We've "upgraded", if you could call it that. to a new internet service. We're on wi-fi now, and I'm surprised with the result. At first, when I signed up for Smart BRO, I'll admit I didn't know what kind of broadband they were selling. I honestly thought it was another DSL service. I didn't know it'd be wi-fi until they set it up.

Now having never been on a wi-fi connection before, I didn't know what to expect. First off, they advertised 384 kbps speed on the website, which is what enticed me to sign up. It'd be a step-up from our previous DSL connection of 256 kbps, and at about PhP500 less cost. But when we got the connection up, apparently it fluctuates. And it's not like cable internet fluctuation, where there are peak hours etc. It's more like, one second, you're going 46 KB/sec downloads, next second you're at 12 KB/sec, then back up to 35 KB, down to 20 KB, then 55 KB... It's unstable and when you ping some servers you sometimes get a time out.

It's even more unstable now because of the rainy weather, apparently. But it's supposedly pretty stable normally. So we'll wait for sunny weather to see.

However, on average I think it does go faster than our old connection. I tested it a little with online games and it was somewhat laggy (lag spikes, in particular), but that was earlier this morning when it was raining hard. I'll test it more later. But I think lag spikes will be my problem ultimately...

In other words, this sort of connection isn't ideal for gaming. D:

In the end, I quickly lost interest in Lineage ][. Why? It's very easy to see why Lineage is ranked as one of the hardest, most monotonous grind games in the online gaming market today. After playing around with the private server, a character that's level 70 with normal attainable equipment and skills can only go around level 5x areas for efficient exp, because the level 70 monsters are way too hard. And healing skills are terrible. So even with a large party it'd still mean some of you will die very often, especially the less-defensive classes. Heck even the offensive skills aren't very damaging.

Here's an example. I was running around with my GM character in the Ketra Orc Fortress, which is supposedly a level 75-85 area. My GM is level 80 with all S-grade equipment upgraded to +100 each (you can't even get +100 equipment in real servers). I still couldn't solo the place without dying. I tried using +30 equipment in a level 70 area and it was still hard. It took ages to kill a single monster, and if you take ages to do that in an aggressive area, you could end up with 5-10 monsters all attacking you at the same time, which means death.

So with a party, I could probably handle the level 70 area alright at level 80. And the killer of exp in this game is that the higher your level in comparison to the monster's, you get greatly less exp as well. That's why it's so hard to grind in this game.

It disappoints me a little. For a game with beautiful graphics, it sure lacks the oomph and excitement of fighting. I guess it's because I got carried by the trailer videos of this pretty elf destroying a bunch of wolves and such. I actually thought fighting would be like that.

If you ask me, I prefer higher damage areas with monsters that die quickly. It means you could die quickly too, but fighting will be fast-paced and action-packed. And in that case, healers are much more useful and necessary in fact (unlike getting a heal of like 800 HP with a long cooldown time when your max HP is like 6K in the current set-up of Lineage).

To conclude, without GM powers, Lineage isn't nearly as enjoyable as I'd hoped.

Been getting a buncha breakbeats and oldschool hip hop music recently. I'm trying to get back into b-boying, especially since I've been gaining weight recently. D: I realized that because I don't break anymore, I've lost my one source of exercise, so even if my diet didn't necessarily change so much, I don't burn any of the excess calories.

So yeah, health talk aside, I downloaded a bunch of songs, and this 44 minute mix of a bunch of songs. I'm looking for more.

Among those I downloaded, which happen to be some of my favorite songs these days:

Lords of the Underground - Chief Rocka
A Tribe Called Quest - Scenario
Redman - Time 4 Sum Aksion

Last Wednesday I got a copy of Battlefield 2 and its expansion, Battlefield 2: Special Forces. After patching it to its latest version (for co-op mode) I found that this is like several times better than Battlefield 1942, which was already an awesome game that I could play it for hours and hours. And today I just got Need for Speed: Carbon.

Silly me for thinking that I have no time for more offline games. I mean, I still play Dynasty Warriors 4, we just got the old Day of Defeat beta 3.1 working again, and I'm also running my offline private server of Lineage 2 (and Frank got to play on it a bit last night). And even with that, I still semi-actively play the online game Space Cowboy Online, which is the only online game I've been reduced to as of now. I mean, surely I should have no more time for more offline games, right?

Wrong. Sadly.

What makes it sad is that I can't give myself more play time. I think I already play too much as it is. If anything I should be cutting down on play time. So the only reasonable solution is cutting the play time for each and spreading myself thin. So I'm left hanging and clambering for more whenever I play, especially the new games.

