59 posts tagged “games”

It's been kinda a low productivity couple of days here, even though I had high hopes that they wouldn't be. I'm still stuck with my mom's craft website design that I've been working on. I've been poking at it here and there still and I can't seem to find anything that works and doesn't look stupid. Still. I think at this point I might need to put some distance on it and come back refreshed.

The most productive thing I've done was to go searching for some fonts that might kick start the process. Finding a foothold to work with starting out seems like it's an issue for me with this project. I just can't find something to use as a base that I can work off of. I find a couple of neat fonts that should work well on a craft store type page that I've been playing around with, but nothing jumps out at me.

So I've been doing some more transferring of my blog posts over to my new blog at http://www.nopurpose.org/blog/. So far I've got all of august and September 2006 transferred over and about half of October. I posted a lot more back in the days when I first got my blog, so once I get pas the first 3-4 months, the rest should follow pretty quickly after that.

I've also been feeling in the mood to play some sort of RPG type game. There's been a lot of talk about Final Fantasy 13 that I've heard recently that's been influencing me. I borrowed Dragon Quest 8 for the PS2 (after going through my old blog posts and remembering that one of my now roommates offered to let me borrow it from them after they had finished in a couple days. This was 3 years ago) but it wasn't quite what I was looking for it seems. So I'm going to be borrowing Dark Cloud 2 for a while instead and hoping that scratches the itch for now.

Suikoden_Tierkreis

I have been consumed by a game. Which is handy because this week is a pretty laid back/vacation-y type of week. That game is Suikoden Tierkreis for the DS. 

I'm one of those guys who used to play Magic: The Gathering. I got into it briefly in middle school when it was all the rage and then about 3-4 years ago got into it pretty heavily for about a year. I played in tournaments, went to release events...the whole 9 yards. I ended up getting pretty decent at it, but eventually I realized that I was sinking way too much time and money into the hobby and started pulling away from it.

For example, I owned a Library of Alexandria which I bought for around $150. And I had 3 mana drains (english language). Those went for around $50-80 a pop when I bought them. Shortly after that was when I had my "Dear lord, I'm spending 70% of my income on a card game" moment which quickly led me to stop collecting. Last year I sold off a lot of my more expensive cards.

But yesterday I caught wind of a Magic: The Gathering game headed to the xbox live arcade. I liked playing the game...the strategy was really interesting to me. The part I didn't like was how hardcore you had to get into it and how much money you had to spend to get all the cards. While this new system isn't perfect (as in there's some limitations to the cards in the game and the deck customization) I think it'll scratch the itch for a more casual Magic experience. Sounds like they have a nice little platform for future expansion as well. Can't go wrong for $10 anyway.

Going to give it a try this evening to see how it runs.

As I mentioned I've been working on a new web site design for Wassy's gallery site. I was really hoping to get the basic header graphic all set this weekend, but I've run into a few snags. Stuff that work working I ended up not liking and I had to scrap a major element of the header unless I can rework it into something that looks good.

I was trying to play around with it yesterday evening to mold it into something I was happy with, but nothing was really working. Which resulted in me not getting as much (productive) done as I had wanted to. And now I'm trying to brainstorm some ideas that might work to fix it/replace the part I scrapped.

On the upside though, I finally finished Final Fantasy IV. I've been playing the DS version and after stopping and restarting twice over a period of several years (well one of the stoppings happened on the Game Boy Advance port, at the end boss) I finally managed to make my way through the evil hardness that is Final Fantasy IV. They don't make em like that anymore!

It seems like we're pretty much all settled into the new apartment. We've got some wall decorations going up now around the various areas. I need to do some more organizing in my room and in the spare bedroom/office but we've got a fully functional apartment now. I'll try to take some pictures once the wall decorations are more finalized.

It's weird. It feels like we've been living here for longer than a week. But this past week seems to have gone by very quickly as well. So...time is just all screwed up in all sorts of ways.

Last night we had a little party deal to celebrate being settled in. We broke out the Rock Band and played through Perl Jam's Ten album which was purchased for the evening. And a late night abandoned game Trivial Pursuit (we started it a bit too late and then ran out of energy about an hour in) rounded out the activities. A fun and much needed evening of relaxation.

This weekend I want to finalize my room and get some of my various art stuff hung around the apartment. I also want to get some work done on my C++ chatbot that I'm making. I finally got the basics working and now I hope to actually get it to do something resembling actual chatting soon. Hopefully this weekend. But first, the cleaning.

