Month: July 2012

Must actually play what I buy.

Steam summer sale is still going on and while I haven’t gone as mad with it as I might have … I’ve not played that much of what I have bought. A lot of that is down to me being in the work type schedule. After a day’s staring at a VDU and using my brain to think through the issues, I’m often not actually wanting to cook more brain cells on a game that’s going to want me to think quickly.

So I’ve been watching the gaming instead through youtube channels including Totalbiscuit (as Totalhalibut), Jesse Cos (as Omfgcata), Dodger’s coffeh and PressHeart videos and the Yogscast series (too prolific to link). They never forget something absolutely key – games are supposed to be FUN. And they have a lot of fun with making their videos. I laugh a lot when watching them.

Oh and it also lets me check games out to see if :

They’re worth spending money on;
They’re my type of game;

And other stuff like that. I’ve watched some of the videos and recognised that while it may well be an excellent game of its type, it’s not one I’d be interested in or spend much time on.

In that case, I wonder why I’m reinstalling League of Legends as I type … And that’s instead of getting more into what I have bought on the Steam sale so far :

Beyond Good & Evil – from Sweet SteamGirl
Borderlands – post apocalyptic shooter with radical graphics style
Trine 2 – bought for soundtrack really, sideways scrolling puzzler
Civilisation V – empire building evolved
Civ 4 Colonisation – conquer the New World and then tell the people back home to poke off

But at least I’ve managed to resist things like Anno 2070 & HOMM6 (bad DRM), Sins of a Solar Empire (not enough discount, think it’d send me back to Moo2), Warlord-Master of the Arcane (unfinished) and a few others. Things like the Total War series – the developers of these have a very long history of pushing out games that are only 90% complete. There’s only so much of that behaviour which can be tolerated. Or should be tolerated.

That’s one massive problem with the gaming world at the moment. Hype wins over good common sense. It’s quite well known that the Total War games and a few others have issues. Most of the top selling games have issues. The Skyrim UI is unusable compared to modded versions of it. Pretty much anything by Bethesda is unstable and everything Ubisoft do is shackled by obsessive and unstable DRM. Yet hype combined with inaccurate and Advertising Biased reviews in magazines leads to these games being bestsellers.

It’s a pity really. And it affects other areas of the media like what we see on Telly.

We don’t get fed Good Stuff. We get fed stuff that is expected to sell. Revolutionary, “interesting” programmes and games get abandoned in favour of what seems a good bet. We lose good series like A Town Called Eureka, Sanctuary, Firefly, Terra Nova and Defying Gravity and keep stuff like True Blood, Game of Thrones (not seen) and Spartacus. I’m pretty much addicted to vampire stuff, so for me to abandon True Blood after 1 series due to its writing being more boring than watching paint dry suggests something had gone horribly wrong there.

Quick music aside – if we got forcefed the mainstream rubbish all the time in music, we’d be missing out on amazing voices singing about Clowns (Alison Goldfrapp – I could listen to that voice all day).

Sadly it’s part of majority rule … We’re a huge collection of minorities. Each minority has its own taste, which while unique overlaps the taste of the other minorities. My sister and I both love Bat For Lashes but we have opposite tastes for Alisha’s Attic (love ’em) and Muse (dislike – all sounds the same).

When it comes to getting pushed stuff in the gaming world, companies steer towards what’s likely to be popular. Which means :

Lots of first person shooters
Third person shooters
Cutscenes that interfere with the action
On rails games that have skyscraper sized plot hammers
Civ clones and Total War clones
Sequelitis

And other stuff like that. It means I’ve not really got into the modern games (Mass Effect maybe?) like I did classics like Neverwinter Nights, Moo2, Tie Fighter and MoM. Mentioning Tie Fighter – where’s the space sims these days ? Those died out because they apparently didn’t sell. Well … the original X Wing kickstarted the sale of many 80486 PCs. (Last century)

And I’ll rest on a horrible thought I just had that makes me feel old – one or two readers may not have been born when X Wing and Moo were released … Lol 🙂 And they definitely weren’t here when I was addicted to BBC classics like Elite & Revs !

