Last (last) week’s long President Day weekend also happened to be Chinese New Year’s, commencing my annual homeward pilgrimage for fatty new year foods and red pocket money. I’ve figured out my parent’s place is terrible for homework (hello TV blaring Chinese soap operas on the other side of my now-converted-into-storage bedroom), but great for catching up on various forms of entertainment, mainly movies and Nintendo DS games.
Turns out one particular game got my sister’s undivided attention. Phoenix Wright: Justice for All tells the anime tale of a spiky-haired defense lawyer on a path to solve murder mysteries: first by gathering clues and chatting with memorable “witnesses”, then by participating in exciting courtroom drama, making use of the full extent of your logical deductive abilities to find flaws in your witnesses’ statements to unleash your argumentative fury upon their faltering testimonies.
Times twenty across four murder trials.
Fortunately, a strong story and compelling characters make the game work. It has a light sense of humor, great writing, and solving a case from beginning to end is intrinsically rewarding; I think of it as a Whodunnit murder mystery with much more clues and sub-adventures along the way, and by the end of the case, you the player would have reassembled the puzzle and brought the story to a satisfying (if not just a bit cliche) conclusion. As an added bonus, you also get to scream witticisms - directly into the DS microphone - along the lines of “Hold it!” and “Objection!”
So yea, it’s a ton of fun and like a good mystery novel, hard to put down once the story hooks you in. Check it out if you have a DS.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything on this site; my usual once-a-week metric fell to the devastating combo of more work + Econ. papers, and my spare moments have been occupied with the hollow trifecta of games, books, and Friends reruns (my guilty pleasure). My writing’s about as rusty as a hangnail under Chinese water torture.
Thankfully, the end of macroeconomics 100 (I truly do not think there was enough material to warrant it a “101″ course) means I get to write for pleasure and not for my sadistic professor looking for the same regurgitated concepts paraphrased from his student congregation. These words mean much more than the anti-climatic revival of my literary dormancy; they are a celebration from the monotonic clutches of Adam Smith, John Keynes and their damned theories on supply and demand.
Well, until I enroll for microeconomics 100, anyway.
Hello.
I spent the past couple of weeks trying to get Windows Vista running on my computer courtesy of Microsoft’s Power Together program. For all the hand-wringing leading up to the release, I actually think it’s a very capable system which does a lot of what users might have wanted in XP (even without them knowing they wanted it). It’s impressive when a lot of utilities simply do not work in Vista (and me being a fan of utility software…) but Microsoft has enough functionality built into the operating system to make them unnecessary.
Apparently I’m only one of few who likes Vista enough to install from scratch and keep it as my only OS; maybe I’m just more sympathetic to the cause being a software engineer myself and relating to some of the pain of dealing with whiny users. It’s kinda interesting: software scales well with usage (e.g., it doesn’t cost much to add users), but badly with complexity (e.g., big programs cost a lot more to develop); applications that can deal with the complexity, as they mature and provide core functionalities users want, evolve into natural monopolies (e.g., Windows, Photoshop, to a lesser extent iTunes); as the user base grows people get whiny and demand a lot more out of future versions of the software, despite the difficulty of getting to first place to begin with.
In the software world, the reward of success lasts but for a fleeting moment, the drudgery of support and maintenance can fill one’s remaining days with despair. I’m not bitter at all.
Last (last) week’s long President Day weekend also happened to be Chinese New Year’s, commencing my annual homeward pilgrimage for fatty new year foods and red pocket money. I’ve figured out my parent’s place is terrible for homework (hello TV blaring Chinese soap operas on the other side of my now-converted-into-storage bedroom), but great for catching up on various forms of entertainment, mainly movies and Nintendo DS games.