We don’t care anymore

I work in a new building. It was built across the parking lot from a Superstore, which is always busy. We have comparatively little traffic, though things have picked up a little recently. The branch is close to the southernmost point of the city, and it’s a bit out of the way, which doesn’t help make us more accessible. However, it seems like the driveway to our parking lot is the real thing keeping people away. Take a look at the diagram below.

The blue arrow shows the way I come on on my drive to work. The gold arrows show the flow of traffic, and the purple arrow is the only way to access our parking lot. It should also be noted that this map is technically upside down (North is at the bottom).

So if you can navigate my clumsy map, you can see that when you journey to my building, you must make a u-turn when approaching from the main street. You could always make life easier and come in from the Superstore parking lot, but that’s just silly. Generally, you’re doing a u-turn.

And people bitch about this.

We’ve all heard people complain about stupid stuff before, but they get so riled up about this, you’d think that they’re taking the poor driveway planning as a personal attack on them. One guy came in yesterday and actually yelled at us about it. He’s not the first to do so, but the location has been open for seven months now, so at this point we’re a little taken aback when someone reacts so violently about it. I thought that people were realizing that it’s a tiny inconvenience and moved on with their lives. Stupid me.

Not that I care that people are too useless at driving to make a u-turn (“I had to make a three-point turn to get in here!”), but they take it out on us humble employees, who have nothing at all to do with it.

There are architects who designed the building and parking lot. There is Superstore, whose head office in Ontario is too apathetic to give us the okay to have the median cut out a little at the end (that part of the lot is on their property, not ours). There are the people at head office who are in charge of enacting some kind of solution. But no, the complaints and verbal assaults are all directed at the branch employees. Of course I’m not surprised, because when something goes wrong it’s clearly the next closest person’s fault.

I’m just sick of people thinking we have any say in this business at all. Yes, it’s a minor inconvenience. Suck it up, and then go dust the sand out of your vaginas. We have to do that u-turn every day. No, old man, I’m not going to rent a jackhammer and tear it up myself. You go do that. And enjoy it as much as you can before you get arrested for destruction of property, and probably a handful of other laws I’m sure that would break.

I’m sorry that the driveway is that way, but there’s nothing anyone who works in this building can do about it, so leave me alone. It’s a u-turn. I really don’t care. I’m a fairly competent driver, so it’s literally no problem at all for me.

If there’s a silver lining here, recently construction started to the South and East of our building. People think it’s the construction of a new entry/exit for the parking lot. I just love to watch the hope in their eyes vanish when I tell them that it’s actually just apartment buildings going up. Oh, the sweet taste of shattered dreams…

We bless you with our mark

One of the things I really like about LEGO Rock Band is the story mode. It begins by your LEGO character seeing LEGO Queen perform on TV, and starting up a band because… well, the lack of dialogue makes the exact reason a little ambiguous, but I’m assuming that they decide the easiest way to meet Queen would be to be in a successful band.

The story rolls out in traditional LEGO video game fashion, with hilarious cutscenes punctuating your band’s tour. Most of these cutscenes happen around rock power challenges. These are special gigs where somebody needs something and you use the power of rock to make it happen. In the first one you demolish a building. Later on you’ll summon a thunderstorm to save a farmer’s crops from drought. It’s the closest a Rock Band game will ever come to having boss battles.

These are cool. I love them and would not remove them for the world. I’m not finished the tour yet, so maybe they get even better later, but I can’t help but feel like maybe there could be cooler subject matter? Look at Brutal Legend, for example, where the power of rock is used to wage wars. LEGO Rock Band is technically channeling the power of power-pop, so it’s understandable that the most awesome thing they would do is fight off a giant octopus, but imagine if the game were something more along the lines of, let’s say Dethklok Rock Band.

It’s no secret that I’ve been wishing and hoping for a Dethklok-centric guitar game since Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, but it’ll never happen. EA will find a way to make a game that gives the player candy and blowjobs before they greenlight Dethklok Rock Band. Mainly because Dethklok is not mainstream enough, and why would EA release a game that’s pretty much guaranteed to move even fewer units than Green Day Rock Band? (Ooh, burn!)

