I commented to mr.doob that I wasn’t very happy with letting bluetooth enabled on my mobile a couple of months ago, although I still hadn’t really investigated the possibilities of bluetooth and what could really happen – would it actually do any harm or not? – so I couldn’t elaborate on why I wasn’t happy with that idea.

But now I can tell you what can happen, since I forgot to disable Bluetooth last time I used it for downloading a picture I had taken with the phone, and it seems that several shops in London already know what can be done with Bluetooth: SPAM.

I have received several text messages just by walking around Central London. More specifically, these shops are located in the Tottenham Court Road area. The messages are like the following one:

Save 30% off Designer Eyewear & up to 70% off Contact lenses as a member of Spamming Store CARE plan. Call blablabla or email blablabla for more details.

The other shop was a computer parts one. Now I really wonder how strong the Bluetooth signal really is… the optical spammers store is right across the road which is a good three lane road. How did they manage to feed my phone with their rubbish from that distance? Unless they’ve got Bluetooth emitters at both sides of the road, that is.

I’m also wondering if there’s any legislation related to this. It surely is an undesired communication. And the best thing is that even if I didn’t notice the messages until a moment ago, it already had been downloaded into the phone.

Is there any channel which isn’t abused continuously nowadays? I get tons of spam in all my e-mail addresses offering me the solution for acquiring the manhood I never got (also known as the megadik), which I obviously prefer not to do, I get at least 2 letters a week from estate agents urging me to get out of my flat and rent it or sell it to excellent companies which are looking for properties in my area, and now I get rubbish delivered directly to my phone trying to sell me lenses or glasses, which I don’t need.

Thankfully we don’t have a phone attached to our land line – I have heard horrible nightmarish stories about land line numbers being terribly spammed.

So from now on, always turn off your Bluetooth connection before walking around Tottenham Court Road ;-)

Mr.doob came with a surprise today … a game bag which undoubtedly was hiding Metroid 3: Corruption inside. It had to be played!

And there I went! (though a bit in shock, because I didn’t expect to have the game that early). It’s also the first time I try to play one of the latest 3D games seriously, I mean, for more than 5 minutes, so that showed in my general clumsiness for getting up to speed with the controls.

The first thing that gets your attention are the graphics. I must confess I haven’t studied the Wii specification in detail so the only perception I had was wii can’t do nice graphics. But they are pretty decent for the task they solve and effective enough, with nice effects like some distortion at the end of the gun if you’ve been firing for a long time, simulating heat. The only problem is that they sometimes are very confuse, and you can’t really distinguish what’s on the screen, but I guess that can be part of the fun of simulating spaceship corridors.

The beginning of the game is pretty boring, more administrivia for getting you into the atmosphere of the game and all that. It’s just another boring 3D game with objectives and goals to accomplish until something (which I won’t speak about) happens and the action really begins. Then is when I really got stunned, with Samus adopting the Ball shape and quickly going through tunnels or under a complete area covered with evil little ant-like aliens. It was like if you were watching the classic 2D game and suddenly it turned realistic, with the camera following the ball and changing its angle appropriately as to show the best view. Very good.

After that I haven’t been able to continue playing or watching mr.doob playing, since my old friend, Motion sickness¹ kicked into scene and I was feeling really bad.

I’ll tell you one more thing. About the music. It’s just so … inappropriate for this game. It simply sounds like Yet Another USA Action Movie. Give me my intriguing corridors and happy music back! It has not its own atmosphere. It lacks personality. Maybe I’m wrong. I need to play more to verify that. But hey, these are just first impressions :-)

Thanks, doob!!

¹ Which I used to call as I get sick when playing 3D games. Didn’t know it had a term on its own. Luckily it’s not just me who experiences it.

I so want this!

Legend of Zelda didn’t manage to catch my attention when mr.doob played it, but hey … this is Metroid!!!

I’m still not very convinced about the first person perspective view; when I tried Metroid Prime at past Game On exhibition I could hardly manage to coordinate the movements, but I guess it’ll be easier with the Wii’s controls.

After a horribly hectic day of work during which I was wondering what’s wrong with the software world, asking myself if it’s worth to work as developer and speculating if it would be better to opt for an artistic way of life, but at the same time reminding to myself that I don’t like to surrender my own ideas to commercialism or guidelines normally and that it would not work, I decided to not to do anything when I came back home.

