I was one of the most excited people about the release of Spore when the time came for the game to be released, and among my circle, I probably played it the most, but eventually I succumbed to the lack of depth in the game play like many others did.

I found myself eventually using it pretty much exclusively for the space ship builder rather than actually playing the game; there was very little left to discover in the game play. It is with a mix of hope and dread that I’ve been following the news of the first full-scale expansion pack for Spore, entitled Spore Galactic Adventures.

News of what it will contain is a bit thin at the moment, but it does sound like it contains at least some of what it’s going to need to make the game really playable again. It will ship with some planet-based adventures in the box, and provide another editor that puts adventure creation in the hands of the players. Like other player-generated content, adventures will be shared online so there should be no shortage of missions your intrepid galactic explorers can take part in.

My main concern is with the potential depth of these adventures, and what news I’ve seen hasn’t given me a lot of information to make guesses about. It is pretty cool that you’ll be able to beam down on planets to explore as your creature & crew, and it sounds like outfits will have practical uses at last, but will the adventures themselves last 5 minutes? Half an hour? More? Or will it be up to the designer of the adventure?

If done well, this could be a pretty compelling reason to get back into the game. Spore itself was a pretty big letdown though, so I’m going to stay a bit cautious in my optimism, at least until a lot more is known.

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A quick note to begin with. This blog documents my impressions of Persona 3 FES, as opposed to Persona 3. The two are not entirely the same game;  Persona 3 FES contains extra content not available in the original Persona 3. However, for the sake of my aching fingers, I’m going to just call it Persona 3 or even P3.

Yes, the name of the game really is Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 FES. What a mouth full! With a name like that, you just have to guess that it’s a  Japanese role playing game, and you’d be very correct. This is no Final Fantasy though, and that’s a good thing.

I love the Final Fantasy series, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I need a break from that style of play, and Persona 3 has given it to me. This is not  a game of physical exploration, wandering from place to place in a vast fantasy/sci-if environment, meeting strange creatures and killing them.

No, this is a game that takes place largely within a few specific locations in one small town. The physical exploration takes place within a vast secret tower in the town, while the bulk of the exploration is more social – exploring relationships between your protagonist and the various friends you make in  and out of school during the course of a full calendar year.

You do your explorations in the role of the Main Character, or MC as he’s often referred to online. In the game, he’s referred to by whatever name you  choose to give him.

MC is a fairly typical high school student, or at least he seems to be at first. His life can take any number of turns depending on how you play the  game. Is he going to be a straight-A student with incomparable academics? A social butterfly that can charm the socks off the ladies? Maybe someone very brave in the face of danger and dating? Manage your time well and you can make him any or all of these, or not, as you prefer.

It all depends on how you want to play him, and the game as a whole. Your socialization with other characters and groups that you meet will have a strong effect on your combat performance in the dungeon parts of the game, thanks to an interesting experience system based on the concept of “Social Links” that power the various personas you control. The stronger your social ties, the more experience a related persona gains when you create it.

Social links are only one method of improvement, however. The charm, academics and courage stats that I alluded to earlier are another form of social advance; your progress on those three stats determines how strong your relationships can get with three particular characters that are of critical importance to your game, and may have other effects as well. I’m not quite at the halfway point in the game yet, so I can’t really say authoritatively what those possible other effects would be.

Like most RPGs, your main character has hitpoints and spirit (magic) points, but lacks most other common stat types; strength, endurance, magical potency and the other “vital” stats are not associated with MC himself. Instead, they are associated with the various personas MC can make use of. This means switching personas in the middle of a battle has a much greater impact that just changing your selection of special abilities; the fundamental traits of your character change as well. You might switch from an exceptionally high strength with one persona to one that’s very physically weak, and find yourself doing far less melee damage as a result. The tradeoff may be that your magic potential is hugely boosted. This is a pretty fascinating system that makes the choice of personas all the more strategically important.

Not having finished the game yet, this isn’t a full review, but just an impression. I’ll leave off at this before I get into anything too spoilerish, but I’ll invite anyone who’s interested to comment or write to me with questions. If I can answer them, I certainly will.

My impression so far: This is a beautiful gem of a game, not to be missed if you can handle going back to the last generation of console games and picking up something for the PS2 ninstead of the shiny and new PS3.

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New fan got ordered yesterday. It shipped today. With any luck it’ll arrive tomorrow. If not, it should be here Thursday.

The impressions piece on Persona 3 FES is delayed until the main system is up and running. Until that happens, my desktop is basically the most expensive paperweight I own.

Update: No joy today, the fan is still en route. Hopefully tomorrow then.
On the plus side, my signed “10 Years of UserFriendly.org” book did arrive today with a nifty T-shirt as an added bonus. Thank you J.D, not just for the book, but for 10+ years of laughs, in the comic and outside it.

My friend and co-worker Jesse Scoble was kind enough to feature my site on his blog today after finding my link over on Facebook.  This was a pretty cool gesture on his part so I thought it only fair to return the favor. You can check out his site at http://jscoble.com/

Jesse’s been in the industry a while so I always enjoy talking with him about what he’s working on, projects we’ve done in the past, etc. His site has been up for a couple of years now, so there’s plenty to dig into; I know I will be.

My celebration of the crash-free computer was a bit premature. I’ve had two of the worst crashes yet today, but at least it conclusively identified the problem for me – my computer just got around to informing me that the CPU fan is running too slow and failing. This is disappointing, but at the same time, as bad hardware goes it’s just about as cheap to replace as it’s possible to get, so I’m VERY relieved. I was afraid for a while I might have to get a new video card, motherboard or processor, none of which I can afford at the moment.

