WillWybrow.com

From the greatest game series in the world: my new toy, Kain.

To come: Raziel. To come even sooner: Spectral Raziel.

I don’t know what it is. All of a sudden, I can feel myself slipping. I’m getting worked up over stupid things, and it’s horrible. My expletive output has increased dramatically. I’m abusive to the people around me. I can’t help it, it just bursts out. It’s not even amusing. It doesn’t amuse me. It certainly doesn’t amuse the people who hear it.

I don’t know what’s up, but it’s not the first time and I doubt it’ll be the last. I just hope that my friends will stick by me, and not abandon me, while I work through these causally sociopathic symptoms. I’ve got to place my finger on the problem, but I will. Don’t worry. And just don’t lose faith. I’m still here.

Wait for me.

I was reading this article, a while back, on speed cameras. It states simply that statistics that take a sample of high-risk roads and re-evaluate the risks just on the samples after installing speed cameras do not accurately reflect the true benefit of doing so. That is to say, finding the five roads with the highest accident tolls and installing speed cameras there, then comparing the accident toll in a year to find fewer accidents doesn’t mean anything: there would be fewer accidents anyway, because the high-risk roads would naturally move towards the mean. The opposite would happen if speed cameras were installed on the five lowest-risk roads: more accidents would occur because the average of the five safe roads will become closer to the average of all the roads put together.

The flatmates and I were playing some Texas Hold ‘em last night. We got down to two players, one with substantially more funds than the other. I didn’t say anything at the time, but I was thinking they ought to have called it there: first and second place. I don’t know if that’s done in “real” Poker or not. We had a stalemate situation where one player would get a good hand and raise, and the other would fold instantly. This was usually after the flop, so the blinds were moving from player to player. After some rounds of this, the player who had more to begin with had much less, and they were looking much closer to levelling out the amount of chips between them.

At this point, they called for a draw. The player who had most chips before entering the one-on-one phase came off worse, but is that because he was a worse player?

At this late stage in the game, there is going to be an obviously good hand. One player will have a better hand than the other, and it is essentially a game of luck, as both players were unwilling to bluff. So, that elevates the status of our good friend Random Chance in the game, from his back-seat role hiding behind conservative play, aggressive betting and a good bluffing face. He’s now the prominent guideline for the outcome of each round, and any random situation can be assessed using statistics!

The average winnings would be split equally amongst two players who were playing randomly. So, it’s not that our rich player suddenly started to play badly, but rather that his financial cache inevitably regressed towards the mean. His failure to call an end to the match with the elimination of third place cost him the outright victory. There is nothing he could do to stop the evening out of the betting chips.

You can try this. If you have a tally of all the heads and tails you throw on a coin, and start the heads column off with five extras, after throwing for long enough, the gap will decrease to nothing. It’s pretty interesting, and after noticing it within our card game, I’ll be on the look out for it in other real-life situations, because I imagine that it’s more common than it seems.

Global Warming

Someone said today that he believed global warming was made up. I don’t want to take a stance either way (because I personally haven’t been given enough unbiased facts to make my mind up), but there is another article from the website I linked to above with a nice bit of physics/maths/substituting into formulae regarding Greenland melting.

3… 2… 1… and you’re suddenly one of twelve brightly coloured characters aboard brightly coloured go-karts in a cutthroat race for first place.

Take the corners, boost off the drift; sail through the air and accelerate from the midair tricks; collide with glowing question marks for weapons and power ups that blow your rivals back or you forwards; all the while, hope that you can get far enough ahead so when that Blue Shell comes… you can recover from it in time.

The single player races range from the pathetically easy to the impossibly hard, which is nice. Characters and races are unlocked in a nice, steady stream that will keep you playing. The tracks are varied; we see the classics return Wii-style, and a very pretty Rainbow Road to fuck you over at the end of the Special Cup.

I’m new to Mario Kart. You might see this as a bad thing; how can I review a game in a franchise when I have no experience of anything else in it? But I see it as an impartial view untainted by previous successes and mistakes. So, to bring a staggering conclusion to day seven of Wario Week, I bring you this extensive review of Mario Kart Wii.

At first, I was reluctant to buy into the hype surrounding it. Everyone was getting excited about the release of a Mario Kart game for the Wii, but I wasn’t. So when I was invited to join some friends for an afternoon of it, I went with a slightly negative attitude towards it.

