Category: Recreation

If you know what I’m talking about, stop reading now, this post will probably be more of what you already know.

For those that don’t, let me introduce you to Peter Molyneux. Known by some to be the face of seriously crazy in the game industry, this guy comes up with ridiculous ideas. This includes using the Kinect to throw tomatoes and create statues in Fable 3.

Anyways, yesterday was November 4th, the official launch date of the Kinect, the newest “revolutionary” device by Microsoft. So naturally, I went down to Gamestop to pick it up along with Dance Central, Fable 3, and Rock Band 3. I came home and was quite confused on where to start. Three awesome games that I cannot physically play at the same time. I had played Dance Central at PAX, I heard Fable 3 had some bugs, and Rock Band 3’s Fender Strat is not out yet, so I didn’t have a real burning excitement to play any one of them. I decided on Dance Central to really put the Kinect to the test.

A lot of people think the Kinect is super lame, only for casual gamers, and nobody’s going to buy it and this includes Myles. He’s been making fun of me since the day I preordered it, but when he came home yesterday and I was in between songs, I made him try out the menu screen. Put your arm out, move it up and down and pick an option. Flick your hand and you’ve selected it. He was quite impressed. And then I took him to the dashboard. Wave at it and it’ll bring you to the Kinect dashboard. Say “Xbox close tray” and your open disk tray will close. (I feel like I’m commanding my robot R2D2, “Hey R2!” *beep beep beep* “Dance program” *dances*) Having thoroughly impressed Myles and making him feel like we’re in the future, I continued to dance until I was thoroughly out of breath.

Overall, I’m quite impressed. Dance Central feels like Guitar Hero 1 again: Harmonix just stepping into something entirely new and testing the waters, so it’s not super polished or full of features, but it gets the job done and it’s fun. It still needs a bunch of updates (like commands to shut down the console and other things to make it run more smoothly), but it’s not broken and it’s a very good piece of launch hardware. Kinect will never replace a controller and it may not be for hardcore gamers, but it’s at least something to marvel at and have a bit of fun with once in a while.

Side note: despite having no controllers, nothing to hold, someone has already managed to break their TV using it.

As promised, a review of late August/early September’s nerdy events.

Halo Reach event in Vancouver

Overall, absolutely terrible. Nobody really knew what was going to happen, but most Halo fans don’t care, as long as there is promise of Halo-related things. So we went and arrived 15 minutes early…to wait in line for 4 hours. By the time we got up to the front, they ran out of t-shirts and there’s no excuse for that. Everyone knows how much people love their Halo. Anyways, the event consisted of giving your demographic information inside an army tent and then in a different tent being “briefed” about the mission with a video that was already released. After a few “HOORAH”s, we got suited up and killed the “Covenant” (they were people wearing purple shirts) with complicated and sometimes broken “machine guns” (laser tag guns with more buttons). The best part about that was if you look down the scope, you get a red dot sight. To make this event even worse, there was a third tent set up with screens and 360s, but no Reach. Seriously? A Reach event without Reach? The Toronto version got Reach, but not us. Anyways, the end product of the whole event was a 5 minute game of laser tag, a lanyard, and a dog tag, which is not worth standing in line for 4 hours.

Penny Arcade Expo

Surprisingly, many people don’t actually know about PAX. It’s a convention in Seattle on the last weekend of August every year (this year they changed it to be labor day weekend) for people who play games. Console games, PC games, board games, card games, handheld games, etc. This year, the event sold out before the first day to over 60,000 people. As my birthday present this year, I went to the first two days of the convention (if you’re a real hardcore nerd, you’ll find stuff do to for all three days and still run out of time, but I get tired an hour or two before the second day is over) with Sir Myles.

There’s really 4 main things to do at this (and probably many other) conventions. You either stand in line for hours to play the hottest games only previously seen at E3 or never, go around collecting all of the free stuff you can, go to all of the panels, or participate in the tournaments or freeplays. Of course there’s other stuff like playing the indie games scattered around the edges of the expo hall, talking with developers of pretty much anything game related, and stalking Gabe and Tycho.

I did some of all of those – I saw a bunch of my Xbox Live and Red vs Blue friends, went to a few panels, played a few hot games, collected free stuff, and saw Tycho crossing the street. I could go on for pages about PAX, but I’ll keep this short, so if you want to know anything more about anything, let me know. But some of the best parts were…

• The Rock Band 3 panel with the hilarious picture of one of the employees doing things outside of Activision (only old music game fans will understand this)
• The 343 Industries panel where we got a Halo Reach poster that’s on thick paper, embossed, holographic, and signed by Bungie (see picture at the bottom)
• Finding a poster tube for the poster
• The Red vs Blue panel
• Playing FFXIV
• Playing Rare’s Kinect Sports – Boxing (only because I pwned Kiryu very hard on it) and Harmonix’s Dance Central on Natal, I mean, Kinect
• Visiting every single booth in the expo hall

Good times were had by all, except those who missed out on free stuff, and I’m definitely going back next year.

