Finally.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has been a bit problematic game for me. It's much harder game than Metroid Prime, and when I started playing the game, I made a conscious effort not to look at any walkthroughs - after all, I had beaten Metroid Prime with some help so the sequel should not prove to be problematic, right?

Well, I'm happy to say that while I did indeed look at walkthroughs while playing the game, I can honestly say that I did figure out the strategies myself. In the end, I did look at the walkthrough at times to see if there's any "optimal" way of beating the bosses - but I did manage to figure out how to damage them and what I really should do to beat them. That's one of the annoying features of Metroid series: You somehow manage to figure out how to beat the things, but figuring out how to do things without dying 10 times is the hard part. I'm taking my enjoyment from the fact that I figure things out this way, rather than slavishly following the "Real Men don't look at the walkthroughs" purism that I thought was a good idea. I enjoy the games more this way.

Anyway, the end battle was amazing - much more fun than the Metroid Prime last boss. Took some massive amount of cursing to get through, though... The crazy thing is, of course, that the final forms of the bosses aren't so difficult at all; Emperor Ing's first form is the hardest because it sucks up all ammo and there's such a limited time to damage the thing.

One annoying thing about the game was the fact that I got 99% of the scans. I missed one damn one-time-only scan (the space pirate cannon). Damn. Well, maybe I'll be inspired to beat the game again or something. Eventually.

But now, this game is finally over. Finally. Damn it. No more beating the goddamn Spider Guardian. Considering adding Metroid Prime 3: Corruption to the to-get list.

I need a bit of rest. But at least now I can get back to playing Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age, without any big diversions like this any more.

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!

For me, the last week marked the end of GameCube gaming... well, GameCube gaming on a GameCube, at least.

Here's the complex, remarkable and weird tale on the last few days of SSBM on the Almighty Cube, and how I moved from the Cube to that fantastic new white box thing. Warning: Horrenduous flash photography also included. Another warning: Nothing works.

... the blog has peen upgraded to Movable Type 4.2, and...

... apparently, "6 days ago" (I hate web2.0 sites that don't provide me bloody exact dates I post my garbage damn it, identi.ca does have exact date, just not in the place I actually could find it easily...2008-08-09 19:07:32 UTC =), I beat Thief II: The Metal Age. Too bad I'm pretty much too coffeed to tell more, but I really enjoyed the whole game. Great levels and stuff. Too bad Thief 3 won't run in WINE too well yet, but I can satisfy my newfound craving for taffering through T2X.

Okay - so what I have done lately? I have been playing the game that is probably right up in the somewhat shortish list of "games I absolutely felt I had to beat."

Thief: The Dark Project, which I started playing late last year and finally beat yesterday for the first time - probably the first game I've started playing and completed in Wine - has been an extremely intense experience. It has had everything: cute lizards, Tombraideresque lost cities, verily hammerething fanatics, weird ratpeople, things that go *GONK* in the night, mysteriously disappearing piles of treasure, strange feeling that everything in this game has been made on purpose, gothic darkess, sheer horror, strange feeling that everything in this game makes sense for some reason, fumbling, humour, and...

...well, let me put it this way: This game is art. Usually, when people say some game is a work of pure art it means it's hard like hell. I think great artful games should not be just amazing and finely crafted, but fun too. Thief is certainly not amazing by today's standards - heck, to release a game with Quake's graphic details in 1998 was pretty weird, probably - but all things considered, this game has great atmosphere and even greater soundscapes. But the cool thing is, it's probably playable by a layman. I had great fun at the normal skill level; I think I'll have a blast at the higher skill level next!

But before that, Deus Ex. =)

I have a peculiar eye for pity.

For some reason, I feel there is nothing sadder than the fact that some people take pains to produce something beautiful... and then, some little-minded ungrateful person decides to proverbially flatten the thing completely.

It was only last week when I got my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for GameCube. Now, I'm already nearing the end of the game. I've enjoyed the game a great deal.

But there was one big issue that put a great big dent in my enjoyment.

Basically, The City in the Sky had one big design flaw that's rather common in modern games. I was banging my head on the wall: I knew exactly what to do next to proceed, but I had no idea how to do it in the game. My day was growing long, I had almost finished the game without any spoilers at all, and now I was here and had spent good five hours trying to figure out how the hell to proceed.

In the end, I had all the information in my head. I just couldn't connect them.

(SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWING)

Basically, just before the end of the level, there's this disco-ball you need to latch on using clawshots. The thing is too high to reach from the floor. Just too high.

I had arrived to some logical conclusions BEFORE looking at the FAQs:

1. To get to the north tower, I had to activate the giant big fan on the main structure. It just sat there, and the turning panes on the way leading to the north weren't turning, and the turning panes could be climbed on but it was impossible to get to the north tower that way.
2. There's no obvious way to start the thing on the way leading to the north tower. It had to be elsewhere.
3. The fact that the fan on the ceiling of the main room can be turned off has to be significant, and the fact that there's a clawshotable wine going to the second floor is significant.
4. There's no obvious way to turn the thing on the main floor, apart of the disco-ball which I hadn't tried because I couldn't get to the disco ball.

