Weekly Wrapup

Barely finished this week's game of the week, Fable 2, in time before having a clean slate for next week which also happens to be the week of E3.

Fable 2 was a good game and I enjoyed it overall but it didn't really give me anything very memorable or super great to experience. I felt it trying to suck me into it's story and critical decision making but in the end, it seemed like I wasn't where the game wanted me to be. Granted, I did cheese my way through it with the help of a JTV viewer and probably skipped alot of the side quests, but I just didn't give a damn about key moments of the game where the game was trying to forcibly shock me with decisions and making the right, or wrong, choice. Probably not the game's fault, but take it for what it is. I enjoyed the hack and slash, variety of spells, and the little extra touches of bartering, realty management, and social mini-games it had. All in all, a good playthrough if you have a 360.

Now, with E3 coming up next week, I plan on streaming all of the press conferences when they are made available. I won't be home for the live showings, but I should be able to put up these shows on JTV once I get my hands on them, so expect some E3 stuff this week. I also might throw up some short site content regarding to particular events/announcements.

As for next weeks game of the week and shindigs, I'll post that tomorrow so stay tuned. As always, thanks for dropping by.

Surprise!

Well, it's been awhile. A long while...well at least I've been pretty active on my JTV account.

I actually felt compelled to kick start this thing once again because, well, people still come here. For all of you who only visit this page, swing by my JTV channel at http://www.justin.tv/elephnat . I play games there, lots of games, alls the times.

I'm also trying out a new feature on this site that correlate's with my JTV channel, a weekly rundown of whats happening in the form of a short video that I plan to post every Sunday. Lets see how that goes.

On another note, this place needs a kick in the rear. Games have been finished, E3 is coming up, and our community is apparently getting bigger. So expect the unexpected (site content and updates!).

elephnat weekly - 6/7/10

Dogs are barking

The end of the week is almost here and as usual, I'll be broadcasting another TGIF gaming session on JTV that will go into the wee hours of the morning. I'm thinking about trying Splinter Cell: Conviction since it just dropped this week. I was a huge fan of the Splinter Cell series until it made it's way onto the Xbox 360. Double Agent didn't sit well with me, especially after putting in alot of hours into the special goodness that was Chaos Theory. I hear that this next iteration is also less stealthy than its predecessors, well at least it looks pretty fawesome.

I've also started Operation Upgrade for my PC and got rid of my trusty 750W PC&Cooling Silencer PSU for something that would offer me enough headroom to run what I wanted, the Corsair 1000HX. I'll be picking up a new CPU and replace my GTX 295 in the following months since I can't find a decent place to get another GTX 295(other than ebay). Thanks Fermi, totally killed off my quad SLi-plan. Until next time, that's all folks.

XBLAH 1 Going Down

Today at midnight, the original Xbox Live service will be going down forever. I can still remember those late nights playing some Ghost Recon over Live and just being blown away by the online experience the Xbox had to offer. While I didn't get sucked into the Halo 2 craze, I did play and respect what the Xbox Live experience had to offer. Those were exciting times, now everything is jacked into the net. Giantbomb is doing some live streaming of it's last moments so head on over to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/giant-bomb-live-test to catch some of the action.

Upgrade time?

Kinda lost track of the time when Friday rolled around, anyway on to the good stuff. Now that my PC is pretty stable since I fixed those loose memory timings, I've been eyeing a spiffy upgrade for my PC for the upcoming year and haven't decided on throwing another GTX 295 to run quad SLi or bumping up my CPU to something more speedy/stable. In either case, I definitely need a new PSU which I've decided on, seems like the Corsair 1000HX will be able to get it done for both scenarios.

In gaming news, not too much new other than I've been playing alot of Mount & Blade: Warband. I also tried out Lead and Gold from Fatshark and have to say it's a pretty fun FPS, but it's kinda small. I think the game just makes me wish that Red Dead 2 was already out, but for 15 bucks this is a nice little break from your standard shooter. Game looks alot like Team Fortress 2, and kinda has that feel too, which is good I guess.