Now, you may be thinking: why is this guy just now talking about these games that came out like 1-2 years ago? Well until about July, I was only into online games. Particularly MMORPGs. I have several blog entries on how frustrated I am that I can't find a MMORPG that suits my tastes to at least 50%. And even if I do find one, it turns out to being a game I don't enjoy too much because it forces you to spend like 16 hours a day playing (possible when you're a bum, impossible when you're trying to prove you aren't one).

So let me talk just a little bit about both games right now. Let's start with Battlefield 2 and its expansion.

First I was stunned by all the new features. Grappling hooks, sensible medics, wonderful A.I. including squad-based tactics, and well-built maps with lots and lots of places to hide, and alternate routes to go so that you aren't forced into a big firefight all the time.

Second, it's visually stunning. I mean that. If you play with a headset (it has nice audio, as always) and a nice monitor + a machine able to handle high graphical settings, it can almost blur into reality at a squint, like you're watching a movie. The feel of lying helpless after you've been incapacitated by bullets, calling for a medic. You still hear bullets ricocheting nearby, and some whizzing above you. A grenade goes off somewhere in the distance. Suddenly a medic shows up and picks you up. You realize you're not dead yet, as your vest stopped the bullets. So you get back in the action. Seconds later, your medic is shot in the head, and you end up having to fire on 5 or 6 infantry including one sniper. If you weren't dead yet then, you probably will be now.

They captured all that properly.

Next, Need for Speed: Carbon. I was already a fan of NfS: Underground 2, and I'd missed out on playing NfS: Most Wanted. So when I learned that Carbon is even more terrifying than the other two, I felt obliged to play it.

And the wait has paid off. I'd just finished playing it for about an hour, before writing this entry. And it was awesome. Motion blur makes it feel a little realistic, though I couldn't say for sure because I've never driven a car at over 90 km/h. Not that I could even if I wanted to, in this urban traffic scene.

So anyway, as much as I didn't like the idea of being an underground racer having to always keep an eye out for the cops (who incidentally do chase you and try to take you down), my first car chase with cops on my tail (or second, rather, as when you start the game, you're forced to get into an easy cop chase) turned out to be extremely exhilarating. Considering how rusty I am on playing a high-speed racing game, I hadn't gotten completely accustomed yet to driving, so trying to get away from like 5 squad cars proved to be a bit of a problem. Finally after I think 15 minutes of chasing and causing their cars to crash into walls and stuff, I got away and hid in a parking lot. When it was over, my heart was beating and I was almost laughing. It was a pretty good experience.

Contrary to what people might think, though, it doesn't inspire me to become an underground racer and break traffic rules and want to total police cars. In fact, after that experience, it did the opposite. I want to be careful and never ever have to get in such a situation in real life. D: I guess if I want the excitement of the chase, I can always get it in the game. Cheaper, and nobody gets hurt. :D

I've been eyeing this game Lineage ][ since I first heard about it a few years ago (I guess around the time Chronicle 1 came out). And on a whim from a sudden suggestion by my friend Frank, I decided to put up my own private server for Lineage ][.

Now take note, unlike in Ragnarok Online before, where some servers used leaked/hacked official server software for running the game (though eAthena and other server emulators are legal), Lineage ][ has effective server emulators that are perfectly legal under the GNU license. The condition of this legality being that we're not allowed to hack or modify anything in the client. So we can't have super stats, we can't have new custom items or model edits, no nothing. All we can do is modify server-side stuff, like monster spawns, drop rates, etc.

That legal stuff out of the way, I'm working on my super high rate server (65535x everything rates). Why such high rates? Because it's not going to be a 24/7 server. It's not even going to be a big server. Just me and a few friends, like Frank and Micko. We'll dress up our characters, then go to the beefed up dungeons and fight monsters with just us. Yeah I'm boosting the spawn rates in dungeons to make it insane.

So far so good. It's fun. It took a while to get the server set up, because it's in a language that I don't understand (MySQL). When I read on the website that it was Java-based, I thought I could handle it because I'm familiar with Java. But little did I know that while it runs on Java, all scripting and editable databases are in MySQL.

Right now I've been able to, with much trouble, figure out how to make my own custom NPCs and monsters. So that's what I'm doing now.

Anyway yeah, I'll continue fixing up my server later.

Warning! If you'd ever thought of Lucky Star as being something that could be spoiled, there's a considerable amount of spoilers in both text and screenshot form up ahead. Just saying.

It's all over! D: I've finally watched the last episode of Lucky Star. Since around episode 15 or so I was wondering how they were going to end such an epic series. I guess now I have my unexpected answer.

Seconded.

Yay Hiyori. :D Certainly one of my favorite characters.

... lol

Costumes + Everybody look familiar? You actually see this coming as soon as the 4th scene where Patty suggests a cheering thing for the school festival. Now that we've seen the entirety of the dance, can we expect to see even more　「もってけ！セーラー服」　choreographies and parodies floating around? I'm pretty sure Kyoto Animation was going for a 2007 version of the famous 晴れ晴れ dance they popularized in Haruhi.

