"I used to be into nostalgia... *sigh*"

I've been playing more video games lately. Not only do I mean I've been renting and buying more, I also mean I've been playing some of my old games again. Not at some sort of crazy-addicted pace or anything, but more than any other time in recent memory.

First up is Crysis. As optimistic as the game's "automatically choose what's best for my computer" settings were, unfortunately even the highest-end iMac can't handle Crysis on "high" settings with AA turned on at a 2560x1440 resolution. To be fair, no computer as of this writing can handle the game on max settings with full AA at that resolution. None. 3 years after the game came out, it still can't be played at its highest settings. Mostly because the game is absolutely stunning, graphics-wise. I mean it doesn't do anything fancy like ray-tracing but I suppose it's not too shabby. The story could be better, and they could offer colours other than brown and grey (which can be fixed with the Natural Mod, Crysis' most popular mod), but otherwise it's a good game.

I also happened to get Crysis Warhead and Crysis Wars, but haven't gotten around to playing those yet. Mostly because playing them requires me to boot into Windows.

Now that Mass Effect 2 is out, I also feel slightly obligated to finally play Mass Effect 1 so I can know what the hell is going on and possibly find out why everyone likes it so much. From what I've heard it's like a very enjoyable sci-fi film or series, except that you can play it. I'll have to check it out, and also keep my eyes peeled for Steam sales of the game.

I've also had a chance to play some Darksiders. I'd give it a 6/10 at best. It's a button-mashing game with a terrible storyline and decent graphics, so it won't exactly be winning any Game Of The Year awards. The thing I hate the most, which is what I hate about every game that does this, is that you have a weapon that doesn't do the type of damage the real-world equivalent would do. What I mean by that is that you have a sword that rival's Cloud-of-FF7's sword in size but still takes 8-50 slashes to actually kill an enemy. Maybe the developer team didn't realize they were using swords instead of sticks or maybe they've never actually seen a sword in real life but I'm pretty sure that swords cut through most things the first time around, especially if they're cutting through soft, squishy flesh. If you try to cut someone's head off with a sword I'm 99.99% certain that you'll decapitate them. The only thing convincing me that they might not is video games. Otherwise: sharp blade = cutting things. I'm also pretty sure a giant scythe is even better at cutting things.

I've also been playing quite a bit of Burnout: Paradise lately. Part of the reason is that I've discovered how to create online games without traffic. Another part of the reason is that I've discovered you can mute people, and if you're the game's host you can also kick them. The biggest part of the reason, though, is that there's a reward for beating all the events and completing all the online challenges (all 500 of them). Sure, the reward is just the ability to put custom paint jobs on every car, but that's still pretty sweet. I've got all 2-player, 3-player, 4-player, 7-player, and 8-player challenges complete, I've beat all the Island challenges, and I've got a few bike challenges left. It should be pretty fun to get 303% completion. To clarify: that's beating all the original events (100%) and online challenges (101%), all the bike events (another 100%) and online challenges (101%), and all the Island events (yet another 100%) and online challenges (101%), for a grand total of 303%. There's probably going to be more expansion packs that follow similar completion schemes.

Best of all, though, is that I've started playing Sim City 4 again! Oh, what a fun game it is. The micro-management aspect of it might be tedious as all hell but nothing beats the feeling of playing god. It helps that it's now gotten to the point where I've started analyzing how the game itself works so I can better "game the system", so to speak. For example, traffic always takes the shortest route, not the fastest, so even if you build a 6-lane highway a few clicks north of your residential area they're still going to take that tiny little 2-lane road a few clicks to the south because it offers a shorter route. Knowing that, it's easy to build a grid-like network of roads, busses, subways, and monorails that evenly spread the load of traffic like butter on toast. I've also learned that if the grid is split at regular intervals you can put a bus stop, subway station, and monorail station in a place that minimizes the amount of area you have to sacrifice to mass transit while maximizing the amount of access the buildings have to it. Sim Cities would never work in the real world, but as a game they're terribly amusing to play with.

Spore's taken a bit of a backseat, but at least with the new video card I can play it on max settings on the Mac side without any lag. The main reason I prefer games like Sim City over Spore is that Spore doesn't really do anything on its own. Cities don't grow, your colonies don't expand, they don't try to adjust their own Terrascore, hell they don't even try to do anything about alien invasions or extinction events. At least in Sim City the cities expand and grow a little on their own.

Classes started again. Most days I finish around lunch, which is nice, but that also means I have to wake up at 7. It's a bit of a trade-off. What's on the schedule this semester? Security, Visual Basic, Windows Server 2003, WANs, and Cabling. Not bad, but it could totally be better. Maybe I'll watch some of those Stanford iPhone courses as the semester goes on so I can finally get around to doing iPhone programming.

On the ISP front, apparently my end of town is too old and shitty to even be capable of decent internet so I may have to go with Plan B, which is to try to get the city to start its own fiber ISP. Not such a bad idea.

The "project" I've been working on for a while has kind of hit a dead end. Combined with not turning out the way I thought it would, I think that's enough reason to call it a day and start putting my resources toward something else (although, to be honest, I haven't really done much with it lately).

That's about it for now. Make sure to check out reddit once in a while, it's where I spend a good chunk of my time. 'Till next time.