As I had mentioned yesterday, I was close to finishing Mass Effect. As it turns out, I was really close as I completley finished the game last night.

Wow.

Mass Effect is an action based RPG for the XBox 360, set in a sci-fi space setting. You get command of a space ship and get to fly around, saving the galaxy. It's played in a third person perspective, and it feels very much like a shooter with stats and special skills. Something of a hybrid of the two genres that really works well.

The story is...awesome. It's produced by Bioware, a company that knows how to make a good story so I really shouldn't be surprised. The main campaign set pieces are so amazingly well done and scripted that you never quite know what to expect when you round the next corner. And just when you think they've thrown out something so cool that they can't top it...they do. The entire last section of the game was filled with these sorts of moments, one after the other in one of the most fun to play ending sequences I've had the pleasure of experiencing.

The game is very cinematic too. From the cutscenes to the music, to the slight hint of film grain on the screen...it feels like you're playing an interactive movie. Also little touches like displaying the dialog options a few seconds before the NPC that you're talking to is finished speaking, thereby eliminating any pauses in the conversation while the player chooses an option really help increase the movie-like feel. The voice acting is pretty good too, featuring the like of Seth Green and Marina Sirtis (Troi from Star Trek, The Next Generation)

I do have a couple complaints however. First, the side quests on the unexplored worlds are...boring. They're all pretty much the same with no twists, on generic maps with generic bad guys living on generic planets. And the rover you drive around in...VERY hard to control, and very hard to aim correctly when you're trying to shoot people. I had better luck running over bad guys than I did hitting them with the gun.

However, all that aside, it's a very good game and highly recommended if you missed out on it. I know it's a little old by now, but I'm just catching up here! I can't wait for the sequel to come out.

I mentioned a few days ago that Wassy was working on a piece of artwork for me. Well...it's finished.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece is a pin-up piece of my main city of heroes villainess. It is a bit risque. Tasteful, but risque. It's pretty tame as far as these things go, with nothing really showing (lots of stuff almost showing, but nothing really showing. Probably the most revealing part is she's wearing a thong to give you an idea). However, artistically done as it is, I would apply the label NOT SAFE FOR WORK to it. So if that kind of thing bugs you, I would recommend not viewing the piece.

With that said...the piece is here (EXTRA NOT SAFE FOR WORK WARNING). I really, really love it. The subject is one of my villains from City of Heroes (well, City of Villains more accurately). Wassy had come up with a really awesome idea for a pose and I agreed (after a little persuasion) to let her do the piece. A couple months later when she got to it (she was VERY busy for a while there)...it was just totally worth the wait.

I especially love her face, in particular her eyes. They're very intense. Along with the stray strands of hair  And also the coloring job she did on her skin. It's absolutely perfect. Everything is so soft and sensual. She really nailed the feel that I was hoping the piece would have.

As she was doing the coloring she was making comments about how good it was turning out, and even then..this just exceeded my expectations. This week had been kinda long and dragging quite a bit towards the end, for a lot of different reasons, but seeing the finished piece made it all worthwhile.

Last night I finally worked up the ambition to list a whole bunch of the games that I have hanging around that I'm not going to play ever again on eBay (shameless self promotion time!) in an effort to declutter a bit and make some extra cash.

It's worth doing, but it just takes so long to compile all the pictures and write a description and it's very much the same thing over and over again. I have a couple more I want to put up tonight. Some leftover magic cards that I never sold the last time I was doing a clearing of my closet and a couple of DVD sets of TV shows just in case somebody's interested in taking them off my hands.

Every time I do this I have thoughts of selling my Wii. I don't really play it much at all and 90% of the games out there for it are crap. But there's still a few things here and there that make me want to keep it around. It's almost the same situation with my PSP. There's very few games I'm interested in getting for it, but those games that I want are really important. So I'll keep the little guy around. I really want to play Star Ocean for example.

Most of my leisure time over the past week has been taken up by Rock Band 2. Last weekend I moved into phase 2 of my Xbox 360 purchase and grabbed Rock Band 2 and the wireless drums. I've been having fun all week virtually drumming along to songs in an effort to unlock the song I bought the game for, Panic Attack by Dream Theater. It's one of the harder songs in the game so it's all the way at the end...I am nearing it though. Not too much longer!

Which is a good thing, because I've discovered that my back has become very unhappy with me due to the way I sit while I'm drumming. I really need to find a better way to do this so it's less painful on my back. I'm getting too old for rocking :(

But overall, I'm really enjoying the game. It should be fun once I can play it with my friends as it was meant to be enjoyed.