Further Assimilations

Today in Paris, at their WorldWide Invitational event, Blizzard Entertainment announced their upcoming game Diablo III.

That is all. (That's plenty!)

I've actually had a great deal to post in the last week, but I've spent most of the week unable to summon the creative juice to sit and really write the entries. I'm feeling a little more in touch with the muse this morning, so hopefully I can catch up a bit on some of the things that have been on my mind.

Today, here at work, I got my first piece of spam from "the widow of a rich African government official who would like my help recovering her funds". Yeah, "lady". That's the one where some people end up broke, and others end up shot. No thanks.

Re-installed Diablo II on my machine twice last night. Cleared the backup files from my boss's laptop (that's another story) for space, reinstalled once, got all my old character files off CD, and had it running (almost) happily before I discovered I'd made a major mistake. I won't go into details, but I had to clear the files and install again. When people bring their machines over tonight, we'll have to ensure they all the latest patch installed, 'cause that's the version I have to use to run the game under OS X. I'm looking forward to the game, though character balance may be a bit difficult, since Rain's favorite char has progressed to level 38, and mine's up to level 50... and we expect to have at least one complete newbie tonight.

Found out this week that the upcoming OS X 10.2 for my machine, retailing at $130, costs about half that if I'm a student or a civil servant. Hmmm...

I finally finished Deus Ex last night. It's a computer game set in a cyberpunk near-future world where civilisation is completely dependent on a futuristic Internet, and a mysterious plague is ravaging humanity - though it seems to leave the rich and powerful untouched. You begin the game playing a technologically enhanced special agent for the UN Anti-Terrorist Organization, but by the end, your loyalties have shifted multiple times as you learn more about what's really going on and who you really are.

At the end of the game, I had three choices (each of which would require some difficult gameplay):

1) Join myself to the master computer controlling and monitoring the Internet (as the bad guy had intended to), and help it rule the world, hopefully with compassion and ethics...

2) Shut down the computer and help the Illuminati (who aided me through the latter half of the game) to return to secretly manipulating humanity from behind the scenes - with myself as one of the new puppeteers...

3) Destroy the computer in a manner that would wipe out the future Internet and give the world the chance to choose its own path out of the mini-Dark Age which would follow.

In the end, I chose option 1. But boy did they leave themselves plot threads for Deus Ex 2, now in pre-production...

And of course, the week I finially get Deus Ex out of the way, Ambrosia Software releases Escape Velocity: Nova. If one owns a Macintosh, the Escape Velocity games are the kind of games where you sit down to play 30 minutes and come out of your hypnosis 6 hours later; this one's the newest, prettiest, and plays under OS X...

...what's that, Blizzard? You say you expect the OS X version of Diablo 2 to be ready in about 15 days? Nooooo....