Finally, finished playing Metal Gear Solid 4. This is the 4th and, supposedly, final installment of the Metal Gear series and it sure climaxes with a big bang. The games ties up the story lines of the previous games together, including any loose ends. I was only able to play Metal Gear Solid from the series.
Assassin’s Creed II
Assassin’s Creed II is the sequel to the love-it-or-hate-it Assassin’s Creed. I myself haven’t played the first game but from what I see one group loved it because of the huge, detailed, and history-based game world and storyline. While the other group hated it because of the dreary repetitive missions and bland cutscenes.
Sony Playstation 3 Slim
I was a gamer not too long ago. I played a whole gamut of games from classic arcade games like Pac-man, Space Invaders to classic PC games like King’s Quest, Karateka, Prince of Persia, to the modern FPS, RPG, and RTS like Doom I/II, Duke Nukem, Quake I/II/III, Unreal, Command and Conquer I/II, Red Alert I/II, Warcraft I/II/III (and DOTA), Diablo I/II, Starcraft, I even played an MMORPG: Ragnarok (yesh!). But I guess work and studies plus an underpowered laptop put all that to rest.
With the series of holidays coming up, I wanted to have something to while away the time during the occasional respites from attending to Jeanne (and to a certain extent Michelle). Aside from watching movies, what’s better than being part of those movies, in an interactive way i.e. games, right?
Skype on Linux
My sister needed a computer for reviewing for her medical exams so I lent her my old (ancient?) IBM Thinkpad X22 which is running Kubuntu. She needed Skype to be able to talk to her hubby who is in the US so we downloaded and installed Skype. Well, what do you know? It actually installed and ran without a hitch. Linux definitely has come a long way. If it we’re not for my games, I would have it on my Asus EEE PC 1000H. I wonder if it’s time to check out Wine, the Linux Windows Emulator, again. Hmmm.
Hamachi
My brothers are out of town but that won’t stop us from playing DOTA :P This morning, we played against each other as if we were on the same network. Well, not really since there was a slight latency delay due to the generally poor quality (and expensive at that!) of Internet connection in this country. But it definitely was playable.
So how did we do it? We used Hamachi, an almost zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) utility. It was such a breeze to use: We set it up, I created a VPN (along with an access password), and we all joined the VPN. It’s not your heavy metal, ultra-robust, super secure VPN solution but it’s enough for most needs and, as I said, almost zero-configuration*.
*We did encounter a snag when we couldn’t find games in DOTA but we found the solution here. Basically it means going to Control Panel->Network Connections->Advanced->Advanced Settings and putting Hamachi to the top of the list of connections.