Wednesday 7 October 2015

More

Well, I guess the other presents arrived!

Another book; Love Songs of Early China, a translation and commentary of some very old poetry indeed. I'm primarily interested in this because of the linguistic angle, but the poetry might be interesting too. :D For some reason, the book has no entry on GoodReads, so I've added one.

For a while now, we've had this annoying issue with the PS3 where it refuses to play some of the PS1 Classic titles I've bought from the UK PSN store. To that end, we now have a PlayStation TV! And... they still don't work, because for some reason many PAL PS1 titles don't support the PSTV. Argh. Well, at least now I have a way of playing Vita games! The memory card just arrived today, so it's time to download everything that it'll play, I guess.

Insignificant Birthdays

Good morning! It's the day after my 29th birthday and I'm suffering from the tail end of a cold, so let's do this. I'm reliably informed that not all of my presents have arrived yet, but I already have plenty to talk about.

As many already know, the past couple of weeks I've been playing Destiny because Emily was kind enough to buy the Digital Collector's Edition for me. My experience with it so far has been quite positive; there have been a few connection issues but nothing to serious. I've since beaten all the main story missions for each expansion and enjoyed the whole thing. Coming in, I knew it was some mix of FPS and MMO, so I expected something like Planetside. However, PvP is strictly opt-in and not very emphasized, so it's really more like Borderlands. In fact, the game is so heavily like Borderlands it makes me wonder if some of the development crew was shared. Maps are reused ruthlessly, guns and gear are semi-randomly generated, the missions are structured the same way, there's a skill tree for each class (well, Destiny has subclasses), the overall atmosphere is grim but there's a fair bit of humour, PvP sucks... I'm sure there's more. Nevertheless, definitely a fun game with some decent challenge (haven't done a Raid yet) and excellent web/app support. Recommended if you like Halo and Borderlands.

My other "present" so far consists of almost the entire Malazan book series. I randomly found the first novel in a Waterstones a couple of weeks ago, and now I have 14 of them. My interest in them was sparked by Chester Bolingbroke, so hopefully he's a good judge of taste. They're pretty long, even for epic fantasy novels, so I'm settled in for the long haul. I'll probably bring a few to America on our next trip.