Saatana!

Subject:	Journals
Time:	12:38 am.

The journal for the Korean class I'm in was due today. They're supposed to be put online, so we can all read each other's. The first half was due a month ago and most were pathetic. I was hoping the final journals would at least be worth reading, but I'm amazed at how bad some of them are. There's two topics. Some are writing about movies others are writing about the experience they had meeting with a native speaker a couple times.

The people writing about meeting with native speakers are just times and dates with a brief couple sentences about each. "We met at Starbucks, talked about my assignments, and they helped me out." And since the syllabus says it has to be 2 pages, there's tons of extra spacing between lines. I don't understand how it's possible to write so little about multiple meetings they had with foreign exchange students. It's 10 percent of the grade; you'd think they would put more effort into it.

I'm reading through one movie journal written by a girl and I notice this sentence, "Kim Young Nam, assistant director on Hong Sang Soo’s Woman is the Future of Man[...]" and immediately think, there's absolutely no way that girl wrote that sentence. No one in that class would name drop Sang-soo Hong like that, much less that girl. Turns out the entire thing was just copy/pasted from this blog. Huzzah for plagiarism, I guess. I'm tempted to e-mail the professor, but I'm probably not going to bother.

Some of them are decently written, but a lot are just poor. We've had all semester to throw together at least 2 pages. Mine runs almost 4 and a half with nothing but single-spaced paragraphs. This LJ entry has more words than some of the journals. :(
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Only a couple more weeks!

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Subject:	Tomb Raider: Underworld - First Impressions
Time:	3:18 am.

I haven't been impressed with most recent games, so I was curious how good the new Tomb Raider would be. I loved the early Tomb Raider games. Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Final Fantasy VII made the PlayStation awesome. The last Tomb Raider game I tried out was The Angel of Darkness, which I only briefly played because I couldn't stand the horrible controls and camera angles. Seems Eidos has learned their lesson. The controls aren't completely horrible in Underworld and the camera is tolerable once you get used to moving it around.

I've been playing it with a cheap controller, because these types of third-person adventure games tend to play better that way; it seems like it could play decently with the mouse and keyboard though. They have it so that the mouse controls the camera and wasd controls the direction. Response time on movement is tolerable, though there's some issues with grabbing onto ledges. They've added the possibility to momentarily cling to a wall and then pounce off it, and sometimes Lara will cling to the wall when you want her to grab the top ledge. Also, sometimes when you want her to jump and grab the wall, she'll just bump into the wall and you'll have to hit the jump/grab button again.

Graphics wise, it looks great. I'm at the beginning of the 2nd level, which is set in Thailand; the greenery and the water movement are fantastic. Also, the rocks have a nice wet shimmery look to them. It seems to play well on my machine, which is nice. I can play with texture details on high, but I have to play with a lower resolution. I've played it for about 3 hours and I've only had the game crash on me once (and that happened in the menus).

Plot seems to be dumb, but it's Tomb Raider; that's sort of expected.

Oh, also, they got a professional gymnast, Alison Carroll, to model the movement, so Lara Croft moves more naturally. =D

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Subject:	Korean Journal
Time:	1:04 am.

The first half of the 'journal' assignment for my Korean class was due a few days ago. I wrote a little over 2 pages covering the movies Chaser and My Mighty Princess (I should probably post those here). He's having us post them online so everyone in class can read everyone else's journal, but it seems most of the class put no effort into it at all. A few are okay, but some of them were obviously thrown together in a few minutes and have no substance at all. A few people haven't even put there's up yet. The best have come from the Chinese girl and the Japanese guy; both of whom wrote legitimate journals on their experience talking with their conversation partners.

The few that wrote about movies wrote about movies I'd already seen (a couple people watched Taegukgi). One guy watched The Shadowless Sword, which I think is humorous. He was telling me before class one day that he had no idea what was going on in that movie.

