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Monday, February 05, 2007

No more excuses..

They’re kind of pointless at this stage. Just be happy I’m posting, ok! I went past an old colleague of mine’s blog, and felt much better about mine-he hasn’t posted in months :)

 

I haven’t really been keeping an eye on much in the tech world lately, what with the fun and games (notice the dripping sarcasm) of project tests at work, so I don’t have much there. Then again, considering everyone who’s anyone in the tech world showed their wares a few weeks ago at CES, so there’s bound to be a short supply of news for the next month or so anyway.

 

Gaaaaames!

In Xbox Land, I completed my review of Lost Planet this weekend, and the game certainly is worth checking out-even if the controls are horrible and the plot seems like it was thought up during a corporate drug testing session. The bosses in the game are amazing; they really feel like something out of a classic 2D game, dwarfing the main character and even the mechs that you use. It’s like someone watched too much Starship Troopers and (rightfully) determined that it was about time someone created a game with those bugs in it that didn’t totally suck.

I finally managed to get my Gears disk sorted out, so I’m playing that again as well (restarted on Hardcore though) and we played some awesome 6 player system link at a friend’s place last weekend. It really is incredible how much easier a 360 LAN is than a PC one-even with the game patches.

I also managed to get a lot of my old Xbox games traded in for some credit and bought copies of PGR and Kameo; and traded Star Trek Legacy for Table Tennis (which is an awesome game-even Natz is loving it). So right now I have way more games than I have time for-I need a sabbatical just to catch up!

 

Plug and Play

Some of us at work managed to organize USB sticks at a killer price, so we developed a renewed interest in stuff that could be used to fill the sticks up last week. In our search we uncovered www.portableapps.com, which hosts an open source launcher that runs a selection of apps straight from any portable drive. The format is pretty simple, so in no time at all we had some cool extras like our favorite calculators and sysinternals tools running off our new devices-along with some of the PortableApps standards like Miranda, Firefox and Open Office. Running apps straight off an external device really highlights how crappy it is to have to install things in Windows and have them infect multiple folders and your registry, helping in every way possible to retard overall system performance. With a couple of low level exceptions like your firewall, with PortableApps you could be running almost all of your day to day tools off your trusty thumb drive. Besides keeping your hard drive and start bar uncluttered, this saves you from having to reinstall all this stuff when the inevitable Windows reinstall comes along.

 

That’s it, short and sweet. I hope I’ll get back into routine again soon, but considering I have been hoping that for the past two months, I’m not betting on it :)

5 comments:

Justin Paver said...

That's it... post shorter posts with increased frequency ...

There we go, you're getting it now :)

So considering the hype about Lost Planet, would you say that it's worth getting an Xbox360 to play that game? Or should I wait for Halo3?

Flint said...

No, Lost Planet alone is not worth buying a 360 for-but the combination of great titles like Gears of War, Lost Planet, Viva Pinata, Kameo, Dead Rising and others makes buying a 360 more than worth it.
See now if you'd been able to join us at Dragon's for the 360 LAN two weeks ago, instead of doing silly things like running off to the US, you wouldn't even need any convincing ;)

Lord Spaceman said...

Yay a new post! Flint, it's good to get into a routine of updating your blog.

What I do: get to work, fire up outlook and a blank email, type a bunch of crap and email it off to my blog. All done within the first 30 minutes of work. What you should do is think about what you gonna say whilst driving to work - I find it makes life a little easier!

I haven't seen you of Xbox live in a while now, seem to keep just missing you. Thanks for that's head s-up on that XBox LAN - I must try it out sometime. I'm interested to know how you found Kameo, I'm thinking of buying that soon.

Flint said...

The thing with posts is that I'd actually prefer to post something interesting about tech and stuff, I'd rather have fewer posts with a bit tech news and stuff, than lots of short posts about my boring life :)

Yeah it's been a while since I was on live. It's mostly a time thing, I've had to get through Lost Planet, which was taking up my game time, on top of that I haven't been able to get the 3g card since last year. I managed to get hold of a 3G phone to use-but it's not HSDPA, so I'm a bit worried about the latency.

I think Kameo is very cool, it's really beautiful and just a lot of fun. If you can handle the splitscreen (not everyone can), then the co-op is cool as well.

Flint said...

Oh, and I meant to mention to Justin, another great title on the 360 is Rockstar's Table Tennis. It walks this fine line between casual and hardcore, with easy to pick up mechanics that anyone can get (seriously, move and hit A when the ball comes for you) and a lot of strategy for the hardcore player to discover (spin, slams, timing, all sorts of stuff).

 

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