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Malik (10/29/12)

So, once again I've been pretty absent from here and pretty absent from games. I'm still working with two of my friends on the Infinite Lives Podcast, complete with a new domain. So, while working a real job and then working on learning Tiki Wiki, I'm pulling down what can feel like two back to back full time jobs. Sadly, only one pays, but at the same time, the other one is fun.

On a quick note, Tiki Wiki has to be the best PHP or wiki style web design tool I've played with. However, it also has to be the least intuitive I've ever seen for the admin controls. Sometimes I feel like the Tiki Wiki system is designed to make me fail...but then it surprises me with a sudden amazing victory. However, while working on infinitelives.us, I can easily say I will not be updating this site from old school HTML. In fact, coming around here is like a breath of fresh air after fighting permission settings and trying to make a working rss feed (and then resorting to another program for the rss feed generation since Tiki Wiki lacks iTunes tags).

With that out of mind, for now, I did get some time with XCOM last week. In the end, the time was little and not well spent. I wanted to have fun, but I really think XCOM needs a patch...or ten. I mean some issues are just a little hard to deal with. The altitude of the camera changing while in a spaceship is not fun. The stuck cameras and reaction shots can be weird. However, when you see enemies that are out of sight (behind a wall and a closed door), then cannot open the door, it starts to be annoying. Add in an enemy hitting your sniper for a critical hit when she is not just behind cover, but behind structures (like a raised section of a ship), and the shot must make a 90 degree angle to hit, it gets really annoying. Now, going back to the enemies I shouldn't see, I then cannot open a door (I'm adjacent to it with two guys, one on each side) and it only goes to firing mode with "no target" when I click the door, I'm getting really pissed off. Then I decide to save, rush through the door with run and gun and then see no enemies anywhere on the other side of this door. Now I'm pissed. So, I reload and find all my saves are gone, except the last auto save. I'm just enraged now. I start to delete old saves (maybe I had too many saves?) and all of my saves return. This is when I save one more time, prior to bum rushing the door, and turn off XCOM.

It's such a great game when it works, but I'm hitting just too many bugs. I'll try, this week, to clear that damned large UFO I'm currently still in and then tackle the alien base. After that, I'll probably shift to Sleeping Dogs for a little while before returning to XCOM (maybe a patch will come out in the meantime). I did get Sleeping Dogs, since Steam had a random 50% sale a week back.

However, for now, most of my time is going into learning rss feeds. If I can make the feed work, I should be back to gaming and this site a bit more. Until then, I just hope Firaxis is as hard at work as I am and their work is going to some XCOM patches.

Malik

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