• Steel’s Edge, Undead to the World, & Lesser Evils

    Ilona Andrews‘ fourth Edge novel is allegedly the last centered on this particular cast of characters and it does a very good job wrapping up the loose ends from the previous two books. Namely Lark’s mental trauma and the mystery of where Rose’s father disappeared to. I think it may be my favorite out of the four, mainly because of the protagonist’s (a fallen healer) personality.

    Don DeBrandt’s Bloodhound Files series (as DD Barant) is unique among the multiple series I read in that I undoubtedly enjoy it while reading it, but somehow manage to forget nearly everything that had occurred in earlier books by the time the next installment arrives. This sixth book is no different, as despite my confusion in regards to what was going on (particularly acute as this one takes place in an alternate dimension) it ended up enjoyable anyway. The cliffhanger ending though? Not so much.

    The second of Erin M. EvansBrimstone Angels novels is interesting for feeling less like a story and more like a window into its characters’ lives. The series of events has a surprisingly natural flow to it and the only part that really feels contrived is Rhand’s interest in Farideh.


  • Xenoblade – Dolphin Setup

    Here are some things related to running Xenoblade on Dolphin since it took me a disturbingly long time to work them out.

    First off, you need a high base-speed processor. The number of cores is mostly irrelevant since Dolphin can only use two of them; meaning a 4-gig two-core will run it better than a 3-gig 8-core. Second of all… you need to not screw up your settings. The settings I finally ended up settling on that give only slight slowdown in some areas/battles (with an AMD FX-6100, GeForce GTX 460, and 8GB RAM) are:

    – OpenGL, 1920×1080, Auto, Use Fullscreen, Hide Mouse Curser, Render to main Window
    – 2x Native Resolution, No AA or Filtering, Scaled EFB Copy
    – Skip EFB Access, Texture, Fast, Disable, Fast Mipmaps, Disable Per-Pixel Depth, OpenMP Decoder
    – Load Custom Textures

    – Enable Dual Core, Enable Idle Skipping, Auto, JIT Recompiler
    – Use Panic Handlers
    – DSP HLE Emulation, DSound, 48000 Hz

    After you get things set-up so that you can actually play the game at higher-than-base resolution, you’ll want to go over here and grab some hi-res textures. The packs pretty much only cover the interface, but something is better than nothing.

    Also, here’s an altered version of the PS3 button pack from the first link made to fit my custom control scheme:

    ——————————————————————
    Button Setup – Wiimote Classic Extension
    ——————————————————————

    D-Pad Up = D-Pad Up
    D-Pad Down = D-Pad Down
    D-Pad Left = L1
    D-Pad Right = R1

    Left Stick = Left Stick
    Right Stick = Right Stick

    A = Square
    B = X
    X = Circle
    Y = R-Stick Button
    + = Triangle
    – = L-Stick Button

    L = L2
    R = R2
    ZL = Select
    ZR = Start


  • Hacked… or something. Whatever.

    The WordPress installation was hacked with some sort of embedded redirect to “tigoe.net”. No idea why anyone would want to waste their time with that, but whatever.

    Didn’t see any easy way to fix it (nothing in the .htaccess file), so that installation was deleted and we now have a brand new one with all of the old functionality (and almost none of the content!). Looks like that Mayan prediction of a new beginning was surprisingly accurate.

    UPDATE: I’ve recently discovered that the site ended up wiped that first time due to Dreamhost’s server move. Turns out that someone had the same database name as I did, and when everything was consolidated onto the same server my database information got overwritten by that other blog’s. I’m using a more specialized name now, so hopefully such a thing won’t occur again.