Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

I haven’t posted anything due to the fact that I’ve been lying in bed since like Friday. Missed work today. I’m going to do my best to make it in tomorrow - 90% chance I’d guess.

OK, I’ve done slightly more than just lying in bed. Chie took me out on the weekend to a part with a bunch of her old coworkers in Kawasaki. It was totally fun even if I couldn’t really partake in the food aspect of the evening. I mainly limited myself to anything that didn’t have a central nervous system to play it safe. I was really worried that I would have to wimp out and go home early sick but like the true powerhouse that I am, I perservered until the end. All 2.5 hours :-)

Other than that I have been lying around. I watched Chie kick the crap out of Ico on the PS2. Oh yeah, that reminds me of the fact that Ico is like the original Prince of Persia. Very similiar puzzles, a girl that runs around and helps the main character, similiar environments (both taking place in a large castle), and even the shared limit of four monsters on the screen at once. So yeah, if you enjoyed Prince of Persia grab Ico - we were able to get it as a greatest hit for like twenty bucks.

The other game she bought - note that she bought the games, not I - was Project Zero. I think it’s called Fatal Frame II in America. It’s a fucked up survival horror game. I’ve played a few other horror games, such as Clocktower 3 and some of the Resident Evil games and none of them hold a candle to how crazy this game is. It’s about fear, not gore. And the story is creepy as all hell - it revolves around identical twins getting sucked into a satanic ritual where one has to kill the other. Yeah, messed up.

Unfortunately our crappy little television here (which came with the apartment) has really dim guns, so the dark areas of the game are absolute black. It both adds to the atmosphere and makes it frustrating. Don’t know what to do about that.

I was actually looking at getting a USB capture card to get around the problem. My grand plan was that I’d plug the PS2 video output into a magic USB device and she/we could play it on the laptop screen. But - there’s always a but - none of the pieces of capture hardware are realtime. There’s apparently up to a second long delay between the input and the output. Which for normal purposes like television and movies is no problem, but for gaming it’s a dealbreaker.

Anyway, I’ll stop. I’ve already gone off on three tangents.