fwaggle.org

I’m an achievement/trophy fiend. I don’t go to extreme – I’ve never bought a game simply for the trophies (and by contrast I’m only level 12 on PSN compared to some who are 60+), or anything like that. But I do like to collect ‘em, and it feels like it helps squeeze some extra mileage out of a game.

We’ve had HL2 for ages – Sabriena originally got it when I was playing TF2 with some friends, and she wanted to play. Very shortly after, they had the entire Orange Box on sale for $10 (half the price of TF2 at the time) so she picked it up. We’d never played HL2 at all, and over a year later I picked up HL2 for free as part of an AMD giveaway. I’d still never played it.

A few months back, a friend of mine decided to drag me, kicking and screaming, through HL2 and episodes 1 & 2 via Synergy. I won’t lie, we had a blast with it. I’d since put it on the backburner, forgetting about it, until recently when I discovered the achievements. I guess I always knew they were there – I’d heard about the one that’s something about getting garden gnomes to the moon or something – but I’d never really thought about it. So I’ve been going back through HL2 to pick up the achievements I never got via Synergy.

It’s amazing how much fun such an old game is.

I keep seeing pictures and videos of people’s servers since the “Adventure” update, and I’m really feening to play some Minecraft. I try not to though, because I can’t remember ever having played the full game where I haven’t sat down in front of it for less than 5 hours straight.

I set up a server a while back, but it didn’t work out very good. Nick and I share an account (I mainly bought it for him, I just jump on it from time to time) so we can’t play at the same time anyway – so it really wasn’t worth having a full-time server set up on my FreeBSD box just for one person to mess around on.

But man, some of these servers are starting to look cool – entire villages, huge castles and churches, houses, gardens, pools (with pool fences to keep the creepers out), towers, and everything. The new rivers thing looks pretty awesome too.

There’s just so much making me want to play it, but I don’t feel like sitting in one spot for 6 hours.

Every so often I find myself reading the case modding sections on a few forums like Overclock and such, wishing I had a bit more money to sink into my PC the way some of these cats do.

I’ve done my share of painting and windows and so on – I actually painted the inside of my crappy HP case so it would match everything else: the aftermarket PSU is jet black and so are most of the other components, but the inside of the case was naked metal so I painted it with a $2 can of paint and it looks 800x better.

But I want something neat, something bigger, something with good cable management. Something with modding potential. Maybe something with casters. Maybe something to put a window in the side of, but more than likely something with good airflow even if the side of the box is off.

Something I can’t afford at the moment.

It seems like the last week or so, at any given moment you can look over at my wife’s PC and it’s either got “The Sims” up, or she’s looking at a Tumblr about “The Sims” or she’s editing screenshots photos of it. I think she may have an addiction or something.

She started getting upset the other day when it looked like her two favorite adults were about to get flattened by a large meteorite, in a panic about the children who are inside who would no longer have parents. Won’t someone think of the children!

Sabriena downloads all kinds of things for it as well – it’s not uncommon to see her dressing up sims in weird and wonderful outfits. Guys in assless chaps, girls in cupless corset. Weird stuff.

Then there’s the inevitable three-hour hunt for whatever item she downloaded that’s making her game crash.

Sabriena’s family used to play the shit out of Neopets back at the turn of the century (hahaha), and after resisting for the longest time I ended up making an account with a little “Kau” (a cow). I didn’t really play too many of the games, I mostly looked for scams where I could make a fast “NeoPoint” or a thousand – things like where back in the day people would buy up “Baby Food” and list it for next to nothing so that when people searched “Food” in the shop wizard, their shops would show up.

I’d buy up the baby food for next to nothing, list it in my shop for sometimes 50x what I’d paid for it, and they’d write me an angry NeoMail before buying it back from me. I also played the stock market over there, buying up stocks at 15NP (the lowest legal buy price) and sitting on them to make a nice fat profit.