With March almost over (PHEW!) and that being the same old stuff and not pleasant in any way (midterms, being sick, etc.), you need something to break the pattern and stress. My new obsession is finding new restaurants to eat at on Yelp. Sure, I could walk to the caf and get something to eat there or I could have a little fun, take a bus ride and go somewhere new to eat.

Trying something new is hard because there’s a large chance of failure. If you’re ordering a new dish, you may not like it and then you’re stuck without a meal. If you’re going to a new place, you might feel like you’re wasting your time if it’s not a good place. But read a few reviews on Yelp, pick a few places and go there. Or pick a restaurant and take a walk to get there, you might find something more interesting on the way. Even if everything about the restaurant is an epic fail, your trip wasn’t because you had something  you need to do (eat dinner) and you did it. The only downside I see is that it’s not cheap. Petition to get the entire city of Vancouver to accept UBC cards? I think so.

I’ve also expanded my search of restaurants from only dinner to dinner and breakfast. With Ama Bistrot gone, I’m left without an amazing crepe place to go for breakfast. If anyone knows of any good crepe places or any that I could try, I’d love to hear what they are.

A short little update today. I’m probably the last one to have seen this, but just in case there’s others out there, this is a very cute video that got me in the Olympic spirit.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPabt1tCV9A[/youtube]

And if you’ve already seen that, this is another cute one which makes me miss my dog terribly.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pby0YI8FdKc[/youtube]

Enjoy the break! :)

I never fail to find a new way to procrastinate. My new obsession? Looking up things from my childhood on Ebay (and getting distracted by looking for my love, who goes by the name of Shelby). Remember any of these?

Pikachu N64

I can’t say that I actually had or even remember the pikachu N64, but I definitely do remember spending hours on my N64 playing some pretty embarrassing games I’m not going to mention here (except Pokemon Snap, that was pure awesome, especially when you could go to Blockbuster and print out your pictures). I bid on one of these yesterday, but the price went over my “I’ll only play it a few times probably” threshold. For some reason, part of me still thinks this is the coolest thing ever. I was always one to love special edition consoles.

Crazy Bones

I really don’t know what the allure of these things was. I think it was the pack rat in me that just needed to have all of them. Feeling them inside the package, opening up the package with the crinkling sound, dropping out a few coloured plastic characters on the table, and seeing which ones you got was for some reason pretty satisfying. Especially when you get one of the rare ones in your favourite colour. Until you accidentally throw it away with your lunch one day. I’m currently trying to get my hands back on one to fill that purple eggy sized hole in my heart.

Harold and the Purple Crayon

Whenever anyone asks me, “What’s your favourite book?” this is what I respond with and I always get a puzzled look. I’m not a novel type of person, I really don’t even like reading. Maybe because I have a crazy weird imagination that they’re just not engaging enough. Anyways, as mentioned above, my favourite colour was purple, so when I got my hands on this book, it became my favourite. Basically, Harold creates his own world by drawing with his purple crayon. It’s a children’s book, but I still think it’s pretty awesome.

Before I left California, I was given “City Walks: Vancouver, 50 Adventures on Foot” which is great for when you want to go somewhere and you have no idea where to go.

The first adventure in this 50 part series was #16: Metrotown.

This one was a while back, on Remembrance Day, so I don’t really remember much of it. But a good friend and I decided we’d do some shopping with no particular purpose in mind. We went to Metropolis and looked in various stores, especially those with shiny things. It was absolutely huge. For those back in California, it’s about twice the size of Valley Fair. I thought we did a fair amount of looking around, but we only moved about 2 centimetres on the map. I have a feeling I’ll be back many, many times to attempt to see all that they have.

The second adventure was #32: VanDusen Botanical Gardens.

For Metrotown, I didn’t really need the cards since I’ve heard of it from multiple people, but it was one of the adventures. However, for this one, I decided I needed something to do on Saturday, since the week before was my last week at Academie Duello for the year. Therefore, I looked through the cards and bolded at the bottom was “maze” which turned out to be “a labyrinth created from 3,000 cedars” and it entirely sealed the deal. Located about an hour’s bus ride from UBC, this is one of the largest gardens I’ve been to that I remember. It was raining, which was a dramatic change from Friday’s absolutely beautiful weather, but even so, it was still quite beautiful. I think to say anything more about it, I’d need to be more poetic than I am, so I will leave you with some pictures:

I didn’t get a chance to update on Monday since I was feeling under the weather and then if I try to update on another day it throws off my schedule. So here I am on a Sunday making a blog post, since my schedule got thrown off anyways. (I don’t have any work that is in dire need of doing which makes my Sunday more free than usual.)

