Mon, 24th Aug 2009 by Alfie.

I was catching up on news at Tales of the Rampant Coyote and there was a post about Galactic Civilizations II being the spiritual successor to Masters Of Orion 2.

I used to play MOO2, along with other 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) space strategy games, like Stars!, Space Empires III & IV, and my long time ‘love-hate’ game VGA Planets, so I thought, “hmmm, I’ll give it a look-see”, and downloaded the demo. Nearly 6 hours in I sprang for the digital download of GalCiv II Ultimate Edition on Stardock (less than £25), and 30+ hours after that I finally went to bed

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in PC, Video Games | Print | No Comments »

Wed, 12th Aug 2009 by Alfie.

My girlfriend wants to get in training for next years London triathlon, so she ordered a hybrid bicycle on-line, but it turned out to be too big for her (despite following the Evans Cycles frame size guide).

My 15 year old mountain bike would need some work to be made road-worthy again, so she gave me this new bike as an early birthday present (and ordered a new one for herself).

So, I now have a shiny, new, ‘Bianchi Spillo Rubino’ with which to get back into training!

Posted in Personal | Print | No Comments »

Sat, 8th Aug 2009 by Alfie.

I had a cable modem failure at the beginning of last week, this Scientific Atlanta Webstar modem was just 2 years old.

Strangely, the new modem seems to be more responsive in pings and download, but has a burst upload, which means that sustained uploads drop to about 40%.

I’m not sure how I feel about that ‘burst’ upload; it seems that it’s designed to counter illegal P2P, but it will also impact FTP uploads, running a home server, legal P2P, etc.

Posted in Personal | Print | No Comments »

Sat, 1st Aug 2009 by Alfie.

Well, looking at Daggerfall again made me think of the more recent installments in The Elder Scrolls story, Morrowind (2002) and Oblivion (2006).

It’s sometimes nice to go back to some of the older titles, that struggled on the average gamer kit available when they were new, and see how they perform on newer hardware. For instance, Morrowind (with the Tribunal/Bloodmoon expansions) struggled a bit, particularly if you had a lot of mods running.

I’ve started up a new game of Morrowind, with both expansions, and about 40 mods running (mostly high-quality textures, better body models, better clothing, advanced sound, weather, lights, etc). Cranking the visuals up to max hasn’t really hurt the frame rate on my current rig, and because it’s been a while since I last played it I’m having fun exploring all over again

Posted in PC, Video Games | Print | No Comments »