Summary and Review of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn

First, read some stuff about Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on Wikipedia.
This game starts off about a year after Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. Back in PoR, after Mad Kind Ashnard of Daein was defeated, the Empire of Beignon was given control of Daein during its reconstruction. In Radiant Dawn, we learn that the senators of Beignon have been taking advantage of Daein and its citizens since Beignon was given control. The game starts out with the player learning about the Dawn Brigade led by Macaiah and Sothe, the sucky character from PoR, whose mission is to free Daein from Beignon oppression. At the end of the first part, the Dawn Brigade wins Daein's independence. In the second part, we find ourselves back in Crimea, where Queen Elincia's leadership is under question by the nobles of her country. In this part, you fight against the armies of the nobles to assert Elincia's leadership. In the cutscene at the end, one of Elincia's closest advisors, Lucia, is about to be hanged when (yay!) the Griel Mercenaries show up and save her. In part 3, Beignon abruptly and unexpectedly attacks the Laguz, and an all out war between the Laguz Army (consisting of Crimea, the Griel Mercenaries, and the forces of the beast, hawk, and raven Laguz tribes) and the Beignon Empire (who forces Daein to fight with them through a blood pact with Daein King Pelleas). In the last few chapters of the third part, you alternate between fighting with the Dawn Brigade forces you trained in Part 1, who are forced to fight for Beignon) and the Griel Mercenaries. In some chapters, you face characters from the other team. In the end of part 3, you must awaken the "dark" goddess from Lehran's Medallion and the goddess Ashera before she is awaken by war, because if she is awaken by war, she will destroy their entire world based on a contract she made with the people of Tellius (their continent) years before. With the help of the goddess that everyone considered to be evil, Yune, you must defeat Ashera because she still plans to destroy the continent. She also turns everyone into statues (except for all of the main characters... what an unexpected convenient coincidence [actually the characters attribute this to them being stronger than all of the other soldiers]), and unfreezes those who will help her. Before you face the big bad goddess you learn that Sephiran (a good guy) used the Black Knight a.k.a. General Zelgius (just research that, takes too long to explain) to orchestrate the whole war in the hopes that the goddess Ashera would destroy all people. That was a pretty big unexpected shocker, actually. Of course, in the end, you do defeat Ashera, and everything goes back to normal.

Anyway... onto what I think of the game.

Part 1: Wii-ness
Looking at it as a game for the Wii and all of the features it entails, it lacks severely. You can't even wave around the controller to do anything. It's all boring button pressing. You can even use a Gamecube controller to control the game. WTF NINTENDO?!? IT'S A WII GAME NOT A GAMECUBE GAME!! That's probably my biggest concern.

Part 2: Part 1
The characters were OK. Definitely not my favorite part of the game, but the cutscene at the beginning is really cool. Nolan and Edward are actually really good, and so is Jill (actually she's awesome as long as you don't let her die like me).

Part 3: Part 2
My least favorite part. It's short and no where near as fun and entertaining as the other parts. Two things make it worth it, though. You get the best player in the game in my opinion, Nephenee, and the cutscene at the end is awesome because you are reintroduced to the Greil Mercenaries, the real characters of the game.

Part 4: Part 3
I love this part because you get to destroy everything with the Griel Mercenaries and you get most of them up to third teir unit. In the chapters you have to play with the Dawn Brigade, you realize how weak they are compared to the Griel Mercenaries. The cutscenes in this part are really awesome, too.

Part 5: Part 4
This is the best part, even though it's much shorter than Part 3 and maybe Part 1. It contains 7 chapters: the prologue, chapters 1-5, and final chapter, but the final chapter is actually divided into five mini chapters. The battles in this part are really awesome and the final chapter is really awesome. The last part of this part, though, the epilogue, is the most boring forty five minutes of the whole game because all you do is read a bunch of text. The cutscene at the end of this part is really cool.

Overall, the game rocks. It's better than Path of Radiance and might just be better than Sacred Stones. Buy the game and play it. I could have done better in this review, but that would take way too much time.

