Difficulties and Deficiencies in the First World

Todays  is brought to y'all from my phone, because I accidentally left my computer cord/charger at my parents' house down in California over the weekend. I did however remember the charger for my phone so I will do the majority of my needed computer needs via phone until then.

This also means that video gaming for this week will be done primarily on my 3DS as pretty much everything else aside from word processing will eat up what little battery power I have left. Which is fine with me because I'm about this close to saying "fuck it all" and leave the game without defeating the final boss, but that might be for another post.

This will also force me to finish the book I've been reading for the past month as well as the previously mentioned PSP games.  I think the next book on yhe lost is an audio book so I'll be listening ti Blood Meridian by Cormack McCarthy and the physical book is supposed to be Science Fiction and I haven't decided which book will cover that BINGO square.

In closing I will say that typing a post on a touchpad phone keyboard is a bit of a pain in the ass, regardless of the orientation of the screen. Wednesday's MIDI Week Single is looking to be fairly minimal, but we'll make do.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time - Updated (Android OS)

A while back, I'm not 100% sure when, but I want to say late last November (and it easily might have been early December, 2013), Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time updated on my phone.  My phone probably let me know that there was an update for the game and I thought, "Sure, go ahead, that's cool."  I'm not even 100% sure it did that as I recall, I opened my phone and noticed that the icon for the game had changed.  Maybe I just picked "Update All" and didn't pay attention.  Okay, let's assume that's what I did, as that makes the most sense.

so PvZ2 was updated.  And it wasn't just a simple update either.  This update was a complete overhaul of the game and the way it was played.  If you remember from my original look at the game, the world looked, I thought, like something out of Super Mario Bros. 3, which isn't a criticism, just an observation.

As you can see, there are multiple paths within the first world, Ancient Egypt.  You will also notice a few locked doors (you can tell they're doors because they have keyholes) along with Pyramid-Keys next to them.  These could be opened with said Pyramid-Keys which you earned randomly throughout the game, depending on which world you were in.  Ancient Egypt = Pyramid-Key, Old West = Some-Other-Key-I-Never-Got; you get the idea.

Now that the update has taken place, things not only look a bit different, but the fundamentals of how one plays the game have changed.  The gaming world, and we'll stay in Ancient Egypt, looks like this:

You will first off notice that the game is now very linear, not that that is a problem as the first PvZ was linear without a world map.  The world specific keys were turned into gold coins (10,000 I think for each).  A mini-boss level was introduced into each world stage where you have to fight the standard horde of zombies, but now Gargantuars have been thrown in for good measure.  You may have also noticed that a strange blue-orbal key has replaced the world keys.  These keys are supposed to unlock an as-of-yet released world and these keys, supposedly, can only be obtained in the Gargantuar levels, but are only dropped at random.

A minor addition to the game is that it's played a lot faster.  Suns now give 50 points instead of the usual 25.  Zombies enter the level a lot faster and they move faster, but your plants also attack faster, basically, everything is faster. And, if that's not enough fast for you, you also have the option to speed the game up further by pressing a "Fast-forward-type-button" in the upper right portion of the screen that doubles the game speed.  Not a bad idea until you realize that your reaction time is the same as before, but now the zombies are coming at you and twice their normal speed.  It would be like taking Ben and Barbaras experience from Night of the Living Dead and putting them into the Dawn of the Dead remake.  I've clicked it once and said, "Yup, they're faster," and promptly went back to standard (albeit faster than original) speed.

One other major overhaul to the game that I am not at all happy with, are the conditions to how a level is beaten/completed/finished.  In the first iteration of the game, you were given specific conditions in order to earn a Star.  Earning Stars just acted as additional challenges that increased in difficulty for a specific level.  Such conditions would be something like, "Spend No More Than 1500 Sun & Don't Lose Any Lawnmowers."  If you were to fail in any one of the conditions, you were still allowed to finish the level and often continued to earn coins, but no star was earned.  Now, if you fail to meet all of the conditions, the level ends the moment you fail.  Accidentally spend 1525 sun when you could only spend 1500, the level ends immediately.  It's kind of annoying and frustrating, especially with the lawnmowers.  Why bother even having them as an option if losing even one means you lose the level?

