The Life of Shaииoи

Dentists are fun…. not.

Had a Wisdom tooth pulled today, didn’t flinch the whole time but, even when the dentist shoved that rather large needle into my mouth (even with me being shit scared of needles), took him allmost a hour and a half to pull the bastard out, roots were all curly, then it broke, plus ill have to go back eventually to get the other one out, and like 6 fillings

I’m now going to morn the loss of my favorite thing… Solid foods , till later.

Well I’ve been holding off posting my impressions of S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl for a while now, mainly so I could give it a good run through instead of playing it for 5 mins and saying “its outdated and plays shit”. Like many people I’ve been waiting for this game since I first saw it in Atomic all those moons ago. Currently in game I’m sitting at the Save point at the entrance to the Chernobyl NPP so I’m fairly far along in the story. So I’ll get right into it.

Packaging: I have to post a picture of the Collectors tin + Contents cause its just sexy. The collectors edition came with A Tin, The game itself, Bonus Content disc, Map of the Zone, S.T.A.L.K.E.R Survival guide, bonus Downloadable maps and skins and the Instruction manual.

Gameplay: FPS with some RPG elements appeals greatly to me . Exploring is fun, but has its perils aka getting irradiated from straying into a patch of radiation and anomaly’s that will rip you in half or pound you to death and even fry your insides! There are however a few things I have noticed:

• The AI for the zombies being extremely accurate, considering they are infact zombies…
• The AI at the beginning of the game is alot stronger and more accurate than you are for quite a while until you progress a little further into the game and get some more powerful weapons. Though learning how to control weapons such as the assualt rifles would counter this.
• AI Allies push you into the line of fire if your blocking there path behind cover
• In the Bar theres this one guy that wont fucking shut up about giving you information. which I found EXTREMELY annoying

Overall I think the Human AI is a little over powered. Apart from that I feel the gameplay is fairly solid most of the time.

Graphics: My GPU is dying so I couldn’t experiance the most from the lighting and graphics systems, little bit of a downer but thats just my machine, even at 1600×1200 and med - high settings the game looks excellent in my opinion.

Engine: I’m totally in love with the game engine, Thunderstorms random weather patterns, rain, wind, its all just awesome . Thunderstorms and weather patterns changing did tend to lag me out a little bit at times but I suspect that is also my computer dying.

In Summary: I’ve really enjoyed S.T.A.L.K.E.R for the most part, accept for some little frustrations from getting lost, or eaten, or dying, and its actually a game thats managed to hold my attention for more than 15 minutes which lately, and as many of you may know, has been kinda hard, And yes I got to Pripyat and the ferris wheel STILL freaks me out…

Overall id probably give it a 7/10 but the game does have a bit of a unfinished feel to certain parts. That being said don’t just blow it off and say “meh” go play it and put a few good hours into it and you might be surprised.

Well my day has been mind numbingly painful, one of my teeth is infected and making every part of me ache and hurt etc.

I’m on the biggest dose of anti-botics that I’ve ever seen, plus cause of the pain my blood pressure is a lil high, which makes headaches that wont go away for days . Sigh stupid teeth. Tooth will probably end up being pulled next week I hope.

Woot Woot go me…

Ive created a new MSN Messenger account, I like to keep my MSN and Personal emails seperate so heres the new addy:

• shannon [at] thelifeofshannon.net

By posting it here it will  no doubt be spammed with rolex and viagra emails but like I care. Add Me!

Well then, after last nights interesting comments from Elyse and Dean, Askimet has picked up about 9 spam comments in one evening, taking the count from 30 something to 44, new record for one days worth of spam, quite funny that.

I also had to delete that post you guys were using as a chat room because the last.fm code was being a whore.

I’m happy though i got my revenge on Elyse by calling here a Lunatic and writing comments backwards on her MySpace. hehehe.

Never Ever Ever Ever Ever connect with TPG Internet, for the last 2-3 hours I’ve had a connection for no more than 15 minutes solid without it dropping out, I’ve honestly lost count of amount of times it has dropped out today, this would have to be the 20th time at least, in the past 3 hours, Not to mention this afternoon when it first started to play up.

