nickchanger's blog - Category: "Gaming"

Waaaay too long since my last blog entry. I will now try to write one every weekend, no matter if I have anything special to tell or not. That way there is a higher chance of me actually saying something clever. Expect the categories of these entries to quite random ;) .

In this entry I will write about the adventure games. Some of my favourite games include the LucasArt point-n-click adventure games such as Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. They have a great humour, a good story, awesome characters and quality puzzles. Another game in this genre which I love is Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacret, Blood of the Damned. It had a different approach to the genre because of its 3D and free-roaming camera. Gabrial Knight 3 has one of the best stories I have ever tried in a computer game. The whole atmosphere enchanted me and my brother, so it was a huge experience for us to actually visit the real-life town of Rennes-le-Château and its church, where the story takes place, during this summer. We both got goosebumps when entering the church and seeing the exact same thing as we did in the game! I almost complained about the graphics :P .

The last couple of years I have increased my collection of games with several adventure games from both GOG.com and Steam, but have not had the time to actually finish any of them. I hope this will change during this spring - one every weekend as well maybe?

Here is a list of the games in question:

• Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
• Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within
• The Longest Journey
• Still Life
• Syberia
• Syberia II
• Simon The Sorcerer
• Simon The Sorcerer II
• Runaway 3: A Twist of Fate - completed
• The Next BIG Thing
• Tales of Monkey Island: Chapter 3 - Lair of the Leviathan
• Tales of Monkey Island: Chapter 4 - The Trail and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood
• Tales of Monkey Island: Chapter 5 - Rise of the Pirate God
• Monkey Island 2: Special Edition

I have tried to play the first Gabriel Knight game several times now, but have never gotten more than about a quarter in to it :( . Therefore it would not be wise to start this massive quest with that one. So instead I have now started on Runaway 3. I have completed the two prequels years ago, so it is not easy getting into that world again - as far as I remember the girl went missing right? wtf?

There are other games I need to complete as well though. E.g. Amnesia: The Dark Descent - where I have only completed a side-story that were included. And of course Skyrim where I have reached 70+ hours and I am still not even level 40 :o .

So I said I wanted to write more often, but of course I did not fulfil that promise - that is just who I am :P . But there is a good reason...

On the 10th of November I receive a package, possibly send from Sweden the day before so it got here rather quickly. Actually one day before it should.

I anxiously returned home and opened the package. Inside was a DVD, which I quickly inserted in to the DVD drive of my computer. An installation menu popped up and I clicked next several times, looking forward to the sweet piece of software that would soon be inside my computer. Then suddenly it gave me a weird alert box: "The game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim cannot be installed yet, because it has not been released yet." ... MothaF*

Finally the day 11-11-11 had arrived and I could start playing Skyrim! At first glance the world ... blows you away, and it continues to do so even after 50 hours of play time. I still have not finished the main story or even visited all of the areas or the largest cities. It is massive!

I have been in love with TES ever since I first played Morrowind almost ten years ago. Oblivion was maybe even better, and now Skyrim have turned TES to 11. Several of the annoying stuff from Morrowind and Oblivion have been removed or changed, such as the stupid Acrobatics and Athletics skills or the cursed "everything-around-you-follows-your-level". Man I hated running into roadside bandits wearing the insanely expensive glass armor.

Skyrim starts out, like every other TES game, with your character being imprisoned. This time you are heading for the block when suddenly dragons attack and you manage to find a way to escape. Skyrim is bloody as hell with decapitations, mutilated bodies and the like - definitely not for kids or the weak. Love it! :)

Other Stuff

I am using quite a lot of time on Skyrim and will continue to do so, but I do manage to sneak other stuff in to my daily life. One such activity were to join the forum at Anime Kita, an anime-community based in Aalborg, Denmark. They have a large meeting two times a year, spanning a whole weekend, which I just missed. They usually also meet IRL once a month, but I have yet to attend any of these. Maybe in January. This is basically my attempt to actually meet people in my area with some of the same interests as me - damn social stuff.

Other stuff this past month:

• Christmas dinner with my colleagues. I got an annoying headache, even though I barely touched the alcohol, and went home before the party got kind-of crazy (or so I have heard).
• My mom turned, uhm, well lets just say 35 and ignore the fact that my sister is then apparently half a year older than her mother.

Rest of this month:

• A Christmas dinner with my friends.
• Christmas Eve with my family in my apartment.
• New Years Eve with my friends.

Next month:

• Incoming packages from Japan containing a total of five figures! That means I will almost double my collection.

Hopefully I can soon write a blog entry about my trip around Europe ...

A lot is going on in these days. To much for my taste actually.

Since I am done at the university I pretty much have to get a job somewhere. That has meant making my CV and different job applications. It also meant joining what is known as an A-kasse. Not sure what it is called in English but it is something that will pay me as long as I do not have a job, pretty sweet deal. Of course they demand that I am actually searching for a job, but who would want to sit at home everyday doing nothing anyway.... wait a minute.

I am currently also in the process of moving out of my apartment in Aalborg (in just a couple of weeks). But since I do not know where in the world I will get a job yet I have no apartment to move into. So to begin with I will be moving back home to my parents. Hopefully I will have a job soon so I can move out again :P .

