Game Review: Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance

A good majority of the games I play anymore I play with friends. But at the same time, I enjoy playing coöp far more than vs. Unfortunately, the coöperative market isn't as big as the versus market (cf. any fighting game) let alone the solo one (cf. the majority of games). After enough playing, the excellent Halo II and the despicable Champions of Norrath begin to wear thin, as all games do. And so, turning to an old friend and fellow gamer I sought out a new game to play; and I was directed towards Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, an overhead dungeon action game with character leveling quite like Champions.

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On the whole I'd give the game 3.5 of 5 stars. Entertaining, but low replayability and no unique additions to the genre.

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Game Review: 真・女神転生 Digital Devil Saga アバタール・テュナー

Let me preface this by saying: DDS looks like all games should look. Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga 1: Avatar Tuner is one of the latest installments in the Shin Megami Tensei line of RPGs out of Japan. DDS is a two-part offshoot series from the main SMT line much like the Persona: Revelations trilogy a few years back. The main series is all about collecting demons, breeding them, and the like whereas DDS and Persona are more of the typical RPG genre.

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Final report: 4.75 of 5 stars. Not quite earth-shattering enough to earn a full five stars, but a must-have for any RPG collection.

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No title so boring as "Update"

So it's been a couple months or so since I've writ meaningfully; school, bad scheduling, and life in general have been keeping me from it. So far I'm loving OS X 10.4, though I can no longer get my system to burn CDs. I've notified Apple of the bug, but haven't heard back from them yet. I just added reviews for two PS2 games I've been playing. A week and a half ago I added a few quotes to the POW section. Other than that, nothing much of note going on.

The Paperboy RSS project I've been working on at SourceForge is going along excellently. Unfortunately the official project manager doesn't tend to keep the website up-to-date well. Paperboy RSS is, in short, a newsfeed reader— though it can also be used as a (low-end) website data management system, or as a conversion layer from XML to any text format for any sort of project. The main paperboy program is fully functional, though we're still adding to it[1]. The secondary paperboyd program—a daemon/batch processor for the pain program—is functional and, while there are no critical bugs (i.e. things that make it crash), there are still two[2] major bugs preventing official release. If you're interested, check us out, see if it works on your *nix of choice, send in feature requests— heck, join the coding effort if you're interested.

I haven't worked on getting the weblog cgi online yet, but it looks like the collab server is being slated for eventual retirement now that Collab has been replaced by NAP at Free Geek. Depending on how soon "eventual" is, I may put it off until the site's on a new server if my schedule doesn't easily allow me to do it sooner.

[1] Just adding XSLT functions mainly.

[2] One of which is just of the "we haven't written a feature we want to support" variety.