tempest in a teacup

Singapore reaches women’s table tennis finals

That pretty much means that they’re guaranteed a medal – the first medal won by Singapore since its silver in men’s weightlifting at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

I could be cynical and joke about how the Singapore team is entirely composed of second-string players from China, but to be honest, I’d rather not. They’ve proven me wrong, and I think they deserve any accolades that come their way.

Kudos to them.

The Beijing Olympics have been going on for about a week. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not much of a sports fan, but I have been keeping track of the big news from the event, like the epic 4×100 swimming relay finals, and India’s first solo gold medallist in the history of their participation in the Games (as well as the reaction at home – the railway minister promised to give him a lifetime travel pass for his achievement, which I found rather amusing).

Oh, and of course, there’s the drama. Namely these little tidbits that have been making the rounds.

Windows XP BSOD makes an appearance at the Olympics

Apparently one of the computers that was projecting video onto the stadium walls met with the operating system error of yore. Bad drivers, perhaps.

A girl who performed at the opening ceremony was revealed to have been lipsyncing

And she wasn’t even lipsyncing to her own performance – it was the performance of another girl entirely, one who was deemed insufficiently representative of her home country. And of course…

The victorious Chinese women’s gymnastics team might be underage

The age threshold for taking part is 16 – I’m not sure any of the team members look that old. It certainly fits into my own perspective of the decisions that tend to come out of figures of authority in China and Japan – the focus is not so much on accountability as it is on preserving one’s image, and any blemishes are explained away or quickly hushed in order to save face.

I would express more indignation, but I really don’t care enough to, and on top of that, I suspect that indignation will be in abundant supply thanks to the drones in the mass media. In the meantime, I shall return to amusing myself with the Singapore contingent’s attempts to get a second medal through massive imports of “foreign talent.”

The next TF2 update is inbound!

The inclusion of cp_steel is very welcome, but I’m wondering what this ‘new game mode’ and ‘five new arenas’ are all about. Hopefully it’s not something retarded like a deathmatch mode.

Then again, that would filter out all the idiots who pick Sniper and hang out on the 2fort balcony all the time…tough choice.

As for the Heavy unlocks, hopefully they won’t be something as overpowering as the Pyro’s backburner. I’m more or less resigned to the fact that there will be class spam until people get their unlocked weapons, but that gives me an incentive to play some of the Heavy’s counter-classes until it dies down :)

On Friday I did something that could be considered rather unusual for me – I went to a baseball game.

To be precise, it was a Seattle Mariners game. I didn’t buy the tickets myself – a colleague at work had bought tickets for whoever in our department wanted to go, and I figured that it was about time I went to one of these games, if only with out of scientific interest. Hence, I did.

Pretty much everything I learned about baseball, I learned in those three hours sitting up in the stands behind home base, and my colleagues Chris and Ted were very accommodating in that regard. The game is certainly paced faster than one-day cricket (what isn’t?) although I suspect it’s just about as fast-paced as the Twenty20 variety.

I suppose it was rather enlightening. I’m not usually one to get caught up in the moment (unless aforementioned moment was something I was involved in), so I felt a little awkward with all the cheering around me. The Mariners aren’t exactly known for their excellent game, but it looked like most Seattleites love them anyway.

It was also rather amusing to see the nonsense the stadium would put up on the big screen between innings – for some reason this got a big rise out of the crowd, even though it was nothing but a pre-rendered 3-D animation of a bunch of boats racing (the objective ostensibly to get the crowd to cheer one of them on). I had my DS with me, so I was putting some quality time into Metal Slug 7 between innings instead. More on that in another post, I suppose :P

I’ve never been particularly inclined towards being a sports fan – part of it is probably that being the fatass that I am, I’ve never actually taken part in any sports. That doesn’t stop a lot of people from supporting their favourite teams, though, so I’m not quite sure why I don’t gravitate in that direction. I can appreciate the depth and strategy inherent in these sports, as well as the skill required to play them, but for some reason the notion of being a spectator doesn’t interest me that much. I guess I don’t really have the mindset for it.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what the title of this post is about, one of the inter-innings things they put up on the screen was a series of short interviews with Mariners players about which of their teammates they thought worthy of an Olympic medal. Then Ichiro Suzuki came on the screen and said, pointing at himself, “This guy? ANYTHING!” This was followed by a montage of Ichiro’s head photoshopped onto pictures of various Olympic atheletes. For some reason I found this hilarious.

Check out this neat piece of machinima that uses Team Fortress 2 character models (as well as a few other interesting ideas):

It’s not great, but there are a few funny bits.

Really good TF2 machinima has been in short supply for some reason. You’d think people would have had plenty of ideas by now…

I’ve been hearing rumours that the 80GB Metal Gear Solid 4 PlayStation 3 bundle was soon to go the way of the dodo, and with it all backwards compatibility from the product line. I was pondering whether or not to take the plunge and shell out the cash for one of these bundles, but an e-mail that popped into my inbox at work swiftly resolved those thoughts.

