Tearaway has a an interesting mental history for me. I remember seeing a papercraft game at PAX Prime several years ago and thought it looked amazing. (It wasn't Tearaway, but it had the same sort of "paper-y" asthetic.) That unknown game still remains stuck in my mind. And then, when the PS4 pre-release brouhaha was happening a couple years ago, one of the games that was shown was the "endearing" Tearaway as a launch title (although Mr. Andrew House kept pronouncing it "teir", like a bunch of platforms, not "tear" as in what you do to paper). Of course, it wasn't released as a launch title (and maybe it was never going to be, but that's what's in my head).

When Tearaway was released in September, it came out to a lot of really good reviews, but overall it didn't sell very well. It went on sale on PSN (for $20) and a few of my local friends bought it digitally. And I almost bought it then, myself. But I prefer physical copies of my games - I very rarely sell them back, but I do have a habit of loaning the discs out to friends. (Local friends, take note!) While it can occasionally be a bit of a hassle to change discs, I generally play games serially - I'll play a single game straight through all in one bunch - so I'm not typically swapping discs.

Then in mid-December, thanks to the poor sales of the game, Gamestop held a blow-out sale to get rid of all of their unsold back-stock, reducing the cost of a brand new disc to only $20. (I later took advantage of a similar blow-out for The Order: 1886, but that's a story for another time).

The PS4 version of Tearaway is called Tearaway Unfolded: Crafted Edition. It's an expanded remake of the 2013 PlayStation Vita game Tearaway. For the record, I never played the Vita version, but I'm pretty sure it didn't have the Dualshock 4 and PS Camera features. For example, in the PS4 version, you use the DS4's touch pad to draw things that show up in the game; the lightbar on the DS4 is used as an in-game flashlight (as if it were shining "through" the TV, into the game world); the Real World player appears in the game (as seen by the PS Camera); some game sounds are player-created (using the Camera's built-in microphone); and in the later levels the controller's gyroscope is used to augment the controls.

The game starts out innocuously enough. It's a not terribly inspired third person platformer. The "hook" of the game is the aesthetic: the entire game world looks like it is made out of paper. The main character is a old-school paper letter (in an envelope, no less!) that walks around the papery world. The main task of the game (at least at the beginning) is to close a giant hole in the paper sky, where villanous paper creaters called "scraps" are changing all of the colored paper in the game world into boring newsprint. Using the PS Camera, the giant hole in the sky actually shows a real-time image of what the camera is seeing, as if the hole is peeking into the real world. It's a cute feature, and I found myself waving at the game a few times at the novelty of it.

It isn't far into the game until the player is asked to aim the DS4's light bar at various parts of the screen to lluminate hidden paths and platforms. The player also "shines" the DS4 lightbar into the game world to "clean up" the newsprint and restore color to the game world. (There is actually a trophy for doing this some number of times.) You are also tasked with drawing a few simple items on the DS4's touchpad that get inserted into the game world. And while drawing on the touchpad might sound like a neat feature, it's actually pretty difficult to accomplish. The DS4 touchpad has plenty of resolution and sensitivity, but it's kind of difficult to tell where you are on the screen without any visual feedback, and once you start drawing, there are no takes-backsies. (This is likely a non-issue for artists and other people accustomed to using a drawing pad, but for us "normal" folks, it's kind of a bother.) And in other sections, a quick swipe of the touchpad creates "wind" in the game world, allowing you to blow platforms open or closed, or blow down obstacles that block the player's path. (They are just paper, right?)

The game itself isn't particularly great. Playing through the various levels becomes pretty tedious fairly quickly. The game does try to break up monotony with different kinds of gameplay - for example, in one section you ride a pig like a rodeo horse, complete with silly rodeo music, breaking down a bunch of otherwise impassible barricades - and there are the requisite "collectible" items, and a few really REALLY difficult mini-quests, but the main game seems to drag on for hours without really going anywhere. Even the combat sequences are mostly uninspired, requiring only a modicum of attention to complete. Between the "cute" aesthetic, the lack of real difficulty in combat, plus the simplistic theme of the main storyline, it almost feels like a game was that was designed for kids.

But if you are willing to stick out the initial few hours of gameplay, the game actually starts getting both "challenging" in gameplay ("challenging" in quotes, because it ends up being REALLY HARD!!), and the game world itself starts to be more interesting and entertaining than the standard kid's fare. The "final" level of the main story has some sequences that require the player to swipe on the touchpad while holding down two different buttons on the controller, pressing one of the sticks to move, and tapping a "jump" button... all at the same time!! There is no way any child would have the physical dexterity to accomplish this. Heck, as a grown adult and experienced gamer, it was difficult to accomplish!!

Once you "finish" the main storyline, the game starts to get wired. It really starts to incorporate motion controls that involve moving the controller form side to side and/or tilting it to control different aspects of the game. And these later levels are where the game REALLY starts to shine. Some of the level design in the late part of the game is really inspired and could have made a decent stand-alone game in and of themselves. In fact, playing trough Tearaway Unfolded actually ends up feeling like you are playing through five different games. As soon as you finish one "game", they say a few lines and send you off on something new, and it's a whole new game. Even the papercraft aesthetic turns out to be flexible during some portions of the game (unless you consider mylar foil to be "paper"). If you can stomach getting through the first several hours of uninspired platforming, there's actually not a bad game waiting.

The biggest problem with the game is that the entire package ends up feeling like it was designed by a committee. It ends up feeling completely disjointed, like the pieces don't completely fit together. It's as if someone handed the developers a list of new features that were available on the PS4 and told them "make sure you get all of these things into the game"; and then various teams went out and designed a game that highlighted one or two features; and then they just stitched all of the resulting mini-projects together into a single game. The resulting package feels and plays just as you might think it would - the various sequences vary wildly in difficulty, theme and look. The initial main storyline is not terribly fun until the very end and while the final extended "games" after that are fun to play, the end result just doesn't hold up well at all.

Overall, while it might be a good game to highlight the various features and accessories of the PS4, it just isn't entertaining enough to warrant the time investment to get to them.

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm not a huge fan of episodic games. I tend to wait until the entire game is released before buying in on them. The game Life is Strange has gotten a LOT of really good word-of-mouth and I was super excited to play it, but when the final chapter was released just before Halloween, I was already invested in finishing the Uncharted games, and Rock Band 4 had just come out.... So I waited. My plan was to buy the season pass when my queue of games was close(r) to running low, or if the season pass went on sale.

And then came the wave of holiday sales on digital games. The Life is Strange season pass went on sale for $10 so I pretty much had to buy it. Also on sale was Telltale's season pass, for $7.50. This game wasn't really on my radar, and after just finishing the black pit of despair and depression that was Telltale's Game of Thrones, I really wasn't chomping at the bit to jump on it. But several of my friends told me it was a great game, so I ponied up the $7.50 and bought it. “How bad can it be for $7.50?” is how I convinced myself. (I ended up buying five more games this holiday season using this same logic, for a total of around $100.)

I am so glad that I bought this!!

While this is still a Telltale game, with all of the flaws that comes with that (i.e. gameplay “on rails”, a nearly immutable story, lack of re-playability, etc) the overall experience here was compelling and interesting, and was the polar opposite to the Game of Thrones experience.

I should point out that going in to this experience, I had never played a single Borderlands game, so most (if not all) of the Borderlands-specific jokes and references were completely lost on me. I'm told (but cannot verify or confirm) that several of the background characters that you meet during the story are well-known to Borderlands players. When one character in particular is introduced, the game even says “You didn't think we left him out did you?” However, even without knowing who these characters were, the game provides enough backstory so that I had a feeling for who they were and what they did.

It's also worth pointing out that while this is based in the Borderlands universe, this is NOT a “shooter” game. It's a story game. And while there is some shooting, it is handled with the Telltale Engine's version of shooting. That is, the game puts up a reticle that is about 1/5 the size of the entire screen and you have to move the reticle using the right stick, then press R2 when it is “on target”. Generally, this can be done pretty easily, even for a really horrible shooter player like me.

The overall story is well written, entertaining, and extremely engaging. It only takes about 5 minutes for the first episode to start rolling in a fun way. The first three episodes are told in a kind of “flashback” style, which opens the door for a few pretty funny jokes. For example, first time I “killed” one of the main characters (who is telling the story in flashback) the other character says, “So you died, huh?” Which of course, is silly. How could the guy be telling the story if he died? The obvious response was “Well, maybe not exactly like that, but...” and then the game picks up form the last savepoint. That kind of off-kilter humor runs throughout the game.

Speaking of humor, supposedly the entire Borderlands franchise is built on silly humor (much in the same way that Terry Pratchet's Discworld is built on puns). As a non-Borderlands player, I can't confirm this, but I can assure you that silly humor runs deep throughout this entire game! In fact, that little factoid is why the fixed story elements work so well here. In a dramatic story, where the choices you make are expected to change the plot elements, here the choices you make change the humorous dialog, while leaving the plot elements pretty much alone. And it works great!! While choosing Joke A vs. Joke B doesn't make you feel like you are actually driving the story, it does make it feel like you have some control and it makes the player WANT to keep playing! (Unlike the prior game I played.)

And then we come to Episode 4. Telltale is (in)famous for having the penultimate episode being the strongest of the bunch, and this is certainly true here! From the opening title’s kick-ass 80’s rock ballad , to the puniest joke (you can always COUNT on accountants to out NUMBER you!) and the amazingly fun finger- gun fight, to the dramatic death of one of the characters (no link for that one because I don't want to spoil it, even though you will see it coming when you play through). Overall, Episode 4 is the crown jewel in this series, but you really should play the entire thing to appreciate it.

Some people mark this game down because the overall ending is happy-happy-joy-joy. Everyone gets what they want and all is well and right in universe. I didn't feel that detracted from the game at all. Outside of one preposterously contrived deus ex machina moment in the final Episode, which seemed so ridiculous that it left me scratching my head, the whole thing holds up really well. The entire experience was these people trying to achieve some ridiculously difficult thing. And whether or not they are ultimately successful or not really doesn't lessen the path they take to get there. As the saying goes: it's the journey, not the destination!

Overall, despite this being an impulse buy (and not one that I had planned on making) I really enjoyed this game. It convinced me to buy Borderlands: The Handsome Collection when it went on sale for the Holidays, and I'll likely be playing some of that later in the year. Bottom line: Highly recommended!

I’ve been a huge Game of Thrones fan since I read the first book of the series way back in the early 2000s. When A Feast for Crows came out in 2005, I took a day off from work and literally read the entire book in one sitting. And then when HBO announced they were going to do a TV adaptation, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl. Sadly, when I started watching the show, I was less than impressed, mostly because the characters on the screen were far less… everything… than they had been in my mind. The most fun I had was near the end of Season One, when “the thing” happened – watching the outrage and confusion on social media was more fun than anything on the show! Still, even though the series never really grabbed me, I did watch the first four seasons. Mostly when I was travelling for work and was staying in a hotel room in a strange city. My options were to go down to the hotel bar and get blindingly drunk or to watch TV. So I ended up watching four seasons of a show that I already knew the story to and wasn’t terribly invested in.

In 2014, Telltale Games released the first episode of their Game of Thrones adaptation. Reviews started coming in that it was a really great experience. But I don’t like the episodic nature of these games, so I didn't buy it at the time. Truth be told, I’ve never bought any of TellTale’s games until the final episode is released. Usually, there will be a sale on the Season Pass about a month before the finale comes out. That’s when I’ll buy in. Then I’ll sit on that Season Pass until the finale is released. When I finally play them, I don’t have to wait for two to four months between episodes. I did that for The Walking Dead, I did it for The Wolf Among Us and I did it for this game as well. (I also did it for Tales From the Borderlands, and Life is Strange but those are another story.)

As expected, the Game of Thrones Season Pass went on sale for $10 on PSN a couple of months before the final episode was slated to be released. I immediately bought it, downloaded the first episode and then completely ignored it until the final episode was released. Of course, when that finale finally came out, I was in the middle of playing through the Uncharted series, and Rock Band 4 had just come out, so it sat on my PS4’s hard drive for a few weeks until I got to it.

For those who may already be familiar with the Game of Thrones series (either the books or the TV show), the game deals with the lesser House Forrester. The Forresters are bannermen to the Starks, and their house’s seat is Ironrath, located in northwest Westeros. The game makes some pretty broad assumptions about the player’s knowledge of the show. The setting is the same as the books and TV show, so events that happen in that story are shown here. For example, the game story starts on the eve of the Red Wedding and the last episode occurs during the coronation celebration of Tommen Baratheon. The larger events of the book/show also happen during the game. For example, when a main character (in the book/show) is killed, or granted lands, a reference is made to that in the game. In fact, one of the game’s primary villains is placed in a position of power specifically because it happens (or happened, depending on how you view the timeline) in the main story of the book/show. So unless you are already aware of the overarcing story, this game will present some pretty significant GoT spoilers to the player.

The main characters are not the ones that you see in the pages of the book or on the screen of your TV. However, true to the form of both book and show, you will play as nearly a half-dozen different people over the course of the game. The characters you control can and do meet up with the main characters of the bigger story! The first time you meet Tyrion is a pleasant surprise; by the end of the game you will have had conversations or interactions with such luminaries as Cersei Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Margaery Tyrell, and "The Bastard of Bolton" Ramsay Snow. The original cast members of the TV show provide voice acting talent, which (assuming you’ve watched the TV show) make those characters seem even more believable.

The total game comprises of six “episodes”, each of which is about 45 minutes to an hour of gameplay. As one might expect from the gritty nature of the source material, the first episode starts out with some fairly unforgiving combat situations. Within the first five minutes of gameplay, the player is forced to perform some fairly gruesome acts, make some questionable moral decisions and basically sets the stage for the story to come. The combat consists of moving an on-screen target to the proper location using the right stick and then pressing R2 to attack. If the player takes too long to hit the target, or if they hit R2 when the crosshair is not aligned, the shot or swing misses and the player has to deal with the consequences. Sometimes this means you die, and have to restart for the prior checkpoint. Sometimes, it means you take a hit and have to get set up for the next shot. It’s always a Bad Thing ™ and should be avoided.

The graphical presentation is typical for the TellTale series of games, but is missing their trademark comic-book “inking” look. Instead the art is much softer and pleasant to look at. Unfortunately, they also added a painting-like filter to the background. While this looks great in some places, it causes a lot of distracting shimmer in many scenes where there is motion. In fact, there are several instances where the backdrop filter interacts with items in the foreground, causing some minor annoyances. Overall, by the time I reached the end of the game, I found the backdrop filtering to be mostly detrimental to the gameplay experience.

The story starts out really strong, feeling very much like something that would take place in the Game of Thrones world. All of the people you meet seem to have believable backstories, realistic goals, and understandable motivations. The point of view of the game does jump around a bit as you are introduced to the Forrester family members. My initial thought was that it actually felt like I was playing a Game of thrones episode!! Clearly the writers and consultants who worked on the storyline did an amazing job putting the player into this world and giving them realistic options. Unfortunately, the further you get into the game, the more the strings holding up the story start to show.

In all of TellTale’s games, there is a main storyline and the player’s actions “modify” that story in subtle ways. But the story always goes the way the story goes. There is never an opportunity for the player to make wholesale changes to the direction of the narrative. The real magic of the storytelling is to make the player feel like their choices are significant – that they are not making decisions “for show” – and actually DO have a real effect on the game world. Unfortunately, this game never really achieves that feeling. Even as early on as the second episode, when the game seems to be implying that the player “should” do a specific thing, or focus on a certain goal, whether or not you succeed or fail, the story advances in exactly the same manner. And since the story is not a happy one, the player might go back to an earlier game save point to try to “fix” the problem. (I should point out that I never did this, but I was really tempted on more than a couple of occasions!) The problem is that the story is immutable. If the player makes all “perfect” choices in dialog and combat and seems to be succeeding… the Bad Stuff ™ that happens in the story... it still happens. If the player makes all “wrong” choices in dialog and combat and the situation is going to hell in handbasket, the Bad Stuff ™ that happens in the story, still happens in EXACTLY the same way, at the same time, with the same results. In short, the player’s feeling of agency quickly evaporates and it’s hard to convince yourself that you're actually playing, as opposed to "watching". It fails even as mere interactive fiction, because the player’s “interaction” is essentially meaningless. The story is basically “on rails” and the player is simply an often unwilling viewer.

Unwilling because the story as a whole is not a happy one. I suppose that anyone familiar with the Game of Thrones would be mostly unsurprised by how much blood and fire and general mayhem occurs. But of the characters that the player controls, nearly all of them end up dead at some point in the story, and the ones who do survive end up powerless and/or abandoned and generally in very dire and untenable situations. At several points during the story, I kept hoping against hope that things would turn out well for the “good guys”, but, as things wound towards their inevitable conclusion, it felt like the writers got halfway through the story and then simply said, “Let’s just kill everyone – that’s what George R.R. Martin does, and people love that!” Well, they were wrong. When you’ve got an investment in a character and they die (whether expectedly or not) it is a huge mental blow. That kind of event can be used for HUGE dramatic effect. Mr. Martin knows this and while he does kill a lot of characters, he is very careful with the pacing of those deaths, and whether they die on- or off-screen. Here, the pacing is such that, as the story winds towards the end, it feels like the player is getting incessantly pummeled with Bad Stuff ™ non-stop. At least three characters die while the player is controlling them; several more are put into extremely uncomfortable situations and the player is continually forced to be complicit in their discomfort, even if they don’t want to! Remember, the story really is “on rails” and you’re going to experience the same Bad Stuff ™ regardless of what choices you make! There is literally no way to "play" the game towards a good or happy ending here.

Overall, it started out strong and had me quite excited to play through. The first three episodes show how much potential this setting had, and were a lot of fun to play. But, by the time I had reached the fifth episode I was simply waiting for the end. Supposedly, the recently announced second season of this game will leverage the choices the player made here in order to further the story. But with a completely unchangeable pre-programmed story, horrible pacing and delivery, and a story that alternates between depressing and disappointing without any positive interactions at all, I can’t recommend this game series to anyone.

Well, it’s a new year. Woo!

About this time of year, a lot of people are posting their "Best (whatever) of 2105" lists. As a gaming-centric blog, I should probably be posting my "Best game of 2015. But I'm not going to. I played a LOT of games in 2015. I started the year in full-on MMO mode with Elder Scrolls Online, got all excited about GW2's Heart of Thorns expansion, hit the F2P Skyforge over the summer, and then, as the year went by, drifted further and further from the mainstream. Luckily, 2015 has some amazing indie releases, and I've was lucky enough to play play several of those (or am still paying them).

I distinctly remember saying this a year ago. I still have a PostIt™ note on the side of my monitor with a few blog entry titles that I was supposed to write up. Obviously, that didn’t happen. This year, however, I have already made a head start. So:

In 2016, I resolve:

1. To send one blog entry per week, on Tuesday, for one full year, or 52 weeks, whichever comes first. Unless something comes up that prevents me from posting on Tuesday, in which case I will post at the next available instance.
2. There is nothing else.

Of course, I’m going to “cheat” a bit. Because this entry (which basically says nothing) is going to count as my first one. Conveniently, today is Tuesday! So… one down, 51 more to go. Well, actually, the last one will likely be a year-end wrap up, so that’s two entries that are more-or-less written already.

Of the remaining fifty, I’ve already got two more entries sitting in my queue (from those aforementioned late-2015 indie surprises) and two more that I have already got outlines for and will likely write in the next week or so. That’ll get me through the entire first month of the year. I’ve started the next game that I’ll be writing up already, so as long as I can finish this thing in six weeks, I should stay on track! If, in the worst case, I run out of stuff to write, I can always fall back on those year old PostIt™ ideas, right?

Right?

Even though I bought my first PS3 in 2008, I had never played any of the Uncharted games. When the Tomb Raider reboot came out in 2013, I played it on the PC (thanks to steam) and loved it!! (It was actually my favorite game that year; I actually enjoyed it more than the so-called GOTY Bioshock: Infinite.) Several of my console compatriots assured me that Uncharted would be right up my alley. So, when the Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection was released the same week as Rock Band 4 (which I was already going to buy) it seemed like a good purchase to me. Since I’ve never played the originals, I can’t (and won’t) comment on how much the visuals have (or haven’t, depending on who you ask) improved. I will, however, comment on what I played.

I should point out that I completed all of these games on the “Normal” difficulty. I played them all back-to-back, or as close as back-to-back as my time allowed. For the record, it took me a bit less than two months to complete all three games. (I have a lot of "real-life" commitments.)

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

For those (like me) that are completely unfamiliar with this series, here’s the elevator pitch: Nathan “Nate” Drake (not his real name as find out later) is a Indiana Jones style action hero who is chasing after some long lost treasure that was hidden by his “ancestor” Sir Francis Drake (of the British Royal Navy) on some island in the south Pacific. I think that when it first came out in 2007, the move from 2D platforming to a 3D “real world” gaming probably made this game look pretty impressive. Compared to today’s games though? Well, it certainly shows its age.

I’m not a very good FPS player; At best, I have horrible aim. With a controller, it sometimes seems like I'm actively trying to miss. As such, I prefer taking my time going through single player games, and taking my time lining up shots. Action sequences that force me to aim and fire while moving tend to be extremely difficult for me to complete. I am also not very good at platformers. Pixel-perfect jumps and razor sharp timing are not my forte.

I tend to prefer “floaty” FPS games because it feels more forgiving when it comes to aiming – or, in my case, “spraying and praying” – and “tight” FPS games like Call of Duty are really REALLY difficult for me. Oddly enough, the FPS elements in Uncharted didn’t feel floaty OR tight. They felt “loose” and uncontrolled. Had I been playing on a higher difficulty level, I likely would have found the various gunplay sequences very challenging. As it was, the cooked-in automatic aim-assist made the gunplay almost trivial in difficulty. Find a bad guy, line up a shot where he is going to be, zoom in and wait for him to walk into the crosshairs. Find another bad guy and repeat. There really wasn’t much challenge to it because the 2007-era enemy AI would give a bad name to “artificial stupidity”.

The puzzle elements are likewise underdeveloped. They do provide a bit of a break between the pointless FPS play, but actually calling them “puzzles” is like calling it a “puzzle” to get out of bed in the morning and correctly close (and latch) the bathroom door. The solutions to these puzzles is almost always completely obvious, well-marked, and simplistic to accomplish. For example, you might be “stuck” in a room, where the only way out is a door that requires you to flip a lever, or turn a crank. That’s a “puzzle”.

The characters felt really one-dimensional. Again, I blame the era that this game was developed. No one would ever say that the “story” of a game like Donkey Kong is going to compare to something like Halo. Much like some of the original Star Trek (TOS) episodes are almost laughably funny today, a game that was produced nearly a decade ago is going to be saddled with the prejudices and built-in expectations of that time-period's designers. And as such, the characters exist to make a VERY specific point and they don’t stray one iota from that stereotypical paradigm. A decade later, the (so-called) “snappy” dialogue feels incredibly stilted and completely artificial and forced. Maybe it was sharp and witty for its time, but that time has long passed. Even the villains are so one-dimensional that it’s almost impossible to dislike them – they feel like cardboard props set up along the map in order to advance the story.

Having said all that, the level design is pretty good. I guess that’s one thing that had already been worked out in 2007. There were several sections where the levels were fun to traverse. The jet-ski sections were a great example of where the level design complimented the gameplay to make a challenging and fun experience. You could drive to avoid obstacles (some of which could kill you) or to stop form being pushed backwards, or you could aim/shoot, but you couldn’t do both at the same time. Having to compartmentalize those two different actions, which were both required (sometimes simultaneously!) was fun and challenging.

Overall, it wasn’t a BAD game, but it really felt like going back in time to an earlier era of gameplay – one that has been improved on in almost every respect. Playing an older game like this may be worthwhile for nostalgia, but if this were released today, it certainly wouldn’t win any awards.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

My local console friends told me that I should have started with this game, and after playing the first one, I can see why. Even though it originally came out only a couple of years after the original, it’s clear that Naughty Dog (the developer) learned a lot during that time. The gameplay is much improved in some areas, but not always in ways that make it a more fun experience for me. Basically, this is a “two steps forward, and one step back” kind of improvement. The difference is, that here, forward steps were pretty large, and the backward step was much smaller.

The FPS gaming is much tighter here! Even though I still never felt like I was limited by ammo or weapon selection, gunplay was much more challenging. A huge stealth aspect was added. Instead of a bunch of small rooms with 4 or 5 enemies (as in the first game) this one has large open areas with 15 to 20 enemies. The thinking (I believe) was that the player would stealth around and kill many (or most) of them before being discovered, and then the remaining gunfight would be relatively challenging but doable. Except that I am horrible at that style of gameplay. I would typically take out one, maybe two, of the enemies before being spotted. The resulting gunfight would have me fighting literally dozens of opponents in each battle. They would spawn from all directions, making it impossible for me to use my standard “hide until you get a good shot” tactic. By the time I had lined up my shot, two or more bad guys had flanked and were shooting me in the face. I had So Many Deaths in the FPS portions of the game that it was bordering on the silly.

Having said that, when I was able to stealth past an opponent without killing them, or by taking them out silently without alerting the hordes, I felt a real sense of accomplishment. So, hey, that’s good, right? In particular I had a blast in the snowstorm fight. Even though the opponents were super-hard to take down, I was able to use the visual breaks to get away, reposition and take them down methodically. So, overall I would say that the combat was better in almost every regard. It was certainly more difficult, but if you could manage it, it never felt unfair. I just wish there wasn’t such a huge reliance on the stealth aspect – it almost seemed like the designers had just figured out how to design that kind of gameplay, and so it got (over) used EVERYWHERE!!

The puzzling aspect is also better here. It still seems to be really basic puzzles, but they have added in some platforming and time-based elements, where the puzzle involved a non-obvious jump, or couldn’t be completed until you clear the area of enemies, or after watching a specific cutscene (that had a specific trigger). The variety of maps really helped here, too. Some of the jumping puzzles really were tough to figure out – especially when you were being shot at while trying to decide where to jump, what path to take and where you could dive into cover to take a (very) short break and assess your next move – and that was a nice change too.

The characters still felt pretty one-dimensional, but they really started to develop during the game’s story. In the original game, it felt like each of the main characters were created specifically to make a point, or for a specific set piece. Here, it was more like someone said: Hey, we’ve got these people as our cast, and here’s the story, now how would they act in this situation? I got the feeling that the writers were much more “invested” than they were in the prior game. In short, the storytelling is much better, and while the characters are still kind of trite, the humor and “snappy” dialogue actually works! The jokes feel like witty comments that these people would actually make in those situations. Some stand-out lines are the bit about “last year’s model” and “You’re going to miss this ass.”

The level design was much improved as well. Even though there were a few sequences that seemed to go on and on forever (the train sequence, for example), and repeating the opening scene twice (once at the opening and then a redux later in the game) the variety of environments and the different challenges that were presented really provided a mental break. Going from desert, to cityscape, to snowy mountain, to villages, to underground tombs, each portion of the game stands out as memorable in its own regard.

Outside of a few mis-steps, this was a really fun game. It didn’t feel like an old game that had been remastered, it felt like a new game from a new developer. Not “Game of the Year” quality, but certainly fun and playable in today’s market. I can see why the series has such a following, based on this game. It really did capture the feel of playing an Indiana Jones style adventure!

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

I started this game with really high hopes. I’ve played The Last of Us and having seen firsthand the massive improvements in storytelling between Uncharted 1 and Uncharted 2, I was really ready for a great game. Instead what I got was a hot mess. Even though the various aspects of the game are much improved, I found this game to be a massive step backwards in terms of level design. So much so, that it significantly detracted from the overall experience.

The gunplay here was pretty much the same as the prior game, but the developers (rightly) backed off the over-reliance on stealth kills. There were some sections where stealthy movement and setup was needed, but once discovered it wasn’t quite the clusterf*** that the prior game was. The opponents would spawn in logical locations and spread out over time, allowing the player to develop an actual strategy for dealing with being spotted, rather than just running around and hoping they could kill everything before they took too much damage. It was challenging and entertaining, without feeling bogged down or unfair. Overall, the combat improved in each game, with this installment having the best combat of the three!

The puzzle aspects took a major step forwards and were actually quite challenging to solve, even with the in-game hints. While I was able to figure them out without resorting to spoilers or online hint guides, I’m quite certain that some people won’t be able to do so. One in particular that stands out is the “wall” puzzle in Chapter 6. (A quick internet search shows that this puzzle actually did stop a great many people from advancing.) The puzzles were both challenging to solve, but also required a non-intuitive interface to be used, so it was kind of a puzzle within-a-puzzle. Whenever I came across one of these in the game, it was a great break from the full-tilt pace of the normal gameplay. Again, seeing the progression from the simplistic “push button, open door” puzzles of the first game, to the complex multiple-element puzzles of this final installment was fantastic!

The characters and storytelling improved again here. Uncharted 2’s storytelling was head and shoulders above Uncharted 1’s, and this installment continued the trend. Characters that started out as being one-dimensional throwaways turned into complex multi-dimensional characters. When presented with a difficult moral decision, it wasn’t always clear which way they would go. The writing and storytelling moved the entire game forward and made the player want to see how things turned out. The main villains here are not cardboard cutout villains that are Pure Evil; rather, they are self-motivated, greedy bastards that want what they want and do horrible things to get it. In short, they are detestable characters and when I finally got to fight (and kill) them, I had a feeling of personal satisfaction. Overall, both the storytelling and character development improved from game to game, and the presentation of this installment was top-notch!!

Level design, on the other hand, was horrible. So, so, so, so horrible! There were endless platforming/jumping sequences that served no purpose other than to slow the player down. There were huge set-piece combat areas that were nearly impossible to complete without finding “the trick”, or getting very very lucky. Nearly half of my overall play time was spent jumping from pipe to pipe to beam to ledge on some pointless platforming, or being frustratingly killed by a hundred zillion enemies that spawned out of thin air on every side of the room and instantly ended my game if I wasn’t predictively standing in just the right place at the right time. Missing a single shot would add enough time for enemies to build up reinforcements so quickly that I would be impossibly overwhelmed. And the platforming sequences seemed to go on forever, for no apparent reason other than that they could. The pitiful attempts to combine the two (platforming while being attacked by enemies) resulted in a trivial hanging-gunfight that was super easy to defeat, but simply added additional time to the platforming sections. In fact, I spent so much time being annoyed and frustrated by the horrid level design that I came very very close to just setting down the game and never finishing more than a few times.

Uncharted 3 could have been a really fun game, but was crippled by the horrible level design. Despite having some real blockbuster elements, if this were released today, it would likely be massacred by reviewers and players alike.

The Last of Us and Uncharted 4

I know The Last of Us was not part of this package, but playing these games serially, back-to-back, made me really appreciate Naughty Dog’s triumph The Last of Us even more than I had after finishing it.

I can see where the incredibly strong storytelling comes from. Watching it develop from simplistic characterizations into multi-dimensional characters that made you care about what happened to them was amazing, and The Last of Us moved that even further into a storyline that really tugs at the soft squishy heart of even the most hardened gamer! I actually have one friend who stopped playing The Last of Us after the first 15 minutes because it was “too hard” from an emotional standpoint. Now that I’ve gotten to know the cast and characters of the Uncharted series, I’m actually really looking forward to seeing them again next spring!

The addictive mix of stealthy gameplay combined with in-your-face gunplay really works well, once the balance is found. And honestly, now that I’ve played the Uncharted series, I have to say that the stealth mechanics in The Last of Us were probably overly used. The artificial limitation on ammunition and supplies, with strong, almost un-killable opponents, really served to over-emphasize the stealth game a bit too much. Bringing this gameplay back into the Uncharted world (and lessening the artificial dependence on stealth that was so strictly enforced in The Last of Us) is probably going to be a winning combination!

Level design needs to support the gameplay, and the level design went from mediocre, to great, to awful, and then finally back to mediocre (in The Last of Us). Assuming that Naughty Dog can get this dialed in, Uncharted 4 could be a lot of fun to play! (I just hope it doesn’t fall apart like Uncharted 3 did!)

Overall, I’m glad I played through these three games. It was fascinating seeing the designers improve from game to game, practically in front of my eyes. The biggest takeaway from this experience was not learning about Uncharted, but rather making me incredibly excited to see what the next game will look (and play) like! After completing the series, I’m really looking forward to playing Uncharted 4 next year!

I'm THE WORST at FPS games. Like, so bad that a "real" FPS player watching me play would probably think I'm purposely trying to be bad, as some sad kind of joke. Unfortunately, that's not the case, I simply AM THAT bad. For reference, after a solid three months of playing and practicing, I was able to get my K/D in Destiny "up" to 0.35 (It started at 0.2). I would be ecstatic if I ended a PvP match with a K/D over 0.4! So, yeah, I'm really bad at these kinds of games.

Having said that: I did not find the gameplay of this beta enjoyable at all.

It might seem like sour grapes, a la "I suck at this game, so it's a stupid game". But really, I'm okay with being an awful player. I've accepted it. That's not really the issue here. The issue is that the game isn't fun to LOSE.

I played for around five hours. That's how long it took me to crawl my way to level 5 (I told you I'm bad at these games!) and there were a few times where I was effective and got a kill or two. Those instances did feel pretty good, so I imagine that someone who has a K/D north of 1.0 is probably having more fun than they are having not-fun. And while that's okay for a niche game that is going to cater exclusively to a hardcore audience, a game that is arguably aimed at a more general population has to be fun for everyone. EVERY fight is going to have a winner and a loser. If it isn't fun to lose the fight, then eventually the losers are going to stop playing. Some might say that is a good thing; it will make the game more challenging for those that remain. But these kinds of games live and die on the size of their playerbase. Every time another person leaves the player pool, the game edges one step closer to being "dead".

I would say that 75% to 90% of my time spent playing this game was doing a not-fun thing: running across the map. Either I was running from a spawnpoint towards a fight, or I was wandering around the map looking for where a fight might be. I would either find a fight (usually not) and then would be nearly instantaneously killed (usually by an opponent I didn't see). If I did find a fight, it would last a second or two at most, and (because I'm terrible) I would usually lose horribly. And, repeat. Over, and over, and over. It didn't feel like it was a difficult challenge; it felt like a brick wall. It wasn't fun.

The matchmaking (if there was any enabled for this beta) doesn't appear to take levels, equipment, or any kind of player "skill" into account. There seems to be a "stats" page (not enabled for the beta) so I can only assume that they are tracking, or at least plan on tracking, player stats in terms of in-game performance. Players like me, with rock-bottom skills and a K/D that is 0.1 (or lower!) should be filtered into our own matches. As a brand new out-of-the box player, I shouldn't be saddled with a double-handicap of not only being horrible bad at the game but also fighting people with way more firepower, equipment, and mobility. That's not how you attract and retain players! It isn't fun (for anyone!) to be in a lopsided match. I actually was in one match last night where the top player on the other team had over 50 kills and only a handful of deaths. Clearly that guy was overpowered for the skill of everyone else in the match. I was in at least three matches where I had 12 to 15 deaths and ZERO kills. Neither of those
should ever happen in a game with a healthy player population. (I assume a healthy populations because I could toggle between different matches on the lobby page and saw there were many matches to join.)

The effective range on all the guns seems to be REALLY FAR. For someone like me with piss-poor aim and not-so-great vision, I find that I'm taking hits from an opponent that is almost impossibly small (for me). Occasionally, I wouldn't be able to spot them, even in the post death "this is who killed you" display. Clearly this is a personal failing on my part. I mean, if they can reliably hit me, then it must be possible. Just not for me.

The map design felt far too open, seemingly catering to people (not me, obviously) who can line up long-range quick-draw firing opportunities. Even the Drop Zone map, which some people are saying has really limited sight lines, felt far to open for my taste. I felt like I was getting sniped from people that were well outside of my usable range far far too often. Either they were perched on top of a peak and had sight lines that covered a huge portion of the map, or they were shooting me from above as they jet-packed around the map like a heavily armed rabbit on steroids. I mean, there is a melee button, right? I'm not sure why, since 99% of the combat in this game is medium- to super-long-range.

The time-to-kill (TTK) felt incredibly low to me. I'm not sure if it is due to my incompetence, but each firefight seemed to be over in less than a second or two. Often times, I would be dead before I even completely registered that I was even getting shot. Or if I did notice it, I'd turn to return fire and be dead before I could line up a shot. Yes, I'm not taking the time to zoom, I'm "hip firing". I also have crappy aim and bad vision, so I need a solid 1/2 second to even line up a shot. And with a superfast TTK, by then I'm already dead.

The powerups on the map felt arbitrary and most didn't seem to be particularly useful. The first time I picked one up, I was like "Oh Ho! This is going to be FUN!" And then I deployed it and found that it had a super limited range, or could only look in one direction, or only shot once, or magically vanished before I even was able figure out the controls. Having some sort of tutorial for each powerup might help with this issue, but "learn as you play" for powerups that have such severe drawbacks isn't particularly enjoyable for a casual player.

The "card" system felt artificial and limiting. No grenades until I reach level 2? Fine, but you better let me grind levels in single-player before throwing me into a fight with people who have tons of equipment that I have zero counters for. (This might be in the full game, but was certainly not part of the beta.) Level 5 for a jetpack? Why am I fighting in matches where everyone else already has this stuff?!? Even once I had unlocked most of the available cards, the vast majority didn't feel like they changed the gameplay at all. (Obvious exception to this is the jetpack, which mostly introduced a new way for me to be a target, and thus eliminated, much sooner.)

Having said all that, the visuals and music are AMAZING and AWESOME and the "feel" of being in an actual Star Wars event are spot on! Despite all of the gameplay "problems" I had, I never once felt like I was playing a game with Star Wars "pasted on". It ALWAYS felt very immersive and very much Star Wars-ey! Near the end of my 5-hour stint I was actually thinking that this is what it must feel like to be a Stormtrooper - you know... the guys that fire a zillion shots but never actually manage to hit anything before getting blasted into oblivion by a shot or two from one of the heroes - but in a Groundhog Day-esque loop.

I'm not a FPS player, so I can only compare this to the last FPS I played which was (year one) Destiny. I was equally horrible at Destiny, but in that game I actually had fun losing. Even though I was still getting killed often (and sometimes quickly), I almost always knew what I had done wrong, why it had killed me and I kinda-sorta knew what I needed to do to improve. In SW:B death was too fast, too often, and too mysterious. The only remedy that I could come up with in almost all cases was "get better" (i.e. L2P, Stupid!) which is a non-solution. If a game is fun out-of-the-box, I'll get better at it because I'm having fun playing it. Getting better at a game for the sake of being able to have fun in the future, isn't a game I want to play. I already have a job. I don't want to "work" in my free time.

I *REALLY* wanted to like this game. You have no idea how excited I was to be able to try it out. But, unfortunately the only thing that being able to play this has done is to completely cross this off my "games to buy" list. The really tragic part is that I think all of the issues I had with the game are resolvable. But I suspect that they would require some major gameplay tuning and development time, and probably aren't part of the "Battlefront" design paradigm. Lowering the damage done by ALL weapons across the board by 35%, cutting effective ranges in half (or introducing significant damage drop-off at longer ranges), and reworking the entire powerup system... while that would make the game "better" (in my opinion), but at that point it might not be a "Battlefront" game. Sadly, as great as it looks and feels, Star Wars: Battlefront (at least in the current beta incarnation) simply isn't fun.

I actually wrote this blog post back in February, but somehow managed to not post it. We were coming out of the holidays, and I was trying to keep the momentum of our Descent campaign going. As a result, we met again in January and completed the first encounter of Act II. Sadly, the momentum did not keep going and we did not meet again until July! But here is what happened in January!!!

As a reference, we’re playing the Labyrinth of Ruin Campaign as a role-playing game. The party is not allowed to look at the quest book, and each encounter is a bit of a mystery to them at first. I am playing as the Overlord and using the Basic II deck and filling with Punisher cards.)

The Setup

As was recalled in my last report, our party of Heroes was now under the guidance of Lord Merrick Farrow, and had been instructed to “deal with” the Goblin King Splig. The directions given were based on the symbols on the campaign map, and I had the party figure out where to go based on that. This was a fun little mini-game for me. The initial travel step is always a great opportunity for some random expository events to occur, and with the party telling me which way they were going I thought it would be fun to let them know if/when they were off the path with these events. The first travel event was perfect for this and it allowed for a short 10-minute role-playing event which resulted in Leoric taking two wounds, and the rest of the party getting nothing except a confirmation that they were on the right path. Sadly, the party quickly realized where they were going and never strayed from the correct path. To make matters worse, remainder of the travel events came up with “no event”. This was really disappointing since the path for this encounter was a minimum of four-steps.

Session One

I had selected this encounter as the first Act II quest because I really want to have a good shot at winning this. A Hero win here would remove Splig from the Finale and I wanted to keep him with us to the end. Since I was really only concerned about the end of this encounter, I was not really all-in on the first session. I described the setting and let the Heroes do their thing. As usual, they bumbled around aimlessly, but managed to completely block Splig’s path and continually stunned or immobilized him. By the end of the encounter, Splig only managed to move a single space.

(For reference, postings on boardgamegeek suggest that this encounter is all-but-unwinnable by the Heroes if the Overlord plays dirty. As it turned out, I didn’t ever get a chance to set this up since the Heroes basically blocked the chokepoint early and never moved. They’ve learned that Hero blocking works very well in an un-timed encounter and if they can block the timing event, then they are almost guaranteed a win. And they did just that!)

In the next-to-final turn, I played my trump card “Blood Bargaining”. I knew I was going to lose this session since Splig had barely moved out of the gate and the open group (which was the win condition for the heroes) was spread out and nearly dead. I picked my players and monsters and let the turn play out. The Heroes did exactly as I expected and literally killed each other with their actions. That single card resulted in the deaths of three Heroes in one round! Unfortunately, it was also the end of the session as they dropped the open group in that same attack. I took my three additional cards (for dropping the heroes) and Splig slipped off into the darkness.

Session Two

Before we started this session, I made a few “house rules” for role-playing’s sake. If a hero was “knocked out” they would slide to the bottom of the map; if it were more than 5 spaces they would break both of their legs, their pelvis and a few ribs, and basically be out of the encounter. (Similar to the Sudden Death rule in the Finale, although it did not work out that way at all!) I also “house ruled” that fatigue movement was ½ normal speed to prevent the 8 fatigue characters from moving 11 spaces every-other-turn. I did start Splig in the less-advantageous location, and I made a house rule that any Web ability that the Cave Spiders used would create a semi-permanent web feature on the map that would help the Heroes move down the slope quickly. So, it was not completely skewed in my favor!

At this point I think it is worth re-mentioning that the Heroes did not know the winning condition for this encounter. To help them I gave Leoric the hint “When violence fails, turn to logic”. I had also prepared a short speech for Splig when the heroes attacked him directly that was a lot more explicit that presented them with an open-ended question, hopefully to spur them into convincing him to give up his evil ways. At least that was my plan.

What actually ended up happening was that the heroes used the summoned stones as backstops and basically “skied” down the incline, with a purposeful slide never moving more than 2 or 3 spaces, which was easily absorbed by their armor. Additionally, the “Quaking Word” ability was used to stun Splig for three turns, changing what could have been a 8-round session into a 11-round session. As it transpired, the tag team of Trenloe and Leoric were able to move downslope quickly, and the only reason they stopped advancing so fast was due to a second fantastic OL card play that killed Trenloe in a single round.

Meanwhile, Kirga and Augurra (and the ally Raythen) stayed near the entrance to heal up before moving in. But since this was a “race” encounter, the three rounds they spent healing up turned out to be their downfall.

After stopping Trenloe and Leoric, and with the rest of the group lollygagging about, Splig moved off the map before a single hero ever got adjacent to him. My prepared speech and hints about “talking about this” never even got used.

Conclusion

We ended the session when Splig moved off the map. We did not do the town step, and did not go shopping or train the Heroes. I wanted to cut this one short because I had not considered how LMF would react to their success/failure and which direction he would push them afterwards. Obviously, with a win, he would push them towards a more difficult encounter with higher-stakes; with a loss, he might consider the party to be less worthy and have them spend the next encounter darning socks or picking flowers or something innocuous.

Overall, it was a fun encounter. The biggest issue was that one of the party members spent the whole final hour browsing boardgamegeek looking up this encounter and pointing out how every rule change I had made was wrong, how the party didn’t know what they were doing and was doomed, and how this encounter was completely unfair to the group and was impossible to win no matter what. I certainly did stack the deck on the second half, but despite that, the party came within one space of Splig and the most powerful character was literally only one turn from taking control of him.

Since the was written so long ago, I can share that the next encounter made sense for the current story conditions! I’m looking forward to advancing this story to the conclusion!

When The Last of Us was released on the PS3, I played it. I’m not very good at first-person games, and while most gamers barreled right through the story in about 20 to 25 hours, it took me well over 40 hours to finish that content. And that’s only the time logged in successful play. Every time that I died in combat, or failed at some skill check, or was discovered from stealth… all of those events didn’t even count towards that completion time!

(To those who can’t fathom how it could have taken me so long to play the game: the reason I advanced so slowly is because I would take several minutes to evaluate each and every combat situation; and I would look at each puzzle in the game form pretty much every angle before attempting it. I spent a lot of time crouched behind cover and watched the NPC enemies wander around until I learned their patterns and routes and then would try – often unsuccessfully – to get past them without depleting my minimal ammo. Because, in addition to being “not very good” at first-person games, my aim with a controller is worse than abysmal! Give me a pistol with a full clip and it’s even odds that I’ll even hit a single enemy, much less kill them. So I ended up having to rely pretty much entirely on stealth kills for the entire game. That takes time to set up and execute with any chance of success.)

After the game wound down to its predictable but extremely entertaining conclusion, I felt like I had just played through a fantastic story. One that I wanted to share with my friends. Unfortunately, most of them either did not own a PS3 or were unwilling to play through “just another zombie game”. When the game was re-released on the PS4, it got a little more traction and won another batch of Game of the Year awards, but it still represents a solid 20+ hours of gameplay for most people.

Enter Grant Voegtle. This guy played through the entire game and video captured it. Several times. Sometimes dozens of times for some specific sequences. He took all of that recorded captured video and edited the entire game into a 7-part mini-series. The story survives mostly intact (with one notable exception that I’ll talk about in a bit) and despite being “filmed” from what is essentially a massive Let’s Play video series, the acting, blocking and layout of the action is pretty darn good!

Unfortunately, it isn’t perfect, and it does show it’s gameplay roots occasionally. This was most apparent to me in the first 15 minutes of the game. This first part of the game itself is mostly a playable movie anyway, and the translation to an actual video experience is a bit clunky. But once the plot gets past the main titles, the action gets a lot smoother and the blocking is a lot cleaner. There are still the odd moments where the characters are having a conversation about various background situations while running down a corridor, but those are mostly ignorable.

One nice thing about this video series is that some of the protracted fight sequences are trimmed down to only a few opponents. There were some sequences, that , when watching, I felt dread due to my memories of trying (and failing) to get through that portion of the game for hours (and sometimes days) of playtime. And then the video playthrough would breeze right through it, clearly showing it as a “difficult” sequence, but successfully navigating it in only a minute or two.

Despite heavy editing – the story is still 20 hours and is squeezed into around 7 hours of video – the continuity is pretty much preserved. The only thing that leapt out to me was that one particular (and VERY IMPORTANT) conversation between the main characters was omitted from the video. Specifically, it is during a long-ish sequence where Joel must dive underwater to open a gate and allow Ellie to pass a barrier. Because (as is revealed in the game) Ellie can’t swim. This tidbit of information is used for huge dramatic effect in the game’s penultimate platforming sequence. When that portion of the story is shown in the video, it lacks the emotional punch because you aren’t already primed to see Ellie drown if she falls in the rushing waters. (Spoiler for those who haven’t played the game: she doesn’t drown.)

Despite those minor niggling bits, the video captures the essence of the game’s story extremely well. So well, in fact, that I would caution anyone that has even the slightest inclination to ever play the game to not watch these videos! While the experience is not quite the same as playing the game, the emotional impact of many of the sequences is still there and will definitely detract from the experience of actually playing the game. Conversely, for the person who has no intention of ever playing, or simply does not own a PS3 or PS4 (and has no plans on ever getting one) should watch this as soon as possible. I would definitely NOT wait until the rumored Last of Us movie is released (which could be years from now) as there is no way that the story portrayed in the game could possibly be trimmed down to a 120 (or even 180) minute film. Entire plot development chapters would have to be cut just to get the basic story into that short of a timeframe. Alternately, they could rush through the entire story, which will likely end up as an undecipherable mess. (Jupiter Ascending, I’m looking at you.…)

Weighing in at under 8 hours total, this video mini-series really captures the essence of the game, without the time and mental effort required to play through it. Highly recommended.

I had first heard of Valiant Hearts: The Great War in a reddit post about upcoming indie games. (I tend to troll a lot of these kind of places; there are a lot of really great games out there that aren’t advertised in the mainstream!) After watching the trailer on YouTube, I was tempted to buy it, but my finances have not been in great shape for the last couple of years and I didn’t want to waste money. Sure it’s only $15, and I could easily spare that. But $15 here, and $15 there, and pretty soon it’s $500 spent, and that’s a lot of money. In any case, I thought it looked really interesting, but never really bit. And then a few months ago it was “free” on PlayStation Plus.

The game is a kind of historical story-based action/puzzle game. The emphasis is on the puzzle aspects of the game, but there are a few action sequences that are pretty difficult. The puzzles are generally of the “get the correct item to the proper location” type, where the player searches the game environment for a “thing” that they will take to a place to “use” it to solve a puzzle. For the achievement hunter type gamer, there are also collections of small semi-hidden items that, upon completing the collection, give a small reward. The puzzles are generally straightforward – not like puzzles where you will find a thing that you need to carry around for hours before you find the otherwise unsolvable puzzle three levels later, and woe to you if you didn’t hold on to it! All of the puzzles can be solved by a reasonably attentive player that is cognizant of the game graphics. Some of the puzzles are fairly complex requiring the player to find and use several different items in the correct order, but I completed the entire game without once feeling the need to look online for a solution to any of the puzzles (even if a couple of them took me a pretty long time to figure out).

The action sequences are few and far between and only of moderate difficulty. Most involve timing or dodging at the correct time, and the things to miss or avoid are well telegraphed. Overall, the difficulty is not very high.

The real draw of the game is the historical story aspect of it. Much like the indie game Brothers (which I’ve posted about in the past), the story is the real draw. The game focuses on four different people as they try to make their way through “The Great War” i.e. World War I. The story begins by introducing us to Karl, a young German man who is living in eastern France, married to a woman named Marie who is pregnant with their first child. As the story (and the war) begins, Karl is forced back to Germany and is drafted into the German army. Meanwhile, Karl’s father-in-law (his wife’s father, Emile) is drafted into the French army. As you play through the game, you also get to meet Anna, a young Belgian woman who becomes a battlefield nurse, Freddie, a shirtless American soldier, and Walt, trained German war-dog.

The story is punctuated by interspersed pop-up historical info-bits. These little bits of real-life wartime information feature descriptions of the people, places and actions that took place during the actual events portrayed in the game. They are accompanied by sometimes graphic historical photos. There is no gore or gratuitous violence, but there are images that could be pretty disturbing to some players. But, even though the subject matter is a major wartime conflict, death and destruction in the game are shown in a very cartoonish and digestible form.

As the story winds towards it’s inevitable conclusion, there are few surprises and with the fairly easy puzzles and gameplay, most gamers should be able to make it through the game. It is currently available on PS4, PS3, XBone and PC. You could do a lot worse for $15.

I don’t normally watch “reality” TV. Like all fiction, those kinds of shows require a willing suspension of disbelief. If you’re not willing, the “magic” of the production doesn’t work, and it becomes pretty easy to see how hackneyed, fake and completely divorced from actual reality they actually are. For every dramatic moment captured, there is an entire camera crew involved. No one is ever “trapped” in a well, room, or jail. Every solitary experience shown involved having, at the very least, a cameraman, a lighting guy and a sound guy right there next to the actor. And while it makes for an interesting story to have little mini-interviews with the people involved, where they explain their thoughts and feelings, real life doesn’t work that way. In order to capture those moments, the action is stopped every few minutes, and the contestants are bustled off-set to give their little interviews.

Having said all that, I have watched “reality” TV in the past and found it quite entertaining. The very first season of the Survivor show hooked me in. I would watch the shows while running on a treadmill in my apartment complex’s health club. At first it was simple entertainment. After a few weeks, I started to get a feel for the different personalities of the contestants. When it came down to the final episode, I was at a remote campsite and I crowded into a packed community center with 100 other people to watch the last episode on a tiny 19-inch TV set. I remember being so completely caught up in the events at the time that I was willing to overlook the obvious fake storytelling and completely manufactured drama.

This last weekend, I was introduced to a TV show that originally aired on ABC, and is currently available on NetFlix. I have to admit that watching the first three minutes of the show hooked me in. The Quest is a “reality” show that revolves around a fantasy-based storyline that directly affects and influences the challenges and competitions of each episode. That sounds amazing!

The show almost lost me about mid-way through the first episode, when they started telling me the backstory of the different people’s real lives. I’m sure they are all wonderful people, but I wanted to see a fantasy-based story, not hear about how some lady from Chicago thinks that the dude from Joliet might end being an ally… Once they got past the boring introduction, and into the actual storyline and challenges, the show really took off.

The main premise of the storyline is that these twelve regular people are whisked off to a fantasy-based realm. They are the twelve “paladins” and each of them is given a piece of a magical weapon called the Sunspear. One of them is the One True Hero. Which one will be determined by a series of challenges, some of which are really cool, others which seem punishingly difficult.

The first challenge breaks the twelve contestants into four teams of three people each. Each team is given a “scorpion” (basically a very large floor-mounted crossbow) that is installed behind a 10-foot wall of dirt and straw. The object of the challenge is to shoot as many targets as possible located on the opposite side of the wall. One person on each team climbs a tall tower. They are the “eyes” of the team. One person aims and fires the scorpion. They are the “fist” of the team. The final player runs to the storage unit and brings bolts back to be fired. They are the “feet” of the team. This seems like it would be challenging enough, but to spice it up, the entire group is pummeled with steam powered mud-flinging cannons while they fire as many bolts as possible in a pretty short time frame. Only direct hits are counted, so blindly firing is pointless. It’s actually a lot of fun to watch, and even though you don’t really know any of the players (yet). It’s impossible not to grin every time the camera catches a bolt skewering one target dummy, or bouncing off another target, or missing entirely and hitting the ground, all while the cannons go Fa-WHOOSH! and hot mud comes raining down.

Of course, like all “reality” shows, there is elimination. The way it works here, is the players or team that perform the poorest are singled out for a second challenge, called the “Fates’ Challenge.” In the first episode, the Fates’ Challenge is an archery duel between the three players on the team that lost the scorpion challenge. Each of them is assigned a colored dummy. They then have a few minutes to shoot as many arrows as possible into their opponents dummies. The dummy with the least amount of arrows determines the “winner”. And to spice it up, the dummies are on a rotating platform so they are a constantly moving target.

The winner of the Fates’ Challenge is granted immunity and gets to stay in the game. The remaining players (including the winner of that challenge) then vote on who they would like to remain in the game. This process really adds to the drama of the show because, unlike other “reality” shows, the voting is 100% public. Not only do the players who are potentially leaving see who votes which way, but all of the other players do as well. (And, of course that gets factored into their future votes!)

Each episode follows this same formula: a daytime challenge where all remaining players compete, followed by a nighttime challenge where the losers of that day’s event do their best to not be “banished” from the show.

The daytime challenges are fun to watch and even more fun to imagine taking part in, or even getting trained for! There is a horsemanship battle, where the players must ride through a route, fire arrows, throw a spear, hit a target with a lance, and finally smash a skull with a hammer, all while on horseback. There is a sword-and-shield fight that takes place on planks, where the object is to knock the opponent off balance while not falling yourself. There is a mini-siege simulation, where teams of four barricade a door, and then use an actual battering ram to bash down the opponent’s barricade. These medieval-style challenges are fun to watch, even if you don’t care about the players.

The nighttime Fates’ Challenges are equally period-appropriate, but they aren’t so fun to imagine taking part in. Working with red-hot metal and hammering it to a spinning wooden wheel while wearing a thick leather apron; playing baseball with a sword, where every “strike” counts against you; running an obstacle course while locked in a steel cage… these don’t sound like fun things to do. Of course, these are the parts of the show where the different players’ character start to really show. You come to realize who is “just playing” and who is really a good, decent human being.

The voting sequence is overly dramatized – it is still “reality” TV, and that kind of drama is what keeps most people watching – but it does serve to even further reinforce the different personalities of the players. By the time you reach the third episode, you’ll most likely have seen enough of these folks to pick a favorite. Or at the very least, you’ll know who you want to see “banished” when it comes down to the final challenge of the day.

The Quest is no The Lord of the Rings, but it really is a fresh fusion of “Reality” TV and a fantasy-based storyline. You certainly could do a lot worse for 9-hours of mindless entertainment.

In the first commercial video games invented – the classic Space Invaders and Asteriods and even the venerable William’s Defender and Pac Man – every game ended in a loss for the player. There was literally no way to win these games. The game would just continue to ramp up in difficulty until the player lost. (There were some exceptions, where the game wasn’t coded beyond a certain difficulty and those players who devoted hours and hours to playing would “win” the game by more-or-less “breaking” it. But that doesn’t really count.) These games were coin-operated and you had to pay 25 cents to play. By making every game a losing game, it not only ensured that there was a constant flow of coins into the hopper, but it meant that the only real measure of “skill” was being able to survive as long as possible. On the other hand, it meant that unless a game was amazingly fun, no one was going to play it.

Race the Sun is a return to those classic arcade roots, and it is a ton of fun!

The basic gameplay is thus: you control a solar-powered glider racing along the ground. The sun is setting and you are trying to keep up while avoiding collisions with buildings, trees, boulders and mountains. Traveling in shadowed areas will cause you to slow down, while staying in the sunlight will keep you running at full speed. The controls are limited to steering with the left stick and one action button.

The graphical presentation of the game is, to put it in the most positive terms possible, extremely functional. While the game is rendered in lovely 1080p and runs at an incredibly high frame rate, the game world is limited to three “colors” white, black and grey. The objects in the world are not texture-mapped, not even smoothly gourad-shaded. Instead, they are blocky polygonal objects with only basic black/white/grey faces. This might seem boring to a gamer accustomed to a visually noisy FPS game, but it actually allows the player to focus on the task at hand. And you’re going to need all the focus you can muster. Whether you are a 5-year old boy who barely knows which end of the controller to use, or you are a 28-year old woman with perfect vision and lightning fast reflexes, this game will be challenging.

The pacing of the game is nearly perfect. The first time you play, you start in Region 1, with only steering control. As race along, the sun will slowly and continually outpace you. You probably didn’t notice it when you started, but there are three “challenges” that you can complete to level up your glider. There are glowing blue “tris” (they look like small glowing blue tetrahedrons inside a glowing blue bubble) scattered around and you’ll undoubtedly run over these expecting a bonus of some kind – they look like bonuses! – and when you do, you’ll be rewarded with a pleasant “ding!” sound. When you lose (and you will, either by hitting something, or when the sun falls below the horizon) you’ll “level up” and get some kind of a reward. The first few levels will give you game hints: the yellow glowy things make you go REAL FAST for a short time, moving the sun further into the sky; collecting five of the blue glowy things will increase your score multiplier by one; and as you level up a bit more, you’ll gain access to the green glowy things which give your glider a short “jump” ability that will let you avoid some terrain, and the purple glowy things that give you a one-time game-continue. There are also the wispy portals that warp you to the end of the current region and the gates that whisk you to an alternate level.

Each of these things unlock at various levels, and you’ll never see a powerup in the game until the game tells you what it is. This results in a nice steady feeling of progression. This is a really neat way to advance the game as the difficulty is more-or-less “locked”. You always start each game in the relatively easy Region 1. Each successive Region becomes increasingly difficult with the stationary rocks and buildings giving way to rolling block, moving vehicles and platforms that appear and disappear in front of you. Personally, I never made it past Region 4, and I’m glad for it. Even that level was nerve-wrackingly difficult for me. For players who have better vision and reflexes than me, each region only takes around two minutes to complete, so you will find your level fairly quickly.

For the “hardcore” player, one of the thing that unlocks fairly early on is the Apocalypse mode. This takes the sedate and well balanced gameplay and turns the difficulty up about six notches. Instead of having an initial region that is an exercise in slow dodging and route planning, it changes the game into a fast-twitch reaction/memory based game. Missiles and bombs drop onto the landscape and flying through one of the blasts will leave you blind for a few seconds. The game world is full of moving obstacles, the pace is MUCH faster, and the normally monochrome world is tinted a dusky redish orange.

Unlike the old arcade games I refer to in the first paragraph, Race the Sun keeps things fresh by not allowing you to memorize maps or patterns. Every day at a specific time, the map changes. This is really nice because each game only last a few minutes at best. After playing the first region a few times, you’ll start to mentally map out a route that gets you the bonuses you need to complete one of your three current challenges. But since it does change every day, you can’t expect to simply play it a few hours every day to learn the timing to get to the “end” of the game. First, because there is no end, and secondly because the map will be different every day.

The only drawback to this system is that if you find yourself in a position where the current challenges require you to collect a specific type of bonus – for example, at one point I was tasked with using two emergency portals in one round – and those types of bonuses are not on the map. For me, I literally could not advance. The other two challenges were to do 20 barrel rolls or to get a multiplier of 15 without dying, both of which were outside my game playing skills. (As it turned out, I was able to get the 15 multiplier after three days of trying. I never did use two portals in a single round.)

And while it is a really fun game, it is not without its flaws, one of which I’ve already mentioned. Another is that the “challenges” all vanish as soon as you hit the maximum level of 25, which only takes about 4 or 5 hours of play (less, if you are good at video games). It would have been nice to leave those available. Even if they no longer provided level-up skill increases, just as a kind of mini-game for completionists. The challenges were nice small bite-sized cookies to keep one playing, and when they vanish there is a real sense of “what now?”

Once you do cap out at max level, the game unlocks the “Labyrinth” mode. This mode changes the perspective of the game to a much higher viewpoint allowing you to see further into the distance, and changes the multiplier increasing “tris” from their normal glowing blue into white lightbulb shaped objects. The real draw to this mode is that it has an actual “end”, a real victory condition, and a quick YouTube search shows that it only takes about 5 minutes to finish this mode’s three regions. While some might view the Labyrinth as a long-term completion goal, for most people this will never happen. The difficulty curve in this mode is ridiculously steep. It still starts with the same sedate difficulty as the normal game but it ramps up super-fast.

Overall, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this game!! As of this writing it is free to Playstation Plus members on PS4, PS3 and Vita. It is also on steam and Xbox Live, as well as a stripped down free Flash-based version on Kongregate.

In late January, we went to the inaugural PAX South show. Since we were going to be in San Antonio for a week, I thought it would be neat to start playing Ingress. That was two months ago.

Now, if you didn’t know from reading this blog, I’m a “system” guy. I like to understand how the games I’m playing WORK on the inside, and then I play them. In the last nine weeks, I‘ve learned a lot about Ingress. If you’re already an Ingress player, this is going to sound a lot like “things I wish I had known when I started playing.” I should point out that this is based entirely on things that I have learned while playing Ingress. Your personal experience may differ.

Level 1
So, you're new to Ingess? The first thing you need to know about Ingress is that it is a very deep rabbit hole. You may not realize it, but Ingress is a very social game played by dozens of people in even smaller towns, and thousands (if not millions) of people globally. There are HUGE community events that involve coordinated efforts from hundreds of people in diverse locations around the globe. If you have the desire, you could potentially be coordinating efforts with other players in Australia or New Zealand or Iceland or South Africa. If you're looking for that kind of involvement, I strongly encourage you to contact your local operators and join in the big hangouts. You’ll get way more than you need there and will be encouraged devote your entire life to the game.

I'm more of a "casual" player. I play during my lunch breaks and commute to and from work. Occasionally I will go out on a weekend day to get some sunshine and do a mission. I almost always play solo and I don’t really join in on local operations. There’s nothing wrong with this style of play, but I am purposely not taking advantage of my local social group. Mostly because I don’t have the time to devote to full-time play. Having said that, I’ve learned many local player’s handles, and actually met a few in person when we both happened to be hacking portals at the same time.

At level 1, you're not really going to be able to do much. Your biggest weapons are going to be little more than a tickle for an enemy portal, and your total defensive abilities are going to register as “non-existent”. Luckily, leveling up is fast and easy!

As a new player, the key for you is going to be to hack, hack, and hack some more!!! Go to the Ingress Intel page and find a few portals that are near your home, work or school, or along your daily commute route. Make it a point to hack these every day!! Try to hack enemy portals if you can; you get +100AP for every hack on an enemy portal. Going from level 1 to level 2 is only 100 total hacks, and going from level 1 to level 3 is only 300 hacks. If you have ten portals on your daily route, and you do nothing other than hack those portals twice a day (once on your commute to work/school and once on your way home) it will take you two weeks to earn level 3.

Always play the glyph game (if you can). When you hack a portal, do a "long-press" on the hack button by holding it down for a few seconds. This will launch a little mini memory game. Watch the symbols and re-draw them. The symbols will get more complex as you level up or try to hack higher level portals, but should be pretty easy at first. By doing this, you will be working on a badge (which you will need later), you get additional AP towards leveling up faster, and you get bonus gear. Instead of getting one or two bursters or resonators, you might get four or five of each! Starting out, it is going to feel like you never have enough gear, but if you regularly play the glyph game, by the time you hit level 6 or 7 you will be throwing away stuff because you have too much!

Level 2 to Level 3

Once you’ve mastered hacking, you’re starting to build up a small stash of gear and are itching to use it. Even as a low level player you CAN actually go on offense and “smash” enemy portals. But you’ll need to know a few things about how attacking works, and more importantly how defense works.

First of all, your targets are the RESONATORS not the actual portal! It seems simple, but if no one has told you this, then you're not being effective. Weapons have range drop off. In other words, they only do max damage in a very small radius around you and the damage drops off the further away from you the target is. To maximize your damage output, you’re going to need to move around in the real world and use your GPS to stand as close as possible to the resonators you are attacking. Low level bursters are already pretty anemic, so unless you're right on top of a resonator, it is going to be really hard to kill one.

You should pick your targets wisely at first. With low level weapons, you’re not going to be able to even scratch a portal with any kind of real defense. Each existing link on a portal will negate 5% of your (already weak) attack power and there is literally nothing you can do about that. Attacking a portal that is an "anchor", with multiple fields and links, is going to be more difficult (maybe MUCH more difficult, depending on how many links it has) than a portal with no links. Starting out, just go after portals that are sitting by themselves. Also, ALWAYS check the mods on an enemy portal before you attack. Common shields provide 30% protection, rare shields provide 40% and AXA shields provide 60%. This is in addition to however much defense the portal has due to links/fields and it all adds up!! There is a cap of 95% mitigation, and it isn’t rare for a portal to have that much defense. Two “rare” shields (which aren’t actually “rare”, they are just called that) with three links is 95% mitigation. That means that every attack you do is only 1/20 as powerful as normal. Basically, if a portal has ANY shields on it, you should probably leave it alone for now.

As a low level player, portal decay is your friend. Every day, all of the resonators on all existing portals "decay" by 15%. If the owner (or some other player) does not "recharge" them, the portal will decay to nothing in 7 days. After a few days of being ignored, the energy level on all resonators will get really low. If you happen to find one on Day Six, it will only have 10% health on all resonators and make it easy(er) to neutralize.

When you do find a target to attack, don't hoard your best XMP Bursters and Resonators!! (Do hoard Ultra Strikes, Jarvis Virii and ADAs. You will need these later.) There is a lot of tendency to think you're going to "save" higher level gear for later. Don't. Always use the highest level gear you have access to! You will get a "care package" every time you level up, and if you are hacking daily, you will usually accumulate better gear faster than you can use it. (If you do run out of gear, just ease off on attacking for a few days and go back to hacking. You’ll replenish your supply of weapons in a few days.)

Finally, use the attack bonus! It's not shown anywhere, but if you hold down the "fire" button, you will see a little animation on your screen. Release the fire button when the circle of dots are as close to the center of the screen as possible. This will give you an up to 20% attack bonus (before shield and link mitigation). This isn’t going to be a huge effect, but when you’re firing a peanut-shooter at an Abrams Tank, using a slightly larger peanut will help.

Level 4 to Level 6

Congratulations, you’re now a “mid-level” player! Up until level 4, you’ve been mostly been paying a passive game, mostly gaining AP through hacking. Starting at level 4, your best way to level changes into fielding and linking. (You could start this as early as Level 3, but it will be a rough game at first.)

There is a natural tendency to try to make a large field, thinking it is “better”. Bigger is better, right? Not in Ingress. The amount of AP you get for making a tiny 1Mu field and the AP for creating a 4M Mu field is exactly the same. So, you should focus on making small fields in clusters of local portals.

Look for a group of four portals. Look at how they are arranged and draw a triangle around the outermost portals, with one portal inside the triangle. Now draw lines from the tree corners to the center portal. That is your goal to create. This is called “layering”. Attacking and capturing a single group of four portals, then linking them together in this fashion will award a whopping 12,878AP! Plus you can get another few hundred AP for neutralizing and hacking. Using this strategy you can level up pretty quickly.

Once you find a good group of portals for linking, go capture the portals. You already know the basics of attacking, so neutralize all four portals. Once they go white, move as far away as possible from the portal before placing any resonators. Any resonators you place will be installed at the same distance that YOU are from the portal at the time you place them. If you place a resonator when you are standing on top of the portal, all of them will be clustered together in a tight bunch. That’s bad. You want them to be as spread out as possible because (as you know) weapons have fall-off. The further apart the resonators are, the harder it will be for an enemy agent to destroy your handiwork. You’re going to need to place eight resonators on each portal in order to link them. Go ahead and use the largest resonators you can. (Remember, don’t hoard gear!)

To link two portals, you need to be standing next to the portal you are linking FROM and have a Portal Key for the portal you are linking TO. Each time you hack a portal, there is an 80% chance that you will get a “key”, which is another reason why it is important to hack everything. As you level up, sometimes you will capture a portal and discover that you can create a very long blocking link or BAF (big ass field) just because you happen to have a key from somewhere far away. No matter your level, you will always be hacking!

The game will not allow you to gain more than one key for a given portal, and creating layered fields requires two or three keys for all of the portals. A common strategy to get multiple keys for a portal is called “drop-hacking”. To do this, you find the portal key for the portal you are about to hack, and you drop it on the ground. Then hack the portal (probably getting a key). Finally, pick up the key you dropped on the ground. Now you have two keys for that portal!! The drawback to this method is that it is time consuming and if you are unlucky to have another agent nearby when you do this, they can scoop up the keys off the ground before you pick them back up. In any case, once you have the keys, it’s time to start linking.

The order in which you create links is actually very important. The game will not allow a link to be placed where it creates more than two fields at one time; links cannot go “out” of a field, only “in” to a field; and links cannot cross any existing links. Without thinking about it, it is easy to create links that block yourself and cheat yourself out of precious AP.

Go back to the image you drew (five paragraphs up, if you’ve forgotten). What you want to do first is create two links from the inner portal to any two adjacent corner portals, forming a kind of “V” shape. Next, close the “V” to form a triangle. This should be a very small triangular field that is more-or-less “pointing” at the fourth portal. Next step, go to the unlinked portal and link to the FURTHEST portals. You want to be making a larger triangle that completely encloses the field you already made. The end result should look like a triangle with a darker base, due to the “layering” effect on the two triangles you just created. Finally, you are going to “cut” the field by linking the apex of the outer triangle to the apex of the inner triangle. Note that you have to link “in” to the field - the game won’t allow you to link “out” from the inner triangle to the outer triangle Even though it is effectively the same link! The direction does matter.

The end result should be four complete portal captures, six links created and four fields created. (Don’t forget to hack everything one last time before you leave!)

Level 7+
Welcome to the “Real” game. By now you’ve probably met a handful of other local players and you might be part of the local Ingress community. Great job! At this point, even as a solo player, you can make life miserable for the enemy team. (Again, just like the last section, you CAN start this earlier, but anything lower than L7 is going to have a pretty rough time.)

X7 bursters have enough firepower to take out an unshielded enemy portal in about 10 seconds, and even a heavily linked portal will go white in less than minute. The trick is to get past the shields and other mods. You do this using Ultra Strikes. If you’ve been hoarding these, should have a small cache of Ultra Strike weapons. Ultra Strikes are the best way to remove shields and other mods. The trick is that you have to get right on top of the portal, not the resonators. Don't rely on the image on the scanner, look at the GPS display on your phone. If the wedge that indicates your position is not inside the portal plume graphic, you're not close enough! Ultra Strike weapons only have an effective attack radius of about 5 feet, so you really need to be right on top of things! A level 4+ Ultra Strike has about 40% chance of killing a “common” mod on a portal each time you fire it. Most of the time you're going to see two "common" green shields. Hitting the portal with a handful of US weapons will usually kill the shields completely and allow you to burst down the resonators.

As a solo player, your best value is in field suppression. I’ve made it my goal to make sure that my home is never under an enemy field. Secondarily, I make sure my workplace office is not under an enemy field. As a solo player, even a dedicated and educated one, it is impossible to defeat an entire enemy team. There is always going to be someone who has more free time, is higher level, and has more equipment than you. Just like you had to pick your portals at low levels, you’re going to need to pick your fights at higher levels. Thus I limit my “regular” play to my home and my workplace – places that I am physically available most of the time. Having said that, occasionally I will look at Intel and pick out a major anchor for a multi-layered enemy field and go smash that.

Once you capture an anchor, you’re going to want to make sure the enemy doesn’t just come take it back and set up the nasty enemy field you just worked to take down. You do this by installing mods on friendly portals.

If you’re solo, the best bang for your buck is going to be two shields. The better the shield the harder it is to remove. Two “common” green shields are going to be little more than a speedbump for an enemy player, but it lets them know that you are likely not going to allow the field to stand. A couple of “rare” purple shields take a bit more effort to remove and two “Ultra Rare” AXA shields are going to be a bit of bother for any solo player.

If you’re working in a duo or as part of a small strike team, install two shields, one turret, and one force amp. This is the “best” (passive) defense you can install on a portal. The shields will provide protection from the incoming attacks; the force amp will double the XM-cost for attackers; and the turret will fire XM-sapping shots back at the attackers. A single attacker, even a very high level one, will find a fully fortified portal a very tough nut to crack!

Another way to support your team as a solo player is by recharging portals. You can remotely access any portal that you have a key for, and that includes refilling damaged resonators. Before I start my commute, I will almost always make it a point to scan through my cache of portal keys and recharge any friendly portals.

Keep in mind you can’t do ANYTHING in Ingress if you are moving faster then 37.5MPH. It might appear to work, but after a few seconds, whatever you did will disappear and any XM you spent will be refunded. Sometimes, the speed limit will catch you even after you’ve stopped moving. The game servers will try to “guess” how fast you’re currently travelling based on your last position when you did something and where you are now. Sometimes it guesses wrong and will not allow you to play for a minute or two. Just wait it out and the servers will unlock and you’ll be able to play soon enough.

So that’s what I’ve learned about solo play. Ingress can be a fun little diversion of a game, or it can become a part of your life. The world around you is not what it seems.

So I watch anime. Some would say I watch a lot of anime, but I would argue that the amount of anime that I watch is less than the amount of “normal TV” that most other people watch. Anyway, one of my friends is a fan of the game streamer channel Rooster Teeth, and their anime show RWBY popped up in my Netflix queue a while back. So it was suggested that I watch this.

My first impression was not good. The animation style is very flat and colorless CGI. If you’ve seen the animation used in Knights of Sidonia, this is kind of the same. The biggest difference is that in Sidonia, the backdrops were gorgeous renders that made up for the flat characters; there was always something interesting for the eyes to look at in the background, even if the main action was shown in bland flat shapes. In RWBY, the backdrops are rendered with even LESS detail than the main characters. The stylized background characterizations seemed kind of neat initially, putting the focus squarely on the main characters and their actions. But those main characters being rendered so plainly gave the entire show a kind of boring look to it.

The voice acting is pretty abysmal as well. In most anime, the different characters are recognizable both in look and in voice. While RWBY certainly makes a good point of color-coding the main characters (and even the secondary characters have a very distinct “look” to them) all of the voice actors sound very bland. Even after watching nearly two dozen of these shows, if you closed your eyes, it would be difficult to tell which character was talking.

Those poor initial impressions weren’t helped by the fact that the introduction to the show’s world comes in fits and starts. Usually when you are watching an anime that has a not-quite-normal setting, the show spoon feeds you how the world works through exposition or exemplary distillation. For example, in FMA by the time you finish watching the second episode, you have a pretty decent understanding of the limitations of Alchemy and more-or-less how it works. Not so in RWBY. It wasn’t until I was deep into the second season that I started to understand what was actually going on, and even after sitting through nearly 4-hours of the show, there are still a lot of really basic “world view” questions that aren’t well explained. (And I’m not talking about the obvious “cliffhanger” type mysteries that the show throws at you.) I’m talking about basic stuff. Like: what does “Dust” do? How does the government work in this world? Where did the Grimms come from? How did these huge cities get built? There are a lot of hints dropped that these things are a Really Big Deal, and that there is a lot of unspoken backstory that is important, but we, as viewers, never really have any of this explained in any coherent manner. I mean there are entire aspects of the show’s obvious antagonists (the Grimms) that aren’t even talked about until nearly the end of the second season! It’s a common writing mistake for and author to assume that the reader knows as much about his setting as he does, but it almost never is true.

While it isn’t an inherent failing of the show, the way that Netflix has the show packaged (in two gigantic “chunks” around 2 hours each) makes viewing it a little confusing. The first chunk includes the first ten 12-minute episodes, minus the opening titles. You are basically watching a two-hour long smash-up of all the first season with no breaks. If you do decide that a 2-hour marathon is too much, then you are left trying to guess where the episode breaks should have been and stopping at one of those points. Personally I think this show would have been easier to watch if it had been released as individual episodes, complete with opening and closing credits bracketing each show. As it is, the first chunk doesn’t include an opening sequence at all, and you only see the closing titles once, at the very end of the twelfth episode. The start of the second chunk does include an opening title sequence (which actually isn’t bad) but then you never see it again. One of the biggest “hooks” (for me anyway) is the opening and closing credits of an anime, and that was completely missing here.

Sadly, one of the few things that this anime got “right” was in the story pacing department. That is to say, it has the standard slow build of anime. Most of the time this works fine, because the first few episodes are filled with setting and character exposition and explanation. But none of that exposition is present here; the setting and characters aren’t really well explained EVER. And the actual story not really getting involved in the show until much later, the first couple of hours are pretty bereft of anything even remotely resembling interesting content. The few fight scenes ARE fun to watch, but without any real investment in the characters or the world, it’s hard to really care about the outcome. Eventually the characters do get a proper introduction and their interplay becomes enough of a plot point to fill two or three episodes, and the viewer actually starts to care about them a little bit. But it really isn’t until the start of the second “season” that all four of the “main” characters have real backstories.

Where the show does shine, is in the fight scenes. It wasn’t until a good portion of the way into the first bundle of shows –more on this in a moment! – that the first “real” fight takes place. There is a little minor dust-up in the very first episode that serves as a kind of introduction to one of the main characters (actually THE main character), but it really doesn’t show off the magic here. During these fast-paced multi-colored effects-riddled fights, the sparse graphical look of the world suddenly makes sense. There is just so much going on during these frenetic combat scenes that the animation HAS to be plain, otherwise the viewer would be overwhelmed! I think that was the intent because the further you get into the show, the more frequent the fighting becomes. But it’s a really rocky beginning to get there.

While I was watching this show, I never really felt any compulsion to finish. There was never a sense of “I wonder what happens next?” It was more like watching a sitcom, where every episode existed in a vacuum but there really wasn’t an overarcing story that made you want to find out how it ended. There are a few cliffhanger-style mysteries that the show dumps on you near the very end of the run – the mystery huntress on the train, the little robot girl-weapon, the interplay between the “grownups” and whatever Big Deal they keep hinting at (but never explain) throughout the show – and those are fun and actually DO want me make to watch a third season. But alas, the show end after two seasons, leaving those unresolved threads… unresolved.

Overall, I can’t recommend this show. It’s not horrible, and it is far from the worst anime I’ve seen, but it is lacking in a lot of ways. If you’re trapped in a house with a TV and Netflix on a rainy Sunday afternoon, you might give it a spin. But there are a lot of better shows out there. Watch one of them instead.

I meant to write and post this last week, but I have been sick. Here it is a week late.

It’s been very nearly exactly one year since I posted my original evaluation of Elder Scrolls Online. On March 17, 2015, the original ESO MMO has gone free-to-play, in that they no longer require a monthly subscription (but they still require that you buy the game, so technically this is a “buy-to-play” game, like Guild Wars 2 and many others in the MMO-scape). The bottom line question is now: a year after the original release, is it worth buying this game?

The short answer is an unequivocal Yes. If you read my old posting, you’ll see that there was a lot about the game that I liked. All of that is still true, and even moreso today. I was hesitant that the game was being released too soon, and they’ve certainly managed work most of the rough edges off. When I log in, I’m never bored or lack for interesting tasks. There is questing (some of which is decently written), there is crafting, there is silly, pointless achievement hunting, there are dungeons, there are things to steal, there are people to murder… in short, there is a lot going on here. A year ago, I didn't feel that ESO was worth a $15/month subscription fee. I still don't. But, since there is no longer any monthly fee, I feel completely safe in recommending this game to others.

It’s actually a pretty good game. The crafting system still works as wonderfully as it did a year ago. The in-game lore is great. I absolutely love the way the world all ties together. The individual sub-stories all relate to each other in understandable and logical ways. Even for a technically minded pedant like me, the lore just WORKS! But it’s not a great game, or even a great MMO.

It still isn’t “Skyrim Online”. Because it is a MMO, some kinds of RPG gameplay have been removed from the game. Any kind of gameplay that could negatively affect the experience of other players is not available – for example, you can’t just go around killing folks just because you feel like it. Because there are actual players behind the vast majority of the characters you meet, the game publishers have (wisely) taken that kind of gameplay out. And it’s not really an “open world”; the design of the various zones is very much level-gated. You start in Region A and as you level up, you move into Region B. If you loop back into Region A, you will find that the content there is now trivial to complete because you are grossly overpowered for it. Conversely, if you want to go to Region C, you will find that the content there is impossible to complete, because you are not high enough level yet. This lends to a bit of an “on rails” feeling of the game. A pure RPG player will probably feel very limited by the MMO changes, and the semi-directed game content.

It misses the mark on the MMO scale as well. It retains many of the “bad” gameplay issues seen in myriad WoW-clones over the last decade. For example, there is player competition for gathering nodes. It's not uncommon for you to not get kill credit for an open-world boss or quest because you did not do enough damage, or one of the other players was too-high-level to allow for loot and rewards. Coming from a social/cooperative MMO (like GW2) back into a competitive one like ESO is a bit of a shock. It’s extremely annoying when a MOB attacks you while you’re gathering, and then, before you can finish the fight, some random nobody swoops in, grabs the node, and then fleetfoots back out of there right under your nose - and there's not damned thing you can do to stop them!!

Quest completion isn’t “shared” – if you have a quest to collect 10 Rat Tails, for example, your personal count of rat tails and the count of other people around you will be tracked separately. This means that grouping up for minor quests will actually slow down your progress. And there are a lot of standard trope quests in the game. The “kill ten rats” quest is alive and well in ESO, as is the “escort the stupid NPC” quest and the “deliver this message to another NPC that is 60 seconds away” quest.

