Month: February 2017

Posted on

Mission Complete: Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor (XB1)

  • Date: 2017-02-15
  • Time: 48h
  • Achievements: 38/74
  • Gamerscore: 755/1680
  • Warchiefs Killed: 7
  • Slaves Liberated: 1119

Fantastic game. The combat is awesome, beating Mad Max and the Batman games in my opinion. The art style and overall feel of the game world imitates the Lord of the Rings movies really well and the Nemesis system is such a refreshing gameplay feature.

You could take on a whole horde by yourself or stealthily take over a stronghold without being seen and feel like a badass doing either one. Great abilities and weapons to make both fun, and a lot of mission variety to keep things interesting. Also, watching Uruks run in fear is such a joy.

Gripes? As others have said, the final battle(s) were anti-climatic considering all you went through to get there. I also don’t like the Caragor-riding missions as I find the controls sluggish compared to your normally nimble character.

If you like the gameplay of Mad Max or the Arkham games, this one is highly recommended.

Posted on

Mission Complete: Murdered: Soul Suspect (XB1)

  • Date: 2017-02-09
  • Time: 13h17m
  • Achievements: 46/48 (86%)

After XCOM 2, I needed something a little lighter. Batman was a nice, light romp and this game worked too. I had bought this game a year or two ago when it was super cheap but never got around to trying it out until now.

Supernatural film noir murder mystery? What’s not to love? I really enjoyed the concept and mood of the game. It really had a bleak feel at times when you would encounter lost souls in your travels who wouldn’t understand that they were dead or couldn’t come to grips with their situation.

Nothing too difficult, it didn’t overstay its welcome and I enjoyed the clue system that moved the narrative along.

Gripes? It had a large collectible aspect to it, but I rarely had to work beyond my regular diligent searching to find just about everything. The lack of the world map meant that once I reached the end game and saw that I was missing about 10 items from my final collectible category, I opted not to continue the search. The stealth/action sequences were irritating at times but they were few and far between.

Solid adventure game.

Posted on

Mission Complete: XCOM 2 (XB1)

My first campaign run failed spectacularly on Normal difficulty, despite finishing Enemy Unknown years prior. It was a combination of too many dead/injured soldiers so my squad was perpetually made of rookies and not enough initial reading on research and facility build orders. The Avatar Project sped along as I was desperately struggling to get anywhere.

I did some reading on build orders based on how I wanted to play, and started a new campaign shamefully on Rookie difficulty. This combination made all the difference, as I still felt challenged and well-thought strategy was still very important. There were missions where I was flawless and others I squeaked out an evac just in the nick of time. I didn’t lose a single important high level squad member, but it was still a struggle to keep them out of the infirmary for long stretches of time.

I’m not sure when I’ll play it again as playing 1.5 campaigns was enough for me for a while. I got the PC version in a humble bundle, so maybe down the road when I’m in the mood to be thoroughly punished I’ll see what the Long War 2 mod is all about.

Posted on

I Love The 90’s Tour, here we come!

Thanks to a lovely presale email from Ticket Atlantic, I was able to score tickets to the I Love the 90’s tour in Halifax this May.

I Love the 90's

Pre-teen Darcy is super pumped, as all I pretty much listened to at that age was early 90’s dance and hip hop. The Rap Traxx 4 compilation cassette was played endlessly, along with Dance Mix ’93, Vanilla Ice, and MC Hammer.

Over a decade ago I went to a Ludacris concert at Mile One, happy to see Luda but mainly to see Maestro (Fresh Wes) open for him and perform Drop the Needle. I was ecstatic. When I was in California in 2009 I went to a classic rock all-day concert, and to speed up the time between bands performance they had a stage that would turn around after each set to show the next band’s equipment already ready to go. During one of those turns, Biz Markie happened to be on the other side and he played a short surprise set. I nearly jumped out of my seat when he introduced himself, and looked around to see most of the people around me were either off to get a beer or nowhere near as interested. He played Just a Friend and I couldn’t have been happier. I even recorded it!

As you can tell, I have a soft spot for the music of the early 90s. Normally, Vanilla Ice is one of the headliners for this tour but it looks like he’s not part of the Atlantic Canadian lineup. So, since he and I apparently follow each other on Twitter, I hit him up.

We’ll see if he replies!

Edit: While I’m at it, since Rap Traxx 4 doesn’t exist as a release on Spotify, I’ve made a playlist. Enjoy!

Posted on

Mission Complete: Batman – The Telltale Series (XB1)

Another enjoyable Telltale adventure with the same stuttering QTEs that have plagued most of their releases. I’d like to see if the PC versions suffer the same fate as their console releases.

Did I enjoy it as much as The Wolf Among Us? Not quite, probably due to the fact that TWAU was an entirely fresh IP for me, whereas I’ve played Batman in numerous other games. Still, it was interesting (and a bit strange) to play a non-canon (as far as I can tell) Batman game in terms of character development. It did certainly keep things interesting in that regard.

Posted on

Tech Tip: How to Reinstall WordPress

Recently, I had a WordPress failure after an unrequested automatic update via my webhosting. The error message I received indicated problems with a number of lines of code referencing plugins and files that were now missing. Google wasn’t able to find a common fix for such an issue, so I relied on the very helpful manual reinstallation of WordPress found on their official web site under the heading Updating WordPress.

Here’s the important part of the article that helped me.

Step 1: Replace WordPress files

  1. Get the latest WordPress zip (or tar.gz) file.
  2. Unpack the zip file that you downloaded.
  3. Deactivate plugins.
  4. Delete the old wp-includes and wp-admin directories on your web host (through your FTP or shell access).
  5. Using FTP or your shell access, upload the new wp-includes and wp-admin directories to your web host, in place of the previously deleted directories.
  6. Upload the individual files from the new wp-content folder to your existing wp-content folder, overwriting existing files. Do NOT delete your existing wp-content folder. Do NOT delete any files or folders in your existing wp-content directory (except for the one being overwritten by new files).
  7. Upload all new loose files from the root directory of the new version to your existing wordpress root directory.

NOTE – you should replace all the old WordPress files with the new ones in the wp-includes and wp-admin directories and sub-directories, and in the root directory (such as index.php, wp-login.php and so on). Don’t worry – your wp-config.php will be safe.

Be careful when you come to copying the wp-content directory. You should make sure that you only copy the files from inside this directory, rather than replacing your entire wp-content directory. This is where your themes and plugins live, so you will want to keep them. If you have customized the default or classic themes without renaming them, make sure not to overwrite those files, otherwise you will lose your changes. (Though you might want to compare them for new features or fixes..)

Lastly you should take a look at the wp-config-sample.php file, to see if any new settings have been introduced that you might want to add to your own wp-config.php.

Step 2: Update your installation

Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin. You may be asked to login again. If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code. You should do this as soon as possible after step 1.