It was misplaced, let me tell you. Mario Kart Wii was as surprising as it was fun. I quickly got into it, and found it more enjoyable by the minute.

Gameplay

There are two ways of controlling your Kart using the Wiimote. The first way is using the Nunchuck’s analogue stick for steering. I’m told this is akin to using the N64 controller. But what if you don’t have the Nunchuck addition? Well, that’s fine too, because you can slot the Wiimote into a steering wheel fascia and steer by tilting it from side to side.

I started playing using a Nunchuck, and when I finally got around to using the Wiimote in ’steering wheel’ mode, I found it a little tricky to get the hang of. Even now, after a week of playing, I’ve not quite got it. But I’m working on it!

Drifting, too, was something I had to get the hang of. But I think I’m nailing that, too. Just take a few corners in a new vehicle to get it right. The boost from a drift builds up automatically. There’s none of that twiddling the steering nonsense that you had to do in the DS at least. It stops ’snaking’ (the act of using drift’s boost repeatedly down a straight stretch of track) by charging the boost on time drifting instead of twiddling. That’s a controversial feature; some people are hardcore anti-snaking, some are snaking lovers who have perfected the technique. The removal of it has, to me at least, validated the anti-snaking camp’s viewpoint that it is semi-cheating, despite Nintendo’s assertions that it’s a “gameplay feature”. They sort of blew that train of thought, though, by removing it. Oh well, it’s their game.

Manual vs. Automatic

No, it’s not gear-shifting… Gear-shifting in go-karts largely defeats their point. It’s braking. You can set automatic braking if you’ve not quite got the hang of drifting; very helpful for new players to instantly enjoy themselves - they don’t need to take hours to get to grips with the brake button without careening off the track and into a pit of lava.

Manual braking is essential for winning the harder tracks, however, as the mini boost from a successfully lengthy drift moves you considerably further than taking the corner while braking automatically. Again, this is easier said than done with the steering wheel controller, but there are those who prefer it.

Wii Features

Obviously being released on a new console, it will have unique aspects that utilise the features of the console. Apart from the steering wheel mode, we have in-air tricks or motorbike wheelies. So what? you ask. They’re activated, I reply, by jerking the motion-sensitive controllers. This adds one of those “comic through the window” properties to the game. Let me explain: when the EyeToy came out for PS2, it had a huge amout of “comic through the window”. So did the dance mats before that. It’s a part of whole-body games that would make your actions look out of place or comical to someone who did not know the context of the movements, if they were looking through a window at the player, for example. To watch three players of equal skill (say, who were following each other closely in first, second and third place) throw their arms into the air in sequence is like seeing a miniature Mexican wave.

The Power-ups

It’s become pretty common to yell “BULLET” when getting a power-up while last or almost last. This is a reference to “Bullet Bill”, the handy helper for those lagging behind. It can have devastating effects - knocking opponents aside and pushing the user up in position.

Shells are there - standard greens, homing reds and winged blues. They come frequently enough to deal out some effective punishment. Mushrooms and bananas are there too, coming (like red and green shells) in sets of one or three.

POW blocks send everyone into a spin unless they jerk the controller at the right time. The squid inks everyone’s screen and makes navigating trickier. Lightning is still lightning and reduces everyone’s size, speed and mass. But the single lightning shot is even more interesting. A stormcloud appears over the player who broke the power-up cube. It speeds the player up marginally, but also counts down. If you don’t collide with another player and pass the cloud on in time, it zaps you. Your speed, size and mass take the same lightning hit, but localised only to you.

Bob-ombs and dud power-up blocks come every now and then, and players in the rearmost few can expect Super Mushrooms or the Invincibility Star to help their performance along, as well as Bullet Bill.

Single Player

Singler player is pretty entertaining. With so many of us sharing the copy of the game, there’s not as much pressure put on one player to complete all the cups. This is a good thing, because I think three difficulty settings on all eight cups is a little repetative. Especially when you’re playing your way through the 50cc cups; it’s nigh impossible to lose. Defeating the Lightning Cup on 150cc, however, was extremely gratifying.

Multiplayer

Split-screen racing is masses of unrivalled fun. We’ve got three controllers and one Nunchuck. This sort of separates the game into two challenges: one between the two steering wheel players and the other between the Nunchuck user and the AI players. With enough of the Wiimote additions, however, we could see a real fight for dominance of the road.

