Raithe

Well I had one of those nights when insomnia hit.. so I ended up reading it through till morning. Light on action as you said, and some of the talk on technical hardware aspects could get a touch overlong for my sense of rythym..but still entertaining for the building blocks. The way the honorverse has expanded and you've got the last few books are all on the same "time frame" but from different perspectives is interesting in its way... I can't quite decide whether I like it for the way it 'builds' the sense of the universe..or dislike it for the back and forth nature it can throw at you.. Still, I'm looking forward to the next book in the series. To think that he'd originally planned to kill off Honor and then do all the Mesa/Manpower about 20 years in the future with her kids.. Of course, Weber has that new book coming out in a month or so that looks like it could be amusing.. 'Out of the Dark' - Aliens invade earth, the rebellion forms..and then gets help when 'vampires' come out of the shadows to help.. Since Weber has done military sci-fi, space opera sci-fi, humerous fantasy, and a few genres in-between I'm not quite sure how it's going to read..but it should be fun.

Having a break from "serious" reading at the moment.. decided to catch up on the Honorverse.. so spent an evening on Storm from the Shadows, then worked through Mission of Honor...

I am a serial non-finisher of games. To me, the greater cost of a game is the time I sink into it, not the cash I fork out to buy it. So if the game gets to a point where the gameplay isn't fun and there aren't enough other incentives (story, character, stat/loot progression, atmosphere, art/sound/music design, etc.) to keep me interested, the game ceases to be worth my time and I stop playing. To me, it seems wrong to put that extra 5 hours into a game that I'm not enjoying, just so that I can say I've finished it. Suffering through things that aren't fun just to get them over with is work, not recreation. Maybe I'm just good at picking up games that I enjoy then.. If a game's if a game has a storyline I like, I might have to force myself to deal with bad gameplay..but if its so bad that I really hate it I won't finish it. But still, that's only a handful of games that I've picked up that I've found that to be the case. I wouldn't finish a game I found myself really disliking just to complete it... But I don't tend to randomly pick up games ..

That's something I've never really understood well. In over 10 years of gaming there are only a handful of games I haven't finished once I've picked them up and installed them. If i've paid money for a game, i plan to finish it and enjoy the story of it.. to leave it unfinished just seems.. wrong. Unless there's something about it that just completely kills my soul. .. (see Oblivion for that..)

And the old lady in question has said that she "didn't mean to be cruel to the cat" that she did it as a 'joke' and that she thought the cat would have wriggled free on its own.

And personally, I found Saints Row 2 to be more mindlessly entertaining then GTAIV which seemed to have a touch too much angst buried in it to be properly fun.

Take it to the needy and lost... How about the Isle of Wight?

I'm surprised Purkake hasn't already mentioned Just Cause 2 for mindless fun destructive entertainment...

Review Hm, a little mixed there.

Well someone else is working on a new iteration of Neverwinter (using the 4th edition DnD ruleset) but as a co-op online thing rather then either a single-player or as an mmo... but I forgot where I saw the news article and interview on it right at the moment..

It's interesting that they've set it up so experience points get spent on opening up new skills/improving skills related to different augmentations you have.. but there's no direct "weapon handling" skills. There are potential benefits to weapon handling (recoil control and the like) depending on how you develop the augmentations and skills on your arms.. but nothing that's out and out "pistol", "rifle", "heavy weapons"... The only way to directly improve weapon capabilities.. is to modify the weapon itself. So that seems a touch more Invisible War'ish. But having "skill trees" as such within augmentations sounds a lot more complicated and potentially branching for character development for creating different character types then they had back then...

Started out as a human mercenary.. did the introduction bit, and the mars robot thing.. now every time I leave mars I just get jumped by 1 of two pirates and blown up before I can reach anywhere else. So I'm thinking I might just restart and see what develops.

The trouble I always have is that Al-Jazeera is about as biased and manipulative as Fox News, if noy more so.. It's so damn hard to take news networks seriously these days with the amount of control they put on just how news is told to suit whatever idealogy they have.. Or maybe I've just become ridiculously paranoid and cynical over it..

Giving Space Rangers 2 Reboot a try. I feel I'd actually quite enjoy this game.. if I could actually do more then get blown up by pirates past the introduction. The fact that their weapons do about 4 times more damage then mine and fire about twice as rapidly seems to keep having me blow up before I can actually do anything to upgrade my ship....

It's not a movie about character or plot really... it's a fairly fun film that's about a bunch of actions stars enjoying themselves rather than taking anything too seriously. I mean, Jet Li doing the whole " I want more money, I'm small. I work harder then you guys do." argument with Stallone was fairly amusing.

Hm, I was just poking around on the DE3 website and the first time I'd actually read through the faq they've put up.. some interesting things that I'm not sure if there's been much commentary on before..

Uplink had the cyberpunk "feel" to it. A nice enough gui representation that made you feel as if you were actually involved in some form of hacking.. rather then feeling like it was just some..puzzle mini-game .

While the AP minigame was fairly fast.. there wasn't that much of an out-n-out "hacking" feel to it. From the sounds of it, the DX3 minigame for hacking is something that's going to push more buttons for the atmosphereic feel of hacking. That could be part of the whole "yes!" response...

Oh, it's also got a brief role for Charisma Carpenter (of Buffy and Angel fame) and she's still looking quite good.. The basketball court scene is both amusing and well choreographed for the brief violence there..

It's been about 10 years since i last played ID... this is bringing back some fuzzy memories...

The Expendables.. Fairly fun in that fairly mindless way. Ticks all the boxes for action pieces as an 80's action flick would. Plenty of explosions at the end. A rather loud fully automatic combat shotgun let loose in a small corridor.. Schwarzenegger and Willis were only brief cameos.. But you do get to see Lundgren and Jet Li fight it out which is entertaining.

You don't actually need names to figure out who an informant is. If you've got what information they provided, the area they provided it in.. you can just work the analysis back to figure it out..and the more information you have that they provided the easier it becomes.. Okay, it's more of a slog, but even the Taliban must have some form of counter-intelligence working to figure out moles, informants, and such-like. Even just knowing that "this" information was provided to the enemy makes you start looking around to see who might have given it up.. which makes it even harder for the informant to provide further data..

But even documents 6 month old can reveal things.. Like potential informants, how things are structured... things that keep going even a year or three down the road. That's what can lead to potential deaths and further troubles.

Kasumi was interesting but kind of short. Had some nice story elements but was nothing too great gameplay wise. Firewalker - introduced the new vehicle which felt like it worked a lot better then the mako..although you didn't have the casual free roam with it.. just certain planet missions had it open. The story arc for that was nada too brilliant. Overlord definitely rules the roost out of all of them though. The storyline works, the gameplay elements are blended in nicely..

I need to figure out a game to have idling in the background.. Just haven't been in the zone to properly game the last week or so..