Supplies

Los Baños' recent adoption of paper bags in wrapping all its groceries does have one advantage: other people can't see what you've bought. So people now can't see that what I mostly buy at Robinson's are multiple packs of Marlboro Lights Menthol as well as CoffeeMate Hazelnut...

It looks like progress, but it sure as fuck isn't

Recently, the municipality of Los Baños have instituted the latest stupidity since they stepped on smokers' rights: paper bags.

Despite what the morons who made this policy may think, it isn't environmental, it isn't cool, and it sure isn't fucking hip. It looks like some slapsoil peon with a relative from the U.S. hit upon this idea, and thought, mistakenly as Asian monkeys are wont to do, that aping such a practice is a realistic and ideal thing.

It isn't. It's hard to carry a reasonable degree of groceries wrapped in flimsy bags of cheap brown paper, and they don't have a convenient handhold unlike traditional plastic bags. Sure, the makeshift carton bags they provide are handy, but they only provide those occasionally. This has prevented me, and a lot of fellow customers, from buying, say, even 2 or 3 one-litre bottles of Minute Maid, among other bottled products.

It is these conceited statements of illusionary progress that makes me want to just go and take the life of these evolutionary-challenged people in power. All of them are ill-thought-out: no littering on the streets when there's virtually no trashcans anywhere, not to mention a crappy garbage collection service. Not to mention how they transgress against smokers' rights by disallowing smoking in PUJs; that's our fucking right, and noone, not even your fucking God, has any right to take it away! And then there's the paper bags: all it does is makes grocery-shopping (among other things) inconvenient for the typical consumer. And it'd be a bit more bearable if we actually had a recycle plant in town, which would of course be the whole point of using recyclable paper bags. But nooo.

So they're all shitty ideas presenting a community of progress to the world, but in reality on succeeds at proving that Filipinos, at least here in Los Baños and especially those in public office, has not progressed much beyond the level of apes.

I'm giving the finger--no, TWO fingers--to the mayor of Los Baños, whoever the fuck he is.

Tonight's Rated K Proves Once Again How Much Filipino TV Sucks

Like they do every freaking day, local Philippine TV stations continually pump out swill and garbage. Just tonight, Rated K, a "popular" (and by "popular," I mean "probably watched by the unwashed monkeys of the P.I.) Sunday night "informative" (hahah!) magazine show, has proven that Pinoy TV, never at stellar levels to begin with, can sink to even more deplorable lows.

Currently featured in tonight's segments, if several footages copied and pasted by a backwater monkey can even be called that, are stories about losers who apparently have been given a second chance by their loser God. It's actually a close competition which one, mortal or deity, is an even bigger loser, seeing as the mortal losers are what one may call prime candidates for Darwinian extinction (I mean, what the fuck? One of the featured is someone who apparently held on to a fucking live wire; only an even more stupid God could have let that one live; do us all a favor why don't you, and clean the freaking gene pool of idiots already!).

Speaking of which, noone idiot could even be more moronic than the show's apparent host, Korina Sanchez. Framing each of these idiot's crap life stories as proof that their God exists and is willing to forgive and forget... Hahah. Give me a break. But then what can anyone expect from a local two-bit television whore who's better off doing Philippine pornos instead.

Fuck.

Yet Another Update Post

For the past couple of weeks I've been immersed with the new and very addicting computer roleplaying slash strategy game, King's Bounty: The Legend. It's the sequel to New World Computing's Kings Bounty, the game that eventually inspired the Heroes of Might & Magic series. I like the new King's Bounty better than any of the HoMM installments though, with its focus on single player play and more exploration and roleplaying quests. This means you visit towns but you don't have to think about an enemy hero conquering it later, and there's no need to wait in between turns as enemy heroes act. I've done a lot of stuff in the game already, and there's still so much to do...

Still haven't finished Mother 3.

I joined NaNoWriMo 2008, but I haven't written a word yet!

