Opine

I’m sort of restless right now. When I start little projects, I find I cannot overcome self-confidence and motivation issues. When I try to indulge in great books or movies, I cannot seem to focus my attention. This may be the most free time I’ve ever had in my life, but I am unable to use it correctly. Sorry for all the whine, but I am clueless as to what I’m supposed to be dong right now. None of my hobbies seem to interest me lately. Maybe I’m just in a bad place. That said, I’m still on track with my schedule, so things can’t be all that bad.

In other less downer news, I played around with the Spore Creature Creator trial today. I’ve been bummed about Spore since last week when I found out that the graphics card in my nine month old Macbook is not supported. As disappointed as I am to have to load up XP, I was excited to try out the demo today. The interface is smooth and almost immediately decipherable. It seems much more intuitive than the Sim creator in the Sims 2.

I spent my time creating what can only be described as abominations. They tottered on malformed legs and struggled to walk without damaging their twisted spines. It was pretty cool, but I am not sure if its sold me on making major changes to my laptop. Sure, this aspect of the game is fun, can provide hours of entertainment, and represents a only a fraction of the experience, but it concerns me. I can’t connect with my lumbering abortions. They seem too wild, hardly cuddly, and completely alien for me to want to play around with them for very long.

Despite this nagging feeling that Spore will not live up to the hype, I remain, as ever, a devoted Will Wright fangirl. I’m sure it will be wonderful, and I look forward to wallowing around in his imagination for awhile.

Bequeath

My parents just bought a Wii and are holding some bowling grudge matches. I love them so.

I think I’ll bring home Mario Kart for Mother’s Day.

Innocence

Still kind of slogging through some work. Did find some time to waste some time with games.

For your questing pleasure, try You Have To Burn The Rope. It’s delightful and beautifully written. It does get a little difficult, though. One of the best soundtracks ever. I’m totally not kidding.

I love games like Magic Pen because they make me feel like a kid playing in the dirt. I remember spending time building crazy machines. It’s based on a game called Crayon Physics, but I prefer the in-browser flash format, because I’m on a Mac.

Hooray for distractions!

Recreation

I’m doing better with my work today, but I’m still not where I would like to be. For instance, I procrastinated today by reading an article about ways to stop procrastinating. Thankfully, I realized what I was doing.

I’ve been spending my evening researching some classic adventure games in preparation for my husband and my summer project. Sometimes I wish I had a PC so I could go back and play some of the ones I missed. I also wouldn’t mind playing through Grim Fandango again.

I was doing some more general game development research and found 400 master rules. The task seems more monumental everyday, but I was glad to read through these rules and find that most of them are second nature to me by now.

The development cycle will start in about a month when school is out. I look forward to plunging myself into some more abstract writing. I would love to work out how to write a development documents and craft a world through interactive fiction.

The only thing I’m worried about is the actual game play. It’s hard to do first person adventure. It’s all been done before. We think we can make it interesting. We hope.

One thing’s for sure: We won’t be depending on the graphics.

Indelible

Here are the fruits of our weekend. My husband, a friend, and I decided to go get some tattoos together. We went to two locations of our chosen shop, committed close to seven hours, and dropped a couple hundred dollars. It was all totally worth it.

I know a lot of people that really don’t understand it when we do this sort of thing. If someone has a problem with tattoos in themselves, I can’t really ever explain it to them. I think it’s either something you get or you don’t. The funny thing is a I hear seemingly contradictory complaints from people on the subject. Some people say they would never ruin their body this way. As a woman, there are times that I am unhappy with my body. I think this is is going to make me smile at myself instead of examining my back fat. Some say they think tattoos are vain. It is slightly narcissistic (Ah ha! Blog title!) to decorate yourself, but I have no aversions about who I am. I’m a nerdy chick. I like that. I think my new tattoo says more about my personality than my body.

My favorite objection is the “when you’re 70″ line. Yes, I know tattoos fade and distort. I try to go to good and expensive artist to counteract this for awhile, but I expect that when I’m seventy and Yoshi is 66 we will both be looking a little rough. Fine. I’m 70. Hopefully I’ll have better things to worry about like pleasing my robot overlords or keeping my grandkids for taking some sort of nano technology drug trip.

So, why did we do it? My husband is starting to get a collection of nerd tattoo. I always say that self-identification is empowerment. He loves Nintendo, Megaman, and the Autobots. He still giggles like a school girl when he talks about them and shows them off in job interviews. Thank goodness he’s in the tech industry.

As for me? Some of the fondest memories from my childhood (and college, for that matter) involve the Super Mario World series. Yoshi’s Island is still my favorite game. Without over romanticizing the whole thing, I think that to me the dinosaur is an embodiment friendship and determination. Silly, I know, but that is why I got him jumping. Also, I thought his feet looked really cute.

Other than that? We both love 8-bit art and have adorned our home with pixelated sprites.

Our artist was wonderful. He said he had wanted to try this sort of thing before, so he really went the extra mile for us. He took extra care to line up all the pixels. It was a grueling process, especially mine. I guess that’s what I get for choosing something with twice the bits.

And no, I don’t main Yoshi in Smash Brothers. Here’s my back again:

Hedonism

I’m out on the patio, and one of my neighbors is listening to Glycerine. I would find it endearing if they hadn’t been screaming and cursing at their dog earlier.

I was going to make my weekend all about having fun. One of my friends was coming down for his Spring Break, but he got into a car accident. He’s fine. I was really worried about him though. I think maybe it was a sign we all need to straighten up and fly right. I might do some personal work this weekend rather than sipping some drinks. Maybe I’ll do both.

It’s been a hard week, so I think I might get off the laptop and actually eat. I know this is short for a Friday post, but it’s extra long for a weekend post.

I’m off to nom nom nom and play some Brawl.

Carnage

So in addition to the human contact I received this weekend, I also purchased and wasted almost a day of my life on Super Smash Brothers Brawl.

I’m not an expert player. I have taken part in all night Melee rounds with my friends, but I never practiced enough to learn the tiers or even learn how to wavedash. I would solidly call myself a (gasp) casual player.

From what little I do know about Smash, I can say that Brawl has a somewhat different pace to it. I expect part of this feeling may come from the fact that I’m not totally used to the new controllers yet. I didn’t want to depend on my wavebird, so I tried wiimote nunchuck and classic controller. The action is noticeably slower than Melee, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I used my old standby Samus and the newcomer Pit, and I never had a problem controlling them. The movement was even. Yoshi is still a nightmare for me. That rolling egg attack is effective, but very cumbersome.

I’ve gone about one fourth of the way through Subspace Emissary. The baddies are very well designed, but some of them are very annoying. The eye-fish is disturbing. I don’t mind running through it, and I’m glad it’s on the disc, but the story seems like bad fanfiction. The cutscenes are awesome, however.

I haven’t been able to find anyone online yet. I think the servers are having trouble. This really is a bummer. Oh well, I plan on making some time to play with friends next weekend. Maybe I can play with my family over Easter. I don’t think one can get the full Smash experience until they are crammed onto a couch with three other players, shouting obscene things at one another.

So the verdict? Mixed. I love newcomers like Metaknight and Pit. I also loved that they sort of gimped my husband’s favorite, Kirby. He’s a cheap player and deserved it. I’m still out on online, unfortunately. I will say that it is inconceivable that you can’t connect two people from the same Wii to a random online match. Also, I’m very close to turning off Final Smash balls and those bomb force-field thingies.