In the past week and a half, I’ve played seven “new” games. I put the word “new” in quotes because one of them is actually an older game that I’ve played before, but haven’t seen in a while. It was a fun experience. In chronological order:

Aye, Dark Overlord!
This is a cute little story-telling card game. One player is the Dark Overlord and then he asks his minions to explain their failures. The minions (everyone else) have to come up with a story about how it wasn’t their fault, deflect blame and pass the buck to another player. The catch is that the buck-passing story has to involve one of three “hints” that every player draws randomly from a deck of cards. The person passed to then has to continue the blame avoidance by pointing the finger at a different player using one of their hint cards. If a player is unable to pass the buck, or can’t come up with a reasonable story, or if the Dark Overlord simply decides so (the Dark Overlord is the ultimate judge during gameplay) they get a Withering Look. Get three Withering Looks and you lose!! This is fun because everyone wins (expect the loser). The drunker everyone is, the more fun this is.

A Game of Thrones
This is an AWESOME strategy board game based on the George R.R. Martin book of the same name. It has about a million rules and uses cardboard chits, token, counters and card as well as a beautiful game board that is 2 feet wide by 4 feet long. It can be played by three to five (we played with four) and completely captures the intrigue, strategy and feel of the books. I found it unusual in that it is a “war” game, but the winner isn’t decided by the one who has the biggest army. It is very reminiscent of Diplomacy in that you really have to work with (or against) your fellow players. If you don’t make alliances, you simply cannot win. It started out slow. The first few turns took a long time to resolve (partly because we were still learning the game) but around the fifth turn, the game really got super-interesting. We only played seven turns but it took about 4 hours to complete. It has a nice mechanic that if the game doesn’t resolve with a victor by the end of ten turns the game juts ends and the highest score wins. I’m really looking forward to trying this one again as soon as we can, but this one will require some hard-core gaming geek friends.

Worms
Kyle actually bought this on my PS3 when he was visiting over the weekend. This game is the latest installment of the venerable “artillery” genre. Not that anyone would ever recognize it as that. Oh sure, you have the same base concept: choose an angle and a velocity with varying “wind” and then fire. But the “tank” is actually a little cartoon worm, you have four of them, the terrain is anything but flat, being made up of a psychotic mish-mash of over-the-top cartoon landscapes, and your gun is a wide variety of rockets, grenades, airstrikes and flamethrowers, each of which reacts to the environment slightly differently. Kelly, Kyle and I played this well into the wee hours and had a blast doing it. This was a great PSN purchase!

Linger in Shadows
I bought this PS3 “game” because I saw it has trophies and it was only $3 on PSN. It really isn’t a “game” per se, more like a semi-interactive 6-1/2 minute long graphics demo. It basically plays a really weird movie, and you can move the camera around (within limits) and change some of the items in the environment, in real time. There are a total of six “puzzles” and ten “hidden” items, all of which grant a trophy. It took me a grand total of 45 minutes to unlock all sixteen. Aside from being a trophy whore, this would have been a colossal waste of my time even at the low price.

Noby Noby Boy
I had heard a lot of good things about this PS3 game and since I was already on PSN, I bought it too. I played with it for about two hours and I’m still not entirely sure what the heck this thing is. I can’t recommend it because it is simply mind bogglingly weird. You control a worm-like creature (the “boy”) which you move by jiggling both analog sticks. One stick controls the front, and the other stick controls the back. The middle parts just get dragged along. One of the most annoying things is that the camera follows the midpoint of the “boy” which means that often you can’t see what you’re doing at all. And there doesn’t seem to be any point of goal that I could discern. It’s just your worm-thing in a very small square world. Another $10 down the drain.

Eye of Judgment
This is the one older game I’ve already played. I have a soft spot in my heart for collectable trading card games, even though I pretty much suck at them, and this one is no different. I pulled it out to grab a few more trophies and managed to beat all of the pre-made decks on “normal” level. I only lost a few times to the computer. I don’t have many card, but I do have a generalist deck that has a few nasty tricks in it and when it worked, it worked big. The problem with this game is that it never really caught on and due to its age, the only people still playing are super godlike experts that would kill me in five turns. I really wish there were a new-ish TCG that was moderately popular, could be played online and didn't require a small fortune to play.

Burnout Paradise
Well, I didn’t actually play this. I loaded the disc into my PS3 and patched it to the current version, but never actually started the game….

