A Cajun-Asian View

Frustration defined: EA Games.

For some reason, EA Games thought that an auto-save function wasn't important. And Sim City 4 had a habit of crashing to desktop on me after one to three hours of play. Talk about frustration when after working on a city for two hours, getting so into the game that you forget to save. So after you feel like your city is taking shape, next thing you know you're staring at your desktop saying "What the Hell?". Then the pressing doom of the fact that the work you did for the past few hours just went bye bye in the blink of an eye. Just like that, what was a very fun game becomes the target of ire. I'm surprised I haven't destroyed the game disks yet (like I did with another EA game, NHL 2001...). For many years now, I'd find the disks, go and install them, play a few hours, hit the CTD, then uninstall the game and throw the discs back into storage out of frustration where they lie forgotten for some time until the next time I find them.

I started up on Age of Conan last weekend, and I have to say, the game looks pretty. It is another fantasy MMORPG, but the combat is hell of alot of fun. The overabundance of blood, gore, and the decapitations help with that a bit1. But what also adds to the combat is that it almost feels like a platform fighting game at times, where you have to hit buttons in a sequence to trigger combo moves2

1. 1. Ok, maybe more than a bit. The female nudity is also a plus...
2. 2. Of course, the game guides you through the combos, so there's no need to look them up or to discover them on your own

Found these on a forum:

First, Zack Kim using hammers-on on two electric guitars:

Next is Jean Baudin playing the theme on on an 11-string bass:

The above two are great, but my personal favorite is Sebastien Gomez playing the Mario theme in classical guitar style:

That's the one I want to learn how to play!

Found out about World of Padman from Digg, a total conversion of Quake 3. Quite an odd first person shooter, but it does have a native Linux installer and does work on my gaming system running Ubuntu. I have the details up on full and pretty much maintain 90 FPS.

Screen shot from World of Padman

I'm going to have to look into some of these when I get the time.

Yes, it's a joke article, but it did peak some interest from me with the links it provided. Especially to UFO: AI. I was a X-COM: UFO Defense addict in the early and mid nineties. Being able to play it on my laptop would severely bring my productivity on Linux down...