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Malik (6/21/10)

In a basic sense, I beat Super Mario Galaxy 2 this weekend. However, with the cool new design of each level having three or fewer stars, I have levels to play still. I'm not 100% sure if I'll get all 120 stars, and then the extra 120 stars, and the hidden one or two other bonus stars. However, I have only about 95 stars right now, which means I still have a few levels to play that are still locked. I want to try each level, so I will keep playing for a bit.

Unfortunately, this will require me taking on some "daredevil" runs on bosses. These are the boss battles that have you facing death if you get hit once. This is not my idea of fun, but it is also an idea that's in front of me right now. I can see some of the daredevil runs being annoying, but I see one or two just being completely frustrating (like the final Bowser Jr. fight).

On a different note, I wasted too much time this weekend. I missed some World Cup things and wanted to look up what I didn't catch on TV online. Since the standard press coverage is pretty limited and didn't cover enough information on some controversial events (like how Kaka got ejected on a second yellow card by being ran in to by an Ivory Coast player who was not paying attention), I went to the land of Google to find some more informed coverage. This lead to me being hit, while on a supposedly professional website (a major newspaper site) by Malware hell.

I just want to say that the type of people who run things like the AV Security Suite malware are pig f#@$ers. There is not nicer way to say that. AV Security Suite is one of those hostage style malware bugs that causes all programs on your PC to fail to load, except Internet Explorer and Firefox, and these browsers are forever sent to a site to purchase "AV Security Suite" to clean the infection. That's annoying as hell, but simple enough to fix when you know what you're dealing with. The part that makes this worse is that free malware removers are a thing of the past. Nearly all malware removers will find your infections for you, for free, but they will not remove anything unless you buy a subscription. Even the good free malware removers of the past (like Ad-Aware) have gone to a payment model.

Of course, if you're smart, the solution is pretty basic. In case you or anyone you know is hit with this type of bullshit, here's the easy solution;

Boot Windows in safe mode (hit F8 repeatedly before the Windows logo appears during a reboot). Then go ahead and uncheck and proxy settings in Internet Explorer (probably unnecessary due to the next step, but it feels safer doing so). Then just perform a system restore to any date before AV Security Suite f#@$ed over your PC. Done. Unlike what most online forums say to fix this type of bullshit, you don't need to pay for a malware remover.

Of course, AV Security Suite makes the PC look like Windows is messing up some, due to how the normal security features of Windows are handled (read: they are handled in some goofy ways to begin with). This makes finding the exact problem a bit of an annoyance if you're not aware of what is going on. It also doesn't help that AV Security Suite installs pretty damned stealthily (it goes beyond tricking you into clicking something...it loaded on my PC without me ever clicking a damned thing) before it hits you like a ton of bricks.

Anyway, between the poor coverage of the World Cup, the bullshit calls (like Kaka's ejection, the US goal that wasn't meant to be, and the bad handball call in the same US game), and how poor coverage led me to getting malware, I'm really losing the World Cup feeling about now. At least I have SMG2 for now...but that will only last so much longer before my attention span wears too thin.

Also, just for the record, this crap with the World Cup does NOT mean a replay system would be good.  It may seem good when your team gets screwed, but it sure would ruin the game the other 99% of the time.

Malik

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