On Wednesday, a lot of people that I’ve been associating with for a LONG time (almost nine years now – time flies!) lost their jobs. I’m uncharacteristically not going to go into what actually happened, nor why. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t involved and I don’t know what conversations happened behind closed door. I do know that they were very talented people and they did not in any way deserve what happened to them. I also know that a few other people who I have very little respect for are still employed by the same company. It certainly lessens my opinion of that company as a whole, knowing that the upper management is willing to throw good hardworking people off the bridge and keep less valuable assets employed. Enough about that before I start to really rant!

Anyway, as a result of this, Karen “found” several of my friends on Facebook. While not a perfect solution, it prompted me to start a Facebook account of my own. It’s a neat little tool, but I’m not in love with it. I’m still unsure as to how much value it has overall. Like Wikipedia, it seems like the more “free time” one has, the larger footprint one can put on the Facebook community and also like Wikipedia, it allows people with strong political and/or religious views a nice perfect pulpit to spew rhetoric. Unfortunately, the only people hit on Facebook are people who are “friends”; that is, people who are connected to your personal network. Based on the people who have “found” me there – whether directly or indirectly or via connections with other people (to its credit, Facebook does have a really extensive organic network of friend-of-friend-of-friend linking!) I’m even less sure about it as a social tool.

Maybe it says more about me, but it is like meeting an old high-school or college acquaintance for the first time in twenty years and then having them instantly more in next door to you. I’m sure that some people would find that perfectly fine – Karen, for example seems to really enjoy it – but the level of immediate intimacy with near total strangers is a bit disturbing to me. Even I recognize their names from my past.

And that's really the key thing. I don’t consider my past to be a wonderfully happy time. Prior to about a half-dozen years ago I wasn’t particularly enjoying life in general (with very few rare exceptions). I pretty much hated everything about high school, but I had a lot of fun in the year after I graduated and went through a period of “better living through Chemistry”. When I entered my first long-term-relationship (which later turned into a marriage) my life took a major downturn and only got worse from there. There was a short bright period of time when I left the workforce became a full-time college student at my local Junior College. And then when I transferred to a 4-year school, my life turned into a living Hell. I can only think of three good things that came out of my college experience:

1. I graduated and that allowed me to get a job that I -love- working for a great GREAT employer.
2. The bullshit that happened while I was at Cal Poly (which, to this day, I consider to be the single biggest mistake of my life) ultimately led to the dissolution of my marriage (which I consider to be the second biggest mistake of my life), and
3. I ended up with a great friend (who, ironically, was a large part of the aforementioned bullshit)

Without any exaggeration I've been happier in the last five years than any other time in my life. Sure I've had rocky spots and trying times in the last half-decade, but prior to that it was mostly bad times interspersed with good stuff. More recently it's been almost universally great with a very few abysmal periods. Having people continually remind me of the less-than-happy times in my past is not a joyful experience. I’d prefer to simply forget most of my past life. And Facebook is not a good tool for that.

We made our first trip to the mountains in a long time this weekend. Kyle graciously let us stay at this family cabin at Echo summit. The trip up was wrought with minor disasters throughout the day. It started out as a late start, due to Kyle and Karen being hung over from a late night of drinking. (I was smart enough to retire at midnight and was instantly asleep whilst they continued to celebrate the end of the work week.) We forgot a whole slew of items while packing. Loading the car was problematic. At the ski rental place, it turned out one of the missing items was Karen’s insoles, so I went home to get those. And then I had to go home again to get a checkbook because the lift passes were cash/check only no credit cards. Then we had to stop for fuel. The stop at In-and-Out burger took about 17 years because they were busy and then when they finally got our order, they had forgotten to get our drinks. When we got to Kyle’s mothers home to pick up the cabin keys, the snow pants that Kyle needed were missing. When we got to the cabin, it turned out we needed a Sno-Park pass. The list goes on and on. It was one minor thing after another all day long.

Eventually we got to the ski mountain and had a GREAT time. Kyle got to take his very first ever snowboard lesson and he had a blast. Karen and I skied together for a few hours and then we split up for the last few hours of the day. I skied Sierra from top to bottom non-stop several times. The longest run on the mountain is over three miles in length and it took a considerable time to go that far. As I write this, my legs are sore from the exertion but I’m already looking forward to our next ski trip!

