Richard Hasselt

After questing on Coruscant for some time i finally reached the stage were i had no more quests left other than that final class quest, the one were i get my ship back (which is stolen from me at the start of the game).

I had tried that quest before but the end boss had been too tough for me to beat, but after finishing the last couple of heroic quests that were left and reaching level 16 i was finally able to beat him.

And it was an awesome sight to see those big doors slide open and get the first sight of my ship.


See my character walk up to it


And take one good look at the ship


And she is a beauty


Feels good to be back home


And we are off "to worlds unknown" :)


I really enjoyed this moment, it was a really nice scene and am glad i managed to get a couple of screenies.

Definatly feels good to be leaving Coruscant, and i have to say they didn't overdo it, it was just long enough, or i should say short enough to not get boring.
Personally i tend to get bored if i am questing in the same area for too long.

Anyways now it is off to Taris and see what that will bring me.
I have allready set foot on Taris and it looks awesome.

For some reason Ever since i started playing Skyrim i developed an obsession with books.

From the start i wanted to collect them all, whenever i see books laying around i need to check whether i can take them or not.
And eventhough i am a member of The thieves guild i still don't like taking stuff from people without a good reason, well unless they are being jerks the moment i meet them, then i won't feel as bad taking their books :)

However there is one thing i rarely do and that's actually reading them, i think i only read a few books from start to end, usually i just flip a few pages and that's it.

So when i found this Blogpost i was somewhat excited.
Here you can download all of the Skyrim books in one Ebook, so you can read it on your iPhone, iPad or whatever device you use while on the go without having to play the game or waste your gaming time reading books :)

The community effort to bring Tabula Rasa back is no more.
Apperantly NCSoft, who never cared for Tabula Rasa, cared enough to shut them down with a cease and desist order.

Personally i never really liked NCSoft (their TR team was awesome though) and after they shut down TR i started boycotting their products and stuff like this really pisses me off.

Unless they plan on bringing back Tabula Rasa (maybe as a free to play??) they should just back the F off and let the community have their fun playing the game, i mean what's the use of having a great game like this just laying around on a shelf, besides collecting dust?.
This all just sounds like a (bitter) little kid telling everyone "no you can't play with my toys, they're mine". Anyway, it was fun while it lasted, thanks Infinite Rasa team !

It's one of those games that you are not likely to admit playing when talking to friends about what you play, i mean telling them you played Battlefield 3 is ok (they play it too) and nowadays saying you play World of Warcraft is not recieved that badly, at least not as bad as a few years ago.
One of those i do no talk about (much) is the one i have been playing for the last couple of days, The Sims 3..
It's one of those "guilty pleasure" games that i enjoy playing for a while and than forget about for some time.
Just a few days ago i bought the pets expansion and have been having fun with that, so far i have only had a few pets that i picked up out and about (like a rat and a bird) and one cat.
Have to say i really like how they have done the cat, a lot of fun to watch.

However yesterday i felt a little bad, my character is a vampire so she does not age, the cat however did and so the result was that Death visited my house to pick up the cat and shortly after that both the rat and the bird died too.


"Death claiming my cat, Zoe"

I have also been trying to advance with the band i formed but for some reason everytime i go to perform a show, one of my band members quits playing and has to leave for whatever reason, before the show is suppose to be over resulting in a failure, so very annoying.

The Sims has been one of those games, that over the years i have always had on my PC to waste those hours away, to me it has always been a very addictive game.

I don't know what brought it on but lately i really wanna play Tabula Rasa again, but of course (or i should say unfortunately)i can't, that's the downside of an MMO that closes down.
I have always wished this game had an offline/singleplayer part to it like Hellgate London so that i could still occasionaly play it, but alas..

Anyway just for old times' sake i am going to post a couple of random screenshots :)

That is a question i asked myself several times.
Today was no exception, after playing Fallout New Vegas for about 10 minutes the game froze/crashed on me and i had to use the windows task manager to shut down the game.

After buying the latest DLC for Fallout NV, Old World Blues, that so far i have not been able to play cause the game doesn't want to coorporate for more than 10 minutes before crashing, i am really asking myself that question again.

To me that crashing is not unfamiliar and to those playing Fallout 3 or Oblivion, probably not that unfamiliar either.
Those games are very "crash happy", the first Bethesda game i ever played and fell in love with was Oblivion, and eventhough i really enjoy playing it, it is not without problems.
Some might say it's because you're using mods or player made addons, but in my experience even without those mods there are plenty of problems with the game.

