Sunday, October 9, 2011

DVD Burning is a pain in the ass.

Every single dvd burning software is full of bugs, bloatware, spyware, bugs and bloatware, bugs and spyware, or bugs and bloatware and spyware.  No exceptions.

They all require me to jump through hoops just to get their basic fucking functions to work-- just to burn data to a dvd so I can back up files and save space on my hard drive.

Every single time I try to burn a dvd something goes wrong and I have to spend hours fixing it-- and, inevitably, the customer service of every single one of these programs sucks more proverbial ass than a gay black hole with a scat fetish, telling you a few basic things you need to do, then ignoring you after you say you've done them (or just repeating them, which means they're probably actually forum bots rather than real human beings).  

ArcSoft, Nero, DeepBurner,  CDBurnerXP-- no exceptions.  They're all like this.  Why the hell can't someone create a simple, barebones dvd burner for backing up files that actually WORKS without having to reconfigure your computer a dozen times and restart it half another?

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

So, I've been reading Left Behind

... I honestly don't know if I've ever read a more abhorrent book, that goes so contrary against Christian beliefs.  Even satanist books offer more for the soul than this tripe-- because even most satanist books don't pray for the end times to come so that all non-believers (and most believers who aren't part of their specific denomination) can burn in hell for eternity.

Yes indeed, that's exactly what this book prays for.  It's not an uplifting book.  It is a veritable "take that" at anyone who doesn't believe in the author's skewed and hypocritical version of so-called Christianity.  And this book is an American best seller.

For those that don't know yet (IE those outside of the US and those with little exposure to evangelistic movements), Left Behind is a series of atrociously written books about a skewed and inaccurate, and often hypocritical, view of "rapture" and the end times-- oftentimes pulled from sources other than the bible.

It follows two misogynistic, homophobic, occasioanlly racist, and even biased against left-handers (What.) "heroes", a sociopathic (and occasionally psychopathic)  pilot who constantly uses and strings along women, emotionally cheating on his wife despite his constant assertions that it's okay cause his pants never came off, and a "greatest reporter of all time", who never actually does any real reporting, and conveniently ignores all of the death and destruction around, to instead go hunt Jews.

And before you forget, these are supposed to be their GOOD side.  For reference, another supposedly good character is a doctor that helps stop the pilot's head from bleeding.  Sounds nice?  But wait, there's more.  He sat there complaining about BOREDOM, while outside the window of the airport were dozens of wrecked planes, the bodies not yet pulled from their flaming carcasses, the wounded not yet cared for.  The so-called heroes are more concerned with the fact that all of this death and destruction is slowing down their travel than they are about the fact that all of the world's children vanished at once, including their own.


And this is exactly how the author says you should act.  These are not Christian books.    These are ugly, hateful, spiteful books, books that in their poor writing don't offer a hand of salvation but instead waggle a finger of "oh, just wait for the end times, because THEN you'll be sorry!".  The emotions it extols from its readers are not the Christian emotions of love, acceptance, and joy-- but instead of vindication, wrath, and juvenile jealousy and hate.

These are the kinds of books the supposed anti-Christ would write, except at least said mythological (and not necessarily biblical) anti-Christ would write a more competent and interesting book than this.

And they sell them at bookstores in colleges around the nation.

I'm scared, hold me.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Duke Nukem Forever

Pardon the shortness of this entry, I'm using a keyboard with a broken space bar, it's tiring to type too much right now.

So a lot of people are really hating on this-- and I honestly can't figure out why.   The game is great fun, it has a sense of humor, it's well paced, has good variety... it's certainly no game of the decade, but it's still hella better than games such as the CoD/MoH/BF series as far as single player goes.

The driving sections which I normally despise, are short enough with enough breaks in them to stay acceptable, the shrink ray sections I wish were more frequent (not necessarily longer, but in more places) but they're still excellently done and played with quite well, the normal FPS gameplay is superbly done, etc etc etc.  The only real problem I had with it was the alien hive, which was just... too dark.  Not metaphorically dark (no, that art fits in quite well), but literally too dark, too... colorless.  Sure the Nevada desert areas are a bit drab, but at least they have an old west appeal going for them, and they aren't quite as monochrome and visually dark and... well, boring.  The casino/duke's hotel was excellent, and I enjoyed the water battles at the end as well.

The weapons are nicely varied, with only the M1911A1 being taken from the real world (though the shotgun is at least feasibly an RL shotgun), the sounds are excellently composed, and the storyline works as well as any Duke storyline has, which is to say, it's an excuse to kick ass.  Hearing duke actually pissed of (and not just dryly saying he's pissed off like normal) was an excellent touch for this duke nukem fan.

All in all... I've spent ~50 bucks on far worse than this.  Certainly I have no regrets, unlike my purchases of BFBC2 and CoD:BO.

Friday, March 4, 2011

As predicted....

...I forgot about this blog.

But then, given the name of the blog, that's probably expected!   Recently, I received Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 and R.U.S.E. for my birthday, and purchased DoW2: Retribution and Homefront for myself with my own money.  So I have had a lot to play over Feb and continue to have tons to play over Mar, to say the least.

R6V2 is a wonderful procedural shooter, although not as complex a shooter as SWAT 4 it makes up for it by not being as brain-bustingly hard and yet still retains replayability.  Its character customization is awesome, and I really regret not getting this game in its prime.  But to be fair, I have the first Rainbow 6, and it sucked more than a black hole crackwhore on a money run, so I had good reason to shy away from everything Tom Clancy.  That said, the gameplay well above adequate and the storyline continues from the first Rainbow 6 to a very good twist at the end, which I won't spoil for you (but then if you're interested in the game you probably already have it anyway).

R.U.S.E. is a very well done RTS game, with a somewhat simplistic approach to units and control, but it's made up for by the use of intelligence and the titular ruses.  Things like switching units on the radar so infantry appears like tanks and tanks appear like infantry in a sector, or putting camo netting on buildings for a sector, a fake (and completely free) tank assault force in which to distract the enemy by making them think you're massing in a certain sector or simply to hide actual tank units in.  Despite its apparent simplicity, it has complexity through its ruses and intelligence scheme.   It does have its issues though, the factions don't appear at all balanced, but that might just be me.  I haven't gone to the forums since the beta to see what the overall opinion on balance is, so I'm not gonna dwell too much on that.

Dawn of War 2: Retribution is the second expansion to the second installment of Relic's 40k license for RTS games, and it improves on the series even more than Chaos Rising (the first expansion) did.  With the addition of the Imperial Guard, the game actually feels semi-complete as far as forces go (the four remaining factions being somewhat niche, despite the fact that I like most of them at least in concept).  The Guard are done extremely well, and truly feel different from the other factions with their weak and cheap shooty units, supported by excellent vehicles and auxiliary units such as Ogryns.  The campaign picks up ten years after Chaos Rising's campaign, with the Ordo Malleus (Order of the Hammer-- the daemon hunters) arm of the Inquisition deciding they've had just about enough of the daemonic/heretic infestation in the sector after well over ten years of constant uprising and daemonic infestations, and so they're just going to destroy every habitable world in the sector, and your faction is, for whatever reasons, attempting to stop it.

Homefront hasn't come out yet, but I will try to remember to write a review of it when I get it on the fifteenth.

Good day to y'all :)