Hooray! I made myself a Weighted Companion Cube. I was so depressed when GlaDOS made me incinerate my cube when playing Portal… Now I can keep this one as my faithful, inanimate companion forever…

Weighted Companion Cube

This Weighted Companion Cube was made of paper, glue, ink and love… It was based on a net from this place that I found tonight. I also found a wallpaper, I may share that sometime.   I chose not to include all of the extra little raised parts, as they were awful to cut out and fold and stick on. So, I’m keeping my Companion Cube simple. Although it’s called a Weighted Companion Cube, this actually has very little weight, ’cause it’s paper. Though I guess you already know that…

Perhaps this entry needs some quotes added to it now…

GlaDOS: Momentum, a function of mass and velocity, is conserved between portals. In layman’s terms, speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.

GLaDOS: While it has been a faithful companion, your Companion Cube cannot accompany you through the rest of the test. If it could talk – and the Enrichment Center takes this opportunity to remind you that it cannot – it would tell you to go on without it, because it would rather die in a fire than become a burden to you.

GlaDOS: At the end of the experiment you will be baked, and then there will be cake.

GlaDOS: This is your fault. I’m going to kill you. And all the cake is gone. You don’t even care.

GlaDOS: Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I said “Goodbye” and you were like

[in a deep male voice]

GlaDOS: “No way!” And then I was all “We pretended we were going to murder you?” That was great!

Curiosity Sphere: Who are you? What is that? Oh, What’s that? What’s THAT? What is THAT?

Curiosity Sphere: Ooooh, that thing has numbers on it.

Curiosity Sphere: Hey, look at that thing. No, that other thing!

Curiosity Sphere: Where are we going? Are you coming back? What’s that noise? Is that a gun? Do you smell something burning? Ooooohh… what’s in heeeere?

GLaDOS: [the character has just destroyed part of GLaDOS] You think you’re doing some damage? Two plus two is…

[sparking and fizzling noise]

I actually tested that last one, and it’s true!

22₄
= 2 x 4¹ + 2 x 4⁰
= 8 + 2
= 10

Therefore, 22₄ = 10₁₀. My number skills are awesome.

Anyway,  who else has played Portal? Did you feel so disheartened having to incinerate your Weighted Companion Cube? Are you still missing your cake? I know I am. You should all tell me how you feel about the Weighted Companion Cubes, cake and the rest of the game.

I think I might go and make some toast before I go to bed. Peanut Butter Toast at 4am FTW!

Ciao.

-Lachy

Greetings! I know this one’s a little late, but I have been a little busy lately.

I’ve been doing a bit more this week I think, besides my recent data entry duties and Tafe. Here’s the rundown on my enjoyable activities.

Watching

I’m catching up on Bleach again! I finished watching episode 225 tonight (I skipped all of that awful last filler arc. I’m not making the same mistake as I did when I watched the entire Bounto arc “in case something important happened”). I”m still about 60-80 episodes behind, but I’m getting a lot closer.

I’ve also been watching Macross Frontier again in 720p resolution. I never actually saw the whole series when we were watching it at the anime club last year, and I forgot where I saw up to, so… I’m watching it all again.

I’ve also been keeping up with Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and watching a few anime AMVs on YouTube. I actually found a couple of interesting ones, including this Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core AMV with Bon Jovi – “It’s My Life”. I haven’t played Crisis Core yet, but I’m hoping to borrow a friend’s PSP and play it soon.

Listening to

This week I haven’t really been listening to anything in particular, mostly just whatever happens to come up on my Winamp playlist on random. Not really much more to say about it than that. I already gave you that video to watch anyway…

Playing

Ah, the gaming… This week has been good fun for me, I’ve been playing a fair few games actually. I finally finished Assassin’s Creed [PC], after being held up for so long due to my dying monitor. It was good, now I need the second one. Apprently it lets you do a lot more than the first did, such as NOT die when you fall in water.

I’ve also been playing King of Fighters XI [PS2] a bit to test it out before I challenge someone on it. It was a little better than KoF 2003, and let you choose up to three characters per match. It’s still is nowhere near as good as Street Fighter or Guilty Gear though. A friend of mine mentioned challenging me to Mortal Kombat earlier tonight on Facebook, so I’m hoping to have a fighting game night pretty soon. Should be awesome, ’cause I made him agree to also playing Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, MUGEN, King of Fighters and ClayFighter.

Yesterday I re-installed Steam on my PC for a special occasion, acquiring a legit game for free! Portal is free this month until the 24th to celebrate the release of Steam for Mac. So, rather than miss the opportunity to finally finish the game on my own account for free, I decided to re-install steam and download the last few updates of Portal. It took me 4.5 hours in total, but I won! They promised cake when I finished the tests, then I found out that “the cake is a lie.” Even when you finish the game completely, and they present you with cake and your “Weighted Companion Cube”, the cake is still a lie, as it isn’t edible by the player. I want cake damnit!

