After accumulating points at the Mountain Dew Game Fuel website for the last few weeks, I was beginning to think the actual drinks might never be coming. I’ve had the Battle Bot pet associated with the promotion since I first heard about the Blizzard and Pepsi collaboration. Finally, after checking the local superstores a couple of times a week I came across a rack of both Horde and Alliance game fuel yesterday.
I’ve only tried the Horde (Cherry) flavor so far and can, rather predictably, report that it indeed tastes like Mountain Dew with an added cherry flavor. It certainly does the job in helping out at those times when you need a boost, and they make a nice little relic to add to my WoW collection.
I was idly reading wow.com this afternoon and found a reference to one of my favorite Eddie Izzard sketches: “Covered in bees”. It’s a line I use often to reflect a mood of ambivolence for an obviously odd action, an expression of: “Yes I know there is a big pink elephant in the middle of the room. I’m ignoring it. I’m covered in bees!” It got me thinking about the trending of this phrase as I assume that many other people have also used it and probably have also invented their own contexts. Urban dictionary say:
“Said by the masterful comedian Eddie Izzard, in his set ‘Glorious,’ to describe what a beekeeper must occassionally say when he freaks out and realizes that he is in fact covered in bees. Great line to quote at random times when surrounded by a lot of people.”
Searching FaceBookyielded a few fan groups for the phrase (note that you’ll need to be logged into FaceBook in order for the url to work) but nothing suggesting a huge public trend.
I therefore conclude that my fondness for the phrase has yet to reach pet rock levels of appeal with the social media crowd. I’ll have to see what I can do to change that.
One of the great things about the World of Warcraft user interface is the ability to install community-authored addons that enhance the functionality of the client interface you use to play the game. However, little instruction is given on how to install those addons. These steps walk through the steps necessary to download and install addons for the game client.
Step 1 - Download the addon
Sites like curse.com contain a plethora of available addons. You can browse descriptions, see screenshots, and download the addon to your computer. When you find an addon you would like to install, save the addon .zip file to your computer. Remember where you saved the file. A lot of people like to save to the Desktop. I save to F:\Downloads (which will be shown in the screenshots below). Choose a location you can remember easily.
Step 2 - Copying the contents of the zip file
The file you downloaded has been compressed. It is a .zip file. That zip file might contain several other files. Zipping it into a single downloadable file makes it smaller and helps keep it all together in one package. Double-click the .zip file to open it. A new folder will open showing the contents of the .zip file. What we’re going to do now is copy those contents onto the clipboard. This will allow us to paste them into the correct location in a moment. To do this first select all of the contents of the zip file, either by dragging your mouse or pressing Ctrl-A. When all of the files and folders in the zip are selected, right-click over one of those folders and select Copy from the menu. (In the screenshot below there was only one folder in the .zip file, in that case I just right-clicked and selected Copy)
Step 3 - Locating the World of Warcraft Addon folder
Now that we’ve copied the contents of the addon .zip file to the clipboard we need to find the destination, the Worldof Warcraft addons folder. To do this, open a new explorer window (double-click on My Computer) from the desktop, and then browse to your WoW installation folder. This is probably C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft. I installed to E:\World of Warcraft (shown in the screenshots below). Once you have opened your WoW installation folder, double-click on the Interface folder, and then the AddOns folder. You will now be looking at the contents of the \World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons directory. This is where all of the game addons live. If this is your first addon installation, you’ll see a bunch of folders that start with the name Blizzard_. Those are the default Blizzard UI addons.
Step 4 - Paste the new addon files into the WoW Addons directory
Now we just need to paste the new addon folders here. To do this, right-click over the AddOns folder and select Paste as shown in the screenshot below. The goal is that the folders you copied from inside the .zip file appear next to the folders that start with the name Blizzard_. If after the copy is complete you see those folders there, then you have installed the addon successfully. If not, try reviewing these instructions and see if you can figure out what step might have gone wrong. The goal is to have the contents of the .zip folder be in the \World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns folder next to the Blizzard_ ones.
Step 5 - Verify that the addon is available in World of Warcraft
The final step is to verify that your new addon is available in the game. To do this, start up World of Warcraft and log in normally but stop on the character selection screen. Instead of selecting your character, look to the bottom-left for a red button marked Addons. Click this and a new dialog list will open up showing your list of custom addons, each with a check-mark next to them. If the box is checked, then the addon is active. If it is unchecked then the addons is installed but disabled. Put a check-mark next to each addon in the list that you want to use. If your addon has a message next to it that says “Out of date” then you might need to get a new copy from the website where you first downloaded it. That means that the addon needs to be updated to work with the latest version of World of Warcraft.
If all has gone according to plan, you should find the new addon active in your game UI when you next log into one of your characters.
Disclaimer: These instructions are provided as is with no implied warranty or fitness for any use. Follow these instructions at your own risk. I am not responsible if your computer spontaneously catches fire and deletes your cat. Your mileage may vary.
I love to play both video games and board games and used to play a lot of D&D when I was younger. When I learned of my friends’ local D&D group, I jumped at the chance to join. Last night was my first chance to join the group. Unfortunately, one of the regulars had a last minute emergency and as a result the group elected to play board games instead of their regular D&D. This worked out well for me as events beyond my control meant I hadn’t had the chance to create a character under the new rules yet. Next time, I’ll be ready.