A guy at work was selling his 60GB PS3 along with a few games, for the bargain price (relatively speaking) of $450. I wasn’t particularly interested in some of the games he was offering (Tiger Woods and Madden…right), but I realised that that sort of price for the long-discontinued 60GB model was a pretty damn good deal, so I jumped at it. Hence the shiny black monster now perched next to my 32″ HDTV.

The machine is remarkably quiet, even with a disc inside it – noise elimination was clearly one of their priorities in developing the hardware. Heat is another story, though – I tried to reposition the console slightly to make space for something else and the underside was almost too hot to touch.

That said, I don’t have much else to complain about. I’ll probably put Ubuntu on it so that I can use it as a media center (without being restricted to the formats that the PS3 supports natively). And now that I have something that can actually use the hi-def capabilities of my TV, I might start buying more DVDs (and downloading content from the PlayStation Store – I hear Xam’d is particularly good).

Games? Err, I got Guitar Hero III along with it, but until I clear my existing PC and PS2 backlog I’m probably not going to buy anything else for it. I’m still halfway through Devil May Cry 4 and I suspect I’ve barely scratched the surface of Mass Effect.

On a somewhat related note, I beat Metal Gear Solid at last (after disovering the first-person aiming option in the escape level which was never revealed to me, and in any case was rather difficult to use). Of course, the game rewarded me by freezing up right after the credits, preventing me from saving my complete file. Joy.

Overall thoughts? Rather rough around the edges, but it did have enjoyable moments.

I put a few minutes into Metal Gear Solid 2 – the two main things I brought away from it were

1. Yay aiming doesn’t suck as much!
2. Boo the cutscenes are still way too long.

I’ll probably only continue once I get the PS2 memory card adapter I ordered from Amazon tomorrow, so I can move all my save data onto the PS3. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the PS2 yet, but I’ll probably take it back to Singapore the next time I go.

Any claim anyone could have possibly made that the aiming system in MGS was not broken is immediately invalidated by the GODDAMN escape sequence at the end of the game.

Seriously. You’re operating a gun turret on the back of a jeep, and it doesn’t even give you any indication of what you’re aiming at, nor is there any sort of lock-on functionality. To add insult to injury they expect you to aim at moving targets with this thing.

KOJIMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I spent pretty much all of today on my couch playing the original Metal Gear Solid on my PS2. Like I said before, I’ve only played part of it before (on PC) with generally positive impressions, so I was wondering how the rest of the game held up. And my answer so far is “somewhat unevenly.”

First off, the game makes you engage in firefights with what are probably the most clunky shooting controls ever. The game has you press square to shoot, but your handgun has an auto-targeting mode engaged by holding square, which prevents you from firing off shots quickly. Manual aiming is really a crapshoot. On the other hand, your rifle fires in full automatic mode when you hold down square, and you can fire it while running if you hold down X while shooting. Keeping in mind that X is normally the button assigned to crouch, this is a rather unintuitive setup, and that the game expects you to enter gunfights with it is somewhat ridiculous.

The second problem I have is less important, but it’s somewhat detrimental to the game’s atmosphere. MGS goes to great lengths to make you feel that your actions are taking place in a realistic, believable world. The attention to detail is incredible. Given that, it really spoils the atmosphere of the game when Revolver Ocelot says something like “Press Circle to regain your strength!” It only serves to kill the atmosphere built up to that point.

I have a few more issues with the game (I think the dialogue repeats itself way too much, the cutscenes are about 50% too long, and the plot’s way of trying to make us empathise with the villains by having them spout their entire backstory as they die is just terrible characterization) but honestly, I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t gotten anything out of the game. The boss battles are suitably epic and challenging, and the sneaking areas are pretty well-designed for the most part.

I’m at the start of disc 2, so I assume I’m about halfway through the game at this point. I will say the good has outweighed the bad so far, but I suppose I’ll see if that trend continues.

Went downtown to see The Dark Knight today. Great movie, and I really enjoyed it. Very satisfying, and no real bits that stuck out to me as forced or unnecessary. Heath Ledger’s Joker was suitably sadistic, random and occasionally morbidly funny. I’m a fan of Mark Hamill’s Joker from the animated series, but I have to say Ledger did an excellent job.

In addition, a certain other Batman villain shows up (you should know who it is if you’ve been paying attention to any of the trailers at all) and while the treatment given to him in this movie is somewhat different from how he has been portrayed in the past, I thought it was pulled off very well.

The only complaint I had was Christian Bale’s Batman voice. Maybe I’m just spoiled by Kevin Conroy’s superlative treatment in the animated versions, but I have no idea why Bale’s Batman sounds like he has lung cancer. Apparently this was an issue with the first movie as well. Not only did it sound weird, it also made it hard to understand what he was saying at times.

In any case, go see it.

On my way back I popped into a Gamestop and picked up Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection. I’ve put in some time with the former and it’s really good for a handheld action game. I’m really not used to being able to block, though, being a long-time Devil May Cry player, but I suppose it’ll come with time.

MGS should be interesting…I played parts of the first game on PC, but I never beat any of them. Time to see what all the fuss is about.

NASA officially declares that it has found water on Mars.

Now all we need is some gondolas, blue-eyed Martian cats and a few hundred years of terraforming and I think I’ll be ready to move there! :D