Worst of all, the “phasing” issues with the world meta-server that I talked about last year still exist and prevent people from playing together. I've tried twice to meet up with friends in-game. Both times, there have been major phasing issues where we would be in the exact same place in the world, but couldn't see or interact with each other at all. Very frustrating!!

Having said that, there have been several major improvements to the game over the past year:

The vast majority of broken quests have been fixed. I’ve been playing for about a month now and I’ve only come across two quests that were broken in a way that stopped advancement. That's a pretty significant improvement from launch – I had over two dozen “stuck” quests within the first few days of release – but it’s still a fairly high number for a game that is nearly a year past “release”. (Interestingly, the most recent patch notes include fixes for two more quests. So apparently this is still an issue!) In both cases that I observed, logging out and logging back in resolved the problem (probably by moving me to a different game world “phase” where the quest was not “stuck”).

The massive PvP area, Cyrodiil worked pretty well right out of the box, but minor tweaks have made it even better. Creating a separate non-veteran campaign specifically for characters that have not reached max-level has made the PvP system much more accessible and fun for casual players. Jumping in at Level 10 and being scaled up to be equal to other players has resolved the feeling of uselessness when fighting higher level characters. Gear and abilities are still based on level, so a low level character isn’t going to completely waltz all over everyone. In other words, a higher level character will still have some minor advantages, but it is nowhere near as egregious as it was. A good player will easily beat a sloppy one regardless of level advantage. The large-scale battles I have been involved in were mostly lag free. Obviously, different players will have different definitions of “lag free”. Compared to large scale PvP in DAoC in 2001 where the frame rate was one frame every 2 to 3 seconds, ESO’s PvP is flawlessly smooth. But there is simply going to be more video stuttering and ability lag in any online game, if you compare it to a single-player game that runs consistently at 60fps. Realistically, it’s very playable and I never felt like the lag was detrimental to my gameplay.

Overall game balance of various classes, skills and abilities is a lot closer to parity than it was a year ago. At launch, there was really only One Way to “build” your character and one (out of four) of the classes was clearly better in every regard (and one was clearly worse than the others as well). This is no longer true. In the current version, I am playing an Altmer (high-elf) Templar that wields a giant 2H sword and wears heavy armor. This choice should fail completely, because the strength of the Altmer race is in magicka levels and regeneration, Heavy Armor is all about damage mitigation and heath regeneration, and 2H Greatswords use Stamina for all of their attacks. Generally speaking, this is about as UN-optimized a character as it is possible to create. And yet... this character works extremely well as DPS/healer hybrid. Using two or three 2H abilities can almost insta-kill an equal-level opponent; the heavy armor gives him a ton of sustain and allows him to take on two or three opponents at one time without too much worry; and the high magicka allows for really great healing both in the middle of a fight, or on the periphery. I’ve played this character as both a primary damage dealer and as the primary healer in a group and it works pretty well in both roles. And that’s a UN-optimized choice!

The recent addition of the “Justice” system has really opened up completely new ways to play the game. Players can now choose to play as the same villainous thieves or murderers that they could in offline Elder Scrolls RPGs. (There is no Thieves Guild yet, sadly.) Obviously, there are some limits and sacrifices made to fit into the MMO genre. You can only steal from and kill NPC characters, not player characters and the NPC guards will not hesitate to enforce the “law” in the game, including dealing out virtual corporal punishment. Suffice it to say that activating “useless” abilities in the game can often have fatal consequences for your character! If you “accidentally” attacked that merchant, too bad for you! A drive-by heal or buff for a fellow player who is in combat with guards will get you killed. (There is talk that at some point in the future, player “Vigilante” characters can hunt down and kill characters that have been playing too far on the wrong side of the law! I can't wait!!)

On the other hand, there are still a LOT of “Quality of Life” user-interface issues that really detract from the game overall. This is probably my biggest issue with the game overall. Fans and long-time players of ESO will dismiss these concerns as unimportant or trivial and ignorable, but they are minor annoyances that continually remind the player that they should be doing something other than playing this game. They are like an itch on the bottom of your foot that you can’t reach, or the incessant dripping from a faucet in the other room. Those “little things” that continue to annoy you for hours on end and eventually sour the entire experience! There are just so many ridiculously arcane keypress/mouseclick combinations required to accomplish seemingly simple tasks!!

The minimalist heads-up-display creates a wonderful feeling of immersion and adding to gameplay. That part is well designed, and you will quickly forget that it is there at all, but the important information you need will always be visible and ready when you need it. But the overall user-interface includes much more than just the display. Sadly, whomever designed the HUD was clearly not in charge of the rest of the user-interface team.

Forming, joining, and leaving a party is needlessly complex and difficult to accomplish. Were you playing the game when a group request came in and you accidentally pressed a key that wasn’t “F” or “X” in the course of your gameplay? Too bad, the party request notification is gone and you can’t get it back. Want to transfer leadership of the group? Press “P” to open the party window, right click on the new leader’s name, select Transfer Lead on the resulting dropdown menu, then press “E” to confirm. Leaving a party is a similarly arcane sequence of clicks and keypresses, or, optionally, you can press “X” at any time with the party window open and instantly quit the party – even if you didn’t intend to.

The bank interface seems simple at the outset: press “E” to interact with a banker. But then you left click to select whether you want to access your personal player bank, your guild bank, or the guild merchant, and switching between these means completely closing the banking interface and starting over. (And listening to the NPC banker's dialog, over and over and over and over!) Want to transfer something from your guild bank to your personal bank? This takes a minimum of six mouseclicks and four keypresses.

The game allows every player to be in up to five player guilds, which is great. But the manner in which the player interacts with those guilds is so ridiculous that it’s almost silly. You use /g1 through /g5 to “talk” in guildchat, but there is no indication of which guild is /g2 and which is /g3 until you type something. Maybe your main guild is Guild D, but when you access the guild bank it always defaults to Guild A. The guild window, guild bank/merchant and guild chat are all selected separately and completely differently, in different windows and using a different sequence of keypresses and mouseclicks. This could potentially result in the player to be chatting with one guild, withdrawing items from a second guild’s bank, while having a third guild’s status window open on their screen. Possibly unintentionally!

Getting into or out of the large-scale PvP area is another part of the game that is poorly designed. Before you can enter this area of the game, you need to select a “home” Campaign. Unfortunately, the list of campaigns is hidden away behind not one, but TWO “hidden” tabs that appear to be merely decorative labels. Should the player accidentally discover that one is a tab that changes the content of the window, the second hidden tab is in a completely different area of the window, looks completely different in presentation and also does not appear to be an actual selectable tab! Having said all that, once the home campaign is set, the process has gotten better, where only a double-click on a list is required to enter.

The game does have a looking-for-group tool in the game, but it simply doesn’t work! I accidentally skipped one of the many dungeons in the game, and I’ve been looking for a group to help me fill in that accomplishment. For the past week I have been “searching” for a group using the LFG tool. Not a single group has been listed in the tool in all that time. Finally, in desperation, I put out a call for a group in the general chat channel. I had a full group within 20 minutes. Clearly there were groups forming this whole time, but not a single one showed up in the LFG tool. I’m not going to comment on how hideous the LFG tool design and how un-intuitive it is to use, because not only is it horribly designed, it is horribly implemented!!

Now some might say that I’m cherry picking some of the less usable UI elements here. This is not true. I could keep going and continue this list for quite a while, but I promised I would limit this to FIVE user-interface issues. I could easily come up with another handful of these without trying – there are just so many clunky, annoying and poorly designed UI elements in this game.

Some of the UI issues can be solved with the use of addons. Personally, I’m of two minds on addon use. On one hand, addons can improve the game experience. For example, the LootDrop addon allows you turn off the ridiculous two-keypress looting system and shows you what you’ve just picked up in an unused corner of the screen. The S’rendar addon unobtrusively displays all of your currently active buffs and debuffs onscreen (which, by default, are hidden on your character sheet, requiring a keypress to access and hiding the screen while open). There are addons that add colored borders to loot so you can quickly see what is worth keeping and what can be destroyed with minimal loss. Overall, there are around a dozen of "must have" addons like these. Combat info addons that track your performance, addons that let you know when very-long cooldown abilities are ready to use, loot info addons, minimap addons, crafting timer addons, improved grouping window addons, improved HUD layout addons, inventory management addons... why this stuff wasn't implemented into the stock user-interface indicates to me that the developers either had no idea what a good UI looked like, or they were too damn lazy to bother. Or both.

On the other hand there are addons that let you see “behind the curtain” and make the game a lot less fun. For example, there is an addon that reveals all of the “hidden” items in the game world, and actually puts markers on your map showing you exactly where to go to find them. There are addons that pop up huge on-screen warnings telling you to use a specific attack or defensive ability. These kind of addons, while they don’t not completely automate the game and remove all need for player input, certainly detract from the game experience. Why bother with actually playing a fight when all you need to do is wait for the “bong” sound and then press the proper key? Why explore when you already know that there are two skyshards and three lorebooks inside that specific house? Some UI addons can make the game so much easier to play, in so many ways, that they almost make it into a color-by-numbers exercise.

At the end of the day, the game is better. But even after a full year, the game STILL isn’t worth a $15/month subscription. Happily it doesn’t require that. It has always been worth a $40 to $60 investment (depending on where you buy it) and this new re-release has only increased the value. If you already bought the game and let your subscription lapse, you should give it a second look. If you never played it and are looking for a new MMO or RPG, you could do a lot worse. But don't plan on spending hundreds of hours playing. It’s just not that kind of game.

Over the holidays we managed to throw a couple of gaming parties, and one of them moved our ongoing Descent campaign along.

Simply put, we’re playing the Labyrinth of Ruin Campaign as a role-playing game. The party is not allowed to look at the quest book, and each encounter is a bit of a mystery to them at first. I am playing as the Overlord and using the Basic II deck and filling with Punisher cards.)

Mission: Start!

We started this session with some narrative-heavy role-playing decisions. The group had retrieved a mysterious map from the fallen corpse of Huldyr the Dwarf, and Raythen was (supposedly) a member of the departed Huldyr’s group. Leveraging off this, I prepared a REALLY LONG text description for Raythen. The resulting two pages of text were read aloud to the players. (In this campaign, Raythen is a bit of blabbermouth and tends to ramble on quite bit.) In summary, he had deciphered the map and it led to two potential locations, either an abandoned temple of the Sun or a dwarven tomb, ripe for looting.

To play off this, I gave Leoric a full page of text that was not read aloud, but was used to start a conversation with Raythen. He confirmed some of what Raythen was saying, and added some additional tidbits regarding some less savory religious practices. He was also given a hint that the temple would be ideal to discover the secrets of the campaign. On the other side of the table, I gave Kirga some information about what kind of treasure might be “rescued” from the tomb/treasure vault, as well as quoting back some her own backstory to indicate that the temple would not be a “profitable” location. (I also took the opportunity to give her a free dig at Leoric.) For Augur Grissom, I set the stage by providing some really creepy dwarf fairy-tale stories about how tombs were bad places, and, while yes there was treasure to be had, it was not worth the effort to reclaim. Trenloe was the simplest of all. For him, he was told that temples didn’t have anything to kill and often have tricky puzzles and traps. (Our Trenloe only cares about killing things.)

This initial setup took only about 20 minutes (for the reading and dialog). The resulting discussion and debate took nearly two hours to resolve. Easiest GM-ing ever! I just sat there with my arms folded and watched the different players try to argue for their personal preferences. And since almost all of them are strong willed personalities, they really weren’t willing to make any sacrifice on their point-of-view. After a (long) while, I noticed that a couple of the players were starting to lose interest (understandably, since “nothing” was going on!) and called for a final “vote” on where they were going to go. Sitting in the Camp wasn’t getting them any richer or discovering anything - after all, this is an “adventuring” group, not a “sit around the fire and talk about things” group!!

The final decision went the way I preferred. I had deliberately set up the weighting in the “opinions” that I had started each player with to go away from my preferred selection, mostly because they had “won” the prior encounter, but they surprised me. Leoric was a strong voice (as always), but Trenloe surprised me by favoring a (supposedly boring) temple run instead of massacring monsters in a treasure vault. (Later the player confided to me that he thought it sounded more interesting.)

Overall, the roleplaying setup phase went exceptionally well!

The Encounter

The encounter started well. A few mistakes were made on both sides. I, as the GM/OverLord, completely missed the ability on my Sorcerers to let them switch range into damage and vice/versa, which made it nearly impossible for them to damage the statues. On the flip side, the players took their sweet time moving towards the “holy water” – even though I had provided a TON of hints that the water was the key to the encounter. They tried several ridiculous things (in character, but still silly) like pouring wine on the statues, drinking the wine and urinating on the statues, trying to destroy the statues….

The first statue fell quickly. After several turns, the party FINALLY made started carrying water to the closest statue and opened the entrance portal. About this time I realized I had been playing my Sorcerers incorrectly and almost instantly killed the second statue. Poor Leoric went through the portal alone (this party has a really bad habit of splitting up, something I use to my advantage nearly every session) and started a duel with Ariad. A few easy swipes at the statue closed the portal and some stalling tactics at the holy water pool meant that the party took nearly three turns to start ferrying water back to “heal” it. Geomancer Leoric was using his standard “run and hide” tactic, by using the summoned stones to completely box in Airad, doing negligible damage and more-or-less just staying out of sight. In the meanwhile, my Sorcerers walked to the third side of the temple completely unmolested and easily finished off the third statue, ending the game with an OL win.

Conclusion/closeout

I had a nearly full-page of text prepared for the end of this encounter. This was simplified by the fact that the story elements were the same regardless of which side “won”. After reading the story and pretty explicitly pointing the blame at the party (which is suggested but not explicitly stated in the default flavortext) I set the stage for a long march back to Pylia in near darkness.

When they got back to Pylia, I was able to wrap several prior story elements back into the game. First, Lord Merrick Farrow was now in charge of the encampment. Previously, he had been trying to get various people in the party to join up with him for “something” – my original intent was to ask one or more of the party to backstab the others, but since that never happened, Lord Farrow turned out to be perfect as a “bad guy turned good”. At least for as long as “being good” meant that he was still moving forward on his own personal goal. Kind of an enemy-of-my-enemy relationship. Secondly, since Merrick had “won” a much earlier encounter and had used the Sunstone against the party (with devastating effect) I used that power to create a kind of “safe zone” at the Pylia Camp. After all, they wouldn’t just hand over power to this guy unless there was a good reason, and the SunStone was it.

This left the party at the mercy of Lord Merrick Farrow. He used the chance to really dress them down about how stupid and shortsighted they had been, pointing out specific instances where, had the party only listened to him and done as he had asked them, this disaster might have been avoided! (It was actually quite fun, and at least one of the players was nearly giddy seeing how the plot had twisted. On the other hand, a different player who had been 100% convinced that Farrow was The Bad Guy for the entire campaign was disgusted by this turn of events.)

Breaking from my tradition of always allowing the players to choose the next encounter, I used Farrow to direct them to the next encounter by telling them that this was their “last chance” to repair some of the damage they had done, and pushed them to the “Let the Truth be Buried” encounter. (In my GM-ing backstory, LMF has been racing with Ariad to reclaim the power of Sudanya to use as part of his rituals, but she got there first. He is telling the party to remove Splig from the equation to give himself a bit more leverage for reclaiming that power. In the meantime, he’s running the Camp and will undoubtedly present some more interesting narrative options to the party as we move towards the Finale.)

As people who know me in real life know, I watch anime. Not a lot of anime, but some. This last year, I watched several shows, some with enjoyment, others with trepidation and at least a couple simply because I’m stubborn. For me, a good anime relies on three major things: Story, characters, and artwork.

Like most forms of entertainment, anime really lives and dies on its story and presentation. Unfortunately, for most western viewers, the pace of anime is really very different from Hollywood-style movies. In a Hollywood movie, the story is supposed to grab you in the first few minutes. Typically there will be some Very Important Plot Point or an action sequence within the first five minutes. In anime, usually you won’t even really know what the point of the story is until the third or fourth show, over a full hour into the story. And then character backgrounds will be introduced much later (usually as “filler” episodes about mid-way through the story). To watch an anime, you really need to be willing to sit through at least three episodes before deciding whether you like the story or not. And even then, you still might be wrong. One of the really cool things that I like about anime is that the “ending” can completely redeem a poor storyline. Unfortunately, the reverse holds true as well. A well-crafted story can completely fall to pieces in the final 22 minutes of a 48 episode anime.

Because the pacing is so different from most western entertainment, this gives the anime writers a lot of opportunity to develop the characters much better than a movie or TV show. They’ll often have complex backstories and unique quirks that you won’t find in the typical cookie-cutter trope characters. Even on an “edgy” TV show, most of the characters do things because that’s what those kind of characters do (I’m looking at YOU “The Walking Dead”!) not because they are actually interesting well-developed characters. Learning about who the players are in an anime is half the fun for me, and characters that end up doing things that I don’t expect (but are still true to the development) are the most interesting to me.

Finally, the artwork and production values of an anime will affect how much I enjoy it. It is, at the end of the day, an animated media. A poorly drawn or animated show will not hold my interest very well. For example, a lot of the CGI animated shows, even if they have strong characters and a strong storyline, tend to not really grab me. I just can’t relate to the animation style very well. On the other hand, if it is well drawn and well produced, I’ll want to keep watching it even if the story isn’t all that great (which really helps get past that initial three- or four- episode “bump” until the story really gets going.)

So, having said all of that, what did I watch this last year?

Fullmetal Alchemist
I watched Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in late 2103. It was an epic undertaking with nearly 30 hours of story (longer than most video games!) and excellently produced, drawn and voice acted. After finishing it up, I read several reviews that said that I should watch the “original” FMA since it was supposedly better. After having watch both of them, I can only think that most people are going to find whichever one they watched first to be the superior show. The original FMA, to me, was a very dark and depressing story. Some of the plot elements that evicted a very emotional impact in Brotherhood were just a blip in the road in this show, mostly because the whole story was pretty bleak in tone. When the entire theme is based on a horrible fatal mistake, having a single character die really doesn’t really hit home so hard. FMA’s ending did not feel satisfying; it was like the story just ended, and nothing came of it. The take-away (for me anyway) was “bad shit happens and there’s not much you can do about it.” Finally, I found the voice acting of a couple of the characters (notably Envy and Barrie) to be a little grating. The story was different enough, and some of the characters slotted into different roles, that it was distracting. I kept waiting for specific plot elements to be revealed, but they never were, and that made me sad. If I was forced to sit down and re-watch one of the two, I would much rather watch Brotherhood. Not that FMA is a bad show, it’s just that Brotherhood was, in my opinion, better.

Magica Madoka
After slogging through FMA, I took those same reviewer’s advice again and started in on Madoka. Supposedly, this show is a new take on the “magical girl” theme and turns it on its head. Well, as a anime fan (but not fanatic) I had no idea what that meant. And to be honest, I really didn’t like this show when I started it. When I got through the first episode, I was completely disappointed. I thought the show was pointless and stupid. But, I knew that anime sometimes takes a while to get going, so I gritted my teeth, poured myself a very large adult beverage and queued up the next episode. After the third episode, I kept going mostly because I had already invested over an hour; I slogged through the first five episodes simply because I was determined, because I was bored, and because I was drinking heavily. I remember thinking “Heck, this is only 13 shows total. Even if it never stops sucking, it’s not that big of a time investment.” And then, during episode six, something “magical” happened. Remember that thing about pacing? It isn’t until the sixth episode (out of 13 – nearly half way through the entire run!) that the plot becomes clear. That’s a LOT of setup for the casual viewer, and definitely far too long to grab a non-anime fan. On the other hand the artwork is really nice. The show uses several different animation styles to illustrate different things. It’s a bit shocking when the style changes and it really throws you for a mental loop until you figure out what is going on. But once you get it, it makes complete sense and actually adds to the final experience. The sound work adds to this stylistic design choice. The characters are fun, and since there is SO MUCH buildup in the first half-dozen episodes, by the time the actual story gets rolling, you’ve come to know them very well, which adds to the impact at the story’s climax. This anime is a classic case of the ending being a redeeming moment for a mediocre show. Given an opportunity to rewatch this in its entirety, I would do it.

Soul Eater
After Madoka I started in on Soul Eater. This show is almost the exact opposite of Madoka in nearly every respect. The story and setting is well introduced in the very first episode; even if the overarcing plotline is not really clear until much later, you know all you need to know about the setting after the first show. The first handful of episodes are pretty much devoted to introducing the main characters. This makes it feel a little scattered at first, because each new episode is seemingly completely unrelated to the rest. But once the main story gets going, you already know who all these folks are so there isn’t the typical mid-story break for character backstory. In fact, there really aren’t any “filler” episodes (with a few exceptions) like you would typically see in a long-ish anime like this (it’s 48 episodes long). The characters are really what makes this show amazing. The main villain character is probably one of the most disturbing I’ve seen in a very long while. Even the recurring side-characters, who in a typical anime would be forgettable nobodies that you hardly remember existing, are fully developed personalities. The opening sequence is a lot of fun, and the animation and music are really great. Overall, this show was a great ride! (How can you not like a show that has Death as the main Protagonist and the legendary sword Excalibur voiced by Troy Baker?) There is only one small problem… the culmination of the climactic battle is completely and utterly lame. When the end comes, the show falls back on the same old tired tropes. I ended up closing this one down with disappointment. Despite being an amazingly fun and entertaining ride, I don’t think I would sign up to see this one again.

The Legend of Korra – Book 3: Change
I took a break from watching “anime” anime, to watch this U.S. produced Nickelodeon TV show. Not that that’s a bad thing! We watched the first two seasons of Korra and mostly enjoyed them. We sat down to the third season of the show with some preconceptions and the show did not stray far from our already established expectations. Pretty much the only thing I can say about this show is that if you watched and enjoyed the prior Korra shows, you will likely enjoy this one. Having said that, I have to admit that the villain in this story arc (voiced by the amazing Henry Rollins) felt much more threatening than the prior arcs. In the first two seasons, the Big Bad was a cartoonish miscreant, dead-set on seizing control and ruling the world. In this story, the bad guy is a psychotic murderer that really doesn’t care whether he, personally, ends up in the driver’s seat. He just wants to fuck things up for everyone else. And, to me at least, that was a far more worrisome antagonist. Also, the writers did a really good job of assembling the final scenes in such a way that it actually felt unwinnable. (Spoiler alert: there is a Korra Book 4… you can figure out who actually wins.)

The Girl who Lept Through Time
This is a MOVIE not a show. It’s only 98 minutes long. It’s deep into the “Young Adult” genre, so it’s not overly complex, and the final ending is kinda “meh”. But despite all that, it’s great entertainment. The pacing and narrative move along at a good clip, never dragging or bogged down with unneeded filler, and you’re never left waiting for something to happen. There are several heartwarming moments and more than a few clever chuckles found within. The overall story is well done, and even though the end is mediocre, it really doesn’t kill the overall experience. The animation is good but not great. Overall, it’s well worth the time, and given a rainy cold weekend day, I would watch this again in a heartbeat!

Sword Art Online
One of my biggest hobbies is online gaming. SOA came up as a recommendation on Netflix so I though t I’d give it a whirl. I watched the first couple of episodes without knowing anything about it. After seeing what it had to offer, I read a few online reviews, and then showed it to my Lovely Partner (who plays along with me in most games). We ended up watching the entire run together. The first few episodes were mostly forgettable, trying to introduce online gaming to an audience who probably were not connected with that genre. Some of the explanations of standard MMO language and terms was humorous for us, since it sounded like a small child trying to teach a baby to talk. The plot didn’t always agree with how we both knew online games to work, but it was done well enough that we were willing to let the inaccuracies pass. Once it caught its stride (around episode 4 or 5), we had a lot of fun with it. And then… there is a mid-show “break” where the expected climax comes to a resolution and everything changes. Suddenly, the one major plot point that added tension and urgency to the plot was, just, gone. It’s as if the writers just ran out of ideas, even though there was a lot of places they could have gone with the framework they had put together. Instead of working with what they had created and developing the Kirito/Asuna relationship, the second half of the show introduces a brother/sister love triangle that is, well, just… ick!! Maybe that’s a-ok for Japan, but it didn’t play too well for either of us. We did finish it out and the final message was a good one, but you really have to look past a lot of plot holes, silly writing mistakes and just plain silly/unrealistic/gross choices to get through it. The animation is better than average and some of the visual particle effects rival CGI. The opening theme for the first few episodes is one of the more memorable sequences I’ve seen and it gets stuck in your head easily. I would actually watch the first 13 shows of this again, but I’d prefer to walk away with a cliffhanger ending than to re-watch the trainwreck that is the second half of this show. (Supposedly there is am SAO 2 but I’d prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist.)

Knights of Sidonia
This was announced as a Netflix exclusive so we watched this one together to encourage businesses to provide more non-traditional entertainment options. My first impression was that this was your standard sci-fi apocalypse survival war story. Everything plays into this, even the vaguely Teutonic march that plays over the main title. (I can usually tell if an anime has grabbed me if I find myself humming the opening music between sitting down to watch it, and this one has that in spades) The animation style tends to be a bit bland in look, using the CGI-style animation that had turned me off to a few other shows in the past. Having said that, after you get used to the animation style, it really isn’t as bad as some of the older CGI work. Once you get past the introduction, the story is a by-the-numbers space-opera: over the top battles, an unknown hero that saves the day, blah blah blah. But, despite being a standard sci-fi trope, it’s still a really fun ride! (Not everything has to be a super dramatic life-lesson!) In fact, my biggest disappointment with this show is that it is over too soon and there isn’t any more. At the end of the 13 episode run, I felt like I was really getting to know these people and their situation and I wanted to see how things were going to develop, to see the next big battle and how it would resolve, to see the young hero become more confident and claim his heritage…. Sadly, that’s all there is. It ends up feeling like the first book of a series that doesn’t exist. I’m impatiently awaiting more of this one and am almost certainly going to rewatch the current episodes before digging into the new stuff. (Season Two is airing in Japan in February. We’ll see when Netflix picks it up.)

Neon Genesis Evangelion
I sat down to watch NGE because I had seen that this is one of the “classic” anime shows, just like FMA or Cowboy Bebop. Unfortunately, even though I am a child of the 1980s, this show just didn’t hold up for me. I mean I could see where they were trying to be edgy (for the time) with hints of nudity and some adult themes, but overall it just felt dated. It probably didn’t help that I was watching it on a 50-inch HD TV set and the original show was only done in SD low res quality. The animation felt clunky and the frame rate was low. The voice acting in the English dubbed version I watched was just slightly less than “stab yourself in the eardrum with a fork to make it stop” annoying, and after about a dozen episodes I started actively hoping that the main character would die a horrible fiery death. The characters were completely monolithic tropes, which led to a storyline so predictable that it was almost laughable. I kept waiting for a plot twist, but there never was one. In the end, I’m glad I watched it, because it shows just how far anime has come since the mid-1990s. I kept comparing this show to Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 and, at the end of the day, I’d much rather watch that show than this one.

Welcome to the NHK
I saw that Welcome to the NHK was on a LOT of anime “must watch” lists. After slogging through this show, I have to assume that my tastes and the tastes of the average anime viewer are vastly different. This show was, to me, about as much fun as going to the local mental institution and watching the patients there wander around aimlessly. I honestly would have preferred getting a root canal over sitting through this show – it would have been over sooner and been less painful. Every single character in this show is a miserably broken person, but not in an interesting way. Broken in a depressing, sad and pitiful way. It’s like a show about a box of crippled puppies, abandoned in the arctic, trying to figure out how to not starve to death, but without the heartwarming feeling of success against insurmountable odds. I watched the entire thing, mostly because I’m stubborn. I’d seen SO MUCH about this show and how it was “almost guaranteed” to resonate with every viewer that I stuck it out to the bitter end. When I finally finished the last episode I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t see myself reflected back in these people. In fact, I go to great pains to not interact with people with those kinds of mental issues! If someone offered me a hundred dollars to watch each episode again, I’m not sure I would take that offer. was possibly the least entertaining anime I watched all year.

Texhnolyze
I don’t recall where I saw the suggestion to try watching this show, and I really wish I could. Mostly so I could avoid suggestions from that person ever again. Now, I’m a fairly intelligent guy. I have a college degree in electrical engineering and my job is to solve pretty complex technical problems on a daily basis. This show is 22 episodes long. I can honestly say I watched them all without skipping any parts. And after all that, I still am not completely sure what this show was about. There were a bunch of people, and they all did some things, and there were varying motivations in their own little world… but what it was actually about? I have no idea. I’m not even 100% sure about the setting, and how things worked in there! Most of the time I could describe an anime in a sentence or two that more or less summarizes the setting, story and plot. For this one, I can only relate EVENTS that happened because I really have no clue what the heck was going on. I knew that I was in for a bumpy ride when, after 10 episodes, I still wasn’t sure what this anime was about! Even now, having finished it, I’m don’t think I could tell you what the main protagonist’s name was. I will say that it was not uplifting and cheerful show. (Spoiler alert: Everyone dies. Everyone! That’s not a happy ending!) To make matters worse, the artwork here is not terribly appealing, with flat featureless faces on most the characters. Maybe I’m just not the target audience for this type of show. I did find the opening credit music really good though – it was probably my favorite thing about the entire thing. Do yourself a favor: skip this anime and just listen to the soundtrack. (Still better than NHK though.)

Vampire+Rosario
I’m cheating here a bit on this one since I have not yet finished the second season of this show. I started it when a friend was on vacation and I was cat-sitting. It was on Netflix and it kept coming up in my suggestions. I can see how this might have been a good anime - all of the seeds are there – but it’s pretty offensive in the presentation. Watching this makes me embarrassed to be watching it. At one point I wasn’t sure whether it was poking fun at itself (which would have been cute) but after getting halfway through the second season, I’ve come to the conclusion that no, it isn’t trying to be a parody of itself, it really is that shallow and offensive. The really sad part is that I like the characters, the artwork is really good (even if the subject matter is a bit… tasteless) and the story has the potential to be pretty darn interesting (assuming it goes anywhere, which it hasn’t thus far). It’s like the creators of this show took a really good idea and made it as unpalatable as possible. Mission accomplished. I’d recommend skipping this one.

Star Wars: Rebels
Some might say this is technically not “anime” but I would argue that point. This just finished its season one run on Disney XD and I’m sorry to report that I was forced to torrent this. We do get the Disney Channel here, but XD is not in our cable package, so it was not available without a several hundred dollar investment that I’m not willing to make for one 8-episode TV show. It’s a decent show, and I really liked that two of the five main characters are female. Even better, in one episode they were pretty much the only characters in the story! I don’t think it’s necessary to highlight female characters unless it makes sense, but in this case it made complete sense and it added to the overall story arc quite well (in both story and character development). My biggest issue with this show is that we already kinda know how it ends, since it takes place between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Overall, worth watching but not as much fun or as well developed as The Clone Wars. I think it could get better if Disney decides to do a second season run, but I suspect that when the new Star Wars film comes out next year, this show will be sidelined permanently.

Wolf Children
This is another MOVIE, not a show, and it clocked in at 117 minutes. It’s a really great and heartwarming story about growing up, and the difficult choices you have to make in life. The artwork is AMAZING, probably the best animation I have seen all year (Madoka would be a close second) The melding of cell-style animation and CGI backdrops is completely seamless. The characters are strong and as they develop during the movie, it feels very fluid and real. It has parts that are funny, parts that are touching, and parts that are unexpectedly emotional. I wouldn’t recommend this one to everyone, but anyone who enjoys Miyazaki films will likely find this to be just as enjoyable. (Hint: the tagline “Love Wildly” really fits the film here.)

That’s it for my 2014 Anime Round-up. I’m planning on taking some time off for the winter break, but my next post should be my Best Games of 2014. (Sadly, it doesn’t look like it will be a long list.) See you on the other side!

Wow, I'm actually amazed to be posting another Descent report so quickly! As adults with Real Lives, it takes a bit of wrangling to get everyone to the table regularly. Having said that, past experience shows that the Silly Season actually makes things easier. Go figure.

Simply put, we’re playing the Labyrinth of Ruin campaign as a role-playing game. The party is not allowed to look at the quest book, and each encounter is a bit of a mystery to them at first. I am playing as the Overlord and using the Basic II deck and filling with Punisher cards.

Setup

This was our first session after a five-month long break (as mentioned in Part II), so the first thing we did was to play a few “fake” turns from the prior encounter. Truth be told, the prior encounter had already pretty much resolved, but there were still miniatures on the table (we have a Geek Chic table and Descent lives in the “well” area) so we played it out to the bitter end. (Note that this is actually described in Part II as well.)

After getting our feet wet with some Descent-y gameplay, it was narrative time! I actually used the group’s long break as a narrative device: “It seems like it has been months since you last visited the camp…” and used the opportunity to describe a small bustling village complete with a gaggle of NPC adventurers going about their day-to-day business, selling loot from their (offscreen) encounters, buying and trading gear, and offhand chatter about possible places to explore.

As the party returned to the small Inn, I made the party EXTREMELY aware that they had pre-paid rooms waiting for them, and that the person responsible for paying for the rooms was none other than Lord Merrick Farrow! (This may not be “cannon” in the Descent universe, but it works in the overarcing storyline that is developing. To be honest, I didn’t know where this was going, but I have read the quest book, and it doesn’t conflict with anything in the Labyrinth of Ruin story. As it turned out, it ended up being a fantastic plot device that will see use later on as the party continues, so that was a good call – albeit an unintended one – on my part.)

The innkeeper also handed Raythen a note, which outlines the start of the Back from the Dead encounter. Raythen also got some dialog that outlines just why doing this encounter is a horrible idea. Something about it being a trap, an obvious trap, and a bloody obvious trap. (Side note: I always allow the party to choose the next encounter. They are given the choices in a thematic expository way with no hard descriptions and then they make their best guess on which one to do based on “feel”.)

I also primed the pump for Secrets in Stone by giving a bit of “secret” information to each of the other characters. Both Raythen and Grissom were easy, they both want to recover magical dwarf artifacts (for different reasons), so I gave them strong hints to choose that one. Trenloe’s backstory was that he is an un-undead, so he was given a slight hint to go to the tombs as well. I knew that the player controlling Kirga was doing her best to be contrary, so I gave her a note that LMF wanted her to go to investigate Hulldyr. (My thinking was that she would immediately choose the opposite – which turned out to be right on target!)

The sole voice that I set up to desire to go do the Back from the Dead encounter was poor, old, Leoric. If you recall, way back in Part One, Leoric was almost completely responsible for the loss of the very first encounter. It made sense from a role-playing perspective that he would be guilty. I played up on that.

The resulting in-character “discussion” took nearly an hour to play out. It was a ton of fun seeing the players talk it out. Two of them actually said out loud, “well, personally, I would want to go do THIS, but my character would want to do THAT…” and then proceed to argue quite passionately for the thing that their character would want to do (even though their own preference was different).

After 45 minutes, I called the discussion to a close. I needed to know which encounter to put on the table. I forced them to vote, and the encounter chosen was Back from the Dead! (I believe that Leoric is becoming the de facto “leader” of the party - or at least the party is deferring to him on some “big” decisions – but there is still a lot of campaign to play out, so we shall see how that thread develops!)

Encounter One

The party knew this was a trap, so they devised a clever plan to try and outwit the setup. They were going to send a single party member to the cabin and everyone else held back. Trying to accommodate that, I switched out a few tile pieces to allow for a large open area outside the cabin, “south” of the graveyard.

The warrior tromped past the zombies and up to the door while the rest of the group milled about in the open clearing I had created for them. The respawning zombies led them to think that it was pointless to advance, so they looted the few treasures they could reach, and discovered the opening to a hidden storeroom (the Secret Room card came up on a search). They then spent the next two turns playing around in the secret room and almost completely ignoring the cabin. As a result, it was a really quick encounter. The goblins achieved their goal, and I explained how hundreds of goblins swarmed into the cabin. The party was forced to hide in the secret room, and all items of value were removed.

Kirga was unhappy that she could not get the last few treasures, but overall everyone had a lot of fun with the role-playing aspect. I even got emails from two of the players commenting on how much fun this play session had been!

Encounter Two

This turned out to be one of those rare cases where the provided quest text matched up almost exactly with where we were, so I did not prepare for this encounter much (i.e. at all). Sadly, it led to a very disappointing run through. I made a critical error in evaluating the quest, thinking that Hulldyr could move off the map in 4 or 5 turns, but in reality, there is an impassible barrier in the direct path, so it would have taken 11 or 12 turns minimum. I tried to advance some monsters to protect him, but as the final encounter of Act I, the party is really powerful at this point. They sliced up all the monsters in no time at all – they weren’t even a speedbump for the group. Leoric masterfully used his summoned stones to block Hulldyr’s pitiful movement. The party is very mobile, and without monsters to force them to move through the bushes, the overgrowth mechanic really didn’t have a chance to be a factor. They just moved around the areas, not through them. They never removed any of them. Within 5 turns the game was lost and Ariad was forced to flee.

Conclusion

This adventure started out amazingly well, but ended with a giant thud.

The lesson I learned here was that while I am getting better at reacting to the party trying to break the rules of physics, time, and space, and figuring out thematic, logical and fair ways to deal with them, I really need to prepare better for these games. It’s difficult (for me at least) to tell a story without at least a modicum of forethought and planning. I also learned that giving the characters (and not necessarily the players!) some personalized motivation for each encounter really enhances the experience for everyone.

Those lessons were taken to heart, and as I write this, the group is almost complete with the Interlude and back on the fun-train again! Next post as soon as we finish that encounter.

When the second edition of the Descent: Journeys in the Dark boardgame came out, our little group started a Campaign game. But because we are all adults with Real Lives, it took a bit over a year for us to complete it.

When the Labyrinth of Ruin expansion came out, with a completely new campaign, and I started it up with the crazy idea of treating it like a Role Playing game (instead of the tactical miniature game that it was designed as), I knew that it was not going to be without challenges.

As expected, we were finishing around on "encounter" per session, about four hours. The game advertises 45 minutes per encounter, but treating it as a Role playing game really slows it down. Plus, even though the game does provide a "story" in the Campaign, the writing is atrocious and the continuity is non-existent. As the Overlord, I am having to create a lot of new content from thin air in order to support the bare-bones story. And, as an added boinus, I pretty much have to tinker with the wining/ending conditions in almost every encounter to allow for continuity. Luckily, there is a vibrant Descent community and a lot of (unofficial) background information to pull from.

What I didn't count on was a five-month long break in play.

Setup

After their daring escape from Lord Merrick Farrow’s jails (described in Part I, the party was presented with a narrative choice. I had prepared nearly a full page of story-based text for each player, feeding them specific information. Two of the party members were given general information about the Barrow of Barris encounter: one of them had overheard some of Lord Merrick Farrow’s guards talking about a dwarf tomb that contained a powerful magical item; the other was told by Lord Farrow himself, with a promise that the party could keep all of the mundane loot if they would assist Lord Farrow in retrieving a magical item. Two other party members were fed a story about goblin raids north of the Sudanyan River, being orchestrated by a Goblin King (aka Splig) and his (supposedly) captured “Fine Lady”. This was, of course, the lead in for Fury of the Tempest. I instructed Raythen to argue for the Barrow adventure.

My thinking was that since we had just completed a Lord Merrick Farrow encounter, it would make the most sense to follow that story thread. I had fully expected the party to debate this for a few minutes and then decide to go for the Barrow. Interestingly, one of the characters I selected to learn about the Fury encounter was the same bloke who had completely flubbed Ruinous Whispers by carrying the woman almost to the doorstep and he roleplayed it extremely well – his character, it seemed, was feeling pretty guilty about losing the woman and the rumors about a Fine Lady being held captive incented him to argue long and hard for that story.

One of the characters whom I had set up to argue for the Barrow turned out to be completely apathetic. The other, as it turned out, was much more contrary than I had anticipated and ended up switching sides and arguing AGAINST the encounter I had set up for her. That left Raythen as the sole voice talking for the Barrow against three “real” party members. (Raythen was still fairly new to the group in roleplaying terms, and the core group kept referring to him as only “half a member”.) The decision did not go the way I had planned, but that’s how role play stories work sometimes. You gotta be flexible!

Encounter One

Since we’re doing this role play style, the party is NOT reading the quest book and the encounter information is presented as they play. I described the beginning field pretty well, and described Splig carrying a huge barrel, sweating and panting as he carried it. I described the pool of water with electrical energy running all over it. I described the Open Field shrouded in mist with an electric blue tinge and an oppressive feeling of immense power.

I also replaced the 17A tile with a 24A tile to straighten out the map and make it very clear that there was no way to “shortcut” across the water. I read most of the stock quest flavortext, but my description of the electrical energy on the water made the party not want to drink right away. They stopped and gathered some of the water in bottles to carry along and drink after they crossed the field. Which was very clever of them! Luckily I had a clever response.

The players are always motived by search tokens and feeling secure with their bottled magic water, they cautiously moved forward. The apathetic player simply wanted to kill things and charged towards the monsters. As luck would have it, one of the players carrying the bottled water used a potion on the second or third turn, which allowed me to descriptively tell him that when he grabbed at his potions, the bottle of “electric water” felt oddly light on his belt. It had "evaporated"! I also dropped a hint that water cannot evaporate after it has been consumed.

It took the party about 0.3 seconds to reverse course and start drinking the water. The sole exception was the apathetic player who was hell bend on getting to the exit as quickly as possible, with no regard for the story. (This was actually “in character” for him, so it played out pretty well.)

The resulting encounter ended up being a comedy of errors. Two of the party ended up getting blown up by lightning. Splig poisoned the pool. Another party member was blocked into the firepit tile by a large monster and chain-defeated. The player who had the least interest in “playing nice” (the original apathetic player) ended up having to come back into play (with a huge sigh of disgust and disappointment) and rescue everyone. Eventually a single player reached the exit and the session ended.

Encounter Two

At the start of this encounter, I left the prior (encounter one) map pieces on the table and built the encounter two map attached to it. This did require a little tile swapping, but it did not have any real effect on the gameplay. Since this is a role-playing session and not competitive, all of the objective tokens were randomized with neither side looking at any of them.

The narrative introduction was that as the first party member (who was still “marked” from encounter one) reached the door, a breeze blew away the mist and revealed that the party was in the front courtyard of a huge dilapidated mansion. The party spent a few minutes cleaning up the final monsters outside. (I stopped reinforcing the encounter one monsters as soon as the encounter shifted, and allowed the party to kill them off for continuity. Plus it makes them feel better about “finishing” the encounter.) I used the “free” turn they gave me to move the goblins into a more advantageous position but did not “cheat” too much – the party still did not know the objective so I was soft-pedaling the first turn.

As soon as the party was inside the mansion, I gave them a narrative description (using the quest introduction text as a guideline). I described a ruined mansion with tattered wall hangings and tapestries, piles of rubble and rubbish, and a ruined leaking roof. I described the gruff voice of Splig telling the goblins to look for “shiney gloves” and that he needed both of them. At that point the adventure was on!

The party’s treasure hunter quickly searched the closest token and found one glove right away. Splig and the goblins search the far north token and got nothing. The treasure hunter bolted north and found a treasure room. I unwisely did not press the attack in the south and the geomancer used his summoned stones to bottle up the large monsters I had chosen there. Using the stones as blockers the party was able to trivialize the southern fight. Luckily for me, one party member went for the treasure room – that had been the main goal in prior encounters and she did not switch gears fast enough – and got separated. Unfortunately, that one character provided enough of a distraction that I never was able to amass enough goblin reinforcements to make a solid push at the party.

After the party recovered the second glove, I used a narrative description to have Splig use a one-time use teleportation potion to escape from the fight. I stopped reinforcing and the party cleaned up the monsters. Interestingly, rather than leaving through the front door (for which I had additional narrative prepared), they went to the rear door (where the goblins were spawning). Also, I had planned on limiting the use of the Gloves to one of the two players who has gotten inside the mansion while still being “Marked by the Storm” from encounter one. (I was anticipating some discussion about who would get the gloves once they saw the loot card.) Amazingly, they didn’t even debate who got the loot and it went directly to the healer. This was not the optimal choice but it was a great one from a role playing perspective. The healer has always played her character as a wannabe fighter, and the gloves fit right into that style.

Conclusion

Even though it came after a long break, this session felt a lot better than our prior meetings. I'm getting better at being more flexible and accommodating the party's weirdly erratic actions and keeping them on-task with narrative tools instead of resorting to "God" moments. I do need to avoid using words like "win" and "lose" when it comes to these game sessions and encounters. There should never be a "winning condition" or a "losing condition", only an "end of session trigger."

The players are settling into their roles much better. Initially there was a tendency to "roll" play to the Descent mechanics, rather than ROLE play the characters. As the players change their mental space, the game is becoming more story like and they are filling in the holes in the encounter stories, making them more robust. In the next encounter they will actually meet the Goblin King and his Fine Lady, and that should be a fun little conversation!

Well.

The Elder Scrolls Online.

As I write this, there is less than two weeks before “early access” release of the game. I’ve played in three open beta weekends so far, and have done my usual survey of the entire game. I don’t expect my little blog post to have much if any effect, but I write this as a plea to Zenimax. I’m hopeful that it gets tossed in front of them at some point. Strap in, because this is going to be a long one.

The Meta Server

One of the most innovative things in the game is probably one of the most subtle, and won’t even be noticed by many people. I’m talking of course, about the so-called meta-server. I have no idea how they are doing this on the back-end, but as a player it shows up in a very interesting way.

So, let’s take a fairly standard MMO trope. Suppose, for example, that you come across a small village that has been attacked by enemies. Many buildings are on fire, there are bad guys at every intersection and evil patrolling guards all over the place. As part of your quest, you go to a specific location and do a thing – kill the leader, destroy a portal, cleanse an altar, whatever – and the village is saved. Now when you go to that same village, the buildings are no longer on fire, there are friendly guards patrolling, and those bad guys on every street corner have been replaced with good guys.

This sort of thing is expected in an MMO, and it usually done with a triggered event. The problem with a timed-trigger is the world is the same for everyone. If player A comes through and “saves the day”, then when player B enters that area a few minutes later he finds that it has already been saved and there is no way for him to complete the quest. In order to allow for player B to complete the event, it re-triggers and repeats after a short time delay. This is what we’ve come to expect in an MMO and it leads to a feeling that the player has no real agency in the game-world. Sure, you can save the town from the centaurs, but in a half hour, those same centaurs will be back and the town will need to be saved again. And again. And again....

The difference here is that the change that is affected is permanent and real. The way they do it is very sneaky and very very cool. When you first happen upon the area, the village is under attack, or is being attacked, or whatever. Let’s call this the initial condition. There is a specific server just for this. As you enter the area, you will see other players fighting the same bad guys as you. They are on the same sub-server as you; you can group up with them and fight alongside them. As you progress along the event path, you may go through a portal, enter a dungeon, or simply go into a building. All it takes is a simple load screen. Suddenly, you (and everyone who has crossed that same load-screen boundary) are on a different server! Anything and everything might be different. Or it might not. When you leave that area, if you have completed the objective, the load screen hands you off to a different server where the final condition is now the case. The village is no longer on fire, the bad guys are gone and the good guys are here. The event will NOT re-trigger. The reason is that once you’ve completed the event, the meta-server hands you off to a specific server where that event has been completed and always will be. You can stand around in that village for the rest of time and it will NEVER be re-attacked.

That’s very cool and it really adds player agency to the game world. However, it does have one major drawback. The meta-server will sort you based on what you’ve done in the word, and will put you alongside other players that have accomplished similar goals. But if your actual friends and guildmates have not accomplished similar tasks in the game, it’s not only possible that you might be on a different server, it actually very likely that you will be. Using the attacked village example, if you party with someone who has NOT saved the village, you will not be able to naturally adventure together, since you will be on different sub-servers. The solution is simple, but artificial. One of you can Travel to the other using the party menu, which forces you onto their sub-server. This means that either you Travel to their server where the village is under attack (again) or they travel to your server where the village has already been saved. (Once you leave the party and go through any loading screen, you should be placed back onto your “natural” sub-server.)

Again, I have only a base understanding of the server voodoo that it takes to make this happen, but I’m incredibly impressed that they were able to pull this off, and if nothing else survives from this game, I hope this innovation makes it out to other games!

Alliance vs Alliance
I don't know if you ever played Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC). Even though it was released in 2001, DAoC is still considered by many to be the best faction-based PvP MMO every created (so far). Well, ESO is DAoC reborn, but bigger and better. I have no idea how end-game strategy will develop post-release, but I can tell you that there is so much more tactical choice here that it makes GW2's WvW look about as complex as checkers compared to a modern 4X game. I won't describe it in detail; it would take another three pages to describe all the inter-relations and intricacies of the system.

I will say this:

It's easily 30 times larger than a GW2 borderland. That is to say, if you took the time it takes to run from garrison to the southernmost supply camp, that is about 1/6 of the run across the entire ESO AvA map.

Relative to the size, there are more capturable points, but they are laid out in a way that encourages a main "front line" development and organized large-group fighting. The transit system reinforces this.

Get ready to re-learn the term assjam. Whichever team has the races with the best CC are going to be experts at this.

Relic ("Elder Scrolls") raids are going to be EPIC!! Again, I don't want to talk about specific mechanics, but it likely to require coordination between at least two large forces, hitting disparate targets simultaneously.

Havok groups that run far behind the enemy to steal a small point (like a tower or supply camp) are still possible, but they play a dangerous game with risk vs. reward. The small goals are individually less important (both score wise and strategically), and it could be a very long run to get back there (like 10-15 minutes).

Solo and small group fighting is probably going to be much more common than large zerg fights. And probably more rewarding too.

I was out there as a brand new level 10 (the minimum level to get in) and in my very first large-scale battle, I racked up 14 ungrouped kills. Later (still level 10!) I was running with a very small group, over-extended (my own stupid fault) and ended up in a 2v1 fight. I managed to kill one of them before the second one finished me off. Character build and player skill make a HUGE and very noticeable difference! A player would have to be an idiot (or blatantly ignoring facts) to even suggest that zerging is the way to victory.

If there is anything that will keep ESO online, it will be this single feature.

The Good Stuff
The Crafting System in ESO is really well done. Basic crafting is very simple and pretty much everyone will do it. It doesn’t require any skill point costs, nor does the player need to buy any specific crafting or gathering tools. They just find a crafting station and start hitting buttons. Raw materials are found in the open world and can be refined into intermediate materials. Those can be used to create basic equipment extremely easily, with only a few mouse clicks.

The catch is that once the player delves down to the next level of complexity, it requires not only a large real-time investment, but it also requires a large game-play investment. To craft anything better than level 14 (out of 50), the player needs to invest skill points. Early in the game, skill points are limited and most players may not be willing (or able!) to make this investment. Additionally, materials are gated such that the player needs to craft a minimum number of items at each material tier to “qualify” for the next grade. Unless the player has invested the time in gathering, or has the available gold to buy raw materials, this may be a small hurdle to jump.

But even if the average player makes this investment, there is another level of complexity to the crafting system! In order to create special items that have innate abilities, the crafter must “learn” those traits by researching them. This research process is gated by real time. There are seven traits per type of item. Researching the first trait takes six hours, and each subsequent trait requires twice as long. This means that it takes 31.5 DAYS to research all seven traits for a single item. And by “item” I mean just that. For example, cloth gloves are a different “item” from cloth boots. A sword is a different “item” from a mace. You may be the highest skilled blacksmith in the world, but a player with half your skill level that focused specifically on making greatswords will have an advantage over you since they know all seven greatsword traits and you only know two or three. (You’ll still be better at making everything else though.)

Another level of complexity comes from the need for advanced materials. Advanced materials can only be created from the disassembly of loot items, and this requires players to pass the skill gates listed above. For example, to create a “precise” greatsword, the crafter needs a Ruby. But the only way to get a ruby is from disassembling a “precise” item. This sounds easy to deal with, and it will be at low levels. But when the average player is questing in a level 30 area and getting “obsidian” level gear, the casual crafter cannot disassemble it. Advanced materials will become difficult to get and crafters that are efficient at collecting and saving these will be rewarded.

Upgrade items fall into this same category. Collecting the "green" level upgrades will be easy (at least at first) since there will be a bevy of low-level crafters. Getting blue and higher level upgrades may be difficult since those will require dedicated crafters to disassemble them, and I expect dedicated crafters will be moderately rare.

The crafting system is really well designed with a very low initial investment to enter, but a very high level of skill required to be effective!

There is a ton of Class Flexibility built right into the game. In most MMOs when you create a character, you choose a class and that determines your archetype and what role you will play in the game. Not so in this system. Every single character has access to a minimum of seventeen skill lines. Here, your class determines exactly three skill lines (out of seventeen!) that you will have access to. This is a fairly minor distinction and really allows for a ton of flexibility in builds.

For example, let’s look at the much ballyhooed Sorcerer class. By choosing this class you gain access to the three Sorcerer skill lines: Dark Magic, Daedric Summoning and Storm Calling. But as a Sorcerer, you still have access to any and ALL of the weapon skill lines. Do you want to wield a giant greatsword? Fine. Want to wear heavy plate armor while flinging spells? Sure, no problem! The game allows the player to mix and match pretty much any active or passive ability in a single character. Any kind of character type that you can imagine can be built from this framework.

Personally, I built two diametrically different characters from the same class. I chose a Nightblade for no other reason than I wanted to test the flexibility of the system, and I came away amazed by it.

My first attempt used a tanky Sword&Shield weapon. I also trained several passive health regen and damage mitigation skills from the Heavy Armor line. Finally, I added in one pure DPS skill from the Assassination tree. The result was a high DPS tank that could stand up to three opponents without taking any appreciable damage and could three-shot MOBs that were two levels higher. In PvP, I was almost impossible to beat in a 1v1 fight and able to survive a 2v1 fight for a goodly amount of time. (It still got steamrolled by zergs, but there’s no way around that.)

My second build was a more standard ranger Bow build. I went heavy into Bow and increased both my range and damage. On top of this I chose some stealthy Shadow skills allowing me to escape from a bad fight, and I bumped the critical damage and health regen skills in the Medium Armor line. Finally, I added in one life-stealing skill from the Siphoning line. This resulted in a very high DPS ranged character that could kill most targets before they even got to me. Those that did try to get to me, were knocked down, interrupted or pushed back by various attacks. In PvP, getting kill assists was as simple as randomly clicking into a zerg fight. Even non-skilled “light” attacks were hitting for as much as ¼ of an enemy player’s health.

The same class, but two completely different playstyles. That's really amazing.

The Bad

This kind of Class Flexibility does have drawbacks, of course. There are no training wheels on this skill system. If the player chooses different skill lines (or even individual skills) that do not synergize, they can and will result in a gimpy character build. For example, training light armor for a high level of magical damage, but primarily using a melee weapon might not be a wise choice. The light armor may give a lot of mana (or, magicka, as it is called here) regen, but it is poor protection in a fight. A melee weapon requires the player to be up close and personal with his opponent. Light armor in melee… these two things are not going to work well together. This puts the onus on the player to develop a synergistic build. Many players may not have the time, inclination or the understanding to do so.

It also makes it very difficult to “survey” a skill line to see if it works for the player’s style. Most of the skill lines do not really open up until you reach the third ability, which is gated by a specific skill level in that line, plus several skill points. There is a certain minimum level of investment into a given skill type to get much from it. This means that in order to really see what a specific weapon type can do, the payer must devote at least 10-20 hours of actual in-game play time using that specific weapon type. If, after that time investment, the player decides that weapon is not for them, they’ve “wasted” that play time. Respecing is available, so the skill points can be reclaimed, but the time cannot be. And even with a nice solid stash of skill points, there is still the time-gating requirement.

Balance is important, especially in a PvP MMO. This is why so many MMOs use a class-based skill progression. It affords the developer a much higher level of control over the balance of the game. If a specific weapon skill is too powerful, they can change a value in a spreadsheet and tune it down very easily. The problem with a skill-based progression system is that players mix-and-match things in unusual ways. That one over-powered weapon skill may be perfectly balanced when used by itself, overpowered when used in conjunction with a different skill or ability, and completely underpowered when used differently. It’s impossible to simply tune up, or down, any single item without affecting it in unexpected ways. The interrelations between itemization and skill usage is much more complex. Sadly, balance is not anywhere near completed in ESO. I expect that there will be some major balance tuning in the next six to nine months. It will be the Smite Cleric and Dual Wield nerfs rolled into one, but multiple times.

Another imbalance is in the world design. The different faction zones were obviously designed at different times during the development cycle. It’s obvious that one area is much more polished than the other two, and one of them is really badly put together. Realistically, each team that designed areas should QA the other team’s zones. Alternately, the team should completely redesign the areas that they designed first and bring them up to the standard of the other two. Yes it takes time, but those kind of first impressions don’t get a second chance.

The Ugly

Questing is part and parcel of the PvE experience. The problem is that the vast majority of the non-repeatable quests in ESO were designed prior to the meta server implementation and they can easily enter a locked or confused state. Suppose that you do some Very Important Quest solo or in a PUG. You get the reward, a Ring of Ultimate Shielding and equip it. Later that day, a guildmate puts out a cry for help, he’s trying to complete this quest and is having trouble. You volunteer to help him and Travel to his server. The problem is, you’ve already done the quest. The server sees this, says “Oh wait, you can’t do it again!” and disables the quest. This results in a required quest MOB not spawning, or an event to not trigger, or some similar effect. The net result is that the quest is now “broken”. The real problem is that it STAYS broken, even after you leave. Your presence on that mini-server puts that quest into an unresolvable state for everyone else on that server. Forever. (Or at least until that server is restarted or reset.) This means that other players that come along many hours after you have left the game cannot complete the quest. To them, it simply appears like a broken quest (which it kind of is).

This is a game-killing situation. Unless Zenimax can find a way to fix this, ESO will have a mass exodus of PvE players. If fixing this means pushing back release, then they should push back release. Developing a solution and throwing it on a live server without a real stress test is not an acceptable solution. I’m told that a solution is in place on the PTS, but internal testing of such a key gameplay element is simply not going to work out well. Personally, I feel that this should the #1 priority of the developers and that the game should not be allowed to go live until this is resolved and tested.

The #2 thing that needs major work is the User Interface. I really enjoy the minimalist base UI that the game uses, with hot-buttons and bars that fade in and out as needed. During normal play, they are out of the way and invisible. When something happens and information needs to be shown, they pop back into view. That’s really nice!

The bad part is the various widgets and controls. Whomever designed this UI is clearly stuck back in the last century. For example: to leave a party you open the party window gadget (default keypress ‘P’) obscuring your view of the game, find your own name on the text list (really! a text list!) of party members, right click on your name (but not anyone else’s name, that won't work!) to open a special personal drop-down menu, then choose “Leave Party” on the resulting drop down. Really? How about something like right clicking on the actual party graphic on the main screen and selecting “Leave Party” from there, like any sane person that has played an MMO in the last three years would expect?

Want to send a private message to another player in game? Maybe a /whisper or /send chat command? Pshaw!! No, you need to open the social window gadget, press E to get a second window to pop open, then you can enter their name and message on that second window. Oh and if you happen to get attacked by anything while your doing this, you have to close the two windows (in the correct order!) to regain control of your character.

Fast travel? Yes, it's in there. But instead of double-clicking on a map, you must press E to confirm. Every single time.

Want to go to the PvP area? Open the PvP window, go to the right-most tab, find your “campaign” on the text list (what's with the text lists, already!?), right click on that name, and then choose “Enter Campaign” from the drop-down. That puts in a request to enter. After a few minutes, a notification will pop up. Open the notification window and click on the check mark next the notice. Oh, and by the way, the notification times out in 60 seconds, so if you fail to see it, or were not aware you needed to click on it, you have to start the process again.

The game UI is full of these sorts of complex last-generation interface options that require an arcane, bizarre and completely non-intuitive combination of clicks, key-presses and window options to get even the simplest of tasks accomplished. Zone-chat should not have people asking how to leave a guild or party, or how to access their guild’s bank!

Admittedly, after playing three weekend events, I started to understand how the UI works and was able to find most things after a few minutes of searching and experimenting. But it should not take several dozens of hours to “learn” a User Interface. MMO UI design has advanced in the last decade. There are a lot of really intuitive advancements, and none of them are here. Put a new player in front of this and they are going to be frustrated and annoyed. Hell, I’m a long-time MMO player and I was frustrated and annoyed! This is not a game-breaker, but the new player experience is going to be negatively affected by this in a major way.

In Conclusion

I told you this was going to be a long one. I have a fairly divided opinion of the game. On the one hand, the technical merits they’ve achieved are amazing. The PvP design is incredibly tight and will keep the game running for years. But some of the core features of the game simply don’t work, required quests are getting stuck and halting advancement, game balance is poor, and the user interface is tragically bad.

It’s (supposedly) coming out in less than two weeks. There are still some major technical issues to resolve and test, and I just don’t see how they have the time to accomplish this. I expect that there will be a launch day rush from the fans of the Elder Scrolls, followed by a mass exodus as soon as the “free” 30 days is up. I myself, who normally buys online game time in six-month blocks, am only going to go monthly on this one. I’m extremely trepidatious about over-investing.

Overall, I like the game. If you told me this was coming out in the summer, I’d be super hyped for it and telling all my friends to pre-order now. I really think this is a solid game that needs about three to six months of more time. If it is released on schedule in April, I predict Bad Things Will Happen™. And that's a real shame.

Another game that was given extremely high marks in 2013 was the (supposedly) ground breaking game Brothers. As luck would have it, this game was available on PlayStation Plus during the month of January. (For those that don’t know, PS+ is essentially Sony’s version of Xbox Live, but in addition to all of the online features, they also give subscribers access to about a dozen free games each month. In January, the two of the titles offered were Bioshock Infinite and Brothers. If you have a PS4, PS3 or a Vita, you really should subscribe!!) So I downloaded it and played it through.

Now, I’ll admit that 2013 was not a great year for games. There were a few standout games that made a big splash (the aforementioned Bioshock game being one of them) but generally there weren’t a whole lot of really great games last year. Brothers fits right into that same category.

Fans of Brothers ballyhoo two things: the story and the innovative controls.

The control scheme is a bit different from most other games and I’m not sure how well it would translate to a PC kayeboard-and-mouse. On a controller, it makes perfect sense. You have two brothers, the “big” brother (dark haired, dressed in blue tones) and the “little” brother (blonde, dressed in red tones). The left stick moves the “big” brother, L2 makes him do an action. The right stick moves the “little” brother and the R2 button makes him do an action. The L1/R1 buttons are also used to move the view around, but this is fairly limited in scope; there are many places in the game where the view cannot be rotated, and it doesn’t work at all during in-game cinematics.

The game makes good use of these controls from the very start. The first task you have to complete is to carry a cart to a house on the other side of a bridge. The cart CAN be moved by a single brother, but it is much easier with both of them. At the bridge, there is a level that must be pulled, and you quickly discover that the “little” brother is not strong enough to do it, so you use the “big” brother.

As the game progresses, the puzzles don’t really become more difficult. Some minor complexity is added occasionally with the different size/strength of the two brothers - you have to use the little brother to sneak into small places (say, between the bars of a cage, or through a small hole) and the big brother for strength related tasks (pulling levers and swimming) – but that’s about it. Once you solve the first puzzle and get accustomed to the controls, the game just goes through the motions here.

And this is my largest gripe with this game. The independent control of the two brothers could have been used in a lot of interesting and challenging ways. Instead of being the cornerstone that a great game was built upon, the control scheme feels almost like a sideshow. Even in the penultimate challenge of the game, the “boss battle”, you really only control one brother at a time. While one is doing something, the other is just standing there. Use the big brother to lure the boss, then when he gets trapped, use the little brother to stun the boss, then switch back to the big brother to do damage to the boss. Without any exaggeration, in 90% of all of the puzzles, the game could have been played with standard FPS controls and one button to switch viewpoint between the two brothers.

Sure you CAN control them simultaneously, but aside from moving across the countryside (where they are moving in basically the same direction anyway) you never really NEED to. In almost every case, you move one brother somewhere, hold down the action button for that brother and forget about him while the other brother does the same thing. There are never any pat-your-head-and-rub-your-tummy type puzzles, and that’s a shame.

One interesting thing that I really did like was the complete lack of dialog in the game. Rather than spoken words or screens of text to read, all of the characters pantomime their needs and desires. This is very well done and there was never any doubt in my mind what the various characters wanted. This is true for even minor side-characters that have no direct impact on the story!

The game feels like it contains a really innovative concept, but it never really goes anywhere. The comparison that comes into my mind is that playing Brothers is like playing the first 18 levels of the original Portal game with the sound turned off. It’s a really great introduction, but the actual GAME part of it seems to be missing.

Which brings me to the story. Now, I have some friends who get really bent out-of-shape about spoilers. They want the story to be a “surprise” and I respect that. But, c’mon here… this is a game about two brothers that share a common control scheme. It shouldn’t be a huge stretch to figure out what happens at the end of the game. (In case you are willfully trying to not do the extremely simple math here, you may want to skip the rest of this posting. Just sayin’.)

One of the reasons that many people find the end-game to be so emotionally gripping is the control scheme used. Big brother dies (shocking, right?) and you are left with the little brother. The one that uses the RIGHT stick for movement. In a typical FPS game movement is on the left stick, so this supposedly “feels wrong” to many people. Personally, I play FPS on the PC, and using the right stick for movement was not a factor at all. To be honest, I hadn’t even considered it as a gameplay element until after I had completed the game and then went back and read a few detailed reviews. So depending on how invested you are in the right-stick/left-stick control scheme, this may or may not bother you.

The other big “story” item that people seem to get all broken up about is the final puzzle of the game. It’s a really REALLY simple puzzle (that I will not spoil), but it stopped me dead in my tracks for a solid ten minutes. I didn’t resort to looking for an answer on the web, but, I admit, I was really close! When I realized what the solution was my reaction was more along the lines of, “Well, of course! That makes perfect sense!” Apparently I’m a cold hearted bastard because that solution has brought many gamers to tears.

So, in summary: Great innovative game CONCEPT, but mediocre execution, and a predictable story. For the price I paid (free!) it was worth the 90 minutes it took to complete. Just like so many games of 2013, it was good, but not great. As a commercial release, I would have been disappointed with it.

I’ve always like the Descent: Journeys in the Dark boardgame. Even the original first edition was fun to me, even though t each game session ranged between 8 and 12 hours long. The new streamlined second edition works a lot better, allowing us to finish a single encounter in just about four hours. In our group we have always had the same player running as the Overlord, but when the Labyrinth of Ruin expansion came out, I decided that I was going to try my hand at Overlording. Additionally, I asked all the players to NOT read the quest book. When I was playing a character, I found it more entertaining to “discover” each encounter as we played. Of course, with some encounters being timed, it was going to mean that the players would need to know enough to win.

My solution was to craft it as a Role Playing game. I (as the Overlord/GameMaster) would lay out the situation in flowery verbiage and then make sure the players understood exactly what their goals are as we played along. When I first imagined running a Role Paying “Descent” variant, I knew it was going to require a little bit of effort. I may have under-estimated that effort. Almost every encounter needs to be modified in one or more ways. Overall I think it is working out splendidly; the result is a nice mixure of mystery and exploration while retaining the tactical positioning decisions of a Descent game.

(For reference, we’re playing the Labyrinth of Ruin Campaign; I am using the Basic II deck and filling with Punisher cards.)

First session
Our first session was the starter “Ruinous Whispers” quest. Aside from developing the backstory of the game, and asking the heroes to come up with a capsule character description, I did not prepare for this session very much. I (incorrectly) assumed that since the players’ winning condition is “kill everything” that they would automatically assume that as a default position. How wrong I was! In fact, out of the four Hero players, I received the following comments and/or complaints. One player confronted me afterwards, saying that they never understood what was going on during the game. A second player said that they were disappointed in the overall lack of role playing opportunities and it was “too Descent-y”. A third player made the assumption that the goal was to grab the woman and take her to the map exit, which was actually MY winning condition, and then felt I had not given enough information for them to figure out the goals. Overall it did not go very well.

Second session
For the second session, I prepared a lot more. Since I was technically abler to “win” the first session, I was supposed to choose the next quest. However, after thinking about it a bit more and looking at the quest choices, I decided that I was going to give the Hero players an option to choose between two quests EVERY time, whether they won or lost. In this case, since I had read the entire quest book, and knew the drawbacks of the two ally characters, I really did not want to allow the heroes to get Serena. Plus I already had outlined the role playing aspect of Raythen in my mind. So the decision that I presented the Hero players with was to rescue a captured Dwarf that might have information about the local ruins, or to go see a dwarven smithy who had developed a new kind of armor. (The second choice was a rumor card from the Lair of the Wyrm expansion.)

I tried to present both options as equally viable to the players. On one hand I had already set up “Honor Among Thieves” and was ready to roll on that. On the other hand, I wanted to get the heroes into the side quest early on, so that I might gain the Valyndra overlord card later. So, from a Overlord/GameMaster perspective, there were advantages to both, which let me look at it a lot more neutrally. As it turned out, the heroes ended up have a pretty lengthy in-character discussion about their options. After asking for more information about both paths (with no spoilers, but outlining the potential gains and pitfalls of both paths) the opted to stay on the main story line. I did ask why they chose that one, and they said it sounded cooler, and they wanted to know more about the ruins right away. They didn’t choose it because it was the main story quest – they actually didn’t know which path was the “right” one for the main story.

The first encounter of this session went much better. I gave them more information about what to do at the start of the quest, describing the captive Raythen across the clearing, and having him gesture that the players should talk to the hooded figures. Luckily the very first check was a hint, so the players continued doing the right thing. I was pleased to the players setting into their roles much better this time, with everyone doing what their character would have done in a similar situation. The treasure hunter went for the gold, the warrior ran into fight, the wizard gathered information and the healer tried to get to Raythen to rescue him. As it turned out, the warrior got there first and tried to open the lock, but he (correctly) role-played as a dumb fighter and flubbed the combination. (I’m not 100% sure this role-playing since the players only knew two of the four colors, the player was drinking, and appeared to have “forgotten” what the ones they knew were.) The knockback to the start of the map was a surprise to all.

In a “normal” Descent game, this particular encounter is timed, only seven turns long maximum. However, the Heroes started with a lack of knowledge about the goal, the knockback was a complete surprise to them, and they certainly weren’t in any rush to get to Raythen. To balance against their lack of tactical knowledge, I had already decided to ignore the time limit. Plus, I wanted them to win this encounter. I figured it would help to bolster their morale as a group, and a win or loss in the first encounter of a quest really doesn’t have any significant effect on the game. Having said that, when the healer tried to open the lock (still only knowing two out of the four colors) and failed, I made another decision. If the players failed the lock three times, regardless of game length, the encounter would be lost.

Since they did not feel any time pressure, the heroes had pretty much settled into “clear the map” mode. But I had really been soft pedaling with my Overlord cards (another drawback of being an Overload/GameMaster is that I must use a feather touch to avoid a Total Party Kill), and in order to get them moving I started using these, almost killing two heroes in the next turn. The mage took the hint and popped the lock, rescuing the Dwarf and ending the session.

Third session
Learning from my prior mistakes, I prepared a bit for this next encounter. I prepared several pages of dialog for Raythen, to set the stage for the next encounter. (I should add that in a break from normal Descent rules, we have a fifth hero player choosing what to do as Raythen.) This went over great! The heroes started the encounter and at different times during the game I would say: “Raythen, please read the page marked (blahblah)” and an additional narrative element was introduced.

This encounter was also supposed to be timed, but rather than an artificial (and arbitrary) time limit, I decided that I was going to track Overlord fatigue as per the normal rules, but would simply add in a new open group at different intervals. This would make it appear that the alarm had been raised and would “encourage” (ahem) the heroes to leave before collecting all the treasure.

Sadly, the heroes completely flubbed this encounter. Before the end of the second turn, they had only gathered three relics, two of the heroes had been incapacitated, and I was at the “alarm” level. I never even activated my original open group (I chose Ferrox, by the way) and started following the pre-defined schedule I had already developed.

What came next was unexpected, but turned out to be a blessing. When Raythen gave his pre-prepared speech about getting out NOW and started for the door as if to abandon the party (which is exactly what the directions on the card told him to do), the group split up, abandoning two players on the map. The other three (including Raythen) made it to the exit, got out and ended the session.

Fourth session
The resolution of the capture of two characters could have been handled with a narrative trick, but that’s kind of cheap. (That’s how most of the quest text in the manual works, sadly.) Instead, I created a new encounter from scratch. I used the “Fountain of Insight” quest as inspiration and created a “jail” for the two hero players. I removed all of their starter equipment and put them in locked cells. I used the voice of Lord Merrick Farrow (hereafter referred to as LMF) to advance the plot. He explained to one of the incarcerated heroes (the warrior) that he would reward them handsomely if they would retrieve “an item” from the ruins, they would know what he spoke of when they saw it, and that it was guarded by spiders. Our warrior agreed instantly to turn his cloak when the opportunity arose (how that plays out is yet to be seen). To the captured scout, he explained that the jail was rigged with explosives and that it would take a mere wave of his hand to bury both heroes forever. The scout was dumbfounded and would not agree to or discuss anything with LMF.

Again, I used Raythen to set the stage. Since Raythen was so recently escaped from the clutches of LMF, he knew where the captured heroes were “most likely” to be held. “Easy ta get in, hard ta git out,” was the catchphrase of the day. After presenting this, the three escaped heroes (again, including Raythen) started on their rescue mission. It took several turns, and during the time before their cells were opened, the captured heroes really weren’t able to do much (which was unfortunate, since one of them is our star Role Player). Eventually, everyone was able to escape and as the heroes escaped, the jail was detonated.

The players were completely unaware that this third encounter was not part of the quest book. In fact, our mage player actually thought that it specifically Was and comment on how cool it was that FFG had put in a three-encounter quest in the book.

Moving Forward
It took a couple of sessions, but I feel like all of the players have mostly settled into their roles now. I’ve had a chance to watch them all play, and I think I know what motivates each player. I’m developing new story elements that will appeal to all four of them, encourage them to play their roles more and shift the focus away from the dry ‘roll the dice, move the mice’ tactical game. It is still going to require a lot of planning modifications to each encounter, and a few on-the-fly mods while we play, but I’m really enjoying the direction the game has taken and am honestly looking forward to future plot twists… whether from me, or from unexpected player actions.

One of the nice things about the end of each calendar year is that it gives all of the media outlets an opportunity to publish year end wrap-ups. As a “normal gamer” this allows me to cherry pick my next few games from various “Best of” lists. Of course, as a discriminating gamer, I typically find that I’ve already played most of the games on those lists, but clearly I can’t play them all. I do have a real life as well, you know. Anyway, this year was no different and there is a short list of new games that came out last year that I plan on playing over the next few weeks.

One that I managed to fit in over the holiday break was Papers, Please! Prior to seeing it pop up on a half-dozen 2013 lists, I had never heard of this game, but it was under $10 on steam, so I bought it to try it out.

The game is a little indie game that has pixel graphics and a gameplay description that look and sound like they came directly from an old Atari VCS in the 1980s. In the game, you play as a customs officer at the border of the fictional country of Arstrozka. The actual game mechanics are that you choose to stamp each person’s passport with a “yes” or “no” stamp. You are paid a wage based on the number of people you check for entry to the country, and you need to balance this money against daily expenses like rent, heat, food and medicine for your family. At the end of each day, your scores are tallied and you pay (or don’t pay) your fictional bills, and then there is a little “newspaper” that has headlines from that day’s events in Arstrozka. Each day is timed, and is only a few minutes long.

At the beginning of the game, the selection is pretty simple. Native Arstrozkans are allowed entry, all others are denied. You do need to check the nationality of the passport, verify that the picture on the document matches the person, and that the passport is not expired. If everything checks out, you allow the person in; if not, you deny them entry. Remember that you are only paid based on how many people you “process” during the “day”, and that the “day” is timed! You need to work as quickly as possible in order to pay all of your bills. (If you go into debt, the game ends immediately and you lose.) Also, if you make an error and allow someone past that should not have gotten in, you are fined, which eliminates the wages earned for two others. Basically, it’s much better to go a little slower and not make errors than it is to rush.

The second game “day”, the ne newspaper reports that visitors will be allowed, but only if they have a valid pass. This adds a little more complexity since you now need to check the non-natives instead of just turning them away. The visitor pass dates need to check and the passport numbers need to match. Sadly, the second day is cut short by a terrorist attack which will put a strain on your money levels.

The next day the rules add a bit more complexity. Fortunately, the different rules for checking the various documents stop changing so frequently after the first few days. And after a couple of times going broke (and losing) you start to get really fast and efficient at checking all of the paperwork. After my third game, I was processing around 15 people on the first (and easiest) day. That’s about one every 20 seconds, including the downtime between people (that you can’t affect).

All in all, this would be a cute, albeit uninteresting, little puzzly time-challenge game. But once it gets past the introduction of the border guard mechanic, it gets’ very interesting indeed! For example, one event that happens fairly early on is a man goes through the checkpoint and all of his papers are in order, so he allowed past. He mentions to you that he is immigrating to Arstroztka and his wife is next in line. Sure enough, the wife is next, but she is missing one document. Do you do the “right” thing? Actually, what is the “right” thing to do? If you let her pass, you get fined, which hurts you and your family. If you turn her away, she will probably be killed, and her husband will hate you for it. This kind of a decision is extremely simple to make and you only have a few seconds to decide. Press “yes” or press “no”…. If you let her in, and she turns out to be a terrorist, you might be arrested (and lose the game). If you deny her, the husband may come back to kill you (and you lose the game).

These kind of blind decisions come up again and again as you play the game. There are no cutscenes and no long text descriptions of the situation(s). Each of the choices you have to make are explained fully with less than a dozen words and the natural gameplay. Yet the scenarios they present are incredibly complex and require a lot of personal thought about the potential outcomes of your choices.

Here’s another example: A lady comes to the counter looking to move to Arstrozka for work. Her work visa shows she is a cook, but the business card she gives you is for a massage parlor. This is fine, and all of her papers are in order. A bit odd, being a cook at a massage parlor, but no reason to deny her entry. After you let her pass (which you should probably do, since you’ll be fined if you deny her for no good reason), she hands you a note that says that she is being followed by a guy that she thinks is going to sell her into sex-slavery, and gives his name. A few people later, and an individual with that name shows up. He’s a native, his papers all look okay, but…. I chose to let him pass. What could I do? Everything was in order and there was no good reason to deny him. The next day the newspaper had a headline about sex-slavery and a bunch of murdered prostitutes. I felt pretty badly about that. I knew that I could have stopped that from happening, but should I have done so?

For being such a simple game in graphical and gameplay presentation, Papers, Please forces the player to make very deep moral decisions on a frequent basis. The game looks like crap, the game play is super-simplistic, and the mechanics feel like a 30-year old video game from the last century. But if you can get past that, there is a true gem here. I wouldn’t say it was one of my top-three games form last year, but I’m certainly very glad that I took the time to try it out.

It's on steam for about $10.

Yesterday I opened my email and found two more character write-ups ready for me. I'm really excited to see that the Hero players are jumping in to the Role Play aspect of the game with both feet. I was so impressed with the thought that went into these that I have to share them with everyone! (Please keep in mind I did not write these!)

Kirga

Kirga is the daughter of caravan guards. As you might expect, Kirga learned early on the many tasks such a life would entail. More often that not Kirga would serve as lookout for her family. Kirga was extremely observant for her age, but she had trouble keeping her hands to herself.

As she grew older, she became more and more dishonest. Much to her delight, a somewhat oblivious merchant named Kendal ignored Kirga's penchant for trouble. He taught her everything there was to know in the art of appraisal. Kirga, of course, used what he taught her to delve into the art of forgery.

As Kirga grew into adulthood, she became bored with the limitations of the nomadic caravan life that kept her from further developing her forgery techniques. She packed her bags and headed out for the long-abandoned dwarf citadel, Koganusan.

Kirga had a lot of fun looting that citadel over the next few years. She had quite the pile of plunder when she was done, but, despite her best efforts, she could not figure out how to create passable knock-offs of the dwarven inventions. She decided to go schmooze with the only dwarves around, and struck a course for The Forge. (She may or may not have robbed everyone she encountered along the way.)

Turns out, the dwarfs had been waiting for someone like Kirga to come along. They bought the items she had salvaged from Koganusan, and they also hired her to help preserve their monopoly of all the best dwarven creations. Any thefts of dwarven goods were reported to Kirga, and she gleefully “repossessed” the items and brought them back to The Forge in exchange for quite the fee. Kirga was also sent out to the old dwarven citadels to retrieve what the dwarves didn't feel like trudging out to get themselves.

Della Kolmud, a matriarchal guild master in The Forge, developed a fondness for Kirga. Della started lavishing quite impressive rewards on the treasure-hunting orc. One of those rewards was a rare Dead Man's Compass (Item: gain 1 movement point if within 3 spaces of a search token.) but other that, no one knows for sure. It has been said that she carries a nasty amulet of warding though (Ability: monsters can not target her if there are other heroes closer to that monster and in its line of sight.)

As for fighting techniques, Kirga tends to prefer dwarven fire bombs and exotic range weapons. Her current weapon of choice is a deceptively ordinary-looking whip. If you're dead-set on inviting her to this thing of yours, I'm sure she can handle her own, but try to warn the other people you invite that Kirga is a bit impatient and pushy. (Feat: Use during another figure's activation to immediately perform a move action.) Also, it would be in their best interest if they left their heirlooms at home!

Leoric of the Book

Early Life
My original goal for Leoric is to show a man who has not fallen from grace, but he does not managed to uphold his ideals gracefully. He tells himself he follows his Hippocratic oath, but he’s just going to use stone shapes and earthquakes to kill when he has to, and it’ll only make him more bitter. Originally interested in the natural world thanks to his bright parents (a), he later turned this lust for knowledge to medicine, anatomy, and fixing people. This is mostly because despite all of his virtues, he was 10, and he sincerely believed the world was going to end.

Of course, he still believes the world is about to end. He waited out the intervening years first in the cloister dedicated to Kellos. His fondness of myth and legend did lend itself well to Kellos, and he did sincerely wish to do something good with his talents. However, due to the hierarchical nature of the church Leoric’s formative years saw him prematurely defrocked (b), with bitter feelings on both sides. He couldn't turn a blind eye to what he now knows to be ordinary politics and administrative ‘graft’ in the biggest center of worship in the baronies, and his superiors could not tolerate someone who diminished the church in the eyes of the community with his arguments, challenges, and lack of discretion.

They still call him Leoric of the book to mock him for being a failed priest, and it does bother him.

Teenager
Despite the fact the church had to kick him out some of Leoric’s fellows and mentors did see some potential in him and did not wish to see it wasted. Without his knowledge, an old mentor managed to speak to an acquaintance of his at Greyhaven University (c). Leoric had applied in one of his bitter phases a year prior, but lacked any real patron to fund his studies. With the holy father’s endorsement and a few books concerning the Elder Circle (d), our unlikely protagonist received a patron under the condition he do some rather serious undergraduate work on studying the Elder Circle. As a moody young man, Leoric was already familiar with the site in passionate detail.

He believed it to be ancient and enduring, holding together a greater mystery he had never puzzled out. Spending time there was also a good time to brood, which he did a lot of early on. But it made him forget for a time that the world was ending, and he was grateful. Out of this obsession you what eventually steered him towards geomancy.

