Back in my first post about EVE I mentioned that I have a habit of indulging in theorycrafting, often tool assisted, when it comes to MMO. I thought I’d get a little further than four days in before I fell prey to it once more. I clearly thought wrong. EVE has a reputation for having a near vertical learning curve. I’d actually thought that reputation a little undeserved until I ran fight off the edge of that fucking cliff. So now I’m in freefall trying to figure out what to do. Continue reading…
Category: review/consume
My opinion on whatever products of the mass market which have had the joyous task of helping me waste my time. Anime, TV, Films, Games, Books, Music, Microwave Meals, Pot Noodles – You get the idea.
EVE and I – Part 02 – The Final Frontier
Well much like 2 Live Crew popped that coochie I have popped my EVE cherry. I played for five hours or so yesterday and roughly the same today. I am in fact typing up this post in EVE’s in-game browser while (one of) my ship(s) mines away in the background. Which brings me to my first point, my goals may have been a tad too humble. Continue reading…
EVE and I – Part 01 – Into the great wide open
Being an account of one man’s virign experience with EVE Online. My first exposure to MMO’s was FFXI on its European release. I walked (like some kind of savage) from Glenwood down to PC World to pick it up after having a quick go of the copy my brother Patrick bought. I have to say it was pretty great at the time, an almost entirely novel multiplayer experience. But it was hardly flawless, the punishing xp loss on death and the hunt for random drops (fuck you second job quest) marred the exprience for me. Still it was either play that or attend class, so I did a semesters worth of assignments in a week or two (the first semester of the add-on BA in Humanities was a fucking joke, easy mode shit, sort of regret abandoning my stonking results to jump to a MSc) and settled in to explore Vana’diel. Continue reading…
(Upcoming) Games of 2012 – Autumn and Winter Edition (July-December)
So it’s been six months since I posted about my anticipated games of 2012. Six months during which I played barely any games at all, fuck you post-graduate education! Sadly a lot of the games on the previous list have been (almost inevitably) postponed to 2013 (a list I shall start constructing after the Tokyo Game Show).
I mentioned in the previous post that I was unsure about a number of this year’s upcoming releases. So far the results have been generally pretty positive. Most games I was wary off have turned out to be really enjoyable, no real duds at all so far. As usual the autumn and winter period is packed full with most of the year’s major releases. I have to say I’m really looking forward to quite a few of these games, a number of them look like they will easily make their way into this year’s Top Ten Games. Continue reading…
Front Mission 5 – Brief thoughts on emulation and a preliminary Lets Play
I like giant robots, real or super. I like role-playing games. I like turn based computer games. Unsurprisingly I am a fan of the Front Mission series, a series of turn based strategy rpg’s from Square Enix featuring a world only slightly in advance of our own where mobile armoured frames known as “Wanzers” have become an integral part of armed conflicts. The mecha in the series fall strongly into the “real robot” category, as represented by stuff like VOTOMS, Mobile Police PATLABOR, etc. The series was renowned for its complex storylines dealing with conflict between multiple morally ambiguous political entities and for the depth of its gameplay. Unfortunately the series saw few releases in the west (Front Mission 3 on the PSX, Front Mission 4 on the PS2 and a port of Front Mission for the DS) and the lead developer of the series has since left Square Enix so no new games are likely to be forthcoming. Though there have been a number of fan trasnlastions (some of which are ongoing). Continue reading…
Comic(book) reading club – Recommendations for selection – Mighty Michael Version
So below are my recommendations for Ongoing Series and Mini/Trade/Graphic Novel. If you know what this is about you can skip on down past this paragraph and get to the main content. If you dont know and want some context then behold the mighty mail that started it all: Continue reading…
(Upcoming) Games of 2012 – My anticipation should be yours
Well its been a year since I posted about my anticipated games of 2011. I still havent managed to figure out how to be excited about things again. Actually its probably worse now. But wangsty whinging aside. I ended up playing most of the games on last years list, even those I thought I wouldnt. Overall there were a lot more pleasant surprises than expected disappointments. Which was nice. Looking forward to 2012 it looks like its going to be a pretty awesome year for gaming. Though I probably wont have a lot of time to play them until I finish up college, which is bad. On the other hand I’ll be unemployed shortly which leaves me with free weekends, which is good. Continue reading…
(Very) Brief Thoughts on the Winter 2011/12 anime season
Yet another blog entry brought to you by my procrastination in writing my thesis. Thirty new shows, none of which I’ll get a chance to watch till late May or June. Which in one way is a good thing, I wouldnt watch them until they were finished anyway so having a good excuse to wait suits me fine. Some stuff looks decent here and one or two I really want to see. But there’s just something about this season that seems dull. In an odd change I’m looking forward to a ton of the OVA’s and most of the films (yay BERSERK!!). Continue reading…
Thoughts on Windows and Desktop customisation
Well I finally broke and re-installed Windows (you would think it could handle having all the hardware in the machine bar the hard drives switched but apparently not). As I was making (something) of a fresh start I thought it might be time to update my OS and desktop customisation. For a year or two now I’ve been using a combination of RocketDock (with some plugins), RainMeter and StartKiller for desktop customisation. I’ve also added a few custom registry entries to expand the power of the almighty context menu. The results of all this can be seen in the screen shots below: Continue reading…
Best of 2011 – Manga
It’s currently September 29th, if past years are anything to go by that means that I should get this posted sometime mid-2012, possibly in June as an early birthday present to myself. Then again starting three months early may actually mean that this is one of my rare yearly round-ups that make it out at an appropriate time. Despite the tragic intervention of an MSc into my life of lazy media consumption I have already read what could fairly be described as too much this year. So much in fact that I’m rather apprehensive of adding up exactly how much. Went and added them up, 16543 chapters read since January. Not counting that a large number are monthly releases (i.e. generally twice as long) lets assume a weekly chapter size of 20 pages, that’s 330,860 pages. Around 135 individual titles. Seems a bit excessive if I do say so myself. On the other hand though its been an awesome year, lots of long-running series finally finished scanlation and I got around to reading a large number of the “classics” that I had avoided or missed (including the “Big Three” – Bleach, Naruto and One Piece). This means that paring this list down to ten was an even bigger pain in the arse than it usually is. Continue reading…