judyonthenet

Kevin Butler spoke many truths during his speech at E3 a few months ago. We now literally live one of those truths. Unless bathrooms count as separate rooms, in which case I suppose our place technically has three rooms.

This is pretty much our entire apartment.

In celebration of having two paychecks again, we (and by we, I mean Kelvin) decided to upgrade our television. We had a nice 42″ Sharp Aquos we bought a while back (which was already a super nice TV), and now we have a 60″ Sony Bravia. We bought it from Costco, and it came with a sound system for free, which is good since Kelvin was planning on getting one. The new TV is… really big. I think it’s excessive. Kelvin thinks it’s perfect.

My camera is crooked, not the TV

Geoff came over yesterday and helped Kelvin mount it, so our TV is on the wall FINALLY. It’s still not within most recommended minimum viewing distances you find online, but oh well. Colors are vibrant on this TV, so Kelvin’s turned down the backlight and brightness so we won’t go blind. For gaming, graphic flaws are more obvious, and SD content (like Wii stuff) looks terrible. However, HD content, especially Blu-rays looks fantastic. (Pixar’s Up looks AMAZING.)

Because of our new toy and new Netflix subscription, I’ve spent most of my weekend watching television and movies instead of gaming. (btw, Dear Zachary is one of the best crime documentaries I’ve ever watched. If you’re into that sort of thing, don’t read up on the background at all and check out the movie.) I’m sure that will change once I figure out a console game to get into.

New thing I learned today: Factory farming is a farming livestock in high density to produce highest throughput at lowest cost.

Another decent documentary I checked out this weekend was Food Inc., a documentary that talks about where your food comes from. (Summary: Most of it comes from evil corporations.)

So busy at work, I’m three days late with a video game tab post. Oy.

Didn’t feel like unplugging the headsets, so I took this pic on our messy desk

Video games and other gaming related purchases:
SteelSeries 5H v2 USB headset (PC) – $107.00
Turtle Beach Ear Force HPA2 headset (PC) – $79.34
StarCraft II (PC) x 2 – hookup from friend
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift (360) – $36.99 from Amazon
Total cost: $223.33

Even though my racist Mexican friend hooked me up with copies of StarCraft II, I still managed to spend quite a bit on gaming. I didn’t even include the $200+ in RAM Kelvin and I bought (2x2Gb each).

And the SC2 games weren’t free… he’s using them to guilt trip me into making him baked goods and giving him company swag (from… a biotech company?). I still have to figure out a baked good that’s worth shipping and I won’t completely eff up. (I don’t know how to make anything except bread right now.) I’m leaning towards cookies. Still, I don’t know if I can make and deliver $120 of cookies. Especially ones that taste like their worth.

I bought two sets of expensive headsets to replace our busted cheapo ones. Neither perform all that fantasticly on my computer. I was originally going to use the SteelSeries, but I can’t get them to work right at all on my computer. Mic’s always too soft or too noisy or has retarded low-pitched beeping. The Turtle Beach ones Kelvin chose work okay on my computer, but they’re heavy (4 speakers in each ear!) and clamp your head. However, sound is pretty good (after noise filtering), so I opted for the Turtle Beach ones while Kelvin took my SteelSeries. I still had to do a lot of ridiculous settings tweaking for decent mic clarity. It’s so much more complicated than the cheapo USB ones we had. I suspect my board has shitty audio drivers. We’ll see how long these last. I probably should have returned them, but I’m lazy and don’t want to go without a working headset. If they break within a year, I’m never spending more than $20 on a headset ever again.

You might notice there’s an extra copy of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift if the background. That’s the first copy I received from Amazon that arrived all busted up with the disc fallen out of the broken holder and ending up with scratch marks. I requested an exchange, and Amazon one-day shipped a second copy. Which is handy, because now I can use its packaging to return the first copy.