Just today, on the commute home, I fired up Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords on my DS Lite yet again--that incredible mixture of connect-three and RPG which I wasn't able to finish before. Right now, it's calling me, even with a lot of other games still on the backlog. Two notable ones being DragonQuest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, an awesome remake of the hardcore Japanese console RPG, in which I'm at very last chapter; and Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (Objection!) where I'm currently trying to solve that concert murder...

I hope to run D&D 4E before the year is out.

Oh, and I just saw the 2-episode premiere of Legend of the Seeker--Raimi's new fantasy series for TV (finally another one, and HBO's A Song of Ice and Fire is just around the corner too!)--and it was fucking awesome. Finally, a show on TV that's not afraid of taking on all of the tropes of an EPIC FUCKING FANTASY. Here's to looking forward to the rest of the season!

Sigh. So many games, so little time...

Mother 3 (EarthBound 2) English Translation!

Finally, an English translation for the sequel to the one of the greatest console roleplaying game of all time, EarthBound, has been completed! 

I was overjoyed when, a few minutes before now, I read the email notice the translation team sent. Now, October 19, Sunday, at roughly 2:45 in the morning, I am about to start playing Mother 3, embarking on another epic journey that's been 12 years in the making...

PC Gaming

Lately, in a fit of crazy procrastination, I've been playing some games again on my PC. Instead of the mere blank-staring-at-the-monitor-trying-to-write-something activity that I sometimes do...

Baldur's Gate, the EasyTutu version, has long laid dormant in my PC since summer. Lately, I've made some progress, mostly completing the various sidequests that can be found in the city. Whew, that sure is a big city. But I'm ready to move on. Maybe give me a couple more weeks or so.

Then there's Neverwinter Nights. I've recently reinstalled this, since I still haven't finished the later Premium Modules, and I needed an RPG fix after uninstalling Oblivion. Anyway, a couple of days ago, I started playing it again, just to peek into an adaptation of the old SSI AD&D Goldbox CRPG, Pool of Radiance, for research purposes. Yes, I'm running a damn Ruins of Adventure game on rPol, using AD&D 2nd Edition rules. How did I get roped into that? Well, the DM dropped out, and I just had to offer to DM in her place. I was in a tabletop RPG high at the time, I think. Now, it's feeling like I've bitten a little bit more than I can chew (I have three other games to run afterall) but, of course, I couldn't let the gaming group down.

Anyway, the NWN Pool of Radiance adaptation was a bit too simplistic for my tastes, so little help there. Fortunately, I also finally managed to get another installer for NWN2, which also had another, and I think better, adaptation of the classic module/CRPG. So I installed it last Sunday, and, after a few hours of downloading the patches and the module, have it up and running. I cribbed some notes from the module, then planned the Slums. Nothing on graph paper. Just a bit of an outline of stuff they'll run into and when. That's one of the great things about play-by-posts: it's a lot easier to just wing it than in face-to-face games. Although the good GM need to at least plan out the story in advance a little bit, just in case Real Life(tm) starts getting in the way.

Tinkering with both Neverwinter Nights games has got me playing Pirates of the Sword Coast (which I left around the part where you finally reach Spindrift Isle) as well as the NWN2 Original Campaign (which I had to restart because I haven't kept a savegame from when I had it last installed and because I also can't remember much of what I've played before).

This afternoon, I finally finished Pirates of the Sword Coast: the final boss fight was a bit difficult but it was a good thing I bought a lot of Potions of Cause Critical Wounds (because the endgame turns you into undead). It was crazy running around for position and guzzling Potions of Haste, then hacking at the huge Aspect of Umberlee, all the while Sahuagin and the other Aspect is harassing you with arrows and swords and spells. My two companions, the pirate Nihar and the lizardman Garm, fell unconscious early on. I think I didn't give them enough gear to survive.

Still, all's well that ends well and PotSC was a well-made and entertaining module. I think I'll try that Premium Module set in Cormyr next. The one that makes use of the horse mount graphics.