At the end of the semester, I'll probably have the longest journal. I think I'm going to watch Santamaria this weekend and write something up on it. And maybe I'll watch the new Public Enemy movie, even though the 2nd one completely ruined the main character.
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I'm trying to avoid studying for the algorithms quiz tomorrow, which is on Huffman Coding. I hate that class. :(

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Subject:	Dead Space [First Impressions]
Time:	12:08 am.

I decided to check out the new game Dead Space. It's supposed to be a survival horror game with a sci-fi/space setting. The reviews I've seen for it seem to universally praise it while pointing out some minor issues. I've played through the first 20 minutes of it and I'm baffled how no one seems to criticize its clunky movement. One review I saw mentions that there's no quick turn, but guesses that was a design decision to make the game more claustrophobic. To me, it's terribly annoying.

The movement is a weird cross between the first-person shooter setup and the older Resident Evil style movement. If I want to turn and walk to the left, I have to move my mouse to make the camera look left and then I have to press 'forward' on the keyboard to make the character turn forward in that direction. This makes moving the character around seem so much more cumbersome than it needs to be. Maybe I'm just used to the first-person shooter format; I find the fact that half of the character's body is taking up a huge chunk of the side of my screen extremely annoying as well.

The plot itself seems incredibly predictable. Here's my prediction: the captain of the rescue ship (the ship my character comes in on) knows/has something to do with what is going on in the infected ship. To use a Resident Evil reference, he's the Wesker of this STARS team.
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I also downloaded an old Tony Hawk game for the PC. It's more fun than Dead Space. :\

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Subject:	Frag (2008)
Time:	2:30 am.

Been a while since I've done one of these; haven't been watching much lately, and I can never get in the writing mood anymore.

Frag (2008) ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1266566/ )
Directed by: Mike Pasley
IMDB rating: 7.0/10 (21 votes)

Frag is a documentary about the professional gaming industry. It start with an introduction to what professional gaming is and how it was formed. It goes back to the 80's, where "professional" gaming was all about achieving the high score. Last year, there was a documentary that covered this era of professional gaming called The King of Kong, which I've not yet seen. It then jumps forward into the 90's with first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. This ultimately leads to the present, where professional gaming involves big corporate sponsors.

The focus of Frag is ultimately on the experience of what it's like to be a competitive gamer at the present time. Short version: it sucks. For talking heads, there's some competitive gamers to discuss the issues they've faced, some e-sports journalists, which I wasn't aware was a job title, and the head of a big gaming league (CPL).

There's absolutely nothing surprising here. Young kids want to get paid money for playing video games as well as all the praise for being the best, but the only way they can accomplish this dream is by becoming sponsored by some big company. The big companies obviously use these kids as human advertising for their products and often screw over these kids with bad contracts. The big e-sports leagues are no better, often failing to pay out winnings or holding winnings for a year.

This film is already out-of-date with its information, even though it just came out a few months ago. The Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) folded earlier this year after many competitive teams refused to take part in their winter event because the CPL hadn't paid many players from past events. About the same time this film came out, the CPL was bought by an investment group from the United Arab Emirates.

It's also mostly US-centric. Competitive gaming is undoubtedly much bigger in South Korea, where top players can become minor celebrities and they have television channels that host Starcraft matches and other games. There's absolutely no mention of this anywhere in the film, instead focusing on how hard it is for US players to make a living playing games, which is extremely unsurprising because no company is going to dish out a lot of money to players that only a handful of people know about.

It was somewhat interesting to hear about LoSt-CaUzE's struggle to become a professional gamer because I'd heard he won an Unreal Tournament 3 (which I play) competition not too long ago. On the UT3 forums, one of the top players was whining that people were calling LoSt-CaUzE the top North American UT3 player, when he was really so much better but couldn't make it to the tournament.

Anyway, this could have been a better documentary had they focused less on the obvious hardships of being a 'professional' gamer in North America and instead focused on how professional gaming is becoming a bigger concept. They briefly and superficially touch on this when talking about a professional Guitar Hero player, but it goes into a stupid montage of people playing Guitar Hero.

