Raithe

Trying to pace myself through the morning. Really hoping that at some point in this new year my sleep smooths out. For some reason the last few nights I keep finding myself awake, tossing and turning and not getting back to sleep around that 3am to a bit past 4am zone of time. Which is starting to have a cumulative effect on my body clock.

Heh, I tried installing Privateer 2 and Wing Commander 4 on my machine a few months back. Which was.. a kind of silly fun because I didn't set anything up to reduce cpu speed for it. The interactive scenes worked fine..but the moment you were out in space.. everything was a blur of ludicrous speed. Kind of made them unplayable without putting in a chunk of effort to find that workaround.

Not playing directly now, but should in a day or so when it arrives.. but I snagged a copy of Borderlands Game of the Year for

Ah, if you want a sort of wrap up to Dark Angel, they released a couple of books. One of which covers the finale episode and then runs along a bit further. Then there was a 2nd that continued the story to explain a whole lot more and provide some sense of completion.

For the truly random subject... We've moved into a new decade and tv has changed a fair bit in the last one.. but think how many damned good television series there were that networks cancelled by the end of the first series. Usually due to network jitters, or the belief that the series appealed to only a small bracket of the population. I mean, right off the top of my head a bunch jump out at me. The most obvious being Firefly. Cowboys & Hookers in SPAACE! What was not to love? Although when it was first put on the network screwed up its time slotting, so the pilot which introduced the characters and universe was shown as episode 10 or so.... Actually, there was a fair bit of sci-fi related shows that got killed like that.. Threshold - a crisis analyst designing worst case scenarios finds out her "Encounter with Aliens" has come true and gets called in to run the plan and keep it all a secret while dealing with what amounts to alien signals changing human dna... Oddysey 5 - a group of astronauts watch the world destroyed while they're in orbit, encounter a strange alien device and have their minds sent back a few years into their earlier bodies. Leaving them with trying to find out what the hell happened... John Doe - A man wakes up on an island off of Seattle with total amnesia...but then realises he basically has the sum of all human knowledge. Just not who he actually is. While trying to find out who he is and how he knows so much he helps the police and struggles with some secret society. Journeyman - Came across in some ways as a modern version of quantum leap almost. Reporter keeps jumping back in time, and finding out that each jump follows a person whose destiny he needs to change. Thrown in an ex-fiancee believed dead, who is also jumping in time.... On the not-so-sci-fi scale.. Kings - now this was a rather impressive one, a reworking of the story of David into a fictional modern setting. Had some beutiful dialogue. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - funny, witty, and smart. Set around a pseudo SNL style comedy show. And then it was cancelled what seemed like 6 months before 30 Rock came out... Apparently the network decided Studio 60 whilst appealing to the university educated, higher income bracket wasn't a wide enough audience to keep making it. The Unusuals - came across as "MASH in a police station". The police precinct where all the oddball cops and strange screwups got posted. Eleventh Hour - scientific crime procedural .... sort of. American remake of an English mini-series. But the thing that got me, was that the majority of those shows also had an arcing storyline... Which left cliffhangers unanswered right when the series ended.. Dang networks.

Went through a fairly pleasant and uneventful bank holiday to start the week off and now suddenly having a major down in mood for no real reason that I can figure out. Pondering on whether to do some major retail therapy and blow some savings on some random goodies for my birthday later in the month before vat jumps to 20%.

Got caught with a random tv film of the season "Santa Suit". What caught me by surprise is that Kevin Sorbo, when he isn't having fun hamming it up in space-opera/mythic fantasy style roles, is actually quite a damned good actor. I mean, he's normally entertaining in those sorts of roles, but seeing him play something totally straight, fairly restrained and with the wide emotional range... I don't know why but I never really expected that.