Despite the multitudinous minor setbacks, Kyle’s cabin is ideally located for a trip to Sierra. I hope we can do it again before the winter ends. Although at the current rate, the winter should be over in about a month.

In other news, about a week ago, I ended up leading a Warband in WAR and figured out why WAR’s RvR won’t work for casual players. See, I’m no stranger to leading groups. In Camelot, I knew so much about the game that people would just start following me and even thought I would never ask to lead, I always ended up leading a small group around, roaming and killing other people... or attacking and capturing towers… or seiging or defending a castle. WAR, on the other hand, has “warbands” which is 24 people in a single ubergroup. Despite that, the options of “what to do” when you have a group are much much more limited than Camelot. You pretty much can’t attack a keep unless you have a full warband, and if there is even a small defense force, you need two warbands. The parallel to a Camelot tower would be the WAR battlefield objective, but even one full warband is overkill for that and they become trivially easy. Open field player-vs-player fights are few and far between; the only place you really find enemy players is either at a keep or an Objective. So the group size is either optimally a small group of six (and limited to Objectives) or a huge zerg of 50+ people and limited to keep takes. The moderately sized group of a dozen people really doesn’t have any fun options.

To make matters worse, once you’ve captured the keeps and objective in your area (which takes about an hour total) there’s nothing left for you to do! So unless you just happen to be online at the right time, you’re basically stuck with all of the fun stuff already done, or not enough people to try doing it. This really is going to hurt the casual player who can only play for a few hours at a specific time every day. If it isn’t the “right” time, they’re never going to see any of the fun content. And that’s a shame because the fun stuff is REALLY fun. I wwas left very disappointed with the leadership experience.

Finally, I’ve been playing a small MMO called Wizard 101. It’s a totally kid-based MMO that strips away all of the fancy graphics and complex gameplay. It’s is basically a MMO skeleton. It still has all of the basic MMO concepts and gameplay paradigms, but without the “flash” to distract you. It’s actually quite entertaining.

They’ve done several things which I find simply amazing to keep it kid-friendly and kid-safe. Even something as simple as name generation has been sanitized and modified to prevent abuse. Chat doesn’t use a blacklist of “bad” words, instead it uses a “white list” of allowable words. And even then, “bad” combinations of “good” words are still filtered out of chat.

The core combat mechanic is a collectable-card game or CCG. Like any CCG, you have a “deck” that you build from cards. During each 30-seocnd combat round you choose to play one card from your “hand” which is exactly six randomly selected cards from your deck. Your deck size is limited by your equipment, and the cards that you have to choose from are gained as you level up. So when you start the game you have a deck with a maximum size of 10 but only five cards to choose from (each card can be put into the deck a maximum of three times). By the time you reach level 10, you can buy a deck size of 20 and you should have around 15 different card types… AND you can put up to four copies of each card in your deck. The effect is that as you level up and gain additional cards and a larger deck, you see a nice steady progression of power.

Of course, when you strip away the trappings, you get to see the MMO skeletons in the closet too. Like all MMOs, this one is not immune to “the grind”. There comes a point in the game where you aren’t doing anything new, you’re juts finishing things up and the challenges aren’t very challenging, they’re juts taking time. That’s “the grind” – you just “grind” out the gameplay to move on to the next area. Some people would say this is a pacing “problem” but its part-and-parcel of every major MMO out there today and I think that perhaps MMO designers have gotten a little too stuck on the idea.

To me, the fun part of the game is seeing my character grow and advance. When I get a new spell, or a new attack or even new equipment, I’m happy. When you start out, advancement is fast and furious. There is an imperative to give the player the basic toolset to compete as quickly as possible. Once past that, you’re going to see “fluff” advancement, upgrades to existing abilities and bigger versions of the same thing you already had. And to keep the player form finishing the game in just a few sessions, the advancement slows to a crawl. When you are level 1, you might need to kill ten snakes to get to level 2. When you are level 100, you might need to kill 100,000 snakes to get to level 101. In theory, this is supposed to simulate that it is harder to learn to become a master than it is to become an apprentice. In reality, it’s just a artificial way to stretch out gameplay and keep people paying monthly subscription fees. That’s “the grind”. And it is just as annoying in a kid-friendly MMO as it is in a major MMO.

A few years back, when I was still involved with Kristen, I had a conversation with her shortly after the holiday break. The first thing she asked me was “What did you get?” This seemed to me, both at that time and now, to be an incredibly selfish way of looking at the holidays. In retrospect, I’m not surprised by that attitude from her since she was an incredibly selfish person.

