04.16.06
Posted in General at 4:35 pm by jw
I’ve pretty much finished Oblivion now, with about 110 gaming hours on my latest save game (though I know that I reloaded enough to add at least 20 hours to that). It really was an impressive game and I enjoyed finding all the quests I could to finish. I could have closed a lot more Oblivion gates before I finished up with the main quest which shut them all down, but by the time I got to that point I really was tired of running through Oblivion to the towers to shut it down – guess I could have just trained my way and ignored the mobs though now I look back on it.
So, now my character (Maxine) is leader of the Fighters Guild, Mages Guild, Thieves Guild and Black Brotherhood. I’m also champion of the Arena and apparently some sort of hero for hanging around the Emperor when the main quest line ended. I finished most of the Daedra quests, at least the ones that would talk to me, and was really at the point where I’d have to run around the landscape looking for mines and so on to clear just because I could. By the end I was level 29, with 100 Strength and Personality and master of Blade, Heavy Armor, Alchemy and Armorer.
I think it would be interesting to play through again as both a thief and caster type character. I have the melee thing down pretty well now but in getting the leadership for the Thieves Guild and Black Brotherhood, I was having a good amount of fun sneaking around and avoiding contact. Sometime in the future though – I have X3, Tomb Raider Legend, GalCiv2 and B5:IFH to play, as well as my ever-present flight sims.
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04.11.06
Posted in Shorts at 1:27 pm by jw
For people looking for a small distraction: Top 10 OSS Games You’ve Never Played
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03.30.06
Posted in General at 2:59 pm by jw
I’d like to say I’ve been too busy to post, but it would only be about half the truth. In fact, I’ve been mostly busy messing with the new EQ2 expansion and since last week, playing Oblivion, both of which have been a lot of fun. Other minor games I’ve been messing with have been X3: Reunion (which I’d only recommend to people who absolutely loved X2 because it really is much of the same), finishing F.E.A.R. (which is a fantastic FPS/horror) and generally messing around with various other things that I pick up when I get bored.
In other news, it looks like I’ll be heading out to San Jose (CA) for 6 months to help out with my work’s new office out there. Hopefully that won’t mean too much offline time (I’d get severe withdrawal) but it should be an excellent experience moving over to the west coast so we can see a different part of the US for a while. I have several friends from EQ and EQ2 over there and am definitely looking forward to meeting them.
DRM has been continuing to annoy me lately as I try to get Windows Media stuff to work with iTunes and my wife’s iPod. Finally figured out how to burn CDs and rip them back to AAC for her (and mp3 for me). I know I shouldn’t buy DRM junk and for the most part I don’t, but in the rare cases it really does make me want to write a virtual sound card that will happily rip anything I send at it. On the bright side of DRM though, Alcohol 120% let me rip my Oblivion DVD to a working image so I can keep the DVD safe and sound on the shelf while playing the game now. Thanks for not using Star-Force, Bethesda, unlike Ubi-Soft which pisses me off by preventing me from playing half their collection because they simply don’t work on XP-x64 because if the junky “copy protection” that stops me from even playing games I legally own.
Also, I think my home PC is about due for a reinstall. Things have been going kinda flaky lately and I can’t get Windows to recognize my CDRW and DVDRW as recordable discs any more. Problem is, can I avoid playing Oblivion for the 2 hours it takes to get it up and running again!
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02.27.06
Posted in Shorts at 4:17 pm by jw
I’ve been busy lately (mainly thanks to the EQ2 expansion being released and trying to level up to 70) but I wanted to plug a great free paint package that basically does everything I want a paint package to do – Paint.NET is pretty much amazing for a free download and the guys writing it really have a good sense of how to make something easy to use. Give it a shot!
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02.08.06
Posted in Shorts at 3:05 am by jw
I’ve been having fun playing with the Yahoo Widget Engine, formerly known as Konfabulator. Lots of cute things there, especially when you can set it up to look a lot like the dashboard in MacOS. All it really needs is a way to set the default widget positions to something other than ‘Normal’, but that’s a small problem.
At the moment I’m enjoying the Weather, Dilbert, GU Comics and about 10 different RSS feeds all sitting a quick ctrl-F12 away.
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