So if I wasn’t going to do anything, I should think of something to do for not doing anything. Something counterproductive… playing a game! Undoubtedly it had to be the Last Ninja 2. I had been browsing some pixel graphics sites on Sunday and for some reason I ended in Lemon64, whose top games ranking included LN2 as one could obviously expect, and I thought I would play it as soon as I could.

The version that I used to play was the Amstrad PCW one, that means no colours (everything in green shades) and no sound (at all!). So I missed completely Ben Daglish tunes, until I managed to get an emulator some years ago and play the C64 version.

Today I wasn’t that lucky… for some reason Lemon64 is not willing to load the disk image and so I was left to my own procrastination sense. Began wandering around the Last ninja archive, ended in Wikipedia’s Last Ninja page and finally found a musical tribute to Last Ninja 2 by Puffy 64, in the style of other C64 bands like Press Play On Tape.

This tribute sounds slightly home-made (specially the percussions, they do sound a lot like General MIDI + reverb!) but it’s a group of very interesting versions. I would have loved to hear more synth-rawness in it, not only chippy blurbs but some more square textures. Anyway, I guess that’s what happens if you have been listening to the original ones for a long time: you want something completely different, but myself I’m more a techno-fan than a metal-rock one so I guess I would have pushed a bit into the synthetic direction if I had had any vote on the final output :-)

For example, I quite like the combination of chip and guitar at the beginning of track number 5, The basement (ingame). A bit after it turns to a more dominant guitar sound which is what I commented before. That said, one must recognize that the guitars are very well played (I would love to be dexter enough as to play like that!).

There’s also a couple of extras: Last Ninja hymn, which sounds strange to say the less. I mean, maybe it’s just me being too neutral but listening to a ninja describing his job feels a bit awkward. Then there are two acoustic medleys so it’s a lot of things to listen and appreciate in the tribute. And you can even print your covers if you’re into burning cd’s and printing covers.

As an anecdote, track 2 reminds me of It never Rains in Southern California, I don’t know why. I think it’s the chords progression, I’m almost willing to begin singing the It never rains… :-)

If you have never seen Last ninja I also found a crazy guy which decided to record how to finish the whole game in a longplay.

Part 1:

Part 2:

And to think that I spent the whole summer of 1990 trying to finish the game… YAY! :-)

So far past week-end was highly productive, even if I was coughing and sneezing and feeling really weak, I still don’t know how but I managed to almost completely sketch three songs in one run. If we compare this with my recent trajectory (which is somehow doing one song each six months) it’s easy to see there’s something extraordinary about that.

The only problem was that my ears are quite blocked since say… Thursday. Which on one hand is good because it’s like using noise-reduction phones, without the annoyances of having the pods inserted into your ears all day and night long. But it’s also quite bad because I can’t hear the higher frequencies. And what does it mean? You can’t mix songs if you can’t hear them!

Today I got a couple of false alarms and thought I was going to finally be able to experience the full sound spectrum again but they were just that, false signs. Some minutes after, my ears were blocked again. Thus I can’t finish these songs yet. And I hope to not have to regret that later: if there’s something I need to improve is the ability to get back into the mood of an unfinished song to be able to finish it. I have hundreds of unfinished sketches which back in the day when I made them sounded very interesting, but if I listen to them now I can’t find the point to most of them. I think I just don’t delete those drafts because I’m a sentimental (and because they hardly use disk space) :-)

Funny thing was that these songs weren’t planned at all, but when adding pictures from our trip to Iceland on February I suddenly got more ideas for my future Iceland EP, so I will add two of these songs¹ to the tracklist, so it’ll be five songs in it. One song (Reykjavík – Höfn) has already been released: it entered the high quality competition on past bcnparty. Unfortunately it wasn’t weird enough to end last, which kind of disappointed me. Some people liked the song and they told me so, and I also got some comments from people which hadn’t dedicated enough time to let the song assimilate them, but that’s something that I was expecting already, so it wasn’t news to me. They just need time…

So if you can’t wait for the final EP you can use that song as a little snack, while I sort little things such as getting rid of this temporary low pass filter which is preventing me from finishing it, and making some artwork and all that. The usual stuff!

¹ The third one doesn’t fit at all with the mood in the EP, I’m afraid.