Elxx.net Labs

Well, I’ve settled into my second semester of college. I still have $250 of books to purchase which is going to be somewhat painful, but Half.com is helping me to not repeat the same mistake I made in the first semester – obediently buying all the required books for all my classes at the university bookstore and getting raped in the process. Hooray for used books.

DICE kindly sent me a copy of Mirror’s Edge when it was released for PC (thank you!!!), and I spent a couple of nights jumping around and leaving lots of splotches on the sidewalk. It’s a very fun and immersive game, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The movement is nice and fluid with slight hitches here and there, but all in all it works very well. It’s a shame that they didn’t get around to figuring out some way to implement true multiplayer, because the fact that it’s a singleplayer game that you can finish and sell will take a huge chunk out of its retail sales. People have already figured out how to hack their way to victory in the leaderboards, so there’s really not much replay value beyond trying to beat your own best times. Still, the time trial mode gives you several routes for each map so there are more options for exploration than there were in the story.

I’ve been gradually getting into the Twitter fad. At first I figured it was just a silly diversion for self-obsessed attention whores, but there are actually many companies and individuals who use it to share useful info and news. It’s a good way to get a quick look at what your favorite sites/bloggers have been up to. By the way, you can follow the DICE CM as well as the Battlefield Heroes CM if you’re still wondering what the heck happened to Heroes. Of course, you can follow my terribly infrequent tweets as well.

Unless you use Adblock (like me…), you may have noticed a little Google AdSense bar at the bottom of my blog. I’m just experimenting to see if it’s possible to pick up a few pennies to help pay the server bills. Trust me, I hate ads as much as anyone else, so I’ll try to keep them out of your way. But if any of you are interested in the NASCAR Daytona 500 (apparently Google thinks that’s what this blog is about – Battleracer is close, I suppose)…