tekHedd – the blog

..unless you plan to fight for them online, and your RAID recently crashed.

Three days after rebuilding my system, the only games installed are Neverwinter Nights and Minesweeper. I want to get Tabula Rasa back in there, but the download is 2.4 gigabytes, which takes about 240 minutes to download. This is complicated by the fact that I won’t leave the computer running while I’m away or asleep. Listen up, children, this is yet another reason that you probably don’t want to mess with water cooling!

The more time I spend with NWN, the more I like it. The first chapter is simply depressing–there’s not much going on, and there are a limited number of side quests, so the end boss is depressingly hard. But chapter 2 is like endless openended goodness. You can go into a cave or something, fight a few creatures, and be completely overwhelmed by an impossible boss who is way beyond your ability to cope–go practice somewhere else, come back, and whup his ass! Unlike Oblivion, when you level up it actually means something… woot level 9! While you can indeed live the Oblivion dream to “go anywhere and do anything”, it might get you killed, and it might not advance the plot. :)

Also, switching dynamically between overview and “drive mode” cameras really works in this game.

And, I have backups!

Oh, and my new backup drive is a Maxtor OneTouch thingumie. I thought I would hate the software that comes with it, but it turns out it’s pretty neat. It simply maintains a mirror of the directories you specify, with a second mirror directory that keeps the last known copy of deleted files. It’s a pleasingly minimalistic approach to backups. Of course, I have no idea whether I’d consider it robust enough to back up business files, but at the moment I can’t really drop the $25 for Acronis TrueImage–saving my pennies to get my car back out of the shop. (Oooh, they’re fixing the dents! It’ll be like having a new car! And cost about as much!)

I noticed the GuildCafe title bar today: “Bringing the world together through games.” Shouldn’t that be “in spite of games”? Because, well, most of the games we like to play have no way of communicating with each other, so we end up using third party applications and web sites in order to… oh heck what do I know. I have a head cold and it’s making me stupid.

Object lesson here. Don’t blog when you’re stupid.

Sometimes there’s nothing worth playing, and sometimes there’s a waist-high stack of unfinished games. This is one of those “waist-high stack” times for me. I just realized that I installed but never even launched Portal! And let’s not even talk about GTA4.

OK, let’s talk about GTA4 after all. I love it. I love that it’s not very much like GTA: San Andreas at all. Even Vice City held my attention for a few weeks, but San Andreas was just so boring…it’s enough of a pain to drag my physical bod to a gym, why should I have to do virtual curls? Suck! GTA4 keeps the annoying “maintain your relationship or die” stuff, but uses it to add depth to the story line and characters.

Probably the most annoying thing is that I don’t really feel like playing pool or bowling nearly as often as my friends do. But hey, sometimes you just have to write off your best friend… :)

Anyway, this is probably the last you’ll hear from me, I’ll be playing GTA4 for the rest of the year. Farewell!