Prey

Prey is a game that didn't seem like anything too special from the preview I read in PC Gamer a long while back. Doom 3 engine, yay, but the idea of a spirit walking Native American being abducted by aliens and having to save his girlfriend didn't sound too awe inspiring. Little did I know that I would load up one of the best FPS games out today. Interesting weapons and the storyline honestly isn't as hokey as I thought it would be. The environments are absolutely amazing. The fear factor isn't all about things that make me jump. Sometimes it's what's all around me. The creepy, crawling, living.. "ship" that the aliens sucked me into. The game auto-adjusts difficulty, which is nice, but means that it'll go from "OMG WTF" hard to "LAWL PWNT" easy. But not nearly as much as SiN: Episode 1. It's a nice distraction since my main EVE character is still about 8 days from being able to pilot an Interceptor class frigate, my alt is grinding away at L1 missions (almost to L2), photoshop is gone as are most of my unprocessed photos (stupid HD crash), and sometimes my mouth is simply too dry to do my German lessons.
Speaking of German lessons, the CD I slapped $200 down for is GREAT. Honestly, it's amazing how much I remember from a lesson after doing one, but even better after a night of sleep. The next day I know words in German. Not just what their English translation is. Is it worth $200? I've spent hours on the Level 1 CD. Hours. I have only scratched the surface of all the units and lessons. I've gained enough knowledge of the German language to put Steam's language into German and get around in the program with little trouble. Let's just say I'll be ready to slap another $200 down for Level 2 when I'm done with Level 1.Too bad it's not like EVE where I can learn things by telling my brain to "train" it over time. Speaking of EVE, many things have happened in the past month. For one, we left the 3asy Company alliance and 0.0 sec. Plundering Penguins have returned to our original home in Empire, a comfy 0.3 system. So why would we leave the ISK and status behind in 0.0 ? Mercenary work. We get paid to do the dirty work for other corporations. Our first contract proved to be difficult, but we succeeded in our mission. Had tons of fun too.

Windows Vista... will I buy it? No, not until I'm running my next PC setup. Who knows when that will be, probably the next big price drop of Intel procs. Why not yet? For one, it takes an obscene amount of RAM to run Vista. Even with all of the pretty things turned off it's got a huge footprint. Second, DirectX 10 needs to take a firm footing in hardware. It's off to a great start, but the prices on the Geforce 8 series will need to go down (for me.. hehe). Final reason? I can run EVE just fine on XP. Hehehe...

currently listening to: filter - skinny - title of record