I tried everything: Figuring out how to get on top of the nearest colums by jumping from the above using the birdmen. (Aggravating - the birdmen move and are always out of the clawshot range). Tried hanging from all possible places to get somewhere to the clawshot range. Tried scouring all places. I tried crossing the north way without making the panes turn. Tried hopping on top of the walkway from the roofs of the main building, which was a bit far-fetched.

The FAQ explained the lead on point 4 was the key: The idea was to latch on the grating on the room above the fan, lower down, then clawshot to the ball on the roof of the main room.

In retrospect I had ignored one major clue: The room above the fan had grating ceiling that I had not used before, and using clawshot to hang from there was, at this point, still counterintuitive...

(END SPOILERS)

So what went wrong? Basically, there was not enough clues, and some of the ones that were present were misleading.

Now I hate myself for reading the FAQ and not trying hard enough. I hate myself for getting annoyed at the whole map and cursing the creators of the level to the third generation. I hate myself for hating the concept of the level - if there's one thing I dislike in games, it's the "crumbling floor" or "no floor" levels. I hate myself for letting anger take better of me.

I should have rested. I should have went to some forum and ask "am I on the right track with this?" Because that's another flaw of this game, and modern games in general, and heck, all game FAQs in general: Lack of InvisiClues-like approach to hints, lack of some protocol through which I could get information on how to get forward without getting the complete solution.

I also hate myself for having to rationalise this. Or do I need to? Should I hate myself for saying "Well, it's not bad, I would have figured it out in 5 more hours"? Do I need to get over the "GAMEFAQS = DEATH" line of thinking? Should all Serious Gamers™ accept "okay, you're allowed to look up a spoiler from the FAQs once, and it's not that bad"? Do I set my bar of seriousness too high?

It also brings me to the point of this article: The folks at Nintendo made an interesting level. I hate myself for hating them for making it aggravating at times. It's a fine dungeon. I should be grateful for them for making such a nice dungeon and putting a lot of thought to that.

So what do I think of the game? At first, I was thinking of calling it better than Ocarina of Time, but because the end dungeons seem to be considerably more aggravating than the ones in OoT and The Wind Waker, I'm not so sure. I'm not saying the game is fun; it's just spectacularly frustrating when you're not moving forward. At least in TWW, you could roll around in circles and hope things would get better (okay, I also had the walkthrough at hand for TWW, but I mostly consulted it for locations of the heart pieces). Here, on the other hand...

And what do I do now? Well, I'll finish the game WITHOUT any spoilers at all. My enthusiasm is gone the way it is now, but I hope I'll regain it. I just hate it that there's so few games I've finished without any spoilers; Max Payne comes in mind, as does (within recent years) Phoenix Wright: Ace Attourney, Star Fox Adventures... and I think I haven't looked at plot spoilers for Baten Kaitos yet, though I did look at the card descriptions and checked that yes, there's Lupus constellation in the game.

Oh my dear. I've actually finished Tomb Raider.

Last night, I don't know exactly when, I finished Tomb Raider. The big cause to celebrate is that about 10 years ago, I got the PC version of the game. I can't remember exactly when I got the game, and I don't seem to have it recorded down anywhere, but the game was out 10 years ago and I seem to have got the game shortly afterwards. (Now that I'm awake, I think I got the game on late winter holiday; I distinctly remember reading the Pelit magazine review before getting the actual game, and the review was in issue 1/1997.) The only odd thing is that I've beat the Playstation version rather than the PC version. But then again, PC version is a tad bit harder. I swore I'd beat Tomb Raider in 10-year limit, and decided I'd be done with it before the end of the year 2006. Turns out my schedule wasn't really airtight... but it never really needed to be - hey, a few more days isn't going to ruin all if the game has awaited completion for that long!

The game is great. The only disappointing thing is that the cutscenes aren't really all that great (very clumsy 3D animations, even by that day's standards - looks like they just bought 3DStudio and started messing around), and the models are pretty low-poly. (Can't make sense of what some things are meant to be...) Wish I could run the PC version right now, it at least had a high-rez mode.

The end was a little bit disappointing. Guess Metroid Prime has dulled my senses in what to expect from end bosses; I walk in with bagloads of ammo and stuff, and the end boss is the most trivial thing ever imagined. Eh... Also, the end clip was a bit short and the end credits were a bit disappointing too. Strange how new games make us demand more...

Anyway, I'm slightly disappointed with myself. It's yet another game that I couldn't finish without looking at walkthroughs. In my defense, I have to say that I didn't really get any new information out of them; I merely glanced at them to see how much of the level remained. That's because the last levels weren't really all that difficult, they were just annoying. I had to look at the walkthroughs to see how much there was in the levels. I did figure out all puzzles in the game all by myself, as annoying as it seemed, and found the secrets that I ever found all by myself, too. So, um, I guess I'm nearing to being a good citizen.