Oh and my five best players in Radiant Dawn (as rated by the game by # of kills):
5. Mia (Griel Mercenaries)
4. Boyd (Griel Mercenaries)
3. Ike (Commander, Griel Mercenaries)
2. Gatrie (Griel Mercenaries)
1. Nephenee (Griel Mercenaries)

I give it an 8.5 out of 10.

American Pie: The Best Song Ever? Yes.

Listen to it. Try to figure out what it means. It's really long, yet it doesn't get boring. Plus, it is really cryptic. If you do some research though, you figure out that it's about the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper". The whole song then goes on to trace the downward history of rock and music in general after their deaths, mainly Buddy Holly. It's amazing how well the song flows when the whole thing is filled with metaphors and puns referring to musicians. Some references that stand out:

• Miss American Pie: The rock and roll of the '50s. It's virgin, innocent music (hence Miss) that is as big a part of America as apple pie, therefore it's the "American Pie". With the death of Buddy Holly, this music went with him.
• The line, "Did you write the Book of Love and do you have faith in God above" is a reference to the hit, "The Book of Love" by The Monotones in '58. We are getting in to the end of the '50s.
• "I was a lonely teenage bronkin' buck \ With a pink carnation and a pick up truck \ But I knew I was out of luck, \ The day, the music, died." This makes reference to "A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation)", a hit from Marty Robbins in '57. He finds himself lonely because this type of music is no more.
• Bob Dylan is the jester. He took the place of Elvis after Elvis died.
• The football metaphor refers to The Rolling Stones.
• The "girl who sang the blues" is Janet Joplin. She sings the music that used to be.
• In the verse that makes reference to Janet Joplin, this song (American Pie) is taken to the sacred store (the record companies) to be recorded. He is told that the music won't play anymore. The long songs from back when with interpretive lyrics won't cut it anymore. It's all about the money now. The quality doesn't matter as much. (Scary accurate when looking at our record companies today.)
  
• "The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost" refers to Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens.
• "They caught the last train for the coast" means that this kind of music is dead now. Buddy Holly, Elvis, and the rest are gone. Rock'n'Roll is dead in its original form. It's no longer what it used to be.

There are many more references than this in the song, but these are a few. The song follows the path of rock so accurately and without a single straight out reference that it definitely is among the top songs in the history of America. Could it be the best? Yes it could.

Numbers!! 11-19-07

So today we have a numbers update. Total video views on youtube has reached over 19,000
views. Our most viewed video, Genghis Khan, has 5,942 views so it is very close to hitting 6,000. Our site has over 800 hits as of today. These numbers are quite special. Almost 1 week ago we had broken 18,000 total views on youtube which means we are getting roughly 1,000 views a week, which I think is awesome. Oh our channel now has 1,073 views so that went up around 50 from last week. We would only expect the growth of views to exponential (literally
speaking, so with every new view it increases our next chance of views so our total views would have an exponential growth pattern). Yay! Expect a party at 20,000.

All In One Computers

Recently designs have been released that feature challenges to the popular iMac. Sony, Gateway, and Dell are gearing up for releases of their first All In One PCs. It is an obvious attempt to curb the popularity of Apple's iMac. So what are these new models going to be like? Sony's will have a 19'' screen and be $1900 for the base model, Gateway's will have 19" and it will be around $1299
for the base model and finally Dell's will have a 22" screen and will have a base price around $2000. The iMac if you were wondering has a 20" screen and starts at $1199 plus it is a Mac. All of the competitors of Apple have added built in cameras to at least one of their models. So what do they look like? iMac:


Sony VAIO VGC-LS1:


Gateway One:


And Dell's XPS something or other:


So there you have it. Processors and RAM and graphics stay about the same for every model. Some of the high end models made by Gateway and Sony have blu-ray drives and burners but that wouldn't make any difference to the standard buyer. Of ocurse I have to say that copies are never as good as the original, so I vote for the cheaper, more reliable iMac.

