I finished off both Painkiller and Onimusha 3 today. Both were good, but deeply flawed.

Painkiller suffered from a severe lack of depth, but since I maintain it's more of a sequel to Doom than Doom³ has a chance of being, that's not necessarily a terrible thing. I'd heard that the last 2 levels were absolute marvels of map design, and they both have good things going for them.

The first one (Old Monastery) is probably the best "wrecked area, just try to figure out how to make it around the wreckage" levels I've seen, but for that very reason, it breaks the game's lack of "find the magic key" design. And once it heads underground, the texturing isn't quite up to the level the rest of the game had. I suppose there's only so much "rock" you can look at before it all starts looking the same.

The last level (Hell), I honestly thought played quite badly, but I'll give People Can Fly credit, it's beautiful, and an amazing concept. In a nutshell, you're smack dab in the middle of a frozen moment of war. Everything from Medieval castle sieges, to trench warfare, to an atomic bomb in the process of exploding is in there, with appropriate sound effects playing if you wander close enough to any of the tableaux on display. On the other hand, having unending swarms of enemies spawning, and a final boss that you have to hit hard to time, rail-style shots at...well, that's just the lamest thing I've ever heard of, and no old-school shooter should end in such a manner.

Oh wait, that's exactly how Doom 2 ended. I keep telling people Painkiller shamelessly ripped id off, but no one wants to listen to me.

Onimusha, for all it's claims of being the definitive ending to what was always intended to be a trilogy, blah blah blah is full of it. The ending just sets up Onimusha 4, and I'm sure we'll all be shocked when Samanosuke returns for more demon-slicing.

That said, I enjoyed it much more than Onimusha 1 (I skipped part 2), because it doesn't feel entirely like a faster-paced, melee weapon-based Resident Evil. In fact, I only counted one ninja that jumped through a window, so it barely counts as Survival Horror at all. On the other hand, the voice acting might be worse than Resident Evil for the simple fact that they hired Jean Reno to do Jacques' voice and then cut Jean Reno's voice out of the game, almost entirely. Now, dubbing over Takeshi Taneshiro's voice probably isn't any better, but it's at least conceivable that he speaks no english, and they had no choice. Jean Reno on the other hand, is perfectly capable of doing his lines in English, so it makes no damned sense to me to dub his lines.

If anyone's played the Japanese version, let me know how it was originally recorded/subtitled.

Okay, now that I've bored the hell out of everyone reading this that doesn't care about games, or at least my opinion of them, I'm done.

We don't hang out.

I hate the waiting game.

The pool's open, so I guess summer's officially nearby.

I still don't update this often enough.

So...tired.

I had a good time tonight, though. Thanks for the invite, Evan.

Now I crash.

So I re-did all the code that makes up the right hand side of this page (ie, the what I've been doing lately section) so that it makes use of some lovely CSS, yet looks exactly the same.

Why'd I bother? Because now it displays much, much nicer in non-CSS browsers (aka, on my PalmPilot).

Yeah, I know, I'm geek.

Now if I could only figure out a way to do the same thing to the left side, my blog would be the most lynx-friendly blog in existence.

Okay, all the pics from March are up.

May pics coming tomorrow, probably.

Just slightly too late to be in time for the party, here's a gallery of Girljack's pics from the click dealie at my house back in March.

I'll post Barry's pictures as soon as I manage to steal them from J's, along with some bonus pics.

Then I'll eventually do a gallery up of pictures from last night's dealie at J's.

I'm sitting in a basement, just a little bit innoculated...but I can still totally manage to code HTML. Yee-haw. How fun is that?

I greatly dislike trying to get to sleep while the sun's coming up.

Stupid birds think it's a good time to start singing.

And that means...I must become...

Wayne "The Main Brain" McClaine"

In unrelated news, is it wrong that I wished there were at least a few fatalities in this story: AUSTIN, Texas - Partygoers apparently hoping to catch a glimpse of nude sunbathers crowded on one side of a floating barge, prompting the ship to capsize and dump all 60 people into Lake Travis.

Two people were hospitalized with minor injuries Sunday after the rented double-decker barge sank near Hippie Hollow, a lakeside park and the only public nude beach in Texas.

The accident occurred during Splash Day, a semiannual event hosted at the clothing-optional area by the Austin Tavern Guild, a gay and lesbian bar association.

...

Maybe it's just me, but I think if a group of 60+ people are willing to risk their lives, for the sake of seeing some nudists, we'd all be a little better off if they drowned.

Why would Hollywood pay Alan Moore to make a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie...that had nothing to do with the comic, apart from its use of a lot of public-domain characters?

I think Sean Connery's face selling bluejeans is the least confusing thing to come out of that flick.