JulioBiason.Net

For some unexplainable reason, I decided to dig my DS from the old boxes and make it work again. No too hard, just recharge the batteries and we are ready to rock.

One of the games I barely played before was “Final Fantasy III”. I must admit that, when I bought it, all I was thinking was Black Mage from 8-Bit Theatre.

For those who never played any Final Fantasy, the story is something like this: Darkness and Light stay in balance. When the balance is broken (usually when Darkness get stronger for some reason), the Warriors of Light (usually a band of orphans) must get together and put things in balance again. Or at least, that’s the basic idea behind Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy VIII (or VII, I can’t remember.)

There is an small “trick” to win easily on “VIII”: Collect the most strong magic spells, bind then with your normal attacks (you can, say, bind your sword attack with the fire spell, increasing the damage done) without leveling up. Why you can’t level up? ‘Cause the level of your enemies is based on your level. So, higher levels equals more difficult enemies.

The binding of attack and spell doesn’t exist on III. But there is one thing called “Jobs”. Basically, you can turn your character in any class: Monk, Red Mage, White Mage, Black Mage, Warrior or Freelancer. And it looks like the way to level up your job is simple staying in battle for long enough. The trick I found in the internet is to select “Guard” for at least 5 rounds; in the end of the battle, every character will get another “job” level, with just a little bit more of experience (so you level you job faster than your character level.) And, with higher jobs, you do more damage with your attacks (almost the same thing with spell binding.) So far, it’s working like a charm.

I think I nailed why I thought Diablo 3 looked like an updated Dungeon Siege: It’s the jungle. The first level on Dungeon Siege is in a jungle and they look a little bit like each other. Other than that, I don’t think there are many similarities.

Also, one thing said in the presentation isn’t actually new: changing your attack with the mouse wheel. From what I got in the presentation, you can change your attack just using the mouse wheel or the tab key. On Diablo 2, you could do the same thing: you could assign a key to an attack (up to 10, IIRC, all defaultly binded to the function keys); using the mouse wheel would change the attack on one of the mouse buttons to the next one (I can’t really remember what would happen when you assign keys on different sides.) Anyway, I don’t think Blizzard would say something is new when it isn’t actually, so I’m guessing the systems doesn’t behave like in Diablo 2.

Still waiting for the release date.

On my teen years, when internet was something you could only use at uni (at 2400bps), I would spent my gaming time playing one of Blizzard’s first games: Diablo.

I would play it over and over again, till I could finish and play on the next difficulty level. I would try to make characters use the wrong weapons (giving a sword to an archer or a bow to the warrior), just to see how the game would be (one word: “hard”.) And then it came Diablo II, which make me carry my computer (you know, those big, bulky ones in creme colour) to friend’s houses, just to play together and kill Diablo. And, later, with the “Lord of Destruction” expansion, play even more.

But time passes and, even as fun as it is, Diablo II graphics look… old. I get a claustrophobic feeling running Diablo at its 800×600 resolution on a monitor capable of 1440×900 (or even more.)

Which brings us to three days ago.

I don’t know why, but I decided to check Blizzard’s website. That’s when I saw the ice pattern melting and a facing appearing. My first guess went directly to World of Warcraft, as the new expansion “Wrath of the Lich King” is about to be released. But the rumours in the internet were saying “Diablo 3″ and, last time, when nobody expected it would be a StarCraft II, the same sites were saying that: The game Blizzard will announce is “StarCraft II”. And they were right.

I really wished Blizzard would announce Diablo 3. But deep down my senses told me it was the new expansion being officially available to everyone (willing to pay.)

And today, while trying to install Trac on my new website (which I’d probably announce what it is for in a few days) and getting constant issues, I decided to check Blizzard website, where I found they would be livestreaming the event. Because I needed some time to focus on something else, i decided to try to install the player and see what was going on. Unbelievably, I managed to connect at the very start of the presentation. They shown a little bit of last year presentation and then I heard the words:

“And now, I’m honoured to present you Blizzard new game.”

Stage went dark. Then red lights. And a guy with a guitar. And the song, I recognized it straight away: it was Diablo 1 theme song. And, if there was still some doubts, they played a video of some scenes, where you could clearly see Tyrael. And man, I knew it was true, after all: Diablo 3 is coming.

