Another day in product design class...

To better illustrate what a typical day in product is like I've used screenshots from Azumanga Daioh.

Neverwinter Nights FAQ

1. Why are there so many traps?
2. Why do I have to get nude to cast a spell?
3. Why do I have to pay money to use a portal *I* created?
4. Who am I even paying the money to, the portal?
5. Why is it so expensive?
6. Do you know how many crates I had to look in to get my money?
7. Do you want me to save Neverwinter or not?
8. Why don’t character’s avatars look anything like them?
9. Where can I get a potion of Hitthedamnbastard for my level 12 Blind Imbecile?
10. Why am I fighting a polar bear?
11. Why is everything getting more expensive?
12. How/Why am I leveling-up without actually getting any stronger?
13. Why does my character spontaneously decide to stop attacking?
14. How should I pass the time while my character is fighting; read a book?
15. Do real sword fights have 5 second pauses in between hits?
16. How can a bear parry my attack?
17. How do you miss hitting a door, chest, pedestal, or other inanimate stationary objects?
18. Does Headraline ever just shut up?
19. Why do I have to fight so many dragons?
20. Will I ever be able to afford *good* store-bought armor?
21. Is an ettercap anything like a jabberwocky?

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

When I first heard about this show I was intrigued. What self-respecting adult doesn’t think that they’re smarter than a fifth-grader? My roommate sometimes watches stuff on his computer and I just so happened to catch a couple of episodes by proxy. The first thing I noticed was the theme song. It’s sung by children. What, is this show *for* fifth-graders? It didn’t take me long to realize that this show is monotonously boring. They talk forever about nothing. I don’t care about their personal life! Just ask the questions! They talk so damn much that they can only fit like six questions in a half hour. The questions are usually pretty boring too. I thought this was supposed to be a game show. Compare this to something like Cash Cab. It’s just question after question without any extra garbage. Now that’s a show. When the contestants answer their questions in AYSTAFG they always feel the need to totally explain how they came to their conclusion point by point and do the math out loud. If I wanted to experience long tedious explanations I’d watch Naruto or Yu-Gi-Oh. When they finally do answer, the audience always applauds. Why do they applaud? Any idiot can answer a question. The impressive thing would be if the answer is correct. Why don’t they just save their applause for that?

Also to my disappointment, the dynamics of the show were contrary to what I wanted/expected. Instead of pitting an adult and a fifth-grader against one another, similar to “Win Ben Stein‘s Money,” the fifth-grader is there for the sole purpose of helping the adult. They have a group of fifth-graders and the contestant gets to pick one to help them on each round. The kid answers along with the contestant but the contestant doesn’t know what their answer is. They get some lifeline things that they can use to get answers from the kid. That’s all they do. Wow, it turns out that the fifth-graders aren’t relevant to the game and are only minimally useful. What’s the point of having fifth-graders at all? Your help could just as easily come from a trained monkey or a fortune cookie. Come to think of it there used to be a show called “Street Smarts” where the players got their help from random people on the street. What was wrong with that? You actually got some variety and an interesting knowledge variable. You didn’t have a bunch of homogeneous robot children giving you answers. All of the kids always give a unanimous answer and they’re never wrong. When the contestant takes a kid’s answer with a lifeline the host always plays up the tension. Oh no, I hope she wrote down the correct answer or you lose. Since they’re never wrong it’s not tense at all. It’s like opening the bathroom door and saying, “Oh my God, I hope the toilet’s still there!”

When the contestant inevitably loses they have to say “I’m not smarter than a fifth-grader.” Well these aren’t normal fifth-graders. They select the smartest kids in the US to go on the show. It makes the whole premise of the show retarded. Oh, imagine that; a group of prodigy fifth-graders is more book smart than the average adult. I’m so surprised. The only reason most of them are probably on this show is because they have overbearing parents that orchestrate their lives for them and at some point decided that it would be a good way to showcase how great of a parent they are.

