OMFG

Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo is, if not one of my favorite games of all time, at least my favorite puzzle game of all time. Having played it all the way since the original Playstation 1 version to Xbox Live Arcade version (shortly named as Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, thank god everyone outside the game itself just call it Puzzle Fighter HD), one would think that I'm pretty good at it. In reality, the only one I can beat in it is my aunt, and that's only because she plays it so rarely that she doesn't remember how to use the controller.
*KUVA*
You know, playing a puzzle game based on colors can be quite hard when you can’t tell the colors apart from each other. I’m colorblind.

So what does that mean for me regarding the game? Well, as you may know, the game has tiles of four different colors, red, blue, yellow, and green. In Puzzle Fighter (HD), I can’t tell the yellow and green tiles apart. And as the player is supposed to pile the similar-colored tiles together, my only possibility while playing is to pile the red and blue tiles accordingly, and just smash “the third color” ones in the same pile. Kinda kills my ability to play the game competitively. “Luckily”, the online mode is quite dead so a) there wouldn’t even be anyone to play with b) all the players there are are very good if there are any, and c) if you can actually get a match started, it usually lags like hell, which a simple game like this shouldn’t do. Oh well.

Some puzzle games that are also based on colorful objects are more colorblind-friendly. The notoriusly addictive Bejeweled of course has all those different shaped gems besides the colors. Hexic HD has on option for adding symbols to the tiles. Sadly, Puzzle Fighter offers no options like this.

But puzzle games aren’t the only ones where I suffer from my color blindness. Back in the day, while I was still playing World of Warcraft, Mount Hyjal surprised my with additional difficulty. Rage Winterchill, the first boss of the tier 6 raid instance, has an ability called Death and Decay. What it does is AoE damage on an area which is marked by swirling fog (or something). I NEVER saw the area unless I was squinting and looking at my screen 2 centimeters away from it - not the best way to heal the raid. I’m pretty sure I died on Rage Winterchill more than on other bosses there combined, almost every time, even while it had been on farm status for months. Sometimes I died even on the same second as the boss itself :P

Does something affect your gaming?

(Twitter -> tweets -> twits; the joke is already so old)

Last week or something I joined Twitter for no reason. I'm just bored? Anyway, here are my "tweets" from the past week and a little bit explaining done.

So: I copypaste my (few) tweets here and tell you what they are about.

This is stupid. I don't have any reason to use Twitter and now I do nonetheless. And someone gets money because I am here and write nonsense

...

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Retweet: pocketnowtweets - The Most Sexy Unboxing Ever (of the Droid X) http://is.gd/dDnaX

As a newborn mobilephone enthusiastic, one of my favorite sites recently has been pocketnow.com. Their news posts may be a bit slow if you follow other sites too (like Techradar and Engadget), but otherwise there's a lot of interesting stuff there, like their own review videos, Application pick videos and much more.

So I wanted to try out that "retweet" button on a funny news post there. This video is from somewhere else but it's quite funny. In it, Motorola's newest phone model is unboxed, presented as porn. Pure win?

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Damn it! After all the wait I finally got my #iPhone 4 just to notice... yes you guessed it, disappearing signal. Bandages for me anyone?

No, I don't have iPhone 4 and probably never will. But several sites reported that Samsung UK was handing out Galaxy S phones for free to those who complained about iPhone 4 signal issues in Twitter. I could use a free Galaxy S :P http://pocketnow.com/tech-news/free-samsung-galaxy-s-in-uk-to-iphone-4-owners

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Typing tvtropes.org to my browser and five minutes later... 50 new tabs opened.

My only real tweet after the first one. There's no really need for me to write anything there as no one is following me :D But I just wanted to share this with... umm Twitter servers? Tvtropes.org - all the useless info you ever wanted to know and then some. Not safe for work or otherwise you don't get anything done that day. Or week. But then again, if you get fired, you have lots of time for tropes!

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Retweet @pocketnowTweets PlayStation Emulator Hits Android Market with PSX4Droid 1.0, Demoed http://is.gd/dHuSS

Another retwwet from Pocketnow. As it says,Playstation Emulator is available for Android phones (at the moment I have HTC Desire <3) has been released. Sounds awesome, but I have yet to try it as here in Finland Google hasn't enabled paid apps yet so I can't buy it. I really wonder if most games are playable using touch input though, but the app actually supports Wiimote as a controller. That's kinda cool. Except I don't have one.

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@majornelson Thanks a lot, you made my day <3

As some of you know, Major Nelson is the Xbox guy. The other day he was handing out Medal of Honor beta keys, and I got one! It's appropriate to thank people when you get something, so I tweeted my thanks to him. MoH beta is quite nice and it made me want to buy Bad Company 2.

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That's it for now. I accept followers at http://www.twitter.com/Echenor.

...because I just joined Twitter.

Now I only need to find out WHY?

http://twitter.com/Echenor

(is there any way to add Twitter widget to my blog theme?)

This Sunday I'm going to see some apartments at my university-city-to-be. Fingers crossed that at least one of them is good and I'll get it!

Two other completely unrelated things:

- That Final Fantasy XIV beta downloader is huge pile of crap. I'm not sure if it's actually even downloading anything - but it's uploading full speed ...? Sorry SquareEnix if I broke my NDA (I don't even know if there is one;), you can ban me - I don't want to play this if the game itself is comparable to this small, but completely fucked up, application.

- I might like Lady Gaga. I know, huh?!!? I have been listening to her all the way since Poker Face with the attitude "meh, I'm always listening to the number one dance chart hits and forget them a month later, but... Gaga's different. This stuff is actually good. And so are her music videos.

