Black Ice

It snowed, then froze over. Not happy. :|

Half a week left to go. Now I shower you with random photos, mostly on food.

(the yellow one is DURIAN MOUSSE CAKE *EXCITEMENT*)


I think me and my friends, now, have posted three version of this.

A Breather

Hi! I'd like to believe I'm still alive.

Near semester end... stuff happened. A lot... and yet it wasn't a lot, really.

But I can say this much: I'M EXHAUSTED.
I'm running on 3 hours right now and my red bull effect has just wore off so I'm really feeling it. Energy draining @20hp/tick.

The past week consisted of writing up a RFP response, an interview report, a 20-pager essay--which all took about 3 or so days each--and finally the 3rd stage of my major project. Hermit week is over!

No school vs School (it's been cleaned up a bit already).

The RFP was just number frustration.


I had to interview my interview guy for a second time because our first meet wasn't long enough. I really didn't want to meet a second time because my laptop's out of commission (as I already mentioned) so I only had one fully charged battery left just in case I had to retrieve anything from there. BUT he was doing ME the favour so sucked it up. The information I got was valuable though, especially for myself, but it was nothing really applicable to the rest of the class so I had to fill it in most with what I already know. A case of good BS.

The essay was tragic. Let's not speak of it again.

When Tuesday rolled around, I didn't get a chance to present ANYTHING. That was upsetting; I was hoping to get the presentations out of the way but now they're all pushed to next week. HAET PRESENTATIONS.

I also seem to eat a lot when I'm under stress. Whenever I took a break, I went straight to the kitchen for something. Since my other break options (video gamesssaaaa, anime) were out of the question, eating(?) was my only choice. Cream cheese was my best friend.

Speaking of video games, I've been video game FREE for THIRTEEN DAYS NOW. I will go and experience again how awesome it is to get my ass kicked in Dragon Age right after this.

I have over 900 unread RSS posts and I consider myself a casual RSSer as I only follow a few websites. It will take a bit of time.

So I left my phone at school yesterday but I was swamped with completing the next stage of my major project so I left it where it was. The security guard (aka. The Transporter) was smart enough to know how to go through my phone and call my house to leave me a message on my answering machine. I also found out that I cannot live without my phone. My phone's alarm clock that is. I failed to wake up today because I did not have it with me.

Blahblah I have a conference room presentation for my major project in two weeks. UGH. WHY.

So I've been dreaming about Christmas and all the wonderful free time I'll have. And so here's some for the to-do list:
- finish reading my bro's Watchmen comic book so I can watch the movie already
- *watch* the Watchmen movie
- get a haircut
- read my manga backlog (both offline/online)
- ugh no one vacuums if I don't do it.
- Dragon Age raaaaaage
- preorder my LE PSP
- marathon another anime?
- something else I haven't thought of yet.

2 presentations, 2 more individual projects, one class project and tweaking major project+conf. presentation left to go. Two more weeks...!

Lost Odyssey - 1000 years and counting

It started as a discussion over consoles, then it turned into RPGs then to how amazing Lost Odyssey was. Thanks to a classmate, I ended up digging for the game in the pile of backlog as soon as I got home from school and popped it in.


STORY 4.5/5
Kaim, for as long as he remembers, is a soldier who fought in many wars. He's been known as the immortal, thus lived through all the wars he has participated in. More recently, a war ends abruptly by a magical storm of lava spewing from the skies killing everyone on the battlefield. As expected, he emerges the only one alive from the battle and encounters a fellow immortal on his way back to report to the superior he works under.

He ends up teaming up with that immortal and one other [mortal] to check out happenings at a magic generator tower and ruh roh, something's fishy there. Where'd all the magic come from? Why's there so much magic here and what were they doing with it?

The story stood out in the beginning as something refreshingly different, but sadly it headed towards the cliche JRPG mid-game: save the world, hoo-rah. The "side stories" involving Kaim remembering his past were probably the best mini stories I've ever read (that's a pretty high claim). If only there were more! Those stories sold the game for me, despite the rest of the main story direction.

[spoiler]As for the ending, it was cliche to the max, besides the fact that one of the immortals get sent back to the other side. It was a fixed and timed final boss battle where you basically pressed enter to win automatically. Then basically everyone lived happily ever after.[/spoiler]

CHARACTERS 3.5/5
Kaim is the cool and collected guy who has the most annoying strand of hair in his face (until I eventually got used to it). His woman is less to be desired. The kids, the boy in particular, has the worst hair. Seth is great too, but (spoiler) why her! The wrinkly is so wrinkly and old. YansenJansen wears eyeliner. My second favourite character is (spoiler) Tolten, a timid guy with good skills up until the end when the wrinkly dude takes over his spot to be the better overall mortal character.

The main boss of this game was a pretty boring dude with a pretty boring reason to take over the world so that was disappointing. He was extremely lenient with the hero's party which makes him seem hardly dangerous. Sadly there was nothing hidden behind the main boss.

SOUND 3.5/5
Voices... I had the Japanese track on the whole time but I realize I should've at least tried hearing the English track as well. But anyway - singers, talents, actors... it seems like the cast of most of the characters came from various places -except- the voice acting profession, which explains why the voices felt a bit inexperienced and awkward.

Music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu so you expect some good stuff, or so you'd think. There were two rock tracks (both for boss battles) that were excellent and the rest of the good ones were most of the ballads played during the mini stories. Overall, there weren't as many great tracks as I hoped. The vocal track for this game is ATROCIOUS. CORNY AS FUCK. 'Cuse the language but that's how much I hate it. Spit on it and throw it in a fire!