My Top 20 Most Aggravating Videogame Enemies List

Name: Hammer Brother

Game: Super Mario Brothers

There are always two of these on two platforms that are at different heights. They almost constantly throw hammers at you and jump up and down switching platforms. You get these nice big arcs of hammers going across the screen and there’s no way you can predict where they are going to go, making it almost impossible to get by without getting hurt. Why can't there just be one of them? That would be hard enough.

Name: Flame/Frost Atronach
Game: Morrowind

There’s not really much to say about these except they shoot a ball of whatever element at you, it causes damage over time and you die. That’s about it. Yeah, one attack and you’re dead. It takes forever to level-up to a point where you can actually take on one of these.

Name: Redead
Game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (and other zeldas)

These are basically zombies with a few key differences. If you get too close to them they scream and you freeze for a few seconds. During your immobilization, they move towards you and if they get close enough well… they rape you. What’s annoying aside from being raped is when you’re frozen you’re going “No! No! No! No! No! No!” the whole time hoping it won’t get close enough and you’ll escape the impending rape. Also, if you’re really unlucky, it’s possible to be gang-raped.

Name: Fetish
Game: Diablo 2

I’ve never heard of someone having an aggravation fetish. This picture actually depicts a fetish shaman. Just imagine the two guys separate and those are fetishes. This is I think the most hyperactive enemy ever. They run around and blow darts and attack you with spears. The thing is you’ll just be walking along and boom, there will be like a dozen of them on your ass. They’re so small you’d think they’d be easy to kill but no. And when you’re about to kill one, what does it do? It runs away, the little bitch. Sometimes you might not even see them again. In a large group, kill the shaman first because if you don’t it just resurrects all of the ones you kill. How annoying.

Name: “Night-vision Guard”
Game: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

The whole time while playing an SC game you’re mentality is something like *Oh yeah, I’m a splinter cell! You can’t see me and I’m using technology far beyond your comprehension. You can‘t touch me!* Then you come across some bad guys with the exact same shit that you have and all of a sudden it’s not cool anymore. You can’t fricking sneak up on these guys because if you can see them they can see you. But the whole point of the game is sneaking. Having a fire fight with someone always gives you the disadvantage because there’s no quick responsive aiming system and there’s no running and shooting. There’s just stand still, aim, and get shot to death.

Name: Raven
Game: The Resident Evil Series

It doesn’t do much damage and it takes one shot to kill. Well that doesn’t sound too bad… Think again. That one shot could take 20 rounds to do. Usually you don’t need to kill them like in the hallway in the second RE. You just run through and hopefully you don’t get hurt. But in the first Resident Evil there’s one or two in the gallery puzzle room. So what are you going to do? Solve the painting puzzle while this bird pecks out your eyes? No, you need it dead. The problem is that your character has a really hard time aiming at it. If you don’t get it on the first shot when it’s in a linear flight pattern it’s likely that it’s going to take a lot more bullets once it starts swarming around your head. The only way to get it on the first shot is to already know it’s there so go back and do it again. Trust me, you don’t want to spend the bullets because Resident Evil *is not* going to compensate you.

Name “Flying Ninja”
Game: Shinobi

I couldn’t find a picture so just imagine one of the green guys on the ground is black, has big bat wings, and is pissing you off. Man these are great! It’s so convenient how they only show up when you’re wall-running over a pool of acid, a torrent of water, or a bottomless pit. Then they ram into you and you fall off and die. I just love this game.

Name: Spawn
Game: Quake

All they are is these little bouncing blue blobs. They’re really fast and chase you around lunging at you. If you don’t shoot them before they touch you, they blow up and hurt you. If you do shoot them before they touch you, they blow up and hurt you anyway. Isn’t that special?

Name: Troll
Game: Neverwinter Nights

First of all, they all seem to have Downs Syndrome or at least ADD. One arm is perpetually curled up against their torso and the other one just sort of flails around and that’s how they attack you. I swear sometimes they look over at the wall while they’re fighting you like they’re distracted or they just aren’t taking it seriously. The worst thing about them is that they are regenerating. Now since, you’re playing NWN you’re character is going to suck already. Fighting an enemy that regenerates establishes a perfect equilibrium where nothing is accomplished until you have a critical hit. It takes forever to kill them and the fact that they look retarded while battling you just adds to the frustration. There’s only one way to fight a troll and that’s while making grilled cheese sandwiches. Seriously, engage your attack and then leave the computer. Go make food or do a sudoku.