5/10

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Subject:	Victory is mine!
Time:	11:28 pm.

I cracked the WEP passwords to both the routers around my apartment that are using it. If you have a wireless router, always use WPA2. WEP is easily crackable and WPA is somewhat vulnerable as well (depending on the encryption algorithm, I think). WPA2 is still solid, as far as I know.

The first one I cracked had a short WEP key, only 12 hex characters long. The second one had a 26 hex character key. I'm not sure why but I had some trouble with the second one. aireplay-ng was saying injection was working with my card, but I wasn't getting any data packets back from the router trying the different attacks. I thought perhaps MAC filtering was on and so I sat around trying to pick up a MAC address. Eventually, I just tried another attack and it magically worked.

I have two access points for Internet access now. Really three if you want to count that weak open wireless connection. Happy days are here.

Now to see if I can play UT3 with minimal lag. :D

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Subject:	안녕하세요
Time:	11:07 pm.

Okay, last post I said this open wireless was a decent connection. It's not. It has been bloody horrible. Stupid thing is fine for a few hours and then mysteriously goes down and stays down the rest of the day. But when it goes down, it doesn't completely stop working. I've found that secure sites (https) work fine. They're slow to load, but they at least load. This means I can access e-mail, but not much else. I found an https proxy, which is what I've been using a lot lately to go to sites. When it's down, AIM works fine, and I'm also able to join some Unreal Tournament 3 servers. Stupid router. It's been fine the last couple days, so I'm not sure what's up with this thing.
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I haven't mentioned that I'm taking elementary Korean. There was only two courses that were worth taking for me, and I needed another to be a full-time student. Korean and Russian were the only languages that had an opening during a time I was free, and I went with Korean over Russian.

First thing about Korean, is that Sejong the Great really deserves his title for creating Hangul (Korean alphabet) alone. Everything is phonetic. Words are spelled the way they sound and when you see a symbol, it always has the same sound. Nothing like English, where letters vary depending on the word. It seems so logical and well thought out.

The professor is making everyone give a short presentation on a topic. Guess who was able to snag the Korean movie topic? Me! It's only like a 5-10 min presentation, which is actually rather lame. How am I supposed to fit my Korean film knowledge into 5-10 mins? I have to cover actors and actresses in that time too.

There's also a journal part of the class. We can either team up with someone and write out our study progress or go for a self-study thing. He mentioned in the e-mail a possible movie theme for self-study journals. If I can get him to agree to that, my work is practically done already :). I wonder if I should pretend I've not seen over a 100 Korean movies.

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Subject:	Free Internet
Time:	5:35 pm.

I'm not going to pay for Internet access in my new apartment because someone is already providing it free for me. :) The connection is decent. Web browsing is mostly without problem and even downloading movies goes at a decent speed. The only problem is that I seem to be sharing the connection with quite a few other people. Right now, I'm monitoring activity on the network using Wireshark and I can see a few other people on it.

There's 'Robbie', 'Diane', 'Vernon', 'Aleksander', and there might have been one other one. That's just in the last 45 minutes or so.

Only bad thing about using this open, shared connection is that it makes playing Unreal Tournament 3 difficult. My ping changes and I think I get some dropped packets. It causes all kinds of trouble playing. One second I'll be about to fire a rocket at someone, the next, I'm staring at a wall and I blow myself up.

It needs to get cool fast. I'm sick of walking across campus in the heat.

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Subject:	First Impressions: Devil May Cry 4
Time:	3:41 am.

I'm trying out Devil May Cry 4 for the PC. The PC doesn't get too many games these days, and the games it does get are either first person shooters, real-time strategies, or massive multiplayer online RPGs. So, it's nice to see something different, even if it's a game designed for consoles.

