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Blow Me AwayFire your guns, it's time to run April 13 Baby it's cold outsideIt's April. It should be cooling off. Instead, we're still having 30 degree Celsius days. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Shivering Isles, although I'm having some trouble working out exactly where the name comes from. SHIVing Isles - that I could understand. Stabbing people with homemade weapons does bear some relation to madness. Or Rocking Back and Forwards Isles. That would make sense. Or Muttering Under Your Breath Isles. Even Brushing Off Invisible Ants and Screaming Isles. I'm just not seeing the connection to shivering. I suppose I'm missing something really obvious.
People have been asking me what I think of it, and I'm surprised that they ask. If there's one thing you can say about Bethesda, it's that they're consistent. Morrowind was good and Oblivion was good. Moreover, they were good in exactly the same ways. Oblivion had some improvements over Morrowind (All hail Fast Travel!) but generally, the things that were good about Oblivion were the same things that were good about Morrowind. Most people either like both of them or neither of them. I think you'll find that people who like one but not the other are exceedingly rare. Which is why when people say: "What do you think of Shivering Isles?" or "Is it any good", I'm surprised. If they don't have Oblivion, then it's of no relevance, and if they do, then they already know what it's going to be like. I suppose the question they're really asking is "Is Shivering Isles worth the cost?", in which case they're asking the wrong person. I love PC-style RPGs, and there is no way that I could ever be induced to say that it's not. What do I think of Shivering Isles? I think it's great. But you have to realise that that is a heavily biased opinion and in no way impartial. I'd think it was worth it just to get new alchemy ingredients. My only gripe is that I wish I'd realised that I had to save before chosing which dukedom I wanted. There are two acheivements - one for Mania and one for Dementia. In order to get them both, you have to reload a save. I wish I had saved closer to that point. But playing through it again will do me no harm. I might do some more of the (numerous) side-quests this time. Next, GH11. February 27 The Woes of Veruca SaltYes, yes, I know. This site is still blocked from work. I am still posting via email. It is teh suck. Do you know what else is teh suck? It's that when you're trying to type an email, the email's spell-checker auto-replaces 'teh' with 'the'. FUCK OFF.
To continue the theme of bad-temperedness, I'm now going to talk about Crackdown. I like Crackdown. I think it's a worthwhile purchase. I'm enjoying it. What I'm enjoying somewhat less is hearing people bitch about how they had to buy Crackdown to get into the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta. These people do not seem to understand how money works. Let me now explain the principle by breaking it down into bite-sized concepts. Money has little or no inherent worth. Financially speaking, the real value of money is in gold that the government stores in the treasury. The stuff you hand over the counter is only the idea of money. Philosophically speaking, money is only worth what it can buy you. And here is where judgement is required. You see, 'worth' is a value that depends not just on RRP, but on other factors like emotion. The DS cost $200, but it has provided hours and hours of happy. Does the happy weigh more than the $200? Yes. Yes it does. That means it was a worthwhile purchase. And this is how adults live day to day. You have to say "Is this car worth $20k?" and "Is this house worth a mortgage of $1200 per month?" Then there's the advanced calculations like "I can buy my lunch for $8, which seems worth it. But if I'm buying my lunch twice a week, then that's $832 per year. Is it worth spending $832 per year for the convenience of not making my lunch every day?" See? Tough questions. This particular case is straight forward. Crackdown costs AU$100. If you don't want the game, but you do want to get into the beta, then you have to ask yourself "Is the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta worth $100 to me?" and the answer will either be yes or no. If you say to yourself "the full version of Halo 3 will probably only be $120, so no, I'm not going to buy my way into the beta, I'll just wait", then that's something that you'll have to live with. You can wait for the game to be on special. You could probably buy a second-hand copy. Whatever. But that's your choice. If, on the other hand, you say "I want Halo 3 like a woman wants a man. I need to get my hands on it ASAP, even if it's only the multiplayer, and truth told I'd probably sell my grandmother for it so YES, I think I can stretch to $100" then fork over the cash and shut the fuck up about how you're being 'forced' to buy Crackdown. No one has a gun to your head*. No one is making you. Take some responsibility for your actions. A virtual pat on the back to anyone who recognises the reference in the title. * Although, that can be arranged. February 06 That's 'Sucky' spelled with an 'F'.The arseholes who administer IT at my work have decided to block LiveSpaces. The bastards. This means that I can no longer post from work (except via email, as I'm doing now). Now I just need to work out how to comment remotely. If only my usual café was an Internode CityLan hotspot, it would be so easy... My teeth are sore. It's probably all the gnashing. I'm thinking I probably will buy Crackdown when it comes out (22nd Feb?). Yes, it may be a little unpolished, but the fact is that I'm enjoying it, even though every time I play it I do the same things over and over. (Halo 3 beta? What on earth do you mean?) My goal is to get onto the second island. I assume that it must be possible in the demo, as it is also highlighted in yellow and shows two supply points. The fact that you can't simply drive across suggests that perhaps you need to kill the Los Muertos kingpin first. That's my theory. If it's wrong, then hopefully I won't find out for another two weeks. It wouldn't be a challenge except for time. From the moment you reach 2nd rank in any skill the demo gives you 30 minutes to finish up. So, in order to give myself as much time as possible, I need to achieve as many of the goals as possible before reaching a 2nd rank. As firearms is one of the skills, it means that you can level up to second rank just by shooting people, so caution is required. I start out by trying to capture the four supply points without firing a shot. It can be done, but not having that 2nd rank in agility makes it so much harder. From there, the next on the list are the generals. Here is where I run into trouble. While I have managed to kill them all, I haven't managed to kill them all *before* the demo times out. Maybe with a little practice I'll be fast enough at killing the generals to take a shot at killing the kingpin. Or if I'm really lucky, maybe I'll get MUA back undamaged and I can spend the intervening time on that. February 01 Battle for Middle Earth II? Nah.Firstly, an apology to anyone who reads this via LJ (or via RSS at all, I guess). For reasons I cannot even begin to understand, Live Spaces sometimes decides to vomit up a string of recent posts. So they all reel out to clutter up your friends pages and so forth. I'm sorry about that, I swear that it's nothing I did/do - my PC was turned off and I wasn't even near a PC at the time! I promise! On the other hand, my notifications (that I tried to turn on *months* ago to no avail) now seem to be working. Trés weird. January 29 Craic-downMy progress with MUA temporarily halted (I've had to send the disc back, it's damaged and I'm waiting for a new one), I downloaded the Crackdown demo. Crackdown is pretty fun. It's more fun than GTA (at least for me), probably because of two things. Firstly, the shooting people. The targeting and health bar makes it much more shooter-ish, and face it, shooting people never gets old. Secondly, the jumping. I couldn't work out how the jumping worked at first (having recently played games that used double-jump). So I'm tapping the A button and wondering why I'm not getting enough height. Turns out you have to *hold down* the A button. Once I had that sussed it was lots of fun. By the time I was timed out of the demo, I could jump higher than 15 feet, which meant I could pretty easily leap onto the roof of a single story building. Collecting all the agility awards - lots of fun. PS: To Game Developers: DON'T KICK ME OUT OF DEMOS! |
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