Nope, not Cataclysm ;)

Final Fantasy XIV beta started and I got invited. At the moment I'm downloading the client via infernal downloader application. It plays music all the time, starts with a command prompt and then does some horrible graphics inside a normal window with the title bar and all, even if all those are already included in the horrible graphics.

The japanese can't program decent pc applications? I hope that doesn't include the game itself too.

The other day I was going through my bookmarks and saved passwords in Firefox and deleting useless accounts for various websites that I felt I didn't need anymore. Among them was Curse.com where I had registered during Vanilla WoW when it still was named Curse Gaming. I had created that account to upload my (crappy when looked at now) user interface pack. Much later, sometime between TBC and WotLK that UI pack was wiped away with all the other packs for a reason I don't remember. I thought it was gone forever, but now I noticed that through some miracle, two screenshots had survived! Wow.

The first one is quite interesting. It's from my first or second raid, in Zul'Gurub. I was in that guild (The Perfect Gentlemen) for a really long time and I was even the guild master towards the end. Till this year when I quit, I still played with a couple of them. I think I have written something about the guild in my first entries that are longer than Lord of the Rings.

And please take a look at my level in the screenshot ;)

The second screenshot is far less interesting. It was obviously taken just to show off my UI pack and there's nothing interesting there. If you look closely, you see I had no clue how to play a hunter back then (keybindings? :P) nor did I have any clue this January either. Paladin, on the other hand, that I can handle.

Let's talk a moment about that UI itself. There was a time when my biggest dream in WoW was to release my own UI package and after a long time spent trying out everything, I finally liked it myself and someone asked me to upload it in the official User Interface forum. So I did, it was named Echo UI and I maintained it all the way till the end of TBC when I quit for the first time for a longer period.

Looking back, it's not pretty. It's the first public version in those screenshots and judging it now, it's mediocre at best. But I still like to think that it makes sense, at least the stuff is positioned instead of just putting stuff somewhere. I released four major versions during its existence and I learned a lot about what's unnecessary to show all the time and it got more minimalistic version by version. The best, of course, would have been the version five, which I made from the working pieces of version 4 after six months of not playing WoW, only to abandon it shortly after for another six months of Wowlessness and then worked on it for my own amusement for a couple of months and then I quit for the last (latest?) time. I never intended to release it again because that takes a lot of work, so it never got the finishing touch, but I played with it myself and I was happy.

During its existence, Echo UI was downloaded at least 5 000 times from Wowinterface.com and a bit less from Curse.com. Not huge numbers, but still, it makes me feel warm inside that that many people liked my work.

Work. Yup, I really didn't do that much, I just positioned stuff on the screen in a way that I liked (I wanted to say "in a neat way" but I guess many wouldn't agree with that). All the real work was done by the addon authors. Some awesome stuff they made, and even if I have quit WoW, the addon community is the one I check out regularly. Thanks to all those great people who wrote all that code.

Now that I finished Red Dead Redemption, I don't want to start any huge game. But then again, after I have burnt myself in the sun and it's too hot to be outside in a shade, I still feel like playing something. So I took a look to my long list of unplayed games on Steam and found a perfect game for Summer.

Burnout Paradise

It's fast, dangerous, looks good and the sounds rock. The perfect game when you want something light, in my opinion. The crashes! The cars! The city!

What do you play when you don't want anything serious?

After some intensive gaming, I finally completed Red Dead Redemption last Sunday. Well, what can I say. Quite possibly the best game released or being released this year. What a shock from Rockstar.

While some (ok mainly stupid comments on Metacritic, those make my head explode nonetheless) have complained it's too similar to GTA IV, I don't see that as a problem. Actually, the similarities come from the game engine. And I don't even know what to say... why the hell would that be a bad thing?

The gameplay of course is quite similar to GTA IV. Some major progress has been made though. Shooting and aiming works a lot better now and I honestly can't say anything bad about the gameplay. Well, maybe going to cover works a little bit oddly inside buildings, but still, a lot better than in GTA IV.

For me GTA IV was the best game for ages because of the story and the characters. Red Dead Redemption doesn't succeed here as well as GTA IV and the episodes did, but I'd still say that at worst it's on par with other good games and overall quality is still above the average AAA-titles. Even if John Marston talks more than does, his character works - the ending leaves no doubt about this after you see it.

I have never been a huge fan of wandering aimlessly in a huge sandbox - the reason why I still haven't finished Saints Row 2 or played Fallout 3 after finishing all the missions. In Red Dead Redemption I liked picking flowers, searching the wilderness and hunting - guess why? Because it rewards you for all those things. There are 10 challenges each for hunting, collecting herbs, treasure hunting and marksmanship. Many times I found myself marking the next mission on map and while riding there I noticed some herbs - and oh there's a wolf, I need some pelts . whoah a vulture I need some feathers, oh a stranger needs my help...

That's another example how the world feels alive. You encounter random encounters out there in the wilds - be it a caravan being attacked, a herbalist wanting to compete with you or a wolfpack after a young lady - you can go there and help. Or you can stop by and look while a man is peeing.

Shortly after Red Dead Redemption came out, a lot of bugs became public. The first update was available on the European publishing date so I didn't encounter many. The worst one was a rifle waving around in air in a cutscene. So no wagons flying to space for me :(

All in all, Red Dead Redemption is one of the best open world games ever. It may not become an instant modern classic like GTA IV because the story telling is "only" barely on par with that epic, but the gameplay improvements make up for that. I didn't think I would enjoy Wild West as much as the modern city of Liberty City but now I only think how much more alive and enjoyable - better - the wild west feels

What to do now? Well...

I wrote a headline yesterday morning. It hasn't been published yet.

My first aid isn't working because the corpse is too cold already? :(