And then there's Deus Ex: Invisible War. I got over my allergy of FPSes (that's First-Person Shooters, for all you nongamers) long enough to want to install this and play through more than just the prologue and I must say, I'm very pleasantly surprised. Multiple paths and solutions through the game truly make this game worthy of all the hype and fanboyism it engendered in its heyday. It's almost just like a huge Adventure game (I mean the genre, of course; i.e. like King's Quest, Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey, etc.) with fighty parts!

But it's Sci-Fi. And not RPG enough. Which gave me thirst for a fantasy version. But I couldn't go through all that crap to install Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion again. So off into my DVD archives to hunt down the nearest fantasy analog to Deus Ex that I can find: Arx Fatalis. Turns out the game's also being re-released in the next few months and it has just received a new patch! After all these years, imagine that. I don't think enough people knew of Arx Fatalis. Not now, not even back in 2002 (?) when it was first released. But it truly is a gem of the deep mines. Exploring AF's subterranean world gives me that same feeling I got way back when I first discovered the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (now that's another story for another day).

Then there's the recently-released Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen on my Nintendo DS. I've always been a fan of DQ, and I even prefer it to Final Fantasy. FF IV's been remade and also released on the DS but as soon as Dragon Quest was out, I put Cecil's quest on hold. Don't get me wrong. Final Fantasy IV is probably one of my favorite installments in the series so far, and I've played them all except for the MMORPG FF XI. But the Dragon Quest series captures that feel that can only be called "classic CRPG fantasy" for me. Add to that a dash of the naughty, the innocent, and a sprinkling of your favorite fairytale. That's what Dragon Quest means to me.

Back in the SNES days, I think the Dragon Quest series as well as the two Lufia games had much more enjoyable gameplay than Final Fantasy's superpower buildup.

It's almost a quarter past one in the morning here, and I've got classes to teach in the morning, so I think I'll have to cut it short.

Until next post, game on.

New TV Seasons

Ah, September. The last month for most of us folks working in the academe here in the Philippines. Also the month of new season premieres for our favorite US television shows!

This weekend, I noticed utorrent being sluggish. Well, we can't have that now, can't we? Especially not when Prison Break season 4's already four episodes in, with the fifth airing tonight! Fortunately, a reconfiguration of my settings was enough; utorrent's chugging along perfectly now, using much of my download speed (which I won't mention out of embarassment).

So far, I've only watched House, M.D. Season 5 premiere (spoiler: Nooo, Wilson, don't gooo!), although I've already finished downloading the first two eps of Prison Break season 4 (I promised my sis we'll watch it together when she comes home for the weekend... Hey, sis, if you read this, COME. HOME. NOW. I don't want to be too far behind. Though I may be amenable to a marathon). Both my PC and the cable modem are still working on completing the Supernatural s4 premiere as well as Prison Break s4's episode 4 (I hope they finish soon!). Oh, and I also decided to pick up J.J. Abrams' new X-Files-ey TV series, Fringe.

Two more TV shows are returning this coming week as well: Heroes (I sure hope they don't botch it like they did last season) and Chuck (go, geeks!).

In other news, I'm still buried under a ton of papers to grade.

RPGTonight.com

My tabletop RPG campaign is well underway. You can see the session logs and wiki over at Obsidian Portal. The system I'm using is Savage Worlds and the campaign is the first Savage Setting, Evernight, a fantasy campaign with a twist.

I've currently got 4 players--Benjun, Krishlex Reyval, Raphael--all of whom were my batchmates from highschool. I hope they're enjoying the game as much as I'm loving running it. On a semi-related note, I miss my home group (but that's Real Life(tm) for you).

Anyway, running Evernight has whet my appetite for more gaming, so I've been searching for an online solution to roleplaying. My previous VTT ("virtual tabletop") of choice was ScreenMonkey, which I got for free when I ran a game for CyberCon 2004.

