Oh, look at me the blasphemy king! First, let me establish my exact relationship with the Metroid franchise. I actually don't know when exactly the first Metroid came out. I had limited experience with NES - my parents got one when I moved back from Germany but I was preoccupied with A) hating New Jersey and B) gettting the hell out! I never had a SNES - although I did have a Genesis late in the day. Truthfully though, I had a 2600 and I'm not real familiar with another console until the PlayStation. Anyway, my first Metroid game was Metroid Fusion for GBA. Which I bought (oddly enough) while in New Jersey visiting my family. And played the shit out of it while flying back to good old California. I really liked it. A lot. I belive Jeff Gregg will testify to my drunken phone call saying how cool it was during a layover. So Josh slightly misrepresents my stance here. Not on purpose mind you, but I figured I'd eluicidate. Metroid Fusion downright LURES you into what Josh calls the "minimalist route". At no time is there some sort of "OK, just explore a bit" mission briefing. You always have some very specific goal - usually with some sort of fake urgency behind it. Right up to the point where I stopped playing - you have to run away from the big bad fake Samus suit. I was mystified - I just could NOT beat it. I talked about it at some with length with Chuji. His conclusion was that I should have about 12 health tanks at that point in the game. I have 6 in my save. :-( I literally cannot get past that point. Wait it's worse - where my save is I can't go get more tanks. I'm locked into this encounter I can't win. I will literally have to restart the game to progess. That's bad game design. I don't want to hear the justifications, the explanations about how great classic Metroid was. I'm giving all you designer weenies the hand right now, go ahead and talk to it. It SUCKS. The designers of Metroid Fusion should be kicked out of the industry for it. It's the angriest I've been at a video game in the last few years. I was so angry that it ruined Metroid Prime for me - I hate the whole FRANCHISE now. I didn't buy Zero Mission because I now equate Metroid with a tease, followed by suckage. I have an entire second rant about the random "blow up every wall" game design, and why it should have died in the 16-bit era, but I'll leave that for another time. Suffice it to say that if you're going to haul out THAT tired chestnut, make it optional - not required to finish your game.

If you have more GMail invites than you can use - this seems like a pretty good cause for them. Basically you fill out a form and they will hook you up with an active servicemember abroad who could use such an account to stay in touch with friends and family. (And possibly to forward pictures that the government is is trying to suppress I suppose - although that's not really the point.) Gmail4troops Better than selling them on eBay or giving them away as prizes for some web contest I imagine.

*sigh* So Mr. Murphy - we meet again. It's possible that somebody noticed HiddenJester was down yesterday and figured I was doing the aforementioned upgrade. Well I was trying but ultimately it didn't happen. As near as I can tell the CD-ROM drive in the box running the web server is dying. I carefully backed up several gigs of data yesterday, checked it twice, and triumphantly stuck the first Fedora Core 2 CD in and rebooted. To be somewhat nonplussed when it rebooted off the hard drive. :-( In fact, I couldn't even read any of those 5 CD's on scribe (the machine in question). Mind you, I used these exact same discs to upgrade the router PC a couple of weeks ago - so they aren't coasters. Indeed 3 out of 4 PCs I tried can read them. But fine - I'll try burning another set The new disc 1 can be read, so I rebooted again - but no joy. Some more messing around, and I finally decide that it's really SLOW to read, and I think it times out during a boot process. I tried a CD-RW version (just mainly to try another brand of media), and it boots! Woot! Strange, but fine. Until it locked up later. I tried it twice more, and it locked up with read errors but in two different places. Of course this is July 4th, so I probably can't get a new drive anywhere. The good news is that I hadn't touched the HD yet, so I just rebooted scribe, and let it resume business as usual with the old Red Hat install. I'll probably get a DVD drive for it today and try to do the upgrade again next weekend.

Hiddenjester.com will be getting an OS upgrade over the holiday weekend (probably Sunday). Hopefully it will be brief, but we'll see how it goes. This will affect both the blog and my personal email address, as well as anybody using an email list routed through here (you know who you are!). Mail should be OK - hopefully your mail server queues longer than the outage will last. Anyway - don't be suprised if you visit over the weekend and it 404's. Check back later - we'll return with exciting new rants after that!

Today DJ iPod is on random play, merrily mashing together all 4600+ tracks with abandon. I was debugging something, when the current tune set off a chord of recognition. What was it playing? Tom's Lehrer's Send the Marines - a satrical piece about the Vietnam war. The verse in question?

When someone makes a move Of which we don't approve, Who is it that always intervenes? U.N. and O.A.S., They have their place, I guess, But first send the Marines!

(Skimmed from here) Some things just never change I guess . . . .