Raithe

Has Ubisoft stopped doing that crappy drm with AC2 yet now that they've released Brotherhood?

Dang it..I can't make up my mind on the Tron Evolution game.. It's Tron.. so I'm interested.. but I'm getting a lil tired of all these "free running" games to make things look slick..so I'm not quite sure on that.. but then every game seller in the Uk still has the pc version as "not available in stock" compared to the console versions...

I need to figure out some game play... I haven't really sat down to do any serious gaming since I finished that first runthrough of FONV a couple of weeks back. Just not sure what I'm in the mood for, or if there's anything that really jumps out as appealing to me at the moment...

For some reason I felt completely shattered last night.. so I ended up sorting things out so I could hit bed about 3-4 hours earlier then usual and promptly passed out. Of course, that also had me waking up in the wee small hours of the morning to find the wind and rain hiding the dawn... Still, staggering somewhat on course for the day...but have to venture out into the gloom and heavy water to valiantly face the dentist appointment...

I'm up there with Planescape Torment as one of the best.. Hm, the various Wing Commanders actually had quite good endings..especially some of the early "variations" depending on how you managed.. Privateer 2 had a mixture of best and worst together.. I could never quite decide.. And how can no-one have mentioned the sheer fun of ending Alpha Protocol and heading off into the sunset on a boat with Scarlet at your side and the amusing conversation? A lot of the Star Wars games seem to have it both ways..the Dark Side endings tend to be gloriously cinematic...and the Light Sight endings can be quite..fizzly. Mafia 2 was quite a let down. There was no real emotional investment and it felt like it was just left for a future DLC to wrap up the story... No-One Lives Forever - the wrap up to that was exceptionally satisfying..

Not on quite the same track, but have you looked at the Ring of Fire / 1632 books at all? They do put some effort into historical accuracy to a point..and try to put the point of view of how people in the early 17th century saw science..and advanced technology... On the film front.. I caught Megamind over the weekend... which was fairly amusing. Nothing too stretching, but entertaining in its way. Not quite to compare with some of the laughs caused when I watched Machete.. now that's a glorious film in its way. The hospital escape alone is worth watching the movie. Throw in a large amount of typical Rodriguez violence, a bevy of cute latinas, and the fun of spotting every clip from the "original" trailer shown in the Grindhouse that they managed to get into the "real" movie..

Rationality and maturity might be able to affect just how much you react / hide your emotions, but they rarely seem to be able to control just how you feel... When the heart gets going, even when you know it's damned stupid or insane there's not much you can do to shift it. There's just how much you can control how much it shows to everyone else.

Had one of those slightly strange nights of vivid and surreal dreams that blended in to short periods of wakefulness and then returning to sleep and more weird dreaming... Pushing that first cup of tea to ensure my mind is in some form of proper cognition and getting the day started..

Working on a headache re-reading through some chapters of my copy Pro C# 2010 and the .Net 4 Platform... Sometimes it would be really nice if examples were given that were more then a dozen lines of code and one or two functions.. Just to give you a feel for how something more extensive is set up. Its barely gone 3.30pm and it's already dim enough to need the lights switched on..

After my mom's first knee surgery.. the joint goes clickety-click with a faint, almost sucking noise which surprised the head resident with the sound,and apparently made him want to vomit. The doctors had decided to let that heal up and mom go through the physio before doing the surgery on her other knee.. but then it was discovered she'd picked up the MRSE bug... So for a few years after that, every 6 months or so we'd get a call saying "you're on the top of the list for the surgery.. but if you keep refusing to do it we'll take you off the list" and we'd have to explain "hang on, no surgeon is willing to do the surgery because of the mrse.. it's the doctors who keep postponing it". Ah well. That's one of the minor issues of the inches thick medical file there... The day's progressed, the craftomatic bed is finally in place..other furniture has been shifted, oaken doors have been taken from hinges and then put back, cupboards were moved out of the way..then back but now it seems to be over for the moment. ... and my sister is trying to sneakily persuade everyone to accept her first getting an alsatian puppy..and then a main coone kitten to add to the ****er spaniel and persian cat already stalking around the house... Other family politics as well.. yeesh. No cooking at least, sending out for an indian just to avoid all that bother... Going to be ultra-lazy and have it delivered.

Cold, tired, mayhaps a touch depressed... but with the absence of rain today, that should allow some furniture shifting and get the old bed out through the french windows and the craftmatic bed moved into its place.... After yesterdays rather torrential downpours, it's being one of those really bright, crisp and downright windchilly days... I really would have preferred to linger in bed today, but that wasn't really possible.. dang it.

