Machinarium, you lovable monster

Previous post stated that I  bought the Humble Botanicula Debut, which I did. Botanicula is an amazing discovery game and is infinitely cute, but the real prize here is Machinarium, another game in the same pay-what-you-want bundle.

The game is a 2D point-and-click adventure game, a nearly dead genre. This game requires that you have adequate thinking skill, persistence to figure out what you have to do next, a good brain to solve some puzzles, and, most of all, the desire and patience to click every dang surface in the game, to try combining every item with every other item, and to try using every item with every surface that you can interact with. In other word, it's a point-and-click adventure game. Not really special in this regard. 
 

The scenes, however, the visual, is stunningly beautiful, in a steampunk sort of way. The animation is fluid and detailed. And although it has no dialogue, at all, it can still tell a story with its animations and visual dialogue boxes. It's music is nice and very fitting with the atmosphere too.

Bought a Humble Bundle

Info flash: Humble Bundle is a, well, bundle of indie games that is sold for whatever price you want. Seriously, any price you want. Whether you want to shell out $1000 to get to the Top Contributors list or if you're so broke you can only spare a cent, you can get (usually) awesome indie games. One bundle usually only last about two weeks or so, then nothing until the next bundle, containing different games, is out.

Right now, the Humble Botanicula Debut is running. Bought it, love it. If you can buy something online, and like point-and-click adventure games in general, I highly recommend giving it a look. There's still one week left to buy it. Or if you are not a fan of adventure sorta-puzzling games, just bookmark the Humble Bundle page or something. The next bundle might be more to your taste. 

The rest of this post is more of a personal banter, or educational information about Indonesian's gaming industry. Call it what you like. It's the result of how this blog post veered from its main purpose.

Final Exam done

For about three years, anyway. I won't be seeing this sort of big-deal school exam until I'm almost done with high school.

So, the most important test for the last three years is done. Over. Poof. Just like that. I didn't even study like mad and dive myself into endless textbooks pages, which I usually do before exams. But now it's all finished.Just... finished. I can even make a campfire out of those schoolbooks, they're not needed anymore. But I never have the heart to do anything worse than banging a book to a wall, even to the books that I loath, so stuffing them into a giant eye-sore of a plastic box will do, perhaps never to be seen again.

There's sort of a feeling of emptiness now. For... about two months I think, I am no longer truly required to study, or even do anything that isn't life-sustaining. It feels almost boring. Of course, there's still many things that I can and should do, instead of lying in bed all day. But still, with the madly long holiday coming up there's bound to be days when I have no great ideas and will probably end up spending the whole day to playing Civilization IV or reading TV Tropes, probably without planning to.

But still, it feels great to be free of school. I don't have to get up so early, for one, and I can actually focus on what I want to do, like trying to play the keyboard or making a proper program. And spend more time and thoughts for more writing. Writing, literature, seems to be the only branch of Creativity that I can try to excel at, beside shapeless imaginations. I have a million stories in my mind, none of them but one cheap short story I made for a school assignment is done.

So, hoping to have something to show in the upcoming holiday that are better than game Achievements, beaten game, and speedruns high-scores... Actually, those are fine too.

Here's hoping for a good summer-on-the-northern-hemisphere vacation. It's really just my luck, and how Earth revolves around the sun, that Indonesia doesn't have a convenient four-seasons system to mark its yearly holidays.

Drawing... stuffs

So the most important school test for the last three years is coming up, something that folks at school consider something akin to life and death. It's beginning Monday, and most people will normally dive into assortments of text and exercise book to get themselves ready. Me? I practice drawing. And it's turning up finer than when I try doing music.

So I royally failed every formal music lessons that I've ever tried, but nobody has ever actually taught me how to draw. Since I was young I only doddle by myself. Stuffs I made up, people I made up, and stuffs that came out of cartoons that I watched on TV. Just little doodles, not meant to be anything. It's fun. I made nothing that impressed anyone, but it was fun. No one praised me or showed any appreciation. I didn't care, it was still fun.

