So I bought Minna Daisuki Katamary Damacy the other day, but to be honest I haven’t really played it much yet. I really wanted to get into the 2-player cooperative mode, but unfortunately I don’t know how! Anyway, here’s the deal: they expand the game more than I thought would be possible. Here are some examples:
You wander around a map area, and talk to different people. Each person has a problem or something, and then you help them out by rolling up a bunch of junk. There’s one person who wants to see a new kind of flower, or the mom whose kid’s room is all messy. Et cetera, et cetera.
Some cool new ideas and areas have been added. There’s a stage where you roll underwater, which is basically a zero-gravity style of gameplay. Or, there’s a stage where you roll stuff up into this big ball of fire in order to light a campfire. If you go for too long without rolling up any items, the fire goes out, which causes you to lose.
The game is still whacked out, and has some weird humor, which I can understand in spite of my horrible Japanese. The annoying thing is that the King speaks all in <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana>katakana</a>, which is annoying to read. It would be the equivalent to someone writing English only using capital letters, and without spaces. Of course for a native speaker there’s no problem, but for my dumb head it becomes rather difficult. In addition, the game will automatically scroll text bubbles after a (short) period of time, which means that after I read the first line of a sentence, a new one appears.
Other minor details seem to include a revamping of the two-player vs. mode. Now if you hit the opposing player with a dash attack, it knocks all sorts of stuff off his katamari, which means that the vs. mode is actually competitive. In the first, whoever got even a small advantage in the first few minutes would win the round, because he could then roll up his opponent, and the opponent could do a whole lot of nothing about it.
Maybe if I get motivation, I’ll play the durn game a bit more and write a full-fledged review. Or something.
Probably going to buy Everybody Loves Katamari Damacy during my “lunch break,” which is like from 3:00-4:00. Fortunately today’s work load is fairly light, but I still can’t wait for the weekend. Then I will play games and waste time in general.<p>
So, like the advantage of CSS is that you can format multiple pages the same way, or change styles very easily, by separating style info from a webpage. Go me, just finally got around to learning it. Anyway, I didn’t realize how powerful it is… you can literally put text anywhere, obscure images, whatever. <a href=test_index.php>Here’s an example</a> of a retro-themed index. Notice that the underlying HTML is the same, but the style sheet (<a href=classic.css>classic.css</a>) changes a whole lot of stuff. So, if you feel bored this weekend, you can make a theme for this site. Check out a <a href=http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp>CSS Tutorial</a> which is pretty good. And, that is it.
I unsubscribed from the gaijinpot.com mailing list. I’ve been getting it for roughly around two years, but now I can’t think of any reason to keep the status quo. For sure, if you’re one who is into the English teaching, it’s a great resource, but I completely burned myself out after one year. Even with less than one month to go, it’s hard to pysche myself up for some of those soul-draining classes. I can only imagine what junior high teachers have to go through every day of their lives, and it must be rotten. <p>
I re-read The Sound and The Fury this week, for the first time in about seven years. I must say, I liked it quite a bit better this time, although I still don’t pretend to understand everything that goes on beneath the surface. I remembered a lot of the commentary that my old English teacher dispensed to my class, and idly wondered if I’d be able to absorb that kind of stuff on my own. Probably not, because I don’t nit and pick enough. Especially with stream of conciousness writing, I tend to read quickly so as to try and absorb as much information as I can in a short period of time, as if the words were goin’ directly to the brain-box. For some reason, I tend to be more interested in the interaction between characters and the characters themselves rather than wordplay and hidden innuendo. Or maybe that’s just me making excuses for bein’ dumb! <p> I proceeded from a Nobel Prize-winning author to Robert Ludlum (shout-out to Ben). Go me!
So, you might notice the page is lookin’ a bit wonky. This is because I had the bright idea to change the layout to use CSS instead of nested tables. Unfortunately, most people (including myself) use the <p> tag when posting instead of using two <br>’s. This screws with the CSS, since I changed the <p> tag to format text in a certain way. I’m still kinda thinking about ways around this, so for now just use the <br> tag.