When the shock was over, they decided to show you the game. I know it’s a development version and things may change and I’ll eat my own words in the future, but I can say two things:

1) They kept it faithful to the original.
2) They kept it faithful to the original.

Why I’m pointing it twice? ‘Cause… I don’t know, maybe I was expecting something bigger. Graphics are gorgeous, but you wouldn’t expect anything less than that form Blizzard. But the whole game looks like an updated version of Dungeon Siege (which was basically another version of Diablo.) Physics were available in games for a long time already, so it’s not new, although I can’t remember any hack-’n'-slash game with that feature.

But, no matter what, I’ll play it. Even if I’ll have to buy a new computer.

PS: Be sure to check the website. The full presentation is available.

IMDB synopsis:

In Thailand, John Rambo joins a group of mercenaries to venture into war-torn Burma, and rescue a group of Christian aid workers who were kidnapped by the ruthless local infantry unit.

After watching Rocky Balboa, I had great expectations about a new Rambo movie. Not that I’m a fan of the series, but what Sylvester Stallone did to the Rocky series was really amazing, in the sense that it wasn’t a boxing movie; it was something bigger than that. And now you have the story about this soldier, which in the first movie ends crying in his colonel shoulder saying that all he wanted was a plate of food. For those who don’t know, the first movie of the series was highly acclaimed by real solders, ’cause it shown a problem in the US at the time.

The second and third movies were more action movies than telling the story behind soldiers. But, then again, so were the other Rocky movies (more about boxing than the boxer), so I was hoping Sly would do the same with this series.

Too bad, I was wrong.

Although it bases itself in the conflict in Burma, the movie never really touches the people involved in it. All you have is killing and blood and gore. There is no conflicting personalities: the bad guys are bad guys, the good guys are good guys with family and all. Plain, simply, black & white and completely wrong.

Take a look at the bad guy: he is bad. He tells his soldiers to go to villages and take the kids to be his new soldiers. He does not rape women; he sodomizes little boys. His soldiers? They rape women and play games like “walk in the mined placed” with hostages. They are bad, really really bad. But the movie never really touches the fact of why they are bad. Do they hate those people? Are the sadists? The big bad guy is bad because he wants more power or does he have a vision of the unified nation (a la the “bad guy” in “Hero“, no nothing. They are bad, that’s what you need to know.

Also, the good guys are like simply good. Ok, they are troubled, but one fought in some special forces thingy and the other is trying to understand who he is and such (which he simply accept without any struggle or anything.)

Simply put, John Rambo is a movie about war, not the fighters.

(Warning: I read the Brazilian Portuguese translated edition, so some of my points my be valid only on that.)

“Marley & Me.” A lot of people read it an liked it. I did. And, when I saw that my parents send me another book by John Grogan about dogs, I thought “Yay! Another dog book!” Too bad I was wrong.

The book is a collection of some stories posted by Grogan in his column in the newspapers. All them about dogs? No, just about three, one being the last chapter of “Marley & Me”, which brings the question of “Why such title, then?” Well, one of the stories is named “Bad Dogs Have More Fun.” And that’s it. It’s not even a good story and not the first story in the book. So, the answer of that question is: “To make this book sell, as people will think is another funny book about dogs.”

Let’s skip this issue and move forward. Are the columns good, anyway? The answer is: they are just a little bit below average. I read better columns every day on the “Sydney Morning Herald”, to be completely honest with you. There is this small infomercial about a place which sells wigs and other stuff to women with cancer (with full address and all), there is a nicely written column were the author post a nice “farewell” to his dog (which you already read in “Marley & Me”); a questioning about stereotypes when the author gives a poor woman a ride to the city… And then we have the mediocre pride to the flag column which almost made me puke. Honestly. I read half of it and skipped for the next one, ’cause I couldn’t stand so much brain-dead-mentality on it.

