bioshock - no sale

You may have noticed I'm a little slow about my games. I'm often playing things that are months or years old. I don't tend to jump at the latest and greatest. I do keep up with what's new, though, I just don't have time and money to get it when it's first released. I like to wait and see the initial reaction before I invest.

So, I wasn't going to buy Bioshock the instant it was released anyway. But I pity the people that did. Looking over their news page we see:

1. Just because you bought that game doesn't mean you can play it whenever you want, you have to have your installation activated online, and you're only allowed a few of them. The numbers have gone up by now, which is nice, but apparently when you first bought it you were told you could install it twice and that's it.

2. The activation servers crashed, preventing anyone from completing their installs.

3. The support phone numbers in the manual were printed wrong.

... so, you rushed out and eagerly bought this new game and then discovered that it wouldn't install (activation server down) and because of this failure worried that it might NEVER install (limited number of installs, and I'm sure someone thought that the install failure counted whether it did or not) and when you tried to call support for help THE PHONE NUMBER WAS WRONG!!!

Geniuses.

What sort of moron thought this was a great way to go about managing a game launch?

titan quest - brick wall

Remember a long time ago I mentioned that the Cyclops early in the game seemed to quickly trigger a heat-shutdown on my slightly overburdened graphics card?

... guess what the final level is full of.

So yeah, I've reached Mount Olympus, but I'm not sure I'm ever going to see the final boss, much less beat it. Card went ticky-boom.

titan quest - still slogging

level 29, stated dps around 350, somewhere in the mountains of china. i really need to lay off playing, though, the stress is bad for my elderly joints. :P

My Little Girl

So, I purchased the Princess Maker Memorial Box which contains all 5 games, in Japanese. Of those five, one of them can be hex-edited into English if you are bloody-minded enough, one of them had an English beta that can be found online, and the last two are accessible through a 'hook' program that extracts the japanese text, allowing you to run it through babelfish or other translation tools you might have. None of this is easy, but they can all be done.

If you're counting, you realise that leaves one more. Princess Maker 3, the one in the middle, is encrypted so that it can't be directly edited and uses an engine that doesn't play nicely with hook programs. There is, as far as I can tell, no way to make any sense out of it.

Playing through (just once so far) was enough to get me to start picking up some katakana, but... I suspect this game may not get much play out of me. There's too many long conversations between characters where I have no idea what's happening, or times where I'm asked to make a decision and don't know what my options are. The sim part of it is easily faked - you can see stats going up and down even if you can't always remember exactly what they are. Conversations are a bigger problem.

Ouendan 2

I love my DS. I love quirky cute games. While I do not own the game about touching schoolgirls in inappropriate ways I do have Ouendan 1 and 2, as well as the more English-familiar Elite Beat Agents

I haven't completed Ouendan 2 yet, and am still quite confused about what's going on in some of the storylines. What's with the old man and the animals and the oni? What exactly is the relationship between the two choirgirls? Are they lesbians? Or was the rose just because sempai is overly melodramatic? Was she threatening to jump off the balcony in the beginning because choir was being canceled? Or what?

This is the problem with not being able to read Japanese.

Heroes and Villains

So, this was a free reactivation weekend for past CoH players. Not that they bothered to tell me (if there was an email, I missed it - or maybe I unsubscribed sometime) but I heard through a friend - a while after it had started. It's a bit of a pain trying to obtain several gig of game only to be able to log in for a few hours, though.

The game is still there, still fun, still not that much different from what it was. There are wings now, but my characters are only 12-month rated, not 18, so I don't get them. The crafting is new but I didn't have time to do more than the tutorial for it. My ninja squad serves loyally, but my lame guild/clan/base/group whatever they're called has gone defunct while I've been away. Not a surprise. I didn't join them because they were well organised or any good at the game (from what I could tell they were pretty lame) but just because they were the first group with a cool ninja name that ASKED me. I just wanted the title. :)

Yes, my highest level character is a lvl30 Ninja Mastermind. despite playing CoH for quite a while before CoV. I don't think any of my heroes are anywhere near that level, maybe not even any over 20. I'm not much for grinding. Or for grouping. I prefer playing solo and not having to deal with stupid people. Masterminds can do this and not be lonely. :)

However, the game does seem to have bloated a bit while I was away. Maybe it's the latest patch, but it's lagging my machine a lot harder than it used to when I played regularly. Not a huge deal for a solo Mastermind - my ninjas can carry on with me lagged out for a few seconds. Still, I'm too busy at the moment to renew my subscription. Maybe sometime...