Games I beat:
Heavy Rain (PS3)
Mass Effect 2 (PC)

Now that I work hard, I play hard, too. I managed to pull myself away from TF2 to finish a couple games. Heavy Rain was very good. The graphics take some time to get used to, as the characters go into uncanny valley all the time. Gameplay is reminiscent of adventure games to me: very linear and you have to hunt for things to interact with to progress the story. Since I love adventure games (pretty much how I got into gaming), this action-light-story-heavy style of game is something I appreciated. The only thing that’s different is the emphasis on quick time events as a primary gameplay mechanic. I just played one ending. There’s other paths to take to the end, but I’ll save them for when I return my coworker’s copy and find my own. This isn’t really a game that would have a sequel, but I hope Quantic Dream makes more games like this.

Mass Effect 2… I made a whole blog post about it. Technically, I made three because I kept reposting it so it would show up in Facebook news feed properly. Yes, I’m a dork.

Now I’m working on the single player campaign in StarCraft II. (I’m too sucky to do multiplayer.) One annoying thing I’ve found is that the game actually uses most of the function keys. I was using F11 to do my screenshots, but since the game uses that button, most of my StarCraft II screenshots look like this:

Thankfully, Fraps has implemented Alt+<key> as a hotkey option, so I should be able to take screens without a message log in the way now.

New thing I learned today: The difference between ice cream, sherbet, and sorbet is their milk content.

Video games and other gaming related purchases:
The Deus Ex Collection (PC) – $4.98 from Steam
Total cost: $4.98

I’ve been wanting to play Deus Ex forever. I think I actually have a hardcopy somewhere because someone meant to lend me a different PC game and accidentally gave me Deus Ex (and never wanted it back). For some reason, I wasn’t inclined to play it back then. Now, I have no idea where that CD went, so I just gave up my five bucks for that game and its sequel. Another two games for my ridiculous backlog.

Games I beat:
WarioWare: Touched! (DS)

I listed WarioWare: Touched! because I completed the “story” and unlocked all the game modes. Not very long if you play it to that point, but it’s got a lot of replayability. Regardless, I admit it’s a pretty weak game to mark as complete.

Prior to starting work, I had been playing a lot of Mass Effect 2. I thought I would beat it by now. For some reason, having a job makes me want to play Team Fortress 2 more, so I’ve been slacking on games that actually end. I was starting Saboteur also, but I think Mass Effect 2 is probably the next game I’ll finish. Check back next month!

I’m a little bummed that no one at work really games, except for the HR guy that dealt with my hiring. I lent HR guy my copy of Uncharted 2 because he was having issues with his copy, and in return he lent me Heavy Rain. A game I’d usually buy because I’m hella possessive, but I heard it has little replay, so I’m good with borrowing it.

New thing I learned today: A fiducial is a marking that imaging systems use as a point of reference.

Finally, a decent video game tab picture!

Video games and other gaming related purchases:
Dragon Age: Awakening (PC) – hookup from friend
Mass Effect 2 (PC) – ditto
The Saboteur (360) – ditto
Dawn of War 2: Gold Edition (PC) – ditto
Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising (PC) – ditto
New Super Mario Bros (Wii) – $3.52 from Amazon ($34.99 – leftover Amazon credit from credit card, comes with $10 Amazon video game credit)
Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii) – $49.99 from Amazon (comes with $20 Amazon video game credit)
12 month Xbox Live subscription card – $29.21 from buy.com through eBay
Glory of Heracles (DS) – $0 from Amazon ($10.44 – Amazon credit, comes with $10 credit)
WarioWare: Touched! (DS, used) – $16 through GameTZ trader
Total cost: $98.72

For the first time this year, I really spent some money on games. All the Amazon games were impulse buys because they were well-priced with video game credit and usually also a $5 mp3 credit. I didn’t use any credit with SMG2 because it was preordered before I had credit. Glory of Heracles was $10.99 including $10 credit, plus it was randomly in my Gold Box. And with all my ridiculous amount of Amazon credit, why not? I’m only out 44 cents in Amazon credit in the end for a crappy RPG. I think I can even register it for Club Nintendo for points.

