“… a frustratingly unrealistic effort at creating balance and strategy”

The latest offering in the rapidly overflowing strategy genre is hard evidence that strategy games need a real overhaul, and fast. Chess, a small-scale tactical turn-based strategy game, attempts to adopt the age-old “easy to learn, difficult to master” parameter made popular by Tetris. But the game’s cumbersome play mechanics and superficial depth and detail all add up to a game that won’t keep you busy for long….

27/365

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First Christian Church II. (When you don’t have a wonderful image, play with posterization and layers and other gimmicks.)

Truth in advertising

Let’s be brazen:

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The offense is slightly mitigated by the fact that the fifth season never was licensed and thus there is no legitimate region 1 release. Still, usually it’s the “marketplace” dealers who sell bootlegs, not Amazon.com itself.

Update (5/22/07): Sailor Stars is “currently not available,” and the link above returns a 404.

Notes

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According to historical costumers, a properly-fitted corset is quite comfortable. Evidentally, in Foreland the craft of corsetry has sadly declined.

After the over-the-top first episode, the second episode of Murder Princess is a bit of a let-down as the former bounty hunter ((What is it with bounty hunters, anyway? I would have thought that Cowboy Bebop adequately covered the subject, but they keep turning up everywhere. Half the characters in El Cazador are bounty hunters.)) discovers the challenges of palace life. It’s still quite watchable, though, and it’s hard to dislike a series in which the good guys look like this:

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Continue reading “Notes”

Grrr

You can legally download the first episode of Death Note for $2, which is not a bad deal, assuming that there is no limit on how many times you can play the file. However, as Astro discovered, if you’re on a Mac, you’re out of luck. You can only watch the show on a Windows machine. This is not mentioned on the download page; you have to do some clicking in the “support” menus to discover this. It looks like I’m going to wait a few months, or years, for the DVDs. I wonder if Viz will stick a mandatory Naruto trailer at the begining of the Death Note discs, as they do with Hikaru no Go.

23/365

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The mystery echinocereus. It’s supposed to be E. dasyacanthus, but the flower doesn’t match the seed list description. (This is another instance where the camera doesn’t get the color quite right, though it’s closer than yesterday’s photo. The flowers are a slightly more purplish than they appear here. This goes for the ones in the header art, too.)

22/365

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There’s a wisteria vine I pass when I go to work. In spring every year it becomes a solid wall of lavender. This year, however, the late freeze killed all the buds. The vine has come back, and it has even managed to produce a few racemes, though it’s a pitiful display compared to the usual spectacle. (The camera has difficulty accurately capturing some shades; the flowers are less blue and more violet than in the picture.)