Stolzes Herz

Someone described fable 2 as the perfect casual gamers game. I will be the first to confirm that. It’s an RPG but not a very impressive one at that, you have the choice between good or evil, you have some nice spells but all in all it brings nothing new to the RPG world. It’s charm resides more in the side-quests, in the fact that you have a dog that begins to grow on you, in the fact that you can buy houses, have multiple families etc. The biggest downside I could find was the fact that the hero never speaks. He can make faces in order to get people to like or dislike him, but it’s somehow annoying in the main story where everyone either tells you what to do or they already know what you’re going to say. Makes you feel that little bit dumb and I can’t find any logic behind the main hero not having a voice.

Otherwise graphics are nice, game is quite responsive on the Xbox 360. I didn’t mention the fact that you never really die in the game so you’re never really scared. Well maybe scared is a too strong word but you know that certain jumpiness. This also means you’ll never do the same mission twice, because no matter how bad you suck at it you’ll always finish it. You can also have sex protected or not, you can get married and have children, do boring chores for little money, trade items, buy real-estate and just enjoy the simple life. This is pleasant and you can really take the time to enjoy the great work done by the graphics team. But it gets boring quickly.

The genius idea behind this game was the dog, I know fans knew about it before the launch and it also has been presented as the highlight of the game.

“Hey a new RPG is coming out. It’s called Fable 2, you’re a hero in a magical distant land and you save the world”

“Yeah, same old, same old”

“But no, it’s much more than that, you have a DOG”

There basically two comics I really like: wulffmorgenthaler.com and xkcd.com.

The first one is kinda pervy, often S&M like, always trying to shock but every so often, funny.

The other one is more for the geek inside, references quite often math and programming and it talks quite alot about social inadequacy.

There a other sites as well from garfield to mordantorange, but none of those hooked me yet.

One comic that I really like is comic 29 from xkcd because I find myself quite often expressing inappropriate ideas in public forgetting people might not share my kind of humor. Ok not as extreme as the one in the comic but still enough to let some uncomfortable silence creep in

Winter holidays are over and I’m back at work. I’ve spent my holidays with my family in my hometown in Romania. It’s been quite pleasant, except for losing all my papers (lost or stolen still not sure) and coming a week late to work. As it stands apparently I won’t be getting much sleep this year anyhow so i suppose a couple of days here or there don’t really matter. It’s my last year of PhD with still plenty of experimental work to be done, writing and three conferences on top of that. Still it’s the path I chose so I can’t really complain .

We spent New Years Eve in a Club in down-town Timisoara and we were five: Rodi (my wife & friend), Radu (high school friend), Doria (Radu’s wife, friend) and Vale (high school friend). On the upside it was quite cheap (around 23 euros with unlimited drinks & some food), music was good and we had a good time, on the downside we didn’t really meet anybody, new or old, and got bored and tired around 3.30 a.m. and went home.

Unfortunately no pics to show off since Radu had his camera I’ve left mine in the car.  Radu had some ulterior mishap with his camera so in short no pics. I do have some pics of other outings in the pubs of Timisoara during this holiday so i may post those when I find them.

This is about it on a personal level. On teh blog level new home banner that Rodi designed for me which I find more pleasing the the first one while still no real about page but I’ll be getting to that.