In lieu, we decided to play the World of Warcraft board game. Having played an hour or two of the online version of Warcraft in my time, I was keen to try the board game edition. I’d looked at it in Rainy Day Games a few times, but haven’t ever bought a copy as I don’t often have the chance to play with a large enough group of interested people. You really need at least 4 and ideally 6 or more to make it work properly. This was the perfect group. We had 3 alliance, 3 horde, and a GM. Excellent!
While we weren’t able to finish our game (it’s truly quite massive), we had a ton of fun beating up on gnolls, zombies, and even a couple of dungeons. We had to take a good slice of time to set everything up and go over the rules with everyone and as you can see from the picture above there are a lot of components to manage. The game works extremely well as modelling its online counterpart, from skill and talent management, level-appropriate quests, and a compelling need to work as a team on many objectives. The dungeon mechanic is both punishing and rewarding for those willing to take risks, and I look forward to another chance to play in the future.
A big thanks to Dan for hosting and to the group for letting me join in with them. I’m now armed with the D&D 4.0 handbook and a blank character sheet and as soon as Meaghan and I get back from Vegas I’ll bring Vaelorna back to life on paper and be ready to do battle. To infinity and beyond!
We enjoyed another of our periodically scheduled games nights on Wednesday at our friends Matt and Holly’s house. This week we had record attendance with nine people. We enjoyed a lovely chicken pot pie for dinner, several glasses of wine, and a few great beers. Then we proceeded to play Guesstures and Catchphrase, both great games for larger groups. Guesstures is like charades on crack. On your turn you select four cards, which you insert into the special Guesstures rack. A timer will cause the rack to swallow the cards in turn, giving you around ten seconds per card to mime sufficiently well as to cause your team mates to be able to guess the word. If your team do happen to mistake your wild movements for the word in question then you grab the card out of the rack before it is swallowed up to score points. We had a boys vs girls match, which ended in a tie and had to be resolved by a golden question of sudden death. The boys won.
Catchphrase works along similar lines, however in this team game you each takes turns passing a ticking time bomb around a circle (must like the popular children’s game “pass the parcel”). Whomever is holding the bomb when the timer runs out must award a point to the opposing team. However, you cannot simply pass the bomb onto the person sitting next to you. First you must get your teammates to guess the word that is being displayed on the bomb by describing it without using the word itself. This adds a frantic guessing element to the game as you desperately try to get your teammates to say the word before the time runs out. Lots of fun.
We had a great time as always, but more than anything it was really nice to see so many of our friends together on one evening. I only hope that we are graced with such fortune again on future occasions.
I found myself installing Warcraft III this weekend. Meaghan and I have been playing through the Wrath of the Lich King together for this past week and it made me feel nostalgiac for the lore on which the new game is based. I got through the purging of Stratholme last night and am already enjoying myself. However, it’s not just nostalgia for lore that has drawn me back to Warcarft III over WoW for a few hours. Our guild on WoW is going through some odd waves lately, and I’m finding that drama is creeping up much more often than I’d like. We’re still solid as a group and I think a lot of it is due to the fact that the new expansion came out. However, I can’t help feeling that in many ways we’re just trying too hard to control the direction of the guild right now and that is leading to a lot of tension. Meaghs and I just like to play for fun, but have found ourselves increasingly surrounded by situations that escalate into one or more parties being unhappy with another set of parties. There appear to be two major categories of unrest:
One is that some people feel the new expansion pack is being spoiled for them by others who are further advanced in the game sharing details about what they are discovering. While I understand that discovering things for yourself in games is half of the fun, I also recognize that a lot of the point of massive multiplayer online games is sharing the discoveries you make with others. I try to use judgement where I can with this but it seems that no matter what, someone is upset about some detail that is being shared. The end result for me is that I’m playing with my DnD (do not disturb) flag up and most of the chat channels turned off most of the time. This isn’t because I don’t want people sharing things about the game. I was in the beta after all and really don’t care that much about people sharing stuff. The game is so ultra massive that I’ll still be discovering new things in nine months time. Rather it is because the last few times I’ve logged on my play time has been soured by the fact that drama erupts between one or more people offended at others sharing details or not sharing or complaining about sharing. I don’t much care either way, but I try to respect the wishes of others where I can and decided simply to plug my ears up and say lalalalala (or rather put up my DnD flag and turn off the chat channels). I just want to wander around, get lost in a fantasy world and have fun.
The other main source of upset is whether people from the guild are helping each other out enough. This is a melting pot of drama. Most people are so focused upon leveling their characters that they aren’t wanting to take the usual detours through other content either as part of a fun run or to help out a lower level character with quests or dungeons that require multiple people. Having played my character up to 70 almost entirely solo, I can certainly understand the frustration of not being able to find a group. However, I don’t really have an answer for it either. I’ve found that many of the players I meet in online games like this are more than willing to go on runs or join groups that they can benefit from OR if they are bored and can completely overpower a place to show off how high level they are. This isn’t a new problem. However, the noise around “nobody helps anyone anymore” is just causing even more drama to surface.
