Disciples of Bork

The Old Republic

2012-01-06T14:10:33-05:00

It owns!

Just for the record. At least as a cooperative single player RPG. Haven’t tried anything else yet, but it’s a BioWare game through and through. Much like KotOR, but way bigger.

We’re playing on Vornskr with our old horde guild Shadow Wolf Guard (republic) and on Drooga’s Pleasure Barge for the empire without a guild so far, but one is coming up soon.

Halo Reach

2010-11-05T12:45:28-05:00

With Halo: Combat Evolved being basically the only game we ever play these days, my friend and I (who played it endlessly when it first came out on Windows and Mac) decided to plow through Halo Reach, just for the nostalgia and all. Turns out it’s a god damn fine piece of work. The campain is a tad short and a bit easy on normal (at least when you’e doing it co-op as you basically never have to start over from the last checkpoint), but it was on the other hand NEVER boring. There was absolutely no part of the game where I felt like I would just like to skip ahead to the next thing (Library). And by the end, the story just got so epic and awesome, I couldn’t really handle much more gameplay anyway.

All in all, fucking phenomonal game. Highly recommended. Especially the collector’s edition, where you get a map and a diary and a whole bunch of nice crap to make the experience even better. I really didn’t think I was going to be able to fully enjoy a game anymore (I usually get stressed and feel like I should be doing something productive instead of just sitting on my ass and wasting time), but I just swallowed it whole.

Just for funsies, here’s a link to the Deliver Hope trailer in HD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKRlWLDWhGI

8800 GT dead

2010-01-30T12:58:59-05:00

Well Mass Effect 2, I believe, effectively killed my video card. I’m not entirely sure if it was Mass Effect 2 or if this was a long time coming after Dragon Age, but the game just froze in this one room on the Normandy. After attempting to reboot and relaunch the game, the screen goes wonky, green artifacts and all kinds of shit start popping up and then the video just dies. Attempting to reboot into Mac OS yields a kernel panic. Even after I shut down the computer overnight and restart the following day has the video freeze then die after less than 5 minutes. The card isn’t even remotely hot. Pulled each RAM and did some tests, so memory is still good. I’ve been through this situation before though… I know it’s the video card.

To make certain, I dug out my other piece of shit, the ATI X1900 XT which also failed in about the same amount of time after I bought the Mac Pro. Popped it in, and everything is OK. Granted I know the X1900 always worked fine until it really started to warm up and then artifacts start showing up. Attempting to run any game that pushes it harder instantly killed the video. But at least it works for simple tasks, whereas reinserting the 8800 GT even when cool, locks up the machine with flashes and flickers on the login screen.

The 8800 GT’s been a great card though, ran cooler, quieter and faster than the X1900. I can’t say I’ve had any trouble whatsoever running any game for Mac or Windows on the highest settings, save for Crysis: Warhead. Besides WoW last year, Age of Empires 3, and most recently Dragon Age, it’s shown great performance. Unfortunately Apple no longer sells them, so I acquired another from an online reseller. I wish I knew what killed it though. I can’t say for sure if Mass Effect 2 made its fan spin faster more than Dragon Age did. Perhaps dust and static? Anyways, this will probably be the last hoorah for the Mac Pro. It’s going on 4 years, been a great machine except the two video card failures. Hoping at least the replacement card when it arrives will last (praying) another 2 years as I do use the Mac Pro for more than just games. By then I may be ready buy a new machine.

Anyways, for the time being I’ll just install Mass Effect 2 on my laptop and copy the save over. Who knows, maybe Mass Effect 2 will take out my laptop. It’s covered by Apple’s extended warranty for the rest of this year. Go-go 8600M GT chipset debacle. If the video fails on it, they’ll have to replace the logic board for free.

Jesus loves me!!!!! New Road Rash is coming…

2007-06-15T23:25:53-05:00

I stumbled across this today. And as long as EA puts some of the good slave-driven designers on the game to bring it back to its glory, I’ll cream my pants on the spot.

Road Rash was MY game back in the day. Road Rash 2, 3D0’s version, 3D… all fantastic (except jailbreak and the ones that brought the series down), and if they really push the envelope with some incredible environments like traffic jammed interstates, crowded neighborhood streets, then throw in a great physics engine, some great bikes and deep characters and storylines, the game could be phenomenal.

So here’s me getting my hopes up insanely high. Anyone else with me?!

