I’ve booted up the good old XBox 360 over the past couple nights to play some more Oblivion. I downloaded a dashboard upgrade that was waiting there for me. I’m not really sure what the hooplah is. I mean, I’m glad for background downloads of content, but those downloads are just about as difficult to get to as they were before.
I watched this whole video last week about what the improvements were going to be, and background downloading is really the only one that struck me. Not that the whole thing needed an overhaul, it’s just when they produce a 20 minute video about changes to Live, I expect -well- changes.
While I was poking around in the dashboard, I noticed that there were some new content downloads available for Oblivion. I bought two of them, and will probably return for the third. The first is an armor pack for horses.
Horse armor doesn’t seem like a big deal at this point. I’ve completed the Dark Brotherhood quests and am now a Listener, so I’ve acquired the horse Shadowmere. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but Shadowmere can’t be killed. He goes unconscious like all story-important NPCs in the game. Shadowmere is also cool because he is a black horse with red eyes. If they glowed it would be more cool, but their metallic look is still pretty neat.
The trick is that Shadowmere is always getting in the way when I’m trying to kill things outdoors, and always getting clobbered. Just last night I took him out with a Storm Atronach familiar I had summoned, and the two of them wandered around some ruins killing all sorts of things summoned by some lich that was floating nearby. Silly horse. So the armor was handy, even if a little impractical.
The other thing I bought was Frostcrag Spire. It’s a tower up in the mountains that when added to the game becomes part of an inheritance left to you. Once the property of some kind of wizard, the tower has many obvious treats that wizards might enjoy. You can re-furnish the place to enable these features by buying packs of things from a woman in a specific shop in the Imperial City.
I spent all of the gold I had refitting the place. What’s really ironic is that I can carry around 15,000 gold pieces wherever I go, but I can’t carry a 2000gp cuirass out of a dungeon, and end up ditching it just so I can walk. Bah!
Anyway, with these extra enhancements to the tower I can now enchant items, create new spells, and summon familiars all within my own “home”. The vault in teh basement now has chests for storage, and there is a complete alchemy lab and garden of all sorts of plants (including a nirnroot!) ready for use. Also, there is a platform with teleport pads that zap you off to any mage’s guild in the game.
So that was fun to do after having the tedium of paying my price for killing a member of the mage’s guild on a thieve’s guild errand. What a hefty price, too: 20 piles of vampire dust and 18 daedra hearts. Those things are not easy to come by. Do you know how many vampire nests and Oblivion gates I had to raid to get that stuff?
Yesterday I stopped at the store to get a copy of Big Brain Academy for the Gameboy DS. It’s not as good as Brain Age.
Particularly, the characters in Big Brain Academy are pretty sad. There’s this sock-like “professor” thing. He just twitches a lot as an animation. I would have preferred they used a disembodied voice.
Some of the tests are a little odd, too. For example, one of the tests wants you to identify objects based on their silhouettes. You get a certain amount of time to identify as many sets of these as you can. The game uses only one stationary object on the first set, and then gradually adds more, and gradually makes them move in different complicated patterns.
Eventually you get to a set where four objects that all look vaguely similar to each other are all spinning very fast on the same point on the screen. I don’t see how it’s possible to accurately tell which one is which!
I also do not like the coin-value game, in which you have to compute which side of the screen has more money in change. The size difference between quarters and nickels in real life is much more substantial, and I’m always confusing the little graphics on the tiny DS screen. Note that the screen is about four quarters across, and the game could display about 7 quarters across. That’s quite a size difference.
Other games are pretty crafty. The weighing games are enjoyable. You need to select the item that weighs the most based on its appearance on balances with other items. This game requires math and logic.
I haven’t played the whole thing through, so maybe it improves, but it just doesn’t seem as enjoyable as Brain Age. Brain Age also graphs your progress over time and compare it to other users on the same cartridge, which I didn’t see in Big Brain Academy. This is a really nice feature of Brain Age, because it really gives a sense of accomplishing something.
All of these games are keeping me busy while I should be rebuilding my computer. I’ve got the OS on there, and not much more. Right now, I’m held up with what antivirus I want to install. Should I go with Avast, which I was using before but seemed to be slow, or go with NOD32, which is said to be fast and thorough but has a yearly fee? Pat would likely suggest OneCare, and I would use it, but I don’t think it will work with my firewall, and I’m not willing to give up Outpost, which is the only thing installed on the computer right now apart from the OS, drivers, OS patches, and EAZ-Fix.
