Elonian Nomad - 3rd Strike

Some games to start-off the year 2009

darthvid — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 05:40:29 +0000

The last game I bought in 2008 was The Orange Box, and I must say that for Team Fortress 2 alone, the price was worth it. I’ll probably love the whole package more after I get my new PC, as The Orange Box proves (even if it was released last 2007!) that my current rig is at the end of it’s rope. Yes, I can play Portal, but barely, and I’d like to relish the short experience it will bring me. As for the various Half-Lives 2’s [sic], aside from the sluggish performance, I also don’t have the HD space. So, I’ll experiment on those when I get my new PC, hopefully before the month ends.

I mentioned that my SO gave me Left 4 Dead for xmas, I was hoping to make it among the last experiences of 2008, but alas that was not to be. It will be my 1st new AAA title experience for 2009 after getting my new PC, I’m reserving it for that.

For my 1st purchase of the year, though, I gave in and got something old, and something new. For something old, I got Psychonauts. I’ve been hearing about it for so long, and I keep hearing it’s one of those great games that few played. I tried the demo on Steam, and I liked it enough. For US$10 (with a US$1 year end sale discount), I thought it was worth it, even for the quirky humor and the amazing imagery alone (I loved how it plays on the imagination). It reminded me of American McGee’s Alice, and for US$10, I’m willing to go through a quirky and visually engaging one time experience (I rearely play a story based game over again).

For something new, I gave in and got Defense Grid: The Awakening. I’m not a hardcore tower defense player, but I do enjoy them occasionally. Two of the tower defenses I enjoy the most are the Bloons Tower Defense series and GemCraft, both playable for free at Kongregate. Still, the sci-fi setting drew me in, and I was interested on what the doll-up treatment can do to a familiar game concept that’s commonly available.

What annoyed me was the lack of a demo. Slick graphics or not, it feels a bit steep to shell out US$20 for a game concept with a lot of free implementations. The 25% holiday discount at Steam made the prospect a tad more compelling, as I argued that I probably could get at least 15 hours of gameplay out of it (US$1/1hr of gameplay is one of my criteria for games I’m not sure about). So, I decided to buy it and give it a try. Let’s see if my “act of faith” (as Paul Eres from Indie Games Blog put it) pays off.

Two games to start off the year, one old, one new. Both non-mainstream and non-blockbuster. Let’s see what 2009 has to offer on those lines.

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Welcome 2009

darthvid — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:54:01 +0000

2009’s gonna be somethin’. A lot of problems are being carried over, but we’re taking with us a lot of innovation as well.

Happy News year to all! May 2009 be a good one!

[ Man that was some good Team Fortress 2 time just now! (^_^) ]

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Booktopia will move to online only serice

darthvid — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 03:25:13 +0000

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!

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Steam’s on a Holiday Sale until 2009.01/02!

darthvid — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 03:10:34 +0000

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…?

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Late in the game for Team Fortress 2

darthvid — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:32:45 +0000

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. (^^)

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All I need now is the new PC

darthvid — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:06:33 +0000

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! (¬_¬)

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Some maintenance here and there

darthvid — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:22:05 +0000

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.

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Well, they’ve got enough BALLS to release the trailer…

darthvid — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:20:19 +0000

… 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.

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