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Metal Gear Solid

Published May 23, 2008 Gaming 4 Comments

The wait is almost over for MGS4. From mid June it will available to purchase standalone or in a bundle with a 40GB PS3 here in Australia and with a 80GB PS3 in America. Yes, I am still miffed at Sony for dropping PS2 backwards compatibility!

Last week, I purchased a mint condition copy of Metal Gear Solid 1 for PSX. The non-Platinum original version. It cost me $56, but it was well worth it. I played through it again and confirmed that it’s lost none of its magic.

I also finally finished collecting all the Dog Tags in MGS2, including those on Extreme difficulty. Although, I’m ashamed to admit I had to use my Action Replay to give myself infinite rations for some parts. It was just too hard! I purchased MGS2: Sons of Liberty when it was first released back in 2002, but about a year later Konami released MGS2: Substance which contained additional content such as 500 standalone missions. It also has a whole new set of Dog Tags to collect. I already have Substance for the original Xbox, though I will likely end up purchasing it for PS2 as well.

MGS3: Snake Eater was released in Australia in 2005, but I never played it because my PS2 was broken (or so I thought). But now I have decided that I must play it before MGS4, even though chronologically it takes place before the original Metal Gear, I still want to experience the evolution of the gameplay. MGS3 also had a re-release (this time called Subsistence) which included the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake games based on the MSX2 versions.

TAFE permitting, I should be able to finish MGS3 before MGS4 is released and if not, it’s no big deal really. I have plenty of time.

EB Games – Complete Bullshit

Published May 2, 2008 Gaming 2 Comments

According to Kotaku, EB Games, possibly the worst video game store franchise in the history of man kind, is the only store in Australia that will be selling the Limited Edition version of Metal Gear Solid 4… AND THEY’RE ALREADY SOLD OUT.

This is absolute bullshit. Now I’m going to be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars on eBay for a copy. Maybe I could just import it from somewhere and bypass the robbery Australian gamers have always experienced.

AVG Anti-Virus 8.0

Published April 26, 2008 Software Leave a Comment

Grisoft recently released the free version of their latest Anti-Virus software. AVG has always been my favourite anti-virus suite because it’s light weight, yet still scores well against the expensive solutions.

However, something I used to do when installing the old 7.5 version was to untick Email scanner and Resident Shield. The E-mail scanner was pointless to have installed because I don’t use local email. The Resident Shield, which scans files when they manipulated in anyway, is important for some but for people who are extremely careful it just slows down your system.

In 8.0, the Resident Shield cannot be unticked during installation and while it can be disabled from within AVG there is no way to ignore its status, which means AVG is constantly reporting that there’s a problem.

This is very disappointing. Hopefully they add the option to ignore the status of each component in a future update.

The Hideout is now closed

Published April 14, 2008 The Hideout 7 Comments

After setting an all new record last month of 0 new posts, I’ve decided it would be best for me to close the forum down completely.

The Hideout originally began in July 2001. It was hosted on SourceForge using a friend’s account and reached 5,000 posts after 9 months. I started the forum as a replacement for the official DarkBASIC forum, as the software it was using at the time, Phorum, was very poorly featured compared to the other message board scripts of the time, such as YaBB SE.

It was quite popular, with lots of regulars from the DarkBASIC forums posting, however in March 2002 it was “hacked” and everything was deleted. I had a backup, but it was 3 months old. Rather than restore it, I decided to start from scratch in April.

Really, from that point on, it was destined to fail. Sure, most people did come back but they did not post in the same numbers and in August 2002, the new DB forums arrived which were more or less on par with YaBB SE in terms of features.

After the regulars dried up, it turned into almost a pure General Discussion forum, with only a little bit of game development talk happening. Though that did offer some interesting times, with the likes of Joey5rince and ste posting a lot of weird and wonderful things.

And of course, who could forget the legendary debates on religion and gay rights.

I don’t really feel the need to harp on anymore about “the good old days”, except to say it has been fun having my own semi-popular forum and was a more than worthwhile experience.

Thanks to everyone who participated over the last 7 years.

Last Post: Re: Mass Effect to be released on PC -

Maybe not ‘mutating’ per se, but there is emphasis on a non good evil type morality system which is affected by your dialogue. This has impacts on the way the game plays. I also think that there are multiple endings based on the choices you made.

It is open ended, though. Pretty non-linear, because you can choose the planets you wish to go to, but the level design on planets can be linear, I believe.

- P@

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