Can a post-season get any worse?
Benitez had been manager at Liverpool FC for nearly as long as I had been married but after a very poor EPL campaign('09-'10) the pressure was on for something to give. Shamefully, the cancers(as one blogger nicely puts it) are still there as owners of the club. I can only hope that Mr Dalglish picks very wisely in the coming weeks/months!
I've reached a point in the main storyline of Red Dead Redemption where I feel a break from the game is needed - I do this often with games that have an open-world setting and while some have not been revisited yet, I did crave a return to an unfinished ACII. I'm making some nice progress there and only have the last upgrade to the off-hand hidden blade to go - the pistol. Leonardo hasn't requested any MMO style hunt & gather type quests, so I take it he's come to the conclusion that the proposed Sforza horse project is just never going to happen - shame that. I'd have loved to have seen a giant bronze horse placed within the grounds of Ezio's villa.
My first ever game for my MacBook Pro has now been downloaded from Steam. Impressed by the trailers and by some of my peer's experiences of the game, I took a stab in the dusk and installed Torchlight. Although I have yet to give it a run for its money, it has spurred me to go back and look at Raptr - not entirely sure why it did but am glad all the same. I had been less than impressed by it when I first gave Raptr a look over but I didn't remove myself from the beta and it has been collecting my gaming data ever since 2008. Looking at Raptr now, there's a very clear and easy to use interface with some nice touches and I'm hopeful for it's future. Include to that that a iPod app. is due to released very shortly, and I may just stick with Raptr.
On that final note, I am curious to know what my gaming readership think is the currently the best or their favourite system of recording their gaming achievements etc. I have added a poll to the sidebar for you to cast your votes.
I don't use any system and not sure whether I want to or not. I see people using them but haven't worked out what the real benefit is to me...
ReplyDeleteI used Xfire for over a year but I recently uninstalled it.
ReplyDeleteThings I liked:
-Simple to use with nice added features like screenshots.
-Publicly viewable web page with your gaming history
-Compatible with almost all my games
-Plug in for blogger available to show your gaming on your blog.
Things I didn't like:
-Inflexible - you cannot access the raw statistics of your gaming but must accept the few limited reports that Xfire gives you. In particular Xfire is bad at telling you when you played a particular game. It says how long you played it for but not when.
-Caused issues with at least one game (although there is a bypass mode which solved the problem.
-I got fed up of having to run the client all the time. I already have too many background programmes running.
I was never a fan of xfire but was forced into it via my old Age of Conan guild. After I uninstalled it however I kind of missed seeing some of the data hence I checked out Raptr.
ReplyDeleteIm much more of a fan of Raptr which just seems more fresh and holds much more relevant data in my opinion.
Oh and last but not least the little Raptor icon is cute!
Given that I am primarily a PS3 gamer, Raptr's not much use to me since it's not supported for the console, and for the PC side of things, Steam does a pretty good job doing things like that by itself with its friends list, community pages and, particularly in Source games, its own in-built stat tracker.
ReplyDeleteI have an account with Playfire, though it's only because their trophy card forum signatures are much easier on the eye than the official PlayStation ones.
@arbitrary I know Raptr supports WoW and its achievements now plus the fact that it gives me an easy way to look at the time spent in each gaming title.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't considered the fact about the non-support that Raptr has with the PS3, James but the official Raptr forums state that it's Sony's desire not to share trophy data etc with external sites but mentions nothing concerning the way that PSN trophies are encoded - Raptr actually had access to the PSN data last year but have turned the tracking option off now: http://raptr.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1227
Doesn't look like Xfire is a favourite for anyone...
I just skimmed the first page of that forum page, and to be honest I agree with the consensus there. Microsoft have never come to any harm with sharing out their info the same way with third-party sites, neither have Steam, or the various games that have dedicated servers with stat-trackers (like Source games, Battlefield, earlier Call of Duty games). I don't see why Sony'd be dragging their heels over it, in fact, you'd think they'd nearly be GLAD that someone else is willing to do their work for them.
ReplyDeleteThe most annoying thing about it is though, that their own ones don't automatically update, and you need to onto playstation.com to manually refresh the details. If it wasn't for that, the in-house ones wouldn't be that bad. It's just ridiculous really, and all it does is wastes people's time instead of making them dynamic and saving a lot of people a lot of bother.
@James This is what happens when a company decides to add a feature that is missing from their system but only does a half-assed job of it. Too little to late with the trophy support! My copy of MGS4 sits untouched until I know for certain that a trophy patch isn't going to appear...
ReplyDelete