Oversaturated Forums
Online forums are a thing of the past for most people now. There’s a few slow ones I still hang around once every month or so but I don’t keep up on any forums like I used to.
But my problem with trying to keep up with forums these days is that sometimes they are incredibly fast paced. A topic can balloon into several pages in less than an hour and then be basically done. Or go onto several hundred pages in weeks which you can never catch up on.
So you have basically two options: mark all as read every once in a while, or start to ignore the forums. I started with the first and then moved on to the second.
Now my addiction is RSS and twitter, both of which I can more easily control the flow of. Want more? Add a follower or a feed. Want less? Drop a few. I only wish there was a way to not have duplicate RSS items about the same news story from separate sources. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an Apple story reported on by 10 different feeds with no new information after the first.
Ars Technica is Awesome
A couple months ago I was looking into subscribing to Ars Technica. So I went over to their subscriptions page to try and convince myself it was worth $50 for the next year.
The Wired magazine was useless because I’m Canadian.
The coupons are kind of nice, but the only one I would use is ThinkGeek and I buy from them maybe once a year.
The full RSS feeds and nice layout are neat as well.
But I didn’t think any of this was worth $50.
I did end up subscribing though. Because Ars Technica is awesome. I love the articles. I love the detail of the articles and I love the fact that they do some awesome features on random things. And that is worth $50 to support something like that.
Little Review of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
As a little background I’ve played Tomb Raider games from Angel of Darkness to Underworld. I missed anything earlier than that as part of my gap of having a shitty computer. In general I liked them. Good puzzles, sometimes a little unpolished or confusing in general but still fun games nonetheless.
So the move to a top-down action game caught me off guard to say the least. I never really thought it was going to be bad, but it was a strong move away from the previous incarnations. It was also another developer so I wasn’t sure how much of a Lara Croft-y feel it would still have to it.
However, to my delight this is probably the best Lara Croft game I’ve ever played. Only ran into a couple bugs throughout the whole game (door wouldn’t open at one point, replaying the level fixed it) and the co-op aspect really added a lot to the game. I played through my first time on local co-op with a friend in two sessions, once last month and once last Friday. The puzzles were generally pretty easy but still rewarding. Then on the weekend I played online (after it was finally released) with a friend. From what he told me by the end he was missing some particles and stuff (caused a few deaths) and he couldn’t switch guns anymore. As the host I was fine all the way through.
I did find in order to get the point rewards I had to basically take all the points I could. My second time through I ended up with the railgun this way. The final boss only took 3 hits (although he had about 6 phases to go through as well, so 18 hits) with this gun which was rather disappointing. My first time doing the boss fight was much more rewarding having to basically use everything I had to beat him.
I plan to play through the SP sometime. I think most of the puzzles will be different; everything in co-op seemed to rely on having two people. For a game released at $15 this a great deal. I wouldn’t say it’s worth more than $30, definitely not a $50 release game, but for about 6 hours for a playthrough (that’s six GOOD hours) I think I’d be interested in some DLC as well. $5 for a new mini-campaign would be great.
Note: I played on PC with the mouse and keyboard and my local friend played with a PS3 controller. Didn’t really feel like there was a disadvantage to either so pick what you’re comfortable with. There’s some assist with WASD for those not-so-8-way jumps that make it all work out.
Little Review of Global Agenda
So I started playing Global Agenda about 10 days ago, starting with the trial (most of the game, up to level 12). It was originally released 9 months ago at $50 + some subscription fee for playing. That fee used to provide the MMO side of the MMOTPS game, stuff like the auction house, mail, agencies (guilds). It has since been removed, the game dropped to $21 ($15 with a friend discount) although you can still pay $12/mo to advance at about twice the speed.
I just hit level 30 with my first character after those 10 days. Level 30 is basically access to all content and all skills, but there are a few items with level requirements that are higher. It also allows you to play with all the other big boys in the 10v10 mercenary arena that is most of the day-to-day PvP in the game. Read the rest of this entry »