06.07.07
Quick update
Been a pretty busy few weeks, hence the lack of updates. To summarize, we’re working pretty hard on getting our house ready to sell – putting a lot of work in so it looks a whole lot better than when we bought it. Mostly it’s a lot of work repainting the areas that needed it, actually painting other parts for the first time (a bunch of stuff was unpainted when we bought it), fixing up a whole bunch of broken light fittings and strange electrical wiring, and just generally making things a lot more presentable than when we first saw it.
Just to add comedy to our whole “moving back to Australia” saga, the green card application actually came through last week and we had to go through the whole decision process all over again choosing whether we wanted to spend the cash to fly back to Sydney to complete the processing or just forget about it and continue with our plan to head back to Australia anyway. Returning to Australia ended up winning out for purely family reasons – given the choice, starting a family with our own families to help out is a much better idea than trying to do it all on our own over here. It’s still a shame to leave, but we’re starting to get pretty excited about returning home.
In my spare time in the evenings, I’ve been catching up on computer games that have sat on the shelf for a while:
I really enjoyed this game. Was good to have a tactical shooter that was pretty simple and fun to play, just like the original games in the series. It still misses the fun of planning multiple teams and different routes through a known facility but controlling a group of people and being able to split up your force to use multiple entry points was still pretty cool. I haven’t yet tried it on “realistic” mode where your health doesn’t recover, but when I get bored enough of other games I’ll probably return to this one and give it a shot.
The only negative was the Securom protection on the game which was turning out a little buggy with Vista x64 and actually made my DVD drive disappear from the system on occasion, when it wasn’t just refusing to recognize the original disc in the drive. A quick “no-cd” patch from Megagames fixed that up. I’m glad the crackers are out there to let legitimate customers actually enjoy games people make that buggy and broken “copy protection” software messes up.
Finally got around to playing this all the way through. Was really just more of the same from Half Life 2, but seeing I enjoyed the original, I definitely enjoyed this as well. The first half of the game where you only have the gravity gun to defend yourself and solve puzzles was pretty innovative. Most of all though, I’m looking forward to Episode 2 and particularly the Portal aspect of that game.
Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Haven’t had a lot of time to devote to this game yet (been in a FPS mood recently), but the small amount I’ve played has been quite entertaining. The live actors doing the video is pretty smooth and the graphics and gameplay have been exceptional, though it seems it may end up a little too much on the micromanagement side for my tastes.
Still enjoying this. Stupid Tau have me all blocked up as the Necrons, almost to the point where I’m going to have to restart my game because the more you lose the stronger the enemy position becomes.
Fired this up again last night, but it keeps crashing on me after 5–10 minutes of play. Not sure if it’s the game, something to do with Vista x64, or something to do with the video drivers. The game wasn’t that great anyway but I was just looking for something light to play for a while.
I ended up playing a bunch of this, just for light entertainment. It’s a pretty engrossing golf game overall, and good for just wasting time.
I actually finished this a while ago (on PS2) but never posted about it. Was a lot of fun, I thought, and although I played mostly just the main story line it kept me entertained for a few weeks. Definitely worth playing through.
Finished this after I finished playing FFXII. Again, a very fun game and again I charged through the main storyline too fast and had problems with the final boss. One day I’ll learn to look around a bit while following the questlines!
Only just started this before having the PS2 taken off me by Tahnia who wants to play the entire FF series through from 1 to X-2 and then Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. Scary thing is she’ll do it too! Still, it looked an interesting game and the combat system was (shockingly) like a cross between X and XII. Be fun to play it more and see how the game turns out. Not really sure about how much I’ll enjoy playing “dress-up” with the major characters though.
Plans
Still have a bunch of games lined up to look at, but mostly just the flight sims now which I really haven’t been dedicated enough to create new button assignments for (my joystick has a whole bunch of buttons that I need to program for each game). Maybe when I get more uninterrupted time at the PC I’ll think about it some more. One game I think I’ll end up getting soon though is UFO: Extraterrestrials, which is essentially a remake of the old UFO: Enemy Unknown and seems to be as good as the original.