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2008 Dec 17 tifa


Guy Blade Guy Blade---08:19:00


Iranian Royalty
I picked up the new Prince of Persia game for the PC at GoGamer's "Red Monday" sale. So far, I've found the game to be a pretty solid platformer and it brings some of the "free world" aspects from Assassin's Creed, though mainly in the form of choosable objectives. My main complaint with the game so far is in some of the "button jam" quick-time events. Apparently, the game way never playtested with my mouse (a Logitech laser mouse) as it appears to be impossible to pass any of the button-mashing events with it. I had to pull out my ancient Microsoft USB mouse in order to click quickly enough to clear the event. This means that I now have three mice at my desk--the mouse for all the machines but the Vista box and two mice for Vista.

I find the new personality of the Prince to be substantially more likable than what the Sands of Time prince eventually devolved into. It seems as though this Prince is more snarky and less angsty which I find more enjoyable. Also, the slightly cell-shaded style is visually appealing without seeming overly cartoony.

I am less sure about the complete inability to die that the game provides to the player. In a sense, it is completely reasonable given the ease of saving and other such things, but it also provides a much more visceral sense of frustration. For instance, when fighting a boss if you reach a "die" situation (fall off a ledge or take too much damage and miss the quicktime event), rather than dying, you are saved at the last second and the boss gets some amount of its health back. So far, I haven't been able to determine what the rationale for the amount the boss gets back is. At least once, it has recovered over 50% of max health (from about 30% to about 80%). Another time, it recovered perhaps only 10%. Obviously, the former leads to anger especially if you hit a die situation because you failed a button-mashing challenge.

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2008 Dec 13 peach


Guy Blade Guy Blade---06:17:00


Above Average
I've found that it is important to have something playing in the background while I'm at work to prevent myself from going insane. Originally, I used NPR radio, then I used my iPod. Once that I was stolen, I set up my computer to stream music. Of course, all of these things get old so I'm always looking for something new to use to keep me sane. This week, I discovered that NPR has an archive of all the old episodes of A Prairie Home Companion available for streaming. I find this very entertaining.

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2008 Dec 12 elly


Guy Blade Guy Blade---04:46:00


Nuclear Winter
Last night, I defeated Fallout 3. I'd have to say the game is pretty good. It is certainly huge, interesting and seems to fit in well with the previous games (mostly). The game has one trait that I found somewhat odd, it became progressively easier as it went on. This may be due to the fact that I deliberately avoided the main quest until after I had done everything else, but I think the main reason was because issues that apply in the early game--finding and repairing good weapons,having plenty of ammo, sneaking to get criticals--cease to matter in the late game. It probably also helped that I built my character with the express intent of shooting people in the head: high agility and perception, perks to enhance targeting, moderately high luck, and perks to increase critical damage. By the end of the game, I was walking into a room filled with power armor equipped enemies and 2 shotting them.

Of course, once you hit level 20, you can take the only perk worth taking at that level: Cheat. Now, the game calls this perk "Grim Reaper's Spirit", but that is insufficiently precise. Cheat lets you refill your AP guage every time you drop an enemy in VATS. Now, if I can drop basically any enemy in the game with my chosen weapon in under the maximum VATS allowance, I can simply make every shot a head shot. At some point after I hit 20, I ceased to sneak unless I was pickpocketing or doing something that could make people turn hostile. I simply walked through rooms dropping people on my way to quest objectives.

Regardless, I'm done with the game now. There may be more to do, but it has consumed basically all my free time for the last week or so. Perhaps when the expansion (aka DLC) comes next year, I'll visit the Capital Wasteland again. For now, I'll just wonder how so many national monuments survived a nuclear war.

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2008 Dec 09 celes


Guy Blade Guy Blade---11:58:00


String Equality
Why are the Fallout 3 versions for the 360 and the PC listed as seperately in the Xbox 360 gamercard system? The games have identical acheivements, why can't I compare with people who played it on the 360? Furthermore, if they are going to list them seperately, they should at least include some sort of deliminator like Gears of War and Halo 2 did. The way it is, there are just two copies of Fallout 3 in the list without any explaination.

