September 2008 Archives

I'm getting back to Metroid series!

A few days ago, I actually made some progress in Metroid Prime: Hunters. Unbelievable, all in all - I was out of clues and was getting desperate.

But best of all, I actually beat the bloody Boost Guardian in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. When I first played the game, it was the first boss that managed to kill me. I was so happy when I had beaten Quadraxis back in the day that there would never ever be need for me to defeat the Very Damn Annoying Bosses again... but then my memory card died. And the motivation to defeat the Boost Guardian again can be pretty low. Hope I can stay steamrolling until I hit the bloody Spider Guardian again...

"'Alpha Blogg was harder than I remembered', he blogged." Yep - I think I even got killed once when I played it first time. I guess the reason is simple: the title loop lies. I'm looked at the opening credits many times, thought "oh, this is easy", and got flattened. Alpha Blogg isn't trivial - just Relatively Straightforward. Fortunately I beat the thing without retries this time, because I messed up and couldn't get to the save point and would have needed to redo a lot of stuff again. Grr.

Oh, and the game looks a bit funny on Wii due to crisper graphics, I guess...

And finally, a little bit of Somewhat Tasteless And In Any Case Quite Inappropriate Humour® (but publishable, I hope, since I'm not making light of the incident itself, no way). From Iltasanomat (a local tabloid) website: "11-year-old American boy died in Thursday after re-enacting Halo, the famous video game, in his home in Farrington. The boy shot himself accidentally with his own gun." *sigh* it is, of course, extremely regrettable that this sorts of incidents happen, but one could bring forth, once again, the Console War angle here. At least Metroid Prime developers, in their infinite wisdom, remembered to include the Space Pirate research data in the game, stating very emphatically that all attempts to recreate Samus Aran's Morph Ball have ended in severe injuries or death. Kids, do not use real guns, they are not toys!

A while back, there was some Æncyclopædiæ drama over Chris-chan (aka Christian Weston Chandler). I'm not really commenting much on the issue, having had similar (but deinitely not as spectacular and not as severe) issues as this guy, but I'm just saying that I found the Sonichu audio books pretty... unique. And at parts hilarious. I sure hope this guy gets over the, ahem, issues, one way or other.

Anyway, I'm not posting about that - I just mentioned that because looking at the case reminded me that I still haven't completed Pokémon Sapphire. So, in the weekend, I played good few hours of the thing. Yay. So here is some aimless rambling about a Grown Man Playing Pokémon, a bit Analytically.

I'm not necessarily completely coherent today, so apologies if this article is too weird to handle.

Finally managed to sign up to Veoh. So, here, I finally uploaded a video from late 2004 or so: Me defeating Metroid Prime, in, uh, Metroid Prime, GameCube's finest game, for the first time. I should have uploaded this somewhere earlier, but I didn't want to burden archive.org and YouTube only wants 10-minute vids. Anyway, my play style here displays some unprecedented clumsiness, never before seen but sometimes repeated. (I think I was just getting tired that day - this was my third or fourth try that day...)