PSPGo - the future of greed

2009-10-05T08:29:44-05:00

I just posted this elsewhere, and thought I’d share it in the wake of Sony’s release of the PSPgo, the PSP without half the stuff that makes the PSP good and with an overpriced version of the AppStore to replace it, at a 50% higher price than the fully featured PSP and games matching sony’s MSRP for UMD based games. Claimed to be the future of gaming, of course. It’s Sony we’re talking about after all:

While a good idea in theory, the execution of the PSPGo is currently a disaster.

You pay a premium price for a console that has only two features the cheaper one doesn’t have, one that is good but not vital (Bluetooth) and one that should be able to implement on older PSPs with a software update (“quicksave” function for all games). But besides that you pay for a drive-less console to which games will cost more than the old one (few larger stores sell games at MSRP and almost no stores goes over it), and that’s not even talking about borrowing/buying used games.

The new form factor is amazing, but it forces you to go entirely wireless… over a 802.11b network card… and it won’t work with any current PSP peripherals besides 3.5mm headphones… which almost amazes me considering some of Sony’s other decisions regarding the console.

I really want to love the Go, and I really wanted one from it was first announced… but then they announced the price and my original reaction was “they must be kidding” followed by a long time thinking “it will be worth it anyways”. But when it finally arrived… it made wanna get a PSP 3000 more than ever before. I can get two PSP 3000s for the price of a PSP go here (albeit, going to a cheaper store for the 3000 and a store at MSRP for the go), and a trade-in option at Game would allow me to trade in a DS Lite with three games to let me by a PSP Go for the price of a PSP 3000. I didn’t take it

I though Sony messed up the PS3 at launch, but I guess that was just warming up for this.

Coming up next year will be the PS3 Go, which will have users pay $1000 to be allowed to watch video streams of chinese gold farmers play FFXIV on a console with no storage media, ports (besides video out) or controller. It will be the “next step in gaming” for sure.

So, ODST drops today…

2009-09-22T05:49:43-05:00

...and we totally beat it yesterday.

This does not mean that the game is so short you beat it in negative time, but that we got it one day early and the main campaign was so awesome we just couldn’t stop playing until it was done (which technically was today, at 3am…). Besides taking the dog out, we never left the sofa until we had beaten it, and then we left it reluctantly, since we hadn’t tried out the new Firefight cooperative multiplayer mode.

The game take place before Halo 3, in the city of New Mombasa, where an orbital drop goes pretty bad, and you, as the nameless trooper, have to figure out what the heck happened, once you regain consciousness 6 hours later. The “main” game has you walking the streets of night time New Mombasa at your own will, looking for clues of what happened to the rest of your squad. Once such a clue is found, you gain the perspective of somebody else in a squad to see what happened with them earlier during the day. These portions of the games are more “standard” linear Halo action, but still completely awesome.

The open layout of the city exploring is probably the best part though, where you have to use your visual enhancing technology to even see anything in the dark, and then everything looks awesome.

Did I mention awesome?

Just to make it certain nobody missed that part. This game is awesome. The story is awesome, the action is awesome, and, besides character faces, the graphics are completely awesome (while the faces are awesomely hilariously bad, thank Bork for awesome looking helmets). And the only thing that can break the game for us now is if Firefight isn’t as awesome. But then we’ll just play the singleplayer game more, because we have lot of more awesome details to discover in night time New Mombasa.

Also, both mine and Lovisa’s Live accounts are fired up with gold membership, so… you know… FIREFIGHT!!!

Also fun fact: ODST comes with two DVDs, one with ODST, and one with Halo 3’s multiplayer. All of it. Every (overpriced) DLC pack released so far is included in ODST. Nice bonus. There’s also the included “ticket” to Halo Reach’s multiplayer beta once that comes next year… but I prefer holding out for stable releases since singleplayer (and coop) is more our game anyways.

Holiday Madness 2008

2008-10-20T23:42:06-05:00

So what games can you all not resist? There’s basically a hojillion games coming out this holiday, and it’s physically painful to me that I can’t buy them all. So far I’ve succumbed to Mercenaries 2, Rock Band 2, Warhammer Online, Dead Space, and Socom: Confrontation. I’m basically powerless against Far Cry 2, CoD5, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, and Fable 2. All this and a two week vacation to Vietnam in November, and my checking account is taking a beating.

So, what games are mind controlling you all out of your hard earned monies?

The World of Warcraft patching shit-storm

2008-10-15T00:40:51-05:00

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar: You come home from work, you sit down to have dinner and watch TV. After eating you decide to go over to your PC or Mac and play WoW for a little bit before bed. But when you get online, you see that it needs patched. So, you download the patch and have it installed when you suddenly realize that you have to go to bed, and you didn’t get to play WoW. Tonight I had one of those nights. The only difference is that patching service is so bogged right with everyone trying to download the patch, I can’t even get connected. Don’t you think that Blizzard would forsee something like this and attempt to recify it to absorb some of the networking onslaught?