Name: Lakitu
Game: Yoshi Island (and some marios)

They float around in their little *happy* clouds and follow you through the entire level while bombing you with either bombs or spiny enemies. Because just going through the level isn’t challenging enough. You need some bastard up in a cloud that’s constantly throwing shit at you! You can’t even kill them. In the Mario games it’s next to impossible to do anything to him because he’s so high up. In Yoshi Island you can hit him with an egg but what’s the point? They always come back.

Name: Undead Archer
Game: God of War

These are so bad, the game has a special ability almost specifically for killing them. Before you get that however, it’s a giant pain in the ass. The first time you see them they’re on these pedestals and you have to push a box all the way to them so you can climb on top of it and kill them. You get the box closer and they shoot it. The box explodes and then they shoot you. You have to go back and get the respawned box and do it again. Then do it about fifty more times if you live that long. Come on, I’m just trying to push a box! Quit screwing around!

Name: Dancer
Game: Kingdom Hearts 2

You can’t hit them because they’re always sliding around on the ground like jackasses. And they attack you by dancing… You heard me. They grab your arm, swing you around and fling you up in the air. Then it takes like three hours for you to fall back down. I don’t wanna dance dammit! Let me go assface! Dancer… what a stupid enemy.

Name: Murlock
Game: World of Warcraft

This is the reason why you can’t just explore in WoW. These stupid pieces of shit are everywhere like vermin. If you’re near water at all, you can’t go anywhere without running into an ass-load of murlock. There’s like a murlock village every five yards on the shoreline. Even if you’re swimming in the water, they’re out there too. I wish they’d all just die.

Name: Bombchu
Game: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

I liked them better when they were a useable item. Does this look like something from a Zelda game? No, it looks like something out of a Ralph Steadman painting. These mouse things clatter around on the ground and if you go anywhere near them they come after you and explode. If you’re on your horse they can’t hurt you but if you’re on foot you’re screwed. You can’t outrun them; there are so many of them; and they respawn almost instantaneously.

Name: Photosaurus
Game: Alone in the Dark 4: The New Nightmare

These things have *three* legs and like a five foot long tongue that they use to hurt you with. They have an aversion to light so you use your flash light to keep them away but you are usually dealing with two at once. It’s really hard to maneuver through a room while keeping two at bay because as soon as your flashlight beam leaves one of them for even a split second you get the tongue in the face. The good thing is if the room has a light switch you can hit that and they’re toast. But that’s not always an option. You can actually kill them with a weapon but it takes so much ammo. As I recall It took six shots with the triple-barreled shotgun. That’s 18 shells! You have three courses of action; waste ammo, waste health, or waste time.

Name: Spider?
Game: Doom 3

The spiders always appear when you least expect it. They crawl around and sometimes lunge at you. And you always have to fight like thirty of them in a

row coming from all sides. They come out of these little ducts in the wall and

they just keep coming. When I first fought them I

thought, *What, is there an infinite supply of these?

Am I supposed to just run? What the hell?!* Sometimes when you’re minding your own business like trying to open a weapons locker or something you’ll start getting hurt. You look around and don’t see anything. Well look down, it’s probably a spider… or twelve.

Name: Gremlin
Game: The Castlevania Series

Since this is a side scroller, most of the enemies make one pass at you or go back and forth in their one little area. These things don’t do that. They get dropped off by these harpy things and then jump directly on top of you. Then they turn around and jump on you again and again and again. They will chase you for as far as they can and then some more harpies will come by to drop off more gremlins for you. It’s like running a gauntlet. You have a really hard time hitting something that moves in that pattern and if you ever get three on the screen like in the picture, you have no chance to survive. Make your time.