Okay, phew, now I can finally focus on Final Fantasy VIII again. Oh wait, still have to beat Baten Kaitos =)

Lately, I've played Baten Kaitos (GC), Tomb Raider (PS1), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Tetris DS (NDS).

As for Baten Kaitos, I've almost played all the way until the place where I was when my memory card blew up. I've noted that playing games is much easier when you know what you're doing. =) The experience has so far been quite interesting, actually: This game certainly isn't tedious to repeat.

ALttP was something that I picked up from used games shelf some weeks ago. A long time ago, I failed to pick it up when one was available, and thought my luck would never repeat itself. It did. =) ALttP is a great game.

Tomb Raider has been quite fascinating. I have good hopes that I will actually be able to finish the game this year. I've been trying to fulfill this goal; it feels kind of silly that I bought the PC version of the game 10 years ago and I haven't finished it.

I also saw the first Tomb Raider movie. I was actually positively surprised, it wasn't as bad as I heard. Okay, clearly the makers hadn't played the games a whole lot, and there were a few background bits that even I noticed were wrong. But it wasn't completely awful in its execution. Lots of speed. A bit too few puzzle stuff. Beautiful locales. The only thing I didn't like was the end - I don't think the movie was wrapped up in an adequate way. But, you know, yawn, wonder where the real game-to-movie conversion is lurking. It sure is hiding good.

Tetris DS is... Tetris. I actually played it on Wifi in PanOulu network. (Still haven't found Linux softap stuff for the USB dongle. Apparently it simply doesn't exist yet. =)

Three cheers for Nintendo - turns out that, for once, Nintendo is doing a a lot of cool stuff based entirely on open standards. Like Wi-Fi. And to top that off, it appears that Nintendo's own Wi-Fi adapter for PC is actually completely Linux-compatible. And the craziest part appears to be that you can use stock unmodified Nintendo hardware to run homebrew games over Wi-Fi.

Yep - rt2570 driver recognises Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector. Set it up, fired up Ethereal (should upgrade to Wireshark =), told Nintendo DS to look for a network, and stood in awe as broadcast packets appeared in Ethereal.

The thing is, it ended at seeing the broadcast in Ethereal. Of course, DS couldn't find an AP. Hardware is apparently the easy part. Now, to actually use DS networking, I'd need to make the dongle to actually respond to AP broadcast, set up the link, and route my packets. In other words, I need the SoftAP part for Linux. Easier said than done, it appears that host-based AP stuff is supported for certain hardware, but I couldn't find that for rt2570...

(There bloody well has to be a way to do this. DS Wireless Multiboot has to be harder to hack together than a minimal AP thingy.)

Also, Tetris DS seems to rule. Tetris is always Tetris, of course, and the new game modes are very interesting. To honour the return of classic to the new machine, I tried playing the game for the first time while wearing the original GameBoy headphones... =)

Okay, some very tired thoughts at four o'clock in the morning...

Yesterday's big news was that I registered to play NetHack on alt.org.

It's a great big freaking time that I get over of my NetHack depression. I have to fight it. I bloody well will beat this game one day.

What NetHack depression? Well, NHD is a very very typical thing - I play what seems to be a rather decent game, get squished like a bug, and swear not to touch the game for the next six months. And after six months, the same thing.

And what makes it even worse is three things: I've played the game damn long already and still don't quite achieve good results; I consider beating this game to be the only criteria for being considered a Serious Gamer; and thirdly, if I see other people getting squillion times more points if I do, well, that certainly does put certain dent in my motivation... I have this annoying tendency to want to excel, and completely and utterly failing to do that does get me down - and no, quit saying that majority of the modern gamers haven't ascended either, dammit!

I've played the game for... hell if I know how long. The thing is, 10 years ain't even close. And my current NetHack skillset is somewhat similar to an advanced player that has maybe played the game for a half an year; I know the most obvious things that I'm not supposed to do, some of the things that are good to do, and that's that.

But the thing is, I've never really looked at NetHack in an analytic way. I've just pressed on, killed things, and then died a stupid death, thinking "well, I'd better not do that in the future!" I think NetHack is a wrong game to start with; I've now played a lot of other games and that's probably teaching me more on how to play games. All these years, I've never had the proper mindset for this kind of games.

I guess it's time for me to quit thinking this as a yet another CRPG and start thinking it as what it is - an action game with endless possibilities for minmaxing and stuff. stretching fingers:: Hmm...

I swear I'll be done before... well, let's be generous and say 2016. Well, at lest it's pretty safe to say I've done the Quest by then. =)

And finally, I'm very surprised to see "Killed by a fox" as the #11 cause of death. "A corrrnered fox is more dangerous than a jackal!" ...um, jackals are on the list too. At #3. Glad to see the old favorite (NOT!), water moccasins, on rank #2, though. =)