I can't go anywhere without someone talking about Mass Effect 2 (says the person whose last couple posts have been about Mass Effect 2). I'm in super spoiler avoidance mode, and I can be reading things entirely unrelated to Mass Effect 2, and someone will still manage to compare the topic in question to something that happens in the game. For instance: I was reading a review of Batman & Robin #7, and the writer of the review was like "this was the worst error since ______ in Mass Effect 2." And then I went "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-" But it wasn't anything major, so I got over it. But it's just the principle of the thing.

In other news, Mass Effect 2 is pretty rockin'.

Mass Effect 2 deserves to be game of the year just for having the most intense and cool opening scene in a game, ever.

And I don't know how they managed to do it, but it both runs really well and looks really good on my laptop. Mass Effect 1 looked like shit, with pixelated textures and detail drained out of faces, and it still ran like shit. But I can see pores on peoples' faces in ME2, and the only real visual glitches I get are people's guns phasing through their armor and stuff like that.

The game really does play more like a shooter than an RPG. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. But the firefights do feel a lot more epic than the ones in ME1. In any case, it's just good to be able to continue the adventures of Nat Shepherd, evil space lesbian murder machine.

oh my god it's Mass Effect 2 day at last

I never thought it would arrive, but here it is, like the second coming of some incredibly radiant and good deity that will save us all from damnation

This will be the game to end all games. I will play this game, and life will be complete. You will not hear from me again, for Mass Effect will take me to a blissful land, just it and I, and there it will whisper sweet nothings in my ear.

You doubt my words, as the Israelites doubted the words of Isaiah? Well, as that beloved prophet lovingly said to his people, listen up, assholes: this game has FUCKIN' GOLDFISH. You can have an aquarium in your room, with goldfish! Put aside your Modern Warfare 2 and Darksiders and what have you, we've got goldfish to feed!

Sadly, I don't think my copy will arrive until later in the week. I wait with baited breath.

oh and also it's my birthday

Finally finished Dragon Age. Thoughts behind the cut.

( spoilers )

I have reached a level of complete obsession with Dragon Age. It calls to me as I write this.

I sort of screwed up my game, though, because I ended up killing my healing mage party member. The quest involved the main tower of mages in the game becoming possessed by demons, and you reach a point where you can either choose to kill them all (to be safe) or rescue them from the control of evil, demonic blood mages. My main mage character, who is just about the most sinister good guy I've ever seen in a game, is all "Screw them! Nuke them from orbit Kill them all, it's the only way to be sure!" and I was all "By Jove, she's right!"

And then my healing mage turned on me and tried to kill me.

So now I have to wait until my evil offensive mage reaches level 14 so she can specialize in healing. Damn you, Dragon Age! Damn you for letting me recruit 3 different warriors, but only 2 mages!

In other news, apparently the rogue in my party is a lesbian and keeps hitting on me (I always play as a female main character for some reason) when she's not rambling on about how awesome shoes are, and I found the strong, silent type warrior dude and my dog growling at each other (his response to the dog: "You are a warrior worthy of respect."). These things actually happened in a serious, non-comedy game.

I am still alive!

My life just has not been very interesting for a while.

I'm currently playing a lot of Dragon Age. I've come to the conclusion that Bioware makes the perfect games for me, because they allow me to kill people for little to no reason. Take this poor doomsayer, for instance. All he's doing is standing around and telling everyone that they're going to die horrible deaths at the hands of the game's big bads. Well, I decided that I didn't much like the cut of his jib, and what do you know, one of the dialogue options was (kill him). So suddenly a half-crazed hero with a big sword, the world's wittiest templar, a bitchy witch, and a rogue who literally has a skill that lets her kick an enemy in the crotch to stun them started wailing on him. All the while, he's praising the game's version of God for letting the end come swiftly. It's the little things in life that make me happy.

I've also been playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii, but I'm kind of mixed on that game. On one hand, it's classic Mario. But on the other hand, all it is is classic Mario. It feels like a shameless rehash of Mario Bros. 3 at times. Compared to Dragon Age, where I literally lie awake at night trying to decide whether my character should become a Champion or a Reaver, I feel like I have very little interest invested in Mario Bros. It's something I've played before. And while it's a good something I've played before, it doesn't let me kill people for little to no reason.

