I’m playing a new game

March 9th, 2010 · kitchen sink

It’s called Avoid the Ceiling Leak in the Bathroom. I don’t like giving review scores but this one is well into the negatives.

I didn’t bitch about this last Friday since I honestly thought that it would be resolved. I complained on Friday, of course, and the landlord promised he’d take care of it. On Monday. Consider me underwhelmed by said response but, to be fair, it wasn’t exactly Niagara Falls in there. The position of the leak was unfortunate, quite, and required an umbrella should one actually want to use the facilities. Two days, I figured, I could handle it. I did wuss out and visited parents’ once or twice that weekend. They were pretty brief visits since I always had to keep an eye on the bucket and dump it before it overflowed.

Monday comes, small leak stops, I rejoice. Oh, how I wish that was end of story. Today I had planned to disinfect that bathroom. New leak. Waaaay bigger than the last and now coming through the drywall. Sooo unimpressed. I now need two buckets. I’m also way past underwhelmed. FFFFFF. Landlord promises to call a real plumber this time. The holding of breath is not recommended. And I have distant family coming to stay on the weekend. PEACHY.

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Gathering Gaming Thoughts

March 8th, 2010 · kitchen sink

DJ MAX Fever (PSP) – Man do I ever suck at this these days. 5Button Mode is all I can handle! Not that I was great at 6B before, sure, but I was definitely better than this! I was also really frustrated at how fast this game decimated my PSP battery. It felt like every few missions it would shut down on me due to the incredible amount of disc access. On that note, load times suck. Right after I bought the physical copy of the game someone told me that it was also available on the PlayStation Network. Hamburgers. Grr. I’m not willing to pick it up twice, especially since it won’t be able to use my save file from the UMD version. After my last batter charge it dawned on me to keep a sticky note on my case and keep track of how many songs I play before it dies. It’s more than I thought! 44 songs and counting. I just get too into it, stop blinking, and time flies :)

Portal (PC) – no update for me yet. I’ve downloaded it but not played it yet since Borderlands consumes me.

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3/360) – Thanks to a dear friend it looks like I’ll be able to get this close to launch after all!! TheEggplant pointed me to a great article by Eurogamer about the graphical difference between the two. I don’t know which version I’m getting yet, the differences don’t bother me, but I kinda hope it’s the PS3 version. It’ll be nice to use it more and I just don’t have the space to put it on my 360. It grinds like a chainsaw if I use the disc and there’s not enough HD space with my saves, even if I delete Borderlands & DLC from it.

Starting Sunday I’ll be taking care of a puppy (not mine) and that should give me ample time to get through a good chunk of it. It’s been ages since I’ve had the time for a JRPG and I’m excited, no matter how linear it is. While I love FFXI I haven’t played a Final Fantasy since 8. I hated 8. It was death for semi-OCD people like me thanks to the draw system. Also, certain characters can DIAF, kthxbai. Skipped IX, skipped X (this was back when I was completely against voice acting in RPGs. Yeah, yeah, I know…) and X2 (even though I might have liked in in spite of myself) and my copy of XII got stolen before I got past the first save point. XII might have even worked for me since I liked the look of the combat system. Ah well, it’s in the past now!

d'awwww
 

Assassin’s Creed: the first (360) – F the flags. Seriously. I don’t even have all the orbs in Crackdown since I didn’t mark them off this awesome map while I was enjoying myself in the game. I hated AC1 for the first half. When it came to the voice acting I was all SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP. The fact that they didn’t have subtitles made it even worse since I couldn’t mute it. This ire mostly applied to the assassination targets and everyone in the lab area. I know AC2 vastly improved, well, everything so I will be giving that a shot when I need a break from linear RPGs. I’m glad I have it on the 360 instead of the PC since their new DRM is serious bs. I hate the idea that my cash for these games went to funding this crap. Of course, right now pirates are the ones who are able to play it while the paying customers get screwed. WTG.

Now, it’s Borderlands time. Again. I’ve brought my older Siren up from 37 to 42 and I want to bring her up to speed. My Hunter is still just under 51 but I know it’s easiest to beat <spoiler> with the Siren and it’s fun to use more SMGs and combat rifles instead of sniping and pistols all the time. They will both get to 61 eventually as I play the game with more people. If you want to join in, let me know in the comments or e-mail jenn@openalpha.tv and we can work out a time. I own all DLC packs so everything is fair game. I don’t mind boosting your lower level characters either. Getting a new headset later this week and I’ll be looking for excuses to try it out :)

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Wii Almost Had a Problem

March 4th, 2010 · gaming

As an unabashed fan of Cave Story, I decided it was time to prep my Wii for the upcoming WiiWare release. It’s a few weeks away but why procrastinate? March 22nd could sneak up LIKE THAT! Especially if you are me and seriously calendar impaired. I mean, Final Fantasy XIII is practically upon us, too! There a FF piece in my head that wants to be heard but that takes a back seat to today’s Nintendo issue. See, I have the Homebrew Channel. There, I said it. This should be surprising to absolutely none of you. Err, well, see, I had the Homebrew Channel. In my haste to update my long-offline system I forgot that 4.2U was gonna wipe it off the planet. Did I mention I was offline with it for a while? It’s not too great a loss since I lost the SD card with all my homebrew and I can always add it back.