The result of it all is that if the game isn’t an enjoyable experience then people either leave the guild or leave the game. I’m hoping to do neither but I recognize when drama is leeching fun and even if I’m not directly involved, watching friends of mine duke things out across a shared chat channel just isn’t pleasant. Massively multiplayer online games derive a large part of their fun from the social aspect. However, it unfortunately means that all of the drama and unrest pleasant in large social situations comes along for the ride as well.
I’m considering stepping down as an officer of Relentless. It’s something I’m weighing up very carefully and not something I want to do lightly. However, I’m finding that I’m increasingly unavailable in the fashion that I would like to be in that role. Furthermore, I’m under a lot of pressure at my job right now and need for Warcraft to take second place for a while. I just don’t have the energy to duke out matters of state online in a game that I play with Meaghan for fun and relaxation. I’ve put a truckload of energy into Relentless over the last few months and feel confident that they are a solid group of people who have a lot of fun playing together. However, I’m finding that involvement is taking away from my enjoyment of playing the game.
I’m not sure what to do yet and I’m continuing for now to just think things over and see if the situation stabilizes. I’m having fun playing the new expansion but I’m finding that all of the politics currently present are taking away from that fun, which isn’t what any of us should be feeling. Hopefully the situation will calm down enough before Christmas for us to all just enjoy ourselves, relax, and remember that this is just a game after all.
Wow, if that didn’t come out like me just thinking out loud, then I don’t know what would!
Meaghs’ mom and sister were in town for the weekend to attend the Portland Bridal Show. They stayed with us on Friday and Saturday night and then attended the show most of Saturday prior to a shopping spree at the Lloyd Center mall.
They spent most of Friday shopping at Washington Square mall and both Meaghan and Mandy managed to find shoes for the wedding. Woohoo! I didn’t get to see much of them that night. I’m starting a new project for my employer and working on the planning and legal stuff for that. Then I had beers planned with Mark for after work. I came home a couple of pints for the better! Fortunately we were still able to share dinner and a few glasses of wine before turning in for the night. It was nice to get the chance to catch up. I could tell that Meaghs had a blast shopping with them both; so nice for her to get some girl time to spend checking out all of the stores!
I spent most of Saturday reading about the Apache web server and researching Ruby on Rails. I decided to take a look at how the open source world lives. Then on Saturday evening I joined Relentless on a very successful raid through Zul’Aman; I even got a new dagger!
On our second Relentless raid into The Eye we managed to not only one-shot Void Reaver, but also one-shotted High Astromancer Solarian on what was only our guild’s third attempt. Pictures to follow tonight when I can get them uploaded from my desktop machine at home.
After killing Astromancer we took a peek at Kael’thas. We were able to kill his four advisors but the weapons in phase 2 simply tore us apart. It’s a complicated fight and one that will take quite a bit of practice but for now it was great to make more progress into the tier 5 raids. Congratulations Relentless on another guild first kill!
It’s Friday morning, I’m getting ready to go into the morning standup meeting for our project, and I’m in a really great mood. My parents just got back from visiting Menorca, a beautiful little island off the southern coast of Spain. The Warcraft patch 3.x is live and we’re less than a month away from the release of the Wrath of the Lich King. We had a shaky start to our Zul’Aman run last night but then ended up scoring a guild first kill on both Jan’alai and Hex Lord Malacrass. Our project at work is going very well. We’re way ahead of schedule and QA is finding only a handful of tiny issues for us to fix. Next week will mark the two-year anniversary our first date together, when I met the girl of my dreams and my life forever changed for the better. I’m listening to one of my favorite albums of all time: Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack (there simply isn’t a bad song on the entire album and it still feels like cutting edge material today). We have a busy social schedule for October and now even parts of November. All in all, life is good.
‘Twas the night before patch day, and all through the realm,
Not an item was dropping, not even a helm;
The toons were all resting, asleep in their beds,
with visions of new talents filling their heads.
From two in the morning, till two in the aft,
the Blizzard employees installed their new patch.
They worked and they toiled through bugs and through lags,
trying to roll out the content they had.
But the servers, like beasts, would boot and then fail,
the mobs all evading in Stranglethorn Vale;
and just as the night seemed to proffer despair,
the Azeroth they knew came alive with new flair:
A harbor in Stormwind,
new routes by the sea.
More items to craft,
and a new loading screen!
There was only one job that was yet to be done,
to make it all right when the players did come.
The Blizz guy updated the greeting with glee:
“Happy Patchday to all, please welcome patch three.”
We had a spectacular success this weekend in The Eye. In only our second attempt on Void Reaver we took him down smoothly. The Void Reaver fight is basically a big game of dodgeball. All 25 of your raiders spread out around the circumference of a large circular room. Throughout the fight, Void Reaver will hurl balls of arcane energy at a couple of raiders at once. Fortunately he aims at your feet, so if a ball of arcane energy is heading in your direction you move out to the edge of the room, let it land, and then get back in. Other than that it’s a fairly simply tank and spank.
Congratulations to all of Relentless! This is great progression and was a wonderful night both for loot and, more importantly, for fun. We had two good shots on High Astromancer Solarian but eventually just ran out of time. We’ll be back next Sunday to progress further, this time with Meaghan leading us into battle.
