Korvkatt

The last few weeks have been hectic, to say the least. Not only is there a thesis which badly needs to be submitted. I have also moved, which was a pretty ardous feat considering I had about 70 moving boxes, plus furniture, plus assorted junk, plus tons of clothes. However, I have finally become more or less settled, and everything sure is dandy at the new apartment, save for the fact that my bedroom is apparently next to somebody's constantly crying baby. Pictures soon. Of the apartment, not the baby.

I also tried my hand at the new computer games everyone apparently talks about. Crysis was a major disappointment. It plays sort of like Half-Life 2 and looks sort of the same. The environments, touted as destructible, are rather non-destructible with destructible palm trees bolted on. Wow. Sure, the graphics are nice, as is the sound. However, the game does not essentially play very differently from any other military-style FPS. Except for when you meet the rather dull aliens (the blue ones, that is, the green ones in the ship without gravity are pretty cool), where it instead turns into Quake 4 or something like it.

On the other hand, Gears of War was really nice. It has a sort of arcade feeling to it, where what it lacks in realism is more than made up for by the sheer fun of playing it. The squad based aspect is much more immersive, too, and the level design is better than Crysis, (yes, Gears of War is horribly linear, but it happily admits it) even though the technical quality of the graphics are not.

Unreal Tournament 3 was just like Unreal Tournament 2004 but a bit better looking. I might as well play the freeware game Alien Arena 2007 instead which looks much worse but plays approximately the same. When will they (as in most commercial game developers save for Nintendo) learn that graphics is not the most important factor for the enjoyment of a game?


When I went to Ikea I found plushie insects. Under an expandable child's bed (which I hope was called Procrustes). Some of them eating plushie rats. Looking menacing. It was quite weird. I was actually looking for a "korvkatt" (sausage cat) but they have apparently stopped manufacturing them. Poo.