New Comp, Finally.

After all the trouble, I finally have constructed my computer. I could write up the entire story, but I have a feeling that it will bore anyone to tears. In short, the first time I got the mobo (P5E Asus) it was DOA (dead on arrival), so after returning it and getting a new one it worked. 1GB of my old RAM wasn't compatible, so I bought a gig more from a friend. That is really all...
The one problem is that I installed a new copy of the OS (Vista 32) so I have to reinstall everything. This is a pain, but I am sure I will be happier once everything is back to normal.

Farewell Azeroth...

Well, it's offical. My World of Warcraft account expires today. I played for about a year and a half. I started out on a trial account from a friend Nurdl, started a druid. I got him up to 36 or so, then we switched servers. My next character was a priest (27), who was ok, but I didn't really get into him as much as my next character, the mage. My mage is now level 62. He was the most fun character, with whom I spent much time. I will say that my fun in WoW declined rapidly after another friend, Zork, quit (I was ~45). Nurdl was taking a long break, and my other friend who played was on another server, on the other faction (he was a noob anyway). I didn't find playing solo or with pickup groups very fun. Make more friends, you say? No, I hated my server. It was always low population, and the people who actually did play on a regular basis were mostly jerks, weirdos, or bots. Most of the time I had only my RL friends on my friend list, and many, many people on my ignore (thanks Impy). After trying to come back to the game every month or so, I accepted the fact that I had lost the desire to play. I think it was the BC expansion that ruined it for me. It would have been great if I had had time to get to level 60 (the level cap at the time) before it came out, but it turned out that it shipped when I was still around 52. I found myself, once so close to my goal, back to being many days of playtime away from it. It's like if you were running a 60-mile strip of road. You started out a little late, but you got close to the end due to your sprint at the final half. They extend the course by 10 miles, and you just can't go on. Everyone who had been at 60 for a long time had had plenty of time to rest, and were good to go the first second of installing the giant patch, maybe even more so than when they were at the beginning. Of course, if I hadn't made a new main I would have reached it, but I don't think the druid was really right for me anyway. The only thing I really liked about it were the cat and travel forms (yes I like cats). Anyway, I think that this game has a very small appeal if your friends are not also playing. It is really fun for me to get together with some friends and quest, but unfortunately time happens, things get old, night comes, and sleep attacks. I think I was probably the one who played the most, which left me ahead of the others most of the time. So ANYWAY... when your friends leave, it seems that you have to leave too. (I do not blame them of course)

So there... there is my farewell tribute to the World of Warcraft. Maybe if we all get to be 30 or so ill call everyone and order them to all install it again so we can play... lol =p

Spirited Away

I just saw Spirited Away for the first time just half an hour ago. I know I am a noob for not having seen it sooner, but late is better than not at all, right?

Without getting into a full review here, this is or is very close to the best movie I have ever seen. It's too bad that doesn't mean very much (I do not watch movies very often) but it is a very very nice movie. I think I finally understand a few references to it, including that bath house in Okami being run by birds. Anyway, if you haven't seen it, and anyone reading this probably already has, you should watch it soon. (by 2002, [released in 2001] 1/6th of Japan had watched it)

One thing though, it really annoys the hell out of me that Disney, the publisher... no wait, the distributer of the English version of the movie, puts their "Walt Disney Studios Presents" thing ON THE TOP AND FRONT. They hardly did anything! GRRR... Sorry, I will spare you the disney rant. Getting the whole thing head-on endangers the side and frontal lobes of your brain, or so I'm told.

Alpha Prime Review

Alpha Prime Review

Ima shoot some doodz

I am trying a few different approches at reviewing games, so I downloaded the Alpha Prime Demo off steam and... had a few things to say about it. First off, I think the developers of this game were trying to mix half-life 2, doom 3, and F.E.A.R. and produce an easy moneymaker game. Let me say this now - it didn't work out for them as easily as they hoped. Half-Life 2 was not in fact defined by the physics, although it was a good point of it. Doom 3 was not all about the outdoor marsish enviornments and fancy door locks. FEAR did not use the time-slowing ability as it's main selling point. Alpha Prime tries to combine all these into a game that looks like it was created 5 years ago based on the weapons and graphics. Now, if this had been created by one dude, I would have been impressed.

Click the pic - They include the manual and the book of system failures IN THE GAME... lol

Concept

Alpha Prime starts with a cutscene that shows a security camera which sees a fireball crash on the planet surface. Thats great. Then it goes to first-person, and expects you to go behind where you start through a narrow passageway that is almost hard to see in order to retreve a gatling gun and some grenades. The first thing you notice is the graphics. I had the settings as high as they could go, and it still looked... plastic. The textures were very plain and big, and the bloom effect coming from the axe you spawn with is way overdone. The second thing you notice is how you move around the world. Most of it is the usual FPS game stuff, same controls you are used to; but the terrain is slanted in many places, and this presents a very large problem. If you find the right path to walk on you are fine, but if you jump or land on a slanted surface or one with a small but abrupt change in elevation, you notice a lot of clumsyness with the design. Once I got the gun but sufficated right next to an oxygen tank because I couldn't jump from a slanted sandy surface onto a three inch up platform. Also, if you go to any place the game designers don't want you to go, you die. There are no autosaves either, you have to remember to quicksave every once in a while; which I am terrible at, because I would rather be immersed in the story.
One more thing I would like to mention is the first friendly that you meet. He seems to be Italian and in his commentary randomly inserts French, Spanish, and Italian words. He also just happens to be a little on the insane/mentally challenged side. His lines do not much help the already simple-and-corny story. Here are two examples:

...ok. One thing I liked about this game was that there is one part at the beginning where you can play basketball with a bulletproof ball. I found this to be more entertaining then the actual gameplay.