PS I wonder how much of that reluctance to game is down to me deep down really wanting to be out somewhere with someone attractive and intelligent enjoying stuff like dinner, movies, shows together ? Playing with yourself can pass the time but playing with others is where the real fun is.

When they start appearing in the hire car fleet … then it'll have been raining …

DUKs all round I think…. [lol]

We actually haven’t had rain for some of this week !

Don’t be alarmed. Torrential rain was back today. For a while. We got lulled into thinking Summer was happening over the last couple of days but reality beckoned again today. Guess what – cricket was due tonight.

I don’t really like to believe in coincidence (if you do, then it can be an unhealthy belief that the world revolves around you – the world doesn’t care that much) but …

No cricket on Monday & Tuesday – rain relatively clear.
Cricket on Wednesday – oars needed to get to work. (Not quite)
Cricket called off – 30 minutes later the sun comes out.

Sun’s still out too but there was so much rain this morning, the ground would have been mud. There’s another game on tomorrow night, to be played on an artificial pitch. Bit more chance of that game happening but I have my doubts.

Loving my car still – can’t quite believe I’ve almost had it a year now. But … I think one of these would have been more appropriate for our English summer :

That’s from the Wiki page and it’s for a World War 2 vehicle – the DUKW. It’s a six wheeled amphibious truck. The letters stand for :
D – designed in 1942
U – Utility
K – driven front wheels
W – two powered rear axles
What that doesn’t say is that it had a watertight hull and propeller and could go 5.5 knots in water as well as 50mph on land.

What say to a modern version of one of them ? Might need it if this Global Warming thing continues ! Let’s see :

Make it smaller. Say use a Juke chassis or other small SUV.
Keep the hull watertight, lighten it for buoyancy.
Use a powertrain with a “Power Take Off”*
And hook up a steerable propeller or propulsor.

Yeah. Mad Scientist Hat is calling … I reckon that without needing to take guns and a buncha squaddies, you could get 80mph+ and 10knts+.

*(Power Take Off – is something that lets you hook up the engine to something other than the wheels. Seen on tractors mostly, used to be on 4×4 vehicles. Not seen so much these days)

More all sorts today …

There’s a few things lately that have set off the That’s Silly alarm.

Olympics are coming ! My summer leave period is spookily going to coincide with the first week. I’ll watch as much Olympics as I can fit in. Or I’ll try to. I’d like to head off for one of the events too but looking at the tickets page, the options are all deeply Meh :

Artistic Gymnastics, Football, Weightlifting, Beach Volleyball, Volleyball, Boxing, Diving.

Hockey’s on the list – hockey’s ok. Unless it’s Mixed Hockey, which is a bloodbath not for the faint hearted. Put a hockey stick in the hands of a woman and there’s only one thing to do : RUN LIKE HELL. Or be in goal where you’re covered head to toe in armour.

So I don’t think I’ll go to any events, looking at the tickets available but I’ll watch it until my brain melts. And then I’ll switch over to the 2nd England vs S Africa Test Match which starts on Thursday 2nd.

House of Lords “reform” …

You have to seriously wonder at what’s in the heads of the people supposedly leading our country. House of Lords isn’t about privilege, although there are members of it that seriously abuse privilege. (If you’re a Lord, you should occasionally attend the house). Being in the House of Lords isn’t a privilege, it’s a responsibility. It’s an unelected body who’s aim it is to keep the elected monkeys in check. They don’t make law, they stop bad ones. And the people we vote in are a bunch of morons.

Democracy is a great system of government when you have viable people to vote for. And we’re sorely lacking in those at the moment. It would be handy to have a mechanism of De-Lording a Lord but they’re really there to keep the MPs from doing really stupid things like …

Setting the speed limits to 40mph on rural roads.

Who came up with this one ? And did they really expect it to be followed ? The speeds they set for GB roads tend to be seen as a minimum speed, not a maximum. Not many people keep to the 40 limits around here and you get the occasional psycho doing 60 in the 30s. So if the limits were set back to 40, you’d get 80mph muppet coming round blind bends and whacking the 40mph people. It’s not Actual Speed that’s dangerous, it’s Speed Differential. When there’s a big difference in speed, that’s when things get very dangerous.

