Hi All,

I'm still around, just not on this site lately. :) I've been playing Fallout 3 a ton & it doesn't seem like I'll ever have time for another game. Although I've also started playing City of Villains again. I'm looking forward to trying Champions Online when that become available. No time for more comments at the moment.

jknight

Now my free time has been dominated by another sport. After this, I should be free & clear. I'm glad I don't watch anything else sports-related other than these two events. I'm already tired of watching the US open at this point however. The powers of Tennis are just beating the bejeezis out of rank amateurs.

Yep. I'm on the very last main mission of Mass Effect & right now I can't work on it as I'm too busy watching (inhale) The Olympics (exhale)...

This week is the big Triathlon & Decathlon events, my favorites. Also, it has been busy at work, so that has taken up my break time for viewing.

Eventually...Ahll be bahk..:)

Oh yeah!!!! At work they gave us $100 for filling out a survey about work satisfaction. I converted it over to $100 in Amazon credit. I just got a $25 Amazon cert from my credit card as well. Lastly, I still have a Best Buy $50 cert from last Xmas that I haven't spent yet. Tally it up & I've got $175 bucks which I'm probably going to have to blow on some new games. I'm thinking I might buy Too Human and Tales of Vesperia when they're released as well as pick up GTA IV...at least that's what it's looking like so far. I kind of wish I could trade the Best Buy for an Amazon cert, but I'll just have to make due...exchanging it for cash on ebay would not give fair market value.

So right now, the list looks like this:
1. Too Human.
2. Tales of Vesperia.
3. GTA IV.

I'll update it if I change my mind to get something else. I'm already "over-extended" in terms of number of games owned versus how much time I actually have to play them. It's ridiculous. I imagine in another year or two, I'll have shelves of old games & look like the Angry Video Game Nerd (except my games will still be kind-of new).

There was as tropical storm hitting Houston (or near) yesterday so work let us go home early, basically a half day off. I used this time to work on my Mass Effect game. So far, I've clocked 41 hours. I just got the Completionist achievement last night (=complete majority of the game). There are only 2 main missions left. I've completed the majority of side missions, the only side missions I didn't complete are most of the ones that ask to find 20 specific alien types, or 20 minerals, etc. I can't find them all & there is no Achievement given for finishing every mission in the game, so there is no value in completing it.

Right when I was about to start the second to last primary storyline missions, I got ANOTHER side mission!! I went ahead & delayed the primary mission & warped over to the latest side mission. Hopefully it's the last one. All the reviews said that there were only a few side missions. This isn't true, there are TONS of them.

I've played this game as a Paragon, a good guy. You can play the game as a Renegade (evil) all over again. However, with all the games I bought & my limited time, I don't know if I want to put forth the effort to play Renegade. I might save the Renegade method of play for when Mass Effect 2 is announced..that way I can enjoy it again while I wait for the ME2 release. If I do play it again in Renegade mode (a small chance), I will go through the entire main storyline only. You retain the same level with the same player (I'm level 43 atm), but I think you can switch c-l-a-s-s-e-s to try out all the other weapons & powers. I chose the Infiltrator (Sniper/Soldier/Tech guy) & got stuck with a pistol/sniper the entire game. The other interesting weapons were available but you can't zoom in which made them useless for me.

Probably the next game to hit on my list will be Dark Sector. Dark Sector graphics reminds me of an MGS4 variant or Gears of War. I like the bio-warfare theme. Let's face it, biotech, biology, genetic engineering, it's the stuff of the future...Currently, it's all still incubating in start-ups & research labs, but one day it will probably alter our society. Hopefully, in positive ways such as longevity, health improvements, growing back limbs, & giving us some vast memory capacity like some people are already born with. Probably when Too Human comes out, IF I buy it, I will play the biotech character first.

Lastly, I recently gave a demo of GoW to a friend of mine. After seeing it again, I feel compelled to play through it once more. Although I only played it in casual mode the first time through, I'm not sure I want to play it in the harder modes as I simply hate repeating the same area you get killed in over & over. I finished Halo 3 in Legendary mode & I was completely disgusted with Halo after that! So I'm not sure the price of hating the game is worth the achievement points. One thing that sucked is that I didn't get all the dog tags the first time through & I'd like to finish that. I got a GoW guide book for Xmas when I got GoW but I didn't read it. I kind of wish I read some of it, at least to know where to look for those dam dog tags.

