Tag Archives: games

Pot Luck Pies

The thing about luck is that it’s always unexpected. No one ever expects good luck to happen to them, and if you’re the kind of person who does, you’re certainly bucking the trend.

A food that is found perhaps a little more often than strictly necessary, but certainly welcome during the holiday period in my house is pies. Yes, pies. Mainly beef pies, but sometimes chicken/vegetable pies also make an appearance as well. That’s all well and good – there’s nothing wrong with pies, and they make an excellent lunch when combined with a couple slices of toast or similar – but sometimes my dad will cook a whole batch of pies at once, eat some, and then refridgerate the rest. Which is cool, fine, I can deal with that.

I should point out at this stage that the pies mentioned above are almost always store-bought – while homemade pies have ocassionally been spotted in the Ling household, they’re usually too much effort to bother with on a regular basis. But damn, they are tasty.

Anyway, the point I tried to make is that these pies all look the same. Combine that fact that my dad likes to cook a whole batch at a time for later consumption, throw in the fact that he mixes different varieties of pies (beef, other assorted meat, vegetable, chicken etc), and you get: pot luck pies. There’s no way to distinguish between them when they’re in the fridge, short of taking their tops off and inspecting them manually. There’s just no way to know what flavoured pie you’ll get before you eat it, hence, pot luck pies.

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Windows 7 Shenanigans

…well, that didn’t go as planned.

What happened yesterday was completely different to what I actually thought (or had planned) to happen. My original, original plan was to move as much freshbytes stuff over to here as possible, but then I decided to use my time more wisely and play Dragon Age: Origins instead. 😀

If only that had been what actually transpired.

You see, I have this file system scheme with my Windows machine where as much as possible is moved off the OS drive. As I format my machines regularly, it just makes sense to dedicate a hard drive to Windows, and have two 1TB drives for storage – one for installed programs (okay, just Steam) and another for all my media, legally acquired or otherwise.

The way that it worked before I decided to play with it was that my User folder was on my OS drive, but the Documents, Videos and Pictures folders underneath that were moved to the Program drive. Truth be told, there’s nothing wrong with this setup.

However, I must make a special mention to those developers who think a special hidden folder in my User folder is an excellent place to store save games and other important info. Usually games store their save information, profiles etc, in either their own program folder, or under the Documents folder, or even under the My Games folder in the Documents folder. Such is the case with games like Dragon Age, BioShock, TrackMania, Rainbow 6 Vegas (1 and 2), and so on. There are certain games, however, that decide the hidden folder AppData is an excellent place to store this information instead, and without naming names, we’ll just say that a certain indie physics puzzler inolving Goo and a recent driving arcade game involving Paradise are the main culprits here.

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Why we quit: the moments that push us away from gaming – Ars Technica

Last night I was up at 4 am in my recliner, holding my baby while he slept after a feeding. I was playing Mass Effect, going through the game to get ready for the upcoming sequel. I had been playing for around two hours, and I was into the story, more than awake, and ready to go for another two. Then… death. A few bad decisions in a gun fight, and that was that for our Commander Shepard.

via Why we quit: the moments that push us away from gaming – Ars Technica.

I may not feel like it now that I’ve finished it, but I certinaly felt this with a tactical shooter by the name of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, or GRAW2 for short.

It wasn’t that the gameplay wasn’t good, because it certainly was excellent – nuking some poor troops with an artillery strike, or even a tank with an airstrike was satisfying beyond imagination, but there are certain places where it fell down, and enemy AI was one of them.

The thing about enemies in GRAW2 – they’re persistent, and annoyingly so. Once they’ve spotted you, they’ll continue to shoot at you regardless of whether you’re taking cover or not – they’ll also do this until they have to reload (at which point you can pop out and shoot them).

That’s not so bad, but what I found myself doing was constantly memorising the enemy positions and taking them out with a rifle before they even spotted me or my teammates. This made each mission feel like just a chore. It’s especially annoying to have taken down every guy bar one, who just so happens to pop out when you have your back turned and shoot you, repeatedly.

…and that’s just the enemy AI. Your own teammate AI is just as stupid, not bothering to take cover, getting stuck behind objects a two year old could climb over, and sometimes moving into the most idiotic positions possible, like directly in the enemy’s sights.

Then there’s the little things, like not being able to jump or climb over things. It’s strictly about the footwork here, and sometimes that’s annoying as hell.

Sure, I managed to pick up mostly “S” (excellent) or “A” (very good) rankings for each mission, but that’s not the point – games are meant to be *fun*, and not made of this “memorising where every single enemy in a level is” crap.

Let’s hope Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is more of the same action and awesomeness that the original Vegas was.

75 Must Have Games for the Holidays

Reviews Editor Tae K. Kim says: “Taking the survival horror genre to new heights, Left4Dead is an adrenaline fueled kick to the sensory organs. Cast as one of four survivors who are under siege by an undead horde, you must shoot, run and survive. What elevates the game to greatness is the fantastic multiplayer component. You can go online and play with friends in a cooperative mode-four players all acting as a team to survive the zombie onslaught-or play deathmatch where you can cast yourself as one the undead masses to take down survivors controlled by other human players. It’s an insane amount of fun and definitely deserves a spot in every PC gamers’ library.”

via Feature : 75 Must Have Games for the Holidays [Domestic] – Page 4- from GamePro.com.

Left 4 Dead, huh?

I have it, but if only I had a computer that could handle it… 🙁