There’s too much sense of immortallity coming from driving our tougher modern cars. People are doing daft things like Speed Limit + 30 or using mobiles while driving.

That’s enough ranty mode for now though.
Abolishing the Lords – bad. It’ll let the politicians run riot and do stupid things.
Reducing the speed limit – bad. It’ll make the roads far more dangerous.

Been running at Ultra Hyper today. Not sure completely why – there’s a few possibilities :

Nattering to various people and trying to make some of them smile
Shaking my head at one fella who we’re hoping won’t damage himself through overwork
(hey ! that could be me too ! too late – already messed up my shoulder – lol)
Thinking my eyes have made an improvement
Being insanely busy at work
Realising that I may need to buy yet another belt
(it’s regularly going on another tighter hole now)
Maybe something I’ve eaten too (there’s something to that “need fish” thing)
Getting bought stuff on Steam 🙂 🙂 🙂
(someone must like me !)

Sporty stuff – this weekend’s going to be busy too … After the disaster which was the Eve Alliance Tournament stream yesterday, I’ll not bother with the finals next weekend. I’ll be busy enough with shoehorning in Cricket and Formula 1 (unless it rains and takes the cricket off the field).

Talking of rain … Having a silly amount of rain this summer June/July. I have a strong feeling that the pink bat grip I got a month ago (it really is a month ago – I checked!) isn’t going to see service on a cricket field this year. Yeah – I reckon it’s a good chance we’ll get an almost completely washed out summer season.

That’s quite sad. And another reason why I’m glad I didn’t go through with making a massive thing of the Pink Hat Project. To be ruthlessly honest there, I don’t think my fragile ego would have coped well with what I anticipate would have been a general response of “that’s nice, now what were you doing again ?” to me hunting sponsorship.

Hunting for charity cash is a really thankless task at the moment. Money’s tight. I’d feel bad if someone I got cash off for a fairly anonymous charity later had to stop doing something they enjoy because they couldn’t afford it. Too many charity people guilt you into giving with variations of “It’s for charity … mate” with the inference of the “mate” factor diminishing if you don’t give. I hate that. And it’s partly down to a colleague from >10 years ago who was everyone’s friend when collecting but didn’t want to know at other times.

I’ll happily give cash to charities that I trust but my psyche isn’t set up for the collecting aspect.

So yeah – Pink Hat Project, if I’d gone ahead with it fully, would have been a damp squib. But on the bright side … No more hose pipe bans !

Games to the left, games to the right, games to the centre this weekend.

On the telly we’ve had cricket, with one shortened game yesterday and another game today which looks like it’ll go the distance.
On the laptop and later desktop we’ve had the Eve Alliance tournament.
And over Steam we’ve had the sales continuing …

I’ve bought stuff ! And had stuff bought for me too, which was a very pleasant surprise in the middle of thumping dragons in Skyrim. The game which was bought for me is Beyond Good And Evil, which I’d have bought in this Steam sale anyway (just waiting for more discount). What can I say about this one ? It’s about the most adorable game I’ve played. And I very rarely pull words like that out for games.

It has a style I’ve not seen much in games, although I have tended to avoid the adventure style game before I came across Deus Ex HR. You play Jade, pictured above and below. Jade is a photo journalist who is looking to get to the bottom of conspiracies. It’s a scifi setting, very colourful with cuteness dialled up to max.

Did I mention conspiracy ? No conspiracy would be complete without a dodgy geezer with strange tache and suit.

I’ve not got too far into it but I’m looking forward to going back in.

Cricket on the telly’s been good. Yesterday’s game saw Worcestershire set a pretty decent target, with Leicestershire chasing. It was Will-They-Won’t-They all the way to the end. With every ball, the likely winner was changing. Very tense, very exciting. And today’s game is looking quite close too.

