I opened it yesterday which leaves Metroid Prime, True Crime: Streets of LA, and Gladius unopened. I think this game is shorter than Wario World. If this were on arcade controls you would probably finish this game in 1.5 hours. It will fire as fast as you can press the fire button. Normal holding of the controller makes fireing pretty slow, but if you keep your right hand above the controller you can press destroy enemies very quickly. Once you get inside it looks ok, outside looks like poorly compressed video. Inside it kinda neat but there isn’t much in it. Kind of generic 70s version of the future.

You play a grooving-to-the-music mercenary woman? I think that’s what’s going on. Anyway, when you want to dodge you press the shoulder buttons to do a little dance twirl to either side. You don’t want to have to turn to the right or left because that is really slow. If you have to run around things you will not be happy. Luckily they added a button to twirl you in place and turn around so you don’t have to wait for that. Also if you try steering then the camera gets messed up and they don’t give you much control to get it back to normal. It will get there on its own, but not right away.

How I think the controls should have been implemented is to make it more on rails. It’s set up to have the camera always behind you as you battle things and dodge. Make it so up is always forward, back is alwaus back, left is always left and right is always right. If you want to go back where you can then hit the twirl-reverse button. Then make the camera stick for looking to the right or left or up and down. You wouldn’t be fighting the camera and the action could move more smoothly.

 

I woke up on Sunday with a lot of things to do. I started off easy, paying bills and starting laundry. Then I moved on to sorting paper recycling in preparation for a recycling run. While shredding the stuff I don’t want to just go in a recycling bin it hit the full point so I had to empty it. The tops of those thigng are really heavy and when I leaned it against the cabinet I guess it wasn’t on the other side ofhte center of gravity since it came downand gave be a long scratch that has 9 scabs now.

I loaded up the car with the recycling and put ht edogs in there because they really needed to get out of the house. After recycling we went to OSH so I could get supplies for patch the hole in the ceiling and to get some clamps I would need to hold things in place while I did some cutting. Then we came home to the disappointment of the dogs.

I started more laundry and got to work on cutting the bottoms off the doors in Darlene’s area so it would clear the various carpet and rugs. I told Terry I’d have the saw I borrowed on Saturday back to him by noon. I pulled the old dining table out of the shed to use as my base. I measured the doors to know where I wanted my cuts, and then took the first one outside, took off the door knob and laid it on the table. The hinges determined where on the table it was. Then I just needed a guide for the circular saw that I could clamp in place.

The molding that was around the room that we had to remove to get the floors done was a good choice. The only problem was that in clamping it the saw couldn’t clear the clamp. So I tried using a cabinet door that wasn’t in use as a cabinet door and that let me clamp out of the way of the saw, but it was too thick. Then I moved the cabinet door back and put the molding next to it as a floating guide. That worked!

I forgot to adjust the saw blade to be no more than 1/8″ below the bottom of the but so it was trying to kick back and doing weird things to the cut. I fixed that but the weird start influenced the rest and it wasn’t so hot. I make a second pass and that corrected the major problems. Luckily people don’t tend to look at door bottoms (you shouldn’t either, Dar). If it’s really a big deal it can be sanded right.

Next up was the bathroom door. This one went much better thoguh it still had a hiccup in the middle but not that bad. Again, don’t look down. The third one went very well and I finally had the hang of things. I re-installed the doors and they all cleared! Yay! Then I installed the 2 remaining doors in Nicole’s room that were off from the floor refinishing and called Terry. He tried to send the mafia after me for being late but then gave up so I grabbed some food and went to drop off the saw.

Terry was about to wash his car when I arrived and he said he was seeking motivation to work on removing the tub from the bathroom they were gutting. He asked if I had anything better to do and I said “Let’s do it!” So we did! Over the next two hours I helped (he did almost all of it) cut apart the tub and haul it down stairs to later be hauled to the dump. That was one well installed tub.

Joel called me asking to borrow his saw that I had borrowed and now returned to Terry. I told him I returned it and that Terry was trying to rip out the tub. Joel came over and was impressed and then went home to check on dump hours. He found that they could make it and brought over the truck and loaded up Terry’s mess and off they went. And off I went to go weedwack the back yard.

I came home, applied SPF50 sun-screen, and took an allergy pill. Then I had an ice cream snack and got busy moving all the junk in the middle of the yard from the house being painted. Then I picked up the dog poop I could find (as long as you go right to left in your weed wacking the dog poop will not hit you). Then I called Sandy who wanted to try a better weed wacker for her to come over and try it when she was done showing houses.

I started weed wacking and 2 hours later (including Sandy visit) was done. Nicole was home at that point and didn’t want me to scoop up the cut grass so I’ll do that today when I get home.

We went to dinner at Carpo’s and then to Julie & Fish’s house to work on the D-Link device they had. After a time I realized that the device should be reset to factory defaults and then I was able to communicate with it and almost set it up. Unfortunately the manual thast comes with it just mentions the mode but not everything you have to do for that mode. I’ve looked it up now and maybe tonight I’ll go there and set them up.

