I’ve been playing American McGee’s Alice recently and seeing all the environments and their beautifully detailed textures again, especially with my new video card, has made me want them as wallpaper and flooring in The Sims 2. I remember for the original Sims game, I found a huge collection of Alice walls and floors that someone had made, and I had the best time making creepy houses with Alice characters. I haven’t been able to find such a thing for The Sims 2, but I was thinking about making some walls and floors myself, considering how easy it looks. I’m guessing I could play Alice, take screenshots, and then use GIMP to snip out sections and turn them into nice tiling patterns. All I need is time, and of course that’s limited because it’s finals week and I’m supposed to be studying and working at Lexmark in my off time.
Blecch to studying. I’ve been reviewing my Asian philosophy notes, quizzes, and tests today in preparation for the final tomorrow. It’s comprehensive, and 50% of it will come from the new Buddhism and Zen Buddhism stuff we’ve studied recently. Unfortunately, the Buddhism stuff is where I’m most behind with my reading, so I’ve been skimming quickly through the several books on the subject we used in class. This final and my honors final will be the most difficult because they’re over all kinds of reading we were supposed to have done. Both professors had no qualms about assigning 100+ pages for two days, and that crap always results in me rolling my eyes, skimming the reading at best, and getting on with my real homework, like A.I. and operating systems. I’ve enjoyed the lectures given in both classes, and that’s where I tend to learn the most, rather than the reading expected of us outside of class.
I took a break a while ago to play some Mario Party 7, which only ended up frustrating me. For one, I can’t figure out how to change my player’s avatar from Boo to something else, I can only create an entirely new player with a different avatar, but of course that new player can’t access all the boards that my current player can. How crazy is that? I can change my player’s winning and losing messages, which I don’t care about anyway. It doesn’t seem like it would be difficult for the programmers to have allowed a user to keep the same progress, name, and messages, but change whether you’re Boo, or Peach, or whoever.
So I’m stuck as Boo unless I want to lose my progress; whatever. I started for the second time a game on the Bowser Sphinx board and watched it proceed the same way that the previous single-player game I played on that board proceeded: the CPU player conveniently got just a big enough die roll to land on the Chain Chomp square, then just enough to use the Chain Chomp to squash Bandit and get the Star. This time, I was able to steal the star back from Toad, my opponent, but of course after another turn he was fortunate enough to combine three dice rolls, get a Chomp, squash me, and steal the Star back. I quit playing at that point, disgusted because the game never works out that nicely for any human player I’ve played against, nor does it work that well for me. In short, I don’t think the CPU characters play fair.
Something Jon and Jessica noticed as well last night, in our 4-player game consisting of us 3 humans and 1 CPU player, is that the CPU characters are either a little too dumb or a little too smart. Waluigi was pitiful when we set him to Weak, and hurt whoever he was paired up with in mini-games; he came in dead last after the game was over. Yoshi, however, was set to Normal and stomped our butts throughout the game, always getting the best possible outcome from die rolls and mini-games, not landing on squares that make you lose coins, etc. Finally, we got pissed off and decided to sabotage Yoshi by running in front of him in mini-games to knock him into enemy fire, or knocking him off a platform, or ensuring he couldn’t get past us. The hate was pretty strong for that little green frog-dinosaur thing.
games and finals
I’ve been playing American McGee’s Alice recently and seeing all the environments and their beautifully detailed textures again, especially with my new video card, has made me want them as wallpaper and flooring in The Sims 2. I remember for the original Sims game, I found a huge collection of Alice walls and floors that someone had made, and I had the best time making creepy houses with Alice characters. I haven’t been able to find such a thing for The Sims 2, but I was thinking about making some walls and floors myself, considering how easy it looks. I’m guessing I could play Alice, take screenshots, and then use GIMP to snip out sections and turn them into nice tiling patterns. All I need is time, and of course that’s limited because it’s finals week and I’m supposed to be studying and working at Lexmark in my off time.
Blecch to studying. I’ve been reviewing my Asian philosophy notes, quizzes, and tests today in preparation for the final tomorrow. It’s comprehensive, and 50% of it will come from the new Buddhism and Zen Buddhism stuff we’ve studied recently. Unfortunately, the Buddhism stuff is where I’m most behind with my reading, so I’ve been skimming quickly through the several books on the subject we used in class. This final and my honors final will be the most difficult because they’re over all kinds of reading we were supposed to have done. Both professors had no qualms about assigning 100+ pages for two days, and that crap always results in me rolling my eyes, skimming the reading at best, and getting on with my real homework, like A.I. and operating systems. I’ve enjoyed the lectures given in both classes, and that’s where I tend to learn the most, rather than the reading expected of us outside of class.
I took a break a while ago to play some Mario Party 7, which only ended up frustrating me. For one, I can’t figure out how to change my player’s avatar from Boo to something else, I can only create an entirely new player with a different avatar, but of course that new player can’t access all the boards that my current player can. How crazy is that? I can change my player’s winning and losing messages, which I don’t care about anyway. It doesn’t seem like it would be difficult for the programmers to have allowed a user to keep the same progress, name, and messages, but change whether you’re Boo, or Peach, or whoever.
So I’m stuck as Boo unless I want to lose my progress; whatever. I started for the second time a game on the Bowser Sphinx board and watched it proceed the same way that the previous single-player game I played on that board proceeded: the CPU player conveniently got just a big enough die roll to land on the Chain Chomp square, then just enough to use the Chain Chomp to squash Bandit and get the Star. This time, I was able to steal the star back from Toad, my opponent, but of course after another turn he was fortunate enough to combine three dice rolls, get a Chomp, squash me, and steal the Star back. I quit playing at that point, disgusted because the game never works out that nicely for any human player I’ve played against, nor does it work that well for me. In short, I don’t think the CPU characters play fair.
Something Jon and Jessica noticed as well last night, in our 4-player game consisting of us 3 humans and 1 CPU player, is that the CPU characters are either a little too dumb or a little too smart. Waluigi was pitiful when we set him to Weak, and hurt whoever he was paired up with in mini-games; he came in dead last after the game was over. Yoshi, however, was set to Normal and stomped our butts throughout the game, always getting the best possible outcome from die rolls and mini-games, not landing on squares that make you lose coins, etc. Finally, we got pissed off and decided to sabotage Yoshi by running in front of him in mini-games to knock him into enemy fire, or knocking him off a platform, or ensuring he couldn’t get past us. The hate was pretty strong for that little green frog-dinosaur thing.