Finishing games tasks

Yesterday I finally reached the last level of Marvel Ultimate Alliance — the game is tremendously good, although I have to say that the final boss is quite easy to beat, just like a friend of mine foretold me (hi Dennis, you were right).

Right now, I could be going back and forth between levels so I can actually finish it 100% by finding all the missing bonus points and missions, so I can actually get all the costumes and so forth. I actually usually do that. But this time I’m not sure I will, I’ll probably leave it at that until I can play with some friend.

What made me reflect is what another friend of mine told me yesterday; he has been playing Monster Hunter for quite a while, and now he reached the end, basically. All the main missions done, just a handful of the longest ones to face, not worth his time.

And the same is happening to me with Pokémon Diamond, now that I got almost all the Pokémon available on my edition, bred all the ones I had to bred, evolved almost all the ones I have. I could be continuing (and I probably will, like in a car or something) by training all my main Pokémons to the 100th level, but even that is not much of an achievement. Doesn’t help that I lack people to play with.

I also have Devil May Cry 4 half-finished (half-way through the second time ‘round to finish it). But even that is now down to the task of getting more points to get more abilities and max the stats out.

Sure all the extra features, bonus, abilities, points, extension and so on are quite good and can extend the life of a game beyond its basic, but… I wonder how many people can reasonably say nowadays that they had finished a game, 100%.

Oh well, now I just have to decide what else to play ;)

Motion sensing, the new “cool thing”

Okay so this was the convalescence week, and yet I fixed some autotools ; today (that is, Saturday), I decided to relax a bit as last night I slept just five hours, as friends came over for the night, and returned playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

The game is very nice, like I wrote before, and it has a nice gameplay. Plus I very much love Marvel heroes, so it suits me well. But I found I wasted a huge amount of time at beating Arcade Bot. The reason ws that i couldn’t understand, and act on, the motion sensing that the game suggested.

If you didn’t know that, even PlayStation 3 has motion sensors, in the SixAxis and DualShock 3 controllers. Of course it’s not the same kind of sensing that there is on Nintendo Wii, but it works for some nice feature sin games.

What is the problem then? In games like Lair and Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, that are designed for the PlayStation3 specifically, the use of the motion sensor is quite good and actually provides a very nice gaming experience. On the other hand, it does not work this well with other games.

For instance, trying to control the podracers in Lego Star Wars with motion sensing is, to me, quite annoying. In Marvel Ultimate Alliance it also wasn’t the best, as I basically just had to shake it around to pull ropes and stuff like that.

In these games, the presence of the motion sensor seems to be there just to “show off” that the title has been converted to PlayStation 3. Luckily there are games, designed for or converted to PlayStation 3, that come to their sense and either don’t use that feature, or use just it in a few minor cases, like Devil May Cry 4.

In general, I’m afraid to say that the motion sensing ability of the PlayStation 3 is going to be almost surely misused by the vast majority of games out there, as they won’t be designed with that functionality in mind.

Oh well, back to my Heroes, I guess.

Health, again

So the past Tuesday I went seeing a doctor, privately, in Verona, about my pancreatitis problems.

He confirmed the diagnosis that the local hospital gave this time: gallstones. The solution is removing my gallbladder, as they already told me in Mestre.

The nice chane, between Mestre (local) and Verona is that this doctor wants to give me a MRCP first, while in Mestre they wanted to start right away with an endoscopic RCP. It’s at least a start. Also the fact that he didn’t ask me to get a new CT scan, but rather an MRI, makes me feel safer than I was in Mestre.

As it’s August, and thus a bit difficult to handle non-emergencies, I’ll be hospitalised by the end of the month, most likely on the 25th. They’ll keep me just a few days for the MRCP, unless they can act through laparoscopy, then they’d move me to Peschiera (for the Italians reading, yes it is near Gardaland :P) to have my gallbladder removed.

If there is the need for a full blown surgery, they’ll schedule that and I’ll come home waiting for that.

I’m now following a very low fat diet, even more so than before. While last year they told me to eat up to three eggs a week, now I’m absolutely to avoid those. I’m sorry “givemesugar” that I’ll have to skip on trying ginger for now, as it also activates the gallbladder, which I have to keep on a low profile, instead.

Unfortunately, even once my gallbladder is removed my odyssey won’t be solved. I’ll be going in and out of hospitals to stay in check for a few months, and that is quite a problem for motivation and development.

During the time I’ll be in the hospital I will be unable to continue working on development, but I should find time to write, for the blog but not limited to hopefully. There are a few issues I would love to tackle in Portage, and I could just leave stuff to build, as I won’t be at home for a few days at least. Unfortunately I’m not sure how worth it is to do so, with the slowness that Enterprise is.

At any rate, waiting for the MRCP I’m playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance, yai for PS3 :P

Changing characters

Today a friend of mine came visiting me. We ended up playing a bit with PlayStation 3, in particular, we played Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which I got some time ago, pretty cheap too. I haven’t played much of it actually, it was cheap, it supports more than one player (which is nice when you play with friends) and I always was a Marvel fan.

Indeed, a few years ago I was a great Marvel fan myself, I read Spider-Man every two weeks (when it was released in Italy, that is), and I also bought more comics when there were crossovers. I stopped reading comics just because it became difficult to actually find them around here.

I also still watch the movies Marvel releases, I have quite a few DVDs of Marvel movies, although I disliked Spider-Man movies very much, I did like X-Men and Fantastic Four sagas, to the point I have Fantastic Four – Rise of the Silver Surfer and X-Men The Last Stand in Blu-Ray. I don’t want to “convert” the old movies just yet. They do cost and I don’t want to spend too much for stuff I have already.

The game was a bit of a “jump in the past” for me, as it was quite a bit of time since I last found myself “in” Marvel super-heroes. The nice thing is the fact that you can actually choose the costume you like more of the heroes, which is a very nice touch, as you can see many different attires they were depicted in.

I admit I haven’t followed much the stories in the recent years, especially I didn’t follow at all the “Ultimate” universe which is where the game is most likely taking place (otherwise why would it be called Ultimate Alliance?). But one thing I noticed: it’s impossible to think of Wolverine nowadays without thinking of Hugh Jackman, since X-Men was released. I think they did a great thing there, and Jackman is really the perfect Wolverine, at least to my eyes.

The one thing I’m waiting for at this point is the release of Iron Man in Blu-Ray. I remember the TV series and I very much loved that. For a long while I also read the comic books, but again, they were hard to find around here.

I’m sure I’d gladly resume reading them, the problem is that I hardly find time to read lately (I read a bit in the hospital, but not ever since), and I would find myself pretty much out of place if I ever try to read them again. There were huge changes every time I stopped and resumed reading Spider-Man alone, and that is far from being the most complex series in the Marvel Universe.

Okay sorry for this totally off-topic post, I had some old-time feeling that I needed to put off my chest. For those interested, I just finished setting up my MacBook Pro so that, if they hospitalise me, I’ll be able to play some games I didn’t play in the past years.