The Mad Bishounen

Happy new year, since I'm lazy and haven't made a post yet this year. OK, that's only four days, but still.

My though process two minutes ago: "Wow, that's a crazy pile of stuff I'm actually kind of excited to do and will probably take me the rest of the day. I should eat before I forget."

deliciouschaos is once again heading in the general direction of being in the same corp as me in EVE, this time a much smaller, much more skillful and much more bloodthirsty organization. We're planning to take a sort of lowsec vacation, lowsec being a part of EVE where you can go around shooting whoever you damn well please (more or less), and of all the parts of EVE where you can do that it's the best for two-person gangs. It's going to be very interesting, trying out a bunch of new tactics, probably getting splodified a fair bit, and generally just having fun.

Of course, to do that we need to be logged on to EVE at the same time, and our internet needs to not crap out while doing so. Our home internet has had this bad habit of becoming excruciatingly slow from about 7pm to well after midnight for the last few weeks. It's not that EVE is that much of a bandwidth hog, it's actually fairly bandwidth-light for an MMO. It's not our network, certainly. One of the few things I threw serious money at when I first moved to New Haven and was losing money left and right was a really good router. No, this is either Comcast fucking up, or our cable modem (which we rent from comcast) crapping out. Given that it's not an all-day thing, I kind of suspect it's Comcast having load issues from all the college kids that are home for break, but I'm going to give them a call and see if they can't diagnose it better. Honestly, I mostly stick with Comcast because their customer service has this nice habit of listening when I tell them I'm not a raging technological incompetent and fast-forwarding to the part where they start checking for actual connection issues and/or dispatching technicians. The first five minutes is still

"power cycle your modem and network"
"I just did before I called you"
"..Well I have to ask you to do it again"
*sigh*

but that's hardly the customer service rep's fault. They have a checklist.

When EVE fails terribly I've been playing Sonic Unleashed, which remains half brilliant and half raging stupid. If I had to guess I would say I'm a little more than halfway through the game. I'm at one of those annoying points where in order to proceed further I need to pick up two more of the "night" tokens so I can do another terrible, terrible night level. The one thing Sonic did right with those, and I do appreciate it, is that they made them very easy to get high ranks on. I usually get an A on my first run at a night level, as opposed to a C or D on a Sonic level. Given the generally perfectionist nature of a hardcore Sonic player, making it easy to perfect the really terrible levels is a kindness.

I'm not sure if I'll bother going for all-S though. I mean, I got S-rank on my favorite of the run-fast levels just because they're fun to play, and I replay them a lot. I mean, optimizing that kind of level is pretty much instinctive. The nice thing about this game, though, is that it's one I can beat and be done with. Same with Assassin's Creed, which I've also been playing of late. It's a game that I don't feel the need to replay and it doesn't have virtually infinite content like La Pucelle and such. With Unleashed I might beat it and then replay the fun levels from time to time, but all-S? Too many other games I want to play (I'M LOOKING AT YOUUUU DEAD RISING 2).

As long as I'm hopping tangentially to Assassins Creed, I might as well say what I think of it. It's a very fun game. That's really what it comes down to. The running and jumping is the most fun of it's type since Prince of Persia, and the murdering people can be very satisfying. I've spent ten minutes carefully investigating my options to silently, invisibly off a single guard that happens to be somewhere I don't like (usually rooftops). When it comes to the plot assassinations I'm actually a bit more run-and-gun, because they so often plot-hammer you in such a way that you can't do it stealthily. Luckily, once you get the hang of the counter mechanics the non-sneaky combat is kind of fun too.

Plot-wise, it's...I don't play it for the plot. Altair, the dude you play most of the time, is a magnificent hubristic bastard and therefore a lot of fun. The running around as his descendant in-between assassinations is...uninteresting. Blah blah pseudoscience evil big corporation/secret organization (TOTES NOT THE TEMPLARS YOU GUYS) kind of a love interest maybe I WANT TO FUCKING STAB THINGS AND RACE ACROSS THE ROOFS OF BUILDINGS. They're basically cutscenes that you have to play through, and while I appreciate what they are doing with them and acknowledge that they are key to the plot and the immersiveness of the experience, they are not the most enjoyable parts of the game and they can't be skipped or avoided.

Huh, this ended up kind of long. Ah well, time to get back to work. Writing up results is hard when you haven't done it in a long time.