Name: Ghost
Game: Silent Hill 4

The main reason these really suck is that they don’t die. There is no way you can get rid of them. They hassle you throughout the whole area that they are located and you just have to deal with it. One of them, (I think it was Jasper), can go anywhere in the level. This is worse than the stupid lakitu. They move pretty slow but some of them hurt you just from being in the general vicinity. You have to go beat them up to get any sort of break. What’s really great is when one is hurting you and you can’t even figure out where it is so you can‘t stop it. You can actually fix the ghosts in place with a sword of obedience but only three of them exist and there are like 20 ghosts.

Name: Marlboro
Game: The Final Fantasy Series

There is no reason why you should ever try to fight one of these! They appear in random battles and have like three attacks. One of which is it’s favorite and incidentally the most annoying attack in the game. It’s called “bad breath.” The tentacle rape monster breathes on you and then all of your characters on screen have blind, confusion, poison, maybe sleep and God knows what else. The rest of the battle goes something like this: Since the characters are confused they attack at random without your consent. Likely it will be an ally but since they are blind they will probably miss but since they are poisoned they hurt themselves. You don’t even get to play anymore unless someone becomes unconfused but by that time you will have killed each other. All you do is watch your team die slowly and in the meanwhile the Marlboro gets to have it’s way with you. If you ever get ambushed by one of these, do yourself a favor and press the reset button. That’s how bad they are.

Name: Fallen
Game: Devil May Cry 3

I have just one complaint about these. They take two hours to kill! Fallen fly circles around you but they’re always facing you. They always come in pairs and have lances for weapons. Since they’re constantly flying around you they’re next to impossible to hit. Bullets don’t do anything and you can’t get them with a combo attack so you get to hit them once, (if you’re lucky), with every assault you make. The only semi reliable attack you can hit them with is a vertical sword chop. They also go through walls and when that happens you can’t hit them either. And also when you begin to fight them they have their wings folded over their body and you can’t hurt them at all. You have to beat their wings off and then you can theoretically hurt them; that is until they regenerate. That’s right, their wings regenerate after like a minute and then they are protected again. When you’re concentrating on one of them, the other one is always right behind you ramming it’s lance up your ass. It's frustrating and you want to just leave but you *have* to kill them or you can't progress. So if the fallen’s wings aren’t folded, it’s not in a wall, it’s not out of reach in some other way, you’re not sprawled out on the ground, and your accuracy is perfect you have a five second window where you can hurt them once. Then it’s only another 10 minutes until you can break their wings again and get another shot in. Have fun.

Originality

Gee, I wonder where the RE 4 team came up with their Ashley Graham character design.

CLAMP School Detectives

CLAMP School Detectives is a stupid anime adapted from a manga that I watched a long time ago. It’s about these three highly effeminate grade school boys that work as the school council at a school for geniuses. The one thing that kept me watching this show to the end is how ridiculously outlandish everything in it is. After I watched the whole series and deleted it off of my computer, I saved one episode, the most outrageously unbelievable one of all, episode ten.
It goes like this: Suoh is tired of Kaichou’s bullshit slacking in his council duties. He challenges him to a baseball match with a deal that if he wins, Kaichou has to finish his damn paperwork. And also for whatever reason, Suoh will be playing alone on his team and Kaichou’s team will be composed of kindergarten girls. Intrigued? Probably not. Well if you enjoy wasting your time, I recommend it…

Part 1
4:52 - Solt? What’s solt?
6:14 - Akira blushes seeing Utako ,(a girl.) Oh please, he’s the gayest one of the three.
7:15 - Suoh hits some balls pitched to him by a pitching machine into a bucket that’s about at shortstop length from home plate. Holy shit! If someone was actually able to do this they would be the best batter ever.
8:18 - Nagisa practices her swing. Yeah you’ll be in the major league in no time.

