random ramblings

Dishonored (possible spoilers)

Well, scratch Dishonored from the list that I posted a few weeks ago, as my feelings toward the game have changed. 

I’m still going to write about it but not in a very positive light. It’s a good game - but as it is with many things I have an opinion of it that goes against the majority. I was hesitant to jump on the bandwagon at first: I follow Bethesda’s blog via RSS and they sure posted a lot of stuff about it, both leading up to its release and afterward. This is to be expected as they’ve invested a lot in it as the publisher and, of course, want it to do well. I found this to be something of a turn off as there have been many cases in the past where games that received such hype haven’t amounted to much. Plus, I’m not all that good at sneaking games.

I decided to pick up the game in early January and enjoyed it at first. I’d fully intended to take the “good” path by not killing people. Being the achievement score whore that I am I also wanted to get through it without alerting everybody. However, even at the second-easiest difficulty level, I found myself reloading a lot; frequently taking 2-3 hours to make one hour of actual progress within the game. The only way to succeed is to just go ahead and knock out every single person within a zone first, before proceeding with the assassination (or non-lethal method in my case, as that was the path I intended to pursue at first). That fact and the amount of reloading I was doing meant that it would take forever to complete the game and I had no intention of mowing everybody down and having the plague get to the point where avenging the empress was pointless. In addition to that the achievements were slow in coming and that frustrated me as well. I know I shouldn’t play a game solely for the achievements, but this added to my disgruntlement. Conversely, I’ve only played the new Devil May Cry for less than an hour and already have two achievements.

So, last week I traded in the game and a few others and put the credit toward Ni No Kuni (which I’m enjoying a lot, took a bit to get my JRPG legs back though); the remainder went to my Dead Space 3 pre-order. I wanted to like Dishonored; I know a lot of people enjoyed it, but it’s not my proverbial cup of tea.

As a postscript, I finally started Metal Gear Solid 4 (yay trophy support) and am sneaking around in that game quite well - without supernatural help from The Outsider. Go figure.

Don’t know what to say really.

It’s been too long since I’ve posted anything on my Tumblr. I have a whole list of things that I want to “write” about but don’t want to crowd everything into one gigantic post. Not that it’ll necessarily be read by anybody but that goes for most blogs I’m sure. It’s more a case of people writing for themselves; should anybody else find it interesting it’s the the icing on the proverbial cake.

Anyway, how about a list of things that I could go on about at length:

1. Dishonored
2. The music of Skyrim
3. Far Cry 3
4. The Sword
5. The Walking Dead (Telltale Games game, toys, comic)
6. music in general
7. video games in general
8. Skyrim
9. Skyrim Dragonborn DLC
10. Fallout 3
11. The Economist
12. Linux

That’s quite a list and I could go on for a while about any of those topics. For now I think I’ll just let this post stand as it is and stand on its own as a warm-up of sorts.

multiplayer fun

I’ve been playing a lot of Halo 4 multiplayer since it was released; all but two matches have been the Big Team Infinity Slayer variant. I got off to a rough start but lately I’ve been finishing in the top half of my team every time - once I was even first on my team. Had we won that match it would have been my first top finish ever in any multiplayer game.

It has been quite a revelation as I’d never be able to replicate that level of success in Call of Duty (where if I didn’t finish dead last I was second-last every time). Why is that so? I think it’s a combination of things: radar; wide-open maps that give you more time to react; not having to “shoulder” your weapon due to greater “hip fire” accuracy; and especially shields. I always got the feeling that in CoD those without the most extreme of cat-like reflexes would never do well. In addition, Halo 4 gives points for other types of actions as well; you can do quite well by helping people whereas I find that CoD offers limited rewards for things like assists and such. The style bonuses in Halo 4 are great as well.

Battlefield is another game where I’ve done well, thanks mainly to the vast number of points one can just for healing others, providing ammo etc. Even with that, my accomplishments in Halo 4 are on another level entirely. Some say that Halo 4 multiplayer isn’t as good as that found in either Halo: Reach, or possible even ODST or Halo 3 itself.

