It's been a long time since we talked games here. In large part because posting frequency has gone way down (Hey, I've been busy), comment frequency is even lower, and because I hadn't really been playing much. Nothing exciting had come out and even the weekly multiplayer session had reached a threshold of "cancelled more often than not" for a while.
Borderlands has changed that though. I was suspicious of the game at first, reading it as a Diablo clone with a sci-fi Wasteland skin applied. This sounds fine to me but the folks I play generally oppose RPG trappings like character levels and skill trees. But Tony was persistent and then Amazon ran a sale letting me pick up a few titles at a discount so I grabbed Borderlands and I like it a lot. The multiplayer is fast and frantic and each class feels very different. I'm even playing quite a bit of the single player which the reviews were pretty down on.
As it turns out, the objections I expected to Borderlands hasn't materialized yet. I'm not sure how much of that is the fantasy trappings of Diablo (or a clone such as Torchlight) and how much of that is the change from 3rd person clickfest to the 1st person shooting, but the takeaway is that there's still a lot of interest in the multiplayer.
I like the single player because I can sit down and play it for twenty minutes, complete a mission, and then turn it off with a success under my belt. It begs some comparisons to Fallout as both can make some claims to being the spiritual heir to Wasteland from back in the day. My problem with all of the Fallouts has been the lack of story. They take the sandbox approach so far that you're just wandering a wasteland aimlessly, trying to not get killed. There is a story in them, but the main story is sort of just incidental to the bulk of the game. Borderlands has story missions and it has side missions, but they are pretty clearly distinct. It just turns out I like that model a lot better. Fallout 3 took me at least an hour to get anything done - I'd turn it on, review what quests were active, pick out something that made sense, hike around for a bit, maybe get sidetracked into something else and so forth. I had fun with Fallout, but I'd only dedicate the time to play it maybe once a week. I can play a couple of Borderlands missions in the time it takes to drink my first cup of coffee of the day. That's a big plus for me.
I'll knock it for one major stupidity: it plays in the first person and yet there are jumping puzzles. HEY GAME DESIGNERS: first person jumping SUCKS. It always has and I suspect it always will. This is 2009 now, you should have internalized the lessons of Half-Life 1 by now. (Even Bwana has played Half-Life 1 already!) But they are fairly intermittent and I haven't seen any that are "fall to your death" just "fall lower on the level and run around and try again". The latter still sucks but it's not a deal-breaker. It ends up being 2-3 minutes of annoyance, not 10-15 minutes.
Anyway, if you're a fan of multiplayer action RPG lootfests, you should definitely check out Borderlands. And if you get it on 360 let me know!
Read moreDirect Droid/iPhone 3GS Comparison
Andy Ihnatko took a good series of shots where he took the same image with a 3GS and a Motorola Droid. If you care about phone cameras it's worth a look.
My super-short capsule summary of the comparison? The Droid has a light and it has more megapixels and those save some shots. In general tap to focus is super-useful and the Droid pictures are really washed out saturation-wise. I think I would prefer having a 3GS for most occasions where I want a camera. Although I'd admit I could envy that light pretty easily ....
And of course nobody is selecting a phone based on the camera built-in anyway. You pick the phone with the feature set you want and then that dictates which crappy camera you have anyway. On either of these the point is not that they are great cameras, the point is that it's a mediocre camera that you happen to have in your pocket all the time.
Read moreAbout that Cat Blogging
Has it been two months since my last blog about Heisenberg's health? It has! (And there were only eight posts in the last two months. Meh. I've been busy.)
But I've been delinquent in posting about the goober and that's especially a shame because we had good news. The funny thing is I posted that last post on August 17th. Well, that 21st was his monthly "glucose curve" where I checked his glucose level every two hours for twelve hours. Now remember, I said something from 80 - 170 mg/dL was "normal" for cats and he was considered "managed" at numbers around 250. Well that Friday his numbers were between 67 and 88. Yes that's right his numbers are now low. See cats can go into spontaneous remission from diabetes and just start producing insulin again. Nobody really knows why.
So yeah, he hasn't taken glipizide for about two months now. I still spot check him occasionally and I haven't seen anything higher than 87 mg/dL in that time.