But my current ISP, kwiknet, won't give me an external IP address, so players can't connect to any servers I'd run. That goes for the other VTTs as well (like MapTool, which I've been dying to try out). 

So that's the status quo.

Fortunately, my search turned up a surprising discovery: RPGtonight. I was actually looking more at using irc for the main game and some online solution for the battle board. RPGtonight offers all that without needing to run any servers. Everything happens on their side!

The downside is, currently, the site's character sheet functionality is d20-geared, but I think it's workable down to the dicerollers. The sheer potential of this site is unbelievable.

I'll post more once I've experimented with RPGtonight's tools a little more this weekend! I hope I can round up some victims--err, players--to try the site out.

Quick Update: Evernight

Created a campaign website over at the Obsidian Portal. Here's a banner link to the campaign:

Savage Worlds: Evernight

Finally starting up an RPG campaign again tonight, after our biweekly Texas Hold 'Em game. This will be the first time I'll be GMing a Savage Worlds game, and I'm filled with both trepidation and hope--this first-time demo could make or break the campaign. I've got 4 potential players so far: one's really hyped so no problems there; the other three's game enough to try, but if I botch the demo, there's a huge possibility they won't continue on.

This is also the first time I'll be GMing again in, like, four or five years. The ol' gamemastering wheels could be rusty. Well, we'll find out soon enough.

The campaign will be Evernight: The Darkest Fantasy, the first Savage Setting ever published by the Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Savage Worlds' wonderful publishers. I'll be starting the game off with Against the Orcs though, retooled as a sort of Act Zero to Evernight. 

Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift

I didn't like FFTA for the GBA as it was too kiddie-fied for my tastes. That was why I was pleasantly surprised when I booted the cartridge for Final Fantasy A2: Grimoire of the Rift. It seems like they took each and every mistake in the first game and corrected them, improving the sequel into an almost perfect game.

And it is perfect so far. I'm about 10 hours into the game and it has taken hold of me, gluing me to my DS Lite, making me move the sword-like cursor around on the overland maps, guide my little army around pseudo-3D battle terrain, change their jobs, finish quests, and... I could go on. There's a ton of things to do in this game, aside from following the main storyline.

Square Enix has got another winner with this one. My gaming ADHD doesn't seem to be kicking in (yet) and it seems it won't for a score or so hours more. I think I'll finish this game by the time the Final Fantasy IV remake releases (July 22).

Jose Rizal: Pinoy Hero and Zero

Jose Rizal is the Philippines national zero--err, hero, and today, the city of Calamba as well as the entire province of Laguna celebrated his birthday.

There were nonsensical parades ordered by the city officials where poor students and laborers were forced to march hither-thither while the higher-ups belched like the swines they are in lavish official banquets.

The legacy of Rizal lives on in his works, particularly his two novels which are required reading in middle and tertiary schools throughout the country. The two novels are typical of most contemporary Pinoy fiction, the two-bit paperback ones about romance domestic helpers usually thumb through with their meager read-slowly-while-mouthing-the-words literacy skill.

No, they weren't particularly good. In fact, they were downright boring, even rivaling J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy in terms of sleep-inducing effect. But I guess being the first Filipino to actually write a novel, much less publish two, it was some achievement for a race not much removed from apes.

In other fronts, Rizal managed to spark a religion of his own, yet more proof of the idiocy of the people of the Philippine islands.

I've run out of steam for this rant for now, and as I look back, it seems such a waste of energy for a topic that's so stale and base. Maybe I'll come back and revise and add to this later. But I think the point's been made: Jose Rizal is stupid, honoring him (or anyone from the past) is stupid, and I am superior to him and to everyone else here in the Philippines.

Hahah!

Quick Post

Just a quick post before I hit the shower and then off to work. We have a teaching workshop lined up today (zzZ!). I guess that's it. Hope the day passes by ASAP.