I do not run wifi at my place since I like to keep everything wired. I’m a pain that way. This always gets mentioned when people come to visit with their laptops but I have a solid router and lots of long cables so they quickly quit their bitchin’. This does not help me with the Wii that much. Nintendo presents 3 options for getting online and that has since gone down to 2.

1.)   run your own wifi router
2.)   purchase their (or third-party) wired adapter
3.)   OLD: purchased their PC-based wifi adapter specifically for the Wii and DS.

Nintendo Wii Wired LAN Adapter   Old Nintendo WiFi Adapter

I had always relied on option 3 in the past. I ran XP until rather recently — my tablet upgraded to Vista but my main PC had too many XP programs that I didn’t want to risk compatibility mode — and the adapter was also XP-based. Nintendo pretends that anything after that does not exist. You know, kinda like how they feel that no one really wants to play online anyway *rimshot* ;)

This, however, isn’t entirely true. Nintendo US says Windows 7 is not supported while Nintendo Europe decided to come to the rescue! Sort of. I think my adapter is borked but I cannot 100% claim whether that is due to hardware or software. My main PC runs win7 ultimate, my tablet runs home premium. It works on my tablet, mostly, but not my PC. In Ultimate I had tried to run the Nintendo US software with compatibility mode a few times but I would get an error right at the end since it somehow lost connection to the USB adapter, even though nothing had changed. On my tablet, I ran the Nintendo Europe software first with Vista SP2 compatibility mode and it installed without issue! From there I connected my Wii to it and everything was peachy. My system updated, HBC disappeared, and I was able to get into the store and update all the channels again… until I reset the tablet and console. The magical reset blew up something invisible, far as I can tell. The Wii could talk to the PC but not connect to the internet, no matter what I tweaked or disabled (it’s not a fan of firewalls or virus protection programs during the installation and I added exceptions after that). Yet, when I un- and re-installed the program, it all worked again. Nonsense, eh? In the end I spent waaaay too much time fighting with all of this stuff and it really wasn’t worth it. Instead, I’ll just dig out my wifi router from the closet and lock it down. This morning I was sad that Nintendo stopped selling the dongle. OH HOW THINGS CHANGE. If your place is all wired, and you are reasonably tech-inclined, you are probably better off running a router of your own since you can also use that with your laptops and other devices. If you are not up for locking down the router securely, get the wired LAN adapter.

Now I’m not going to look at my Wii until Cave Story comes out and shoot stuff in Borderlands until I feel better. You know what else contributes to my present Nintendo ire? Why, I’ll tell you. Did no one in Nintendo ever sit with their menu screen open for any >1min block of time? I’m guessing not or there would be an option to turn it off without having to mute the tv. It’s worse then elevator music. Forget using classical music as punishment, USE THIS INSTEAD. They’ll be begging to do community service or anything else to make it stop. For the record, I love classical music! <3 CBC radio stream.

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Can’t talk, Borderlands.

March 3rd, 2010 · gaming

 

20 gig hard drives simply do not suffice. My 360 grinds like a chainsaw when I attempt to play anything from the disc so I make sure to install the game de jour. My dismay that my drive was full once I purchased The Secret Armory of General Knoxx was strong. Thankfully I had forgotten that I installed Assassin’s Creed 1 and freed up 6 gigs that way. I need want a new 360. In a perfect world, I’d get this one. The 250GB drive means that I can install every game I own and never have to delete anything, ever. It’s a bit excessive, I know. I could use the two extra controllers to give to friends and, hey, FFXIII. EB has the edition with the faceplate but I tend to get screwed on pre-order bonuses — they get my money and I get no bonus — so I am wary. And the whole deal is pretty gosh darn expensive. Hamburgers.

*ahem* Borderlands. I’m a fan. I wrote three different entries about how I lived on Pandora for a while and one about borked achievements (since fixed). I was live blogging my experiences as I first stepped into T-Bone Junction and I placed them below the cut in case people want to go into it knowing absolutely nothing. [Read more →]

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When We Won

March 2nd, 2010 · kitchen sink

 

Just skip to 50seconds in and wait. I hope this is real and not edited! I know I’ve been quiet but I am suffering from Olympic exhaustion and withdrawl ;)

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