He still had the neuropathy walk and I eventually asked the vet about it (and about the possible vertebrae fusion). What they originally said is that any treatment for that would interfere with the glipizide and we couldn't do that. So now he's on a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory called Metacam. Metacam is a scary thing to Google for felines: it's not approved for cat usage in the US, and it can cause renal failure. So I watched him really carefully as we started him on it. It definitely makes a big difference in his gait. He's not walking like he did last year but he's faster and more agile on the Metacam than not.
Just to keep the roller coaster going last week he started peeing inappropriately again, and I immediately thought "Well crap, that could be renal issues with the Metacam" so we took him into the vet Saturday so they could get a urine sample and do some tests. Word is that he's doing just fine, all of his levels are what we want to see and he can stay on the Metacam. So he's just peeing on the floor to spite me. (sigh) I did rearrange his access to the litter box to see if that made him happier, we'll see over time.
Anyway, the main takeaway is that he no longer has diabetes which is good. He's on a medicine which has been bad for some cats and you can find plenty of anecdotal evidence about cats who couldn't take Metacam on the internet. But that's not science, and my anecdote is that he seems to love taking the Metacam - he'll even come over and sit in my lap while I'm obviously holding the syringe (it's a syrup that you squirt into his mouth). He's got stable levels in his blood and he's been taking it long enough that it was going to cause problem it would have by now. We still have to keep a close eye - if he got sick from something else that could break the equilibrium and then we could have trouble. But for now he's a solid little guy and he may not have to go back to the vet for another four months. Which is a good thing.
Read moreCutting the (Virtual) Cable
I just cancelled my DirecTV subscription. There's a long string of archived posts that mention DirecTV in some form or another, primarily centered around them turning on the MPEG-4 HD streams for many of the "basic cable" channels, such as the one formerly know as SciFi, USA and so forth. You can search the blog for "DirecTV" if you'd like to see the nitty-gritty. As you can see from the archives I was pretty enthusiastic about DTV back then, and was willing to sign a two year contract to get my hands on the HD-20 DVR that would store these HD signals. I don't regret that but a lot can change in two years.
I realized over the past few months that easily 95% of the programming we watched was coming in from the antenna. The only things we used DTV for were the "basic cable channels" - Karin watches some things on USA, my science fiction programming on the channel with the stupid name and so forth. But here's the kicker: We were paying $80 a month to pretty much access three of our channels. That's stupid. Even worse, when I started looking I can find EVERY SHOW in question on either Hulu, iTunes, or some moderately janky "stream in a web browser" channel site. Hulu Desktop is producing ... well I wouldn't call it full HD quality but it's better than DVD in a lot of cases and seems to carry almost everything we lose. I'll watch something like Warehouse 13 in HD, but I have trouble selling that as worth let's say $10 or $20 a month. Meh. Hulu Desktop is good enough for so-so TV.
So I bought a new "TiVo HD" unit and an external drive for it from Amazon. The pair costs less than $400 and give me over 150 hours of HD programming storage with a new generation TiVo receiver. It can record ABC flawlessly, which both of the older PVR's were still having trouble with as of a week ago. So you figure that will pay for itself in five months, maybe six or seven if I end up buying a lot of iTunes season passes. But so far it looks like a rooftop antenna, a TiVo, a computer hooked up to the TV, and Hulu Desktop are going to get us every show we used to watch, and they are going to do it for free. (OK, they are going to do it for the TiVo Guide fee, which works out to about $10 a month.) Hulu makes you watch a couple of ads, but it's not super-obnoxious about it.
This is the future people. There's no reason to pay cable or satellite fees in most of the country if you own your rooftop. Used to be cable and later satellite were the only ways to get a decent picture, but the antenna is a better picture than DTV provided and it is much cheaper. When I talked to the customer service rep he kept stressing 200 channels, but I never watched 99% of those channels, so those don't count.
Hulu lets you subscribe to shows and it just puts new episodes in your queue as they become available. Watch' em and they are automatically removed from the queue, so you can get a list that works an awful lot like Season Passes from TiVo.
I've had Hulu Desktop on my system since it first came out but I was sort of stunned to start using it again this fall and see how far it's come. It's not bad, not bad at all. The biggest drawback is that it has limited number of series, or only the last three episodes or whatever, but that will all get better over time. The TV networks have no reason to prop up cable companies (except in cases where they are OWNED by cable companies of course, cough cough, too much deregulation, cough cough Rupert Murdoch), so I think this will improve fairly quickly. Especially if they ever realize that two unskippable ads in a Hulu stream is a better deal than dozens in a TV stream that I just blink right on past.
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