One might also argue that between both The Dethalbum and The Dethalbum II there are only 33 Dethklok songs, and that’s not enough to justify a full disc release. There is tons of music on the show that were never released on either album though, and while some are just bits of songs, I’m sure Brendon Small has complete versions of all the tracks somewhere. And really, would it not be awesome if songs like “Hamburger Time,” “Takin’ It Easy,” and “Underwater Friends” were included? While we’re at it, why not include a couple Snakes N’ Barrels tracks? Or a venue dedicated to Dr. Rockso/Zazz Blammymatazz? The point is, the official material couldn’t fill a game, but there’s more than enough supplemental stuff there to pad it out. Not to mention that fans would eat it up. With a friggin’ spoon.

Circling back to my original point here, rock power challenges would be awesome in Dethklok Rock Band. You wouldn’t even need to read lyrics to come up with cool challenge scenarios; the titles are more than enough in most cases! “Volcano” and “Comet Song” would obviously have you summoning (or maybe repelling) the named disaster with the power of metal. “The Cyborg Slayers” speaks for itself, and “Awaken” will have the band bringing a giant troll to life. You don’t even have to be creative with this stuff, it’s awesome. The challenges in LEGO Rock Band really draw you into the whole scenario, and I think it would only get better with something as intense as causing a volcano to erupt through the power of death metal.

That intensity takes us back around to why the game would never be made: it would be way too damn difficult. In Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, “Bloodlines” is fairly easy, but “Laser Cannon Deth Sentence” is so difficult that I can’t even star power my way to the end. “Thunderhorse” was one of my favourite tracks to play on Guitar Hero 2, even though to this day I cannot 5-star it. The Van Halen and Metallica editions of Guitar Hero have pretty steep difficulty curves (in comparison to the numbered games), but Dethklok Rock Band would be many, many times harder. You’d be a fool to expect any less from a game that’s 90% death metal, of course, but I think it would still turn away potential buyers. Yes, people could step down their difficulty level if it were spoiling their fun, but I’m pretty adamant about not toning it down. If I can’t play a song on expert, I don’t go down to hard: I just don’t play that song. Best case scenario, I play it on expert bass instead of guitar.

The really sad thing about all this is that Konami was developing a Metalocalypse game. …Only it was an action game where you play as a Klokateer for some reason, and was quickly cancelled because they realized how stupid that was. I posit that a Metalocalypse action game could work, but nobody wants to play a Metalocalypse game where you don’t get to play as Dethklok. That’s like having a Super Mario Bros where you’re forced to play as Toad. Good as the game might be, you will inevitably say “fuck this, I’m not playing Goddanm Toad.” Likewise, I do not want to play a Metalocalypse game where I can’t play as Toki or Pickles. Can I say that enough times?

Time has not been kind to single-band plastic guitar games, or even just plastic guitar games in general, so any tiny window there was for a Dethklok Rock Band has long since closed, but I still think it would kick some serious ass. No, it wouldn’t be for everybody, but Metalocalypse has been pretty well-received for what it is, and even though there’s no way it would get close to million-seller, there is certainly a niche that would play it. Maybe we should get Atlus on the case? Somebody do that. I’d be pretty pumped if there were even a Dethklok DLC pack for Rock Band someday in the near future. It doesn’t even have to be a full album, I’ll take a 3-pack (“Awaken” “Black Fire Upon Us” and “Comet Song,” please). The fact that there isn’t even one Dethklok song available yet is sad, and I hope that one day it will be remedied, but I’ll likely have to buy Rock Band 3 when that happens. Hopefully it’s $5 on that day.

All aboard the Learning Train!


This is broken now that I’ve moved to WordPress! Now come back in a few hours and see if that greeting has changed. I made up (re: stole) a dealie that makes it change based on the time of day. Hopefully it works right.

The point of this exercise -aside from seeing how little function you can get from as many lines of code as possible- is to play with JavaScript a bit today. The code I used is really not complicated at all, but it took me almost half an hour to get that greeting to the point where it would show up on the page. I don’t much care for JavaScript; I cannot foresee any reason why I would use it. Alas, to learn XSLT properly, one must also know XML. And to learn XML, a firm grasp on JavaScript is highly recommended. So today I’m learning about JavaScript. It’s going slowly.

I don’t really think that it’s useless or anything. It’s just like, I’m reading and there’s these cool things you can do but then I turn around and realize that there’s no reason to. Sure I could put a self-updating time stamp on the site, but why bother? You’re probably reading this on a computer, and the time and date are right there on the bottom-right corner of your screen. I can do algebra on my page with JavaScript, but I cannot imagine any situation where it would be useful. Even if/else is just if/then’s dropout cousin for webpage content. I’d make stuff up just for the sake of learning it, but really, that would amount to making homework for myself. Mind you, I’m in the JavaScript tutorial equivalent of kindergarten, so maybe there’s better stuff beyond the horizon.