One of the things I do for fun occasionally is to record footage from the games I play; most recently World of Warcraft. It’s a bit of fun and something I can keep as a momento for later of some rather cool times that Meaghs and I have had together. In order to share this with others and as a good place to store the rather large video files, I use websites like YouTube, FileFront, and WarcraftMovies. One thing that has amazed me as part of this experience is the utterly crappy feedback that most idiots leave on these sites.
I got one particularly insightful comment this morning from a waste of breath on the WarcraftMovies site telling me how I shouldn’t make projects any more because what I do is crap. Soooo constructive. I PM’d the guy and asked him to send me links to his projects…but, ummm, oh yeah that’s right - in the 2 years he’s been a member of the site he’s contributed a total of 0 projects! Hahaha- nice one. That adds credibility to your responses when you’ve contributed absolutely nothing to the community but criticism.
A friend of mine recently got me included in the closed beta for Wrath of the Lich King, the upcoming expansion pack for the popular online MMORPG, the World of Warcraft. Meaghan and I have been taking a break from WoW recently, enjoying some time in real life instead. However, I can already feel the draw of the expansion pack and the opportunity to participate in the closed beta is very exciting. At the very least I’ll get the chance to burn out on the content before the actual game is released, thereby saving me the need to buy it and play through with our guild. :)
I upgraded my account, transferred my main character Vaelorna, and downloaded the beta client. I’ll take my first steps into Northrend either tonight or Thursday (tomorrow is already looking busy). Since the NDAs on the closed beta have been lifted, I’ll be sure to post details of my adventures here.
I’m loving Soul Calibur IV. It’s probably the best XBox 360 game I’ve bought this year. However, I’m finding that the standard gamepad controller isn’t quite cutting it for me. I did a quick search around the local game stores and on the web for a good arcade joystick and found that apart from a few rebranded items, the XBox 360 is sorely lacking such a device. The best I was able to find was this Soul Calibur IV Limited Edition stick that is “jointly released” by Microsoft and Namco/Bandai. However, it looks curiously similar to the Dead or Alive 4 stick that was also “jointly released” by Microsoft and the manufacturer of that game. From what I’ve heard the Hori stick (which is the base device that has been rebranded with a decal or two) is pretty loose and feels a little sloppy. I’ve had that experience with more than one arcade controller in the past and for $60 I’m very hesitant.
During my research however, I did come across the reason for the lack of arcade controllers. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put a verification chip in all of their licensed controllers. What this means is that a controller built without a verification chip present won’t be able to communicate with the XBox 360. They then required that all hardware vendors wishing to construct custom controllers pay a licensing fee to them in order to get said verification chip. Way to stifle the marketplace and make it prohibitive for independent vendors to practically market a profitable device there Microsoft. Thanks for that one!
However, in thinking about the problem a little further I realized that I probably wouldn’t have been satisfied with a commercial arcade controller anyway. They “look” like the ones at the arcades, but the similarity ends there. When you get it home, excitedly plug it into the console, and then play for a few minutes, you suddenly realize that this is actually a cheap plastic controller that’s unresponsive and sloppy. I’ve broken more than one “Mad Catz” after-market controller and I’m not keen to return to the experience. Enter the custom solution.
The problem is that commercial vendors are thinking of this:
Ugh!! What’s wrong with this picture? Well, for a start there are only 4 buttons showing on the face. The triggers and bumpers are actually on the back of the controller (the part of the picture out of view), which kind of defeats the purpose of a joystick. You’d have to hold this like a gamepad and move the joystick with your thumb. The “joystick” part is actually replacing one of the analog pads, which is dumb because the main reason I’d want a joystick is for up, down, left, right, and diagonal movement, not for 360 degree analog movement. The lower analog stick is right in the way of the teeny little red, green, blue, yellow main buttons of the controller and the whole thing looks like it might just break in shipping let alone after two or three days. Ewwwww! Not at all what I’m looking for.
Whereas I’m thinking more like this:
Yeah baby!! That looks rock solid. The buttons are large enough to hit and are unobstructed. The joystick looks robust and the controller itself looks like it could stand up to heavy use. Unfortunately, its only got 9 buttons showing. The standard XBox 360 controller has 11 and some of the games I play use ALL 11. Hmm, I’m just going to have to build my own.
Components, components, components!
A little research taught me that for the feel and durability of a real arcade machine, one must use high-quality coinop-grade components. The most respected of these components are manufactured by two Japanese companies: Sanwa and Seimitsu. Further research taught me more about buttons and joysticks than I ever realized I’d need to know; however, this is starting to get fun.
I spent a good portion of last night browsing catalogs put together in Japanese and trying to learn as much as possible about what makes the difference in a solid arcade controller. I learned that what I’m looking for is a balltop 8–way octagon-gate microswitch joystick. Both Sanwa and Seimitsu manufacture such joysticks and after much debate I decided that I needed to go with the Sanwa JLW-TM-8 joystick.
This joystick is both a 4 and 8–way octagon-gate stick. The 4–way means it recognizes up, down, left, and right movement. The 8–way means it knows the diagonal corners in between those directions. The octagon-gate means that at the base there is an octagon shape to restrict the joystick movement. You can replace the ball top with a custom one for about $2. I prefer the red.