Adulthood
During the following years, as an undergraduate, a fellow, an associate professor, and other such humiliating offices, Leoric watched his old patrons fade from the scene. However, his esoteric field at least gave him a niche, and not many of his fellows were both experts on religion, and willing to criticize the practices of the faith. He was reluctant to learn ‘useful’ applications from the occult stones he had studied, imbued with power from generations of blood spilled, incantations made, and sacrifices accepted. His only escape from the politics of the university was working on his great work that will establish him as a Runecaster and to be left alone. He did not know what it would be, but he found reasons to travel far and wide. He did not mean to be gone so long, but he took an ecclesiastical variant of the Hippocratic oath (e) in the cloister. While he is not bonded to any power or god, he takes it all the more seriously for that.

Learning to bend great arcane powers to defend yourself without doing something that repulsed him was truly a challenge, and time consuming. To explain his exceptional practical wisdom, I wanted to work in lots and lots of historical anecdotes to give him color. I’ll probably wish to make some up on the fly, but I had some basic ideas.

• He was a vizier to an up and coming (failure of a) Sultan. He mostly was an exotic foreigner, and added to the prestige of his homely court. He tried to help, but he found it a harsh, confusing land, which often brought out man’s worst nature.


• He was press-ganged by deserters and outcasts who sought opportunity in a land still recovering. This establishes the fact he’s a coward, and was willing to be intimidated if it meant he was stabbed by these men he met by chance. However, he learned something about crime, economics, and surviving outdoors. I wanted to work in with Kirga that we might have crossed paths before, and Leoric used Kirga as a distraction to escape, or as a way to set up the brigands to fail miserably and die. He was pretty bitter and shameful, by the end.


• He was an intended sacrifice when he ran into some scoundrels who seemed to be willing to buy him drinks and listen to his stories in Nerekhall (f). Turns out, they had made some sort of esoteric magical error and wouldn't be able to sacrifice him at all. Feeling a distinct loss of face in front of the junior professor of Greyhaven, they let him go. The fact they could do something so callous and attend class the next day reminded Leoric of his own school, and contributed to his eventual disenchantment with his life there.


• A broad category could be defined by his experience as a mercenary, or adventurer. He still feels the doom and gloom from when he was 10, so he doesn't worry about risk when it’s only a potential part of a job. So he’s been reckless, he’s survived, and he learns. He tries to share his wisdom about being beaten, cursed, impaled by traps, falling down pits, betrayal, etc. This lends him an air of humility that would have been godly and pious in the cloister. He’s old enough now he can laugh at that, and who he was, but he still hates pit traps.

I think I’ll call it there for now, two pages is a lot of backstory. This is mostly the stuff I was toying with working in on the fly, but it might make the game a bit easier for you if you already know what it is I’m drawing on. To wrap up the last part before the adventure briefly--

Current
When he did finally come back to the school, he could take care of himself. And he was ten times worse than he ever was in the cloister. Perhaps his age was catching up on him, maybe he is rather preoccupied after learning about some strange rumors concerning upheaval and magical intrigue back in Cathridge thanks to that absentee Daqan Baron "Lord" Zachareth. He declares he’s found a new lead, and he takes off as part of his graduate runecaster work. All the while knowing that considering the circumstances he left under, he’ll never be able to go back.

And he may be okay with that.

Footnotes:
(a) Bright, like scribes, not wizards
(b) They told him he could not become a priest
(c) Greyhaven: Best known for the Universities of Greyhaven which have, for generations, been the paragon of magical learning and knowledge of the arcane. Runecasters the world over have learned how to work their magics here. [D1/RtL]
Also houses the Shadow Academy, an underground magic school in Greyhaven, run by Kral the Bone Lich and offering to teach young wizards the forbidden arts in exchange for a piece of their soul. [RB/Web]
(d) Elder Circle, the: A old set of stones arranged in a circular pattern in the Carthridge Downs. A strange cavern is hidden beneath. [D2: The Ritual of Shadows]
(e) Or some variant that makes him reluctant to use the supernatural to hurt. Directly.
(f) Nerekhall: Another center of arcane lore, although not as prestigious as Greyhaven. The wizards in Nerekhall are not as shy about researching the darker arts - such as necromancy - as their counterparts. This cavalier attitude towards the darker arts has been known to cause trouble from time to time, however. [D1/RtL]

We started a new Descent: Journeys in the Dark campaign on Saturday. We are playing the “new”(ish) Labyrinth of Ruin campaign. This was my first time playing as Overlord and I made it really hard on myself by starting this campaign off as an experiment.

Descent was designed as a “dungeon crawler”, but is actually better described as a turn-based tactical combat game. My goal was to use the Descent campaign encounters as the “combat” portion of the play session, and to do some real Role Playing between the descent encounters to better develop the bare-bones campaign story a bit better. Mission goals and objectives would be presented in Role Play and the players would describe their actions in more detail, rather than “I move forward three spaces and (roll dice) hit the goblin for (roll dice) three hitpoints.”

I had prepared a long history of the game world that laid out generations of backstory. My goal was to allow the players to have a rich backdrop to develop their own characters from, rather than coming up with something fresh out of thin air. Unfortunately, when Bob left us last week, that really had a pretty major impact on my mental well-being. This spilled over into our first session. All of the great ideas I had in my mind were pretty much squashed flat and it was really hard for me to get into the story mode. Rather than telling a grand tale of intrigue and betrayal, of magic and war, I fell back to merely reading the words I had typed out. It wasn’t horrible, but I was not able to completely come up with the mystique that I was shooting for.

(I used the simply amazing Runiverse “fluff” files compiled by Steve Williams to put this together. It’s not official, but it should be!!)

After the world was set before them, I asked the players to choose an archetype. I stressed that it was not necessary that they have one of each archetype and that, in fact, it would probably be preferable if they were missing one or two and doubled up on others. I told them that they would be gaining a “non-player” character during the campaign that would fill some missing roles. After a short discussion, they selected their archetypes. I was a bit disappointed that they ended up with the tried-and-true one-of-everything combination. It did happen organically, so I can’t say that they didn’t think about it. It was a conscious decision, not a default position.

Once archetypes were chosen, each player was given a card that described the four classes available within that archetype. Each player individually deliberated over the role they wanted to play. After they selected a class, they were given that class' starting cards, and allowed to review the purchasable skill cards. Amazingly, not a single player asked if they could go back and choose again. I think this shows how much effort they put into their initial selections, and not trying to min/max the party makeup.

(I used the incredibly useful Hero Selection Guide to get to this point.)

After classes were chosen, I gave each player free reign to select a character within their archetype. I reminded them that there was going to be a strong Role Playing emphasis on the game so they should pick a character that was going to complement both their style of play and one that they could personally identify with. Two of the players were able to make a quick decision, within only a few moments. I knew the Warrior archetype would take the longest since it has the most character sheets available, and the warrior player slowed this down a bit by choosing to read each and every Hero Ability and Heroic Feat on every card. I grimaced inside every time I heard the name of some of the known overpowered characters, but none of them ended up on the table.

The group that we ended up with are:

Trenloe (the Strong) – Berserker
Augur Grissom – Disciple
Kirga – Treasure Hunter
Leoric (of the Book) – Geomancer

After this phase was done, I asked all of the players to come up with a short character history and their individual motivations for coming to the adventure site. The looks on their faces varied from shock to terror to amusement to mild disinterest. Despite getting blindsided like that, they all came up with extremely good descriptions. Some were stronger than others, but they did not have much time to come up with their histories and they wanted to be consistent with the world I had already presented. I’m sure that many of these characters break “cannon” for the Runiverse setting, but since we started out with an unofficial world backstory anyway, what does it matter?

In summary:

Trenloe was a fighter in the undead army of Waqar Sumarion. He hated being undead and one day he fell behind his patrol. An (unspecified) miracle occurred and he was restored to life and began to fight for the forces of good. But his memories and dreams are haunted by the atrocities he had committed in his past so he flees to the comfort of alcohol.

Augur was a young dwarf who grew up in The Forge but always wanted to be an adventurer. As soon as he came of age, he grabbed a shield and a mace and went out into the world on his own, armed with only the countless sayings grandmother had drilled into him as a child.

Kirga is an orc refugee who relocated to The Forge in hopes of cashing in on the dwarves near-monopoly on high-quality armor and weapons. She is extremely skilled with a whip and can use it not only to grab items from afar, but is able to spot weaknesses in other’s armor and has an quick eye for finding quality items.

Leoric was a professor at the University of Greyhaven when he was “invited” to take an extended sabbatical after expressing a bit too much interest in some of the younger students.

I have invited each player to expand on their backstories. The only one that has actually been done so far is the story for Trenloe the Strong. I hope to see others soon! Here is what was done:

Trenloe the Strong
Old and Cold. It seemed as if that was all he felt any more. Sitting on a stone bench in an alcove of the Cathedral of Kellos, he the took a deep swig from the half-empty bottle of brandy in his hands. The red and gold armor of his new "god" Kellos comforted him much less than the hot liquor as it slid down his gut. He could feel the alcohol start to dull the memories of his past. It felt like centuries since he had last felt warm. He muttered aloud as he took another long drink. It had been so long....

Trenloe was born poor. His parents were sharecroppers working the lands in central Terrinoth, outside of King Daqan's capital. As he grew from a babe into a young boy, he would often marvel at the power and might of knights and soldiers that would pass by his farmhouse window, off on errant missions. He would daydream of the day that he would become a soldier and visit far off lands.

One night after Trenloe had grown into a young man, he was sleeping in a nearby barn. Hordes of marching soldiers streamed past on the road. Trenloe did not know what was happening, but he knew this was his chance to become a soldier. He grabbed his meager possessions and ran out to join their ranks. At first, the soldiers laughed at him and told him to go home, but his perseverance finally paid off. The Captain of the force told Trenloe that if he wanted to join their numbers, he would have to swear an oath of loyalty and would be expected follow any orders, no matter how strange or unexpected they might be. Trenloe quickly agreed and swore the oath. Little did he know that he had just volunteered in the army of Waiqar Sumarion and was about the attack the city that had been his lifelong home.

During the fight, Trenloe had little choice. His oath compelled him to take up arms and he fought his way into the city square along with others in his new company. Suddenly, a great ring of light exploded form the top of tallest tower in the city, the one belonging to the great wizard Timmoran Lokander. Bright flecks of glowing power streamed away in all directions. All fighting stopped as the combatants on both sides craned to look skywards at the display of power. As the light faded from the sky, Trenloe heard a great voice in his mind, swearing never to rest until all of the Stars were collected. All warmth left him, and he became undead.

Over the next few years, his un-life was one never-ending battle. The Elder Kings rule came and went. The Rebellions changed the names of places, but the land endured and so did Trenloe. Not all the Stars had been found and Trenloe's curse sustained him. The Dragonlords came and new wars erupted, spurred on by Trenloe's master. It during one of the final battles of the Dragon Wars, that mere happenstance gave Trenloe a second chance.

His company had been assigned to guard an old ruined Temple of Kellos not far from the site of his upbringing. He was assigned to watch duty on a crumbling wall when the army of the Free People attacked. A Dragonlord that had been hiding within the Temple burst forth and breathed fire on army. Trenloe was set alight by the dragon's fire. Knowing that it was his doom, he jumped off the crenellations into a deep pool of water, hoping to extinguish the burning fire. But this was a Temple of Kellos and the pool was a blessed spring. As his body plunged beneath the surface, the magical fire of the Dragonlord combined with the fading power of the sacramental water. His head broke the surface and he gasped out the first real breath he had drawn in nearly five thousand years.

The battle soon ended and a Knight of Kellos found Trenloe's now-living body next to the pool of water. It was proclaimed a miracle and Trenloe was immediately made into a Knight. He was taken back to the Free City of Carthridge, given quarters in the Cathedral of Kellos, and equipped to fit his new station. But the memories of his past un-life never left him. He had committed untold atrocities in the service of his Master and those memories weigh heavy on him to this day. He only took comfort in two things: fighting and drinking. Little else interests him.

He channeled his self-hatred into combat training and quickly became one of the strongest fighters on the Cathedral training grounds. He used his great strength to overpower opponents, rarely missing a strike. (Ability: reroll one power die on each attack.) He would often fly into a rage in melee, doing additional damage to his foes. (Skill: "Rage" gain +1 damage.)

When he can no longer fight, Trenloe seeks refuge at the bottom of whatever bottle he can find. Luckily, the sacramental wine used by the church was always on hand, and "convincing" the wineseller to include a barrel of brandy in the deliveries was the least of the sins that Trenloe carries on his conscience.

It is this broken Knight that comes to the Pylia Encampment, searching for... something.

Depression is not be a great place to be, but it sure is one heck of a weight loss program. I'm not sure that I ate or drank anything on Monday. I honestly don't remember. Yesterday, my total intake was one small bowl of cereal for breakfast (that made me cry), a package of Costco trail mix for “lunch”, a small plate of veggie pasta (that I had to choke down - it tasted bitter and salty) and one glass of homemade sports drink for dinner. I've lost six pounds in the last three days.

It’s easier to be at my office and not at our house. I say “our house” instead of “home” because that’s how it feels. There is a feeling that goes along with “home”. It’s like when you’re on vacation or staying with friends. You have a place to sleep and go to the bathroom and that’s good, but it isn’t “home”. When we were in Australia, we stayed in several different apartments and while they were all very nice (except for the one in Melbourne which was extremely disappointing) they never felt like more than a temporary way station. Just a place to stay, a place to live. After being away for three weeks, I was ready to go home and sleep in my own bed, with our Bob.

When he got sick last year, we made changes to our home - subtle changes, but changes nonetheless - to accommodate his needs, to make his life easier, and to keep him happy and warm. We pushed an ottoman up against the front picture window and folded up his favorite blanket on top of it so he could sleep in the sun. We put a cat bed on the dresser in our bedroom, and a second one on the computer desk behind our monitors in our home office. We arranged furniture to create sunny cubbyholes during the day. We bought cans of tuna and then boiled them in water to make a kind of cheap tuna stock. We would mix it in with his food to encourage him to eat more. We would put his food in different places in the house so that he was always near a food bowl, just in case he got some appetite and wanted to nibble on something -- but always in the same place in each room so he would know where to go. He was a small cat, but every single room in our house has a spot where he always was. Eating, sleeping, playing, resting, or just being himself, he was in every room and every room was his to be in.

I woke up this morning and the very first thought I had was “Where’s Bob? Why isn’t Bob laying on us?” He would always nestle between us while we slept. And even though his morning routine was to wander around the house about an hour or two before my alarm goes off, he would almost always make his way back to the bed and crawl on top of us. He would rest in the crook of Karen’s knee while I showered. I would joke that he was making sure that she didn’t float away from me.

He would follow me around the house while I ate my breakfast cereal and he knew the sound of the spoon clinking on the porcelain meant I was getting to the bottom, and that he was going to get the dregs of the milk. If we wasn’t in the room with me (as he often was, pawing gently at my arm as if to encourage me to finish faster) he would come running to the spot at the top of the stairs where I would set my bowl down for him. I would always leave a teaspoon or so of milk in there just for him to clean up. While I laced up and tied my shoes on the top step, I would hear the sound of him clinking the spoon with his nose as he licked his way around the bowl. He got accustomed to drinking cereal milk that he would turn his nose up at milk from the refrigerator; it was too cold and it didn’t have bits of cereal in it.

When I came home from a day at the office, if he didn’t greet me at the door, I could call for him. He would come running, or he would raise his head all bleary eyed from sleep, or (on especially bad days) he would stay on our bed and wait for me to come to him. It was a kind of ritual for both Karen and I to announce our presence at home by notifying Bob that we were there and that he wasn’t alone any more. We would say hello to Bob before we would say hello to each other because Bob was part of our home, part of “us”. Greeting him was as much a part of coming home as opening the door and walking across the threshold.

Coming home to a cold, dark house these last couple of days has been very difficult. His absence in the house is a tangible thing; it is ever present, in every room and in every place. Each time I walk in, I have to fight the urge to call for him, because I know he isn’t there to answer. We’ve eaten our last two meals in a different room than normal. He was always with us when we ate, and I don’t want to face the spectre of his not-being-there. I can’t help but check where his food bowl(s) normally sit, to check if they have been nibbled on. It’s a slap in the face each time I remember that there will never be a food bowl in those spots again.

Karen found a great quote and it has helped me a lot.

"There is a cycle of love and death that shapes the lives of those who choose to travel in the company of animals. It is a cycle unlike any other. To those who have never lived through its turnings and walked its rocky path, our willingness to give our hearts with full knowledge that they will be broken seems incomprehensible. Only we know how small a price we pay for what we receive; our grief, no matter how powerful it may be, is an insufficient measure of the joy we have been given." ~Suzanne Clothier

I miss him terribly. But I feel glad that I got to know him, to share in his life and to spend the last decade with him in my life.

I'm still very sad, but I'm getting through it. I feel hungry today, for the first time this week. At times, the sadness feels overwhelming (again), but other emotions are starting to creep back in around the edges. I actually laughed at a co-worker’s joke today. I’m starting to think about my games and what I want to do for the holidays, and making tentative mental plans for next year. But I still have unexpected random waves of sadness that wash over me, almost bringing me to tears. It seems like my mind and emotions are on a hair-trigger, and the slightest push drops me back into that pit of doom.

Karen and I had a great conversation last night before going to bed. We were trading stories about the wonderful, adorable and amazing things Bob has done. I want to cherish those memories. I suppose it’s all a part of healing, but I still miss him terribly.

I first met Bob almost ten years ago. Karen had just moved in with me (technically our second date but it’s been 10-1/2 years so far and she still makes me deliriously happy). Roommate Dave was living in the spare bedroom with his dog Rufus.

At first he was just a cat that Karen brought in, but it didn’t take long for him to become an integral part of my life. Bob was already a six year old adult cat when we were introduced, and the male figure in life prior to me had not treated him well. When we first met, Bob was a bit shy around me. He would sometimes flinch when I reached for him to pet on him or to move him to different spot on the bed. I don’t think it was more than a couple of months before he finally accepted me as part of his life too. I’d like to think he knew that I wasn’t going to hurt him and that food, shelter and a clean litter box would always be near the top of my priority list.

Bob was named after Bill Murray’s character in the movie “What about Bob?” He was totally unflappable and completely trusting of his human caretakers. Taking him to the vet for the occasional checkup was never a chore. We could just put his cat carrier on the floor with the gate open and he would walk right in, turn around and lie down, and then look at us like we had given him a new place to hang out. Yes, no one likes the vet visit, but when we brought him home afterwards he would never be sulky or vindictive. Instead he was crawl all over us as if to say “That really sucked, thank you so much for bringing me home!”

Bob was burrower. Most cats don’t like confined spaces, but Bob would make it a point to dig under the covers on cold winter nights. We always had to look for a Bob-shaped lump on the bed before flopping down, and there were more than a few times when we had to reach under the covers in the middle of the night to pull him out. I used to worry that he wouldn’t get enough air and suffocate under the heavy covers, but Bob knew when to move around. He loved curling up in the crook behind our knees while we slept.

I knew that Bob loved me when I would come home from work, and he would hear my car in the driveway and greet me at the door. He hadn’t learned to come to greet me for a reward of food, but just to be picked up and put on my shoulders. It was a daily ritual where he would perch on my left shoulder and purr in my ear while I walked around the house putting down my work stuff.

Bob was always super social and very curious. When we would have parties, Bob was never one to shy away from the noise and action of drunken people boisterously playing games. He was always there making the rounds, sitting on everyone’s laps and getting petted by everyone. He would always seek out new people and introduce himself.

Bob was an amazingly smart cat too. It sounds cliché, but Bob was definitely at the top of his class in the intelligence department. I’ve had cats before and Bob was the first one I’ve met that understood that doors could open three different ways. You could push a door open, but if that didn’t work, you could pull the door towards you to open it too. And sliding pocket doors open by pushing to the side, not pushing or pulling. The old saying about a cat waiting at a door for a human to open it for them? Not Bob. We had to specifically latch doors to keep him from opening them himself. If he had thumbs, I’m sure he would have found a way to turn the doorknob too.

During the days when Karen and I would sit in our home office playing MMOs together, Bob would come and find us just to hang out in the same room as us. He didn’t like being left alone in the house and he was always around when we were watching TV or playing video games. If I was home alone, Bob would follow me from room to room doing house stuff. He was always underfoot, but never in the way.

Last year, Bob started getting sick. He would vomit often and he was chewing all of his own fur off. When he went in to the vet, we discovered that he was in renal failure (i.e. kidney disease) and extremely dehydrated. Our vet at the time did not have a positive prognosis, so we switched to closer vet that gave us a couple of meds for his kidneys, suggested some food additives to lower the digestive impact of high-protein foods and gave us saline ringers for sub-Q hydration.

The first question we asked when he got sick was, “Is he in pain?” We decided that no matter what we did not want him to suffer just so that we could keep him around. That would have been selfish for us and cruel to him. It would have been sad to say goodbye, but I would rather deal with that than to put him through a life of torture. After doing a lot of research on kidney disease, which also occurs in humans, and we discovered that the overriding description of the condition was a general feeling of unwellness. It was not painful nor did it have any debilitating symptoms (if treated).

It was a tough few months. He had lost over 1/3 of his total body weight and we had to “spoon feed” him (which is a polite way of saying “force feed”) since his appetite was practically nonexistent. He was getting 75-100ml of sub-Q fluids every other day, which was an ordeal for both him and for us. He continued vomiting often, ruining our carpets, and between the vet bills, medications, ringers and some herbal remedies suggested by the new vet, we were shelling out around $250 a month for him.

It was completely worth it. Within a couple of months, his blood toxin levels were back in the “normal” range and he was back to being his normal self. The vet actually commented that if any other cat had come in with those blood levels they would have called them perfectly healthy. He was still vomiting occasionally, but we just considered it part of the price for keeping our Bob around.

Then on March 25 2013, Bob had an episode where he was panting, as if he couldn’t breathe. Karen noticed it earlier in the week, but cats are really really good at hiding symptoms when they are sick. It was a Sunday night and he started having EXTREME problems breathing. His nose and ears which were normally pink were very pale and he was laying on the floor with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out. We rushed him to the Veterinary ER and it turned out that he had 350mL of lymphatic fluid called Chyle in his chest cavity and it was squashing his lungs to about 1/5 of their normal size. The vet drained the fluid but they gave Bob about a 50% chance of surviving the night.

Neither Karen nor I slept much that night. True to form, Bob had curled up in the bed with us, and every time he moved, we would wake up to check on him and make sure he was still breathing. We had a timer set for every 2 hours to take a closer look at him and make sure he wasn’t having any reaction to the sedative they had given him at the ER.

The next day we took him a feline cardiologist (such things exist!) and they did an ultrasound on his chest cavity, called an echocardiogram. (This is the same procedure they use on humans with congestive heart failure.) The procedure showed that the left side of his heart was atrophied and the right side was enlarged to compensate. They called it “severe dilated cardiomyopathy” which is doctor language for “your heart is leaking fluid into your chest”. They took out another 140mL out of his chest (a total of 490mL in two days – that’s over a full pint of fluid!)

The cardiologist told us that Bob might not survive two weeks, but if put him on a aggressive drug regimen that we might (might!) keep him alive for six months, but that would require a heroic effort from both us and from Bob. (She actually used the world “heroic effort”.)

After a consultation with our normal vet, we put him on a couple of medications. Again, our first question was whether he would be in pain. Again, the answer was that he would not be hurt, but he might be mildly uncomfortable. I can tell you that he did not like getting his pills in the morning and evening. When we first started the meds, he would get all squirmy, but I think he was smart enough to have already figured out that even though it was annoying to have some big human shove stuff in your mouth and force you to swallow it, you would feel better afterwards. He never stopped trying to avoid the pills, but giving them to him was generally pretty easy.

The total cost to get him through the heart issue was nearly $5000 and his meds were running around $100 a week, plus around 20 minutes a day in prep time. Balancing the heart meds and his kidney issues was a challenge, but he was generally healthy once we had him stabilized. We had a large party in May and June and for both events, Bob was being his normal social self, introducing himself to the party guests, sitting on any lap that would let him and getting pet on by many.

The last visit to our normal vet was about 5 weeks ago for a followup echocardiogram. The technician was surprised that his heart had improved as much as it had.

During most days, despite his years and his various medical conditions, Bob would be as playful as a kitten. He would bat around toy mice and chase little bits of paper that we would throw for him. He would curl up in the bed with us every night and he still came running to the front door every time I came home from work. He was ever-present in our home and there wasn’t a day that passed when he did not add joy to our lives.

Bob was a buff colored American shorthaired cat. He died on October 27, 2013 at 11:45 PM. He was nearly 16 years old.

I miss him so much.

I'm a Hilton HHonors member. I joined this "club" specifically because we've stayed at the Homewood for the last five PAXs and really enjoyed it. When we go on other trips, we usually try to make it a point to stay at a Hilton property because they have done good by us in the past.

I typically make my reservations for Seattle in March, well in advance of the PAX block opening up. I make my reservation through the web and not through OnPeak. It costs a little more, but I'm willing to pay for the peace-of-mind that my reservation will be made, no matter what. This year, I reserved an "accessible" (ie. handicaped) room with one king bed. When we checked-in, they put us in a NON-accessible room. (This isn't a problem, since neither of us is handicapped, but it could have been a deal breaker if we were.) Amazingly, our room was a 2-room suite, with two queen beds, plus a pull out hide-a-bed couch. A bit of overkill for two people, but not unreasonable for the $249/night I had reserved it for.

We happened to be going on the elevator at the same time as BigRed. We got to chatting with him and found out that his group of four people (one of whom was BigRed!) were stuck in a tiny room. We offered to swap, since we certainly didn't need all the space we had, and moving into a lower cost room would help us too.

What we didn't know was that tiny room was more than just tiny. It doesn't include a kitchenette (the main reason we book at the Homewood), and it's no more than 175 sq feet total including the bathroom. And as a "bonus" they raised the room rate from Bigred's original rate of $197 (for four people) to $239 (for two people) for the same fucking room!!!

Homewood is seriously on my shitlist right now. I'm already in Seattle for PAX and using the WiFi in this joke of a room to "explore other options" for lodging. This is not how I wanted to spend my pre-PAX Wednesday night. And if this is how they treat their "valued customers", I'm not so sure I'm going to be looking for Hilton properties in other cities from now on.

This is the final post about our three-week trip to Australia.

We were there in the dead of winter (mid-July) and had been warned about how it was going to be cold. We packed our cold weather overwear, and more-or-less wasted space with it. Apparently in Australia, water freezes at about 60-degrees Fahrenheit, because a great many natives we met continued to tell us how it was “freezing” outside. Meanwhile, we were blissfully traipsing about in jeans and t-shirts, sometimes with a light sweater.

It’s not as if we are conditioned to live in a cold-weather climate. I would posit that a major grape-growing region in Northern California is probably the closest you are going to get to the dictionary definition of “mild” weather. I mean, the week we left, there was a heat wave and we were transitioning from super-hot summertime temps of 100+ (Fahrenheit, of course) to the middle-of-winter. If anything, this should have made the cooler temps all the more biting. And yet, on more than one occasion, I found myself wishing I had packed shorts!

The only possible conclusion I can take from this is that summertime in Australia must be brutally hot.

Anyway, for my final trick, I’d like to stir the pot of inter-city rivalry that is alive and well down there.

I’m not sure I can explain the extent to which this kind of rivalry exists on a national level. In the US, we have sport-ball teams that people will get all upset if you suggest that their favorite team isn’t going to win their championship. In Australia, simply being from a place where you live is a banner worth waving. All the time. It’s really weird. People who used to live at Place A and are now living in Place B will be either apologetic (about moving) or adamant (that it was a good move).

So anyway, here are my impressions of the three major cities we visited. (Having said that, I have little doubt that people from any of these places would question my use of the word “major” in reference to the other two.)

Sydney
Sydney is a lovely coastal town. It has the big-city feel of San Francisco with the weather of Santa Cruz. Unfortunately, due to our incoming plane flight SNAFU, coupled with a migrane headache one day, and some major issues dealing with mobile phones (which could have been EASILY resolved in minutes if we had known about them before we left the US), the four-and-a-half days we had planned to stay in Sydney were trimmed down to one-and-a-half days.

Our apartment was in Haymarket, right on the edge of the Chinatown district, and we were able to sample some local restaurants. Chat Thai was AMAZING! We did not expect to have such a good feast there, and it really set the tone for our stay. (AS a side note, since our trip, we have both been craving Thai food, mostly because Chat Thai set the bar so high.) Sadly, this was countered by the really awful noodles we had in the Chinatown Food Court. I honestly felt like we had wasted both time and money there.

Of course we took in the iconic Opera house and Harbor Bridge scenery. We opted not to climb the bridge tower, but that could be fun for some. We spent one day wandering around Hyde Park, seeing the ANZAC Memorial, followed by the Royal Botanical Gardens, and ended the day watching the sunset behind the Harbor Bridge from Macquarie Point. (By the way, it’s pronounced “muh-kwar-ee”, not “maa-kuh-ree” like a American would say.) We met up with a local who pointed us towards Love Tilly Devine. This fantastic wine bar is located in a small service alley off of another alley, and from the outside looks very uninviting, and even a bit scary. It literally looks like the kind of place a gang would use as a hideout! (And kinda is.) But inside…? Oh my! The sommelier-slash-owner was VERY knowledgeable about the wines they served and willing to take as long as needed to make sure you got exactly what you wanted.

We also spent some time walking around visiting some of the old cathedrals and churches in the area, ending the day in The Rocks part of town, but we were really tired from our flight and it was the end of the day, so we really weren’t able to get much out of that region.

On our final day we went to the Museum of Sydney, which was neat. They had a lot of interactive displays showing how Sydney had developed. We spent a couple hours there. When we left, the staff told us that we could also visit the Barracks Museum for half-price with our ticket stubs. Since it was our last day in Sydney we thought this would be a nice way to close out our time there. What an amazing surprise! This place had a self-guided tour that really delved into the nitty-gritty of the history of Sydney and New South Wales as a whole. We expected to be in here for a couple hours, but as it was, we spent nearly four hours in there. I really recommend this stop to tourists!

We really never left the ten-block area between Haymarket and the Opera House. I really felt like there was so much more to do and see. We had planned a trip out to Manly one day but never made it. We didn’t get out to Bondi beach. Overall, I really enjoyed my time in Sydney and would love to go back and visit it again sometime.

Canberra
Canberra is a weird place. I knew that it was a “designed” city, but I had no idea how recent it really was built. While in Canberra we learned quite a bit about the history of Australia as a nation (which was interesting), and how the city had been designed form the ground up as a compromise. Pretty much everyone in Australia hates it, with the exception of the people who live there.

Canberra is not a very city-esque city. It’s more like a planned community. This means that it doesn’t have the high population density of an urban area, and really retains a small-town feel even though it houses over 350,000 people.

Luckily for us, we had a rental car while in Canberra, and took a full day driving tour of the five “hills” that surround the City. Some really great views! Although, speaking as a native of Northern California, these were more like speed bumps than hills. Anyone from San Francisco or Seattle would be amazed that the word “hill” was associated with these topographical features. One of the hills we visited was not an “official” hill, but was home to the Telstra Tower, which is a prominent feature in the Canberra skyline. (It was the first thing we noticed when we got into town.)

The city of Canberra is centered around a man-made lake, complete with a paved running/biking path that goes all the way around on a 28km route. We rented bicycles one day and spent several hours riding this route. Incredibly scenic and easy to access from downtown. We stopped in at the National Library and ended our day at a mini-mall eating some fast-food falafel. While sitting there eating, we noticed a game store called The Games Capital so we HAD to stop in. (Good thing too, as it would turn out.)

Canberra is very close to the northern end of the Australian Alps. Again, the use of the word “alp” has some connotations that aren’t really true here. Yes, it’s rugged terrain and there are some pretty impressive rock formations. But the highest peak in these alps is only 7,300 feet high. It’s pretty comparable to the Santa Cruz mountains. Luckily, there is a lot of hiking trails, and we spent one day walking around in the Namadgi National Park.

We were surprised to learn that there was an Alp Walking Track that is a good approximation of the John Muir Trail we have always wanted to backpack.

After four days in Canberrra we had pretty much seen everything that we wanted to see. We skipped the War Memorial (not really our interest, and we had already seen the ANZAC memorial in Sydney) and we didn’t visit the embassies. Instead we spent our last day at a game con in town, learning a new, unpublished game!

I wouldn’t recommend Canberra as much of a tourist town, but If I had to pick one of the three cities we visited to live in, I would definitely pick Canberra. It felt like a better planned version of Sacramento. It’s close to the mountains (such as they are), within reasonable driving distance of a big city (Sydney is about a 3-hour drive), not far from the ocean (again, about a 3-hour drive) and chock full of outdoor activities like cycling, hiking, swimming, etc. All while being a major metropolitan area with all of the benefits of such. In fact, it felt very much like the city we live in right now, but bigger and better. (And without our local gang, gun and drug problems.)

Melbourne
I know this is going to stir those inter-city rivalries, but Melbourne was probably the biggest disappointment on our trip. It really felt like Melbourne was set up simply to serve as a shopping and food hub for tourists, and there was literally nothing else to do to or see. We were in Melbourne for a total of one week, three days of which were our primary reason for going to Australia: PAX Aus. Despite that, after a couple of days we really ran out of things to do.

We took the free tourist shuttle and rode all the way around the entire loop. We got off and toured a little shopping mall, but it was just more shopping. Walked a bit, and then finished the loop. We got a Myki pass (which isn’t as bad as the locals would have you believe) and rode the train out to St. Kilda which is a beach resort. The day we visited was the warmest July day on record – it was nearly 80 degrees (Fahrenheit). Watched some bikini girls on the beach and found a local community garden, which was kinda neat.

One thing that was really neat about Melbourne was that cultural diversity. Walking down the street you would hear four different languages in a single block. Being from liberal left-coast California, I thought I knew what cultural diversity was, but I was wrong. Melbourne has us beat by a long shot in that regard! Aside from that, however, everything in Melbourne seems to be designed to cost a ton of money, and provide almost nothing in return.

Luckily, we met up with some local people (shout out to Giselle @IDGAMelbourne and Igor @FuzzyPredator for getting us going) and did a little mini-bar hop on Wednesday night (which led to some minor hangover action on Thursday morning). Thursday we went to a gaming session in the evening, and then it was off to PAX!

Overall, I feel like there was more to Melbourne than what we saw. I really wanted to know more about the history of how it developed from a shipping port into a metropolis. But apparently that’s a well-kept secret, not to be revealed to tourists. If your idea of a vacation is to spend a ton of money on shopping and food, Melbourne is your place. If you actually want to see and/or do stuff or learn about local culture… not so much.

As I said in my previous blog post, I’m a planner. I plan things. One thing I had planned on not doing while in Australia was eating out at restaurants every day. To accomplish this, I booked us in “apartment hotels” in each of the various cities we were visiting: Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. As it turns out, my employer had a discount program in all three of these cities. (Actually, they have a discount in most major Australian cities, since the bulk of the firm is based there.) And of course I took advantage of this. This let me get some pretty nice accommodations for a very reasonable rate. I was getting a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen and laundry facilities for about AU$175 a night.

Our first stop was in Sydney. We stayed at the Quest World Square. They had a normal hotel-style front desk that was manned 24/7. We arrived around 11AM, but they wouldn’t allow us to check-in until 2PM. They did however allow us to check our bags so we could be rid of them and explore the city a bit. Right across the street (literally, right across the street) was the World Square shopping center, which included a Coles supermarket and a JB HiFi. We went over to JB to buy cell phone SIM cards for our phones, grabbed a cup of coffee, and bought some groceries for later.

The room was a very nice studio apartment. The kitchen included a full refrigerator, a four-burner electric stovetop, a small oven, a dishwasher, and a hot water pot (for tea), toaster oven, and microwave oven. (We took advantage of the kitchen facilities making hot breakfasts and lunches for ourselves. We did not cook dinner while in Sydney.) The bathroom had a stall shower, no tub. The laundry facilities were in a small closet attached to the kitchen and included a stacked washer/dryer unit, large enough to do a reasonable load of clothes. (We took advantage of this the night before we left Sydney, and the machines did a bang-up job.) The television was set up for comfortable viewing either from the bed or from a small loveseat with a coffee table. There was a “breakfast nook” style dining area in the kitchen, complete with a small table and two chairs. Also a work desk with an office-style chair adjacent to the TV. This is where the internet cable was located, right next to a power outlet that we used for charging our various devices – iMac, phones, PSP, etc. Sadly it is cable-only internet (no WiFi was available) at a cost $5.50 an hour or $20 per day. (We declined.) The bed was king-sized and the mattress was thin enough to feel the “ridge” between the two box springs. Not terribly uncomfortable, but not great either.

The entire place was clean and neatly kept, with a full room turn-down on a daily basis. The maid service did not disturb any of our possessions, including the small pile of Australian currency we left on the dining room table. The room was very well lit with three square fluorescent lamps, and a couple of MR16 down lights in the entry hall in front of mirrored closet doors. All of the fixtures and outlets worked as expected.

The only real downside to this apartment was that it is located on a very busy street and there was a lot of noise all night long. Our first night there, a Red vs. Blue AFL game as on and the revelry went on literally until 6AM the next morning. I’m pretty forgiving of drunken celebration (we’ve all been there) but I had been travelling for two days before checking in. Listening to some drunk footie fan belting out his team’s fight song all night long was not fun. Subsequent nights were better, but overall, there was still a lot of street noise that never really went away. Between sirens, shouts, traffic noise, etc. I suppose that is to be expected in a business district of a major urban area.

Our apartment in Canberra was courtesy of the CityStyle Executive Apartments. The property we stayed at was called The Avenue, located on the corner of Northbourne and Barry. Unfortunately, the management office is located two blocks away and is only open during normal 8AM to 5PM business hours. Our check-in information had been sent to my office phone in the US and not to my Australian mobile. This led to a few very tense moments as we were trying to check in at 9PM. I had to locate a working "emergency contact" phone number, when none was posted at the property and there was no indication of how to proceed! It took about two hours to work it out, but once the check-in procedure was resolved, we retrieved our keys and moved in.

The apartment was a very nice 1-bedroom unit. The kitchen included a full-sized refrigerator, a four burner electric stove, a small oven, a dishwasher and a hot-water pot (for tea) and a toaster. There was no microwave oven. A full set of cooking utensils, pots and pans were included. (We used this to make hot breakfasts, lunches and dinners for our stay, including a small pot roast.) There were several different storage containers for storing leftovers in the refrigerator for later reheating. The bathroom had a stall shower, no tub. The laundry facilities were in a closet attached to the bathroom and included a stacked washer/dryer unit, large enough to do a reasonable load of clothes. (We took advantage of this before we left Canberra, and the machines worked fine.) The living area included a full sized dining table with four chairs, a small sofa and coffee table and a television and DVD player. The entry area included a very large desk and office chair, which we did not use at all. A 3G/WiFi hub was available upon request for an additional $20 per week, but we already had local 3G on our mobile phones. The bed was queen-sized and Oh My God! It was like sleeping on a cloud! This bed was so comfortable that we took photos of the brand and are buying one for ourselves!! (If we can get one in the US, that is.)

The apartment was clean and well kept. There was no maid service during our stay, but it was easy to keep the apartment tidy ourselves. Interior lighting was atrocious with small spot lights only. Even with all of the lights on, it was still dim in the apartment. The reflections from the lights off the glass dining table were difficult to deal with while eating. The heating and cooling was provided by a wall-mounted system and the remote-control failed a day before our stay ended. After a quick call to the managers, within hours they had provided plug in heaters for the rest of our stay.

Despite being at the intersection of two very busy streets, there was very little street noise and we were able to sleep very peacefully all night long. Covered car parking was included. There is a SupaBarn market about four blocks away, and the local bus transit hub was two blocks away.

Despite the minor issues we had with this property, we enjoyed this apartment.

Sadly, I cannot say the same of our apartment hotel in Melbourne. Of the three apartments we stayed in, the Punthill Little Bourke was the most disappointing. The check-in desk was only manned between the hours of 6AM and 10PM. Late or early check-ins are done by dialing an off-site manager whom did not know the combination to the key safe. (We found this out from experience, unfortunately.)

The studio was extremely small, about the size of a budget hotel. The “full kitchen” was a mini-fridge that belonged in a college dormitory, a tiny two-burner gas stove, a miniscule wet-bar sink, and a hot-water pot (for making tea). There was no oven and no dishwasher. The sink was too small to wash a single plate. The cooking utensils were extremely limited and only one small sauce pan and one frying pan were provided. No bowls or storage containers were provided. (If they had been, they would not have fit into the refrigerator.) Oddly, the microwave oven was as large as the refirgerator.

The closest market was a Coles that was six blocks away. One kilo of bacon, one dozen eggs, one liter of milk and a few vegetables completely filled the refrigerator. There was also a small freezer that was only large enough for a miniature ice-tray. To use the “kitchen”, it was required to run a very noisy fan full-time to exhaust any cooking smoke or the fire alarm would go off. (We found this out from experience as well.)

The bathroom was spacious and included a full tub and shower, but the shower curtain was a fixed pane of glass that did little to keep the floor from becoming a swampland whilst showering. The laundry facilities were a euro-style combination washer/dryer in one unit, located in the bathroom. We ran two loads of clothes during our stay and while the washer was passable, the dryer simply did not work. A collapsible drying rack was provided and we ended up air drying our clothes. The living area included a very small loveseat and a tiny coffee table.

There was no dining table. We ate our meals seated at the loveseat, using the coffee table.

A small work desk and a single chair adorned the room. The TV was positioned to be watched form the bed only (it was completely across the room from the loveseat). WiFi was available for the standard $20 per day, but we opted not to buy this.

The rooms were not well maintained. The stove was greasy and dirty on our arrival. I accidentally dropped some bread crumbs on the floor while making sandwiches and even though maid service entered our rooms and turned down the linens and towels, the crumbs remained on the floor for three days. The bed was extremely lumpy and uncomfortable and was so old that it had two body-sized depressions where past guests had slept, creating a huge ridge in the center of the bed.

Half-way through our stay, we found ourselves locked out of the hotel. Our card-keys would not let us into the hotel lobby. Luckily, another guest was entering at the same time. He let us in and allowed us to ride the elevator with them to our floor, but our keys would not open our room door. I had to call the off-site late-night phone number, where I spoke to an attendant that had to put me on hold for several minutes while he called someone else for the key-safe combination. Despite providing a local Australian phone number, the hotel did not call us to let us know that our key-cards were going to be replaced mid-stay. I would have expected them to either hand us new keys that day, or slide them under the door in the morning before we went out. At the very least they should have called us to warn us that we might need to get new keys! Instead we found ourselves locked out of a hotel that we had pre-paid for, at midnight on a Wednesday night.

One of the two elevators in the building was out-of-order for our entire week-long stay.

Despite it being the middle of winter, the room was extremely hot. The only window in the room was a sliding glass door that opened into a busy alleyway with foot and vehicle traffic all night long. We resorted to running the air conditioner set to a chilly 18-degrees C, and it ran non-stop for our entire stay. Even with the A/C running constantly, the room temp was maintained around 22-degrees.

Finally, the Punthill had required that we pre-pay for our stay when we booked it in March. At the time, the exchange rate was about US$1.10 per AU$1, so I paid an extra 10% over the published rate due to exchange, plus another 1.5% credit card fee. During our stay the exchange rate had fallen to US$0.93 to AU$1. Because of this, I ended up paying nearly 20% more than it should have cost me, for a room that was sub-standard, not as advertised and extremely poorly maintained!!

The only good thing that can be said about this property is that it is ideally located for Chinatown restauranting. I cannot recommend this hotel to anyone and would actively direct others to stay elsewhere.

I’m a planner. That is, I like to plan things. When I’m doing something new, I like to go in with some expectations of how things will play out. Obviously one has to be flexible to survive, but I like to have a general idea of a what to expect before embarking on a new adventure. For the month of July, my long-time girlfriend and I celebrated our tenth anniversary by taking a trip to Australia. This was a monstrous undertaking and I had planned out where our trip would take us. Well, I thought so, anyway.

My plan was to fly out of San Francisco on an overnight flight. We would leave just before 10PM, fly all through the night and land in Auckland at 5AM, then transfer to a connecting flight after one hour on the ground (never leaving the airport in New Zealand, so no customs checks!) and then arrive in Sydney just a bit after 7AM. It would be a really long “night” – the total flight time was expected to be 17-1/2 hours - but it was essentially one “night” on an airplane. We would leave SFO late in the evening and then we would be in Sydney the next morning. Well, that was the plan.

As it turns out, the airline I had selected (Air New Zealand) only owns two 747-400 aircraft. The one scheduled to depart SFO for Auckland (our flight) had some sort of mechanical issue that prevented it from leaving on schedule. In fact, the flight was canceled completely. I should point out that ANZ really did go to great lengths to make it right and did a great job of dealing with the issue. Regardless, it really sucked for us.

The flight was rescheduled for 10:30AM the next day, but that would have us flying in the daytime, which was exactly what I didn’t want to happen. Not to mention that our connecting flight to Sydney would have been long gone by then. But there was actually a silver lining! When I was making reservations for the trip, the apartment that I had picked out for our stay in Sydney was sold out for our first night there. To deal with this, we had a reservation in a different hotel for one night. After that first night, we would transfer to the apartment, which was going to be a hassle, but it seemed like the a much better solution than camping on the street. But there was another ANZ flight scheduled for the identical time we had originally planned on, just one full day later. If we simply changed to that flight, we could cancel that one overnight stop and our vacation would continue, just one less day.

When we got to speak to an ANZ representative, we asked if we could do just that. We wanted to transfer our reservations to the same flight on the next day. Sadly, we were told that flight was at capacity. (I’m not really convinced this was true, but that’s what we were told and I wasn’t going to start accusing anyone of anything in the middle of the airport.) We mentioned our connecting flight to Sydney, and this got some attention. It turns out that we were “special” since we had one of the few connecting flights that could not be accommodated by the 12-hour delayed/rescheduled flight.

The ANZ people pulled us aside and told us that there was a possibility that we could get on to an United Airlines non-stop from SFO to SYD, leaving in about an hour, and dropping us in Sydney about two hours earlier than expected. This was an even better deal, since it would still have us there as expected, minus a layover and plane change, and in less time. The catch was that there were a limited number of meals on the plane and unless they had food for us, we wouldn’t be allowed to fly. The ANZ people were frantically calling the SFO catering folks to see if additional meals could be transferred.

While we were waiting, we got to watch them process several other people. They were handing our vouchers for a local hotel in Millbrae, which is where the majority of the SFO hotels actually are. As we watched, they started to run out of vouchers and started parking people off to the side, as they called around trying to find rooms for everyone. After about a fifteen minute wait, we were told that the United flight was a no-go. We were destined to get onto our 12-hour late plane the next morning. They checked our luggage, gave us a credit voucher for staying at the Embassy Suites in South San Francisco, told us where to catch the shuttle and sent us on our way.

We checked in to the Embassy suites around 10:30PM. The first question we asked the hotel staff was, “How late is your bar open?” We had both been pretty stressed out by this whole process, and really wanted a drink. Thankfully, the bar was open until 11PM. During the conversation, the hotel staff asked us why we were going to Auckland, and we explained that this was our tenth anniversary trip. After checking in, we went up to our room, dropped our carry-on luggage (in which we had thoughtfully packed a spare set of underclothes and spare shirts) and went back down to the bar. We ordered a couple of drinks and some fries. While sat there, a second shuttle pulled up and about 50 people from our flight, the ones that had been “parked” at the airport, got off. It took the hotel a good 20 minutes to process all those people. By that time we were already on our second cocktail.

The very nice lady from the front desk stopped in to the bar and told the bartender to comp our drinks since we were on our 10th Aniversary trip, which was really nice. (I’m almost certain that she charged Air New Zealand for that, but whatever… Free Drinks!!) After our nightcap, we trundled up to our room and got off to sleep. For about 6 hours.

See, by the time we had gotten through all of the rescheduling and shuttling and checking-in process (not to mention two drinks each), it was nearly midnight. Our flight was scheduled for 10AM and the shuttle left the hotel at something like 7:45. So we set an alarm before going to sleep, then got up, caught a quick shower and then headed back to SFO for our “overnight” flight that was now going to be in full daylight for the entire trip, landing in Auckland about 10 minutes after sunset.

Overall, the flight wasn’t bad. I had hoped to sleep for most of it (or at least doze), but since it was now a DAYTIME flight, we got a full assortment of meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus a couple of snacks at various times. The aircraft had a built-in in-flight entertainment system and I watched Wreck It Ralph while Karen watched Hitchcock. I really enjoyed my movie, and recommend it. Karen spent about a half hour typing up a blog post about hers. Later we both watched Cloud Atlas at the same time and we shared a smile and a laugh at a few points in the movie. (For the record, it’s a VERY long and very deep, thought provoking film. I think it really lost a lot of presentation being shown in ultra-low resolution on a badly lit 9-inch LED screen, but I’m not willing to sit through it again just for improved visuals!) It was a solid 12-1/2 hours in the air, and it wasn’t exactly an easy ride, but it wasn’t as unpleasant as I thought it would be, I had planned on hitting my PSP and/or the DS for the bulk of the time, but really didn’t even get them out at all. It was nearly impossible to sleep however.

We arrived in Auckland about a half hour later than the delayed flight was expected. After checking with the ANZ people, we were told that we were going to be on the very next flight to Sydney, which left at (you guessed it) 8AM the next day. Not to worry though, we were going to be comped a night at a local hotel (again). BUT since we were going to overnighting in New Zealand, we were going to have to collect our luggage, and go through customs. That process took about two hours.

Eventually we boarded our shuttle to the hotel, only to be greeted by an enormous group of people already in the queue to check-in. We had been lucky in South San Francisco, but this time we were the late-coming group, so we had to wait in line to be processed. And the hotel staff in New Zealand was nowhere near as efficient as the staff had been in SouthCity. Once again, it was well after 10PM before we got checked-in and into our room. And this time our flight was even earlier! We needed to be back on the shuttle at 4:45AM the next day, so we skipped dinner and went to bed. For a second night in a row, we only got around five or six hours of sleep.

The next day was much smoother. After getting up at Oh-My-God-Are-You-Fucking-Kidding-Me o’clock, showering, catching the shuttle to the airport, re-checking our bags for a three-hour international flight (New Zealand to Australia is international!) and boarding our final plane for the “day”. We had landed in New Zealand at night (in the rain!) and were leaving before dawn. While we can say that we spent time in New Zealand, we didn’t see anything aside from a rainy nighttime and pre-dawn street.

By the time we landed, and then went through Australian customs (which was SUPER easy – you scan your passport on a machine, then a dude asks you if you have any food or drugs and off you go. Seriously, the entire process took about 2 minutes!) it was nearly noon, a full day later than we had expected to arrive. We skipped the one-night transit hotel completely (and amazingly they actually did not charge me for the cancelation, even though they had every right to bill me anyway) and went to our first apartment hotel.

We were in Sydney!

Last week was the annual geek-fest E3. The major fallout from that (at least in my world) has been mostly bashing on Microsoft, so why shouldn’t I put out my two-cents as well, right? As a kind of disclaimer, I should point out that I currently own Microsoft stock, and have a vested financial interest in seeing them be (more) profitable. I’ll also say up front, right now, that I am leaning heavily towards the Sony camp.

Let’s ignore the public relations nightmare that Microsoft has created. Personally, I think many of the arguments against the B.S. that Microsoft is trying to pull are, in fact, pretty valid. However, I have a full time internet connection; I have a game room that is almost letter perfect for the kinect where I don’t really have any real privacy concerns; I live in a country where I will get support; and I can honestly say that outside of the nine months where I was a GameFly customer, I have never sold, traded, or returned a game after I purchased it. In short, for me, specifically, none of the Xbone “issues” really apply.

However, there is one issue that really gives me pause, and that is the issue of price. A hundred bucks is not going to make or break me, but I’m not so blasé that I just go around dropping benjamins like they are growing on a tree in my backyard. $100 is more than I spend on food for a week and it's more than I spend on gasoline in an entire month. When Sony introduced the PS3 and it was $100 more than the Xbox 360, it was a big deal. It was a big deal in 2006 and it’s still a big deal today.

The PS3 was a financial disaster for Sony for the first three years. It wasn’t until the “slim” model was introduced in 2009 that Sony actually started making money on selling these things. The Xbox 360 maintained a price advantage and as a result maintained a very healthy sales advantage until January of this year – over six years after release! Personally, I believe that the one of the main reasons that Sony was even able to catch up was because the Xbox 360 completely saturated the console market – everyone that was going to buy one, already had one – and consumers really only had one other option for a current generation console. (Plus, Sony has been doing great job of putting out good quality games for the last couple of years with some very well received exclusives.)

I would say that, historically speaking, the price issue hurt Sony a lot over the last seven years.

I think it’s safe to say that the Nintendo Wii was not exactly the pinnacle of entertainment technology. From a technology standpoint, it's pretty lackluster compared to either the Xbox 360 or the PS3. But it does have two things going for it. One was the “innovative” motion controlled WiiMote. This captured the fancy of casual non-gamers, who didn’t have to deal with a 16-button controller, dual thumbsticks and a D-pad. You just picked the thing up and started swinging it around. It's terribly easy to control and made the system an easy sell to non-gamers.

Even more important for the majority of consumers was the price point. Imagine a typical consumer in 2006, standing in WalMart looking at these newfangled vidya gamer boxes. There are three systems, side by side. They all have some technical gobbledygook written all over them about framespersecond, resolutions, HDTV, blu-hd-cdrom, HDMI, whatever! While this stuff is the wet dreams of engineers and hardcore gamers, Joe Consumer doesn’t know what any of it means and (quite frankly) doesn’t care. All he cares about is “is it a video game thing, does it hook up to my TV, and will it make little Billy and Sally stop pestering me?” Three boxes, all incomprehensible, priced at $600 (PS3), $400 (Xbox 360) and $250 (Wii). Despite being by far the “loser” in the technology race, the Wii flew off store shelves! One would have to be delusional to try to deny that it’s low price point was not a factor in this phenomenon.

Anecdotally, I work in an engineering office with about 100 people. All of them are what would be politely described as “above average intelligence” (in other words, a bunch of know-it-all geeks), and operate at a fairly high level of technological competence. At least ten people I work with bought a Wii system within a year after it came out. Not because it was “better” for games, or fit in their lifestyle better. No, for most of them the driving factor was the price! In fact, one of them bought the Wii specifically to play Rock Band after playing it on my PS3. (I used to host an after-hours Rock Band group in our office’s conference room.) He bought the Wii version because it was less expensive. After all, why pay more for the same thing, right?

While it’s fair to say that the majority of consumers play single-player games in offline mode, there is a pretty significant percentage of people who play online multiplayer. The most common of these are first-person shooters like Call of Duty, but there are also other type of multiplayer games: racing games, card games, fighting games, strategy games, online multiplayer role-playing games, and even online play in old games like Rock Band.

These systems, be it a XBone, PS4, SteamBox, pocket calculator, or whatever... these gaming systems exist as entertainment devices. The system specs are fun and interesting to technology grognards like me, and to hardcore gamers that expect to wring every possible iota of performance from their consoles. But for most people, the biggest factor is price. And a hundred bucks is… a hundred bucks. That $100 difference *is* going to matter.

When this holiday season come around and the general consumer (not the hardcore gamer) is standing in front of the games section in WalMart and they see two very similar looking black boxes, both play games, and one is $100 cheaper, there is going to be a lot of pressure to go with the less expensive one.

Personally, I really enjoy multiplayer. I’m absolutely horrible at first-person-shooters, mostly because I’m a goofball with a controller. Give me a keyboard and mouse controls and I’m slightly above average, but I never touched a controller until I was in my late 30s and I just don’t have the muscle memory to make them work. It shows! (Having said that, the E3 demos of 'The District' and 'Destiny' are pretty compelling. I might have to go on a “controller training session”.) Regardless, I really enjoy multiplayer games. That means I need someone to play against/with.

When the vast majority of consumers are on a specific system, there is a lot of pressure to go with that same system. This is why, even though I already owned a launch-model PS3, my preference was to play games on the PS3, and the PS3 offered more games that I wanted to play, I ended up buying an Xbox 360. The vast majority of people I know are on Xbox-Live. If I want to play a game with my friends, it’s going to be on the 360. It doesn’t matter how much “better” I may think the PS3 is than the Xbox 360, my gamer friends are on XBL so that entices me to play multiplayer there. This will hold true for multiplayer games on the XBone and PS4 as well. Whichever system takes an early lead will require a lot of momentum to overtake.

Interestingly, last week amazon.com put up an informal survey asking people to indicate which system they are more likely to buy. After only two days, the poll was taken down, with the PS4 getting over 95% of the votes. (See article HERE.) Now, this may be a bit disingenuous since there was so much bad press from Microsoft and Sony was doing their very best to capitalize on that. This same poll may end up being equally skewed in the opposite direction in five months, but I doubt it. Regardless, the point that the market tends to follow the early leader remains. And at this time, at least, it looks like Sony is that leader.

Finally, as an aside, assuming that Microsoft stands firm on the issue of requiring a full-time internet connection (which is far from assured at this early date), I have to believe that there will be an extremely high XBone return rate in January. Many "normal" people simply don’t have a full-time internet connection in their living room, where the XBox goes, or in their bedroom, where it might potentially go. (This is patently untrue for gamers or internet users, so if you’re reading this, I’m not talking about you!) When it misses a 24-hour check-in and stops playing games (even single player games!) John Consumer isn’t going to care about cloud-saves, external processing or stream-while-you-play features. All he is going to care about is that he can’t play games on a system that he already bought, and is going to pack the whole thing back up and return it to WalMart and buy a PS4.

It’s still only June, and November is a long ways off. A lot can change. But for now, it looks pretty likely that Sony is going to have a winning system this holiday season.

For the dozen or so regular readers of this blog, you may have noticed something new has appeared here in the last day or so. I’m referring, of course, to the nice shiny new RSS icon in the upper right. If you’re not a regular reader, I can’t say I blame you since my updates are sometimes fairly sporadic, and unless you happen to follow me on twitter or Google Plus, you probably wouldn’t click back. Even if you do follow me on one (or both) of those networks, clickthroughs are rare.

Last week, Brian “psychochild” Green posted an article on his blog about the relative paucity of MMO blogs. This touched off a short conversation about my own blog and the very small amount of traffic I have. I’d like to think that I do more than (as Brian put it so elegantly) “vomit words into an input box.” (This particular article may violate that rule. You be the judge.) Last year, when GW2 was in beta testing, my various class descriptions actually gained bit of notoriety among followers of the game, and over the years I’ve had a lot of game developers and publishers link to my writing.

But, as mentioned, clickthroughs are rare. Google says that their RSS products really don’t get that much use, but everyone I’ve talked to about my blog says that the number one reason they don’t follow is because there is no RSS feed. Well, this weekend I spent some time and added one.

You may not realize it, but this blog (like most blogs you read) doesn’t actually exist in any real sense. The HTML text that you are looking at right now isn’t stored on a server anywhere. The text data is stored in a perl-based multi-level database, extracted by a custom CGI script and output to your web browser as a HTML page. I wrote the handful of scripts that run things here in 1999 as part of a project to create a Guild webpage for my old EverQuest guild. The scripts allow for any authorized user to authenticate and enter an article, and anyone with read access (i.e. anyone) to view those posted articles. It was intended that all guild officers would have write access.

In late 2000, I switched from playing Everquest to playing Dark Age of Camelot, and my guild webpage project was abandoned. In December of 2002, I made some very minor changes to those scripts and started blogging. At the time I was going through some very rough personal issues and I really needed the creative outlet to keep myself sane. (If you want to see them, those old posts are still archived here – click on the little plus sign at the bottom of any post there and scroll down as far into the past as you want.) Aside from being my own personal shoutbox, the blog really didn’t serve any purpose back then and eventually slipped off my priority list.

In May of 2007, I revisited the scripts and updated from table-based formatting to actual CSS, and to repair the damage done by moving to a new type of webserver. That was the last time I touched the scripts until this weekend.

Despite being over six years since I’d even looked at the code, I was happy to find the well-commented and really straightforward. The script that outputs individual articles, it reads the database entries and then outputs them as HTML which essentially “builds” the page you are looking at right now. It seemed like a pretty trivial task to modify the output to dump XML formatted correctly as a RSS feed. The problem is, I didn’t know what valid XML looked like, so I had to learn that first. As I started editing scripts, I quickly realized that it is far more than just changing a few tags to make this work. Actually, that may not be entirely true, but the way THIS blog works is that it uses several HTML templates and then does a kind of “mail-merge” to insert the actual data. For example, the heavy blue line at the top of each entry is a specific HTML file, the body of each entry is a second, and the little “signature” line at the bottom of each entry is a third.

In order to make the HTML turn into XML was starting to require a lot of conditionals. Pretty much every line in my script was turning into “if HTML do THIS, if XML do THAT.” It was not a good strategy. I was getting frustrated and after nearly six hours of reading about RSS standards and coding, I was only about 25% done with the scripting, and had done none of the verification that it actually worked. I needed a break, so I went downstairs, got quietly drunk while watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex’s 2nd Gig.

But, as my mind often does, I kept working on the problem. And at 8am the next morning, without having looked at the code, doing any research, or even really giving it any conscious thought, I had a solution. What I was trying to do was create XML for the readers on-the-fly, the same way I create the HTML. But, really, when you think about it, the only time the XML changes is when a new article gets posted. And I already have a script that runs specifically when that happens. Why not create a new script that specifically creates the XML and then trigger it to run when a new posting is made. That way the XML is always up to date and I don’t need any conditionals at all. Plus, I could manually trigger it to create the XML without any “live” activity in order to test my feed.

Using this strategy, the entire thing fell into place in less than 4 hours. I had a few coding issues - I’m not a programmer by trade and every time I do scripting I basically have to re-learn perl – but the web is an amazing resource.

So (if you’re still with me), no longer do you, the reader, need to click on anything. There is now a valid RSS feed for this web page. You can add it form the RSS icon in the upper right, or by manually entering the URL http://therealstupid.com/rss.xml. Welcome to my blog.

I like Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. I like them a lot. When I’m not actively playing a MMO with a monthly fee (and sometimes even when I am) I sample Free-to-Play (F2P) MMOs as a kind of hobby. Since I started playing these types of games in 1984, I’ve probably been a “tourist” in several dozen different AAA MMOs and probably around a hundred different F2P titles.

When I try a new F2P game, I’m usually going in with one of two expectations. Either it’s going to be a cash-ship pay-to-win scheme, or it’s going to have ultra-low production values. In short, I’m not usually going in to these things thinking it is going to be the Next Big Thing, or that I’m going to be playing this new title for the rest of my life (or even for the rest of the month)! Because my expectations are so low, I usually make a deal with myself. I play each game long enough to find three things that are fun, innovative or unique.

Recently, I tried Cryptic’s new F2P MMO Neverwinter. Ostensibly, this is a Dungeons and Dragons game, based on the current D&D ruleset. Supposedly it is based on the old PRG and semi-hosted MMO called “Neverwinter Nights”. I wouldn’t know about either of those things. I haven’t player real D&D since I was in Junior high School (in the early 1980s) and I was too busy playing Dark Age of Camelot when Neverwinter Nights was released to notice it.

In a nutshell, Neverwinter is a standard DIKU-style MMO. Unfortunately for Cryptic, I feel that the days of the DIKU-MMO are in twilight and we really don’t need another. I know a lot of people would disagree with me, but the standard for comparison in today’s DIKU-like MMO marketplace is Guild Wars 2, not World of Warcraft. And I’m sorry to report than Neverwinter simply does not hold up. In fact, it does such a great job of not comparing well, that even after playing a character to level 20 (1/3 of the max level and certainly enough to get a good flavor for the game), I couldn’t find my typical three things to say about it. Instead, this posting will be the three things I found very confusing about Neverwinter.

But before we get too negative, let’s start at the beginning.

Character creation is pretty typical for a fantasy MMO. The race and class selection is a bit unique in that - I assume – it comes from D&D races and classes. (Again, I’m not a D&D player so I’m just guessing here.) The descriptive text really doesn’t tell you much about the backstory of the races, or which classes excel at what skills. I assume that the player is expected to already know this going in since D&D is apparently all-prolific and well understood amongst the potential playerbase. (Note: this isn’t true, and it is a place where Cryptic could improve the appeal of the game to new players with very little investment.) After a bit of web-based research, and according to my normal playstyle preferences, I created a “tank” class. I prefer to have something resilient to play around with. In this case, I chose a half-elf Warrior Guardian. Clearly not an optimal choice, but I’ve found that the difference in DPS output is so small at low levels to be insignificant, whereas the survivability of a tank class at low levels is really high. That makes a baby tank an ideal test case.

The graphics in Neverwinter are very reminiscent of Rift. Whether you think Trion’s graphics were great or not, this has a lot of the same feel. Each time I logged out of Neverwinter, I would replay Rift zones in my mind for some reason. In fact, after my first session with Neverwinter, I kept having flashbacks to the tutorial zone in Rift. Speaking of tutorials, the opening levels of Neverwinter are pretty decently done. There’s nothing too surprising here, as far as gameplay mechanics. The tutorial areas and on-screen popups do a moderately good job explaining where the various widgets are and what they do, how the skill system generally works. Instanced content is not very well explained, but newbie areas in general are designed to be really easy, so it isn’t hard to just muscle right through it.

I should point out that the very first thing I did, before I even took my first step, was to turn off the zone-wide chat channel. I’ve found that generally, the “easy” chat channels tend to evolve into an XBOX-esque pit of filth, racism, misogyny and generally unsavory stuff. (Note: I’m far from easy to offend. But there are a lot of players who get kicks out of giving misleading answers to newbie questions, so I consider that kind of chat channel to be almost completely worthless when it comes to learning a new game.) For me, aside from any very limited voiceovers, the game was nearly silent. I never saw any other player say a single thing. I may have missed several messages directed at me in the zone chat, but since I had squelched it, I’ll never know.

In terms of initial immersion, I really felt like Neverwinter has taken a giant step backwards from GW2. In fact, it was very reminiscent of the first time I played EverQuest, after coming from Ultima Online. In UO, the cities felt very alive. There was chat everywhere on the screen, and people bustling about on their personal tasks. Even the NPC merchants had a schedule. If it was night time they would be at their house. If it was daytime they would walk to their store and start buying and selling stuff. Guards stood around, and when a player did something “bad” they would dispense justice with a witty slaying. Going to EQ was a shock. The NPC merchants didn’t have storefronts, and in some cases didn’t even have buildings. They were just a non-descript NPC standing stock-still in one place, unmoving. Chat was limited to the chat box (as it still is today!) and unless you made a point to mentally connect that disembodied text with the figures shown on the screen, it felt very… dead.

Coming from Guild Wars 2 to Neverwinter felt very much the same. If you stand in a city in GW2, there is ambient voiceover chatter. Yes, if you stand still for 5 minutes it will repeat, but it exists! Click on a random NPC and the majority of the time, they’ll say something. NPCs wander around doing whatever pre-programmed thing they do. Again, if you stand and watch them it is completely fake, but at least it moves! Not so in Neverwinter. The NPCs didn’t move from their pre-assigned locations. Even when you click on characters, most of the time they don’t have voiceovers, it’s back to text boxes. It feels very silent, and the game did not feel alive to me.

Eventually, I got through the newbie stuff and was dropped into the first quest city. (Maybe the only city? I wouldn’t know.) This is where my experience, which was none to good already, took a huge turn for the worse. Apparently there are seventeen different forms of currency in Neverwinter and none of them exchange. All of the “gold” I had been accumulating up to this point is essentially worthless outside of the tutorial area. There is a cash shop currency – understood since this is a cash shop F2P game. But there are also two different flavors of crystals, and at least three different “seals”. Again, none of them seem to be equivalent or tradable, so if you find a Lion Seal vendor and all you have is Unicorn Seals, you can’t buy anything. This really confused me, and there didn’t seem to be any kind of in-game tutorial explaining what these different currencies are, where they come from, or what seals the different vendors use. (I later figured this out, but only after about 10 hours of play.)

Another thing that took me ages to figure out was crafting. Crafting in Neverwinter is not like standard MMO crafting and this is probably one of the very few things I actually like about the game. In Neverwinter, you can craft from ANYWHERE in the game by opening a UI widget. Your very first crafting task is to create a kind of “henchman resource”. (Not to be confused with “henchmen”, since they have actual henchmen in the game that you can buy and help you out in combat.) Once you have done that, the actual crafting is done by this “resource”. It uses materials from your inventory, and deposits the end result back in your inventory, but essentially it does the crafting off in an alternate dimension that you don’t have to worry about. Obviously, more difficult items take longer to create, and there is no crafting queue, but it is easy to start the guy doing something whilst you’re off doing a quest, then starting a new task 20 minutes later. My absolute favorite part of this system is that crafting still progresses when you are offline. So you can queue a very difficult, costly, or bulk order item that takes (for example) 6 hours, then log off for the day. And then the next time you log in, your item is ready for pickup! That’s pretty neat.

The final bit of confusion I had about Neverwinter was the actual skill system. It uses a pretty standard skill system where you gain one point each level, and then spend them on skills which are increasingly expensive to buy and/or upgrade. The thing that caught me was that some of the better skills has a tool tip that says something like “Unlocks at xx skill points.” So I picked out a few advanced skills that I felt would complement my playstyle and started saving. Well, as it turns out, that tooltip is incorrect and misleading. What it actually meant was “Unlocks at level XX”, even if you didn’t have the skill points saved up, or had already spent them. In fact, when the skill unlocks (at level xx!) it only costs ONE skill point to buy, and one additional point to upgrade. What this meant was that, until I discovered this, I was using sub-standard skills, and fewer of them. No wonder I was having a lot of trouble with low-level content!!

The supposed “hook” for Neverwinter is layer generated content via something they call The Foundry. This is a little toolpack that allows the player to generate in-game quests using the resources that the game has provided. For example, you could use a given map, repopulate it with different monsters and set up different triggers form the normal game. While it’s an interesting idea, the quests are limited by the tools, so they are always “go here” or “kill this”. The narrative that surrounds those two basic tasks may change, but unless you’re a lore buff, or you really like reading other peoples badly written D&D fan-fiction, it really doesn’t add anything to the game.

The final killer for me was gearing. This is probably related to my currency misunderstandings. But at level 20, most of my gear was patchwork, a little of this, and a little of that, with nothing that synergized and very few things that helped my specific style of play or my character.

Overall, Neverwinter was an interesting little diversion, but I don’t miss it, I’m not excited to see what’s around the next virtual corner, and I’m certainly not chomping at the bit to get back to playing it. If anything, it stands head-and-shoulders above its MMO peers as a shining beacon of mediocrity.

One of things I maintain on this blog site is a “wish list”. It’s over there on the left side toolbar, at the top, red text on a green background (with no apologies to color blind readers). I typically keep this pretty much up-to-date with a variety of gift ideas. These are things I “want”, and even though I do have the financial wherewithal to buy them for myself I don’t “need” them, so they are gift ideas.

During the Holiday season last year, I received some duplicates. Specifically my Sister and my Mother both ordered the silent sweep wall clock that I had been lusting after for several years. We all got a good laugh out of that since I had been “wishing” for this clock for at least five years, and then when I got one, I ended up with two!!

Anyway, I kept the one my Sister bought and my Mother volunteered to send hers back to amazon for a refund or a gift card. Well, she surprised me by trading it in for a game that I had on my list: Nike+ Kinect Training. It arrived a couple of weeks into January, but we’ve been dealing with several minor disasters in the last few months, so I really didn’t even look at it until March. Well, I’ve finished my first 4-week training session with it and wanted to post my impressions.

In a nutshell, it's a really good product and great at what it does. If you have an Xbox360 and a kinect, and have any desire to “get in shape”, there are a lot of worse options. For example, playing Dance Central, while fairly taxing from an aerobic standpoint, is not going to be nearly as effective, nor as quick, as Nike+.

The first session with Nike+ is a kind of “evaluation”. The game asks you to so some basic exercises and stretches as a baseline. It does a pretty good job of making it impossible to “cheat” since the kinect sensor is what is evaluating you. It’s doesn’t really let you lie and say “Oh sure, I can jump three feet to the left while clearing a 6-inch hurdle!” or “Yeah, running in place for 90 seconds is easy!” You might think you can, but when it comes down to brass tacks, you probably can’t.

Once you finish the evaluation, the game allows you to select a main goal and then tells you how you stack up against other players in your same age group. The idea here is that the “competitive” athlete/gamer is going to want to try and increase their score over time. Frankly, I found it pretty demoralizing. A typical “easy run” for me is a quick 6 mile run. I bicycle to work at least one day a week. I’ve completed a half-ironman triathlon in the last decade. In my mind, I’m generally pretty fit for my age. But, according to my evaluation, I scored in the bottom 1/3 of players my age. That doesn’t encourage me to play more, it makes me depressed!

Once you get into the main game, the workouts in Nike+ are really well balanced. Depending on what goal you have selected, there are strength workouts that use your body weight as resistance, flexibility workouts, and cardio/aerobic workouts. Even though the workouts can be as short as 25 minutes, you will sweat!!

A lot of the exercises are a lot of fun too! There is one where you stand in the middle of your room and virtual walls come from one side or another, with a small “gap” or space. The goal is to move your body to avoid the walls. It’s a lot harder than you would think, but it’s a lot of fun. Another interesting one is “dodgeball”, where the game throws virtual soccer balls at your on-screen avatar. Rather than moving a joystick or D-pad to dodge, you have to actually move your body to avoid being hit. Fun!!

BUT (and there is always a big but):

The game really expects you to be in reasonably good fitness and fairly flexible before you start. There is no (so-called) couch-to-fit workout. As I mentioned, I’m in pretty good shape for my age, and some of these workouts are very difficult for me. I actually had to stop doing some of these routines because I just plain ran out of air. And the supposed "cooldown" stretches are simply a non-starter. As a runner/cyclist/triathlete, I have really tight hamstrings; I had one real life personal trainer describe my legs as “like a bowstring”. I just don’t have the flexibility to do many of these things.

The most eggregious problem is that the workout will not adjust the workouts to accommodate a chronic injuries. After over a decade of running, coupled with poor posture and ergonomics of working in an office, I have a bad left knee. But the game still expects me to do to deep knee squats and deep lunges. While some people might say “no pain, no gain”, I’ve found that to be wrong. Plus, we’re not talking about “oh that’s a little sore” kind of pain here. When I tweak my left knee, it’s more like “rolling on the floor screaming” kind of agony. I’ll often get a zero score on some exercises simply because they aren't possible for me to do. In one notable session, I quit the game in frustration because it gave me several things to do that I could not complete, and then after 20+ minutes of not-working-out, it asked if I wanted to do another set! No, I don’t want to waste my time doing pointless stretches that I can’t do!

Finally, there is the kinect tracking itself. Most of the time it is pretty usable, but occasionally it just goes wonky. It will sometimes tell me to "slow down" when I'm already motionless, or miss me doing a rep of something I've done perfectly, or count a rep of something I didn't do. It might tell me to “go lower” when I’m sitting on the floor, or ask me to move my feet further apart when I’m already spread-eagled. Sometimes I just need to turn slightly without changing my position or form and suddenly I’m “doing it right”. While the tracking is better than pretty much every other kinect game I’ve played, it’s far from perfect.

Despite these pretty significant drawbacks, it is a really fun and challenging workout routine. It’s definitely not as good or as valuable as having a real life personal trainer that can adjust the workouts to accommodate different failings and strengths. I’m also kind of mystified why such a product exists at all. It’s really targeted at the casual “hard core” athlete, who happens to own an XBox360 and a kinect (a real ‘hardcore’ athlete would be paying for a real personal trainer). I just don’t see this game having a large market.

Having said all of that, if you’re looking for a fun workout game – or if you’re playing Dance Central to “get in shape” – you should definitely give this one a spin. Now that summer is here, I’ll probably be playing this less and going outside more, but when the weather starts getting cooler in the Fall, you can be sure I’ll be picking this up again!

I recently finished both of these outstanding games and I wanted to talk a bit about them with respect to one another. If you’re a skimmer and don’t care to read the massive wall-of-text that is in front of you, let me say this up front and save you some time: I liked Tomb Raider better. Why I liked it better is a much more complex issue. So let’s compare the two games. (This is a *SPOILER FREE* comparison.)

Tomb Raider is a complete reboot of the 1996 franchise of the same name. I played about half of the original Tomb Raider game when it was first released, but never finished it. I was a 30-year old man at the time and the supposed draw of a low polygon-count pneumatic Lara Croft wasn’t enough to encourage me to play any of the successive games. The new reboot is a new storyline that does not require any knowledge of the prior games, nor is it a continuation of any of the storylines. Essentially, other than being connected by name, it is a new game.

Bioshock Infinite is the followup to the Bioshock games originally released in 2007, with a sequel in 2010. I did not play either of those games, but as a gamer I am familiar with the basic setting and storylines of both. This new game is set in a completely new environment and doesn’t depend on the earlier games in either story or background information. Essentially, other than being connected by name, it is a new game.

Initial reactions
Games, like all entertainment, really need to have a strong initial hook. The first few minutes of gameplay are crucial in getting the player involved with the game. There are lots of different ways of accomplishing this. Tomb Raider has great hook, Bioshock Infinite does not.

Both games start in a rainstorm.

Tomb Raider opens with a two and a half minute long action-packed cutscene that shows you a massive disaster, a near-drowning, and a shipwreck, before the titles even come up. The player doesn’t even have control until three and a half minutes into the game and does not know the details of the games backstory or the various character’s motivations, but it is crystal clear that some Bad Stuff™ is happening. When the player is given control, the very first thing you see is the heroine hanging upside down in a kind of meat larder. Without any exposition at all, it is obvious that goals are to escape and survive. Standing still and doing nothing doesn’t seem like a good option since, based on the initial cutscene and current situation, it seems like that will result in a Very Bad Thing™. You’re literally less than 5 minutes into the game and already you have some real motivation to play the game.

Bioshock Infinite starts in a dinghy being rowed towards a lighthouse. You are forced to listen to some inane chatter between two NPCs in the rowboat with you, and while what they say is moderately important to the story (once you know it) it isn’t interesting and you really don’t have enough information (yet) to understand what in the hell they are talking about. (Watching it after you finish the game, you can see what is going on, but on an initial playthrough… no.) After more inane (and initially meaningless) exposition, you are given the direction: “Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.” What girl? What debt? Why should I care? Even when you reach Columbia, the motivation to continue seems tenuous at best. The first few hours of the game are more of the same. Long exposition pieces that eventually make sense, a seemingly open world to explore, but no real reason to care about it.

Graphics
This is an aspect where Tomb Raider stands out far ahead of Bioshock Infinite. I played both of these games on a mid-range PC. Tomb Raider’s crazy hair TressFX were disabled by default, but I played the original Doom on a machine that could barely pump out 20 frames per second. I turned TressFX on the first chance I could, and while it did impact my framerate, it was still a very playable 40 to 60 frames per second.

Bioshock Infinite seemed like it was using a graphics engine from last decade. Aside from the main characters, all of the NPC models look creepy and fake. (Hello from the Uncanny Valley!) Exposition is handled by having the characters speak during the game, which removed jarring cutscenes, but at times in the game there was overlapping dialoge which led to me missing story points. The overall texture quality seemed to be mediocre, but they were well applied and did not alias or tear. The ambient NPCs and enemies only seemed to come in one or two flavors, and while the overall enemy count was probably higher than Tomb Raider, you only fought one or two “types” at a time, giving the impression that they were all Bad Guy Clones. The environment was actually the high-point of the graphics, but that very pretty background scenery was just that: background scenery that didn’t have any real impact on the experience and definitely did not make up for the poor rendering.

On the other hand, the character models in Tomb Raider had very high poly counts and looked very realistic, almost movie-like. Textures were well-rendered and there was minimal artifacting or tearing. There were a few cases where “creepy eye” syndrome was apparent, but it was rare. Cutscenes appeared to have been rendered with the in-game engine (albeit with the settings set to maximum) so they did not feel very disjointed or out-of-place. Enemy models had a lot of variety and it very rarely felt like you were fighting enemies from the Bad Guy Press-O-Matic factory, and the environmental effects were well done. The only real graphical complaints I had were that the shadows cast by the TressFX were a bit too blocky and led to some really bad artifacting on Lara’s face at times (it sometimes looked like a really bad scar or a dark colored zipper), and that the physics engine did not deal with water effects very well during the game’s many sections where a character was wading. One section of the game (about one-third in) had me literally shaking from fear due to the environmental graphics.

Map design and gameplay
Both of these games fall into the general bucket of First Person Shooters, but they play very differently. For reference, I played both games on “normal” difficulty.

Tomb Raider is a fairly short game, but it has a lot of optional side content for the meticulous player. Basically, the core gameplay in Tomb Raider is a shooter. The maps are well designed to “feel” open, with large unobstructed areas allowing for a lot of mobility. The areas of the game that take place in smaller, constrained spaces never felt like the player was pinned down, unable to move into a more advantageous position, or limiting in playstyle. The gated content was well done, with obvious connections between areas, but it never felt artificial or manufactured. Optional content was off to the side, but never really hidden. Depending on the player it was easy to experience or ignore.

Each map section was fairly large with only minimal loading screens, adding to the feel of a unified world.

One of the things I really liked about the map design in Tomb Raider were the “timed” sections. When Bioshock infinite wanted you to move along quickly, it would have an NPC urging you on and played very dramatic fast-paced music. But in reality, if you put down your controller and walked away, nothing would happen. The urgent mucis would continue playing and the NPC would keep calling out “Hurry! We need to get there!” In Tomb Raider, when you hit a section where you had to move quickly, if you didn’t move (usually in less than a second) the game would kill you. Hanging from a burning rope above a spike trap? If you don’t jump to a nearby ledge before that happens, the rope burns through and you die. This led to me reacting very quickly in some situations, usually without the time to completely consider my options, just taking the first visible opportunity to survive. This was extremely fun and injected an interesting challenge into the game.

Enemy battles were generally pretty well balanced. Ammo was plentiful and easy enough to find, and I was usually full. When a fight was designed to be an ammo sink, it worked pretty well and I would have to start thinking about making shots count in the next fight or until I hit the next ammo store. Occasionally I would run out of ammo for my “favorite” weapon(s) and be forced to fall back on one that I was less proficient with or less ideal for the fight, adding to the challenge. But that situation would be remedied quickly at the next ammo supply.

Bioshock Infinite, on the other hand, is a longer game with almost no optional content. As a result, the map design felt very linear and tightly constrained. I always felt like I was trapped in a very small map with connectors to other very small maps. Loading screens popped up frequently, making the world feel much more segmented. Even the layout of the maps seemed archaic. Whenever I came to a fork in the road, I had to force myself to take the path I would not have normally have chosen; my instinct was to pick the path that moved me into the next area. I believe the intent of the map was to deceive the player into going the “wrong” way and then having them backtrack to the less obvious “correct” way, but in this case the map designer missed the whole “less obvious“ part of that concept.

Fighting seemed to be all or nothing. Small, ambient fights were so trivial that it wasn’t uncommon to come out of the fight with more ammo than when you started. On the other hand, some of the larger fights required magical, unexplained (or expected) triggers to complete. For example, there are at least three fights with infinitely respawning enemies that continue until the player takes a specific action, targets a specific enemy or passes a certain point on the map. Nowhere in the game are these triggers shown or explained. Basically, the player learns about them by dying and repeating the same fight again and again (with less ammo each time!) until they stumble across the “secret”. By changing the “trick” in each fight, the player is corralled into changing their gamestyle in order to progress. One fight requires a Rush to get past, another requires Stealth, and third requires Sniping.

