Clear Skies

Most of my free time in the past few days has been taken up by playing EVE Online and Infamous. I’ve been spending a lot of time mining asteroids in EVE to help out the corporation that I’ve joined, and I essentially just turn on my mining lasers for a while and make sure I don’t get attacked. There’s essentially a lot of time that I have to do other things, so, that’s when I’ve been playing Infamous.

Another thing related to EVE is a great video made with the Half-Life 2 engine. It’s more like a two part movie, but it’s definitely worth watching, even if you don’t play EVE. You should download and watch Clear Skies when you get a chance.

Infamous has been a lot of fun so far. I just finished the first island tonight and have started on the second. It’s been fairly easy so far, but I’m only playing it on the default difficulty for now. I’m playing through as evil first, then I’ll play through as good on the hardest difficulty. One thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense, other than the not being able to climb or shoot through chain link fences, as Penny-Arcade pointed out, is that if you drain the power of a car it continues to drive.

I’ve also been playing GRID some more, since it’s great and I’ve barely played it. It’s very unforgiving if you hit a wall and spin out. It’s basically makes you lose the race, but they have a feature that you can roll back time and retry the corner a few times.

inFamous And Today’s Purchase

The night I took inFamous home, I played it for about an hour and I haven’t posted much else (either about it or in general) since. Well, now that it has been a few days, I can definitely say that I am addicted to it. I have likely invested 90% of my gaming time into inFamous since Tuesday (around twelve hours or so).

I currently just finished defending the prison against the dustmen on the second island. I have done all of the side missions and good side missions presented to me so far. Statistically, I sit at the highest Karma level (Hero), 49% complete, 20 out of 32 Dead Drops, 10 out of 21 stunts, 164 out of 350 shards, 55 out of 84 districts cleared, powers and upgrades at 38, and I have done 10 out of 15 good missions.

When I play, I find it extremely difficult to stop. Hours go by and I don’t even notice. Everyone must have this game for their Playstation 3.

Anyway, I won’t go into the game in detail really. Once I am done the game once through, I will give a better review.

Today I met a guy in Cambridge and picked up a game.

The game is Final Fantasy II for the Super Nintendo. It’s in decent shape, other than a minor tear on the label. It was $20.

Mail For May 29, 2009

This is a day late, but oh well. I received two things in the mail yesterday. They are the last of the stuff I purchased on E-Bay this month.

I received WipEout XL for the Playstation 1. This is the sequel to the original WipEout, and is considered one of the best racing games for the Playstation. I love the first game, and played it a lot. This game is fast and has some great controls. I am happy to finally have it. Maybe some day I will find a mint copy. This copy is in okay condition. There are some light marks or stains on the back of the manual, and the disc is scratched quite a bit. The game still works fine, and the price was really low, so I am not going to complain about it too much.

Here is a picture of the bottom of the disc. All of the scratches are fairly light. I was a bit annoyed at first, but I am over it.

I also received two new bits for opening Nintendo game cartridges. I can finally continue cleaning them. Yay. I won’t bother posting pics of these, since they are just bits.

An Infamous game enters my PS3’s slot and doesn’t come out for a while

As Matt said in the previous post, I have Infamous. It is very good. So far, it has been a lot of fun, and there’s a lot more fun in store.
I’ve just become the second level of evil, and I’m about half way through unlocking the first island of the game (like GTA).
There are these things called blast shards scattered all over the game, and there are 350 of them to find, so it’s going to be a while. I’m getting close to 100, and finding them isn’t that bad. You just need to be near them and press L3 and they show up as blue dots on the mini map. You then just need to scale a building or what ever else it’s stuck to to pick it up. There are lots of power ups and lots of reapers to kill. It’s great.

I’ve also updated a previous post about when I bought games when I was in Waterloo with Matt, and added pictures.

It’s time to get back to playing Infamous and mining in Eve.

It’s Electrifying!

Yesterday, Laynix went down to Kitchener to pick up his copy of inFamous, and I was able to talk him into picking up my copy as well. I got off work last night, picked it up, went home and played it.

If you don’t know the plot to the game, here is the basics. You are a bike messanger, and you were delivering a package. While you are biking to your destination, the package explodes and takes out a huge portion of the city. You awaken and find yourself in the burning ruins. You have inherited electical super powers, and and you can use them for good deeds, or evil. It’s up to you to find out what happened, and why you have these powers.

I am currently playing through as a goody-good. I will talk more on this when I have played more. I have only played 5 missions so far.

Mail For May 26, 2009

Today I received I-Ninja for the Playstation 2. This is an action platformer that I played a demo of a long time ago. It’s rather fun. The game is in okay condition, but there’s a problem. The auction picture, from E-Bay, showed a manual with it. This came with no manual. Needless to say, I was rather upset about this. I contacted the seller, and will either be partially refunding me, sending the manual, or else they will receive some negative feedback.

As you can see, there is no manual inside. Upsetting.

This is the picture from the E-Bay auction. As you can see, there’s a manual right there.

The seller gave me a partial refund of 50%.

What I’ve been up to

So it’s been nearly a week since I posted something, which I think is the longest amount of time between my posts so far.

The main reason for this is due to some corrupt data causing my WinXP install to not boot, and, a reinstall failed.
I’ve been meaning to better organize all of the data I have spanning across many hard drives, but I haven’t been keeping up, so I had a lot of it stored on my main drive. I backed that up and played some UFC 2009 Undisputed and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.

I was talking to one of my friends, and he has been using the beta for Windows 7 and likes it, so I thought about giving it a try. I decided I may as well, since I have to install something, and so far it has been great. The install was very fast, and had every driver except for an 8 year old SoundBlaster Audigy. I haven’t ran into any big issues except for a lag issue with Vent which I was able to clear up, and a problem that screws up the sound output, but that could be the Audigy drivers, and since it’s a beta OS. It is definitely better than I expected. It hasn’t crashed, it’s quick, and it looks really nice. I guess it looks pretty similar to Vista, but still nice. It took me a little while to figure out how to share folders, but it’s just because they have given the user a lot more control over file sharing, so, that’s good. So far I’ve only played Eve Online and TF2 since installing, but neither have had any problems. I’ll post more about Windows 7 when I’ve spent more time with it.

Another change to my PC has been my memory. Last week one day there was a great sale on memory at NCIX. I picked up 4 1 gig sticks of crucial DDR2-1066 for $10/stick. I couldn’t resist the surprise 1 day sale on this stuff. It came in today and is nice and fast.