Rock Band 2: Ion Rocker Drum Impressions….

2008-10-14T05:39:55-05:00

Well I made probably one of the more silly purchases, the Ion Drum Rocker drum set for Rock Band 2. I found that playing Rock Band drums, (stupid as it is) actually helped my rhythm in drum programming for actual music and has helped me develop my ability to stay on tempo.

Now first and foremost they look and feel like a cheap set of drum pads instead of fisher price plastic toys. Striking the pad immediately “feels” You get natural rebound from a drum strike and it feels sturdier and more natural. Instead of a clacking dead sound, you’re greeted with deeper thud, more equivalent if you were to tap someone’s shoulder rather briskly. By no means it is silent but its quieter than the Rock Band 1 set.

Secondly the pedal is heavy duty, completely a metal chassis, and in comparison feels more rugged than the rest of the set. Perhaps its for the better but its the loudest component by far as it emits dry metal rattling as you jam on the giant spring.It feel good but honestly, my RB1 pedal didn’t feel bad either after adding the metal billet plate I bought online. It looks identical to the Alesis DM5ProHHPedal

Lastly there’s the cymbals. Yes Rock Band actually can tell the difference between the cymbals and pads. When you play a drum fill, the four pads are snare and 3 Toms, and the cymbals are high hat and crash. Even cymbals from higher quality midi sets always feel stiff and unnatural and the Ion’s are no exception. Even my friend’s rather nice set that allows for cymbal grabs and such doesn’t feel a whole lot better to strike. Its a nice addition but its really hard to move towards playing the high hat for all high hat notes. Its optional thus I find myself using the pads, however with a drum fill, I found myself always reaching for the crash cymbal without even thinking.

All the pads are velocity sensitive as well. Play the drum harder (at least in fills) the louder it plays, no surprise since the Ion Drum Rocker essentially is a midi drum set, right down to the 1/4 inch cables. You could use any of these pads with a midi module provided you have one, and have a fully functioning Midi set. However, even the cheapest Midi modules set you back $250. The pedal as before is not velocity sensitive, it works with my Korg padKontrol as a sustain pedal for a drum pedal but without velocity. I’m willing to bet you could use the Midi Drum Pad to Xbox 360 remote with any standard Midi drum set which makes me wonder why they don’t sell the unit by itself, for about $120?

Its a shame there isn’t any cheap Drum pad to Midi hardware that is strictly for controllers, aka no soundbank, as I could just wire it up to my Mac Pro like my other Midi controllers, and just assign it to BFD or Drumkit From Hell, and have far far better sounds than any hardware module could provide.

So what benefit does the Ion Rocker Drum set provide? It honestly doesn’t really change the game BUT there’s one distinct difference, you’re actually for the most part playing the drums. You can’t dilute yourself Rock Band 2 will teach you complete drumming as velocity has a lot to do with expression, there aren’t any rim shots, no flam, no alternating hand paradiddles, no cymbal grabs, no brushes, but you could certainly transition to playing a better midi drum set. Plus, it adds a new dimension to fun and certainly is crowd pleaser. Its not a pure skill transfer for my padKontrol but it helps. Having never played a rhythm game before Rock Band, I went from easy to hard in Rock band 1 and the ability to play about 1/5 of the songs on expert on the drums. I’m hoping i’ll be able to play most of the medium difficulty songs on expert, and play them well. If I can do that, I’ll actually be actually able to be competition for three friends who actually play real drums… at RockBand.

Hopefully I’ll dump plenty of time into it to justify my purchase as it’d be nice to actually be able to half assed play drums. I’m liking them quite a bit but I have to say, its purse extravagance and probably outside of most people’s wants or needs.

If it came with Midi functionality, it’d make for a great starter kit. Hell, with a proper module, you could simply toss on some Roland CY-8s and call it good, the pads work well enough as is.

Ghostbusters Video Game Cancelled

2008-09-06T19:42:58-05:00

So, here’s the story. I was in at GameStop today to check stuff out and I noticed Rock Band 2. But then it dawned on me, I wonder when the Ghostbusters game i coming out. So, I went to ask and they said it was canned completely. That disappointed me completely seeing how that was the one console title that I was looking forward to. Does anyone know why it was cancelled? It can’t be just because of the publisher because that is a weak excuse to stop writing a highly sought after title like Ghostbusters.