Spaceships and surprise visits
Now that tarendol is off to Heidelberg to do science, I have started to notice a disturbing lack of occupation in my life. Since I deliberately planned it so I would not have to do any post-term papers this semester after being swarmed by them last year, and getting everything else done in a hectic flurry of activity before tare's arrival in order to be able to fully concentrate on wasting time and nerding out with him, I literally have nothing to do till the middle of October, save for the most basic of maintenance. In retrospective, I should have taken an extra course or something that would have provided a non-vital paper for me to do before the next semester starts, even though that would have provided a week of busyness at most.
As such, it was a really cool surprise when my best buddy Benedict knocked on my door on Monday, apparently looking at apartment offers in the vicinity. If all goes well, I'll have my crazy-friend living only a few minutes from my place come October. Another reason to look forward to that month, huh? Also, he can now do the whole "And then a Hellbeast ate them" routine from Darkplace from memory.
On an entirely unrelated note, I am a big big fan of the X-Beyond the Frontier series. I just love spending incredible amounts of time navigating complex, mostly keyboard-controlled menus and keeping excessive notes on interstellar economy in order to administrate a gigantic trade empire of my own making. I am so big a fan that it really hurts that neither I nor any of my more-tech-savy-than-you friends could get the latest game to run on ANY computer it has been installed on so far, and there are only two left that I think could run it. This recent experience also has brought me to the conclusion that the FAQ and technical forum of KOCH Media and/or Egosoft are among some of the worst tech support in the world, even though they actually try their hardest. They just don't know how to make it work. They will go to considerable lengths in order to verify the specifics of a defective batch of discs and set up a complex, yet effective system to replace them, but putting answers to common questions in one easily accessable FAQ file seems beyond them. So far the forum seems to list at least half a dozen people with the same problem as I, and only one of them got a conclusive, helpful answer (try patching it).
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that a fresh-out-of-the-box game with the newest patch should work on a perfectly fine-running machine way above the game's recommended specifics without the user working magic or doing the work the bugtesters should have done in the first place. At least I still have two computers to try it on...
[/rant]
This rant has been brought to you by the Priest-Emperor Xaar in collaboration with Teladi HoloAds.
As such, it was a really cool surprise when my best buddy Benedict knocked on my door on Monday, apparently looking at apartment offers in the vicinity. If all goes well, I'll have my crazy-friend living only a few minutes from my place come October. Another reason to look forward to that month, huh? Also, he can now do the whole "And then a Hellbeast ate them" routine from Darkplace from memory.
On an entirely unrelated note, I am a big big fan of the X-Beyond the Frontier series. I just love spending incredible amounts of time navigating complex, mostly keyboard-controlled menus and keeping excessive notes on interstellar economy in order to administrate a gigantic trade empire of my own making. I am so big a fan that it really hurts that neither I nor any of my more-tech-savy-than-you friends could get the latest game to run on ANY computer it has been installed on so far, and there are only two left that I think could run it. This recent experience also has brought me to the conclusion that the FAQ and technical forum of KOCH Media and/or Egosoft are among some of the worst tech support in the world, even though they actually try their hardest. They just don't know how to make it work. They will go to considerable lengths in order to verify the specifics of a defective batch of discs and set up a complex, yet effective system to replace them, but putting answers to common questions in one easily accessable FAQ file seems beyond them. So far the forum seems to list at least half a dozen people with the same problem as I, and only one of them got a conclusive, helpful answer (try patching it).
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that a fresh-out-of-the-box game with the newest patch should work on a perfectly fine-running machine way above the game's recommended specifics without the user working magic or doing the work the bugtesters should have done in the first place. At least I still have two computers to try it on...
[/rant]
This rant has been brought to you by the Priest-Emperor Xaar in collaboration with Teladi HoloAds.