Oh yeah, finally changed the layout for our page here to represent the Dale, but I need a new banner, which means work, which means it'll probably never happen. So there you go.

Thursday mang!

With all the new hype the iPad has brought since it's release last week, it's hard to kinda not think about it, even for me and my Apple-phobic self. I don't really have anything against Apple, I just kinda played more games on a PC than anything else, and the Mac was just simply not a choice.

Anyway, I'm not really sure what this device is for. It's not really as productive as having a laptop and it's not really small enough to be a convenient access to apps and the web, so where does it fit? Have we reached a point in our tech that we need a device to use while sleeping in bed or watching T.V. on the couch? At 500 bucks it's not really that affordable either, so I'm having a hard time figuring out where this thing fits.

On a side note, finally got my PC up and I started a queue up for all my games on Steam. The servers are kinda taking a hit though since they decided to let everyone and their grandma download Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer this weekend starting today. It actually kinda made me stop and realize for a second, that I don't actually hold these games and that I'm relying on Steam to always be there when I need it. Kinda scary.

A Trip To Santa Monica

PC Woes Continue

Just when I thought I was starting to get somewhere with my PC, I glanced at my RAM usage on boot and it was at an absurdly high 80-90% usage rate. So now my PC has legs to stand but forgot how to walk so to speak. I tried scrolling through my process to find out what obnoxious app would dare take up so much resources on boot and came up with nothing. No flags on my AV protection (Norton IS 2010) and disabling startup apps didn't really help.

So I started on another journey of restoring my PC back to a fresh image I had saved on my server. Sounds like plan. I boot up and pop in the CD and get a nice "Server is not found" message. Great, I fiddle with my LAN setup for another hour or so since I have a kind of unfriendly setup of 1 router and 1 VOIP router set as a bridge. After reconfiguring and restoring the network and essentially placing both the server and my PC on the same physical router with static IP's, the server might as well have been on Pluto.

With those series of mishaps effectively killing my day, I turn to my last resort, nuking the sum'beech with a reformat and reload. So while I'm doing that, I figure I should check on my server since it pretty much failed on me. Come to find out that all is not well with the server too, with some processes not starting up like they should and getting a looping mysql error message upon boot. So I nuked that beech too. When the dust settles I should be in good shape hopefully, I should probably run a test restore while I'm at work tomorrow just to be sure. At least I got in a few games of Solitaire today, here's to tomorrow.

Surprise

In another futile attempt to keep this site updated, I'm going to try and post short daily posts which may or may not be about nothing, and probably won't be spruced up with a nice picture. So here goes...

Tonights gaming session started off with Mount and Blade: Warband for PC, and well it lasted way too long. I am having way too much fun with that game than I probably should. It's got some outdated graphics, a kind of clunky UI, and a very steep learning curve but for some reason that game's got plenty of appeal. There's something cool about setting up your own army and laying waste to villages and castles from a 3rd person perspective.

On another note, I think I've gotten my BSOD's figured out, seems like it's related to my OC and the CPU voltage my PSU is pumping out. For whatever reason 1.45V ain't cutting it anymore and I'm getting mad 101 BSOD's in alot of my games, which either points to an unstable board or my PSU starting to fail on me. Anyway, I should be able to figure it out tomorrow once I run this evga utility that took me 3 days to get (long story).

Chillin with RJ, Again!

It's been far too long since an update, so here's a video post.

Sik

Browsing through some old vids and found this short clip of Jason shredding, enjoy.

what

elephnat especial bideo number one

Anybody into Airsoft?

