Dave's Place / Metamusing

Life and times of a webgeek

Monthly Archives: March 2009

Game finished: Monster Madness

This is possibly the worst game I’ve ever finished. Susan and I played through the action game Monster Madness, finishing last night after a couple of weeks of chipping away at it level by level. If you’re familiar with the old arcade game Gauntlet, or more recent action brawlers like the Xmen series of games on consoles, you have a general sense of the gameplay – top down camera, 1-4 players romping through the gameworld bashing the badguys.The best thing I can say about the game is that the concept was solid – fight your way through a modern day world overun with all the monsters from horror movies and legend colored with a satirical spin. Everything else? Terrible. The audio was apparantly downsampled or recorded at a really low bit rate, the voice acting was awful, the plot itself (4 heavily stereotyped teens out to save the world) was terrible, and the game was full of bugs – your character gets stuck on and in things, you randomly warp around the screen if the game gets bogged down, the framerate is highly variable but trending towards too low, and while it featured a ton of variety in weapons I ended up spending most of the game just whacking things with my default melee weapon because it was just overkill with the gadgets and dozens of alternate weapons.

Why we managed to finish this thing is hard to say. We like playing through coop together in games and we didn’t have any other handy options is I guess the main reason why. Anyway stay far away from this even if you find it cheap is my advice. I think I paid around $15 for it and that was too much. It’s available on PC, XBOX360 and PS3. We played on the PS3. Here’s a brief video to give you a sense of how the game plays:

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Latest in the Mazda 3 saga: Mazda USA does me a solid

The check engine light came on in my car for like maybe the 30th time last week. Mid-week, I dropped it off. I didn’t know it at the time, but my car was out of warranty based on date – I haven’t passed the mileage limit but the time had expired. They called the next day with bad news – I had a vacuum leak, they thought it was a sensor attached to the exhaust manifold and it was going to cost me at least $350, but could cost at least another $800 if there was something wrong with the exhaust manifold itself. Ouch! (the prices are high in part because it’s a modern car – they had to disassemble half the engine to get at these parts). Anyway they call back a day later with more bad news: it’s not the sensor, BUT – am I willing to risk another $250-300 to have them disassemble the exhaust manifold to check it, but not replace it?

At this point I was starting to wonder if they might be scamming me, but I took the gamble. Their thinking was, they had almost never seen an exhaust manifold in a car with mileage this low that had a leak, and that maybe something was fixable on the manifold itself by grinding it down/resealing etc.

At this point I’m looking at ~$500 with the possibility of another $800 hanging over my head, so I’m not happy and praying for a happy ending. Of course when they next call it’s nothing of the sort – they can’t fix the manifold, they have to replace it. Now I was half convinced they were scamming me, and I’m looking at ~$1300. Double ouch! They mention that they’re going to try and get Mazda corporate to reimburse some of the expense since while I’m technically out of warranty I have not exceeded the warranty miles and I have an unusual part failure issue. I don’t count much on this and at this point am pretty pissed. Poor Susan gets a couple of earfuls about this. Meanwhile I’ve also been in a rental all this time and since I’m not in warranty this is also on me and they won’t be able to get the car back to me until the following week. To sum up: all bad news.

When we return the rental (because Susan is back from Boston and can bring me to work) they tell me Mazda USA has agreed to pick up all parts costs plus most of the labor – all they ask me to pay is the local dealership’s time spent diagnosing, which amounts to ~$300. They even cover the cost of my rental.

!!!

Talk about a dealer doing you a solid. There’s no better way to earn customer loyalty than this kind of stuff, and they just earned mine bigtime. This car has been a pain in my ass with the constant check engine light stuff, but they definitely did the right thing by me this time around. Kudos to Mazda USA and Balise Mazda in Springfield MA, I owe a debt of gratitude to both of them.