Overall, this week was interesting to say the least, but it was the little things that kept me going.

Tuesday: Thanks to a very awesome person, I was able to do something I hadn’t been able to for about 3-4 months: Play Halo 3 on Xbox Live. Since I didn’t bring my 360 with me and I’m not on good terms with the only person that I know in this house who has a 360 and didn’t even have Live, I’m really happy to be online again and doing one of the things that I do best.

Wednesday: Always my longest day of the week (9-5 with an hour lunch break, but only for one more week!), so this one’s always a tough one to get through, but I got my Jump Start certificate after my last lab and I got to see Shehneen again.

Thursday: Last chem lab for the term and I got to hang out with a lovely person.

Friday: Last midterm! It’s about time. The best part about this day though was that I went to McDonald’s for dinner and through their Monopoly game, I won a muffin! It’s Sunday and I’m still excited about this muffin. I smiled all the way from the village back to Vanier. And of course I was eating one of my twice daily ice creams, which always make me feel happier.

Saturday: Got my green cord from Academie Duello (which is literally a little thing, it’s only about a foot long and hangs on my glove), even though the test was very hard and I had no idea what I was doing.

Sunday: I forgot to circle what kind of bread I wanted for my grilled ham and cheese and the chef remembered that I wanted wheat or maybe he just guessed, either way, it made me smile.

All weekend people have been gone and there’s only so much that I can do by myself. I had enough of studying, so I decided to go back to Granville Island. I’m not really sure if I can say I went back there since I don’t really remember much about the first time I was there, but it was much more awesome than I remember it being. Anyways, I took a trip there for Thanksgiving and I didn’t know of any good places to go, so I just wandered around.

I was amazed at the amount of shops there that were run by local artists – I haven’t seen anything like that in California (it probably exists, but just not as prominent). The one that caught my eye the most was Forge and Form which is run by a gold and silversmith who makes absolutely amazing jewelery. Even though I’m not a big jewelery person, I loved the style and how it was all handmade, but since there were no price tags on anything, I had to assume it was way too expensive for me to even contemplate buying in the next 20 years. It was really interesting just to walk through the various shops that I knew were ridiculously expensive (but also for a good reason) and see what all people were able to make.

As weird as it may sound, another amazing place was the Kid’s Market. There was so much there that reminded me of my childhood – the games, puppets, toys, etc. Also, if I was a Harry Potter fan, the best place in the world would be upstairs in the Halloween store. I only bought a hat at the store, but as a nerd I still definitely appreciate how they had wooden hand-carved wands for each of the characters in a velvet bag and a nice box.

My trip ended with a trip to La Baguette & L’Echalote (the map they gave me was in French, but the store name was similar to that if not the same), which as you may guess is a pastry shop. Since I’m the crazy science student who wants to be a pastry chef, I couldn’t resist going in and at least looking around. And that’s when I found The Great Granville Grenouille (grenouille is frog in French). There is no way I could eat this grenouille, he’s way too cute, but he reminds me why I want to be a pastry chef.

No, the time machine that took me back to the Renaissance is not what hurt my arm. In fact, I took a bus to get there. You take the 33 at the bus loop, get off at East Blvd, get on the 16, get off at Seymour, walk down two blocks and ta-da! You’ve officially arrived in the Renaissance.

You must think I’m crazy right about now, but after hearing about Academie Duello, I insisted on taking this trip to the past. While I was still in California, I always wanted to take a sword class. I looked and looked and looked and couldn’t find anything. As I was wasting time on Facebook, while I should have been reading (no matter how much I read, I always have more), I saw an ad for this place. Facebook ads are usually terrible, boring, and usually scams (they have been in the past at least; they are getting better), so I had doubts on whether this place actually existed since it seemed that such places do not exist in the world (from my limited research). I believe that you can sign up for a free class on any day that they have classes, so the one that I chose was on Saturday and luckily it was the first Saturday of the month (that means that the class rotation schedule starts over again).

It took me over an hour to get there since I was lost and their website didn’t help much since they just moved a few days prior, but once I got there, it was amazing. Once the class started, we learned how to hold the rapier, stand properly, and other various basic things. Being the weak person that I am, that rapier is not easy to hold, so I switched sides a lot, which also confused my brain when telling me how to stand and how to lunge. By the end of the class, my rapier was mostly touching the floor since I wasn’t used to holding it yet.

The end of the class was the most interesting part though. It was a rank test day (I’m not sure if they do this when there aren’t rank tests), so they had everyone in the room stand in two lines, no matter your skill level, and practice. It was quite intimidating since I had just learned everything about 20 minutes prior, but I met a lot of interesting people who helped me with my technique and they were all very nice.

To get a better feel for it, here’s the video from the end of the class that I just mentioned. I’m towards the beginning if you look hard enough.