Weak One

One week has gone by and I think I've only spent 2-3 hrs on flash game #1 which is a very weak performance on my part, largely thanks to learning more piano pieces and taking advantage of the recent events in Mabinogi. 5x EXP = 5 days of playing condensed into 1! I suspect I'll be a thrall to it's whims while it lasts... :P

Most of my focus will be on "flash game #1" which should end up to be a pretty small and wierd game. To that end I'll ditch the other two from the status list for now since they're not going to be changing till #1 is out of the way. I'm also tossing up the idea of salvaging some of my old flash movies and trying to monetise them somehow, if that's even possible. Would be great if I can as all the work is already in there, or possibly a compilation work of the best bits or something but I'll have to see how that goes. Unfortunately most monetising stuff I've looked at is aimed specifically at games. Also, I would need to add new sounds to the ones I have in mind either way.

Lastly, the mysterious book laughs at my futile attempts at starting a prologue. -_-

Apologies to anyone who stumbled across this page looking for flash stuff as I have none yet to offer, but I'd like so recommend Astromiau, or the mainsite of Vinnie Veritas (aka Kite-Ride). He makes a lot of Frame by Frame movies which are great to watch in any language. :)

Project Status:
Flash game #1 - 8% (most main chars animations done)
Mysterious book - 1% (no change)
Salvage mission: Hellsing - 0% (need to find fla, add sounds and music, possibly fix some stuff)
Salvage mission: Equilibrium - 25% (found fla, just need to find free music for it and alter credits a bit)

Repurposing - Not so Random anymore

Rather than continue with the "review" type site as my previous posts were leaning towards, I think I'm better off time-wise (both mine and yours :P) in using this as more like a creative journal. Hopefully it will also encourage me to be more productive!

So, just what thingies have I got in mind? At the moment a book and a few flash games, all of which are just distant goals in the horizon at the moment. The main difference to the other stuff I've made before is I'm actually going to try earn money from these, and I'm going to track how well or how poorly each attempt goes. Why these mediums? Generally my flash stuff always gets positive feedback and my forays into writing have won me little prizes here and there on the various MMO's I've been on, so I'm interested to see how well it does in the "real" world.

They're mostly planned out and really just need me to get on and doing them! At least I've got a logo for the flash stuff.

Yeah, well - it's better than nothing. :P

I'll be with-holding the actual titles until they are closer to completion, simply because I may decide to change them later on... and I like secrets! ^_^

Project Status:
Mysterious book - 1% (planned)
Flash game #1 - non DRM related. Small - 2% (planned - and now I have a logo. Ho ho ho. :P)
Flash game #2 - DRM related. Largish? - 2% (planned)
Flash game #3 - mysterious, even to me :P - 0% (rough idea only)

Wandering a Nuclear Wasteland

Fallout in Vegas? What a stupid idea! That was my initial reaction when I first heard about it, despite me truly adoring Fallout 3 and all of its DLCs. However after receiving it after my birthday I soon found myself well and truly sucked in, so much so that my Mabinogi adventures went on the backburner for awhile - with a pet thunder dragon card waiting to be used! After one month of the wastes, I'm glad to say I've come out alive, though towards the end there I was going a bit nuts with the to and fro quests.

While the main quest line can probably be finished in a few nights, the abundance of side quests and locations to discover really got me hiking all over the Mojave, which was the part I loved. In general the surroundings seemed less hostile that Fallout 3 (even in the most difficult setting with hardcode mode turned on), which was a bit disappointing - save for some deathclaw infested areas and hidden boss caves. Everything else was pretty much ok and entertaining enough, but I wasn't as invested in the protagonist is this one (who is a courier that finds him or herself taking a central role in a large scale upcoming war) as opposed to the Vault dweller from Fallout 3 who leaves the vault to find his or her dad. One of my friends described it perfectly - New Vegas is like a big expansion to Fallout 3. It doesn't really build on anything gameplay wise.

The Honest Hearts DLC is even more of the same, centered in Zion valley where no nukes hit it becomes very cowboys and indians and that whole sense of post-apocalypse is almost removed entirely. When I went through it, it was also bloody easy with only one yao guai boss causing me any problems. It also features a pretty big opportunity to stuff the whole thing up right at the start, when I accidentally started shooting someone who is mandatory to the storyline. At least there are nice scenic views, and a mini collectible story in some some of the caves which is very interesting but all in all it's a pretty weak DLC.

Dead Money however, for me is -right- on the money. This story driven adventure has the best written characters, scary opponents and a real sense of dread and foreboding throughout. There are instakill devices and traps a plenty, and with the very air you breathe slowly killing you - you cannot afford to be too cautious. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea but I loved it, so much more than the base Fallout New Vegas game and is actually the highlight of the entire experience for me.