Next we move onto buttons. I went with Seimitsu for these because they offered some extremely responsive and durable transparent buttons with screw-thread attachment and a flat surface instead of a bevel. These are exactly the buttons I love to press at the arcades and look like they’d take a hell of a beating. In my research I learned that some of the buttons from this manufacturer and this line have survived over a decade in the field without having to be replaced. That’s a lot of wear and tear to take: ten years of being mashed, smacked, spilled on, and generally abused without ceasing to function. They also come in eight colors (blue, green, orange, pink, red, purple, clear/white, yellow. That’s sufficient for all of the eleven buttons I’ll need to map for my custom controller.
The green translucent PS-14–KN.
That’s the stick and buttons taken care of. Now we need a chassis and a means of connecting to the XBox 360. This is where the fun starts!
Connecting to the XBox 360
Remember the verification chip? That’s going to be a problem with our custom controller because the XBox won’t recognize anything that doesn’t have the verification chip installed. Well, we’re going to get clever and instead of wiring our custom controller to the XBox directly, we’re going to wire it to a dismantled XBox 360 gamepad first.
Think of it this way. When a button is pressed on a standard XBox 360 gamepad, the button touches a copper contact beneath it. That copper contact signals to the controller that the button has been pressed. If we solder the microswitches on our custom Seimitsu buttons to the exposed contact of a gamepad circuit board then the gamepad will think that it’s button has been pressed when really it is the button on our custom arcade joystick. The signal is then passed by the controller down to the console. Sweet!
So I’ll need to caniballize a controller as part of the project. Meh! I have one that is getting pretty worn out anyway and would need to be replaced soon as it is. I might also just buy a cheap wired controller as the circuit board inside is the same no matter what. Now all I need is a cabinet to house the buttons, some copper wire, solder, a project box, the joystick and buttons themselves, some quick disconnects, a wood bore, brackets, wire clips, an acrylic panel, dowels, glue, and a plan and I should be in business. Sweet! This is going to be a fun weekend.
I’m going to try to keep the whole project under $100, which would put it at less than half the price of one on eBay (given shipping costs too), as well as being something completely customized to my wants and needs.
The final advantage of building this myself is that when it breaks, I can fix it. No more prying apart a cheap plastic shell only to find a proprietary black box inside. This will be structured and serviceable. If I crack a button or damage the joystick, I’ll just mail order another one for $4 and fix it. Plus, this is going to be a heck of a lot of fun and it should hopefully be a really nice item that I can enjoy when it’s done. I’ll post pictures and a full walkthrough of the process here so you can watch it come along.
Meaghan and I have been enjoying a break from our favorite online passtime recently. We decided to take a few weeks off from playing the World of Warcraft and those week have already turned into a little over a month. The outlook for Azeroth does not look good from there either as we’re both really enjoying doing something different for a while. There is no doubt that Warcraft helped us save a heck of a lot of money. Fifteen dollars a month for hundreds of hours of entertainment is hard math to argue with and we’ve seen a significant increase in our spending this month already.
However, it’s been nice to enjoy some other passtimes for a chance. I’m still playing video games like crazy; I always have and always will. Yet despite that, we still have oodles more free time for plenty of other stuff. With the lovely summer weather we’re having, we’ve spent a lot more time doing that whole outside thing too. It’s been nice to take some evening walks, and really great to get out with our friends more.
So, sorry to our friends in Azeroth, but you might not be seeing the return of Stuart and Meaghan any time soon. We still raid with people on Sunday afternoon for a couple of hours on the weeks where the guild actually has enough people to go, but other than that we’re pretty much done. I’m sure that when Wrath of the Lich King comes out (reportedly in November) that we’ll return for a while to enjoy the new content, but for now I’m hanging up my staff and cloak and return to that whole real life thing for a while. I have to admit that the Lifecraft graphics are a little better, although I really miss being able to fly on a golden gryphon. I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time.
Since I’ve been taking a big break from Warcraft lately, I’ve been getting heavily back into playing XBox 360. My latest big push is on Dynasty Warriors 6, the sixth edition of the chronicles of The Three Kingdoms and the struggles to build a dynasty in ancient China. Yes it’s basically button mashing for your hero to K.O. hundreds of opponents and win the entire war as a one-man army, but there is something incredibly addictive about hitting X, X, X, Y over and over again, especially when paired with the fact that you can hit B once your Musou meter is full to dish out incredible damage.
I digress and should get to the point. The problem is that there really isn’t a point. I was just blogging about the latest game I’m playing. So there!
As I hinted at earlier, in DW6 you follow the story of several families wrapped up in a story drawing from the lore of The Three Kingdoms. You play as one of the heroes from those families, following the footsteps of the battles they must win in order to restore peace to the land; and of course become emperor in the process. There are four or five heroes per family and while each families story plays out roughly the same irrespective of which hero you choose, their fighting styles and roles are different enough to make playing through as each hero individually quite compelling. I’m currently working on completing the story mode for each of the Wei family heroes. I’ve already finished nearly all of Wu, but wanted to take a break and switch to a different family for a little while before finishing up the final few chapters.
As you progress you get better weaponry, horses, and special items that increase your effectiveness on the battlefield. I’m trying to get as many of the families completed in DW6 before the impending release of Soul Calibur IV, which will consume altogether far too much of my time over the coming weeks.
