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Affilliation
Booktopia will move to online only serice
Read about this from Bibliophile Stalker’s blog.
Booktopia will be shifting to an e-commerce service next year. The last day of their physical store in Intrepid Plaza, Libis will be on 2009.01/04 (that’s the 1st Sunday of 2009).
Since I left my office in Libis, I’ve been hard pressed to go to the area and visit that store. It has a rather different selection than what’s avaliable in the mainstream stores, which makes browsing for titles very interesting. More importantly, it has a good selection of sci-fi/fantasy titles, and those books ocassionally have labels on which won any Hugo/Nebula/etc awards. There’s also a little pamphlet on the side that gives a nice ’starter’s list’ for budding sci-fi fans.
They will be having a sale until the last day of their physical store:
Everything in the store is on sale except for items on consignment basis. This would include magazines and religious/inspirational titles tucked in the white shelves near our counter.
The rest of the books in the store will be discounted at –
30% if you buy 1-2 books
40% if you buy 3-5 books
50% if you buy 6 or more books
So if you have any inkling to try some sci-fi, see if they have that hard to find book, or just want to take advantage of this great sale, I suggest you go and see the books while they’re still physically there!
No tags for this post.Steam’s on a Holiday Sale until 2009.01/02!
Steam is having a holiday sale! From now until 2009.01/02, there are discounts on everything! The discounts range from 10%-75%, so there be bargains here and there. Portal and Team Fortress 2 are definitely steals at 5 and 10 bucks (though why not just get both and more for 27 bucks?).
I wasn’t planning on getting any more games this year, but now I’m thinking of getting Defense Grid. Tower defense is a distraction occasionally, so I wonder if it’s worth the US$15…?
Tags: SteamLate in the game for Team Fortress 2
The Orange Box was released on 2007, so getting it just now (as mentioned in my previous post) makes me a bit late in the game. My system can barely run Portal, and I’ve even run out of virtual memory (a problem I rarely encounter).
Still, in my bone-headed desire to fill the time until I can get a rig that can handle Left 4 Dead, I toughed out the arduous wait times and hard disk crunching on my bare minimum rig to play Team Fortress 2. Even when the game starts I have to bear with embarrassingly slow caching until everything is loaded into RAM.
Once all this had come to pass, I looked for server’s on Steam with acceptable latency, then I slogged through an even worse wait time! After going through all that crap, all the dumb staring at the screen waiting for the progress bar to move a tick, all the the hard-disk caching I have to go through every single time I start a map, after all that, I was finally able to play the freakin’ game. And I learned something…
… Team Fortress 2 is WICKED AWESOME!!!
Everything was just to… tight! The art, the vocals, the humor, and most importantly, the variety, playability, and balance of the various “classes”, they just all gelled together to produce this wonderful wonderful team based PvP experience!
It’s just danged fun to play! I intended to play just a game or two, and ended-up losing 3 hours from the wee morning. It’s been a while since I played something that made me lose track of time like that.
I’m probably awfully lat in saying this, but I still want to give kudos to Valve for such a polished and focused multiplayer experience!
Now, I’ll have to force myself to sleep to I can properly relish the rounds I’ll play later in the day. (^^)
Tags: SteamAll I need now is the new PC
My SO was cool enough to get me Left 4 Dead for her xmas present! Thanks, sweetie! ^^
All I need now is for the new PC to arrive and I’ll be set for the holidays!
— update 2008.12/22 —
It seems I won’t be getting my new PC anytime this year, so no Left 4 Dead over the long holidays. (*￣m￣)
Just to make myself feel better about it, I got The Orange Box so I can play Team Fortress 2 and Portal to bide the time. Come 2009, tho, I’m gonna make sure that I get my new PC before January ends! Those zombies better be ready! (¬_¬)
No tags for this post.Some maintenance here and there
Second to the last weekend before xmas. Shops, malls, and restos are packed with people buying gifts and attending parties. Traffic scaled as much, even late at night the traffic is like it was still 7pm. I don’t like going head-on with that.
So I got myself some takeout and decided to just rest at home. I’ll try to find an off-peak period this weekend, and I’ll probably try not to veer very far. For now, it’s just winding down with Hanachi-e sleeping nearby.
So, I managed to find the time to do some maintenance on this blog, and apparently it was very much needed. I upgraded to WordPress 2.7, which was thankfully painless. I the new blog management UI is an improvement. It might be a bit confusing at 1st, but I know that once I get used to it I’d rather have the level of accessibility the new management screens offer.
I also recalled that stack overflows sometimes show-up when I load the site. I never get any when I use FireFox, so I never noticed that it always happened in IE (sorry IE users). Apparently, it’s been happening for weekds. While browsing through the changes in Wordpress 2.7, I noticed that I duplicated my Amazon Associates preview scripts, which not only caused the JavaScript error, but also stopped the pop-up preview from working altogether.