Pokemon Time Exploration Team Restart

Last Sunday, I fell asleep while playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time, and when I woke up, my team had wiped, and all our items have disappeared *sad*. So I re-rolled a new hero, and got Skitty this time.

Skitty (Japanese: エネコ Eneco) is a Normal-type Pokémon. Skitty has the ability Cute Charm, which has a 30% chance of inflicting an Attract condition on foes using a direct attack on the Pokémon. Skitty evolves into Delcatty when exposed to a Moon Stone.

I chose a female Torchic as my partner this time.

Torchic (Japanese: アチャモ Achamo) is a Fire-type Pokémon. Torchic comes with the ability Blaze, which increases the power of Fire-type attacks by 50% once the Pokémon has less than one-third of its maximum HP.

I hope I do better this time around. I'll post the rest of my current exploration team next time.

My Current Pokemon Exploration Team!

Here's the current line-up of Team Rogue-Like:

Bong, Lv13 ♂Chikorita (Grass)
Pikachu, Lv13 ♂Pikachu (Electric)
Lileep, Lv11 ♀Lileep (Rock/Grass)
Spinarak, Lv7 ♂Spinarak (Bug/Poison)
Geodude, Lv6 ♀Geodude (Rock/Ground)

If anyone else is playing, here's my Friend Code: 4081-5843-5878.

I frequently check Wonder Mail and SOS requests via WFC, so give a holler if you need anything or just want to say hi.

Explorers of Time and Darkness

Just got the latest Pokemon Mystery Dungeon! Well, one of them, at least. In keeping with true Pokemon tradition, the developers released two parallel versions: Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness. Although, the difference between the two appears to be cosmetic, there are apparently certain subtle variations in key plot scenes as well as available pokemon.

I got Explorers of Time, by the way. No main reason; I didn't play enough of the new Pokemon games anyway so I'm unfamiliar with the various pokemon and thus no favorite. Except for Pikachu! Hahah. Explorers of Time sounded a lot cooler than Explorers of Darkness, which sounds a bit too, well, dark.

It's still the same rogue-like gameplay, however, so yay! I was disappointed with the convolutedness of the much-hyped Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. If I wanted that much punishment from a game, I'd just play nethack instead.

As with the previous installment, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time begins with an "aura reading" where the game asks you several questions in an attempt to determine your "aura color" and thus which starter Pokemon you are. It's a very cool personality-type quiz where they even have this gimmick to ask you to press your finger on the touch screen.

I got a result of "blue" (can't remember what they called it exactly, but it was a dark shade of blue... like navy or something). And the game has determined that I am a Chikorita. That's a Grass-type Pokemon that looks like this:

Anyway, I'm off to bed with my DS Lite. See you all later!

[Let's Play] Dragon Quest V: Bride of the Heavens

Just started a [Let's Play] thread over at rpg.net. I'm playing Dragon Quest V: Bride of the Heavens, which I've never actually finished before. I hope I finish this time around. This should be fun!

I've always loved the Dragon Quest series. Much better than the Final Fantasies in gameplay and sense of wonder and heart. Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King is probably the current crowning achievement of the franchise, the best console RPG ever.

Random Updates

School's ending this week and I've still got a ton of grades to do.

I feel as lost as ever. But this time around, it really isn't as lonely as before. Guess I've got Lariz to thank for that. Looking forward to summer vacation, and spending a lot of time with her...

Perfect World's really far from perfect; I hate the fact that there's no new content, and it's a crummy rules system. The only thing keeping me there before was Say. But even that's... changed. I'm just playing now for the clan. Sanctius is definitely the finest clan ever. Why do I feel so empty?

The Dungeon Master, Gary Gygax died earlier this week. And the world's a darker place without him. I'd really like to do a tribute session for him, time willing. I hope my gaming group clears a weekend or two to do a dungeon romp in D&D. Or maybe Savage Worlds.

That's it. I just wokeup; it's 2:30 a.m. And I'm going back to sleep....