Jack in the Box

This is my new favorite fast food eat place, having eaten food here about 4 times so far. Part of it probably has to do with how I find the mascot hilarious:



He's kind of creepy like the Burger King king, but I think in a more non-threatening and funny way. They both just like to watch, but Jack is probably more business about it than the King is. The King, being carved out of a tree and then bronzed, has a wild obsession with watching. He can do nothing else. I tried to find him in Sterling, Colorado, the place of his creation, but he was not as easily found as the old woman in the visitor center told me he would be. The King was probably watching me the whole time.

Anyway, Jack in the Box, my New Favorite Fast Food Eat Place, has a bunch of good food choices. There are some rules about ordering food there though. Actually there aren't, but I just like to always order 2 tacos every time I'm there no matter what. There's something about how it's listed on the menu as "2 tacos" that cracks me up. Like you have to get two tacos at a time, and tacos only in even numbers. Can you buy just one taco? Probably you can order that, but you will still be charged for both tacos and right before the guy hands you your order, he takes one of the tacos out of the bag and drops it into the trash right in front of your face. This is the kind of place I would go to if ever I decided that tonight I will eat 100 tacos. (Update: people have apparently already done this and then filmed, with 200 tacos too. I guess I wasn't thinking big enough.) It's a good thing to add on top of an order though, since it's only a dollar for two tacos.

Besides the tacos though, I ate the steak melt sandwich there (thumbs up) and another sandwich I ordered blind. I didn't have my glasses with me and the menu was way in the back. I could tell that there were about a dozen numbered items to order from so I went with a number that had to be a valid choice -- sandwich item number 7. It turned out to be a chicken sandwich with bacon on it. Also good.

Jack in the Boxes are open 24 hours per day, so it makes them an important middle-of-the-night food option. I think they serve their breakfast menu all day too, but I have not tried it. They also claim to have desserts and egg rolls on their menu, but I'm suspicious about that. Everyone knows that the other menu options in restaurants are just to make the menu look bigger and more impressive. Nobody actually orders those things. If you did, you'd get one of those "alright wise guy, what are you trying to pull?" looks. Actually, once when I was at Burger King, I did order the pie slice, and the employee didn't say anything strange about it. I thought it was going to be like a game of chicken, to see if I would first try to retract my ridiculous order of nonexistent pie to save myself embarrassment, or if the employee would end up having to confess that there is not and has never been any pie at a Burger King. I was in disbelief when I actually saw that I got served a slice of pie.

I rate Jack in the Box 2 out of 2.

"Eco" Cases

I hate the Eco Cases that discs get sold in nowadays. A bunch of other idiots probably love them because they like to pretend to themselves that they are somehow "saving" the environment, and they enjoy being tricked by all the positive-sounding words surrounding them, like "friendly", "green", and "saving". Probably a lot of people who don't care about packaging design just immediately throw their cases in the garbage 2 minutes after ripping the case apart to get the disc out. I guess the recycling symbol would be appropriate then.

Here's a list about how eco cases are different from normal cases:
- the packaging looks shitty and full of holes
- it's name being "eco case" is pretentious
- when you hold it, it feels like it will crumple up like a sandwich bag
- the case cover art will get bent inwards easily and will be left with markings of where the holes are in the case
- whenever you buy one on ebay, there will be a much higher chance of the case art being damaged, either by the person who would sell their things so doesn't have as much as an incentive to keep it looking nice for himself, or during the mailing process when it's in a mailing envelope
- the holes in the case scream out "look! we found a way to save ourselves on manufacturing and shipping costs!"
- they don't hold up as well to being stacked in huge piles
- you have to buy another case if you want to replace it with a normal case

I rate eco cases 0 out of 2.

First Impressions of King's Field

King's Field is a Playstation game that comes in a big Sega CD/Saturn sized box, except that the plastic is black and the cover has a sticker on it instead of the manual being the box's cover. Due the first King's Field not being released in english, King's Field is actually King's Field II and King's Field II is actually King's Field III, and King's Field: The Ancient City is actually King's Field IV, so as to not scare off new customers that might not play King's Field IV because they are afraid of high numbers.

I played the first King's Field for a short while so far:

- it's first-person action dungeonship crawling
- there are lots of scary skeletons
- the music is scary
- I'm scared of getting lost
- it takes me 4 seconds to turn around to check if there's a scary skeleton behind me


Another first-person view dungeonship crawling game I tried earlier was Arx Fatalis. I stopped playing shortly in when the game required that I draw symbols with the cursor to cast spells. Maybe I just found it extra annoying because I was doing it with a touchpad and a pen tablet, but I suspect I would still not enjoy doing it with a mouse.

Crusader: No Remorse PS1 review

I recently came across Crusader: No Remorse for PS1 and bought it because it was only a few bucks. I was going to get the Saturn port because it has a sweet big saturn case, but it was more expensive, and I could get a sharper picture from the PS1 version through an HDMI cable.