One of the first (major) problems i encountered in Oblivion was the "famous" corrupted savegame, that basicly forced me to completely start over from scratch, all progress lost, and then i am talking about 20-30 hours worth of gameplay and that was even before i discovered mods.
I had that same problem with Fallout 3.

Fallout New Vegas, when i first launched it, it crashed after just 15 mins of playing, again without mods, what a (familiar) welcome to the game..

Why do i even put up with these problems?
Well because despite these problems, the games are freaking awesome. They are absolutely the top games when it comes to open world RPG's.
The customization of these games really extend the lifetime of these games, just look at what´s still going on for Oblivion.

For me Bethesda has been an absolute favourite when it came to RPG's/games, but also my major bane.
The times i have cursed them for making such unstable games are countless, yet i am willing to put up with it is because the games are so much fun.

However now with Skyrim coming i have my hopes up, that for once they go on a new road and bring us a stable, working game.
For me Skyrim is going to be the treshold, it will decide my future decisions on wether to buy Bethesda games, cause frankly i am fed up with problems with the games i love so much.
Why can´t they make a game that works and keeps working, so that i can enjoy these games without forcing myself to save every 5 minutes, without the constant worry of the game crashing (cause i know that´s going to happen sooner or later).

So far i have put up with it, because i love Oblivion, because i love Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, but enough is enough.

I have allready pre-purchased Skyrim on steam and i can´t wait to play it, but if they are using the same engine as they have been using for Oblivion/Fallout than i fear the worst and it will start all over again.

But i have made my decision, Skyrim or bust. If Skyrim is just as "crash happy" as Oblivion and Fallout it will be my last purchase of an Bethesda game, no matter how much i love them. I am just sick of the constant crashing and the constant fear of losing my game progress.

I mean it's not impossible, look at other great games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, i have yet to encounter a single problem, so it is quite possible to make stable games.

So Bethesda: Skyrim or bust!
This game is going to decide whether or not you will be getting any of my money in the future, because i am done playing games that should not have left the beta stage like that, because they are not finished when they are glitchy or crash/lock up without a clear reason.

After recently activating my SWTOR CE code on my SWTOR account i actually found out i have several EA accounts, my SWTOR didn't show up on my games list on Origin along with my other games, SWTOR actually creates an EA account for the same login/password you use for SWTOR.
So i ended up with 2 accounts a SWTOR/EA account and my EA/BioWare/Origin "master" account, i linked all my BioWare stuff (Mass Effect,Dragon Age) up to my main EA account sometime ago, good thing i did or i would have had another EA account to keep track of.

However by going through some of my other EA games that didn't show up in Origin either i found that i actually have a third account used for a few other games (Sims, Spore). Great three different accounts/logins, to make it more complicated.

Initially i figured to just change emails on all those accounts to match, but unfortianetly that didn't work, everytime when i try to put in my main EA account email it just says email adress allready in use and won't allow me to change it. Not to mention that by going through the options to change email or find out more about my account i ended up on several different account (login) pages for the same account and that's without going to Origin.

Then i contacted SWTOR support to see if they could help me out in merging at least my SWTOR account together with my main EA account, but they send me on to EA customer service and said they couldn't really help me as my SWTOR account was linked to an EA account.

So next i contacted EA and all i got was a message that they undestood it was inconvenient to keep up with several different accounts but that due to technical reasons it was not possible to merge accounts together.
That's just great..

All i would need is for them to allow me to link the accounts to one and the same email adress on all the different logins, doesn't sound to difficult to me, but apperantly "technical reasons" prevent me from doing so.
I mean why even prevent people from using an "existing" email to an account, i really don't understand the reason behind it, i mean it should be my choice only wether or not i want to change my email adress to an existing one, all they need to send me is a confirmation link email asking if i am sure i want to change that email adress.

I had some hope that with the upcoming changes to accounts because of their new Origin accounts it was possible to merge them, so i could keep all my games together in the same Origin client/login, but it looks like EA likes to keep it simple and i am going to have to use different logins to keep track of my stuff. Thanks for the "effort" EA... thanks for keeping things easy.

EDIT: If you have the same issue of different accounts, let's flood EA CS with requests to merge accounts, let's get them to work on this as i am sure i am not the only one with this problem.

Why are so many people/bloggers claiming certain games will fail?
Why are there people who wish games to fail?

When Tabula Rasa shut down, there were people (bloggers) almost celebrating, claiming they knew it al along and the "i told you so's" where everywhere.
Personally i was heartbroken, as for me this was the game i loved playing.
Yet, all along it's (short) lifespan Tabula Rasa had many people who were yelling for failure.

