/dev/null/kevin

Want to own your own life-sized X-Wing Fighter? Just go on over to EBay and buy yourself one. It's only 28 feet long (8.5 m) and 2000 lbs (900 kg) and is one of eight surviving full-sized replicas constructed for an earlier promotional tour by Fox.

As of today (April 22) there are no bids, so maybe it can be yours for only $40,000. Deal!
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April 22, 2005 01:58 PM PDT Permalink | |

You don't need me to tell you about gas prices, but here's another hidden cost: TIME. Gas pumps are programmed to pump gas at a certain rate, but that rate is based on dollars per second, not gallons per second. This is to prevent people who want to buy a certain dollar amount of gas from overshooting that amount. If the pumps are too fast then people can claim that they were "trapped" into buying more than they wanted to.

The downside to all of this is that as gas prices go up, the pumps slow down so it takes longer to pump your gas. So not only are we paying more, but we're losing time out of our days.
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April 20, 2005 02:50 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [2] |

OK, who else is annoyed with these flash banner ads that have audio? To me they are just counter productive as I just close the window and never read the ad nor any of the other banner ads on the page. I might not even read the actual page content if it's really annoying.
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April 13, 2005 04:14 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [3] |

One of the things that I was looking forward to was the game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Sith Lords. I've played the game twice now, taking both the "good" and "evil" paths. Here are my thoughts, and I'll try to touch on things that I haven't seen in other reviews. I'll also try and note any plot spoilers.

Bottom Line

KOTOR II is about as almost as good as the original KOTOR I. However, it does so by being both better and worse, so it averages out to be about the same.

If you liked the KOTOR I, you should play KOTOR II. If you haven't played either one, then you should play the original KOTOR first. It's probably cheaper and some of its plot points are revealed in KOTOR II.

What's Better

• The graphics are minutely better, but probably only on the PC.

• There are some much bigger battles to fight.

• Customized fighting modes for your NPCs (melee, ranged, jedi, grenades) lets you select a fighting style for each party member.

• The whole workbench/lab station idea is nice.

• No limit on your characters' level (the best improvement, IMHO)

• More weapons, force powers, skills and upgrades.

• Consistent upgrades. No more having to plug an item in to each weapon to see what it does. Now every upgrade component does the same thing.

• Faster "space suit" walking (oh the pain, the pain...)

• Swoop bike racing almost free. If your persuasion skill is high enough, you can race for free. Maybe this is a bug, but at least you don't have to keep saving and reloading. They also added "up and down" to swoop racing.

• Bigger story concept and deeper ideas.

• Very complicated action/reaction matrix for your dialog choices and other actions. Different things happen if you're good vs evil or male vs female. They added a whole new dimension of "influence" between you and each party member.

• New pazaak cards. Also, starting draw now alternates, making it more fair.

• More opportunities to play the NPCs in special missions.

What's Worse

• It takes freaking forever to get your lightsabre.

• Combat mostly too easy, even in hard mode. In the original KOTOR I found myself pausing the battles often to micro manage all three members of my party, especially in the early and weak stage of the game. In KOTOR II I almost never did that since there just wasn't a need. The new "role assignment" feature may have something to do with that.

• Confusing backstory revelation. In KOTOR I, you as the player knew exactly what your character knew and your backstory was revealed to you in normal conversation with other NPCs. However, in KOTOR II, your character knows most of his/her own backstory but you as a player don't. Your backstory is revealed to you, and in fact constructed by, your character's dialog choices. At the same time that you're trying to select what to say to be either good or evil, you're also reading the choices just to figure out your own past. Sometimes it's hard to tell what you're supposed to already know and what you're just learning.

• More bugs. I'll note them individually, but most revolve around dialog and quests and the order in which things are done. Basically, the complicated action/reaction matrix has a few bugs in it.

• While the first KOTOR had perfect story construction and an excellent non-linear game design, KOTOR II makes a lot of assumptions on the order in which you do things. I found many inappropriate dialog choices while playing. Someone might say something that they shouldn't because the programmer assumed that I had been somewhere, or spoken to someone, that I hadn't yet. Likewise, they'll still talk about something that I "solved" but they don't seem to realize it.

• Some quests that I had completed were resurrected in the journal because I talked to someone who would trigger the quest again. Or a quest was rendered impossible because I had already done something quest related before speaking with a quest trigger person.