Not Hot enough being a Yahoo

Having an email account in both Hotmail and Yahoo for awhile now it has become abundantly clear over my years of continued usage that one is simply much superior to the other. Your opinions may vary but since I exclusively use them for one thing only (being EMAILS), the winner is...

Hotmail!

Why? Well, lets look at my judging criteria.

-Ease of use (tie) - They're both good at this. Though they both released new layouts recently which kinda threw me for a bit.

-Security (tie) - again, both pretty good. The weakness of passwords is always the users themselves.

-Adding attachments (hotmail wins) - Yahoo failed to attach a 4MB file after 30 minutes of trying to do so. Hotmail did it in under 5 minutes. Sure, yahoo may be trying to scan it as it uploads to the message but at the expense of -MY- time? I don't think so.

-Viewing attachments (hotmail wins) - Again, yahoo likes scanning stuff before displaying it to you. This is nice in theory, but can get really aggravating when you have a number you want to view. Nowhere near as bad as uploading them though.

-Login Page (hotmail wins) - Go to hotmail and you get a simple login page come up quick. Login, and you are taken to your email. Log out and you are taken to a sponsor page. Go to yahoo, and you get a full news page, search engine and have to follow a little link in the top right to actually login. Once you login, you are put BACK on that busy page and have to click again to actually get into your email. Those features are really good, UNLESS YOU USE IT PURELY FOR EMAIL.

In closing, if you are looking for pure email functionality and are choosing between these two, pick hotmail and save yourself some headaches and some time.

Jumping into Haystacks

More commonly known as the game series "Assassin's Creed", the player is put into the shoes of said assassins Altair, Ezio and Desmond - who is actually the main hero of the story but who you spend the least time playing (so far anyway). In the games I've played (the original AC, AC2, and AC Brotherhood) there is a lot of killing, a lot of violence, and a fair number of cleverly positioned haystacks.

Each game features an "open world" which lets the character run, climb and jump around pretty much wherever he feels like - and the scenery is absolutely gorgeous! This combined with a pretty engaging story line ensures that you will probably stop playing each session at least 30 minutes to 1 hour later than intended! :P Ubisoft really milk the open world mechanic too by having side missions galore, some of which tie in strongly to the story while others are more non-sensical, like collecting flags and feathers or beating up evil jesters... but hey, this is a world where you can cut people's throats with brooms, buy various murdering tools from Da Vinci, and survive a drop of any height as long as there is a haystack to catch you where you fall.

While this cuts into the realism a little bit (which is funny since most of it is essentially a Virtual Reality simulator), it doesn't make it any less fun. Combat is fast and wonderfully animated, and there are enough various guards to keep you "slightly" on your toes. This is perhaps my only gripe about the game. Your character, even at his weakest, is way too damn strong. There is not one fight or opponent who really poses any challenge and while there is an "incognito" mechanic in place, its really not necessary as you can walk about with your sword drawn and openly asking for the guards to come die at your hands. This also makes the missions where you must "sneak and not be detected" somewhat more frustrating than they should be as while logically the objective seems sound, in your head you are wondering why you need to sneak past 10 guys when you just killed 500 effortlessly while strolling up here?

In the Thief series, Garrett had the potential to be very deadly if you played him that way - but the tension was there because you knew that if it came down to sword play, you would often lose. In Batman: Arkham Asylum, Bats is a very dangerous close quarters/sneak attack specialist but when you come across the crazies with the guns you knew you had to be careful or meet a sudden loud and lead-filled end. That sort of tension doesn't exist in Assassin's Creed which is a shame, but it more than makes up for it with the sheer fun it offers.

Multiplayer on the otherhand, is extremely tense and fun! Though I think I only killed one guy once and got murdered 10 times in my last round, the idea that you can only kill one target of whom you have a -vague- idea of their location while trying to elude an unknown amount of pursuers is awesome. Hiding in plain sight has never been executed so well in a pvp environment I think, and given that I don't really like PvP but I like this should speak volumes. :)

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As an aside, no silly pictures for this posting as I'm planning to get another flash thing up and running and am saving all my skills for that. I'll let you know how that turns out. :P

It's all about the cooking!