I have been in the process of creating a framework for websites, and have for months now been working on using that framework for this site. At the moment I only need some administration stuff and I should be ready to release it. I did, however, feel like it needed a new design as well so that might come too. Of course it has already taken longer than I expected but I just have not had the time :( .

Riot Games (the creators of League of Legends) released the "Season 1" ladder stuff, which meant the log file changed. The log file we parse to get all the data for LoLBase.net. Since my partner were visiting his family in Vietnam and rarely had any time, and the fact that it was me who originally created the parser, I was forced to fix it so we could continue the parsing of the thousands of log files we receive every day. Of course season 1 was released right in the middle of a holiday trip I was on, where me and 8 other young people (I was actually the oldest :P ) went to a summer house on the west coast (of Denmark) to get drunk for seven days straight. Yes I was drunk most of the time there and it was actually quite fun. Well, except for the fact that one of the two girls who were there got a concussion the 2nd night at could not participate in most of what we were doing the rest of the week. Pictures on Facebook :P . Anyway, I finished the parser a few days ago and the parser is currently crunching through the more than 120000 log files that was in the queue (would take around 85 hours), and it is still going :P .

Riot have, however, done something really awesome. With the release of season 1 they also released a new website both in North America and in Europe. At the bottom of the front page is a small box with the title "Community Spotlight". On both sites there is only one thing inside this box: the banner for LoLBase.net! Fork yeah! I have made something that is used and known intonationally by thousands of people! Not sure, but I do not think Sands of War reached the same amount of users?

I have also finally started to actually play some LoL again. Sucks and owns randomly atm :P . I have also bought Arcanum on gog.com. My brother bought that game years ago but I never finished it - now I will! Then there are several tv-series that are about to start or have started and finally some anime. I told you, lots of stuff to do :P .

Shit this was long... I end it with Lilim...

Today, the 14th of February, has its name from an almost completely unknown person who is believed to have lived during the third century. During the 18th century some fake stories came up using Saint Valentine as the patron for lovers and Valentine's Day where born. Today it is mostly "celebrated" in America but flower shops, greeting card companies and restaurants are doing all they can to introduce this tradition in Europe too ... for obvious reasons (no not love dumb ass :P ).

Now for the news. I got three, two of which coincidently involves love. Let's start with the third...

As expected Steam had a sale on Trine (75% off), so I bought it and completed it this morning. It is not very long but it is damn cool, with only a few extremely annoying puzzles ;) . J0k3 have asked if people could beat his finishing score, and I tried too. But of course I could not do it, but I was not that far behind IMO :P .

Now for the first "love" subject. Two days ago my good childhood friend Ste finally proposed to his girlfriend through the last 2½ years, AC, and she said yes! Congratulations to both of you!

Second "love" subject. Today Angels and Airwaves (AVA) released their third album called... LOVE. (far fetched but still :P ). Tom DeLonge (Blink-182, Box Car Racer and AVA) have expressed that this album is the best thing he have ever done. That is aiming quite high as almost all of Blink and the two first AVA albums are just awesome. LOVE where released as a download for free and through wikipedia I found a way to download it yesterday (through something called fuel.tv). Maybe I had expected more because of Tom's statement or I have just been to excited about it cause I were just a bit disappointed when I heard it. However, I do believe that the songs just have to grow on me and eventually I will probably love them as much as the previous AVA songs. The album is still quite good and I can only recommend it to basically everyone. Now I am just waiting for the release of their movie, also called LOVE, that is "coming soon".

*UPDATE*
As expected the songs just had to grow on me. Check out a screenshot from my WinAmp media library showing my ratings and a possibly scary play count? (done within around 48 hours)

Yet another boring update - as I have been to busy to do any interesting writing with a twist.

I have made small updates to several parts of the site. None of which have any great importance, so no fun there :P .
The game list have had even more additions including both Max Payne games, and all three Company of Heroes games. Both through Steam, which of course does not work as it should, so Company of Heroes wont start :/ .

J0k3 have "forced" me to take a look at Trine. It looks interesting, but I am gonna wait to see if Steam feels like having a sale on it in the near future (else it would become the most expensive game I have ever bought through Steam :o ).

As mentioned in my last entry, I were playing around with a match and player statistics website for League of Legends together with my group mate, Døng. It is now online and going great! Already contains almost 33000 players in over 6800 matches. We have called it LoLBase.net and it works by having players upload their log files from the game. To make this process easier we have also created a small upload application (finally I can use my skills in C# for something used by someone else than me). These log files contain a lot of information about the played games. In less than a month the database for this site have become more than 30 times larger than for everything I have done on 109.dk ... in the last several years. We will continue to add features to the site and maybe some day it will actually become general knowledge in the LoL community ;) . Oh and of course you can also see my stats :P .

Now why did I call this entry for "Exams Update" when I have not talked about any exams at all? Good question... I passed both my exams this semester. Only have one semester left and one exam - and then I have a masters degree in Software Engineering! yeah bitch!