I got my mother a kindle for last christmas, with her joint problems holding a book was being a problem, but she's able to use the kindle with ease. The kindle is fairly easy to use, the text is smooth to read, and it's simple to scroll through pages and books. Once you've bought a book Amazon keeps a library of all purchases and you can re-download it to your Kindle whenever you want, but you can keep around 1,500 books on the device itself.. although that might be a bit of a problem to easily run through. One point is that while Amazon.com does do quite a few cheap/free books as well... you don't get access to them if you happen to be outside the states... Oh, and the kindle text isn't backlit. Which can make it easier on the eyes to read, but it also means the kindle doesn't produce it's own light when the room your in gets dark.

And sometimes.. all you want is generic, fun, fantasy.... There's no need to make something.. different and other..purely for the purpose of being different...

Finished off the new Wheel of Time book... Made the mistake of trying to read a few chapters in bed before sleeping ..and ended up several hours later going "crikey, it's nearly dawn". Threads are tightening, loose background bits are brought back together, characters are evolving.... and then it ends on what (according to the story so far) is the day before everyone heads off for the Final Battle....

Now you just need the physio to respond in a positive manner to make your week?

It's more of a hold-over from the fact that the "hard-core" gamers who liked in-depth games were the ones that played on the pc.. the console market was geared towards the casual gamer, the "simple" platform jumping / button-mashing fight games type of thing that you could jump in, play 15 minutes or so, then leave without worrying about saving... That's evolving over the past few years.. but I'd say that's where the viewpoint comes from.... I mean, it's still a rarity for a game that was designed for the console takes more then 10 hours to play through once.. while it used to be a rarity for a pc game that fell under that time.. length of gameplay, levels of complexity.. that's what's been shifting of late. That, and precisely what makes up a "casual" gamer compared to a "hard-core" one...

I never seemed to find anything that kicked up from the Wild Wasteland trait for me.. And I never stumbled across a Gauss Rifle at any point.. Lasers, Plasma , and Miniguns oh my, but nary a sight of a Gauss Rifle. Although I did stumble on the Tesla lightning zapper thing...but I didn't really unlimber that until the final Hoover Dam battle.

It amazes me how the difficulty of learning a programming language can vary depending on how well written a book one has. I've always found the interesting point is learning from the examples in a book, and then making the jump to being able to adapt techniques to other situations. Some books can make that easier then others...

I was constantly running close to the carrying capacity. pick up a couple of things and then I was over the limit.. so was fairly constantly having to shuffle off and sell it or stash it.. and plenty of offloading onto companions. Generally tried to make sure I had weapons that used the same ammo type as well.. rather then have hordes of different ammo.

hm, I tended to split mine into 1: Pistol, 3: Shotgun, 4:Melee Weapon, 5:Laser Pistol, 6: Rifle type, 7:Laser/Plasma rifle, 8: Heavy Weapon I'll admit, Pew-Pew with the Meltdown Perk was kind of crazy... especially in enclosed spaces..

Handled post, some grocery shopping, and a few other odds and ends... tried to do a touch more C# revision to kick the plaque away..but my brain seems to have locked in the "mushy" role since this morning. Tried to help explain some basic, reallly basic computer matters to my mother. Okay, my mother is an intelligent woman, she's capable in so many areas.. but computer.. it doesn't register. No matter how simple you make it, how many times you explain it.. it just won't stick. She'll cheerfully admit to this. But trying to explain why saving 30+ silly games to the desktop, installing them from there and never uninstalling and deleting them when she's finished and having her blank stare when I try to show her how to save things to other places... I get many, many stabby pains erupt in my head. When I try to explain about backing up some files.. she gives me a blank look and a "so how do I move to a different folder?" It's.. bizzare. She took to ebay like a duck to water, taking photographs, uploading them, cropping them, using ebay features to organise items... But simple, basic computer matters..and aaargh! It can drive me nearly to the point of eating the keyboard in frustration.

There's using a Chekov's Gun.. There's using a Chekov's freaking Arsenal.. and then there's just widely beating the audience around the head with an obvious plot hook/item.. which happened an awful lot in those books.. What always bugged me with Harry Potter was just how similar the appearance and initial attitude was to the main character in Gaiman's Book of Magic.

Arg, well back from morning labours. Some physical workout is nice, but trying to maneuver beds and furniture around stairways and narrow doors is so much fun. It's not so much the weight as the general awkwardness and lack of a good handholds... Still, having that slight pause for lunch now. Don't know exactly why but having that mix of tired and depressed wave kicking in while my brain is feeling generally mushy rather then sharp and aware.. Get this sorted, then off to post a parcel to a cousin serving in Afghanistan and a few more chores to take care of...

I don't think Hardcore really added much to the general difficulty of the game.. it just added a higher level of annoyance over weight limits... One slightly random thought, does Ceasar's Legion react any differently if the main character is female?

Yeah, the whole.. wonder of the natural world tends to be more of a specific single feature rather then the sort of.. expansive area. I tend to think some place like Iguazu Falls which spreads out and consists of many features.. sort of falls into what I'm thinking of.. While Everest or the like are places within the area..