Anybody into Airsoft? Got some really sweet gear that we're trying to sell, these things were treated like babies and the vest wasn't even used.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220565554734&ssPageName=ADME:L:LCA:US:1123

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220565550452&ssPageName=ADME:L:LCA:US:1123

Heaviest Rain

A few days of hair raising moments and shouting at the game, I finally finished Heavy Rain. The game sets you up controlling three characters on the trail of a serial killer that kills children by drowning them with rain, hence the title. From start to finish, the game has a certain lethargic feel to it which, well, gets you down. But overall the story is pretty good and the action sequences feel like they're taken straight from some Die Hard fight scene. I've never really felt that way about "fights" inside a game before but in this game, I was always tense and gritting my teeth from every blow. My biggest regret is putting down 60 bucks for what you can really beat in a day. There's some replayability with it since there's multiple endings and some bonus clips you can unlock but the whole storyline won't change, there's no character building mechanics, and it's just a singleplayer experience. My only hope is that maybe they'll release some episodes as DLC with other characters kinda like Rockstar did with GTAIV.

Thoughts on WKC

I was able to finally get through White Knight Chronicles over the weekend, and I can't help but feel utterly disappointed with that game. It had some neat ideas and the online mode offers alot of replaybility, but all in all it feels pretty underdeveloped, which is amazing because the game was conceptually announced in '06. The game does offer some deep gameplay (which is of course the hallmark of any good JRPG) but it all seems too focused on the Online mode. Since the online mode carries over the exhaustive combat system, skills, and rather bland quests, the game just falls short of delivering any kind of solid positive experience.


The true heart of any decent RPG is having likeable characters that interact in an engrossing story. Kinda like a Reading Rainbow vibe. Unfortunately, the character you create doesnt talk at all, Leonard (the main character) felt more like a tool to move the story along rather than an actual dude, Eldore was just too much of a fake Auron for me to pay attention to, and Yulie kinda revolved around Leonard which didn't really offer anything for me. What does this all mean to you? If you enjoy a good RPG story and characters, move along. Another gripe with the game is the combat system.


At first, I really liked the real-time combat but throughout the entire game, I only ever used 2-3 different attacks, maybe a Combo if I wanted to see some Devil May Cry action, and spamming the White Knight transformation. For having so many different types of attacks, none of them really felt as useful as just finding the one that dealt the most damage possible. Status ailments, debuffs, buffs all were kinda short lasting and not really needed.


I have to say that the online mode is probably the only portion of the game really worth taking a look at. There's a unique Georama Hub that you can create which is essentially a small Town for others to connect to and queue up Quests, gather materials, sell/buy items, and just act as a central lobby. There's a crafting system to go along with the harvesting, recruiting NPC's into your town to add beneficial attributes, and I'm sure other crazy stuff for the online mode that I haven't even seen yet. If you enjoy a pretty deep online experience from an RPG, then by all means take a look at this game, but beware of the shoddy singleplayer mode and non-varying combat mechanics.

Windows Phone 7

My T-Mobile contract is ending pretty soon, what perfect timing...

Let it be known

White Knight Chronicles

So far this year has started off pretty awesome and this new JRPG, White Knight Chronicles, is keeping up the pace. Not your traditional, traditional JRPG game, the game has a real-time action orientated combat system which is reminiscent of FFXII's, it also has an interesting combo mechanic where you can land multi-hit attacks with quick button presses which are based off your skills that you assign for the combo, not to mention the ability to transform into a huge white knight. It's stuff like this and the game's skills system that keeps it fresh. The online portion of the game features a 4 player coop allowing you to complete quests that you purchase in singleplayer mode with others. Insert crafting weapons and armor and enchanting them as well, and this game totally feels like Japan is giving you a nice big hug.

On the downside, the game's story seems pretty weak so far. Standard save the princess stuff with piss poor voice acting, and even the script and characters seem pretty week (coming from stellar stuff from Mass Effect 2). It's got enough going for it for me to keep playing, that is until all the other stuff coming out totally consumes me in the not so distant future.

From an RPG to MAG

So I found a Best Buy gift card the other day and figured I'd finally see what the commotion was about MAG. It's got a weird mix of Battlefield and Socom to it, maybe what Socom Confrontation might have been if Slant Six didn't take over. It's got several different game modes and maps tailored for big games of 64 players up to 256 total along with a persistent leveling system where you can unlock weapons, attachments and gear. In order to spread the players out and avoid chaos, the game locks you into squads where you and about 8 others attack a single objective while the rest of your team goes after their objective on the other side of the map.

