Angry Birds Makes me Angry.

The game itself I don't have a problem with. Except for the part when a brick falls on a pig and the pig doesn't die. Or how the constructs have a tendency to fall the opposite way that you would expect.

My beef is with Rovio. I don't think they did a good enough job handling the game. How can I say that even though it has consistently placed in the top ten of downloaded apps? Because I didn't know it was available for Windows until Justin mentioned it off-hand. Then it took me another hour to get it on my computer.

I had always known that it was available on IPhone, IPod, IPad, Android, and even heard Bob and Tom playing it on their Macs. Also Leo Laporte and Kim Komando talking all about how this game is all over the the same platforms. Not a word about Windows. I thought it's great the Mac finally gets a quality game, but I ain't buying an IPhone just to play this game.

(Big secret: I don't have an IPod. Why spend a couple hundred dollars on a music player when a $40 one does just as well?)

Late last year I needed a graphic reference and of course Googled Angry Birds. Took me right o the Angry Birds page at Rovio. I just wanted that big picture in the center. But I did do a bit of looking around but didn't see much that indicated to me what it was available on. I'm familiar with the App Store and such. I didn't bother with much else. Why trouble myself, Everybody says it only on mobile devices.

Then reading Super Justin's review he mention it was on Windows. I immediately Googled Angry Birds on Windows and at the time came up empty. Going to Rovio's site still had me guessing. Except for Palm for some strange reason, they never mention the specific OSes that Angry Birds is available for. I'm not asking for every damn Android phone on the market, just say Mac, IPhone, Android, and Windows. Click here to check compatibility. Adobe makes it pretty obvious. Microsoft can do it. Look at their shelf. DUH! Office is for Windows, but HEY! There's a Mac Version sitting there too!

With a bunch of random clicking around I figure out that the Windows version is in the Intel AppUp Store. You can't just download the game.NOOOOOOoooooo! You have to install the AppUp App as well. Then you can buy the game.

Now it's time to get stupid. I like to keep things slim and trim on my computer. I can't have a bunch of crap running hogging up resources. Intel AppUp turns on when you start up your computer. I go into MSCONFIG and turn it off. Angry Birds won't play. Next you can't make a backup copy. I tried. I copied the Rovio folder to another fully updated computer and it failed to play. Even installing Intel AppUp failed to get it to work. So you have to re-download it again.

Harddrives fail, motherboards overheat, and yes, Leo's cosmic rays do screw up Windows.

I understand totally. If you make this game playable by itself, people will pirate it to no end. It happened to Rosenkreuzstilette. But hell, Adobe is still making tons off of Flash. People pirate it, and some do buy it.

My problem is what if Intel AppUp loses your information? When I installed Win 7, I then installed Bejeweled 2 that I had downloaded from Pop Cap. They lost my information so I couldn't activate it. Had to go buy another copy. On CD. There's no option to get a hard copy of Angry Birds from Rovio.

For five dollars, it's worth the effort. Rovio is smart about this: check back once in a while, there's new levels.


I do have this feeling of Deja Vu, but this time I can't figure it out. I think I've played a similar game before, but the closest I can come is the "Cat"-Apult sequence from Blazing Dragons.

Ravy 2011 Pg 13.

The New Swim World Federation Intercontinental Solo-Synchronized Tag Team Champions of the
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRLD:

The Bad Ass Trauare Wrede, Road Dawg Zorne Sepperin, 

The ROSENKRUEZ OUTLAWZ!

Worth a Look: Sasami and the Magical Girls Club.

Most people probably heard of Pretty Sammy by way of Tenchi Muyo, not me of course. On one of my all to many vacations to the continent of Asia I watched tons of anime. Some in the language of the land such as Sailor Moon, Bomber Man, some Transformers rehash that had the copyright logos from Takara. I also got to watch a few in English and unedited like Power Stone, Samurai X, Ghostsweepers, Dual, Transformers: Headmasters(uhg,) Powermasters(YEAH!) and Victory(whoopie).

