Reaction: PSP X-Men Legends 2

I must say I haven't been this taken with a new game in quite some time. I guess a plain old action game was just what the doctor ordered. X-Men for PSP (and available on several other platforms) is a Zelda-like action-RPG. That is, it's mostly a walking around and beat things up, but with a mixture of puzzle-solving and character-customization.

I only started playing last night on the Easy mode (where most options are automated; the AI will equip what it thinks are the most powerful add-ons to your characters). It took me a while to get used to - in the sense that I hadn't played the first game, and secondly, there is very little in the way of in-game documenation. I spent a lot of my first hour or two just experimenting with what buttons did what... But other than that, I started to realize that there was some sort of intuitiveness to the experience even if I didn't necessarily know what every single status icon meant. Particularly annoying, however, is the selection of super-powers your team members have... you only have an icon to go by and in the heat of battle is not the time to be guessing what 4 pink dots together is supposed to signify.

But once you do get the gist of everything walking around throwing punches can be a great stress reliever. For my early missions, I selected my old favourites: Wolverine, Rogue, Cyclops, and Storm... it only took a little while to understand that by looking at certain coloured meters, I could tell when Wolvie would soon be able to unleash one of his special attack moves, or when Cyke could blast away with a choice of optic-blast patterns, etc...

In fact, I just spent the better part of 3 hours sitting in bed with my PSP... bringing my total game time to nearly 8 hours (I spent 2 hours this morning with the PSP while waiting for my automotive work to be done). Yessirrie - I think we have a winner.

Bad timing...

So I get this email from my cellular carrier about their Perks program... kind of a freebie they send out to their customers now and then. This time it happens to be right up my alley: a $15 gift certificate at Toys R Us. The catch: it's only good for one week.

So of course, I hop right onto the web and check out their games prices. Ordered X-Men Legends 2 for my PSP on Sunday night - I figure on a week for delivery.

As it turns out: according to the Purolator tracking link, it was delivered today ...on the very day I happen to not come home (was at the dentist, by the way). And on the very day where I won't be home during the day for the next two days (I've already got plans for tomorrow afternoon and evening).

So I have to make plans for Friday to rush back home since I know the admin office is closed on weekends. Ugh. The hassles of apartment-living... you know, I was almost hoping they wouldn't be able to deliver to the admin so that I could call them to redirect the package to the Purolator outlet near work. *sigh*

One last Valkyrie

What can I say, it's the holiday season... that and Toy-Wave was having a sale! ^_^;

But anyway, this arrived in the mail today!



That's a hundred bucks well-spent. ^o^;;;
No seriously, this is the last 1/48 scale Valkyrie I plan on buying. My plan is to transplant the Strike Armour (currently worn by the limited edition Low-Visibility plane) over to this one to give it the appearance it had during the movie. And the "TV" armour set from my VF-1J will go over to the Low-Viz. When the GPB-1 armour set comes out in Janurary, I'll put that on the VF-1J to give it the appearance from the "Miss Macross" episode in the original series...

*sigh*... see I wasn't kidding - I really did intend for this to be the last one.@_@

Fun stuff: more Star Wars Minis

This oughtta be old news since they've been out for a while, but the last "expansion" set for Star Wars Minis was called "Universe" which to me implied it would contain all those characters features in novel and comics but not seen in the 6 movies themselves. Turns out the gimick isn't its theme, but rather the new "huge" scale characters.

While doing some much needed Christmas shopping yesterday (it was really nice out for a long walk), I decided to splurge on myself with a booster pack for my Star Wars Minis game and here they are:

And yeah, they are from all over. For instance, yes, it's Darth Vader there, but he's known as "Jedi Hunter" and his game stats on the accompanying playing card shows that he's got unusual rules when playing against other Force characters. This would be the Vader we don't get to see between the events of Episode 3 and Episode 4. Also there's the box-like "Gonk" droid we saw among the scrap heaps in episode 4. While that big monster in the back is some kinda super-duper droid I'm not familiar with at all... his inherent coolness is that he's so damned big. ^_^;
(I'm told it's from some old comic published by Dark Horse called Dark Empire.)

Anywho, I also grabbed another Green Lantern book yesterday. Called "Circle of Fire" it collects one of those "event" type thingies publishers were into a while back when they wanted to push a second-stringer. In this case, Green Lantern teams up with a series of third-tier characters, none of which got any sort of follow-up, unfortunately (not for a while anyway). I've read about half now and I have mixed feelings about it so far. It's not great, but it doesn't suck either.

Also stopped for my weekend latte. Just the right sort of thing when the weather sort of hovers at freezing - like it can't decide whether to be cold or warm.

On a final note and completely unrelated to this post, here's a photo I forgot to post yesterday morning. It shows the case stickers I had finally applied. Just wish it could've been a little clearer....

PC: it lives!!

Wow - that was actually fun (except for the part where I sliced open my left index finger with a sharp edge inside a drive-bay while poking the structure panels out from the inside). The surgery appears to be a success - Zero Prime lives again and here are some pics I took while working on it...

Here's the case ready to go:

The power supply goes in (the blue fans are already factory-installed).

The motherboard goes in (I didn't have to remove the CPU or its fan)... just screwed it into place. I started to deviate from the instruction manual at this point because I wanted to get the front panel wired first and out of the way since they're all at the bottom.

Here I punched out the panels for the external drive bays. Yes, I ended up having a couple of white drives (since I haven't bought a new floppy drive in a whole decade). Also, one of my older DVD-ROM drives is still perfectly good so...

Oh yeah... this was also where I took a break to bandage a badly bleeding wound on my finger... after wards I wasn't in such a great mood so photos came fewer and father in between.

Had to remove the back cover (the manual got a little confusing here and talks about the FRONT cover; WTF?) Anyway, just a matter of adding a few more screws for all my drives.

Things got weird again after this: it took me like an hour to realize that everywhere they say "male connector" they actually mean a "female connector." Either that or my sexual education is severely lacking!!! ^_^;
Anyway, got all the cables done by this point:

Finally, the cover goes on... it fits! ^o^;


And finally powered up... (actually took two tries: the first try it didn't read my floppy and locked up on boot. Other than that, pretty damn lucky).