• There is a real assumption that I will visit a particular planet before others. The NPCs practically beg be to go there first.

• As my backstory is revealed, my character doesn't seem to realize it. I'll still have the option of asking the same stupid questions that I ask everyone, even though I already know the answer.

• Swoop Bike Racing. Lots of problems here if you are a swoop bike racing fan. In addition to a bug where some of the accelerator pads don't work at some speeds, the first race is basically impossible. The first race also doesn't have any prize for 2nd and 3rd place like every other race does. So, you can spend lots of time trying and get no payoff. The Xbox version had a cheat to let to win, but this doesn't even work on the PC, so we lost out.

• Even with the workbench, I found myself with a lot of extra junk.

• SMALL SPOILER. White on white text, so select to read.

  KOTOR I had one big plot fork, based on your alignment. KOTOR II has multiple small plot forks, but no big one. Dialog is also different, but in the end, the whole thing is mostly the same for good and evil.

• SPOILER. White on white text, so select to read.

  The "BOSS" characters are kind of lame. I found almost every BOSS fight to be rather easy, except the last one. That one was almost too hard until I figured out an easy way of winning. Both the box and website feature the two characters shown above, but both are rather easy to beat and aren't even a big part of the story. I guess they just look cool.

• It's been reported that they rushed the XBox release for Christmas and ended up cutting parts of the game out. The PC version is almost "bug compatible" with the XBox and with none of the cut features readded. The few bugs that they did "fix" were done by disabling some features (tiny spoiler: the transport on Nar Shaddaa ). You can even see parts of the map that exist, but you can't get to them. This is rather unfortunate.

• No real quests for NPCs. In KOTOR I, some of the NPCs could trigger subquests on the various planets, sometimes revealed by getting to know them. That's not really that case in KOTOR II. The rewards for "digging deep" into an NPCs dialog tree are different.

• BIG SPOILER. White on white text, so select to read.

  The ENDGAME for both sides is very rushed. I think that the "XBox cut" caused them to yank large portions of the ending out. By the time you understand the true nature of the plot the game is basically over. There is a lot of text telling you what might have happened, but it's just text. What actually happens in each ending (good/evil) is so similar that if you blink, you'll miss the difference. Also, once the main "bad guy's" motives are revealed, their actions don't quite justify it. Do they love you or hate you? Do they Want you to live or die? You just don't end the game with the same feeling of accomplishment that you did in the first game since it's unclear what you were fighting for.

So, my hope is that they release a patch to KOTOR II that includes the complete game and fixes to some of these bugs.

Much has been made recently of the new healthier cookie monster, both in the news and in satire. However, I just need to make these two points:

1. Why is everyone talking about this now? This story broke in the Aug 29, 2004 issue of TV Guide. That's six whole months ago! If you're going to get all up in arms about this, you should have done so back then.
2. Have any of these people seen the new shows? I have a 22 month old and we watch everyday. Cookie Monster is still eating lots of cookies. He's still fat, and the actor behind the puppet still is the funniest ad lib guy on the show.

Now, if the show does change for the worse, I will get on the bandwagon bashing this change, but I will do so as an informed individual, not just part of a mob.
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April 10, 2005 12:37 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [2] |

There are a couple of Star Wars name generators out there, but I think I found the worst one. Target's Star Wars toy site now has a name generator (click on Yoda). I won't spoil the humor by giving away some of the names, but I will say "make sure you try different departments when selecting the options."
Tags: name starwars target
April 05, 2005 05:52 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [1] |

Many times you'll see two comic strips tell the same joke, but these two are really similar. Both of these appeared on April 1, 2005, so I expect that this is part of an April Fools gag.

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis

Foxtrot by Bill Amend

We've got a Ouija board, a command to injure the other person, pleased gods and almost the same punchline. So, anyone else see any other comic strips doing the same gag? I've only seen these two, so that would make it kind of a lame April Fools joke if only two strips did it. Maybe the joke is on them.

Post a comment if you've seen this joke elsewhere.

Update: I found another one:

Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley

Update 2: I am not the only one to notice this. I'm disappointed that it's only these three comics.
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April 01, 2005 02:22 AM PST Permalink | Comments [3] |