over the last week or so, but there’s work in between all of this :p

creative x-fi platinum.  i can finally say goodbye to my ancient sblive and actually play games using eax (lol).  the 24-bit crystallizer thing works nicely on music and general sound, and the software including isnt too bad.  except the program to manage the included remote control wont install… format time is coming up methinks.

i have the card connected to my yamaha system via both optical and 6 channel analog input.  any non-dolby already compressed dvd content that is processed by EAX or such is only output as 2ch audio over optical, so for gaming and stuff i just hit a button to swap to analog input.  luckily the x-fi outputs on both digital and analog simultaneously.

and a g7 to boot.  this mouse is quite a piece of work.  compared to the bluetooth predecessor, there’s almost no lag in movement, and the tracking is awesome.  not to mention its battery is about 10x lighter than the 2 AAs in the bluetooth version.

well i have been saving all this money for japan, and figured i had a bit to spare with my trip being cut short 1 month and all…

i bought a yamaha 6.1 amp/speaker set .  i had a look around at quite a few systems with larger speakers, but really i don’t need the power or have the space in my little corner so i fell back to a nice satellite set.  they sure produce a nice crisp sound though (compared to my blown altec lansings they kick some ass lol).

there is the standard left-centre-right and identical for rear, as well as quite a powerful sub.  positioning may take a bit of playing around, but it seems to be working nicely without any special mounting of the rear speakers yet.

i am yet to have any method of outputting more than 2 channels of sound to the system (hello 1994 sblive!value) but it does a good job using in-built dsp at converting this to surround.  once my new card arrives with optical spdif out, it should be another story .

played a bit of zero hour with ds and chan over the weekend. quite an interesting game, but ends up with huge armies and very little strategy… are we just missing the plot by playing against computers? i think the pwnerer would tell us that.

at least it was all well and good until my full infantry army ran STRAIGHT THROUGH the poisonous gas fields… china inf are for noobs?

i ended up specialising in air units, which turned out to be much easier than slow moving tanks. i only wish my screenshot of the fields of hackers i had worked :/ quite amusing it was..

we also ended up rewatching all of H2 (bar the last ep ^^;) on dual lcds. this was achieved using VLC’s video wall filter to split the overlay output into two separate windows.

a bit distracting from the wrong angle, but still a lot better than mirroring :p

with the lights off and from a more viewable angle, it looks pretty fscking awesome. hmm i haven’t slept yet and seem to be working quite shortly… lannage pwns

This game is really worthy of being the sequel of the pwn game DS1 was. There’s just so many hours of gameplay, really nice graphics and an engine that runs flawlessly with next to no loading time. Building characters is a lot of fun, with too many items to ever find them all. I only have one problem – they don’t give enough skill shortcuts for spell casters. Being a nature magic healer, I was only able to maintain 3 healing spells and 1 ice attack skill in my main set. Then I had to have two extra spellbooks which would be swapped in and out from inventory to apply buffs / portal etc.

Its a nice break from ro, and finally a game we have actually played and enjoyed at a lan (for WAY too long )