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[Feb. 10th, 2009|02:26 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | biophysics, comics, dvice, extensions, firefox, galciv2, games, ideas, job, meeting, moon, random, review, robots, school, scrabble, simon, solution, xkcd, zits | ] |
I'm taking time out of my busy schedule to post random stuff that nobody cares, but I will force them to read anyways because I think it will do them good. =D Here I go!
Old news first: A couple of weeks ago, I got my first biophysics assignment and I on it was this question: "How many houses does the tooth fairy visit each night." At first I thought that was a trick question like, "The tooth fairy doesn't exist", but no; I actually came out with a number. Think about it for a second, because the answer isn't actually that simple.
( Here was my full solution )
Needless to say, I got the mark.
You know when sometimes you get cravings for stuff? ....You do know, right? Like how girls have cravings for sweet treats all the time? Well, for gamer nerds like me, we sometimes wanna sit down some quiet Friday night and play some type of wacky genre that no one cares about. As is the case with Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor... not to be confused with Twilight the book, movie, action figures or trading cards (its only a matter of time) that all the little girls with their raging female hormones are so into nowadays.
So what's so cravey about GalCiv2? Well, at the time, I felt like playing an RTS. You know, something with tanks and little men and fighter jets all starting from different corners of the world and apocolyptically clash in the middle, where you play as an overhead omnipotent being that controls all the smiting that goes on. GalCiv2 is not that. It's... kind... of.... slower..... than.... that. It's a turn based strategy game... it's kinda like chess, where you sit there for hours and analyze your next move, and then the move after that and then the move after that. It's pretty deterministic and the only challenge up until now is that I know the game is bigger than me.
What do I mean by that? Well, macroscopically it's a very straight forward game. You start off as some race/faction in the universe and your goal is to dominate the universe. But wait, you don't just have to crush the enemy.. instead, you can win by creating alliances with them or you can spend lots and lots of money to convince other races that yours is the best and somehow they all side with you, or you can spend even more money and research... a LOT. Ultimately, there's a lot to do every turn.. lots of variables... lots of negotiating with AI computers which can be very dumb or very frustrating.
So from a critical standpoint, is it any good? I mean, every major game review site has given it at LEAST 8 out of 10. Well, I don't know... I've only played on the beginner and normal difficulty because I'm scared that if I go any higher the computer will somehow wipe me out in 5 turns, which I think they can do because on the first campaign map, there was this enemy ship on the first turn that had a weapon rating of 128 and 28 shields (I think it's a glitch). The max I've EVER gotten was 9 and 3. =| It's not so much of a game to have fun as opposed to a game where you like to sit, think for a bit, click around and see what happens next. While almost everything is theoretically deterministic, there's a point where there's too many factors to process. If you're a perfectionist like me, it's very unsettling to know that there's an optimal way to crush all 8 of your enemies in 5 turns by some weird build order you've never thought of, but because you're human and you have emotions, and intuition, you can only win in 3000 turns. =( Of course they tell you that there's no right or wrong way to play, but that's only true if you don't have a life. The game takes a really, really long time and I probably researched and waited a lot more than I needed to. I played a tiny galaxy and that took like..... half a day to achieve victory (by conquest). They say you would probably need to spread it out over several weeks or months for a large galaxy, but I don't wanna play a single game for a month when I could potentially lose. It did however keep me entertained and amused for several days as I tried to figure out how to invade planets and how trading routes worked an such.
I guess this makes me a bit of a hypocrite. After all, I did say I wanted to try something different, and now that I did, it reminds me why the genre is not that popular. It's not the game's fault that it's boring; I can sympathize with it. I can't say that it also wasn't thought out or badly designed, because some geek clearly sat there for probably years in his mom's basement and made it. I can see the appeal, but I'm probably just not cut out for TBS. Maybe if I play it a bit more it'll grow on me; at least up until the next review I do, which I know will probably be the RTS Sins of a Solar Empire, also made by Stardock.
The most random thing happened to me last Friday. I was coming back from the physics building and I cut through the chem building on my way to SS. As I got near the door leading out, the brown dude cut in front of me and came to a sudden stop at the door, forcing me to stop. Then out of the blue, he yelled out (quite loudly) "Simon!" and I just said... "umm.. yes?" He turned around and looked me in the eyes for 2 seconds and said my name again. I followed that up with, "I'm sorry, do I know you?" Then this chinese dude cuts in front of us... turns out his name was Simon too. As we all got a laugh when we were leaving, the brown dude said, "You see, this is why I think God exists." LOL.
I've been meaning to advocate this Firefox extension for a while. Normally I don't comment on plug-ins because they're very individual, subjective, buggy, non-intuitive, pointless, or overused. I could start listing a bunch of bad examples, but I won't. Instead I'll tell you about this little gem I found, and this was EXACTLY what I was looking for at the time. If you use the internet for research, or looking for notes or something, you've always wanted a highlighting app, but not just a highlighting app. A key specification is that it needs to remember your highlights on the page, so that if you ever go back to it, your highlights will still be there. And of course, It needs to be functional, efficient and customizable. Introducing Wired-Marker. It's a bit complex at first because it uses a folder system, but once you understand how to set up folders, it's pretty usable and I found myself highlighting notes and pages for course work lately, specifically highlight pages on Wikipedia to snap to points quickly. It's bookmarking and highlighting on steroids. Really, if you need an internet highlighting system, definitely check it out.
I need some random inputs for me to generate some ideas. Someone throw spew out some random inanimate objects!
Remember those cute little turret robots from Portal? There's this real life robot that kinda reminds me of it that can play pong!
Would you ever wear this?
I was job hunting several weeks ago, and applying to multiple places and I'm sad because not only do I rejections, I don't even get a response. =( Shouldn't it be at least a bit courteous to tell you you're rejected? ...I don't know. Probably not. I'm just frustrated that if I can't even compete to get a part-time job, how will I get a real job?
Scrabble.
Happy Belated Full Moon.
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