The shooting resembles something close to GRAW where guns definitely have some range to them and shooting without aiming will rarely get you a kill, even close up. The leveling is kinda fun and is a nice hook to keep you playing just like it did in BF2/2142. There are some vehicles in the game but the whole thing feels too infantry focused and the vehicles feel sort of like an afterthought in the game. It's too early for me to tell if I'll stick with this for awhile but for now its been fun playing a multiplayer fps on console again (which I hardly do cause I have issues with FPS+gamepads).

Finally... Chillin With Jason S2E3

WAT?

You know, I always wondered what the hell was taking Squeenix so long to release their nex-gen Final Fantasy game. Fast forward to 3 years later and we have the Japanese release with our version of the game coming up in March. It appears that the game was originally slated as a PS2 only release. Everyone and their mom knew the PS3 was coming out by 2006, but Squeenix held onto the development of FFXIII on the PS2 for one and a half years. What?! Seriously? Imagine playing a AAA title that was released on a previous gen console. Who does that? Why did they even consider...oh well. That just kinda blew my mind. Well it's 2010 now and I'm ready for my fill of Final Fantasy.

Oh yeah, the XIV Online is dropping this year too. Will I be able to even handle an MMO? Whatever, I'm definitely psyched about killing my first Rarab, San d'Orian pride '03 muhfuggas.

Mass Effect 2 - Sweet.

What a game to start off the new year. Yes, I'm talking about Mass Effect 2. I was finally able to sink my teeth into it this weekend and man, I can't get enough of it after putting in 22+ hours in. You can really tell that Bioware sat down with ME1 and said what could we do to make this game substantially better, it shows right from the get go. The improved frame rate, straightforward class and level builds, distinct quality side missions, improved character backstory, and just the overall shooting and tightness of controls make this game really fun to play.

Oh and in case anyone was wondering what exactly happens with your game save transfer from ME1, I think all it pretty much does is transfer over some of the decisions you made, your class if you want to keep it, some credits, and your appearance. Probably the most important and coolest feature of it all is the transfer of your decisions throughout ME1, there was some stuff ranging from not so important to game changing factors determined off of that stuff so it really felt like more of an extension from the first game rather than a traditional sequel to a game.

ME2 does feel alot more streamlined for the masses with its very upfront and limited RPG mechanics, but I think it's a good approach for this game since it doesn't really get in the way of the story but still gives you different ways to play the game. The game is a little more approachable now but it's still a very dry Sci-fi game in between all of the action. I haven't beat it yet but I can safely recommend it to fans of the first game or anyone who loves a good Sci-Fi themed story/RPG. Oh, and Shepard is Boss.

Watch The Carlos's

We caught The Carlos's debut showing at Butler's Coffee and I have to say, those guys have serious talent. We showed up about 30 minutes early for some good seats but the place was pretty much packed when we got there, so we had to snag a seat in the back. The place had a wifi AP setup so we were able to stream it live, I clipped it and it is now viewable for the masses. Great show Carlos, let us know when you're next show is!


Watch live video from elephnat on Justin.tv

Watch live video from elephnat on Justin.tv

Watch live video from elephnat on Justin.tv

live at Butler’s Coffee @ 6:00PM

hey everyone check out The Carlos's aka carlos at Butler's coffe (It’s right across from Wal-Mart, and just a short hop from Cinemark, the Antelope Valley Mall, the Antelope Valley Country Club and Highway 14.) on the 30th of this month his first show and we should all be there to support him. for more info check out his music myspace listin to some of his music and add him. The Carlos'

Where: Butler's Coffee, 40125 10th St. West, Palmdale, CA 93551
When: Saturday, Jan. 30th, 6:00PM PST
Who: The Carlos's



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Java Jam

Red Dead Redemption

I'm sure I would have liked Red Dead Revolver if I got it when it first came out, that game had serious business style, but the game mechanics and storyline felt very dated when Jason and I tried it out. Thank jeebus they're making a sequel and man does it look good. This trailer/infomercial shows off a much improved ragdoll that carries bullet momentum, pretty much the same style as the Killzone 2 stuff. Besides that, the game looks action packed, has a kick ass main character, and Mexicans with Sombreros, it's a done deal. Its droppin April 27th.

