Blazing Angels and MassCool MassImpressive
I wanted to put up a little Blazing Angels update. As noted yesterday I had downloaded the demo of the game for PC. Oddly enough this game came out on PC a year ago this month so it’s been out for a while. The game looks amazing and when graphics are cranked to the max its still capable of dropping the frame rate to low for comfort on my 256mb ATI X1600. The sound is excellent with clearly under stood radio chatter and nicely mastered 3d audio effects. The game sounded great even on my comparatively weak laptop speakers. Game play is just complicated enough to make you feel like you’re mastering something but not so complicated that you can’t pick it up and fly. The catch is that the game is designed for a controller that isn’t a PC keyboard/mouse so you almost have to get a game pad or joy stick. You should probably be using a joystick for flight sim’ing any way. As I guessed the action is slow enough to keep some nice close range dog fights going. Throw in a nice lean $19.95 for the game from Direct2drive.com and this becomes a nice, cheap well rounded but beautiful piece of gaming. I will be purchasing it my self for PC and possibly for Wii as well.
By way of my job I get to work with computers a lot. Sadly like a lot of employers they like to cut cost when/where possible. This means a lot of the time we’re left scrounging for resources. One thing we had but that didn’t stick around were external USB hard drives. This poses a problem as there are certain systems we have to update that are not allowed on the network. So how do you move large 4GB+ files to a system like that? Obviously enough the USB hard drives we don’t have. So with the move to our new employer we had the opertunity to request some things of them and one of those requests was for external USB drive enclosures. We had some old laptops so we asked for 2.5″ enclosures.
What we found were the Fanner Tech MassCool drive enclosures for a mere $9.75 from mwave.com. Talk about a heck of a deal! I expected some low quality terrible looking monstrosity. What we got was quite the opposite. With a shiny gloss black exterior and nicely matched silver caps it’s definately a nice product to look at. It’s designed exactly like the other 50,000 enclosures out there. One end cap comes off and you plug the drive in to it and slide it in to the casing. Securing it with small screws on the side of the case. What set this apart to me was the attention to detail. The kit came with a little screw driver just in case you didn’t have your own teenie-tiny screw driver. They threw in an extra screw. I don’t know if that is a bakers dozen sort of situation or if they just wanted you to have a spare. The screw driver, or screws, were magnetized to make it easier to put them in with out losing them. I know it’s not a big deal to most of you but to a technician who has lost a laptop screw or two in his day this type of detail is amazing. Fanner isn’t a big manufacturer but if they keep this sort of detail they will be huge very soon.
Christian, Geek, Gamer 
Would you recommend this for a 10 year old? I know the Teen rating can have a lot of negative stuff in it. I’ve never played the game, but my son wants it. Any comments on its moral content, other than you are obviously shooting down and blowing up enemy aircraft? Any cursing? Blood and gore? Thanks.