Shades Of Twilight

Strange as it may seem, I have started spending time in There again.

I thought I had already gotten There out of my system back in 2004, when I quit it to go to City Of Heroes. However, lately I have just been toying with the idea of going back. And, I did (as my Xfire banner can attest to).

Now, I am not “addicted” like I was back in 2004. Yes I have been to Second Life, I checked it out, I even met an old gaming buddy there in 2nd Life. However I don’t seem to like 2nd Life much. I don’t know why. I have checked it out before in 2004. I checked it out again in 2007. I still don’t like it.

Another buddy of mine, my regular drinking buddy, got me into IMVU last year. Same thing – didn’t like it much, plus, it’s like a “lite” version of There and 2nd Life. No “world” to explore. Just “scenes”. Anybody in the group chat can just change scenes at whim. It really interrupts the conversation.

Anyway I still do hang out in IMVU, if only for the friends I’ve made in there. Recently IMVU introduce “groups” too, and it was great. However, as the old adage goes – “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

They went ahead and “fixed” it. It wasn’t broken.

Now it is.

Bah.

I need to get back to GRAW….

I finally managed to get some game time in last night. Instead of heading straight for Bioshock, I decided to just run around inside Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 for abit. Then I remembered that I haven’t really uploaded anything to Youtube in awhile, so I ran up FRAPS and did a game session capture.

So, here’s the game session, slightly edited to fit Youtube’s *#@(*&* under 10 minutes rule.

The game session itself was brief – under 45 mins including loading times, briefing screens, and weapon loadouts. Actually I’m mildly surprised at this run myself. Not a single fatality, and my AI companions actually know how to shoot!

Anyway, conversion from the RAW capture as well as uploading to Youtube took about 2 hours, thanks to Starhub’s pathetic upload speed (256K upload on a 6MB downlink). Starhub needs to increase this so that people like me who aren’t compulsive pirates that makes bootleg copies of everything can actually UPLOAD something!

Well, since I had to wait an eternity while the video gets uploaded to Youtube, I decided to fire up the IMVU client. What’s IMVU? Imagine MSN or Yahoo messenger. You got buddies right? You chat right? Ok now, you imagine doing this with a 3D avatar in a 3D-ish world. When you talk, speech balloons float above your head like in comic strips. If interested, feel free to check IMVU out.

Anyway, as I was saying, I went into IMVU and happened to run into some friends. We yakked. I had time to kill anyway, since I’m waiting for the video to upload to Youtube. So one of them decided to have a “photoshoot”. The whole group literally had to “freeze” their poses for about 2 hours for the “photographer” to take snapshots of us all in various poses.

So, eventually, video got uploaded, and I was “persuaded” to remain in IMVU for much longer than I had intended heh!