Janmanden

After banging (literally, bang-bang) readiness up to 100% I got Only took six hours to get there.. But at least MP is fun - sort of.

One word, actually two, now four in total, sixteen including what I intended to say: delivery-service.

Because then you might accidentally skip some of their amazing dialogue. That makes too much sense. Well.. the worst part is actually the total lack of control at all. You can't even pause it. My gf called and I was like "just a moment honey", I just need to.. erm.. wait a minute.. No wait two minutes.. Oh bloody hell.. End now FFS, STUPID GAME!! EPIC FAIL!!

I just finished ME3 for the first time with an import of a male ME1/ME2 character and now I wonder what my options are.. It made more sense to replay previous ME games, because there was more choice.. A replay of ME3 will be too much of a repeat of the first. Hmmmm..

In ME2 I replaced the loading screen with a very short movie and that saved me from watching 15 seconds of loading between every load and area transistion.. Maybe the same could be done with all the cutscenes without interaction.

As long as they don't use a close-up narrow third-person view with only three members and your main character blocking 50% of your view watching his back.. Oh ffs.. Console.. Yuck.

I caved in and got the game on GamersGate too, which saved me about $15 compared to Origin. I got an MS of T-6006/E-3003 without MP (50%), which could probably have been higher if I had just kept my mouth shut. The worst part is really all the cutscenes and the game playing itself.. I did notice ONE more dialogue than the demo, but there was generally too little dialogue by choice. The cordial wheel is more like scene selector than a dialogue wheel. I hate being put on stand by this much. I really wish there would have been a visible count down to the next 'choice' so I could relax more and do other things in between. I think the part I lo.. liked to do the most was pushing buttons. That was really well done and quite funny too. Overall it was a nice mix of tried and true and despite the plot holes and goof balls I liked the ending(s) too, but I am quite amazed how well lack of originality counts in reviews.

Unless the monitor is going to be lying down flat on the table I just don't see myself using such a system for the PC, because sitting with my hands stretched out in the air touching a screen standing tall on a table just sounds too tiring not to mention the back problems and what other ailments you are going to attract from such an akward work position.. It works as a whiteboard for five minutes.

Good advice, but yes I know.. I don't really want to do regular scans, but .. Geez, never really thought about it that way before, but this hybrid thing is messing with my head. Somtimes I notice the slowness more than usual and I think "****, something is hogging me.." add to that, I know it's silly, but that exclamation point that Bitdefender use to remind me to do a scan actually stresses me out a bit.. And I always feel it was a complete waste of time, because the scan only finds and removes the same 30 harmless cookies.. It's a good thing it's quite effectively blocking anything from getting on the computer, but better safe than sorry I guess. Somtimes I bite that apple.. I am contemplating, actually preparing for a switch to Windows 7, because I got 9GB's of unused memory(!!)..

It's a bit 'funny' that you've got one key to do a lot of things with, when you still got four keys to do one thing.. The ASWD is basically just going forward in four different directions, but neither sidestepping (strafing) nor going backwards.. Funny being painfully clunky and annoying.

Thanks for the replies. I do kind of worry that the RevoDrive would just be a delay of the inevitable total switch when I realize it doens't quite work as intended like the Seagate Momentus XT already proves to me in painfully slow ways.. Not really that slow, but when SSD do work it's blazing fast compared to the HDD aspect. So.. Another thing that bothers me is that ultra-slow av-scan.. I assume that it's done in a few minutes with SSD?

Sounds like the game is playing itself more. Is it only the Normandy or is there more Party Banter as well out in the field?

Inspired by this I installed all the old M&M and had some problems getting them to run until I realized that Bitdefender was somehow blocking them, but turning on Game Mode fixed that. Been playing quite a bit of MM7 again.. Afternoons turned into evenings turned into nights and all of sudden I had to go to bed so I at least could pretend to have been there before getting up again.. It's still good, but compared to MM6 it's really crippled and pointless in a way and there are some changes that really makes some spells completely useless. I used to love to Enchant Items and all that, but it's really useless now, because the strenght of enchantments has been hacked down to mediocre. And I really hate all those silly requirements that limits your mastery.. If you can buy a skill you should be able to max it out, having a half-baked version that's just silly, especially when you realize after expert or master that you can't get it to the next rank.. What a waste. Somehow it just feels like some spells would have been much more useful earlier in the game and pretty much useless when you finally do.. And the tracking of teachers and promotions.. and too much, but still I endure. Wow me. Rant: It's probably something about balancing, but it feels very old school having rigid inane requirements and limits like that.. Like some old, hard and unforgiving mud I used to play.. If you died you, you came back empty in the town square and then you had to get your corpse back in whatever hostile zone you were killed and on top of that you were cripled for 24 minutes.. If you died geting your corpse back, which was easy because you are naked and the monster you tried to kill still remembers you, you would get another 24 minutes on top of that.. That's really player-hostile.. Amazing I put up with it, it must have been some mental flaw that evil geniuses exploit. They make an addictive game and then they add PAIN because they are twisted and perverted inviduals who gave up pulling legs off of spiders.. Go back to spiders, please! Rant:End.