Internet I hate you

So I’m trying to get some small part of that project I’ve been talking about up. Not happening. Being insistent on using XML is keeping the project in the “working on” phase, and it’s not getting anywhere. I really don’t understand what it is I need to be doing. Guess I’ll just have to spend tomorrow reading about it… Dammit. I really wanted to have something up today.

Droppin’ addendums

I have a couple things to add to previous posts from this week, and no better time to do it because I don’t really have anything else to say today.

Firstly, and most importantly, you can quick turn in MegaMan Legends! While not as intuitive as the quick turn in Resident Evil games (pressing down+run), it offers more fexibility by letting you quick turn in any direction! I say less intuitive because in RE games you’re always pressing the run button anyway, but the circle button in MML is for talking to people and opening doors/chests. Now that I think about it though, MML doesn’t have a run button and the next most logical choice is the context sensitive button. So forget everything I typed here except for the “I was wrong there is quick turn” bit.

I don’t know which one it is, but I’m sure somewhere there’s a game where the quick turn is pressing both shoulder buttons? Maybe I dreamed it?

Secondly, I tallied up the amounts of songs that I like in Rock Band 2 and LEGO Rock Band. Just because I didn’t feel comfortable rounding up the amount of crappy songs in LRB to “about half.” And what I came up with is that I like 19 of the 45 songs, which means that in reality, 58% percent of the songs in LEGO Rock Band are crappy. Not really enough of a difference to justify the time it took to do the math. Whatever.

I did the same count for Rock Band 2, and amazingly I like 63% of the songs on that disc. Which is surprising to me, because when I think about RB2’s setlist, I can only think of the boring-ass garbage on it like “Float On,” “PDA” and “Feel the Pain”. So I guess if you’ve heard me dissing on RB2’s setlist, just disregard it because I apparently like it quite a bit more than I thought.

P.S. I like roughly 30% of the tracks in Band Hero. And that’s being generous.

Holder of Legends

My family was down in the States last week, and I’d given them a short list of things to pick up for me while they were down there. It was mostly Peanut Butter Crunch and Mountain Dew Throwback, but at the very end, I snuck a note on there asking them to check out the used game shops for either MegaMan Legends game. I wasn’t expecting much, because I’ve been prowling the local shops for years now. Lo and behold, the ol’ family came through for me.

So now I’m the proud owner of a legitimate copy of MegaMan Legends. It doesn’t have the proper jewel case, but I can fake that if it ever starts to bother me. It’s been a few years since I played it in earnest, so I’d forgotten just how strange the control scheme is. I was a little worried about how MegaMan Legends 3 would control on the 3DS, but my fears have been assuaged now that I know they certainly couldn’t have gotten any less functional. It’s all moot though, because that game was cancelled.

I think the most jarring thing to me is that there is no quick-turn button/button combination. I don’t think it was introduced into the Resident Evil series until the GameCube remake, but I have lingering memories of there being such a technique in MML. Maybe I’m thinking about the sequel? Maybe there is a quick turn and I don’t know how because I don’t have the manual? It would be really handy though. S’all I’m sayin’.

On the other hand, I’ve been doing pretty well for myself so far. Near the beginning of the game, there’s a huge robot boss whose weaponry can destroy the surrounding buildings. One of the sub-quests later in the game is to grind up the money to donate towards rebuilding the city. Usually the costs are pretty high, but I managed to end up losing only two of the smaller buildings on this run, which is significantly better than I remember doing on any previous playthroughs. So, I guess I’m getting the hang of the funky controls again.

There’s a second phase in the Northern section of the city that works the same way. Only this time there are a handful of smaller robots which are far more interested in demolition than self-preservation, and three of which fly around and spawn new robots. Also the buildings are spread out a bit more, forcing you to run back and forth across the map in a vain attempt to save what you can. Needless to say, that part never works out too well for me.

It’s a great joy to drop back into the MegaMan Legends world though. Kattleox Island is such a vibrant place, with little flourishes all over the place to keep explorers happy. Maybe they’re as simple as a poster with a pig and chicks on it that says “Don’t kick us!” (which ties into Legends 2), or as unexpected as a lone Servbot hanging out on a roof. And the characters! The voice acting doesn’t exactly shine, but it certainly has the same memorable quality as the original Resident Evil does, just without most of the cheesiness. At worst, Capcom had programmers/translators who wanted to do voice acting do it this time around.