Just a little maintenance work, but I’m glad that Wordpress 2.7 has a built-in update feature already, and I’m even more glad I removed the stack overflow problem.
No tags for this post.Well, they’ve got enough BALLS to release the trailer…
… unfortunately, it does nothing to improve an already highly skeptical ambiance towards the upcoming movie. Not a surprise, really, just a teaser for the disappointment to come on 2009.03/13.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, perhaps both… but not in a good way.
I first saw the trailer at Tor, then at Kotaku, not that it helps my expectations any.
Tags: vidclipPackaging Sucker
I’m regretting I ever asked a local PC game retailer regarding the availability of Left 4 Dead. I already had my mind set on squeezing a few more months off my 4 year old PC. It’s not wheezing yet, as long as you don’t try to feed it anything the young ones are having.
Then, I decided to drop by a local PC retailer to check-out anything interesting that my PC can still handle. On a whim, I asked about Left 4 Dead, particularly since I couldn’t see it’s box around anywhere.
The staff helpfully opened a cabinet and produced something akin to a FedEx document package and a little bigger than an old vinyl record jacket. It looked like a small poster of a zombie movie, and turned out to be the actual packaging (with a presumably regular sized DVD inside).
Then I felt a little tug at my heart.
I’m not sure if it’s the same packaging for other countries, but for a second I forgot that the retail CD was being distributed by EA (which I’m reluctant to support due to their DRM choices). More importantly, my plans to go the last few miles with my 4 year old PC has been mired by plans of a PC upgrade… within the year!
Damn you zombie-movie like poster!
No tags for this post.There’s fraggin’, and then there’s puzzle fraggin’
The past week was filled with rave reviews on Left 4 Dead. Since I already got myself a steam account last week, and since I’m assuming you’ll need Steam anyway to play Valve games, I was considering purchasing Left 4 Dead online so I can finally get my feet wet with multiplayer FPSs.
Two things gave me pause:
- My PC is a bit on the old side (around 4 years now).
- FPSs aren’t friendly to lag. Half a second delay could get my ass handed to me.
I wish the L4D demo was still available so I could test it on my system, but alas, I can’t find it. The game currently retails at around US$50, so if I’m gonna fork out the dough, I better make sure I can play it immediately. I do have plans on upgrading my PC, but I’m waiting for Starcraft 2 to come out before I do it.
Fortunately for me, a nice little option came along.
Last week, gog.com started adding Unreal and Unreal Tournament stuff. I remember Unreal Tournament as the first shooter I really liked because it wasn’t as frantic as Quake was, and it was the 1st shooter that didn’t make me dizzy after prolonged hours of play. Delighted at the prospect of a shooter my system could handle, I decided that the cheap price is acceptable even if the ‘net multiplayer doesn’t work. I can accept US$10 for just fragging a few bots when I’m in the mood. If my ‘net connection can handle the lag, then the ‘net play would be a welcome bonus.
So I made the purchase and started the download. 2 gig don’t download all that fast, though, and I had to redo the download due to a silly thing I did. So while waiting, I decided to check-out what the other digital distribution sites had to offer.
I ended up being intrigued by the new stuff Greenhouse had. Hitherland was added a week or so ago, but the demo was available only recently. Puzzlegeddon was the new game, and it already had a demo available. I downloaded both.
I installed the Puzzlegeddon demo and played a few rounds. I wasn’t expecting much, but it ended up engaging me for quite a few rounds!
Puzzlegeddon’s core mechanic is basically sliding blocks in a square grid to make sets of at least 5 of the same color. The cool thing is that this core mechanic is used as a means to fuel a competitive game between 2-6 players! Making sets fills a meter of that color. The meter is used for various special effects like attack, defense, buffs, and disruptions. Also, you can select among several avatars which give you special bonuses like more powerful attacks, more efficient meter filling when chains are made, etc.
[pic above] A game against 5 bots. Me (12 o’clock, the castle) and Bit Bot decide to simultaneously fire missiles at Probot Hector. The wormhole above Probot Hector is an interrupt I cast, and the ephemeral flexing arms is due to a buff I cast.
One thing that bothers me a tad, and it’s not the gameplay. For some reason, Puzzlegeddon take a while to load, and it eats-up q big chunk of resources. Given the game, I was expecting it to be snappy, but it actually takes longer to load than OtRSPoD:E2! This has nothing to do with gameplay, though, and hopefully an update comes along to speed this part along. In terms of multiplayer, the lobbies aren’t that full right now, but if others like the game too, this will probably fix itself.
The whole concept, along with the fun and quirky art, and the possibility of multiplayer just gave me a nice warm feeling, enough to get me to purchase the thing!
And so, I now have two new competitive games, a nice old game where I shoot people, and a nice new puzzle game where I shoot people! 
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