(Wtf.. Logged me out and now the editor is teasing me, arrrrggggrrrh. I think I know this feeling. Aigh, It's PAIN!!) Hmmmm.. My computer is really sssssloooww and it shouldn't be.. Run one application no problem.. Gaming, easy. Run five different browsers, a few ftp sessions, some graphics and Visual Web Developer and it's full of coffee breaks switching from one application to another and with overlapping artifacts from the previous one until the next screen refresh.. If it was memory problem it would be easy to fix, but I am never really close, but maybe it's time to switch away from XP to 7. Either Core i7 sucks at multi-tasking or triple-channel memory is overrated or my disk is slow or Bitdefender is hogging me.. I feel that turning on Bitdefenders Game Mode increase the responsiveness of the system a good bit, not all of it, but I think that mode is too permissive for the paranoid part of me.. It is a small part, but there is a vicious internet out there and while I generally seem to steer clear of it I like having some freedom too with belts and buckles.. I wonder what the effect of going for a full SSD will be in regards to having some AV suite constantly scanning the disk. I've already got a hybrid disk, the Seagate Momentus XT, that combines the 500GB HDD with a 4GB SSD cache, it's a small cache but it's still helping a bit and in some ways it's fast, but all it's really done is to wet my appetite for more. I've seen some statistics showing that the durability of SSD's is somehow measured in disk read/writes and thus having a Security Suite that do that for a living would kill such a disk pretty fast, but maybe that's in the past? Price is too high for my needs. Having a SSD for just the OS or games.. Feh, I need all or nothing and nothing is too little. Currently I am considering whether I should pick another hybrid with a larger SSD cache.. Something like the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid SSD 1TB.. Which is stil quite expensive, but half the price per GB than the cheapest SSD.. But then again I could combine 4 128GB's SSD's for 500GB of SSD for about the same price, more or less much more.. Brrrrr. Tough choice. Anyone got any experience with the OCZ RevoDrive or other hybrids?

Just picked up a movie called Maniac Cop in the supermarket. As I saw Bruce "Ash" Campbell's name on it I thought it was probably another crazy horror-comedy, but unfortunately it wasn't that Bruce even though he had his face.. Felt like three different teams made the movie.. In the beginning there were like two teams.. One trying to build up a conspiracy and the other one trying to make a thriller, but half-way through I think both teams got sacked and a rush-job was performed. I was really quite surprised by this movie, but I also got mixed emotions about it. Doubt I'll watch it again. It could have been fun and I was sort of expecting that, but I got a pretty nasty unexpected surprise. I feel like this movie could have been great with a bit of direction, because it's got a lot of things going, but unfortunately it stops dead in its track and pushes on with something else - all the time. Weird. Don't think I said any more than what you can read from the back. I think it would be sort of okay if you don't come looking for a humorous Army of Darkness kind of movie.

That was a balance problem, not an issue with the mechanics themselves, which were solid. They could have easily kept the reheat mechanics nearly untouched (except for some rebalancing of the values) and added "thermal clips" in quantities comparable to medi-gel and grenades from the first game, so that if you really needed to keep firing in a certain situation you'd have the option to cool down your weapon immediately. If you have infinite ammo, unless you have an AI that is determined to remove you from cover you can just hide until you cool down.The way things spawned in ME2 made it rewarding to move forward. I actually felt that ME2 punished me for moving on and wanted me to camp out every combat and as much as I hated that it always worked.. Especially the Kasumi DLC was one big scripted camp-fest and especially the end of that emphasized the futility of it all to me. Dodging bullets is also a bit hard with clunky controls, no strafing, crouching or jumping and every now and then I am suddenly glued to a brick.. I felt the global cooldown crippled me as a Vanguard with Area Charge.. Right smack in the face of a horde of enemies sprawled all over and then one shot.. and no powers?? I just couldn't get the hell out of there fast enough. The Locus helped, but the controls are just not as responsive as I need them to be and I still fought too much with the omni-key.. Covering, when I should be storming or jumping over to enemy side of cover to duck and silly things like that. I liked the infinite ammo and overheating was a nice balance system.. Maybe they should have worked harder on that. The change in ME2 where you suddenly have to run and around and search for those completely random ammo drops.. I thought that was a quite boring and painful exercise.. The way it was it should have been an auto-loot feature. If all the dead bodies didn't just vanish mysteriously and actually required me to search their bodies for 'goodies' that would be okay with me.. But this.. Little invisible space valkyries come down to bring the dead bodies to never-never land and sometimes leaves a present behind, that's just ridiculous.. I guess it kinda puts the fantasy in fantasy, hehe.. erm, heh.. leave it.