What people don't seem to understand is that every game has people playing it and loving it, i am sure Auto Assault had it's dedicated players, The Matrix Online did and i am sure Star Wars Galaxies has it's share of dedicated players (i used to be one of them, yet i am sad to see it close).
Yet many people seem almost happy to see the games close down.

Is it because they are being childish, and they don't want other people to have fun with toys they don't like/enjoy?
To me it feels that way, i mean why would you care if GameX closes down or not.., you don't like it? Fine move on to the next game and let those who enjoy it play it.
And to me this goes for any/every game out there, even if i don't play it or like it, why would i wanna see it fail, see it close down? I don't play it, i don't care about it, so why should i wish for it to fail?

Recently i have seen some bloggers posting how they feel about WAR and wanting it to see closed down.
It just doesn't make sense to me, let other people have fun with what they enjoy.

I can't stop thinking that in some way even the blogging comunity might be partly to blame for this, i mean if there are a whole bunch of "top" bloggers writing about how much a game sucks and how big a of a failure a game is, readers are going to pick up on it, often people not even playing the game and that's gonna spread like wildfire, i mean look at the SOE/SWG witchhunt not too long ago, many people claiming SOE/SWG sucked had not even touched an SOE game, they just followed on the hype that was started.

I mean when you haven't played a game yourself yet and all you read on blogs/twitter/forums about it is stuff from people who are being negative, you might start to think a game sucks and not even try it, but the game could just be awesome and just what you were always looking for, but if you don't try it because, well one of those "famous" bloggers told you it sucked, you will never know.

In my opinion, even if a game has only a few thousand players, it's still worth having around, simply for the fact that people love/enjoy playing it.
There is no need to call for it's closure or failure, you don't like it, fine move on and let those that enjoy it play their game.
What can you possibly gain from a game shutting down? The pleasure of people not being able to play their game?, the pleasure of devs losing their jobs??

Like many gamers i am one of those that always tries to document my gaming adventures by taking lots of screenshots.
Today i had a look at my screenshots folder only to see that it has grown pretty large.


Over 10 gigs worth of screenshots.
17504 screenshots in 123 folders (games), that's a lot of gaming..

This is the oldest screenshot i could find, dating back to 2005, before that i never kept screenshots for long.



Every now and then i like to go through my screenies folder and try to remember the moments i took them, always fun :)

Ever since Raptr launched their new website, i have changed from loving Raptr to no longer interrested.
I used to love Raptr because of the great profile i could show off that basicly showed all of my gaming across all platforms, achievements, new games, whatever, it was there.
Now they have changed to a Facebook wannabe and are also starting to implement stuff they take from Twitter, it also reminds me a lot of Digg and who is using that nowadays?.

Ever since my beloved profile dissapeared i hardly look at my profile/Raptr anymore, and i use to visit my profile at least a couple of times a day, not only to check my own achievements/progress but also check my friends achievements/progress.

I definatly don't need another (gaming) Facebook.

I still keep the client running for one reason, logging my gaming hours.
Way back i imported my gaming hours from Xfire into Raptr and stopped using Xfire, so if i wanna keep tracking my hours i am gonna have to use Raptr for it since there is no way to import my hours back into Xfire.

I do wonder however, how many of the original people are still on Raptr, that have been there from the start, those that probably joined Raptr, just like me because of that awesome gaming profile.
How many of those people are still on there and actually like Raptr for what it has become, or how many are dissapointed like me in what Raptr is turning out to be.

Personally i really hope they are gonna dump that shit they are working on and give use back our old profiles. I know it's still posible to link to your old profile, but how long are they gonna keep that around??

Hot on Raptr, they say.. Well not much.

I'm becoming more and more a fan of ereaders/ebooks.
I allready have a ton of books in my house and definatly am at a point where I say enough is enough, so ebooks are the perfect solution here.

However there is still one thing that I really miss and that's the smell of a book when you stick your nose in it.
Whether it's a brand new book or a ten year old book, each book has it's sent and every now and then you come across a (new) book that smells really good or a really bad one.

I really wish for an ereader that will enable sent for books, have a really old book smell like a really old book and a new book having that really fresh new book sent to it.

Welcome to yet another blog.
I felt like i needed a place to put stuff that is not gaming related, for gaming related stuff i have my blog To Worlds Unknown, but sometimes i wanna write about stuff other than gaming and that's where Hauntshade's Hideout comes in.

I will be writing here about all kinds of stuff that might interrestd me, piss me off or random musings.

I might post here often or rarely but if you're interrested in my stuff, keep your eyes out for this blog or subscribe to my feed.