I didn’t get much of anything done this month because of 2 things. Deadlines at work, and Final Fantasy XIV. The two things I did finish were little lame things that didn’t take very many contiguous blocks of time. Books: None Games: 51. Simpson’s Tapped Out. Just adding this because I’m sick of this endless game. 52. Candybox 2. Quickly finished in one day. Finished it on hard mode a few days later.

I’m participating in Extralife again on Nov 2nd. Here’s my donation page. http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=50807 All money going to Colorado Children’s Hospital in Denver. This year, I’m going outside my comfort zone a bit. I had hoped the PS4 would be released before this happened, but it won’t. I don’t want to setup a camera like last time pointed at the screen while I play. I don’t yet have one of those nice Elgato capture cards either.

Books: Games: 47. BreakQuest: EE. Finished in just 2 days without buying anything. 48. Divekick. Finished 4 characters storylines so far. I’m not interested in multiplayer on this, so I’ll mark it complete after I finish all the storylines. 49. Time and Eternity. Not a terrible game, but not worth $50. Like Last Rebellion, wait until it’s $15-20 to get it. 50. Dust: An Elysian Tale. Pretty good, especially for the work of primarily one person.

Books: 7. Errant Story, the entire run of the comic. (All in 2 days. Does it count as a book?) Games: 42. Stealth Inc. A clone in the dark. Pretty good, though tricky 43. Hermit Crab in Space. Also enjoyable. Beat it on my first attempt though. 44. Little Acorns. Eh, not terrible. 45. Stranger’s Wrath. Definitely the best FPS on the Vita right now. Killzone might be better, but right now it’s multiplayer only.

Books: 5. Tales of the Emerald Serpent. Got this ages ago, just got around to reading it. It’s very, very short though. Interesting in how the stories intertwine, especially in the beginning of the book. Lots of characters that link up between the stories. 6. Shadow of Freedom. Whoa, 2 books in one month? Anyway, it was pretty good, though not as good as others in the series. It’s a whole lot of setting up for what follows, with a little bit of action in the middle.

Books: Almost had a book done this month, but was about 25% short of the end. Games: 33. Rymdkapsel (PSVita/PSMobile) Entertaining. It’s a 72 minute game if you know what you’re doing right off. For me, it took 5 tries to beat it, 3 of those tries taking oven an hour. When I finally beat it, I only had 1/5th of my minions left and had only finished exactly the wave I needed to get the win screen.

A lot has been made of Microsoft’s statement that their console will be more powerful because of 300,000 cloud servers on the net available for use. As an exercise, lets calculate “the power of the cloud” Lets assume for now that Xbox One matches 360’s first year performance on the sales charts. That gives it about 5.5 million units. Most companies use Commodity hardware for clouds because the idea behind them is that they’re essentially disposable and used in large numbers, and prone to failure with instant failover to another node.

Books: Another month where I’m too (la|bu)zy to read a book. Games: 25. Dragon Fantasy Book 1. (PSVita) Pretty good for a tiny little indie game. Faithfully replicates the experience of Dragon Quest, without being long enough to be annoying.  26. Jetpack Joyride. (PSVita) Fun, but it got annoying how it kept rebooting my Vita towards the end. Ended up with 6 badges in it, all awards, all trophies. 27.

Books: 4. Machine of Death. A rather interesting look at fatalism. Especially the last story, Cassandra. Games: 17. Lunar: Silver Star Harmony (PSP) 18. Cthulhu Saves the World (PC) 19. Commander Keen: Earth Explodes (PC) 20. Super Dodgeball (GBA) 21. Commander Keen: Keen Must Die (PC) 22. Heavenly Sword (PS3) 23. Dragon Quest 2 (GBC) 24. Bioshock Infinite (PS3) 24.1. Persona 4 Golden Platinum! (PSVita) Videos: 17. Adventure Time Season 1.

I’ve seen a ton of forum posts saying that the PS4’s memory will be so expensive that it will drive the price to stratospheric levels. The problem with refuting this is that it’s hard for consumers to find information on the price of GDDR5 chips. The closest I can come up with is the following. If we find two graphics cards that are identical in every way aside from the amount of memory on them, then we might get some idea of how much this memory costs, at least on the retail side.