Diablo III – Open Beta/Stress Test Weekend

This weekend was the Beta Open Weekend, or the Stress Test Weekend. This fact is already interesting. I do not know any other company with any similar initiative. This is not only great for them as a mechanism to check how good their servers can cope with the game and some hundreds or thousand players, but also because this works a demo. I would love to know how many players made the pre-order during this weekend. I am one of those.

There are lots of critics about this game. Most of them are funded. The characters don’t seem as dark or scary, but more comic-like, the magic system is more simple, the inventory items are smaller with less detail, etc. I defend that we need to be open to new approaches to the same game. If it is all similar, just an enhanced version with new enemies and new characters, that doesn’t get that interesting (my opinion).

We expect some issues to improve in the final release, but we can’t expect much changes.

I didn’t play much, but my main complains are that for two times that the game returned me a black screen only with a cursor when exiting (Mac OS X), and that it doesn’t have any logic to have a character (witch doctor) whose primary weapon is a jar full of spiders. And, as far as I could dig, I can’t have a standard weapon instead of those “magic” weapons. But probably I didn’t dig enough.

Now, waiting for the release in May.

GTAiv: Lost and Damned – first impressions

GTAiv: Lost and Damned

I just started to play Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City. It took me some time to get back to GTA controls after some Red Dead Redemption. My first impressions start with the knowledge that there are two episodes. I did not know they were two. Thought it would be just one new story. Also, I didn’t know you are not playing with Niko. Started with the first one (well, the one that appeared at the left in the monitor, thus, the first, for me that read from left to right), named The Lost and Damned, that is about a group of bikers. Wanna know more? Well, buy it and play.

Main differences from plain raw GTA? Well, bikes are easier to ride, but still a lot unpredictable… second main difference, is that now you do not need to take care of your life, but of your friends. And your friends can get behind you and the enemy and, as far as I could dig, there isn’t any visual hint on whether a character is friend or not. That will make things harder. In half an hour that I played around, already noticed I am pretty good on killing my friends…

Red Dead Redemption

I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption for some time. Well, in fact, I do not play it for a while, but it is the latest game I played on my XBox (that I am not using that much, I must confess). I am a fan of Grand Theft Auto and therefore I needed to test this new approach, with the same game engine. Well, my first complain is that horses do not run as fast as a car, and that is a problem, because in Red Dead Redemption you need to walk from city to city and that takes some time. It is true that the landscapes are beautiful (just check the image above, it is from the game, not just for ad) and there are some small missions between cities.

I did not finish the game, and will not finish it. Not because the game is not good, but because I do not have much time to play, and now I want to test another one (Episodes from Liberty City).

Regarding Red Dead Redemption my main complain is with the aiming but that is probably my fault for not playing enough. Other than that, I do not have the patience for collecting plants, but that it not essential for the game.

Tetris Company suing Quinn?

It is just stupid that some company, named Tetris Company, LLC, could be taking the time to sue Simon Härtel over his tetris implementation for Mac OS X, named Quinn.

Tetris is out for a long time. The idea was nice, that is true, but we are years over it.

Let me guess, now they will sue GNU because Emacs has a tetris implementation?

I’m sure that a couple of minutes googling will find more than a dozen of other tetris implementations…

Stay Alive (2006)

Stay Alive

This movie has a standard story, a video game turned reality (or mixes with it). Nevertheless, there are some nice details in the movie that makes it interesting to watch till the end. There are some glitches and the bigger one if the fact that the character Swink appears at the end, alive, although he should be dead. I can possibly find one or two excuses for that to happen, but they are not presented in the movie, making it seem cheesy.

Another fact that makes me think is the amount of laptops from AlienWare that appears in the movie. I know that they make (or supposedly make) the best PCs for gamers. But unless there is some money associated, I can’t get why a movie would advertise so much a brand. In fact, you can almost say that the AlienWare  laptop was essential for the main character survival.

6/10 @ IMDB.

GTA4: No Love Lost

GTA4: No Love Lost

I took a break on my work to kick the ass, wipe out, or kill (as you prefer) the boyfriend of Faustin’s daughter. Fortunately he has some friends that wanted their ass kicked as well. Mission accomplished.

GTA4: Logging On, and Cerveza Heights Carstack Ambush

GTA4: Logging-On

Since yesterday, Nikko Bellic has an e-mail account. It was the easier mission so far, get to a computer and create an e-mail account. At the same time, I did my first job for Little Jacob, got in an ambush, and killed some guys. It was kind of easy, but I am not happy with my controlling abilities, yet.

GTA4: Shadow

GTA4: Shadow

Didn’t play for some time. Yesterday restarted with my new 22″ Acer, with FullHD. And now I notice the great graphical details I was missing. Yesterday I was kind of rusty and I was only able to kill a flying rat. Today I managed to finish a mission where I should follow a drug dealer, and kill him and his gang. My main problem was the process of climbing five flights of stairs…

Using HDMI and external sound in XBox 360

In a previous post I was wondering why I couldn’t get sound from my XBox using any kind of connector when the HDMI cable was plugged in.

My doubts were funded on the design of my own cable, that shipped with XBox 360. It has two RCA for sound and one RCA for video but, in the XBox connector, it has too much plastic, in a way that it covers the HDMI connector.

Therefore, I supposed that that would be a design issue, with that purpose (to prevent to connect the two cables at the same time), and not a design flaw.

But then, I found the kit shown in the picture on sale: it includes a standard HDMI cable and a connector without that extra plastic, that can be plugged together with the HDMI cable, and deliver sound to two RCA (and an optical connector).

Already ordered the kit on eBay. Waiting for it.

Using earphones in XBox360

As I poster some weeks ago, I bought a new LCD, 21.5″, with HDMI. The idea was to use it as a second monitor on my Mac Book Pro (done that already) and to use it to play with my XBox 360. Tried to do this latter, but it was not possible.

Why wasn’t it possible? Because I am stupid and I bought an LCD with an HDMI connector but without sound support. So, the LCD doesn’t have speakers and Acer didn’t bored to add a sound jacket.

When searching for solutions, I remembered that the gamepad has a 2.5mm jacket for a headset with microphone. I tried a standard earphones with 2.5mm jack but it did not work. Searching on Google I found the adapter shown above that, apparently, splits the signal from that connector into two different jackets, one for microphone, another one for earphones.

My current doubts for anyone who already use one of these:

• does anybody know if the sound is stereo?
• and, does it work for games, or just when using XBox360 for online conversation?

Oh, and of course, if you know another solution, please keep me posted.