Raithe

So how long before someone gets hold of the Leviathan dlc and lets us know what it adds to the game..?

Got all the achievement/challenges in Hitman Sniper Challenge done and out the way... Got my Bounty Hunter on TOR to 49th and cleared Voss (although technically still have the bonus Voss I could do). Plan to see if my ocd will let me skip the Corellian planet quest arc and just focus on the class story to wrap it up....

Looks like they've given in and decided to make the fans happy..

Had a short bout of Hitman Sniper Challenge. Although it seems to have a quirk of the mouse bouncing between being really slow to move and then suddenly becoming uber-sensitive and jerking rapidly, then bouncing back to slow crawl.. which is really off-putting when trying to make delicate headshots...

I know healing is important.. but it is kind of annoying to run through a match of Voidstar and be the only guy who planted bombs, have stacks of "objective points" for doing so, having our team win the game because I got them planted and got us through the doors.. and then have all the mvp votes go to the healer who never actually healed me...

They originally had the melee maneuvers for free with no energy use required. But during game testing they found it basically made every tester slide into stealth route and auto-melee kill/ko the enemy. So to encourage the development of discovering creative routes they jury-rigged the energy use for melee. Or something along those lines...

Spent a brief foray into Space Marines, then went and helped out some guildies in TOR for a short piece of the evening..

The upcoming Star Wars show from Seth Green... (and the return of Seth MacFarlane as the voice of the Emperor...) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yRNXFhboBI

My Little Dr Horrible - Bad Horse Chorus.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1BRdXobf4I

Happy birthday Hurlshot. And may the problems find some swift resolvement..

Having a base-defined character in a rpg isn't that far from having a GM sit down at the start of the campaign and say "right, the theme is this, and it's set here, so all characters no matter what have to be linked by x, y and z." - I mean, if you join in a Spycraft campaign, you pretty much expect that every player is going to be a member of "Intelligence Agency X", so being that doesn't take away from how you develop your character from that point on.

And the teaser on "the future of the game" Nothing too revealing, although the new planet might be interesting. I'm assuming it'll be something like Ilum and end-game content related...

Well one of the interesting quirks about Sleeping Dogs is that you're an undercover cop, so running around causing mayhem in general isn't something that's pushed at you. In fact, if you do it while performing any of the missions you actually get penalised. So causing random destruction, accidentally killing innocents.. all lose you "Police Points" that you earn during missions to improve certain skills. You don't even earn "Triad" points for doing those sorts of things, you only earn Triad points on story missions and via combat and funky environmental kills and suchlike. But if you like story, especially those classic Hong Kong Action/Thriller types.. then the game is good for that. It's supposed to take around 14-17 hours to play through just the story side of the game. So that's not counting the assorted extras you can do. Hm, does the ending actually change any if you don't do the extra police case files available? I finished it off, but I don't really feel a need to replay it and avoid them just to see...

She's also the main character in that DA anime movie that got produced. To be fair, that wasn't too bad.

And..the gag reel from the upcoming Avengers dvd.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0TZcBjZSNM

I do have to say, the Expendables 2 has a few in-jokes about the actors as much as the 80's action genre. A nice throw-in mention about Gunnar (Dolph Lundgren's character) having that Master's in Chemical Engineering and such like. And the whole introduction sequence of Chuck Norris is full of win. The combination of events, tank distraction, walk in from the smoke with old cowboy music twanging away... "I heard you were bitten by a King Cobra." "I was.. but after five days of untold agony.. it finally died."

I have to say, one mildly aggravating bit about Sleeping Dogs combat... You get some nice moves to break limbs as you "level" up skills, but apart from the immediate lowering of health, and the intimidation value it does on all other enemies involved, the breakage means nothing. You can break their leg, they'll be stunned for 5 seconds, then its boom, they're back on their feet and dancing around you trying to kick you. I'm not saying they should be "immediate kills" or some such, just that if you break a guys arm, he shouldn't be able to grab up a knife with that arm and attack you with it seconds later...

I can do solo/2-man content to a degree, but frankly if it requires communication faster than typing, I'm not gonna be bothered to do it. The majority of the dailies are totally solo-able. 5 missions on Ilum, about 8 or so on Belsavis. And then there's another 5 or 6 on Corellia at the Black Hole you can run just for the money, loot and daily commendations you get. Sure, Ilum has 1 Heroic, Belsavis has about 5 heroics, and the Black Hole has 1 (which you have to do for the Black Hole commendations), but the plain old missions are totally do-able. Hell, if you catch it at the right time (ie, no worry on respawns and mass-crowds) you can run through Ilum's dailies in about half an hour and be ahead about 100k credits, and the Belsavis "run" takes about 40-60 minutes if you ignore the Heroics and that'll net you another 100-150k. And of course, the dailies all reset at a standard time, which makes it quirky if you get the timing right. One morning I ran Belsavis solo, then a guild member came online and wanted to do them, the dailies all reset at around 11am GST, so I grouped with him and re-ran them. So after about 80-90 minutes of play total, I had a stack of daily commendations earned and had made about 300,000 credits. Unlike a few people I know, I don't grind the dailies constantly. Just every now and then run through them with Guildies, and to boost cash reserves and send them around my various characters.

And for other movie trivia, apparently they're looking at making a "Snow Whiteand the Huntsman" sequel, but have decided to look around for someone other then Kristen Stewart...

Okay, so I've got a maxtor 750 gig harddrive that's suddenly started to act up. As in, it's not always showing up in Bios or Windows, then it will show up, but when you go to click properties it might hang. Or it might actually let you explore it, but then decides to crash out explorer. Then it'll let you schedule a disc check, but the moment you restart the machine it disapears from bios again... I'm guessing it's pretty much toast, but does anyone have any suggestions for how possible it is to access and get things off it?

Well one thing the end-game content of running dailies is good for is building up a nice stash of credits that you can send to your new characters and pick up some of those Character Perks available via your Legacy.. That and easily making sure you have the filthy luchre for your speeders..

Heh, I haven't gotten any character yet to reach the 750 social points you need for the first rank you gain on Social. Hm, one thing I've noticed over the last month is that suddenly you'll get social points for completing bonus elements in missions while you're in a group. I can't remember seeing that 3-4 months ago..

Well, if you're still running on Corellian Run, I've got my assorted toon's there. Republic have Smuggler Dhar and Jedi Knight Ehtiar, whilst Imperial Side is Sith Inquisitor Drayke, Bounty Hunter Khayul, and Sith Warrior Khael.

Apart from the flashpoints and heroics, you can do pretty much everything totally solo. And even then, if you're x levels over, you can do most of the flashpoints and heroics. They've geared it so that you can do each class storyline with no-one along, just for those people like enjoy that. But you can just as easily group up and handle it.

Got my SIth Warrior to 40th.. which meant I could outfit him in some nice mixture of Armour of Savagery / Entropic Assault that I'd stocked up on via warzone commendations earned during the 30's... Currently have to decide whether to do some Taris bonus missions for the companion gear, or just head to Quesh. Hm, although I'll probably take a break and push my Bounty Hunter through Voss and onto Corellia first before I do that.