Not really, no, but this early track of the Canadian singer would’ve blended right in with the rest of the cheesy vocals of Sonic CD.
(The soundtrack for the levels is still awesome in a geeky-nostalgic way.)

Yesterday evening I finished Mass Effect 2 and I’m feeling kind of empty ever since. I really didn’t want this game to end.
I must say that I’m really impressed how mature ME2 is, both design and story wise. The target audience is not teenagers, entertained by one-liners burped by macho, hairy men in Gears of War. No, this piece of software is for adults, in spite of lacking alien porn and excessive gore.
This is how you make games in 2010.

I let this experience rest for a while and then write an article about it. What I’m certain of even now is that I have a new #2 best game ever. (Deus Ex is still #1.)

I’ve finished my programming task on schedule, a standalone Lua application which provides utility functions for processing data coming from Unreal. (More on its features in a later article.)

I also started making a custom animation tree and learned much about Unreal’s animation system in general. The animations will be outsourced, and since this part of the project is going to be the most expensive, I really need to get everything right on my end. I must ask for the right animations as I can’t afford redoing anims over and over again.

Fortunately - if everything goes well - I’m going to get help from a technical animator with this whole animtree thing, so there is hope yet that it will be done on time/budget and at a high quality.

Speaking of high quality, my beloved Dollhouse has ended. After 26 episodes split between two seasons, it was canceled. I’m not happy about it but it’s still better than overdoing something until it’s squeezed and disfigured but still sweats money. (I’m looking at you Stargate… )

Fortunately my sci-fi needs are still well fed: Mass Effect 2 is simply awesome.
Fun to play, looks nice, runs at 60 fps, has great music and last but not least, the story is interesting. I though as much after playing ME1, so I stopped reading any kind of news about ME2 to avoid the marketing machine and similarly retarded forum users spoiling the story for me.
Same goes for Bioshock 2 and any game from Bethesda Softworks. This article on Kotaku is about this is issue, and I totally agree with the author.
I mean, it’s really shocking when Shepard discovers that she has a Geth twin sister, but it just wouldn’t have the same impact if you knew about it beforehand.
Oh..erhm… oops…

I’ve bought ME2 (from Direct2Drive) and now that the release date came, I wanted to install it.

After downloading the 9 Gb pack I extracted the rar file and ran setup.exe:
Language: English, Ok, Yes I want to install, Next, I Accept the EULA, I Agree… Installation canceled? Uhmp, silly me, I must have accidentally clicked on “cancel"…
Okay, Finish, lets start over. Setup.exe, Ok, Next, I Accept, Installation canceled. What the hell?!

After spending an hour tracking down the problem on forums, it seems that the installer fails on Win7 x64 systems. Here we have a AAA game with tens of millions of dollars spent on the development (and twice as much on marketing) and the fucking installer doesn’t work… Well done! Yeah, I know, windows 7 is a rare, exotic operating system, I can’t expect the developers to test the installer on it… Oh wait… Win7 is the best selling OS in history.
Now I’m trying a manual install method, made for MassEffect 1, where the user copies stuff manually to the proper directories.

I wonder if there is an achievement for being able to install the game…

EDIT: I take everything back.
It was DirectoryOpus. Its zip extraction screwed up a few files, one of the exe files was copied into in several ini and rar files for some reason… o_O
7zip was able to perform the requested operation flawlessly, so its installing now! Fingers crossed.

EDIT2: It runs without a hitch.

Back in April I was bitching about how annoying GTA 4 was on PC.

Time has passed so modern science and technology advanced to a point where most of the crap things about the game can be fixed.

There is the GTA 4 Native Trainer which is an awesome piece of hack. It bypasses all the retarded Rockstar Social Club and GWL logins and skips the intro animations. It also allows the user to tweak an insane amount of stuff: spawn cars and characters, access to trainer functions, teleport, change weather and tons of other features.

It can do much more than just cheat: it can help the user customize the game experience. For example I went through all the cars in the alphabetical list and did one mission with each. (Well at least I tried. Racing with a station wagon was not very fun.)
By spawning ramps and other objects, one can do basic level editing, with super run, super jump and the gravity gun, one can play a superhero, so there are many things to mess with.

But there were official updates as well, so now it is possible to use any joystick or gamepad to control the game! (I wonder how difficult it was to enable DirectInput?)

And while there is still no way to customize the gamepad control layout, the excellent XBCD driver can work around that limitation: it can assign any button or axis to any button or axis. You can change the the number of buttons and the axis reported, map analog inputs to buttons or invert them. It supports profiles which you can switch on the fly. The official driver can’t hold a candle to XBCD.

So that the annoying stuff is out of the way, thanks to the hard working members of the community. Now I can truly enjoy this very well made game.