And the final scene of the main show. Like I said, I'd long wondered how they were to end such a series. In slice-of-life and friendship anime like this, they usually end it either with a graduation episode or some other big event where they realize that they enjoy each other's company, and they're going to miss stuff when it's over.

That being said, the school festival is the big event, and Kagami's tsundere makes the mix. But I certainly wasn't expecting the final curtain for the show to be a curtain raising.

After that scene, and Shiraishi's usual funny singing at the end of the episode, I was actually hoping for something else to happen. But nothing. So I guess it's goodbye to the girls of Lucky Star. I'll see them again on the great interweb, on imageboards and blogs and other things, or when I replay episodes now and then.

さらば、らき☆すた

Here's the link to a music test on Bored.com.

My results were:

1.65 Hz Pitch Accuracy
72% Rhythm Accuracy
88% Tone Accuracy

To put it in perspective, the average for Pitch Accuracy is around 5 Hz. This is probably their best test for a musician as myself.

The Rhythm deafness test wasn't what I expected. I thought they were going to test our ability to count beats like a metronome. Like two samplings, and pick which is faster or out of rhythm. Turns out it's just differentiating between drum lines. I think I would've done much better in a metronome test.

Tone Accuracy is really easy when you're not tone deaf. Though I'm not sure where I made a mistake (I got 22 out of 25 answers right for 88%).

If you're curious, no I'm not really bored and taking random tests (though the nerd test yesterday was borderline on that). I really was curious to see just how accurate I am, considering I'm a musician.

Well, out of randomness I took this test as the link was given to me by my sister. Unfortunately they didn't have any questions on the things I am nerdy about (mostly particular games and World War II), so I ended up becoming a Cool Non-Nerd. Or does the fact that my nerdiness is concentrated on just some things count for my being a Cool Non-Nerd? Then again, some of their questions were very specific to specific kinds of nerds, like the debate of which superhero is best, and particular novelist I've never heard of, etc. I dunno.

Sad. Well I've been looking for a job recently and though I got accepted to what sounded like an awesome job, it turns out it's not what I was looking for. In fact, I'm not the man they're looking for either, although I did get accepted and I'm supposed to begin job training tomorrow. I should've said something right then and there, but I was worried about what mom might think, like she might think I'm being impractical or too picky.

But after thinking it over the weekend, I decided it's not a good idea to go through with a job where I'm pretty sure I won't be happy. I'll attend the assessment tomorrow, just to be sure, but I'm pretty sure nothing good will happen. So at the end (or in the middle) I'm going to jump out while giving them a good exit.

So I've begun my search for another job too. Miracel suggested a job in FEU, and also a job at the Edulynx call center. There's also a job that'll open up in October, which is for online teaching for Chinese students. They all sound good (well the call center job doesn't sound too good, but I don't know the details so I can't say for sure). I'll work on contacting people about them all.

After about four months of absence, I'm back playing SCO. It's as fun as ever, but now I have my new souped-up computer to enjoy the graphics and flying around without lag.

There were some problems at the end of August, including the servers going down temporarily, and the Item Shop (the place where you pay for game items with real money; basically how the game is kept up and running) still being down. There were major patches applied since my absence, though I haven't noticed the differences yet.

Haha well I was at Robinson's Galleria yesterday for Urban Hope. So I passed by Tom's World, like I always do when I see arcades, to check if they have Pump It Up or something. When lo and behold, I run across the old game Ez2Dancer! Man that's still fun to play. I'm trying to get my friends and Abby to come play whenever.

Well, seeing my drought in the MMORPG world, I turn to my old friend, Space Cowboy Online. Here I am, ready to play, though, when suddenly I'm hit with the news that the servers are down. They've been down all day it seems. Some kind of technical problem, which is expected to be resolved quickly.

Anyway I always remembered SCO to be a game you can play casually despite its grinding nature. You hop in and you can chat around with your buddies of the same nation. You can go out flying for fun, you can shoot stuff down. You can even go to war if there is one, and if there isn't, you can start one. There's always something to do in SCO, which is nice.

Also on the GPotato line-up, I downloaded their golf game called Shot Online. It's a lot less forgiving than Albatross 18 (Pangya). In other words, it's a real golf game. You really have to factor everything in, and getting an even par on a simple hole can be a real challenge until you get used to teeing off accurately, getting on the green, and reading the green. Trying to hit a 5 yard putt proves to be such a big challenge that I only get around 20% accuracy. Trying to hit one from 10 yards away I only get about 11% accuracy. But it's still fun. Not as stress-relieving as Albatross 18 (rather, stress-inducing), but still fun.