Friday, July 16, 2010

nintendo stop wasting my time!

I actually bought NSMB for the wii.

I'm just insulted by the game on a regular basis. There's no save point where I need one, so I've spent the last few months staggering over and over again through the 2nd World. I've beaten every one of these levels, and any decent emulator would let me save where it makes sense, not where the designers decided to waste my time.

Every time I die, usually caused by some snot-nosed insult of a gap placed right where the designers engineered me to HAVE to land...they waste seconds of my time on their demon face deathmask animation AND then the absurd delay at the map screen before letting me pick up where I left off, at the last bullshit death the game built into itself.

I enjoyed NSMB for the ds. I wanted a direct port, or at least the option to play a direct port of that. Instead we have a seriously fucked up affair with multiplayer grafted onto the platforming experience like frankenstein's monster.

I appreciate Mario platformers with skill required, like SMW. NSMBw isn't NSMB. It's NSMB with 10-20x the cheap deaths and bullshit tricks to keep you wasting time in the death-penalty loop.

Weak.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

bitching about bejeweled (among other stuf)

"going dark for a while." Love how they say that on 24. aka torture-porn or the jack bauer power hour, depending on the favorite references of your surrounding crowd.

Then again maybe I've been dark for a few weeks already, if this and nearby blogs are any indication. Dumping rough compositions, blog posts, reviews and other musings into text files between binges of consuming the very same stuff I usually reflect upon.

Multiplexing myself worked okay far as the sites go, I just need an in-home espresso machine and two or three clones, then each of them could take a different theme blog and run with it.

I lol'd to see a blogger writing month. I don't think there'd be any actual content in my posts if I posted everyday, unless I was reviewing a particular site, book, record, movie...

I've been churning the gears, tumbling over the inspirations and scraps of notes, feeling vital now that the temperatures I associate with summertime have come to our semi-coastal current city. Caffeine and temps above 72 get me up and about. Vacuuming the floor and the rugs, doing the dishes.

In fact last night I built a small speaker stand out of salvaged wood, probably an old futon frame, found near the dumpster a few weeks ago. But that's another lame story undeserving of a post itself until properly perfected, probably painted matte black.

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I continue to be frustrated with the devolution of Bejeweled Blitz on facebook, what began as a truly skillful pursuit limited to a mere minute each game. Now it's a resource hog...not that in previous incarnations it ran even on a G4...but now it makes an intel mac whine.

Either my brand new mouse with brand new batteries is glitchy only when playing this game, or they've engineered all playability out of it entirely in the process of diverting users to chasing their 'coins.'

The same path that led Zynga to irrelevance, the tired purchasing of virtual credits with real money. Same tired capitalist model isn't gonna take root without resemblances to gambling, but the clueless chumps keep trying the same broken wheel in search of a smoother ride.

I once upon a time could lose 20 minutes at a crack playing Bejeweled Blitz, but now it's a chore getting through five minutes in a row. The pointer moves the wrong block, moves the right block but the wrong direction, or fails to notice its proper position entirely.

It would seem that in order to compensate for the performance issues, the flash app has been allowed to become more and more resource-intensive. Doesn't matter what browser, either. Mac os 10.5.x (whatever the current patches and updates are) on an intel mac with 2gb ram seems to perform similarly, as one might expect from a plugin, agnostic of browser.

I haven't honestly trotted out Opera, but Firefox, Chrome and Safari, all of which I updated to their recentest versions, including the goddamn adopey trash plugin itself, all hammer the processor and spin up the fan from the 1500rpm range to 2400-2600.

Weak...