Part 2
1:45 - The concept of “invisible runners” is explained. Well that’s great, only a few problems like tagging an invisible runner, forcing out an invisible runner, an invisible runner stealing a base, and sacrifice bunting for an invisible runner.
4:22 - Suoh hit’s a fly ball and Kaichou gives a team member verbal commands where to run to and stand, thereby catching the ball. From that far away the two person’s perspectives of the ball would be completely different even if Kaichou was right behind his teammate giving the instructions it would still be a one in a thousand thing. Try throwing a ball to your friend and verbally guiding their movements to catch it, it’s stupid. And if it was that easy for Kaichou to get this girl to catch the ball just through instructions what does that say about *her* abilities?
4:54 - Announcer describes how Kaichou calculated the exact trajectory of the ball upon impact with the bat. BULLSHIT! That’s even more impossible than just eyeballing it.
5:15 - Suoh displays some really good pitching skills. And he’s also just as good at batting. Um… no. In reality pitchers have much lower batting averages because they devote most of their practice time to pitching.
6:00 - Kaichou strikes out. He can instantly calculate where a ball will land but he can’t hit it with a bat?
6:30 - Suoh shows some impressive fielding abilities. Do you know how impossible it would be to field an entire baseball field by yourself? Virtually every hit would be a homerun.
6:45 - More bullshit.
7:25 - Nagisa Gets a hit but trips over her bat. Luckily Suoh catches her. It takes anywhere from 1/2 to 2 seconds for someone to fall down. And you’re telling me that he sprinted from the pitcher’s mound to home plate within that timeframe?

Part 3
1:30 - Umpire yells “Batter outo! Game set!” Game set is what they say in sports like tennis, jackass.
3:03 - Kaichou is a bastard.

Final Fantasy VIII Followup

I know I really unloaded on this last time but it’s just so horrible. This is all about the final boss of Final Fantasy VIII which I didn‘t cover prior.

So you’ve defeated Adel without using any GF attacks; you’ve beaten up a dragon by swinging a sword once a minute; you’ve stayed awake through Laguna talking to you; and you’ve somehow managed to thwart the game designer’s attempts to royally screw you. Now you’re at Ultmacia’s Castle. Think you have what it takes to beat her? Well if you have every GF, they know every move and are all at level 100, your characters are all at level 100, are maxed out on the best spells, and equipped with the best weapons, and you are maxed out on all restorative items, then you might have a snowball’s chance in hell.

The first problem with being able to beat the game is in your characters. Prior to getting to the castle I was always moderately aware that the characters were weak and there was pretty much nothing you could do about it. But at the end it becomes painfully obvious that they are all just worthless pieces of garbage. They literally can’t do anything except attack unless they have a GF equipped to them. GFs boost your character’s stats and make it possible to use magic and items as well as summon the GFs themselves. If the characters are that fricking debilitated without the GFs, why do you have to use them at all? Why don’t you just play as the GFs? It’s like everyone is on life-support or something. In short, if you want your characters to be worth a damn, you will need to acquire as many GFs as you can. Now where do GFs come from? They come from sidequests. I’ll be the first to admit that I get easily distracted by sidequests; provided one thing, I actually find the sidequest. In Final Fantasy VIII you have to scour the entire world to find them and most of them are really cryptic in their locations and/or dead-end once you do find them. Why the hell would you rack your brain over trying to find sidequests? Well it doesn’t even matter because once you’re in the castle you can’t really do any more sidequests or even shop for things that you need because some dipshit decided it would be a great idea to put barriers around all the towns.

This is a good time to bring up the second problem which is your characters’ items and magic. As I just said, you can’t shop anymore which means that all items you will be getting from now on will be from winning battles and stealing from enemies, that is if you have the correct GF to steal. If you don’t already have it then tough shit. (And the funny thing is you still get paid money for doing your job, money you can’t even spend.) Your weapons will also no longer be upgraded because you can’t purchase the upgrades. Normally you would find the correct parts from winning battles and then use them to upgrade characters’ weapons at a shop. This is moronic because a lot of the parts you can’t even find. Presumably they would come from some enemies you haven’t fought. There is something like seven generations of upgrades but most of my characters only made it to the third one even after going through the entire game. Who wants to go around searching for these elusive enemies to get weapon parts? Even when you do find an enemy that you know has a part you want, there’re no promises that you will actually get it after the battle. Now the problem with the magic is that you will need a lot of it and you will need the best spells. Since you never learn spells, you have to collect them from enemies and “draw points” that are scattered all around the world. You don’t know what spells are where and it just turns into yet another shitty gimmick to get you to run around aimlessly for hours on end.