Meaghan and I both love to play board games, however as a couple we find that the number of games that work with just two people is somewhat limited. Most of the games we enjoy the most work so much better with four or more people. That’s why we were so excited on Saturday night at Matt’s birthday party when we arranged what we hope is the first of many board game nights with our friends. Wednesday night this week was the first of these nights, which Matt and Holly were kind enough to host at their house.
As we first arrived, we could smell the lovely dinner Holly was preparing for us, and no sooner than we had said hello we were asked to participate in gin tasting and testing. The candidates were the Aviation Gin, the Vintners Gin, and of course Bombay Sapphire.
Surprisingly, the group agreed that the Edgefield Vintners gin was the clear favorite with a difficult distinction between aviation gin and bombay sapphire. Bombay has been my gin of choice (on the rare occasions I drink gin), however I now have other options to consider.
Meaghan and Holly had been berry picking earlier this week and for a dessert Meaghs had made angel food cake with a sauce made from some of the berries they had picked. This night was shaping up superbly. Onward to gaming glory.
We started with a game of Carcassonne, a Klaus-Jurgen Wrede tile game in which players take turns constructing (and attempting to own) a medieval landscape. By careful use of knights, farmers, and thieves, each player attempts to control the majority of the resources on the ever growing landscape. Part of the fun of Carcassonne is watching the board grow as each tile is placed. It’s a fun game but can run a little long, especially when you’re rusty to the process of playing each turn. Fortunately it’s very easy to modify to a half-tile set, making for a smaller board and a shorter more tactical version of the game.
For our second game, we decided upon Pictionary. It’s a lot of fun to play as a group and we relished the opportunity to stage a classic “Guys vs Girls” match. The girls summarily kicked our asses, however we all did fairly well considering some of the challenges we had to draw. I felt that “Hard Copy”, “A Time to Kill”, and “Lie Detector” were particularly curve-ball like, especially for the graphically challenged such as myself.
To finish the night up in style, Matt invited us to see the first episode of a new show called Flight of the Conchords in his new movie room. I don’t watch much (if any) TV so I hadn’t heard anything about the show, but have to say that I rather enjoyed the pilot. It chronicles the adventures of a band from New Zealand that find themselves in New York trying to make it: as a band, with chicks, and yet still maintain their friendship and camaraderie. Meaghs and I are going to try to catch up on the episodes we’ve missed so that we can all watch the new episodes of the show together. Awesome!
We’re going to get together for games night every other week as often as it can work out for our schedules, something I’m really looking forward to. It’s great to have local friends to play board games with and we look forward to the kinds of trouble we can cause together in the future on other trips too: starting with the Oregon Brewfest this weekend. Pictures and footage to follow.
I pre-ordered my copy of Soul Calibur IV tonight. Only one week until the saga continues. I’m was already pretty psyched when I heard that SCIV would be on the XBox 360/PS3 generation of consoles, especially when I heard that online competition modes were included. However, a couple of weeks ago I heard about the “special guest” characters introduced in this release: Yoda, Darth Vader, and an as yet un-named, but distinctly Anakin Skywalker looking additional balance Jedi. Yoda will be featured in the XBox 360 version of the game, whereas Darth Vader will appear in the PS3 version. While I don’t support console-specific content as I only own one of them, I do like the idea of the hopevs fearconcept they have come up with.
The pre-order cost $5.00 and counts towards the final game price. As part of the pre-order I also got an 18–month desk calendar featuring several of the more popular characters on each of the months.
It’s pretty rare that I’ll pre-order a game purely based on my faith of how good it’s going to be. However, I loved Soul Calibur III and have seen only good things in the previews and hands-on sessions with the development team so far. Here’s hoping that it lives up to my rather lofty expectations. Either way, I’m pretty stoked for next Tuesday and the return of my SC domination with Siegfried.
Meaghan and I enjoyed a wonderful independence day weekend and for a chance decided not to log into the World of Warcraft. We’ve been feeling for a couple of weeks that it might be time to take a break and that thought finally came to realization on Friday. We’re taking a couple of weeks off to evaluate our desire to remain active participants with our friends in the virtual world of Azeroth.
This weekend we have enjoyed an afternoon party on Friday, a lovely dinner out at Stanfords, some glorious weather, and the opporuntity to spend some time together and relax. I got the idea in my head to make a pizza together and so on Sunday afternoon we headed out to the grocery store to get a pizza base, some sauce, cheese, and a pack of pepperoni. We didn’t exactly make a pizza from scratch, but we had fun smearing the sauce over the base, sprinkling cheese, and then arranging pepperoni pieces. Ten minutes in the oven and “ding!” home-made pizza. :)
For those of you who own a Nintendo Wii, Meaghan and I picked up a copy of the latest Zelda game: Twilight Princess. So far so good! We’re playing through it together and despite some early frustration with the fishing mechanic in the game we’re having a lot of fun. One of the things we both really enjoyed about Warcraft was the collaborative aspect and we were keen to keep that up and find another game we could play together rather than disappearing to our respective corners.
In other gaming news, I discovered the joys of the game Portal as part of The Orange Box, which I also picked up this weekend. If you haven’t played this one yet I highly recommend it. I’m going to write more about Portal and The Orange Box a little later on.
