Playing catch up
Sunday, October 26th, 2008I’ve been meaning to do several things lately and had wanted to accomplish a few of them this weekend. First of all, I have a fairly substantial number of documents on my computer that were created a long time ago using PaperPort. Being a full-time linux user these days though, I haven’t been able to read them and have been looking for a tool that will convert them to something like postscript or pdf. Well, I went searching again last night and found Maxview. It does _exactly_ what I need. So I’ve spent a portion of the weekend converting all the old, unreadable .max files to .ps files and archiving them off to backup disk.
Next, I have a number of books that need to be sorted and put in appropriate boxes, folders, shelves, etc. Some of them I don’t want/need anymore so they’re getting pitched (very old topics). So another portion of my weekend has been devoted to that.
I also have a fairly good chunk of reading that I need to catch up on. I’m reading Prelude to Foundation right now and am about halfway through it. I also have Beyond Numeracy and like 10 or so books that various people have lent to me.
Xbox games are also collecting dust. I finished Infinite Undiscovery this weekend. It was a pretty good game overall. Just around 18 hours of play. The voice to mouth sync was incredibly bad, as were many of the voice actors and dialog. Overall though it had many qualities that I appreciate in an RPG. One of them being that I dont need to spend practically any time leveling (thank you god!) That is by far one of the most annoying parts of many RPGs. You progress quickly through the story only to hit a boss that you can’t beat, so you spend 4 or 5 hours leveling your characters; totally lame. I can assure anyone looking to play this game that that never happened to me. Play through as you normally would, and fight the normal crops of enemies that appear; you’ll be fine.
There was one big thing that I _hated_ about the game. When you die, you start over from your last save point; lame. IMHO you should start up right at the last major cutscene or last door you stepped through. There were many times when I’d work through 20 or 30 minutes of gameplay only to get killed and have to start all the way back at the beginning; I hate that!
You begin to figure out how to get around said problem after a while (select button to skip cutscenes) but it still really pisses you off.
Joe lent me Lego Batman too which is actually a problem since I already have too much stuff to play. I should probably let him have it back, along with the library of Wii games he let me borow.
That brings me to another topic; Wii. What a totally blown out of proportion system. I bought one, and for all the hype it has, I haven’t barely played it. I have 1 game for it, Metroid, which is only “meh”. I have other games for it that people have said are “oh my god you must get this” but I get it and those games too only turn out to be “meh”
I used to bash MS for the Xbox, but as my CD shelf is my witness, Xbox totally destroys the Wii in quality games. One can quickly get over the steep price tag when you figure that the game is in all likelihood better than 90% of the games released for the Wii in the same time period.
Granted, there are some games that totally suck for Xbox, but that’s where free demos come in handy. Also, reviews on IGN or other sites (even Amazon) are usually worth reading since few have been wrong imho.
Where was I again? Oh yeah, finally I have this spare computer that for the longest time I have wanted to install Vyatta on. Well, this weekend was my chance, and it has been installed. I need to configure bind for DNS, but after that I should be able to hook it up to my modem and see how it all works; cool!