New Chrome Version Adds Extensions, Bookmark Sync | Maximum PC

New Chrome Version Adds Extensions, Bookmark Sync | Maximum PC

Somehow I missed the latest addition to Google's Chrome browser allowing you to finally use "Extensions" or add-ons. This was one of the biggest features that kind of made Chrome feel a little outdated, but no more! There's already over 1,500 extensions available and a new synchronize bookmarks feature lets you save your bookmarks to your account, allowing you to pull up all your faves from any PC instantly. Just a quick note, you'll need to download the beta version of Chrome since Extensions are not available for the released version, which you can get here http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/. Here's just a few that you might find interesting:

Chromed Bird - lets you get down on some tweeting from your browser.

GMail Checker - instant inbox alerts and email access.

Bloggr Tool - post blogs to your blogs about blogs.

AdThwart - brought over from Firefox plugins, effective ad-killing tool that removes ads.

Speed Dial - Opera's speed dial makes it's way into Chrome.

MARY & 501 MOVIES IN 365 DAYS

"MY GOAL IS TO WATCH THE 501 MOVIES LISTED IN "501 MUST-SEE MOVIES" WITHIN THE YEAR, AND BY DOING SO, GAIN MORE INSIGHT INTO THE MOVIE WORLD BY WRITING A BIT ABOUT THE FILMS I WATCH." Mary watching movies, now theres a blog i can get behind. Go on over and follow this gal, she knows what shes doing. And be nice. MARYS BLOG

12 Days after New Years, Happy!

Happy New Years! Oh crap that was 12 days ago!! Nothing like to continue bad habits into the new year, right? Anyway, I really do hope everyone had a great New Years, it's kind of refreshing to sit down and actually think about improving yourself for the upcoming year, then again, doing so is a whole other story.

Gaming News:
I finally finished off Zelda: Twilight Princess last week. When I started that game I was set to finish it within two or three days. After investing over 20 hours into the game, I realized that I couldn't realistically do that, so I kinda just set it aside and completely forgot about it. After a long hiatus, I popped it back in and finished the last 3 or 4 dungeons and stabbed that sucka Ganondorf in his chest. The game was a solid Zelda title, but I can't help but feel that Ocarina of Time was just a bigger and better game. Now that I think about it, I might just pick that up off of the Wii Store...

I also picked up Final Fantasy: The Crystal Bearers. Im not a big fan of the Crystal Chronicles series of the FF line, but the trailers for this game sucked me into getting this one to help tide me over until Firthteem drops later this year. I had to re-check the cover of this game after only the first few minutes of the title screen. I was shooting birds down and using mind powers to toss enemies and objects around. This is a Final Fantasy game? WTF!? The story is out there, the characters are out there, this game is way the freak out there. And that's why I'm compelled to see this story end. The game does feel a little weird without actual experience points, level grinding, or even a real combat menu/sequence. My biggest gripe with the game is the absence of a minimap and an actual helpful real map screen. It's nice that it shows a huge hand showing where I need to go on the map, but it doesn't tell you HOW TO GET THERE! What is this? 199X? I can't waste 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B anymore, I have limited time Squeenix! And oh yeah, there's a beach minigame with 50 half naked girls. In a Nintendo Wii game.

a late happy new year

well sorry to say that this is the first post of the new year. now that a week has past. lol i hope everyone first week of this new year was a good one. and you guys better be keeping with your new years resolutions. i know mine was dead literally seconds after 12 struck i said i was going to quit smoking and as soon as it hit 12 i lit up a cigarette so dont be like me and keep it up people. welcome 2010 goodbye 09