I finished up my remaining 3042 work before classes in the morning. I joined Titus for our weekly lunch at L’il Dino. Upgraded Fink to 0.62, OS X to 10.3.3, and applied the first public patch release from the Melty Blood translation project by Revolve Translations. Only things like the launcher and menus are complete�no story mode for now.
Sacred is probably the most interesting Diablo-clone I’ve seen yet. The action is true to form but the environments and NPC interaction are closer to something from the Baldur’s Gate series; viz, the environments are lush and there are more than half a dozen NPCs per town to interact with. The demo is quite liberal compared to some—you’re treated to a couple of the classes and you can explore a modest area of the game world. It appears to be limited to the Windows platform so it does fall short of a Blizzard game in that respect.
I can now say I’ve seen Princess Mononoke. It’s really quite good, but I think Spirited Away is still my pick for best animated feature. They’re both Miyazaki films so it’s a good thing either way.
DOSBox is really cool. It lets me play old classics like Wolfenstein 3D and Darklands in XP and on my Mac!
I still don’t know what I’m going to do for the Ancient Greece project. I mean, I can always do a paper but that feels like a cop-out when I could do something easier and more interesting by going the artistic route.
The day just kind of flew by. I watched “Tsukihime” and even downloaded the game Melty Blood that it’s based on. Looks interesting, but I’m not getting much out of the story mode, what with the language barrier and all. There seems to be a translation project but it doesn’t seem that too much progress has been made.
I did manage to finish the matrix program before the end of the day. I need to get cracking on my design critique though. ECE 3042 has also been presenting some problems.
I left early to meet with my CS group and the TA who will be grading our project to make sure we have everything correct. Between the meeting and my first class I worked on the project, read the VLSI project description, and had a pretty good burrito at the student center for lunch. The VLSI project looks like it will take a disturbing amount of time.
I received a notification from Apple that my copy of Panther shipped today. A quick check of the FedEx tracking page revealed that they used Overnight delivery service so it should get here tomorrow afternoon. The fact that I didn’t have to pay anything for the shipping makes it that much better.
Titus and I watched episodes #2 and #3 of “D.N.Angel.” The plot seems to move pretty fast from the get-go. I’m liking everything so far.
I also passed “Sakura” (Heavy) on my home pad with a C late in the evening, with no mods at that. It’s a cool song but hardly seems like a 10-footer. I passed it on my second try and after doing it on Challenge mode on the previous stage. I hope this means I’m getting better and it’s not just the song.