The final battle in particular was extremely frustrating to me. Some of the earlier boss battles were challenging, but I was forced to repeat that final battle no fewer than twenty times and look up hints on the internet before I managed to beat it. To be honest, I’m not certain I could do it again.

In my opinion, Tomb Raider is a much better designed game.

Weapons
Another reason Bioshock Infinite feels like a game from the last decade is the weapon system. While there are about a dozen different weapon types in the game. The player only has access to two of them at any given time. In order to pick up a different weapon, you need to drop one of the two you are carrying. While this is supposed to present a tactical decision, what it really ends up meaning is that once you pick your favorite weapons you end up using them for the remainder of the game. Since I never really knew what was around the next corner, I ended up using the most flexible weapons (for me, the machine gun and the sniper rifle) 90% of the time. The only time I switched away from these two was when I ran out of ammo for one or the other. Even then about half the time I just suffered along with a dead weapon until I found ammo for it.

The “special power” alt-fire abilities functioned the same way. Even though you had a handful of these to choose from, you only had one active and one swap ability. (The others are available on a menu.) And similar to the weapons, once you settle in on a favorite Vigor (as they are called) you will rarely, if ever, use any of the others. This is compounded even more by the fact that ALL of the special abilities use the same “ammo”. If you run out of salts, you can’t use ANY of them, so if you have salt, you might as well use your favorite one.

Tomb Raider is much more forgiving with weapons selection. Even though there are fewer of them overall, once you acquire a weapon, you have access to it. (There are a few places where the game strips all your weapons, but you get them back pretty quickly.) Switching between weapons is quick and painless, allowing the player to use the best weapon for the task at hand. The player can switch from a sniper, to close combat, to knockbacks, to flame attacks with fluidity, even within the same fight. Have a one-shot “open the can” type situation? Pull out the pistol, take the shot and swap back in less than a second, saving “important” ammo. This really allows the player to play the game they want to play, rather than the game that the designer decided was appropriate (or required) for the situation. Even the boss battles allow the use of any weapon type.

I found myself making a lot more tactical decisions (and having more fun) with Tomb Raider’s system, so it wins in this respect as well.

Story!
(NOTE : I will not be spoiling either story here, so if you haven’t played the games, you’re safe reading.)

The story in Tomb Raider is pretty much a throwaway excuse for a bunch of people to be shooting at you. That doesn’t mean it’s a dull or uninteresting story, but it is pretty predictable. Most of the really neat parts of the story are told in optional ways; only the bare minimum to get you to the climax is revealed in mandatory cutscenes. If you just go through the game with the goal of finishing it and don’t seek out all of the optional books, puzzles and trinkets, you won’t even know much of the backstory or the motivations of the characters (including the main antagonist). On the other hand, if you do make the effort to find all of the story tidbits, there is an amazing amount of background material available that paints a fairly robust (albeit unoriginal) backdrop for both the antagonists and the environment.

Bioshock Infinite’s story starts off extremely slowly. The vast majority of it is non-optional, with only minor story elements being “off the track”. Even if the player isn’t interested in the story, it will be force fed to them, willing or not. And, oh my, what a story it is! This is easily the strongest point of Bioshock Infinite. As you play the game and the plot unwinds, amazing things happen. This story starts to suck you in and makes you want to see what happens next. (Something that the game design itself never does.) When you finally reach the climax, you may think you know how it is going to end, but (unless someone has spoiled it for you) you will NOT see this ending coming. This is the kind of complicated story, dealing with very human elements, that will leave you thinking about it for days after you finish.

As much fun as the Tomb Raider story was, Bioshock Infinite is BY FAR a better narrative. Both are entertaining, but one is a “movie” that you go see and enjoy, while one is a “film” that has you considering the different character’s motivations for days afterwards. Tomb Raider’s story is a fun-filled adventure that we all can enjoy; Bioshock Infinite’s story is one that leaves one questioning if they would have made the same decisions or if the characters did the right thing. We fantasize about being an actor in one, and agonize over the choices we made in the other.

Conclusion
The last-decade gameplay and graphics, poor enemy balance and slow plot development really turned me off to Bioshock infinite. I never really felt like I -had- to get back to the game to complete it. I felt like I was grinding out the game to see the story. Even though the story was well worth it in the end, the game never really felt “real” to me. The motivation to “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt” never really hit home for me. I never really cared about Booker until the finale’s big reveal.

Tomb Raider, on the other hand, pulled me in right away. I felt invested in Lara’s character immediately. The game triggered my survival instinct fomr the frist few seconds. The background story, while unoriginal, was pretty well developed and revealed at a good pace. Map design felt fresh and exciting and enemy balance kept me on my toes without being overly difficult or easy. While I was running through this game I always felt as if I wanted to continue playing it, not just finish it for the sake of finishing.

Both are great games, but for very different reasons. As I mentioned in the opening, I preferred Tomb Raider to Bioshock Infinite. (As of this writing Bioshock Infinite has a metacritic score of 95/100, and Tomb Raider is ranked at 86/100.)

This posting is a result of a comment made by a GW2 player on Google+. GuildWars2 is running a month-long "april fools" gag that is a throwback to the 8-bit games of your youth. I say "your youth" because even though I was playing video games at that time, I completely missed the 8-bit gaming era.

I was playing video games on home systems like the Atari VCS and ColecoVision in the very early 1980s, then switched to online gaming in 1986. While all the kiddies were going ga-ga over their silly super mario B.S., I was shooting down people in AirWarrior (Kesmai, 1986), tossing fireballs and lighting bolts at wizards in OrbWars (Simutronics, 1987), glomping along as a self-healing tank in Dragon's Gate (AUSI, 1990), and playing against Real People in countless other modem-connected games. When Ultima Online was released in 1997 I was already a 10-year veteran of online gaming. I was sucked into EverQuest the day it released.

I didn't circle back to consoles until the PS3 was released in 2007. Today I have a PS3, an XBox360 and a Nintendo Wii nestled under my 50-inch plasma TV, with an easy way to set up a PC system and use the TV as a display. My PC is not a top-of-the-line system, but it is definitely better than average. I am no longer able to boast that I am a hardcore online gamer simply because I have more varied interests than I did when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and thus devote less time to playing them.

My point is that 8-bit "nostagia" is completely lost on me. It doesn't exist. I don't look back on the nintendo-era with longing. I play online games for the competitve aspect, not because I want to recapture some bygone era of my youth. Quite frankly, when I was in that age-group, I could not wait for the future!! In 1986, while all of those cracked-out hyper-kids were learning controler codes, I was dreaming of the day when a world-wide network would exist, with data rates in the hundreds of kilobits per second and sub-second latency! To me, the high-point of my gaming "career" was in late 2000 when I was asked to be a Phase 1 alpha tester for DAoC, exactly one year prior to it's release! I played DAoC fulltime and nonstop. When it was released, I logged in 5-8 hours a day during the week (while holding down a full time job) and was online 12 to 14 hours a day on weekends. As a tester, I already had the client when the game went live so I was able to log in a good 12 hours before regular players got in. Anyone who was playing at release on the Percival server would recognize the name of my character.

That was pretty much all I played until mid-2007. I made several month-long excursions into other games, one of which was the original Guild Wars, but DAoC always called me back. I was internet-famous (which, I know from experience, means next-to-nothing), and I had a close connection to many of the Devs. I won't claim to have had any control over development decisions, but I know from speaking to many of the people involved that they actually considered my voice to be as valuable as any designer of the game. Near the end, I was actually allowed to design an end-game weapon which became the "go to" choice for my class within a day after it was added to the game. Those are the memories and times that I long for and look back on with pride. Not jumping.

I'm not a jumper. I play the jumping puzzles in GuildWars2 for one reason, and one reason only: they grant 5 to 10 acheivement points each. They are, as the saying goes, a means to an end. I don't enjoy them and They. Are. Not. Fun.

I will complete this stupid "super" puzzle thing (just like I completed the Halloween jumping puzzle and the Holiday jumping puzzle) because it grants acheivement points. I won't enjoy it. In fact, I've been dreading this content. The entire 8-bit look (to me) is a reminder of a time when the games I wanted to play just weren't ready yet; when a "high speed" connection was a 2400 baud modem and 1250ms latency times; when I was paying $6 per hour in online fees and the several months where my monthly bill was in excess $1000. These are not things I want to remember. It doesn't make me go "Oh, cool!" It makes me go "Oh, no!"

To the people who say "but this is optional content; you don't need to do it" I would like you to show me how to get those acheivement points without doing this content. I would like you to show me how to get these (so called) exclusive skins without farming PvE for hours upon hours. PvE players can get Badges (the rewards from killing other players in WvW) without actually killing other players, by doing a jumping puzzle. Where are my jumping puzzle rewards from killing other players? Or from doing anything OTHER than a jumping puzzle? Why is it that they can get WvW rewards from doing PvE content, but when it's a PvE gating issue, suddenly it's "optional content" that doesn't need to be completed? How can I get those rewards without doing the tedous, annoying and difficult PvE puzzles? sPvP? WvW?? Why not??!?

May 1st can't come soon enough.

Recently I read another gamer’s blog linked to me on G+.

I'm nearly 15 years older than the author and I both agree and completely disagree with his blog.

I agree that no game will ever recreate that "first time" feeling, but I disagree that gamer ennui is the result of getting older or from limited play time. It's not that things were better or brighter or shinier or less expensive or more fun when we were younger. If you have kids, or even if you know some kids, try showing them some of the games that you found so compelling when you started playing them. I would be very surprised if their reaction isn't along the lines of "Really? You thought this was fun?"

I hit my own personal gaming doldrums around 2005. I was wandering around on the show floor at E3 in Los Angeles, a virtual video gaming nirvana, and all I could think was "another FPS", "another RTS", "another platformer".... Despite being surrounded by the best new games that were coming out in the next year or so, I was so jaded that I really couldn't see the improvements in gameplay. All I saw was the same old gameplay wrapped up in prettier graphics.

The real problem is unrealistic expectations.

We older gamers are jaded and cynical. We've seen the "man behind the green curtain" (how's that for an old reference, eh?) and we recognize the tricks that developers use to make games seem fun when they are really just padding lackluster content. But many new games actually ARE offering new and improved gaming experiences. Better NPC AI, more involved and emotionally touching stories, more dynamic scripting, and, yes, better graphics.

You're NEVER going to recapture that "first time" feeling. But that doesn't mean that today’s new games can't be just as engaging and fulfilling as new games were when you first started playing them. When you start with the expectation that a new game is going to be as compelling as the very first MMO you played (Ultima Online, EverQuest, or for most people, World of Warcraft), or the very first RTS (Dune, Command and Conquer or WarCraft III), or the very first platformer (Super Mario Bros for most people), or the very first ANYTHING… you're already setting yourself up for failure. It's just not going to happen!

That’s not to say that new game types don’t pop up occasionally. I mean look at the original Portal (which really doesn’t qualify as a “new” game any longer). When it was released in 2007 (six years ago!) there was nothing like it. It was heralded as a groundbreaking new game type. And it was. It was new, it was original and even though it was still a FPS type game it really did recapture that “first time” feeling. Similarly, we’ve seen new “first time” games in the RTS genre with the MOBA style games. But those games are going to be few and far between.

Some of the difference is the actual games. Today's games aren't designed to be long-term investments of time. Oh sure, there will be a very small percentage of players who will get “hooked” on a specific game and play it until they master it. But generally speaking, even the triple-A games of today are designed to be completed in six to ten hours of gameplay. For a “hardcore” adult gamer, that is going to be anywhere from one to five sessions with a game. Assuming you are setting aside about an hour a day for gaming related pursuits, you’re probably going to burn through a game in a matter of a few days. Regardless of how much hype is developed about the newest title, the marketplace is pushing developers into smaller, tighter and shorter games. The expectation of a long-term “relationship” with a new game is just not realistic in today’s game market.

The real key to getting maximum enjoyment from a new game today is not to look for the long-term play, or a brand new experience. You don’t go to a movie or watch a TV show with the expectation of a life-changing experience, or to become a fanboy/girl. You expect to be entertained for a couple of hours, and maybe have something to think about for a day or so afterwards. We always wanted our video games to be more like movies and TV shows, and guess what? We got that. Games are no longer life-sucking vortices that will happily vacuum up every free moment of your time. Instead, today’s games are spot entertainment that can be enjoyed after a long day at the office and eating dinner with our families, or for a few hours on the weekend when we’re done with the kids’ soccer game or mucking out the garden beds or taking a long bike ride with our Real Life friends.

If you go into a new game with the expectation of being entertained and nothing more, you’ll find that the games today are no worse than the games of our youth. And, in many respects, are actually quite a bit better.

This seems to be the season for gushing about Guild Wars 2, and I haven’t posted a blog in a long while. Plus my head feels like it is full of dead bugs and oil blackened cooking oil. So here we go.

For those who aren’t completely familiar with the Guild Wars 2 World-versus-World-versus-World (aka WvW; wuvwuv; or DubVDub), the way it works is this: All of the game servers are placed into brackets of three. Each of these matchups battle over four complete zones, each of which is big enough to take about 5 to 10 minutes to run across. Each particular zone has about a dozen control points (castles, towers, and the like) that earn varying amounts of “points” for the server that controls them. After two weeks, the points are totaled up, and the server matchups are re-sorted so that winning servers fight against winning server and losing servers fight against losing servers. There’s a lot of nuance that I’m leaving out, but that is not the point of my discussion, and there is plenty of information on the inner strategies of WvW elsewhere. The takeaway here is that there are three (relatively balanced) "teams" and the areas are HUGE.

So here is one of the fun little things that happened to me this week.

I was playing in the Eternal Battlegrounds (the “neutral” zone out of the four). I had just zoned in and popped open the map to get an overview of the fight. I saw a few crossed swords not too far from my location, and a Commander icon sitting outside of an enemy tower that was under attack, only about a minute’s run away.

Now this particular tower is a bit unique in that the approach comes up on the “back” of the tower, and the front gates are on the opposite side from the main road. It’s build into a steep hillside, and the “front gate” is accessed from a small level plain. The only way to get to the front gate is to climb a narrow set of steps right along the outer wall, or to go way around the too-steep-to-climb hill.

I’m frantically checking my map every few seconds as I run. I can see on the map (and hear in the map-chat) that my team is about to breach the gate. Typically when the gate goes down, there is a furious melee and then the tower will be captured in a matter of only a handful of seconds. So, I’m scrambling to get there as fast as I can.

As I climb the steps, suddenly an enemy player drops over the tower walls right in front of me. They had seen that the tower was lost and were making an exit out the back. I was so shocked I didn’t even have time to react before he was up and running. I wheeled around, but by the time I had recovered from my surprise, he was long gone. So I turned back to the tower and started up the steps again.

Once again, an enemy player dropped right into my sights. Only this time, he wasn’t alone. This time, there were four of them, and they were looking for an easy kill while they fled from their obvious demise. They took a few swings at me, but I’m moderately defensively built and I knew they weren’t interested in a protracted fight, so I just played a delaying tactic and generally kept moving up the steps.

By this time the gates had gone down, the tower had been captured (Darn, I missed it!) and my team had swept in. The zerg crashed over us as we fought and washed the few enemies away. I joined the zerg and we flooded down the road towards the closest supply camp.

For the next few minutes, what followed was unexciting zerg surfing. We crashed into the supply camp and captured it in seconds. The small group of defenders was downed almost instantly. The zerg turned towards the next tower and started running….

Along the way, the commander that was (supposedly) leading the zerg took a right turn. The zerg, of course, being a mindless horde, didn’t notice and kept trucking down the road. I stopped to follow the commander, along with one other person. The three of us climbed a small rise into a cave that ran behind the enemy tower that the zerg was swarming towards. As I crested the hill and got a view of the interior of the cave, I saw red names. First one or two, then five… no, more! I immediately flipped around and started fleeing. There was no way the three of us were going to survive this many enemy players. My only chance was to get back to the zerg and hope they noticed.

Luckily, I only had to run for a heartbeat. Somehow, the zerg had finally noticed the commander had peeled off and they were coming to our position. When the friendly zerg came over that small hill, I was awash in friendly green names. Again, I turned. Battle was about to be joined! (Open-field fights are always my favorites because of the mobility they offer. I’ve always been a player who hunts around the edges of a big fight.)

Imagine my surprise when I turned to see that the enemy zerg was MUCH larger than I had thought. There were at least 100 enemy players! Way too many for our zerg to handle, but we were going to chip off a few. But wait, their nameplates were different…

Unbeknownst to me the few enemies I had seen coming out of the tunnel weren’t charging in to fight us, they were running for their lives from the third server zerg, right behind them. When our force appeared, they were sandwiched between two enemy teams. Instantly chaos erupted. There were at least three times as many enemy players as there were friendly ones, but the enemies were fighting each other as well as us! In fact, it was obvious that we were the smallest force in the fight. All of the heavy DPS jumped right in and started swinging. Our ranged players spread out and were firing like mad.

I jinked to the right to get out of the main furball. I’m not sure how it happened, but I found myself on the flank of the enemy backline. I found a player with low health, hit leap, snare, frenzy, and they went down. 1-1/2 seconds later, I had a kill and two Badges. I looked up and lo and behold another player with low health, trying to exit the fight, right in front of me. Leap, snare, swing, bleed, and down they go!

The fight went on like this for about two minutes. My timing was perfect, and every time I was looking for an ability it was available. Kill one, pop a 5 second buff, leap and attack another. Swing a few times, dump conditions, debuff them, and that’s credit for another kill! I was right where I loved being, on the outskirts of a three-way mashup, and given a license to kill with impunity. No one was paying attention to the lone warrior.

All in all, I got credit for ten kills and never went down a single time. Our zerg, despite being smaller, was able to take advantage of the other two team’s inattention to us (and their single-minded focus on killing each other) to win the day.

Is it just me, or am I amazing?

After the Thanksgiving holiday I came down with a horrible horrible cold. While I was busy being brutally sick I played one of the unplayed games that was on my Steam list. In this case the game was a very “noir” style game called LIMBO. I played the demo when it was first released and bought the game when it was on sale several months ago, but I had never actually played it. LIMBO is very reminiscent of a much older video game called Another World. That game came out just as the modern “story” games were starting to make an appearance.

Way back in the dawn of coin-op video games, there was no way to “win”. Ever. If you were very very good, you might be able to play for a goodly long time. But there was no “end” to the game; it would just get progressively harder and harder to continue until you ran out of virtual lives and you walked away. There was no incentive for designers to give the player any way to “finish” the game. In fact, they would go to enormous lengths to make sure that the player did not win, and kept pumping quarters into the coin box.

There were a few outliers, like one infamous laserdisc powered game that asked the player to complete 30 randomly ordered “screens” to get to the end and rescue the Princess. And there was the Adventure game on the Atari VCS where you controlled a red square trying to kill a green squiggle with a black line. But there were few and far between. The vast majority of games were games that you were guaranteed to lose.

As personal computers started making inroads into home entertainment, game designers started designing “story” games. At first these were role playing beasts, intended for the hardcore grognards that grew up on the original Dungeons and Dragons (and had barely outgrown it). As more powerful graphics processors started to make an appearance, we started to see action/adventure type games appear. Another World was one of the first side-scrolling adventure type games and it has since been ported to pretty much every computer system ever created.

Keep in mind that Another World was designed when many game developers still thought that games were supposed to be unbeatable. While it is not a difficult game to beat (I think I ran through the whole thing in a handful of hours) it was brutal in terms of the player body count. After the initial cutscene, the player’s first action had to be performed in 5 seconds or the main character would die. On the second screen, there were at least two different ways to kill the character. The idea was that the player was going to die, and die a lot. But it was never an unfair death, and each time they would learn something. “Oh, those little worms have poison claws!” Splat! “Oh, that lion can jump further than me!” Whoof! “Hey, that alien man has a personal shield he can shoot me through!” ZZAP!!

Anyway, the reason for this little trip down memory lane is to illustrate why I really enjoyed LIMBO. It isn’t a difficult game, but your little character is going to die, over and over again, usually in brutal and horrendous ways. It will never be an unfair death, but it will almost always be something that you didn’t expect. Once you know that tall grass can conceal a bear traps, you can easily jump over them, but until you know what to look for… well, let’s just say that it will be a learning experience.

Almost all of the puzzles are extremely logical and are pretty obvious. That’s not to say that they are trivial. For example, one of the first puzzles is to use a log to cross a pool of (deadly) water. The problem is that the log is at the top of a tree that you’ve already passed before you get to the water. That you can only climb by jumping up to a cleverly concealed rope hanging from one of the tree’s branches. The clever part is that the rope looks like just so much background environment imagery that many players will look right at it and not see it at all. With the exception of one notable mechanic, the game does a great job of teaching the player what they need to know in order to solve each puzzle. Anyone who was able to complete Portal will likely be able to figure most of these out. (I did have to resort to “cheating” on one puzzle, but I’d like to think that was because my disease-addled brain wasn’t seeing the answer. At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

The game world is done in faded sepia tones and really has a “creepy” kind of vibe. When the occasional splash of color appears, it really stands out (as intended). There really isn’t any introduction to the “story” (such as it is) but it only takes a few minutes of play to realize that your goal is somewhere “that way”, the guys with the bows are “bad” and there are a LOT of ways to die. Eventually you will find out what you’re after, only to have it snatched away from you at least once. By the time the game winds to its conclusion, the reward you get is well worth it.

Overall, it was a fun game and a good investment of an afternoon.

People have funny ideas about what it means when an MMO "fails". In particular I’m thinking about two very specific “failed” MMOs that have been released in the last few years. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (aka WAR) and Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). Interestingly, aside from both having a colon in their name, they both were published by Electronic Arts.

WAR, for all of its flaws, was not a "failure" for EA. It made back all of their invested money in initial box sales and then some. Right now, as long as they have enough subs to pay for the network connection and the handful of people left maintaining it, it is still a "success".

I’ve “worked” (ie volunteered time as a stunt dev) on MMO products for over ten years. When a game goes into maintenance mode at the end of its commercial life, it really only takes a few people to run the thing. A skeleton crew is usually going to be one server guy who does the coding/scripting, an artist, and one real “dev” (who is usually a mid-level manager in charge of the team and takes the blame from upper management and also plays community face as a side job). On average, they probably are paid about $100k each per year, for a total outlay of $25k per month.

Commercial office space isn’t cheap, but a small team doesn’t need a lot of room. A 600 sq ft office would allow for two “private” offices (one of which doubles as the company “conference room”) and a small cube farm with 4 8x8 cubes. In a major metro area, commercial space rents can be as high as $5 a foot for primo space. Still, even assuming the worst, that is only $3000 a month in office rent.

Network connections, server hardware, and technical upkeep is practically free on these games; they are usually going to be piggy-backed onto a newer, faster, shinier game and get the hand-me-downs. Still, there are some minor maintenance costs: office supplies for the staff and whatnot. For the sake of argument, let’s assume around $1k per month.

That bring the total “cost” to maintain an older MMO s only $30k per month. Assuming they are still selling subscriptions at $15/month, that means they really only need about 2000 active subs to break even.

An older, niche game like WAR is sure to have a solid ~20k subscribers. That’s about 1/600th the subscriber base of WoW. If you look at it from a bitter ex-gamer perspective, you might say that such a small market share is a complete and unmitigated failure. Clearly their product sucks, since they can’t even boast to have a 1% share of the overall space. But, at $15 per sub, and with almost no overhead at all, those 20,000 subscribers generate around $270,000 of profit every 30 days, or $9k every day. Personally, I would consider a product that pays back $9 every day to be the exact opposite of a failure!

SWTOR has a similar story.

SWTOR is an MMO which I had absolutely zero interest in from the day it was announced. I went to several of the big initial announcement’s made and BioWare never demonstrated to me that they were going to deliver anything other than a re-hashed WoW-clone... in a sci-fi setting... with more voice acting. (Which, as it turns out, was exactly what they delivered.) All the talk of the “third pillar” of gaming being story telling sounds great, and probably works wonderfully in a single-player game where the developers can control the pace and gameplay much better. But in an MMO? No so much.

MMO players are finicky, terrible people that will rip a design to shreds and optimize the hell out of progression. 99% of the content you design will be completely ignored. The remaining 1% will be played exclusively since it is the fastest/easiest path to the best part of the game (whatever that is).

Despite creating a single player game in MMO clothes, BioWare still sold 1.7M boxes. Maybe it was on the shoulders of a grand old IP, but regardless they sold a lot of boxes. Even with a publisher's cut of only 50% of retail, that means EA pulled in a sweet $42.5M just in box sales!

And since the “average” player took about three months to figure out that they were paying a monthly fee for what is essentially a newer version of Knights of the Old Republic (now with more voice acting!) each of those 1.7M players poured an extra $45 into the pot.

As stupid as SWTOR turned out to be, it was profitable within a month after release. It made a boatload of money in the first three months. It _continues_ to be a profitable title for EA to this day. A failure? As an MMO, it most certainly was a failure. But as a money-making game? From a development standpoint, SWTOR was a smashing success.

Having said that, I personally don't play either of those game and I don’t recommend either one of them. Personally, I think that the DikuMUD MMO design paradigm has played out and I can’t see anyone choosing them when there are so many other, better choices in today’s marketplace. But just because a game isn't generating truckloads of money doesn't mean it is a "failure". There's plenty of room in the MMO-space for smaller niche titles too. And as long as there are enough players to support those smaller niche titles, they are going to continue to be successes in their own rights.

Guild Wars 2 has been released for over two weeks. To say that I’ve been playing it a lot would be an understatement. Even after taking an week away from the game for PAX, I’ve managed to get my “main” character up to level 49 and have completed all of the personal story quests up to level 54. (I finished the level 54 part last night.) While I really like the concept of the “personal story”, and it really is a great improvement over the static storylines found in the earlier Guild Wars games, it does have some rough spots.

I've found that the personal stories only tell you a tiny little piece of the overall story taking place in the game. This is true in many parts of the game, just as it is in life. We only see what we can see, and only experience what happens in the game world while we are there. The rest of the story keeps going without us, and a lot of other story plot items keep occurring when we are not present.

That’s not to say that one must be logged in continuously to see the whole picture. The pace of the story is completely dictated by the player and the amount of time they play. With respect to pacing, the “personal story” is a complete success! If I play for 20 hours straight over a single weekend, I can experience the first two “episodes” of my story. And if I take a week off from playing for a vacation in Seattle, when I log in a week later, the "my" story has not advanced without me; I pick right up where I left off.

But what does end up happening is that the larger meta-story is being told in multiple places, by multiple characters. This is similar to a typical high-fantasy book. Two well-known examples of this that come to mind almost instantly are the Lord of the Rings and the Wheel of Time series, but it's really true of almost any good story. In the Lord of the Rings, once the Fellowship is broken, there are several sub-stories that develop: Frodo and Samwise go to Mordor, Merry and Pipin are kidnapped by Uruk-Hai, and Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas persue them. In the Wheel of Time series, each of the main characters has their own story which contributes to the overall plot: Rand becomes the Dragon Reborn, Perrin comes to grip with being a wolfbrother, Mat adopts his past lives as a great general, Egwene becomes the Amerlin, Nynaeve becomes a… well, whatever. Each of these sub-story threads is separate and distinct, but each is an integral part of the overarching story. Since a book is a written media, we get to experience all of these distinct parts. Not simultaneously, but as invisible observers to the story we do get to see ALL of the pieces and parts of the overall story.

But we are actual characters in the story in GW2. We simply cannot be in all places, at all times. We can't experience the entire story. It's as if we were reading the Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time, and we were only able to read a single sub-story of the entire book. The Lord of the Rings would be a lot less epic if we only followed Aragorn, and only found out what happened to Frodo, Sam and Smeagol as “background”. The Wheel of Time would be a lot less compelling if we only followed Rand’s story and the other main characters were simply people that we saw occasionally and didn't get to know intimately.

The upshot of this is that making different story choices and following multiple paths can result in wildly different stories. This is great for replay value since every playthrough of the personal story can be completely different. One time through you can follow Frodo and Sam, the next time you might follow Merry and Pippin, and the time after that you might be following Gimli and Legolas. There might be some parts of the story that are the same (the Fellowship, for example) but others might be completely different, and take place in areas of the world you didn’t even know existed on the first playthrough (Isengard vs. Mordor vs. Helm's Deep).

On the other hand, you never really understand what is going on in the bigger picture (and really not even in your own story) unless you play the game multiple times. There is just so much going on "off camera" that you really only see about 10% of the action. The rest is delivered in cutscenes, but that doesn't have near the impact or tangibility of avtually playing it. Being told "so-and-so fought a great battle in such-and-such place" is compeltely different from actualy being part of the battle and fighting next to the main character. (Especially when you almost lose, but then manage to succeed!)

Other story problems manifest in several ways.

In order to accommodate flexibility in player choice, the meta-story is broken into little pieces. The player gets to make several choices as they progress which selects which pieces they see. Continuing my prior examples, when the Fellowship breaks, the player chooses which character they will follow, or whenever two of the main characters in the Wheel of Time meet, the player can “switch” from one story thread to another. More or less, these switching points occur every ten levels, after three or four story missions. For the sake of discussion, I refer to these ten-level chunks of the story as “episodes”.

The episodic nature of the personal story is readily apparent when dealing with the major NPCs in the story. I’ll use an example from my character’s personal story. (WARNING: this paragraph will contain spoilers, skip to the next break if you want to preserve yourself.) I created a sylvari mesmer. One of my character creation questions asked me to choose what time of day I awakened, and I selected to awaken in the dawn. As a result of this choice, my level 10-20 episode dealt with a mini-story involving the Hylek and a major character in the meta-story, a sylvari Firstborn named Treehearn. I played alongside this NPC for several missions, and the spoken cutscenes told me that he was impressed by me and was going to be watching my progression. And yet, when he re-entered my “personal story” at level 50, my mentor introduced him to me, he was completely oblivious to our prior missions. He did not say “Oh yeah, I’ve met you and you’re doing great since we last adventured together.” Instead it was if we had never met and he had forgotten completely about me. All it would have taken to stitch together this discontinuity would have been a single line of dialog: “Yes, I’ve met him/her, back in Caledon Forest. I’m glad he/she is here to help.” Instead, it was a jarring discontinuity that really took me out of the game.

(That’s it for story spoilers; it’s safe to read again.)

Now I know WHY this is done. Other players will have experienced different low-level episodes from me and will probably not have met the same characters that I did. Thus, those NPCs won’t know those players and thus can’t “remember” them, since they’ve never met. Recording voice and animations for every possible combination of story choice is probably not practical, but may have been simulated by creating a more procedural cutscene display engine. Rather than popping out each pre-rendered cutscene as a whole chunk, each cutscene could have been comprised of smaller one- or two-line bits that are displayed in sequence, making it appear as a continuous cutscene. This would allow for a lot more flexibility in dialog and allowed those continuity preserving lines to be inserted (or omitted, depending on the writer’s intent) into the cutscenes.

Another issue is transition between episodes. Since the player is allowed to select which story thread they will follow several times during the game, occasionally they will end up with completely new (to them) NPCs in a completely new (to them) environment, with a completely new (to them) backstory and lore that they haven’t been exposed to (yet). For example, at one point in my personal story, my character (a sylvari mesmer) chose to learn more about the Quaggon. This choice resulted in my personal story introducing me to a new NPC (a norn warrior), going to a new far-off zone (the Shiverpeaks), to battle against evil forces I had never heard of (Jormag, the Ice Dragon). The problem is, as a sylvari, I hadn't yet learned any of the lore of the Shiverpeaks regarding the norn race and their long-standing fight against Jormag and the Sons of Svanir. Luckily for me, I had played a norn guardian during beta and had seen the personal story of the first two norn zones so I (as a player) was able to make the transition. But a new player who hadn’t already played multiple characters would have been completely lost by this sudden abrupt story transition.

Even worse, (and much harder to solve) that particular part of the story really seemed to have been designed for players who had selected to join the Priory. (I had chosen The Vigil.) The whole zone was full of Priory NPCs. The zone-wide meta-event was kicked off in a Priory outpost. And that meta-event was completed with Priory NPC helpers.

When the three factions were introduced, I did one mission with each of them. During the mission I did with the Priory characters, I developed a deep-seated loathing for them. The mission itself was a lot of fun and I probably enjoyed it the most out of the three faction missions I did. But I really disliked the Prior characters and their methodology was completely dissimilar from my own preferences. In short, I just could not stand the Priory and their entire outlook. (In a way, I guess that's a testament to the quality of the story, since it did invoke a emotional reaction from me.)

And yet, here I was in a zone that was more-or-less being run and managed (albeit badly) by Priory NPCs. As a member of The Vigil, my intial reactions was "Why am I helping these bozos? Can't they solve their own problems? Shouldn't I be helping The Vigil somewhere else?" I would have been much happier if all of the local (unnamed) NPCs were wearing the tag of a Vigil class. I strongly suspect that one of the other two options I did not select led to a zone where that was the case. On future playthroughs (with other characters) I will make those other selections.

A potential solution to this discontinuity is to develop a way for each NPC to have multiple names and selectively display a different name based on player faction affiliation, but that would be extremely difficult to implement and could lead to other technical issues such as different players seeing different NPC names while playing together. Alternately the game could limit the player’s options to ONLY allow them to go to the “right” zone for their given faction; while that’s a much easier technical solution, it would make the game a lot less flexible and would negatively impact replayability.

Guild Wars 2’s “personal story” is not a perfect solution, and it does have some pretty significant problems. The “episodic” nature of the personal story is really a mixed blessing. While it can lead to some weird continuity problems, with amnesiac characters and jarring transitions, it adds a lot of replay value to an already fairly epic game plot. Rather than metering out lore and story as walls of text hidden in quest dialogs (does anyone read those anymore?) it’s told in an entertaining and engaging way. Being able to make different characters and see completely disparate events and people in the story, while telling a coherent and unified meta-story is a fantastic improvement over prior storytelling in MMOs. I just wish it worked a little better.

Elementalist was the second caster class I tried. Like the Engineer, this profession simply didn’t sit well with me. Probably because my playstyle revolves more around a longer, drawn-out fight, and I absolutely hate dying. The Elementalist is more about hitting hard, dying a lot, but taking the opponent with you.

I played the Elementalist during a four-hour "stress test". The starting weapon for my Elementalist was, like all other casters I tried, a Scepter. I quickly paired that with an off-hand Focus. I only used this one weapon combination for my entire play session.

The Elementalist’s class mechanic is a bit weird. Rather than having two weapons they can swap between, they have four elemental attunements that they can select from. Each attunement changes the weapon abilities. For example, while wielding a Scepter, the #1 Fire ability is a high DPS attack, but with the exact same weapon, the #1 Water ability is a triple-shot of ice. There are four different elemental attunements (Fire, Water, Earth and Air) and they each have a separate focus, although there is a bit of overlap between them. Generally speaking: Fire is all about damage; Water is mostly support; Air is for mobility; and Earth is for control.

And herein lies my first and biggest problem with the class. Just like all other professions, weapon skills unlock with use. Unlike all other professions, the Elementalist needs to unlock each weapon set four times, once for each element.

To avoid confusion, when starting out, only the first element (Fire) is available; the other three are locked until the character gains experience. Water unlocks very quickly (I believe that was at level 3 or 4). Air unlocks shortly thereafter (level 5 or 6), and Earth unlocks at level 9 or 10.

Switching attunements is similar to changing weapons on other classes. If all five weapon skills in Fire are unlocked, when the player unlocks and switches to Water for the first time, only the first Water ability is available. As they are used, subsequent abilities unlock. When Air attunement unlocks, the player is forced to train their weapons skills yet again. While this seems very similar to other profession’s training different weapon skills, in practice it ends up being much more frustrating. By the time I had unlocked the final attunement (Earth), I already had access to several high DPS abilities, some medium DPS utility abilites and a few low DPS mobility abilites, all already on my toolbar, only two button presses away. Forcing myself to not use those skills in order to unlock the new Earth skills was not enjoyable and really limited my play options.

Having to repeat this process for more than one weapon set was beyond my capacity for tolerance. Particularly when, after unlocking the third attunement (Air) I found myself switching back to Water or Fire (mostly Water) in most fights.

I believe that most players come the Elementalist profession for the Fire attunement. I actually found that Water was the most useful for my playstyle. The #2, #3 and #5 abilities are all ground targeted and have a short time delay. My strategy in a fight quickly became a kiting tactic. I would run away, drop the GTAE at my feet as a I ran, and the poor sots chasing me would run right through an ice field, or into the AE range of an ice grenade. And if they actually managed to catch me, all of these abilities granted me a small heal at the same time.

Once I had developed this playstyle, it was extremely difficult to unlock the Air abilities. Even though Air and Earth both provide a lot of new utility, the later attunements are arguably weaker than the first two. (In my opinion, Fire and Water are the strongest attunements.) This made it even more difficult to work through Air and Earth, since the player is forced to ignore the powerful abilities they have already unlocked.

In the four hours I played the Elementalist, I was able to develop up to level 11, unlocked all five of the Fire and Water skills, four of the Air skills, but only one of the Earth skills for a single weapon set. This, in my opinion, is far too slow character development. On every other class, I had unlocked all of the basic skills and abilities by the time I had reached level 10, and spent the next 10 or so levels refining my playstyle. I can see it taking up to level 20 to simply unlock all of the weapons abilities on the Elementalist.

I was initially excited by this profession and thought it would be challenging and fun to play, but after I tried it, this class is simply not the right choice for me. I will break from posting a "build" here, since I do not feel that my play session really was able to generate anything worthwhile.

After I completed running through all of the heavy and medium armor classes, it was time to start running through the light armored ones. In Guild Wars 2 these are called “scholar” professions, but let’s be honest here. It’s an MMO. These are casters!

I traditionally do not play caster classes very well. As I’ve said several times, I tend to prefer heavy armor classes, getting into the mix with the melee, and fights that tend to last a relatively long time. Casters are everything that I have not described. They are lightly armored and tend to die quickly. To make up for that lack, they output tremendous levels of damage, leading to the popular phrase “glass cannon”. I strongly suspected that I was not going to enjoy playing a caster, so I picked the one that was least attractive to me as my initial foray: the Mesmer. For reference, this was my second character created during BWE2, so any bugs, issues and imbalances that I mention were present at that time, but may have been fixed, resolved or corrected by now.

Like all of the caster classes, the Mesmer starts with a single one-handed scepter as their initial weapon. I was surprised by the #2 skill on this weapon and actually didn’t figure out how it worked until much later, which prompted me to return to Scepter. This is a “block” similar to the warrior’s Mace #2 and offhand Sword #5, but instead of just timing out and doing something if you weren’t attacked, the mesmer’s Scepter #2 chains to a followup skill. In this case, if the block fails (ie. you used it when no one was attacking you, or the attack does not come in the very short 2 second duration of the “block’ effect) the ability simply goes on cooldown and nothing happens. But while the block is active, the followup skill allows you to “cancel’ the block and trigger a second effect. For this ability, that happens to be a ranged Blinding beam effect. Effectively, this wraps two weapons skills on one button. Press once for a very short duration single-attack block; double-tap for a ranged blind effect. It’s worth noting that this dual-skill ability meshes very well with the scepter #3 ability which puts Confusion on your opponent, making them take damage when they use any ability. Confused and blinded (or blocked) means that they are doing damage to themselves, and not doing any to you.

It’s also worth mentioning that using this weapon effectively is pretty difficult. I completely missed out on the utility of these skills at first, even though I used a Scepter for nearly 10 levels of play time.

The first off-hand weapon I found was a Focus. Scepter and Focus were my ranged mainstays on the guardian, so it seemed to be a good match to try out. The Focus #4 is mostly a utility skill, putting down a speed/snare wall. I used this to good effect in a Personal Story mission where I ended up kiting hordes of bandits across the instance and back. But when I unlocked Focus #5 (summons an illusion that blocks projectiles), I started to realize that this profession was not at all what I expected.

Mesmer is not a caster class. Well, it is in that it wear tissue paper armor, and generally speaking it doesn’t go around hitting people with large chunks of virtual metal. But for playstyle? The Mesmer is a Tank class! Even though I still had not developed any real synergies between the weapon skills, out of my five weapon skills, two of them were almost completely defensive abilities. And both of them had a small offensive component which allowed for a very “active” tank style, much like my beloved Reaver from DAoC. Where the Reaver was a completely reactional/positional fighter, doing most of its damage after triggers from the opponent or form being in a specific position during fights, the Mesmer is more of a “control” fighter. The Mesmer dictates where the fight will go and uses that to their advantage. The Scepter #2 and #3 abilities are a perfect example. By Blinding and Confusing an opponent, the Mesmer is basically telling you to stop attacking them. A poor player who mashes buttons and doesn’t pay attention to conditions will fight a Mesmer and lose and not realize what killed them. A good player fighting a Mesmer will be forced to switch strategies several times during the fight to avoid killing themselves.

The biggest similarity between the Reaver and the Mesmer is this: Most people that play them are not going to get it. Oh sure, they’ll have fun and there will be one or two “faceroller” abilities that will make everyone go “Holy Crap! Overpowered!” (For the Reaver this was the infamous Leviathan.) But for the most part, outside of those simple combos, the “average” player will not be very effective. But for the player for whom the class “clicks”, they are going to be able to (in the words of one of the DAoC devs) “bounce sparks off the ass of anyone else.”

My point is that is going to be my longest profession posting. You’ve been warned.

The next weapon I found was a Sword. I wasn’t really enjoying the offhand focus, so I unlocked the offhand sword abilities first. #4 is another dual-ability skill, but used traditionally, it is simply a second single attack block, just like Scepter #2. #5 summons an illusion that fights for you. It was about this time that I realized that the “block” abilities on Scepter #2 and Sword #4 had a followup skill. For the sword block, the followup is a ranged daze/interrupt. It also is a “leap” finisher, even though you don’t actually leap and it acts like a projectile. So for this ability, a single tap is an ordinary block, and a double tap is a ranged interrupt, on a 15 second cooldown.

Offhand Sword couples very well with Scepter for a very defensive style of play. Of the seven weapon skills you have access to, two of them are blocks, and one of them summons a pretty tough “pet” illusionary swordsman. Drawbacks of this combo are that using this weapon set effectively requires a lot of skillful finger dancing (two of the abilities are a double-tap to trigger) and the lack of “on demand” illusion summoning. With the right utility skill selection, this could be a very effective (albeit hard to play) weapon choice.

Since I already had a Sword, I switched to Sword/Focus. The Sword mainhand abilities really captured me, particularly #2. I believe that this is going to be one of the two “faceroller” Mesmer skills. This ability makes the Mesmer immune to damage for about a second or two, while unleashing a pretty massive melee attack, on a ten second cooldown. As expected, while this can be a devastating ability against an unskilled or inattentive opponent, it is very easy to dodge or simply move away from. The sword #3 is yet another dual-function ability that seems straightforward, but will really shine in the hands of a skilled player. Press the ability once to summon an illusionary swordsman that leaps at your target (which is, in fact, a “leap” combo) and snares them. Press it again quickly to swap places with the illusion and root any enemies nearby. This ability is great for mobility, allowing the Mesmer to enter a melee fight from range (twice.. if you count the illusion), or it can be used defensively to snare/root opponents before making a quick (and potentially invisible) exit. Finally, the Sword’s 3-attack spam chain applies 10 stacks of Vulnerability on the opponent, followed by a boon canceling effect. This is pretty powerful in a more subtle way. Rather than straight up hitpoint damage, this effectively nerfs the opponent’s armor, making them much easier to hurt, and stops them from using HoT regens, or damage boosters of their own. Mainhand sword is a very solid weapon choice!

Since I was happy with my mainhand Sword, I explored the offhand options. I had already unlocked offhand sword and focus, but neither or those seemed to be all that compelling to me. Sword/Sword does provide a very interesting mix of offense and active defense, but it didn’t really grab me. Sword/Focus also provides a nice mix of offensive punch, with a more passive defense and some great utility, but again, it did not grab me.

Offhand pistol, however, did. The #4 ability does a CRAZY amount of burst damage. It summons an illusory pistolier who uses a skill similar to the thief’s Pistol/Pistol “Unload” ability, shooting like ten times in two seconds. Of course, to keep this ability from being crazy overpowered, the pistolier only unloads this ability once every dozen seconds or so. Still, as a ranged burst DPS skill, it is pretty impressive. This skill is probably going to be another of the Mesmer’s “overpowered” abilities since it does provide a fire-and-forget very high burst. The catch is that since it is burst, a skilled player can turtle (with a shield or other defensive ability) for a second and avoid most of the damage and then ignore the pistolier. They won’t even need to waste time killing him, since he doesn’t DO anything outside of that small burst. The #5 ability is a bouncing attack that will hit three targets and apply a different effect to each one. In order, it applies a 2 second stun, a 2 second daze, and, finally, a blind. The catch is that it only applies one effect per “bounce” so against a single target, it will NEVER apply the daze or the blind. And with uncontrollable bounce, this skill will undoubtedly result in over-agro and additional (unintentional) pulls. Still, the #4 ability is really powerful and easily makes up for the unpredictability of the #5.

Similarly, offhand Torch is another winner. The #4 ability (called “the Prestige”) grants the Mesmer three seconds of stealth while applying blindness to adjacent opponents. This can be used as an “head start” on escaping from a fight gone bad, particularly if triggered right after the mainhand Sword #3 snare/root. When the Mesmer reappears, they apply three stacks of Burning on any adjacent enemies. This ability has so much utility and different potential uses that it boggle the mind. On the other hand, it is not very straightforward to use. The Burning DoT is applied as a PBAE, and it is a three-second delay after casting, so it is not a normal DoT. The stealth is only three-seconds long, and slow running speeds make it a poor alpha-strike ability. The blind is applied with the stealth, and only absorbs a single attack, which will likely be made while the Mesmer is stealthed, so it can’t even be used as a normal defensive ability. However, this combination of effects, when used properly, can turn the Mesmer into a blinding, stealthed, fireball. The Torch #5 is equally useful, but in a much more subtle way. It summons an illusory caster that applies a damage shield to allies, and confusion to enemies. Either way, this discourages the opponent from hitting the Mesmer, and makes for a great defensive tool.

The first two-handed weapon I found was a Staff. Now a lot of people really like Staff Mesmers. I am not one of them. My biggest gripe with the Staff is that the effects are unpredictable. The spam attack shoots a slow ball that hits multiple people, friend and foe alike. For friendly targets, it applies a random boon. It might apply Fury, or it could apply Might, but never both. For opponents, it inflicts one random condition: maybe Burning, maybe Bleeding, or maybe Vulnerability. Staff #2 summons a illusionary caster that uses the Staff spam attack. Staff #3 summons an illusionary caster that acts like a Ranger DPS pet: it’s not great damage, and it tends to die fast. #4 is a defensive armor ability that triggers when you get hit. Now, I’ve never been a fan of abilities that require me to take damage to trigger. The whole reason I’m using the ability is to avoid damage, not cause it! In any case, the effect of the armor spell is, of course, random. There are five possible effects, two of which are good for the Mesmer (Protection or Regenration) and three that are bad for the opponent (Confusion, a snare, or Blind), but you don’t get to select which one you get or apply. It’s random! The final Staff ability is the one that everyone loves to see and is actually kinda neat, but with a very long 40 second cooldown, and seven completely random effects, it really didn’t make me want to use Staff. You might notice the word “random” being used a lot in these descriptions. That’s why I couldn’t stick with Staff. I’m all for a little randomness. I don’t want my weapon to do exactly the same damage every time I use it. But I do want to be able to rely on it doing damage every time, and not surprise me with a bonus buff or heal every once in a while. Having said that, I will happily take advantage of every Chaos Storm I see, and combo the hell out of it.

And what Mesmer discussion could ignore the two-handed Greatsword? This weapon has been the star of many YouTube Memser videos, and for good reason. Who expected a caster class, using a giant two-handed sword would be using it to shoot laser beams at enemies from long range? Who saw them having the ability to stab the sword into the ground and have the tip stab back up and apply Vulnerability to a foe that is well out of melee range?? Who expected them to swing the sword in a cone AE in front of them and knockback enemies (potentially off a cliff)??? No one did, that’s who! And yet these are the three Mesmer Greatsword “melee” abilities. The other two abilities are a summon that brings an illusory Greatsword Warrior that uses Whirlwind Attack, and a giant sword toss that hits three enemies and summons an illusory Warrior. Greatsword is flashy, it’s fun, it’s pretty simple, and it’s mostly effective. I expect this will be the “go to” weapon for newbie Mesmers. The problem with this is that the spam attack has a very loud sound effect that plays on every shot, and it can get annoying really fast.

The Mesmer’s special class abilities all involve the illusory summons. The Mesmer can “shatter” them at will, providing one of four different effects. Managing and shattering the illusions (especially for a Greatsword user) is really going to separate the good from the bad Mesmers. A Mesmer that ignores his shatters and just uses the normal abilities is going to be okay. A Mesmer that uses the normal abilities and knows when to shatter and which shatter to use, is going to be amazingly powerful.

The simplest shatter is Mind Wrack (F1). This makes all of your current illusions explode right where they are, causing AE damage to everyone nearby them at the time. While this seems straightforward, it really is situational. If you had three melee illusions in a fight with a single opponent, this would be three AE bombs going off right next to them. On the other hand, if you had caster illusions fighting, using this would be pointless since they would explode far away from any opponents.

One of the more interesting shatters is Cry of Frustration (F2). Similar to mind Wrack in that it causes illusions to explode where they are, but rather than doing damage, each clone applies 5 stacks of Confusion to nearby enemies. Confusion is, in my opinion, one of the most powerful tools in the Mesmer arsenal. It causes damage each time a skill is used. So, with three illusions, a single Mesmer could potentially apply fifteen stacks of confusion to multiple foes, causing each of them damage for their next fifteen skill usages. Even if the Mesmer dies in the fight, the conditions can persist, allowing the Mesmer to do additional damage even when they are no longer an active participant in the fight!

Diversion is the third shatter, and it is a bit unique. This shatter makes the illusions charge their target, then interrupt them. This is especially useful with ranged illusions. Since they will likely have different distances to cover, they will arrive at the target at different times, providing three different interrupts. Also, since shatters are not technically an “ability”, it may be possible to use this to interrupt an enemies’ channeled attack even while stunned or knocked down!

The final shatter is a defensive ability. Rather than exploding the illusions for an effect on the enemy, this one puts an effect on the Mesmer. What it does is allow the Mesmer to completely avoid one attack for each illusion. If they shatter all three illusions, the Mesmer would be invulnerable for the next three attacks.

I did not experiment much with the three Mesmer heals, and stuck to the default one for the duration of my play session. The secondary option is a projectile reflection/heal, which would be very useful when fleeing from a fight, and being shot at the whole way. The healing mantra is something I really wished I had experimented with. At the time, I didn’t understand how Mantras worked. Essentially, these are pre-casted spells that you “load”, and then can be triggered instantly at any time, even while in the middle of an channeled ability without interrupting it!! The catch is that the pre-cast is slow and forces you to stop moving, so it can’t be chained. Which is a good thing since the cooldown on the healing Mantra is only 8 seconds!

The Mesmer has a wide variety of utility skills. This was the first BWE that had the tiered utility skills, and after buying all of the passive Signets, I really did not test many of these skills. Due to time constraints (and skill point limits) during BWE2, I was not able to experiment with very many of them. Here are the ones I did try out:

Signet of Inspiration – great signet that gives a random boon every ten seconds. I can’t tell how many times it would magically pop out a speed boost when I was running, or a health regen in a close fight. The active ability allows you to buff everyone around you with the same boon. It’s a 1 point skill, and I would make this one of my first purchases! I kept this loaded for my entire play session.

Signet of Domination – increased power. I may have already been capped on power since I was concentrating on keeping that stat very high, but I did not see any appreciable return from this signet.

Signet of Midnight – adds duration to boons. I thought this would pair well with the prior skills, but the durations were so short that the additional time was nearly insignificant.

Signet of illusions – adds health to the illusions. This was useful in learning how to shatter. It kept my illusions alive long enough for the “shatter now!” message to stumble around in my brain before running down to my fingers and jumping on the F-keys.

Blink – teleport. This was a fun one for getting around, but unlike some of the other classes “jump” skills, this one requires there to be a valid path to your target. It cannot be used to teleport through, for example, a jumping puzzle. If you try this (and I did!) all that happens is that you move in the direction of your target up to the edge of your current platform, and then stop. Still, this has some pretty obvious mobility uses in a fight.

I did not try any of the Mantras, I wish I had!
I did not play with Portal Entre, I wish I had!
I did not try Decoy, which would be a great skill for a non-torch using Mesmer.
I was playing a PvE character, and only made it to level 20 (and just barely that!) so I was not able to try out any of the elite skills.

For my trait, I went into the Chaos line choosing the Descent into Madness trait. While this may not have been a good PvP choice, it was a ton of fun in PvE and world exploration. The reduction in falling damage was neat, but being able to summon a Chaos storm on demand was even better. I was climbing up on rocks and things in fights just so I could drop down and pop one.

Overall, the Mesmer went from being a class that I was almost completely not interested in, to my favorite class in the game. I will be playing one of these guys as my “main” character come release time. At first I was treating the illusions as summonable allies or pets (a la the Necromancer) but once I started to understand the shatters, the class really started to wake up for me. I hope to get better at managing the illusions as I play it more. I ended this play session at level 20, from 100% PvE play. My final spec can be found HERE.

(I told you this was going to be a long one! I'll edit typos later....)

I was discussing my Ranger experience with another GW2 player at my office and he told me that the melee-heavy style I had adopted while playing the Ranger was almost identical to the way he was playing his Thief. I had already decided that the next profession I was going to try was Thief anyway, so it seemed a bit serendipitous. So when BWE2 rolled around, the very first thing I did was create a new Norn Thief.

As always, I feel obligated to point out that my preference tends to favor “tank” classes, and longer fights where the timing and situational use of skills tend to matter more.

Because the thief has a fairly limited selection of weapons (sword, dagger, or pistol mainhand; dagger or pistol offhand; two-handed shortbow), my usual strategy of unlocking all weaponskills worked flawlessly. It was actually quite fast to unlock all of them. Once done, it only took a few fights with each combination to see which skills were working for me and which ones were not.

I thought the unique #3 “combo” skill for each weapon combination would add complexity to weapon choices. In actual practice, it felt like it was mostly tied to the offhand weapon; instead of being three skills determined by the main hand weapon and two skills determined by the offhand weapon, it felt like there were two skills from the mainhand and three skills from the offhand. And with only two choices on the offhand, it was pretty easy to run through them.

Mainhand sword really didn’t do much for me. The primary attack chain was basically damage. It did have a very short duration snare on the third attack in the chain, but it was almost impossible to capitalize on this effect. It took too long to land initially. Once done, the short duration forced the player to continually refresh the effect, which ties you to simply using the spam attack. The #2 sword attack is the analog to the jump out/in sword attack that I loved on the ranger. The problem with this ability is that the thief’s version is jump in first, then out, and the thief already has a leap in with the F1 “steal” ability, making a second “leap into melee” skill practically useless. Especially when the followup is “leap back to where you were” – and 95% of the time “where you were” was already in melee range.

Mainhand dagger suffered in exactly the same way. The spam attack chain was just more damage and the second attack skill was a similarly useless, duplicated, leap skill.

Mainhand pistol clicked for me. The spam attack not only did damage, but also inflicted a bleeding condition. (And I love those DoT conditions!) When used from stealth, it unloads several rapid-fire shots, which instantly applies several stackable bleeds. And even though it is a ranged attack, it could be used from melee range with no detriment.

As for the offhand options, pistol seemed to pair well with the sword or dagger, providing for a defensive melee support. The fixed #4 and #5 skills are a daze (interrupt) and a blind, both of which are used to best effect when one is in melee range with the opponent. The combo skills are a stun (with sword), a blind (with dagger), or a massive DPS burst (with pistol). The dual-pistol DPS combo skill was really fun, but it really didn’t make up for the general lack of ranged utility with the pistol offhand. The dagger/pistol combo effect (blind) duplicated one of the offhand pistol skills, making it not terribly useful. Similarly, the sword/pistol combo effect (stun) has such a short duration that it is really only useful as an interrupt, which duplicates the other full-time offhand pistol skill.

Offhand dagger seemed to have more overall utility. The #5 skill is an on-demand 3-second stealth ability, albeit at a high initiative cost. #4 is a short-range multiple target snare ability, incredibly useful for delaying advancing opponents or catching fleeing enemies. The combo skills include an evade/reposition (with sword), a high DPS bleed (with dagger) and a stealth/escape (with pistol). All three of these abilities mesh very well with their mainhand partners. The sword ability is exactly the same as the #3 ranger sword ability that I had grown so enamored to in my last play session. It’s very useful in melee letting the player both avoid damage, and move to a new location on the battlefield simultaneously. Used thoughtfully, it can be used to dodge a large hit without any endurance cost. The dagger ability not only does a large amount of damage and stacks several DoT conditions but is also a “whirl” finisher. It’s no coincidence that whirl finishers have come to be known as “spin-to-win”. The pistol ability provides a second stealth-on-demand while simultaneously moving the player out of melee range. This was a great first-use ability, and provided a “jump out” ability followup to the “jump in” F1 steal ability.

Obviously, my preference fell pretty strongly towards the pistol/dagger combination.

The shortbow offers some really interesting abilities, but it’s a two-handed weapon. The #2 ability is a ground targeted AE DPS skill with a variable radius. #3 is a snare shot with a leap away. #4 is a ground targeted AE that inflicts a strong poison DoT condition. #5 is a fantastic mobility ability that allows the thief to teleport to a ground targeted location. Collectively, these abilities offer a ton of utility, but ground targeting requires a lot of finger waggling. Since my preference was to use a ranged weapon (pistol) in my main hand, the ranged bow attacks did not offer enough variability to make me want to use the bow in fights, but I did keep the shortbow in my swap slot just for the #5 mobility skill during long distance travel and the ground targeted AE effects when other players were fighting in a ball of MOBs.

For my healing skill, I ended up using the Signet of Malice. The passive health regeneration while fighting added a little bump to the skill, and the cooldown on the active heal was only 5 seconds longer than the default healing skill, while healing for a similar amount. The default heal skill might be slightly more useful against skilled PvP opponents due to the instant stun break. Unfortunately, I was on a “new” server for BWE2 and our initial matchup was against an established server. Within hours after the weekend started, the established server had steamrolled all of WvW, and they had a large group camped directly outside of our home keep. This meant that I wasn’t able to test out different healing abilities in WvW situations.

As per my usual preference, I started out with passive utility skills: Signet of Shadows (for the speed increase), Signet of Agility (for the increased crit rate), and Infiltrator’s Signet (for the increased initiative). While this was a good no-brainer setup, I never felt like I was getting much utility from these so-called utility skills. I experimented a bit with poisons, but since they only affect the “next X attacks” and have a relatively long cooldown, these skills ended up requiring too much situational awareness for me to get much utility form them. By the time I had run through these skills, I was out of skill points, so I was unable to evaluate some of the more interesting utility skills.

I didn’t figure out how to effectively use the thief’s F1 “steal” skill until I was nearly level 19 (out of the 20 levels I played). It is a “jump into melee” skill that changes into something new every time you use it. The new skill that is granted depends on the “class” of opponent you jump on. For example, if you jump on a melee class, you might get a followup that blinds the opponent for a short time. But since the followup ability is semi random, the steal can be difficult use. What I found to be very effective (for my weapon selection) was to leap into combat, steal something, then use my #3 combo ability to leap back out. This gave me a second to look at what I had gotten and decide whether to use it immediately, or what to watch for to maximize its effectiveness in the coming fight.

I specialized into the Tactics line and chose the Uncatchable trait. This trait had me throwing caltrops on each dodge. After playing four characters to level 20+, I have gotten fairly good at dodging at opportune and appropriate times during combat. Tossing caltrops on each dodge really had a pretty major effect on each fight. With continual dodging, this ability kept opponents almost continually snared and really reduced their mobility in a fight. If I was trying to escape a fight, I could dodge once and snare all chasing opponents without blowing a cooldown ability, without aiming, and without any additional effort.

The thief’s initiative system didn’t work as well as I had hoped. While the lack of cooldowns is supposed to allow any ability to be chained or used at any time, the long global cooldown really stopped the thief from stacking several abilities at once and then moving on, which was my expectation. In practice, the lack of skill cooldowns really didn’t allow skills to be used faster than is possible on any other class, and, in some cases, the initiative system actually slowed my skill use down. The one upside to the system is that it made me consider every skill use a bit more since I knew that initiative was a finite resource that needed to be doled out carefully. At the end of the day, the initiative-based combat didn’t offer any real advantage over cooldown-based combat.

Overall I found the thief to be an entertaining profession, but not really my style. I would probably play one as an alt, but it won’t be my main class. It really depends on actively managing alpha-strike utility skills and roll-of-the-dice abilities that have semi-random effects. I ended my play session after achieving level 20 from purely PvE play. My final spec can be found HERE.

My second foray into the “adventurer” medium-armored classes was the Ranger. This was the fourth and final profession that I was able to squeeze into the first BWE. At the time I played it, this profession has some definitely “unfinished” aspects, but despite the flaws, I really enjoyed the experience. I ended the weekend with the ranger at level 24, with about 60% of my time in WvW.

Traditionally, I play a “tank” class. Heavy armor, low DPS, and long, drawn out fights. The ranger was the opposite of this in almost every regard.

Very surprisingly, after playing the warrior and engineer, the ranger actually felt very “tanky”. No so much due to out-and-out protection, but more due to the evasive nature and high mobility of the class. It may also have been that after playing three other professions for many hours, I was getting better at the game.

My first goal is typically to unlock the various weapon skills as quickly as possible. I’m starting to question this strategy. While I am opening up weapons, I tend to look at them in a very short-sighted fashion and not evaluate their overall value very well. When I come across a weapon or combination that I like, I tend to stick with it and not look at the other options creatively. I believe this really impacted my experience with the ranger profession, particularly with respect to greatsword play.

The ranger can use two different types of bows (short and long – both of which have the same effective range but offer different skills), a greatsword, and two mainhand weapons in combination with four offhand weapons. That’s a lot of different weapon types!

The default starter weapon is a one-handed axe. I had heard a lot about the #1 ability being incredibly useful. As a more tanky/control type player, I found it to be both unpredictable and annoying. It often would hit a target, bounce and pull two additional adds that I didn’t want.

I switched to bow as quickly as I could, but found that the shortbow was not my style. While I do enjoy positional play, it is very difficult for me to maintin optimal position when dealing range. I think in the hands of a different player, it might have been effective, but I never could grasp the synergy of the abilities. In particular I am not fond of “cone” abilities like the shortbow #2. Shortbow #4 provides a pet buff and my pet was dead the vast majority of the time, lessening this ability’s utility for me.

Longbow worked m uch better for me and I ended up keeping it as one of my two active weapons for my entire play session. But it really required keeping the target at long range to be most effective. The only real control ability is on #5 with a long cooldown. In WvW (or group encounters where someone else is controlling the battlefield) the longbow is capable of devastating levels of damage. In particular, I was able to take another player (in WvW) from full health, down to about 30% health with one rotation. This makes the longbow a great sniping/support tool, but not very effective for solo play.

I tried the greatsword and had moderate success with it. The #2 skill offered great mobility, but required a lot of targeting control. If you targeted correctly, the leap could be used as a linear damage ability, hitting multiple targets, and hitting them hard! But if you are targeted on something not in your direct view, often the leap would take you in a direction you weren’t expecting, completely missing what you were aiming for and wasting a cooldown. I suspect that if I had stuck with this, I would have gotten more mileage out of it, but I was still trying things out.

Mainhand sword stuck with me. Despite being a moderately lightly armored “adventurer” profession, I was able avoid a lot of hits by liberal use of the sword #2 and #3 abilities. I would say that both of these abilities require the same type of “learning” that the greatsword #2 does, but for some reason the one-handed abilities gelled for me in the way that the 2H sword’s did not. I was leaping out of melee, repositioning, leaping back in, snaring folks, and spinning around behind my targets with wild abandon. I was actually using the #2 and #3 abilities so often that I started to internalize the cooldowns.

As for the offhand, I liked the warhorn’s #5, but the #4 ability was on too long of a cooldown to make it useful to me. Players that are more accustomed to burst DPS would probably enjoy this ability though. Dagger #4 was too similar to the sword #3 for my tastes, and the #5 was too short of range to be effective as a closer. Both of the torch abilities are nice, but I’m finding that burning effects (in general) are too common and I’d rather capitalize on others’ fires than try to create my own. Offhand axe offered both a short range attack plus a defensive ability, both of which fit my style very well. Plus the whirl finisher on axe #5 gave me the perfect ability to leverage all of that overcommon fire! Had the offhand axe #4 had a snare (even at the cost of shorter range) this would have been my perfect weapon selection.

The default healing ability provided healing to both the player and the pet, but since my pet was usually dead, it really didn’t do much for me. The cooldown on the self-regen was quite long, and I found myself without healing most of the time. I took the compromise for the healing spring. While this really impacted my mobility, it also gave me more group utility. And in stationary fights (for example when somone else was providing control) the overall healing effect was much larger.

For utility skills, at first I took passive signets: Signet of the Hunt for the speed boost, and Signet of the Wild for the health regeneration. I also took a single trap skill (Viper’s Nest). After a bit of play, I dumped the Signet of the Wild (the regen level was so low that it was unnoticeable) and added a Flame Trap. I was surprised how fast the traps were able to be set, and used them to decent effect even in WvW. The sword #2 ability really helped with this, allowing me to set both traps for a pursuing enemy, then use the leap away to gain distance and escape, or to jump back in, crippling them and then running away. Either way, they would take the full brunt of both traps, while only hitting me once or twice. It didn’t take long before I was traited to maximize my trap effectiveness. and had completely dumped the passives in favor of a hotkeyed DPS booster.

The ranger’s pet was, in my opinion, useless. While it was alive, it did provide some minor tank-ability and a small amount of DPS. But it would die in every single fight, even a one-v-one with a same level MOB. Rezing it after every fight added downtime to my play, and the "dead" pet wandering around was almost always in the way of quick looting, taliing to a NPC or activating world items. If I chose not to rez it, I lost the DPS and protection that it afforded me, making play much more difficult. Overall, it felt more like a detriment to me than an added bonus. The only pet that had any decent stayability was the bear, but it had a less-than-stellar selectable ability.

Managing the selectable pet skill on F2 felt odd as well. Other classes have their class “thing” on F1, but since F1 swaps between the two “active” pets, the ranger is constantly looking the F2 button. The pet’s #3 and #4 abilites were not controllable by the player, leaving the player to the whims of the pet AI. More often than not, the pet would blow it’s “big hit” ability on an opponent that was nearly dead, wasting most of the effectiveness of the ability, or heal itself when it was not taking damage, or somthing similarly boneheaded. Basically the pet AI was simply spamming cooldowns in combat, which is not a very effective way to play.

Overall, I found the ranger to be a surprise equal to the warrior. Whereas the warrior ended up being a great ranged profession, the ranger ended up being a great melee DPS profession! Even with the stupid pet being dead, a sword/axe ranger or a greatsword ranger both have great battlefield mobility, can hit like a truck and get out of a fight quickly when things turn south. The longbow offers some great group play opportunities (in terms of massive damage), and the shortbow can really shine in the hands of positional fighter.

It probably won’t be my first choice (mostly due to the difficult to manage pet) but (despite the pet issues) it really is a fun profession. I ended my ranger play session at level 24, equal to the guardian. My final spec can be found HERE

Way back when I first started playing online games (in 1984!!) it was a very collective experience. There was no internet. Online gaming wasn’t really even a Thing back then. Mentioning that you played games “online” would result in people tittering nervously behind your back as if you had just revealed that you enjoyed some deviant sexual practice. It wasn’t anathema, but it certainly wasn’t acceptable and far, far from commonplace.

There were so few of us back then that when our little gaming groups grew into small communities (as they always do) we became furious friends with each other. Even if the games we played forced us to become fierce opponents, asked us to try to will the other player out of existence with every fiber of our being, placed us in game situations where it was not just us-or-them but asked us to look at each other with inhuman disdain… even then we became brothers-in-arms. Our collective, shared experience made us One with each other, rallying together against the blind populace that did not understand what we saw in those “video game things”.

Journey is a game that encourages this kind of bonding.

In the game, your character’s actions are pretty limited. You can “use” power that you have accumulated (to go up) or you can “talk”. Talking is manifested in the game by a little mysterious glyph and a sing-song-y pinging. The beauty of this simplistic system shows up in multiplayer. Journey’s multiplayer is one of the “new” multiplayer titles that is non-traditional. As you go through the game, occasionally you will meet another player on the same Journey as yourself. There are no weapons and no trading, so your interaction options are very limited. You can’t even “talk” outside of the sing-song-y “ping-ping-pong-ping” communications.

As I was playing, I met several others. (The game does show a list of the people you "met" along the way when you complete it.) Some of them seemed as lost as I was, wandering around the world, trying to figure out how to get up the mountain. Some seemed to know where they were going. Sometimes they would show me a way to progress, softly pinging to me as they walked along the proper path. Other times, I would find the next doorway and ping back to them, as if to say “This way! Follow me!” Players would appear mysteriously. I would spot one off in the distance, running along the desert floor. We would travel together for a few moments and then I would lose sight of them and they would be gone. It was a very organic method of matchmaking and while I would see others along the way, I rarely connected with them for very long.

As I progressed through the game, my character’s scarf grew in length. I’m not certain of the mechanic, but I believe that this showed “experience”. In some games you might call it “level”. In any case, it was clear that as I did things correctly, my scarf grew in length, and with it, my “power”. It didn’t take long for me to progress to the point where I was swooping through the air. Until I met the first “monster” in the game. I didn’t even know these creatures existed. When it captured me in its gaze and blasted me, my scarf was shortened to non-existence.

I had lost my power. I was alone. I felt trapped. It was a dark level, full of power-sapping monsters. I didn’t know which way to go. I wandered aimlessly for several minutes, hoping that another traveler would appear and show me the way to go. No one came. After retracing my steps several times, I finally found the doorway to the next section of the game and started rebuilding my scarf.

I had managed to gain three panels when I met the next player. His scarf was longer than I had ever seen. Obviously, he was much more accomplished than I. So I followed him. I think he recognized me as a new player (with a tiny tiny scarf) because he constantly sang to me, showing me where to go and leading me on. I followed him through an entire level. When I would fall behind, he would wait, patiently pinging as he stood next to the next doorway, on the next platform, at the end of the next bridge. His chatter was incessant, something I was grateful for. I got lost several times, not knowing which way to go, but all I had to do was stop for a second, listen for the continually tapping pings and orient on that.

Eventually, I reached the final level. It was here that I was the leader. Maybe it is because I played so many flight sims three decades ago, but I’ve always had an easy time with 3D puzzles. The last level was to follow a path that was not only winding, but had a lot of vertical component. I literally flew through this section of the game. I rocketed up, and up, and up, and up. Over waterfalls, up cliffsides, higher and higher I climbed into the clear blue sky, while the game’s music swelled, and birds flew around me.

It seemed like only a flash before I was at the summit, my goal in sight. I started the final walk into the light that had been the goal of my quest. I was literally moments away from winning the game. But then…

I listened.

I heard him.

My fellow companion. I could hear him continually pinging as he struggled to keep up with me. I stopped and turned away from the light.

I waited.

He came running up to me. “Ping ping ping pong ping pong!” He said.

I replied, “Ping. Ping.”

He started past me towards the end-goal of the game, but then stopped. I started moving forward. Maybe it was just lag, or maybe it was intentional, but as I walked past him, he started walking beside me. He had stopped his chattering. Side-by-side we slowly, silently, walked towards the glowing portal at the end of the game.

I don’t know who it was, this faceless, nameless person who shared the previous 10 minutes of their life with me. I didn’t care what their gamertag was, how many kills they had, whether they were an elite or casual gamer. It no longer mattered if they were a school kid, a 32-year old man-child living in his parent’s attic, or a 60-year old granny. K/D ratios, leaderboard rankings, ELO scores, none of that counted for squat. All that mattered to me at that moment was that they were walking next to me.

We had beaten this.

Together.

After trying both of the “heavy” classes in Guild Wars 2, I decided to start working my way through the medium-armor classes. My first foray into this group was the engineer. Over the course of BWE1, I had three people playing Guild Wars 2 in my home. My lovely partner, my best friend and myself. At one point all three of us were playing engineers.

At this point, I’ll mention once again that my preferences are biased strongly towards being a traditional tank class. I enjoy fights that last a long time and require a lot of maneuvering. A fight where the apparent victor changes several times over the course of the bout is (to me) much more exciting and fun than a fight where the winner is decided instantly or where the fight is over in a matter of seconds.

As always, my first goal was to unlock all of the weapons abilities for the profession.

The engineer is starts with a single pistol, which is a decent weapon. However, after playing the guardian and warrior classes, the DPS output of the engineer’s pistol felt very lackluster. The off-hand pistol abilities did not provide much additional utility, mobility or high-DPS burst, making the combination feel even more awkward. Off-hand shield seemed moderately defensive, but the long cooldowns made it difficult to use either shield ability effectively.

Rifle felt similarly anemic, and had some odd skill combinations. In particular, the #3 and #4 abilities seemed to lack synergy. Similarly, #5 seemed to be a bit schizophrenic: it does a considerable amount of damage when used at point blank range (hitting the enemy twice) but loses its mobility bonuses, OR if you use the mobility portion, the damage done drops nearly to the point of uselessness.

Even worse, unlike the prior two professions I had tried out, the engineer did not allow for “swapping” weapons. Rather than selecting two weapons that complimented each other and switching between them as needed (an aspect of the game that I found to be very enjoyable), the engineer is limited to a single weapon set.

They make up for this lack with their “utility tool” bar, four abilities that sit on the F1 to F4 keys, that basically act like separate weapons sets. These weapon-esque skills are selected by the utility skills slotted into the 7 through 9 skills. For example, the F1 class ability is a skill that is selected depending on which of the profession’s three healing skills are on the player’s hotbar. F2, F3 and F4 are determined by which utility skill the player loads into slots, 7, 8, and 9, respectively.

And this is where my engineer experience took a bad turn.

Some people will absolutely love this class, and be very effective at it. I am not one of them. Having a utility skill that does Thing X, and a class-specific F-key skill that also does Thing X (or at least something very closely related to Thing X… let’s call it Thing X.1) seems cumbersome and awkward to me. This type of setup is advantageous for the real weapon-y utility skills like the flamethrower, bomb kit or grenade kit. For these tools, the F-key skill is more-or-less a sixth “weapon” skill which adds utility. For everything else, it feels like the designers were just searching for a half-way decent skill to put on the F-key, and were only moderately successful.

For my first utility skill, I saved up seven skill points and selected the Rocket Turret. This was pretty effective in short to mid-range fights. The turret did a decent amount of damage (albeit at a slow fire rate, with missiles that could be dodged), and could be overcharged every 20 seconds to do much more damage. And in a pinch, the player could detonate the turret for pretty significant PBAE damage. The problem with turrets are the incredibly long 60-second cooldown. Once placed, it was practically impossible to reposition. Even for stationary fighting (like command points in WvW) where turrets could be extremely powerful, if the turret is accidentally placed in a location where it cannot see enemies, or has it’s shots blocked by terrain, it can’t simply be “moved” to a better spot. You basically have to detonate it (or pick it up... but why would you do that when you can detonate it?) and wait out the cooldown before trying again. This was incredibly frustrating!

After slogging along with the engineer profession for some time, I decided that I simply wasn’t having fun with it. Games are supposed to fun. We play them for entertainment. Since I wasn’t having fun, I decided to abandon the engineer at level 9, with only one utility skill and no traits. My experience probably would have been very different if I had selected a different utility skill (like flamethrower, or grenades), but that wasn’t the case.

My final (very low level) spec can be found HERE

The second profession I tried in the first Guild Wars 2 beta weekend event (BWE1) was a human warrior. I think it’s important to point out the use of the word profession rather than class. Unlike most other MMOs, each profession in Guild Wars 2 actually plays is several different classes, depending on what weapons are equipped. The warrior was my first real taste of how dramatic this difference can be.

I leveled this character up to level 15 in the time I spent with it. My play time on this character was spent mostly in PvE – I completed all 20 levels of the personal story available during the BWE – with only about 10% of my time in WvW.

In the interested of full disclosure, I should point out that I was coming to this character directly after playing a norn guardian up to level 24, and that I have traditionally played a “tank” class. Also, I have a long history of being a skilled “kiter”, going all the way back to games I played in the early 1990s. I mention this because those facts have undoubtedly affected my impressions and opinions.

My first impression of the warrior was that they are fragile. Even with heavy armor and one of the largest hitpoint pools in the game, I quickly had to modify my playstyle from the guardian’s “scream and leap”, to a more cautious “fighting around the fringes” style. It may have simply been due to the abrupt change from a high-mitigation character, but the warrior really felt like a fragile DPS profession, and not a heavily armored one. Because of the huge hitpoint total, the biggest self heal was only a 20% heal. Whereas the guardian was quite happy to pop the self heal at less than ½ heaIth and be refilled to nearly full, I found that I had to be much more proactive on the warrior and use the self heal at around 75% health. If I waited until I was at ½ health (or less) to use it, I would often be dead before the 40 second cooldown was up.

As an aside, I found the human areas to be much more generic than the norn zones. The first chapter of my “street rat” human personal story was pretty uninteresting. The people in my story did not seem to be well developed, and felt more like throwaway, background characters. The buddy/love-interest character of Quinn did not seem likable, and I really did not bond to him or his problems at any time. When given the choice, I did choose to save him specifically (as opposed to stopping the bandits from poisoning the water supply), which, after playing a different character, I think was a more difficult path to complete, but only because I felt that the character I was playing would have done that. (Yes, I sometimes role-play. Try not to faint.) But as a player, I really couldn’t have cared less about him. I found the second chapter (the unknown parents storyline) much more interesting, but that may have been because it was steeped in Guild Wars 1 lore, which really catered to my geek interests.

As always, my first task was to unlock all of the various weapon skills and abilities.

The default starter weapon combination is a sword/shield. This really added to the fragile DPS feel of the class. The defensive shield ability on #5 took a long time to unlock, and the long cooldown made it very difficult to use effectively. The offensive shield ability on #4 did not add any real functionality over the sword #2 ability, and is on a much longer cooldown. #3 provided a short duration snare for getting out of melee, but the preponderance of ranged abilities made this almost useless against anything other than a pure melee opponent. The auto-attack was strongest with its initial abilities that apply a bleed, with the finisher being the weakest attack in the chain. As you have probably guessed, I did not enjoy this weapon combination.

The warrior has many weapon choices and combinations and I tried pretty much every possible combination for at least one protracted fight. Rather than list them all (for reasons which will be made clearer), I will point out a few notable abilities that stood out for me. Generally speaking (and surprisingly), melee was not a very good place for a warrior to be.

Mace/sword is a good defensive weapon selection, and is ideal for melee duels or dealing with veteran or champion MOBs. Between the mace #2 and the sword #5 abilities, this combination can “turtle” incredibly well. The various other abilities add daze or stun effects as well, allowing the warrior to almost completely shut down their opponent’s DPS. On the other hand, this really only works against a single opponent, and the DPS output is so low that the player will get bored and wander off before a single fight winds to its inevitable conclusion.

Offhand warhorn provided good support abilities with a group-wide speed boost on #4 and a melee buff/debuff for allies and opponent, respectively. This would be a good choice for a group-oriented support warrior build.

Axes generally focus on AE melee damage and effects. I settled with offhand axe as my primary weapon choice at one point. The whirl finisher in conjunction with a fire effect makes for an amazing combo. Being able to transform from a melee warrior into a mobile, whirling tornado of flame that stacks a half dozen burning effects on an opponent is so much fun that it cannot be understated. I was literally cackling maniacally every time I was able to pull off this move. With a relatively short cooldown, this was probably one of my most favorite warrior experiences, but it was highly dependent on another player putting down a fire field.

Both of the two-handed melee weapons seemed lackluster compared to the guardian’s greatsword. This may have been partly due to my impression that the warrior really didn’t fare too well in a melee fight. Regardless, the 2H options didn’t feel as powerful as the guardian greatsword, and the fragility of the class made any melee fight a dicey proposition.

What was really surprising was how powerful the warrior became with ranged weapons. Despite having access to no fewer than 17 different melee weapons combinations and access to heavy armor, the warrior really excels as a ranged profession.

My first ranged weapon was a rifle. This weapon was ideal for taking down a single target without getting hit at all. This felt very natural, since the warrior seemed so fragile when in close quarters combat. In fact the #5 ability is actually a knockback, and the #2 ability is a snare, allowing the rifle warrior to keep a target at range for much longer than one might expect. The autoattack applies a stacking bleed effect. I was able to win several fights by stacking bleeds on one target and then switching to a second target, letting the bleeds finish them off. The F1 adrenaline ability, if used after the #4 debuff, could remove 40% of an opponent’s health in a single shot. Not to mention that the rifle has an incredibly long range; if a rifleman to opens a fight at maximal range, they can almost always kill an opponent without taking a single hit.

The other ranged weapon usable by warriors is the longbow. Where the rifle was a strong single target device, the longbow excels at area-effect damage and combo effects. In the hands of a skilled player, the longbow is devastating. Using the F1 ability to lay down a fire field, then following it with the #5 snare (to keep the target in the fire area), the #4 blast (to spread the fire around to even more opponents), or the #1 autoattack (to add two additional burning stacks to your target), can be incredibly effective. The #2 ability provides additional burning effects to a single target, and the #3 can be used to ignite either multiple targets (at range) or two or three stacks of burning to a single target (up close). If a warrior is traited/runed/equipped to maximize condition damage, the multitude of short-duration high-DPS burn effects will likely be extremely painful to entire groups of enemies. The drawback to the longbow is the range; the longbow only has ¾ of the range of the rifle.

Once I tried them, it didn’t take very long for me to completely abandon melee weapons in favor of the ranged options.

I chose the Healing Signet as my self-heal. This signet grants a passive hitpoint regeneration, and a fairly strong heal when activated. I think the longer cooldown was (mostly) offset by the passive regen, but once I switched to ranged weapons I almost never needed this. Even a slow backpedal (after applying a ranged snare) kept me out of melee range and dodging most ranged attacks was fairly easy.

Since I only made it to level 15, I only unlocked two utility slots. And since I more-or-less completely altered my playstyle about halfway through the session (switching from melee DPS to ranged DPS) I did not make good utility skill selections. My initial choice was to choose the passive Signet of Might to increase my DPS output. While this may have been a decent selection in the end, I did not feel that it added much (the majority of my damage was condition based). A few amber pebbles mounted in my equipment seemed to have a larger effect than this signet. My second utility skill was Endure Pain, allowing me several seconds of immunity. Again, this was based on a melee setup, and once I changed to ranged, I never used this.

I ended up favoring longbow over rifle, so I traited into the Tactics line with the intent of taking either the Stronger Bowstrings ability, or the Burning Arrows ability. However, as noted, since I only made it to level 15, I wasn’t able to get that far, so I don’t know if that would have been a good choice. I think that the Arms line would be better suited (for the passive condition damage increase) but none of the trait abilities really add much for a bow warrior. They add a lot for the rifleman, but rifle lacks the heavy condition damage of the bow.

Overall, I found the warrior to be a surprisingly poor melee profession, but an amazing ranged profession. While this is not generally my playstyle, I think that players who tend to enjoy a long range style of play will be ideally matched with the warrior. Both rifle and longbow have amazing utility in both PvE and WvW. In PvE, the combination of abilities allow the player to drop MOBs of much higher level with no worries of ever getting hit. In WvW, the rifle shines in attacking control points and blasting defenders on the walls, and the longbow is amazing for defending a control point when opponents are forced to ball up at the gates.

