Open world game play is all the rage. The industry has decided that linear is out and that open ended randomness is in! The issue being of course that it detracts from the over all story and game play something awful.. of course gameplay also appears to be out right now, so no big loss … but I get ahead of myself..

Over the weekend I picked up Farcry 2.  I wasn’t on the original Farcry boat.. For whatever reason that game came and went long before I ever saw it.  When I finally did get my grubby hands on it, I had just played HL2 and was jonesing for some extra action.. needless to say it didn’t do much for me..   But I could see the potential!  And certainly why it was thought of as awesome.. It was still pretty good for an older game..

Now that Farcry 2 is out I was one of the first ones on the band wagon.  I downloaded the game from direct2drive and had it installed and playing in fairly short order.

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 ”Updates are ready for your computer.  Click here to download these updates. ” But don’t expect Windows XP to actually know how to install them.  I’m stunned by yet another sloppy piece of work by Microsoft.  This almost smacks of an intentional ploy on their part to say “well if you just go to Vista this wont be a problem.”

So, to sum up; Windows XP Service Pack 3, wont install unless you hack your into your registry.   That’s the short of it.

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So, I have always liked racing games. Grand Turismo was always my favorite franchise on the PS2 because the game was absolutely beautiful and fun to play.  However, I hated always being tied to the PS2.  I am not a big fan of console games, but it seems that our stock of racing games for PC have been fairly lack-luster.

Not any more!  Codemaster’s, GRID is a fantastic game.. Codemasters yet again earns the faith I put in them for a high quality product.. (Operation Flashpoint 2 better rule!)
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Update:  On my layover in Baltimore my coworker and I were the only two left on the plane for more than thirty minutes. The copilot of the previous leg ( and pilot of the next leg ) of our trip let me sit in the pilots seat of the four year old 737 700.

I sat there for thirty minutes talking to him about everything under the sun. Nice guy. He’s an old computer nerd like me and my friends and we had a good chat. He showed me a lot of the controls for the plane and introduced me to the various screens as shown in the picture below. My side is an exact mirror of what you see there. (with the exception of having a fairly competent pilot on that side. )

Did you know that the 737 has pull down HUD? It was very cool. Wish I had thought to snap a couple more pics but I didn’t think to take that one until just before I got up. It’s odd but I felt so much better about the flight once I talked to him and found out he could have been one of us.

My friends are all now terrified of flying.. haha

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Shooting themselves in the foot? Mmm maybe.. I’m an avid MMO player and ever since Cryptic first announced City of Heroes back in 2002(?) I was in love with the idea of a super hero MMO. It really seems that all modern MMO’s are fantasy based, and I have said for a while that I’m pretty fantasy-ed out.

Cryptic had sold CoH to the masses as this do anything engine that would mirror “Champions” the role playing game, without actually saying the word champions. And to be honest, it turned out to be much less than champions. Still a good game, but not the freeform system that everyone envisioned. Lots of work and updates went into the game and it’s still pretty fun. I still play it.

In November of 2007 Cryptic sold their ownership of the CoH and City of Villains franchise to NCSoft so that they could work on their new super secret project!
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