I just read this article about how Mass Effect 3 will not be on Steam and this article on that you will need Origin to play the PC version and can’t help but shake my head at EA.
It’s a bit sad how they are pushing Origin on people, especially since their Terms of Service state that “By accepting these terms, you and EA expressly waive the right to a trial by jury or to participate in a class action“, “YOU UNDERSTAND THAT BY THIS PROVISION, YOU AND EA ARE FOREGOING THE RIGHT TO SUE IN COURT AND HAVE A JURY TRIAL” and “YOU AND EA AGREE THAT EACH MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN YOUR OR ITS INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING” (all quotes are copied from the ToS). So basically you can’t team up with people to sue them, you can’t sue in court or anything like that. And this is simply by having an EA/Origins account.
Now, I have an Origins account and I’ve already accepted these terms, but I still don’t like it. Only reason I have Origins really is because I have to if I want to be able to play Battlefield 3, have access to the Pinnacle Station DLC for Mass Effect and in all likelihood Star Wars the Old Republic. And the thing is, I had Pinnacle Station on what was the EA Download Manager previously, but I automatically had to upgrade to Origin to be able to access it, plus I already had a social.bioware account which was automatically merged into my EA account (which basically turned into an Origins account). So I didn’t have much of a choice if I still wanted to use these old services.
Also, in the first article they state their reason for not releasing Mass Effect 3 on Steam is that “Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content” which is basically just a bullshit way of saying that steam won’t let them hook up stuff with Origins, thus they won’t release on Steam.

Clever some might say, but it’s still a bit of a dirty play in my eyes.
Not that that’s anything new coming from EA, but I’m sad to see that such a giant in the industry only seem to try to squeeze every last penny out of their customers instead of actually checking what their customers want.
I fear for every developer under the EA flag, but I’m hoping that I’ll see my fears are ungrounded in the future.

I doubt it’s any sort of surprise to anyone that I’m a Mass Effect fan, but I just have to show off these darlings. I picked them up through work and they’re actually a lot better quality than I expected. They’re going to share the place of honor in my bookshelf with my Darth Malgus statue. =D

So, I FINALLY finished Space Marine. Good game, though quite frequently frustrating for me as I tend to tunnel vision on a small part of my screen which made me die to silly things (I hate you squigs!) and I was horribad at melee, but still. A good start to what will hopefully be a series.
The last Let's Play episode is still rendering but provided it renders properly, it should be up on my youtube sometime tonight. The last episode is now up!

As for the art, it was supposed to be a speed paint but it took me three hours to get to this state so I’m obviously still slow as hell. >.<

So I’m sitting here rendering some Space Marine footage for the I-lost-count’th time and remembered I should write something here.

I’ve been playing Star Wars the Old Republic a fair bit since the christmas weekend and my little smuggler has reached level 33 so far.
It’s pretty much World of Warcraft in space gameplay wise, but there are enough differences to keep me interested. The classic Bioware writing is one of them, the class stories that I’ve seen so far have been well written and nicely laid out. The whole Taris part is very sentimental and interesting for me as I’ve played Knights of the Old Republic (some interesting things happening on that planet). The space combat is, while currently slightly repetitive, interesting and has a nice flow to it and the pvp is (to me) a lot more interesting than for example WoW.
I still miss the huge roleplayer support that Star Wars Galaxies had when it came out but to date that’s the only game that’s even come close to having that amount of animated (and actually useful) emotes and the only game where you have been able to have a purely social experience.
Anyhow, I decided that I should revive my old SWG character Erin Eevia, the Zabrak musician, as a smuggler and I set about it as soon as I could. Thus far I’m enjoying it most of the time, though the Scoundrel advanced class plays a lot different then I anticipated for a smuggler. I’m still trying to figure out what skill tree to go for though so everything’s still very much changing for my playstyle at the moment.
And right now I only have one big pet peeve and that’s the targeting. It’s really hard to heal for me due to targeting and as with just about every other game I’ve played that includes tab targeting, the tab targeting is horribad. It may just be that I need to get used to it or it will be changed slightly over time to make it easier. On my wish list right now is the ability to toggle on something similar to WoW’s enemy bars, basically small health bars above their heads to make targeting slightly easier.
But all in all, my experience so far has been very positive. There are a few bugs here and there, especially in some cut scenes (and twilek lekku drive me crazy with their twitching) and the textures tend to randomly swap between the high and low res ones. Still, bugs are to be expected at launch and so far they’re fairly few and non-critical as far as I’ve seen. I’m also quite happy about the fact that even if I get the urge to play, it’s not overshadowing everything else the way I had with WoW for the longest time, and speaking of I haven’t even played WoW for the weeks I’ve been poking around in SWTOR. So it’s a good enough experience that I want to spend time on it, but I don’t feel the pressure to constantly play to keep up. So, I think I’m going to keep spending time on this game, but in moderate enough amounts that I will be able to keep up all my other hobbies as well. =)

On a completely different note, I stumbled over an article while browsing twitter, 30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself, which is a good reminder of things I’m trying to live by this year. It’s so easy to forget to take care of yourself that I need a reminder as often as possible.
And, as I decided that this year will be my “heart on my sleeve” year, I personally need to work with not running away or avoiding my problems, stop lying to myself, stop trying to be someone else, stop being scared of making mistakes and berating myself for old ones, stop being idle, stop competing with everyone else, stop complaining/whining about the little things, stop acting like everything’s fine when it isn’t (see stop lying to myself) and stop focusing on what I don’t want to happen. Generally, I need to work with everything on that list, but those in particular. I have a very bad habit of being constantly afraid of making mistakes, afraid that others will think I’m weird and lying to myself that everything’s alright even when I feel completely crap. Time to work on fixing those habits!
I might do what my mom has been doing for a while which is every day you write down five good things that has happened and keep those in a journal. I might put them on here as I’m terrible at keeping actual physical journals, but we’ll see. I might even go back to trying to put together a small diary comic again, but we’ll see how that fares.

Anyhow, I need to get a few things done before work so I’ll stop poking around here for now. Hopefully I’ll write again tomorrow, provided I have anything interesting to show/tell. =)

jakface:

cyspixels:

tinycartridge:

New Ocarina of Time 3D commercial with Robin Williams and his daughter, Zelda — yes, she is named after the Nintendo series’ princess, so it’s all very appropriate! Wow, Robin Williams’ beard is impressive. Preorder: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D Find: Nintendo DS/3DS release dates, discounts, & more See also: Our Ocarina of Time 3D preview [Via Player’s Pulse]

Aw, that was sweet.

Robin Williams is a HUGE gaming fan. He comes into the downtown EB Games (video game store) all the time. I’ve never met him, but my friends who worked down there have and they say he’s a huge geek and buys games all the time, and is so much fun to talk to ABOUT games. How awesome is that? Also his beard. I just died of awesome. Robin Williams, please never die. <3333333