SpaceRodent

Modern Warfare 2: EPIC

dennisr — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:18:38 +0000

I just finished Modern Warfare 2. It was, in a word, EPIC. The single player campaign is pretty short. I finished it on normal difficulty in about six hours. That being said it was a wild ride. I wasn’t sure the sequel could live up to the original but it did and surpassed it. This game goes to great lengths to show you a realistic depiction of war while still maintaining that video game feel. More than once I felt uneasy about what I was doing in the game. I was also at times thinking “why the hell did I just go through that?” The plot is dense and twisting. The story was totally believable and there were parts that I predicted and many that I didn’t.

I don’t want to give anything away so I am being vague on purpose. You really need to experience it without prior knowledge to get the full effect.

My biggest complaint of the first one was how wave after wave of baddies would just keep coming at you until you passed some spot. That is fixed now, yay! I don’t normally go for multiplayer but I have been playing the free for all mode and have been enjoying it a lot. I am going to try some of the other modes as well.

I got the XBOX 360 version so the lack of dedicated servers doesn’t affect me. I can say though that so far online play has been smooth and easy.

Of Borderlands, Dragon Age Origins and Torchlight

dennisr — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:26:20 +0000

I got the three games mentioned in the title. So far the only one I am really happy with is Torchlight.

Borderlands: Diablo done wrong. Uninspired levels, repetitive creatures and a million weapons that all look and act the same and no armor! So the only loot is weapons; boring.

Dragon Age Origins: If Oblivion was a Porsche then Dragon Age Origins is a Toyota. Its the third day and it still hasn’t captured me. I don’t feel like I have to play this game.

First of all the story is right out of every single fantasy novel, movie and game you have ever experienced.

Second of all there is this lush beautiful world and you get to interact with none of it. There is a narrow path you can walk along. I loved in Oblivion that I was able to go anywhere. In Dragon Age Origins the environment seems very small and confining. The gameplay is ok but I prefer the pause based system of Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR).

Finally, if you haven’t purchased it yet get the PS3 or PC version; they are both better than the 360 one (which I got) if you can believe that. The PC is the best though because you can zoom out and see a more tactical view.

Tonight after playing for about an hour I felt like playing Oblivion again! I just wish I hadn’t completed everything in the game. Oblivion is the only game where I got every single achievement. Right now I am not even sure I will finish Dragon Age Origins. I bought this game sight unseen due to the developers previous games (Baldur’s Gate II, KOTOR, Mass Effect) but I wish I would have waited for the reviews and peoples opinions first.

Torchlight: Gorgeous game that looks like Warcraft III and plays like Diablo II. Seriously fun times. I downloaded the demo and played for three hours straight then purchased it. I love it. I will definitely be playing this game a lot. Kudos to Runic games for pulling off a masterpiece. Apparently they are working on a MMO component and I am pretty excited to see what they come up with.

Proud owner of a PSP

dennisr — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:47:41 +0000

I picked up a PSP over the weekend and have been enjoying it quite a bit. I got the 3000 not the Go. I got a used 8GB memory card for it and have quite a few games installed on it already. Games I have been playing on it:

Fieldrunners
Thexder Neo
Final Fantasy VII

The screen is gorgeous, the speakers are so-so but that is okay I got a headset. The controls are quite comfortable. I got a slick custom theme too.

I beat Demon's Souls!

dennisr — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:41:41 +0000

Tonight I finally beat the Archdemon False King and in doing so beat the game. My final level is 89 and total time played was 67 hours and seven minutes.

The game was hard but very fulfilling. In my opinion it is definitely the best game of 2009.

The other games I will be playing this year:

Brütal Legend
Dragon Age Origins
God of War Collection (re-release of God of War I and II on the PS3)
Left for Dead II
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Games I am skipping (or at least waiting till I can get them used and cheap):

Assassins Creed II
Borderlands
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Demon's Souls

dennisr — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:09:43 +0000

Quite simply Demon’s Souls is one of the best games of 2009. The game has sucked me in completely. I have been playing for the last week. Some people call it an RPG but I feel it is more of an Action RPG. Yes; you do level up stats and get better weapons but the story is pretty weak. The meat of the game is the combat. It is very tactical and when you die you always know why – you made a mistake. Death’s never feel cheap (except for when you fall:)).

All the character classes can eventually do everything so you never feel like you picked the wrong class. The knights and soldiers do have an easier time of it in the beginning but the magic users get deadly quickly.

You have two states of being: Soul Form and Living Form. In Soul Form you are safe from other players but when you are alive prepare to be invaded. The meat of the online play is cooperative and versus play. In cooperative play you help other players slay demons. In versus play you try to kill the player whose game you invaded.

I experienced an invader tonight. It was exciting. I was just doing some soul farming (repeating an area over and over to collect souls; I do this on level 4-1 since you can get about 3000 souls in five minutes) when my game was invaded.

It was a long battle (at least 10 minutes) but I finally defeated him. It was a great feeling. The great feelings come frequently. Every time you beat a part of the game you feel great. Keep in mind though that this game is hard and you will die a lot but don’t give up. You will also feel incredibly frustrated at times but mostly in yourself not because the game is cheating.

