I’ve spent some time on and off trying to learn French, and Duolingo has an excellent free online, interactive program to learn French and dozens of other languages. Worth checking it out if you haven’t already.
All posts by Jeremy Fonte
Gyokuro Imperial Green Tea
I love drinking delicious loose-leaf teas, especially white tea and green tea – and the “Gyokuro Imperial Green Tea” from Teavana is quite possibly the most delicious green tea I’ve ever had. It’s both sweet and plant-like with a certain saltiness or umami flavor.
New Fonte Labs Site
I’ve created and posted a new, very simple site for “Fonte Labs”, my experimental programming portal.
Check it out at:
Game Review – “Assassin’s Creed II” for Xbox 360
Game Title: Assassin’s Creed II
Game System: Xbox 360
Rating
Graphics: 9 / 10
Gameplay: 9 / 10
Replay Value: 6 / 10
Difficulty: Average. Short challenging moments in between longer easier adventures.
Having only begun the first Assassin’s Creed after finishing the second, I can’t really do much of a comparison between the two. However, I think the sequel stands on its own as a genuinely fun, captivating game of mild difficulty – it seems easier than the first one.
Most of the gameplay revolves around avoiding the guards, parkour around the rooftops and eliminating certain targets, and it’s the kills which are the main anchors of the storyline (perhaps unsurprising given the game title). While there are open-world elements in that you can explore the environments (read: cities) that you visit, there is a clear path of how to move the story forwards. Your “next step” is generally made clear by blinking icons in the mini-map and full map, and between the maps and the compass it’s easy to find your next activity.
As the game progresses certain “meta-tasks” arise, that is, activities that span across multiple cities and parts of the game. The two most prominent examples of this are codex pages that you have to have deciphered, and certain locations that hold secret relics (which are hard to explain without revealing certain sub-plots).
The combat is fluid and fun, but due to the abundance of “medicine” that heals a significant part of your health, fighting is rarely much of a challenge, even when it’s many against one. As you progress, you get to buy better armor, which gives you more health, and better weapons that increase your attack speed and damage.
While the game is so easy that at times it almost feels like watching a movie rather than playing a game, the story and gameplay is continuously entertaining and I highly recommend it.
Retro Game Review – “Dragon Warrior” for NES
Game Title: Dragon Warrior
Game System: NES
Rating
Graphics: 7 / 10
Gameplay: 8 / 10
Replay Value: 4 / 10
Difficulty: This game is more a time investment than a difficult challenge
I finally beat this game a week or two ago. It’s one of my absolute favorite old RPGs, and was a fairly early hack and slash RPG. The premise is you’re a warrior tasked with defeating the dragonlord to basically save the world. You’ll spend most of your time leveling up to face more and more difficult dungeons and roaming monsters over the course of maybe 20 hours. You wander around an overworld map facing enemies that appear at random intervals, wandering from town to town and speaking to locals for clues to the fairly simple puzzles/hidden items spread throughout the game.
Gold, to buy better weapons, armor and items, as well as room and board at inns to restore health and magic points, is difficult to amass early in the game but is absurdly plentiful later on. As you level up and have increased stats, you face enemies that both provide more XP and more gold, making it possible to buy increasingly expensive and powerful weapons and armor.
The best part of the game is the monster fighting sequences. Each monster has a brightly colored image that pops up when you encounter the enemy. Some monsters are just variations of color or minor detail built upon other monster art, but there are many unique designs overall.
The most dangerous part of the game is questing too long and letting your health get so low that you can’t make it back home – but the entire time I played I only died a few times.
Overall a classic RPG for the NES that’s a blast to play once, but not so much a second time.
Warcraft, the Movie…
This past weekend I watched Warcraft… pretty disappointing. Poor acting, not much of a script and nothing too surprising or interesting.
I’ve never played World of Warcraft, but I did thoroughly enjoy Warcraft and Warcraft II, in the days when it was an RTS game not an RPG (I didn’t find Warcraft III as interesting as the first two). There were a few nostalgic references to those RTS games but that didn’t make the movie that much better.
Should have rented it before buying… oh well.
Theory Math Library
I’ve updated the site for my theoretical math library, currently only written for JavaScript – “Theory JS”. I plan on porting it to Java sometime soon. It covers abstract algebra, combinatorics, number theory, set theory and statistics.
Check it out at:
http://fonte.me/theorymath/default.html
Retro Game Review – “Battle Chess” for NES
Game Title: Battle Chess
Game System: NES
Rating
Graphics: 7 / 10
Gameplay: 8 / 10
Replay Value: 8 / 10
Difficulty: For casual chess players, there is more than enough of a challenge here.
This chess game is solely responsible for my wanting a blue and red chess set, due to the colors of the two sides in the game. Sadly, such a chess set would be mostly for show, as I’m not terribly interested in chess – please keep in mind that I’m reviewing this game as a mildly interested beginner at chess.
The graphics offer 2D and 3D modes. The 2D mode has a quicker feel due to a lack of animations, and the chess pieces have a nice clean look. It’s the 3D look, however, that inspired my imagination playing this game as a kid. Every time a move is made the pieces slowly (and I do mean really slowly) walk to their new destination. If they take a piece as part of the move, a short 10-second animation is shown of them fighting one another.
These 3D fight scenes are cool, but the sluggish pace of moving pieces in the 3D setting can make you really, really want to switch to the 2D mode and its more responsive feel. There are a host of sounds that accompany the 3D mode and add some nice atmosphere generally lacking in chess games.
Due to my lack of chess skills I only play on the “novice” difficulty setting, and there are a number of levels beyond that. The NES’ humble processor performance is obvious when the computer will sometimes think for 5 or more seconds before making a move – but it’s generally not enough of a delay to become truly annoying. You can also play in a two-player mode instead of playing the computer.
Overall a fun chess game with more than enough difficulty for beginners and beyond.
Return to Raspberry Pi
A couple years ago I bought a Raspberry Pi – the B+ Model. Unlike Arduino, which I made a number of hobby projects with, I only really used the Pi as a normal Linux computer. Its specs are fairly modest with ½ GB of RAM and an ARMv6 processor – and this ARMv6 CPU really limited which Linux distros could be installed on the microSD card that functioned as storage for the system.
I ended up installing Pidora, a flavor of Fedora Linux using the Xfce desktop that runs on ARMv6 processors (Xfce is actually my favorite desktop, regardless of the system – followed by Gnome, then followed by Unity on Gnome).
After running some console commands and browsing some of the software that was installed, I ended up just playing a game of chess, which I lost… and then I disconnected the Raspberry Pi, perhaps for another good while.
Guitar Pedals – MXR Distortion +
One of the reasons I bought a Jackson electric guitar as my first guitar, many years ago, was because that’s what Randy Rhoads of Ozzy Osbourne played (though he played a variation on the Flying V body shape – cool but a little too extreme for me). The MXR Distortion + was just as key in the tone and nature of his sound.
This MXR pedal is not very high-distortion, like many modern distortion and overdrive pedals. But the tone is sweet and smooth, and remarkably articulate; it’s an optimal pedal for shredding, providing just enough bite to carry the gentle fuzzy base tone through the mix.
The pedal is a nice sunny yellow, with a stomp switch and two knobs: “Output” and “Distortion”. Generally, I keep the distortion knob ¾ up or higher, and the output from 12 o’clock to 2 o’clock. If you really crank up the output close to max it gets a bit fuzzier as the sound breaks up. I much prefer the definition provided by moderate output volume settings.
This is easily my favorite guitar pedal, and it’s built to last with MXR’s durable metal design.