{"id":204,"date":"2008-04-29T13:20:39","date_gmt":"2008-04-29T02:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=204"},"modified":"2008-05-03T13:49:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-03T02:49:00","slug":"what-ive-been-up-to-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=204","title":{"rendered":"What I&#8217;ve Been Up To (Part 1)&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/dsc00183_reduced.JPG\" alt=\"dsc00183_reduced.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve gotten my Streamyx service up and running, so hopefully I can be online more now. To start with, this is what I&#8217;ve been gaming with for the past month. Since I expected to be in Malaysia on holiday for only a month, I knew it wasn&#8217;t feasible to bring back my main gaming PC all the way from the Solomon Islands. So in order not to become bored silly while on holiday, I bought a PSP. As my wife will readily attest, I&#8217;ve been making noises about buying one ever since it launched, but the higher price and the limited games library available then didn&#8217;t make it seem like a good buy until now.<\/p>\n<p>The really funny thing is that while I originally intended to buy the PSP to play &#8220;deep&#8221; games that I&#8217;ve heard so much about, such as <em>Monster Hunter<\/em> and <em>Armored Core: Formula Front<\/em>, I actually ended up spending most of my time on it on more arcade-style action games like <em>God of War<\/em>, <em>Wipeout Pulse<\/em> and <em>Tekken: Dark Ressurection<\/em>. I have to admit that between the handheld format and the clunky English translations (and the severe lack of them in many places) I just couldn&#8217;t summon up enough enthusiasm to really understand how the deeper games work.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->I&#8217;ve also learned over the past month that while I find arcade-style games to be a lot of fun in short doses, I no longer have the reflexes and finger dexterity to actually do well at them. I did manage to finish <em>God of War<\/em>, which as all of the reviews have pointed out is an awesome looking game with sumptuous graphics that look like they don&#8217;t belong on a handheld, but on <em>Wipeout<\/em> and <em>Tekken<\/em>, I get horribly massacred whenever I attempt to venture out of easy mode. Heck, when I waiting in a queue while at Genting earlier this month, this guy in front of me was playing a PSP and I noticed that he had his thumbs completely covering the control buttons and could accurately control things just by rolling his thumbs around. In my case, I just sort of tap on the appropriate button with the tip of my thumb like a total amateur. That said, I&#8217;m pretty satisfied with my PSP and it&#8217;s great to relax for a change with games that you won&#8217;t normally find on a PC, but the PC will always be my preferred gaming platform.<\/p>\n<p>While I&#8217;ve been messing around with the PSP, here&#8217;s a picture of my current backlog of PC games:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/dsc00180_reduced.JPG\" alt=\"dsc00180_reduced.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>As you can probably guess, this will likely keep me busy for a while. Note that I didn&#8217;t actually buy <em>Dungeons &amp; Dragons Online<\/em>. It was sent to me as a free gift from PCGame.com.my since I managed to get onto their list of people who made the most valuable purchases for the month and I haven&#8217;t even opened it to see what&#8217;s inside yet. I could always try to sell it since I have zero interest in it, but I doubt that I&#8217;d be able to find anyone who&#8217;d want it either.<\/p>\n<p>But before I can actually play any of them, I&#8217;d need to buy a new gaming rig, since it was way more convenient and cost effective to just sell off my old rig in the Solomon Islands to my colleagues there and buy a brand new one here rather than try to bring the whole thing back here. I&#8217;ve been spending quite a bit of time looking at hardware reviews and prices and scouring forums for suggested builds. So how beefy a gaming rig will a budget of around RM4,000 to RM5,000 buy these days? That&#8217;s going to be the subject of a future post. If anyone has suggestions, feel free to comment here or e-mail me at wankongyew at calltoreason.org.<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve gotten my Streamyx service up and running, so hopefully I can be online more now. To start with, this is what I&#8217;ve been gaming with for the past month. Since I expected to be in Malaysia on holiday for only a month, I knew it wasn&#8217;t feasible to bring back my main gaming PC &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=204\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What I&#8217;ve Been Up To (Part 1)&#8230;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}