For reference, my final spec can be found HERE.

A couple weeks ago, Guild Wars 2 had their first beta weekend event (BWE). During that time, I pretty much immersed in the game. I played a norn guardian up to level 23, a human warrior up to 15, a char engineer to 9 and finally, a human ranger up to level 24. I also dabbled in crafting (up to around 125 skill points). My time was about 50/50 PvE and WvW (aka DAoC style RvR).

I found that each class plays VERY differently. Within a single class, the different weapon choices really complement a specific playstyle. While it can sometimes be subtle, the different weapon choices really differentiate even a single class. There didn't seem to be a "best" weapon choice for any class, only a "best for me" choice. For me, I knew I had found the right weapon selection when I started using all 5 weapons skills consistently, rather than hitting 2 or 3 all the time and the others only occasionally.

Historically, I've favored tank type classes in MMOs, so that undoubtedly colors my experiences. Today, I’d like to talk a bit about the guardian class.

I created a norn guardian for my very first character. During play, I found the guardian to be an extremely robust character, able to take quite a beating before falling down. In fact, during play, I was often completing “hearts” three or four level higher than my character, and leaping into battle with bunches of up to four or five enemies without any concern. It does have a comparatively small hitpoint pool, which makes it seem less powerful than other classes, but it had much more durability.

My first task was to unlock all of the weapon skills for all the different weapons.

The default starter weapon combination is a mace/shield. This is a great choice for a player who wants a traditional “tanky” character. The primary auto-attack chain provides a small self-heal on every third hit, increasing the durability of the guardian. It gives a (very small) point-blank area-effect heal-over-time on #2, and a finisher on #3 that not only provides a 33% damage reduction, it turns the #2 field into a wide area group heal. Between the auto-attack heal and the #2 heal, the guardian's hitpoint pool is actually quite a bit larger than you might think. #4 and #5 on shield are primarily utility skills. With the (existing) overabundance of ranged classes, #5 is especially powerful in a large WvW fight. The disadvantage is that this weapon combination is pretty low on the DPS scale, making even easy fights take a very long time to play out. I pretty much abandoned this combination as soon as I unlocked others (around level 6). In retrospect I should have gone back and tried it again after gaining some experience with the game.

A lot of people found the hammer to be a lot of fun. I am not one of them. Perhaps it was because I did not take the time to learn it properly, but I found the #4 ability to be a detriment more often than not. I've never been able to understand why people flock to a knockback on a primarily melee class - when you hit things with a giant piece of metal, the last thing you want to do is punt them further away! There were several times over the weekend when other players would indiscriminately use a knockback and negatively impact their own play – sometimes they would punt an opponent away from other players, making it harder to kill; other times they would push a nearly-dead opponent out of the fight, allowing them to heal and/or escape completely. I barely touched this weapon outside of unlocking the skills.

Mainhand sword has an auto-attack chain that ends with a cone AE on the third swing, which made aggro management a bit difficult. The #2 “leap” skill was a bit confusing to me, since it was functionally the same as the Greatsword #4 ability. Why would the same ability be #2 on one weapon and #4 on a different one? The sword’s #3 ability also seemed to mirror one of the shield skills. I unlocked sword in combination with the torch. The torch abilities seemed very situational and more intended for a support character. Similar to the prior weapons, I did not use this combination beyond unlocking the skills.

Like many others, I settled on a 2H sword as my weapon of choice. The auto-attack chain provides a small buff that increases the chance of a critical hit. This makes greatsword a great choice for guardians who simply want to cause others pain. The #4 leap skill offers fantastic mobility. Plus, when combined with the #2 and #3 skills, it can take out a ball of opponents very quickly: leap in, set a mark, then spin to set everything around you on fire! Plus as opponents invariably target you, the retribution reflects their own damage back to them. When fighting a solo (player or MOB), the #5 (which can chain off #2 for additional burning/retirbution damage) could be either a long 10-second root (good for burning some self-heal cooldown time) or a very strong pulling tool (or both)! The damage output of the greatsword more than made up for the lack of defense. (Also, my utility skills helped quite a bit, as I’ll discuss later.)

The biggest downfall to the Guardian was the real lack of ranged options.

Staff was too short range for me to think of it as ranged. The primary attack ability only has a range of 600, only four times normal melee range. It ended up with more of a "magical melee" feel to me. Plus, the staff skills basically turn the class into a well-armored support character. I'm thinking that players accustomed to playing a healer will probably gravitate towards this since it plays more like a classic mid-line healer than a melee class. I beleive that the staff guardian is probably the strongest "heal others" class in the game, even more than a water elementalist. I could see a staff guardian choosing more support-oriented utility skills and really getting a lot of mileage out of the staff, particularly the #4 ability in a WvW keep fight. But I’m not that kind of player.

Scepter was pretty much the only ranged option. The auto-attack range was the same as most ranged classes attacks and while it certainly wasn't notable damage, it wasn’t ignorable either. I was able to kill a few Wilsons (running players) in WvW with this. The combination of the #3 and #2 skills is pretty powerful too, and I found myself watching these cooldowns often. Because of the way they interact, it was always a strategic decision to pop the AE damage and hope the enemy didn't move out of the circle, or hold it for a bit longer and root them down first, to ensure they took the full brunt of the damage. The root had the obvious utility uses as well, making it an even trickier balancing act. I unlocked scepter with a focus. I found #4 to be very powerful in a large fight (like WvW) but required careful positioning to use effectively. The long cooldown on this made it hard to use, since it was so positioning dependant. #5 seemed to be too situational, like a seldom used, get-out-of-jail ability. Having said that, I still feel that focus is the best offhand for a DPS oriented guardian.

The #6 skill healing breeze was extremely powerful. Much more so that the #6 skill on any other class I played. I think that it is partly due to the small hitpoint pool, but the self-heal on the guardian seemed to be practically a 50% heal. It also allowed me to heal others around me. Definitely not as a dedicated healer, but it certainly did help to supplement their self-heals. The default heal was extremely lackluster with a very short duration block. If the block were longer it might have some utility for a melee-oriented guardian. The healing signet option only healed for a tiny bit more than healing breeze, and did not heal others, making it a non-starter for anything other than solo play - which never happens. Even when you are “solo” there are other players around that will be affected by the healing breeze.

For utility skills, I chose Shield of the Avenger, Signet of Judgment, and Retreat!

Shield of the Avenger made me even more "tanky" as it would block about 20% of the incoming damage I would have normally taken, and was especially powerful in WvW. I didn't understand how the followup skill worked until much later, so I probably did not use this to its full effectiveness. Regardless, this ability was almost always on cooldown for me.

Signet of Judgment was a great passive making me even more durable. I did not ever use the active skill, but this was mostly because I was still trying to learn the class. I expect that if I had internalized this ability earlier in my play session, I would have made better use of it. But I didn’t.

Retreat! was an incredible skill that I used both offensively as a gap closer and defensively as an exit skill. This made the class more like a traditional "tank", since it allowed me to better control the fight. With two other people playing in the same room as me, I was able to call an exit from the fight, pop this and all three of us could escape safely (even from overwhelming odds, most of the time). In retrospect, I would probably choose this as my first utility skill. The only downside to this skill was the icon has a dark area that looks EXACTLY like the cooldown timer. Often I would think it was up when it wasn’t, or think it was on cooldown when it was ready.

I did not use my class specific abilities a single time over the entire play session. The passive effects are decent, and the active abilities didn't seem to make up for the loss of the passives. For example, the F1 passive is to burn my foe every fifth swing. The active ability is to make my entire group burn their foe(s), but then the passive is disabled for 30 seconds. The problem is that if I am attacking continually, I am going to attack many more times in 30 seconds, burning more foes by myself, than my group can do in a single attack. Thus the active becomes less worthwhile (outside of very specific burst damage situations). I found this to be generally true of all three of the guardian's class abilities.

Overall, I found the guardian to be a very fun class to play that complimented my personal playstyle while allowing for a great amount of flexibility. Players of traditional Tanks and traditional Healers would both probably enjoy the guardian. Since this was my first character, and I was still learning the GW2 character systems. I did not trait it at all. For reference, my final (untraited) spec can be found HERE.

I’ll admit it. Guild Wars 2 may not be the game for everyone. As the past beta weekend showed, with all of its attendant NDA breaches, some people really didn’t like Guild Wars 2. With good reason. Some people simply aren’t going to like it. Here’s why:

There aren’t any quests.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There is exactly ONE quest that every character gets, their so-called “personal story”. Other than that, there are no quests that give the player direction on where to go. Instead, the player is thrust into an organic world with dynamic events that just spring up around them. Without the giant green exclamation point quest givers, walls of needless flavortext and quest tracker summaries, how is the payer supposed to know where to go and what to do? There is no mechanic that directs the player to grind out XP gathering 15 rat tails, shows them where a cave is so that they can rescue 5 slaves, or pushes them into the next XP area with a quest to deliver a message to some random NPC in the next town. Instead, the player is left to their own devices.

Players who want quests to help them explore and experience a game are going to HATE Guild Wars 2.

Players are forced to explore the game’s world without being told where to go. Players expected to gain XP by reacting to events that occur in the world around them. There is no NPC that tells you to go kill ten bandits on the hill overlooking the town before they attack. Instead, the bandits actually attack the town while you are standing there. If you fail to defend it, there is a very real chance that the town will cease to exist and it will become a bandit enclave. There is no quest giver that tells the player to go rescue townsfolk that the bandits captured when they took over the town. There is no nearby guard who has a quest to recapture the town from the bandits. All of these things JUST HAPPEN in the game. A player who is expecting definitive directions in the form of a formal quest might not notice or even realize that something is happening in the world around them.

Players aren’t given a bridge quest to the next level-appropriate section of the game. The game does not give the player a clear signal that they are “done” with a given area. In most MMOs the player knows when to move on when they run out of quests in one area and they get a quest that send them down the road to the next quest hub. Instead, the player is forced to decide for themselves whether or not to move on to the next section of the game. Which can be difficult because of…

High-level players are not Gods
Every area of the game has a very specific level range that is appropriate. For example, the very first area that new players spawn into might have a lot of level 1 and level 2 monsters to kill. Guild Wars 2 puts an “effective level” cap on the player in that region. As long as they stay in that newbie area, they will never gain stats higher than a level 2. They actually do gain the levels, but the game will not take those higher stats into account as long as they are in that area, effectively de-leveling them in that region. A high level player can go back to a newbie area and they are effectively limited to a much lower level.

Players who like to feel powerful by attacking dozens of low level monsters and killing them instantly are going to HATE Guild Wars 2.

Players are forced to deal with challenging low-level content even when they hit max level. When the player enters a level 15 area, their stats, equipment, hitpoints and DPS are down-scaled as if they were level 15. Even if they are actually level 80, as long as they are in that area of the game, the game will treat them as if they were level 15. This means that when you find a task or event that is “too hard” at a given level, it is impossible to simply gain a few levels, come back and simply herpaderp through it. The game will downscale the character so that they can NEVER make challenging content “easy”. A low level explorable dungeon that is hard for a level 35 will be just as hard for a level 80, because the level 80 will be “down scaled” to level 35 the instant they step into the dungeon.

Players will never be able to blithely waltz back to a newbie area with their high level characters and completely obliterate low-level content. The game does not allow players to trivialize content that they have outleveled. Which is not to say that character level doesn’t matter. Character level is important because the game does not (generally) “up scale” characters. Low level characters will find play impossible in high level areas. High level characters will find challenging play everywhere. Which will become easier, not as the character levels up, but as the player becomes more skilled. Especially because…

There are no attack rotations
Most players are accustomed to combat being a situation where you use damaging attack skills in a specific order to maximize your effectiveness. If you aren’t familiar with what each ability does, or what effect it has, you spam them as quickly as possible, and then pop them again as soon as the cooldown expires. After all, doing something is better than doing nothing. The dynamic feel of combat is due to the player continually using different attack abilities. They develop “attack rotations” where a specific sequence of attacks, used at a specific time, can be spectacularly effective in a fight. Autoattack (or “white damage”) really not a factor. It is only about 10% of the total damage.

In Guild Wars 2 , auto-attack (or “white”) damage is your most effective attack.

Combat in Guild Wars 2 is not deciding WHICH ability to use as soon as they are off cooldown. Instead, players need to be continually repositioning themselves and thinking WHEN to use their very limited situational attack abilities. Guild Wars 2 weapon attack abilities are specifically designed to be almost completely ineffective when spammed.

To illustrate this, let’s imagine a (fictional) example. Suppose there is an attack skill on a 20 second cooldown that does 100 points of damage when used from the side, but does only 20 points of damage when used from the front. If this ability is used as traditional “spam”, it will do 20 points of damage each time it comes off cooldown every 20 seconds. If the player sits on the ability and waits for a single “side” hit they will do 100 points of damage. The player who holds off on using an ability until the ideal opportunity will out-damage the spammy cooldown hunter by a factor of five. Even if they are sitting on a ‘ready to use’ ability for half the time, and only using it half as often as they could (by chasing cooldowns) they are still going to be putting out 2-1/2 times as much damage as the ability spammer.

This is not too dissimilar to other games. Most games have some situational attack abilities. But in Guild Wars 2 all attack abilities are situational, but some of them are less obvious than the example used here. Like a snare attack that does minimal damage. At first glance this might seem to be a pointless ability that the player would rarely use. That’s actually true. In a normal fight, it really wouldn’t be a standard “go to” attack. But when chasing a fleeing opponent, or when a player needs to extend out of range to heal up or use a potion/expendable item, or simply decide to flee, a snare attack becomes an invaluable resource.

Players can no longer just madly mash buttons and expect “something” to be better than “nothing”. Using abilities in that fashion will actually make them less effective and limit their combat options. Instead players will have to learn which abilities do what, and when it is appropriate to use each one. Combat becomes less about who can quickly push buttons in the right order, and more about who is better at recognizing (and creating!) opportunities where abilities will give them maximal benefit. This will really change the definition of player “skill”. Which shows up in other parts of the game too, because…

You aren’t competing with other players
This one is really hard to get. Dozens of years of MMO play have trained players to hate each other. Let’s use a little quest example to illustrate how much difference this makes. Suppose Susie the Piemaker has a quest to gather apples so she can make a pie. She needs 36 apples, and there is 3 minute event to gather apples from the nearby orchard and bring them back to her.

In a traditional MMO, there are 36 apples to gather. Players must run to the orchard and gather apples as fast as possible to collect them. Every apple that Player A picks up is one that Player B cannot gather. Every player is in direct competition for apples. When the event ends, the player who gathered the most apples is given the “gold” reward, the two second best gatherers get a “silver” reward, the three next best get “bronze” and anyone else who participated gets s consolation prize of some XP and maybe some gold. The competition between players is reinforced because they know that in order to get the “best” reward that have to gather more apples than everyone else.

Or it might be a quest to kill some type of monster. When someone kills one of the monsters, that means there are fewer for other players, forcing them to wait on respawns.

In Guild Wars 2, the rewards work differently than what we are used to. Using the apple gathering as an example, the requirement for a “gold” level reward might be based on a combination of participation time and gathering. For example, the event might be tuned so that if you gathered only one apple (or a very small number) but you were out in the orchard TRYING to gather for the entire event you still get a “gold” level award.

Players who like to feel that they are “better” than other players are going to be disappointed.

Getting the “best” reward doesn’t require the player to be better than the other players in the event, they simply have to meet some minimum criteria. Potentially, every single player could get “gold” rewards with no one getting “silver”, “bronze” or lower awards. This doesn’t mean that the rewards are easy to get. Low level events might be trivial to get gold level every time. But since every player is trying to meet the same requirements, a higher level events might have a higher threshold for success. Just like it is possible for every single player to get a “gold” reward, some events will result with no one getting “gold” and every single participant getting “bronze” (or lower) rewards!

It’s NOT “completely different” gameplay
Players who are expecting Guild Wars 2 to be a complete reboot of the MMO genre are going to be disappointed. While it does have a lot of new gameplay elements, at the very core, it is still an MMO. There are still “kill ten rats” events. There are still “go to town X” tasks. There are still dungeons that have button puzzles, “secret” crafting recipes that will be posted to various websites within hours after release, and button-mashing combat opportunities.

If you are expecting something revolutionary, you will likely be disappointed.

Guild Wars 2 is innovative just like WoW was innovative in 2005. It really isn’t adding anything completely new and revolutionary to the genre. What it is doing is wrapping pretty much everything good from every other MMO, dropping all of the time-sucking pointless parts of it and rolling it into one giant ball of fun gameplay. The sum is a product that feels very fresh and new, but still familiar and easy to pick up. The roughest spots for most players are where the design is mostly what they are used to, but implemented just different enough that their old “bad habits” still work (sort of) and they aren’t willing (or able) to adjust their playstyle to this new paradigm. (Combat is a prime example of this.)

Guild Wars 2 will become the new standard for MMOs. There is no doubt about it. There will be detractors who don’t enjoy it. That’s undeniable. I’ve listed a few reasons why people won’t like the game right here. But for most players of MMOs, Guild Wars 2 is going to be a game that they can play and enjoy for years to come.

By now it should come as no surprise that I'm a fan of Guild Wars 2. When I was first bitten by the bug a couple of months ago, one of the things I started doing was working on the Guild Wars 1 Hall of Monuments. This is a repository of titles, pets and items that new characters will get in Guild Wars 2. The only way to get them is to earn them in Guild Wars 1. There are a total of 50 "points" available, with every single point up to the first 30 granting an item, a title, a pet, or some combination of those.

When I first started, I had 3/50. This was pretty easy, since every player in the game gets three points just for linking their account. It's like the proverbial "first one is free" credit.

It didn't take long to get to 8/50. I had some legacy accounts, so I was able to dedicate 15 miniature statues right away for one point. I bought an in-game item allowing me to put a Hero staue in the hall for a second point. I had already finished the original Prophecies campaign, and that was worth two more points. And finally, I had already set up some end game "elite" armor for my final point.

And there I sat. For about two months. And then came this weekend.

In my past game play, I had completed 15/25 of the Prophecies "bonus" missions. Completing all 25 would give me a title and move me towards another point. So I started working on bonus missions. Luckily, I had a friend who was playing through for the very first time, so I would do missions with him and complete the bonuses that I was missing. The problem was that he was playing on my second account. About halfway through, he decided to buy his own account and restart the game. So I had to work on the bonus missions solo. I managed to finish all of them except for one: Thunderstone Keep. I remembered that this mission was incredibly difficult with a full group, and I needed to do it solo. So I put it off.

I saw (in-game) that I had explored about 70% of Tyria, so I started working on the Cartographer title. Because of the name, I assumed (mistakenly) that I nly needed to explore 90% of the game to get credit. When I passed 92% and still did not have it, I realized that I actually needed 100%. But since I was already, as they say, "invested" in the title, I decided to finish it off. Some of the areas needed are within difficult to get to mission areas, and others required a lot of wall-scrubbing.

A good portion of what I needed was in the Thunderstone Keep mission. So on Friday, I bit the bullet and tried it. It took three attempts, each of which was a good 45 minutes of time investment, but by persevering, I was able to prevail and completed the final bonus, which earned me Protector of Tyria.

As a bonus, i came out of that mission with 98% explored. I finished up the two other small areas I knew were missing and brought it up to 99.8%. Looking around the map, I found a slice in a very early mission that looked fairly easy to get to. A few minutes later, I was awarded Grandmaster Cartographer of Tyria. Two more titles!

In parallel, I was working on the Factions. I had been stuck on the second-to-last mission. I was able to complete it, but for the Protector title, I needed to beat it in 20 minutes or less, which seemed nearly impossible for me. I had tried it a handfull of times and no matter which route I took, or what strategy I used, I was finishing within ten seconds of 24 minutes, four minutes too slow! So I did some soul searching. I spent several hours skill hunting in orer to tweak my build. I took a deep breath and plunged in... and finished in 18 minutes! From there the final mission was a cakewalk. I needed to beat it in 150 seconds for the bonus; it took 45 seconds. Two more titles, added to the three Tyrian ones gave me three more HOM points, for a total of 11.

(It's worth pointing out that my "good enough" goal for HOM was ten points. For ten points, you get the title "Guild Warrior", which seemed oddly appropriate for a game called Guild Wars.)

Following the Factions campaign, I was able to charm a phoenix. I took it to the Zaishen Menagerie and death leveled it with a throwaway PvP character. This involved letting the pet kil me endlessly for about 30 minutes. Eventually, it gained enough XP to become level 20 and could be mounted in the HOM. The phoenix is a rare pet, worth two more HOM points, bringing me up to 13 total!

As a followup, I was only two quests away from completing the War in Kryta storyline. I knew this story would give me a weapon that was worth another two HOM points so I completed that. Sure enough, two more points. But one of the ancilliary rewards is a box that contains a random item. I've gotten these in the past and they invariably give some useless totchke that I would never use in normal play and would end up clogging my inventory until I ineffectively used it in a useless situation, just to get rid of it. Lo and behold, but I pulled out a rare gold miniature! This was worth yet another HOM point!

So in two days I went from 8/50 to 16/50!!

I still need to buy a unique green miniature (another point). I'm 90% done with the Black Moa Chick quest. But I'm told that I can sell the moa for 70k and buy any other green for 30k. The extra money will help towards my armors. And since I'm sitting at 19 minis right now, the green one will also trigger the 20 statue award for an extra 2 points.

I should finish Eye of the North. Once done, I can dedicate two more hero statues for two more points. (I already have the items needed, but I can't access the location until I complete the quest line.)

I still need to finish Nightfall. This won't get me any more HOM points, but it will give me access to the vabbian elite armor crafter.

I should try to get some elite Kurzik armor (another point for that one), some cheap norn armor (another point), some expensive vabbain armor (another point), and another cheap armor (two more points when I have five total).

I need to beg, steal or buy a Destroyer weapon and a toremtor weapon. Each of those is worth a point.

Finally, if there is time, I will buy a Zaishen PvP title. This "only" costs 1.1million in-game gold.

If I manage to get all of this done, I should end up with 31/50 points.

And I'll never play Guild Wars 1 again.

This is the third part of a mulit-part blog post. If you didn’t see the first two parts, they should be right below this one. Or you can click here for the first part, and here for the second part.

It’s worth noting that arenanet has more-or-less confirmed my speculation in a recent dev-blog posting. Even if the specific details are not inlcuded, it looks like the general idea will be in the game. They call them “meta-events”, and they will involve multiple groups defeating multiple local events that combine into a large zone-wide meta-event. In fact, the dev-blog even mentions the centaur invasion event I’m discussing!

One thing that often comes up in this discussion is what happens when the event is “over”. In past games, like WAR, the PQ would simply reset to the initial stage and restart in the same exact area. This felt clunky and unrealistic during play and it certainly wouldn’t make sense to have all of the centaur camps just instantly spring back to life the same second that players killed the centaur War Boss! I think that these events could reset organically, simply by virtue of how they could be implemented.

So how could you build this centaur event that I’ve laid out? It’s actually not too difficult, and mostly uses existing MMO elements. Let’s break it down and see how you can build this thing. (This may get a little technical. I’m going to talk about game design!)

First, think of each centaur camp as its own “event”. There is a static spawn (an existing MMO element)… but let’s not put it in the camp. Instead, put it somewhere not-too-nearby, but not-terribly-far-away. Now when the centaurs spawn, they need to path to the camp. This is easily handled by making them default to be “patrol” MOBs (again, an existing MMO element). The only catch here is that they need to be pathed to patrol only once. This might require a little code change since most “pat” spawners use the actual spawn point as one of the waypoints. In this case, they spawn, move along their patrol, then stop. Of course the end point is going to be in the camp that they are attached to.

This layout means that if the camp is occupied (by players) the remote spawner makes it “appear” that wave after wave of centaurs are attacking. After all, the spawner will continue to spit out MOBs as soon as the prior ones are gone. But if the players all leave – after the event is over, for better or worse – and the camp is unoccupied (by players), the centaurs will continue to attack any NPCs there, eventually kill them and then set up residence in the camp. If the NPCs manage to kill one (or more) of the attacking centaurs, the spawner naturally spits out a couple more until the camp is full. and then the spawner would stop, since its MOBS are still in the game. This allows the centaur camps (with NO active event running) to naturally and organically reset itself.

The only major code changes to make this happen would be the “trigger” for the events. Each event would need to be “active” all the time, but basically “asleep” until a specific condition was met. For most of the camps, the trigger would be that each of the prior events is in the “defeated” state. That is, players have occupied the earlier stages and, as new “patrol” centaurs spawn, they are killing them off. Thus the event chain ends up being essentially a cascade of static events. The other significant code change would be that the later stages of the chain need to be able to instantly “fail” when any of the earlier chained events fail. Essentially this is similar to the “trigger” condition, but in reverse. (This is actually the same code change.)

So if we have things set up like this, let’s look at the “reset” conditions. The event can end in one of two ways: either the players kill the War King (which a pretty easily definable state), or they fail to defeat the War King. The failure condition is harder to define, so we’ll deal with that later.

If the players defeat the war king... nothing happens. The natural triggers for the event will automagically reset it over time. Maybe I’ve grown jaded form playing MMOs for so long, but I strongly suspect that players will not bother to defend NPCs that are being slaughtered unless there is either an active event or they are directed to do so as part of a quest. The remote spawners will just keep spitting out centaurs util the NPCs are killed and each camp goes back to being occupied by enemy MOBs. The only trigger that is a concern is the very first camp, which instigates the chain. If we set the trigger condition for the very first camp to require that ALL of the later stages be occupied by centaurs, the event cannot “reset” until it has naturally put itself into that condition. No special code or game design trickery needed. It just naturally “happens” over time. It’s unpredictable how long the event would take to reset, but it would happen. Eventually.

The other condition is even less clean. This is an open-world event; how do we know when the players have “failed”? It could be a timed event (Kill the War King in 30 minutes) but that always feels unnatural and doesn’t really work within the organic world paradigm. A potential solution that accomplishes the same thing, but “feels” better, is to have a massive spawn that is on a time delay. When the final event kicks off, the timer starts running. If the players take too long, the War King calls up his army (who conveniently spawn on the other side of a hill) and they massacre the players, causing a complete wipe. Those spawns could be set as the same kind of one-shot “patrol” spawns as the earlier camps, with one assigned to each camp.

This causes the centaur army to essentially send a massive wave of attackers back along the chain, causing resets and failures as they fight back. The chain would migrate backwards along it’s conditions, resetting where the players lose, and staying active where they win. Either the players lose completely and the centaurs push the chain all the way back to the initial setup (which is a reset), or the players manage to stop the “failure” wave and start advancing the chain forward at some point (which isn’t really a “reset” but would serve as one). It could end up with a “front line” being established. Where the players are pushing the event one way, the MOBs are pushing the other way and the event chain simply sits at a point of stability, oscillating between to chained camps. Eventually the players will get tired and leave (causing the chain to reset completely) or rally and kill the War King (and cause the chain to reset completely). Either way, it would be fun to be in a continual battle!

Again, much of this is conjecture and guesswork. The start of this discussion (chained DEs) has been already revealed to be factual. And while the actual mechanics of this specific DE chains is mostly guessing, it has been confirmed that large “meta-events” such as what I’ve described are definitely in the game! How different events tie together is only one potential possibility. The actual event chain described is mostly conjecture based on the text on a year-old leaked image, and the final event described here is almost certainly wishful thinking. None of this is based on “privledged” information and I am not involved in the GuildWars2 beta. I respect and adhere to non-disclosure. I am NOT in any way involved in the development of Guild Wars 2, or, for that matter, any game product at all.

This is the second part of a mulit-part blog post. If you didn’t see the first part, it should be right below this one. Or you can click here.

To see how a Dynamic Event (DE) is going to differ from War’s PQs and Rift’s rifts, I’d like to present a develoment image that was leaked on to the web some time ago, and present some speculation on one possible DE “chain”.



I’m going to make some guesses about a chain that runs across the entire map. It’s listed as the “N” chain. This is a very long chain with potentially twenty-eight steps. I’m going to make some very broad brush assumptions based on publicly released information and add in a healthy dose of speculation in order to describe how this system might actually work in the game. Please keep in mind that I am NOT in any way involved in game development, nor am I in the beta. It’s worth noting that I would never be making this post if I were under NDA. It’s also worth noting that the start of this discussion is pretty firmly based in fact, each successive paragraph delves deeper and deeper into conjecture and wishful thinking. I do think that everything I describe here is POSSIBLE and would be relatively easy to implement given the types of development tools that are available. In fact, my next blog post will describe just how simple something like this would be to implement.

Let’s start at the “beginning” of this chain. It’s listed as N1 at Camp 6. But actually, maybe not. We’ve been told that some DEs have pre-requisites in order to start. Similar to the “random” spawns of rifts, DEs are not always on and might have some sort of "trigger" to start. This is an important point and something that should be kept in mind. Regardless, let’s make an assumption here that when the player enters the they are told that enemy centaur have occupied Camp 6 (listed as N1/2 on the map) and the players need to kick them out. The players move forward and kill all of the centaur and destroy their encampment. (This would be the event “N1: Destroy Camp 6”). After a short time delay, a caravan of NPCs moves in and starts building a friendly outpost at Camp 6. At the same time, centaur continue to attack that area from nearby (and maybe not-so-nearby) spawns. If the players are not vigilant in defense, the encroaching centaur population will stop the friendly NPCs from building and, in the extreme case, if the players vacate the area for a while, can actually rebuild the enemy encampment. So the players must stay active on the next part of the chain, N2: Hold Camp 6.

Once the friendly NPCs are established at Camp 6, this acts as a "trigger" for the start of the N3: Destroy Camp 7 event. It's worth noting that up until this point, that event did not exsit in the game world. Until Camp 6 is captured, the players would just see a centaur encampment at Camp 7. There would no active DE in this region. Even though the N3/4 event exists, it would not be active and the players would not be notified. Killing the centaurs here and capturing the camp would not result in a friendly camp being established. The chain requires that prior steps be completed in order to unlock later ones.

Even better, suppose the centaur attacks at Camp 6 don’t just artificially stop because the players captured it. Suppose that the N2 "event" continues indefinitely and the monster attacks continue. If the players abandon Camp 6 after they "win" and run off towards Camp 7, the centaur spawns recapture Camp 6. The event chain would then "reset" and return to its prior state of N1.

Capturing Camp 7 is going to be more difficult because the players must, by necessity, split their forces and attention between protecting Camp 6 (N2) and capturing Camp 7 (N3). Even if each camp is individually very easy to capture – suppose it only takes two to three players working together – by “stacking” the event chain in this manner, the event is going to very naturally and organically ramp up in difficulty. It will get harder without resorting to standard MMO tropes like mini-bosses, increased monster levels, faster spawn rates or silly raid-like “tricks”.

Let’s assume that the players are successful and manage to do this. This would unlock the next event in the chain, “N5: Destroy Camp 8”. Meanwhile, the prior events Hold Camp 6 (N2) and Hold Camp 7 (N4) continue to be active. Let’s continue with our assumption that the players are able to split their forces and successfully capture Camp 8 while keeping both Camps 6 and 7 defended. I would expect that there is some time delay between destroying each centaur encampment and the time it takes the friendly NPCs to arrive/spawn and set up at each camp. The “hold” quests would stay active throughout all of this allowing the players to adjust to the increased difficulty as it ramps up.

Now that the players have successfully captured Camps 6, 7, and 8, the chain splits. They can push on the northern fork and capture Camp 9, or they can go south around the mountain and capture Camp 10. Either of these two events are valid, and completing either one of them will advance the chain.

Keep in mind that centaur spawns are continuing to attack each camp that the players have already captured. If any one of these is lost to the attacking centaurs, the players “fail” the current step and the chain resets back to the camp that was lost. Let’s suppose that, for the sake of the example, that while the players are attempting to capture Camp 9, the players are stretched too thin. It’s getting late on the east coast and some players have been defending Camp 7 for nearly two hours. They are getting bored with the endless cycle of slaughtering waves of centaur, so they log out. With no one defending, the monsters manage to kill the camp’s few NPC guards and start to rebuild their own encampment. The current steps at N4, N6 and N7 automatically fail, and the “current event” listing on the screen of all of the players in Camps 8 and 9 vanishes. Meanwhile, Camp 6 players are told that they need to retake Camp 7.

Some players will assume the event is “over” and leave. Others will use whatever means they have to figure out what happened. Over time (when these chains are better known) players will realize that a prior event in the chain has failed and go back to reclaim that lost stage. Eventually an organized group of players will be able to coordinate these types of chains and keep multiple stages active by assigning different players to different tasks and rotating new people in and out as required. It’s possible that players could potentially capture multiple camps simultaneously and push the chain ahead several steps at once. Keep in mind that we have so far only talked about three parts of an event chain that has TWENTY-EIGHT stages!

Let’s go back to the position where players have captured Camps 6, 7, and 8. They will need to either keep a couple of people in those “back line” positions, or rely on “fresh recruits” – as new people enter the zone, they will automatically find the “hold” events active and hopefully participate. In any case, let’s assume that the players have this figured out and, this time, for some reason, they decide to go south to Camp 10 instead of Camp 9. Once Camp 10 is captured, the actual chain continues on to Camp 11. But what about N11:Centaur Mining? That could be an optional dynamic “side” event that doesn’t advance the event chain, but may offer special rewards. For example, maybe Camp 10 is a forge or refinery that is processing ore and after taking it, the players have an opportunity to attack the adjacent mines. (This part is almost entirely guessing on my part.)

The neat thing about the concept of a “side” DE is that is it only available if the chain is pushed forward to that point, and the correct situation has unfolded. For example, when the players go north to Camp 9, they can still push forward to Camp 11 (without taking Camp 10), but there is no side-event associated with that route and the N11 “side” event is never activated. Until these event chains are better explored, it’s impossible to know which stages have the potential to “unlock” a side quest like this and which ones are the fast, easy way to the final stage of the chain. The “side” events probably will not advance the DE chain, so players who rush off to collect ore at the mining camp (N11) will not be told to progress to the next step of the chain at Camp 11. A similar “side” event might be triggered at farming Camp 11, activating the N14:Stop Harvest event.

So, let’s assess the situation so far. There probably a couple players defending continual centaur spawns at Camp 6, another few defending at Camp 7, several more defending at Camp 8, a handful defending Camp 10, Camp 9 is left under centaur control, a couple of groups went out to mine ore or stop the harvest at N11 and N14, and more players are holding Camp 11. This might ALL be required to unlock the “Destroy the War King” event at N15. It’s likely that this event will involve a very difficult and boss-like event, similar to the undead dragon and pirate ship dynamic events that have been shown at various trade shows.

This one event chain could require over three dozen people actively involved and working towards a common goal! All without any real coordination or formal grouping. This seems very exciting to me. In my next posting, I'll discuss how I think these types of events can conclude in an organic way and how they could be implemented fairly easily.

So it should be obvious by now (based on my last five postings) that I’m pretty excited about Guild Wars 2. In fact, it was this excitement that led me to start posting to my blog again. More specifically, I was motivated by a single question: What is it that you are most looking forward to in Guild Wars 2? I will leave the honest answer to that question for future posting. News is only now just starting to be released on the aspect of that game that I find most intriguing. Instead, I’m going to start posting my short list of features that I’m really looking forward to in the new game.

So, let’s talk a little bit about Dynamic Events.

First I’d like to discuss some of the “dynamic events” we’ve seen in past MMOs. I’m going to ignore player-run and GM-run events in even older games because those were rare things that most people never got to participate in. I was lucky enough to be playing EverQuest one night when a Gnoll “came alive” (ie, a GM was controlling it) and began to RP with me. It was a lot of fun, and in the end I ended up having a two-hour long in-character “discussion” with this Blackburrow Gnoll. But that was one singular event and it happened only to me. It was not part of the game. I’m not going to consider those kind of events.

The first game that I played that had automated dynamic events was WAR. For those that never played that game, it had (and still has, I suppose) an innovation called Public Quests. For example, as you entered one of the low level areas, you might see a burning windmill off in the distance. It looked cool, so you would go there to see what was going on. As you entered the area near the windmill, a new quest would just “pop up” on your screen. You didn’t need to talk to an NPC and click through dialogue or text to accept it, you just entered an area and suddenly you were given this additional task. Something simple usually. Continuing the example of the burning windmill (which is an actual PQ in the game!) the new quest would say “Stage 1: Seeker Horror 0/50”. Mouse over the text and the tooltip would have some flavortext about the Seeker Horrors and how they were evil and blah blah blah. All around you are a bunch of Seeker Horrors just wandering about. So you get to it, and start killing them in droves. When the counter reaches 50/50, the quest changes to “Stage 2: Seeker Cultists 0/16” with a ten minute timer. Suddenly the Seeker Horrors all de-spawn and six Seeker Cultists appear, along with two pets each. These are much more difficult monsters to kill and you are forced to fight three of them at once. Meanwhile the clock is ticking down. There are some other players in the area who were also killing the Horrors, so you team up (without actually forming a group!) and start knocking out the Cultists. It’s tough but, by working together, you manage to kill all six before the timer runs out. The quest then changes to “Stage 3: Baruun the Seeker 0/1; Volkyth Flamecaller 0/1” with another ten minute timer. The Cultists and their pets do not respawn, and two very large Bosses appear at the base of the burning windmill. All of the players charge in to kill them, and several characters are killed almost instantly. These guys are TOUGH!! The flamecaller summons ten Horrors every minute, and Baruun starts spawning Seeker Flamers that do an AoE attack. As luck has it, a high-level character happens to be wandering by and he helps you kill them. The quest is completed well within the ten minute timer.

And then the real treat: the reward. Once the quest is completed, a kind of scoreboard pops up and you can see how much each player contributed towards the different goals. You never formed a group/party/fellowship/whatever with these other people, but the game was tracking your individual contribution towards the goal regardless. It didn’t matter if you tagged each monster first or just wildly flailed about, hitting things that others had already tagged. Killing blows were not counted. But if you were working towards the goal, you got some amount of contribution. The top three players get a really nice special reward, about a quarter level of XP, a decent amount of coin, and a blue or purple item. Everyone else gets some coins, some exp and a white item. The amount of reward is tied to the contribution. So even if you just wandered in during the middle of the PQ and started killing things, you got something.

While this was innovative and new when WAR came out, there are some inherent problems with this system. They are completely static, just like standard monster spawns. If the quest is completed (or failed) it just “resets” back to Stage 1 and the exact same goals are listed. In essence, it becomes a kind of open-world instance that never changes. The location is fixed. The Windmill PQ is always based around the burning windmill. The stages are always the same, and they occur in exactly the same order. This makes each PQ predicatable, boring, and not a lot of fun to repeat. The fatal flaw is that PQs do not scale. If the PQ is designed for 10 level 5 characters, a single level 10 can probably complete it without breaking a sweat. Likewise, if a PQ is meant for 40 level 50 players, it's going to all but impossible with fewer than that number. This leads to PQs being fun the first time you do them in a level-appropriate group of the proper size, and completely useless when you are not in the correct level range, you have a group that is too large or to small and incredibly boring to repeat. 90% of the PQs become trivial or impossible, limiting their appeal. With a limited selection that is even further constrained by level and group size coupled with the lack of replayability, the Public Quest system really couldn’t maintain it’s appeal.

The next iteration of this type of design came with Rift’s… well, rifts. This system was similar to PQs but added some dynamics to the scope. Rather than being fixed in a single place and continually available, rifts would spawn in semi-random locations. The engine would check to make sure that the area had the right number of players of the proper level range and then spawn an appropriate Rift event in that area. Similar to the PQ system, there would be multiple stages to a Rift, with some stages timed. Also similar was the reward system that counted overall contribution even if the player was ungrouped. One of the major changes was that if the players did not “close the rift” by winning the event, the monsters that it spawned could gather forces and attack the NPC towns and villages. There was the possiblity of the local merchants, equipment sellers and even the player’s spawn points being overrun and lost to the AI controlled monsters. This gave the system a feel like the monsters were actually AT WAR with the players. It really felt like the player was under attack by the game at times, and not just a static game world where nothing ever changed.

This solves some of the problems with the original PQ system, but not all of them. The rift locations were still mostly static. Even though they could appear randomly, they always appeared in the same exact spots within a region. If players did nothing, the game would “reset” a rift after one hour, so even if the monsters took over an area, all a solo player had to do was wait a bit and the attackers would magically “go away”. Each rift event followed the exact same cookie-cutter formula: 1. Kill some number of weak monsters; 2. Kill a smaller number of stronger monsters; 3. Kill a single Boss. If the players were fast enough killing the Boss, a “bonus stage” would start: 4. Kill a small number of difficult monsters within a set time; 5. Kill a second Boss within a few minutes. Even by adding some dynamicism to the system, the real killer of the rift system was that it was still far too static. After playing through them, all of the rift events really felt the same and become monotonous. It was like having each and every “raid” in the game, be set in the exact same dungeon, only with different monster populations to differentiate them. And regardless of whether players participated (and won) or ignored them (and lost), the events never really affected the game world in any meaningful way.

Which (finally!) brings us to Guild Wars 2’s Dynamic Events. I believe that these are next stage in the evolution of this type of automated dynamic gameplay. I will deal with these in my next posting.

It seems like a lot of my attention over the last few weeks has been focused on completing my Guild Wars Hall of Monuments. This is true. Sadly, I’m finding this task to be a lot more challenging than I originally expected.

I started a new Ritualist in the Factions campaign. One of the HoM guides I read suggested that starting a Ritualist and running a Spirit Spammer build was a quick and easy way to complete that campaign. Further, the guide suggested that it could be done by a “new” player in about 25 hours. I figured this would be about a week or two of my effort and I would have two more trophies in the Hall.

So far it has been two weeks. I’ve completed only 9 out of the 13 missions. The next mission appears to be impossible to solo, and my pleading for help online has basically gotten me the answer that I need to complete the Nightfall campaign to level up NPC Heroes to get me through it. This makes me unhappy.

I almost always play a melee class in MMOs. I originally played a Warrior in Guild Wars. And I really enjoy smacking things around until they die. My Hall is based on my original Warrior character since it had the most “complete” and it seemed easier to finish off an 80% done trophy than to restart on a new character. But in the current game, Warriors have been almost completely eclipsed by one of the newer classes in Nightfall, the Dervish.

Then I learned that the Hall was account-wide, and not character wide. So trophies from different characters all count in the Hall. Of course, the catch is that a given character has to actually get the trophy. You can’t, for example, have a one character finish ten missions and then a different character complete the final three and call it done. A single character has to do all 13. But, having done that, the credit for that trophy shows up on all characters on the account.

My hope was to finish Factions, and the “master” mode for that storyline, grab those two trophies, then abandon the Ritualist. Quite honestly, I’m finding that Spirit Spammer playstyle is pretty boring. Basically, you start each fight by dropping five spirits (which are essentially turrets) and then just waiting for things to die. It is a lot like the old Minion Master builds, but without needing to have startup time.

My plan, once finishing Factions, was to use my existing Warrior to complete the “Protector” trophy in the original game (I only need 6 more bonus missions to finish it up), and complete the “Cartographer” trophy (I only need 4% more of the map to be explored to get this one). Once those tasks are in the Hall, I can start a new Dervish in Nightfall. This would replace my existing Warrior for the remainder of the game, and I would run through Eye of the North with the full palette of Heroes as the designers intended.

That’s the plan, anyway. Meanwhile, back in reality, I’m still playing Factions. I’m two weeks in and it looks like I’m going to be working on finishing that campaign for at least two more. Intellectually, I know it’s just a game and that I should be having fun playing it no matter what. But I’m putting a lot of personal pressure on myself to get to a specific point on my accomplishments – a point that seems like it may be unobtainable. And that’s making me treat this game like a job.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been (re)playing portions of Guild Wars in order to fill out my Hall of Monuments and get some unlockable skins, titles and vanity pets for Guild Wars 2.

Now, let’s be honest. Guild Wars is an OLD game. It was released at the end of April 2005, making it nearly seven years old. Like all MMOs, it has a slash-command that allows the player to track time spent online, in-game. In Guild Wars, the command is /age. Truth be told, I had actually completely forgotten this command and had to ask about it. As it turns out, the /age command not only reports how long you’ve been online on that specific character, it also reports how long your account has been active and how long you’ve been in the current zone.

Despite being one of the original purchasers of the game in 2005, I really never got very far. (For what it's worth, my /age on the original character I created 81 months ago is just about 450 hours. That would be around 5-1/2 hours each month.) I finished the original campaign (called “The Flameseeker Prophesies”) and I played a VERY little bit during the lead-up to the second campaign release. It was essentially DLC that was published as a for-pay expansion called “Factions”. By that time I was pretty much done with guild Wars, so I never purchased it. One of my co-workers was very active in the game and my purchase decision was strongly influenced by his opinion that it was not worth the $60 price of admission.

When the third campaign/DLC/box “Nightfall” was released, I heard a lot of rumblings from other MMO players that this was (finally) a worthy successor to Guild Wars and it was well worth the price. But, by this time, the skills and abilities that were introduced in Factions were widespread in the game. The developers had (rightly) assumed that if you were playing through the newest campaign, you had access to those abilities and had balanced it based on that assumption. Skipping Factions and going straight to Nightfall was said to be “extremely challenging”. So instead of being a worthwhile $60 purchase, for me it would have been a less worthwhile $80 to $100 purchase. I opted not to do so.

The point is that I barely scratched the surface of the game that Guild Wars currently offers. The Hall of Monuments has some easy to achieve trophies, but they are spread out in all three campaigns, two of which I did not own. Since I had stopped playing the game at least four years before the Hall of Monuments was even conceived, I didn’t have many trophies.

My co-worker who played Guild Wars a lot (it was his first MMO) has 23 trophies on his account and he did not even try for them. He just “got” them for doing the stuff he had already finished in the various campaigns. Me, on the other hand... I’m working on finishing achievements by going back and picking missing steps in mostly completed achievements.

One of those is to complete all 25 of the “bonus” missions in the original game. When I first (re)logged in to Guild Wars a couple of weeks ago, it turned out that I had already finished 15 out of the 25! All I needed to do was to complete the ten missing bonus missions and I would get a trophy. The problem, of course, is that the ten bonus missions I was missing included some of the most difficult missions in the game. If you think about it, it makes sense. If it had been easy to get them done, I would have done it already. I’ve got a bit of the completionist OCD in my personality, and I could easily see the six-year-ago me wanting to see crossed swords on EVERY mission shield. (In fact, I recall thinking that exact thing at one time.)

As luck would have it, I ended up in a group of real people (a rarity in Guild Wars these days it seems) and we ran a couple of missions and their bonuses. I ended up just standing around watching one particular player who literally accomplished two missions and two bonus missions, solo.

I’ve been playing MMOs for a long time. I know what the buttons do. I’m pretty fast at learning how skills work and putting together a prettyy solid understanding of gameplay design. I’d like to think that I’m a better than average player. I admit that I am hampered by my (relative) lack of time to play MMOs, and my advancing age has certainly taken the edge off of my skillz. I know there are some people who will literally spend more time playing these games in a single day than I spend in an entire week. (For reference, I typically play one or another MMO for around ten hours a week.) I’m at a point in my life where I realize there are players who are just plain better than me and I’m definitely okay with that.

But, while I was watching him play the game, I felt like a five-year old boy interested in sports being suddenly plunked down on the sidelines of a professional event. More accurately, it would be like a recreational player who has long since left the field of play watching that same professional event. This guy was so much better than me that I wasn’t even sure how he was accomplishing some of the things he was doing. It was definitely amazing, and almost surreal.

Just prior to this, I had run a Real Life friend across a different section of the game. I went as quickly as I could (which was probably about five times faster than my buddy would have been able to manage). When we were about ¾ of the way there, he mentioned that he was feeling like a complete noob watching me because I was making his gameplay look childish. I can’t even imagine how he felt watching this “pro” play the game! For me it was a very humbling experience.

The one consoling thought that I am left with is that a player of a game that has spent seven years perfecting his technique and practicing gameplay is probably going to be quite skilled. When Guild Wars 2 is released later this year, no one will have those years of experience. Many of the standard gameplay tropes we are accustomed to are not present. We will all be starting from square one. And even though my reflexes and eyesight will never be as quick and sharp as a 20-year old’s, I still expect that I will be better than the average player. At least for a little while.

At PAX Prime 2011, I was vaguely interested in Guild Wars 2 but nothing even close to the frothing-at-the-mouth level of intense fanboy-ism that I've recently adopted. (This is kind of an important point to this story, so keep that fact in mind.) So I was wandering around in the Arenanet booth and watching other people play a demo of the starter levels and the two mid-level events they had set up. Each player was allowed only 45 minutes and the line was two or three people deep at best (it was five or six long at some stations). I really didn't feel the need to stand in line for a couple of hours, so I watched other people play. Remember, I was only "interested" at this point. And as an old-time MMO player with over two decades of experience in the genre, watching others play was giving me plenty of information. In fact, I probably had a better "hands on" experience just watching others, since I was able to see two or three different classes at the same time.

It's worth noting that at this point I had not watched any of the promotional videos, done much reading, and I know for sure I had never even heard the phrase WvWvW yet. I only had the barest grasp on basic gameplay mechanics. For example, I knew how weapons skills developed, but I didn't know how weapons skills were selected. I was honestly coming into this as an interested observer, and not as a "fan".

After about a half hour of watching the three stations I was parked in front of, I found an Arenanet rep. I asked a handful of questions about what I had seen and some of my concerns about gameplay. Of the three questions I asked, two of them got me a blank stare for several seconds, followed by a regurgitation of some already well-known basic game info: "Our game is going to be great, because we intend to have... blahblahblah (weaponskills/crafting/dynamicevents/peronsalstory)." Totally not answering my question(s). Which was totally understandable. When you’re at a exhibition with 75,000 attendees, and 95% of them have never even heard of your game, you only need to be able to spout of the most basic info to generate hype. But that’s not what I was interested in. I was already interested, I wanted some specific answers. So I re-asked the same question in a different way. The person I was talking to clearly didn't know how to deal with me, and I most definitely wasn't treading into NDA territory. I've "worked" for a dev before and I know what that looks like. This wasn't that.

It didn't take long for me to be passed off to a "real" dev to deal with. So I asked my original (and still unanswered) questions. This resulted in a several minute long discussion that started out with the exact same marketing/basic info but as soon as I said ten words, we quickly started down into MMO design issues and the intended specific intent in GW2. In a nutshell, my basic questions boiled down to: "What if the player does this other thing you aren't considering? What if they don't want to play the way you expect them to play?" I had an easy to understand, illustrative and completely sane and logical example that I could point to on the screens right in front of us.

The final answer I got was that they really hadn't thought of that, but it was pretty unlikely that anyone would play that way (even though I had just seen someone playing EXACTLY that way not a mere handful of feet from where I was standing). And then came the question that I was totally unprepared for: Hey, would you like to be in our beta? Yes, an Arenanet dev actually asked me if I wanted to be in the GW2 beta!

Now remember when I mentioned (way upstream) that at this point I was only "vaguely interested" in the game? That's why, at that moment in time, that I looked this guy right in the eyes and said "No, thanks for the offer, but I'm not really interested."

Since then, I've learned more about Guild Wars 2 than is probably healthy. I spend a good two hours every day reading speculation posted on various GW2 communities on a handful of message boards. I've "done the math" on various builds already, played with online tools, watched HOURS of YouTube video, and have started picking out which class and race is going to be the right fit for me. I honestly believe that this game will revolutionize MMOs as we know them today. In short, I've made the switch from "interested observer" to the guy who WOULD be willing to stand in a six person line for four-and-a-half hours in order to spend 45 minutes with a time- and feature-limited demo of the game.

And I really, honestly, and truly wish that I could go four months back in time and punch my past-self in the face for turning down a chance to play it sooner.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been totally geeking out about the upcoming release of Guild Wars 2. That has gotten me playing the original Guild Wars game again.

I never was a huge GW fan. It was released in the Spring of 2005 and I was still actively playing Dark Age of Camelot at that time. I did buy a preorder box and I did have a lot of fun with it, but it never really stuck.

I was especially intrigued by the way they handle in-game abilities. In most MMOs, the player has access to a few dozen abilities that range from spammable attacks to long-cooldown spells that can completely change a fight. You can pick and choose which ability to use at any time, allowing the skilled player to pop a situational ability at the right time. Most people develop a "rotation" of a handful of abilities and largely ignore the rest.

In Guild Wars, the player has access to literally over 100 abilities on each character. The abilities run the gamut from damaging abilities and attacks, defensive abilities that prevent damage, heals, control, and utility type skills. The catch is that you can only put eight of them on your hotbar at any given time. And you can only change your hotbar in a non-combat area. Once you step foot outside of a “safe area” (like a town or outpost) your hotbar is fixed and you cannot swap out abilities until you enter another town or outpost. (You can do this by simply pressing M and double clicking on any outpost you’ve already been to, but you lose all forward progress you’ve made since then.)

I found it a lot of fun trying to develop a good ability “build”. While my preferred ability loadouts never became incredibly popular, for what I wanted to do, it really worked quite well.

The first character I played was an Warrior/Necromancer that specialized in knocking down opponents while slowly draining their health and healing my own. I still remember going through a mission at level 12 and, after an ill-advised pull killed everyone else in my party, soloing two level 14 MOBs at the same time, and winning the fight with my (dead) party cheering me on! Of course, I hadn't loaded a resurrect ability so we had to restart the mission anyway, but it was still fun. I still have this character and it is the one I am playing now.

One of the later characters I made (that is still around) was also a kind of odd duck, but again, it worked really well for what I intended. I built a Elementalist/Monk with an emphasis on Protection type abilities. These abilities would do things like change an attack against one of my allies into a heal, limit the amount of damage that a character could take, or simply absorb a hit entirely. Most of the protection skills were low mana cost and as an Elementalist I had a very large mana pool to draw from. I could spam protection spells for several minutes without running out of mana. And when I did, I had a self buff that filled me back to full in about 10 seconds. I remember doing a mission near the end of the game and having the group’s healer comment on how they were getting bored. I was simply preventing so much damage that they didn’t need to heal at all!

I never bought any of the expansions and pretty much stopped playing when the Factions was released in 2006. But since Guild Wars has never had any monthly fees, I’ve left my account open and accessible. According to the in-game /age command, my account has been active for 80 months!

The primary reason I’m playing Guild Wars again is because of something called the Hall of Monuments. By gathering achievements in the original game and its expansions, various armor and weapons skins, titles and vanity pets are unlocked in Guild Wars 2. As of this writing there are 34 different items, titles and pets available for unlocking. I currently have eight (8) items unlocked and should be able to acquire another 15 more with a little effort.

I held on to this game a lot longer than most of the prior GameFly discs. I’ve had a massive backlog of games to play over the last couple of months. Plus this game has some “issues” that made me not want to power through it. I’m kinda glad that I did. Despite the bad parts of the game, the overall experience was worthwhile.

So here are the two main things that I did NOT like about the game:

1. The Story: Probably the primary reason I was so interested in playing this game was for the (supposedly) “adult” story. It does have some very mature themes, dealing with adultery, love, relationships and even a transgender background character. Sadly, at the start of the game, the main characters are presented as trite, one-dimensional, abusive, and unlikable. As the early game progresses, the characters develop into pointless cardboard cutouts that seem to serve no purpose other than to advance a high-school level “morality play”. (In actuality, “high school level” may be a bit disingenuous. It’s not to the level of “Did you SEE what she wore to the Prom? O-M-G I would have killed myself…” but it really isn’t too far from that.) Suffice it to say that I was extremely disappointed with the story.
   
   There are actually a lot of little side story characters that TRY to be interesting, but these poor sots are presents as so one-dimensional that they are forgettable fluff. In fact, the side-story character that was most interesting to me was Daniel’s wife, Anna, and she is only a side-story to one of the side-stories.


2. The Difficulty Level: Okay, I’m not a “pro” level gamer. I’m not handy with a controller. But I do know how game difficulty is supposed to go. Even in a very difficult game, there is an introduction level (or two) that teaches you basic gameplay, and then as the game progresses, new gameplay elements are introduced and the difficulty ramps up. The problem with this game is that the difficult does not ramp up evenly.
   
   The game has major levels called “nights”. Each night has one to four timed puzzle sections, followed by a “boss battle”. As new gameplay elements are introduced, the puzzle sections simply do not get any harder. Ever. Even though they are timed, I never once felt any time pressure to solve the puzzle elements of the game. In fact, It was not uncommon for me to be topping out each of the puzzle sections with half of the allotted time left over. Even in the later stages of the game, the puzzle difficulty simply wasn’t.
   
   The boss battles, on the other hand, start out at “very difficult” and by the time the player is on the fourth night, the difficulty is approaching “impossible”. (I should note that I played through the entire game on “Normal” difficulty.) And then, amazingly, the difficulty actually goes DOWN. Yes, once you pass the fourth night, the game gets easier to beat. I was barely getting past the first few bosses, but the later ones presented very little challenge.
   
   To really make things even more mucked up, the player can only change difficulty between nights, not between individual stages. When one starts a new night’s puzzle stages and finds them easy to finish, and then the boss fight at the end is maddeningly difficult, the only way to turn the difficulty down is to go back and replay all of the already-too-easy puzzle stages. Oh, and you need an old save file to restore from, because you can’t change the difficulty from a save in the middle of a night.

It’s so easy to focus on the bad middle parts of this game because they really stand out. Mostly because the end-game is actually very good. And not in a “game-ey” way. If this was a film, it would have fallen squarely into the “Oscar Movie” category. When the game reached its two final chapters, the simplistic and trite characters finally really got interesting and developed. And since the final chapters are long ones – between them they total seven stages long with three boss battles – there is actually enough time to add some depth to them. The story moves from being a teenage-level relationship story to a study of personal growth and mature awareness. It’s almost as if the final (good) bits of the story were written first, and then handed off to a low level intern to “fill in the opening bits” that ended up being the bulk of the game. It’s really a shame. I suspect by the time most people reach the end of the game they will have stopped reading the game text and watching the cutscenes, so they will miss out on some really good fiction.

There were a few little aspects of the game that were pretty neat and added a lot to the experience. One of these was little “bar trivia”. See, in the game, the main character spends a lot of time at a bar (I can relate to that at least!) and after he has had a certain number of drinks, the game presents you with some interesting little factoid about the type of alcohol he has been drinking. Another was the morality questions between each section. Even though some of these questions were quite laughable (Housekeeping? Really??) the game totals up the answers in an online database and then reports back how everyone else answered the same questions. it was fun and interesting to see how other players responded to some of the questions. More than once I was shocked or surprised by the outcomes.

Another really cute aspect of the game is a little mini-game within the game. It’s basically the same as the puzzle levels of the game, but with a small twist. Rather than being timed, the player is only allowed to make a set number of moves. The mini-game is quite fun and it’s really too bad that this puzzle element was not incorporated into the main game on one or two sections. Oddly enough, the difficulty of the mini-game is better tuned than the main game itself.

The game purports to have eight different endings that vary depending on the answers you give during the game. (I only played it through once.) By the time I got to the end of the game I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted things to go. Amazingly, even though the game did not end the way I expected (or the way I wanted, for that matter!) I was very satisfied with the ending that I did get. It actually seemed to make sense and fit into the final characterizations (or at least how I imagined them to be) extremely well.

Overall, I’m glad I played it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to others.

As a gaming enthusiast, I have several gaming news aggregators on my RSS reader. I will typically scan through the headlines at least once a day and read articles that seem interesting to me. Now, I’ll admit that articles that mention new beta-test cycles will almost always catch my eye, but the truth of it is that I’ve grown tired of the current crop of “beta” tests that are little more than hype-generating marketing ploys. And it’s not like I don’t have enough games in my current rotation to keep me busy for the rest of the year!

But for some reason, an article about Hedone caught my eye. It came with a link to a “free beta access code” (as if the marketing department really had any intention of selling access to beta!) to a one-day, six-hour testing session. Karen was having some friends over for her Book Club at the same time as the event, so it seemed to make sense to try it out. I took the bait, grabbed a code, signed up for beta, and downloaded the client.

In a nutshell, Hedone is a FPS. It uses the unreal engine, and the graphics use a gritty, ultra-realistic style.

The game fiction/backstory is actually pretty good. Supposedly, in the not-too-distant future, some yokel figures out how to clone people and “copy” their memories into the new clone, granting a kind of immortality. The catch is that the copy has to be made within a few minutes of death. Completely ignoring the socio-political implications, and staying on the simplistic game writing track, this gives rise to a Blood Sport where contestants are killed, cloned, and killed again for entertainment value. The player takes on the role of one of these clones. It's not a BAD story, but, like too many other FPSes, the backstory and the gameplay are almost completely divorced from one another. Once you’re in the game, you might as well be playing Call of War’s Battlefield Fortress or any other FPS. The other big problem became apparent right away, but I didn’t figure out what it actually was until I played for a few hours.

See, the game is billed as a FPS-MMO. This means character advancement. In the game, your character doesn't really gain stats, but as you gain “fans” (XP) you unlock more powerful weapons and skills. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a “pro” FPS player. I can hold my own on most public servers, but real FPS players will wipe the floor with me. In my first dozen or so games I was running a K/D ratio of about 1:4. I chocked it up to inexperience with the game and trundled on. Eventually I unlocked the first weapon upgrade, a new machinegun. Suddenly, my K/D jumped up to 1:1.5! I was killing people in ¼ second if I got the drop on them. I was shocked how much more efficient the first upgrade was in terms of firepower. No more “spray and pray”. With the new gun it was more like pulling off short controlled bursts of fire. And this was the first upgrade.

As the night wore on, the total population of the game fell down to about ten players. It was me, one other newbie and several people who were level 30+. They had access to weapons and skills that I could only dream about. My K/D fell back down to the 1:3 range. I could still get kills, but it started being more about LUCK than about skill. Simply put, the power differential between the haves and the have-nots was too great.

I didn't look into the monetization strategy, but the game is pretty clearly set up for micro-transactions. I would suspect that they are going to allow players to buy in-game currency with real cash. (You can also gain this in-game currency, albeit very slowly, as you play.) This would solve the problem of high-level players dominating, but opens the door to the typical pay-to-win issue that plagues many F2P games.

The game is clearly still under development. There were only two game modes available: Team Deathmatch and Domination. The latter was a standard Control Point variant, one team attacking and one team defending for a specified time, with only two points that would periodically reset, and then the roles reverse for an identical time. There were only four maps, and these did double-duty for both modes of play. The maps seemed to be designed for different numbers of players. For example, the trailer park map was very small and cramped, and in a game with 16 people, there would be four or five firefights going on within my field of view. Whereas the warehouse map was huge and confusing and in a 6-player game, I spent more time looking for opponents than actually fighting. The lack of diversity in maps made the game feel very “samey” after only a handful of plays.

So, would I buy it? No, not really. Usually when I play a new game for the first time, I have this desire to learn more about it, at least for a few days. This one just didn't grab me. It doesn’t really have any stand-out feature that makes it more appealing than any of the other FPS games on the market (or even some that I already own).

If it were released as free-to-play, would I drop a few buck on upgrades to play on release? Again, the answer is no. Half the enjoyment of an MMO is watching your character advance in power. The game just isn’t interesting enough to me to want to pay my way to the top of the heap.

Overall, it was a fun little diversion, but I don’t think I’ll be going back. Unless the developers come up with a new hook, I doubt I’ll even be checking back for more beta events.

Since I live in a multi-system household, GameFly is working out great for me. The latest game I’ve finished is Ghost Trick: Phanotm Detective. This wasn’t one my top picks, but apparently I have a bunch of really popular games on my Queue, so I got this one, which was eighth or ninth on my list. That’s okay though, because I wouldn’t have put it on my list at all if I weren’t interested in playing it.

I first discovered this game nearly a year ago. See, as a gamer I follow a lot of gaming blogs and gaming news aggregators. Last year, the publishers of this game put out a flash-based demo that is the first chapter of the game. (The demo is available for play here.) I played the demo and thought it was a clever puzzle-game concept. And it really is. The mechanic is very easy to figure out and well implemented.

As my friends know, I’m not much of a “story” guy, but the story in this game is presented in bite-sized chunks. I’m easily annoyed by games that force you to click through 25 minutes of exposition in order to get to an action/puzzle/challenge level that takes 45 seconds to complete. In my opinion, if I’m spending more time reading about the game than I am actually playing the game, then, quite frankly, I’d rather just go read a book. It’s a very rare game that has a compelling story that even comes close to even a poorly written book. So I was very happy to find that even the longest clicky-story parts of this game were only a few minutes long. About half of the story is actually told as part of the puzzles. And, to be honest, the pace of the story really does a pretty good job of keeping the player interested. The basic “murder mystery” is introduced in the first chapter, using gameplay elements. After that, it’s pretty much got your attention for the duration.

The downside of this is that there really is only one story. The replay value of this game is virtually nil. There aren’t branching paths, and the choices you make don’t affect the storyline at all. Either you solve the mystery, or you don’t continue the game. Sadly, this lack of replay value is also true in the puzzles. While many of them were challenging and some were real head scratchers, once you know the solution, you know the solution. There is only one way to get past each puzzle. Even later in the game where you have three different ghost abilities, and have to use different abilities at different times or places, there is still only one way to get past each puzzle.

Despite the linearity of the story and puzzle elements, some of the puzzles are extremely difficult. Some of them are timed – the game has a clever “four minute” mechanic – and some rely on you moving to a location or interacting with an object that is only available for a split-second. For example, one puzzle required me to wave a flag to stop a pitcher of water from falling. If I waved the flag a second too soon or a second too late, I would miss the pitcher and it would spill. This made some puzzles very difficult to figure out since the window of opportunity was sometimes very small. In other cases, the complexity of the puzzle required multiple retries. In one particular puzzle, I knew what I wanted to do, but getting my pieces in the right position to affect the game object in the way I wanted took nearly a dozen attempts.

Luckily, the game offers infinite retries. In most cases this was a boon, keeping the game moving even when I failed. For long, complex puzzles, the game has a kind of “mini-save” checkpoint at various points in the puzzle and if you are forced to restart (due to missing one of the aforementioned short windows-of-opportunity, or simply failing the puzzle) you don’t have to redo much of the puzzle. In one case, the dialog during the puzzle was long and annoying and I had to wade through it a handful of times. This only happened once in the entire game.

The game only autosaves at the conclusion of each chapter, but it does allow manual saving at any point. I played it through without ever powering down (over the course of 12 days). I would estimate that the average player will get about 20 hours of play. A skilled puzzle-player (which I am not!) will probably finish it in half that time.

The denoument of the story is quite satisfying, even if it is somewhat predictable and a bit drawn out. The final chapter got a bit long on exposition, as if the writers were getting frustrated by not being able to put in tons of text within the game and finally convinced the producers to allow them some free reign. Of course, by the time the player reaches the final chapter they are most likely willing to sit through a few dozen screens of text to complete the story arc.

Graphically… well, it’s a DS game. If you’re looking for high-definition 1080p graphics on the DS, you’re insane. Generally the graphics made sense and never once did I say “That’s a WHAT?” due to pixelization or low-resolution. I suppose in the grand scheme of things, that equates to very good DS graphics.

Overall it was a fun, fast little romp. I gave it an 8 out of 10.

We discovered Thunderstone at PAX Prime this year. Having played Dominion and Ascension before, the concept of a deck-building game was not new to us.

In case the reader is not up-to-speed on this concept: Basically it is a card game similar to Magic: the gathering, but with three important differences

1. You don’t buy expansion packs. All of the cards come in the box.
2. You build your deck as the game progresses.
3. You don’t battle each other directly.

All players start out with a very small, identical deck of weak cards. You shuffle these and draw a hand of random cards from this starting deck. Everyone has the same cards on the first two turns, but because they are randomly selected, there are going to be slight variations. You use the cards in your hand to “buy” additional cards from the table, which go into your deck and will show up in subsequent hands.

We tried out the base game at PAX and really loved it. It was much more immersive than Dominion; it felt like you were actually doing something. Rather than just buying victory points, you were building an army of heroes to go into a dungeon and kill monsters (which are worth victory points). And it felt “cleaner” than Ascension; you only had to deal with your own hand and not with lingering effects from other players.

We played several rounds at PAX and purchased the second “base” set Thunderstone: Dragonspire there. It’s technically an “expansion” for the game but it includes all of the base cards as well, so it is a stand-alone game in its own right. When I unboxed this game (a while back I was quite confused by some of the stuff that was included. Since this was basically the “not really, but sorta second edition”, the publisher included a LOT of cards that were corrections for the prior games and not intended to be used in this stand-alone game. This confused me at first, but after going through each and every card, I sorted it out and set aside the unused cards.

Anyway, this weekend we played our first game of Dragonspire. When we bought this game one of the things we asked for was that there be more “chain” cards. One of the things that made Dominion fun was the ability to play a card that gave you additional actions, or draw and play more cards per turn. Well, Dragonspire has that for sure! A normal turn in Thunderstone is six cards. During one turn in Dragonspire, Kyle has nearly TWENTY cards on the table (nearly his whole deck!)

Unfortunately, three Bad Things™ happened during this session that really detracted from the game:

1. A really bad random draw. One of the really cool things about Thunderstone (and especially Dragonspire) is that most of the cards have some really cool synergies. For example a Fighter hero that wields an edged weapon or a Wizard hero using multiple spells will get bonus attack power; or a weapon that “saves” a hero will allow you to use a different item that gives a combat bonus and would normally kill one of your heroes without the drawback; or a hero type that gets a bonus from other non-hero cards in your hand. These kinds of synergies make every game of Thunderstone really a unique experience. The problem is that when you randomly draw decks, sometime you end up with cards that DON’T synergize well or at all. For example, you might randomly draw four Wizard hero types, and only have edged weapons available to buy. This really slows the game down because players are not able to quickly grow powerful heroes and/or abilities and as a result can only kill the weakest monsters. This is exactly what happened, so our game lasted nearly four hours, the last two hours of which were painfully boring.
   (It’s worth noting that I’ve since discovered an online “intelligent” randomizer tool that specifically will not allow those sorts of combinations from occurring. We will be using this next time!)
2. Low value cards. Normally, the decks available to buy are mixed in price form dirt cheap to hideously expensive. Sometimes there will be a cheap card that lets you either take a gamble and possibly get a higher priced card, or a trade-in card that lets you make more money when it comes back. For this game, we were all gold-poor so instead of buying heroes in the first couple of hands, the hero decks were mostly full all the way to the end of the game. In fact, of the four hero types on the table one of them still had level 1 guys showing, and none of them had advanced to level 3! Mostly because no one could afford to buy them.
3. A really bad shuffle. This was seen in both the drafting phase (we got the first three monster groups alphabetically) and in the dungeon decks. The monsters came out of the deck, practically in order! First we fought a wave of Fire Elementals, then we got Humanoid Bandits followed by a few Dark Enchanted. This added to the slowness of the game because the Bandits required that you have three, four or five heroes in your hand. And (as I mentioned) we were gold and hero-poor. It was a minor miracle when someone had three heroes in a hand. Pretty much those cards were cleared just by attacking them and losing, just to push them back into the dungeon.

Despite these drawbacks, the game was still interesting to play. I really enjoyed the theme or the dungeon crawl. I lucked out on one of the first hands and was the first player to buy a hero and a giant sword; rather than building a “fun” deck with chained cards and weird effects, I was focusing on a utilitarian “get to the end” deck and trying to synergize my hands as much as possible. I took an early lead, but stalled out in mid-game with several bad hands in a row. And by then the dungeon was locked in Bandit Mode and I had concentrated on building two strong heroes instead of the required three/four/five heroes needed to defeat those buggers. And when our dungeon’s only “trick”, a Guardian, popped up, we were all so battle weary that no one even wanted to deal with it, so rather than deal with it, we just pushed it to the bottom of the deck right away.

We played Thunderstone at PAX with three people and a second time with four people. This session was with five players. As you add more people around the table the pace of the game slows since you’re more-or-less doing nothing but spectating during other people’s turns. I felt like the ideal number of players is three, but four is manageable. I’ll probably try to limit it to three or four next time we play.

Overall, I would say that we’ve played worse games. It certainly wasn’t a session that is going to have the players clamoring for more. The player who ended up winning (Wyatt), won by a landslide victory. He ended the game with over double the next highest score. And one of the players only managed to kill three monsters. I think with a better draw and more randomization the game would have been much more fun. I’m actually looking forward to giving it another try. At our next party.

The second game I've gotten from my new GameFly account has been Heavy Rain. I actually have had this one for about a month, but I loaned it out to my good friend Colby at my office for a few weeks before digging in to it. I finally finished it today.

I'm not big on the writing in most video games. I have a long running "discussion" about the storylines in single-player games with another friend. He feels that video game stories are engrossing and force the player to make difficult decisions. I thinks that's a load of crap. I've NEVER felt like any decision in a video game was going to have any real effect, even in the game. After all, if I make the wrong choice, its just a reload away to back up and try again.

The counter argument to that is that in a "good" story, the fallout from the choices you make early in the game wont be known until much later, when it's far too late to go back and change them. Fine, but you know what? It doesn't matter. Even if a bad decision in chapter one would put my character in an unwinnable situation, the game HAS to let me keep going. I know that it is just a game and even though I'm "driving" the characters, the game HAS to let me get to the end. So armed with that knowledge, I stop caring about the "hard decisions" and "moral dilemmas" that an RPG will present.

Heavy Rain is not that kind of game.

First of all, the genre isn't high fantasy, post apocalyptic sci fi, or even adrenaline filled action. It the story of a father who has had his son kidnapped by a psychopath and what he is willing to go through to get his son back. (Hint: it's some twisted fucked up shit.) The characters are well developed and believable, which really allows the player to care about them. The storyline has a few predictable elements, but as a Murder Mystery, it feeds you enough condemning evidence that you start to question your predictions (which are probably right). The decisions you make in game are true moral dilemmas that have real lasting effects. It is entirely possible for you to make a choice that will literally result in one of the four main characters getting killed. Forever. Like when you are being chased by the police, do you allow them to capture you or do you jump off a three story building to escape? You know you're innocent, and the jump might kill you; but the police think you're guilty and might shoot you unless you get away.

The catch of course, is that if you choose the wrong path, the game actually kills that character off. Often brutally and graphically. The story keeps going, but if the character is integral to the story-line, you simply lose the game. Period.

One of the first things I noticed about Heavy Rain was that, unlike typical RPGs where you can exhaust dialog trees and learn everything about the game, most of the time you are put into a branching situation, whether it be dialog or action, you only have a limited number of "turns" before the game moves you on. So, for example, say you're asking someone about something in their past. You have four basic things you can ask about and each of those items may have two or three followup questions. But after you ask three questions, the other character gets a phone call, makes an excuse and leaves. Even if you didn't ask everything. In this way you really DO need to think like you're trying to solve a mystery.

Playing with the Move was very natural. The actions on-screen and the actions with the controller were very similar. Enough so that it really felt like I was controlling the characters. For example, to knock on a door, one would hold the Move upright, lift it about 6-inches and then thrust it forward, approximating the same hand-motion that you would make knocking on a door in real life. Fight scenes would flash motion cues on the screen for about 1/2 second. For example, if the character needed to doge right, it would show a right facing arrow. If you completed the cued action fast enough, the character would react properly and dodge the punch/bullet/knife/whatever. If you "missed", either by moving the wrong way, hitting the wrong button or not reacting fast enough, the character would react incorrectly and get hit. Sometimes fatally.

The same also applies to dialog timing. If you spend too long trying to decide what to say or ask, the game just moves you along as if you said *nothing* and you miss out on any information in that dialog tree! This makes the mystery even more compelling. It feels a lot more like real life, where there are things going on that may not be related to the core story.

The story is EXTREMELY compelling, easily on par with a dramatic movie or a complex book. Even if this had been a non-interactive experience, it still would have been a good story. One of the bonus features that is unlocked during play is a 4-minute tech demo. Even that little vignette was worth watching and it was literally just a short film. A story of love, betrayal, despair and ultimately revenge... in less than 5 minutes. Let's just say the writing is well done and leave it at that.

During my play session, I "lost" two of the main characters at various points in the game. I reloaded those segments and worked like hell to keep the characters alive to the end of the game. By the time it wound to it's conclusion, I had (as they say) "investment" in these people. I played through the final action sequence at least ten times in order to get through it with everyone intact. I tried. I really tried. I was not able to achieve that goal. So close...

If you have a PS3, and haven't played this game, you need to get it. Now. If you don't have a PS3, it's worth borrowing one from a friend to play this game. I play a lot of games in my life, and Heavy Rain is one of the top ten games I've ever played.

Let me preface this by giving a little background.

I've been playing MMO type games since the mid-1980s. My first online gaming experience was in 1982 with a game called "Isle of Kesmai" run on a dialup service called CompuServe. We connected at 300 bps with an option for a "high speed" 2400 bps connection. Graphics were ASCII art. I think the maximum simultaneous online users was slightly over 100.

Since that rather crude beginning, I've played, tested, sampled and enjoyed several dozen different MMOs and basically watched this industry develop from it's most tender roots. I was able to play all of the first generation of mass-market MMOs (UO, EQ, AC), most of the second generation, and in the last few years have made it a point to sample at least one new F2P MMO every few weeks. I was an unpaid volunteer "consulting" designer on Dark Age of Camelot for nearly eight years.

I should note that I am a bit unique in that I have not played very much World of Warcraft; I only played WoW for about two weeks when it was released. As a result, I am not very familiar with common WoW setups that differ from standards in the industry as a whole. A classic example of this is the keypress to access your inventory: In WoW, you press B for "bags"; in nearly every other MMO in the entire world, you press I for "inventory". A small thing, and remapping keys will fix it, but it serves as an example of how I am not "in touch" with WoW-like design decisions.

So... Rift.

This opinion is based on one 8-hour play session, from character creation up to level 14. Anyone who has been paying attention will realize that its impossible to get a good handle on an entire MMO in such a short time frame. So consider this a "preliminary" opinion, subject to change as I explore the game a bit more. If I had to sum up my initial feelings about Rift in one line it would be this:

Rift is just like WAR, without the PvP.

Right out of the virtual box, Rift gave me a warm fuzzy feeling. Patching it for play was quick and painless. The first time I ran the client, it actually checked my video drivers and upon finding that I was a mere three months out-of-date, recommended that I update before playing. That's a nice touch!

Character creation in Rift is pretty standard fare. There are two major factions, each of which has three races. Each race has a special racial ability, so the choices are not just cosmetic. You also choose a gender and one of four primary "callings". These are the base meta-class that your character will develop from; Fighter, Mage, Cleric or Rogue. Each Calling adds another unique ability to your arsenal, so even as a level 1 newbie, there is a pretty wide variety in character skillsets.

Sadly, the world in which the game takes place is not very compelling. I'll admit that I did not read the numerous quest dialogs, so a lot of the "flavor" was lost there. (I did skim the tutorial text for game-specific idiosyncracities.) But the world/setting didn't really induce me to WANT to read the flavortext either! In fact, the tutorial area was actually extremely annoying. I found myself counting the minutes until I would complete the final quest to get out of that area and be kicked into the "real" world. I understand that the goal was to create tension and give the player a feeling that there is a larger battle going on in the game as a whole, but let's face it, you can't simulate an exciting, dynamic battle-scene with stationary NPCs that are locked in "mortal" combat when neither side will EVER actually win. I never felt like I was actually in a battle, nor any sense of urgency. Admittedly, this was the newbie area, but the quests themselves were quite boring and simplistic. The only time I ever even paused to jump into a fight was the final "rift" quest. As it turned out, that quest was actually easy to complete, but until I hit the trigger location it appeared to be impossible.

It's worth noting that the character development system in Rift is actually very well done, and one of the strongest aspects of the game. Each "Calling" can activate up to three "Souls" from a selection of eight. Basically this is a sub-classing system where you can mix-and-match different specialties. For example, a Warrior can choose any three sub-classes from Paladin (tank), Warlord (self-buffs), Beastmaster (pets), Champion (two-handed), Paragon (dual wield), Reaver (AE), Riftblade (magical attacks), Void Knight (anti-caster), and later in the game, Vindicator (PvP specific). Each subclass has 20-ish abilities that the player can train, laid out in a skill-tree format. Some of the abilities have up to 5 levels, increasing in power and utility as you train them further. Of course, the player only has a limited number of skill points (about one per level) to spend. The net result is that the player ends up with a lot of options and no way to choose them all. With three different sub-classes to choose from and 20 skills in each subclass, it allows the player to really create a unique character skillset as they grow and develop.

For example, I chose a Cleric "calling". For my first "Soul" I chose Justicar (a primarily melee-based subclass). One of the default abilities this class gets is a melee-based self heal, similar to a lifetap. I knew that this was likely to be a pretty durable selection, so I focused on the DPS skills. As expected, my damage output was still fairly low, so I selected Shaman as my second "Soul" and started pushing my DPS skills in that tree as well. By the time I hit level 10, my self-healing was actually out-pacing the damage I would take from most MOBs. At level 12, I gained an ability that let my heals "spill over" to another person in my party and suddenly became a tank's best friend. By standing next to the Warrior and fighting his target, as long as I didn't take damage, all of my self-heals would transfer to him!

I had started with a concept of what kind of character I wanted to develop and within a few hours of play, I had actually "created" a character class that met my concepts. This system is a lot more flexible than most traditional class-based systems I've seen, but it's structured enough that it avoids the confusion that class-less skill systems often create. My only concern is that specific combinations will prove to be more powerful than others and the entire system will distill down to only a handful of viable options. Only time will tell if the developers are savvy enough to keep the system in balance and that there are multiple options for the player.

It's important to spend a few paragraphs discussing the "rift" system. This concept sounds great on paper: random "rifts" appear, spilling a kind of mini-raid into the area. A battle cry goes up (it actually prints a short paragraph of text in the middle of the screen) and the map has a huge, unmistakable marker showing where the fight is. Just getting close to the vicinity allows the player to join a "public group" which is extremely reminiscent of WAR's public quests. To sweeten the pot even further, participating in a rift even awards the player with a special kind of currency that can be used to buy upgraded equipment, armor and weapons (also similar to WAR's public quests).

Where it falls down is in the actual execution. Even a small rift will dump a group of 4-5 hostile MOBs right on top of the player. The MOBs are tethered, and they move as a group. If a solo player draws agro from one, you end up fighting all of them. A rift event can potentially shut down a game region for players who are questing or grinding there. A large rift even will spawn up to 50 (yes, really!) elite-level MOBs, some of which are very high level. To make matters worse, rift events specifically target a quest hub, or town, so players don't even have the option of opting out and hiding behind the guards. For example, when I was finishing up some quests in the level 7 to 9 area, a large rift dropped 40 level 18 elite MOBs immediately adjacent to the town area. The rifting MOBs made quick work of killing all of the local guards and quest givers in that area. Within about 45 seconds all of the players were killed as well (including me). Since the fight was happening in the middle of a town area, the game would respawn you right in the middle of the fight, where you would be summarily killed again. I lost count of how many times I was killed within seconds of respawning. I'm almost certain that there is a game mechanic that allows the player to "escape" from this death-loop, but it wasn't obvious to me. (It's worth noting that eventually the players did band together, killed all of the MOBs, and closed the rift, allowing the town to respawn.)

Anyone who played Aion probably has some bad memories of being killed without warning by an enemy player. Rift recreates that experience and removes the safety of guard posts in towns and quest hubs. After a few "rift" experiences, I started to actively AVOID them! When the screen showed a rift event starting, I would immediately check my map and run in the opposite direction as fast as possible. It wasn't until I finished my character skills set up and had outleveled the smaller rifts before I started participating in the smaller rift events again. (I still avoided the larger ones.)