Since it was designed for consoles, it's meant to be played with a controller. Unfortunately, I don't own a USB controller for my PC, which means I've been playing the game with the keyboard only, as it doesn't utilize the mouse at all. It's quite awkward trying to lock-on to monsters and pull off combos with the keyboard, but the more I use it, the more I'm getting used to it. It has an 'automatic' setting, which really seems to help with the combos.

Plotwise, I have no idea what's going on. This is really my fault, as it's the fourth in the Devil May Cry series, and I've never played any of the previous games. I briefly played a demo for the first game, which I believe came with my copy of Resident Evil Code Veronica X, but that's the only DMC experience I've had prior to this. Anyway, you play as Nero, who seems to be some half-human, half-devil that I'm guessing has somehow excised all the evil out of him. Suddenly, demons begin showing up everywhere and Nero takes it on himself to investigate. There's another part of the game that seems to involve playing as another character, but I haven't tried it yet.

There are several things that annoy me about the game. For one, all references to Xbox controller buttons are still there. Since this was released as part of Microsoft's 'Games for Windows' thing, I'm guessing they still expect PC gamers to be using the Xbox controller to play, which I find annoying. The menus have been carried over directly from the console versions as well. It's incredibly frustrating just trying to figure out how to exit the game. There's so many levels of menus that it's just sad. They've even hidden features like 'save' in other setting folders. I kept thinking I would run into a save point, but only saw one once I completed a 'mission'. This brings me to the issue that really annoys me. The game lets you save at most any point, but it seems bloody useless because if you save during a mission and quit (and they make it as difficult as possible to quit), you have to re-start the mission at the beginning. It seems the reasoning behind this is because the game ranks how well you complete missions, based on how awesome your combos where, how fast you completed it, etc. You can keep playing the same mission over and over again to get a better ranking for it, and I imagine you get something special for getting high rankings. This is the same rubbish that Capcom used to do for obtaining special Resident Evil endings. It was annoying there, it's a million times more annoying here.

Oh, but the art design is absolutely amazing. The game looks fantastic. I have most of the settings on high, and it seems to perform well. I think I get a bit of slowdown when there's a lot happening, but it's not a big deal. The settings, with its European/Gothic buildings and cathedrals is most excellent. You can tell a lot of work went into designing the look and feel of the game. Too bad no one bothered trying to make the menus a bit more PC-friendly. Overall, this looks to be a pretty cool game.

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Subject:	Youtube News
Time:	3:09 am.

Since I think we all know that American news is bloody horrible and empty of anything of substance, I've found that YouTube provides a pretty good alternative, especially for a view of the world outside of the US.

Al Jazeera has an English language channel on YouTube where they post their big international stories. Currently, the most recent story covers the water crisis going on in Cyprus.

BBC World News is doing their thing on YouTube as well. Looking through the recent stories BBC World News is reporting vs Al Jazeera, it appears Al Jazeera is doing a better job covering the bigger stories, though I suppose it's subjective as to which you find more important. Al Jazeera has more Middle-East news, whereas BBC seems to be doing more UN, G8 Summit, EU/UK policy stories mixed with some human interest stuff.

If you feel you're missing out on your Eastern European/Central Asian news, have no fear. Russia Today has you covered with what's happening in and around Russia.

Hilariously, CNN International has a YouTube channel, but it won't allow me to view any of their videos. I just get the message, "This video is not available in your country." CNN doesn't want Americans to see their international stories, I guess. Their channel is clearly inferior to the others anyway. :P

If you want to see state-run Chinese news, you can check out CCTV. At school, this is a channel on Gamecock Cable, so I've watched a bit of it. You'll get nothing but a pro-China prospective, but it's still not terrible. I found their bias pretty obvious when covering Tibet material though.

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Subject:	The Happening (2008)
Time:	11:55 am.

The Happening (2008) ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0949731/ )
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan ( The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water )
IMDB rating: 5.4/10 (23,392 votes)

You may recall the news stories last year about the mysterious honey bee deaths/disappearances. Colonies of honey bees throughout the country were mysteriously dying and there were numerous theories as to why. A quick Google search seems to suggest that it's still a problem and the root of it is still being researched. Apparently, Mr. Shyamalan also saw these reports and thought, what if something like this happened with humans. As a result, we have The Happening.