My best holiday memories are of giving gifts that were exceptionally clever or well-received. Like the “rat family” I got for my uncle Joe and his family, or the year I took Karen to San Diego for her birthday. Sadly, I didn’t give anything very nice this year. But I did receive a lot of very very nice gifts. My “wish list” has been pruned down to reflect that. (See the link on top left.) I’m going to list these in the order I received them…

From Zant: Chimayo Tequila Reposado. I had some of this many years ago when I was on vacation in Southern California. I’ve been searching for it ever since. Amazingly enough, our local Bottle Barn started carrying the stuff about a month before the holidays, so I bought a bottle. And then my friend Zant bought me a second bottle! This is “sipping” tequila, super smooth and quite tasty. I’ve already had a few shots of this. I’m going to try a little taste test with the Patrón Silver soon.

From Kyle: I received a very cool Rock Band instrument bag. It stores all of the instruments including the drum kit, two guitars, the mic, cables and the game itself. Everything in one bag. This is especially cool since I already have a carrying bag for the PS3, so now when I plan a Rock Band event at work or want to take the game somewhere, it is all self-contained in two cases. A much better solution that the vegetable box I was using previously.

From Karen: The best ski jacket EVER! This is a top-of-the-line North Face ski jacket with a removable liner and about a million pockets. I took it with me to New Orleans, but of course the temperature never dipped below 60-degrees while we were there so I didn’t need it at all. But I suspect we will be visiting the snow soon and my old ski jacket is about a million years old so this was an incredible gift.

From Yvonne: Blu-ray copy of 300. I’ve wanted this for a very long time and I’ve already watched it twice. Also a $50 gift card from SonyStyle. I suspect that this will turn into PSN credit soon and be used to buy more Rock Band tunes and downloadable games :)

From my Dad: BEST GIFTS EVER!! Not one, but TWO of the “Perfect Beaker” measuring cups. I know it sounds trite but getting these made me extremely happy. It’s such a simple thing and was the least expensive item on my wish list but was probably the one that I wanted the most. (For future reference the item that I most desire on the shorter list is the clock.) Also a copy of Valkyria Chronicles, which is a kick-ass PS3 strategy wargame. If this had a multiplayer mode I would say that it is the best strategy game ever made for the system. The gameplay is be –perfect- for that type of play. Alas, it only has a single-player campaign, but I’ve already spent about 10 hours playing it. It’s very story-driven and has Final Fantasy-esque cutscenes to advance the plot, but you can skip some of that if you just want to play the game. The gameplay is extremely easy to pick up and the missions are pretty challenging. In the six or seven missions I’ve played, I’ve failed two and had to replay them to advance. My favorite type of game: one that is easy to learn but difficult to do well with. Thanks, Dad!

From Karen’s Parents: $50 gift card from amazon.com. I’m not sure what this will turn into, but I have no doubt that it will be used (eventually). The last time I got an amazon.com gift card I spent it the very next day on a new network router/switch. Nothing is broken right now, but I –will- buy something from amazon eventually.

Overall, it was a very fruitful and fun Xmas.

TLDR version:

Karen's computer broke. We tried three different video cards, a new motherboard, two new power supplies, a new hard drive and after three weeks of dinking around with it constantly, it works again! We still need to replace here DVD burner, though.

The full story:

For some time now, Karen's computer has been giving odd warning messages about USB power. It would pop up an alert that a USB device was pulling too much power from the hub and could potentially be damaged. The odd thing was that the device listed was always "unknown device". The only things plugged in via USB were (and still are) a keyboard and a mouse.

About a month ago, some strange video artifacting started happening and programs that were graphics intensive (ie games) would sometimes close unexpectedly. She even got a Blue Screen of Death a few times with an error on the video driver. I had to reinstall the newest drivers for her card to resolve the problem.

Three weeks ago, anything that hit the video card would instantly crash and her computer would boot back up into 640x480, 8-color mode. There was noticeable artifacting and graphic errors even before the OS would load; there was vertical banding in the POST screen and the bootup splash had a checkerboard pattern. It was almost assuredly a dead or damaged video card.

Luckily, Kyle was visiting and he had just come from his brother's house. Apparantly his brother had not one but TWO GeForce 8800GTX cards sitting around unused. Serendipity! We offered to pay for the shipping to have his brother send us one and the deal was struck.