At the end of the night I was standing on the bridge leading to the main city for my faction. I think I have completed almost all of the quests in the newbie area (but might be wrong about that).

I have not tried any of the battlefront (PvP) scenarios yet, and I'm hopeful that those will be enjoyable and relatively balanced. With the flexibility of the character skill system, I hope that there will be a wide variety in playstyles and it will not devolve into a rock-paper-scissors system like so many other PvP MMOs.

I also have not done any crafting. I'm not sure I will have time to explore that part of the game.

My initial impression is that this game is trying very hard to be what WAR aspired to be, and I think they've done a great job of it. WAR's fatal flaw was it's indecision about trying to be a WoW-clone while at the same time trying to be a completely different experience from WoW. Rift avoids this pitfall by completely embracing it's WoW-ness and simply adding a few interesting tidbits into the mix. Some of the mechanics that Rift adds to the mix are well done. For example, the fun and inventive character development system. Sadly, the game taken as a whole isn't very compelling. If they had a team of writers (not to be confused with "quest developers") and another six to nine months to work on the game world and backstory presentation, it would probably help a lot. But in the end it will the the "rift" mechanic that will doom this game to niche status. Very few players will enjoy being FORCED to participate in a fight that they are not prepared for and cannot escape from, even in defeat.

This phase of beta testing is scheduled to shut down at 4PM PST on Friday, which will only allow me one more play session. I will follow up with my final thoughts then. (EDIT: this was expended to 10AM on Saturday, so I will get two more play sessions.)

I normally go home for lunch. I only work about 2.4 miles away from my house, so it makes sense. I eat leftovers which gets rid of old food and saves money at the same time. Plus it allows me to do a 30 minute run or bike workout on my lunch-break which works really really well.

Yesterday I had planned on starting my 2009 taxes. I was going to install TurboTax and start inputting income. But alas....

The night before, I thought I had left my computer on, but when I glanced into the room before bed, all was dark. I assumed that I had actually put it into hibernation mode and had just forgotten about it. So when I pushed the power button at lunch at it made a nice "click" sound and nothing else, I suddenly remembered that I had NOT turned it off the night before, but it was clearly off now. It was dead, dead, dead.

I did some basic troubleshooting. The power supply fan does spin up. The "power on" LED on the mainboard lights up, but the computer doesn't turn on any farther than that.

I wasn't planning on doing a rebuild, but this looks like a good excuse to upgrade. I spent a good three hours last night reading builder's guides and I think i have a decent set of parts picked out. I was amazed to find that the best way to get a good performing system these days is not to pick out speedy parts, but rather to pick a "suite" of parts that work well together! I was also surprised to learn that the high-end processors are wholey unsuited for my applications (primarily gaming) and that lower-end "budget" systems actually performed BETTER in many cases.

So I've started buying pieces. I'm going to buy them in little chunks and replace things until it works again. I've set a $1000 limit on what I will buy no matter what. So here is my new system list:

Antec Three-Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Case
OCZ 600W ATX 80+ Modular Power Supply

Intel i3-530 Dual-Core Processor
GIGABYTE GA-H55M-S2H Motherboard
4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 Memory
GeForce GTX 260 (280Mhz overclock) Video Card
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

So, this year has been a fun-filled ride so far and I haven't made time for this blog. Or training. Or gaming. Or pretty much anything.

This morning, I spent a couple hours and updated this year's training log, my weight tracker, and the current Wish List. Some is better than none, I suppose.

I wrote this back in May and intended to edit it to be cleaner and better presented, but I'm clearly not going to "find the time" to do that, so here it is in it's ugly glory:

We tried out Shaiya - a "mature" rated MMO. It's also free-to-play (F2P) so the only thing lost by trying it out is a little time.

THE BAD

My first impression is that this game really needs a publisher. It looks EXTREMELY amateurish and unfinished. The text popups break in the middle of words so a quest might tell you something like:
" Go out into the wilderness and ki
ll seventeen wild tree monkeys. B
ring back their tails."

Really?!? You couldn't even program a way to make the text break on whitespace?

Monster names are often truncated. Only the first dozen or so letters are displayed so a long name gets appended with an elipsis. For example, if the monster were called "Thantalorn Evil Quest Monster" (a very long name) it would display as "Thantalorn Evil ..." The only saving grace is that it is displayed that way -everywhere- so you can kinda match up the truncated names in the quest log to the truncated names in the game world.

The font that use for names is a 1-pixel wide simplex font that scales to always be microscopic and annoying.

THE GOOD (sort of....)

The world graphics are very nice, albeit a bit dull in palette choices. The first time you come into view of a big city and the different sections of the model draw in, you go "wow!" It would be nice if they had used more dynamic colors though. The whole game feels a bit... brown.

The character models are very attractive. This is the first game in which the male characters actually look sexy and strong. Oddly enough, they are actually more attractive than the female models.

Skills can be trained as soon as you level up, no matter where you are. You don't have to visit a trainer, you just pop open the skills window and train right there and then. On the other hand, with no real way to know what skills are valuable and which are fodder, it's easy to gimp yourself early on. With a limited number of skill points and more skills than you could afford to buy, choosing the "right" skills to train can be a challenge.

Quests are standard MMO faire. Step one: go kill ten moneys, bring back the fur. Step two: go kill five elk, bring back the antlers. Step Three: go kill seven sealakel (??) and bring back the scales. Yawn. But you do get "free" equipment and weapons for doing them.

Leveling is superfast and easy. In four hours of play I've leveled three characters up to level 10+. I only died once and that was because I wasn't paying attention. The PvE game is almost mindlessly simple.

THE GREAT

RvR is very similar to DAoC. You go through a portal to the "Borderlands". You initially zone in to a "safe" area with friendly guards. Passing through a large gateway, you enter a land full of MOBs and enemy players. The "game" (so to speak) is to capture and hold a central tower. The tower becomes stronger (or weaker) depending on how many smaller capture nodes your side holds. So the RvR action becomes a large zerg at the central point, while smaller premade groups roam around capturing the smaller nodes. If you've ever played in a DAoC battleground, this is almost the same feel. The "borderland" areas are even level limited, to make it a relatively even paying field. The first area is limited to level 1-15. One significant difference is that it won't kick you out if you level up within the borderland zone. So as long as you do not log out you could be one, two, three or more levels above the limit for that area. Couple this with not needing to train and you often will have one or two people that are almost invulnerable wandering around.

Unfortunately, there are only two factions, like WAR and WoW.

THE WTF???

When you make your first chracter, you can start in "easy" or "normal" mode. Easy limits your level and how many skill and stat points you get per level. Normal gives you a nominal amount. Once you reach level 40 you can start a new character in "Hard" mode. Hard mode characters get extra points each level. So a level 10 "hard" character will wipe the floor with a level 15 "easy" character. This means that the first character(s) you make are essentially throwaway toons no matter what you do, and you'll need to grind out a character to level 40 before you can really play the game... by restarting and throwing away that progress.

Even weirder, when you reach level 50 on a "hard" character, you have the option to start a new "Utilmate" mode toon. These get a ton more skill and stat points, but come with a major drawback. If you die in PvE and are not resurrected within three minutes... that character is dead. Forever. Yes, they have permadeath. But supposedly the extra stat points make up for it. Personally, I’m not convinced.

CONCLUSION

We only played this game for a handful of hours, so its hard to say whether it is any good. I'm enjoying the character development portion. Thus far I've tried a Fighter (melee DPS), a Ranger (stealth DPS), a Mage (ranged DPS) and a Defender (melee Tank) on the "good" side. The roles play as one would expect.

The pace of PvE is pretty slow and bland (just like every other MMO) and the RvR action is insanely fast paced. We spent only 30 minutes in the first RvR zone and every time we saw a red enemy name, we were dead in 2-3 hits - faster than we could figure out what was going on. That's normal for the first venture into PvP in a new game.

I have a feeling that if we devoted the time to become familiar with the game, figure out how to recognize the other classes and gain some experience with the skill system that RvR would be fun and competitive.

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.

The holi-daze shopping season is almost upon us. I know that the economy is in poor shape but in my close circle of friends and family, I think we're all doing okay.

I've updated my "wish list" (top link on the left) with some current wants and desires. I do update this occasionally during the year and pretty frequently during the end-of-the-year sanitized-ex-pagan celebration-of-your-choice.

A couple of weeks ago, the good folks at Penny Arcade blogged a little note about WAR. Ever since Karen read that, she comes home from her stress-filled days at work and asks if we can go fucking murder people. I think that it’s kinda sweet that she wants to include me in that.

I spent the entire weekend last weekend reinstalling XP pro on my computer. It has been nearly two years since I've had a fatal crash and Windows has been slowly eating it's own brain for the entire time. I finally decided that I was tired of all the little warts it had grown - like defaulting to the sound being off and losing the active user's name every 15 seconds - and started over.

And I'm also working my way through an anime series called "Fruits Basket". This is a cute little show that we discovered when we were at PAX and I've downloaded the entire thing off the internet. At 20 minutes per episode it doesn't take a huge time investment, but there ate 26 episodes, so it does add up. I'm 11 shows in, so far.

In other gaming news, the holiday deluge is upon us. Little Big Planet is out now, but I have thus far resisted buying it. I know it is an awesome product and would suck me in for a few weeks but I’m not buying it simply because I have too many other irons in my virtual fire. I ordered Rock Band 2 "special edition" from amazon on the day it was released. It arrived on Saturday, last, and I’ve managed to scrape together enough time to set it up, create our characters and five-start the first batch of songs. This was a monumental effort considering that there is this constant siren call to fucking murder people. We’re about ½ way to maxing out in Warhammer and then the progression will start to slow down a bit. We are, however, starting to form a nice core group of people that we play with often and building synergy with those folks. That will help us out a lot in later stages of the game.

Rock Band 2 is very slick, a nice incremental improvement over the first game. For an additional $5 I was able to transfer all of the 45 songs from the first game over to the second one, and all of the downloaded content I’ve already purchased works in the new game, so I have a bit over 200 individual songs on Rock Band 2, right out of the box. (It’s worth noting that this isn’t true for Guitar Hero; none of the existing content will work with the new game!) The new drum kit s a lot quieter and more "snappy" feeling. The setup phase is fully automated now and times things down to the individual millisecond, which is very cool.

I was hoping to set up a RB2 night at the office for those people who wanted to see the game. The sad part is that most of the new songs in RB2 are still locked up. I have to play through the game at least once to unlock them. And that might be hard to swing considering the pressure on me to fucking murder people every night.

So ever since PAX, I pretty much decided that I was going to focus my time and energy on playing games for the rest of the year. It was a messed up summer for doing triathlon – all the fires we had on June and July made the air quality so bed that it was almost hazardous to breathe outdoors. Plus the huge VA project that I’m still working had me going down to San Francisco two days every week and pretty much ruined every weekend for the entire summer. As a result my training has been basically non-existent (much like it was the year I took and passed my P.E. exam) and we had a TON of fun at PAX, so the decision was pretty easy to make.

As you can see from the last few posts I’ve made and the tracking that xfire does, I’ve really been going full-bore playing Warhammer. I logged 91 hours the first week it was out. The second week I only put in 50-ish hours.

And then someone from work invited me to go mountain biking.

It was supposed to be a casual thing, just a little ride in a local park after work. As it turned out it was a very technical, white-knuckle, adrenaline-filled, heartbeat-in-the-mouth kind of ride. Complete with grueling climbs up rocky fire trails and fireball careening down rocky singletrack at breakneck speeds. There is a path all the way around Lake Ilsanjo and we had a little “race” there and I swear there was at least three times that I was sure that I was going to go down in a bloody heap, or smash into a tree, or go flying off the path into some rocks… But every time my back tire slid out and it felt like I was completely out of control, I’d hit a root, or a rock, or something and my wheel would stay on the path and I’d breathe a quick sigh of relief and keep pedaling. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before something goes horribly awry and I do actually fall and I break myself in some uncomfortable way.

But it’s a LOT of fun and I’m doing it twice a week until Daylight Savings ends.

I took last week off from work to de-stress from my job. I basically spent the entire week sitting around playing Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and drinking beer. According to xfire, I played 91 hours of Warhammer in the last seven days. It was a very nice break and I really needed the time to “get away” from EVERYTHING. Amazingly enough, the day before I was to return to work I was actually thinking to myself how I was ready to get back to the office. So apparently it was long enough of a break.

I’m really enjoying Warhammer. It’s crazy how much fun it is to get out there and kill other people. When we work together we wipe through them like a cloth on a dirty window. The problem is that there are only the two of us, so when they work together in a group of six, we wipe through them like salt through water. That is to say, they completely destroy us.

Still, the good far outweighs the bad and we are having a blast playing.

EDIT: I found a site that creates dynamic signature images based on the current level of a character. Here is mine. Note that this image will automatically update as I gain levels and reknown! thatscool!

I’ve been lax in updating again, but mostly for lack of time to post. Several interesting things have happened in the last few weeks, but in the interest of brevity (and time) They are all only going to get a brief mention.

I’m spending every Wednesday and Thursday in San Francisco for the next month or so. This is a –huge- project that I’ve been working on since November of last year. And it looks like I’ll be working on it for some time to come. I’m actually getting tired of being “stuck” on the same project, but it is paying my salary and is making a bucket-full of money for W&K… some of which is actually trickling down to me.

We went to Tahoe for the weekend of the 4th (thanks Kyle!) and had a great time. We went on several hikes that never made it all the way to intended destination, but were still a lot of fun. We ended up meeting two women on the trail, one of which was a proverbial “cougar” who seemed to take a real shine to Kyle, and lives in Seattle. We got a business card and will probably be pushing Kyle to see if he can hook up with her when we’re in the Seattle area for PAX.

WAR beta is in swing again. The difference this time is that Karen has a slot (Thanks to Larian!) so we are both playing alongside one another again. After a false start, she is having fun with her second character – a DPS caster/healer hybrid. I seem to be settling on a melee/healer hybrid. This is weird for me, but the combination is quite deadly. If enemies go for me, she heals, and if they go for her, I heal. Between the two of us, we stay up for a long time.

Tri 4 REAL #2 happened a couple weeks ago, but we didn’t race. The smoke here has been very thick and it’s been very difficult to get outside. So our training really has been mostly non-existent. When race day came, it was amazingly clear and we probably could have raced, but since we had fallen off on the training we decided not to participate. I have high hopes that we will make it to Tri 4 REAL #3 in two weeks and I –am- training for it now, but we’ll see how things turn out in the next 10 days.

Well, there you have it. A one-page summary of my last four weeks.

So I got a call today from my doctor.

1. The x-rays came back "negative". That is to say, the infection had not affected any bone, so the only thing I have to deal with the is the infection itself.

2. The infection is a not anti-biotic resistant. There is apparantly a strain of staph virus "out there" that is resistant to anti-biotics and there was some concern that this might be the case. As it turns out, the pills I've been taking for the last week should knock it out in a couple more days.

All in all, good news!

This is a difficult blog entry to write. I have good news and bad news. Let's start with the good.

I'm becoming more and more happy with the PSP purchase every time I download something new. I recently downloaded Jeanne D'Arc - a single player RPG. I've only played it a little bit, but it is very reminiscent of the old-school dungeon romps I grew up with.

I really like the story thus far (and not just because it features a anime-style french girl either!) and I'm excited to see where it goes.

I also downloaded the third X-Men movie. After watching it on the PSP I'm -very- glad I did not waste the time to go see it in the theater. I actually bought a print copy of the Dark Phoenix saga for Karen to read before seeing it. I don't think she ever did, and I'm actually glad for that. If she had read it, I would have wanted to see the movie, and the movie was a train wreck in slow motion. I'd like think that I'm not one of those fanbois that isn't willing to let a filmmaker take "creative license" with the source material, but COME ON!!! They killed off (or neutralized) pretty much all of the main characters of the entire X-Men storyline. They aren't called the X-Men for nothing, you know? When you kill the "X" (i.e. Xavier) you pretty much kill the X-Men; and yet, the writers and director felt it was okay to do just that. And then, once they did this, they figured it would be just peachy to completely remove all mutant powers from the leader of the "bad" mutants. The "hook" (if you can call it that) at the end of the movie was that Magneto _might_ be regaining his former powers. Who the f--- cares!?! You've already taken a giant shit on the franchise, why bother trying to make it look like "it might be okay in the end." Too late!

Anyway, despite being a god-awful movie that made me angry at the filmmakers, it was cool watching it on the PSP. I'm currently downloaing Spiderman 3 and UltraViolet. I don't have high hopes for either of those, but they will be nice time wasters over the next couple of weeks.

Finally, I downloaded a game called PataPon. The game defies description, but it is both annoyingly difficult and amazingly easy at the same time. It's a little puzzle-y, and a little music-y, and a little RPG-y. (I told you it defied description!) It's been the game that I've been playing whenever I have a spare five minutes. Although I find myself "stuck" at a certain level currently, I'm working my way back out of the hole I dug for myself.

In other news, I finally got beta access to WAR for Karen. The beta is currently closed, but should be reopening sometime after the holiday weekend. Finally Karen and I will be able to play an online game together again. And we may have a lot of time to do just that because of the Bad News (tm).

A couple of weeks ago, I reported on this blog that we had done a training ride of the Vineman loop with some friends. What I didn't mention was that just prior to embarking on this ride I stepped on a tack or nail or something. My left foot was punctured in some way. It seemed trivial at the time, but it was sore for a couple of day afterwards. That was over two weeks ago.

Last Friday my foot started hurting. A lot.

I'm not talking about, "oh that's a bit sore" kind of hurt. Nor the "Ouch!" kind of hurt. I'm referring more to the "OHMYGODITHURTSMAKEITSTOP" kind of pain. I couldn't walk. It was difficult to even -move- without crying out in pain. And of course, it started hurting at 4:55PM and my doctor closed at 5. I tried calling but got the answering service. I looked at my foot and it had a red spot about the size of a silver dollar with a tiny white spec in the center. I know enough to know that is a pretty telling sign of infection. Luckily I did not see the telltale black streaks that indicated a SERIOUS infection. I considered going to the emergency Room, but I already knew what they were going to do - tetnus shot, anitbiotics, and bed rest.

And a $1000 fee, which my insurance would only pay 80%.

So I let it be. Over the weekend it oscillated between mind-numbing pain and a mere annoyance. On Saturday I barely got out of bed. Going downstairs was unthinkable. Yet, on Sunday I went for a 30 mile ride - my foot wasn't hurting at all.

Today I went to my doctor. A $20 co-pay later I got what I expected: a tetnus shot and a presciption for a sulfur based anti-biotic. But I also got something I didn't expect. She told me to get an X-Ray of my foot. I wasn't sure why I would need an X-Ray for what was obviously just a simple infection. So she told me.

Because of the time involved (two weeks) there is a possibility that the infection may have reached bone. (Thus the X-Ray.) If it turns out that the bad stuff has gotten into the bone, the only solution is to remove the affected bone(s). That is to say, there is a distinct possibility that part of my foot may need to be removed/amputated.

Yep. That's right. They might need to cut part of my foot off. Great, huh?

I'll know more later this week. I'm just hoping that the X-Rays come back clean.

So after plinking around with the PSP a bit, I posted an advert on craigslist looking for someone to mod my PSP to use “homebrew”. As luck would have it, I got a response almost instantly form some guy in Santa Rosa. After a bit of back and forth, we finally met in the parking lot of Taco Bell on Wednesday. It felt so “shady” to meet some strange guy in a Taco Bell parking lot – almost like we were doing a drug deal, but with high tech goods.

Anyway, he popped the battery and memory stick out of my PSP, put in the Pandora battery and memstick and while we chatted the PSP downgraded itself. It took maybe 3 minutes, tops. After that, he put my battery back in, changed to a different memory stick and installed what is essentially the exact same firmware that I had - version 3.90 – but in “homebrew” style. That took another 3 minutes. I handed him a $20 bill and that was it.

When I got home, I copied three ISO files onto the PSP. I had already downloaded a couple of games just to see how they worked. I have ISOs for God of War, Puzzle quest, Syphon Filter, Wipeout Pulse, and Crisis Core.

OMG

I’ve been playing Puzzle quest for the last two nights. The PSP is small and light so I can play it while I’m laying in bed. The screen is bright, but not as bright as a decent booklight and it has a headphone jack. Karen reads for a bit before sleeping and I play and then she turns off her booklight and I keep playing. This thing is super addictive. It has an internet connection so I can even play online multiplayer while reclining in bed. The game is pretty cool, it’s basically a little puzzle-y combat game similar to Puzzle Pirates. It has a multiplayer component, but I haven’t really explored that much. I don’t think there is a matchmaking server; even if there were, I’m pretty sure that there aren’t people just waiting to play.

I played a few acts of Crisis Core. It seems typical, albeit simplistic fighting game. I found it amusing that some of the cutscenes are rendered with voiceovers and other cutscenes are dynamic with text “voices” in the game engine. I suck beyond words in Wipeout. Racing games just aren’t my thang, apparently. (I plan on downloading the PSP version of Burnout to see the trend continues.) I haven’t moved the God of War or Syphon Filter ISOs to the PSP yet. I only have a 4G memstick and the ISO files are really big. The God of War ISO is nearly 2G all by itself. (UMD, the optical media that PSP games are distributed on, can hold up to 1.8G!)

I may have to buy another few memsticks just to carry different games around on. They’re very small though, so the chances of them getting lost are great. It would also be nice to have one memstick dedicated to just MPS3 and other media. That stick could be inserted into the PSP when we’re on long trips and want to listen to music (the stereo in the Rav4 has a iPod input).

Overall, my excitement level about the PSP has increased dramatically since I can now use it for a ton more things and not just commercial games that cost $30 to $50 each. There are homebrew emulators that allow the PSP to play a wide variety of games from –other- systems. For example, the PSP can play games for the NES, SNES, N64, Gameboy, Genesis, Atari VCS, C64 and NeoGeo. Tired of having a separate remote for your DVD player, TV, cable box, receiver, etc? There is homebrew software that lets you use the PSP as a universal IR remote control! There is even a homebrew httpd so you could run a website, not just host a page or two but actually host an entire site, from your PSP! The PSP homebrew community is very creative and has a ton of very smart people working on really cool things.

There is even a homebrew PSP GPS device. Why buy an expensive GPS when you can use the PSP?

Getting my PSP hacked was the best $20 I’ve spent in a long time!

So last weekend we gave what is most definitely the biggest gift we’ve ever done. Not the most expensive, because we’ve spent more on smaller items, but the surely the largest physically. We bought a car for Kyle.

It was his 33rd birthday. He’s been without a car for about a year now. He’s been bicycle commuting to work and when he had longer trips (or on the weekends) he would get a ride from Kelly. Well, Kyle broke up with Kelly about two weeks ago so getting around was difficult. He was going to make the trip from Mountain View to Santa Rosa using only public transit, but that was going to take about 4-1/2 hours. It wasn’t terribly costly, but it was annoying and very time consuming. Not to mention difficult to bring luggage or his bike along.

We really like when Kyle visits and he needed a way to move his stuff around. A car was the right answer. So we started car shopping. We had a maximum amount that we wanted to spend and started looking in that range. Karen found one that was more than I wanted to spend and it looked to me like a real piece of crap, but she was excited about it so we went and did a test drive. As expected, it WAS a piece of crap. But, as it turned out, it was being sold by a charity and they had a whole yard full of used cars. We told them what we were looking for (a –reliable- car that wouldn’t require much maintenance and was inexpensive) and they pointed us at a 1990 Honda Civic DX. We test drove that one and it seemed pretty decent. The only real flaw was that it had an aftermarket sunroof – those ALWAYS leak – and that it had some mysterious damage on the driver’s side. Not like car-type damage. It didn’t look like it had been in a crash. It was like the driver’s side door was really really OLD. The plastic was brittle and the rubber parts were all powdery. But the passenger side looked almost brand new. The same thing was on the outside. The plastic lens on the drivers side running lights was all white and pock marked like it was really really old and left in the sun too long, but the passenger side was fine. Even the paint on the driver’s side exterior was obviously oxidized and discolored, while the rest of the car looked decent.

As it turned out, the car had been parked next to a house that burned down in a fire. The driver’s side of the car was “cooked” in the heat. We had to replace the driver’s side seatbelt (it had melted), and did some work on the sunroof to try and get it to seal (unsuccessfully). We also spent a full day washing it completely, inside and out, vacuuming the whole thing and fixing little miscellaneous issues.

When Kyle came up for the weekend, we asked him to bring his bike. Not to ride, just because we wanted him to put it into the new car for the drive home.

Karen did a great job wrapping it too. She took a medium sized box and wrapped it. Inside that was some little trinket that she had bought with Kyle. That was good for a laugh. Kyle was like: but you bought this with me there!! Also inside the box was a smaller wrapped box. Inside that was another little toy (magnetic stix in this case) and a smaller wrapped gift box. Kyle opened the toy and we played with it for a moment before opening the next box. And inside THAT was a little toy car and a Starbucks envelope. Kyle was mystified by this one. So we told him we bought him a car. It really didn’t sink in since he was –holding- a toy car. I think he thought we meant we bought him a toy car. So he set it down and opened the envelope and a key dropped out. He was enev more confused by this. So we told him again. “We bought you a car.” And then it sank in.

Priceless.

I bought some new racing wheels about a week before the Tri-4-REAL #1. Since I’ve been doing pretty good at getting out and riding my roadbike semi-regularly I figured it was a good time to invest in some bike-related improvements. My original plan was to buy a new bike and replace my Y2K model road bike with a new TT bike, but I’m not riding enough to make that level of investment worthwhile (yet?) I have wanted to get a set of racing wheels for about a year, so I finally did the last bit of research and settled on a set of RŌL d’huez wheels.

I basically narrowed it down to that wheelset or the Shimano Dura-race wheels. In the end there were two things that swayed me. First, I naturally tend to mistrust large faceless corporations. While I do use many Shimano components on my bike, as I buy new things I have been slowly transitioning over to SRAM. And, really, Shimano makes a –lot- of stuff. Maybe they’re really good at making bicycle wheelsets, but they also make a lot of other stuff. I just don’t have the confidence that their wheelset is going to be the shining star of the production line.

After the wheels arrived, I needed to buy a new cassette. I wanted to have a complete set of racing wheels that I could just pop on/off my bike with out having to dink around with changing gears and readjusting things. After shopping around I found my preferred cassette for “only” $170 plus shipping. I don’t know if this is loss leader marketing, or if it was on closeout, or what, but the next lowest price I could find was $190. Twenty bucks is twenty bucks, after all!

I had tubes sitting around, so the last piece of the puzzle was tires. Doing research on tires was very difficult. Tires are one of those things that no one really notices but make a huge difference. I started looking at what the pros use and then reading any reviews that “normal” people would have seen of those products. Eventually I narrowed it down and bought some Michelin Pro3 tires. The silly part was that place I got my cassette from was the same vendor that had the lowest price on the tires, meaning if I had ordered them together I could have saved a few buck on shipping. Alas, I did not.

I finally assembled the entire shebang on Thursday. We had invited a couple of people up on Saturday to ride the Vineman route and it seemed like that would be a good ‘shakedown’ ride for the new wheels. If something broke, I’d have people to help out. So we did Karen’s longest ride ever, 61.3 miles. I found that the new wheels are really nice on the climbs. They’re over a full pound lighter so that’s less weight to haul up a hill. On the flats, they accelerate like I’ve got rocket boost – much ‘snappier’ feel than my old wheels. I felt like it took less energy to get them up to speed and keep them there. The downside is that they just don’t roll downhill as fast as my old crappy wheels. I don’t know if it is a terminal velocity issue, or if the hubs just aren’t as smooth or what. But whenever we would start down a hill, I’d have to work hard to keep up with Karen. Normally, I can pass other people on the downhills without pedaling (even if they are, sometimes!) but this time I was the one having to keep adding energy on the downhills.

I think they’ll be a huge advantage on a flat course like the Tri-4-REAL route. I’m not completely sold on them for a hilly ride, though. If it was a hilly ride, I might use my old heavy wheels because they go so much faster on the descents.

So the PSP arrived last Friday (a week ago!) and I spent a little time playing with what it could do. It has a lot of features that I think are pretty cool.

It works as a little handheld media player, MP3s WMAs and video all play on it. The nice thing about the video is that the screen is like 4.3 inch diagonal screen, so while it is small, it isn’t eyestrain-o-vision small like the iPod. And since it is a 16:9 “wide” screen, it doesn’t lose screen real estate to letterboxing. The screen resolution is “low res” but at that size, there just isn’t the physical space to fit in many pixels; I know that the resolution is only 480x272 but in actual practice it appears to be crystal clear and super sharp for images and video (more on this later).

It has WiFi connectivity and a built-in web browser. This is one of the primary motivators for me to buy the thing. I configured it to access the internets via the home router. Setup was quite easy and only took about 45 seconds. The speed was passable, but not great. Despite it’s small size, it seemed to have better connectivity than the PS3 and TiVo. I used it to read web-based forums for about a half-hour in bed. The small screen size was not much of a hindrance when it is only 12-inches in front of you. I did notice that that low resolution was not very good for text-based applications. There was a lot of visible aliasing and it made the text a bit difficult to read. As a test I pointed the browser at one of the ubiquitous pr0n websites and was surprised to see how sharp and clear the images appeared. The aliasing that I noticed on the text was completely invisible. The time to load an image-heavy web page was actually quite good.

One of the (many) kewl/nifty things that the PSP does is it can act as a display device for the PS3. Basically, I turned on the PS3 and put it in “remote play” mode, and the connected to it wirelessly with the PSP. At that point the PSP becomes the “screen” for the PS3 and the PSP controls work as if you were holding the PS3 controller. I tried playing a couple of the games I own on the PS3 and some of them work but others do not. The display of the PSP just isn’t up to the task of displaying a blu-ray image, and any game that uses the motion sensing aspect of the sixaxis/dualshock controller won’t work.

I was also able to play MPS3 and video files from our file server. Karen’s computer runs a DLNA media server on her computer. The PS3 acts as a DLNA media client, and the PSP acts as a the display device for the PS3. So essentially, the files were read from the file server by Karen’s computer, sent via WiFi to the PS3 which sent them out again to the PSP. Adding in the links between the router the data made seven network hops between the hard drive and the PSP, three of which were wireless! Wild, but it played with practically no latency in full screen video playback.

I’m told that it is possible to transfer TV video to the PSP as well, using TiVo software, but I haven’t tried it yet.

The only game I have right now is the one that came with the PSP when I bought it: GTA Liberty City Stories. I’m not a big GTA fan, but I did try it out for a little bit. Metacritic gave this game an 88 so it should be good. I only played it for a few minutes and it seemed to perfectly capture the story-heavy style of a GTA game. The graphics were passable - about the same level as a PS2 – but on a much smaller screen.

I did check to see what version of firmware is installed. Most of the really nifty-keen-cool stuff for the PSP requires what is referred to as “homebrew” firmware. The problem is that the homebrew stuff has to be installed over a very early version of the default firmware. Sony, in their infinite wisdom, have been adding things to the firmware that make it impossible to update to “homebrew”. Sadly, my PSP came with Sony 3.90 firmware. The only way to install "homebrew" on that is to use something called a Pandora battery and memory stick; those cost about $80 on eBay.

Well, the first “real” triathlon of the year is in the bag now and I did pretty well considering that my training ahs been hit-and-miss all spring. It really shows where my weaknesses are and what I need to concentrate on. My goal for this year is to set a new PR, but I’ve only got two more shots at it!

Swim: 30:44
I felt –great- on the swim. I went out with absolutely NO expectations on finish time for the swim. My goal was to stay calm and practice bi-lateral breathing. That usually means I have to slow down to stay aerobic in order to hold my breath long enough. Usually I’m pushing pretty hard in the swim and need to breathe on every stroke. So this time, I just stayed relaxed and swam. I didn’t do any bi-lateral breathing but I completely forgot about racing and just swam. I didn’t pay attention to when the first group of people from the wave behind passed me (I usually do) and I didn’t try to draft off of anyone that passed me (I also do this). When the swim was over I still felt VERY fresh and I was only 44 seconds off from my “ideal” swim time!!!

T1: 3:47
I’m still not fast in transition. I suspect that I never will be. I feel like this is about as streamlined as I am going to get. My wetsuit practically fell off. I probably might have been able to save a few seconds putting my bike shoes on, but only a few seconds. I might save another second or two doing a moving mount of the bike, but I don’t think that shaving those seconds is really going to buy me much.

Bike: 1:18:15
This is still my weakness. A few years ago I was doing bike-centric training and set my PR. Since then I’ve really been run-centric and have struggled on the bike. I really need to get back into the habit of riding my bike regularly and start doing focused bike skill/speed drills. The farthest half of the out-and-back bike course was all brand new smooth-as-glass asphalt and my overall bike speed –should- have been close to 20MPH on that surface. But alas, my legs just didn’t have the conditioning. I pushed really really hard on the bike to come up with the split that I got, and it isn’t all that impressive.
One thing though: I normally count the number of people who pass me. When I pass someone I decrement it so that it ends up being the number of overall places I’ve lost on the bike ride. Not really, but sorta. Anyway, it is a nice metric to measure my performance. This time the count was only four. So, I’m getting conflicting information here. Clearly, my bike times are not as good as they have been (and, truth be told, the bike route “felt” short) and yet I’m holding my own with the pace of the riders around me.
It doesn’t matter in the long run. I need to get faster on the bike and that’s all there is to it. This is one aspect that I can definitely work on and get some concrete benefit from.

T2: 3:17
Again, slow transition. My setup was in a poor spot for a speedy T2 and I bobbled a few items while changing from bike to run. I’d like to see this go under 3 minutes, but clearly not likely.

Run: 56:55
This run time is actually pretty kick-ass. It’s only 21 seconds slower than my fastest ever run split. I honestly think that if I focus on my bike training I’ll get faster on the run too – at least that is how it has worked out in the past. If I can knock 6 or 7 minutes from my bike split, I should be able to drop a minute per mile from my run times. That would put me in position to beat my current PR by a whopping 7 minutes!! I’m not going to count on that (or even try for it)… just beating my current PR by a few seconds would be gravy as far as I’m concerned. But I could see that happening with a little consistent training effort.

OVERALL 2:52:58

For the last few weeks I've been putting in low-ball bids on PSP units on eBay.

The PSP only runs $170 new in the box, but I was looking specifically at the more aesthetically pleasing "ice silver" model. These, unfortunately, retail for the slightly higher price of $200.

My desire to have this device is not so great to drop $200 on what is essentially a toy (albeit a toy with a lot of nifty features) so I was pretty firmly in the "looking... but not serious" phase of the purchase. Which brings me back to eBay. I had been tracking ice silver PSP units and putting in the odd bid when I saw one that was in good shape. I had pegged my highest price at $125, a nice solid 37% off from retail. So when I would see a likely candidate, I'd take $125, subtract whatever they were asking for shipping and enter that as a bid.

As expected, I lost a lot of these auctions. In fact, I lost sixteen of them. (eBay tracks this for some reason.) But as I mentioned, I wasn't really serious about buying a PSP so the lost auctions weren't even a consideration.

Yesterday, I won an auction. So I guess I own a PSP now. It should be arriving in a week or two. It will be interesting to see what it can (and can't) do when it arrives. I suppose my first task will be to see if i can install the "homebrew" firmware so I can play "backup" games and utilities on it. I'll post more as it develops.

So this last week I was playing a little Asian MMO that I’d heard of some time ago. It has what is possibly the stupidest name every for an MMO ever. It’s called Dofus.

Apparently a Dofus is a dragon’s egg and the goal of the game is to collect five or six of the little buggers. I can’t speak to what happens if/when you do that but I assume it’s something along the lines of “You win!” and then you re-roll and do it again.

Anyway, they have what I’d like to call a “misleading” game. Well, that’s the polite way of putting it. I’d actually like to use several expletives to describe their hook, but I won’t. They CLAIM to have a “free to play” (or F2P) game that you can subscribe to (“pay to play” or P2P) and get additional goodies and whanot. What they actually have is a free to play –trial- version that is level-limited that only allows you to access a small fraction of the entire game. You’re excluded from most of the crafting sub-games, you may only enter a small part of one dungeon for adventuring. There are only about 20 quests that you have access to. You can’t even pick up or equip any items over a certain specific level. Basically, it’s the MMO version of a single-level demo. I found this to be very frustrating and annoying. When someone advertises a “free to play” game, I expect it to be “free to play”. I don’t expect it to be “free to noodle around in the noobie area but that’s all.” I understand that they are trying to make a profit here, but even if I thought that game was worthwhile, this marketing scheme would have turned me off.

So the game has a few of what I’d consider to be fatal flaws:

1. Equipment is “level limited”. This is a huge no-no. If I’m good enough or lucky enough to end up with a sword of instakillyoudead when I’m only level 5, I want to use it. I do not want to put it in my backpack while I grind out 195 more levels of XP because it has a level limit that means I cannot equip it. “This item is too powerful for you” is NOT a fun gameplay mechanic. Sure, twinking is bad (especially in any kind of competitive MMO) but there are a lot of creative ways to deal with this issue. Limiting the level at which equipment can be used is not a good solution and it really annoyed me that I could buy a weapon that was level 45 for a few hundred kamas (the in-game currency) but I couldn’t use it at all. Meanwhile, a level 10 weapon (that I could use) cost several thousand kamas. Stupid, stupid game design!
2. Dropping an entire complex game design on a new player is intimidating. I really was hesitant to spend my first few advancement points because I really didn’t know what was “good”. This is especially problematic when you have specific racial/class limits on equipment that aren’t noted anywhere. I had to find out (by trial and error) what types of weapons I could equip/use and what types were useless. If you have artificial limitations on what kind of equipment is usable, you’d damn well better put that info in big giant bold letters. When I spent all of my hard earned kamas on a sword that my class couldn’t use I was flaberghasted!
3. The rate of character advancement was glacially slow, even at low levels. This game advertises 200 levels of character “evolution” (their word, not mine). In a good solid week of around 20 hours online, I managed to reach level 10. Admittedly the first few hours were spent just noodling around and trying to figure things out, but once I found the wiki page and read up on the various quests and abilites and game hints I was running pretty well. I joined a guild and we were running the starter dungeon over and over and the XP was moving in pretty fast. But advancement was still extremely slow. This is a deal breaker for me. I’m not going to grind away for months and months just to get to a decent competitive level!
4. Character advancement was completely linear. From the instant you started a new character you knew exactly what skills you were going to get and what level you would get them at. I suppose this was done to make players want to keep playing despite the slow level of advancement. When you know that you’re going to get new ability XYZ in just one or two more levels, it gives you incentive to grind it out. But with no alternate character development, there really wasn’t any way to distinguish yourself. One warrior was as good as any other. Why bother playing if I’m just going to be a_player_4973!?
5. The world is separated into distinct tiles (called “maps”), and combat occurred outside of the game world. This really broke the continuity of the game for me. It actually took me several minutes the first time I logged in to figure out how to move between maps. Once I saw how it was done, it became much smoother, but the feeling of discontinuity remained. When combat starts, you and the opponent are replaced with a combat symbol and whisked off to an identical, but different map. After 30 seconds the combat symbol vanishes and no one can even tell that you’re in a fight, much less help you out, or offer advice or anything. When the fight is over you just appear back on the map in your initial position as if nothing had happened, except you have a few more XP. Very

Things that I found annoying, but could have learned to live with:
1. Player commerce was extremely limited. The player-to-player selling mechanic was actually quite innovative (see below) but limited to only 5 lots per vendor. Lots were only allowed to be singles or sets of 10 or 100. so if you had, for example, four of one item, you could list four individual items but that counted as four separate lots. On the other hand if you had –exactly- ten of one type of item, you could list it as a set and it would only count as ONE lot. This led me to hoarding useless junk until I had exactly ten of them and then listing them at a much lower price than I could have sold them for individually. A simple NPC merchant that bought everything for a few kamas would have been preferred since I could have offloaded my entire inventory without worry.
2. Sales made to other players via the NPC merchants would result in the money going into my bank account, not into my inventory. This meant that even if I immediately sold an item (it happened a few times) I had to walk to the bank, open the box, and grab the money I earned from selling something at the merchant.

On the other hand, they did have some interesting bright spots:
1. Combat is turn based. You have a limited number of action points to cast spells, buffs or debuffs, or use weapons/abilites and a limited number of movement points to move yourself. You could move, cast, move in any order or sequence as long as you did not exhaust your points. You only had 30 seconds per turn to do this. This led to some interesting decisions in combat. Do I move forward one step and unload spells and then step back? Do I move forward and enter melee? Should I cast now and move later? The ticking timer lent a feeling of pressure and sometimes I found that I figured out the proper sequence of events just as the timer was running out and then didn’t have enough time to actually do them.
2. Player-to-player commerce. Every MOB drop was used by someone for something. So rather just having vendor trash loot, you would always take your drops to a merchant and see how much it was worth. Some of the most trivial items that dropped in the lowest level dungeon were required to make the highest level items in the game. This led to a lot of player-to-player interaction. The NPC merchants do a great job in matching buyers to sellers and a lot of times I would find that my items that were posted one day would be sold by the next time I logged in. Occasionally, “trash” items that I posted at a vendor would sell to another player almost instantly. Profits from sales are directly deposited into the character’s bank account, so I would have to check the bank occasionally to pick up my sales money.
3. The race/class interaction is actually pretty interesting. Rather than having classes and races, each race –is- a class. So, for example, if you choose to be a Feca, that means that you are a staff-wielding protector type with defensive spells. While this might seem to simplify things to the point of being too dumbed down, it actually doesn’t. What it does do, is allow for instant identification of specific character abilities. For example, the fairy-like Eniripsa is the healing class/race. So when you see someone with wings, whether it be big pink butterfly wings or little black bat wings, you know –instantly- that they are a healer type. The same sort of thing applies to each and every race/class, and this was really nice for “profiling” others in a fight.
4. Character customization. When you create a new character there are three different areas of the character that you can color. You can choose garish colors or nice ones; it is totally up to the player. For example, when I made my Feca, I chose to make him a blonde chap with yellow-gold hair, blue clothes and light grey boots and gloves. Even if I stood right next to another Feca, using the same exact model (and easily identifiable as such!) we looked completely different. In fact, despite having relatively “common” colors, during the time I was playing, I only ran across one other player with a similar scheme and it was startling enough that we both sent PMs to the other about the choices. It’s a simple little thing, but it really lends a lot of attachment to the character when you feel unique in the game world.
5. The game client is written in Flash® so it runs on a variety of different computer types. I think this is a huge bonus for a small game like this.

The final thing I wanted to comment on was the pricing scheme. We’re obviously not looking at a WoW type game here, and the pricing is accordingly low. The game is based somewhere abroad and the base prices are in euros, with US dollars accepted as an alternate (they also accept GB pounds, CA dollars, Czeck or Swiss francs or Japanese yen). It comes out to only $6.90 a month (5 euros), or $65 for a full year. This is roughly ½ the cost of a modern fantasy MMO.

It was a fun little diversion, but not worth paying for in my opinion. Too many fatal flaws to account for the few bright spots. Still, I’m glad I took the time to explore this product. It made me feel better about some of the items I’d like to see in a “mainstream” game and opened up a few options that I hadn’t previously considered.

To help me keep my blog current and semi-relevant, I’ve made myself a reminder in my outlook calendar that pops up annoying notices on my desktop every Monday morning. The theory is that I’ll have something interesting to say at least once a week, and it will usually be about those oh-so-precious days where my head is not stuffed full of volts, amps, watts and all things that keep a hospital operational.

Every year my company sponsors me and several other people to run in our county’s Human Race event. This is a “fun” event, but I always try to inspire a bit of competitive spirit in my fellow coworkers. I make a challenge that if anyone can beat me in the 10km race that I will give $10 to the charity of their choice. Well this year, it finally bit me. Two of my fellow employees bested me. And not by just a few seconds either. The guy who came in first (from our company) crossed the line a good seven and a half minutes ahead of me! Not only did he decimate my finish time, but he beat my 10km PR by over five minutes!! The number two man was within striking distance – only beating my average time by about 30sec per mile, but still. Maybe I’m getting older and starting to slow down. Well, no, that’s not it. I’ve had slower 10k races before. These guys just had a GREAT run and me… not so much.

One of the highlights of the race was that I actually ran the entire event with two different shoes on. I had my new Saucony shoe on my right foot and an older Brooks shoe on my left foot. This was completely unintentional; I simply didn’t notice until it was pointed out to me (AFTER the race) and I had to laugh. At that point I’d already been “in public” for a good two hours, so I wasn’t going to go run and hide in the car or change my shoes. I just had to throw my hands up and admit being an idiot (again).

I felt like my pacing was good, I just didn’t have it in the tank that day. Some days you wake up and you feel like you can take on the world. This wasn’t one of those days. On the good side, this has given me a lot of incentive to lose those extra 5 pounds and train much harder for the next Tri 4 Real on June 8!

My splits were
Mile 1 – 8:38
Mile 2 – 8:05
Mile 3 – 8:16
Mile 4 – 8:16
Mile 5 – 8:14
Mile 6 – 7:39
Mile .2 – 1:22 (6:50 pace)
FINAL 50:30

In other news, I tried The MMO With Possibly the Stupidest Name ever: Dofus. I saw this advertised at an E3 several years ago and was moderately intrigued by their casual-friendly price structure (ie: free, but you get “perks” if you subscribe). It’s all done in Flash, so it’s platform independent. I played iot for about 8 hours on Sunday and it most definitely isn’t for me. I did take one very strong lesson away from the experience.

If you have your own IP, don’t just drop it on the user and assume they are going to figure it out.

If you’ve got an IP like (for example) Camelot, you can probably fake it. Most people know the legend of King Arthur and even though they may not be familiar with the details of the story, they know that it is in Briton, and that there was a round table and whatnot. The basic framework is in place. So when you start seeing Welsh names like Bwca monsters in Llyn Barfog, people may not know –exactly- what it is or where it might be found, but they have a general feel that this probably is something Olde Englishe. When you start talking about Elves and Dwarves and Orcs and Dragons, people have a built-in understanding of what that means. The details may not be there, but given the basics, most people will figure out the rest.

The problem comes when you have a cartoonish race of dog-people and cat-people and rat-people and squirrel-people and bear-people and fairies and demons and cartoonish… uh, CARTOON-people, and then you drop some silly sounding names on them like Feca, Ecaflip, Osamodas, Pandawa, Cra and Iop…. Well, most people go WTF?? There isn’t any basis to start wrapping the game milieu around. It’s all uncharted and unfamiliar territory, and it’s just too much to expect the new player to assimilate it all at once. It’s a Berlitz course in some strange IP, without the payoff of taking a vacation to a mystical foreign country. I played for 8 hours and I still have no idea what each race/class combination is, whether they are good or bad or even possible. I’m sure someone put a –lot- of time and effort into making a cohesive game world, but it’s just too far removed from anything I’ve seen before to make it understandable.

It would have been better if they had introduced little bits of the IP over time. But they couldn’t do that without limiting player choices initially. I’m not convinced this is a bad thing. Especially for a brand new player in this (supposedly) vast online space. I don’t want to be coddles, but I’d rather be spponfed for a little bit before the game starts throwing not only shovelfuls of data but TRUCKLOADS of new info at me. Heck, just to creat my first character I had to read 12 different descriptions written in flowery high-fantasy style. I want to play a tank; is that the one that is “valued in groups because of their protective powers” or is it the one that ”are warriors beyond reproach”? In the end I chose the one with the shield icon on the class selection page.

The thing that kills the game for me is that the world is too compartmentalized. As you move around, you walk around on a “screen” and then you move to a little dot to load the next “screen”. So when you’re standing on the edge of the display, there could be a huge fight going on just over the edge of the monitor and you’ll never know because you haven’t loaded that map yet.

Still it was an interesting experience and it was completely an utterly free to download and play. I’d like to try it with Karen and see what her impressions are. As we know, even a bad MMO can be fun if you play together!

I read several blogs. Many of them are linked off in the left hand column. I know that when a blog goes quiescent for weeks, it makes one not really excited to read it. On the other hand, I’ve seen personal blogs which daily postings simply for the sake of having daily postings. Those are annoying. It’s like having some bubbleheaded girl telling you about how they went shopping yesterday and saw these super-cute shoes but they were too expensive and they didn’t even come in plum, but they bought them anyway because they were just so cute and they matched the new ankle bangle that they had found at the boutique the other day when they were getting their hair colored. Whew! Anyway, I’m falling on the “too few” side of that and I will try to do better.

My friend Zant called me last night and was asking about my life, so I’m going to update this. Tardy, I know, and I –will- try to be more punctual!

Carneros 10km
We did our first 10km race of the year on April 3. It was a bit rough since I really haven’t been training much over the winter. I had a GREAT fall training schedule and was sticking to it, but in mid-December when we abandoned the idea of running the Mardi Gras Marathon (which was held in February) I kinda stopped training for the most part. Oh, sure, there was the occasional run or bike, but pretty much I haven’t really done any athletic stuff for nearly three months. So I approached this event with a bit of trepidation. I just bought a new Heart Rate Monitor (HRM) to replace the half-dozen monitors I lost or broke last year. Two weeks out, I did a threshold test to see where I “should” be. As it turned out this was a lifesaver for me. Since I’m so out of practice from doing much of anything, I can no longer “feel” the right pace and either I end up going to fast and blowing up before the finish, or going too slow and having a lousy finish time. So when I saw that my threshold was 166bpm, I knew that I was going to try to keep it in the 165 to 170bpm range for a 10km race.

As it turned out, that was perfect! I fell into my pace pretty fast and just hung out there for the entire 10km. I probably ran a tiny tiny bit too fast in the first half because I found a lot more people passing me near the end than I prefer, but that may have just been because my endurance is so low. Or maybe I didn’t eat enough (likely since I was STARVING by the time I finished). I did feel like I pushed well though and despite having a mediocre result (55:50 for those who care) I still had a great time and I’m super glad we did the race.

Game night – April 2008
After the race, we had a Game Night. We had an interesting thing happen. A dozen people showed up and we found that we don’t really have any games suitable for more than 6 people. We had been to a game night at some friend’s house a few months back and when you have more than a half-dozen people playing anything with “turns” the long wait between turns as it goes around the table is an eternity and you lose interest. Players start chatting about non-game related things and before long you’ve forgotten that you’re even paying a game.

We did make a trip to the Comic Shoppe the next day and bought a new game that supports up to 8 players. We played it twice with Kyle and it was fun, but it is a one-shot game only I think. The second time around was more painful than fun. Still, we’ll give it a whirl at our next game night just to see how it goes with a larger group.

If we continue to have such a large turnout, we’re going to have to ‘split’ into groups and play multiple games. If we moved the “card game” people to the kitchen table, we could do a video game group in the living room. I’m not sure how well that would work though. We usually put the food on the kitchen table, but we could set up a card table for food (or set it up on the fireplace hearth) and then use two table for different games. I think that we will see how the next Game Night turns out before making any real plans.

Icebreaker 2008
We did our first triathlon of the year, the Icebreaker race. I didn’t do great – my overall finish time was nine minutes slower than my best ever finish there. I think this was mostly due to my abysmal bike leg. I was over 6 and a half minutes slower than my prior slowest bike at that race! But on the other hand, I didn’t do horrible either. Despite losing 6:28 on the bike, my overall finish was still faster than my slowest performance at this race. I feel like I raced as well as I could have given the circumstances, so I’m happy with how I did no matter what it was.

It was a pretty warm day so I tried putting my wetsuit on while standing in the water. Oh, that was a mistake! You would think that the water would provide a bit of lubrication and let you slide the wetsuit on easier. You would be wrong. The water formed a kind of suction seal and made it nearly impossible to move the wetsuit over my skin. I had to sit down in the water and work the neoprene fabric up over my body, inch by painful inch. It was a learning experience.

The swim was cold as always. This year the water level was so low that there were a few places where my hands hit the bottom during the swim, and I actually got up and walked around the first buoy. I really didn’t “settle in” to my swim until about halfway between the third (and final) buoy and the shore. For the first ¾ of the swim I was struggling and then suddenly BING! I was swimming! It was a wonderful feeling, going “Oh now I remember how this works!!” Of course, I haven’t been in the water since then so I’m sure my next race will be a repeat of this. I should make it a point to go to the pool at least once a week just so I can remind myself what swimming is supposed to feel like.

I mentioned that the water level was very low this year. It was so low that it was a good ½ mile hike up the “beach” (which was normally underwater – so it was technically the floor of the lake) to transition. It felt like an eternity making that long slow jog with bare feet and wearing my wetsuit. If I hadn’t known that this was an unusual event I would have likely decided not to race here again. I am noticing that my transition times are getting better. I came in with about five other people racked nearby me and I was out with the front of them.

My bike was, simply put, horrible. I couldn’t find my cadence. I started off too fast and quickly lost steam. I kept getting passed for the entire bike leg. Usually I find myself passing some of the slower women when they enter the course on my second lap, but I was even having trouble keeping up with them. Then about halfway through the second lap it suddenly went BING! I was riding my bike! My cadence fell right into step and I started shifting gears at the right times. My speed crept up by about 2MPH and I was starting to pass people. But it was too late to save my race.

Transition was pretty darn fast. I may be out of shape for racing, but for some reason my transitions have gotten faster. It took less than one minute for me to find my rack, drop my bike, change shoes and run out!

The run at this race is pretty challenging. That’s a polite way of saying it is FREAKING HARD!! They changed the run course (again) this year. The first two miles are difficult with some hilly single track trails that cross sand, dirt and paved surfaces. And then there is a huge climb up to the top of a hill with a water tank. After taking this beating, it suddenly went BING! I was running! The last mile of this run was a joy. I felt great, my foot turnover was fast and efficient and I passed a half-dozen people (kind of the opposite of my experience at Carneros). When I was coming down the last stretch of run, I was running all out and feeling great about it.

My final finish time was 1:49:22. It was a real eye-opener with respect to my personal training. I really need to ‘tune up’ my efforts and get back into race shape.

The Relay 2008
We made an attempt to put together a Relay team this year but had zero response. So when I saw a call for four runners on one of the mail lists that I read, I sent out an email introducing myself. As it turned out, Karen, Kyle and me ended up all in the same van and out friend Shellee was able to drive for us. So out of the seven people in van, we counted for four of them. We kinda ‘took over’ the van.

As always this event is a lot of fun. The team we ended up being on was really casual and aside from one guy who was really whining about everything, everyone did awesome! Both Karen and I ended up doing the exact same legs as we were assigned last time around, but this time we actually had a decent start time (9AM) and were running with others for the entire race. We even left some of the other teams that started with us behind and never saw them again. That’s a first.

We did end up in a weird spot when we started our third legs. Since we were faster than most of the slow teams, we were out in front of them. (We were actually third or fourth on the course at one point.) And then the faster teams started catching up to us. They had a much later start time, so we had a pretty significant head start (more than 4 hours in some cases!) so it took them a little while to make up the time. But just about the time we were running our final legs, the fast teams started blowing past us. It was a bit discouraging to be running as fast as you can and then suddenly have someone trot past you like you’re standing still.

I felt great about my legs. On my first run I passed five people. It was early in the race and we were still pretty bunched up with the other teams we started with. On my second leg, it was a lot more spread out. I didn’t see anyone for the first half of the leg and then they started coming. I saw some high-school girl walking through Fairfax, sobbing into her cellphone, followed by three other high-school girls. Real life drama, I assumed. I passed four runners, including one girl who was walking. I don’t know how that team did. If she was walking on her second leg, I can’t image how she did on the third leg. My third leg was spent running in isolation. There was only one other runner on the route, and she was about a mile ahead of me. But I was faster and by putting in a herculean effort I closed the gap to about 50 yards before we finished. I wanted to catch her SO BADLY I could taste it! Sadly it just wasn’t going to happen. I think I might have done it if there was another half mile of distance to cover, but it was just too much to make up in too short of a distance. Still, I came away feeling great about my effort.

We will definitely try to get on a team next year as well. I really like this event.

Warhawk + GTA4
I’m still buying games for the PS3. I picked up a used copy of Warhawk from eBay. This is an online-only FPS type game, with a crapton of usable vehicles. It also has a splitscreen local mode for up to four players on one console. We have two controllers so we started by playing little 2-player local games. I think I might invest in a third controller or try to borrow one or two for 3 or 4 player local play. I would love to do a Warhawk multiplayer Jeep race locally. I did try some online play for a couple hours, but with a game this old, the only people still playing are the hardcore people that know every nook cranny and gameplay mechanic by heart. New players like myself tend to not last too long in that kind of an environment. Still I had fun playing and it was a lot more casual than I expected.

I think Karen really enjoyed this game as well, because she was asking me questions about it the next day.

I also took the plunge and bought a new copy of GTA4. Karen has been sick this last week and I thought it would give her something to do while sitting around trying to get well. Plus WAR testing is going again (as the astute reader may have noticed is displayed in my xfire tag) so she is playing GTA4 whilst I am plugged into the Warhammer universe. Of course, since we live in close proximity, I’ve picked up her cold so I’m feeling pretty crappy about pretty much everything. I know from past experience that my performance in games is juts a tiny bit above the “You suck!” level when I’m sick so I’m trying to keep in mind that my piss-poor performance may not be due to any failing on the part of the game designers, but rather the game player. That is, me.

So there’s a good solid month’s worth of postings that should have been posted… well, a month ago.

The more games I buy for the PS3, the happier I am with my original decision to buy a console. PC gamers may sneer at consoles (I know, I was one of them until very recently) but I gotta say, their derision is sadly misdirected.

Last night I acquired a used copy of Rock Band for the PS3. We already had a Guitar Hero 3 game for it (also purchased used). I have to say Rock Band is a whole hell of a lot more fun. Being able to play with both of us working on the same song at the same time was a whole new level of interactivity.

I was playing guitar on "medium" level and it was actually medium difficulty! (This is different form Guitar Hero 3 where "easy" is actually moderately difficult and "medium" is actually hard. Guitar Hero 3's "hard" is just plain stupid crazy.) It was challenging but doable. By the end of the evening I did step it back down to "easy" level as I got more and more tired. My first three songs (which were also played on "easy") I came in with 5 stars easily on the first attempt. The last three songs (on "easy") I was having trouble not being knocked off the stage.

Karen was set up on the drum kit on "easy" and she was rocking every song. We would finish a set and she would look up at me and tell me how badly she had done... until the numbers flashed up and she had hit 98% of all of the drum notes. Of course she started to get pretty tired by the end of the evening too. Before we quit (at 1 AM) she was only hitting about 90% of the drum notes correctly.

It was interesting because as I stood next to her wailing away on the miniature drum pads, I would hear the beat of the song from the drumsticks hitting the pads and not from the music. So i would sync my guitar strumming to that. What ended up happening was that when Karen lost the beat of the song, I would start missing notes too! It really was a synergistic experience.

At the end of the evening -- which was actually morning by that time -- I plugged in the microphone and belted out a couple of vocal tunes. It was interesting because I couldn't really hear myself "singing" (I use the word VERY loosely). It was akin to singing along with a radio whilst driving. The game does some processing on your voice so that you almost, sorta hit the notes as they were supposed to sound. Unless you're horribly off-key (I was in a few cases) it actually ends up masking the awful-mess of an untrained singer screaming into a microphone. They also add in a lot of echo effect, which makes almost anyone sound half-way decent. Only half-way though.

Overall, it was a TON of fun to play together. The only real drawback (in my opinion) is that there is no way to get a second guitar controller for the bass part. The only way to get a second guitar is to buy an entire new Rock Band game (on sale for only $148 this week at amazon.com!) but I don't think that's a very good price for one piece of hardware.

I've already ordered a USB hub so that I can have all three (eventually all four) Rock Band instruments plugged into the PS3 and still have USB ports for the Eye of Judgement camera, a controller charging cable and a USB keyboard. That should be here by the middle of next week.

A stand-alone guitar controller -should- be avialable in a few weeks; they say it is due mid-April. Once that happens, I'm going to set up a friday evening Rock Band "event" at work. We have a handful of people who alreayd play Guitar Hero, so we should get at least four people on any given Friday.

The other big console game thing that happened was that my order of nearly 300 Eye of Judgment cards arrived. The guy shipped them min piss-poor packaging. The only saving grace was that the whole shebang came along with a complete game, field, AND a new camera! So I have a spare Playstation Eye now. I'm not sure whether I should bother trying to sell the original game assembly on eBay or not. I have enough "extra" cards now that I could give away a few of them and not notice. Maybe I can get $30 for the spare set.

The exciting part is I now have a couple "hero" cards and one "phantom" card. With those additions I might actually have a chance against some of the online people. I hope to put together my best deck this weekend and give it a shot. I expect a humiliating defeat, but am hopeful for any other final result -- even a drawn game would be a win, in my mind.

After publicly proclaiming that I will never upgrade my PCs again, Karen's computer needed a complete overhaul. So $375-ish got spent on PC upgrades.

Today, the hard disk drive in my computer is not spinning up. I am not a happy camper.

Hot on the heels of my proclamation to never upgrade a PC again, we had one of our main PCs fail. As I write this, $310 worth of new mainboard and CPU are sitting in my living room waiting to be assembled with the failed guts from Karen's machine. I can only hope that this is the only thing that failed and I won't need to continue to pour money into either of the PC systems.

In other news, we've been bitten by the Collectible Card Game (CCG) bug. On a lark, I bought a copy of Eye of Judgment. My thinking was that even if the game sucked, I would still have an Playstation Eye camera for use with Burnout Paradise. As it turns out, the game is a LOT of fun. We only have the 30 "starter" cards, plus the single 8-card expansion pack that came with the game (total of 38 cards). The first few games I played against the easiest level computer opponent, I lost within 10 moves. After that I enlisted Karen to play against me. Our first head-to-head game went 35 moves. We've probably played a dozen matches now and with the experience, I can beat the computer on "normal" level without too much hassle.

I've never played a CCG before, but this is such an interesting mix of strategy. Which card you play, what direction you play it, and where you play it all have an effect. And of course, with the PS3 doing all of the heavy lifting you don't have to consult arcane Tomes of Knowledge to look up rule #35729A-6, subsection 3, paragraph 9... you play a card, the PS3 knows the rules and it resolves the actions for you.

It seems simple enough. To win, all you need to do is have five cards on the game board. Of course, that's like saying chess is a simple game because all you have to do is capture the opponent's King. There are so many layers of gameplay here that it's almost uncanny.

I've only had the game for two days and I've already spent over $100 on eBay auctions for additional cards. I can't wait for them to arrive so I can try an online game.

UPDATE: After installing the new mainboard and CPU, I found out that my comments about PC upgrades were all too true. The one-year old DDR2 memory in the old machine is incompatible with the new mainboard, which requires DDR2 memory. Oh, wait, I already have DDR2 memory. But nooooo, it's not just DDR2 but it's New! Improved! DDR2 memory with a n all new (incompatible) form factor. So another $55 out the window. Even worse, we have to wait 3 business days for the bloddy memory to arrive. The time is the bigger loss in my opinion.

Maybe a set of EoJ cards will show up.

I wrote the bulk of this in early January and had intended to post it to my blog some time ago, but, as they say, you know where good intentions will get you. At least one reader will find this oddly familiar since much of it is cut-and-pasted from an email chain we shared at that time.

One of my full-time hobbies is computer gaming. Historically, I've spent around $1000 to $1500 each year on upgrades for my computer(s) to keep them current and able to play the newest releases. But I've had a bit of an epiphany this holiday season. I recently purchased a PS3 and I honestly think that the days of PC games are coming to a close. In my opinion, consoles are the way to go in the future.

For one, there would be no more endless hardware upgrade paths: you buy a console and it works until you buy a new one. You don't need to buy a new video card (two or three video cards if you are using SLI!) every nine months. You don't have to get a new mainboard every 18 months because the form factor for system memory and CPU sockets have changed yet again and you no longer have a valid upgrade path. You don't have to download new drivers every time you buy a new game because the newer drivers display are required to keep it above the level of a slideshow. You buy the console. You plug it in. It works. Period.

Secondly, no wierd interactions between hardware. Developers know what you have and they know what you don't have and that's that. How many times have PC owners had to deal with a game (or a legitimate program for that matter) that didn't like some particular piece of their system. Maybe it's the video card. Or the audio card. Or maybe the networking system. Or the printer doesn't work. Or the scroll wheel on the mouse isn't supported. Or it does something unexpected, since the program doesn't know what to do with it. These kind of issues have been part and parcel of the computer gaming experience for years and players have simply come to accept those issues as part of the deal. Game publishers basically sell you a game and it may or may not work on your system depending on whether they tested all of the different interactions. If it doesn't work with your particular setup, that's pretty much it. From the perspective of a playtester for a game publisher, the amount of effort that goes into making sure those kinds of issues don't come up is not trivial at all. With those issues removed, that effort could be redirected into making a better game, rather than making a mediocre game that will work on a lot of different configurations.

Most importantly, the "advantages" that the PC had (past tense) are now shared with the consoles.

Great graphics? HD video is as good as, if not better than, most of the PC graphics cards out there. Both the X-box 360 and the PS3 were designed from the ground up with multiple video processors that run rings around PCs that are 10 times as expensive. Modern cutting-edge gaming PCs come with THREE video cards at $600 each. A recent "ultimate gaming computer guide" had several machines that were over $12,000. That's not a typo. Twelve THOUSAND dollars!!! For a gaming computer! When was the last time you looked at a 1080p screen and said "It's nice but it would be better at a higher resolution"? I have a 50-inch diagonal HDTV in my living room. I have yet to see a computer screen that is 50-inches. And I have yet to see a 50-inch TV that costs 12 grand.

Input devices? Both the 360 and the PS3 are completely USB capable now. True story: When I was registering my account on the Playstation Network, it (naturally) asked me to input a name. When I started to do that with the joypad controller I got as far as entering three characters before I said "Screw this!" (literally, I said it out loud) I walked up to our computer room, grabbed an older (unused) USB keyboard, brought it back down, plugged it in. And it -worked- without any setup or configuration. Need a keyboard? Plug it in. Want a mouse? Plug it in. Want to use a joystick? USB. Some weird pointing device? No problem. Plug it in, you can use it. Even better is the PS3 with native bluetooth. With a BT keyboard or mouse you don't even need to plug it in. You tell the console to search for devices, it finds them and registers that and they work. (The PS3 controllers are BT devices.)

Networking? WiFi is the new standard and the consoles have it too. The PS3 is just as connected to the internet as my PC is. It even has a built-in browser that will let me stream you-tube video onto my 50-inch HDTV screen. The network hardware in the console is no worse than any wireless card in a modern laptop, and probably quite a bit better. Laptops have to deal with very stringent power and size requirements. A larger part in a laptop makes the laptop larger, so they use the smallest components possible. Also, laptops are often on battery power so they have to use the least amount of power possible. That's not good when it comes to wireless communications, where higher power means better reception and ultimately, higher connection speeds. The PS3, on the other hand, is a behemoth that is plugged into a wall socket 24/7. Size constraints are not an issue, and while power concerns are a nice idea, the reality is that anything that has a wall plug is probably using a decent amount of power. It boils down to the PS3 having a pretty good internet connection. I have used it to play realtime online games and I have to admit is works really well.

Digital Distribution? Heck, I bought and downloaded two new games on my PS3 over the winter break over PSN (PlayStation Network) without blinking. As of this writing, I've bought three complete games online, installed at least a half-dozen game demos and downloaded expansion content for another three of the games I own. I'm still a little uncomfortable with buying a product and "owning" it but never actually having anything "real" to prove it. If the hard drive in my PS3 were to crash, I would have no proof of my purchase and would have to trust that PSN would allow me to re-download and re-install the stuff I have already bought and paid for.

My biggest problem with the PS3 is the gamepad controllers. I really enjoy FPS type games. But I learned to play FPS with a mouse and keyboard. A joypad just doesn't "work" for me, so -my- copy of The Orange Box is the PC version. Console versions of first-person shooters all have a kind of "auto-aim" feature to compensate for the gamepad control system. I played a demo version of "The Darkness" on my PS3. While the game a creepy mobster/demon mix (who'da thought those two genres would match up so well, but it really works!) I was very nonplussed with the "standard" FPS controls on a gamepad. In fact, I was pretty much annoyed by it. I just couldn't get the hang of using one stick for movement and the other stick of aiming. I missed the speed and precision of mouse-reticle aiming. The funny thing is that the online console players (for example, people playing Team Fortress 2, Halo 3, and/or Gear of War online competitively) consider it to be "cheating" if you use a keyboard+mouse. According to the console crowd, it makes the game "too easy"!! I'm a pretty bad shot with the mouse and keyboard. During my short foray into the gamepad control scheme, I was hopeless. I unloaded four full clips of ammo at a single opponent and I'm not certain I managed to hit him even once. So essentially, I hate the console controllers. However most of the current crop of console FPSs work just peachy with mouse and keyboard (i.e. WASD control scheme) on the PC. Even on the fighter-style game I recently played (and beat) I was having issues with button-press sequences and timing issues. On the other hand, for some games the gamepad is great. For example, simulations and sports games. RPGs and simpler games where you don't really need a lot of keys or a full keyboard to communicate.

Outside of MMOs and FPS games, I really don't think that the PC has an advantage any longer. And even that is debatable in the FPS genre. With Halo3 checking in at 4.2M units sold in 2007, and Call of Duty 4 selling 3M (according to NPD) units in just 8 weeks, it's pretty telling. Out of the 3M CoD4 copies sold, only 383K were the PC version! Also, you might notice that the overall scores for the console version of CoD4 outscored their PC counterpart (on metacritic).

According to NPD, the people who track game sales, the two best selling PC games of 2007 were the WoW expansion and WoW. The third top-seller was a looooong way back, didn't even break a half-million units, and was an expansion pack for an older game. The combined sales figures for all ten of the ten best selling games of 2007 was only 5.6M units sold. Halo 3 (only available for the XBOX 360) sold 3/4 of that amount in six months, by itself! It sure looks to me, from my perspective, that consoles are doing a whole heck of a lot better than PCs are with respect to 'gaming' as a whole.

Don't get me wrong. I -love- my MMOs and I still have four active accounts in two different games and am playtesting a third one. I have two not-quite-top-of-the-line PCs in my house. Even as recently as 6 months ago I probably would have argued that PC games are just "better" than console games, and that consoles will always be hampered by their input devices and lack of upgradability. But that isn't true any more.

One of my online gaming friends (who plays WoW) just bought a new PS3 and the first thing he did when he got it was to install linux. For what it's worth, that OS is Sony-approved for installation. Google "PS3 Ubuntu" for a crapton of links. You can even use your HD TV as a monitor for your PC games, if you wanted to. Another friend was looking forward to playing Bioshock on his PC. But his "new" $3000 (2 year old) computer didn't even meet the MINIMUM system requirements! For the cost of an upgrade to current minimums (which would need to be upgraded again in a year) he could buy an entire XBox 360, which will play Bioshock in HD on the 42" Sony TV he already owns. Not to mention that the current generation of consoles are being used for some VERY serious computing these days. Mass Tech is using 16 PS3 units to compute the propagation of gravity waves that would occur when two black holes collide. The US Air force is buying 300 PS3s to run "technology assessment" programs. The consoles of today aren't just for playing games.

With respect to MMO development, I firmly believe that the current generation of consoles with their built-in networking and high-end graphics capabilities are a platform just waiting to be exploited. Moving an MMO to a console would allow developers to do away with the tired, old Diku model and try some innovative new ideas that would NEVER work on a PC version of an MMO. The only real "problem" with console MMO development right now is that there is a lot of pressure to make it "family friendly" -- since consoles are generally kept in the living room and the kids have access to the TV it is connected to, it's a hard sell to get a even a "Teen" rated game out there with the current "monthly fee" MMO business model.

Having said that, a micro-transaction based MMO (which is another reason why we need to let go of the current design model - it doesn't lend itself to microtransactions well) that didn't "require" an adult to enter a credit card number to install and play would be a lot easier to drop onto the console marketplace.

Looking into my personal crystal ball, I predict that the first company that puts out a viable console native MMO (it doesn't even need to be that good!) that allows the player to "get hooked" BEFORE asking for any money, and then asking for it in bite-sized chunks (based on player desire to "get ahead", rather than basing it on time based "access rights") is going to make gajillions of dollars. I suspect it won't be in 2008 though. And given a year, it is certainly possible that the PC market may pull a rabbit out of its collective hat and put the PC back at the top of the gaming heap.

I have a feeling my next computer upgrade will be a second PS3 and a 32-inch hi-def LCD screen.

It feels like the holidays are more work then they are worth. Even though I had nearly two weeks away from work, I fee like I've worked harder in the last 11 days than I have in the prior month. I refuse to pander to the New Years Revolution idiom, however. I won't make any silly "resolutions" that I am certain not to keep. I will continue forward with my life and try to be the best person that I can be.

Two significant events spurred this entry (and then I discovered something while entering it).

Last things first: Apparently a Turkish hacking group "hacked" my website. It was a pretty innocuous hack. Basically they just inserted a .php file into one of my subdirectories and then linked directly to that file which showed their "You've been hacked by..." banner. (You can see the hacked page HERE.) It was an obvious gaffe on my part; I left that directory writable by all. I've since changed the permissions to close that little loophole and deleted the php file. In the end, I owe Cılgın_HaCKer and Tu3d1 Polat a big THANK YOU for pointing out a silly mistake on my part and for being considerate enough to point it out in a non-destructive way. I'm a bit in awe of the amount of effort involved in finding the pathname. I mean, in retrospect I can see how it was done, but how do you find the places to look for these things? My little web page gets only a few hundred hits each month. Not exactly a high profile site to hack, you know?

Anyway.

Over the New Years weekend, I purchased my first PS3 game. I bought High Velocity Bowling from PSN. It's a lot of fun and it uses the motion sensing technology in the Sixaxis controller to let you literally "throw" the ball. We played it at out New Years Party for a while and it was quite fun. I also downloaded the demo version of Paradise Burnout and Oh MY!! I've played a lot of console games and a lot of driving games and a lot of game demos. This one is a great combination of flash, gameplay and just plain fun! Within 5 minutes of starting it I was completely sold on the game and have already placed a pre-order for it on release. (It comes out on January 22.) So you could say I bought my first TWO PS3 games this last weekend!

Second, my wireless router is giving me fits. It still works great as a wired router, but the wireless part is unreliable. And since the PS3 is connected wirelessly full-time, this will not do. One second it will have a 100% strength signal and connected with blistering WiFi speeds, then, only a mere second or two later, it can't even locate the SSID and the router doesn't even exist! And then a moment later it's back up to 100% strength again. I have no idea why this is happnening, but the router is at least two years old (possibly three years, I'm really not sure how long it's been here) and I'm hoping that it is just a sign of the age of the device. I'm working on a replacement and hopefully that will happen in the next week or so. In the interim, I'm connected to PSN using an unsecured wireless router in my neighbor's house. (Thanks Neighbor! Whomever you are.)

On a related note, one of the gifts we received this year (from Kyle) was a new HD TiVo box. The TiVo uses an optical output for audio. The PS3 also uses an optical output for audio. The problem is that my current receiver only has one optical input for audio. So it looks like it is time to upgrade to a new receiver. The smart money would buy a HDMI capable receiver since the PS3, the TiVo and my 15 month old TV set all use HDMI. Not to mention that single-cable connections are much easier to deal with. So I've started doing research on the next $500 I'm going to spend. Happy New Year!

One nice thing about this time of year is that all of the gaming press is scrambling to put out their version of the "Game of the Year". After reading several of these lists, I've added a few more titles to my wish list of PS3 games. Pretty much all of these can be purchase as "used" copies from Amazon and I would STRONGLY suggest that any gift-giver consider that as an option. The prices are much lower and the quality of the "used" products are typically indistinguishable from new products.

WarHawk - This was already on my list, but after reading more about it (and seeing the new expansion videos) I really want a copy of it now. This is an online only game in the same style as Battlefield 2149. We bought a new USB headset so I can actually use the voice features. As a die-hard online player, this one was already at the top of my wish list and now it's permanently there. If a copy doesn't show up over the holidays I'm certain to buy it.

Heavenly Sword - I downloaded and played the demo version and it looks play a lot like a hopped up version of God of War. Since I really enjoyed GoW, I suspect that this one will be a fun one too. The only drawback that I've seen in the reviews is that the game is stunningly short (but thats seems to be a growing trend in console fare).

The Darkness - I'd never even heard of this one before. I'll probably download the demo for this tonight and see how it feels. The reviews look good though and the description of the gameplay makes it sound a lot like a console-ish version of Half-Life ... without the immersive storyline and lengthy play times. Again a short game. Is a dozen hours of gameplay worth $50? Apparently so, because people buy them.

MotorStorm - This came free with a lot of people's PS3 and I downloaded the demo just "for fun" last weekend. It turned out to be a blast to play with the one track that came with it, although the single track of music was getting mind-numbing by the time I'd run through it a few times. I'd love to have the whole thing. It also has online mulitplayer and how can you go wrong with that?

Puzzle Quest - This is actually a PS2 game, but my PS3 is one of the models that has the compatibility emulator so I can run it. (I've actually tested this with several PS2 games and even a PS-one game. It works!) I know that Karen would eat this one up, and I'm always looking for new and innovative ways for Karen to waste time.

Rachet & Clank: Tools of Destruction - I'm not a big platform player but I played the first R&C game on the PS2 (thanks to Mr. Burdine!) and I was impressed by the storyline and unique weapons. I onlt made it about 60% of the way through the first game before retiring it (and the PS2). (And, no, Zant, I am NOT going to replay the first half of the game, so don't bother suggesting it.) I downloaded the demo level for the new R&C game and it looks to have the same "woohoo" kind of feel. Plus, the folks at Insomniac deserve a cookie.

DiRT - also knowns as Collin McRae Rally 2007. This is a wildcard on my list. I've never been a big racing game fan, but I have always loved simulations. DiRT is higher rated than Motorstorm -- Motorstorm isn;t really a simulation, it's more of an acrade-style "racing" game whereas DiRt is a real racing/simulation game. (I tried a demo of one of the PS3 flight sim games and was annoyed to find that you simply could NOT do any advanced maneuvers like a hammerhead stall, or an immelmann. If you're going to pretend to be a sim... BE A SIM!!!) A different kind of tweaky fun than arcade games, but I'm the tweaky kind of player that enjoys them.

A few months back I bought a Snap! server off of eBay for about $40. It came with four 30G drives (which I still have) but since I had a stack of 80G drives sitting around from the old TROUBLE machine, I swapped those in and formatted the whole thing. It cam out at just under a quarter terrabyte. While that may seem impossible svelte for today's data needs, I've never really had a plethora of things to store on rotating media. Both mine and Karen's computers have tiny (by today's standards) 160G drives. Neither machine is using more than 1/4 of the total drive. I think mine is the fullest with just under 40% used -- including two of three virtual copies of entire DVD images.

Anyway, last week one of the drives in the server failed spectacularly. Oyr first clue was the horrible SCREECH! noise. After a power cycle to test if it was an intermittent problem (as if!) it came up with an even more distressing ka-CHINK! ka-CHINK! ka-CHINK! sound. It literally sounded like a smoke alarm going off, it was so loud. The drive was well and truly dead.

So I ordered a new 120G drive for another $40. Three days later it arrived and I installed it. It was as simple as pulling the old drive, plugging in the new one and powering the server back up. It took about ten hours for the RAID-5 array to rebuild, but the server did it almost automatically and never lost a single byte of data. I'm pretty happy with that.

In other news, Saturday I did my longest run ever. 18.45 miles in total. I've never before had doubts about finishing an event. A lot of people express amazement about my triathlon participation but after the first race I completed, there has never been any question in my mind about how each event would end. The only question was how long it would take. But I'm not so sure now.

After 18-and-a-half miles I was ready to die. That single run was as difficult as doing the entire Half-Vineman race (or at least it felt that way to me). The marathon is another 8 miles on top of that. I just don't know. I'm not sure I can pull another 8 miles out of me to finish. Forget about a "good" finish, just getting there may be more than I'm capable of. I'm sitting here writing this entry a full two days later and I'm -still- suffering from that run.

It took just shy of 4 hours to go 18.45 miles. That puts me looking at a 6 hour marathon finish. Assuming, of course, that I can find another two hours of running somewhere in my legs. If this training run was any indication, I may need medical attantion at the finish line.

I suppose this post is largely irrelevant. We've already bought the game so the concept of a seven-day "demo" period is no longer valid. But I persists for two reasons. First, we haven't actually -received- out retail copies and are thus still playing on the seven-day trial period. Secondly, because I keep thinking of game mechanics that I haven't discussed yet. On that note...

LotRO has several little mini-game features. I know that some people would insist that a MMO doesn't need mini-games since it should be entertaining enough on its own. But these little mini-games are the kind of thing that give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. When you've slain your ten-thousandth goblin and are looking at the quest counter and asking why you still need 65,000 more reputation points until you can get the über Sword of Ass-Kicking, you can just turn off the grind and play a little silly sub-game. I suppose that's the argument against mini-games as well; killing the ten-thousand orcs should be entertaining enough that you don't need to play a mini-game.

But here's the thing: MMO players like being "in" their fantasy worlds. LotRO in particular, is a simply stunningly beautiful place to be. Call it escapism or OCD or simply obsession, but once we're plugged into a game we don't want to leave it, even if it has stopped being entertaining and fun. I suppose that's why so many players leave a game with a mental "bang" and deride the game after they've left it. They still want to be "in" that place, they just can't stand the game that they have to pay when they are there. So, in my way of thinking, little mini-games that allow you, as the player, to stay "in" the game world, but don't force you to "do" the game... well that's a good thing.

The little mini-game that brings this up is: in-game music. By equipping an instrument, the player can just play that instrument and be entertaining to others as well as themselves. Obviously this requires no little talent. It's actually quite difficult due to latency issues and lag spikes. Imagine playing a piano were there was a 1/2 second delay between pressing the key and the hammer striking the string. Then start randomly changing the delay so that it could be 1/2 second... or it could be instant. That's the challenge to playing one of these things. I tried making a keyboard macro to play an instrument, but it ended up being just plain awful!! I'm very impressed with the people who can do this and do it well.

The really interesting part is that if you play (or watch/listen, for those of us who are not in the 3% of people with real musical aptitude) an instrument in a tavern, you increase your Hope. Hope, in the context of the game is a sliding scale stat that increases (and decreases) as you play the game. It is a straight up additive stat to all damage and healing you do and how much effect your armor has. For example, if you had 5 Hope, you would do 105% damage but only take 95% from monsters. So there is a real gameplay reason to play the music mini-game.

Speaking of gameplay, I wanted to make a little comment about the rate of XP in LotRO. Specifically, the rate at which the character "grows" as you play the game. While it seemed (and felt) relatively speedy the first couple of days, it quickly slowed to a crawl. It might just simply be that I've gotten spoiled by the lightning fast advancement in DAoC, but gaining levels in LotRO seems positively glacial. Not that we are running out of entertaining things to do. No, quite the contrary. We both have 33 quests to finish (not all of them are the same) and there is a LOT of the game "world" that we have yet to explore. (NOTE: We did, in fact, finish our Prologues last night, but I want to wait until we get our retail boxes before we start in on the main storyline.)

In 47 hours and 17 minutes of playtime, I've only hit the lofty peak of level 17. Over half of those levels came in the first day. Now, I'll admit that part of the reason my leveling has slowed is that I've been kinda "idling" and helping Karen on her quests. Looking at my list of active quests, I'd estimate that 1/4 of them are "grey" (i.e. much lower level than me) and I'm only getting 50-ish XP for completing those. Green colored (easy) MOBs are only giving me about 5XP per kill. And it takes something like 5000 XP to make a level now. Worse, I've noticed that the difficulty is starting to scale up so I'm forced to fight easier and easier MOBs, which means even less XP.