The happening that occurs begins in big city parks. Everyone in the area begins acting strange; some stop and begin walking backwards, some begin repeating the last thing they said, but eventually they all kill themselves in some way. From the parks, it spreads, until entire cities are killing themselves. Understandably, everyone hearing reports of this are confused as to what is going on. We do find out that it's an airborne toxin that somehow impairs humans' will to live. The film follows one couples' race to stay away from the invisible threat.

I'm afraid Shyamalan's ideas seem much better in his head than they do in his films. They always seem to lack cohesion with reality, like he's trying to bring comic book sensibilities or campy b-movie material into reality. It works only if you can ignore how massively unrealistic it is. If The Happening didn't try to take itself so seriously and embraced the ridiculousness at the heart of its premise, this might have been a decent movie. I found a lot of the movie quite funny, but the problem is that I don't think it was intended to be.

Since this doesn't seem to be a comedy (although it works better that way), I have to wonder what his intentions are. If this is meant as some sort of pro-environmentalism allegory, then it's too absurd to take seriously. It felt to me like he was almost trying to do a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film (I'm reminded especially of Charisma (1999) and Pulse (2001). But whereas Kurosawa is usually abstruse, Shyamalan is silly.

The acting is unusually bad here as well. It's not like Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel are bad actors, but they couldn't pull off Shyamalan's bad writing. Deschanel's character in particular comes across as really unnatural. At least how bad it is makes it an entertaining watch.

4/10

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Subject:	Dead HD and Japanese TV
Time:	1:26 am.

My laptop's primary hard drive died a few days ago. Thankfully, I have two drives in my laptop and the one that died was the one with the operating system and some movies. My data drive with all the music and movies is fine. It's annoying having to re-install everything. I lost my save data in The Experiment game, but I'm not going to bother installing it again and re-playing through what I've already done again. It's a French-developed, slow-paced PC adventure game. Interesting atmosphere and all, but really slow.

To replace it, I bought an external drive from Best Buy and took the drive out of the external casing. For some stupid reason, it's actually cheaper to buy an external drive than an internal drive. I got a 250GB drive for $97 and even got a free Bubblegum coloured external case to go along with it. :)
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My hard drive happened to die on the day that ABC was starting its Japanese-influenced game shows. I probably wouldn't have watched them had my laptop not been down. The first is Wipeout. It seems to be based on MXC/Takeshi's Castle. They have unusual obstacle courses setup and contestants attempt to make their way through them, usually falling in the mud/water. It's a decent show, if they can keep it going. I especially like how it isn't taken serious. The new American Gladiators is just embarassing how dramatic and serious it is.

The other is I Survived a Japanese Game Show. They flew a group of Americans with no/little knowledge of Japan and have them compete in wacky Japanese games on a fake game show at Toho Studios. This one seems a little fake. It's clearly not a real 'Japanese game show', and when they cut to the audience laughing, they don't appear to be authentically laughing. And with the introduction of the mean house mother (mama-san), it seems more of a caricature of Japanese culture.

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Subject:	Diary of the Dead (2007)
Time:	2:53 pm.

Diary of the Dead (2007) ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0848557/ )
Directed by: George A. Romero
IMDB rating: 6.4/10 (7,842 votes)

Diary of the Dead is presented as a film within a film. What you see is the footage shot by amateur/college filmmakers as a sort of video diary and then edited into 'The Death of Death'. The group were out shooting their low-budget horror movie in the woods when accounts of the dead coming back came in. They decided to head back into town, but, along the way, they ran into some zombie trouble, which forced them to head to the hospital. Our amateur director films everything as their adventure continues.