I've played Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret on my PC years back, so I'll just list some of the differences in this port from about 5 minutes of playing it:

- The game's resolution is 320x240 instead of the original's 640x480, so there is a lot less detail in everything.
- There are 5 setups for mapping the buttons to the controller. It really makes me wish there were at least two more buttons on the dualshock controller. It would have been a lot better if the game just let me assign buttons to commands myself instead of giving these premade setups.
- You can set the game to absolute movement instead of relative, which makes it so that you don't have to rotate your little man to change the direction he's facing.
- You run all the time and you cannot walk. Your weapon is always readied.
- You can roll forward.
- The automatic pistols have been removed from the game and you start with the first machine gun.
- According to the manual, there is no lasor pistol and no riot gun.
- There is a new weapon, the "Massdriver", which uses ammunition and energy.
- The shotgun does not fire more rapidly when you crouch.
- The HUD is more in the style of No Regret's HUD.
- The sprites are mirrored instead of having animations for facing left.
- When you hold down a shift button, and then left or right to roll or strafe, your little guy will keep strafing or rolling nonstop if you have the shift button pressed but stop pressing left or right.
- Some floors that used to be able to fall apart due to explosions are now solid floors.
- The music doesn't loop properly. And it seems to select a random track each time it is paused and then unpaused. It can play the final stage's music and the option screen's music during the first stage.
- Walls can be changed to transparent so you can see your little guy when you're behind them.
- Moving doesn't feel as precise as in the original version. It feels like the little guy slides around a bit.
- Because you cannot unready your weapon, there is no animation for the Silencer standing still with his arms at his sides. When you enter a health booth, he will not move to face outwards as his health recovers.
- You can see blood splatters from enemies as you shoot them.
- Robots are much more difficult to control because they can only walk in four directions now.

Note: I haven't played the original in years and I'm going by memory of what it was like.

Space Invaders Infinity Gene review

Space Invaders is a pretty old vimeo game. It's one of those games that it's cool to tell people you like it. Sort of like how people will talk about how they love to play Pac-Man or how the best vimeo game ever is Galaga. They're okay games I guess, if you like to ignore every single better game that has come out since then - which these people probably do. Either that or these people just like these games for the cooldude points they get from talking to other people who know even less about vimeo games than they do. I hardly ever play these games, and I bet the people who claim they love them have played them even less than I have. I don't feel like reviewing the original Space Invaders from 1978, so here's a review of a new version of it I played on PS3 that was released recently:

Space Invaders Infinity Gene
- developer: Taito
- publisher: Square-Enix
- for: iOS
- ports for: Xdude 360, PS3
- on: you can't display it on a shelf because it's a download
- released: 2009/07/27 (iOS), 2010/09/14 (PS3), 2010/09/15 (Xdude 360)
- type of vimeogame: Spaceship Shooting Game

At first this game is like Space Invaders. You get a spaceship that can only move left and right, and it sucks at shooting. And then the game changes and becomes completely different as you keep playing, giving you things like super rapid fire, the ability to move everywhere on the screen, and different weapons to choose from before starting a stage. The game will tell you some quote about evolving and adapting while it does this. I guess you're supposed to adapt to Space Invaders becoming not Space Invaders. The original Space Invaders had an interesting thing going on with the destructible barriers between you and the aliens, and how you're going to automatically lose if you don't make sure to kill all the bad guys, but this game is all tons of bad guy formations flying around all over the place while you whale on them.

There are wire frame graphics everywhere in this game. It looks kind of boring. In addition to the standard alien enemies, there's a bunch of random shapes that fly around for you to shoot at. All your favorites are here, such as star, hexagon, the other hexagon with two lines in it, large wireframe battleships with rectangles inside of them, and I think I even saw octadecahedrons.

I quickly found the real reason to play this game: the Music Mode. What the game does is take a music file you pick from the hard drive, and then construct a stage based on that file while it plays that music as the stage music. I had a lot of fun playing music from other spaceship shooting games and pretending to myself that I was playing a better spaceship shooting game instead of Space Invaders Infinity Gene. Also fun is playing music that is totally inappropriate for a spaceship shooting game, like Lady Gaga music. I guess that you could just instead play any other spaceship shooting game with the music volume set at zero and have something playing on your laptop though, and it'd be better. This game only lets you have one song per music stage and do one music stage at a time, so when the boss appears, it just loops the song from the beginning again. I've never felt the need to change a game's music something else though. Games's normal music always suits them just fine, unless I'm making a youtube video of me playing the game. Then I would have to replace the normal music with Korn.

I rate this spaceship shooting game 0 out of 2.

Adult Content

I'm taking the adult content warning off my internet. As funny as I think it is -- because of how content warnings are stupid -- I found it annoying when trying to translate my internote into french with google translate. Also it probably turns people away from the internote because it's an extra step you have to go through to L@@K at it.

Candy Bars

I ate some candy bars recently. They're kind of similar. It's Three Musketeers, Milky Way, and Snickers. I used to think that Snickers was the best and Three Musketeers was the worst because of how much junk is put in each one, but now I feel the opposite way - mainly because of the nougat part of the candy.

Snickers - This has peanuts and caramel on top, but it has the lowest quality nougat inside. Also most of the space in the candy bar is wasted with the peanuts.

Milky Way - The nougat in here is better than in the snickers, but I feel like the caramel is a waste of space.

Three Musketeers - This thing is all nougat. I know what I'm getting and I like it. Also, I like the name better than the other two candy bars I talked about here.

If I had a choice between all three candy bars, I would pick Three Musketeers nearly all the time. The other times I would pick snickers and milky way to remind myself of why I like Three Musketeers more.


Update: It has come to my attention that the name of the candy bar is actually "3 Musketeers" and not "Three Musketeers". Maybe I was just excited to spell out the number.