For more than two years my girlfriend and I suffered with having a stalkers.  Not the kind that follow you around (though with stalkers can you ever really be sure), we would regularly get a lot of phone calls, calls to our work numbers, calls to our cell phones.  The stalker wouldn’t actually say anything, because, like all people with mental issues they were too scared to have any sort of confrontation, their entire purpose was to be an irritant and be disruptive.

The cell phone companies can do nothing, as usual they expect you to pay your bill and not to call them, when asked they said there is nothing that can be done track these blocked calls.  Calling the police gave similar results.  Their solution (which was identical to the cell companies) was to “change your number”.  Why should I have to change my phone number to get someone to leave me alone?  The stalker is the one breaking the law, not me.  At any rate we suffered with this annoyance until my girlfriend found a really cool service called Reveal5 here in Canada.  Their system allows you to see ALL blocked/unlisted numbers and then reverse the number to find out the address, telephone provider, name of the scumbag person who is calling you.

The service really works, we sent all the information provided by Reveal5 to the local authorities who then proceeded to have a discussion with the stalker and since then the calls have stopped.  While I would have preferred to press charges because clearly people who irritate  you (sometimes called 15-20 times a day and do nothing on the line) have mental issues it was easier to just have the police have a chat.

We’ve subscribed to this service.  I cannot express how happy we were that the calls stopped.  The Reveal5 support team have been nothing but fantastic, friendly and understanding as well as willing to work with local police to provide them with the information they needed.

I highly recommend subscribing to Reveal5 if you are suffering from blocked calls calling your lines.

So I’ve been paying with the PS4 for a while now.  There is a lot to like about the system but a lot of goofy things too.

1. The OS and updates to it are terrible
   1. Updates seem to come very infrequently and when they do it’s a crap-shoot on what content will be in the update.  So very often the update notes say “stability updates” but no indication as to what sort of things needed the update.  Sony thus far haven’t had a lot of luck when it comes to keeping the Playstation OS dynamic.  The last update (v2.0) was terrible, their ‘standby’ or now called ‘rest’ mode was broken with v2.0, and so Sony a week later posted a 2.01 patch that supposedly fixed the ‘rest’ mode.  Unfortunately for me the console will still regularly have difficulty starting properly and will fail and require the machine to be turned off then on again.  In general the OS on the PS4 is a mess when it comes to stability.  I like a lot of the features (bounce in-out of games to OS seamlessly, screenshots, videos, etc) but so much of the console’s instability is centered around how buggy the OS is.
   2. Sony does a terrible job of keeping customers informed, using a facebook page to keep users informed as to what is going on with the service, patches, etc is a terrible idea.  They have notifications broadcast features on the console, why do they not use them.
2. The controller battery life is pretty bad.
   1. I can’t believe Sony didn’t allow the users to be able to turn off the light on the controller.  It seems pretty clear that if I don’t have a PS-EYE camera, then why would I want the light on the controller to stay on.  I mean, for games like GTA5 where they use the light or other titles that actually use the light to denote which player has control, etc then by all means keep the light on, but I would say of all the titles I’ve played none really NEED the light on so power is wasted needlessly.
3. Patching games is painless
   1. This is a huge improvement over the PS3, being able to leave the console in ‘rest’ mode and having it automatically update your games and patches is nice, and by the sounds of things significantly better than the Xbox One.  This was my biggest gripe on the PS3 (besides the shitty controller), if I had 30 mins to game I had to wait 15-20 of them for updates to download and install, this thankfully has not been the case with the PS4.

In my last post Destiny was the focus of buying the white console.  I will say that Destiny in general was a pretty big disappointment.  Perhaps if more of my friends had PS4s and the game I wouldn’t have gotten bored of the title so quickly but once you hit level 20 the game changes and turns into more of a grind which is a pretty big disappointment.  I don’t have limitless time to play games so a game that forces you to replay content over and over again in order to progress is something I’m not interested in.  I quit games like WoW, DAoC, because I couldn’t tolerate having to repeat content over again over again in order to compete with other players, Destiny seemed to expect that.  I got about 15 hours out of the title, which is pretty terrible.

I about about 1/2 way through The Last of Us:Remastered.  It’s an excellent game but pretty harrowing.  It feels a lot like Half Life 2 which is good in my book.. The collectibles and side mission story elements are very well done.  I haven’t played it for a little bit since I got distracted with another game but in general TLOU is probably worth the price of a PS4 as it stands.  It even has an excellent multiplayer mode which by the sounds of things is also very good.

I am currently playing Shadow of Mordor which is amazing.  My favorite genre is sandbox games and Mordor fits that model well.  I enjoy sandbox games because I like how, if the game is designed properly, there isn’t 1 way to play the game, that there are several ways to complete game content.  I’ve had several very cool somewhat random events happen as a side effect of the game being sandbox which makes the game feel very organic.  I enjoy the game world (LOTR is still one of my favorite movies), the voice acting is really well done and the graphics are top-tier.  My only complaints is that the game is really difficult in certain sections (it is easy to get swarmed if you don’t try and play the game with some thought put into how to tackle missions) and the free-formed nature of it being a sandbox game can sometimes feel daunting.  Being placed in a huge game world with dozens and dozens of things to do sometimes feels like “there is so much to do I don’t know where to begin”.  That might sound like a good thing but sometimes without the game making suggestions as to what makes the most sense you as a player spent too much time debating which of the seemingly endless parade of missions do you attempt first and if you fail what are the ramifications of failing.  Overall I have been really happy with the game, even moreso that I got it for free due to some of my other Amazon shopping.

I’ll eventually make a post or two discussing some of the indy games that have come out as part of the PS+ membership.  Initially I was disappointed that so many of these ‘unknown’ games were given out instead of retail games on PS+, but I was mistaken because I’ve played some really interesting games that normally I likely would have not played at all because I had an impression of what they were (and I was wrong).

Stay tuned…