I actually feel sad that since this update has taken place, that I've lost a bit of interest in PvZ2.  A lot of the levels feel like they're trying to force the player to use up gold coins to buy power boosts.  There have been levels where I used any one of the boosts at least four times because I knew my defense that I had planted (sort of the whole point of the game) would not hold against what I was going up against.  Nowadays, all I look forward to are the Piñata parties, even though I wish I could turn off the costumes.

Initially, I would have given the game a "Must Play" rating, you know, if we did official ratings here.  Now, I would probably give an "You Could Live Without Playing."  Maybe I'm just becoming cynical in my old age.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Because You Don't Do Like They Think You Should

It Looks To Be Another Update Of Sorts

I'm only kind of at a loss as to what to talk about today.  I wasn't able to post this last Friday (8/9/2013) as Conklederp and I had some friends (Vorlynx and Mills Co.) visiting from Nor*Cal all last week.  There was a robotics conference up here in Portland and there was some river floating and blackberry picking that had to be done as well.  We also started the process of making blackberry wine (adapted recipe to follow) and now our kitchen smells like fermenting fruit, which in turn brings me back to my time working for R.H. Phillips Winery during the 2006 harvest season.  It's the kind of smell that would make you think some fruit somewhere has done something it shouldn't have, if you didn't already know where it was coming from.  Goodtimes.

I've (still) been playing a lot of Infinite Space, (still) and have acquired some more "abilities" such as having a docking bay for individual fighters (a la Battlestar Galactica's Colonial Vipers) which cause minimal damage to the opposing fleets flagship while slowing down the rest of their fleet; realizing that icons above each of the ships in your fleet correspond to weapons and each have their own max and min range; melee battles are a pain-in-the-ass and play like a constant game of  roshambo; ship modules of a certain type (such as bridge/red modules) can fit in other areas of the ship as long as they don't say they have to be in a specific location in the description; "Grus" is a word used in the game that is substituted interchangeably for both "shit" and "fuck" and any other variation thereof; the game is pretty mature, considering it's Teen rating, such as the main character cutting off a bad guys arms to get information and a main character shooting a bad guy at point-blank range in the face out of frustration/fear/anger.  There's a lot going on in the game and a lot of space to do it in, sometimes almost too much space.

I also played a bit of Portal 2 co-op with Vorlynx, but only so much before I had to leave for work (which was also before he had finished the single player campaign).  I've also put roughly six more hours into Torchlight, 2 hours into Half-Life and maybe an hour into Penumbra: Black Plague.  Torchlight is more-or-less just dungeon crawling fun that I continue with after Half-Life becomes too frustrating with having/needing to save after every encounter with enemies and then reloading every time I feel I've wasted too much ammunition or taken too much damage.  I want to play more of Penumbra: Black Plague (partly so that I can write up my First Impressions, but also) because I really liked the first game in the series, I like the company (Frictional Games) and I want to see how the story will end.  And semi-most importantly, I want to play it in the dark for maximum un-nervingnous.

I also went through a couple of the demos that I have on my 3DS, most successfully were the two demos for Style Savvy which will make their way to Demo Time in the coming weeks.  Yes, stop laughing.

I haven't kept up with video games in the news and what's been going on in that world.  I haven't played enough "older" games to warrant another Emulator Hour.  I kind of feel like a bad person, except that I don't.  Boo hoo me, I know.

With all the PAX timbits floating around, I'm very sad that I will not be able to attend PAX Prime this year (as I haven't been able to since PAX2010) due to work scheduling problems.  It doesn't help either that I live 600 miles closer than I did when I was able to attend, but things are in the works (loosely) so that I will be able to attend in the future, although I vaguely recall making a similar statement last year around this same time.

Oh hey look, The Bridge is on sale.  Time to go and take care of that.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Wonders Need Time