Online play is sadly not an option for our rigorously-controlled networking options. To help you out, though, I’m going to quote the Facebook group Mario Kart Wii is my new addiction:

[Mario Kart Wii]’s got absolutely everything (12 player online, time trial leaderboards, the ability to access the ghost data of EVERYONE, competitions, etc.)

As you can see, lots of work has gone into providing a solid online experience, so if you have the game, check it out. If you don’t and this is one of the key features upon which your decision hinges then it’s packed with all kinds of leaderboards and statistics and fun things to do, so consider the game recommended.

Soundtrack and Visuals

This game is filled with “bright noises,” the audio equivalent of bright colours. The sounds and music tracks are simple, expressive and borderline childish; exactly what you’d expect to come straight out of a Japanese game developer’s brain. The graphics are nothing we haven’t seen before on the GameCube; the Wii was never intended to have superior graphical processing power. It’s not ugly, however, and the tracks from earlier games have been retextured and remodelled to look prettier.

Summary

Fans of the Mario Kart series will find familiar aspects and new aspects in the right mix to make the game enjoyable as returning Mario Kart players. New players will find the introductory easy tracks and automatic braking ease them into the game gently, while still being fun. This is something that most people would be hard-pressed not to enjoy. After the challenges have been completed in single player, you can get your friends over to play with them, or find them online and race them at your convenience. It’s a game with a lot of potential playing hours and good, simple fun that other recent releases simply can’t best.

This is a follow on from my awesome discovery of ToolChronicles archives back from when I didn’t exist to lots of you, but it’s an idea that’s been with me for a long time. On the 6th of March, this post enjoyed its private 2-year anniversary. It has a timeless air about it, however, and despite it being jotted down in a spare twenty minutes, it’s got a sexy, nostalgic voice to it.

Million Dollar Baby

The film starts with a dull, boring tale of a boxing gymnasium, and some woman who can’t box. There’s something in there about her age, but only a woman could care. So, we’ve set up a main character. Good work, Eastwood; your directing skills astound me. Next, we’re introduced to 10 other people, only one of which actually needed to be cast in the film, but maybe two. Morgan Freeman and this Old Guy were the significant ones, and there were a bunch of guys who frequented the gym to box. The gym was only a setting, and the guys were really only a part of that setting. They didn’t have a clearly defined story, they just went to the gym. That was understood within a few minutes, but we keep getting gym scenes of men boxing. They have no relevance. Every scene should have a significance in a film. The scene where the Boxing Bitch is pounding a bag unprofessionally showed what a poor boxer she was at the start of the film: it had a purpose. The scenes of the gym after that were purely idle filler. Now, on to the poor storyline.

Old Guy was persuaded by Morgan Freeman to train Boxing Bitch; he didn’t want to but the awesome persuasive power of Morgan Freeman caused him to anyway. After a brief session, Someone Else trained her for a bit, and then pitted her against another woman.

Someone Else turned out to blow at training, because Boxing Bitch was getting beaten. She was almost devastatingly owned when Old Guy steps in, gives her a pointer and she wins. Then, all of a sudden, she’s a boxer so awesome that she can beat everyone in the first round, after one sentence of encouragement. Thanks for that, Eastwood: you can’t direct.

She wins some, she wins some more. Then she enters a fight with some Woman Champion of the Boxing World. Woman Champion of the Boxing World gives Boxing Bitch a few good elbows to the face, and hits her while she’s down. This pisses everyone off something awful, and things break up. They fight some more, get tired, and someone puts a stool in the corner of the ring for Boxing Bitch to sit on. Instead, Woman Champion of the Boxing World slugs her in the face when her back’s turned, and Boxing Bitch falls over and breaks her neck on the stool. I could only laugh out ‘owned’.

The rest of the story is about Boxing Bitch, her mother and her paralysis. Eventually, Morgan Freeman persuades (he’s good at persuading) Old Guy to kill her. The end. What a WASTE OF MY TIME.

It’s shit, it didn’t deserve any of the awards it got. Don’t see this film.

By the way, if you haven’t seen this film, the above entry contains spoilers.

Fucking yeah. I just found an archive of my site, pre-university, and it’s got all my awesome fucking controversial stupid stuff on it. Holy fuck, this is the greatest find since I was sleepless that one night.

Aww FUCKYEAH.

