So, I had expected the various parts for my new computer to arrive before the end of the week. It turns out that, because I live less than 50 miles away from both the NewEgg distribution center and the Dell distribution center, both the new drives and the new mobo/processor/ram were waiting for me when I got home last night. I used the case that I had previously been using for eve before I switched eve to a low power single board system which saved me the trouble of having to find a new case.

I installed Ubuntu for the new fileserver (Ubuntu has been my goto distribution for about a year now). Unfortunately, there is some sort of bizarre issue wherein the enumeration of drives by the motherboard and by the kernel are different, so I had to use my old Gentoo learned skills to fiddle with the devices.map and manually reinstall grub.

It turns out that rebuilding a drive in a 5x1TB raid array takes about 6 hours. I hope to not have to do that again until the next doubling of the array. I'm now in the midst of rsyncing the 1.7 TiB or so from the old array to the new array. Even with switched gigabit ethernet, I expect that this will take several days. Hopefully I've over-estimated, but I doubt it.

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So, I just beat darkSector. It was a game that I picked up on a whim when it was on sale from newegg for less than $20. That fit within my general rule of thumb which suggests that I purchase any game with an average review score greater than 70% and a price less than $20 (obviously, the game must not belong to one of the genre blacklists: racing, sports, etc).

The game itself was rather decent if a bit short. It certainly wasn't anything groundbreaking or amazing, but it was fun enough to kill an afternoon. It was mainly a third person shooter with a handful of odd gameplay mechanics such as making use of a chakram as a primary weapon and not allowing you to use weapons dropped from enemies for more than perhaps a minute due to various plot machinations. Rightly or wrongly, it appears as though the second shotgun available in the game's shop could be better known as the "win button" because of its ability to decimate most enemies even in the late game.

Immediately previous to playing through darkSector, I had been playing The Force Unleashed. The gameplay in TFU is actually quite decent and the game is generally fun. I found the plot itself to be interesting as an explaination of how the Jedi were hunted down as well as a bit of expounding on how the Rebellion formed. My main complaint with the plot, however, is the complete lack of explaination for why the main character's attitude changes over the course of the game. My best explanation is "spite", but it seems strange that a character would turn to the light side of the force out of spite.

The game also has a few gameplay issues: it is easy for enemies to destroy you by juggling; there are lots of ledges to shove enemies off of, but no way to recover if you fall off one; checkpoints are arbitrarily spaced. Also, the game's acheivements consist primarily of "kill 100 enemies using x" and "kill 500 enemies using x" which is just laziness in a game where they could've instead had "throw an enemy out of the window of a space ship by hitting them with an exploding barrel", "kill an enemy by throwing a jawa at it", "use every force power on an enemy without killing it", or "make three gripped enemies hold onto the same object, impotently hanging on for dear life".

Previous to TFU, I'd been playing Resistance: Fall of Man. It was one of the early PS3 titles and is, again, a decent but not amazing game in its genre. It had a somewhat interesting plot, but was hampered by a couple of issues. Firstly, it was a first person shooter on a console which made the game much harder than it needed to be. Secondly, it used the now-standard "hide to regenerate" health system. Unfortunately, it divided the heath bar into quarters and only let you regenerate up to the next highest level requiring healing items to bride the gaps. This made it very easy to get into the same sort of condition that the "hide to regenerate" systems were implemented to negate: being one hit away from death with no health in sight.

Even before that, I had been playing Infinite Undiscovery--an action RPG for the 360. It is actually one of the more interesting RPGs that I've played lately. The character development of the protagonist is especially interesting (especially since the development is interesting and few games bother to do any advancement anymore). Of course, it is a Tri-Ace game which means that it involves item creation. This, coupled with the free DLC which adds items to shops, means that I spent most of the game with equipment far better than what one would expect to have at such a point.

Finally, going back to Xmas, I got Chrono Trigger DS. It was a very good port of the game--it had none of the problems that the PSX port had with slow transitions. It also added some new content in the form of a few new dungeons and a new ending that helps to tie in the link to Chrono Cross. Unfortunately, the dungeons seem a bit pointless because they open when you get wings on Epoch, but mainly provide equipment that is between the best available for sale and the best that can be found through the end game quests. This led to me going through the dungeons and finding equipment that provided me now benefit. The dungeons are also rediculously full of money (individual chests with more than 100 kilogold in them) despite the fact that there is no reason to ever spend more than maybe 20 kilogold in the entire game. Nevertheless, it is a faithful port of the game and the extra ending may be worth it to long time fans.