GAMEPLAY 3.5/5
K so they tried to make the player more involved by having this ring system where you had to hold and let go of the RT at a certain time to activate the ring's power you're currently equipped with. Yeah I suppose it worked but it made battles that much longer.

The whole system of A-1, B-3, etc (round and turn respectively) to figure out the character's required cast time was silly and close to useless. If you had more than one character with the same determined cast time, how do you figure out who goes first (when both of those characters also have the same cast delay)? Not knowing what the enemy's cast time makes this "strategy" further useless. Also if a character is delayed to a certain round (say the 2nd one), how do you know when during that round he/she is going to cast after you enter in more actions with your other characters who are going on the same round? USELESS.

Some other random thoughts: interestingly enough, there's no airship BUT you get two ships (one being a cruise ship); there were some unexpected minigames such as the cubic musical score which had you replay the notes listed in the description, an airship minigame where you avoided enemy attacks, chasing and sleeping giant monsters, and putting wreathes around statues; the treasure trove achievement is brutal (I didn't bother with it and it's my only missing achievement, minus DLC).

GRAPHICS 4.5/5
The in-game graphics vs the prerendered FMVs were pretty close. The graphics were pretty and pretty detailed. Though some of the cutscenes lacked the proper facial expression to match the voice coming out, which made it really weird.

OVERALL 4/5
The optional dungeon, optional boss fights (I ran into most of them accidentally), and the optional hardest boss in the game were all very challenging and fun.

I noticed the English subtitles and the Japanese dialog were quite different (though I think that's the case with most translated games just to fit the audience) but yeesh, they made Jansen sound like such a stupid douchebag in the English.

Disc swapping is so last gen. D:

For the record: I encountered two sound-related glitches, music tracks overlapping and music ceasing completely.

I can totally see a Lost Odyssey II. Mistwalker, MAKE IT HAPPEN.

November Reality

It's nice that Halloween came and all but that means that November is here. I hear Hell whispering in my ear again...

My laptop is out of commission. More precisely, either the power cord (which is most likely the problem) or the power plug has broked. The power cord is dead. I was able to cheat it for a few days by angling the cord a certain way so the inner metal touched and charged. Now it refuses it completely. Seems like eventual power cord deaths are a common occurrence. A whole new, official cord will cost a leg but a new laptop will cost me a few legs so I am relieved, though still not happy that the new cord will cost quite a bit.

So this finally came in the mail the other day:

This wasn't exactly what I was expecting but apparently my actual loot package got lost(?) or they just never sent it so this was my replacement. I was supposed to get the whole Tokunaga plushie set plus the Tales Vol.2 CD but instead came a [useless] L-size WHITE t-shirt, ONE Tokunaga plushie with its head severed and the Vol.3 CD instead. I thought Vol.3 was the one that was hard to get a hold of? I'm still waiting on that bonus for the Tales of Vesperia CE, which is supposedly the Vol.2 CD. I should go and bother them some more for it.

November means there's really only one month and a few weeks left of the semester (shock). The coming weeks will be brutal... which reminds me, registration was yesterday.

Parents also came back from their crazy cruise of crazy (Turkey, Israel, Ephesus, Greece) today. The past two weeks were pretty nice and peaceful ('sides all the school crap).

I swear I had more to say but now I can't remember.

(Domo straw courtesy of Tofu smuggling it up during his trip to join the Vancouver team. Team Vancouver +1)

Halloween, Costumes & Explosions

It's that time of the year when I scramble frantically for a relatively easy costume to put together for Halloween. This year instead of red gloves it's bunny ears. Not just any pair of bunny ears... No - not fuzzy, no glitter/sparkles/shiny, must be white, must be bendable and long would be a plus. I wandered through at least 8 different stores... It was Faith all over again! This year they were Reisen bunny ears. :3

You know you are a geek when you purposely dress up (hm, the more suitable term in my case would be cosplaying) as a character from an extremely niche market and you know that a good 97% of the people who will see it won't know where it's from. To my surprise though, one person did recognize my costume at the party but that was after I told them that it was from "an obscure Japanese shmupvertical shooter." And for those who really had no clue, "Japanese bunny school girl" was a good enough description for me.

Now that I have a new costume... I think I can reuse this again. Maybe I'll get a wig, though I am a disaster at maintaining wigs. I gave up on trying to straighten my Lacus mop-of-a-hair back in the day. I'm unsatisfied with my ears though, they just aren't long enough but there was one girl at the party who had an awesome pair of perfect long ears but she got it at a game stand at PNE/Playland. Not sure if I'd ever get a chance to go there and force myself to win myself a pair of ears... or if it'd even be there by the time I visit the place again.

I almost didn't end up going to the party. Sty's been busy packing and was tired so she didn't wanna go. It took me about three tries to actually get her moving, the main reason I used (and was the truth) was that I couldn't face the scary cupcake girl by myself. But the three tries took about three hours before we finally got to Gar's place three hours late. Luckily it was because we got there late, cupcake girl was already deep in conversing and boasting about her cupcakes so I had nothing to fear. I kept my box closed until the end of the party.

Sadly also because we got there late, there wasn't much food left. Although while I was waiting at home, I raided some of my brother's food so I was pretty good without. We watched "Halloween" movies on tv... the scary/horror flicks and the like. Ugh Saw II/I. ;(

When there's Halloween, there's fireworks. Fireworks are only cool when you're the one playing with them. Besides that, they're annoying and loud. A bit past midnight, we made our round of noises in backyard and came back in smelling deliciously smokey. That followed with the revealing of my cupcaaakes, and the consumption of more candy, baked+salted pumpkin seeds, garlic bread (?!), pop?!

I think I'm eventually going to run out of easy costumes to do...

Then I get to go back to elaborate sewing.
Before that though, I'd probably have to get myself a sewing machine.