Had a nice little New Years Eve celebration.. round a friends who was holding a small party. Since his gf is from Mexico and over here at working on her post-doc , her mother was visiting as well.. they made up a pinata for the party. So slightly drunk English people.. using a japanese bokken..to hit a mexican pinata while blindfolded... And I was rather surprised to see just how many chinese lanterns were being sent up... Although the whole gathering around the firepit with blazing fire going.. and the assorted cuban/mexican/dominican cigars he keeps picking up cheap while he's visiting over there being passed around while everyone enjoys slow drinks of port was quite nice. Then ending the evening with a few tequilla shots. Still, took yesterday at a slow and steady pace. I was surprised to wake up none the worse for wear apart from a generally dry mouth. Still poking around looking at replacement tvs... It's kind of surprising to see simple things like a tv with 100Hz setting jump up the price by

Wandering around in Bully Scholarship Edition... I'll admit some of the controls for pc are a bit gimpy to get to grips with at first but not too bad. Some of the classroom mini-games are a bit irritating, but the writing and dialogue for the different cliques is spot-on.

That's what Deus Ex gives you.. But Shadowrun can have some very funky atmospheres and moods.. and really highlighted the phrase "Never deal with a Dragon."

And on that slightly random solication for advice.. TV's... LED or LCD? I've seen a batch of people complaining about how LED tv's can have odd lightbleed from the edges which ruined their enjoyment, but some say it settles in a week or two.. Anyone have any experience or advice?

Just finished off AC2... interesting cliffhanger style ending there. It does make me more interested in AC:Brotherhood..but I still doubt I'll pick it up at full price with that drm. Did like the music though..nicely mood evocative.

Heh, I had my ipod plugged into speakers playing some Gregorian (that german group that take modern / rock / metal songs and turn them into gregorian style chanting with a little bit of synth music) when some friends popped round to catch up over christmas. They sat down, enjoyed a cup of tea, a chat..and about half an hour in finally asked what the music was because they sort of recognised it... When they realised it was "Nothing Else Matters" they were totally surprised..sat a moment..and then did this "I liked it.. didn't know what it was..but now I do it's kind of taken over in my mind when I try to think what the original was like..."

So the tv which had partially gone just before christmas, but managed to limp through is now really, most sincerely dead... so the rest of the family keep hitting me up for explanations of current tech specs and what does what as they look at new tvs. Of course, my mother keeps doing these Tim the Toolman impressions of "More Power!" and "Size matters!" but mostly she's kind of giggling over the idea of having a bigger/better tv downstairs then dad has in his room upstairs.. (family politics, what can I say..).. Either way it'll probably end up going on my card and then other people giving me some cash towards it... Hm, and of course right at this moment the dishwasher has decided its running on its last legs..the Dyson isn't picking up properly, the Microwave keeps having cobby moments.. and the Oven is being slightly tempermental at times.... I foresee this being an expensive upcoming new year..

Been catching up on some gaming time while the family is spread out and enjoying the season. After all the cooking of the week, decided to go easy and just had indian takeaway for tonight. Ah, just kicking back, watching an old episode of John Doe and nibbling away at some fresh Peshwari..

I've never been totally impressed. Some of his books can be really good, some of them can be total crap. While his ideas are generally good, bordering on great, the execution can leave a lot to be desired...

Well I was playing AC2 this afternoon, then did one of the Assassin's Tombs in Venice... and that sucked out all my enjoyment of the game. I was practically foaming at the mouth over that. Maybe it's because I've just had a batch of the same issue on Tron Evolution.. but I really am loathing platform-jump-jump games that have those sequences in. Playing the rest of the game is fun..but the tombs , especially that one I was just doing really make me grip. They're fairly artificial to make you bounce around..and then they increase the difficulty by having camera angles suddenly shift and change and lock you in at odd angles. It doesn't become about playing the game but memorising when those camera shifts happen and adjust keypresses to match.. If it was a few degree's different you'd run in a straight line when you hit a key, but because its just set so...you have to finaggle it to run in a slightly diagonal manner and the slightest wrong twitch wastes time and bounces you off a wall the wrong way... But anyway, now that I finished that tomb I'm going to have a long break from that and see if I can settle my grouch.

I picked up Crysis awhile back.. Actually I'd just upgraded my pc at the time to the bleeding edge. Crysis was the first game to really use all that oomph. Graphically I was impressed.. but meh, just couldn't get interested in it beyond a certain point. It felt like a technical win with no real soul to suck you into the gameplay. At least to my mind.

