Ty’s Weblog

I’m upgraded from Gaim today to Pidgen. My only complaint was all the work I had to do fix it so that control-enter sent messages and enter entered a newline.

I found this blog entry about the problem, but it links to a 404 currently, so it wasn’t much help. After a lot of searching, I was able to find this ticket which helped me create a .gtkrc-2.0 file (which goes in your %USERPROFILE% directory in Windows). So I’m reproducing what I finally got to work for others to find and use.

binding "pidgin-bindings"
{
# enter inserts a newline
bind "Return" { "insert-at-cursor" ("\n") }
# ctrl-Enter sends message
bind "<ctrl>Return" { "message_send" () }
}
widget "*pidgin_conv_entry" binding "pidgin-bindings"

Ultima 5 Lazarus has been realeased. It’s a remake of Ultima 5 using the Dungeon Siege engine. I’ve not gotten it installed yet, but everything I’ve heard about it had been great. So you you like that kind of game (and own Dungeon Siege) it’ll be worth checking out.

GameSpot is reporting the rumor that Half-Life 2 has gone gold pretty much as fact.

Game Gossip is reporting that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake eater will be out Nov 17th.

Paper Mario came out this week.

Vamipire the Masquerade: Bloodlines comes out the day before my birthday.

Donkey Konga has been out for a little while and Xander and I want to play.

Halo 2 has gone gold.

This is a very good time of year for games.

Irrational Games has announced the development of BioShock, the “spiritual successor” to System Shock 2, which is one of the best games ever.

There are a bunch of IP issues which keep them from doing an acutal sequel, which is too bad, but I’ll take what I can get.

No word on release dates yet, but I’m looking forward to this one quite a bit.

Doom 3 was a fair amount of fun. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped though. It was beautiful, without a doubt. The graphics engine is amazing and I can’t wait to see what someone like Raven does with it.

The whole game was kind of a one trick pony. Things jump out at you and it scares you. It got kind of old after awhile. The bosses were all pretty easy. I found having multiple enemies to fight much tougher than dealing with any of the bosses. The last boss was even trivial.

I had a good time playing it, but overall I was kinda disapointed with it.

Bethesda Softworks has announced the development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. No other details yet, but I’m already excited.

My new computer arrived today.

3.2 GHz Intel P4 w/1MB cache
1GB PC3200 DDR Memory
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard
eVGA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB DDR3 8X
Creative Lab SB Audigy 2 ZS 7.1

Doom3 plays great on it!

Yes, I’ve started playing EverQuest again. We’ll see how long it lasts this time.

A demo has been released for Deus Ex 2. I’m bittorrenting it right now. I plan on giving it a try when Xander is down for his nap this afternoon.

Blue’s News has a list of other mirrors.

The patch for ToEE is finally out. I know what I’ll be doing tonight! I’ve been holding off on actually playing this for a while now, because of all the bugs. Hopefully this will get the game into a playable and enjoyable state.

I love iTunes. I really didn’t think I would. It’s easy to use. The cost is reasonable. Even the DRM isn’t too bad. I’ve very happy with it so far. I’ve only bought 3 songs so far, but I expect that number to climb fairly rapidly. I gave Kate a demo of it, and she thought it was great also. I expect in the near future our CD buying will drop off sharply. I also suspect it will lead to us buying at least one iPod in the near future.

My only complaint is that a fair amount of the music which I like to listen to isn’t avaliable in their store, but that’s a problem that can fix itself with time.

I don’t think I ever mentioned that I’d finshed Tron 2.0 and Jedi Academy.

Both were very good games, but Jedi Academy is the stronger of the two. Tron looked nicer, but Jedi Academy had a much better story and better game play in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I bought and played Tron it was a lot of fun, but if I had to make a choice, Jedi Academy would win in a second.

It has a very good story, even if it is predictable at times. The force powers are very useful, and they actually keep improving on the light saber duels.

A new version of the official BitTorrent client is out. I’m still using an experimental client that has a lot more info about what is going on during the session, so I’m not gonna upgrade quite yet.

I’m weak. Yesterday, I realized that The Temple of Elemental Evil was out. I also realized that I had a $5 off coupon from my Best Buy Reward Zone membership. Sum the two and I’m now it’s proud owner. I’ve only played it for about 30 minutes, because Kate and I have been busy catching up on Stargate SG-1. It’s a good game so far though. It’s not completely 3.5 edition D&D, but it’s pretty close.

I look forward to getting more play time in today during quiet time for Xander.

My copy of Jedi Academy came yesterday. With all the hurricane preparation I didn’t get a chance to play it very much. I did manage to make it through one mission though, and it was quite fun. After playing the demo, where you play as a fairly advanced character, it’s neat to see my character start out using his light saber in a clumsy fashion. I look forward to seeing the skills develop over the course of the game.