1337pwn which tells you when your friends are playing a game on their xbox 360 and also gives you most of their profile information, including their gamerscore, list of games with associated scores, personal info, and their avatar picture.  It also lists when they last played every game in their list.  All of this data is pulled from the xbox website.  There’s other silly stuff too like magic 8 ball or an Arnold soundboard.
• Drag down status bar. Whenever android needs to notify you of something like a text message, instant message, email, or missed call, it will display a small icon in the upper left of the screen.  To view these items, you simply drag the bar down with your finger and then select whatever you want or tap on the clear all messages button.
• Easy access to every program on your phone. On the home screen, there is a tab that can be tapped or dragged up to see a list of every application installed on your phone.
• The three desktops are great. There are three seperate desktop spaces on the home screen.  To switch between them, you simply drag you finger from left to right or right to left, depending on what screen you want.  The home screen always starts on the middle screen.  With three desktops you can reserve each for a different purpose.  I use the center desktop for my most used apps like gmail, calendar, instant messenger, and contacts.  I use the left desktop for games and goofy apps like the magic 8 ball.  I use the right desktop for web related stuff like links to facebook, myspace, wikipedia, and the like.
• It’s easy to add and remove shortcuts, widgets, and links to the desktop. If you tap and hold for a short while on the desktop a menu pops up, giving you the option to add a shortcut to any installed application, widget, or link to a webpage.  A widget, by the way, is something that sits on your desktop and does something special.  The widget that is on your desktop by default is an analog clock.  I removed it because I just use the digital clock.  To remove a shortcut, link, or widget you just tap and hold on it and then drag it down to the bottom of the screen where the trashcan icon has appeared.
• Scrolling is made easy. Like the iPhone, you just tap and drag up and down to scroll.  You can also scroll in any direction in some cases, like when viewing webpages.
• Fully functional browser. The Android browser was created using webkit, which is a collection of code that helps you make a great browser.  It’s actually called a framework, which you build off of to make the browser, but I won’t get too far into what that means for the sake of this review.  The Apple iPhone also uses webkit.  What all this means, is that things just work when you view the web.  It’s just like viewing the web from any browser on your pc, albeit from a relatively small screen.  You can zoom in and out using the magnifying glasses at the bottom of the screen.  Also, when drop down boxes, like the one on google images to select picture size, are tapped, a menu pops up with the options in large letters.  Overall the only downside to the browser is that it doesn’t support some flash websites like hulu.
• Integrated Youtube. There is a youtube application that will show full screen streaming video from youtube.  You can navigate around on the specially formatted site, looking at the popular videos, or you can search for your favorites.  The other nice thing is that you can open Youtube videos directly from the browser.
• Google Maps application. This isn’t that big to me, but it’s still nice.

What’s not so good:

• No PDF file support. That’s right kids, Android can’t open PDFs.  You can’t download any apps right now in the Android Marketplace either.  They have two demo apps that expire in a month or two and that’s it.  I looked this up online and the only solutions I could find were to save the pdf as a jpg file, to save it as an html file, or install a program called multireader.  I tried multireader, but it was so incredibly slow it for my 70 page document I was trying to open that I don’t consider it a solution.  I’m suprised that either Google or Adobe haven’t fixed this problem yet.  I just want to open my pdf on my phone.
• No word/excel file support. I would have thought that with their work on Google Docs, Google would have been able to add word and excel support to the phone, but apparently not.  Hopefully something is in the works.
• No notes application installed by default. This isn’t a big deal really since you can just install one of several notes programs, but I was surprised that google didn’t create their own and include it in the phone.  It is a standard in almost any pda device ever since palm first came around. My favorite notes app is AK Notes by the way.
• The instant messenger program could be better. My only main complaint is that you can’t rename your friends like you can on trillian, the program I use on my computer at home.  I like to see the person’s real name instead of happyfluffybunny5678… or whatever.  But, on top of that other IM apps that you can download have many more options that you can change that should be in the google IM app.  I use “Hello AIM!” as my IM app of choice.

There are several ways to become Zero Suit Samus in Smash Bros Brawl.

1. Hold down the R button on the gamecube controller. (classic controler: R button, nunchuck combo: Z button, Wii Remote only – minus button)
2. Destroy the final smash ball using Samus and activate her final smash. Remember that this works both ways, so if you play with items you can switch back from Zero Suit Samus.
3. Tap the up and down taunt back and forth until she changes. Note: you cannot change back using this method, so make sure you want Zero Suit Samus.

I found method three impossible to do, so I looked it up online and found this video on youtube. After watching it, I can easily change to Zero Suit Samus. Take a look.

If this video ever gets taken down, this action is easiest to perform if you turn the controller sideways and use one finger to basically rub the d-pad from the center from up taunt to down taunt and back very fast like you are trying to rub some dirt off of something with a single finger.

Hopefully this helps someone.

As an added bonus: You can select Sheik from the character select screen by moving the hand down over Sheik’s picture after selecting Zelda and clicking on Sheik. You can click back on Zelda as well.

So I went to see Babylon AD this weekend.  I like Vin Diesel movies, so I thought I’d give this one a try, even though it looked like it might not be that great.

And it turned out that the movie was pretty bad.  The camera motion especially.  During fight scenes and car chases the camera jerks around so much that you can’t even tell what’s going on.  Maybe people think that jerking the camera around makes the movie more exciting, but it doesn’t.  It makes the movie nauseating.  And while I won’t spoil it for people who have yet to watch the movie, I hated the ending.  It was lame.  The weird thing was, the whole movie seemed kind of disconnected and not quite right.  It seemed like the movie could have been much better.  I was reading about it on wikipedia and stumbled onto the fact that the movie was taken away from the director and royally screwed up from what it originally was.  Here’s what wikipedia says about it:

Director Mathieu Kassovitz has expressed outright disgust with the distributors, 20th Century Fox, for removing the movie from his control and altering it significantly. He described the film as “pure violence and stupidity” and that “parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24.”

This makes me wonder, if a directors cut was ever released would he fix it back to how he intended it to be and make it a good movie, or did 20th Century Fox remove the movie from his control early enough to make it so that it’s not salvagable.

Anyway, if it is possible, Director Kassovitz, it would be great if you would release a directors cut and save us from the bad movie Babylon A.D. has become.