There is a nice picture that Grogan inadvertently writes about the American society. First, we have this sickly “OH MY GOD! I JUST LOVE MY FLAG! I WANT TO MAKE LOVE WITH IT IN FRONT OF MY KIDS TO PROVE MY LOVE FOR IT!” column and than another one saying “Yeah, I was in the airport and the officers used an anal probe on me, but that’s good, ’cause we are fighting terrorism” followed by, some columns later (which means some weeks later in real life), another one say “They anally probe me again. I wonder if that’s really necessary.” I mean, you can see, clearly, this man, which absolutely, blindly loves his country, start questioning the government politics about the whole fight against terrorism.

Also, Grogan shows his point of view of his best-seller book (no, I won’t type the title for a third time, you guys are probably going sick with it already.) To him, he is the main character in that book, not his dog. Now, if you read the book (yes, you do. If you don’t, go read it when you finish reading this), you’ll see that Marley is the main character. It’s not a book about Grogan and his dog, it’s a book about a Dog and its family. You know when the first Batman movie show up and people said that the real main character in the movie was The Joker, not Batman? So yeah, Gorgan is Batman.

Let me finish this saying some words about the translated version: it sucks. Donkey balls. One thing is when the written word is translated and you lose some information; another thing is when you lose information because the translator decides to use some liberties. I hate when that happens. The most common ones if when the author tries to describe some distance using two cities in their country; usually bad translators will translate not just the words, but also replace cities for some local ones (and it doesn’t even matter if they are big ones; sometimes they are known only by the translator). Same goes with food: instead of keeping the authors national dish, the translator decides to replace it with some local (to him/her) food. Both happen. Worst, the translator decided to translate even cities names. And, at some points, reading it made me feel like I was reading some 13-year-old girl book, with some cutesy-cutesy words.

As most of you already know, I’m playing World of Warcraft for a while. “For a while” means “time enough to create about 6 characters.”

Anyway, this morning, playing with my Blood Elf, I got myself asking “what the hell is this ‘dead scar’ in the middle of the map?” And the answer was easy to find on WowWiki. And, to my surprise, they have a pretty good explanation for that.

Which also made me think about the whole WoW lore. I mean, it is not the first time I got impressed by the richness of the lore. When I was playing with a Draenei and doing all the chained quests one right after the another, I got a pretty good idea of the events from the arrival of the Draenei to Azeroth, to the beginnings of the alliance between humans, elfs and dwarfs and the draenei. And the way the quests were designed makes this easy to get, as long as you follow them in order.

Before WoW, I used to play GuildWars. The way GuildWars works is quite the same way WoW works, except that the quests are designed to be done in just one place, then you have to complete a special quest, a “mission” in GuildWars-lingo, then you move to the next area, do more quests, open the mission and so on. It forces you to follow the lore, to learn what did happen in there.

In a way, like Gerald once told me, things get a complete different perspective when you realize that everything your character is is just a few numbers in a database. That’s the way I feel about most people who play WoW: they are just fighting the numbers in the database, not following a story where you play a character on it. They are munchkins, not RPGers.

PS: Isn’t it cool that the two androids in the Star Trek universe make a nice subject?

I decided to write reviews of (almost) all the albums I bought on iTunes those days. I wrote all them on Last.fm, since it is a music related site, so you can read them there.

And the list is:

• Nightwish - Dark Passion Play
• On the Virg - Serious Young Insects
• Across the Universe (Soundtrack)
• Daft Punk - Alive (2007)
• Cyndi Lauper - The Body Acoustic
• Information Society - Synthesizer

I still have three more albums on my todo list:

• Gin Blossoms - New Miserable Experience
• Powderfinger - Dream Days at the Hotel Existence
• Valve - The Orange Box (Original Soundtrack)

I’ll let you guys know when those reviews are done.

Portal. I’ll borrow the words of Ben Crosham and say that “If you don’t like it, you are stupid.” You can get dizzy, you can get movement sickness but you can’t get bored playing. It is fun and it is smart.

Since I’ve played Portal and like it so much, I decided to play its father, Half-Life 2. You know, I had some fun playing Half-Life, even when, in the last chapters, they give you more ammunition that you can carry, which you completely deplete in a few minutes and then you are left with a shitty weapon that throws bees (which is the only thing you can use for long range.)

Half-Life 2 was praised for being amazing and received a lot of good critics. So, why no to try it?

Well, I must say that I’m not completely impressed by it and it amazes me that it received such praise.

