fjord
So, internet was put in yesterday and I've found that, strangely, I really didn't miss it. I'm sitting here bored and unsure of what to surf to next. I mean, I have my daily rituals, such as reading a few web comics, watching commentaries on Youtube and such, but then I'm left with... eh. Free time and nowhere to go? It was inconvenient not having the resource that is the internet when I wanted to read up on certain things but not once was I flipping out that I couldn't get on the web.
I think, during the week and a half without internet service, I went to CiCi's/Starbucks (both in the same day due to noise at CiCi's) and a late dinner at McDonald's with my wife. So, twice in a week and a half I felt the need to surf the net? Now, the one thing I did miss was Xbox Live. That, I came to realize very quickly, I use a lot. Between downloading fun new stuff, addons for the games I love, killing foo's in CoD and Battlefield, and chatting with Steve, Xbox Live devours the majority of my free time.
Unsurprisingly though during this period the power of Skyrim staved off any potential withdraws I made have had for any of my online-oriented games. I clocked 108+ hours on my first and only character before I decided to finally try something new. So I fired up an Argonian Mage for shits and giggles. Gotta say, it's pretty fun. I was a bit concerned about swapping spells but the favorites menu makes it quite easy, and I found that double-tapping your #1 and #2 favorites on the d-pad allows you to quickly dual-wield those spells for maximum carnage. Overall, I'm enjoying the mage despite dying a few times. I chalk that up to a mix of learning to use a completely different fighting strategy when compared to my sword & board Imperial, and being used to slaughtering virtually everything in only a few swings of my sword. I found with my mage's current level I'm not quite ready to retrieve Nettlebane from the Hagravens.
I had the intention, I don't recall if I mentioned this in my previous journal entry, to catch up with the DLC content that's been accumulating with several of my games. I wanted to tackle Minerva's Den of Bioshock 2 especially, but I found with this game and all the others I needed the requisite title updates from Live to use the DLC so that idea was quickly nixed.
I was fortunate in purchasing and downloading the original Crysis from Live before our service was cut. I played thru that and had a good deal of fun, despite having to adjust to the differences in gameplay between it and its sequel. Crysis 1, it turns out, is best played much more slowly and methodically compared to Crysis 2 which allows you greater survivability in hectic combat situations. My playthrough of this prompted me to put in Crysis 2 again, to which I will state this, and feel free to disagree:
Crysis 2 lays down the foundation for everything a modern FPS game should be. The nanosuit is implemented in a way that makes it wholly unique to the series, allows you to progress thru the game in different ways, and just feels so, so fresh. Crysis 2, dare I say it, is the best shooter single player experience I have ever had and more developers should seek to emulate and learn from it.
So in other news, if you're a Kinect owner, the Nyko Zoom addon is trash and won't help you reduce your playspace in small areas at all. I took that back and exchanged it for a copy of Dungeon Siege III for something my wife and I could play together. We haven't really found the time to do so yet, however. The little bit we have played wasn't bad.
Oh! So over the past couple weeks I acquired the Season Passes to both Forza 4 and Gears 3 because they each came up for sale on Live's New Years Countdown sale. The most recent bit of Gears DLC, RAAM's Shadow, was a blast. A good 3-4 hour single player/co-op campaign that introduced some new characters and allows you to murder COGs as RAAM, the boss from Gears 1. The story is about Zeta squad (including Tai Kaliso of Gears 2, Kim of Gears 1, and newcomers Valeria and Barrick) trying to evac civilians a few days after E-Day in Gears lore.
So, there is no Lambent to battle, and it returns to the classic gameplay of the first game, including emergence holes. New enemies and weapons that had since been introduced in Gears 2 and 3 are available, of course. In playing it I found that I did kind of miss the e-holes. They were a neat mechanic and I'm not sure why Epic strayed away from it. The story also made me respect both Kim and Jace a great deal more. Kim died in the first level of Gears, like the first Carmine brother, like a bitch. And Jace, introduced in Gears 3, was just kind of a throw-away character in the vanilla campaign in my opinion. Just there to have someone new. RAAM's Shadow takes a small bit of time to flesh out his character, something he desperately needed to become relevant, and made me respect him a great deal more. He came across as both a bad ass, and even a little funny. All the characters introduced in the campaign are available as multiplayer avatars, and the content also added some new goodies to Horde mode.
So I guess that's it for now. The new internet seems pretty fast wireless on my PC. With Charter we had to stay wired or it was slow as hell. Last night I was downloading Big Bang Theory and the peak speed reached about 958kb/s. That's some fast shit. I haven't played anything on Xbox online yet to see how good that is, but the communication between my PC and Windows Media Center on the Xbox is slow as hell. I think if anything I may wire the 360 again. But we'll see. Overall, though, I'm initially happy with our new service. But some kinks with the TV install I wasn't here for (I had to leave for work before the whole install was done) need to be ironed out. I believe I have the wrong TV channel package so I need to call and get that changed. The one we have now, my wife found, doesn't include MTV. I find that to be quite acceptable. As long as we don't have it I won't have to sit thru Teen Mom and all the other garbage on that network.