It was such an activity that got me to log in today – I saw a post on Reddit about someone who had logged in after 8 years to find a 6000% return on one of their stocks. I’d bought that same stock for 2 points lower than they did, and netted a nice tidy return on it. Unfortunately though, I’m to understand that 1,000,000 NP is not very much money at all in the game anymore, but it’s still funny to think about.

I bought up another stock at 15NP, exhausting my limit of 1,000 shares per day, and took a look around a few places before signing out. Sabriena and I used to send each other crap back and forth, unique christmas gifts, anniversary presents, birthday gifts. Things like bottles of sand and fairy shit and so on. A few years back I logged in and found some crap in my safety deposit box and sent it to her, and she never signed in to pick it up.

I’ve got my opt-out letter for the “arbitration clause” in PSN’s new EULA ready to go.

It’s not because I particularly want to sue them at all. I might have gotten an email or two from some raleigh nc lawyers about this class action or that. I don’t really even give a shit that I can’t put Linux on my PS3 (though in retrospect for Sony, pulling that functionality was a really bad decision) – in fact in the entire time I’ve had it, I’ve had no desire to put an alternate OS on it at all. Make no bones about it, it makes a really shitty Linux desktop with the hardware access you’ve got.

I don’t care too much that my details were exposed – pretty much everything that could get released on me is public knowledge already anyway. The cat’s out of the bag, man. I didn’t even use the identity theft protection coupon they gave out.

No, the only reason I’m bothering to fork over the stamp to send this letter is because I want Sony to know that I’m paying attention to their bullshit. If enough other people do it too, then hopefully they’ll pull their heads in. I know that personally, I am probably not going to buy another Sony console. PC gaming master race all the way now!

While our DSL was down I decided to go through and farm the easy achievements on Borderlands. I’ve picked up a good 15 or so in the last week, easily, and I’m not even done with the mainline campaign. According to Raptr, when you add in my “Xbox Live” (which is actually from GFW:L, but the profiles are merged) achievements and my PSN trophies, I’m at almost 1200 collectible events in games on all four systems.

What a loser I am.

Since I mentioned L4D2 in a previous post, I thought I’d ramble on a bit about my quest for Dolby Digital output from my PC. Apparently they’ve been making cards for a while now with the ability to do realtime encoding of DD, which is called Dolby Digital Live.

Unfortunately, the chipset that’s in my PC has that stuff neutered (Realtek make the exact same chipset with the letters “DD” after it, indicating it supports this feature), so I’m stuck with SPDIF pass-through or analog 5.1. Bummer.

I’ve been trying to find a reasonably priced card that supports it and is PCI-E x1, but so far no luck. If I could have 5.1ch audio out through my home speakers instead of my headphones, I’d be a really happy camper.

I need to get on and play some Left4Dead2 to get the ticket from it, along with a couple of other games I need to grab tickets for – it ends today!

Zombie games are great, no need to spend all your money on the best weight loss pills when zombies chase you around. Cardio. “Poor fat bastard”, and all that.

So that contest I entered a few days ago? I was one of the winners! \o/

Turns out only about 15 people entered, and there was 11 games up for grabs, so my odds were pretty good. I wound up scoring Doom3, which is cool because when I first got Steam the demo was one of the first things I ever downloaded (Yeah, I got into the Steam game late – I was a console gamer up until then, but it’s okay I’m all better now).

I’ve not even got as far as you get during the demo, because of time constraints but that’s okay – I’ll get around to trudging my way through it at some point.

Steam is having their Summer Camp event on at the moment, and I’ve been collecting as many tickets as I can… nothing would make the gamer in me happier than winning things like Portal2 and Homefront for free as well. Of course for the most part, I’m about as lucky as an afore-mentioned Mars lab scientist calling up about term life insurance quotes on the day the demons come to town, but hey it could happen.

It gives me something to do as well – it’s an excuse to revisit games like Day of Defeat and Counter Strike: Source that I’ve not played in months.