First of all, you don’t the story very much. I mean, of the strongest points of Half-Life was the story. Not much like “We opened a portal to another dimension (with things that are/look like demons) and now you have to kill everything that moves.” More like “We opened a portal to another dimension and you must close it. Oops, it looks like you can close it this side, you must go there and close it in the other side.” Of course, most of story is only understood in the latest chapter (the one you run without any bullets and kill enemies with a crowbar and bees) but it explains much of what you have done. Makes you feel like you just watched “Fight Club” and finally realised what the story was about.

Anyway, Half-Life 2 doesn’t have this kind of closure. Maybe because they decided to split the story in three parts, so you’ll have to wait for Episode 3 to be released to understand why you were put on stasis (which I only discovery reading the Wikipedia page), why you were brought back (still no answer) and why you keep running back and forth (still no answer.)

Second, there are a bunch of chapters (five or six, I can’t remember and I don’t want to remember) which the level designer probably had a fetish about Dukes of Hazzard:

You get a hovercraft-like vehicle and run around in radioactive waste and water. And every time you see a ramp, you have to jump it. If it slightly looks like a ramp, you must jump it. You try to go around it and you find that you need to come back and jump it to keep going forward. Just before the end of those chapters I found a ramp, tried to jump it and failed. The first thing that came to my mind was “Ok, now the guys are making fun of me. ‘We put all those ramps to make you jump, now we are going to put one just to mock you’.” Well, in the end, it turned that I tried to jump it before I could. And I had to jump it.

Still about vehicles, it seems the game designers drive things with a lot of weight in the back and no weight in the front. You get the constant feel that your vehicle (hovercraft, car) is constantly sliding the front wheel.

Third, there is the constant “let me show what our physics engine can do.” You move things, you need to pile things to make ramps (which you use to jump with your hovercraft), you lift bars on doors to keep going… And some things break and some don’t. Door are barred with wood planks, which you can easily break with two or three hits with the crowbar. But, some wood planks used as wall, you can throw three grenades and it would still be there. Ok, your physics engine rocks, Valve, but for the fuck of God, if you put wood somewhere, make it behave like wood in a consistent way!

Fourth, and I will again still from Ben Croshaw and his review of Crysis, some points require that you assign your left button and right button to quick save and quick load. It is so annoying that you need to jump in a three centimetre square or you’ll either fall in the hole of infinite depth or into fire. Or realise that you forgot to put an empty barrel under the bridge, so it won’t fall in the electrified water. Not to mention that you need to do that pretty quick, in a 90 degree turn, jumping over three of those three centimetre squares while a strider is shooting your ass.

Fifth, linear paths. Although it is kinda good, so you don’t get lost while searching for the air conduct hidden in the darkest place of the last room in the corridor you just came from (’cause, you know, there is no point in turning back), it also gives you a complete feeling of lost of free will. You path has been already chosen and you can’t get out of it. Sometimes I found myself wondering “were the fuck I’m going?” just to get there and people say “Hey Dr. Freeman, you made it!” Made WHAT? I was just following the only possible way!

Sixth, fanboynism. At first, it seems nice that everybody remembers you and seem to be happy that you are around. But when completely strangers, just by hearing your name, come like “Dr. Freeman, I’m a man, but I want to be the mother of your child! Make me!” then things start to get weird. It also adds another point to the failure of the story: why the fuck everybody in the whole planet things you are their saviour, their messiah, their Jesus? No explanation so far, except that you killed a lot of them.

Seventh, AI. Although it is cool that people actually use space in the game and you can’t just, say, walk through them, it is freaking annoying that they decide to stay in the fucking way all the time. At first, you get annoyed that, when some enemy throws a grenade at your feet and you move back to avoid the explosion, the friendly IA decides to stay in your way and you can’t get away from it (and probably saved their stupid, pathetic life using your body.) But, then again, you can’t stop smiling when they look at a granade in the floor and look at it like “oh, shinny!” and blow up in pieces. “That would teach them how to get fucking out of the way.” The friendly AI is so stupid that, later, I realised that it wasn’t worth try to save them. Just let them die, maybe they’ll learn how to shoot and avoid grenades in their next life. This is partially solved in Episode One, as your only companion is Alyx (which, much for your happiness, her bootilicious body can’t die.)