I liked KotOR1 and 2, because the voice was still mine to think up.. I think. BG was in parts like reading a book with a few hints about how to see the character.. The voice and style of Minsc echoed in my head whenever his voice was missing like it did for all the characters. It wasn't until a new gamer on the old IPLY boards, who apparently wasn't used to that kind of self-compensating gaming, came along and asked about the missing voices that I realized that it wasn't fully voiced.. Playing a game that isn't fully voiced, lipsynced and so on leaves a lot for the mind to work with and that work is nice.. Playing a game that is fully voiced and like a movie.. That's quite alienating in a way and it leaves me feeling a bit empty headed as my head is never actually used for anything, because I am just supposed to be sucking it all up.. apart from the action. I think every time the dev add a voice or remove a choice.. The loss is on me. I lose out on having a mental experience of compensating with my mind, which is a personally gratifying experience I lose, and thus I miss out on the personal involvement. In a manner of speaking in BG I was the Bhaalspawn, in ME I am just the puppeteered puppet-master.. Every dialogue option is actually just a disguised PLAY button in a way. Somehow every cutscene is just blah-blah-blah until the action begins.. As long as I can skip those cutscenes and move straight to interaction I can forget the pain of what I lost, but give me too much time waiting for something to play out without me and I get distracted and start thinking.. The suicide mission was particularly bad in that way as you lose control completely for several minutes.. It's hard to imagine that it's the same company that made BG that also made ME, but I guess it really isn't the same company. It's just the same name.

Overthinking: They do look a bit fishy.. With the tentacle hair.. Maybe they paralyze their 'prey' into a happy dream state and then those tentacles do sucky 'things'.. Aria also sort of hinted that nothing leaves a body quite as empty as an Ardat-Yaksi does.. Maybe she sucked a bit too hard. Well.. Hmm.. Liara talked about it when she was still a virgin.. Personally I think she was just being naive.. A 'slightly' more avanced tale than finding babies under gooseberry bushes.. In my experience it was 'virtually' quite physical after the mental foreplay even though the connection was obviously fruitless.. erm, asaribabyless, buuut there was clearly left something out. I think the mental foreplay/intercourse is just a cover up, a parlor trick, Considering how linear ME is I am a bit puzzled why there were no offsprings produced from either romance.. Shepard must be rusty. No wonder.

Seriously, it's not hard, you just need to endure the probing, which is a pain in the arse long before you get to probe uranus.

In Pursuit of Greed (1995) Horrible game, but the 'techno' music impressed me and the game sounds blended in quite well in amusing ways. Soundtrack by Andrew "Necros" Sega. Someone put it all together here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXgEM42PbGc&feature=related

Are you sure about that? I thought and still think there are a few bugs. Sometimes you just die in this game for no apparent reason. Also happened in the demo a few times. Like ZOINK; no blood or anything to reveal cause of death.. Not like there is really anything to reveal that, no bullet holes or anything.. Apart from the Female Krogan of part 2 of the demo that blow two Cerberus away with Wrex's shotgun I don't remember any blood splattered and death rattling enemies lying around.. It's so clean.. It also happened once when I was ducking for cover with no enemies close..

Oh.. I see, hehe. Well.. I lost my appetite with Red Alert pretty fast.. C&C has been imprinted deep in my genetic memory as something horribly chaotic, repetitive and boring since It was running rampant all over the dormitory network in the late nineties. I assume it's still the same chaotic gameplay with emphasis on chaotic micro-management.. MP, that is. This game would be so much easier if I wasn't colour blind..

It's an interesting idea, but it sounds crazy that people are donating that much.. Does the donation buy a share of the profits or is it just for the sake of a new game?

He makes it sound bad, but that guy is a kind of politician too, representing the voice of the industry.. But.. Well, Isn't his views essentially where politics and representative elitism comes from? Representing someone.. If you don't cater to the needs of your voters, supporters or whatever's you lose that support. As long as any run for a political office is sponsored by private funding there is going to be a problem.. Any system that is dependent on backing support is going to be a bit sticky somehow.. That's the way it is and not just in politics, but in every social relation, I think.. I realize that's a bit cynical, but..

You probably need to work more on your sales speech, because whatever it is you are selling, I am not paying for that, yet.. Well, they should probably have done a (Normandy) ship in a bottle.. closer to home. Considering that everybody in ME space speaks american, or canadian or whatever that language from somewhere on the continent of America is that they speak, I think it's reasonable to assume that they would think anything in space would drop in America too.. Like aliens, who also only seem to pick America, of all countries, ever to visit..