Only when the internet came around that I noticed that, man, my drawings are horrible. So I looked up some tutorials, anatomy guides, and artworks with the kind of style I can relate to. My drawings become progressively better as I practice and look at more better artworks. But I can never agree to have someone taught me face-to-face. I never even follow a tutorial straight-on. It just feels a bit irking, having someone telling what to do with what I make.

Not sure what point I'm trying to make here. In fact, I should be getting back to drawing things instead of dropping another nonsensical ramblings into the sea of blog.

Later.

I tried doing music

Here's a life story I don't mind sharing.

When I was a kid, I heard all sort of things about music, and to be specific, how anyone should learn to do it. How much it'll help develop creativity and those blah-blah-blah. I didn't hold much interest in music then, my ears weren't as accustomed to listening and paying attention to them.

My parents thought having me learn how to play music is a fine and dandy thing, and I had nothing against the idea. The earliest formal lesson I could remember was in Elementary School, where playing either a flute or pianica is a mandatory subject, whether or not you're good at it. And I was, or at least it felt like I was. Playing the flute for school is still the best formal lesson I ever had in music, and as it turned out, the only one that I enjoyed.

But playing the flute was only for school, it didn't grab much of my attention. Then my mother had an idea to give me guitar lesson in a local music education center. I just nodded my head, thinking being able to play the guitar would be pretty cool. So she took me there once a week, sometime after school, where I would be taught how to play from the very basic by single teacher who only has a single student each day.

So I notice there's a Now Playing thing?

At the sidebar? Right now only existing as a white box with "Coming Soon!" in black? One of the many things that I planned but never carry out for this blog. I might actually use it, I might not. It's meant for showing what video game I currently play, and now that I think about it, what book I currently read. The two will, most likely, heavily influence whatever I happen to make, blog post or otherwise.

It is now abandoned, forgotten, just like every other thing in this blog.

EDIT: Finally made use of the Now Playing spot. The 12th Touhou games, Undefined Fantastic Object, should be shown there instead of a big white-and-black stock picture. 

And now that I think about it, maybe it needs a redesign, the blog I mean. The current design is just a Blogger default, modified as I see fit, but not modified enough. I guess I really do need to mess with the basic stylesheets. I have some experiences on the field, should be enough to tweak it a little.

And look, I find the trouble to spare a few minutes to write another blog entry, even though it's about the blog itself. Maybe it won't be useless as I think.

This is a fact

That I cannot keep a journal or blog of sort, to be updated regularly, without eventually abandoning it before getting anywhere, is a tried and true fact. The only successful journal I have is a physical one that I drag around wherever I go, and while dragging a portable computer is fine and dandy, internet connection is not available everywhere. Writing one offline to be put up later is also not a desirable option, it will just be left in my hard disk, never to be read again.

This blog is just a little experiment, one that is already doomed to fail, in a way, and looks like it has already failed. But that I find all the trouble just to post another post might be a sign that this blog hasn't died yet. Or at least powered by some unearthly necromancy so it can stay alive. Yet, just like every other places in the sea of blogs, this one's fall and/or revival most likely went unnoticed by most. One would never notice if one grain of salt disappear from a vast ocean, after all.

I still go to school, and these last few weeks it has kept me busy. There's fewer times to spend for surfing the web, reading, or playing with little programming knick knacks I made when I want to do something more useful. It's very unlikely to see any of those little excuses of a software to be released to the wild wild internet, but I still have hope that one day I'll make one that won't be embarrassing to look at.

Right now I'm pouting over my internet connection, and possibly my browser's capability, which seems to always run into trouble whenever I play a video longer than 10 minutes. But when I think of it, connection has been quick and speedy, nothing to be complained. It's just my impatience. 

And what's up with my use of English here? It sounds poetic or... prose-ic... or something... Must be all the hardcore Purple Proses I've been reading, not all are enjoyable, although most are rather pompous.