On Saturday night I went over to my friend Jesse’s house to enjoy the latest UFC and had a lot of fun catching up with everyone and seeing Forrest Griffin defeat Quentin “Rampage” Jackson despite it going to decision. I bet against Forrest in our pool but actually wanted him to win so although I came in second on points for the night due to that fight, I still won in terms of that fact that Forrest is now the new titleholder.
All in all a really great weekend and a great portend for the coming summer!
I’ve been playing some classic games from my library recently. I know I sound old when I say this, but they just don’t make them like this anymore: Freelancer Red Alert 2
I had a really great weekend these last couple of days. Meaghan and I didn’t do anything particularly special. We watched some episodes of a new tv show called “Army Wives”, something that caught Meaghs’ eye during a marathon on Saturday. I was playing Warcraft and watching out of the corner of my eye. We watched a couple of episodes of Voyager (up to season five now) and even took a nice walk around our neighborhood. &nbps;The sun was out, the birds were singing and something just “gelled” that left me in a really great mood this morning.
Meaghan and I have made a lot of changes over the last few months and I think that our hard labors are really starting to pay off. I’m as happy as I can remember being in a long time and despite the fact we’ve been incredibly busy, I think we’re really setting ourselves up for even better times ahead. Here’s to the future.
Our Warcraft guild Relentless has been doing pretty well recently. We have many people who are getting well geared at level 70 (the maximum level a Warcraft character can be) and we’ve been poking our heads into some of the most exciting end-game dungeons as a result. We’re almost at the point where we can give the 25 man raids a really good shot, meaning that we have 25 people who have the gear, are at maximum level, and can devote a couple of hours to group together on a Sunday afternoon and invade some of the most difficult areas in the game. There is a lot of work involved in getting ready for such a task and the payoff for finally getting there feels great. However, we’re still only really on the verge of that achievement. We still need to run a 10 man dungeon named Karazhan pretty regularly to get the last few pieces of really good equipment for some people. Blizzard don’t make coming by this gear easy, but if they did then everyone would have it and what would be the point?
As I mentioned though, Karazhan is a 10 man dungeon and we have over 20 people to equip. That means we have two groups of people wanting to go every week. For the past couple of months our guild leader Amante has been running both groups each week. It’s an incredible amount of work and he does a fabulous job of running the show for us, but it can’t go on forever without him burning out. Kara takes about five hours to run in its entirety and despite the fact that we split each run into two events on separate days, that still means Amante is putting 10 hours straight every week into just the runs alone. This doesn’t even count the preparation necessary to ensure that everyone is signed up, has the gear they need, herding them together on the day; all of the little tasks that nickel and dime your time away. He’s been asking for volunteers to lead group two for a while and this weekend I decided I had enough experience to go for it.
What this means is that for two hours on Wednesday evening and then three hours on Sunday afternoon, I will be leading nine of my fellow guildies through the fabled tower of Medivh that is Karazhan. It’s a great dungeon to do, probably one of the best designed in the game, and is the best starting point for people to get the gear and experience they need for raiding. I have my notes, maps, guides, and checklists ready by my desk, and despite some nerves am looking forward to being back at the helm. I was guild leader of our previous guild (Honor Bound) for a while, before life/work stress and then game burnout caused me to take a few months off. Meaghan and I discussed at length before I took on this role to ensure that I wouldn’t get burned out again, and this time I think I’m ready to go. There are two other guildies who have expressed interest in leading also and together we’re going to divide the responsibilities and learn as a team. Furthermore, Relentless is a much more solid guild than Honor Bound was and the support we all get from each other is amazing. So tonight I’m looking forward to taking my first turn at the helm as we brave the first part of the run. It will be two hours long and we’re hoping to take down Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, and the Opera event.
If you ever played games like HeroQuest, Dungeons & Dragons, or other fantasy quests into unknown places with your group of brave adventurers, then think of venturing into Kara as undertaking one of the quests in those games. You take in a diverse party of 10 people, each with their own skills to bring and roles to play. Each of the character classes is dependent upon the others to fill the gaps that they cannot. The raid leader simply coordinates the construction of the team, organizes invitations, explains the fights to those who have not been before or are a little rusty, and keeps things moving along. Tonight, that will be me. Wish me luck!
I just finished compressing my second YouTube video. This one is of our guild, Relentless, taking down Prince at the end of Karazhan. This can be a pretty tricky fight even for guilds that know what they are doing. The basic premise of the fight is that you will be dueling Prince on a circular plateau that you cannot leave. Periodically throughout the fight a fire elemental will land somewhere randomly in the plateau, making the area around where it landed catch on fire. This area will then be off-limits to all members for the duration of the fight. Given that this fight can take around seven or eight minutes and the elementals are falling roughly once a minute at first and then faster towards the end of the fight, the “safe” areas can get scarce fairly quickly. Furthermore, the fire is deadly enough to kill some less well armored raid members in a matter of seconds.
What this means is that throughout the fight someone needs to call out the predicted landing zone of these elementals and instruct the other raid members where to move in order to avoid dying. More often than not, that person is me. What this entails is keeping my camera focused backwards and up at the sky for large portions of the fight watching for where the elementals are going to land. When I get a good feel for where destruction is about to rain down I call out for the other members to move accordingly and generally direct where each group needs to reposition in order to continue. Needless to say it’s a lot of fun and a lot of responsibility. I still get nervous every time we do this fight and decided that it would be kind of fun to make a video of the encounter from this perspective; it’s quite different from how it would look to most raid members. The quality is about as high as I can get while still being able to upload to YouTube, but I think it’s good enough to give the general idea. I hope you enjoy “Relentless vs. Prince (A Warlock’s Perspective)”.
