Raithe

Got my sister to take out the dogs for many hours..and then steam-cleaned the carpets downstairs.. If the timing works, they should all be dry by the time she and the animals get back... Then I'll have to give some thought to getting the decorations out of the attic and put the tree up at some point this week...

Caught a replay of the "Women of Sci-Fi Calender documentary" from a few years back, which was..quirkily interesting Michael Shanks (aka Daniel Jackson of Stargate SG1 fame) apparently came up with the idea, and Christopher Judge (Teal'c of SG1) is a photographer in his spare time. The whole assortment of Sci-Fi shows filmed in Vancouver being really quite familial, they got a bunch of their friends and relatives to turn up and be the stars of a Sci-Fi calendar. Kind of amusing the behind the scenes and seeing them chatting and acting as their real selves rather then the assortment of characters they're so known for by the fans. But yes, the likes of Erica Durance (known more for Smallville, but also guest starred on SG-1 and other sci-fi) happens to be married to Judge's brother. Shanks is married to Lexa Doig (of Andromeda fame), and then they pulled in friends from the various shows they all work in .. So Teryl Rothery, Ona Grauer, Laura Bertram, Rachel Luttrell, Brandy Ledford... Some interesting background chat, and just how interrelated it all gets. Also having these actresses who were all "wow, modelling pinup style for the cameras is a lot of hard work in its way"

And I played on an East Coast US server over the beta stress weekend with no problems.

And now they've done the announcement that all game testing will end this weekend. This upcoming Sunday at 23:59 cst. Thats it, the game will be wrapped and on its way to finalisation..

I've used the game launcher to update it , but alas, no "play" button for me at the moment... I guess that's the system until early access kicks in, putting on the launcher to catch the updates in a semi-regular fashion until the final release is out...

An amusing review of Saints Row from Rock Paper Shotgun

Hm, between the weather and the dogs the garden has turned into a veritable mud-pit. Joys. Trying to figure out when I can get my sister to take them out for 4 hours or so, then I can get the cleaner out and have a big go at the carpets before we get the christmas decorations out. Pondering where to put the tree.. Having the joys of a lingering headache to keep me company this morning, and I seem to having a case of brain-dead about writing up a case-study style documentation type of thing.

Replaying Saints Row and picking some of the alternate mission endings just to see how that shapes things up. That and having moments of stress relief with utter chaos, mayhem and a little weirdness in the game.

Unfortunately , it's a BBC thing, each episode is about 90 minutes, and there were only three episodes for the first season.

A brief look at some of the shifts in ME3 combat ..

MMOMFG - A ToR preview based on several weeks on the Beta..

I find it quirky that there's that whole "show skin/flash flesh" and people get considered to have lower intelligence, lower self-control etc.. And I'm thinking of the various girls I knew at university who were studying to be doctors, nurses, etc... who paid their bills by working at some of the.. a.. gentleman's clubs in the area.

It was a quite nifty series. The second episode is generally considered the weakest, but the third when Moriarty comes into play was rather brilliant. And there is going to be a second season. And for the random trivia, the guy who played Mycroft? Is also one of the writers of the show..

Having another doodle-around on Saints Row the Third causing chaos and mayhem. I've got all of the Fallout New Vegas dlc now added, so at some point when I'm in the right mood I should start that up again.. but like Hurl, I find I'm waiting for TOR to release so I can jump back into that after my weekend run...

And for the quirky science.. The Psychology of Nakedness...

It's always fun to struggle with those moments of creative genius. Most especially when you can pull the draft of a brief together in a very short time.. and then when you sit down to rework a few sections, make the summary snappy, and then produce a companion document ... you end up shuffling a few words around over hours and not having any of it actually sound right...

Urg, got about 4 hours sleep and trying to kick myself into some format of wakefullness. Hm, between winter weather and the puppy, the garden's turning into a paddock looking place of mud.. and the kitchen floor and hall carpet inside is just.. looking fairly awful, muddy paws and the bones dad keeps giving him to chew on is leaving its mark even with multiple daily vacuuming. I'm going to have to try breaking out the carpet steam cleaner at some point .. probably before I start getting the christmas decorations out soon...

Crafting is a bit..different I think. The key trouble being, you have to select up to three "crew skills". One of which can be a crafting, but (and correct me if I'm wrong) I seem to remember hearing that you can only select one crafting skill. It works out at around six different "Crafting" skills in total, and a slew of non-crafting skills: Four "Gathering" skills, and Four "Mission" skills. Basically as you wander around, you can send your companions off to do those things. So you don't directly craft stuff yourself, just have your minions do it for you. Crafting skills are: ?Armormech

