The future has been sealed

By Cwaff May 1, 2010 6 Comments

Real Life

 This week marked the occassion when I replied to my university offers. I have signed up for Computer Science at Queens University Belfast and now there is no going back! Providing I put the work in and get the grades then that is what I shall be doing and my career path is pretty much set. I got the offers at the end of last year but I only replied to them this week. It felt like a big commitment setting them in stone and that's probably why I delayed so much! 
 

Today I am heading to an 18th birthday party which is a costume party. The theme is characters from movies so I decided to go as Rorschach from watchmen. My costume was hast ily put together and looks pretty crappy but I guess it does the job! I made the mask myself out of a pair of tights bought from Primark (where the woman at the coun ter gave me the dirtiest look I have ever seen!) It started off okay and then the paint I used started to run and went everywhere over the mask. It looked kinda bad so I went over the edges with white paint to try and fix it up although that ended up making it look so much worse! 
But anyway, it's not important but as long as people know who I am then surely it's all good! I shall post some more pictures of the complete costume later on!
 
 Last night a lot of fun was had at the beach at midnight, I went out with some friends around 10PM and we stayed out on the beach until after 12AM. It was rather nice and peaceful (apart from all the noise we were making.) We played some football, tossed a rugby ball about and had a few dips in the freezing cold sea! Then we played the intro game from "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" in which 2 people perform the intro of a song without using any lyrics and the others have to guess. Example BELOW!
 
 

  
 Random story time! A few of my friends and I went into Belfast and decided to get some coffee. We headed into Starbucks and my friends made their orders. They both ordered take away Cappucinos. Once the orders were complete a guy hands my friend a mug of coffee and I said "So much for take away..." and we thought they just made a mistake and decided to drink it in the shop. I had a sip of the coffee and my 2 friends also had a sip of the coffee. We then were handed a take away Cappucino and we realised that the coffee we were drinking belonged to the gentleman sitting nearby staring at us. We quickly set the coffee down and ran as fast as we could away from Starbucks abandoning my other friend who was waiting for his Cappucino still! Not a terribly exciting story but it is when you have a dull and boring life like mine!
 
Still working through Band of Brothers, will give a short review once I finish up all these episodes.
 

Virtual Life

 

Gaming time has arrived! So this week I have mostly been playing through Ape Escape. In fact I just completed it 100% this morning! There was so much more to it than I remembered as a child. I firstly caught all of the monkeys, caught Specter the last boss and then went back to each stage to collect all the Specter coins. It was only when I had done that and checked my progress that I was only about 80% complete and I realised that I had to go back through every stage and complete each of the time trials! That didn't take so long and then I realised I needed a gold medal in each of the time trials! I really enjoyed playing through it again for a bit of nostalgia but I am really really glad I am done. I felt it was going to go on forever... (Review forthcoming)
 
 
***MINOR FF13 SPOILERS AHEAD***
 
Speaking of games which go on forever I am still continuing the never ending quest which is Final Fantasy 13! I am still in that monster of a chapter which is Chapter 11. I did a few side quests around Gran'Pulse for the Cie'th and it had me thinking. L'Cie focuses really vary don't they? The main characters focus's are all extreme adventures, Dajh had to locate Pulse L'Cie and so on and so forth. These Cie'th who have failed just had to kill a monster... a blue blob which I killed in a matter of seconds thanks to a pre-emptive strike. Surely they could have been crystalised easily enough and saved themselves...
 
Otherwise I'm still trekking onwards, I found a boss today which I don't think I'm meant to fight. It is a huge Juggernaut which one shotted my entire party, there is nothing I can do to not be one shotted at the very beginning so I ended up just walking on past it. I shall continue with this game to the end and continue to post my progress in the many weeks it will take to do so!
 
***SPOILERS ENDED*** 
 
I mentioned last week that I bought Prince of Persia while it was cheap and it arrived! I don't have any urge to play it though so it's likely that it will remain in it's plastic wrap for some time. Another purchase I made, which will be the last game I buy for quite some time is Bad Company 2. I did want to get it at some point though was in no rush but my friends all decided to go out and buy it and I gave into the peer pressure and ended up getting myself a copy too. I haven't played a lot of the campaign but I have had quite a few multiplayer games and I have had a lot of fun with it sofar! I've decided to stick with the Engineer class for now and try and level it up as best as I can. One problem I am having, not related to the game, it is just my hardware, is that that my laptop is starting to see its last days. I crash a lot as my graphics card begins to overheat and it is detracting from the whole experience. However, I have been pricing around and believe I can get a fairly decent PC for £500ish if I use my TV as a monitor and make use of the peripherals I already have!
 

While I was out in town yesterday and while I was in HMV they had numerous displays up and I got to play some Super Street Fighter 4 which I was very excited about after watching the Thursday Throwdown thing they did! I won some games, I lost some games and now I have to play some more! Seeing as I can't afford Super at this moment in time I am going to have to get my normal Street Fighter 4 back from my friend and get practicing once more! I also had my first experience with DJ hero which I wasn't playing, I was just observing but I didn't think it looked as fun as Guitar Hero or Rock Band are. Maybe I'm wrong but I think I will stick to my Guitar shaped peripherals for some time to come.
 
I promised a friend, Petemyster here on Giantbomb that I would play some Battlezone, a Strategy FPS hybrid for Windows 95. Although he will be disappointed to hear I only had time to play the tutorials. Next week I'll have a lot more to report on it! Sofar it seems promising, it doesn't play as badly as I had first anticipated but it is still early days to give a full review of what I think! (Then I have to finish Grim Fandango for him and all will be good with the world)
 
Here on Giantbomb I've been keeping as active as possible on the site. Posting in the forums when I can, watching the VJ Endurance run which is really entertaining and one of the highlights of my day, I am actually sad when it is the weekend and I have nothing to watch! The SSF4 live coverage was great too and if this continues to happen every week with a new game Thursday could very possibly become one of my favourite days of the week! Although I will still love Mondays. I've been working through the Quest system and I did take part in the quest set to earn a Beta Key for Halo Reach. As you can see, I didn't win. Although I'm not too disappointed! I'm not a huge Halo fan... In fact I would go as far to say as I really really dislike Halo. Although... a Beta key would have been fun! But if I did win I would only have been taking it from a Halo lover and that would not have been fair, I'm sure whoever won deserved it more than I did!
 
While I'm on the topic of quests... I find myself getting annoyed with the random 2 line blog post people are making just for the achievement. Don't people like to earn their achievements? It's like those achievement grinding servers on Team Fortress 2. I always avoided them because I hated the thought of just getting all the achievements with no work (also like Fallout 3 on the pc, which I own and got 1400ish points in legitimately! I really need to finish of Mothership Zeta). Another thing I don't like here is the threads for people just to gain followers for the quests. I don't know about you but I want to earn my followers, I want to earn them like I earn my achievements!
 

So yes, I have far too many games right now and before I start any more I will finish those which I currently have in my possession! This week I will probably continue playing FF13, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Bad Company 2 for some multiplayer action and Battlezone for a bit of oldish school gaming!  
 
I think that will do for todays blog post! Thanks for reading as always and leave your comments and questions below because I do love answering them!
 
Cwaff

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