After a year on hiatus, I've started RPing again. I'm playing over at a_facility right now, and I have reserved the same character over at capeandcowl at the behest of another player. Historically, I'm pretty bad at keeping up with multiple RPs, so we'll see.

I bought the Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Wii, even though I've owned, played, and finished all the Metroid Prime games. It's like being reunited with an old friend who has aged even better than you expect.

I've only played MP1 thus far on the set, but the controls really do make a big difference, and it almost feels like you're playing a different game at times. The "scan a random number of runic symbols" puzzles are way easier when you can look around freely while moving, for instance. Also, they've improved the lighting in the game a little bit, and it looks noticeably sharper at times. I was amused that they didn't bother to touch up the horribly pixelated foliage during the cutscene when you land on Tallon IV, though.

The only minor disappointment I've had is that they've removed all the individual menus for the games in favor of one master game select screen, so you don't get to hear the cool music and see the Metroid close-up in the MP1 menu. Also, I think the achievements are sort of stupid.

I hear they toned down the difficulty of MP2 slightly, so I'm interested in seeing how that game plays. Though I can't say I'm eager to play it, since I'd say it's the weakest of the trilogy.

But anyway, if you haven't played Metroid Prime and you own a Wii, you need to buy this game right this very moment. It even comes in a cool metal DVD case that looks pretty snazzy.

So I guess about a year after it actually premiered, I finally watched the end of Avatar. My (incredibly late and irrelevant) thoughts after the cut.

( This is the worst field trip ever. )

All in all, it's okay, but it will not go down as one of my favorite finales of all time.

My cat managed to somehow hurt herself yesterday. She's visibly fine, but she's having a lot of trouble walking, mainly when it comes to putting weight on her back legs. It takes her a while to get up once she's been lying down, and once she does start walking, she only goes short distances before flopping down again. More mysteriously, she's capable of jumping up on top of my couch, though I have not witnessed her doing this to determine how much effort it takes her.

I've checked her back legs and neither one seems to be broken or injured. I imagine that the problem might be compounded by the fact that she's hilariously overweight. She doesn't act strange, or act like she's in any pain when she's not trying to walk.

Anyone have any expertise in cats and cat injuries?

Also, the Avatar movie trailer was surprisingly not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I actually felt sort of hopeful when they showed the huge Fire Nation fleet shooting fireballs. And for all the hoopla about racism, the kid playing Aang does look hilariously like Aang from the cartoon.

I didn't really like Transformers 2 all that much. I enjoyed the first one, but recognize it for what it is: a deeply-flawed movie that's still fun to watch. The sequel, however, is one of the few movies to ever give me a headache.

Transformers 2 is the culmination of the summer blockbuster. It's the peak of the pure action genre. And by that, I mean that it's essentially nothing but action, and all the "plot" and "characterization" and "coherence" are sort of afterthoughts, when they're present at all. Everything in this movie is intended to create a great action scene. There are a bazillion giant robots, none of which I gave a flip about, on the screen at any given moment. Well, except for a moment in the middle of the action where the focus inexplicably shifts from the robots to the army and becomes blatant military porn.

It really is a shallow movie, and where the first movie could coast by on the novelty of the transformations and robots being so amazing, those things just seem overdone in this movie. It's hard to find a robot particularly amazing when there are twenty in a single frame and you can't really tell them apart and, in some cases, you can't tell what they're even supposed to transform into.

I just gave up halfway through the movie. The plot is dumb, the characters are bad, and the action is sort of hard to follow. Granted, these are things that were wrong with the original movie, but for some reason, I found them to be much more grievous errors this time around.

There has to be a third movie, since this one will make enough money to pay off the national debt, and perhaps by then Michael Bay will have figured out a way to get rid of this "plot" thing entirely, since all it does is get in the way of his terrific explosions.