Hm, from what I've seen, I wouldn't say that meet one and you've met them all. It is literally impossible to select all the possible advanced class tweaks. Okay, let's see if I can explain this in a manner that's actually comprehensible.. There are Abilities that your class picks up that you actually "buy" from a trainer. So that every Trooper, every Smuggler, Every Jedi /Sith etc will have as they go up levels. Each Advanced Class also has some talents that you "buy" from a trainer as well, but only those of that advanced class has access. As you level up, better versions of those skills are available as well. DarthHater - Abilities - There's a handy dandy list, showing all the assorted Abilities, the classes they go with, and the levels they become available at. The bit where ability customisation really comes into it are the talent trees. Darth Hater - Talent Calculator Each class shares a single Talent Tree, and you get access to another two Talent Tree's depending on your Advanced Class. - All Jedi Knights have Focus Talent tree, but Sentinel has Combat and Watchman Trees, while the Guardian has Defense and Vigilance Trees. By 50th level you will have 49 points to spend, and that really shapes exactly your character in a lot of ways. It refines/improves skills and opens up new Abilities as well. If you want the really advanced options, you're going to have to be quite focused on a specific Talent tree. If you spread your talents around, you're not going to get that far up the tree. You have to spend 5 points on each level of the tree before you get access to the level above.. It can make a big deal on whether you're Trooper can effectively heal, or tank or just do mass aoe damage or what.. So two commando's could be very different in what they can do. Visually, there is a lot of variety to the armour that you could pick up, and that could change how you look. They have it pretty much locked in that you won't get rewards/items for quests that aren't actually usable by your class. So as a Trooper, I pretty much only got credits, guns, armour, or commendations as rewards. - Each world gives out "world commendations" for various things, and you can use them as a special form of currency to pick up items as well. Throw in the various crafting skills, I'm sure you can end up with something quite different visually. I do remember hearing something about being able to make sure colors matched, but I didn't actually find anything to do that... not that I actually looked that hard. Physical alteration of your character , well pretty much the body is on a thin-fat (big boned) physique, and then the face has the type of slider setup of DragonAge. Note - each race has different setup for exactly what you can alter. Also, races that can be both Imperial and Republic have differences. So there are variations you can have as a Human or Twilek if you're Republic that you don't get access to if you were Human/Twilek for the Empire. And vice versa. Edit: Nearly forgot something...

You do get to overhear a few fun conversations as you wander around, and I have to say this.. the background music is really damn good. You've got the familiar star wars tunes, the tunes reminiscent of star wars scores and it pretty much always works with the atmosphere of what you're doing and where you are. I can't say anything about PvP. I got lost in the PvE content. Seriously, solo'ing most of it just felt like a massive Kotor game. While the world didn't seem to change per se to what I'd done, character interaction did to some extent or another.

Wait, you can replay dialogue? How? I think Holocrons might have been disabled, there were some issues with them in a previous build. There is a really easy to find one on Korriban, that was the only one I ever found. If you hit escape, it takes you out of the conversation before it finishes. Space will skip the dialogue to the "choose response" part. And I can agree, sometimes the short words choices don't always react in the way you expected them to. Flirting also seemed to bounce wildly from entertaining/smart moments of teasing flirtatious play with words, to some really braindead jock style "me like you, lets go play doctor" type. It would be nice if they actually balanced those sorts of things out. Hm, I found one holocron, but that seemed to be part of the whole "introduction to the game" type of situation, rather then one that you actually find on your own. I'd bet every class has that on their starting world.

The key expense at the moment, is boosting out of the gravity well. If/when we get a station in orbit and potentially a moonbase, once some minding/manufacturing in place it becomes a lot simpler to establish further solar system exploration and travels.

An old one - A Matter of Life and Death (although I think it was called "Stairway to Heaven" in the US). A classic fantasy-romance set against the backdrop of WW2. David Niven as a pilot who cheats death by accident. The bomber he was flying was damaged, his parachute ripped to shreds and he ordered his crew to bail out. He talks to an american radio operator (played by Kim Hunter) and both spark up a connection. He decides to jump out of the plane rather then burn in it.. and the angel supposed to pick him up misses him in the fog. Through the general mixup in Heaven, it takes about 20 hours before the mistake is realised.. By which time, the couple have met up and fallen in love. Niven's character ends up having to take the argument that Heaven owes him a second chance, since if they'd done things right he'd never have fallen in love. So has to take on a Celestial Court to decide exactly what his fate will be...

I managed to do Esseles and Hammer. Esseles seemed quite smooth, and the conversation points slid in quite nicely - and I did it from the Republic side, you can do an Imperial version as well can't you?. At the time I seemed to be in a good group of four folks, and that certainly helped. It made a nice storyline, although the guy who had to take charge of the ship seemed a waay bit suspicious so half of us were waiting for him to be exposed as a traitor or something throughout most of it. Hammer didn't seem to have as much in the way of dialogue to partake in, much more of a run around and kills things as you progressed the map. Certainly hard without the full team and a dedicated healer. What was a nice touch was that depending on crew-skills you had, there was potential to open up short-cuts or side-routes that would take you past encounters - scavening, kicked off some mining machines that bored through a wall, slicing hacking an elevator into activation. Small things you had to notice. On an unrelated note, I have to say even while I was exploring worlds, I didn't see any holocrons around. Although I heard a few people mention them. Also, codex entries that could be in the environment for clicking on - pretty damn hard to notice. I do kind of think they should make them perhaps a wee bit more obvious rather then totally blend into the environment...