Mice in Space

My favorite RPG games of all time are Final Fantasy X and Shadow Hearts Covenant. Both were 50+ hour games and the stories were great. I preferred the combat in Shadow Hearts though. They had a ring with a clock hand that spun around and you had to hit a button when the hand was on a certain portion of the ring. There were many different ring configurations. In my opinion this added a bit of ‘twitch factor’ to an otherwise turn based game. I felt the story in Final Fantasy X was a little better and the graphics were of higher quality.

Now that I have a Xbox 360 again I was looking into what sort of RPGs are available. Since I already completed Oblivion prior to giving up my 360 that wasn’t in the running. I know that a Japanese RPG is a lot different than Oblivion (which I guess is an American RPG?) but lets pretend they are both in the same category (I think they are). So I was looking at Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey.

Okay Blue Dragon was just too cute for me and it starred kids. I really don’t like playing kids (yes I know the star of Final Fantasy X was a kid - well a teenager more like it). It also got very luke warm reviews. With regard to Eternal Sonata - I just wasn’t interested in the story what-so-ever. Finally I came to Lost Odyssey - which also had luke warm reviews but it had something…special?

The team behind Shadow Hearts Covenant and the writer of Final Fantasy were the ones who put Lost Odyssey together. For me, a match made in heaven. So I dug into the reviews - what were people saying? Well for the most part they didn’t like the random battles and folks felt it didn’t break new ground. More of the same - of my favorite games - sign me up! I did like the random battles of Shadow Hearts so that was no big deal. Okay what about the story?

A world where there was an industrial+magic revolution results in steampunk technology. Two countries go to war and have a massive battle that is interrupted by a meteor strike! Everyone is killed except our hero who has lost his memory - this is where the story starts. The introduction movie is really nice and you get introduced to combat right away.

My only complaint about the game is the dynamic texture system is little wonky. Sometime the characters are really blurred and the high resolution textures don’t load unless you zoom in using the left trigger.

All in all I recommend the game.

So it turns out I couldn’t live without my XBOX 360 and so I bought another one. This doesn’t mean and I have given up on programming but that I am looking for some balance.

I understand the whole idea behind activations. Your a software company and you don’t want people to steal your product. You come up with a way that even if the baddies get your software they can’t use it. It makes sense on paper - like Communisim. In practice it doesn’t stop the baddies and only aggravates legitamte users - like me.

I had to rebuild my Mac and my game system this weekend because I ran out of space on my Mac and bought some new hard drives. I used the old hard drives out of the Mac to create a three drive stripe in my game system. This meant a total re-install of both the Mac and my game system.

Windows XP activation worked great - I guess it detected that the only thing that changed was the hard drive and activated over the internet just fine.

Adobe Photoshop CS2 on my Mac wouldn’t reactivate and I had to call a 1 800 number and plead my case. I was chastised for not deactivating the software first and thereby releasing my existing activation - what? Like I should know how your stupid system works? Well at least I was able to get it working again.

On my game system all the Ubisoft games refused to activate again: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Might and Magic V. When the activation fails you get a nice message directing you to a website, support.ubisoft.com and to request manual activation. Of course when you get to the site there is nothing, nowhere mentioning manual activation. Not a single item in the knowledge base. I finally had to submit three different tickets for my three games. Now if I was a warez cow pirate I could be playing my games right now. So here I am an honest person that spent ~150 dollars on software that I can’t use until the company says I can.

I am sick and tired of being treated like a criminal.

P.S. Fuck You Ubisoft

Every Saturday my wife and play roll playing games at a friends house. We started with Vampire: The Masquerade, then went to Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP), Dungeons and Dragons, and finally GURPS or Generic Universal Role Playing System.

We switched to GURPS because my friends wife got an editors job at GURPS and we wanted to support the company.

I must say that I really like the system. It’s really simple. Today I picked up GURPS for Dummies because I am still learning the system and it has some really neat reference cards.

You can also buy just about anything except the two core books in PDF form for a lot cheaper with no DRM.

Check it out if you get a chance.

I haven’t been on GameTap in about a week and I come back to Descent III! So cool. I also loaded up Empire Earth which I never played but is a lot of fun. Another one I tried is Wings of War. I love that I have access to all these games for only $10 dollars a month.

Well I just spent the last hour on the phone with GameTap technical support and we figured out the problem. It was my video cards running in SLI mode. Turn off SLI and everything works great. I don’t know why previous versions worked okay with SLI but the newest update doesn’t like it. Luckily it is real easy to turn off SLI. The tech support guy was real nice and while GameTap was loading again we were talking about our favorite games. I like that real gamers work there.

I feel bad that I blamed GameTap right off and didn’t even attempt to call tech support. I guess being burned so much in the past by other services and companies I didn’t expect anything could be done. So glad to be wrong.

So I got a free month and am happy again:)

UPDATE: Easiest way to avoid this is run in Windowed mode

I loved Gametap. I wrote about it more than once. Today I got an update that added all these “great new features” and effectively broke it. In the Arcade simulators there is now a pronounced stutter effect that makes playing the games an exercise in frustration.

Well I still really like www.gametap.com I just hope they can stay in business. I would pay more than the $10 a month too. My wife is now playing games. She loves Bubble Bobble. I got an itch to play Splinter Cell recently and I saw that GameTap had it - so cool.

I found www.gametap.com tonight and signed up for a two week free trial. In a nutshell its this. You pay $9.95 a month to get access to 500+ games (and growing). You select the game you want to play and it is downloaded to your system and cached. You then play.

What’s the cool part? They have all types of systems: DOS games, Sega Genesis, Atari 2600, Arcade game, Dreamcast, Intellivision, etc…

I have already played the original Zaxxon, Kings Quests 1, Zork 1, Defender, Astrosmash, etc.

I don’t know how they are doing the emulators but it is flawless. I am really impressed.

Been playing Oblivion most of the weekend since I hurt my back Saturday morning. This is a great game.  I played World of Warcraft for a while but stopped because I didn’t like having to team up with people to do certain quests - of course the $13.95 a month after paying $50 for the game was hard to swallow as well.  One thing I miss from WoW was exploring and fighting creatures in the wilderness.  You never knew what you were going to find.  Oblivion, for me, is like WoW offline.  Its perfect for me.  Recently my character was bitten by a vampire and so now I am one.  My face has changed, I am stronger and faster, I can’t be in the sun without taking damage.  I keep having nightmares about “feeding”.  I am really impressed with this game.  Though I said I didn’t lilke Morrowind due to its look and feel I think after oblivion I am going to give it another try.  I have the gold edition and one of the exansions lets you be a werewolf!  The down right sexy engine of Oblivion pulled me in but its the great gameplay that is keeping me there.

 If you like RPG games at all you must get Oblivion.

 Oh, I am about 6 hours into the game and I have only done the first part of the main quest which by itself is like 40 hours.