And now, the awesome game that I hadn’t played since 2005… HARDWARE: Online Arena! I decided I wanted to play it again on PS2 after discovering that a friend of mine also owned a copy. It was such a good decision… Empty servers, but still good. Played two games and won both. Turns that dying quite frequently in an active server five years beforehand can have a positive effect on your gaming skills later.

Reading

I haven’t really beenreading much again this week. I’ve mostly been concerned with Tafe work I need to do, games and trying to manage my data without feeling intimidated by the large volume I have. I didn’t actually end up reading Ar Tonelico: Ar Peggio as I said I might. Perhaps this week.

Well that’s it for now. Seeing as I have no other plans this weekend, I’ll be driving up to Murwillumbah with Mum tomorrow. Four hour trip, yay. I’m going to have to take one of my parent’s laptops to get some Tafe work done as well. Gonna have such a fun time… *sigh*

Ciao.

-Lachy

Pyramids of Ra - Level 1 (Flash 5)

Have any of you ever played the classic GameBoy game, Pyramids of Ra? It’s the game where you have to start on one tile, then move to every other tile in the room, while managing to leave a path back to the starting tile. If you fail to leave a path, you end up falling off the edge and losing. A similar puzzle was included in Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Seasons for GameBoy Colour.

Zelda version of the Pyramids of Ra puzzle

I quite enjoy going to this site, oos.moxiecode.com (where we got the idea for oos.shadowthief.com, if any of you are familar to it. ). It’s mainly just a flash project site, where the author posts his recent projects. Quite an old one (using Flash 5 ) is called Pyramids of Ra. After going to it, I realised what it was and associated it with the puzzles in the Zelda games. I was reading the info down the bottom, and took note of the part “There are only 7 levels in this verison”.

So, after some difficulty, I managed to get to the 7th level, and spent a good 16-18 tries on it before I finally succeeded. And then.. AN 8TH LEVEL? :O

I tried playing it, then failed once before I realised, it’s impossible! I’m so stupid, just look at the layout!

Pyramids of Ra - Level 8

It’s been quite a while since my last blog on here, as usual. A few things have happened since then, I just always get lazy and don’t post anything until I accumulate enough things to put into a decent entry. The stuff I have today though could easily make one.

~New PS2!~

After over a year of waiting for my PS2 to be fixed, I finally gave up on it! Doesn’t sound too good, I know, but it gets better. I decided to actually test the “modified” PS2 after the most recent guy I took it to refused to touch it, because someone else had.

Anyway, I tested it, and it was bad. The powered on easily enough, it played a game from the main menu screen. Then I tested it with a backup disc and, nothing. So I tried it with the first game again, and I got a disc read error. Turns out that the first guy that did the mod screwed it up for me, messing up the disc drive. The mopdchip didn’t even work. That’s $160 (two DMS4Pro SE’s) wasted. So, after that failed miserably, I figured it was time to get another PS2, and give up on modding it.

I asked on MSN, and found a new PS2 easily enough. A good deal. $90 for a black version 9 PS2, two controllers, an 8MB memory card, remote and two games. Although I gave up on modding it, I hadn’t given up on softmodding, so I bought a black fliptop case for it, and Swap Magic 3.8 Coder. After all that came in and I had the PS2, I tested it. It worked perfectly. Then installed the case and tried out Swap Magic with a backed up disc. Worked fine. I also got out the 120GB HDD I used to use with it out of my download comp, and put about 20 games from the PC onto it.

More recently, I’ve made it even better than before. Now it has the fliptop case, a 500GB HDD (one I was using for an external hard drive before), and I’ve loaded it with HDLoader 0.8c, and other apps.

Last night though, I discovered FreeMCBoot. I’d seen it around before, but didn’t know what it was exactly. I thought it was just another ELF launcher like ulaunch or keylaucher. Turns it it was actually much different. Free MC Boot (FMCB) actually provides an alternate PS2 OSD (main menu). Instead of having the regular menu with the Browser and System Config, it gives you the option to add as many homebrew applications as you want (well, up to 100). It also doesn’t need a boot disc or trigger disc at all, as I had to do with my other ELF launchers using an MC Exploit. Now I can access everything, media players, ELF Launchers, game discs, hard drive games, all from the menu without having to load any kind of disc. Here’s how it looks:

That’s all for the PS2 for now. Now for something else that’s exciting… In the NEXT BLOG! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ciao.

Lock Jaw.