Well I just pulled the trigger & ordered 4 new 360 games today. I haven't figured out how exactly I will play these games all that much but they were pretty cheap, about $30 each roughly & Amazon gives free shipping. One game I had to order used since it was still above the $40 for a new copy. Here are the games I ordered (drum roll please):

1. Lost Odyssey

2. Dark Sector

3. Assassin's Creed

4. Culdcept Saga

After all the talk about JRPGs coming to the 360, I figured I should finally get one & see what the fuss is all about. I don't believe I have EVER played a JRPG other than demos since I've never owned a Japanese console. I do own Septerra Core but never got into it. It just wasn't interesting. So LO is technically my first JRPG for me, subject to all others that I play in the future.

I looked at Dark Sector & it looked like fun, reminding me of Gears of War. The price wasn't that bad. Same goes for Assassin's Creed. I figured both of these are staple games for the 360 so they should be part of my collection.

The last game I was a bit chagrined about. It wasn't exactly as cheap as I'd like in new condition, but I did want to give it a try further than what the demo gave. It's pretty much hit or miss, I'm not sure how much I'll enjoy it. For those that don't know, it's a board game with trading card qualities. I've been curious as to how such a game will work. On the demo, some of the animation sequences suck but the game might be interesting nonetheless. I also hated the voice acting. It really wasn't necessary...and I hope there is a way to turn it off other than me having to press mute all the time. I may try this game first. That way if I really hate it, perhaps I can return it. However, the Collector cards for the game intrigue me, since I was a MtG player in the past.

We'll see.

I'm tired of being suspended from System Wars here on Gamespot, so I've decided to create a systemwars board of my own that anyone can join.

The good thing about a separate System Wars board is not to disturb the moderators at Gamespot & get suspended for whatever it is they decide to suspend you for (stars in a certain alignment, bad hair day, etc).

The bad thing is recruiting new members. It could be hard to get people to post there if they don't like being on two boards at once. However, it's officially open today & I will campaign around Gamespot to find new people to sign up & vent on whatever system they want without the fear of a 7 day suspension. Here is the sig I made for it that will replace my current Charlie Brown sig.

To sign up & get it started, go to http://systemwars.activeboard.com. One thing I liked about it Activeboard is how automated & simple it is to create a board. I kept it simple as I just want to discuss System Wars related material there. Controversy is accepted (unlike other places I will not point at *hint* *hint*).

Enjoy.

On friday night, I brought my PC over to my buddy Nettles house & upgraded the box. We put in the Intel Quad Core CPU/mobo along with the 4G RAM & 150 G Raptor X hdd (I bought the hdd & ram last year but didn't have time to do anything with it because of time-consuming grad school).

The old PC had an 80G hdd in it that was split into a C & D partition...for the past 5 years I thought I was using 2 hdds! Boy did I feel stupid. I also found that my vidoe card was using the ancient AGP connection, not PCI express. My bad, once again. What we did was put the C drive from the old hdd onto the Raptor & kept the D drive in its own partition. We reformatted the old partition which as become the "F" drive. However, with Partition Tragic, I'll be eventually making the entire old hard drive its own D drive.

The end result will be a C drive Raptor X and a D drive (old 80G EIDE hdd). The eventual plan is to replace the 80G EIDE drive with a 500G SATA drive sometime in the near future. I skimped on buying a new hdd right away so I could save a few bucks on the upgrade cost.

Further, since my old video card was an ATI X800 AGP video card, I had to replace that. New mobos don't have AGP. So I got a $27 ATI videocard from Nettles for the time being. New ATI video cards are out in August, so I figured I would need to wait to upgrade that. Also, I was informed that I might need to replace my Enermax power supply with a power supply with more wattage to handle a high end video card.

To protect my Raptor X, I've ordered an hdd cooler. I'm really disappointed in the high price. About $38 after including the $8 shipping & handling! No stores around my area carry the Syntrin & those look the best. Finally, I've come to the conclusion that my 5 year old case sucks. It's very bland & beige. I might go ahead & buy a new case from Newegg as well. They have a gamer case (black) for $70-80 after a $40 rebate.

Well, I think I'll wait until I switch energy providers. I'm getting raped by my electric company so I might have to get the power turned off until I can get switched over to a better provider. I can't believe how ridiculous these electric bills are.

I'm thinking about getting a Quad Core Intel & a mobo that can handle the 4G RAM sticks I have. My "dealer" can sell me the cpu/mobo combo for $290. It's a bit more than I wanted to pay, but the cost for the cheaper stuff just doesn't seem as appealing, plus the quad core ought to be quite fast.

