yes, i’m alive.
i typed what’s below quite a time ago, why i didn’t publish, i don’t know, but now – yes…
i have more potential posts in mind, so things might pick up here again. it’d be nice to give this old place a new coat of paint, too.
Windows 10 has a thing. A thing where it displays some featured image on the Lock Screen. If you have a look at the ‘Personalization’ settings for the Lock Screen, the thing is called ‘Windows spotlight.’ Well sometimes it’s a rather nice picture and maybe you want it, yes? Well you can have it, and I’ll tell you how to get it.
Read More…I posted an offer for this on Reddit’s /r/GiftOfGames. Go there if you want it.
Homefront was free on Humble Bundle a week or two ago (that’s the 2011 one – not the bugfest that is Revolution. Though to be fair it may have been patched…). I redeemed it as soon as I heard, naturally. The fact that I had bought and played it on release (steel box edition and all that – yes, I drank the Kool Aid of the time) changed nothing. So I have a Homefront key (for Steam) looking for a new, ahem, home, and yeah, this is a giveaway.
Alternately: Review: Seagate Barracuda 3TB
My hard disk failed [a time ago]. The one I used to store games and media and such. Sucks, right? Yeah. The drive presented with fast declining performance, which soon progressed to CRC errors and general unresponsiveness. I got what was important to me off before the end, though [porn joke here haha]. And now it’s been replaced by a new and shiny Seagate BarraCuda, the 3TB model (ST3000MD008). I kinda wanted a WD Black drive but, well, I couldn’t come to grips with their prices. And the benchmarks I was looking at showed these BarraCuda’s were outperforming the WD Blacks (the sub-4TB ones) on read speeds anyway, which are more important to me (for things like game loading times and what-not).
Oooh!! Barracuda.
So, in case you’re interested, I figured I’d run a couple benchmark tests on this one, to see how it measures up.
Want a tip? Have a tip. Sometimes tech, sometimes life, sometimes not a tip at all. Now faced with the prospect of not posting this month (shock and horror!), I throw ’em out there with wild abandon.
![Like this, except [more || less] delicious.](https://r4mzy.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/00-tip-o-thursday.jpg)
Like this, except [more || less] delicious.
Satisfy* your hunger after the jump.
This started out as one of those, “another month, another post” kind of posts. Then I made the mistake of “I’ll just put some words down about my GTA V experience,” and now we have this. Basically a review. Except I never meant to review it so there are no screenshots to do the picture things. Once I play the thing again (The Witcher has me right now), I’ll snap some shots. I had meant to write about GTA V, NAG magazine stopping production (though I guess I did that in their comments), The Witcher (still on number one, even though I went and pre-ordered three…), perhaps The Smashing Pumpkins’ new album (I like it – not Siamese Dream or Machina love it, but like it), maybe Star Citizen’s recent developments (or rather this mini game), and generally waste your time. But now you have this. So, there you are.
[picture goes here?]
ONWARD!
GTA V! ON THE MASTER PLATFORM FOR THE MASTER RACE!
(That’s the PC, for the peasants among you.)
That’s right, folks. GTA V has finally released on PC, and hot damn if it isn’t my first new-release pre-order game-purchase of the year! I’ve been chomping at the bit to play this since it got rolled out to the peasant platforms last year and studiously avoiding spoilers, too-detailed opinions, reviews, and gameplay videos (okay, I cheated a little with those, particularly after the PS4 and XBONE releases). After all this time, I now have the game sitting on my work desk. It and the lovely box, cover, (seven!) discs, map, poster, and most of all smell have all been doing their delicious parts to taunt and tease me, but it won’t be long now…
Wah-hey, it’s a another year. I almost skipped this post, because laziness or some such thing, but eventually my urge to type about the newest free thing on Origin won out and now here we are. So to get right to the pointy end, Origin’s latest On the House thing is ye olde Bullfrog classic Theme Hospital. To get it, you need to do the usual On the House thing of logging in to the Origin application/client, check out the Store, and click all over those helpful bits that, currently at least, are trying to tell you about what this very post is also telling you about (that is, Theme Hospital being free, obviously). Which is a terrible way of saying “open the Origin client and follow the prompts.” No idea how long this’ll last, Origin only gives us a cryptic “Available for a Limited Time Only” message, and I’ve no idea what’s up with the capitalisation…
Yep, that’s right: Dragon Age: Origins, the first game in the Dragon Age series, is free right now, until 14 October 2014, on Origin. The price of zero monies/credits/dosh/green/et cetera. Ala on the house. So get on over there and do the things to get it. Hurray!
Alrighty, this game. My first impulse buy in a long while, and perhaps the most important question to answer is “do I regret it?” Uncharacteristically, I’ll answer that right in the header: No. No, I have no regrets at all (thus far). I spent some three hours with Talion in the lands of Mordor last night, it and all three of those hours were engrossing, interesting, and fun. Some funny snippets, some “aww sweet!” bits, and more than a few “ooh’s” and “aah’s.” Vault the jump to splash in the less descriptively-muddy waters.
So what did Gamescom have in store for Evolve, the 4v1 monster-hunting game in development by Turtle Rock Studios (the chaps behind Left 4 Dead) and which is looking set to be monstrously fun? Make the jump to find out.