Meanwhile I still can’t decide what to do with this car. It’s proven a constant source of reliability issues which are very out of the norm for the model and model year. I don’t figure I can continue to count on the dealership doing me solids when it has issues, so I feel like I ought to get out of the car now, but the situation kind of sucks – buying into something new means car payments again, just as I made my last payment! On the other hand, when this latest issue cropped up I was cussing myself since I swore after the last time that I had had it and it was time to trade the thing in. I dodged the bullet once, how many more times will I be able to? Susan and I will be debating this over the weekend, no idea how this will play out.

Nori in the bath

Nori after a skunk attack

Shocking photo eh? It’s not nearly as bad as it looks. This is Nori getting a tomato juice bath after a skunk attack this fall. It’s such a striking photo I had to post it.

Things to do when you’re sick

So I got food poisoning Saturday from a package of indian food. It’s a shame – one of my favorite dishes (spicy spinache with cottage cheese) and now just thinking of it makes me gag. Anyway I couldn’t eat for almost 2 days and was so weak I couldn’t really do anything, so I lay around watching tv, alternating between half paying attention and dozing feverishly. It pretty much sucked. I did watch a lot of movies though, including:

I am Legend – it stunk. It’s a remake of an old Vincent Price movie and based on a classic short story about a sort of Zombie apocalypse brought on by medical research. This version strays pretty far from the source. The first 1/3 is kind of interesting as it follows Will Smith around a post apocalyptic NYC, but it falls apart and has a very stupid ending. Avoid is my advice.

Flesh and Blood – early Paul Verhoeven. 1501, Europe, and a band of mercenaries falls under the sway of a lunatic priest, engaging in a series of larcenous adventures. Kind of fun, lots of cheesecake action, and a somewhat realistic depiction of the grimy middle ages, but really B-movie material.

Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone. Pretty good documentary. This is the second documentary I’ve seen on him and I really admire the guy. He’s stood up for our first amendment freedoms in a way no one else I can think of has.

Stalingrad: Classic war film that no one seems to know about. Originally a German production, it’s been dubbed for the US market. Brutal, brutal depiction of the siege of Stalingrad from the point of view of the frontline german infantry. This is the third time I’ve watched it. One of the most effective anti-war films I can think of.

Felon: Low budget drama exposing the gritty realities of prison culture. Better than I expected. The beginning and end are a bit too pat, but the middle exposition of prison life in a maximum security facility was terrifying. Great acting from Val Kilmer.

I also managed to make my way through a good portion of the last season of The Shield believe it or not – it’s been a movie marathon. I have to say I’m not liking The Shield much either – way too contrived at this point the only likeable characters at this point are Dutch and Claudette.

Back after a week away

Susan and I spent most of last week in Washington, DC. For me this was mostly work – this year’s North American Drupalcon was in DC so I spent Wednesday-Friday in conference sessions from 9AM to 6:30 every night, then entertaining in the evenings. The conference was pretty good overall – I learned a lot and added a bunch of stuff to my todo list. Friday night I got together with a couple of old friends from college and had a blast catching up, hanging in a funky bar/restaurant that was Marvin Gaye themed and had a southern/belgian fusion menu (no typos there!). Saturday was my 42nd birthday and despite nursing a miserable cold Susan and I tromped all over the mall, visiting an exhibition of 15th century Dutch painting in the national gallery (cityscapes, really great stuff), an outdoor sculpture garden and skating rink, the National Botanical Garden, the Jefferson Memorial (which I had never been to), Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial Park, the Lincoln Memorial, and finally the Korean War Memorial. Sadly we ran out of gas at this point and never made it to the WWII Memorial which I had also hoped to see. We finished off with a poor choice for dinner by me. Susan doesn’t like chinese food so we never get to eat it, so for my birthday dinner I chose chinese. Sadly Washington DC has no good chinese food and the place we went to pretty much stunk. Despite this I had a great day. It was the first time I had been to DC since roughly ’93 and outside of the mall area it was all new to me. We walked pretty much everywhere and by and large I really liked the city.

I’ll also mention that we took Amtrak both ways. It was pricier than flying, we got stuck for 2 hours in a broken down train, and the bathrooms were disgusting, but I’d still choose to travel that way again in a heartbeat, it is so much more comfortable than flying.

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