I'm hoping that the difficult is due to my crappy mix-n-match equipment. With no access to the crafted components that I need to make armor, I'm stuck with quest drops and random loot items. Karen took a trade that includes weaponcrafting and I already have Metalworking so between just us two we have all armor, shields and weapons covered. But neither of us can MAKE anything because the trial version doesn't allow player-to-player trading! I need boiled hides (which I can't make) and she needs metal bars (which she can't make) and we have no way to get them!!

Just another reason to look forward to the retail version showing up later this week. I'm really counting that days at this point. I'm sure there will be a few days where we can't log in when the trial expires, before the boxes get here.

The last item I wanted to comment on is the User Interface. The LotRO UI is incredibly powerful and has a lot of cool features. Unfortunately, it is a real bear to figure out. For example, you might click a widget to open a window. Inside the window there might be tabs along the top to select different aspects of that window. Inside each tab there might be more tabs, this time along the bottom to select different aspects of that particular tab. And inside of THAT there might be a collapsible multi-level list. Suppose the button/quest/item is at the bottom of that hierarchy and you didn't already know where it was. Would you intuitively just know, "Oh, I open this window select this tab, then that OTHER tab, then click the plus sign here, here and here and scroll down three pages and then click on the thing." No you wouldn't. We've been playing the game for six days now and we're still finding little hidden UI "tricks" like that.

The only saving grace is that nearly everything in the UI has a mouseover tooltip. Even the options screen. For example, when you mouse-over the description for a graphics setting a tooltip pops up and tells you -exactly- what that option does and how much it will affect you performance and at what cost. That's nice.

My thinking is that the UI team really didn't do much QC testing with new players. They tossed it at experienced computer users and long-time MMO players and called it a day. If you aren't intimidated by the UI then it can be quite powerful. But you really have to be willing to mouse over things, READ the tooltips and then choose the appropriate action. And very often that requires a lot of computer savvy and a lot of MMO experience.

Today will be our last day in Middle Earth until the retail boxes arrive.

Several things happened over the weekend in LotRO.

First, my co-worker Chris downloaded and installed the trial version. He started a Man Hunter. On Friday night we were up playing until 3AM doing various quests in Bree-Land. Between his high (ranged) DPS and my tanking we were able to breeze through a lot of quests. There were still a few that stopped us dead but it was a lot of fun. Chris also convinced his brother Jaime to install the trial. Jaime started a Man Champion. I haven't had a chance to play with Jaime yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Secondly, I ordered two retail boxes for the game. After a little poking around, I was able to find retail versions for $18 (shipped!) each. The monthly fee is $15 a month, and the box comes with a "free" (ha!) month. So essentially, we're paying $3 for the retail activation code. (LATE BREAKING NEWS: The vendor may discount the shipping since we ordered two copies, making the initial month even less expensive.) I don't think this game will be a long-time feature in our household, but it seems entertaining enough for a month or two.

Third, my impressions of the game thus far:

I forgot to mention this in prior postings, but LotRO plays nicely with the G15 keyboard. As soon as the game starts up, it takes control of the LCD screen and displays my character's hitpoints (called "morale") and Power level (Power is a combination of mana, rage and endurance). It also displays my character's "mood" which has an effect on how much damage I do and take, but I'm not sure what makes that go up and down. Still it is quite cool to see that happen automatically.

The presentation is pretty damn good. My hat's off to the Turbine artists and musicians that put this together. The graphics are nothing short of beautiful. Some of the scenery is postcard perfect. The models of the animal type MOBs are very lifelike. Heck, even the monster type MOBs are lifelike and most of them don't exist. I can't think of anything I've -seen- in the game that makes me think I'm playing a computer game. Clipping is done very well. The textures are clean and very realistic. Even the particle effects are above average. Graphically, the game is stunning.

Soundwise, I'm equally happy. The background music (which, I'll admit, I have turned of in every other MMO I've ever played) is unobtrusive and very thematic. When you're running across a sunny, verdant hillside, hearing a soft guitar strumming or cheerful flute in the background just seems... well, it feels 'right' somehow. Even though the landscape in the Ered Luin is almost identical to The Shire (aside from the building architecture, which is VERY different), the musical themes make it feel somehow 'older'. And when you cross the boundary between elf- and dwarf-land there is a distinct and very noticeable change in background 'feel'. The transition between environmental and combat music is smooth and fits into the actual combat.

My initial concerns about character individuality have been resolved. The Deeds and Traits system seems to be the distinguishing factor. By accomplishing Deeds, characters gain access to little passive mini-abilities that increase their power in a variety of small ways. Deeds that gain you Traits are many and varied. Some are simple: visit five locations. (Of course, you have to -find- the locations first. They aren't listed on the map and you aren't given directions. You just have to stumble across them as you play.) Or run a dozen FedEx tasks between point A and point B. (To mix it up a little, if you come within a certain radius of several moving obstacles you automatically 'fail' the current mission.) Some are combat related: kill NN of a specific monster type. (The killtask Deeds typically have smaller, less important rewards, though.) There are even Deeds that have to do with finishing a certain number of quests in a given area.

I'm sure a hardcore player would see the Deeds system as a liability, but the way it has been working for us is that we don't do Deeds that gain us 'uber' Traits, we just play the game and we accomplish Deeds naturally as we finish other things. Personally, I think that was the intent of the developer.

Speaking of hardcore players, LotRO as a whole seems to be a MUCH more casual-friendly game than anything I've ever seen. People claim that WoW is casual-friendly, but my experience was that it was actually quite hardcore with a thin veneer of causal-ity slapped on top to make it "look" casual. So instead of having to find a MOB camp and grinding for hours, Wow gives you a quest to kill 50 MOBs in a specific camp (and gives you directions!). But that's -still- grinding.

There are still those types of quests in LotRO, but there are also a lot of interesting ones. A couple come to mind that are completely non-combat related. For example, in one quest where I had to gather mushrooms from a bog. The bog was full of slugs and rats. The slugs smelled awful and if you killed any of them, the slime would coat the mushrooms and the quest would fail. So not only was it a non-combat quest it was an ANTI-combat quest. Another example is the 'mail delivery' sequence. All you need to do is get from point A to point B within an allotted time. The catch is that you can't use any skill, interact with anything, talk to anyone, or be attacked by anything. Oh and the aforementioned moving obstacles wander around on the 'safe' roads, and if you come too close to any of them you instantly fail the quest.

Finally, the BIG STORY in the game. Someone made a movie or three about that, as I recall. And there might have been a multi-volume book as well. Yes, the story of the War of the Ring is alive and well in the game and while you play you "see" the story happening. There is a main quest line that every single player in the game can do that directly relates to the meta-story. The opening of that quest is solo-able, and is unique for each different race. The race specific quest sequences are considered the 'Prologue' of the 'Book'. Once you finish your racial Prologue, you get to start Book 1, Chapter 1.

We finished the Hobbit Prologue for Karen last night. The plan is to complete the Elf Prologue tonight (or maybe tomorrow) and then sweep up the Man Prologue for Jaime (when he hits a high enough level).

One of the strengths of Turbine (as a publisher) has always been monthly episodic content. They've been releasing new "chapters" in the story every month and are currently up to Chapter 11 in Book 1. I haven't seen the end game yet (for obvious reasons) but if they follow the book layout in the print materials (and I have to assume that they are) then Book 1 will end with the hobbits reaching Rivendell. (Currently, Rivendell is the south-easternmost location in the game world.) If I were placing bets, I would expect Book 2 to add all the lands between Rivendell and Moria to the game landscape. I would also bet on Book 2 being a "for pay" expansion, doubling the size of the game world, adding a ton of more end-game "raid" content as well as more high-level solo stuff.

I saw this game at E3 in 2006. I asked a Turbine marketroid how their product distinguished itself from other MMOs currently out (WoW, DAoC, etc) and those in development (WAR). The deer-in-the-headlights look on his face was priceless. Apparently that was 'too hard' of a question. The stammered answer that he ended up giving was "Well.... it's... it's... it's THE LORD OF THE RINGS!!!" As if the title and IP was going to be enough to carry the product. I was not impressed and basically wrote off the game as a non-issue. I'm glad I took the time to try it out.

I've only played for five days so far, but my impression is that LotRO is a very polished MMO product. The more I learn about it, the more I like the concept and the execution. I'm not sure why it isn't sweeping the MMO-scape (maybe I'll find out as we level up) but as I think about it, this -is- the kind of game that I might keep an account active for and only play periodically. I haven't seen how much (or how little, as the case may be) each "Chapter" adds to the game as a whole, and that may not be worth $15 each month ($30 for two of us). When I finally have WAR, I may drop this like an acid filled clay pot. But for now, I'm feeling very excited about LotRO and am really looking forward to getting our retail product keys later this week.

Finally, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it but xfire has been tracking my online time. Since I've installed the LotRO client (last Wednesday!) I've logged over 40 hours in-game! That's a jaw-dropping 8-hours a day average. I suspect that will drop off as time goes on; I'm still dealing with the "Ooo Shiney!" effect.

I'm up to level 13 now with just over 15 hours played.

I find it interesting that, for a game that is so heavily biased towards PvE play, that the quest system is so weak. I would compare it to WAR but I'm bound by an NDA on that one and I don't want to risk my access. I will say that LotRO's quest system leaves a LOT to be desired.

As I've gone up in levels I'm starting to find that quest completion is a much larger fraction of my total experience than it used to be. At low levels I would gain maybe 50xp for killing a MOB and 300xp for finishing a quest. So essentially, unless the quest only took as long as killing six MOBs, it really was a losing proposition to do the quests. At level 13 I'm only getting about 16xp for killing MOBs but quests are granting nearly 1kxp. So finishing a quest is a big deal.

LotRO's quest designs tend to be fairly circuitous. The book of Deeds lists how many you've completed. I knew what mine said, but I suspected Karen didn't, so I asked her how many quests she thought she had finished. She guesstimated fifty. When we looked, it said she had completed only three. The reason is that each "quest" is actually a multipart task. For example, you might have a quest to go gather grape vines. You go out and fight your way to the vineyard and click on the dozen or so 'hotspot' vines to "gather" them and then go back. You get a reward and are offered a follow-up quest to get a wine jug from a vendor in the next town. Did you just finish a quest? No, you didn't. Even though it seems as if the follow-up quest is a new (but related) quest -- it even has a different quest name! -- it is actually a continuation of the original quest and you haven't actually "finished" anything yet. You need to pick the grapes, retrieve the jug, deliver the wine, return with the letter, and kill the Goblin leader that over-ran the vineyard (each of which is a seemingly distinct "quest") to get credit for finishing ONE quest. Doing each quest in serial would be impossibly time consuming so you end up doing six or seven of them at once and having to try to keep track of the various storylines simultaneously.

Speaking of storylines, the stories that the quests tell are usually pretty entertaining and reasonably well written. I tend to not read quest text unless I'm testing, but I've taken to at least giving them a passing scan. If nothing else, Turbine has a great team of creative writers. Notice I said CREATIVE writers. Because no matter how indisputable the entertainment value is, the directions that the quests present is often convoluted and occasionally just plain wrong. For example, the quest may direct you to go "north". In actuality, the location you should be looking for is three steps to the north, then 10 miles to the west. While the destination -is- technically north, if you were to put the two points on a map, it's pretty clear that you should be going west, not north. Even worse is when the route follows any of the many roads. For example the directions will say to follow the road south and east. What they MEANT is to take the south fork at the first intersection then east at the next one. The reason this is confusing is because the east road actually heads north-east, which is completely opposite from what the "south and east" directions say.

Occasionally, the directions leave out particularly important information. One quest told me to see a NPC in some town. What they meant was, go to the town, take the bridge across the river and then enter the adjacent housing zone (A process that, by itself, is not intuitive -- you have to select a housing market, select an existing house and then press the "visit" button. I never would have figured that out without spoiler site help!) and then run to the merchant square. Which is, inconveniently, named the same as the original town.

I've gotten to the point where I will make a decent effort at finding the quest location on my own. If, after 15 minutes I start to get frustrated, I alt-tab out of the client, do a websearch on the quest name and find the coordinates of the end point. I'm a lot less frustrated by the quests, but I'm also not enjoying the fact that I have to rely on a spoiler site to solve what should be simple fedex or killtask quests.

Despite my protestations to the contrary, I caved in and started crafting in LotRO. I chose to do Armorcrafting, as I always do. I did like the fact that shields are created by armorsmiths. This is different from Camelot, where shields are the domain of the Weaponscrafter. But one similarity between LotRO and DAoC armorcrafting is dependence on other crafters.

Making armor in LotRO is a multi-step process. First you have to find ore deposits. As a new Armorer you can only "prospect" two kinds of Ore: Copper and Tin. You use these to make Bars (still using the Prospector trade skill) or either Copper (cheap skill gains but useless, like Camelot's "trinketing") or Bronze (not as much skill gain but used to make armor). Bronze Bars can be converted into Bronze Plate and Bronze Chain using the Metalworking skill. You need both of those items to make a single piece of armor. But that's only 2/3 of the ingredients. You also need Tanned Hides. Unfortunately, Tanning is part of the Forester tradeskill and you don't have access to that as an Armorer. So you HAVE to find another player do do that for you.

Or not. My solution was to switch to Forestry, causing my Metalworking to 'reset' to zero. I tanned the 50-ish Hides I had been collecting and then switched back to Armoring. I lost all the skill in Tanning that I had accumulated, but that was fine. I just needed the Tanned Hides. Using my ill-gotten Hides I created the lowest ranked shield I could make and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a level 8 item! So even at the very start, I'm making items that are usable at a higher level than I expected. The lowest armor I can create is level 15 and I premade a few pieces for when I reach that lofty goal.

Aside from the requirement to have a Forester tradesman to work with, the real bottleneck to Armory is gaining the Ore. It isn't buyable so you have to forage for it yourself, or buy it from a Auctioneer. Sadly, those of us on a 7-day trial are not allowed to use the Auctioneer, so I'm stuck foraging. I have a small collection of Ore now and I take a few minutes out of my game every time I see a deposit to mine it.

One final item of note was something that Karen found late in the evening. There is a quest/mini-game in The Shire that turns you into a level 1 Chicken. You are given a couple of simple quests: "find so many worms", "go to these three farms". As a Chicken you cant attack, and you're easy prey for any wandering wolf-kind in the game. Karen had a blast playing around with the Chicken-mode for about an hour and I was chuckling beside her as I watched. Pretty interesting option, if I say so.

We have a guest staying with us this weekend but I intend to try to get in as much playing time as possible.

Some time ago, I downloaded and installed the Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) client on both of our gaming computers. With Camelot in decline and due to some recent changes in that game, we just stopped playing it pretty much. But we both still enjoy playing games together. I thought it would be a good thing to see what is "out there" and LotRO has a free-of-charge seven day trial period.

The client download is 5.6GB. Luckily, we're all networked so I only had to download it once and then copy it from machine to machine, but on our pokey outside-the-limit DSL we only get about 100MB/min at best. Typical download speeds are usually about half of that on average. It ended up taking about two days to complete the download.

Once installed, we had to patch. Unfortunately, each machine had to patch on its own. And the patch server would hang about halfway through the process. Thankfully, it would patch file-by-file so it was able to resume with only a little bit of lost time. The patch was about another MB each, so that took another solid day-and-a-half for each computer.

Overall it took just under a week to download and install the client. And then it sat. We only were going to get seven days so we wanted to make sure it was a time frame that we did not have other commitments. Last night we activated the trial accounts and started playing.

To activate the account, you have to use a web-based from and give them an email account to send a product code to. Karen got hers within about a minute. Mine however, was not so easy. I don't know why, but they refused to send me an activation code. No error message, no failure notification, no warning at all. Just no activation code. After waiting for a goodly time, Karen suggested I do my training run, so I left and jogged my 8-mile "moderate" run. When I got back, still no code! After a bit of frustrating tinkering, I created a "dummy" email account on my domain, sent a test email to myself to make sure it was working and then entered that. Within about a minute I had my code.

Upon starting the game we were given a suggestion to start on three specific servers. We chose the Meneldor server. I have no idea what the current clime is on other servers, but our experience so far has been pretty good. The areas we've seen so far are very sparsely populated, which is good (no grieving) but also bad (no socialization).

We tried to start nearby each other. The game starts you out in racially distinct areas. For example, if you chose to be a hobbit, you start out in Hobbit-lands. Similarly, if you are an Elf, you start out in a Elf-area. The two are not the same. Since I was stymied by the lack of an activation code, Karen had the opportunity to start first. She chose to make a Hobbit Minstrel named Corabell and started out in The Shire. When I got in, I wanted to do my typical melee-centric class, and I've always had a soft spot for Elves (how original... NOT!) so I (re)created my 'standard' Paladin-ish character, Penric. I tried to pick a location near the Shire as my starting spot. As it turned out, I ended up in Ered Luin. For those unfamiliar with Middle Earth geography, this is the area just west of The Shire, Unfortunately, Karen's questing was taking her EAST, into the Bree-lands. I comment to her that had I know she was going to be moving into Bree, I would have chosen Rivendell as my home base and worked west towards her. (I can't imagine that the game would push Rivendell starters east into the Misty Mountains... but maybe they do.)

We ended up playing for about five hours. At the end of the night we were both level 8. I can't speak for Karen, but the quests I was getting were starting to nudge me east into The Shire (or perhaps on to bigger and better things). So even though we weren't able to meet up right away, I got the impression that we were heading towards one another.

Random notes:

• Graphically, the game is very reminiscent of Asheron's Call. This makes sense since it is the same developer.
• It's hard to say with the short time we've been playing, but I'm already very concerned about character distinction. As I've gained levels I've seen new skills added to my options, but they all seem to be the -same- skills for the class. I don't wanna be a carbon-copy of every other Guardian in the game!
• The "Deeds" system is pretty cool. Already in the short time I've been playing I found a title that I wanted to get, simply for the sake of having the title, and sidelined my question JUST to become a Guardian of Ered Luin. I'm a little disappointed that I've already lost the opportunity to gain the >i>Undying title - you get that one if you make it to level 20 without dying at all. I managed to "accidentally" die by falling off of a cliff while on autorun. OOPS!
• The "Traits" system is also kinda neat, but I can see it becoming very grindy since the requirements are pretty high for a very minimal reward. But as a long time gamer I know that oft times even a minor power differential becomes a "must have" in the end game, essentially "forcing" players to complete even the most simplistic and rote tasks an improbably large number of times until they get the miniscule reward. But if you're vying for a group slot with a guy who has a permanent +1 to a stat, then you too will kill 100,000 rats just to get back on an even footing.
• Combat at this level is a little frenetic. The class I selected has two "taunt" styles, two AE "swipe" attacks (which can also be used on single opponents), two react ional attacks (need to wait for the proper opening), one "anytime" and one short-duration buff proc attack. Juggling timers during a fight to make sure that every swing is styled is a little difficult, but I imagine that it will settle down later.
• I'm seeing a petty significant power disparity between classes already. The "Hunter" class (LotRO's ranged DPS class) seems to be able to kill MOBs much faster than a melee class can ever dream of. I hope that they are equally weak in melee combat but not having played one, I don't know. I do know that players are tricks things and given a ranged class that can do oodles of damage it might be all but impossible to actually get to them to find out how squishy they actually are.

We have a dinner date tonight, so we wont have much time to continue. I'm torn between keeping going with the Guardian or restarting with a Champion. With a limited amount of time to play, I probably will keep on going with the class I've already selected.

It arrived on Monday. I spent the evening hooking up the cables (had to fish a new 5-prong component cable up to the TV) and updated the OS to version 2.00. And we watched Serenity again. It works as a DVD player, that much I can be sure of. The DVD control is done using the PS3 controller, but it's a little less than intuitive or user-friendly. And with no IR input, getting a master remote isn't really an option. I'm looking at ways around this (if any).

Tuesday morning I checked the PS3 documentation. It's all online, no printed manual. It turns out I had set a setting set wrong and wasn't getting HD video from it. I changed the setting and OH My GOD! What an amazing difference in the image quality. Having done that I played with the DVD playback a bit. It only "upscales" a DVD if you use a HDMI cable, and I'm not so DVD will still be 480p just like before. Then I sat down and played a little bit of God of War 2. Yea, its 'just' a PS2 game but I never finished it and there is no memory card slot on the PS3 so all of my old saved games can't move over. That's kind of unfortunate since I have about 15 hours into the first Ratchet and Clank game that I can't access any longer.

After work on Wednesday, I went to the local mall to see how much PS3 games cost. They look to be about $60 each 'new' and only about $10 less for used ones. That still seems like a lot. I browsed craigslist for about 45 seconds and saw a bunch of PS3 games for $30-40. Most of them are in the $55 range on amazon (used) so I may need to bottom feed fro a while. There's really only a couple of titles I'm interested in anyway. I just don't have enough time to play an extensive library.

By the way, I'd like to point out that people are fucking IDIOTS! Maybe its because I live in a sheltered microcosm. I work at an engineering firm where people are probably more intelligent than average. I hang out with pretty technically apt people that would best be described as 'fast learners'. I play in triathlon which is a haven for obsessive-compulsive persons. But just walking around in a shopping center for 30 minutes has me ready to go buy weaponry and wait for the end of the world. I swear 95% of the people I saw there have no fucking clue what the hell is going on, and no desire to know. I often wonder how the megacorporations have made so much money. Walking around a mall, I began to understand. Those morons are just walking meatbags with money falling out of them. Hell, I'm fairly socially-conscious and I wouldn't feel bad taking everything those people have, and leaving them to rot.

Anyway, after that experience, I went home and loaded up Settlers 6 on my PC. I used to love the Settlers series. In fact, I still have my hard copy of the original Settlers game for the Amiga (thats the ONLY remnant I have from that system). I played the first five or six scenarios and Karen kept mentioning that it looked like a game that she would enjoy. I think she would, too. It has a 4-player PvP mode, but the core of the game is in city-building not combat. The player has almost no control over the actual fighting so it is a lot less of a RTS than, say, Warcraft 3. It's more like Sim City with a PvP gloss on top. If the rest of the missions keep up the same pace (about 60-90 minutes each), I might have to finish the single-player campaign before diving into the PS3.

I added several PS3 items to my wish list. For those interested, it is the clickable link on the upper left of the sidebar. Yes, the red and green one.

I installed it on Karen's computer on Thursday morning, but we were walking out the door before the installation completed. As the Penny Arcade people put it, we have been swept up by "the whorls of Famhovor, the Family Holiday Vortex". We should be home on Monday.

We should have the fisrt disc of Planet Earth from netflix in the mailbox when we get home. The blu-ray version. I can't wait to see what a BD disc looks like on the 60-inch TV!

(Also, for what it's worth this is the first "real" blog entry that is being made in a long time. I'm all caught up with re-entering the old stuff and moving on into the future! Whee!)

Only three articles remain to be re-entered. By the time Thanksgiving weekend gets here, I should be all caught up.

I bought a PS3 off of eBay. As of this writing it is on a truck somewhere between Syracuse, NY and San Pablo, CA. It should be delivered next Monday. I picked out three games and put them on my xmas wish list. I also added a blu-ray movie and a couple of PS3 accessories.

I started playing The Witcher last night. After getting it loaded, I sat through the 7-minute opening animation. Then the 5-minute introduction sequence. By the time I was given control, a good 15-minutes had passed since I first started the game. And I only had control for literally 5 seconds before the game asserted itself and started talking again. I felt like I wasn't -playing- the game, but rather I was watching it play itself. Eventually I was given control and was allowed to play. I did manage to finish the entire Prolouge and acquired my first "card" (the game allows you to collect "cards" with erotic images of the in-game women that you have virtual sex with).

Maybe it's because I've been playing PvP MMOs for the last seven years, but I found The Witcher to be incredibly boring, with uninsipired, simplistic combat, almost ridiculously easy puzzles, a whole hell of a lot of exposition and very little "game".

If you read this blog, you may or may not have noticed that I've been (re)adding new (old) entries to the page at a rate of 3-4 every day. Because the new (old) stuff has been added to the BOTTOM on the blog, not to the top as you would expect. So if you just pop in here, see that the same top entry is listed and then leave, you're missing all the fun stuff that is going on below the break.

As of this writing, I've (re)added 111 entries to the BOTTOM of the blog, covering the period from December 23, 2002 through July 3, 2003. That six-month time frame covers a significant phase of my life as I was going through the final death throes of my (semi) relationship with Kristen, exploring my newfound single-ness after a failed long-term marriage (unrelated to Kristen) and, interestingly enough, entry number 111 is when my life entered it's current phase.

I've been re-reading my own writing, four years later. When I originally typed it all up, it felt so personal and each word was practically -dripping- with emotion and meaning. It felt very much like exhibitionism when I wrote it. But as I re-read it, I'm forced to admit it isn't all that. Yes, it's interesting and the drama part is kinda fun, but I remember how I felt and the words simply don't capture those emotions the way I thought they did when I wrote them. I'd like to think it is because I've gotten more mature.

It's like looking back on a letter written to the person you had crush on in junior high school and realizing how silly you were.

(It's worth noting that the top three entries on the front page are 'current' and only the bottom two are part of the 111 that have been added back in. Those bottom two will be updated as I continue to add the next 97 entries, but the top three will remain static. The archive link at the very bottom will get you to all 111 posts.)

Meanwhile, in the not-so-silly reminiscing corner, a few days ago I was reading one of the blogs that I follow (Eating Bees) and there was a link to The Escapist that had a link to Penny Arcade that had a link to a report on the PAX show that had a link to the keynote address given by Wil Wheaton. While I'm not a big fan of Mr. Wheaton's acting work, every time I stumble across his writing or his speaking, I can't help but be impressed by him. I literally laughed out loud more than a few times while listening to this speech. Be warned, this is nearly an hour long, but if you're 'plugged into' games or gaming you'll probably find something in there for you. Well worth the time investment.

Here's the URL in case you missed the clickthrough in the body: http://www.pennyarcadeexpo.com/PAX07_Keynote.mp3

While doing some reading on PAX I also discovered a link to Jonathan Coulton perfoming his song "Re Your Brains". And thus discovered the entire Thing a Week music collection. Now I should note that this is not the kind of music that I typically listen to,and it sure as hell isn't original (most of the music is recycled pop from past decades) but the song content made me laugh out loud in more than one case and I'm sure you've heard some of this before.

And finally, it's not summer any longer, but I stub=mbled across this great trailer for a movie I've never heard of but I simply MUST go see in the theatre. D-War Three great finds in one day!!!

In less entertaining news, my "wireless wire" (ie wireless bridge) the DWL-810+ arrived today. I'll finally get the stupid ethernet cable off the floor and have the torrent/winmx client machine back. About time!!

My new computer is assembled and finally works.

I purchased new central components (mainboard, CPU, RAM) to upgrade my current system; TROUBLE wasn't terribly slow, but I was noticing video hitches and frame rate issues in a lot of games. Especially WAR. So I decided to pop for an upgrade. The parts came in late July and I assembled them on the 30th. Unfortunately, there were "issues" and the whole thing failed time and again. It turned out to be failed RAM, which I sent back to the vendor. Once I put in some good RAM the whole thing went swimmingly. WHEELS has been up and running 24/7 for four days now.

I also bought a small fileserver. The four 80G Maxtor drives from TROUBLE (which was why the system was so much trouble!) are now living in a Snap server in a RAID5 configuration. They formatted to a tiny bit under 1/4T. The only real drawback is that the server is loud so I'm going to put it in the spare bedroom. I'm still working on how to get it on the network permanently. Right now there is a net cable running across the house and the third computer (which will be the guts from TROUBLE) has no connection. Between three computers, and a print server, all of the hard-wired ports on my router are full. So either I buy a bigger 8-port router, or I try to find a wireless solution. I think a D-link DWL-G810 will do the trick.

In other news, we've found a new MMO that is taking our time. It's a kind of 'casual' MMO and it is light on stats and items but still oddly entertaining and fun. Don't laugh, but we're playing Puzzle Pirates. Go figure.

My blog has been offline for the last year or so. The reason this occurred was... complicated.

As you may or may not know, my blog is powered by some custom perl/CGI scripts that I created back in Y2K. Last April, my webspace account was "upgraded" to a new server and all of my CGI scripts broke. Being a busy boy (and lazy to boot), I never 'got around' to fixing them. Until now. I did, however, upgrade all of the pages to use CSS compliant HTML. All of the tables are gone. As a result, the HTML shrank by over 2k per page!

I also purchased a new domain name and this page is now available at www.TheRealStupid.com.

In the interim, the main database where all of my past blog entries have been stored was corrupted. I had to manually pull all of the entries out in plaintext. (Yes, I could have written a script to do that too, but there were only 208 entries and the time to write the script probably would have been longer than the time it took me to pull the entries out by hand.) As of right now, they are (in)conveniently stored in a giant Excel spreadsheet.

While I was pulling the entries out, I realized what made this page so popular when it was active. (As a side note, at one point, my little personal blog was getting over unique 100 hits PER DAY!) The entries here range from sublime to the idiotic, from the pointless to the profound, from entertaining to bo-o-ring. The articles which are the most poignant are the ones written when my life was in the greatest turmoil, and the most useless postings are when I devolve into a reporter of facts only. Clearly I'm a better "writer" than I am a "reporter".

In the past few months, I've started reading chelseagirl's pretty dumb things blog, and when I read every entry I've every written here, I see a lot of similarities. Obviously, her focus is a little different from mine, but not terribly so. One of her articles which really hit home for me was her second anniversary solipsism. It was this posting, among other factors, that gave me the incentive to revisit my own blog.

Another major push was Amber Night's recent answer to "the end of the blog" meme.

I will be adding the past entires back in in chronological order until I'm caught up. I will be adding them back in at the rate of 4 of 5 per day, so don't go crazy with the refresh button just yet! If you miss an entry or two, feel free to use the 'complete archive' link at the bottom of the page. Amazingly enough, it actually works. I'll be correcting all of my old typos as I reenter the data, and some entires may simply be archive. For example, race reports will be pulled out of the blog and lovingly stored under the EVENTS tab on the left where they belong. So, hold onto your hats, grab a drink and get ready for a bumpy ride!

IMPORTANT NOTE: Be sure and check the DATE at the bottom of each entry before jumping to conclusions!!

We're finally back online.

On March 16, our DSL went away. I called the tech support number for Earthlink to see what was up and got put on hold with an automated message about the wait time being six minutes. About five minutes later, I heard a click and the line was dropped. I was slightly annoyed, but I figured someone pushed too many buttons and I was accidentally disconnected. When I called back, I got a message that tech support was aware of the issue and were working on the problem. Apparently I was not alone in having my DSL drop out and tech support was basically closed. So we called it a night and went to bed.

The next day, the DSL was still not back. I called tech support expecting to get the same message. Instead I was connected to support rep and told them my DSL was out. They had me jump through the usual hoops (reboot your computer, disconnect the router, connect directly to the DSL modem, new cables, etc.) but nothing helped. After a bit, the rep asked how old the modem was. When I told him that I had first received it in April of 2000, they offered to send me a new DSL modem. Of course I was going to have to pay for the new modem and shipping.... When I laughed in his ear, he quickly backpedaled and offered to send it free of charge.

It took nearly a week to get the new device, mostly because there was a weekend in the middle. I got the new modem on the 22nd and plugged it in, but to no avail. No DSL service. I called tech support back and informed them of my issue. They ran several tests and then scheduled a tech to come out to my home to look at the premises wiring. The problem was that they couldn't schedule it without me giving them a day when I was available at my home. I told them that I worked full time and I would be available for a short block of time, but they would have to choose the block. My mistake, since the block I got was Thursday afternoon, March 30!

After two weekends without DSL, the tech arrived. He checked my phone jack (no DSL), and then checked at the NID/MPOS (no DSL). He rolled up all his stuff and left to check at the Central Office. Apparently the DSL was active there, which put the ball into SBC's court; the problem was the wiring between the CO and my premises. According to the tech, it would be 24 to 48 hours to repair, but it was already late Thursday so I wasn't expecting any joy until Monday of the following week.

Monday came and no DSL service. I called tech support at lunchtime to find out the status and they told me it would be up in 4 hours. Joy! 5 hours later, still no DSL. I called back again. They told me it would be running by 10AM on Tuesday. Okay. At noon on Tuesday, still no DSL. I called again. They assured me that it would be fixed in one hour. At 6PM I got home from work and DSL was still not active. I called tech support again. They told me that they had identified the problem and to call back at noon on Wednesday. I did so and was informed that they had identified the problem and technicians were working on it. The sad part is that the problem was identified the prior Thursday afternoon, and technicians had been "working on it" for over three (business) days.

After another three calls to tech support, I came home from work on Thursday to find my DSL was working. Total time offline was 21 days. If you sent me email in this time period, I'm not ignoring you, I just haven't been able to get to my email at home. I'm working through my email now and should have it all cleared out by the end of the weekend.

We did our second run of the year this last weekend. (It should have been the third run, but we were sick for the Valentine's Day race in Concord.) This was our third time running the Carneros Vineyard run. We lucked out and the weather actually broke long enough for us to do the entire race without getting drenched. It was raining like crazy when we left Santa Rosa, and it started raining again as we were walking back to the car after the race -- the break in the rain was just long enough for us to do the race.

This race is a bit unusual in that they encourage people to bring their dogs to the race. I saw at least five dogs that were running the event, and at least two did the entire 10km. I was passed right away by the dachshund and even though it only has legs that are 5-inches long, it finished a good ten minutes faster than me. The 1000-year old black lab that I chased the entire way finished about a minute ahead of me.

I was sad to see myself getting passed by a lot of people in the second half of the race. This race is a mass-start, and usually by the time you reach the halfway point on a race like this, people have sorted themselves out by speed and the only real rank changes depend on pacing. If you pace it right, you should conserve energy in the first half and go slightly faster in the second half of the race. I failed at this and was passed by a good dozen (or more) people in the second half. I'm very disappointed in my fitness level, but that's to be expected since I haven't been doing any real training this year at all. (I've updated my training "plan" to reflect the lack of workouts this year.)

I ended up with a 9-minute pace overall.

So we went to the Super Bowl party in February.

As it runs out, we brought home a really nasty cold. As a result of that cold, we missed one 10km race (Valentine's Day Race in Concord, CA), a vacation in Yosemite (that I had to make reservations for in September of last year), the entire Amgen Tour of California, and an all-expense paid ski trip to Arnold, CA. I missed four days of work, and completely flubbed one project to the point that our client actually rejected my submittal and refused payment. (This ended up costing the company somewhere between $50 and $100 thousand dollars.)

We were -almost- well enough to have our Mardi Gras party on the first weekend of March. We had the party anyway and it was fun, but by the time 10PM rolled around we were pretty much wiped out.

Of course, we both still have little lingering effects... like a cough that won't quite go away, and a hoarseness that has us both clearing our throats every 10 minutes, and little assorted aches and pains leftover from being completely wiped out for a week and a half. But we're back up and running again.

It seems that everyone wants to pull me in different directions of late.

At work, I've got no fewer than three projects that are all due at the same time and all of the Project Managers want me to work on -their- project first. Plus all of the miscellaneous stuff that filters in each week. The result is that I've been working 12-hour days for the last two weeks.

At home, I've got the Dakota to deal with. The registration expired in January and I can't renew it without getting a smog check. But of course the battery is dead so I need to buy a new battery. We've been looking for a new bookshelf/media center to move all of our DVDs and video tapes into. It has to be about 40" tall and a minimum of 16" deep and it has to be able to support a 100 pound fishtank on top. Once that happens then we can paint our accent wall (we've had the paint selected since November) and start thinking about carpet colors for the downstairs.

In Camelot, now that we are guildmasters, we have a responsibility to feed our guild. This requires a minimum of one hour every day to check in, do a little maintenance and move stuff around. Plus I've set up a weekly event on Thursday nights that require around four hours.

In triathlon, I'm okay (so far) in keeping my running training going. I really want to do better at my next race, but I'm not getting a warm fuzzy feeling about Wildflower or any "real" races. Last night I went for a 3 mile run at 10PM because that was the first chance I had to go running.

Pretty much, Monday through Friday is overflowing with commitments to other people. So my weekends are very precious. Unfortunately, I'm being forced to spend over 5 hours in a car just to attend a birthday celebration for someone whom I've literally only met three times in my entire life. What a great way to spend an entire day!! And then comes Super Sunday. I'm not exactly a sports fan (as if anyone who -is- a sports fan even cares about this year's SuperBowl) so I'm not overjoyed about spending a whole day on a television event that I don't care about. Yep, this is going to be a fun weekend.

I just have to survive until the 11th. I'll be able to something for ME then.

This weekend we did our very first running race of the year, the Chinatown YMCA Chinese New Year 5K/10K Run. I ended up with a sub-9 minute mile average, but was not fast in any way. We have another run planned in the East Bay in two weeks, so I'm going to see if I can become a better runner in a very short time frame.

My mile splits:
1 - 8:06
2 - 8:42
4 - 18:29 (9:15 avg)
5 - 8:27
6.2 - 10:46 (8:58 avg)

My finish time was 54:31 which works out to a pace of 8:48 min/mile. I felt like I pushed too hard on the initial mile and it came back to haunt me on the only real hill on the run, right at the start of mile 4. I was passed by a 14-year old girl on that hill and was pushing really hard during mile 5 to catch her (I was NOT going to let some little girl beat me) so my speed picked up there. I finally passed her about 3/4 mile from the end and slowed down a little bit (but not a lot) to finish.

Overall, I'm about a minute per mile off of my expected pace, which should be just under 8min/mile on this distance. Time to get training!!

Karen's computer is working again after a two-week blackout. It was harder than expected to find a replacement mainboard. It's running at a lower clockspeed than it should be, but at least it's running now. I tried bumping the clock speed up a bit, but it became unstable. I'm not sure if it is due to the age of the mainboard (it only supports 100 or 133MHz FSB, that's how old it is) or if I'm just setting something up wrong. I'm going to have to dink with the settings over the next week or so. Running at a slow memory clock with a slow CPU clock is not going to make for a very fun experience.

I "upgraded" my webspace account this weekend. This means that instead of being on he.net, my webspace now lives on toad.he.net. Supposedly, "most" things will not be affected, but anything compiled will probably break. It's been such a long time since I wrote this blog software that I don't recall if any of it is compiled or if it is all script based. More changes are probably going to be happening in order to lower my web hosting costs. Ideally, you, the reader, will not see any changes. Anyway, if anything is broken, send me an email and I'll do my best to fix it.

The Dakota that has been sitting in a parking space for nearly a year finally got tagged for towing. The last time it was moved was when we used it to move a new washing machine. Of course, with it sitting and not being driven for such a long period of time (around 6 months) the battery has drained and it is impossible to start. With luck, the battery will still hold a charge, but that's not a sure thing. The current plan is to jumpstart the thing, move it into the garage, clean it up (there is a layer of fallen leaves on the hood) and list it for sale. It is nice to have access to a real truck, but realistically, we don't need it around full time and for the days that we do need a truck, they can be rented from U-Haul for $20 a day. It's just not worth the insurance and registration costs to have vehicle that is only used once every six to nine months.

Well, what a wild and wooley last few weeks.

When Karen came back, we started playing Camelot again. We started out by rejoining some of our old friends on one specific server, playing Hibernia. As luck would have it, a lot of changes were coming down the pipe that I was aware of due to being a Team Lead for Mythic. So I was getting really excited about paying Camelot again. Of course, I'm supposed to be representing the Reaver class, so I started playing in Albion more and more. Eventually, I ended up "adopting" the remnants of a guild on one of the newer servers.

After a few weeks of very dedicated playing and work, I managed to build the guild back up to around 25 active people, and formed an alliance with two other small guilds. I'm now hosting raids every Thursday evening. The first one only had three people attend and lasted about four hours (mostly because I kept hoping more people would show up). The second one had around fifteen people and lasted three hours. The third one only lasted about 90 minutes, but we had two dozen players involved and several people commented that it was the most fun they had playing in a long time.

The guild seems to be a success, and I'm happy to see it working out after the effort I've put into it.

And then, last Wednesday, Karen's computer died. It kept telling me that there was no video card installed. I pulled the video card and swapped it with a known good one and it works fine in a different machine and the other card also gives me the same "video not found" error. Ergo, the video glue chips or possibly the slot connector is bad on the mainboard. After a day of research, I ordered a new DFI mainboard for $75. It should arrive today and hopefully we will have two computers again.

My triathlon training is a non-starter. I did not register for swimming this spring and I'm barely running or biking. I started out strong for one week and then lost momentum. Mostly because I was focusing on making the new guild work out, so that didn't leave time for training. Still, we're both registered for Wildflower (Olympic distance) and we have our first 10km running race this Sunday.

Work is still incredibly busy. I've got way too much to do. We just hired a new engineer, but he's already loaded up to 100% and we still have more work to spread around. I suppose it beats being too slow, but the stress is getting silly. I'm starting to like doing -nothing- on the weekends simply because I feel like I have a zillion things to do all the time during the week. Which is not a good thing since we're starting to gear up our schedule for the spring already (our next free weekend is 6 weeks out already).

There are some bumps, but the road ahead is looking pretty sunny still.

On November 30, 2005, Karen came back home. That was two weeks ago.

The last two weeks have been a time of stressful soul-searching for both of us.

The short version (which is all I'm going to post here, at Karen's request) is that the situation was resolved. It wasn't easy or enjoyable for either of us and I'm sure that we will be dealing with the physical and emotional ramifications for some time to come. However, I'm also certain that our relationship is strong enough to get through this difficulty.

It's all sunshine and roses from now on.

On January 18 2003, Roommate Dave had a dinner party and invited many of his friends. One of these was an attractive woman with long brown hair named Karen. Sadly, she was there with a partner. She lived in Healdsburg, almost local, and Roommate Dave had lamented that he never really got to hang out with her much when he lived in The City because it was so far away.

Karen started to hang out at my house pretty regularly. She was a NetFlix subscriber and I had JUST gotten my brand new "free" DVD from my VISA Rewards program. She was working at Sonoma State at the time, and since my house was about midway between her job and home in Healdsburg, she would stop in pretty much every Friday with a new movie to watch. At first she was stopping by to see Dave. Over time, that started to change, she started coming by to see me. Dave told me that her relationship was pretty much over and she simply hadn't made the final decision to move out. I could relate, having just finalized my divorce only a few scant months prior. We would watch her movie and then sit around and chat. Dave would go off to bed, but Karen and I would sit in the living room and talk. For hours. About life, about love, about friends, about things we saw, things we did, things we wanted to do....

On July 4th of 2003, she moved in with me.

I look back on my life, the things I've done, the people I've met and Karen is the brightest light in my life. She has helped me where I was weak and been weak where I was strong. She shares many of my interests. We enjoy doing things together. She as enough interests that are different from mine that we don't grow tired of each other. In the last two and a half years, I've grown to love her more every week. Sure, she's not "perfect", but neither am I. I feel totally comfortable around her. I know that she accepts my flaws the same way I accept and enjoy hers.

I love feeling her nestled in my arms at night while we sleep. I love the look in her eyes when I come home after a day at work. I love when she would "hide" around a corner and playfully pounce at me when I would come home for lunch. I love training with her (even though she always was depressed about how slow she was). I love watching her round the final corner at a race, and seeing her improve every time. I love sitting next to her in our computer room as we play Camelot. I love the little voicemails I get at work, the emails, and the notes that she leaves for me in my wallet or in the pocket of my pants that say simply "I love you". I love her more than anything I've ever loved before. It's a natural love, one that grew without any help or underlying ulterior motivation, that grew from mutual respect and admiration and understanding and enjoyment.

On November 20 2005, at 8:30PM Pacific Standard Time, Karen will be leaving me, very likely forever. She is taking with her everything that is good and happy and wonderful and joyful in my life. I don't know when, or even if, she is going come back to get her possessions. She's never been really attached to "things". It doesn't matter. She will be gone. And the best part of me will go with her.

After about two weeks of trying, I finally was able to track down a copy of F.E.A.R. This is a new first person shooter, along the same lines as Half Life and Doom. I've completed the first two chapters so far.

The graphics are not up to the level of Valve's Half Life 2 engine. The character models don't appear nearly as life-like and the environments are significantly less interactive. That's the only bad points.

This is the game that Doom 3 wanted to be. There were several times during the game that I've literally yelled in fright (and scared Karen). Simply put, this is a very disturbing game.

The computer AI is a decent opponent. The computer enemies don't run willy-nilly into you as you wait around a corner for them, instead they chuck a grenade at you or try to flank your position by going around you. The thing you have on your side that they don't, is that you have a limited amount of "bullet time" play a la Max Payne. It didn't take long for me to develop the strategy of popping my bullet time, squeezing off a dozen shots and then going back into normal mode to line up the next enemy. Using that tactic it became easy to mow down four enemies at once without taking a single hit.

But the combat isn't the selling point here, the story is. I've only started getting into it thus far, but every time that little girl in the red dress appears, I find myself wanting to run away. The "flashback" cut scenes (if that's what they are) are horrifyingly disturbing. The in-game music is very moody and adds to the suspense of the game. In the few short hours I've been playing, I've already reached a point at least once where I -knew- a cutscene was coming and I just wanted to close the door and not continue. I was actually afraid to see what was going to happen.

If you are a FPS player, you could do a lot worse than playing this game. While not as graphically stunning as the Half-Life engine, the fine people at Monolith have created a horror masterpeice here. Play it with the lights on. Play it during the the day. But you should play it regardless.

Highly recommended.

I updated my xmas list.

Also check out Karen's list for more ideas.

Ha, only one month in this entry! I'm almost caught up!!

September 30, 2005: Serenity
I've never watched the TV show Firefly. I had no idea what the story was going in. I knew that the movie was getting good reviews and I wanted to get out of the house for a while.
THIS MOVIE ROCKS!!!
(Hint: the link takes you to a site where you can watch the first nine minutes of the movie, free of charge.)
As a testament to how good it is, as soon as we got home Karen (who is not a big sci-fi buff) put the whole season of Firefly at the top of her NetFlix list. This movie is nearly perfect. The story is engaging. The characters are lovable (even the "bad" guy) and feel very "real". The dialogue flows well. The acting is strong and the direction and cinematography are very strong. As a whole, it makes anything put out by Lucasfilms look like a high-school production. Don't get me wrong, there aren't any real surprises in the storyline. It's your standard good vs. evil. The only difference here is that the "good" guys are a bunch of outlaws and the "bad" guy is a Samurai. I didn't have the year's worth of back-story in my head, so the plot twist wasn't a "oh my god" kind of experience, but it was still enough to keep my interest. And then, just when you are starting to think about how long you've been watching a movie... it's done. Even the denouement is entertaining.
Simply a stunning piece of work. Without any exaggeration, this is the single best sci-fi movie ever made to date. Go see it. Now.

October 8, 2005: Superhero Party
Because our schedule has been so crammed, we didn't get to have my birthday party until now. This year the theme was "super heroes and villains". I actually spent a week learning how to sew and put together a right nice spandex suit based on DC's Nightwing character. Many hours spent learning to sew and many more actually sewing. I'd estimate I spent around 30 hours of time to put it all together and spent around $100 on all of the raw materials and pieces.

The actual party was... so-so. We were expecting around 20 people but only had half that number show up. Many of the people who were definite "Yes, I'll be there!" did not show. Our phone was ringing all day on Sunday with people calling to apologize. I've heard every excuse possible, running that gamut from "I overslept" (those damned afternoon naps!) to "My dog is dying" to "My car broke down halfway there" and even "My kid had a 104-degree fever".

It turned out that I was the only one in spandex. Kyle had a pretty damned clever costume. He was "The Sticky Wicket" with duct tape armor and weapons (sticky side out) that stuck to everything. Corrina and Karen were representing the ubiquitous drop-dead-sexy-girl costume category and doing a very good job at it.

I'm a little disappointed in the level of effort that we put into making this happen, only to have half of our party not show up.

October 15-16, 2005: The Relay
I've done this event twice in the past. Both times it was a kick in the pants, so when Brian offered to Captain a team for this year, I definitely put my name in the hat. After some early drama (which was resolved quickly by removing one person from the team roster) we were ready to go. Then one person dropped out. We started looking for a replacement, but not too hard. Then about five days prior to the race, I found out from one our couples on the team that her mother had been diagnosed with throat cancer and was going to need emergency surgery. We were now down three runners on a team of 12. It felt like there was no one looking and time was running out. In desperation I posted a last-second plea to the GGTC list. Amazingly, it worked and we filled in the last slots on the team on (literally) the last day.
I ran in slot #3 this time. My first run was easy, flat and fast. I completed it with a comfortable 7:56 pace, and really didn't feel like I was pushing too hard.
When we were at leg #13, the start of our second rotation, we were told that we were the LAST team running. The event was closing handoff points as we went through. That was a bit depressing. So when I came to me second run I was pushing REALLY hard! This run was supposed to be harder, and while I didn't notice it at the time, I really dug deep to make it happen. My pace was 8:26 but I really gave it everything I had. I was more worried about being "cut off" than saving anything for the last run. Of course, I learned later that there was no "cut off" and they would keep the event running as long as it took to finish.
When it came time for my third run I was dead tired. My legs HURT. But I ran as hard as I could anyway. Of course "as hard as I could" wasn't very hard. I posted a sad, sad pace of only 10:01. It was all I could do to hold tat 10-minute pace.
The really sad part was that when we finished, it turns out that were far from the final team. There were a few teams that started WAY before us (we started at 1PM, the first starters were at 7AM) and finished slightly after us. Our total time was close to 30-hours, with a rank of 171st. The slowest team was over 36 hours, and ranked 236th. (I'm ignoring the two one-person teams, since they aren't really comparable.) Of course the winning team did the entire 199 miles in only 20:53:26, over nine hours faster than us! So there's some perspective.
The event was a ton of fun (again). I'm thinking of putting together a team for the next 24-Hours of Adrenaline race in May '06. We'll see how that goes.

October 22, 2005: Bothe 10k race
Karen and I did this race last year expecting a nice fun 10k run. What it turned out to be was a hellish run up 1100-feet of vertical, and then back down again. Both of our finish times were around 40% longer than a "normal" 10km. So when Kyle suggested doing it this year, we were a bit hesitant. But in the end I caved in to curiosity and convinced Karen to run it again. I wanted to see how much I had improved (or not) over the last 18 months.
As it turned out, I finished quite a bit faster than my prior time. Last time was 1:08:09. This time I finished in 1:00:05 (according to Chip, the official race timer). Of course, last time I didn't end up with poison oak on my ankles. This time I did. It itches.

October 29, 2005: Halloween "Party"
Well, if nothing else, this made me feel better about my party. We got a call from one of our friends last week inviting us to a party. I don't know if it was stated, but we both assumed a Halloween party. We had our costumes from the super-hero party, so we were just going to re-use them. Sadly, we were the only people in costume. There were a grand total of six people there, including Karen and I. Not exactly a rockin' party. Still, the food was good, we had some good conversation and we didn't get in until after midnight, so not all was for naught.
I'm still jonesin' for a really good party though. It feels like we haven't really had a good one since last year.

new power supply (again) -
people that are not me -

Summer
Turns me upside down.
Summer summer summer!
It's like a merry-go-round.
-- from "Magic", by The Cars

It's been a looooong hiatus since I've updated this page. So long that I'm getting comments from friends and family that it is no longer serving its purpose. Thus, here is an abbreviated version of my summer. Yes, I'm going to try to be brief, since a LOT has happened in the last six months. So, pour yourself a nice cup of your favorite beverage and settle in. This is going to be a long one. Starting where I left off last...

April 17, 2005: Icebreaker
I completed this race in my fastest time ever, shattering my prior record on this course by over seven full minutes! It looks like I'm in an ideal position to finally break the 3-hour barrier at Wildflower. I just need to maintain my intensity level of training for two weeks. My run is still a little weak, but I'm more than making up for it in the bike leg. Full race report here or use the linkage on the left bar.

April 26-May1, 2005
So we picked up the RV (from El Monte RV who I gladly endorse) and drove down to Lake San Antonio. We arrived about an hour or two earlier than last year. Doing a loop through the hookup spots showed no available sites. Every site had either a RV in it or a tag on the site marker. As we were passing the last two sites, I noticed that the tag on the next-to-last marker was blue instead of white. We stopped to get a closer look. The site had only a shade cover in it and no car. As we were hesitating, a guy started walking out of the next site down, towards us. I turned to Karen and said, "Watch this guy is coming over to tell us he is holding this spot for someone...." Sure enough he walks up and says that he's holding the spot for his buddy. And then finishes up by telling us her just got a phone call from the guy and he's not coming so the site is available if we want it! So for the second year in a row, we ended up with full hookups when no spots were available. Can the trend continue? Tune in next year!

Admittedly, the spot we ended up in was not exactly "flat" (we were at about a 15-degree slope even after using the leveling blocks) but at least we had hookups. No complaints here at all!

One of the sites in the hookup loop was being "held" with a tent when we arrived on Tuesday. I can see holding a spot for someone, that makes sense to me. But this sport remained unused and unclaimed on Wednesday. And on Thursday. And on Friday! Over the week, there had have been at least 50 different people who came in, stopped, looked at it and passed on. Frankly, I think it was exceptionally rude of someone to come in on Tuesday to hold a spot that NO ONE USED until Saturday!! Meanwhile, dozens of people who had RVs were being denied hookups.

On Friday evening, we heard some noise outside. When we woke on Saturday, some guy had pulled a tent trailer in next to us and was "sharing" our hookups. It's easy since the electrical outlet has two receptacles and the water spigot has two heads. The only thing that really can't be shared is the sewer connection. So we made a plan. Next year, if all of the sites are taken, we're going to pick one of the flat spots and approach the occupants and see if they are willing to "share" hookups with us. The most critical thing is the electricity for the air conditioning. Second is the sewer, but since that in not a full-time connection (you only need it when you "dump" the tanks) it can be time-shared easily. I also made some 2x8 wheel blocks to use as levelers. After three years, we're finally getting better at RV camping.

The race was fun. I did not break 3 hours (again), but I did beat my best WF time by over 4 minutes with a final time of 3:08:54. I think I can shave about three minutes from my swim, and maybe another 30 seconds from my transitions. That's the easy part. Getting my bike and run times down is going to be a lot harder. I'm about as fast as I'm going to be. Even with dedicated training, I don't see saving more than a few minutes total. My best ever 10k run time is only 10 minutes faster than my WF run, and I'm not going to PR a 10km run after doing a 1.5k swim and a 40k bike, so the run isn't going to get much faster for me. And while I'd like to imagine puling in a 1:20:00 bike ride, even on a year where I felt my bike was my strongest event, I have yet to actually break 1:30:00. It's a goal, but it might not be realistic.

Overall, it was a great week, and (as usual) I can't wait to get back and do it again.

May 7, 2005: Human Race
I was hoping to see some competition this year from my office. Last year we hired a guy who is supposed to be some sort of super-runner. He was signed up to do this race with me, but did not show up, nor call or in any way announce that he would not be running. I'm disappointed that he was not there to offer some competition, and irritated that I spent time and money getting him signed just for a DNS.

I found out later that he did not race because he had a neurological "issue" and was busy being hospitalized. Ouch!

May 17-20, 2005: E3
This year's E3 was less. I'm not sure if I'm just becoming more jaded or if there was just a lack of innovation this year. Sure, the X-Box 360 was sporting drop dead gorgeous graphics, but so was the Nintendo Revolution and the PS3. But the games? Ho hum in the extreme. I was looking at these beautifully rendered images and I was thinking, "Oh, another RTS" or "top-down shooter" or "FPS" or "whatever...." There was NOTHING exciting being shown. The closest thing to "innovation" was the AD&D MMO being shown by Turbine and even it wasn't innovative. (It's all instanced, so the whole community that is required to make a MMO work might not even appear.) The booth babes were lower quality this year, and lower in quantity. Images can be found here. I really need to get a better camera.

The five most notable things about E3 this year (in order of appearance):

1. I managed to be in the right place at the right time, and ended up getting a personally signed playboy PS2 cover. This involved actually talking to a real life Playmate (for about 45 seconds). I was surprised how short she was. She looked nothing like her picture, in real life. Her hair was darker and she was actually a lot more pretty than the picture. More like a very attractive woman and less like a sexpot model. Compare the Playboy image (any splotchyness in the image is the fault of my scanner, not the image, she really has perfect skin!) to my own picture. (Yes, I need a better camera).

2. The AD&D (Turbine) booth was running a little contest. If you could "beat" the demo level they had set up, they would give you a free beta test slot. I was unsuccessful, so I got the consolation prize: a set of nice new gaming dice! For which I have absolutely no use whatsoever. You know its a sad state of affairs when a useless, yet cool (in a geeky kind of way) gimmick is one of the "high points" of a trade show.

3. Swag for the Conan booth was a giant inflatable sword. I was asked to get one for a friend at the Mythic booth (she couldn't get it herself because she was "working"). When I asked the guy at the Conan booth he told me I had to wait in line. When I looked disappointed, he quickly added, "Unless you're willing to inflate it yourself...." I hastily agreed and he gave me FIVE of the toys in a little shrink wrap package that was no more than 3-inches square. I passed one to my friend at Mythic, kept one for myself. One went to a co-worker, and the other two ended up going to some of the other Team Leads at E3. (Two sales gimmicks on my Top-5 list!)

4. nVidia was having a drawing for a new top-of-the-line Alienware game system. You had to jump through a flaming hoop to get a ticket and some people had four or five. I had one. It was simply too much hassle to get more. With no exaggeration it took around four hours to complete the circuit the first time; I was not about to repeat it. Anyway, when they finally came down to calling the winning number, they called the first six digits on the ticket WHICH MATCHED MINE!!! The announcer paused for maybe a half a second, but I was running on a huge burst of adrenaline and the whole word went into slow motion. I swear it was about 20 minutes before he called that final digit. My ticket number ends with a three and he called a seven. So close. Still, there is no award for being close and I did not get to lug a brand new computer home. I did however get a splitting headache from the adrenaline.

5. Last but most certainly not least, I was trying to scam a new ATI mousepad. This year I had two people helping me out. The ATI guys were not willing to give them away, under any conditions. Apparently these were not really "promotional" items in the sense that they were handing them out. Last year they had been taped down with stickyback. This year they actually used an industrial adhesive. I had already tried to pull one up by having my accomplices run a distraction, but the adhesive just caused the pad to rip. One guy actually convinced an ATI rep to give him one, but they had the same problem.

So around 4:30 on Friday I was camping the ATI booth. Somehow, I ended up with my back to a bank of computers that had been powered down already. As I stood there watching the last few minutes of the AD&D demo, I reached behind me and slowly pulled the pad up. As it warmed from my hands, the adhesive slowly gave way. The entire thing took about 5 minutes to release. I rolled it up and dropped it in my bag at my side.

So there you have it. The biggest computer gaming show of the year and not one single game made me say "I have GOT to get that!" Sad.

May 22-27, 2005: Yosemite
Karen has never been to Yosemite before. I decided that it would be fun to plan a "surprise" camping trip. Well, not really camping, since we were staying in one of the tent cabins in Curry Village. More like staying in a hotel in the middle of a forest. She figured out where we were going about halfway there.

It seems that Yosemite hosts a sort of adventurer/explorer type thing for junior high kids. The cabin across from us had six pre-teen girls. The cabin next to them was six pre-teen boys. With awakening hormones, close proximity and being in an unfamiliar environment where established mores did not apply. So all night long we were treated to the shrieks and screams of the youngsters as they would "sneak" between the two cabins, swat at each other through the canvas walls, and "whisper" (at about 80 decibels) to each other. Lights out was at 10PM but these kids would be awake "playing" until well after midnight. And yet somehow they still managed to be out and about every morning at 6AM, running around playing "tag" and generally being noisy.

The "restaurant" at Curry Village (more like a cafeteria, actually) had some of the worst food imaginable. Think buffet-style in Reno and bring it down two notches in quality. Luckily, there were lots of other options for dinner and we settled on a light breakfast at the coffee counter every morning. The funny thing was that we probably ended up paying less for better food than the people who ate at the "restaurant".

The week prior to our stay, there was a tumultuous downpour and the valley was evacuated due to flooding. When we arrived, the floodwaters had receded, but there was still a TON of water. Of course we did the Vernal/Nevada Falls hike. That evening, when we were wandering around, Karen spotted a postcard with Vernal Fall. She pointed out that it "looked different" in the postcard. I told her that the picture in the postcard didn't have as much water as when we had seen it that same day. So, in essence, we got to see all of the Falls and the park when it was more stunning than it is in the postcards!

We also hiked to the top of Yosemite Falls. On the way up, Karen started to get dehydrated. We had stupidly only brought two liters of water. Rather than drinking it, she was concerned about "conserving" our fluids and plodded along without drinking. I could tell her condition was deteriorating and by the time we reached the top, she was nearly delirious. I kept trying to convince her to drink, but she wouldn't. Luckily we were passed by a youth group on the path and the docent mentioned that she had iodine tablets. I offered her a few dollars to buy one and quickly purified another liter of water. Karen quickly drank it all down and within a few minutes was back to her wonderful self. Lesson to be learned: sometimes "conservation" is not the best course of action.

One of the days we went up to Glacier Point. Even though it was late May, there was still a good 6 to ten feet of snow on the ground. The roads were open and clear, but there was a LOT of snow piled alongside the road from the plows. We hiked up to Sentinel Dome, a hike I've never done before. The trail was pretty interesting since it was under four feet of snow. Interestingly enough, the signs marking the trail were about four feet tall, so they were not visible at all. Luckily a gigantic granite dome is pretty easy to find so we just headed "thataway" until we got there. The view was STUNNING, easily surpassing the view from Glacier point or the top of Yosemite Falls.

The last day we were there we went to the Hetch Hetchy valley and did a short walk. It was getting late in the day when we got there. It was as lovely as Yosemite Valley, but much more rugged. Fewer people too. I'd like to go back there someday and actually walk around the reservoir completely. Sadly, the only lodging in that area is a tent, and there are no places to buy food. It would have to be a "real" camping trip.

April-May 2005: Disk crash/reinstall
My computer is still not able to rebuild the array. I started poking around in there to figure it out and it appears that disk 1 is generating a CRC read error when it tries to rebuild to the new disk 3. I was 90% sure that this was the issue and had developed a workaround when I jostled the case during a powerdown and drive 1 bit the big one. Since disk 3 was new and unformatted, I basically lost the entire array. I also lost my cool entirely and violently attacked my keyboard, completely destroying it. About 2/3s of the keys ended up broken and the case cracked in half. So, off to the store to buy a new keyboard (I ended up with this one) and a new hard drive.

I tried reinstalling XP, but I can't even get the system to boot any longer. About 75% of the time it wont even POST. When it does, it will only get a few minutes into the installation before the drives start going ticka-ticka-ticka, as if they are having a seizure. I started buying new drives like they were going out of style.

I took apart Karen's computer and started changing out parts in an attempt to figure out exactly where the problem lies. After three days of testing, I finally discovered that my +5VDC rail on my power supply was running at 4.65VDC. I thought this was a bit low. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view) I had just purchased the power supply from my local computer store in February. I went back, with receipt in-hand and demanded a new unit. While it was too long for them to offer money back, the guy did give me a new Power Supply (he took the old one, probably to use in a new system for someone else). The first thing I noticed was the side of the box "guarantee" all voltages within 3% of rated values. That means my +5VDC should -never- be lower than 4.85VDC.

After I installed the new power supply, I saw a nice happy +5.000VDC. All four drives spun up with no errors. (By this time I had no fewer than seven drives sitting on my kitchen table. at a total cost of around $400.) I reinstalled windows and a real-time voltage monitor. I was able to return almost all of the drives for a full refund, with a couple exceptions. I did end up losing about $250 total on the exercise. But my computer is working again.

Part of that $250 loss was on a new 160G Western Digital drive, which I put into an external USB enclosure with it's own power supply. I now have "offline" storage that I use to make a Norton Ghost image on each month. I'm tired of losing all of my data. So now I have a 4-disk redundant array PLUS a hard disk image on a separate offline drive. Total cost for the hard drive system: almost $600 for 150G of storage. What a waste.

June 5, 2005: Tri 4 Real #1
It's amazing how fast the speed falls away when you don't train. After Wildflower, I really slacked off. Between E3 and Yosemite, I basically "coasted" through the last month. And, as the saying goes, if you're coasting, you're going downhill. True words, there. Possibly my slowest swim ever (37:18). A nice solid bike ride (1:21:23). And a not-quite-abysmal run (59:54). I did beat my Wildflower time for this year, but by less than 10 minutes. Considering that the course here was so much easier, that's nothing to be proud of.

June, 15, 2005: Bike theft
My Trek 4200 Mountain Bike was stolen from the front of Winzler & Kelly office. No, it wasn't locked. Anyone who thinks that a lock on a bike makes even slows down a bike thief should watch this 5 minute video. No, it's not what you think. The officer who took the police report didn't even bother asking if it was locked. It was, however, parked in a "secure" bike rack that is not visible from the street and is watched full-time by the front office staff. The guy that stole it was about four feet away from the receptionist when he took it off the bike rack. In full daylight. With one of our engineers watching him take it off the rack. He must have had balls that clinked when he walked, because that's pretty brazen, if you ask me.

My homeowners/renters insurance would have covered the loss, less my $250 deductible. But in order to file a claim, I would see a 10% increase in my homeowner's rates for the next three years. If I don't move, it would be a "break-even" proposition. If I moved or became a homeowner within that time frame it would be a huge loss for me. So I did not make a claim on the theft.

June 18, 2005: Beer-n-Brats
Thirteen packages of various sausages, a big cooler full of ice, and twenty friends. Here's how it worked. Everyone who came to the party brought one six-pack of their favorite beer. They were encouraged to bring a micro-brew or some boutique beer (it isn't so much fun if everyone brings Corona). All the beer goes into the cooler. You're only allowed to drink ONE of the beers that you brought, or unlimited numbers of other people's beers. (It's all "beer" so mixing is not an issue.) We ended up with a wide variety of brews, ranging from a super-bitter Pale Ale from E.J Phair in Concord, CA, to Red Stripe from Jamaica, to Sierra Nevada Stout, to Young's Double Chocolate Stout, and everything in between. Party-goers managed to consume forty different varieties of bratwurst and only left about 12 bottles of beer intact.
A great time was had by all!

June 25, 2005: Kyle's Party
Kyle turned 30 this year, but we were busy the weekend of his birthday, so we scheduled this party. It was originally intended to be a bus-trip/sushi consuming event, but when the final cost came in, we needed something like 14 people to make it possible. And most people were a bit hesitant to cough up the dosh. So it was scaled back to a limo and wine tasting. Which still needed eight people to make it work. When all was said and done we ended up putting a blindfold on Kyle, driving him from Sacramento to Armstrong Woods and having a "3rd Birthday" party, with an extra '0' hand drawn in on all the party stuff. We put up balloons and had ice cream cake. We ended up with six people total (which is kinda sad when you think about it) and ended the day with the usual drunken debauchery. A good time was had by all.

June 29, 2005: Kysrium theft
We went for a short bike ride on the weekend last weekend. 21-1/2 miles. Monday was a rough day. Tuesday I did a short ride at lunchtime at work, but because I took time away from my high-priority project to do that I ended up not coming home until after dark. I left my bike (locked) on the bike rack and went to bed. The next day I got up early to go a jobsite meeting in San Mateo. I noticed that the handlebars of my bike were askew on the back of the car. WTF? I walked to the back of the car to see what was up and saw that the front wheel was gone. The back wheel skewer had been released and loosened and the cassette was hanging from the chain. The frame was pulled off of the bike rack, but since it was locked to the rack itself, it couldn't be taken, so they left it hanging. Both of the nylon straps that secure the bike wheels to the rack were cut, even though they had simple quick-release tabs on them.
Here is the sequence of events as near as I can figure: Some idiot saw my bike. They pulled out a pocketknife and cut the straps intending to steal it. Tried to pull it off the rack, but foiled by the lock. Undid the front skewer and took the front wheel off. Undid the rear skewer but the cassette was "captured" by the chain (which they could have just pushed to the side, but apparently did not know how to do) so they couldn't get the back wheel off. They run away with my $400 front wheel.
So, they cut two nylon straps with quick releases, and they couldn't figure out how to remove a rear wheel. I'm 100% certain they had no idea what value of the wheel was and it was just bad luck. In the meantime, I'm out another $400.

July 10, 2005: Tri 4 Real #2
A new olympic distance PR!! 2:47:39 is now my record to beat. I'm still feeling like I'm not finishing strong and my training would be best described as "spotty". But a strong showing on the bike leg pulled my finish time down by nearly a full minute. Now if I could just combine my run workouts from three years ago with my bike workouts from this year, I'd be in a much better place.
Also of note was that Karen crashed on the bike course here and we ended up going to a Urgent Care hospital in Sacramento to get her arm stitched up. Eight stitches on her right elbow. Ouch!!

July 29, 2005: Jury Duty
The joys of performing one's civic duty! After making a daily phone call all week to learn that I was on "active standby", on Friday I was actually told to report for Jury Duty. I went in to the courthouse, I left late and forgot to bring a book or magazine or anything to pass the time. After three mind-numbing hours of watching CNN, the introductory "movie" extolling the joys of being a juror, and watching my fellow peers using the complimentary coffee vending machine, the judge appeared. Apparently, some "new" evidence had appeared that morning that made it impossible for the trial to continue, thus we were relieved of our service. He actually sounded apologetic, like we would be disappointed that we couldn't spend our time in court. At least I got a half-day of free time out of it.

July 31, 2005: Half Vineman
On July 31, 2005 I completed my second ever Half-ironman race, the Half-Vineman. I started at 8:21AM. Finished the 1.2 mile swim in 41:30.1. Not a horrible time, but not exactly speedy either. My prior swim was about 20 seconds faster, so essentially, the same speed. Middle of the road, in my opinion. I finished the 56 mile bike in 3:07:20.8. This is an incredible time for me. My prior bike leg time was nearly 10 minutes slower. And then came the 13.1 mile run. Around mile 4 I started to feel like my body was shutting down. I was pushing so hard that the blood was not getting to my digestive tract and I had a belly full of undigested gels and sports drink. By the time I got to mile 6, it was clear that I was in serious caloric deficit and my energy was running out quick. I pushed on to mile 9 by sheer force of will, but at that point I was completely tapped. Both legs were cramping up on every step and I was starting to feel woozy as I walked along. I finished (sorta) the run in a shambling 2:46:35.5, nearly ten minutes SLOWER than my prior race, and almost a full HOUR slower than my best half-marathon time!!

My total finish time ended up at 6:45:38. While I'm happy to have finished, I clearly need to work on my long-duration nutrition and endurance issues if I'm going to compete at the half-iron distance.

August 7, 2005: Tri 4 Real #3
One week after doing a half-ironman, I'm out doing an olympic distance race in 100+ degree temps. What was I thinking? I was thinking it would be a nice recovery race. Well, it kinda was. Except that the run kicked my ass seven ways until Tuesday. I've never been reduced to walking during an olympic distance race, not even the awful Pacific Grove race when I was sick. But in this race I walked, and I walked a lot. I was probably on-track to come close to my PR for this distance until about mile 4 in the run and then it all stopped. I literally walked the last two miles to the finish line. I ended up finishing in a bit over 3 hours, which is still a decent time. Heck, two years ago, I'd have been proud of it, but now it's 15 minutes slower than I "should" be. I think I may skip this race next year. I'll still do the first two, but the third one is just too soon after the half vineman. Unless, of course, my training actually happens next summer and I finish the half-vineman in a decent time (like under six hours). If that happens, I'll be back.
But I'm not betting on it.

August 13, 2005: 1/2 Vineman RELAY
For the last four years, Winzler & Kelly have sponsored several employee teams to participate in the Half Vineman RELAY event. In prior years, I've swum, run, ridden, and this year I was... a spectator. Yes, I did not race. I did however make sure that we had two full teams racing. One team was "stacked" and we were expected to finish in the top 5 relay teams. Our swimmer was actually the second fastest relay swimmer and the runner was the third fastest relay runner. The biker, on the other hand... well, just 25 miles into the 56 mile ride when his rear shifter broke. Stuck in his lowest gear, he was spinning at 110RPM and only going 10 MPH for the next five miles until he was able to stop at an aid station. With the assistance of an on-course mechanic, he was able to get his bike into a middle gear for the remainder of the route... which included the infamous Chalk Hill. He ended up climbing Chalk Hill in a gear best suited for a flat ride. And then to make matters worse, he flatted out one tire and had to do a tire change with other cyclists whizzing past him. After that setback our "top five" relay team finished in 18th place. Maybe next year....

September 5, 2005: New bike
A new 19" Gary Fisher Wahoo! It's red. I also bought toe clips, a new cyclocomputer, and front and rear LED lights. The bike came with cheap plastic pedals which I'd love to change out, but the price was already hard enough to swallow. The sales guy asked me to pick out a water bottle cage (which I did) and then charged me for it! When it was all said and done, the total was a bit over $500, about the same as my Trek that was stolen. The only difference is that instead of shouldering the cost, this time around I was able to submit the new bike as an "expense".

Yes, that's right. My new bike was paid for entirely by my employer! I think they felt a little guilty because my Trek was stolen from right in front of the office. So I'm a bicycle commuter once more!

September 9, 2005: Pacific Grove
This was my fifth time racing at Pacific Grove, and my second slowest time ever (the year I raced with a head cold I did worse). Considering that my training this summer has been lacking, I'm not shocked nor disappointed. The swim seemed much harder than prior years. On the second lap, as I rounded the first buoy, I glimpse something large, grey and oblong moving through the water about 15 feet under me. My heart stopped for an instant and I froze momentarily. One of the nice things about adrenaline is that it increases brain activity instantly. It only took a split second before I added it all up realized that I just saw seal swim by. Still, very unsettling. The bike was the bike. I did manage to have my fastest ever T2 at this race, and I finished the run with a 9:22 average pace.
Karen, on the other hand, had a GREAT race, smashing through the four-hour barrier with a stunning 3:55:05 finish. That's a PR for her on an Olympic distance race. I'm super proud of her!!

(Note: it took me nearly a month to compile this last posting. I've already started the next installment. It seems my blog is becoming episodic, rather than continual....)

Several important things have happened in the last few days, and all of them are blogworthy.

Thursday, April 14, 2005: I bought Karen a bike!!

Karen has been looking for a used road bike for a few months, but not looking that hard. With Wildflower coming closer and closer, she kicked that search into high gear last week and started sending me links to craigslist adverts. I'd look them over and most of them were crap bikes being sold for improbably high prices. And then one caught my eye. It seemed decent enough, but it was a bit more than I really wanted to pay. She set up a meeting with the seller and rode the bike. Apparently it fit like a glove. I told her that if it fit, she should buy it. So that's what we did.

The bike is made from Russian titanium. (Apparently most of the world's titanium actually comes from mines in Russia.) The tubes and frame were manufactured by a Dutch company, Blomson International. They tried to break into the roadbike market a few years back, but were not able to compete with the name-brand recognition of Litespeed, Trek and Giant. After a few years they pulled out of the market. The seller actually imported the frameset from Belgium and built the bike from scratch using a mixture of Shimano 105, Ultegra and Dura Race components.

The bike is 99% new. It is in -pristine- condition. It rides like a dream. Here is a link to a bicycle page that describes it, complete with a picture. The only difference is that Karen's bike is blue, not pink (the yellow text and highlights are the same).

Now we have to spend $500 on getting it set up, fitted to Karen, put on some good pedals, buy matching shoes, a new cyclo-computer.... Much like buying a house, the initial purchase is only the start of the costs.

Friday, April 15, 2005: Guild Wars!

The final Guild Wars Beta Weekend Event started on Friday. After a few hours of puttering around, I finally got invited into the guild I had selected. I ended up in the 'B' group and was unable to do any "real" fighting, but three of the guild went into the "tombs" section (a kind of guild vs. guild free-for-all zone). After a few false starts, we (three people) defeated five guild groups of 8... simultaneously. Guild wars is structured so that there are no "uber" items and the level cap is so low that everyone is maximum level. In other words, we won by being better players, not by being better equipped, with bigger characters.

Of course within minutes after that, my computer locked up. Upon rebooting, I discovered that a drive had failed. I ran out to CompUSA to get a replacement and installed it. The RAID failed to rebuild. I decided to walk away from it, and did a run and then went to bed.

Saturday, April 16, 2005: Bike ride.

I led Karen on a 20 mile bike ride. In the past, on her MTB, she has typically called 17MPH a "fast" speed on a flat road. After a 7 mile warmup, I told her to pop the new bike into it's highest gear and go as fast as she could. She topped out at 25MPH!! Wowza!!

(More to come...)

Let me preface this by saying that I rent my home. I really like living here and if I was given the chance to buy it, I would most likely try to accomplish that. however, realistically, I probably can't afford the price of admission.

When I arrived home from work last night, I was surprised to see a sign had grown in my front yard. Not just any sign, but the sign of a local realtor. Hurd Realty was advertising my home for sale.

I've been on pretty good terms with my landlord. I've been here for nearly three years and I always pay my rent on time (with two exceptions: one month I just completely spaced out and forgot to mail a check and one month I actually sent TWO checks by mistake). I've done a few thousand dollars in improvements to the house and I always provide the original receipts to my Landlord so he can use them for tax purposes. When the refrigerator stopped working, the landlord had a new one delivered within 24 hours. Like I said, it's been a pretty good relationship.

So I was surprised that I hadn't heard of any plans to sell the house. And while I -am- on a month-to-month contract and not a lease, the contract still requires 30-days notice. So even if he decided to put it up for sale without telling me (which would be well within his rights, even if it would be contrary to decent behavior) I would still have 30 days to find a new home.

I called his local hone number, expecting to hear that I was going to be out of a home. A distressing thought, to be sure. The phone rang... and rang... and rang... and rang. No answer. Suddenly, my mind changed tracks. (Obviously, I was thinking negatively at this point.) My landlord is an older guy, and one never knows when accidents happen. But the house is also owned by his son, a guy I've never met. If something had happened and my landlord was out of the picture, the son could conceivably put the property for sale and he probably wouldn't think twice about it. He doesn't know me, so why would he care what happened to me? I was getting an increasingly bad feeling about the whole situation.

I called the realty. It was local, but since I don't get home until 5:15PM, the Agent was long gone. I left a voicemail explaining that I rented the property, and I had not heard that it was for sale and could she confirm that it actually was?

I called my landlord's remote number. He spends the winters in Florida and the summers in Santa Rosa. Normally, he comes back to Santa Rosa in April, but I was running out of options and I was getting increasingly nervous. The phone was answered right away by my landlord's partner. I've spoken to her on a few occasions in the past, and I think they're not married. I'm fairly certain that she isn't involved in the rental properties that he owns. I explained the situation to her and expressed my concern. She told me that she wasn't aware of any sale, but she would have my landlord call me back when he returned in a half-hour.

I went online. My first stop was the realty's web site. I checked their active listings and found a property that was eerily similar to the home I lived in. No address was listed on the realty web page, but the zip code matched. The number of rooms, beds and baths matched. I went downstairs into the garage to check the building permit date (it is still stapled on the wall behind the water heater). The construction date matched exactly. Things were not looking good. The listing included the MLS number so I tried to access the MLS service for Santa Rosa, trying to find a street address. Sadly, the days of "free" MLS services are long gone. You have to subscribe to access that service.

After a bit, I noticed that on the listing there was a little "151" label, almost as if there was extra data in one of the fields and the software didn't know what to do. I started hoping that was the unit number that the listing was intended for -- I live in #191. I put on some shoes and walked over to #151. The garage door was open and there were several boxes inside, but it did not look like the current residents were planning on moving any time soon. Not a good sign, but I was still thinking that this was just a mix-up and I was okay.

As I walked back in, my landlord called. After a bit of stammering from me, he confirmed my beliefs. He was NOT selling the house and I wasn't going to have to move. After a short talk, we hung up.

Only a moment later the realtor called. She confirmed that it WAS #151 that was supposed to be listed, not #191. Apparently the sub-contractor they use to place signs had mis-read the address and put the sign up in front of the wrong house. She apologized profusely and assured me that they would relocate the sign the very next day (it was after 6PM by this point). At that point I was so relieved that I wasn't going to homeless that I thanked her and hung up the phone.

Of course, my landscaping in the front yard has now been trampled (twice) and I've got a gaping hole where the sign was placed. I think I may call the realty and complain. It's not like they are going to try to sell my house.

Last night I did a bike workout. About 2/3 of the way through the session, I had to get off the bike and lay down on the ground. I simply could not push any more and my heart rate was well over 200bpm. For about two minutes, I just lay there on the ground, gasping for air like a fish out of water. I haven't had that kind of physical breakdown in over two years. It was frightening when it happened last time and no less so this time around.

I suspect the daylight savings time change has something to do with it. I'm just so tired.

I finally got my copy of God of War on Thursday. For those not paying attention, this was my Game of the Show pick for E3 in 2004. It's a PS2 game, not a PC game.

Having played it, let me restate that. This is not a PC game. And how! It isn't Politically Correct in any definition of the words. I expected it to be bloody, but this game goes so over-the-top that the developers found an extra three floors and then went over the top of THAT. There is one puzzle which you find a grave, open it and then rip the rotting head off of the carcass to use as a key for a door. There is a minigame where you have to move the joystick in time with random on-screen prompts to bring a menage a trois to it's successful culmination. The preferred way to defeat many of the game's monster opponents is with "fatality" type moves such as stabbing them through the mouth with a resulting fountain of blood, ripping their heads off or beating their skulls into pulp against the stone floor... all of which is shown in graphically detailed glory. This game goes directly to the heart of all that is brutal, demented and just plain BAD in every person and shows it in living color.

I beat the game on "easy" mode yesterday. I never went lower than 1/2 health the entire game, but I died many many times to puzzles, mistimed jumps and the usual platforming nonsense that these types of games always seem to have. There was one level where you have to traverse a maze constructed completely from a bunch of narrow balance beams. Thankfully there was a save point both immediately before and immediately after that sequence. It took me over three hours to complete that one step. In perspective, the final "big boss" battle only took me about twenty minutes to complete.

I'm replaying it now on "hard" mode. I'm sure there will be a point where I simply can not continue to advance at that level, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

This game is possibly the best example of the RPG/action genre that I've ever seen. You have to be able to look past the gratuitous gore and violence, but there is a damn fine game there as well. It isn't some platforming and fighting crap that someone just threw together as an excuse to highlight a bunch of spewing blood and guts. If you removed the gore, it's still a great game. It gets five golden stars from this player. If you have access to a PS2 and a strong stomach I -highly- recommend this game.

In other news, Karen and I ran another 10km race this weekend: the Carñeros Vineyard run. Last year I finished in 50:09. This year I came in at 49:45, a teeny tiny bit faster. I'm happy with this. I would have liked to have done a bit better than that, but at least I'll be as ready for Wildflower as I was last year. Of course, I'm shooting for shaving nearly 15 minutes from my Olympic finish this year, so "same as last year" may not be a good thing. Only three more training weeks to go!!!

I hate doing these novella like entries. I need to make it a point to sit down and type things out when they need to be typed, and not wait until a week and a half has gone by to make a gi-normous entry.

