APB Reloaded - Shit or not

It's been two weeks now since I decided to install APB Reloaded, and in those two weeks I've played exactly 0 hours of it. There are a lot of reasons for this: work, family, upcoming holiday season, beer and disinterest. This morning, after an alcohol free evening of watching TV and eating Doritos Burn, I awoke before 7am with a hankering for online GTA-like action (or so I had built it up in my mind) and a mild discomfort in my colon.

After a few moments of registering an account (including a jarring interruption as it dumped me into a browser), 10 minutes sidetracked looking at Facebook Timeline (which is...dull), 5 minutes reading about the best server to play from in Australia and 10 minutes tinkering with the character builder I was finally logging in. And logging in, and logging in. Fuck, this game takes an age to load anything. The first thing I noticed was that I'd forgotten to change my resolution, so it's a mess of crap textures and jaggy edges. The second thing is the looping sound and lack of response. Yep, it hung within 2 seconds of getting into the game.

This was 100% of my APB experience

Not to be deterred, I rebooted - got sidetracked swapping out my wireless card and plugging in a cable - then made my kids breakfast. Then I made a cup of tea and I spoke to my wife for a bit. You can see where this is going, I wasn't particularly excited about APB and a hang at the get-go dampened the already moist tinder of interest. Long story short, I finally sat down again (after looking at the rain for a while and generally wasting time on a gloomy Christmas eve) and re-loaded APB.

Luckily my character was still there, I'd like to say I called him something cool like Franklin McThrustinDuds, but I didn't. Nice training shirt by the way. Back to it, had to watch the tutorial video again which was interesting the first time but the entertainment value of this production is inversely proportional to the number of times you're forced to watch it. And the ESC key does nothing. Plus it hung halfway through. So here we are, on the one hand it hung again, but on the other hand I was spared watching the entire training video from beginning to end.

I'm not saying this is what happened, but I am saying I'm open to interpretation if it gets me some compensation dollars

I'm not a patient man, so the next thing to happen was this:

Actual gameplay screenshots!

So, shit or not? I don't think I'll ever know. Time to wrap presents and refrigerate beer. Merry Christmas loyal following of 4 people, see you next year!

LAN Optimised house

Being still a big fan of the LAN party, yes kids it is more fun to play with your friends in person, this guys efforts struck a chord with me.

LAN Optimised house

Knowing what some of my nerdy friends are like, I would be more inclined just to have the monitors setup.  Nerds love their own rigs, forcing them to use the same hardware might lead to arguments and the throwing of things.

BF3 Ownage

Got to love it when crazy shit comes together. This BF3 air combat video is just uber

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 finally for sale in Australia - Apple now a bunch of cocks AND looking pretty stupid

http://www.news.com.au/technology/smartphones/samsung-win-galaxy-tab-101-legal-battle-against-apple/story-fn6vihic-1226218212403

Because, fuck you Apple and your monopolistic ways.

Of Brink and disappointment

Last night I played Brink and it went...well first let me tell you a story.

Some time ago, Boris sent me a youtube video of a game that included MMO like stuff, shooting, large outdoor areas, cities and interesting looking team options. Being the absent minded professor I am I forgot the name and when I asked him about it later he told me it was Brink, but I was not convinced. A little more time went by and Boris grew quite excited about Brink, Brink this and Brink that he would say. I was too poor at the time to afford it so I thought I'd let him run with it a while and grab a copy when I could.

This was not to be as Boris dropped Brink from his play schedule like a sobering man drops the girl he slept with last night and escapes via the fire escape. The only feedback was that Brink wasn't very good after all. I was saddened and never bothered reading any reviews.

Now back to the recent past and last weekend Steam had Brink on sale for $6- how could I lose? Surely they'd fixed up the bugs and balance issues by now! Fast forward to last night and I finally had an opportunity to play Brink with my friend Raptoralpha. Or did I? Well, no. I didn't. You see, I thought Brink was an MMOFPS in the vein of either Tabula Rasa or Borderlands (which I had recently finished) and the first 30 minutes of character creation bore that out. Then we tried to play it online and completely failed. You see, Brink is more like a poor mans Team Fortress and less like an awesome game than I had supposed. In fact, the most game time I spent was running around a bit while waiting for Raptor to connect (which he never did). In the end we agreed that the best part of the game was making the characters and the worst part was everything else - that ultimately Brink was totally not the game we thought it was. To spin an analogy: after setting out to buy KFC we came home with a couple of servo pies. Golden looking on the outside but lukewarm and suspiciously lacking in what we though it would have on the inside.

Brink is a fail and I still don't know what that other damned game was!


MAJOR EDIT: After a lot of searching and following dead-end leads...I FOUND IT!

Firefall

http://www.firefallthegame.com/

Ok, so it doesn't look as good now I've finished Borderlands (basically looks like a BL variant). Still, might sign up for the beta and report back what I find.

Terraria 1.1 Fuck yeah

Terraria 1.1 has been released. For me all the game really needed was more content, and here it is! Can't wait to lose hours to this game.

Patch notes are here