Skyrim Blues
posted 13 Nov 2011
This weekend all I had been planning on doing was playing Skyrim. But alas, it has yet to arrive. Without it, I should really have finished all my Uni work to prepare for Skyrim arriving tomorrow. But I really don’t have that much drive at weekends.
The header image relates to another matter. Without Skyrim I’ve ended up just playing The Binding of Isaac all weekend. And have yet to get any further than the second last level. It’s a brutally hard game and it’s very unforgiving. You play as Isaac, a child who’s mother was told by God to murder, so he ran into his basement to find safety.
All you really do as a player is try and clear each room from monsters and defeat the bosses. I’ve not reached the final boss yet, but I assume it’s Isaac’s mother. What makes Binding of Isaac so replayable is everything is randomly generated. Each individual room is randomly generated as are the monsters and items within it. Even the hundreds of different items you collect are randomised which makes the game feel quite different each time.
Between two plays I had one where I had about 10 heart containers, but could never find any hearts to fill my bar back up. Next play I found dozens of hearts, but never found any heart containers to need them.
The game looks great, and disgusting. Because it’s a basement and the monsters are just frightening things a child would think of, they are pretty horrible monsters. The creature I hate the most are zombie like, but their heads extend off their body, which is rather frightening.
I think I burned a good 7 or 8 hours on the game and I’m still finding plenty of new creatures and items to fight and collect. It’s really a great game, and I don’t think it’s that expensive at all. I personally picked it up in the Humble Indie Bundle but I think that will be finishing soon.
Right, let’s talk about the main image. As you can see, it’s YouTube; this has been my main media player for the past few weeks because I don’t own much music and Spotify’s limiting 10 hours a week put me off using it. Grooveshark, I don’t like because it’s crowd sourced. The song titles can be inaccurate and there are plenty of times where albums have the same songs 3 or 4 times.
Because of this, I decided that I’d go for YouTube. It’s fairly reliable, all the music I like is there somewhere or another and it has playlists. My only main issue with the Cosmic Panda interface in YouTube is that you can’t shuffle songs, but I prefer this interface over the default, so I just shuffle the songs randomly every week or so.
I’ll admit that it’s not ideal, but it works for now. I should really just swallow my pride and subscribe to Spotify, but I don’t like being tied to subscription based services. And I prefer the freedom of streaming, as I grow tired of songs quite quickly and barely ever play any songs in my personal collection.
That’s pretty much everything I’ve done this week, might write a post later in the week about my Arch Linux setup, but I doubt that would interest anyone.