tail -f carlo.log

Pleasant Memories Of Times Past

Trying to keep track of the last one or two weeks…

• Running again! Avoiding tarmac, thank God there are many forest roads around. Using light weights on my hands now, too. Fun. The most interesting part of the down period was that I was actually missing my runs, and that I was looking forward to start running again. I think it’s official: I like it.

• Found out I can watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart & The Colbert Report freely and legally on the web, OMG. Thank you, Comedy Central. Too bad there isn’t an RSS feed. Or is there?

• Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo! – and so is JR Conlin. Bummer, two of my personal heroes gone. Well, I guess ~9 years at the same company is enough for anyone. All the best, guys!

• Using FriendFeed now. It’s not bad, really; then again, I mostly use it to have a single place where all my loose threads come together. I really like the stalking helper imaginary friends feature. Makes it easy to keep track of pals who don’t use FriendFeed themselves.
  I’ve tried subscribing to the combined feed of all the people I’ve subscribed to on the site, but it’s like being fed by a firehose. Unusable, sorry. As I’ve said before, the idea to build a social network on top of peoples’ lifestreams is a bit too meta for me.

• Discovered Goodreads. Nice.

• I love GTA IV. Incredible game. So many lovingly crafted details, amazing.

• New iPhones! Dope. Want. And a revamped .mac! Let’s hope it works as good as it looks in the presentations. The current .mac web implementation is useless for me. It just doesn’t cut it.

Mini Review: Need For Speed Carbon (Demo), Xbox 360

Preface

• ~1GB download.

Lasting impressions

• Bad framerate issues. (No joke. Pretty choppy at times.)
• Good sound design, especially in the “angry polygon dude yelling at me from his car”-type cutscenes.

• Kinda (too) easy.

Verdict

• Meh.
• It’s no Burnout Paradise (demo).

• Srsly — it’s no Burnout Paradise (demo).

Sky: Brought Down

This afternoon I’ve finished the first/latest Mass Effect DLC, Bring Down the Sky. It adds a new mission to the game which promises ~90 minutes of gameplay, a new location, a new race and a new XBL achievement (worth 50 gamerpoints). It costs 400 MS Points (€4.80).

The mission was nice, nothing out of the ordinary, tho. Drive around in your Mako, clean out some places, gather “leads” (if you want to call them that) and then face a boss guy. Make some Paragon/Renegade decisions, get a glimpse at a possible new story line to come and be done with it.

The aforementioned new location is an asteroid on a collision course with a colonised planet. The rock itself looks like pretty much like any of the old “lesser” planets from the main game. It’s okay, not more, not less. What makes it special (to me) is the beautiful planet looming overhead — X57, the asteroid, is heading towards Terra Nova, destined to bring doom and destruction. A grim outlook! Still pretty, tho. Seriously, it’s really shiny, but I’m a sucker for stars and planet imagery, so I might take more joy from something like this than other people.

Anyways, why is it heading there? Because of the Batarians, a race of 4-eyed humanoids. Apparently they don’t like the Humans for various historical reasons, and thus use their first on-screen appearance ever for speaking with the protagonists in a resentful manner. And for shooting at them. The audacity!

So, is “Bring Down the Sky” a perfect DLC/addon? No. Bioware’s decision to make this an “in-between mission” is questionable. I can understand it from a storyline point of view — too much is in flux after finishing the main game, what with the Council and all. But unfortunately it means I have to go back to a savegame where I could freely roam the galaxy — i.e. a save that was made prior to visiting Ilos etc. —, and for some people that might be a drawback. A co-worker of mine has no save like that left, and that means he’d have to start over, and therefore he won’t pick up the DLC. So… srsly, not a good decision. (Personally, I was lucky to still have a “good” save, tho.) But the implementation could’ve been smoother. Well, I actually expected it to be smoother.

And what’s with the silent team members? I though Garrus and Kaiden were pissed since they wouldn’t talk to me during the mission. Not even random chatter. Meh. It’s a small issue, tho. Just something I found a bit strange.

All in all, tho, it’s been a nice ride. For the average price of a Döner you get ~90 minutes of additional Mass Effect goodness. A good bargain in my book.

Mini Review: Mass Effect, Xbox 360

Okay, yes, I’m late to the review party. In my defense, it has something to do with this and the fact that I wanted to finish Mass Effect twice before rendering my judgement.

So, my first playthrough on normal difficulty was very thorough. I’ve picked a male (Infiltrator class), took the “good guy” approach (“We have to save the galaxy! — Wait, what’s that, old lady? Your kitten is trapped in this death maze? We’ll help!”), also did pretty much every sidequest I could find, landed on every rock available, and ended up spending ~43 34 hours or so. Hey, my char even had freaky, slightly awkward (in the build-up) alien sex with that endlessly blabbering blueberry. Dynomite.

The second time around I rolled a female (Soldier class) and played the whole game on hardcore difficulty in a “I have a job to do, get out of my way” kind of way. Short-tempered, gun-in-your-face attitude, not afraid to leave a crater. In short, for the most part I tried to play it like time actually mattered. This time I clocked in around 20 14 hours. And this time, my leading lady ended up ripping the clothes off one of her male subordinates. Oh, and she had freaky, surprising lesbian alien sex with some random NPC, without meaning to.

Shiny.

The game’s not without flaws, tho. The sidequests on the planets are a wee bit repetitive. There are some rather frequent framerate drops and “Halo 2”-style texture pop-in issues after the loading screens. Background noises were sometimes awfully quiet, and it was really, really hard to make them out, which made some surroundings appear a bit sterile in the aural department. The squad NPC pathfinding took a short break from time to time, making me run back to show one of my compadres how to walk around the car. Oh, and Bioware? My wife asks whether for ME2 you could add some more samples to enemy NPCs, I think if she has to hear “I will destroy you!” or “Go! Go! Go!” one more time, she’ll be going postal.

But ultimately, in my book, it’s really a great game. Hey, it’s mostly “Knights of the Old Republic”, albeit with a lot of changes! It might not perfect, but it comes close. The player char’s gender does make a difference every now and then. I liked the majority of the voice acting, the stories and side-quests were mostly laid out well, and the presentation was usually top notch. Especially the last 1-2 hours were mighty fine. Cinematical, even. Wonderful, wonderful build up of tension.

All in all I’ve spent around 60-70 50-60 hours on Mass Effect, and enjoyed those. I recommend it.

Testing Out Xbox Live

Thanks to Mike for lending me his 360 for a few days!