Guitar Hero III anger

Just saw my friend play Guitar Hero III.

At some point, there’s a duel with Slash… and the guy was like, unbeatable. My friend was playing on Hard and was having a real difficult time because Slash always made a come back in the end, even though only in the yellow of the meter and no matter what malus my friend could throw at him.

I felt really angry about this even though I wasn’t playing…

(really useless blogpost :P)

Kalaba and other languages

We’ve got some big homework to do for the 14 of december. We have a corpus of 48 sentences in an unknown language (which is actually a rough one reinvented each year it seems) and we’ve got to explain each word category’s morphology. One example:

pok ka suklai ka bubalada, the cushion is coming onto the bed

So we’ve got to say what “ka” exactly means (we know it’s an article but we’ve got to make this more accurate), what does the -lai suffix indicate and how is the “bubalada” verb composed. I wrote the line as it is given in the document but most likely it should be read from right-to-left.

Anyway, it was coming along nicely — been doing it with a small group of people. We had to give it in by wednesday but it appeared that some errors in the corpus were reported and corrected by the teacher so we got one more week! Hence the 14 of december deadline. Awesome.

What about the other languages? Well I just wanted to talk a bit about the languages I’ve been constructing, mostly one, for now called Proto-Sû.

Proto-Sû is a ‘virtual’ language — ie, it’s the root of a whole family of languages born later in history and as such it isn’t intended as an accurate description of an existing language (nevermind the fact that it is fictional). It was supposedly spoken north of the Sun Coast of Zunqu (I’ll link the map here when it’s finished). Later, Sû languages spread south — or rather they moved, pushed by other non-Sû speaking people, themselves pushed by the invasive insular Naji people. Eventually the Sû languages spread onto the Rofalan-Zunqu islands, a very vast system of islands kind of akin to Indonesia, although not the same climate at all. In short, this family is one of the important family of the world.

Proto-Sû is a very agglutinative language; one of the best words to show that is coqusōqēpániqūeyīwaqēāehcīso, meaning I had become a hunter said to a respected person (indicate by the <qusō> infix. The lexical word is coqēpániqūe, to be a hunter, formed from coqēpáni, hunter, itself formed from qēpá, the hunt.

Another word is ōqanā sky, which is used to form the verb ōqanā́riē, to be heavenly and the phrase ōqanā́riēxōkohsī, literally meaning they are heavenly, ie “gods”.

And there is qotō star, giving qotṓki stars and qotṓkilāhma from the stars. There is a long list of locative suffixes, marking: location you come from, location you go to, location you’re in, location you’re out, location you’re next to, location you’re below, location you’re above, location you’re passing through, location you’re passing by, location you’re passing above, location you’re passing below.

Describing all of it would be too lengthy for the scope of this post though!

Progress

Gah. I just can’t properly wake up. I should sleep more! And I’m cold, of course.

Anyway, progress on RifE 1.31 patch is good. We’re finishing the lairs’ design and it should be put in XML quite soon. Finally! I hope the forums will regain their activity.

Always forgetting

Yeah, I always forget that blog. Damn.

You know, it’s not even my first blog — I tried many times to set one up and use it often, but somehow I just don’t think about blogging. I guess my life is *that* interesting.

Maybe I should just blog about my Civilization games and my constructed languages! Though for sure it would bore everyone to death!

Back

Oh yeah, me back! Or so I hope. I should make an article on how hard it is to blog for me. So what happened since half april? Well, quite a lot actually.

That time I went away, I was looking for an apartment (for my friend and me) at Bordeaux. We came back with nothing. We had seen nothing. Nothing at all! Nothing in our budget, more precisely. And my mother managed to find us something while we were back in northern France… We had to go back to Bordeaux quickly for two days to visit the flat and we ended up renting it. It’s a pretty nice one with two levels, some big windows and all. Nicely located as well: downtown and close to all convenience stuff, be it tramway, food store, etc.

Had some problems with internet then but it got fixed quickly enough. However we waited one month to get a proper bed to sleep in because the guys supposed to deliver it decided to not show up for work and then the bed got lost… Ugh.

We also released a new version of Rise from Erebus and a few patches afterwards. People weren’t happy with some changes although the anger softened with time. Now we’re not doing much due to Civ5′s release.