In the end, I think it’s mostly the fact that I can appreciate this game for what it was in its time. Mechanically, it doesn’t hold up as well as I’d like to say, but it certainly makes up for that lack with a compelling game and story underneath those outdated levers and pulleys. I still love the game, and I’m relishing the chance to really get into it again.

Destiny calls me

Okay internet, I need something new. I have finished Scibbe.com.

“But Ryan, how can you finish a website? And a blog at that?” you might ask. I would proceed to wonder why you would ask such a silly question, because the only way that I can imagine that anyone could conceivably finish a blog would be to read all the archives. And that, I have done. A lofty task considering that Brickroad had a pretty consistent 5-posts-a-week thing going on since February aught-nine.

It’s true, I skipped all the “Crystalis the Lovable Warlock” posts and still need to catch up on all the vlogs and LPs, so I haven’t 100%ed it, but I’ve read everything that interested me, and now I need something new. So if you know of any gamer blogs that read half-decently and contain a few posts about other things, let me know. Basically, I want to read my blog, but by someone else. Oh, and long posts are always a plus. I have a lot of downtime to fill with fluffy online entertainment.

Also, maybe go check out Scibbe.com. At least the “13 Weeks of Final Fantasy” feature and the “Memoirs of the Peemeister” posts. There’s plenty of great (or at least mildly interesting) content there, but those are the ones I feel shone the brightest.

Lace up your shoes

So Guitar Hero games are dirt cheap now. What better opportunity to pick up GH: Van Halen? I’m still angry because I should have gotten it for free, but $10 is a reasonable price to pay for a game I’ll get at least a few hours of enjoyment out of. Also I <3 Van Halen.

I can’t decide whether it’s more impressive than the GH:Van Halen being $10, but LEGO Rock Band has also plummeted down to $5, so I grabbed that too. It’s just like Rock Band except with more collectible crap! Someone knew exactly what kind of game I want to play!

The downside here is that some jackhole at… Harmonix maybe?… decided that all the music had to be kid-friendly, so 90% of my DLC does not work when playing on the LEGO RB disc. It’s not the worst thing that could happen, but some of the songs they chose to not allow bend my mind. Out of the ten Queen songs I have, only four are playable. This is double weird because the crux of story mode is that your LEGO avatar has been inspired to start a band after seeing (LEGO) Queen perform. And “The Boys are Back in Town” isn’t allowed? It was good enough for Toy Story 2, but not LEGO Rock Band? Harmonix must have brought in the most bored, angry soccer-moms they could find to make the cuts. The one upside here is that it removes almost all of the ludicrously difficult songs, so random setlists aren’t so terrifying anymore.

The setlist on the disc isn’t exactly stellar either. It’s head and shoulders above the tripe they were pushing in Band Hero, but about half of it is still crap. Really, does anybody actually like Counting Crows? Looking at it in a more positive light though, a DLC pack of three songs would cost slightly more than this disc did. Yeah, the price will double if I choose to import the songs to Rock Band 2, but it’s still way more cost-effective in the long run.

Let it all out

I’ve been up all night learning how to integrate XML into my website. The short version is that I don’t think it’s going to work.

The long answer is a little more complicated. XML will work fine for my article pages. The only thing that it’ll inconvenience is the little “related” tab I have on the navi bar, but I barely fill that out properly anyway. I still have a long way to go before I really understand this stuff, but it seems like it will not work at all for the blog. Essentially, all that goes in the XML files is the body text, and HTML tags don’t work there, so I can’t type up a post in my blog.xml and call it good. I’d have to go add a new set of tags to the xsl file too, and that makes the process slightly more complicated than the copy-paste-replace routine I do now.

But maybe I’m missing something? It doesn’t look like it, but I still have a lot of reading to do. I managed to mock up a new xsl index page, and I did it all through trial and error. Just took an example page, and started figuring out how it worked. That’s exactly the same way I learned to do HTML (which is why my coding skills are so limited).

In any case, I’ll be using XML for my upcoming project. It’s still a week or so from launch, which means I’m way behind, but I’ll have plenty of time to work on it next weekend. Hopefully it works well. For now though, bed.