Isn't that sad? There was a time in my youth where not having MTV was sacrilegious, blasphemous and downright wrong. Now, heh, get rid o' dat shiz. Ah well. How times change.
I think, during the week and a half without internet service, I went to CiCi's/Starbucks (both in the same day due to noise at CiCi's) and a late dinner at McDonald's with my wife. So, twice in a week and a half I felt the need to surf the net? Now, the one thing I did miss was Xbox Live. That, I came to realize very quickly, I use a lot. Between downloading fun new stuff, addons for the games I love, killing foo's in CoD and Battlefield, and chatting with Steve, Xbox Live devours the majority of my free time.
Unsurprisingly though during this period the power of Skyrim staved off any potential withdraws I made have had for any of my online-oriented games. I clocked 108+ hours on my first and only character before I decided to finally try something new. So I fired up an Argonian Mage for shits and giggles. Gotta say, it's pretty fun. I was a bit concerned about swapping spells but the favorites menu makes it quite easy, and I found that double-tapping your #1 and #2 favorites on the d-pad allows you to quickly dual-wield those spells for maximum carnage. Overall, I'm enjoying the mage despite dying a few times. I chalk that up to a mix of learning to use a completely different fighting strategy when compared to my sword & board Imperial, and being used to slaughtering virtually everything in only a few swings of my sword. I found with my mage's current level I'm not quite ready to retrieve Nettlebane from the Hagravens.
I had the intention, I don't recall if I mentioned this in my previous journal entry, to catch up with the DLC content that's been accumulating with several of my games. I wanted to tackle Minerva's Den of Bioshock 2 especially, but I found with this game and all the others I needed the requisite title updates from Live to use the DLC so that idea was quickly nixed.
I was fortunate in purchasing and downloading the original Crysis from Live before our service was cut. I played thru that and had a good deal of fun, despite having to adjust to the differences in gameplay between it and its sequel. Crysis 1, it turns out, is best played much more slowly and methodically compared to Crysis 2 which allows you greater survivability in hectic combat situations. My playthrough of this prompted me to put in Crysis 2 again, to which I will state this, and feel free to disagree:
Crysis 2 lays down the foundation for everything a modern FPS game should be. The nanosuit is implemented in a way that makes it wholly unique to the series, allows you to progress thru the game in different ways, and just feels so, so fresh. Crysis 2, dare I say it, is the best shooter single player experience I have ever had and more developers should seek to emulate and learn from it.
So in other news, if you're a Kinect owner, the Nyko Zoom addon is trash and won't help you reduce your playspace in small areas at all. I took that back and exchanged it for a copy of Dungeon Siege III for something my wife and I could play together. We haven't really found the time to do so yet, however. The little bit we have played wasn't bad.
Oh! So over the past couple weeks I acquired the Season Passes to both Forza 4 and Gears 3 because they each came up for sale on Live's New Years Countdown sale. The most recent bit of Gears DLC, RAAM's Shadow, was a blast. A good 3-4 hour single player/co-op campaign that introduced some new characters and allows you to murder COGs as RAAM, the boss from Gears 1. The story is about Zeta squad (including Tai Kaliso of Gears 2, Kim of Gears 1, and newcomers Valeria and Barrick) trying to evac civilians a few days after E-Day in Gears lore.
So, there is no Lambent to battle, and it returns to the classic gameplay of the first game, including emergence holes. New enemies and weapons that had since been introduced in Gears 2 and 3 are available, of course. In playing it I found that I did kind of miss the e-holes. They were a neat mechanic and I'm not sure why Epic strayed away from it. The story also made me respect both Kim and Jace a great deal more. Kim died in the first level of Gears, like the first Carmine brother, like a bitch. And Jace, introduced in Gears 3, was just kind of a throw-away character in the vanilla campaign in my opinion. Just there to have someone new. RAAM's Shadow takes a small bit of time to flesh out his character, something he desperately needed to become relevant, and made me respect him a great deal more. He came across as both a bad ass, and even a little funny. All the characters introduced in the campaign are available as multiplayer avatars, and the content also added some new goodies to Horde mode.
So I guess that's it for now. The new internet seems pretty fast wireless on my PC. With Charter we had to stay wired or it was slow as hell. Last night I was downloading Big Bang Theory and the peak speed reached about 958kb/s. That's some fast shit. I haven't played anything on Xbox online yet to see how good that is, but the communication between my PC and Windows Media Center on the Xbox is slow as hell. I think if anything I may wire the 360 again. But we'll see. Overall, though, I'm initially happy with our new service. But some kinks with the TV install I wasn't here for (I had to leave for work before the whole install was done) need to be ironed out. I believe I have the wrong TV channel package so I need to call and get that changed. The one we have now, my wife found, doesn't include MTV. I find that to be quite acceptable. As long as we don't have it I won't have to sit thru Teen Mom and all the other garbage on that network.
Isn't that sad? There was a time in my youth where not having MTV was sacrilegious, blasphemous and downright wrong. Now, heh, get rid o' dat shiz. Ah well. How times change.