Games to play in the Dark: Silent Hill Origins

And I'm back!

Things have been going a bit slow over here lately, mostly because of laziness, and a distinct lack of load shedding going on! I haven't had a power cut at home or at the office for at least two weeks now. I dunno if Eskom just switched off the power to all rural areas to keep the metropolitan areas powered or what, but hey, I am not complaining!

As to the title of this post, I have recently picked up Silent Hill: Origins for the PSP, as it was on sale at one of our retailers, and it is the perfect game to play in the dark! They even suggest you play the game with the lights off and earphones plugged in. I am not very far into the game, so a full review will have to wait until I am further, but at the moment I can say that the game has freaked me out a lot already.

That is all for now, later!

Hello Darkness my old friend...

Ok, so the blackout did not last that long (for me) today, only 1.5 hours, which is good, since I can work on this blog some more then.

For those readers in South Africa, here is a list of web sites you can go to that has information on load shedding schedules:

• Main Eskom site : At this site you can search by suburb or by time of day. Problem is, the way Eskom has indexed suburbs and the way in which the local municipalities has done it are totally different, so you might not find your suburb in the list. :(
• City of Tshwane : For Pretoria and surrounding areas. Very nice map of which places will be blocked out at which time. Only one problem: you would have to know where geographically you live to read the map, because the map itself is very general, it only shows general areas.
• City Power : More information for people living in Johannesburg. No schedules are given on which areas are going to be without power, so it is a bit of a wild goose chase this one.
• City of Cape Town : Hmm, this one just points you to the City of Cape Town Web site. Fat lot of good that does you.
• eThekwini Metro : For people living in Durban and surrounding areas. This one at least gives you an idea of which areas will be affected and at what times the blackouts are likely to occur.
• Centlec : For Bloemfontein and surrounding areas covered by the Mangaung municipality. Same sort of thing, schedules, time slots, groups and User information are available.

From all the above resources the one that looks to me if it has the most information in the most user friendly way is the City of Tshwane one. Why could not all the municipalities have followed their model I wonder?

Welcome to Gaming in the Dark!

Hi to the Internets!

First of all, an introduction:

My name is Samuel and I live in Pretoria, South Africa. Gaming wise I own a PSP, and I do some PC gaming as well. I would really like to get into XBox360 or PS3 gaming, I am working on that. South Africa being a third world country, we have some, how do you say, problems...

The newest one is called load shedding, which means that up to 10% of our country is in the dark at any one time on a given day. All this because ESKOM, our (only) power supply company, has not done their homework.

So I thought: Why not start a blog on the situation and how it impacts gaming, and I think I will probably put in some gaming news as well, especially those that impact South Africa.

And now I must probably post this because I am 99% sure my power will be cut off in 15 minutes time. :(