While in LA, we visited some friends, including my racist Mexican friend who hooked me up with some games I’ve been wanting (several via another ex-German-now-Canadian friend). Um… sweet! Thanks guys! I’ve been really wanting to play the Bioware games, so I’d been eagerly awaiting to get these. The rest was just icing on a most delicious cake.

The Xbox Live sub is for Kelvin so he can keep playing his fighting games online. Usually once a year, you can find sub cards for $30, and I think our subscription is running out soon. WarioWare: Touched! I’ve wanted for a while, and it’s been hard to find a mint copy after it went out-of-print.

Games I beat:
Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening (PC)

I plowed through Awakening as soon as I got it. It was very… meh. It was billed as a second game in the form of an expansion (and was priced as such), but it turned out to be much smaller in scope. Not very much from the first game carried over to the second game, and the characters weren’t particularly interesting and didn’t have much time to be fleshed out.

Alistair completely disregards what we had last game. Jerk!

I loved the characters in the first game (duh), but you barely get to talk to the ones in this game. You have to run into some random object somewhere in the entire game world that they feel like talking about in order to have any interesting conversation. One of the few characters that didn’t irritate me, Sigrun the dwarf girl, I got last, so because I didn’t travel anywhere with her, so I never got to talk to her outside of the mission I got her in. And there’s no romancing in this game… seriously?? What’s the point of playing this game then? Not that it matters because all the guys in the game are annoying (Anders), emo (Nathaniel), or a walking corpse (Justice).

Woohoo, more “bears“.

Plus this expansion is seriously bugged. Whichever character you get last, you can’t make into a Grey Warden because you’re immediately dumped into the final mission after they join your team. A couple of the characters get +100 relationship points for anything positive you do. Powers from the Warden’s Keep DLC are completely nonfunctional in the expansion.

Sigrun really likes me.

Despite all my bitching, I still enjoyed it enough to play it all the way through. In the end, I can’t help but be drawn into the world of Dragon Age fiction, and I still find battling and micromanaging my team fun. And it’s nice that, after you saved the world from a monster invasion, your character finally gets a freaking box to put all her junk in.

New thing I learned today: Catgut is cord made from animal intestines, usually not a cat.

Video games and other gaming related purchases:
A bunch of Steam games – gift from a Mexican
Total cost: $0

A friend of mine (who, btw, is very proudly and slightly racistly Mexican) gave me a bunch of Steam games. Which is super incredibly awesome, except I haven’t had the chance to play them because of TV, personal projects, Metro 2033, and recent urges to play Left 4 Dead 2. Hopefully, I can start a couple of them next month.

We’re a third of the way through the year, and can you believe I’ve spent less than $5 on games? The crazy things not earning an income does to people.

Games I beat
Left 4 Dead 2 (PC)

I got pretty sick of Team Fortress 2 in the middle of April, so I switched gears and started playing Left 4 Dead 2 again. Plus, The Passing DLC came out end of the month, so that was more motivation to play it. I think I had played all the campaigns before April, but April was when I survived all the finales and got all the achievements for finishing each level.

I’m terrible at L4D2, but I’ve mainly been playing with Ted and Steam buddy tasteekakes. They’re so good, I can survive Advanced mode with them.

Two tanks and four incapped survivors

I tried to save Ted from the smoker, but he apparently had a buddy

Not your typical bridezilla

Almost dead, but still have time for games

Unfortunately, I don’t have screen caps of when Sith threw a Molotov on my incapped body. Or when Draconis threw a Molotov on me and my incapped teammate as I tried to revive the teammate. Or when I shot Bean into the red for stealing a teammate’s health pack and accusing me of it. Or when Draconis left all three of his incapped teammates right outside the safehouse door while it was clear because he was afraid a zombie would pop out on him and his 5 health (but eventually he retrieved us because he couldn’t leave the level without us being dead).

New thing I learned today: The Molotov cocktail got its name from Finnish soldiers who were fighting the Soviet Union in the Winter War. It’s named after Vyacheslav Molotov, who was the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union at the time.