Archive for June, 2008
Hanging out with some friends was the soft fluffy cake of the night. The icing? Video games. We played TetriNET and while I was far from dominating in the game, I did well enough to survive for a bit. The best thing about TetriNET is its unpredictability where you could be doing well, then suddenly you get swarmed by the other players, jacking up your well thought out tetris with block bombs that blow up your pieces and send them scattering, or the ‘ole switcheroo replacing your neat little stack with their near critical one. The added screaming of anguish is something to relish upon hearing from others and a dreadful thing when it comes from your mouth.
The next game we tried to play was Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. Unfortunately, we had a few issues on some computers and it took a long time to set up. Then, while we were in the process of playing, our rigs went out of sync and the session crashed. After trying to recover the session, we decided to try another old game we used to play, which was Quake III Arena. Man, did that bring back memories. One of my friends and I would jockey for domination of higher platforms to use our rail guns. Rocket jumping and blowing people up in mid air were all the old encounters. Even shooting our own teammates while they were jumping to get them killed from either a further landing or missing the ground entirely.
The final game I played (I had to leave earlier than the others) was a few rounds of poker. I did okay but still lost as I know nothing of playing poker, other than what combinations there are. I was hoping to give Team Fortress 2 a go with them but only two of us was able to buy it and set it up before game night. Maybe next time?
And for the record, I was the only one on a Mac (with boot camp and Vista, of course). 
So, my HD crashed on my Macbook Pro. My digital life was potentially stripped from me like a foot length of duct tape on my chest. But, thanks to Time Machine, I was able to restore (nearly) all my data to the new drive. The only casualty that didn’t make it was my copy of Untraceable. However, since I bought it on iTunes, I made the cute anime eyes and wrote to the support group about what happened. Not even 24 hours later, I get the reply that Diane (the rep) understood my troubles and made the movie available for download again. All felt right in the world, until I realized I needed to build my Vista Boot Camp install again for gaming night.
Now that was torture.
Ever since I started blogging and adapted to a CMS system, I’ve always used the built in editor of the systems themselves. The only time I didn’t was during my Alaska cruise since the ship had really crappy satellite internet, not to mention it was expensive. So, I ended up using NeoOffice to write my blog entries and waited until I got home to post them and that was sufficient for me.
But now, I’m interested in using an offline application to write up my blog posts, save them and publish them whenever I want to (and if I’m connected to the Internet). Copying and pasting the entry is all well and good but why not have a one click solution? So here I am, using a weblog client called ecto and so far, I like it. While I don’t have any means to manage comments, ecto’s pretty full featured by allowing me to not only write a post and save a draft, publish posts and delete posts, I can also lay out my posts if other elements are used (like images or flash movies), whereas I couldn’t if I used NeoOffice. I must admit, getting an image positioned just right through a WYSIWYG editor is still a little finicky but when I encounter such difficulties, I can just go into HTML edit mode and conduct my fine tuning.
ecto’s been able to retrieve my posts successfully as well as my About page and I can go through and view or edit them. When creating posts, there’s automatic spellcheck and I can also get a word count. Preview doesn’t show the posts in my blog theme but rather a basic view state akin to Microsoft Outlook’s preview pane. However, I did notice a template feature in one of the menus when I took a cursory glance. Perhaps I can modify the template to match my blog’s design? I’ll have to look into it further or read up on some support material. I am trying to see if I can send a draft to the server without modifying the Publish button to do so as I’d like to keep that functionality the same as my Wordpress interface.
It’s not without its flaws however, and I find myself using the HTML editor quite a bit (besides the aforementioned image finickiness, there’s also problems with editing link text while trying to keep the hyperlink reference intact). All in all, though, ecto is pretty darn nifty. and with a license being sub-$20, it’s very affordable and I think worth the price of admission.
While there are other clients out there (like MarsEdit and even TextMate), ecto is the first one I’m trying and I’m really pleased with it.
Last week I picked up the game Mass Effect and it’s been an awesome adventure. I’ve been able to complete the main campaign due to not doing all the side quests. The story is engaging and has its cool moments. The NPC companions you get have their own unique personalities and regularly interact with each other and your character. Their abilities are as varied as their personalities and compliment your character well regardless of the class you’ve chosen.
Speaking of classes, the one I’ve chosen to play at first is the Soldier class. While this class doesn’t have access to Tech (affects weapons, shields and mechanical enemies) or Biotic (similar to Star Wars Force powers) abilities, it’s pretty robust and can lay out some nice damage. It’s the only class that can train in all the weapons used. The weird thing is, even if another class can’t train in, say, assault rifles, they are nevertheless equipped with it and can use them. This confused me at first and I had an NPC use a weapon it could never train to use better, and that lead to quite a few needless deaths.
In combat, there is a cover system but it’s more unwieldy than any other cover system I’ve played with. All that’s needed to take cover, is to press up against a hard surface while you have a weapon drawn, you’ll snap your back against the cover and can move to any side to lean out and shoot. If the cover is low enough, you could also stand up and fire. What’s unwieldy about the cover system? It’s easy to get to cover, whether you want to or not. Also, many enemies tend to rush your position just as often as they try to outflank you and it’s a bit sluggish to get out of cover status so it can get a little frustrating to have enemies pound on you while you wait the second or two for your character to leave cover.
Aside from the weird mechanic that every class is equipped with all weapons, even if they can’t train to maximize their use and the slow cover system that’s not all useful, combat in Mass Effect can be pretty fun. While hit and miss rolls are handled in the background, the fighting has a good real time feel and with the ability issue commands (like attack, advance, take cover, etc.), there’s a neat tactical feel.
Combat’s not the only thing going for Mass Effect. The stories within the game are well created. While you’d expect the main story line to be well done, side missions are also well crafted and provide more information than just “go here, kill this, retrieve that” bland stuff. The graphics and sound are also top notch and with all of this packaged together, Mass Effect is well worth the money and wait as it was ported to the computer. It has great replay value as you can explore different classes and can even restart the campaign with a character that’s already completed it, maintaining his/her weapons and equipment and experience. At the moment, I’m starting over with another Soldier, intent on completing at least 90% of the side quests this time around.