I should also note that all of the games that I listed in this (aside from CT:DS) can be found for under $30 with a bit of hunting (at least that's what I paid for them).

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So, earlier today I was getting ready to play Far Cry 2. I was, of course, going to play it on the PC which means that I was beginning the PC game ritual: rip the disc with BlindWrite, copy to mystique, install from image. Unfortunately, I looked at free space and I only had 3.1 GiB of space available on the 2 TiB array! I'd known for some time that space was getting scarce, but apparently I hadn't been paying enough attention. Needless to say, I'm opposed to deleting anything (I've always been a pack rat, especially of data), so I've bought myself a new set of drives to form the basis of a 4 TiB array as well as a bit of hardware to drive them. It looks like this is going to become a yearly occurance, so hopefully drive size increases continue to double to size of the $100 price point yearly.

If I'm lucky, I may even get all of the necessary equipment before the weekend since I ordered from NewEgg and Dell. Usually, I'd just buy everything from NewEgg, but they were out of stock on the low power Western Digital 1 TB drives (which coincidentally cost $99) and Dell was the most reputable place selling them. Then I can begin the ridiculously time consuming task of moving 1.9TB across a network.

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



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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).



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.



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So, about an hour ago, I beat Dead Space. It was a decent game, though the use of a silent protagonist seems a bit far fetched due to the sheer amount of time you are supposedly in two-way communication with people (Incidently, the Wikipedia article on silent protagonists has been deleted due to the lack of scholarly work on the subject. I nominate Greg to correct this.). Dead Space did make me realize how influential System Shock 2 was on gaming, especially first person gaming. I believe such a point has been made by Yahtzee before, but it bears repeating.

Doom 3: SS2 with demons.
Bioshock: SS2 underwater.
Dead Space: SS2 with dismemberment.

Also, it is worth noting that I originally had problems with the game crashing whenever I went into submenus for any length of time. It turns out that my ancient Sidewinder Percision Pro joystick causes the game to spaz out. This is probably due to some mildly broken interface into the joystick system system as the joystick (even when not being touched at all) constantly generates events of various kinds. I figured out that this was the problem when I noticed the menu instructions freaking out and showing the "360 standard" controls flashing in and out along with they keyboard controls. Disconnecting the joystick resulted in zero additional crashes for the rest of the game.


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I took off this afternoon as sick time due to exhaustion. My sleep schedule has finally caught up with me. I seriously need to get back into a normal flow. This stupid 4 down, 3 up, 4 down thing is killing me.

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I have produced this easy to use chart to determine how much the EESA of 2008

        $700,000,000,000.    Economic Stabilization Act of 2008
    =================================================
          12,870,012,870.013    Barrels of Oil (as of 18 Nov 2008)
           2,800,112,004.480    Nintendo Wiis
           1,750,043,751.094    Xbox 360 Elites
           1,750,043,751.094    Playstation 3s
              65,783,291.044    Metric Tons of Nickel (as of 18 Nov 2008)
              65,005,417.145    Pounds of Gold (as of 18 Nov 2008)
              53,435,114.503    Minimum wage employees (per year)
              45,439,792.275    Honda Civic Sedans (basic package)
              31,818,181.818    Toyota Priuses (basic Package)
              16,164,788.472    Hummer H3s (standard package)
              10,000,000        GB Salaries (per year)
               2,333,333.333    One Bedroom homes in LA (~$300k each)
               1,093,750        Liebeck v. McDonald's Awards (post-reduction, pre-settltment)
                   9,070.882    Delta II Launches (FCA)
                   3,449.975    Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Endowments
                   2,535.654    Days in Iraq (~0.276 $B/d)
                   2,333.333    Boeing 747-8s
                   2,333.333    Space Shuttle Launches (in year 2000 dollars)
                   1,035.503    Hoover Dams (adjusted for inflation)
                     376.344    California Institute of Technology Endowments
                     243.309    NOAAs (per year)
                      40.462    NASAs (per year)
                      33.849    Sonys (by Mkt Cap)
                      18.970    Harvard University Endowments
                       9.044    Puerto Ricos (by GDP)
                       7.478    Googles (by Mkt Cap)
                       4.011    Microsofts (by Mkt Cap)
                       3.705    Israels (by GDP)
                       3.271    Indianas (by GSP in year 2000 dollars)
                       1.731    Egypts (by GDP)
                       1.275    US Defense Departments (per year)
                       0.386    Californias (by GSP)
                       0.339    Frances (by GDP)
                       0.314    United Kingdoms (by GDP)