There service has just become beyond substandard, In the past few months we’ve been plagued with dropouts, hours and hours of downtime, times where My modem full stop refused to connect to there pathetic service. And on top of that it seams the more I actually download the slower and less reliable my connection becomes. I’m sitting just over 16GB of my 25GB cap. So hmm You Explain it.

I bet even people with Dodo get a ADSL connection that actually STAYS connected for more than 3 minutes at a time.

So tomorrow Internode is getting a call. GG TPG You have lost yet another customer… ADSL 2+ here I fucking come with bells on.

FragFest Autumn LAN was yesterday and I had a Blast! Aside from some issues that have arisen with my Computer, I have a suspicion that my Mobo or RAM are on there way out, but thats a story for another day..

CSS Tournament:

After giving up my Spot in Section 9, Yes I know I’m a Traitor , I assembled a random team called “tDc.| Team Discovery Channel” (Yes I am aware I stole the Name ) and we managed to win 2 out of 4 games, which was pretty good . Not too sure how Section 9 went ill have to find out from Twitch . Three of our games were shoutcast by GameStah, ill have Links to Demo’s and Shoutcasts for those interested soon.

Results for tDc.|

• vs Section 9: 16 - 6 (Win)
• vs Pwnage Pandas: 16 - 12 (Win)
• vs Remember the Name: 1 - 16 (thrashed )
• vs GermanZ: 3 - 16 - (thrashed again )

Section 9 and Pwnage Panda’s were both fairly hard fought matches, but the matches vs GermanZ and Remember the Name we got thrashed pretty bad, We had a lot of fun thats all that really mattered, I’d like to thank my team which consisted of: DarkNexus, Lance, Po! and t@arget pr@actice for a great effort . And also props to the Shoutcaster for getting my name wrong, I had a good laugh at his reply.

The Rest of the Day:

After some fairly lengthy CSS play, Samantha and I had a couple of rounds at Smash Bro’s on the GameCube, and I’m happy to say well, She pwned me and some randoms with Pikachu a few times which was pretty fun, We had a rather interesting game of DOTA (Warcraft 3), not fully understanding how it worked I rage quit after getting owned 20 times in a row :S , Bit of Warcraft 3, during which I got Pwned again by Samantha after the other guy we were playing with quit. I managed to go the whole LAN not playing BF2 , Watched some Top Gear, generally loitered abit, all in all it was a good day. Oh and we got Free Red Bull which always rocks .

Props to Dean and all the FragFest Staff for another great LAN!

Downloads:

• Photos
• CSS Demos & Shoutcats @ FragFest

Until Next time!

Well we just got yet another massive electrical storm, makes about the 2nd really big one in just as many weeks.

The one this evening lasted from about 11:30pm to just after 1am, fairly ferocious too, almost continuous lightning and thunder, couple of lighting strikes around near my place, with one just across the road, which I happened to watch from my front door as the sky went purple for a second then the bolt of lightning came down, followed allmost instantly by a massive crash of thunder that made me jump almost to my kitchen… I’m a wuss so shoot me . Thats what I get for standing near the Door, same thing happened last week as well but at my back door… I see a trend forming here… Looks like we might be in for a few decent storms this Autumn .

Also got a fair whack of rain during that time, hopefully some fell where its needed most .

Next time I’ll try not to chicken out from recording some of it, and post it up on YouTube or something like that. (I think I know a couple of people who would enjoy that ).

Anyone looking for storm warning info should check out the Bureau of Meteorology home page, they usually have fairly upto date storm warnings, and some handy information, like rain fail charts and radar images etc etc.

Well im off im tired and the laptops battery is running out…

Well the day I’ve been waiting for ever since I first saw images of S.T.A.L.K.E.R in Atomic has come…

Today S.T.A.L.K.E.R was announced as GOLD! After so long and so many disappointing delays the day I and so many others who have dreamed of having that S.T.A.L.K.E.R box in our hands will finally come, were looking at a 23rd release in Australia and I’m glad to say (as I did in this post) my copy of the collectors edition is safely pre-ordered .

Not much longer now, until I’m drooling into a bucket over the real thing instead of Screenshots and Videos . *Drools some more*