There are very few "reality" shows I get into, and Masterchef Australia is one of them. This is really strange since I don't cook at all, but am slowly being encouraged to try. Prior to watching it, I didn't know who Heston Bummenthal was, nor Nigella Lawson, Tetsuya, Adriano Zumbo, Matt Moran, Gary Mehigan, George Calmobaris and certainly not Matt Preston among a host of other names. I didn't know that there are people who can hold hot pieces of iron and meat straight from the oven with their bare hands, or that something called a croquembouche was a desert. I didn't know what the terms molecular gastronomy, shucking, and caramelisation meant. I didn't know there were an almost infinite amount of ways to prepare food, and that there were crazy chefs who worked out things that needed to be cooked then baked then frozen then cooked again then fried - what the hell man, was that just trial and error? O_O

And then came Masterchef Australia. A spin-off of the original Masterchef UK (some of which I also watch now), the Australian version focuses quite a bit more on the amateur cooks themselves rather than the cooking. This makes it somewhat less impressive for foodies sure, but I think grabs quite a few more of the non-cooking demographic like myself. The format is ye olde contestants facing a variety of challenges which sees them depart one at a time and the last one standing wins. It's a formula that seems to be working too, as it is now in the 3rd season of the show, with a very awesome Junior Masterchef season thrown somewhere in the mix as well. It also airs 6 nights a week during primetime which gives you an idea of how much pull this "little cooking show" has.

While there certainly is a lot of cooking - there's quite a bit of this too:

If you haven't seen any of it yet, you can find all their episodes online on the main MasterChef Australia site.

Just as amusing as the show itself are the forums that recap it daily, giving their own (usually hilarious) spin on the transpiring events. The two I visit most often are Reality Ravings and Shuckittome. Definitely something to have a little taste of if you haven't already! ;)

MMORPG Korean Anime Heroes in Celtic Shakespearean Fantasy!

If that title elicited a "wtf" response from you, then you probably have never played Mabinogi. Developed by DevCat (Korea), this games sees players as cute, simple anime-styled characters which is very different to the crips character rendering of a game like Rappelz or even World of Warcraft. However if this doesn't bother you, this little gem offers loads of content and a dazzling amount of things to do with ever expanding content. While the main story arcs dealt with a very loose transtlation of celtic mythology, recent adventures have found players reliving parts of Shakespearean plays! If that sounds too wierd for you, don't worry - there's lots of other things to do! :P

Perhaps my biggest gripe about Mabinogi is that servers are separated by world regions. So while there are servers for Korea, Japan, China (I think), North America (where I play) and most recently Europe - you are restricted on where you can play which means my guildmates in London and Switzerland cannot join me on Mabinogi NA nor can I join them on Mabinogi EU - at least not without the use and hassle of 3rd party products.

Like a number of other MMORPG's while majority of the content is free, there is a "cash shop" where you can spend real money on some exclusive items, additional character cards, and uberly cute pets. All the storylines and quests ARE freely available though so if you can get by without a mount, a house in a city (you can have a house on your private estate though), and little gems that can summon a well endowed magic girl to ressurect you (these become handy later on), you can play through all of the content for free.

If you decide to try it out (on Mabinogi NA at least) I strongly suggest making a human character as your base, as you can get one free elf and one free giant when you reach their cities later on. You will want to visit and research skills on Mabinogi Wiki too, as there are interesting quirks to ranking them up. Also the skills need to be practiced enough times before you are qualified to gain rank in them. Sword mastery for example may dictate you need to kill one hundred awful creatures and one boss monster before you can rank it up, and what determines what exactly are awful and boss monsters is your own level. In the example I just gave, a brand new player may only have to kill 100 wolves and 1 bear to complete that, whereas a level 1000 player would be looking at 100 demons and 1 dragon to achieve the same requirement.

"Level 1000!?" I hear you exclaim. Yup, and those are the mid-level players like me. The true vets are around level 4000 in my server cluster. I'm sure there are those in Korea who are OVER 9000! What then can pose you a threat when you have all those zeroes in your level count? Everything, and at the same time - nothing. That's because of the combat system present in game which I absolutely love. It's a rock paper scissors affair where using the wrong skill or mis-timing your strike often leads to a lot of ouchies heading your way.

As an example Your normal attack can be deflected with defense, but if you know that's what your foe is doing you can use a heavy hit and smash through instead. However if you used the heavy hit and your enemy goes for a standard attack, you will be the one taking damage as the standard hit swings faster. Throw in around fifty more battle related skills and you get the idea. Much more fun than the "use special 1", then "use special 2" while special 1 cools down employed in many other MMORPGs.

This means that having skilled characters just means they can dish out and take more damage, but a low level character in the hands of a skilled player with enough potions to keep his stamina (and/or mana) up can beat the same level of opponents, just at a slower pace. Ofcourse this means lag favours the monsters and you will have to read your foes and time your actions well. :P



There are almost as many non-combat skills available too, such as fishing, cooking, tailoring, blacksmithing, refining, alchemy, handicraft, carpentry, etc. Some have their own fun mini-games to complete and special events (on Mabi NA at least) seem to run every fortnight, making sure that people don't run out of things to do. Some  people even ignore all of this and just use it as a glorified chat server or just collect pets! 

If you want to give it a try, Mabinogi is free to play. Just google it up for your region. If you happen to join Mabinogi NA and pick the Ruairi server, you may run into Josephsky - thats me! ^_^