There was one interesting and pretty obnoxious series. As soon as I got home I went to the local anime store to find it. A store dedicated to renting out and selling nothing but anime. I saw the star of the series on one of the boxes for Tenchi Universe. I took the box up to the proprietor and asked:

"Do you know of a series that has this girl but she wears pink, transforms, and has a talking rabbit that meows?" He immediately takes me over to the subtitled section and points out Magical Project S.

What does that have to do with anything? Nothing. It's my time to waste and nobody's forcing you to click on this.

For many years I dismissed Sasami: Magical Girls Club mostly based on the early descriptions. Overemphasizing the cooking club bit. Which was really only a minor part. And the costumes were God awful, even for a magic girl show. I was tired of the whole "Does this lipstick go with my shoes?" routine of these kinds of shows.

One day Amazon recommended Sasami: The magical Girls Club. I guess based on the similarity to Rosario Vampire and Deathnote. I can get the whole series for thirty dollars. Well, I had been watching House for a couple of weeks and needed a change. If I don't like it, I know some guys I can give it to, or donate it to my Grandma's church rummage sale.

This ain't Pretty Sammy. This series was par excellence. For the most part. Let's start with that. After many years of Tenchi I'm used to a certain character design. This is very different. It's good, different, but good. Voices: good actors were chosen, they did a good job acting, and the correct voices were used. However, I was disappointed that Chisa Yokoyama, Etsuko Kozakura, Sherry Lynn, or Kate T. Vogt were nowhere to be found.

The next two problems are the fault of the acting and writing. I thought we were done with gross mispronunciations of names back in the 90's. "Roy-o-oh?" I can't even begin to figure out how to spell out the way they pronounced "Sasami." The thing I would fault this series for is too many characters. They get no development what so ever. You have the three other girls with Sasami and Misao. Then there's the other magic girl club. All the witches in the other world. Plus their parents, and a bad guy that looks like a good guy. They all have their own stories, which are good, but no time was given to fully develop them. They should have left it to Sasami and Misao. Which was always the strongest part of any of the Pretty Sammy series.

This is the best part. I had been thinking the whole time :"When is Misao going to get hypnotized into Pixy Misa and fight Sasami?" Never happened. Instead the bad guy used trickery to play upon Misao's jealousy and anger towards Sasami to make the decision to turn on her friends and fight against them. That in my mind made it worth suffering through the asinine little girl stuff.

Of course Misao is taken over by the main bad guy, fights Sasami, rescued, and then gets to use Sasami's powers.

While watching this, I got that feeling of déjà vu again. I definitely recognized the imagery from Pretty Sammy, and even from Tenchi in Tokyo. But, there was something else:

 NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
(Though I must say the ones on the left where both very difficult to get.)

Ravy 2011 Pg 12.

Click

Just a shout out to a character model that helped me along the way.

Here.

GoAnimate.

Friend of mine pointed me to a site called GoAnimate. So far all I've done is just peruse some of the tutorials and played around with the character maker. As far As I can tell it is something of a simplified version of Flash.

Mostly.

I say that because in one of the tutorials they kept talking about making one scene after another to get Spock and his ship to move from the back ground to the foreground. In Flash you only use one scene. Then to get both Spock and the ship to move on a path you have to coordinate them as separate objects and trust the judgment of your eye. (My eyes? You kidding?) In Flash you make a movie clip with Spock and the ship and then place them in the scene as a single object on a motion path.

The character creator was was a bit limited for what I wanted to do, but it was still fun. Though I didn't get the money thing they kept displaying.

Nurse Becky.
If she had been able to get a
job at a serious medical facility.

Angel form of Nancy Conner.
5 bonus no-points if you can
find all the mistakes I made.

This one really shows off the limitations.
I wanted an ACU pattern but couldn't find one.
Who is she?
She used to be in the comic, I'll say this, I have plans.

Thus far for a FREE program it's pretty well rounded. I haven't gone any further into it, so I really can't judge how good it is. I will at some point. Then I'll get back to you.





(By the way, it is a real pain in the ass placing those pictures, putting captions to them, and making it look somewhat comprehensible. Thank Google for that "PREVIEW" button.)