The whole point in upgrading was to ensure that my PC could play Spore. My theory was that Spore didn't like ATI cards, but liked nVidia. My PC at my parent's house I thought had an nVidia card in it & he we had swapped out ATI for nVidia. But I was wrong! We swapped out for ATI as the nVidia card didn't work for Maxis Sim's games! The PC at my parent's is an ATI X700 & the one in my place is an ATI X800. So it looks like I just need to reinstall the OS.

However, I figure if I need to reinstall the OS, I might as well do some upgrading too. I think at this point, I will just keep the X800 video card & upgrade it later to a superior ATI model. I have read on this site that ATI is coming out with a high end, cheap gamer video card for $200 that I may be interested in.

Last Saturday, I spent almost the entire day dealing with Tech Support for Norton's Ghost 14 product, trying to install and configure it on my PC at my parent's house. Man, what a pile of crap it was! They still haven't fixed it & it has been escalated to development. However, I can't blame them entirely. I have 2 licenses & used the other for my place's PC. It installed fine there & I have completed a full backup & setup incremental backups monthly. It has some interesting features. For one, it can hook up to Google Desktop indexes for recovery. It also uses Symantec Threat-con levels. If the security threat is up on Threat-con, it can do a backup of your system. Incremental backups will save space as it only backups up the updates to the main installation. It also has encryption, but the encryption doesn't work with Google Desktop so they are mutually exclusive features.

I've been told that Acronis True Image is the best PC backup system. However, I get my licenses for Ghost at $15 each, so that's why I'm using it. The feature set is similar between the two products. Bottomline is: if you can get Ghost to work on your PC, or have a freshly built PC to install it on & succeed on install, then you'll be happy with it.

I also bought 2 boxes of Norton 360 version 2 for $15 each. I kinda screwed myself as one box of Norton 360 gives you 3 licenses. Unlike Ghost, the new Norton 360 version 2 installed & setup perfectly on the PC at my parent's house. Last year when Norton 360 version 1 was released, if you had downloaded the "free add on pack", it would hose N360 & the product would demand to be reinstalled. It took a few uninstalls & reinstalls before I realized that the crappy add-on pack was the culprit. The add-on pack generally includes a spam filter for your email client. But who really uses email clients anymore? I'll be installing this on my place's PC tonight to see how it goes & how it gels with Norton Ghost.

Last up is Symantec/Norton PC Anywhere, which I also got for $15. I never have used it but plan on getting it working. At one time I had it installed, but during the troubleshooting of N360 version 1, the support reps blew away PC Anywhere. At any rate, I want it back on my PC & want to be able to make use of it. I'm pretty sure PC Anywhere, Ghost, & N360 is the entire suite of tools from Norton that one needs..not sure what's left after that. N360 comes with some sort of defragment/performance tool, but the defrag is very simplified. I'll need to look elsewhere for a good defrag tool. Probably Paragon Software's Total Defrag. It's a software that can do a bootable/low-level defragmentation. I just hope it all works together. Otherwise, I'll be writing up a few batch files to run to shutdown these services when I play a game. I'll post about this in another blog in the coming days. :-)

John

Time to upgrade my PC. What a hassle. Last year, there were two sales. One for a Raptor X 150G and another for 4G RAM. I got both but then never had time to upgrade my PC. So I'm getting around to it now. It looks like I'm going to upgrade the videocard, power supply, mobo, CPU, & keep everything else the same.

You know how when you upgrade to a new PC you usually say goodbye to all your installs, programs, and data and then after the upgrade, you want to go back and look at your old PC but you can't? Well now there is an easy way to fix that. I'm using VMware Converter, a free tool, that will convert my old PC into a virtual machine. Then after I upgrade, I can load up VMware & reference my old PC as if it were still alive. :-) This is going to help me tremendously. I might even keep it around if I can find a use for it. I doubt I'll play any games over it, but I can at least see what I had installed & then install it on my new physical machine & subsequently uninstall it on my VMware image.

It sounds like there are some really interesting possibilities with this. For instance, after my new PC is built, I can turn it into a virtual machine as well, to use as a backup. I would need to find out how I could turn the virtual machine back into a physical machine for the backup though, otherwise, there isn't much point. I don't know how much I'll use this feature since I recently ordered Norton Ghost to be my backup facility. I'll do some more digging & maybe I can find a way to have them work together for backup and restore purposes.

UPDATE: Well, it appears that VMware's v2p (virtual to physical) migration process states the following:

"The process for Microsoft guest operating system environments includes the use of Microsoft ysprep 1.1 and a disk imaging tool such as Symantec Ghost."

So it looks like Ghost is already a desirable thing to have for moving from a virtual machine to a physical machine. Groovy.