 

Nicole went to SF for the weekend for Pride. I went to work in the morning and then came home and for the directions to izzy & jim’s for izzy’s birthday party. I stopped by Fry’s on the way to get Julie’s graduation present (a way to extend their wireless network) , the new Audioslave album (it’s good!), and another Kevin Smith dvd for my sister (I messed up the sending of her birthday gift so it came to me and she gets a bonus as a result/she’s rebuilding her collection since her ex-bf kept most of her DVDs).

I continued up 880 and after 5 miles came to a stop and joined a 5 mph group. I listen to traffic, no report on anything wrong but it’s wrong as far as I can see. After 15 minutes I realized that with 60 miles left to go I would get there in time for the end and then have to go. I get off to turn around and as I cross on the overpass I see it’s like that as far as I can see.

I came home and decided if I couldn’t have fun with people I should at least get work done around the house, and hey, we have two lights waiting to be installed for like the last 2 months. I got to work on those. The one from Ikea was a challenge because it didn’t come with appropriate mounting hardware like I’m guessing it is supposed to. Their screws were too big, but the ones that worked had too narrow a head. I got some washers for the narrow ones and that worked fine.

The Ikea one was going to be in the office and was going to require a new electrical box in there so I have a hole in the ceiling to work on that. The new light for the office doesn’t need that though so now I have a hole to patch. The one was tought to install because it came with a funky electrical box crossbar and it was tough to make it all fit but I did it! Yay!

After that I went to Julie & Fish’s house where Fish and & were watching Seven and I worked on the device I picked up to try and be a repeater for their wireless network (reception outside of their little office is horrible). Unfortunately, as it turns out, the device I got can’t be used in that way so it’ll go back to Fry’s. Fish says another device he has there is supposed to work that way but he can’t talk to it to get it configured. I told them I’d call on Sunday about trying to configure that. When it wasn’t working and I had finished helping Julie in her Hearts game I went home.

 

Well by tomorrow anyway. Last week I decided I didn’t really care if I finished the game so I put it up for sale on half.com. I picked it up for rediculously cheap clearance so I’m making a small profit, but mostly it’s just not too thriilling. So if I get to finish it by tomorrow when I have to mail out the order fine and if not, that’s fine too.

 

The Revenge of the Sith novel I think it the longest of the novelization at just over 400 pages. It’s alsot he one that strays from the movie the most I think. I like reading the novelizations because you generally find out what had to be cut from the script. In this case it looks like extended scenes everywhere what would have made the movie 3 hours. In some cases those scenes would have been nice but the pacing would have been thrown off and the pacing of the movie is where Revenge of the Sith really differs from episodes 1 & 2.

The other things that’s unique to this novelization is that none of the action scenes are the same as in the movie. It’s like he was given a script and some story boards for ideas about what the action would be but then over time the action went to its final form and you can’t change a book as easily.

The author, Matthew Stover what chosen because of his other Star Wars books and his handling of the light/dark conflict among Force users. That continues here and I recommend his other Star Wars books as well.

 

Last night I watched Stripes for the first time since before college? It’s been a long time. I bought it because I remember liking it and it had deleted scenes. Image quality isn’t the greatest, no remastering of the film print here. You get all the grainy glory of a 1981 film.

So how did it hold up? I still thought it was funny and I enjoyed it.

 

She’s always liked to burrow in to things and crawl under things. When she was a puppy I would have to get up in the middle of the night becasue she would crawl under the bed and then couldn’t get out.

Anyway, when we removed all the bricks from the planters Nicole made a 4-brick high wall around part of the driveway. Then she decided she didn’t like it so we put the bricks into the free pile out front. When we started doing that Sage laid down behind the wall, safe. When I took a brick from the area she was laying, making it a 3-brick high wall, she move to a remaining 4-brick section. As the bricks kept coming out she kept scrunching down lower and lower until finally she was trying to hide behind one brick. When I took that brick away she looked kind of sad and upset but then she got up and was happy again.

I wish I knew what she was thinking.

 

Saw this on Friday night. I’m not sure why it received such a low rating on the imdb. There are so many worse movie and this one is pretty fun. Especially when they are speaking in Ks. I guess the main complaint people might have is that the ending is a little weak. Something a little stronger following the finale would have helped I think. Still, I think it’s an enjoyable film.

 

This morning I got up and Nicole and I cleaned out the RV. Then I re-assembled the dining table and went on to finally install Darlene’s bathroom cabinet. I did leave out the shelves since Dar should decide where they go. There are instructions for that too so I’ll help when she decides. I still need to install her new bathroom fan and seal the hole from the living room to her area.

While I installed the cabinet, Nicole vacuumed the RV. After all that we returned the RV and we are now free of that. Yay!

 

After finishing Sphinx I decided I needed to open another still sealed game that I picked up at extreme bargain prices and Wario World was it.

I’ve never played Wario game before so I don’t know what it’s about but in this case it’s like a 2D side scroller where you beat things up and collect coins (taken to extreme levels) but rendered in 3D. And there is some depth to what’s going on since 3D gives you more flexibility even in a 2D style side-scrolling game.

The controls are a bit touchy but end up being ok once you get used to them. It seems like this will be a short game but I think I wouldn’t want this to be too long.

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