Wasting bandwidth since 1996

Muhh! Big Green Froggy Dragonny Thing Pwn0r3d! One boss down and it’s yielded a speed boost upgrade. Which is nice. I have a cool 85 missile capacity but only two energy units and I still haven’t found a charge beam. So, before I do much else, it’s exploring I go to try and rake together all the stuff I’ve missed.

3 Hours and 27 Minutes in, so far.

So, I have two minutes to get things ready before I’m herded off to hospital – what do I take with me? Gameboy Advance, of course – we all know how long hospital visits tend to take. “Aha!” though I, “the perfect opportunity to complete Metroid Fusion!”

Oh no! Little Miss Dotty has deleted the save file :-/ Ah well – could this be a sign? See, I picked up Zero Mission a few months back when it was going for a tenner and it hasn’t been played yet. Rebelstar is still ongoing, but it’s going to get very tedious writing a gaming diary about it cos it’ll take me years to finish…… so here it is! The gaming diary subplot!

Zero Mission is, I believe, a remake of the original NES Metroid (which is unlocked upon completing the game). It’s your standard Metroid fare, you start the game lightly equipped (because it’s the first game, you don’t lose everything) and gain powerups as required through the course of the game. There’s a lot of backtracking required to move between the levels but, as with the other Metroid games, it gets progressively easier as you get more powerful.

There’s the usual array of annoying wee things that scuttle about, big things which annoy you, and stupendously big level bosses. The game mechanics are ace, allowing rapid fire dashing about, leaping and morph balling with a pause. Playing through the 2D originals really impresses upon me the amazing job the Metroid Prime team did moving it into 3D while keeping the game characteristically Metroid.

Anyhoo – I’ve unlocked the first few areas and activated the ceiling trolley thingies. My current task is to get to a blinky red circle at the bottom of the map of Kraid. That’s 2 hours and 38 minutes in, according to the save file. Trouble is, I can’t quite work out how to get there, so I’ve backtracked all the way to the ship to collect previously unreachable missile upgrades and energy units while I have a think about it.

We watched Jurassic Park (again) yesterday. It brought back a lot of memories. I think JP was the first film which made me realise that the cinema could do anything with modern technology.

I have distinct memories of sitting in the theatre (the Odeon on Clerk Street in Edinburgh – a proper cinema, none of yer multiscreen shoeboxes) watching it. When Sam Neill is standing up in the jeep with his mouth gaping open at the Brachiosaurus, I was sitting with my mouth gaping open in disbelief.

When the T-Rex was chasing them in the jeep, I came to my senses with a start because I suddenly realised I’d been thinking “How did they get it to do that?” rather than “How did they do that?”

Course, with the advent of Lord of the Rings and all the over effects heavy movies that have come since, Jurassic Park’s dinos have lost a little of their impact, but nothing can quite compare to that T-Rex bellowing and munching through the top of the car. An added bonus is that the movie scriptwriter managed to get rid of almost all of Crichton’s preachiness, and added a few nice one liners for good measure.

A truly great movie, if only for reminiscences sake.

Had a bad day on Friday. I’d been feeling a bit unwell on Thursday morning and on and off during the day. It got bad enough to prompt me to make a doctors appointment on Friday morning. So, in I toddled. The doctor was making a flap about blood clots, lungs and “why didn’t you come in sooner?”.

So, off to hospital I went, to spend the rest of the day attached to various machines and being poked and prodded and jabbed by all manner of pointy devices. At one point I had a nurse taking my blood pressure at one side and another drawing blood from the other arm (in a particularly ham-fisted manner which resulted in a very large pool of it on the floor). A young doctor came up and stood in the middle and I asked if he’d come to stand between the other two and hit me with a stick. Not a trace of a smile.

Anyway, off for chest X-rays, some more blood tests and then left alone for three hours to think about it. You can imagine. As it turns out, I stopped smoking a couple of months ago and by the time the doctor came back I had convinced myself that he was going to start talking about lung cancer.

As it turns out, there had been a blood clot involved, but it had broken up on its own with a little help from some warfarin (which I always though was rat poison, but never mind). I’ve been overdoing it a little – because I’m very out of shape (too many videogames and not enough exercise) all the stuff I’ve been doing (swimming and so on) since stopping smoking has just been too much. So, I’ve to take it easy for a day or two and then try a sensible exercise regime – starting with walking.

It was a very scary thing.