Monthly Archives: February 2006

Passion

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I remember a long time ago, when everyone found out that FFVIII was going to have a vocal theme by Faye Wong, thinking to myself that it would never work. Video games and vocal themes done by famous people? Never. And in the end it worked out, even though FFVIII had a battle system that bugged the hell out of me.

And I remember the skepticism at the announcement of what Kingdom Hearts was: Final Fantasy crossed with Disney characters. Our beloved RPG series churned with those cartoons from our childhood. That will never work, we all said. And again, it proved to be a surprisingly good RPG with a really good story.

The other thing Kingdom Hearts had was a really good vocal theme, Hikari (or Simple and Clean for those of you who don’t follow Japanese music or games) by Utada Hikaru. It was a really good song. It got me into downloading all of that J-pop and I know a few people who aren’t music people at all who like it a lot.

When I found out that there was another theme for Kingdom Hearts 2, I was disappointed. I mean, Hikari was the only song for KH. Over here, Utada Hikaru and Kingdom Hearts go together. And then I didn’t hear anything about KH until just now.

I was listening to some of Utada Hikaru’s stuff again, just for variety and switching it up once in a while. Apparently, KH has been out for a few months now, so the new theme, Passion, has been released as a single in Japan. I decided to give it a whirl.

Passion is something completely different. Watching the music video for it, it has this really cool sounding atmospheric, ethereal background behind the main vocals. And it has this awesome drumline that, really drives it along. And the main vocals are just sweeping and really grand. All of this is combined and the result really screams high fantasy.

It is really different from any of Utada Hikaru’s other songs. After watching the KH2 opening FMV, I was just blown away by how well Passion matches it. I guess I was proven wrong again. Passion fits in with KH2 just like Hikari fitted in with KH.

Passion is now my favourite Utada Hikaru song.

Some more musings on university stuff

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I’ve applied at three schools: UW for software engineering, Mac for Engineering I, and U of T for computer engineering. At the moment, I’ve pretty much decided that I’m going to end up at Waterloo one way or another. Mac is a nice second choice, and U of T remains a distant third for completely stupid forms. Anyway, during one of my anticipating next year thought sessions. The more I think about it, the more uncertain I am about whether or not I chose the right program. Continue reading →

TI

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Today in algeo, we had an interesting class. Sure, we didn’t do anything and it was pretty pointless, it was fun if you were a complete nerd like I am. You see, we were playing with calculators today–but not just any old calculators. So our teacher walks in after O Canada lugging one of those suitcases on wheels. Apparently, that’s where the math department kept those calculators. Continue reading →

Bomberman, NOOOOOO!!

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Bomberman

So I was checking my feeds like I usually do and when I hit my gaming blogs, I found a post titled Bomberman, What Have They Done To You? at Press the Buttons. This was cause for concern. Bomberman is a good friend that has been with us for years. Was he in danger or something?

Then I saw this.

Bomberman Act Zero

That’s Bomberman in Bomberman Act Zero for, what else? The Xbox 360. Good old Xbox, being crappy just isn’t good enough for you. Now you have to go around metaphorically raping our favourite characters.

I think I’ll just load up Super Bomberman 4 in ZSNES and weep at this travesty.

I hate U of T

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If paying thirty dollars for an “assessment fee” for your student profile wasn’t enough, wait until you actually start filling it out.

The U of T Student Profile Form wins the Most Frigging Stupid Form Design Award of 2006. The form is divided into several pages with no easy way to get in or out to a specific section.

Want to save your information? Well, gotta log out too, sucker! Want to log out? Well, you’d better blank out everything you’ve already filled out! I won’t move forwards or backwards if you’ve filled out half of my fields! Want to type your marks in really fast? Well, you got head faked because I use drop down menus that list every single bloody grade you could possibly get. Yes, 99, 98, 97, 96, and so on and so forth. And, when you want to go back to where you were when you left off, you have to go through every single page you’ve already submitted before you end up where you were.

And no, CGI is not the future. At least make a form in bloody PHP.