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So, a few months ago I ordered copy of Watchmen. Unfortunately, when I did so, I ordered the hardcover edition which was a prerelease. I had forgotten about it quite completely until it arrived yesterday on my doorstep. It had been recomended to me by someone (I've forgotten who at this point) and I was suprised by its quality. It was good enough that I read through about 60% in one sitting (it was after midnight at that point and I had an 8am meeting) and finished the rest after work today.

What I don't understand is how anyone intends to make a movie of it. It seems as if having a big naked blue man wouldn't fit into the demographics that an X-men or Spiderman might target. Then again, maybe they're doing it as equal time for Mystique...

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So, all of the ads for Fallout 3 made me want to get some retro-futurism going. This led me to playing through Bioshock again. Since on my previous trip, I had been good, this time I decided to be evil. It turns out that the game isn't particularly different, though it is very easy to purchase whatever upgrades you want. Since the whole game can be beaten without ever really using much more than the lightning plasmid and firearms, I suspect that it would be possible to even try beating the game while being ambivalent to the little sisters. If I ever play again, I will save exactly one and kill exactly one little sister and see what ending it gives.

============

Ninja Gaiden Sigma is excessively difficult. The game is hard on easy mode. The difficulty of the game is not the main problem, however, it is its completely unforgiving nature. Gameplay wise, it is quite similar to the Devil May Cry games. Unlike the DMC games, NGS makes gameplay decisions the explicitly frustrate. Example 1: In DMC, if you die you can (usually) start from the beginning of the room that you're currently in. In NGS, you can continue, but you reset to the last safe point you used. Compounded with the relatively rarity of save points, there is much backtracking. Example 2: In DMC, there are enemies that do a fair amount of damage. Single enemies may do up to 10% of your health per hit, but you're given temporary immunity after being hit so that you can recover and counter attack. In NGS, basic enemies that show up in chapter 3 (of 19) can take 1/3 of your health or more in a single attack. Enemies are also capable of juggling you successfully while you are generally incapable of juggling them. Example 3: DMC has almost universal access to the in-game store. In NGS, there is no access to the store for the last 6 or so areas unless you're willing to backtack through a huge distance. This is bad gameplay design.

I beat NGS so that I could say that it didn't beat me.

============

Dead Rising is an amazing game. It turns out that running headlong into a swarm of zombies swinging a chainsaw does not get boring. Neither does picking up a bunch of orange safety cones and stuffing them on the head of zombies. Driving a car through an underground tunnel filled with zombies? Always awesome. Shooting a zombie with a nerf gun is also awesome unless you intended to stop it from biting your face off. And of course, the best thing is to pick up one zombie and then use it as a missile weapon to destory a small crowd of zombies. If you have a 360, you should have this game. It is essential. Also, the plot is rather interesting too.

Apparently there is also a Wii version. I can't vouch for it as I haven't played it.

============

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is the archetype of the average game. Its story is average. Its gameplay is average. Hell, even its acting is average. On the PC, the controls are lousy (due to it being built too cross-platformy and not really being optimized for keyboard and mouse). It has several of the major flaws that show up in the more "Japanese" action games. Most noticable of these is its tendency to explain things to you (with a narrator and everything) rather than allowing interesting things to be revealed in more natural ways. It also commits the sin of having a plot that is wholely divorced from the levels being played.

It is like PN03 only less fun and with no RPG elements. It is like Oni only without an interesting plot or fun shooting/fighting elements. It is just plain mediocre.

============

Crysis: Warhead is more Crysis. The game doesn't particular add anything, but it is more fun in the Crysis universe running around and shooting people in the face with a shotgun while cloaked. I could spend a fair amount of time doing that without getting bored. It also ran somewhat better than its predecessor on the same hardware which I consider a nice added bonus. I could barely get 30fps during the outdoor winter scenes in Crysis, but was able to get somewhat near that in Warhead.

--------------------------

I'm now playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The most interesting thing about the game so far is the realism in characters' facial gestures. This game probably has the best facial movements that I've seen since Half-Life 2 and may well be significantly better.

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