Marshall's Blog

So, I have had the ADB Surewest DVR for some time now and I just have one thing to say about it: it sucks.

I rarely even watch TV anymore but, anytime I get the urge to sit back and waste a few hours, I have to physically unplug the power to the DVR and plug it back in so that it will reboot. If I try to just turn it on with the remote I will get a black screen for every channel I try to watch.

This might not be so bad if it didn’t happen so often that I am lucky to watch a two hour movie without the signal going out. Yes, in the span of a two hour movie, odds are the screen will freeze then go black and I will have to power cycle it once again to finish the movie. Oh, and I probably missed a big chunk of the movie since this thing takes about 10-15 minutes to go from plugged in to actually displaying the TV signal.

I even tried contacting Surewest about it back when it first started happening, they sent a technician out who did pretty much nothing except fiddle with a couple wires and say it should be fixed. Well, it wasn’t fixed and continued to happen consistently after that.

My advice, if you are looking to get a DVR, avoid this one. Go buy a new computer with a TV capture card and use that, it will be much better than using this Surewest one.

Have purchased a new template for Eternity-Web hosting as I feel the old site is overdue for an update. Already have a few pages built out and content inserted, just have to finish up the rest and then get the back-end coded which will bring a much better experience for our users. Here is a little teaser of the new site:

Looks much better than what is currently up there right?

Well, at least for the bronze 2v2 ladder. Kris and me teamed up the other night after they reset it and worked our way to the top! Screen shot below for proof:

Probably will be knocked down to rank 30 by the time I wake up tomorrow though >.<

I was surprised when I found out I was part of the first wave of beta invites for Starcraft 2 and have been playing in the beta pretty often since installing it. Here is a little review from what I have found in the game so far:

Pros

• Similar game play to the original Starcraft
• New graphics make the game look great
• New units and building for all races
• New battle.net system with matchmaking

Cons

• Alot of people using rush strategies now with all races
• Battle.net is not finished yet
• No single-player during the beta
• No map editor yet so no custom game types

As you can see, most of the cons have to do with the game being in beta and should be gone when the game is released.

One annoying part about the new battle.net system is that you need to play 10 unranked games before the matchmaking system can figure out your skill level and start matching you up with people around your skill. I understand this is necessary for their algorithms to match you up later, but during these 10 games you will get matched up with people better than you and get absolutely destroyed a few times. Once you get through these, and start getting matched up against people around your level, it gets much better and you start having much closer, more fun, games.

While it may have taken forever for Starcraft 2 to be developed, I think the finished product is turning out to be worth the wait. If you were a fan of Starcraft 1, you will probably love Starcraft 2.

All defeated. If you are a fan of the original .hack games I have no idea whether you will like these or not. I hated the original .hack, it got incredibly boring and repetitive in vol. 1 and then they made 3 more which were all more of the same. .hack G.U. is similar in the name and that it takes place in The World. That’s about where the similarities end. The entire combat system changed for the better, you have PKing and arena battles, new character types with new abilities. I love it, I recommend people at least give Vol. 1 a shot to see if they like it.

I wish a few things would appear from GameFly, mostly I want updates to their GameQ section. A few nice additions I can think of would be Next Game Lock, Queue Shuffle, Send Lock and for the system to warn you when you select to rent a game you have previously rented.

Next Game Lock – What I mean when I say this is for you to be able to select the next game that you are going to receive in your queue and lock it in place so that if it happens to not be available that day, the system won’t skip down to the next one. Instead it will wait until that game becomes available and then send it to you. I cannot count how many times I have wanted to play the next game in my queue alot more than the rest but on the day my next game is shipped, it becomes unavailable. However, the day after my game ships, it says it is now available but I am stuck waiting alot longer to get it as I do not want to just ship back the new game the moment I get it. It would be alot easier to lock games into place to ensure that I get it next and I think this would be a GREAT addition to the GameFly GameQ. They could put a restriction on it such as you cant lock games that are not coming out for more than 2 days or games that are below “Low Availability”. I just want to be able to ensure my next game is the one that I want to play most.

Queue Shuffle – This kind of goes against my above want, but at the same time it only makes sense to me. When I browse through the games for rent, I normally go system by system. What does this mean for my GameQ? I have blocks of games for each system, such as 5 PS2, 3 PS3, 4 Xbox 360, 5 Wii, etc. It would be nice to have a shuffle button so that these get mixed up and I get games for different systems instead of them being in blocks. You could still send a game to the top and lock it in place to ensure you get it, but for the slow times when it seems like no new good games are coming it, I would like to have a bit more randomness in my queue.

Send Lock – This is not to be confused with Next Game Lock. This one is to set a lock on the maximum amount of games they should send you at a time. I know, you will probably say to change your plan to match how many games you want, but what if you had just downgraded your plan and are waiting for it to take effect? You essentially become locked with the current games you have until this happens because if you send anything back, they will send more to match the current amount. It would be easier if you could setup a lock to match your new plan so you can still send/receive games without worrying about how many new ones you will end up with when the new plan takes effect.

Previous Rental Warning – Right now, I have about 200 games in my previous rental list. I only expect this to grow as time goes on and at some point I may forget I had already rented a title and end up renting it again. It would be easier if the system warned me that I had previously rented the game that I am currently adding into my queue with the options similar to “Woops, cancel adding it” and “I know, add it anyways”. Save alot of time for me as I would not have to double check my list for games I think I might have rented already.