Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Today is the last day of a decade and I find myself thinking once again about one of the thorny issues of our age: copyright, piracy and the ongoing impact of the digital revolution. Visiting relatives last week I picked their child's Nintendo DS. Turning it on I was surprised to see a menu of games appear including a dozen or more of the best selling titles. A quick look at the back of the console revealed an adapter cartridge carrying a removable flash memory card. I was surprised. The child's parents are find upstanding moral people, they are not particularly technically competent. Yet they had acquired and given their six year old some €500 worth of stolen technology. Leaving aside the morality of piracy it is not hard to see that there is considerable economic value in this type of adapter. Not only is it a convenient way of carrying your game collection but it solves the issue of kids losing their individual game cartridges. My relatives paid money for the device and ...

Actively  playing: Dragon Age Origins: got this as a Christmas present. Very enjoyable so far this game reminds me of Never Winter Nights. I am surprised at the difficulty level on "normal" setting but then again I still haven't figured out how to set party tactics correctly and the party AI is not great.  Red Faction Guerrilla: My one concession to Steam's Christmas sale, a steal at €12.99. I have only played the intro but any game that starts off by handing you a sledgehammer and telling you to go demolish a couple of buildings has got my attention. Less actively playing: EVE Online : I played five free welcome back days and am seriously thinking of resubbing for a month. The only thing is that I seriously don't have time for an mmo. Torchlight:   I can play this for about an hour before I get totally bored but it is a useful time-water if there is nothing else happening. Borderlands: I stopped playing this about half way through the campaign partl...

There used to be a fairly established pattern of game pricing. New releases were sold at top prices. If you shopped around you might get a special offer or pre-order discount but otherwise you could wait about a  month and get the game for perhaps 75% of its new price.  Six months or so after release most games could be picked up for half their new price and after a year those titles migrated to the bargain shelves at a quarter of their original price or even less. This was a very reliable pattern - only a tiny number of titles had sufficient staying power to buck the trend of price decay. Age of Empires and Medal of Honour Allied Assault being two that I can remember but they were  the exceptions that proved the rule. The last year has seen a revolution in pc game pricing spear headed by Steam and their fellow digital download distributors.  They have finally broken free from the artifical restrictions which held digital download prices higher than the high street...

I am very much not in an mmo mood at the moment but when EVE sent me an invitation for a free welcome back week plus offered me the free gift of a very special ship it was hard to say no. Kudos to CCP on their installation process. No marathon patching session was involved. Just download a 2Gb client, install it and you are in the game. The graphics (especially planets) are now prettier than I remembered but I experienced quite a deal of lag. Some of this happened in relatively unpopulated systems so I wonder if my four  year old gaming computer is struggling with the new finery. Lag during a space battle  can mean death unfortunately so I will experiment with options to try and make it go away. Ah ... the agony and the ecstasy that is EVE. How quickly it all comes back. This game really is a nerd nirvana. Although I have forgotten what I was up to before I quit I logged in to Marb Pelico find that he has stuff stored all over the place. Hundreds and hundreds of pieces of...

There is a little computer shop close to where I live. It can't compete with internet pricing for major pieces of hardware but it is a useful source of consumables. He does a pretty good deal on printer ink and on several occasions the ability to nip round the corner and buy a patch cable has gotten me out of a hole. I was in there this morning buying ink. A customer in front of me was inquiring about a video card  upgrade. "Can that be done on the spot if I drop the computer in" he asked Unfortunately the young lady behind the counter was not a technician and "the engineer" as she called him would not be back for a while. " It has to be booked in It could take a few days" was her reply. The customer asked "How hard is it to upgrade a video card? Do you think I could do it myself?" The assistant was honest enough to admit she didn't know and recommended that he leave the computer with them. Recognising a potential fellow ...

I would love to have a detailed record of my gaming habits - so that for example I could look back and see what games I was playing a year ago. I installed Xfire a few months back in order to avail of its gaming history feature but I am very disappointed by the statistics it keeps. It tells you what games you have played in the last week and it also keeps a record of total time spent in any one game but that is it. There is no way that I can find to analyse my past gaming on a monthly or weekly basis. Now that I have discovered that X-Fire can cause conflicts with some games I am wondering if I really want to keep using it but I don't know of any other tool that comes close to keeping the gaming history I want. Does anyone know of a better way to keep a record of my gaming history?

I have played a fair bit of Frontlines Fuel of War over the last week both single player and multi-player. Apparently the game owes a lot to a Battlefield 1942 mod called Desert Combat but as I have never played either BF1942 nor Desert combat I cannot comment on any similarities although this might explain why one of the NPCs keeps complaining about being in a desert even when you are no where near one. Single player is fun enough but does get repetitive. The tutorial and seven missions deliver about 7 hours total gameplay and even in such a short stretch you come to recognise a few basic structures that keep cropping up over and over again. There are some furious fire fights though and even on normal I found the missions challenging enough to complete. Multi-player shows a lot more potential. You select one of four classes (assault rife, sniper, RPG or submachinegun) and one of four specialisations that will allow you to unlock things like a portable mortar cannon or an EMP beac...