I have to say that it’s only fair to reward people for completing a match and what 343 Industries has done with Halo 4 is, for me, perfection. The load-out unlocks, and the armor and other customization options are fantastic.

80s TV, Ubuntu, mySQL and YouTube

Here’s a Friday night for you. After watching the premier episodes of Knight Rider and The A-Team on Netflix (I’m just old enough to have watched both programs when they first aired on TV; 1982 and 1982 respectively) I settled in on my newly setup Linux computer (using the Ubuntu distribution) and dipped my toe in the vast ocean that is MySQL. I now have a tiny database, cds, that has one entry about Nirvana’s Nevermind album. Now to see if I can enable MySQL to let me load data I’ve entered in text files instead of doing it all in the Terminal. After that I fiddled around with Screenlets and installed a couple along with a new wallpaper. Then it was time for some YouTubing, which included Tunak Tunak Tun, which I’ve linked below. The Draenei males in World of Warcraft dance this way, and one of those odd Gangnam videos had guys doing a lasso move that reminded me of Tunak Tunak Tun. I should get to bed soon; this is way later than usual for me. Good night!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg-4c4uQmdo

hello Linux!

I’ve finally taken my first steps into the world of Linux. In addition to studying to take to CompTIA A+ certification test, I’ve installed Ubuntu onto an older computer that one of my friends gave me to fix.

I have to admit that my first impression of Linux, through the Ubuntu distribution (or flavour if you will) is that it seems too easy. With the Unity interface it’s not all that difficult to get going and use it as a basic OS. Before installing Ubuntu I thought that using it would be restricted to entering commands via the Terminal (another new them that I’ve learned). But the interface makes it quite easy for basic use; I guess it’s possible to go beyond that and use the Terminal for much more. Hopefully the two books I ordered to learn more about Linux in general and Ubuntu specifically will have more to say about that. Eventually I hope to get a LAMP setup running and work on some basic website and database management. Exciting stuff!

legendary dragons

I have a bit of a beef with Bethesda about the whole legendary dragon thing. It’s cool that they’re in the game; that’s fine. My beef lies with the way you end up encountering them: at high levels. I tend to play characters with different styles: I have a warrior, level 61, stealth guy, around level 36, and a mage who’s under level 20. The reason for this is so I don’t have some insane hybrid do-all type (although I had a character in Oblivion who did every guild and the arena mainly by being invisible most of the time and being able to freeze opponents in place and whack them to bits when fighting was necessary). My Breton from Oblivion isn’t possible in Skyrim and I’m actually glad for that.

Anyway, back to my point. Legendary dragons only start to show up when your character hits level 50, and even then they’re quite rare. The best thing is to be at the maximum, level 81. This is problematic: first, if you get to 81 the honest way it will take a very very long time. My Nord warrior is at level 61 and I’ve been playing him for 120 hours. That’s five solid days. I’ve worked on skills I never intended on to get him that far (light armor, block and other things). After tiring of this I went and got the Oghma Infinium and did the glitch to get my stealth guy to 81 and eventually found a legendary dragon and killed it so I could finally be back to 100% completion, achievement-wise, in the game. (I’m insane about achievements as I’ve mentioned in previous posts.) I then deleted the saves I made so my Wood Elf would be back to where he was pre glitch. After that I was relieved: I could play my warrior as normal and not have to bother with gaining levels through the advancing of skills I’d never intended him to be good at. I went back to Proudspire Manor, dumped the light armor, put my heavy Daedric set on, grabbed another one-hand weapon to dual-wield, and was happy as a clam as I set back out to retrieve someone’s lost flute.

This is not really much of an issue, I admit it, but it’s something that I wanted to get off my chest. The pursuit of a legendary dragon takes people too far out of the way, in a sense. Barring any necessity to level like mad for achievements in the just-announced Hearthfire DLC I doubt I’ll have to use the book again. I just hope it doesn’t have anything that requires levels beyond where most would go.