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2008 Dec 05 tifa


Guy Blade Guy Blade---12:25:00


Clive Barker
Today, when I arrived home from work, my copy of Fallout 3 that I picked up on Black Friday arrive (incidentally, $30 for the basic PC versions from gogamer). Unfortunately, I have developed a sort of set of guidelines for how I play games recently. Essentially, the crux of the system is that I can be playing any number of games "actively" at once, but no more than one game per system. I won't start a new game on a system until I've beaten the currently active game or given it up for worthless. So far, this has worked out fairly well and it is probably the only reason that I made it through Ninja Gaiden Sigma.

Unfortunately for me, however, the game being played on the PC was Clive Barker's Clive Barker's Jericho by Clive Barker. I was about 60% of the way through the game and so I forced my way through the rest this evening. I have to say that the game's biggest faults come in two forms that make it almost, but not quite, worthless. Firstly, there are lost of enemies that can arbitrarily kill some or all of your party. Mainly, these are the every present exploding zombies that require you to shoot somewhere between 3 and 8 hot points before they get into range. Of course, doing so still makes them explode and you can't possibly outrun them while shooting, so if they get close to the party, someone is usually going to die as an exploding zombie is instant death. Secondly, every encounter is, at a minimum, twice as long as it should be. There are usually about 3 times as many enemies in an encounter as one would typically see in FPS games. This doesn't particularly raise the difficulty since you've more or less figured out the encounter's strategy by about the time a usual encounter would end. Unfortunately, couple this with instant party-wipe enemies and you have a recipe for infuriation.

Neither of these things would be so bad if the game allowed you to save, but it only gives checkpoints throughout the level. This is doubly terrible when you consider how often the game crashed (at least once every 3 or 4 levels) and the fact that the game doesn't let you restore from a checkpoint on a reload: you have to replay the entire level. There were at least 3 levels where the game crashed when it was doing the last cutscene before level transition.

I blame SecuROM.

All in all, I paid $10 or $15 for Jericho and I think I paid various close to the correct amount. The game's pointless and forced plot and genuinely unlikable characters wasn't helping any either. Plus, the amount of blood in the game (most easily measured in cubic meters, I'd say) was ridiculous given the in game justification. Look, I know that 10,000 people is a lot, but they just plain don't have that much blood in them--even if you go by compressed anime swordcut standards.

As for Fallout 3, it took the entire length of an episode of Michiko to Hatchin to install, plus a patch to the game, plus a patch to SecuRom before I could play it (didn't even have to crack it to get it to work with my disk image this time). The game itself has been rather entertaining, it does seem to feel like Oblivion with guns which I won't complain about as I enjoyed Oblivion. The only reason that I stopped playing was because I walked over a landmine, died, and the game crashed while doing whatever it does after you die (presumably loading a save of some sort). I should probably go to bed if I want to be productive at work, however.

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2008 Dec 04 emeralda


Guy Blade Guy Blade---07:10:00


Sage Advice
I believe this is useful advice. It was written on some sort of large piece of machinery outside a building at JPL.

Sage Advice

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2008 Dec 02 garnet


Guy Blade Guy Blade---05:40:00


Shaping up as a homemaker
My mother has, for some time, been suggesting that I obtain a Crock Pot, but I had resisted doing so because I'm lazy and using such a thing requires more forethought than I usually put into my dinners. Last week, however, my mother sent me a Crock Pot as a sort of Thanksgiving present. Due to various reasons, I was unable to make use of it until today when I made my first attempt at using it.

I actually began last night by preparing the a recipe that came included for the preparation of a pot roast. All of that work took perhaps an hour and I left the perpared ingredients in the cermic base in the fridge overnight and then left it to cook while I was at work (total cook time ~10 hours).

First Crock-Pot Meal

I have to say that this is probably the tastiest thing that I've eaten in several months. When I was spooning it out into my bowl, I cut the roast using a plastic spoon. I consider this a testament to the success of the dish. Obviously, there was too much to eat in one sitting (the meat alone was 3.4 lbs raw), so we'll see how well the dish holds up on a first (and probably second) reheating.

The only change that I wish I had made was to put in more potatos (the recipe called for only 3 potatos) and that I had prepared dinner rolls before beginning to eat it.

Pot Roast

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