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.

Today’s Penny Arcade

I read today’s Penny Arcade and then read the comic. This made me laugh for a few minutes and also destroyed the little patience I have for waiting. I cannot wait to play inFamous and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Tomorrow inFamous will be released and it will be glorious (unfortunately I work tomorrow, so I won’t be able to get it until Thursday. BALLS!). It’ll hold my attention until Red Faction is released on June 2nd. That, too, will be glorious.

You may be thinking that I have a lot of games, so why don’t I just play those until these games come out? Why the rush? Well, it’s been this way since I started noting release dates for games. No matter how awesome the game I am currently playing is, the next one I am looking forward to will almost always appear better in my mind. It’s like I build the hype of a game up, in my head, so much that it doesn’t matter what I am currently playing. I need the next game.

It’s rare that it isn’t this way. It’s part of the problem for me. I spend so much money on games, it is actually like an addiction. I fun addiction. I am addicted to spending money on fun. I guess it doesn’t sound all that bad. Okay, I can live with that.

Mail For May 25, 2009 +

I received Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits for Playstation 2 in the mail today. The game is in mint condition. No damage or wear anywhere to be found. I saw this cheap on E-bay, and decided to get it. Now I have both Arc the Lad games for the Playstation 2. Now I need to find the Arc the Lad Collector’s Edition for the Playstation 1.

On another note, I got back to playing Resistance: Retribution the last couple of nights. I am very close to the end of the game now. Maybe one more sitting and it will be complete. I could have possibly been finished it by now, but my battery died during my shift last night and I forgot to bring my power cord.

Catching Up On The News.

It’s likely been a week since I read any gaming news, so I thought I’d get up-to-date. Here are a few articles I’ve read today.

Resident Evil: Director’s Cut is coming to the PSN store soon. That’s alright, but not really necessary. There’s been so many releases of the first Resident Evil game, it’s a bit insane. I guess this will allow people who have never played the original a shot to try it out, but meh.

This is just completely hilarious. I can’t believe that Evolved Games would release Terminator Salvation for the PC with such a huge flaw. I’d be pissed if I returned home, sat down in front of my PC, and the game would not install. It’s apparently not a very good game anyway, so I hope not too many people bothered. So much for there ever being a good Terminator game. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I have a feeling it’s not going to be very good.

Back a while ago, I mentioned that I had purchased Demigod, and there were some issues with the online multiplayer service. Stardock has decided to compensate the players who have suffered due to the issues. Good stuff.

Fuel is apparently a world record holder for the biggest playable area in a console game ever made. It has 5,560 square miles of area. That is crazy. Now I need this game just because of that. Thanks a lot Asobo Studios and Codemasters. Now I need to spend more money on another awesome game. Oh well, I’ll have an extra week to save up some money, since it’s been delayed a little bit. It is now due out on June 5, 2009.

Do you like Metroid Prime? How about all three of them? Well, be happy, because Nintendo will be releasing Metroid Trilogy for the Wii, and you’ll be able to play the first two with the Wii remote. Yay. This is pretty cool, if you don’t own or haven’t played any of the Metroid Prime games. Otherwise, meh. I may get it, since I never completed the first Metroid Prime and never played Echoes. I do have them, but I wouldn’t mind using my Wii remote instead of the Game Cube controller. Oh and there is apparently going to be multiplayer.

Here are some screens and artwork from a game that I will need to have. I am talking about Diablo III. I can’t wait for this game, as it will put an end to my life and I will be lost to reality. Diablo II did horrible things to me. I expect the same from this game. I may as well start doing lines of off a hooker’s ass while I am at it.

Did you like Little Big Planet? Will, people who have played it, and own a Nintendo DS, may be in for a treat. Level editing and sharing those player-created levels with other players will be great fun. Should be a must-buy title for Laynix and I this fall.

Hideo Kajima’s next game will be revealed next month. This is the guy that created the Metal Gear Solid series, so I am sure whatever he makes will either be good or make lots of money or both. We’ll have to wait and see what it is.

The Queen of England gets some bling. THQ thought that this would be a good step in promoting their new game Wii BIG Family Games. Good job, THQ. You got everyone’s attention. Is it really a good game?

Some kids just take games too seriously. Wow. I really have nothing to say about this, other than kids need to fucking chill the fuck out.

Used game sales are up by a shit load right now, and new game sales are down a bit. Nintendo seems to be okay with this, instead of complaining about it. People just need more incentive to buy brand new games. I wonder what kinds of ideas Nintendo will think up. I don’t really have much need to buy many Wii games, considering the lack of awesome in the Wii library.

It would have been kind of cool to have Bill Clinton as the voice for the President in Fallout 3. A firm apparently tried to get him for the voice, but Bethesda denies that they told the firm to chase him down for the role. We lived without it, so whatever. I guess Bethesda doesn’t want to be known for bothering former presidents? Was somebody annoyed with the firm for them asking Clinton if he’d do the voice? Is this really all that important for there to be a news article on it?

Here is some fun facts about EA’s annual report. Just thought you may enjoy reading this.

That’s all I have read today. I am a bit tired now, and I have a night shift tonight, so I am off to bed now for a nap. I’ll maybe add more to this post later at work.