If you have been on the fence regarding a PS3 purchase I suggest you get one – the good games are here. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves comes out tomorrow as well. I bought my PS3 to play the first one and wasn’t disappointed. I am very excited to play the sequel.

Deadgirl

dennisr — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:35:39 +0000

I just finished watching the movie Deadgirl and I really liked it. It was an original take on on the zombie/vampire genre. In this age of sequels and remakes it was refreshing to see something new.

That being said it was a pretty sick and twisted movie. If you like horror with a bit of social commentary check it out.

If you are looking for another movie that will challenge your perceptions of the horror genre you should also check out KatieBird *Certifiable Crazy Person.

Finally, another movie I saw recently but which you should avoid is Feed. Interesting concept on the serial killer sub-genre but totally ridiculous.

Murder, She Wrote

dennisr — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:03:46 +0000

First of let me say that Netflix streaming is awesome. I have XBOX Live Gold so I can use my 360 to watch it on my TV. My wife and I have been watching Murder, She Wrote. I love mysteries and the lead character, J.B. Fletcher, is like a female version of Sherlock Holmes.

It’s nice to see a program with older people in it. Seems that all the TV lately is all about the young people. It’s also great to see a world with no internet or cell phones.

Personally after watching a few episodes I figured the F.B.I. would hunt her down as being a serial killer since everywhere she goes someone dies and she “solves” the crime:)

Wolfenstein load freeze

dennisr — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:51:22 +0000

I have been playing Wolfenstein for the 360 for the last week and was having a good time until all of a sudden whenever I loaded a save game past my last one the game would completely lockup and I would have to power cycle the 360. Some googling revealed this is a known problem if you get more than 80% of the items in the game. Being a completion-ist I hit it the 80% mark pretty quickly. So now my options are to:

Wait for a patch
Start a new game and don’t collect that many items

I have decided to wait and hopefully it gets fixed soon. It’s a wonder how this made it past the Q&A process.

iPhone from locked to unlocked back to locked

dennisr — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:27:16 +0000

I have been an iPhone user since February when I got the 8GB 3G model. I love it. I call it my tricorder. It has everything a geek on the go needs. I have about nine screens of applications and games.

A lot of my friends also have iPhones and most of theirs are jail broken and run the Cydia app store. I thought maybe I was missing out so I decided to take the plunge and jail break my phone.

There is a lot of documentation out there and I was a little nervous about doing it. I wanted to be sure I had the latest and most up-to-date information.

A Google query here and there revealed two primary methods. Every time I searched for “iphone unlock” ads for automaticiphoneunlocker.com were shown. Its looked good. I pay $29.99 and download a piece of software that does all the work for me.

Well there is a sucker born every minute and it was my time to be the sucker.

I paid the $29.99 and instead of getting a piece of software that does it automatically I got instructions and multiple downloads that pretty much mimicked everything else out there. Now the instructions were so detailed even a noob could follow them but still it was not automatic.

I had to follow this complicated 20 plus step process that involved wiping my phone and deleting everything on it. (I had backups so I wasn’t worried).

The whole process took about 30 minutes quite a bit longer than the five minutes the ad promised.

Okay so my phone was now unlocked and I had this Cydia app store icon – now what? Well that was the end of the instructions. At this point I had to do more googling and reading up on Cydia to see what exactly I could do with it.

In a nutshell its Debian apt-get with a nice front end similar to Synaptic on Ubuntu.

Okay what to install? Well more googling revealed something called winterboard which is a theme manager. From there I installed some different themes and a category application.

All of a sudden it was 1997 again and I was playing with Enlightenment (an awesome window manager for X). For its time there was nothing cooler. Gnome and KDE were babies and if you wanted something “cool” you ran it.

I was back in that mindset. What looks cool. Oh a neat clock. New icons! Look at that awesome wallpaper.

After about an hour playing with the themes and Cydia I realized that one of the reasons I love Apple computers and the iPhone so much is it just works (and it looks good in its own right too).

I have long since given up making my desktop and windows look “cool”. I am firmly in the function over form camp now.

I don’t want to tweak my phone endlessly. I don’t want to worry about upgrades breaking everything. I didn’t want to be cool; I just wanted an iPhone.

So I un-unlocked my phone.

MAS*H DVD Menus are the best

dennisr — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 07:27:20 +0000

M*A*S*H is my favorite TV series of all time and I typically watch the entire series at least a couple of times a year. One of the things that took me a while to notice was how well the DVD menus are. Each season has a different look and most incorporate scenes from the episodes in the episode sub menu. Fonts are different, they sometimes wrap to scene elements and in one case they are backwards.

I am including a couple of screen shots to make my point.

Here we see the menu tacked onto the ring and it almost looks like it should be there

The topic for the episode, exchanging red for blue, is used as the menu. I like how they used both colors.

This one is my favorite. In this episode Radar tries his hand at writing. I love how the font is backwards.

It seems to me this was the promise of DVD but very few movies and TV series really make use of the available media to make each disc unique.