Eighth, infinite enemies. At one point, Valve pushed the physics to be the most realistic thing possible. On the other hand, you have this portal to another dimension, which is not something we see every day. Although you can balance those two to work as a normal sci-fi thingy, you can’t stop wondering where the hell are all those enemies coming. First, you have the combine, which captured part of the human population and turned them into mindless droids. By my counts, if you take all 6 billion people living on Earth today, kill some when the combine appeared, kill the children, kill the old, take some to make a resistance, turn everyone else into droids, you’ll probably get the count of 10 billion people. I’m not kidding here. In one of the last chapters of Episode One, combine soldiers keep coming in a steady pace. You need to take some survivors to a train while preventing the combine soldiers to kill them. If you try to kill the combine soldiers before letting the survivors to reach the train, you’ll see yourself in an infinite loop of kill, get ammo, run, come back, kill more, get ammo, and so on.

The insectoid race is even worst. In one chapter, you’ll see yourself in the set of “Tremors“:

You are in a beach where you can’t step in the sand, otherwise a swarm of insects (which look a lot like the bugs in Startship Troopers) will crawl from the sand and attack you, so you need to keep jumping over rocks and other stuff in the ground (remember the “mouse buttons as quick save and load”?) And, if you survived around three waves of such thing, you’ll wonder how the beach didn’t sink after so many bugs coming out of it (remember the “infinite number of enemies” thing?) In Episode One it gets even worst: the insects just pop from holes in the street and the only way to stop them is to move cars over them, so they can’t get out of. You don’t do it, they just keep coming and coming and coming. It is like the whole insect planet from Ender’s Game were inside Earth, which would be hollow and full of bugs. Either that or they reproduce at the speed of 10 per second.

Ninth, story don’t flow if you don’t do what it is expected (yeah, kinda like the fifth point.) You are in a corridor, there is a strider just behind you and the only person who can open the door in the end of the corridor refuses to go out before you blow up the strider, even if you can safely go all the way to the door. That happen about three times in Half-Life 2: the story just stops if you don’t kill a certain object, even if you can safely get away from it.

Ok, that’s what I came with in the last 30 minutes, just remembering some pieces of the game. I must say that the Half-Life 2 guys must learn something from the Portal dudes. Portal, although is just 1 hour long (18 minutes, if you are pretty fast and watch the YouTube video), have a complete story, nice puzzles and it is not annoying. I’m hoping that Episode 3 will take most of good stuff from Portal and be something that actually adds some closure to the Half-Life 2 story arc.

After almost four years, Arjen Anthony Lucassen released the new Ayreon album, 01011001. My guess is that Arjen decided this would be the album that would connect all Ayreon stories, from the blind minstrel to the last migrator. And it does. Unfortunately, from a musical stand point, the album fails to deliver anything impressive.

The songs are completely unimaginative. Sometimes, when not paying attention to the lyrics, I thought I was hearing some other Ayreon album. The same rhythm, the same sounds… nothing new. And when Hansi Kürsch sings, it really feels like you are listening to Blind Guardian, not Ayreon (in contrast, when Mike Baker sung in “The Human Equation”, you didn’t feel like listening to Shadow Gallery. And I would dare to say that when James LaBrie sung in the same album, it also didn’t feel like Dream Theater.)

So far, I would say that’s the weakest of all the albums. But who knows, maybe that was the idea, to give people some context for the next album…

Latest Avantasia album, “Scarecrow” finally hit the market. And I finally got a copy. So, what we can say about it?

First, this is not Avatansia. Sorry about that, but it isn’t. It is not about Gabriel and his quest to save his sister, while trying to save the universe from clashing with another universe, due the actions of an evil bishop. No, not at all.

This is “Tobias Sammet’s friends - Scarecrow.”

My guess is that Tobias really liked to play with another people and decided to use the name Avantasia for this project. So, fans of Avantasia, sorry but this isn’t part III. On the other hand, for those who like melodic metal, this is an awesome album! And not just melodic metal fans, people who like power ballads will really enjoy “Cry Just a Little” and “What Kind of Love”. I would even dare to say that “What Kind of Love” beats “Farewell” in any competition, hands down.

I would give it a 4 out of 5 stars.