BEHOLD THE HATE-FILLED PLACE THAT LIES BEYOND THE NAMELESS VOID

WHERE DARK AND ARCANE MACHINES GRIND ENDLESSLY AT THE SOULS OF THOSE CARELESS MEN WHO TREAD THERE

AND GLEEFUL HOOKS SHALL SPEAR YOU AND TWIRL YOU 'ROUND UNTIL THE WORLDS FREEZE AND TIME CEASES

BEHOLD, YE MORTALS

AND DESPAIR

widsom steath is ofver noW?!!!! i know i was going to have frequent updates but DIE IN A FIRE I DON'T CARE

it is all fixed, success

Also this blog software is a butt it refuses to let Firefox log in, says some lies about cookies which I am sure Paul will think is very amusing because IE raises no complaint

but as my cookies are well and truly enabled it is obviously something wrong with the software so SHUT UP PAUL

DAY TWO

this is just as horrific as i was expecting

i suspect i am going to be a victim of a dry socket, and this terrifies me - they've got 4 more days to hold out and i could swear something is loose already

guahghuhuhghh

i am going to rinse my mouth with warm salt water now and hope that when i spit the water out a torrent of blood does not flow with it

I am going to document my experience for the benefit of future generations

DAY ONE

soup is the second greatest invention ever

the first is general anaesthetic

currently i have ice packs strapped to my face, most of which is still numb

seems to have stopped bleeding and now it is just fffffffffffff saliva

this is less horrific than i was expecting even though i look like someone who tried to eat a bucket of tumours and am hounded by a perpetual dull ache

i like that they gave me a sheet thing designed specifically to put on my pillow in case i start bleeding in the middle of the night so when i wake up in a pool of my own blood it can be disposed of quickly and easily and with a minimum of dazed screaming

So, I completed The Witcher.

This game is fucking fantastic.

It's a very story-driven RPG, more along the lines of games like Planescape Torment than cheese like Elder Scrolls. By which I mean it's far less concerned with exploration - there's not much of that, and you spend most of the game in or around a single (admittedly very big) city. But there's a truckload of side quests and character interaction and it succeeds in all sorts of areas Oblivion totally failed in. The ambience, for one. It manages to really sell the sense that you're in a breathing world. The NPCs aren't the usual depthless quest-dispensers - rather, they're believable characters with motivations and opinions.

The game's tagline is 'There is no good, no evil - only decisions and consequences.' It lives by these words. The decisions you make are never clear-cut; there's no flat good-and-evil moral system, and every choice has merits, both practical and moral. It feels much less like you're controlling an avatar in a computer game and more like you are simply directing the personality of a fully-formed character. It's incredibly immersive, and the whole narrative plays out far more smoothly and believably because of it. In this way the narrative is closer to a novel than a game, except you get to control the main character's choices. It actually affects how the story plays out, too. Decisions you make early in the game will change events much later. You make alliances, you lose and gain friends. It is wonderful. The fact that the story is really cool anyway is just icing on the cake. While it includes a few fantasy cliches (though none of the most abrasive ones), they're used in an unfamiliar way and unlike your average fantasy game the story is always thoroughly personal. There's no generic evil warlord sitting atop his throne of flesh - only people whose ideologies and motivations clash with yours.

The game takes a little while to get its awesomeness rolling - around the middle of Chapter II, roughly - and before then there's more than one instance of goofiness. The cutscenes are sometimes a little clumsy (although more often they're totally awesome), and the character animations during dialogue take a while to get used to. Most of the first Chapter feels a bit disjointed and ham-fisted, but it pulls itself together in the end.

While Oblivion had a system to make each character look a little different but used about four voice actors to cover the countless characters, The Witcher's NPC models often pop up all over the place - though not to the point that it's distracting - and there's enough voice actors that I never actually noticed two characters with the same voice. There's a lot of dialogue, too, so that's really quite impressive for a fully-voiced game. Most of the acting is pretty good as well.

For the length-obsessed of you, the game's pretty long. Longer than most games as story-focused as this, at least. I guess it's around 50 hours or so assuming you don't do every side-quest - that's around how long it took me. The box says there's 80 hours in there. The gameplay's pretty fun - it's real time sword-swingery, but it's a little hard to explain. It's combo-based. You click at the right time during a fight and you go to the next combo, and so on. It's not as direct as something like Prince of Persia, but once you get used to it it's quite fun and it avoids the tactical pause-fest of games like Baldur's Gate. There's spells and things, and a big skill tree. There's not much of a focus on phat lewt and getting the next new sword and armour, which I actually found kind of refreshing once I got over the initial shock that there were only like four suits of armour in the entire game. There's a fair few swords and things, but the way it plays out is more like the event-driven acquisition of a new sword in Prince of Persia than picking one off a freshly killed zombie in Diablo 2.

Most of the item-based gameplay is to do with ingredients. Witchers make potions, you see. They make potions from herbs and bones and stuff you skin off dead creatures - there's a whole aspect of the game dedicated to getting new formulas and discovering new ingredients and so on. The potions aren't Diablo-style health potions, either; they have a whole range of abilities and generally last anywhere between thirty minutes to several hours. As examples: there's one that slows down time, there's one that makes you immune to stun and knockdown effects, there's one that lets you see in the dark, there's the expected damage-boosting ones and poison-resistance potions. As the game progresses, and especially on the harder difficulties, you can't survive without them. It's an interesting mechanic.