A week passed.

The new card arrived, I installed it and.... no video output signal at all. I tried everything I could think of, but could not get the card to output a single scan line. The card had been "altered" to work with a liquid cooling system, but had been reverted to the stock heatsink. After a visual inspection I found a bit of discoloration on the video board directly opposite the main GPU. I assume that there was some heat event or condensation or some sort of electrcial problem there. It had only cost us $15 to ship it so it was not that big of a loss. I packaged the whole thing back up and we went to Best Buy and bought a brand new GeForce 9800GTX.

I was shocked and amazed at the prices for video cards. It was only about $125 for a 1GB card that was faster than the $300 cards we bought only one year ago! So we bought one and brought it home and installed that. It output video (indicating that the "free" card was indeed damaged) but it had the EXACT SAME artifacting pre-POST and after bootup! It seemed that the problem wasn't the video card after all.

So, we returned the new video card to Best Buy and started thinking about what might actually be the problem. The most likely candidate seemed like the mainboard. We asked at BestBuy if they sold motherboards, but they did not. We drove to our local computer shoppe (which happes to be right around the corner from our house) and bought a new Asus P5QL-Pro mainboard.

It took about an hour to swap out the mainboard. I plugged it in and.... the computer powered on. Then it powered off. Then it powered on again. Then it powered off. It flicked on and off about six times in as many seconds, and then shut down. there was a strong smell of burned plastic in the air and nothing would get it to power on again. Thinking the worst, I swapped the old mainboard back in and tried again. The computer seemed dead and would not power on. I walked away from it before I broke anything else.

The next day, I went and bought a new power supply. I suspected that was the "new" problem. I put the new mainboard back in (clearly the old one has a video/"north bridge" issue) and disassembled the case to put in the new power supply.

It seems that the case we used to build Karen's computer uses a "custom" power supply layout and a standard power supply doesn't work. Luckily, again, fortune smiled on us. It turns out that Kyle had the exact same case with the exact smae power supply sitting around unused. He actually was going to throw it away so we all piled into the car and drove down to San Francisco to pick it up. Along the way we stopped and had some noodles in Japan-town. Hey, if you're in the area, might as well enjoy it, right?

The next few hourse were spent moving stuff from Box A into Box B. Finally it was time to test it. I plugged it all back in (and held my breath AND crossed my fingers, toes and eyes) and....

It started up. NO video errors, NO flickering power, NO problems at all! Except that it didn't detect the main hard drive. At all. It didn't show up in the POST detection, and it wasn't found as a bootable drive. It was as if it didn't exist at all. I tried switching power cables, I tried switching SATA cables, I tried moving the drive to a different (working) computer. It was well and truly dead. It was a brick. A dead, dumb brick.

So, I ordered a new hard drive. The smallest one I could find economically was a 320GB drive (double the 160GB that died) but it took a few days to arrive. I pulled the old (dead) drive ad dropped in the new (good) drive and rebooted and it was detected! Hooray! I put in the Windows XP install disc into the CD drive and... it didn't boot. GAH!!

I tried three different XP installation discs. I tried slipstream. I checked the boot-ability of the discs in another (working) computer. Everything was fine but the installation disc simply would not boot.

After a bit of thought and some research I decided that the next troubleshooting step was to pull a known working CD reader from another computer, install that and see if the machine was bootable then. But I didn't want to rip apart another (working) computer so I put it off for a day or two. And then an idea occurred to me: What if I made a bootable USB drive with a copy of the WindowsXP installation on it? I did some research and it certinaly seemed do-able.

It took three days of playing around but it finally came together last night. After -exactly- 21 days, I successfully installed Windows XP on Karen's computer. After that was done, I tested the optical drive and it too is dead beyond repair. I guess that when the power supply died, it took the drives with it.

I spent a good portion of today reinstalling her apps. Lukcily, we have a network attached fileserver, so I would copy the installation CD/DVD to the fileserver from my computer (with a working CD and DVD drive), create a windows "share" to that directory on the server, then map a network drive to that share and Windows would treat that like a local disc. It was very speedy to install things like that -- the slowest part was the copy from the optical drive to the server.

I'm still doing research about the optical drive and I will probably buy one this weekend.

21 days Karen's computer has been dead. Merry fucking Christmas.