Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Not reindeer games. I and the rest of my family got a ton of Playstation 2 games collectively, and I’ll give my thoughts on them.

Final Fantasy X-2

Awesome, totally cool and I and my cousin Maureen are massively addicted to this game. I started playing this a long time ago but using the Japanese edition; this version is much better, since I don’t have to constantly translate everything. It’s extremely girly but who cares? Fun is fun.

True Crime

I got this for my brother, another cool game. Basically it’s Grand Theft Auto, only you’re given some motivation for a being a good cop. I’ve played it a little bit and may pick it up for myself. There’s some funky graphics glitches in it though where you see large patches of textures missing, and then displayed depending on the player’s angle.

Prince of Persia

Wicked game, way more fun than the original (which just made me wish I was dead). It really oozes style. There’s a little bit of lameness - like killing stupid little beetles and stuff - but it’s still one of the best games I’ve played in a long time.

Need for Speed: Underground

Another game I picked up for my brother, but I’ve played it way more than him. It’s awesome - think street racing like Fast and the Furious. The career or “Underground” mode suffers from some gayness like not being able to do over races that you’ve won to collect more cash. I’ll definitely be getting this one.

Tony Hawk’s Underground

Another underground game. I guess the word underground is this years “Extreme” or something. Anyways, this is a decent Tony Hawk game but it’s nowhere near THPS 3 as far as I’m concerned. This whole pseudo-open endedness of THPS 4 and Underground just doesn’t really appeal to me. The best part about the older skate games was trying to find the best lines in the levels to get a disgustingly high score in two minutes. That’s all gone now though.

Add in the fact that this game is a huge fucking advertisement and it becomes less appealing. Now advertising for skate companies made sense, and was excusable. But there’s product placement everywhere for stuff like Nokia and McDonald’s. Lame. And the biggest ad is that the final unlockable video is a KISS video and the unlockable character is Gene Simmons. WTF?? That really bothers me.

They also added a whole bunch of horrible vehicle missions in the game that just plain don’t fit. Like you’ll finish a goal where you have to score 50000 points in a pipe, and then you have to fly a stupid little blimp. It really takes you out of the game.

Oh, and you can get off your board and walk around, adding another lame feature that probably one jerk in a message board wanted sometime way back.

I still like it, just not as much. I admit though I got pissed with it after and threw THPS3 back in.

Amplitude

This wasn’t a gift for anyone; in fact, I’ve owned this game for a long, long time. But it deserves special mention because pretty much everyone in the family (not to mention a few friends here) have played shitloads of this game. My parents even play this game. It’s awesome. Anyone who doesn’t own this game should. Even if you don’t like it, the majority of people that you know will like it, and therefore it’ll make you cooler and more popular. Yeah.

The Wikipedia project needs help; you can donate if you think it’s a worthy cause.

A view from the deck.

…and boy are my arms tired. Heh.

Yeah, so I’m here up in the great North of Ontario, and damn it’s cold. But I made it in yesterday - I got to Toronto from Tokyo, had a about five or six hours and then came here. I was jetlagged all crazy yesterday but I think I’m OK now.

Got tons and tons of new games to occupy my time - Manhunt, Prince of Persia, Tony Hawk’s Underground, FFX2, and on and on. Sweetness.

Made it back into Toronto. Bam!

Knowing that I’d be in Narita all bored and shit waiting for my flight, I had the foresight to use Feedster and search for wireless Internet access in the terminals. They have it. They apparently charge about 10 bucks to use it, but the signal strength is so poor that it makes using it impossible.

So the other option is a Yahoo Cafe. Free non-wireless access, but you have to use their computers. They have an interesting system which uses USB keys that plug into their systems to unlock them. Unfortunately they want to scan your fucking passport before using the computers. That’s a little frightening.

So I whipped out my trusty AirH cell-modem PCMCIA card, and I’m typing this at a blazing 3 kilobytes a second. Which, if you’re just looking to waste time, is all you really need.

Consistently Air Canada has screwed up sending me Aeroplan cards (they’ve managed to send statements to my apartment for years, just not replacement cards), so I’ve not had one in my wallet for a long, long time. This was previously not a problem, as the clerks at the counter would take any number since you have your passport in hand and they have the Aeroplan database on their terminals.

So today I get fucked out of about 7000 Aeroplan miles because I don’t have a card, and they’ve “changed their policy six months ago” - which is strange, considering I’ve flown many many times since six months ago and have had all my miles credited to the account.

This really dissapoints me due to the fact that the Star Alliance loyalty program is one of the few in existence that I find any value in. Airmiles is a huge fucking scam, and most of the non-Star Alliance plans (American Advantage comes to mind) suck.

Bastards.

This is probably an old piece of information, but it was fairly new to me. I’ve found that my computer was periodically connecting to (and attempting to connect to) a site called sa.windows.com. After many Google Groups searches it appears that the Windows “Search Assistant” is constantly updating itself through a web service located at that machine. Thankfully it’s easy to turn off. Go to the registry key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Cabinet State” and add a String key named “Use Search Asst” with the value “no”. Do it for all the users on your system that login.

This is one of the things that piss me off about web services - they’re a total bitch to block with a firewall since they all use port 80 and most of them use the system URL fetching utilities.

Yesterday we went to Tokyo Disney. It was cool, but Good Lord it was also very painful. And a damned cold day to boot.

The rides and attractions were cool and all, but there were lines in excess of an hour for almost all of them. There was a “fast pass” system which previously I had only heard of in South Park (where I absorb most of my knowledge). I’m sure Wonderland and what not have a similiar system, where you grab a fast pass ticket for an event ahead of time and you can bypass the line to another that’s only half the size. You’re entitled to about 3 or 4 fast pass tickets a day, so it didn’t really solve the line problems.

It was still fun though. There was an awesome Star Tours/Wars ride that I remember going on in Disney World when I was a kid, and it was still pretty damned awesome. The Winnie the Pooh ride was fucked, it was the little retarded bear having a bad dream but it resembled a horrific acid trip with massive amounts of creepy imagery flying around. It reminded me of that old game Alice, where they took something that was usually pictured as innocent and warped it. I like that.

Most of the attractions were centered around faking reality, which is something else I like. I’ve always liked the Disney parks simply for the fact that their rides are kind of a manual physical virtual reality - using those creepy animatronics, holograms and so on.

We were there for the whole day I think, opening to closing. There was a big parade at the end celebrating the 20 years of either the park or Disney (which one? I don’t care). The best part of the parade was the last float that was a huge “Sponsered by Unisys” logo - heh. Disney clutches to copyright, Unisys clutches to patents - a match made in heaven.

Overall it was pretty cool, and I’d absolutely go again - but on a warmer day and with a more normal human level of sleep the previous night.

I’m heading back to Toronto this evening, and I gotta tell you - I am not looking forward to these flights. 8 hours to Vancouver, 5 to Toronto, then 1.5 the next day to Sault Ste. Marie. And then a 1.5 hour car ride. Ugh. Luckily I’ve loaded up the computer with a shitload of movies and games, plus a book from Charles Stross that I’ve been trying to finish forever (reading on an LCD sucks).

Although I do admit I am looking forward to coming home. Seeing family and friends and all that will be good.