It sounds eclectic but those were in fact the component parts of the lunch I enjoyed today. A friend we met through the World of Warcraft, Bob Beck, invited me to lunch for a demo of Tabula Rasa; a new title in the ever growing MMORPG genre. Bob invited me to join him at the Mad Greek Deli once before so this time I knew what to expect; great food, great company, and lots of atmosphere. I learned something new as well. Apparently the word “w00t” (yes those are zeros) is soon to be added to the lexicon. According to Bob, Websters dictionary will soon be included the word as part of the recognized English language due to popular usage! For those unaware, w00t is a term meaning “hurray” that emerged originally from Everquest and has progressed through most of the MMORPG culture.
It was good to see Bob again and catch up. We had a lot to share since last time what with Meaghs and I being engaged, our WoW guild Honor Bound disbanding and joining with Relentless, my new job (oh yeah, more on that in a minute), and the fact that it had been a couple of months since we’d last seen each other. Inevitably our conversation transgressed to gaming and we were busily discussing the ins and outs of our latest virtual endeavors. After we had eaten Bob gave me a comprehensive demo of Tabula Rasa, an impressive game by the looks of things. They have taken much of the WoW formula and found ways to improve upon it. The combat seems to have evolved particularly well and has a much more organic feel to it similar to first-person shooters. The graphics are pretty stunning too. Meaghs and I still aren’t sure whether we’ll return to the World of Warcraft just yet. We both needed a break from the online genre. It is nice to see some new development in that space though and I’m certainly intrigued to get a demo of Rasa and give it a try.
In addition to the demo, Bob was kind enough to invite Meaghan and I to the New Year’s Eve party that he and his wife are hosting. W00t! A merry mad greek Christmas to all!
I’ve been playing a lot of XBox Live Arcade games recently. There’s something about the design and creativity that’s happening in that space that is so much more appealing than the large-scale commercial projects right now. I think that several larger projects have lost their way in terms of playability and game design, instead focusing on voice acting, graphics, and loose franchise tie-ins. The Arcade games just seem to have an intrinsic playability and simple game design that makes them intrinsically addictive in a sort of “Tetris” or “PacMan” way; the unique element that has kept those games popular throughout the decades.
Arcade games also award achievements and gamer-points, even if they are typically much smaller in value than their commercial counterparts (more on this topic coming in a separate post). Achievements are basically milestones to strive for in gameplay such as uncovering a particular secret area or beating all of the bosses in a games. They give you something to work on after you’ve consumed the bulk of the game’s initial material. Usually when a game has been completed and the achievements checked off, there is little reason to return beyond the nostalgia or enjoyment of replaying parts of the experience. However, last night I caught the seed of another motivation for dusting off some of the old favorites; that of leaderboards.
Leaderboards are basically a world ranking list of all players that have posted a score for a particular game. Once you have finished all of the in-game goals and checked off all of the achievements, you can start to focus on how your score compares to other players around the world. I’ve been aware of the existence of the leaderboards since I began playing, however I’ve never really paid them too much attention because I was already ranked 174,000th or something and couldn’t seem to crack the l33t (read elite) boundaries of gamers who apparently did little else with their time. Last night, however, I finally broke that boundary and it left with me a hankering to perhaps pursue competing on the leaderboards further.
I downloaded a new Arcade game called GripShift. If you haven’t tried it out yet, I highly recommend taking a look. The premise of the game is to guide a stunt car around a variety of tracks either as part of a race or in the highly addictive “Challenge” mode. In challenge mode there are three objectives: reach the finish line in a target time, collect all of the gold stars littered around the track, and find the hidden GS symbol. You receive bronze, silver, and gold rewards for the time challenge and stars challenge and the respective time you took for fast lap, stars, and collecting the GS symbol determine your overall ranking.
There were a couple of levels that I enjoyed so much that I kept on trying to get faster and faster times for each of the three objectives. After a few hundred runs through, I felt pretty happy with my times and on a whim decided to see how I stacked up against the rest of the world. I fully expected to see that I was the millionth slowest (as usual) and sat back in complete disbelief to discover I was ranked 3rd. THIRD! In the world! Woohoo! I’m sure that I’ll be knocked out of the top five and even the top hundred within a few days as the game gains popularity. For now though, I’m basking in the glory of placing third in a world ranking list on XBox Live Arcade. These are the good times.
The screenshot below is a little fuzzy (as you can see I still play on a standard CRT TV). My XBox Live gamertag is Purplekilt and despite the fuzziness you can make it out in the image. I’m still not sure how the two people in front of me got the GS symbol in 18 seconds instead of 20, but I’ll probably be working on improving that tonight!
Welcome to the personal blog and homepage of
Stuart Thompson and Meaghan Brown.
The opinions and views expressed here do not in any way reflect those of our employers, although they sometimes reflect the opinion that kitties are more intelligent and cunning than they appear!
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