I started college again; in linguistics this time! Also studying Basque.

More recently (like, last friday) I got Fable III and finished it yesterday. Good game. The last part is very tense… More on it later.

And we also bought Mass Effect 1 & 2 again… just to have them in English!

I think that’s all. Just have to try to post more often now!

Going Away

Some might say they thought I already was away. Tsk!

I got a bit… taken away by many stuff, namely: reading the first novel of a Kingdom of Thorn and Bone, by Greg Keyes; watching both Robot Chicken and Battlestar Galactica; playing Valkyria Chronicles; and of course my work for Rise from Erebus, although it has been quite slow for some time as well as my blog.

So, doesn’t it sound like I would have lots of things to talk about? Yes it does, right? And I have. I even made some progress on Mogna. But I don’t feel like typing long posts; and I can’t allow myself to just smallpost. Just feels cheap.

So, going away! Trying to find a new flat way south from here. Being away from home might also have been a good incentive to blog… But I won’t have Internet there; at least from the last news. Hopefully that’d be fixed, but I’m not too optimistic about it.

PS. Yes, I do enjoy multi-tasking, as in playing three games at once! Woohoo!

Dragon Age: Origins #1 ~ Introducing Solona

I started a new game of Dragon Age: Origins.

My first one was with a Noble Dwarf named Duran. It was a long time ago so I figured I should just start again from scratch. That time I’m playing a Mage Human, a girl, named Solona; the default name actually. I’m not sure in which direction I’m going to develop her yet. I’m thinking something the like of a buff-oriented mage with some healing/damaging spells.

Some spoilers ahead!

Demon’s Souls #1

Demon’s Souls is a Japanese RPG released on the PS3. It wasn’t published in Europe, so I had to import it from the US. The PS3 being zone-free is really awesome.

The game is about a Deep Fog, an Old One and Souls. Basically, a king made a deal so his kingdom would flourish; but soon after a demon, the Old One, appeared and covered the kingdom with a Deep Fog, in which demons thrive and devour humans’ souls. Humans without a soul become insane and violent. Many adventurers tried to solve the mysteries of the Deep Fog but none have returned. The Player Character (PC) is one of those; s/he breaks through the Fog and tries to figure out what’s going on.

Uncle Slam! Tsunami Train!!

If someone didn’t see it before, here it is: a new way of doing diplomacy in Civilization V!!

…

Well, of course it was an April’s Fool. But come to think of it, it would have been pretty awesome, wouldn’t it? A bit like Somnium in the Fall From Heaven mods: a minigame you can play to whenever you feel like it during a game. It would have been awesome to let the pressure go against those supposedly awesome AIs ;)

Prinny – Thoughts

Currently playing my first game of Prinny and what I felt the most is its difficulty. The first two levels are easy as pie but then… It’s usually enjoyable though, the difficulty making the success even more tasty, but where I’m right now, it’s just frustrating, mostly because the jumps are really rigid, inaccurate. It’s very hard to hit precisely a small plateform, the way jumps are handled. That makes the platform parts really annoying at times.

Except that, I’m really enjoying it for now. The Prinnies are awesome as usual, and we get to see Etna! <3 Not sure it will have much to do once beaten though; I do hope it has something else to offer.

First Thoughts about Civilization V

Like any fan of Civ4, I’m drooling watching CivV’s screenshots. Though maybe not all fans of Civ4 are doing that. Anyway. The game really looks superb.

Gameplay-wise, with what we currently know, I’m a bit skeptical. That mostly has to do with the removal of religions and of the civics system; but we don’t know much about that for now, so really I’m probably alarmed for little reason. Many other stuff sound great, like the new way culture expansion works, the hexagons, the city-states, the talking leaderheads… Even the civilizations roster sound good to me.

Seems like Python from Civ4 changed to “Lua”. I checked it and it bears some similarities to C++, at least in how indentation work; no more white-space-powered indentations! :)

Really, really expecting it!

Introducing Mogna

What’s “Mogna”? I doubt you know the answer; or else you wouldn’t be here anyway. Another reason you wouldn’t know it is that it’s a pretty personal thing that hasn’t gotten much attention, probably ’cause I hardly talk about it publicly. Well, enough riddles and babbling, it’s my “conworld“. If you don’t know what kind of animal that is, please just follow the link.