It's a bit hard to believe that this is a George Romero film. It looks, sounds, and feels very much like an amateur film. If this were the intent, it worked, but it was a terrible idea. Purposely making something poorly doesn't negate the fact that you made it poorly. Cloverfield also had this amateur/handheld camera diary idea, but the quality is still there. The execution here is just bad.

The concepts presented are somewhat interesting. The film discusses the issues that have arisen because of media decentralization. Because the mainstream media sensationalizes and blows things out of proportion for ratings, people turn to the Internet/blogs for reality. But since the Internet is such a democratizing media and anyone can publish anything on it, it's hard to know what is reality and what is true. This is all very relevant stuff, especially in light of the recent reports of the government purposely downplaying the potential negatives of the Iraq War to get public support for it and the media selling it to the American people. But these issues are only stated in bad narration and don't really have much to do with the main thrust of the film.

Not really worth your time unless you're a Romero fanatic. It might have been an okay film if this were made by some nobody, because it's better than most of the terrible amateur horror stuff, but this is really unacceptable coming from someone like George Romero.

4/10

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Subject:	Game Review: Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Time:	1:19 am.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2:_Episode_Two )
Developed by: Valve Corporation
Time to completion: A few hours

Episode Two does indeed pickup directly where Episode One ends. You are, once again, Gordon Freeman, and you are still accompanied by trusty sidekick, Alyx Vance. Like the rest of the Half-Life 2 series, the plot is that you have to reach a certain destination; in this case, we're to meet up with the resistance's top scientist guys. Along the way, you run into enemies, obstacles, and little side-quests that get in the way of your progress to the headquarters.

Episode Two is strikingly more open than Episode One. The path between point A to point B is still linear but some of the environments are a bit more open for movement. Along with this, it's also nice to see that the vehicle segments of Episode Two don't have enemies constantly attacking you like Half-Life 2 did. There are still some areas where you'll get attacked, but the vehicle sections give you a bit more leisure this time around. Overall, the atmosphere and thematic consistency are better than the other Half-Life 2 games. Episode Two seems to be a tad more difficult than the other games as well.

However, despite the improvements, there isn't much to get excited about. Outside of the more foresty environments and an extra enemy type, there's not much new here. Graphically, there's not much of a difference from Half-Life 2, which came out three years prior to this. The puzzles are all similar to ones from previous games. It's still an enjoyable experience though.

There are a few small things about the series in general that I like. For one, the triggering of in-game sequences is done well. When you arrive at your destinations, the AI will greet you and tell you to follow them along. The facial expressions on the characters are well done also; while not exactly life-like, they do add a nice touch during conversations. The sound is handled really well. If your character turns to the side while someone is talking, the sound will come in louder from the side that is turned toward the person talking. If you're further away from them, the sound is fainter, etc. It's really well done. It would be nice if the plot was more than "go to this place" over and over again.

6/10

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Subject:	Game Review: Half-Life 2: Episode One
Time:	1:33 am.

Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2:_Episode_One )
Developed by: Valve Corporation
Time to completion: Couple hours

The naming scheme here is stupid. There's Half-Life 2, and then there's its sequels: Half-Life 2: Episode One and Two. The 'Episode One' part of the title gives the impression that this is the first part of Half-Life 2, when it's actually the sequel. Whatever. Valve thought it would be a good move to release the next part of the Half-Life series in an episode format. I was under the impression that Episode One would be a full game in itself. In actuality, it's a couple missions that build up to an explosive ending. I'm guessing Episode Two picks up where this ends.

The game starts directly in the aftermath of the end of Half-Life 2. Somehow, you've managed to survive and you're pulled out of some rubble. You learn that the reactor in the Citadel is about to explode. There's not enough time for you to get far enough away from the blast, so instead you charge directly into the heart of the Citadel, which you were just blasted out of, to stabilize the reactor. After doing this, you must get out of the city before it blows.