Picked up AC2 cheap via the steam sales.. the low price battled my distate of the drm and won.. A lot more enjoyable then the first one I'd say.. Even though it's doing a lot of the same things, it doesn't actually feel quite as repetitive.

Tron Legacy. It's bright, it's shiny, it's fairly fun. Olivia Wilde looks good in it.. The "young" Jeff Bridges looks very smooth in it, a nice use of computers. I guess we can start expecting to see more things like that happen in films now... Generally it's entertaining..but I don't know.. part of the trouble is you're expecting this nice update on the world inside a computer, some references to the internet and such... but the whole thing takes place only in this single closed system that has no outside access. Heh, the old Tron 2.0 game showed one view of how things would have changed and I guess I was hoping to see the film's take on that shift in progress..but you didn't really get that. Still, enjoyable for what it is, and it did push various nostalgia buttons.

In the real world (that's outside this forum), you'll find that describing most games. Not quite to that extreme that it comes across in that game.. Honestly, Tron 2.0 actually gave me a more.. glowing, nostalgic feel for the Tron universe then Tron Evolution did. I was hoping it would give you that feeling of being inside a computer again...but it doesn't really convey that sort of mood. Which in a Tron game, is really, seriously disapointing.

Tron Evolution. It somehow managed to combine elements of good with elements of disappointing. Lots of nice visuals, it comes across as a fairly decent film tie-in type of game. Sets up lots of connections and explains things in a lot more detail for how things are in the film. However, you don't tend to stop and enjoy the visuals because the pace of the game is set so you're usually rushing through locations rather then enjoying the sights. And while the combat has a flow to it.. it does get a little repetitive. The multiplayer aspect actually blends in fairly nicely with the single-player story. But they don't really make any good transitions as to why you're doing it.. just sets it up so that at various points you can slip into the "game grid". The lightcycle sections at first look really nice... but then you realise it's basically an on-rails type of travel and there's no actual opportunity to use lighttrails to take out opponents. It's more high speed from point a to point b along a single narrow track with occasional disruptions. My main grief with it is that there are several locations where its a flipping pain to move along. The whole.. urban running style in games is beginning to get a bit annoying and overused. But there are a few locations where the camera suddenly locks in tight, at odd angles, and the controls get incredibly fiddly and the slightest wrong movement sends you plunging to your doom. So with a checkpoint system that will quite often have you running across x distance you can do in your sleep, and then this simple 5 second piece of travelling that you keep failing at.. reload back to the checkpoint and start all over.. you can end up spending 10-15 minutes with multiple reloads trying to get past a simple 10-15 second stretch of movement. Which can get exceptionally frustrating. Especially when it happens for the 5th time in the game... One point of note, although they've said they coordinated with the Tron Legacy film, to set it up as a kind of "prequel" story and yes, there are a few characters and scenes that you'll recognise when you see the film.. there are a few things that seem to be told in "different" ways. Notably a couple of aspects about the ISO's, the Purge, and Quorra....

Deus Ex HR is on pre-order (yes, the augmented edition, I want the shiny art book and soundtrack..) Mass Effect 3 I'm most likely to give SW The Old Republic a try.. Dragon Age 2 is pretty likely, just to get a hands on for what they do. Homefront I'll keep an eye on, but undecided just at the moment. What are the odds of Red Dead Redemption finally making it to the pc over this upcoming year? Dungeon Siege 3 is one I'll wait and see on. Hasn't got me all excited just yet. Apart from that, there isn't much that's hovering on my awareness.

That would work better if it could be seen outside the US.. Still, it's crossed midnight here in the UK.. so I shall wish all you folks a Merry Christmas day..

I have to admit, I do appreciate the whole concept of that..and the effiency of that process. But to me it just..makes the gift rather impersonal. Wrapping it personally and putting a handwritten note actually "feels" like it means more. Because you're taking an effort in it. Just whacking off a couple of mouse clicks and a short typed in keyboard prompt..just. makes it feel too mechanical to really mean something. Not saying I wouldn't do it under certain conditions, but generally I'd rather have them sent to me, then wrap them up and deliver them.