Not to mention they usually have a girly face to boot.Then in FFXIII you have Lightning as the protagonist. This time it's a female lead and she looks much more matured than the entire line of male leads from FFVII onwards.
How old does she look? Early to mid-twenties probably?Think back. The main guy of FFVII was Cloud, some emo teenager. FFVIII was Squall, 17-year-old kid. FFIX was made in retro style with cutesy characters, so it's even worse. FFX was back to the young teenager, this time named Tidus. FFXI doesn't count since it's a mmo. FFX-2 was horrendous and doesn't count either. That game was like going to a Japanese female teen pop band concert, except even more "kawaii" (read gay).
What does this mean? All the male leads in the FF series since VII has been teenagers who somehow behave as if they were in their mid-late twenties. If you go back further, you can see the trend of the entire series. FFVI had a female lead Terra of age 18, FFV had Bartz who was 20-year-old and FFIV had Cecil who's also 20.
FF I to III had ageless protagonists. :P
The ages keep going lower. It was better in the era of 2D sprites since the ambience, the music and the appearances were not as "teeny".
FFVII presented us with a very emo (not to mention delusional) teenager, FFVIII had us watching an interactive love story not too different from Twilight without the vampirism, FFIX had nothing but a bunch of children, FFX had a whole story centred around an imaginary 阳光男孩 (as the Taiwanese put it, and "sunny boy" is probably a good translation of the term), FFXII was the worst with a teenager who had no special characteristic to differentiate him from anyone else.
The only reason we didn't see scars on Cloud's wrists was due to limits in video card technology back then.
I heard FFXIII has such characters too, except they aren't the main lead. Still, one can tell what sort of age group Square Enix has been aiming for and what they're doing with FFXIII. They said they were changing the focus and learned from Western RPGs (which explains why the Japanese hated the game when it was first released there). I expect this game to be less "teeny" than the previous games but I'm not planning to get the game. No PS3 here.
Right, that's it for my ridiculous FF rant.
So that's why people steal supermarket trolleys...A jar of shrimp floss mysteriously appeared while I was searching my home's collection of dried/canned food. Also remembers the jar of mayonnaise in the fridge and the loaf of cheap bread from yesterday. Mmmmmm.....
Made baked rice some time ago. Since I had this chunk of Kraft cheddar cheese and 1.5 bags of mozzarella in my fridge and freezer respectively (I leave my mozzarella in the freezer because I don't use it often), it wasn't hard.
Just had to stir fry some chicken, ham, mushrooms and onions a bit, spread some chicken mushroom cream soup paste on the dish of rice before pouring the chicken mix over, then cover with cheese and bake till the cheese starts to brown.
Result was that. Cheddar was sliced too thickly, too much rice was added. Overall, pretty good.
The plate wasn't necessary. Just a rectangular aluminium-foil-container will do too. I'd shred the cheddar if I had a shredder, but I don't.
Just found this classic RPG called Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura. Pretty good game so far, the character creation process was very interesting. Not only were there lots of pre-made characters that the player could choose, but there were lots of options to adjust. This is because the game's world is one where magic was in the process of being replaced by primitive 17th technology like the steam engine. Hence one can be a mage or an engineer (not both, not enough points for everything). Even in each of the two fields there are many categories to choose from, like in technology one can learn stuff in explosives, firearms and etc. In magic there are even more categories.
The slow music the game seems to favour sounds kind of sad though. The fact that all the pre-made characters that the player doesn't choose would die at the beginning makes it even sadder. I'd read each of their backgrounds while trying to decide which to use so it was like I knew everyone who died at the start. The only good thing about this is that you get lots of looting to do right from the get-go.
The game was released in the era of Fallout 1/2 and Planescape: Torment, so they all look pretty similar what with the 2D sprites and all. The combat is similar too, except you can choose to fight in turn-based combat or real-time. Personally I go turn-based when it's serious and real-time when I need to fast-forward the fighting because "real-time" feels more like "double time" in this game.
Fighting is a serious matter. I learnt the hard way that all characters need to have some sort of fighting ability to survive on Moderate difficulty (2nd out of 3 levels of difficulty). Right now I'm playing my third character because my first character kept dying and my second couldn't have more than one companion due to bad Charisma. Hopefully this charismatic bomber gnome is good enough for the entire game.
Update: It frickin is. All those golems that damages my weapons when I hit them and has insane damage resistance, my molotov cocktails worked really well on them. These bombs even push enemies back randomly and do AoE (area of effect) damage! Screw my guns! If my supply of fuel wasn't so limited, I'd use them all the time instead of only on tough enemies.
Deductive reasoning 101
In 2007 49% of Japanese men sit to pee, which is more than 3 times as many as there were in 1999. Therefore, one or more of the following is true:1) Peeing with the penis is not as great a benefit as some men believe.
2) 49% of Japanese men have vaginas.
3) 51% of Japanese men do not urinate.
4) Japan is facing a massive nationwide urinal shortage.
Also, Japanese men pee with their pants on.
The Matrix Pill. "Before you can go down the rabbit hole, it needs to go down your mouth hole."
"I hate all these singing."
There was once when a friend described me as "sophisticated". How I laughed. I'm just a simple moron, the furthest thing from sophistication that a man can be. The thought of me being that has never even crossed my mind till that day. How is that even possible? The idea is completely preposterous!
The number of times I have made a fool of myself in front of many people in my entire life is proof that I'm no genius. As much as I try to forget, these memories resurface frequently to bring back the humiliation I felt. Hardly a day goes by that I don't randomly recall an embarrassing incident I had experienced in the past.
Sophisticated? I'm not even smart! It would be no big surprise if I take a Mensa test today and score 80.
So why the heck would anyone think I'm intelligent? Is it because I use proper grammar in both my speech and blog? Is it really that hard to type in proper English and speak it?
But that's exactly how things seem to be working these days! If someone speaks and write with perfect grammar and spelling, he's a frickin genius and the logic of his argument is infallible! That is why one of the rules of proper Internet trolling is to use perfect English! If you have bad spelling and/or grammar, people automatically see an immatured white kid or a semi-uneducated Asian/South-american. Type everything correctly, you immediately look like an well-read and matured person who knows what he's talking about.
It doesn't even link! More importantly, it shows the illogic of psychology.
Just look at my blog. Notice how few of my rants ever have any depth. Most of the time, I cut off just when I'm beginning to reach something more serious and less commonly known. What I do is that I just skim the topics and move on. And I'm not even going to mention originality.
Metro 2033 is out. Crack too, but there are many who claim that it doesn't work. We'll just have to wait and see if SKIDROW did it right.
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