AND! The game has a not insignificant portion inspired by fucking H P Lovecraft. So, yeah. Game is fucking fantastic. Elder Scrolls has nothing on this.

Well, the last time I upgraded my computer was for Doom 3. This time it's for Supreme Commander. Which, for me, is less an actual reason to upgrade and more a signal that it's time to upgrade because my poor three-year-old computer can't handle new games anymore. Considering I'd expected the machine to last only two years, I think it went quite well.

So I ended up replacing just about everything. All that's left of the old machine is the power supply and the DVD drive. The upgrade includes a Core 2 Duo E6600, a Geforce 8800 GTS and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Well, I say 2GB -- in fact it wouldn't boot up at all for a while, and refused even to get to POST until I tried removing one of the RAM sticks. Seems it's faulty, so I'll have to send it back to get replaced.

The thing doesn't care, though. It's been a long time since I've had a computer that burns through modern games without breaking a sweat, so excuse me if I sound a little overenthusiastic. It's damn quiet, too. My previous computer you could hear humming away in the neighbouring room; with headphones on this machine is scarcely audible.

Paul will be happy to hear that I got Vista along with it. Home Premium 64-bit. So far, aside from a bizarre networking problem (which was actually the fault of the motherboard), I'm quite happy with it. It was painless to install, and it certainly looks pretty. I must admit, though, that
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ENORMOUS TIME GAP BETWEEN THE WRITING OF THIS POST
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Okay so I have had this computer for quite a while. I just upgraded to 4GB of RAM, which is cool I guess, but I must admit Paul I am rather disappointed in this operating system of yours! Ignoring the general fanciness factor and the stuff you actually need Vista for (DX10), the system is basically useless. I barely ever boot into it anymore, because it is oh so slightly slower than XP for gaming and that is just not on! Plus, business like Stalker runs like shit on it for no satisfactory reason.

The only real use I have for Vista at this point is for Supreme Commander, and even then it's only useful because I've got the 64-bit edition. If I had the 64-bit XP, that'd probably be better. Because for whatever reason there's some kinda hard limit with how much RAM things can use in 32-bit Windows and I am like whaaat but that is just how it is

I am not saying Vista sucks, because it is certainly spiffy, it is just that UAC is mostly annoying and fucks up sometimes when you want to install things. Oh, and there's basically no reason to use it for things that don't explicitly need it. So I'm not giving Vista the finger, here, I'm just sort of telling it that maybe we should start seeing other people.

Uh oh here comes personality-judging websites

http://www.paulsadowski.com/Numbers.asp

I wouldn't normally post this sort of thing because I realise the whole idea is a bit silly, I just found it amusing that it managed to describe my character to the letter. That is to say, it pins me as an over-ambitious, stubborn, introverted control freak. It slipped up when it said I was exceedingly well-organised, but everything else is pretty much accurate.

IN OTHER NEWS, I don't know what game this is but clearly it is the best skateboarding game ever (sorry about the shitty captures):

As you can see, I am skateboarding on some sort of boat

whoops

well that's a relief

Our final news-piece of the day is this stunningly precise graph which presents the formula for your average Farscape Season 3 episode. On the left is the level of awesomeness, and on the bottom the portions of the show; act 1 being the episode's set up, the second act being everything between that and the third act where everything gets resolved.

Seriously, I'm not sure how this show manages it. I really, genuinely don't understand. Half the episodes of this season that I've watched so far have started with a fairly interesting premise, then gone progressively sillier until the show is so cheesy you could melt it and put it in an omelette. It's usually at this point that some sort of cheesiness explosion occurs, where the show goes through cheesy and out the other end into some sort of euphoric realm of anti-cheese. The result is so incredibly awesome that as the end credits roll I become a convulsing wreck on the floor, giggling and muttering things like 'Damn, Smokey, you can't argue with a woman!'

I got my Wii today and also finished my web design course.

That's all.

MOSTLY SERIOUS POST AHOY, PROCEED WITH CAUTION

So I've eliminated most of the detritus in this blog and I'm starting again. It is sad to see the Saladin Watch go, but that creature has renounced its dark over-large signature ways so its Watch has been retired.

...Permanently.

You are perhaps wondering what the title means by now as that last paragraph had absolutely nothing to do with it. Well here you go, you impatient philistine: I was testing out a tweaked pressure setting on my tablet and this mess, this sideburn scientist, is the inevitably dodgy five-minute result:

I'm also planning on trying my hand at what I think is called digital painting (which I totally suck at; you can tell because I'm not even 100% sure what it's called) so I fiddled around with several techniques and came up with this something-or-other:

Is it a drainpipe? A mechanical snout? Perhaps even some sort of control wheel attached to an ominous system of questionable goodwill? The world may never know, unless I actually get around to fashioning a complete picture out of it. Whatever it is, it sure does suck. I suppose it's ironic that after over four years of drawing cartoons I've become far more interested in this sort of thing.

As an aside, I saw The Wrong Man today, known as Lucky Number Slevin elsewhere. It's quite a film, and I'm glad I went: by the end it had turned into something entirely contrary to the sort of film I'd been expecting. In a good sense.

Oh! Oh hello, I DIDN'T SEE YOU THERE, what is up login form?

No, don't mind me, go on take a seat, IT'S QUITE COMFORTABLE I ASSURE YOU

Hey login form! GUESS WHAT?