As with Half-Life 2, there's not much plot or any explanation of what is going on. I guess I'll have to play through Half-Life 1 if I want to know why Gordon Freeman is so special or who the Combine are and what the deal is with these alien monsters. Episode One is mostly a race to the reactor and then a race out of the city. I'll admit I cheated and God-moded through much of it. Episode One offers nothing new from Half-Life 2. It's the same weapons, same enemies, and the same settings. It does try to add a little atmosphere by having sections that require heavy use of the flashlight, but that's about it. Nothing to see here unless you really want to play more Half-Life.

5/10

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Subject:	Game Review: Half-Life 2
Time:	2:57 pm.

Half-Life 2 (2004) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2 )
Developed by: Valve Corporation
Time to completion: ~10 hours

Typically when it comes to video games, it's not necessary to play the previous games in the series to understand what's going on. This is half true of Half-Life 2. Half-Life 2 is a direct sequel in that the actions of this game seem to follow directly from the first Half-Life, which I've not played. The game makes absolutely no attempt to re-introduce characters; when you run into characters from the first Half-Life, they're treated as if we should already be familiar with who they are and what they do. Incidents from the previous game are referenced in passing, but are never explained for those not familiar with them. This is fine, because there's nothing much really going on here plot-wise.

The game starts with you (Gordon Freeman) getting off a train and entering into an Orwellian city. The city is run by a Dr. Breen, who was apparently Gordon Freeman's boss in the previous game, I think. You, Gordon Freeman, are some sort of resistance hero, and all the plebs love you, so you have to keep a low profile or the government will pick you up. Thankfully, an old friend happens to help you through the check-point and you make your way to an old friend's lab. At the lab, you're to use his new teleport device, but it doesn't work and you have to take the long way to another lab, but when you get there, it gets attacked and you have to go somewhere else.

The plot suffers from following The Da Vinci Code school of narrative, and, that is, anytime you get to an 'important' location, have the authorities arrive and force you to go to another 'important' location. To keep this interesting, the game has sections which involve you using vehicles to get from place to place. There's a long section that involves you driving a boat through canals and another that involves you driving a dune buggy across beaches.

The game lacks a consistent mood. I really liked the dystopian settings presented at the beginning and end, but then it switches into boat rides, which leads you to Ravenholm, which has a survival horror theme to it, and then it's on to the dune buggy and fighting sand insects - it doesn't have a cohesive theme. And because there's no backstory or introduction to the Half-Life world, it comes across as just random, like the developers were trying to break the monotony by providing all different kinds of environments.

The ending has nothing to offer and there's no sense of accomplishment in finishing it. There's already two follow-ups, Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2 that I can play through now, but I'm not even sure I want to. Maybe I'll turn on God mode and just rush through them. Despite some cool moments in the game, it never really goes beyond just being okay.

I do have to give credit to the level design. The levels are linear, but they give a very good impression that they're not. Games these days try to provide open environments, which can ultimately lead to you getting lost or making wrong turns and ending up at dead ends. The level design in Half-Life 2 is such that you always seem to be going in the right direction. There were a few times where I was wondering if I was going the right way, and I always ended up where I needed to be.

6/10

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Subject:	South of the Border
Time:	4:51 pm.

While driving in South Carolina, you'll inevitably run into one of the South of the Border signs. They're everywhere. The idea, I suppose, is to flood motorists with so many signs that they think it has to be worth seeing. If it wasn't, why would there be so many signs for it? It's about 30mins from my house, but I've never been there, though my parents describe it as simply a tourist trap with nothing but garbage. It even has its own Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_of_the_Border_(attraction)

Anyway, the signs with "Pedro" don't make sense to me. Here's a picture of one I took on the way back from the beach recently:

It has that quasi-racist Mexican caricature thing down, but what's with the buck teeth? That strikes me as something more fitting for Chinese/Asian caricatures. It makes sense for a Chinese caricature because it stems from their tendency to enunciate L sounds, which happen when the tongue touches the back/bottom of your top front teeth, with an R sound, which doesn't have the tongue touching those teeth. I can't see how they make sense on a Mexican caricature though. Perhaps I'm making too much out of nothing.

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