The Eve Alliance tournament has been happening this weekend too (finale next weekend) and to be honest – if previous Eve tournaments drew me back into the game, this is chasing me away from it. And it’s not even CCP’s fault either, it’s the reliability of their chosen streamer that’s letting them down. It’s been down a lot today. Very embarassing for CCP.

As well as Beyond Good & Evil, I’ve sent a copy of Trine 2 back to a very good friend on Steam which I hope she enjoys a lot :-). And I’ve picked up another copy of Borderlands (with all DLC for £5), Civ V (£7.50) and Civ 4 Colonisation (£2.50). Civ V is mostly in the hope of finding a cheap copy of its expansion but I’ll check out Civ V at some point.

Lots of games – not enough time to play them.

I didn’t finish Borderlands the last time around but remember it being pretty good. I didn’t finish because it drove me back into World of Warcraft. I doubt that will happen this time because I think WoW has pretty much had its day with me. GuildWars 2 might just be the Next WoW though.

Nah – no air filter machine. May have to scout them for when I next blitz clean the house. Last time I really did that, I was coughing for days due to the dust going up into the air for me to breathe in.

it took me years to learn not to buy it just cause it's on sale
well done kid

do you have an air filtering machine, or several, they really do help with dust
also Swiffer products are great for dusting off, they hold the dust rather than spread it around

hugs

Not actually bought anything yet on the Steam sale …

A few things have caught the eye but not enough to actually get the credit card for :

Anno 2070 – it’s a city builder game but I’m not altogether sure what I’d do with it. Still curious about it though. However … it has Ubisoft’s overbearing Digital Rights Management software attached to it which requires an always on internet connection. That’s not actually a problem for me, although it is for Ubisoft. My internet connection is 99.9999% available, which is much more than can be said for Ubisoft’s DRM servers.

Might & Magic Heroes VI – missed the boat on this one, although it’s another one that’s subject to Ubisoft’s DRM. It’s another example where rampant piracy is costing honest customers. The DRM would not be there without piracy.

Warlock – Master Of the Arcane – another one I avoided but it’s one that I was interested in. I’ve always been a fan of Civilisation type games. They have huge depth available in terms of strategy and this one looks to bring in fantasy elements which seriously open up the scope past Spearman vs Tank. But … it’s another which was released before it was ready, with elements like diplomacy being sacrificed in the rush.

Bloodbowl – I used to be a big Games Workshop fan. I’d get White Dwarf every month and keep up with their games. I even got a few of their PC games. They were strong games too – tabletop and computer. GW went very mercenary though and it showed in the attitude they had towards selling complete games. Actually, on tabletop that’s probably not completely fair as they maintained game balance while adding new bits through White Dwarf. But on computer, they effectively pioneered the “sell something incomplete now, sell DLC later” ethic that’s infecting the PC gaming market more now.

So I’ve avoided getting what the independent reviewers think of as a broken game. Wonder if I could find a copy of the earlier Chaos League somewhere.

Lesson – just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean you Have To Buy It.

That’s kinda distant from the title isn’t it …

My eyes have been particularly bad lately. People are noticing and asking about it … Hayfever seems incredibly bad this summer and my eyes have been watering excessively. However … always ask if you’ve found the right cause. I suffer from dust allergies as well and my house is in severe need of Attack By Vacuum Cleaner. I also wear glasses and while I keep the lenses clean that’s not always enough. So I attacked them with something short n pointy to clean the bits that a hanky doesn’t reach.

Eyes improving. Handy 🙂 But still a way to go. They’re still sore but not as much as a couple of days ago. I’ve also changed my pillowcases. Where do we put our eyes when we sleep ? Usually next door to a pillowcase. Lesson – don’t neglect the obvious 😉

Chilling out today. I can keep myself going for ages if I need to. And when I start to struggle, I know stuff I can consume to kick in the hyperactivity again. Things like going for the coffee, crunchies, Mini Egg stash. I need a certain amount of fish in my diet (iodine for thyroid) so had a bit of fish last night for dinner.

Needed the chill out this weekend. I can push myself when I need to but at some point I need to stop and catch up. My body’s telling me I need to catch up after last weekend plus the Scotland trip by letting me know about all sorts of soreness. It’s mostly in the achilles area of my legs.

