In a moment of self-indulgent nerdiness, I spent a fair amount of time scouring the Internet and figuring out how to extract the dragon shouts from Skyrim. These directions could also be used to extract anything. Hopefully this post helps someone who was as lost as I was.

1. Download BSA Unpacker, Voice file extractor, and xWMAEncode.
2. Use BSA Unpacker and point it at Skyrim – Voices.bsa. It’s in the Skryim\data folder.
3. Look through and find all the files you want to extract. For the shouts, for example, I extracted everything that started with maleeventoned/voicepowers_.
4. Extract everything to its own folder.
5. To convert one .fuz file to a .wav, do:

   fuz_extractor.exe -e file.fuz
   xWMAEncode.exe file.xwm file.wav

Basically how this works is that fuz_extractor pulls out the .lip and .xwm from the .fuz, and then xWMAEncode converts the .xwm to a .wav file.

Now obviously this is tedious for some eighty-odd files, so I used PowerShell, a really useful scripting tool that comes with Windows. Here’s the script I ran:

cd c:\shouts
foreach($f in $(gci C:\shouts | % {$_.BaseName})) {
    .\fuz_extractor.exe -e $f.fuz
    .\xWMAEncode.exe $f.xwm $f".wav"
}

And then just let it run. You’ll have to tweak it to fit your own setup, but that’s how I did it. Once you’ve got your .wav files, you can do whatever you want with them. You could run them right through an MP3 encoder and get MP3s, or you could edit them in Audacity.

Three days ago “Geek and Gamer Girls” was released on the Internet. Those of you who missed it can watch it here, but basically it’s a song where four chicks sing about how they’re geeks. The intention is good but ultimately misguided, and the song ends up really just being an enormous embarrassment. I admit that I spent most of the video cringing.

The first thing I noticed is that it’s less of a song and more of a list put to music. At its core, the song’s lyrics are just references to TV shows, video games, board games, and other things that are traditionally considered geeky. That doesn’t prove that you’re a geek – it only proves that you have a cursory knowledge of some things that aren’t considered to be mainstream. It’s probably hard to come with lyrics for a song like this, but maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t be writing one altogether.

I think I’m questioning the need for a song like this altogether. Was it in question that there are a bunch of girls out there who play video games – and that a portion of them are good looking? Why does that need to be declared in a song? Yes, most geeks are still guys, but females are a still growing minority. There are far better ways to make such a declaration, anyway; take a look at Felicia Day’s The Guild for an example.

But the part that gets me the most is that, in a song about girls who are geeky, there’s a fairly lengthy rap session by Seth Green. I don’t understand why his cameo is necessary. I get that the original song (Katy Perry’s “California Gurls”) has a rap section with Snoop Dogg in it and maybe they wanted to reflect that in this song, but it seems contrary to the point of the song. Clearly the song is meant to be some form of anthem for geek girls, but then you have a guy perform in roughly one third of the song? The song is about empowerment, and having a guy in it waters it down, I think.

Ultimately I think the song falls flat and really just ends up hurting the cause (whatever you defined it as) more than helping it. And unlike other people on the Internet, I’m not insulted that the song references things that I like. It’s really just an unnecessary piece of fluff that sets back female gaming. The right way to do it would have put the girls in a Gears of War group, have them go around wrecking other teams, and then laughing over the mics.

I’ve just completed Machinarium, an indie Flash-based puzzle/strategy game, and it was absolutely excellent. I grew up playing puzzle games like this, but even this one was a bit of a challenge. Some of the puzzles in there were just really, really difficult. In one part, you play Connect Five against a computer who’s exceedingly good. And there’s a sliding block puzzle towards the end that would give any Professor Layton players a run for their money.

But beyond the puzzles, the game is gorgeous. It has this sort of hand-drawn steampunk feel with a main character that’s both sad and adorable. In the game, there are these bully robots that have more or less terrorized all the other NPCs in the game, and they demonstrate this with these crude little animations that are heartbreaking. The soundtrack, which you can also get, is also wonderful. Overall it’s dark and melancholy, but can be uplifting in some parts. It’s not unlike the soundtrack to Braid, only it’s a bit more cohesive.

It’s truly an excellent game, and well worth your money. I picked it up for $5 during their piracy sale the other week (I didn’t steal it in the first place, thank you very much) but it’s worth the $20. Plus you get the soundtrack, so all the better. Go play it.

I know I’m probably the last person to finish FF13, but I had stuff to do (like moving) so I didn’t have time to finish it. This was the first Final Fantasy game I’ve played since FF10, so it’s been awhile since I was in the JRPG world. Anyway, my thoughts:

• Graphics: I don’t think it’d be a surprise to anyone that this game is gorgeous. It’s crazy to think that we’re beyond the point of fully rendered animations, but they’re just irrelevant when the in-game graphics are just about as good as the cutscenes. Not that I could really tell what I was supposed to be looking at in the sequences, but they sure were shiny.
• Battling: Overall I liked the battle system. I spent most of the time jamming the X button to go into Auto battle (or whatever the equivalent was) but I get the sense that picking the actual moves wasn’t the main purpose of the system; they wanted us to build the right teams and use them effectively. At first I remember being a bit thrown off by only controlling one character, but they did a pretty good job of making the computer as efficient as possible, so I didn’t really need to worry that it would make stupid decisions in what to cast and so on. Now having said that…
• Summons: Why in the hell did this game have summons? Seems like it was just something that they threw at us at the beginning of the game as a challenge, and then forgot it altogether. I think I used my summon a total of two times, one of which was the end battle – and even then I probably didn’t need it. It just served no purpose and was entirely forgettable.
• Leveling: I think I liked the new system. Get a bunch of experience, pump it into whatever roles you like, and advance on. I guess it was nicer than having to swap out materia or some such – or at least didn’t make me feel stupid for not wanting to deal with all that. The focus was clearly on evolving the right roles to get the best outcome for your team.
• Gameplay: Here’s the part where everyone slammed the game, and I have to agree. There are so many sandbox games out there now where you can just wander around and do whatever you want whenever you want, and this was the exact opposite. You walk in a straight line for pretty much the whole game. Oh, there’s one part where you can wander around a bit, but they sort of push you away from doing that. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for the days when you got a ship and could travel around.
• Plot: I don’t expect to ever understand the plot of JRPGs, so that’s that.
• Music: Masashi Hamauzu did a pretty good job with this one, I think. Character and plot motifs are present throughout the game and add to it without being overly annoying. I still wish they wouldn’t use lyrics (does the chocobo melody really need words?) but I can deal with it.

Alright, I guess that turned out to be an actual list. I think I liked the game as a whole, and it was nice to play it after a long drought, but of course there were some annoyances. Now I gotta go find something else to play. Maybe Super Mario Galaxy 2…

After a week-long hiatus, I started playing Final Fantasy 13 again. I had basically burned myself out, getting stuck in battles for which I was underequipped or clearly had no chance of winning. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers, but it basically started when the game became nonlinear. It went from this “walk down the corridor” sort of game, to “here’s a big area, go wander around, and maybe if you get bored, go find the exit.” Fairly abrupt shift, I think, and that’s when the frustration started.

You know, I really wanted to like FF13. It’s been eight years since I played a Final Fantasy game, and I had really been looking forward to it. There’s just something holding me back. Maybe it’s their use of apostrophes.