Mobile gaming, Dead Space

I've gotten really into mobile gaming on my iPhone,

especially the free Dead Space game.

It's good and definitely impressive for a free mobile game. 

This is the type of game I would have expected only for platform or PC not that long ago.

Great graphics and story with cut-scenes, plenty of weapons and upgrades, surprisingly long and without prompts to upgrade to continue playing. Maybe I'm just jaded from the pay-to-play mobile gaming dominating today. All in all, this game is awesome.

At first I wasn't sure about it. I wasn't used to the controls and with a limited weapon I felt helpless.

Thankfully I was on easy mode and so my health was forgiving.

I finally finished the game recently. All went smooth until the last big boss.

I had no idea what to do and found online to hit the yellow spots. After a while of that, it was over, I had won (I guess, sort of).

But then it only got better.

The second time through I kept my weapons and items. I hadn't been able to get up to 200k the first time but easily did the second time through. At the first store I picked up the heavy pulse rifle after selling peng.

Shortly after I had enough to upgrade the suit (RIG). I thought I could take the 90k best, but instead I had to get the first two 30k and 60k upgrades first.

So I had to start saving up again and late in this second run I finally had enough to get the best suit/armor.

Early in the game:

First two suit upgrades (up to level 3) and heavy pulse rifle:

Cut-scene late in the game:

Final (level 4) suit upgrade:

Comic Lover App

I just installed the Comic Book Lover app on my iphone.
I don't have a tablet but this is one of the big reasons I could see getting one, as a convenient digital comic reader. But for now, this is better than sitting at a laptop or desktop.

I was planning to use Google Drive, but when I saw how easy the FTP appeared to be, I tried that first.
Under Transfer -> FTP I found the connection settings for my phone over my wireless router, as IP 192.168.1.2 and port 20000. I left the phone on this view.
In Filezilla, I connected to this IP/port and found an empty directory.
(If failing to connect, disabling and reenabling wireless on iphone seems to help)
I transferred over a test CBR file with drag/drop.
On the iphone, the "Add To Library" button was now enabled.
After clicking it, I saw the message "Finished, 1 comic added to library". Easy as that.

Under the Library, I found the comic listed as (Unknown Series). The metadata tag icon allows setting the title, series, issue #, etc.

The comic reader view looks ok, especially good in landscape view and zoomed in.
Although in this view, when turning the page, it zooms out and then back in on the next page. I don't really like the zoom out and back in, i'd rather have it stay zoomed in and just go to the top of the next page.
Otherwise, I'd say its a nice reader and definitely convenient for me.

Star Wars legacy

I finally finished the Star Wars Legacy series.

In the end, I really enjoyed it, especially how all the different story lines came together.

I wasn't quite happy with the final confrontation, a bit anti-climatic. I just expected a longer and more grueling one-on-one battle. But despite that, it was still satisfying. Especially with the tons of action leading up to it.

PA DLC USB

Recieved my Penny Arcade usb drive in the mail from the Downloadable Content kickstarter.
It has a flexible rubber-feel cover with the PA DLC logo.
It's 8GB and a little over half filled with:

• 40 mp3 from the DLC archives (2006-2009)
• 2 albums from Paul and Storm (Do You Like Star Wars and Learning Town)
• 1 album from MC Frontalot (Favoritism)
• 20 mp3 of PAX Q&A from almost all
• 1 PDF of Book 3 The Warsun Prophecies (circa 2002)
• 9 sizes of the DLC wallpaper jpg

I think I'll be busy for a while absorbing all of this material.

I've already been keeping up with the new DLC podcasts.

After Google Reader shutdown, I moved over to Feedly and I've been following my usual list of xkcd, penny arcade, table titans, trenches, and blastr. I have a few others that I check occasionally like zero punctuation, lifehacker, and slashdot.

XBMC DVD

I usually use XBMC on a PC hooked up to the TV with HDMI, usually for streaming or local TV shows.
But with the lull over the summer, I'm popping in a few DVDs from the library.

My first impression with XBMC playing DVDs was
  'Great, a new menu option just appeared to watch DVDs'
and my second impression was
  'This is so slow and choppy it's unwatchable'.

After some internets searching I stumbled across this XBMC forum.
And the solution of changing the audio settings also worked for me.

I had Audio Output set at HDMI and it needed to be Analog.
I did also set the Audio output device to WASAPI - HDMI.

All was well with the world again.
Well other than the fact that I ended up playing DVDs on the PC because the DVD player is only pushing sound and not video.

Latest Distractions

Got back to reading more of the Star Wars Legacy comics, finished volume 8.
I've had this on hold for months at the library and didn't get it shipped until I cancelled and re-requested.
Now back to waiting for the remaining issues in the series.

I also finished the Blackest Night hardcover collection, which was just awesome.
Zombified and revived characters, spectrums of rings/corps including black and white lanterns, and well tons of characters.

Gaming on my iphone with Dead Ahead. Outrun and shoot zombies on a scooter.
I'm working on rank 15 savior and just did 18,440m on bridge/nightmare location.
I'm was using just the upgraded super scooter, except for the one challenge i needed to use the quad. Same thing with always using the grenade launcher except for rank challenges where i need to use others (like submachine). The double ammo and fast reload definitely help along with the 2nd chance.

Finished getting caught up in Game of Thrones, Being Human and Californication.
Now watching Defiance on Hulu and starting into Arrow.