New Video

Not really a video but it counts. www.youtube.com/mysticteacupproject

Pencil

Well there has been a lot to post about today. So awhile back I downloaded a free animation program called Pencil. Today was the first time I had really tried to use it and it turns out to be a powerful little app. Here is the video I made, it is short and really bad, but I was just getting used to things.

Yeah you can expect a whole new breed of videos now. Don't worry though, they will actually have a story and some quality when we actually release them.

Site Updates

Well today a lot of work has been done on the site. Two themes have been added to the welcome page, night and light (really creative names). Night features an all black background, usual gray text, and one of the images from a previous blog post. Light has a yellow background, orange text, and an all new picture that was mostly hand drawn (obviously). Of course the original is still there with its white background, gray text, and original emblem. Night is my personal favorite. Also the entire site is now set up so that it can be easily navigated using a non-javascript enabled browser such as the one on the iPhone. Keep on the lookout for more themes and new features.

Numbers!!

Our total video views on YouTube has broken 18,000 and our channel views have broken 1000! And our total site views has broken 700! I'll bet 10 dollars every single one of our site views was us... But that's OK because it's awsome!

Public School Bureaucracy

So, I go JCIB. At least, that's what they want you to think before you get there. Once you are there, you realize that all you are is just Shades Valley High School's way of making their test scores look better. The beastmaster (who recently decided to appoint herself principal of JCIB) of the whole thing is Ms. Baker, who cares more about how she looks with the test scores of her students than she does the actual well being of them. If she did really care, JCIB would be a separate school. I've thought about writing the Jefferson County Board of Education about the unfair use of JCIB students and the fact that we are being forced to say that "we are part of the Shades Valley family." It occurred to me, though, that for how long they have been letting this go on, they must be in line with Ms. Baker, making writing a letter pointless. Anyway, they want to make Shades Valley be the Jefferson County flagship school, and they really do not want magnet schools like JCIB. The only reason they keep it around is because of it's national recognition. They'd rather the smart students not be able to be together under their own separate building, but as part of Shades Valley. What really makes this bad is the offenses that if repeated can get you suspended in Shades Valley, which are also enforced on the JCIB students because of the beastmaster:

• Bringing a bookbag (even if empty) in to the lunch room
• Bringing a bookbag to a classroom
• Leaving your shirt untucked
• Bringing a blanket to class
• Closing your eyes in a classroom

On top of this Bureaucratic BS, if you are late to a class, you'll find the door locked, and you must report to the library to get written up and miss 30 minutes of class. At lunch, you cannot buy any item of food separately, because it's against Jefferson County regulations. You must buy a whole lunch, even if you just want a milk. This leads to a whole lot of wasted food. It's also against the rules to use a bookbag that is not mesh or plastic. Their reasoning for these rules (I'm not making this up) is that in a bookbag, you could hide a bomb or a gun. This is also why you can't bring a bookbag to lunch or to a classroom. In your pants, you could hide a gun if your shirt was untucked. A blanket represents sleeping. Now the teachers at JCIB (and the real principal of JCIB, Mrs. Jones) thinks all of this is stupid. And since the board wants JCIB so much to be a part of Shades Valley, we have got to adhere to all of the crap rules.
That's bureaucracy in Jefferson County.

Stuff I have been working on

So recently I have been reading some photoshop tutorials and have been inspired to do some things for the site. Here are two main new things I have made. Oh and now you can expect holiday or seasonal layouts for the site. Such as Christmas, Valentines, etc. Here are the pics.

Leopard Log: Day 7 ( I think) and some other updates.

Well Leopard continues to preform flawlessly. Today was the first major software update that i have had for Leopard, so that was exciting.
So for other updates. I have spent a few hours in Photoshop and come up with a pretty nice picture, well nice by my standards. And now the page that comes up when you visit our site
you will see he picture and after 5 seconds be redirected to the main page. It is pretty snazzy.