Play some Bball!

So overall, I would say do not buy this game unless you already have all the better FPSs, you have a lot of money to waste, and you are in the mood for a completely mindless shooter.

How convenient!

Back

Well, it was a good thing that I did so many posts on Friday Jan 4th, because right after then (about 3 hours later) the power went out. When I say "went out", I mean it went out on a major scale. A lot of my state was out of power, and although the electric company worked its ~500 employees hard, I didn't get my power returned until Wendnesday; 6 days later. One tree fell over breaking a power line right behind my house, and although this was reported twice to the company, they still attempted to make the line live again. This resulted in a small fire and a lot of smoke right behind my house. The Ground was fortunately too wet for the fire to spread much, but it smoldered the tree and probably shocked the ground around it (water doesn't exactly help that). Anyway, that was the only exitement of the week, even more so because the other days were completely and utterly boring. In this day and age, there is not really much you can do without electricity in your house.

Completely Unrelated: George Bush (president of US) sings "Bloody Sunday"

Also Completely Unrelated: I recently rediscovered how awesome the users of the website Flickr are. I was looking at picture of Sweden, and every link I clicked completely blew me away. This one in particular, I stared at for at least 15 minutes.

The Witcher Review

The Witcher [Wikipedia Entry] [Official Site] is an action RPG for PC developed by CD Projekt RED STUDIO (based in Poland) and published by Atari. This fantasy game takes place in medieval times, (you can expect swords, monsters and magic) and includes the usual races of humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, demons, etc. You are Geralt, one of the few remaining Witchers. Witchers are professional monster slayers, humans who have gone through vigorous training and have gone through the painful experiance of being mutated by a secret formula known only by the Witchers. They are hated my many common folk, called "mutants" and "omens for desaster". Geralt apparently has died in the past, and he has lost almost all of his memory. The player begins the game when Geralt is taken to a hidden castle among some people who know him.

The Witcher, first and foremost, is a very beautiful game. The artists did a very good job putting together the landscapes and lighting of the world. When you first start up the game, you can watch a very nicely done CGI intro, although all it really tells you is what a witcher is, and that this particular one is famous. When the game is loading, you can examine the concept art, which is also very beautiful.

The gameplay itself reminds me very much of Diablo with the types of dungeons, the equipping system and the npc stores. Although you cannot play online, it has a few elements of World of Warcraft (talent system) and Oblivion (sleeping/meditating to gain levels and health) as well. The combat system is kind of a tossup. At first I was disappointed that I couldn't actively initiate all of the fancy moves that Geralt can do, but once I get both swords, some magic abilities, and all three styles of combat I started to enjoy just sitting back and watching the animations. Fighting is actually quite easy. You just choose the correct style depending on what enemy you are facing or if there are more than one of them, click once, wait for the cursor icon to appear yellow, and click again. You repeat this until the enemies are dead. You can spice it up by flipping over your opponent or blasting him with magic, but that is the basic idea of it. The storyline is continued through a series of quests that make you talk to specific NPCs, kill specific monsters, or deliver items somewhere. There are of course many side quests that you can get by talking to villagers and reading bulletin boards.

Of course this game, like all others, is not without its flaws. Some of the NPC's conversations and speech is poorly translated from polish and may seem corny or odd. Although the concept art you see on the loading screens is nice, you will unfortunately be seeing them a lot. One of the biggest problems with game is the long loading times. I consider my computer to be on the medium-high end, but the loading times still are long enough to be bothersome. Sometimes the game randomly crashes on me, exiting out to windows. This must doesnt happen on all computers, otherwise it would have gotten worse reviews from other sources; these crashes do happen on both of my computers. If you get this game, I would reccomend immediately going to the main site linked above and downloading patch 1.2. This, I am told, cuts the loading times 10% and fixes a load of bugs, including the game not starting up at all. It also (according to Wikipedia) allows you to run the game even if your computer doesn't meet the system requirements.

Overall, I think that this game deserves the millions of copies that were sold around the world. The characters seem rich and the animations are superb. Out of 10 I would probably give this game a 9. I reccomend reading the Wikipedia article or downloading the demo for more information.

Note: Some of the information provided above was taken from Wikipedia, so just give them credit. All of the screenshots were taken and uploaded my myself. Any other legal stuff is however it is supposed to be I guess. =P

Coming Soon!

Some of my friends have been asking me about the game The Witcher. I decided to do a review here so I could just link them to it. It will be the next post.

An Interesting Find

One thing I discovered a few days ago is this photo-realistic rendering software (Wikipedia entry)"POV-Ray" I of course am no where near as programming-savvy as required to be able to use this program, but I found it very amazing that these images were all rendered using the software to create all of the reflections, lighting, textures, etc. Imagine if games were able to use something like this in the future! Too bad, some people said it took their computer a month to finish rendering the images; It'l probably be a long time before that happens =P Be sure to click the images to see the detail these things have =).

New Year Again

Yikes, it has certainly been a long time... I have no idea what happened... So what has happened...
I finished Crysis singleplayer, had some fun playing MP a bit
Played a lot of Garry's Mod, as well as GMbeta2007
Started playing the Witcher
I ordered the CPU and mobo (total of ~$551, ouch)
The year 2007 ended, 2008 began
Started learning Swedish again
and probably a lot of things becides those I can think of at the moment. I'll post a few more things as I think of them.