tekHedd – the blog

I’ve been sucked back into Fallout 2 again, because of the release of the Restoration Project version 2.0. And wow is the game a lot better than I remember. Maybe that’s because I actually found the north half of Gecko (the Junkyard) finally, after what, 10 years? And some of those broken quests are unbroken now.  Somehow the game is a lot more fun when you can actually achieve goals.

So, yes, this means that I actually am driving the car for the first time. The wasteland is a lot more fun when you’re mobile. The master’s army still tears me up though…and it seems like there are way too many great guns. I forgot about that aspect of the game.

Because they made guns plentiful and powerful, the biggest problem in Fallout 2 is that nothing was rare and special. Well, the biggest problem was previously that you couldn’t complete the game because it had so many bugs and that a lot of quests were simply impossible to complete because they weren’t finished. With unofficial community patches that is all fixed, and the game design flaws can be promoted to “worst problem” status. And there are plenty of problems with the game design: blah locations, plot twists that play fast and loose with game canon, and as far as your character is concerned it really forces you to play a specific way–that is if you want to finish the game. (These flaws were faithfully reproduced and expanded on in Fallout 3, of course.)

But it’s a lot better than without the restoration pack. Even at its worst, it’s still Fallout.

Wow, blogging isn’t entirely pointless!

I recently discovered I might be part of a class action settlement by Earthlink over early termination fees. I couldn’t remember exactly when or whether I paid them a fee, but it turns out that I blogged about Earthlink and their horrible service in 2007.  So it looks like I may actually get some of that back.

That’s right, Earthlink, suck it! Suck it dry!

I found a new annoying Vista/Win7 trick!

I used “Send To CD” to burn some tracks to CD, but never burned them. Because I wanted an audio CD, not a data one. So, I burned them with another program.

Now, whenever I walk away from the computer for a while, a status balloon will appear in the status area saying “You have files ready to be written to CD. Click this balloon!”

As soon as I move the mouse, the balloon disappears, along with the status icon that accompanied it! Gotcha! Ha ha ha! I hate windows.