So it seems for the time being I won’t be able to play any serious computer games. No Half-Life 2, no Portal, no Sims 2, at least until I can get a new fan installed. The system seems to run fine as long as I avoid taxing it with games.

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When I last wrote about my Windows 7 adventures last weekend, my system was in a mostly usable state but with several big question marks hanging over it.

1) I had no sound, since I could not convince my X-Fi sound card to work with Win7.
2) My system was initially crashing, something I’d been experiencing for a couple of months in Vista as well.

I’m happy to report that issue 1 is now resolved; it was a relatively simple matter to fix. I simply installed the Windows Vista X-Fi drivers using compatibility mode, and much to my surprise, they worked fine; I can look forward to some testing of various games over the weekend. (My hit list of choice: Half-Life 2 and it’s various episodes, Portal, and Fallout 3. I’d try The Sims 2 as well, but there aren’t enough hours in the weekend.)

As far as issue 2 goes, the system has been rock solid since I blasted years’ worth of dust out of the fans. Funny how that works, huh? I can’t say for sure yet that it’s fixed. The machine did run for a good 2 weeks straight over the holidays under Vista. But at this point, I’m pretty confident in saying Windows 7 is very stable and my machine is definitely liking things as they stand. Stay tuned for my post-gaming report sometime early in the week.

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Week 2 back at the gym with a new trainer. My original trainer was great; maybe a little too great. She got herself promoted. Dan, my new trainer, is really cool too, but man do I ache for days after each workout! My body feels like it’s made of rubber bands tonight. But that’s a good thing I guess, it means I’m doing something right.

I’m working on an impression post about Persona 3 FES. I’m hoping to have that up tomorrow night or certainly by the weekend. It’s an incredibly compelling Japanese RPG that plays like a dating sim game combined with a dungeon crawler. That description really doesn’t do it any justice at all, so I hope you’ll check back here this weekend and get a better picture of what it’s like.

That’s about it for tonight. Stay tuned for more soon!

The install finished without a hitch and it wasn’t long before I was running Windows 7. And I really mean it wasn’t long; the news out there about how fast it boots is right on the money. From hitting the switch on the computer through booting to a usable environment, Vista takes about 5 minutes on my system. Windows 7? Less than a minute. Maybe a touch over half.

Usability land isn’t all rosey good news, though. The first program I tried to get set up was Google Chrome, my favorite browser. It turns out it has known compatibility issues though, and while technically it will run, it can’t render pages, making it kind of useless. So I installed my second choice, Firefox 3. That one, I’m happy to report, does run perfectly well right away.

Windows 7 has a lot of new features, and I won’t go into them all here because, well, because Microsoft isn’t paying me for this. That, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s changed in this thing. The new task bar is both good and bad. I like how you can pin applications to it, similar to the way MacOS works. I like the preview windows; they’ve improved over Vista’s previews and now act as a selection mechanism for apps that have more than one window open. I don’t, however, like the fact that the quick launch icons are gone now. I can understand why, since you can pin shortcuts to the bar, but as a creature of habit, it’s going to take me some time to get used to that change.

I’ve had some issues with audio as well. At the time I write this, my Creative X-Fi sound card isn’t supported, so I won’t get to test out Fallout in the immediate future. It’s a good thing the games I’m actively playing right now are console games; Animal Crossing: City Folk on the Wii and Persona 3 FES on the PS2 are going to be getting most of my gaming attention for a while, I think.

The Win7 interface has been cleaned up a lot from what we got in Vista, and for the better as near as I can see. I haven’t dug too deeply into things like changing network configurations and other nitty-gritty details yet, but I was up and online with it in no time, and those things I have tried to configure have been pretty easy to get to. My adventures with Windows 7 are just beginning, and I’m sure I’ll have more stories to tell, both good and bad, in the coming days and weeks.

For now, thank you for putting up with my long-windedness!

The initial install of Windows 7 beta went pretty quickly, and the whole thing was without incident. There was very little for me to input beyond the type of install I wanted.

Having done more than my fair share of installs with previous versions of Windows, I expected it to take a lot longer. Windows 7 first impressed me by identifying my TV and configuring it as a secondary display device before it had even finished installing itself. Every previous version of Windows I’ve used has had to be told there was another monitor attached, and this one picked up a TV. I like that quite a bit; it reminds me a bit of BeOS, an alternative operating system I used to use years ago.

All in all, I would say the install took maybe half an hour. Possibly up to 40 minutes, but no more than that. That, of course, is before you get to all the post-install work that needs to be done on a clean computer – installing apps, setting it up the way you want it, etc. I’ll begin to get into that in part 3.

Welcome to my first real blog post! Just a quick introduction; my name is Gord McLeod, and I’ve been a writer for years. I’ve had some minor fiction publications (short stories in now-defunct magazines,) and have had a game instruction manual published as well. This is my corner of the web to rant, rave, and pontificate about things that interest me, which will likely be very heavily biased towards science fiction movies and TV, video games, and news on science/technology/archaeology/anthropology. I’m just going to dive right in tonight with my first post on today’s experiments running Windows 7.

Windows Vista has been crashing a lot on me lately. Two years with barely a hiccup and suddenly it’s very difficult to play Fallout 3 for more than maybe an hour or so without the computer locking hard on me.

I know, many people will be thinking, “What, Vista, crashing? Say it ain’t so!” But it’s true, it was extremely stable for me for years. Others have had their bad experiences, I had my good one, at least until recently.

This is where Windows 7 comes in. Just yesterday, Microsoft released the public beta of Windows 7. I’ve always been prone to living on the bleeding edge, and even beta versions of Windows aren’t too bloody for me. I put it on a blank DVD this morning and went to work installing it.