Terminator has been on my mind ever since seeing Salvation, and I think I've realized that the one thing I absolutely cannot forgive is that the classic Terminator theme song, perhaps one of the most recognized theme songs in cinema, is not used in the film. The percussion part is used at one point, but the rest of the theme is never heard. The main theme sounds somewhat similar to the classic theme song, but it isn't the same. It's a glaring flaw in the soundtrack, and I have no idea why Danny Elfman decided to create his own, far inferior Terminator theme.

For comparison, here's the Terminator theme from the title sequence of T2 and here's the Salvation theme from the title sequence.

The Terminator theme is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, and I can't believe they didn't use it. Danny Elfman is now on my shit list. >:(

Let's talk Terminator: Salvation.

( Spoilers of course )

I am now a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics.

And now I have to decide what to do from here.

Star Trek was pretty good. I'm not much of a Trek fan, but I liked it pretty well, though maybe not quite as much as I was prepared to. I think the trailer might have made it out to be a little more epic than it actually is, but I enjoyed it, and it's definitely the best Trek movie I've seen (which isn't that big of a statement, I guess, since I've only seen Wrath of Khan and First Contact).

I think the beginning is a lot better than the rest of the movie. The first scene is intense and great, and I don't think the rest of the movie quite equals it. The actors are all quite good in their roles, especially Simon Pegg as Scotty and Karl Urban as McCoy.

All-in-all, I enjoyed myself, and my dad, who used to be a pretty big Star Trek fan, stated that it was the best Trek movie he's ever seen. So take that as you will.

Oh, and in less important news, I graduate tomorrow.

Today has been a day of excitement.

I finished my last exam, so I guess I'm tentatively done with college forever.

Second, there was a tornado here today. I didn't actually see it, but I could see the clouds swirling out the window and the emergency alarms came on. It was pretty exciting. I really wanted to see that tornado though, damn it.

Computer science is done, perhaps forever. I will not shed a tear if that's the case.

The final wasn't that bad, and parts of the exam were actually taken directly from a practice exam. I still feel like I'm going to get fucked over somehow, though. Just as long as I pass...

Probability final is on Friday and will probably be pretty hard, but I've done pretty good on everything else in the class and I have a day to prepare. It's all downhill from there.

I recently bought all of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (I actually bought anime, best check to make sure that the world hasn't ended and/or hell hasn't frozen over) since you can find it pretty cheap now, and it's merely reinforced the fact that I love cop dramas. I do hate the Tachikomas something fierce, though. And something that has bothered me more this time around than when I watched it in the past is the Major's lack of pants for most of the series. In a series that mostly prides itself on presenting a realistic vision of the future, I have a hard time buying that someone of the Major's rank could get away with prancing around in a leotard. And it's especially glaring since no one else in the show dresses ridiculously. I guess I understand why they included it from a business standpoint (durr hurr fanboys love the Major's ass), but it's a glaring "anime" aspect of a series that is mostly the anti-anime in terms of usual anime bullshit that makes me dislike the genre as a whole.

Crank 2 is a great film that everyone should see. Well, everyone except for the easily-offended.

Haha, I love Mass Effect. There's a quest where you can help a drug addict by getting a stimulant for him, but you can buy a downer instead and give it to him, and he starts cursing at you with slurred speech.

Anyway, in the real world, which is far less interesting, I'm worried about my computer science class. I think it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to make the lowest grade of my life in this class, and whether or not I'm going to pass is still up in the air. The grading is just so draconian. I got a 15 out of 100 on the second project because I could never get it to quite work right, and given that I put something like 20 hours into the project, I just don't really know why I bother anymore. It's like the professor grades in binary: you either get a 1 or a 0 on these projects.

I wouldn't be quite as angry about this if the teaching in the class was better. The professor basically tells us the concepts, and without giving any actual code examples while ensuring that the code in the book is nigh useless due to the rules for the projects, he expects us to come up with hilariously huge programs that work perfectly. No credit is given for trying, or demonstrating that you were at least understanding the concepts but could not get the execution down exactly right. Which is sort of ironic, given that he only teaches the concepts, after all.

I have another project due at the end of this week. I know I can get it to at least partially work, but there's an aspect to it that I have no idea how to implement. We'll see how things go. I know I'm definitely not going to put 20 hours into this project only to fail.