They’re just whinging at me though. There’s nothing actually broken. Now I’ve had a little break, if I needed to I’d switch right back into up and at ’em 🙂

Milkshake later while the cricket’s on – milk’s good for the bones.

Uhoh.

Steam Summer Sale time …

Every summer and winter, the most popular (cos they got in first) online software distributor does a massive sale. Huge discounts, daily deals and all that. I’ll keep my eye on it for a while in case any good deals appear. So far I have my eye on Beyond Good & Evil, although I’ve not bought that yet. I’m also interested in Sins of a Solar Empire (not discounted) and a couple of others.

I’ll occasionally have a mad moment or two when the sales come around. I’ll see something and think “ooo – shiny, always wanted that” and then when I’ve got it, I’ll leave it in the games library unplayed like :

SWTOR – got boring very quickly
Battlefield 3 – criminally unstable
TitanQuest – bought it when my last machine broke its Windows
Moo3 – very, very poor

And there’s a bunch more like that. I’ve improved my record lately with games, just by buying less of them. I ignore the magazine reviews which don’t tell you about unfinished code and believe the online reviews more. It’s trusting where the money is coming from. Online reviewers tend to be unaffected by commercial interest. They get their cash from you watching their videos and they’ll make enough ad revenue to let them buy their own copies of the games. A magazine has far higher production cost and is dependent on the publishers feeding them early stuff so they meet their deadlines.

I’d far rather trust an independent than magazines which time and time again prove themselves to be in the pocket of publishers who persist in peddling stuff that’s unfit for sale.

I guess I’m getting a bit cynical about the gaming, although I’m not actually gaming that much at the moment anyway. Doesn’t seem enough time in the evenings to bury myself in a game.

I have had time tonight though to indulge in a bluray (Three Musketeers – silly but fun film). Not done that for months. I needed the popcorn. (Getting tired – leave is booked for a fortnight’s time, just spookily coinciding with Olympics!)

Still raining. I was thinking about saying “Hey! Not busy, I can play tonight” for cricket after missing potential games on Tuesday and Wednesday due to the Glasgow trip. However, I’d have had to fight my way through traffic to go home to fetch my kit before heading to SW Bristol to the game. Bristol roads are bad news at that time of evening. The decision became academic at about 3pm when the heavens opened … and I think there’s still stuff up there because it’s still raining.

Wanted to say something about a work colleague.

He hurt his hand quite badly on Monday evening, bad enough that he needed to go in for an operation on Tuesday morning. We hadn’t got much information coming through to the team so we didn’t quite know what the implications would be. I figured he’d be demanding his work laptop as soon as he was coherent enough to remember the password. Back on Communicator by 11.30am after the op. That’s commitment.

Some people will take the mickey for doing things like that. There’s a few who are a bit too much into “I’ve been signed off work – yippee! Free time”. We’re not like that though. We feel an obligation to get things done. Last time I had off sick (I don’t notice bugs) was bugs but the time before that was my 2 nose jobs 9 years ago. And I only had about 4 days off total for that. We”d get horribly bored anyway if we had that kind of time away from getting stuff done.

We’ll miss our guy’s actual presence for a little while but with the way we’ve shifted how we work over the past few years, he’ll still be able to make his mark through remote log in and teleconferencing.

It used to be that we’d have people visiting the outstations far more regularly. That expended a lot in terms of time and air tickets. We’re hopefully more efficient now with us reaching for the spiderphones at the slightest excuse. We probably get more meetings in and more stuff done that way, although I have to say it was great yesterday to say hello personally again to people I’ve only talked to over the phone over the last couple of years.

That’s enough about work though. Friday tomorrow. Bacon day. And I’m hoping to get away early enough to not lose any of the flexi credit I’ve built up 🙂

PS I think my fingers have come out in sympathy. I’ve cracked the bones in most of my fingers through cricket and they occasionally like to remind me … The latest are two fingers on my left hand which feel cracked again. They still support typing pressure and holding stuff but are still … distracting. I’m either getting old or they’re rain sensitive !