Moving Day Approaches!
I signed my new lease today, so it’s official that I’ll be moving in about 3 weeks. I admit that I’m pretty excited about getting to the new place and settling in.
Hopefully it won’t be a huge hassle….
heh.
Life, movies and games
So I’m officially 26 now, and I figure that’s a good reason to update anyone who actually reads this on a few things. First of all, I’m on chapter 4 of Heavenly Sword. The game is still awesome though I’m afraid it’ll be over soon. There’s some really fun and challenging missions with Kai (the funny cat-girl looking character) at the end of chapter 3, and the boss fights keep getting more involved. It’s defiantly not just a button masher. I’ve cooled off on the Warhawk lately, but it’s still a ton of fun to pickup and spend a few hours blowing people up. I’m totally into the dogfight aspect. I should probably play some ground battles more but it’s just not as fun as the expansive open chaos of the dogfight. In other PS3 news I’m currently testing the development transcoding stuff in mediatomb. It works pretty well, considering the age of apollo (the server that is running this thing) and the fact that it’s an external transcoder so seek/pause doesn’t work. It pretty much makes my dream of having just the PS3 and my stereo hooked up at the new house a reality. I just have to get mencoder working so I can watch quicktime movies.
I finished cleaning out the rack the other day, it’s so empty now… but I’m also only using 66% of the one UPS now, so that’s a 33% decrease in electricity usage which I can totally get behind. It also frees up the other UPS to move upstairs to protect the WAP and switch in the den. Since my workstations are both laptops that means I can survive a short power outage unscathed. Hooray.
In other news, I’m waiting to hear about my car which remains at the dealership being worked on and the approval paperwork for the new place is still in limbo so hopefully I’ll start hearing soon and we can begin moving on to the next stage.
Notable birthday events: Had dinner with mom and the family, was nice if not hectic as usual :) Had wine with Nina, was a nice quiet way to end the day. Generally laid around and relaxed.
Heavenly Sword
This has been one of the most anticipated titles coming up for the PS3 for me. It’s been fairly highly accoladed by the swath of gamer sites out there and even Sony is jumping up and down about it. Most of the game websites will all tell you about the game, it’s a combo based action game much like God of War featuring a gorgeously rendered female lead “Nariko” voiced by Anna Torv (imdb), who really helps to bring this character to life. The game itself was done in England by developer Ninja Theory (wikipedia) but was directed by Andy Serkis of “Gollum” fame. Standing opposite of Nariko is the evil King Bohan, who is voiced and mocapped by Andy Serkis as well and all the power he put into his performance of Gollum on the big screen for the Lord of the Rings trillogy come dripping through in this perverse corrupt king. As I sit down to write this I am just starting chapter three of the game but already I find myself liking Nariko a lot more than I thought I would. The character was in mortal danger after playing the demo earlier last month of being too driven, too coarse, not human enough, not likable but as the story has progressed between the making of featurettes that Sony has had in the Playstation store and website over the last month and the actual gameplay one finds themselves really pulling for this character, she has a soft female side that works very well and she carries a GIGANTIC DEIFIED SWORD.
I don’t know how anyone, anywhere can argue with that.
All the other things that the reviews have said are true. The audio is amazing. 5.1 motion picture quality score, professional Foley effects, awesome voice actors, and of course spectacular graphics. I was worried the skin textures would look like Oblivion, where everyone looked like they had shit on their faces, but the skin tones and textures are quite good and I am perpetually amazed in the quality of the PS3 video output. Not to sound like a fan boy but this has to be the prettiest game for any next generation console, hands down.
bdr02, we barely knew ye.
4:03PM up 631 days, 16:24, 2 users, load averages: 0.06, 0.08, 0.08
bdr02 was the OpenBSD bridge that connected the wireless to the wired LAN and provided transparent packet filtering so even if someone did connect to the wireless LAN, my equipment and the internet weren’t wide open to attack. Seeing as I’m moving out shortly (I hope) I won’t need it anymore as I will be the only user of the network. As such I’m reducing the number of hosts to try and reduce the amount of power consumption, so bdr02 is going to replace bdr01. So I’ll be taking it down and formatting it. For shame.
Later: my initial impression of Heavenly Sword.