The third problem is of course the boss itself. The bullshit starts the second the battle begins. Instead of having the three people in your active party show up in the battle, this stupid bitch picks three characters at random for you to use in the fight. So actually preparing for the boss by equipping all of your GFs to your active party members is completely useless because you‘ll end up getting like one character that‘s decked out for battle and then two characters that are useless because they aren‘t equipped with GFs. You could always spread your GFs around but then you just have six OK characters instead of three good characters. The boss also has four stages which is stupid. Why do Final Fantasy bosses always have to have all these stages? Why can’t it just have one fucking stage and then after you beat it the shit ends and you know the game is over? (After I beat the third stage I seriously thought it *was* over. It wasn’t. What a cruel joke.) Your only effective offensive weapon, (GFs), are only useable in the first stage. After that, If you try to summon them they instantly die. Speaking of dying, when one of your characters gets KO’d and you leave them that way for more than a few seconds you get a message on the screen that says “Absorbed into time.” Then the KO’d character disappears and you can’t use them anymore. Absorbed into time? What the hell does that even mean? Could Stephen Hawking maybe explain that one to me? When the character gets absorbed… whatever, another random player from your group appears to take their place. WOW! How magnanimous and benevolent of the game to allow this to happen! For the first time ever in the whole stupid game you actually get to toggle characters while in battle. This is still asinine because you don’t have any legitimate control over it and which would you rather have; your characters die/disappear and cycle through until you run out and have a game over, or be stuck with only three characters that you can revive consistently for an indefinite amount of times?

Since GFs don’t work in this battle you’ll be using the next best thing, magic. I hope you have a lot because it takes a lot to do any damage as well as a lot of time. As you’re playing along and casting spells you will get messages from time to time on the screen that say something like “Irvine’s Fira blew away.” In layman’s terms that statement means that Irvine just lost all of his Fira spells and can no longer use them. So basically what you’re telling me is that I have like a bag of magic spells and every so often a gust of wind comes by and blows one away and it sails away on the breeze like a leaf in autumn? My ass! That doesn’t make any sense at all. I could understand if it was blowing away items, but magic? How the hell do you blow magic away? It’s like they were so out of ways to make this totally impossible for you that they had to resort to completely illogical guerilla tactics. This is horrible. It’s only a matter of time before everyone’s Cure and Revive spells get nailed, and then what? You’re up shit creek. Theoretically this means you could play through the whole battle, get to the last stage and then lose just because a random number generator made you lose your last bit of revive spells. Not only do you lose random spells constantly but your characters’ stats incidentally go down too. This is because the way a GF allows you to boost your stats is by allowing you to equip spells to them. Equipping a spell to a stat makes the numbers of that stat go up; the more powerful the spell, the higher the numbers go. Should the equipped spell “blow away” the stat returns to it’s normal crappy digits. With all of this stuff going on, the final battle is reduced to a war of attrition. Those are fun right? People love those! I literally played for four hours in a row trying to beat the last boss of Final Fantasy VIII. That’s not four hours of trials, that’s a single try. Yeah, it lasted four hours. Can you imagine sitting down to fight one boss that you know is going to take at least four hours to beat. Why would you do that? I beat the first three stages and made it to the final stage but to make the long story short, after going through all of that I just didn’t have the resources to continue fighting so I died. After four hours and then losing, I wasn’t upset at all. I was actually relieved. The game just wasn’t fun at all anymore, only a grueling and mind-numbing trial that I was glad to be free of. Even If I knew of a way to beat Ultimecia I wouldn’t try it again. That’s how horrible it is. This is the only way you should ever play FF VIII…