Maybe I’ll post my reviews of 3 Megadrive games, my guide to butchering the English language and my super-sexy review of that atrocity known as Million Dollar Baby. Holy fuckizzle, this is the shizzle.

I’m going to be busy for the next few days. You might not see me.

Awwwwww yeeeah…

One of the most commonly asked questions when I say that I’m part of an atheist society is “what’s the point of an atheist society? Do you just get together and talk about how you don’t believe in God?”

That’s like saying “what’s the point of a football society, do you all just sit around and talk about how you like football?” Well, yeah… but it’s never as simple as that, is it? There are discussions of recent footballing events, discussions about teams, favourites and best, discussion of footballing techniques and so much more.

Atheism is almost unique in the respect that it is a cause devoted to people who don’t do something. There’s no society for people who don’t play football, or don’t like chocolate. But football and chocolate don’t turn people into suicide bombers or mutilate the genitals of children, do they?

Religion (which builds up around a belief of a deity) is something that has a huge impact on the lives of those within and without the religion. It’s this impact on the people who choose not to be a part of it that is the biggest reason for a union of atheists.

Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature. — Carl Sagan

Some of us are irreligious and some of us are antireligious. But whatever the stance, we all say ‘no’ to religion. Theists like to argue that atheism itself is a belief. It isn’t. We don’t need to believe - everyone starts off as a nonbeliever until someone or something makes the claim that there is a god. We don’t need to believe, theists need to convince us.

They get their chances, too. With there being no real antireligious force, people feel like it’s them on their own against the leviathan that is religion. Well, no more. We are the Warwick Atheists, and we’re here for you to put your back up against and fight off the religious evangelicals who are after your submission. If you are looking for some compelling counter points to make to religious people who parade their beliefs around as fact, or you want stimulating discussion about anything related to free thought, rationality, deism, theism, religion, scepticism, secularism, humanism, philosophy, or sciences, you’ll find what you’re looking for with us.

Warwick Atheists

A while ago (Third of April), I left a little message in my “personal message” space of my Windows Live Messenger account. It detailed my designated favourite strips of two of the webcomics I keep up with. Trouble is, I referenced one of them by number and not name, and I forgot the number. So I’ve searched through the strips and finally found it again, and I’m posting it here so I don’t forget again.

Webcomic Favourites

QC.net – 828: Ova and Ova — Previously: 792: Poor Lion’s Almanac
xkcd – 377: Journal 2 — Previously: 374: Journal

1. Ordinary individual
2. Encounter with radioactive or supernatural influence
3. Superpowers!
4. Heroism

Partial credit to Richard Brown

The Marvel Curse

Stan Lee doesn’t seem unintelligent to me, but here’s a little scenario we’ve got occurring with our cinematised Marvel comic book heroes. The upcoming movie Iron Man is supposedly going to break the mould on this one…

Listen closely to this biased summary of the Iron Man plot…

• Man who works for a weapons company disappears
• Comes into contact with “bad guys”
• Leaves bad guys as a changed man
• Uses vast fortune to acquire gadgets
• Uses gadgets and a “suit” to be a superhero

The above summary was actually written from memory as a biased summary of the plot of Batman Begins… do you see where I’m going with this?

The only way Marvel have been able to break out of what they’ve seemingly continually brought us is by plagiarising the storyline of another comic book hero: DC’s Batman.

Oh god, that was a seriously awful pun. I’m really sorry, guys, but I’m in a state of suspended thought due to the hilarity of what I’m about to tell you.

I was listening to an internet radio broadcast (Robot Radio, can’t guarantee if it’ll be broadcasting or not) that talked of horny grandpa Hugh Heffner making a certain telephone call, and the idea amused me so much, I thought I’d share it with you guys.

This MSN video is a clip from an Australian news show that clearly states that Heffner called child actress Emma Watson’s (Hermione in the Harry Potter films, if you don’t know) agent up and requested (or offered… I don’t know how these things work) a nude photo shoot. This was simultaneously shocking and floor-roll (you know, rolling, laughing… that whole thing) worthy, and aside from the typical internet forum life, I’ve not heard anyone else’s opinion on it. What the fuck, she’s barely eighteen… Seriously, when are people going to learn? But, that’s not to say she doesn’t deserve the unwholesome attention of Mr. Heffner… it’s what happens when you draw too much attention to yourself. Remember that.