DATELINE March 18: The monthly GuildWars beta weekend event kicks off at 12:20AM. Yes, I stayed up Thursday night to catch this. I started playing a new character just to try out the newbie areas and was instantly hooked. New Ascalon is fantastically designed breaking a new player into how to play the game very well. There are oodles of quests and you gradually gain skills and abilities like a regular MMORPG. As one point, Bob the Cat came into the room and started fussing. I looked up to see what was the issue and was shocked and amazed to see daylight outside the window. I played all night long without even realizing it!! That says something about the immersiveness of the game. I'm a HUGE fan of GuildWars and it continues to get better and better every month. I think this one will be a winner when it is released in May.

Kyle, Karen and I drove down to Oceanside for the Ralph's half-ironman. We left at 10:30AM, expecting an 8 to 8-1/2 hour drive. We were right on track until we hit El Lay. Then traffic stopped. It took two hours to go ten miles across Los Angeles. We ended up missing the cutoff for packet pickup by one full hour, making the entire drive a 10-1/2 hour oddessy. Coupled with me only getting about 90-minutes of sleep the night before, I was little cranky by the time we rolled into Oceanside. Luckily, Kyle was able to arrange a packet pickup the next morning so he was going to be able to race.

DATELINE March 19: Kyle raced. Karen and I spectated. Somehow, despite being in an ideal spot to watch for racers, we managed to miss Kyle pass by us at least three times. We never saw him. As the clock ticked past the 7-hour mark, we started asking volunteers about our "missing racer". We were told that there was a HUGE crash on the bike course and that at least one racer was airlifted out to the local hospital. With massive head trauma and a possible broken neck. Amazingly, they did not know who it was, by race number or by name. WTF?!? Suffice it to say that we were more than a little concerned. Heck, I was really worried at this point. Luckily, we had already met up with Kyle's father, so we had a bona-fide family member to help smooth over any needed administrative issues, legalities and whatnot. After about 30 minutes of talking to everyone we could find about this, Kyle just nonchalantly saunters up. He had finished with only a minor injury (some friction on the inside of one shoe had caused a bleeding sore) but nothing life threatening or even serious. Whew! Not only was he safe, but he came in with an awesome finishing time! WTG Kyle!

After a shower, and a entertaining lunch with a multi-colored adult beverage, we were back on the road. A quick stop in El Lay for desert with Karen's friend Ingrid (who is a local entertainment maven -- now I know who to call for restaurant ideas when I'm down there for e3!) and we made it home just after midnight. The trip home was MUCH faster than the trip down, with a total travel time of just over 7 hours.

DATELINE March 20: Amazing what a difference a couple of days makes! Did the same bike workout that I did on Thursday. I was feeling very tired afterwards on Thursday, but today I ran through the whole set with energy to spare.

DATELINE March 22: Started doing speed work finally. Feeling pretty slow still. My run times are about where they should be though, so it could work out. I really need to focus on my training to pull this one off. That 3-hour finish time at Wildflower is looking pretty questionable at this point. I really slacked off way too much in February and March and it's going to be a tough road to get it back in the short time left. My workout format has changed from doing X gear or pace for Y time, into doing X -speed- for Y intervals.

DATELINE March 26: Another great Santa Rosa Cycling Club ride. 4000-feet of elevation gain, in a 50-mile out-and-back ride. At the summit (and turn around) I was surprised and amazed by seeing a snow-covered vista open up in front of me. Truly amazing views, and who knew we would be coming close to the snow line? It was a shock to be sure. I also met a local fellow triathlete. This guy is not in my age group (he's much older) but he probably could kick my ass any day of the week. He dropped the entire group on the return trip hammering out the last few miles about 1-2MPH faster than everyone else. Of course, it was only a few miles so he ended up finishing only a couple of minutes ahead of the rest of the group. I got a business card, so I might have found a good workout partner that is going to push me a bit harder. That could help when it comes time for Vineman. (BTW, I -am- registered for this race, finally.)

DATELINE March 27: Finally got my taxes done. As expected, I'm getting money back from the feds, to the tune of a bit less than $1000. Also as expected, I ended up owing the state a few dollars. When all was said and done, I ended up with an overall refund amount of $856. That would be a nice windfall except that I also balanced my checkbook and discovered a $571 error (I hate that!) So, when it all worked out, I'm only ending up $285 ahead of where I started. It's not a trivial amount, but it isn't going to incent me to go buy a car or anything.

I always notice when things end for some reason. Today we did some house cleaning and I tossed out the old CD player from the Jeep. This was a bit weird since I bought that player as a birthday gift for someone in a past relationship. Full circle I guess.

I've been tracking my foods for the last week and entered them into a nutrition site. I'll post the graphs and charts shortly. The summary version of my diet for the last week is an Atkins advocate's worst nightmare: 65% carbs, 21% fat, 14% protein. I average around 1600 calories per day, which they seem to think is too low (they want me to have 1750 per day) but seems to be right on target for weight loss (even though I'm NOT losing weight). The upshot of this is that I need to eat more proteins and a bit more fats and I need to cancel the carbohydrates and sugars. Looking at specific meals, it looks like my usual breakfast of cereal with 1% milk is my -highest- protein percentage of the day! I think maybe a meat-based sandwich will start moving onto my personal menu, and I'll have to make a concerted effort to drop out some of the sugars. Maybe I can drop those last 5-10 pounds before wildflower after all. Clearly my diet needs a little work.

There! Now I'm caught up with my blogging. For now. And it wasn't even that painful. (Even if it did take two additional edits to get it all in.)

One of the amazing things about skiing is that it is an almost completely anaerobic activity. Since I've been training for triathlon related events, running races, swimming, and biking, I've grown accustomed to feeling "tired" when I'm out-of-breath, my heart rate is high and my body goes into oxygen debt. I'm not accustomed to being "tired" when my heart rate is only about 50% of my max, I'm not breathing hard and I feel like I just got up form the dinner table. But my legs didn't care what I was accustomed to. They screamed at me on the slopes on Saturday, they were sore on Sunday, and this morning I feel like an 80-year old man with bad knees.

I really need to make better plans for skiing next year. I'm putting it on my calendar to schedule a few trips. In September.

In other news, I received my registration confirmation for the Half-Vineman in July. I think I'm on-track to do pretty well in that race. Speed work starts this week -- only 5 "real" training weeks left before Wildflower!

Several minor but interesting things happened recently.

First off, I purchased and received a new heart rate monitor (HRM). I got the next model down from the one I had last time, and saved around $40. I had to give up a couple of things, but I never used those features anyway.

I did a bike workout on Friday morning with the new HRM. I was shocked and amazed to find how -low- my heart rate was when I was pushing very very hard. I'm not sure what that means. I'm hoping that changes when I start doing speed work mid-march. It just seems "wrong" to have a heart rate that it only around 170-ish when I was seeing 205-ish one year ago during the Valley Ford Relays.

We went down to Lake San Antonio (LSA) for our second Wildflower Training Weekend. This time we had eleven people and we rented the largest cabin that was available. Despite tumultuous downpour on Saturday, we still managed to get in some good training time.

During the rain on Saturday, we jumped into the lake (you get wet swimming anyway, so who cares if it is raining?) and swam around for a few minutes. I rented a wetsuit for Karen so she would get a feel for how it felt to swim in a neoprene baggie. The water was around 52 degrees, and the wind was whipping across the lake, so she really didn't get to much more than paddle around in the boat ramp area. I was kinda disappointed about that. Following our swim, we all headed out for a nice rainy run. We did the "rainy day" 10km route up Beach Hill. It was cold and miserable run. But, by the time we all got showered and warmed back up, it was still only early afternoon, so we spent the remainder of the day lounging around, napping, reading the variety of triathlon magazines that people brought. Dinner was dee-lish-us!! (Thanks to Zak and Rita!)

Sunday we got up bright and early... so early that it wasn't bright. And when the sun finally got up, the day was a party cloudy, but still cool and NOT rainy day! We completed the 40km bike ride with racing tips being bandied about by Kyle and myself.

We were showered, packed and on the road by noon. Returned the wetsuit by 3PM and home by 5PM. While we were away, Bob the Cat decided to destroy one of the Corwin-Vega speakers. While these speakers were free to me (a long story which, while interesting, I wont repeat here) they originally retailed for over $1000. I'm sure it will be a few hundred to "fix" them and the sound quality will probably be much degraded. The joys of being a pet owner.

Later, I sat down to log in to GuildWars, but my computer spontaneously rebooted. A few times. And then it shut down. A new power supply was installed on Monday and so far that seems to have fixed the problems. (I've been suspecting a power related problem for some time and I -sorta- confirmed it a couple weeks ago when I unplugged all four hard drives, both optical drives, all of the 'extra' fans and lights and the machine STILL had cold-start issues.) I suspect that the spontaneous reboots that Karen is having on her computer are probably the same thing. New-fangled Radeon cards draw a LOT of power and the old power supplies just can't handle it. We'll see how the new power supply holds up over the next few days.

The numbers are in for the Second Annual Valentines Day run.

2004 -> 49:48, 33rd overall
2005 -> 49:49, 32nd overall

So basically, I ran exactly the same time as last year.

We did our first "race" on Sunday, a 10km run in Concord. The CHS Academy Valentine's Run is a super-flat running course on asphalt. We both beat our times from last year, but not by a whole lot. Of course, last year it was an all-out run, while this year it was a training run. I consider that a huge win.

On Saturday we did a long ride, too. Well, medium-long. We rode our bikes to the ride start locations, did the ride, and then rode home. I put in 40 miles (not counting the commute to and from the ride) and Karen did 35 miles (counting everything).

In other news, my current Camelot project, a new Bainshee character, capped out of the newbie Battleground this weekend. When I went back to killing monsters again, I was surprised when I lost a fight and lost exp. I'd gotten so accustomed to simply being killed with no downtime in RvR that I'd forgotten completely about the PvE death penalty. So I was surprised when I died doing a quest and lost 1/100th of my current level. I'm really enjoying this caster class and I expect to be in the mid-level Battleground in about a week.

So I did another SRCC ride this last weekend. This brings to mind two discussions.

First off, the ride itself. The ride would have been a GREAT training ride except for three things:
1. Traffic. Call me crazy, but I consider a nice ride where you see a car every ten to fifteen minutes is ideal. That way, if you break down, you can flag a passing motorist, but they aren't whizzing past you often enough to make you worry about your personal safety. On this ride, however, I was being passed by cars about every fifteen seconds. A section of the ride was actually on the infamous Silverado Trail - a great road to find Napa Valley wine-tasting tourists. Not so good for the bike.
2. Hills. The ride leader advertised 4000' of climbing. Normally, a lot of climbing wouldn't be a bad thing, but on a hilly road with a lot of traffic, you worry on the uphills because you're going so much slower then the 45MPH cars. And on the downhills, you worry because the idiot drivers think that it is their duty to pass all the bicycles. Some moron decided that he just HAD to pass me on a downhill, crossed a double yellow line and then realizing that he was going 65MPH down a two-lane road on a hill, slowed down so much that I nearly rear-ended him. (UPDATE: I spoke to the ride leader today and apparently the GPS using riders informed him that the total actual elevation change was closer to 8000'. Nice. Only -double- what I expected!))
3. Distance. The ride leader advertised 45 miles. My cyclo-computer recorded 52-1/4 miles. 45 miles is a bit long for me at this point of the year. 50+ miles, with over 4000' of climbing is freaking insane! And as a result of that, the ride ended up taking a LOT longer than expected, and completely ate the remainder of the day because I was too tired to do anything afterwards.

As I mentioned above before I started to rant, the ride had the potential to be a great training ride. But it wasn't. (Update: I spoke to the ride leader today and he told me that this was one of the hardest "short" rides the Club hosts! Now he tells me!!)

Secondly, I've now done three rides "with" the club and I'm starting to think I should join. Well, thats a bit of a question.
I did the Geyser's ride with the club, but they all dropped me, so I was really only "with" the group at the regroups.
I did the Cotati ride with the club, but since I forgot my shoes, I started an hour behind them and only saw them as I passed them at rest stops.
I did this last ride with the club, but I started late and since I took the "short" option (there was another 20 miles that was "optional") I only saw two or three people the whole ride.
So... out of three club rides, I've met zero people, and actually ridden with only a handful, for a very short time. I'd have gotten the same benefit from just printing the club ride list and not even trying to show up when the actual club rides are taking place. So is it worth it for me to support them with my membership fee? Hard to say.

I've been tracking my weight and training plans over the winter break, but I haven't been updating them on this page. I'll start making a concerted effort to make at least one update a week from now on.

My weight log can be found HERE.

My current training log can be found HERE

This weekend I did a ride with the "B" group. It was pretty clear from my last ride that I couldn't keep up with the "C" group. (Bike group classifications are "backwards"; the higher the letter, the faster they go, the longer the rides, and the more hills they will tackle.)

Well, sorta...

I showed up at the ride starting location about 10 minutes before the ride started. I knew I had some time, so I wasn't in a rush to get my bike out of the car and get set up. I leisurely meandered around for a few minutes, and eventually got around to pulling the bike out and putting my helmet and riding gloves on. I pulled my VISA card and my driver's license out of my wallet and tucked them into my center jersey pocket, along with my spare car key. And then as I was about to step over my bike, I realized I still had my old running shoes on. Well, no problem, I'll just change my shoe--

I'd forgotten to bring my bike shoes.

So, I frantically threw my bike back into the car, jumped in the driver seat and sped home. When I got home, I saw that I'd ALSO left the garage door wide open. Obviously, I was not thinking straight at that early hour.

So, I printed out the route directions, grabbed my bike shoes, closed the garage door and drove BACK to the start. I was an hour late when I started.

The ride was EPIC!!! I would have to say that this was one of the three best bike rides I have EVER been on. The route was comparable to the Wildflower Olympic course ride in difficulty (a bit longer, but a bit less hilly). The weather was PERFECT, temps in the high 60s to low 70s, full sun and no wind whatsoever for the entire ride. And when I came around one curve after the "rest stop" (I actually caught up to and passed about half of the group that started an hour ahead of me there) I was surprised by a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean! The entire route went through rolling green hills, and I think I saw maybe ten cars on the roads the entire time. Simply put this was an AWESOME ride and I will be repeating this route again. 43.62mi in 2:59:30.

The problem is, of course, that I now know that the "B" group is too slow for me to train with. I started a full hour behind these folks. Even if I assume that they were late in getting started, I was still at least 45 minutes back when I got rolling. Now, I'm not the most humble guy in the world, but anyone who has ever seen me ride can tell you that I'm no Lance Armstrong. Heck, I'd call a 17MPH -average- speed "fast" (Lance sprints uphill at that speed). My overall average for this particular ride was only 14.6MPH. And yet, despite this not-so-great speed, despite starting 45 to 60 minutes behind, I caught up to, and passed the main group! That's kinda sad, when you think about it.

So it looks like I'm going to be with the "C" group next weekend. It may be hard, but that "B" group pace just isn't going to cut it for me.

Oh, and I realized today that I will not be running the Valley Ford RELAY event -- I will be at Lake San Antonio for a Wildflower training weekend that day.

We did our first timed swim last night. Basically, this was a 30 minute swim and we just had to count laps. I finished 54 laps. I stopped about 25 seconds short of the time limit, so I probably could have gone 55. Even if we assume that I did 55 laps, that translates into a 36 minute 1.5km swim. Slow slow slow!! And today, my arms feel like lead weights. I'm really out of shape!!

This weekend saw my first long bike ride of the year. I joined up with one of the cyclists at work (who happens to be a member of the Santa Rosa Cycling Club) and went on a nice cheerful 55 mile jaunt that included over 3500' of climbing. All of which was in the first ten miles. Of course, with all of the climbing out of the way right away, there was a fast and furious downhill that followed. I wish I had known the road a bit better. As it was, I would brake hard for each turn, then have to pedal hard when I realized it was only a gentle curve and not a death defying hairpin turn. The end of the ride was an easy 15 mile mostly-flat cooldown. Of course, by that time my legs were completely ruined and I ended up finishing a good half-hour behind the leaders, despite a regroup and the bottom of the hill. (Yes, I really was a full 30 minutes behind on a 15 mile ride.)

Karen and I also did a nice long, slow run. We went around Spring Lake three times (that's 6.75 miles) at a moderate pace. While it wasn't a hard run, I was surprised how unprepared I was for that distance.

By popular demand, here is my probable race schedule for this coming year. Spectators are welcome at any race. Click on the name of the race for details.

Valentine's Run February 13, 2005. Concord, CA
Valley Ford RELAY February 20, 2005. Valley Ford, CA
Icebreaker Triathlon April 17, 2005. Granite Bay, CA
Wildflower Festival May 1, 2005. Lake San Antonio, CA
Tri-for-Real #1 June 5, 2005. Rancho Seco Park, CA
Tri-for-Real #2 July 10, 2005. Rancho Seco Park, CA
Half-Vineman July 31, 2005. Santa Rosa, CA
Tri-for-Real #3 August 7, 2005. Rancho Seco Park, CA
Half-Vineman RELAY August 13, 2005. Santa Rosa, CA
Pacific Grove Triathlon September 10, 2005. Monterey, CA
Treasure Island Sprint November 6, 2005. San Francisco, CA

First of all, thank you to the many people who emailed or called to express concern about my prior entry. Secondly, the resolution (for me) was positive. For Karen, it is still in flux, but I'm not here to report on her feelings.

Even though is it the middle of the month of January, I'm going to post my resolution for the year 2005. Last year, I didn't see a need to do anything like that. I ended up living the year 2004, like any other year. Not that it was a bad thing. In fact, 2004 was probably the best year I've had in my entire life. Regardless, I'd like to set some goals for the 2005 calendar year. So, in no particular order:

1. Get out more often. When I was single (and actually a bit before that) I was going out with friends at least once a week. Since I moved into my current home and become "attached", a night of excitement meant a bottle of wine and a video. I don't want to become one of those old couples who have no friends.

2 through 5. Fix up the house. Yes, it's not my house, but I do live here. I want to make it a nicer place to live. Things that need doing are the front yard, the dryer vent, the dishwasher, and the carpet. The back yard needs some help. Air conditioning would be HUGE. Also, I still have yet to actually re-hang all of the door casings from when I pulled them off when I was painting when I moved in originally (over two years ago). I'm going to make at least three significant improvements to the house this year.

6. Become a better triathlete. Last year I kinda fell down on my races. My goal this year is to complete Wildflower in under 3 hours and Vineman in under 6 hours. Note these are the same goals i had two years ago, and did not meet.

7. Work on my relationship. I love Karen very much. I think she deserves to be reminded of that at least once a week, so I'm going to resolve to do something special for her at least every seven days.

8. Be more focused at work. Recently, I've been putting in hellacious hours and getting more done. But I need to put in FEWER hours and keep my productivity as high, or higher. I know there is a lot of "wasted time" that can be trimmed from my workday, and I'm going to work on keeping my work hours dedicated to doing work-related items.

9. Enjoy my games more. Too much of my time playing some online games has been frustrating rather than fun. But on my desktop I currently have Half Life 2, Knights of the Old Republic (the original one), Prince of Persia (the original one), Warcraft III, Camelot, GuildWars and even World of Warcraft. Between all of those enjoyable games, there is no reason to play anything that I am not having fun with.

10. This one, I'm going to keep secret. I will say that it is a great resolution and it will definitely change my life.

I don't want children. I've never wanted children. Although my Mother would probably tell you a story about how I used to longingly gaze at infants and sigh with the desire to procreate, I have never wanted kids. I can recall saying that as a young man, and my family would tell me that I would change my mind as I grew older. When I got married in my mid-20s, everyone assured me that by the time I was 30 years old, I would be a happy father. But as I passed the 30-year mark, I still did not want kids. Of course, they just smiled and nodded knowingly and said, "Just wait until you're 35... then you'll change your mind." And then 35 came (and went) and no inclination towards reproduction manifested. In not very long, I'll be looking at the low side of 40-years old and I still don't want kids.

When I was in high-school, a horrible thing happened to me. Like many teenage boys, I was more interested in getting laid and less concerned with the consequences and ended up with a pregnant girlfriend. I still recall the feeling of utter helplessness, like a fish that has already been hooked, waiting for the line to reel him in. I knew that my entire life hinged on this one thing. Whether or not I wanted it or would have chosen it didn't matter. The girl had the power to completely change my life until the day I died. The decision was entirely hers and there was nothing that I could do except hold on and hope for the best. I entertained thoughts of suicide, murder, and worse. I'm not religious, but I remember praying for horrible things to transpire. Luckily (for me) she chose not to take my life away from me. No matter what your stand is on abortion, I honestly feel that on that day my life was saved. A few months later we broke up. Years later, I learned later that she married, had three kids and then was abandoned by her husband. I look back and know that could have been my life and I am thankful that I avoided it, no matter how narrowly.

On December 15, 2004, Skylar Dawn, my sister's first (and probably only) child was born by Cesarean. It was a difficult birth, and it's not my place to report on my sister's personal issues. Regardless, this Christmas was spent at my sister's home. Karen and I were there for several hours on Christmas Eve and again for a few hours on Christmas Day. While the birth of my niece would be significant alone, it also served as a lit match in the powderkeg that is my life.

Karen wants kids. She wants kids a LOT. As in, her entire life's goal is to have a family. This, obviously, is not exactly "compatible" with my desires and hopes. The real problem is that we each want a different aspect of a binary choice. There is no "sorta" in children, you either have them or you don't. If we have kids, I end up giving up my entire life. If we don't have kids, she gives up her lifelong ambition. Neither one of us can change without fundamentally altering ourselves. Neither one can make the other happy without changing. And by changing ourselves to make the other person happy, we ultimately make them unhappy. A classic paradox with no solution.

After a year-and-a-half of living together, I can honestly say that I am ready to spend the rest of my living days with Karen. She's everything that I've wanted: she's loving without being demanding, she cares for me and allows me to care for her, she never nags me but she still reminds me to do all of the things that I keep putting off, she supports me in all of the crazy things I do and allows me to support her in the things that she does. I look at her when she wakes up in the morning, with her hair askew and her face all squished from the pillow and I fall in love with her all over again. I remember our first night together, our first kiss under fireworks, the first time we walked through a redwood grove together... and I want to spend more firsts with her. I want to take her to amusement parks and watch her squeal with delight on a roller coaster. I want to show her Yosemite and Sequoia Park and Kings Canyon and all of the great places that I've been and see her face light up at the wonder of it all. I want to go cross country skiing with her. I want to spend a week with her and a motorhome. I want to cross the finish line of a hard triathlon and see her waiting there for me. And I want to be waiting at the finish line for her when she runs her first marathon.

When my marriage failed (and even before that) I vowed that I would never remarry. It just is too much hassle. But in the past year and a half, I find myself toying with the idea of marrying Karen. More than once I came a hair's breadth from asking her.

But right now, I'm scared to death of her. Sunday night, I learned that she skipped five pills over the last week. I honestly don't think it was done maliciously, or "on purpose" or with any intent of trying to change my mind by forcing the issue. Karen has been living with near-suicidal depression since Skylar was born (which I knew about, but not the cause) and those little hormone tablets kinda slipped off the radar. At this point, however, the intent doesn't matter. Whether it was intentional, or accidental, or caused by Martian rays beaming in through the window of our bedroom, it just doesn't matter. The only thing that matters right now is whether or not she is pregnant.

There, I've typed it. I just sat here for 20 minutes trying to type those last six words. The thought makes my chest feel tight, my ears ring and every muscle in my body tense. I'm having trouble breathing and I feel dizzy. I have this overwhelming urge to hide under the desk until the bad stuff goes away. I'm scared to death, because I really and truly think that she is. As I run through my memories of the last week, I make a mental tally of the times that we made love, backtrack to when her last period was and... let's just say that if we were to put odds on it, it would be a good bet.

But it's NOT a good bet, no matter how you slice it. It's a shitty decision to force someone to make, even in the best circumstances. And no matter how I feel about Karen, I'm not ready or willing to sacrifice my life for a child that I don't want. If she is pregnant, then our relationship is going to be over. Maybe not today, maybe not next week, but it will be a knife through the heart of our love. And that makes me incredibly sad. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Maybe I'm being a little selfish or unfair by putting my needs and desires above Karen's. Maybe. But there just isn't a middle ground on this issue. It HAS to be one way or the other. There is no possible compromise situation. When you only have a choice between "Yes" and "No", if you're 60% in favor of "No", then "No" wins, even if it isn't completely the right thing to do. She means the world to me, and if I could do anything to make this situation better for her, I would. But I can see the end bearing down on me like a runaway freight train.

And it hurts. I love her so much.

Treasure Island Sprint Distance
Year	Overall	Swim	T1	Bike	T2	Run
2001	1:26:30	11:57	4:26	40:39	2:53	26:35
2002	1:29:07	11:25	4:59	42:56	2:03	27:44
2003	1:19:37	11:24	3:40	38:43	2:19	23:31
2004	1:21:11	11:46	3:51	38:38	2:02	24:54

I started out nice and strong on the swim. About 100 yards in, I sighted on my left side and saw that I was tracking pretty good, but I looked forward and could count the guys swimming ahead of me. One, two, three four, five.... I knew that I couldn't -possibly- be the sixth swimmer, so on the next stoke, I sighted on the right and counted the swimmers ahead of me. One, two, three four, five, six.... Wow. I actually was in the lead pack of swimmers. Of course, that freaked me out psychologically and my swim stroke went to crap and I started dropping back, and fast. To put it another way, I lost my rhythm. But the time I recovered from that momentary lapse, I was already past the second buoy in a three-leg swim. I started strong, finished strong, but had a weak center. Still, despite not having seen any water since TFR#3 in August, I was only 22 seconds off my pace from last year. My goal at this swim has been to break 10 minutes, but that might be impossible. I'll keep trying though.

T1 felt impossibly slow. I was just all out of sorts and having all kinds of problems changing gear. I didn't have any Body Glide and my wetsuit didn't come off smoothly. I couldn't get my socks on. I couldn't get my bike shoes on. It was just a bad scene. And despite all of that, I only lost 11 seconds from last year's time. That "feeling slow" was to be a trend for the whole race.

The bike felt slow. About the second lap I started getting hungry. If I was feeling hungry, it was not only out of food, but -past- out of food. (You typically won't feel hungry/thirsty during a race until it is already too late to recover from.) Luckily, I had ONE PowerGel that I grabbed from the freebie goodie table in transition before the race. I sucked that down as I was finishing my second lap. I think it saved me from a complete bonk. Even though my bike time was the fastest every on this course, I still did not feel like I was pushing all that hard.

The first lap was nice. The second lap I had that food issue. The third lap was crowded. About that time the female waves were hitting the course and I just happened to be lapping at the same time as a group of about 20 of them were just joining in. I had to weave and jog and dodge to get through that big pack of bikes. Some of them were a bit faster than me (I think the fastest one finished her first lap about a minute ahead of me) but most were slower.

19.2 MPH average. I still felt slow.

T2 felt slow. In actuality, it was a pretty fast transition, but I felt like I lost a lot of time changing shoes and grabbing equipment. It was a decent transition, but I think it could have been a lot more streamlined. I think my T2 has gotten to the point where I'm going to have to start putting in some real effort to get faster. I've pretty much figured out how to not have 5-minute T2 times. Now I've got to work on getting a 1-minute T2.

The run actually felt pretty good, even thought this was where I lost the most time off of last year's finish. I still managed to hold a nice 8-minute pace (8:01 to be exact). I was passed about 1/2 mile from the end by a guy in my age group. He was up maybe 100 yards on me when the finish line came into view. I tried to catch him, I really did. I was pretty much putting in an all-out sprint. About 200 yards from the end, he looked over his shoulder -- I'm sure he knew I was there since he had just passed me a few minutes prior. I had cut that lead down to around 50 yards by that time. He sped up a bit. I continued to close in on him and when we hit the finish chute itself, he was only around 25 yards up on me. But that was all there was. I simply ran out of time and real estate. He ended up finishing 12 seconds ahead of me. If it had been another 50 yards, I might have been able to catch him.

Overall, I finished 00:01:34 slower than last year. Last year I trained like crazy for six weeks prior to this race. This year I did not train at all. Based on the regimen, giving up only a minute and a half... I'm happy.

And I'm already thinking about Wildflower 2005.

I normally don't "do" political commentary, but I'm going to do it just this once. Quite frankly, I'm disgusted and frightened by the results of this year's presidential election.

At one time in my past I played World War II flight simulations online. As is typical for myself, when I was learning about these flying gunships, I learned everything I could about them, the time period and the situation in which they came to be. As a result, I know a little bit more about WWII than the average person.

I keep drawing parallels in my mind between Mr. Bush and Adolph Hitler. Both had a "scapegoat" (Hitler blamed the Jews, Dubya blames the Iraqis/Al Queda/Muslims). Both were loved and blind followed by the "common folk" of their respective countries -- even when the Allies were marching across Germany, the German people clung to the hope the Der Fuhrer has some super-weapon that was going to save them. Both had a 'master plan' that was written prior to their rise to power that describes their ultimate ambitions. Both ended up being the ringleader of a small trio of countries that the entire world allied against. For Hitler it was Germany, Austria and Italy; for Dubya it is the USA, England and Israel. I'm dead certain that history (assuming there is someone left to write it) will look back on George W. Bush as an evil man and he will join the ranks of Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and yes, Adolph Hitler as one of the most evil leaders the world has ever seen. (If you don't know who those names are, I strongly suggest you do a little history reading.)

The major difference is that THIS madman has nook-yoo-ler (sic) weapons at his disposal. When he manages to touch off World War III and his Joint Chiefs decide that the time is right to simply nuke the opponent into oblivion, the big bombs aren't going to be limited to being used on the other guys. No one wins in a nuclear war.

And I honestly and truly believe that is where we are headed.

It's been a loooong time since I've updated my blog. Not because nothing has happened; no, I've been extremely busy. So much so that several friends have contacted me and asked if everything as okay. I'm fine. And here are two months worth of updates!

DATELINE September 2, 2004:
My employer is building several new private office spaces in our building, and some old cubicles are going to be demolished to make way. The people have moved into new cubes, and got all new "modular" office furniture. The old built-in cubicle furniture ended up being up-for-grabs and since I had expressed a desire to get this in the past, I was offered a set of this stuff. I had a meeting in Redwood City today, so I asked the intern to install it while I was out of my cube. When I returned, all of my office "stuff" (papers etc) was scattered in my cube. The stuff that was in my old desk ended up in a banker's box on the floor.

So as I'm putting stuff away, I find a blank, white envelope with my name on the outside. I don't recall what this could be, so I open it up. Inside is a smaller tan envelope with my name on it. Thinking this is a bit odd, I open the second envelope. Inside is a greeting card. I open the greeting card and it's a Christmas card from my father. Inside the card are six $100 bills and six $20 bills. $720 in cash money. Was sitting in my desk drawer at work. I have ZERO recollection of ever putting it there, and I've only been working here for four years, so it had to be from a recent holiday season. No matter what: THANKS, DAD!!!

DATELINE September 11, 2004:
The Triathlon at Pacific Grove is my favorite triathlon. It was my first ever race in 2000. Last year I posted my slowest EVER Olympic Distance finishing time in Pacific Grove. This year, my goal was to beat last year's time by one hour or more. My best finish time to date on this course was the very first time I did it at 3:02:39. My Personal Record on any Olympic Distance course is 2:47:57. Last year's time here was 3:49:29, so I was pretty confident. I was also looking to beat my PR, but that was more of a secondary goal.

The swim is two 1/2 mile laps in a kelp forest. The first lap was horrible. I swam decently, but the kelp slowed me down horribly. Going through a kelp frond is like swimming in jello. Sure, it works, but it isn't fast. The second lap, on the other hand, was like magic. I started to sight correctly, was able to spot the kelp fronds and wove my way around the majority of them. I'm not sure if I figured it out, or I just got lucky and missed the majority of the kelp. Either way, the second lap was MUCH faster than the first lap. 34:58 is not a great swim time, but I'll take it considering the difficulty of the swim.

The bike was the bike. I'm pretty much dialed on on my bike speed. Sure, I can get faster, but that would require a level of dedication to my training that I'm not really willing to devote. I have too many other interests to put 20 hours a week into -just- bicycle training. I've always wanted to beat 1:20:00 on the 40km bike and I'm pretty much there. For the four Olympic distance races I did over the summer, my bike splits have been
1:26:15 - Tri for Real #1 (June)
1:19:34 - Tri for Real #2 (July)
1:18:05 - Tri for Real #3 (August)
1:17:54 - Pacific Grove (September)
As you can see the trend is improving, but I'm close to the top. I only improved by nine seconds in the whole month of August. This tells me that I'm not going to get much faster. But I'm okay with that.

The run went pretty well. I am learning how to really push myself on the run. When I first started triathlon, I was told by someone, "Don't worry about the run, it takes care of itself." In the last few years, I've learned that is completely wrong. The run is probably the second most important part of the race. A good clean run can make up a lot of time. A lousy run can cost even more. This whole year I've been struggling to get my triathlon 10km times under one hour. In a pure running race, I can beat 50 minutes (49:30 in the Human Race last May). Plus, I honestly think that getting to be a stronger runner will make me a faster cyclist too. So I was happy to see my run time come in at a speedy 50:55, an 8:12 pace!!

Overall, a very good race experience!

Afterwards, we went home and got smashed. A great time was had by all, even those that can't remember it (and shall remain nameless to protect themselves).

DATELINE September 18, 2004:
We hosted a barbeque at home in celebration of my birthday. At it's peak, we had about 20 people crammed into our little townhouse. It actually ended up being a lot of fun with people showing up from pretty much all walks of my life. We had a few friends form work, a few friends from online games, a few friends from my single bar-hopping days, and even a few 'adopted' friends that Karen brought in. We ended up closing it down around 2AM.

DATELINE September 25, 2004:
My 20-year class reunion was held in Walnut Creek. I would guess there were about 100-200 people from my graduating class that showed up. It was interesting seeing a lot of those people. It was especially odd that there were some people there that, even after being introduced to them and knowing their name, I couldn't recall them at all. I thought I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class, at least enough to know who they were. But I guess 20 years of chemical experimentation have altered some of my recollective abilities, because there were more than handful of people that were complete blanks to me.

It was both entertaining and a bit scary seeing the single people in action. I fully admit that had I been single,I probably would have been in there with them, but this gathering was a total hook-up. I'm not talking about the old boyfriend-girlfriend-from-high-school-get-back-together-after-20-years here. It was more like a "Hey, I'm single, you're single, let's laugh a bit and then go get a room and rip each other's clothes off." type deal. I'm sure that is normal and expected in today's dating climate. When a typical "date" consists of dinner, a cocktail and then a roll in the hay with no intentions of going any further than that, why not take advantage of a willing and able pool of people that are definitely in the same demographic as yourself?

It was still entertaining, but I never really had any close friends in high school. There was no desire on my part to "check in" with people. It was interesting seeing how some people looked like they had been hit with a the old fugly-stick a few dozen times in the last two decades, and other people still looked like themselves, just older.

The dinner was awful. The drinks were overpriced. I knew we had a 2-hour drive home afterwards so we were not drinking that much anyway. Overall, it was an entertaining night, but going out to a local dinner and movie would have been more fun and less costly. I doubt I'll go to another reunion for a good long time.

DATELINE September 26, 2004
I finally hit level 50 in Camelot. I started playing this game on October 9, 2000 as one of the phase one development testers and after four years I've finally topped out my first character. I started this one when the Shrouded Isles expansion went live in October of 2002. So two years of elapsed "real" time to level from 1 to 50. I still enjoy the game, and I'm still playing. Four years later and I'm still playing.

DATELINE October 5, 2004:
Catacombs beta started today. This is the new graphical enhancement for Camelot. It is essentially Camelot part 2. The download was just under one full CD (700MB) and the installation took just about two hours. The character graphics are amazing, but the background textures are still the same old Camelot engine. Of course, the only realm that is playable at the installation is Midgard, so I started a new Valkyrie (that's the new class). I can't really comment on it much since there is still a NDA in effect. From what I'm seeing here, Catacombs will build in a lot of player retention, but I don't think it will attract many new players to the game.

DATELINE October 6, 2004:
We interviewed a potential new electrical engineer at my company. She is a tall, willowy blonde haired, blue-eyed girl with a wicked sense of humor and she's totally reminiscent of Kristen. Based on both looks and personality, they might have been sisters. I immediately mistrusted her based on that alone, which probably isn't fair, but that's life. I only had a chance to talk to her for about 20 minutes but as the conversation went on, I kept making comparisons between her and Kristen. One major difference is me. When I met Kristen there were certain things missing from my relationship at that time and Kristen was willing to fill that void. (I never took her up on the offer, a mistake that I still regret, but hey, the past is past and I'm over it.) My current relationship is fulfilling and happy and while I still feel that primate-level urge to spread the seed among nubile females, it's very easy for me to shut that down. Even if it came with no-strings-attached (see prior discussion on "dating") I would still decline. I'm very happy with the way my life is going and I wouldn't want to mess with that.

DATELINE October 13, 2004:
I've been playing my Valkyrie pretty much non-stop up to now. In fact, in the last seven days, I have a bit over 3 days of online play logged. Add 8 hours a day of work, and time spent eating, drinking, bathing and all of the other stuff that a living person has to do and then 39 hours of online gaming and guess what I haven't been doing? That's right, sleeping! I've been averaging about 4 hours a night all this week. I've made it to level 30 in a week. Considering that it took me two years to level to 50, going from level 1 to 30 in one week is insane fast. It's more a factor of the amount of time I'm investing than anything else.

Albion opened up in Catacombs today. I started a new Reaver to test the low level quests. I'm finding a ton of issues and reporting them all. I'm getting the impression that Mythic is using the beta test as a QC period as well as a play test phase. Most people in the beat seem to have fallen into this role pretty well, but typically a software company pays their QC testers. Online gaming, I suppose, doesn't need to since people who play these things tend to play a LOT and given a chance to play even more, they take it. I'm starting to wonder how long I can keep up this pace. I know I'm going to fall behind the curve this weekend, but I have to have a life.

DATELINE October 16, 2004:
We went to Lake San Antonio this weekend. A bunch of women from Karen's online triathlon forums are thinking of doing Wildflower next year, so I came up with the bright idea of doing a pseudo-training weekend. We rented one of the cabins (actually a mobile home). The prices are event, but not great. We got the cabin set up for six people. When we actually made the reservation it turned out that we were going down in the off-season (whatever that is) so we got it for half-price!! After the split, it worked out to $25 per person for the whole weekend. Not a bad deal at all.

We ended up doing the bike course with four stops for regrouping. It wasn't a fast ride. Of the six of us, only three had even seen the bike course. So it was more of a "tour" type ride. We rode a bit, stopped a bit, rode a bit more, stopped a bit more. I think it took something like three hours total to finish the ride. After lunch, we then ran the run course. This was a complete run, but Karen and I were doing base training so we did it really slowly. Like 1:45:00 slowly.

Dinner was a bacon and flank steak roll. It came out decent, but not great (I cooked). After dinner we sat around, added some wine and beer (amazing how much six reasonably athletic people can drink!) and a great time was had by all! We're planning on doing a follow-up trip in February. Hopefully it wont rain.

DATELINE October 25, 2004:
Hibernia opened in Catacombs. The graphics in Hibernia are jaw dropping. We also got second accounts into beta, so I got Karen playing a bit on Pendragon. Of course, her computer is a bit too slow, so she has a lot of lag, some textures don't load and in at least one location, the computer simply crashes.

THE REMAINDER OF THIS ENTRY WAS LOST TO THE EVILS OF DATABASE CORRUPTION.

I made my LAST mini-ding last night. My nearly two-year old Reaver, finally made level 49.5! Only five more bubbles of exp to go until I top out at level 50.

Of course, then, I'll be stuck farming for gold to buy "real" equipment. Joy.

Kill a cyclist: go directly to jail, do not pass "go", do not collect $200.

14-year sentence in cyclist's death

Wednesday, August 18, 2004: Well, I finally bit the bullet and bought a PS2. I found a used one on craigslist and dropped $100 cash for a PS2, one 8M memory card, one controller, four games and something called a "gameshark". After a little internet research, it turns out that this gameshark thing is a cheat code dongle. I have no idea how to make it work, and quite frankly don't really care. I may try to sell off the games and gameshark thingie to help make back some of the $$$ I spent on the basic box. All I wanted was a PS2 and I got one for a decent (in my opinion) price. It works.

I'm still trying to figure out how to download games and burn them so that I can "sample" some of the stuff that a PS2 has to offer. I'll probably buy my top 3 picks from E^3, when they are released.

Saturday, August 21, 2004: Karen and I went down to Great America. I was disappointed how much the place has been dumbed down. Well, not really. See, I have fond memories of that park being host to some of the best roller coasters in Northern California, plus a lot of fun attractions and basically a full day of "stuff". Well, call me a sissy, but the new bottomless-style roller coasters like "Top Gun" and this vomit machine they call "Invertigo" just aren't fun to me. I don't enjoy the feeling of motion sickness. Nor do I enjoy not being 100% sure how gravity works for a good half-hour after taking a 45 second whirlwind tour of my stomach's contents. So, basically they have narrowed the park's attractions down to the tamest of the tame "old style" rides and the most violent stomach churning rides possible, with precious little in between. Still it wasn't a bad day, just not all that I had hoped for. Maybe I just had unrealistic expectations. Still, I had more fun going to our "local" park, Marine World.

On the way home, we stopped in Burlingame and ate dinner at the Ramen Club. I haven't eaten there since before I went to Cal Poly and it was as good as I remembered. We ended up having two HUGE bowls of delicious authentic Ramen that we couldn't finish and after paying and tip it still was less expensive than the crappy fast-food style fish and fries we had at Great America.

Overall, a fun day, and a long day.

Saturday, August 14, 2004: I completed my first official 1/2 Vineman Relay bike leg. I did this leg as a bandit three years ago when I was the swimmer on my relay team. I was pleased that I completed the bike leg faster than the actual cyclist on my team that year. This year, however, I was one of two cyclists. The other team had a much faster swimmer, so I knew that I would be starting about 10-15 minutes back. I also knew the other cyclist was stronger than me, but that wasn't going to stop me from trying.

I started strong. Since the relay leg started dead last, the people that were directly in front of me on the bike were the slow people from the waves preceding (the two waves just ahead of us were the Barb's Race, women only, racers. So if nothing else, the view was nice). I quickly passed around two dozen of them in the first 10 miles. Around the 15 mile mark, a lady in a yellow jersey slowly passed me. She didn't get far because I was determined not to lose any ground. After a few miles I crept back up to her. As I passed her, I took the time to thank her for making me work a little harder than I normally would have. As we were chatting, an Asian girl in a blue passed us both with the comment, "What... socializing?"

At mile 30, I stopped to use a porta-potty. I'm not to keen on on-bike evacuation. I was stopped for maybe 3 minutes. When I jumped back on the bike I knew I had to make up some time, so I pushed even harder. After a good ten miles, I finally caught up to (and passed) that same lady in yellow AND the Asian girl in blue. If nothing else, I had made up the time from my "pit stop".

And then came Chalk Hill. My legs were starting to ache and I simply could not hold the pace. I had been marking out people about 1/2 mile up the road as my "target" for the whole ride, but now I was losing them in the distance. The yellow jersey lady passed me and I never saw her again.

On the other side, I was passed by the second girl. She pulled about 1/2 mile away from me on the rollers. I dug deep and stuck with her and at one point managed to close the gap to tens of feet. About one mile from the end, I was passed by the third girl and my legs finally gave out completely. The third girl dwindled and the second girl was gaining distance.

I finished the ride with an official time of 3:08:53.1 - an average speed of 17.79 MPH.

Sunday, August 15, 2004: Roommate Mike moved in. We've been looking for a roommate for a while and Mike seemed like a really good fit. He is a huge baseball fan, plays computer games and seems to have some semblance of a real life. Both Karen and I found it really easy to talk to him when he stopped in and he seemed to like the place and us as well. The only real gotcha is that he is only 18 years old, but it doesn't seem like it will be that big of an issue. Here's hoping for a good house-sharing relationship.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004: Roommate Mike sat down tonight while Karen and I were eating dinner. He apologized profusely, but he asked to move out next weekend. Apparently he hadn't completely realized how much time school was going to take, and with no real income he simply can't afford the place. His intent was to get a job locally, but since he has been spending 10+ hours a day at the school, he claims (and I tend to agree) that living at home and commuting makes sense for him. Heck, I did the same thing when I was going to SFSU, long ago. I would drive to school, stay there all day long and then drive home. Sure it was a lot of miles and the commute time sucked, but it was a lot less than trying to live locally to the school. I told him that he could move out whenever he wanted but I was going to keep his rent for the second half of August. A rental agreement would state 30-days minimum, and I'm letting him out after only 15-days. He seemed disappointed - apparently his money issues are pretty severe and he REALLY needs the extra money that the 15-days of rent amount to. That's life.

The final effect: I'm looking for a roommate again and I've now missed the beginning-of-school rush.

The last seven days have been amazingly full and frenetic!

Tuesday, August 3, 2004. I officially accepted the Reaver Team Lead position with Mythic Entertainment. This is an unpaid volunteer position, and it requires about 10 hours a week of time. Of course, most of that time is going to be spent either playing Camelot (which I already do), reading message boards (which I already do), writing postings (which I already do) and being an ombudsman for the Reaver community (which I used to do). So basically, it means I get to keep doing what I'm doing, only now I have to be "responsible" about what I say in public, since I'm a sort-of "representative" for an entire class of people. Oh, and I get accolades too.

Wednesday, August 4, 2004. Two separate projects were due today at work. One was completed, one was not. On the other hand, a different project that had been on-hold, finally got finished up and sent out. Overall, a very busy day and very productive too.

My friend Zant Burdine II (yes, that really is his name) stopped in for a visit. He's being shipped out to the Persian Gulf on 15-AUG-04 as part of the National Guard force being deployed there. He and his wife, Suzanne, decided to take a second honeymoon and see some sights before his tour, and California was on the list. We went to Spring Lake and I ran two laps around the lake while Karen did a brick. She rode her MTB around the lake three times and then ran around once. Go Karen! Afterwards, we ordered some pizza and invited April over. The five of us played a fun game of Pit for a few hours before we all retired for the evening.

Thursday, August 5, 2004. I'm falling further behind at work. The job that was due on Wednesday is probably not going to get done this week. I have another project that is due on Friday and it looks like it will be pushed back to next week. The project that I was supposed to be working on next week might have to get bumped by a full week. A few weeks ago I was searching for things to do at work, and this week I'm falling behind. It's a crazy job.

Karen, Zant, Suzanne and I went to Spring Lake again. This time it was swimming for everyone. The plan was for Karen to swim 8 laps, I was going to swim 10 laps and Zant and Suzanne were going just float around for a while. Karen and I swam six laps and then we both decided to call it a workout. My arms were sore and aching and I wanted to be sure to be in good form for the Tri-4-Real this weekend.

Zant and Suzanne checked out of the local Motel 6 and decided to stay at my house in the spare bedroom. No reason was stated, but I suspect it had something to do with internet access; I set up Zant's laptop to work with my DSL on Wednesday night. Zant and I stayed up until 12:30am playing Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm a better FPS player than he is, but as the night goes on, I start making stupider and stupider mistakes. Zant ends up winning the last match after I annihilate myself with the Redeemer.

Friday, August 6, 2004. The wrong synapse finally fires in the morning and I check usenet for Doom3. I flag the appropriate messages and start the download before going to work. At lunchtime, I have one complete disc and a ton of parity files. I un-flag the parity files and by the time I sit down in the evening, I've got the full game, crack and keygen.

Of course, before that happens, Zant and Suzanne roll out, to go visit with Jeff Johnson for a couple days before continuing on their honeymoon. Karen and I go over to April's apartment to jump-start her car so she can drive to Sears and get a new battery installed. I make dinner for Karen and then settle in to play Doom3.

I can't help but compare Doom 3 to Half-Life. Even though HL is five years old, Doom3 feels LESS immersive. The small little touches like sinks that turn on, hand driers that work and toilets that flush (in Half-Life) make Doom3 seem like a much older game than it actually is. When you shoot an abandoned fire extinguisher lying on the floor, it doesn't explode, or even burst, it just moves around a bit. It is almost as if you are playing the original Doom game (circa 1986) with updated graphics and sound. Oh, the graphics! If you want eye-candy, this game delivers! The graphical effects are nothing short of awesome, but the gameplay is severely lacking. The game is full of multitudinous dark hallways that are not "spooky" or "scary" but merely annoying. It almost seems like the developers had to lower the light levels to nearly nothing so that you can't see what's shooting at you, just to make the fights fair. I am playing on the "normal" skill level, and I played until I died the very first time. I played the first three levels (out of 30-something) completely and died about 90% of the way into the fourth. Quite honestly, I think the only reason I died was because I was getting tired (it was after midnight again) and I was thinking about how many hours of sleep I was (or wasn't) going to get before driving to my race the next morning.

Saturday, August 7, 2004. We got up at 3:30AM (three hours of sleep for the win!) and drive to Rancho Seco. Karen is set to do her second ever triathlon. I'll let you read her race report. After the race, Karen won a free entry to the Luna Bar Challenge in October. We did discover a pretty good Italian restaurant in Lodi that evening.

Sunday, August 8, 2004. Back to Rancho Seco for the Tri-4-Real #3 race. I still have write my own race report, but I finished in 2:48:29, a full 32 seconds slower than my target time. Of course it was 99 degree in the shade on Sunday, and that may have been a factor. I also did the math and computed my USAT "score" for this race. It isn't a USAT sanctioned event, but the math still works. My overall score works out to be 62.6946. Compare this to my score at Wildflower, which was only 57.3054.

I'll write a full report later.

Karen claims that she pointed this out to me a few weeks back, but apparently I was having a loss-of-brain service at that time because it didn't sink in. Kyle convinced me to look at the Pacific Grove web site, claiming that it "looked" like I was accepted to race there. I checked it out, and sure enough I was on the "approved" list. $145 later and I'm registered for the Olympic race on my birthday!

Now I have to get training... 5 weeks to go and two races in the interim. This is going to be tricky, but I'm ready for it. Bring it on!! My current training schedule is online under the EVENTS heading on the left.

Yesterday was the half Vineman race. I did not participate. To be honest, I'm actually pretty glad that I did not. I'm in nothing even close to half-ironman distance shape. After Wildflower, my training took a nosedive, and I pretty much coasted for a month. After Tri-4-Real #1 I started to pick it back up again and was on track for racing the half Vineman and setting a new PR for that distance.

And then, only one week into that schedule, I got hit by a car on my bike ride home from work on June 14.

After that, my training pretty much stopped. For the next two weeks, all I did was some light swimming workouts. If I tried to do any kicking, my knees would ache. If I sat in a chair too long, my knees would ache. Finally, at the end of June, I did a 50 mile bike ride and my legs completely locked up on me. When I put my foot down to dismount, my quads cramped so hard that I had to reach down and push on the back of my leg with my hand to unlock my knees.

I picked up my training and I even raced in Tri-4-Real #2, even though I was still not back up to 100%. After that, my training was back up to speed and I started feeling good about racing again. But it was too little, and far far too late. With only three weeks between Tri-4-Real #2 and the half-Vineman, there just wasn't enough time to get into shape.

Oh, sure, I could have muscled through it. I could have thrown myself at the course and finished. But I want to race at Tri-4-Real #3, which is NEXT weekend, only a mere seven days after the half-Vineman. Had I done the half, there is no way I would have even been recovered (much less race-ready) in one week. And then I am running a half-marathon as part of the W&K relay team seven days after that!! It's sad to pay for a race and then not do it, but I think I did the right thing.

Moving forward, I'm not sure what my next target will be. Normally, after the half-Vineman, I'm looking towards Pacific Grove. Sadly, this year I had a brain failure and did not register for that race before it closed. I am entered into the lottery, but I can't count on getting in. Other options in September are the Nautica Malibu race (a sprint in SoCal), or Sentinal (Olympic in Santa Cruz) or maybe even the Big Kahuna (a half-ironman in Santa Cruz). After that, there really isn't anything until Treasure Island (which I'm already registered for) and then the winter break. It's really too early to start looking at Wildflower 2005, but without a solid target, I'm finding it difficult to justify 10-15 hours a week for training in the immediate future.

A funny thing happened at work.

There was this project that I worked on during my first six months of employ at Winzler & Kelly, the Casanova Pump Station Upgrade for the City of San Mateo. I wasn't a licensed Professional Engineer at the time, so my work was supervised (and later signed) by the guy who hired me.

Well, this was done way-back-when, in Y2K. The project wasn't terribly complex. In fact it was a lot LESS complex than anything I'm currently working on. Heck, even a simple tenant improvement project has more confusing things. Anyway, the project was designed and sealed in late Y2K, but the City did not have funding to build it, so it sat on a shelf for a couple of years.

Fast forward to today. The City has the funding now, so it went to bid and a contractor was selected. We are now receiving pre-construction Request For Information forms (RFIs) from the contractor prior to him breaking ground. The guy who gets to deal with these RFIs is the Engineer-of-Record, the guy who signed the drawings. Of course, he can't remember what we did (it was nearly four years ago, after all) and the paper file lives in my cubicle. So when he finally got a hard question, he cames over to my cube and asked me, and we dug into the old paperwork to find the answer.

This was quite an eye-opener. I got to see a design that I did four years ago, in all it's glory. Wow. It's pretty sad. Sure it was four years ago, but... wow. I'd be embarrassed to put out a drawing set like that today. Yes it was a simple job, but there are glaring holes in the design big enough to drive a cement truck through. As I read the specifications and scanned the drawings, I couldn't help but ask questions: what about this? why didn't we spec that? why isn't this detailed? and so on and so on.

I guess the short version is that I realized how much I've developed as a designer and as an engineer. A lot.

It was so nice to have a weekend where I didn't have any real plans. Yes, the plans that I have during the weekend times are usually FUN stuff; it's not like I'm going to work or forced to do community service or serve jail time on the weekends. But for the first time in a long time, I slept in BOTH mornings.

Saturday we went for a nice run up at Annadell park. Slow jog up to Lake Ilsanjo, a sprint around the lake, and then a slow jog back down. After a leisurely warm shower, we went out and gorged on sushi, followed by a few hours of playing Camelot. I sat Karen down and had her play my buffbot account which served as both a way of introducing her to Camelot and a way to stop the bot from dying all the time. A level 8 bot is at some significant risk when it is following a level 48 toon around.

Sunday, we went for a bike ride. Separately, of course. I did my usual Guerneville ride (29 miles) in 1:36:xx. Last year, my goal was to do that ride in 1:30:00 before Wildflower. I'm almost there.

Despite that, I'm thinking of pulling out of the Half-Vineman this year. I'm certainly not feeling "ready" for a half-ironman in two weeks. I could go ahead and "wing it" and have a slow finish time, but then I have an olympic distance race the following weekend. Recovery from the Half-Vineman would be my taper for the olympic. In other words, weekend warrior style, I would race->rest->race. And then, to round out the month, I would run a half-marathon the very next weekend as part of one of the relay teams my work is fielding. I think this is like the old "good/fast/cheap: choose any two" saying. I'm committed to doing the half-marathon as part of the relay team. I basically have to decide whether I want to blow off the Half-Vineman or the Tri-4-Real #3.

September looks just as bad. I'm entered into the lottery for Pacific Grove. I missed the registration, simply because I was too busy to sign up. Even though I had a chance to pre-register two weeks prior to the general opening of the registration, I still managed to miss it. So depending on whether I race there or not, I may do PG, or possibly the Nautica/Malibu sprint, or maybe Sentinal in Santa Cruz.

This is why a relaxing weekend was so nice.

Tri-4-Real #2 was held last weekend. I did "okay", which is actually better than I did in T4R#1, but not as good as I did at T4R#2-2003 (which remains my PR race). I was wearing Karen's HRM which was good because I could split my times more finely than the three-split "official" results, but bad in that I was not 100% comfortable with the equipment and made a big boo-boo in my personal timing.

The Swim

The swim went decently. Karen did her 1km swim the day prior and she reported the water to be bath-water warm, so I did not take a long time to "warm up" (which is usually more accurately described as a cool-down in most of the races I do) in the water. The water was plenty warm, but by skipping that 5-minute 20-stroke swim out-and-back-to-shore, I did not get my wetsuit "set" on my shoulders. Consequently, for the first 1/5 of the swim I felt like my shoulders were being held by rubber bands. In a way, they were. At the first buoy, I stopped to tread water and wave my arms around and slide the neoprene around a bit. After that, my swim felt a lot more comfortable, but the damage had already been done. The shoulder that was bruised when I got hit by a car a few weeks ago had been intermittently sore since that accident, and the strain of fighting against the wetsuit for 5 minutes had irritated it. I finished the rest of the swim with a gimpy pull on the left side. (On the plus side, this -forced- me to have an efficient stroke in order to preserve my shoulder.)

The official swim split is 31:00, even. When I left the water I hit what I thought was the "split" button on the HRM, but what I actually pushed was the "hold" button. So the stopwatch stopped when I was in T1. I hit the same button when I was leaving transition. When I looked down, it was still flashing "LAP 1" at me, so I knew I had done something stupid. I finally lap-split the HRM 41.8 seconds later. I learned from my mistakes and split everything else correctly. Despite me being an idiot, because I had -stopped- the timer in T1, I was able to figure out my T1 time by doing some time-arithmetic.

T1

I felt pretty good leaving the swim, and actually jogged the entire way into transition. I felt pretty good doing my transition stuff too. The wetsuit peeled off quickly. Everything was where I expected it to be. I sat down, dried off my feet, pulled on my socks, pulled on my shoes (that I had gotten ready BEFORE the race - first time for everything), grabbed my sunglasses and helmet and bike and jogged (with bike in tow) to the bike start.

The "math determined" T1 time was a mere 2:55, which may be my best ever T1.

The Bike

This bike course is fairly flat. Not as pancake flat as Pacific Grove, but I'd guestimate that there isn't more than 50 feet of elevation difference between the highest point and the lowest. The kicker is that the way out is slightly downhill (overall) and the wind is at your back. Of course, this means that the return trip is generally UP-hill and against the wind. I split my ride on the way out at 36:28.3, plus the erroneous 41.8 seconds that were leftover from the swim/T1 fiasco, gives me a 1st-20km bike split of 37:10.1

Less than a mile after the turnaround, I saw a large group of riders going the opposite direction. I thought that was a bit odd, but didn't give it too much importance. Until they caught me. Now I don't think that it was intentional, but what had developed was a Tour de France style mini-peleton. It was a fast-moving gaggle of riders, maybe six of them, all drafting off of one another, jostling for position, but no one was breaking away. The leader(s) would break the headwind and the followers would "rest" in the draft, until they felt they could break and pass, and the process would repeat. The key thing is that these people were CLEARLY drafting. I did get "stuck" behind them for a short time and automatically fell into the group, doing exactly the same thing. For about two minutes. And then I realized that what was happening was completely and utterly against the rules and contrary to the spirit of triathlon. Sure, I could have worked the group and finished the bike with a lot more energy and saved several minutes on the run. But would that have been an accurate indication of my personal efforts? No. So, on the next uphill, I dropped a gear, let my cadence wind up to 120+ and pulled about a half mile away from the group. Of course, now that I was all alone ahead of them, I was fighting the headwind and they were not. So it only took a few minutes for them to catch me again. This time I did not wait around and as soon as they caught me I pushed again and pulled way out in front. And again, the headwind slowed me enough that the group caught me. Four times this happened.

Now, the thing that was abundantly clear to me during all of this was that I was a stronger cyclist than all of them. When I pulled out in front, any of them could have followed me, which would have broken up the pack (or at least spread it out some, which would have had the same effect). But they didn't, or couldn't. Clearly, in my mind, I "won" the bike leg against all of the people in that pack. Of course, two freaking miles from the end of the bike leg, the fastest one in the pack (who was a girl) FINALLY broke away... followed at about 30-second, non-drafting distance intervals by everyone else in the pack. On an uphill. And of course, since they were all "fresh" (they weren't working half as hard as I was on the main ride since they were all drafting, and thus had a lot more left in the tank) they were all able to drop me on the last stretch. To my own credit, I was able to re-pass two of them before we finally pulled into transition. Those guys were CLEARLY getting benefit from the draft-pack; I was faster than them one they were on their own, even with me being far more tired than them.

My 2nd-20km bike split was recorded as 38:16.7, about one minute slower than the first half, and the overall "official" bike time was 1:19:34 (which includes both transitions). That's a new PR for the bike leg!

T2

Contrasted with my first transition, my T2 was completely confused. I couldn't focus on changing. I had trouble figuring out how to change my shoes: okay, bike shoe off, okay, sit down, no wait, don't sit down, stand up, okay, pick up running shoe, wait, I'm still wearing one bike shoe, put down running shoe, sit down, no wait, stand up, take off bike shoe, no wait, I should put the running shoe on first, pick up running shoe.... I was a bit blurry about the whole process. I do recall that the fast people from the drafting group were leaving transition at least a full minute ahead of me.

The HRM claims that I was only in T2 for a bit over a minute at 1:08.8. I think it is lying about that. I'm pretty sure I was wandering around aimlessly for a lot longer than that.

The Run

The run was pure hell. It was (as Nancy says) "afrika hot", dry, dusty, and the run is on a rocky dirt trail with rolling hills and poor footing. I split every mile and kept a running tally in my mind of how far above or below my target 10-minute pace I was.
Mile 1 - 8:52.7 - Looking good! I'm hot, I'm tired, and I'm feeling mighty slow, but I'm running. I walked from the 1-mile mark until the clock hit 1 minute, putting that "mile" at 8 seconds under my pace.

Mile 2 - 10:43.1 - There was an aide station in this mile, and I walked while I drank a dixie cup of Cytomax. Between that walk and the initial stroll, this mile sucked. I'm now 35 seconds slow.
Mile 3 - 9:26.1 - There was an aide station in this mile too, and I stopped to drink there, too. But I'm pushing hard to make up that 35 seconds and actually did it! Yay me! I'm back "on track" for my pace. Well, not completely, I'm actually still 1 second slow, but I can make up one second, right?
Mile 4 - 10:00.5 - Apparently not. The aide station was right at mile 4, so it did not impact this split. Regardless, I'm only holding steady and not gaining back that one second deficit.
Mile 5 - 10:17.1 - The fatigue is getting to me now. I get passed by a two or three guys in my age group and a half-dozen women. I'm not passing anyone anymore like I was early in the run, but I'm not losing ground to those that I've already passed. I went through the aide station that Karen was working and got a kiss on my way by. She says that my face is beet red and asks if I'm okay-- apparently I look like I'm about to pass out. I feel hot and I'm hurting, but otherwise fine. I'm now 18 seconds behind and I'm thinking I'm not going to be able to make that up.
Mile 6 - 9:51.4 - Pulling out ALL the stops here, I was able to gain back nine whole seconds off my pace. I only did that because I knew that it was almost over and I could rest at the end. Even though I was almost sprinting this mile, I was still only just barely under a 10-minute pace and did not make any significant comeback on my deficit. I'm only 9 seconds under my pace, but for some reason I lost my mind and thought I was a minute behind.
Mile 6.2 - 1:24.1 - This should have been a two-minute leg, but I was thinking I only had one-minute to do it so I pushed REALLLY HARD here. It was the finish chute so I let my stride go long, pulled my stride and did my best "finish strong" imitation. I ended up beating my pace by a whopping 25 seconds!!

The "official" run split was 1:00:31

The results

This was race #2 of a three race series. I'm not fast, finishing 48th in a field of only 56 people. But in order to be considered for the series, they had to have finished race #1 ahead of me. Removing all of the people that did not compete in race #1, I'm ranked 16th in my age group. Awards are given five deep, so I'm only 11 places away from a podium. I've never gotten an award before. This makes me want to do well in race #3. I suspect that I won't be able to move up 11 places, but it's a nice dream.

My finish time was 2:51:05, which is only 0:03:08 slower than my PR (which was this same race one year ago). My REAL goal is to beat that PR time in three weeks when I do Tri 4 Real #3 on August 8. But I'd settle for a podium spot, too.

One more item of interest from E3:

Some of the most coveted "schwag" (ie toys) that everyone wants to get from E3 are the "glowy" things. This year, Nintendo was giving away a glowy non-brand specific Palm stylus. The catch was that they pretty much forced you to watch their presentation on the DS (Dual Screen) handheld that they are releasing later this year. Now, I'm not much of a handheld gamer, but I can watch anyone's presentation for 15 minutes. But the line! The line was 2 freaking hours long! So, being smarter than the average consumer, I asked where the exit of the presentation was. I waited by the exit. When someone came out and tossed the stylus into their bag, I would approach them and ask if they were going to keep it. The first few people told me that they did, in fact, want the stylus. But after a few minutes, some guy responded that he would trade me his stylus for the green glowy necklace I was wearing. I pulled the necklace off and took the stylus. And then I walked over to the monstrous X-Box booth and got another green glowy necklace. I win! It only took me 15 minutes to get my stylus (the duration of the presentation) and NO line!!

Well, I'm having a potential new roommate looking at the place tomorrow, so it basically forced me to go through my E3 bags and pick out the good stuff from the bad. Most of it was crap, but there were a few gems in there.

First, though, the pictures. I use my little 640x480 Clié camera to snap a few images, and those are available here. Another attendee totally unknown to me has a similar taste in imagery; his shots are here. He used a much better camera than I did. And he did get one shot of the THQ girls (who were some of the sexiest things on the show floor) and there is a blurry shot of the sexiest SRS dancer (most of the rest were pretty mediocre). Sadly, he did not get the most attractive woman at the entire show. I saw her walking around on the last day (wearing a purple tanktop and blue jeans) and the show would literally stop when she walked by. The funny thing was, she was sitting in a booth where a babe from the Baywatch TV show was supposed to be the main attraction (you can see the teaser picture on the table in my photo) and people were more interested in HER than the big-money hired help! The booth manager sent her away away, which led the the aforementioned show stoppage. When all was said and done, I had to go back to that booth about 20 minutes before closing and specifically get a final picture. Sadly, it doesn't do her justice. Overall, the babeage at this year's E3 was far superior to last year, but they were fewer in number. Quality over quantity is a good thing!

On to the games! My three top picks this year:

1. God of War (Sony). Yes, this is a PS2 title. Deal with it. Read the GameSpy GameSpy preview, then go buy a PS2 and pre-order this game. Really. From what I saw at E3, this is going to be big like Half-life was big. This one convinced me, a true-and-true PC gamer, to start looking for a PS2 to call my own. Luckily (or sadly, depending on your point of view) this won't be released until next year, so there is plenty of time to get that PS2. Believe what you want but when this one comes out you WILL hear about it. Every single person that I spoke to at E3 (including the 30-some odd MMO players I was there with) commented on this game and every single one of them wanted to buy it. Trust me, buy a PS2 and pre-order this game. I'm not kidding.

2. Death by Degrees (NAMCO). Okay, call me a sucker for a blue-eyed blond, but this game had more going for it than just stunning looks. It has a kick-ass attitude to back it up, as well. The gameplay varies between weapon-based to straight-up knuckle fighting, with a James Bond-ish plotline. And (who knew?) this one is a PS2 game as well.

3. Guildwars (NC Soft). I mentioned this as a title to watch last year, and it is even nicer now. This is a class-based PvP MMO, but they have addressed most of the issues that PvP games have. Basically, they have given every class of character a major weakness that can be exploited by a different class. So no more solo ganking. If you want to be successful in this game you NEED a "guild" (or at least a group) to back you up. Coming from my DAoC-centric perspective, this means cooperation of a bunch of people with very different playstyles is important, which means a varied game. The game allows for almost instant action with "instanced" gameplay. Currently in closed beta (they call it alpha, but they are WAYYYY past that point from what I saw at E3). This may be my next MMO.

Also worth mentioning:

Blood Will Tell (SEGA): Another PS2 game. Read the GameDaily preview. Look pretty nice and the gameplay seemed varied. It stood out among a lot of other products, but not enough to make me rave.

XTango (BinaryCraft Ltd.): This one is an XBox title, and despite its rather unusual gameplay was still quite compelling. Who would have thought a game about learning to dance could be fun? Sadly, this game is unlikely to ever see the light of day in the US. Really a shame. Read the 1up.com preview.

Liesure Suit Larry (Sierra/Vivendi): Yes, Larry is back. With a bevy of hot digital coeds, and several simple mini-games that determine whether Larry gets to see them naked or not, this one caters directly to the shallow male audience. While the mature responsible side of me laughs at this game, the immature schoolboy secretly wants to play it just to see if animated soft-core computer porn is as much fun as it used to be. I think it will be.

Era of Faith (TQ Digital, China): This one caught my eye, not because of gameplay of technical reasons, but simply because of its pricing structure. This is a typical MMO. The game engine is a free download. There is no monthly fee. You can play as normal like a regular online game, but with NO COSTS EVER!! Of course, there is a catch. This is it: you have the OPTION to spend $8 to buy a "power up" - think of it as a skill point, or a level that you can use to increase some aspect of your online avatar. Of course, all other players also have this option. According to the company rep, this is so popular, that they limit players to buying "only" ten power-ups in a single month. Want to be a high level character? No problem, you can do it the old fashioned way and grind out the levels (and some undoubtedly will) or you can reach into your pocketbook and be there instantly. Talk about a great marketing strategy aimed squarely at the MMO market! Whether or not the gameplay is compelling enough to get people to keep coming back for more remains to be seen however.

Half Life 2 (Valve): Yes, this last on my list for a reason. I'm only mentioning it because everyone in the whole world is waiting for this game. It was nice seeing Counterstrike running on the HL2 engine, which is freaking GORGEOUS... I've played with the pirated beta version and I wish they had shown more of what this thing is capable of. And seeing the first bit of the introductory level (which was very cinema-like) gave a good "flavor" for the game. And there were some serious "hints" that Team Fortess 2 would be part of the package. And I did get a rare HL2 t-shirt (which I gave away after finding out that they were selling for $50 on eBay).

Notable non-game things:

At the demo of Lineage II, they had some nice little 250ml cans of Coke with some elf chick on the side. When I sat down at the computer, I was told everyone who tried the game would get one. When the session was over, the girl who was handing out the cans said that "only the person who died first" could get a Coke! I did my best disappointed, crushed-male-ego, sappy guy look and wandered around slowly in the booth. After a few minutes, this same girl appeared next to me and handed my a can of Coke. The amusing part of this was that the guy who was sitting next to me at the next computer (one of my group) tried to bargain with her and completely failed. I so victoly!!

Intellivison sponsored a booth where they had gaming consoles and games from the dawn of computer games. This ran the gamut from coin ops (Space Invaders! Pong! Millipede! Defender! Pac Man!) to handhelds (Lynx! Gameboy!) to consoles (Atari! ColecoVision! Vectrex!) to computers (Pet! Apple ][!). It was fun seeing some of the stuff that I played with in Junior High School. It made all us "old folks" feel like part of an exclusive club. When standing in that booth and hearing someone exclaim "Wow, I haven't seen one of those in twenty years!" those of us that had been around the block all exchanged a knowing smile while the kids and newcomers wondered what the excitement was all about. Who can forget the old "Adventure" game on the Atari? Or the original "Pitfall"? It was a fun jaunt down memory lane and one of the highlights (at least in my mind) of the show.

Overall, E3-2004 was as much fun and as tiring as ever. Knowing what to expect sure made it easier to find the stuff that I was interested in, I felt like I got both more, and less, from the show this year. More because I was able to make better use of my time, and less because there was less there that catered directly to my personal tastes. On the other hand, I was able to play around more with the things the interested me and had loads of fun talking to several booth-babes. Every year I learn more, and the big lesson this year was to spend time in Kentia Hall on the very first day of the show, not wait until the end. Even though Kentia is the place where all of the small not-really-a-name companies and products end up, it had the most interesting, cutting-edge stuff (as well as some of the lamest you-have-got-to-be-kidding, that-will-never-work-in-a-million-years crap).

I'm definitely looking forward to next year!

Some number of months ago, I had a hard drive crash. What happened exactly was that the utility power "blinked"... that is to say that it went out for about a second, then came right back. This did Something Bad™ to a hard disk and it crashed. At the time I was running a 2-disk RAID0 system, which was later upgraded to a RAID0+1 system. Subsequently, one disk of the RAID0+1 system crashed for reasons unknown, and upon replacing it, I found that the controller would not "rebuild" the array. I elected to buy a different controller.

Today, while I was sitting here playing Camelot, the same exact thing happened. The power "blinked". When my computer came back up, I got all sorts of warnings about a failed disk. I was told that the system was usable, but that Something Bad™ had happened and I was given about five different options on how to fix it.

As I sit here, the system is 90% rebuilt.

If anyone ever asks me about building a RAID system, I have to give a glowing endorsement to the Promise Technologies TX4400 controller, and a glowy NON-endorsement to anything from Silicon Image. (Sadly, the "built in" controller on many mainboards is a Silicon Image controller -- use it at your own risk and don't say I didn't warn you!) Buying the TX4400 was the best $100 I have spent on my computer.

Pretty much any group can be separated into two major groups. Bicyclists, for example, can be separated into ones that have been hit by cars, and ones that will be hit by cars in the future. Yesterday, I joined the first group.

I was coming home from work and some guy in a silver pickup truck totally did not see me and made a right turn into me. He was in a hurry (as if that is an excuse) and was looking the opposite way to try and merge into traffic. Luckily, he was starting from a dead stop and I saw it coming. By the time I hit the pavement, I was already out of my toe-clips and was rolling to get out from under his tires. He did come to a stop on top of my front wheel, but aside from a few scratches (and possibly a bent front rim) my bike was undamaged. I distinctly remember hearing the tinkle of broken glass, so I'm pretty sure that he lost a headlight in the impact.

As far as bodily damages, nothing significant. I really lucked out. Both of my knees are bruised form the fall. My right knee got scraped a teeny tiny bit, but my left knee got wrenched sideways. My left elbow also got a tiny scrape. Nothing was torn or broken, but my knees are VERY sore and don't like bending, and my left shoulder (which wasn't hurt at all at the time) is very stiff. I will heal.

Of course, I won't be running or riding for a few days until my knees stop hurting. At least swimming class started this week.

TBF posted the split times for the race last weekend.

Swim 27:27 (good!)
Bike 1:26:15 (includes BOTH transitions, so also good!)
Run 1:04:19 (ARGH!!)

As expected my run time was... "not optimal". It works out to a 10:21 minute/mile average. That's a full minute per mile SLOWER than my best Wildflower run time and a darn near 15 full minutes slower than my best 10km time.

Only seven weeks to Vineman.

After a full month of NOT training, after being sick for about a week-and-a-half, after not planning anything until the last second, I completed the second annual Tri 4 Real #1 in Rancho Seco Park on Sunday.

My finish time was a bit slower than last year (by about 11 minutes), but I still came in under three hours. I think that I probably would have had a better showing if I had been better trained (duh!) but I'm still pretty happy with my performance overall, considering the LACK of preparation that went into this race.

The swim went amazingly fast. Of course, it is a faster-than-a-pool swim. Glassy water in a ten to twelve foot deep lake that is naturally around 80 degrees. My watch reported a 25-minute swim split, and amazing as it may seem that matches my swim split from last year on this same course.

The bike is generally downhill, with the wind at your back on the way out. I split the turn-around and it was 37:29 to the half-way point. Of course, the way back is generally uphill, going into the wind. Not exactly conducive to a negative split on the bike. I still managed to get a second-half split of 41:34. Of course the official splits will include both T1 and T2 in my bike time, so I expect it to be higher than what I've got here.

The run...well, the run blew chunks. I really see a problem here now. My run times need some SERIOUS help. I split on every single mile mark and for the 10km run I saw 9:13 (not bad), 11:23 (what?), 9:38 (pacing issues!), 11:29 (d\'oh!), 11:00 (not doing well here), and 10:07 (better, but a bit slow). I was shooting for a nice 10-minute average, but failed miserably. Note that I did not get a good split for the last 0.2 mile of the run. Regardless, I know my run time is going to be around 1:06:00-ish, which just plain sucks!

Last year I trained my running a LOT and let my biking slack. I didn't really see any slowdown in the bike, but no improvement was made either. This year I focussed mostly on the bike, and while I feel that I'm a lot stronger on the bike now, I'm not seeing any significant time improvements. And I -AM- seeing some serious degradation of my run times. I think I'm going to start doing more run training over the next seven weeks.

I have one more "check-in" race before the 1/2 Vineman in August: Tri 4 Real #2. We'll see how that goes.

Oh, and by the way, I'm ranked #49 in the running for a $2000 purse that pays down to 5th place. No new entrants are allowed (it is a three-race series), so I can only move UP the list. Now if only 44 of those guys would either not do the next race in the series, or have a flat or something that makes me faster than them..... (as if)

We watched "Lost in Translation" the other night. It was very illuminating. I was able to make a pretty strong parallel with some fairly recent events in my life, so it had a pretty personal message to me as well as being a good film. A year ago, this movie would have thrown me into a suicidal depression. Not now though. I really am over it.

It's nice being able to look back on my life and see how I've become a better, stronger person. The life events which I went though during that phase of my life were very painful, and I wouldn't want to do it again. But I also wouldn't want to avoid them either. Growth is always painful, and I grew quite a bit.

I am a Nationally Ranked Triathlete! Yes folks, yours truly is actually on the books as a Nationally Ranked athlete in the sport of Triathlon. I am listed as the 2176th ranked male Triathlete aged 35-39.

Okay, okay. So maybe being ranked as number 2176 is not that big of a deal. But when you consider how men there are in the USA that are between the ages of 35 and 39 that are not ranked (or are ranked even lower, the poor guys) then it starts being a pretty significant accomplishment.

In other news, the Wildflower report for 2004 has been written. Read it by clicking on the link on the left (look under "EVENTS").

Wow.

Wildflower. E3. Jamaica. Grand Cayman. Cozumel.

I'm going to be blogging every day until I catch up.

Watch this space.

ps: the E3-2004 photos are online at http://www.therealstupid.com/_images/E3-2004. Sorry about the quality. I think a new digital camera needs to be on my gift list this year.

This is not a race report. I'll write that later and stick it in the "events" column over there on the left. This is my accounting of several things which were "interesting" leading up to the race.

Monday, April 26, 2004:
I was hideously unprepared. Nothing was packed. I hadn't even shaved my legs. The shearing took nearly 90 minutes. This is a new long-time record for something as simple as shaving my legs. I can only account the difference to doing it "right". See, in past years I have used cheap-o one-blade disposable razors to shave leg hair that only sees a razor once a year (i.e. about 1/2" long). Most women would shudder at the thought, but I've had good success with that method. Prior to this year, I've never even -nicked- myself with those cheapy razors. Despite that, I decided to use a "good" razor, a 3-bladed Gilette model with the smooth-glide strip and built-in moisturizer and all of the fancy gimmicks that the razor people want to sell you. It ended up taking twice as long. It didn't do nearly as good of a job of shaving. And I ended up taking off my skin on several points along my knee. Verdict: using a cheaper razor for infrequent shaving works better.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004:
Karen and I packed everything up and tossed it into the Jeep. I had hoped to be on the road by noon, but it was closer to 1:30pm before we got out of town. I was feeling a bit of stress going into Santa Cruz since I was unsure as to where the CruiseAmerica place was - the place in Felton was no longer renting RV's and this new place was in Watsonville. As it turned out, it only took two tries to find it. We picked up the RV and quickly tossed all of our stuff inside without unpacking it and drove away. We got to Lake San Antonio around 7:15pm, just before sunset. We drove through the 'D' loop where I stayed last year, but there was no space. We drove through 'C' loop and all the spaces were reserved or had someone set up in them already. I knew it was pointless, but we drove through 'B' and 'A' loops as well. As expected, no spaces. We even went to the top of the hill across from the TNT festival area and it was all reserved as well. Admitting semi-defeat, I drove to 'O' loop and pulled into the same spot that we had parked the "other" RV in three years ago. While Karen actually unpacked our stuff -- pulling it out of the bags and boxes that we had stacked on the RV floor and putting into the various drawers and cabinets -- I went out and walked down to 'D' loop. I was thinking that maybe I could find someone leaving and "adopt" their spot. As it turned out, I met a very nice retired gentleman named Bert who was leaving the next day at 10AM. After a short discussion, we pulled our RV into the fire lane directly behind Bert's trailer. (The discussion was to assure Bert that we were not going to be playing any rap music, nor running our generator.) When he pulled out in the morning, we pulled into his spot within seconds, and hooked up. There was one other guy leaving the next day too, but he had already made a deal with some people to give his spot away, so we quite literally got the LAST SPOT in the park!!

Friday, April 30, 2004:
We had finally filled up the grey water tank, so I decided to hook up the sewer hose and dump the tanks. While I was doing this, a guy comes up and says "Excuse me, sir, you might not want to do that just yet." I was a bit confused and I'm sure it was reflected on my face. After a very brief conversation (during which I continued to hook up the sewer line) he informed me that the spot I was in had been "reserved" for the medical staff, along with the three spots to my left. The odd thing about this was the site immediately to my left was where the Monterey Park "live-on" volunteers had their trailer hooked up. They were a very nice older couple named Bob and Joannie and had been there for about five months already. I was a bit flustered by this, but I wasn't about to give up my spot. I more-or-less ignored him and went back inside. After a few minutes to collect my thoughts I came up with my plan. I was going to assume that this guy was smoking crack and I didn't have to move. But if I -did- have to move, I wasn't going to do it unless they also got Bob and Joanie to move (unlikely). Later I came up with the plan that I was only going to move if they comp'ed me with free -transferable- entries to all Tri-California races for the rest of the year (including the already sold-out Escape from Alcatraz and the already sold-out Triathlon at Pacific Grove). As it turned out, the Tri-Cal guy WAS smoking crack. The medical staff were supposed to be in 'E' loop, which was empty and marked as "reserved". But it was a fun little adventure.

Saturday, May 1, 2004:
Long course. Kyle raced long course. I'm impressed that he did it. It is a difficult, gruelling race. His finish time was under 8-hours, which I suppose is a decent finish time. Two of the GGTC people that I have trained with in the past took DNFs on Saturday. I'm glad I did not race that day, I'm not sure I could have done it.

Sunday, May 2, 2004:
Race day.... (see report to left)

Monday, May 3, 2004:
We got up bright and early and cleaned and unhooked the RV. Again, our start was not as early as it should have been. Especially considering that there was a $25/hour "late fee" for getting the RV back after 11AM. This fee was enforced by the registration computer, so if we were checked out at 11:01AM it would automatically tack $25 onto my fees. As it turned out, we pulled into the CruiseAmerica place at about 10:45AM and they would not do the walk-through until we had already unpacked our stuff. We hastily tossed everything into the Jeep (we had already re-bagged and re-boxed everything, so it went fast) and did the walk-through. By the time everything was done, the wall clock read 11:05, but apparently it was a few minutes fast because I got a refund of $10.03 for unused mileage and no "late fee". It took another half-hour to get the Jeep drivable (put the bike rack on, close the doors, etc) and then we were on the way home.

Tuesday, May 4, 2004:
I found out today that the WISH beta 1.4 opened up on the 28th and is closing today at... well it closed 20 minutes ago. Oh well.

E3 in less than one week. I'm looking forward to it!

My five season box set of Babylon 5 arrived yesterday. That's 110 hours of Babylon 5 on 30 DVDs.

We watched the first episode last night on my computer. I remember thinking how much I hated Michael O'hare as an actor when the show was on the first time, and seeing him again brought it all back. Being that it was the first episode, all of the actors are unsure, uncertain and definitely NOT BELIEVABLE in their roles. The writing feels wooden and the story is pretty darn weak. In fact, if this was my fist experience with the show, I would have to say that I probably would not continue watching it.

Luckily it isn't my first experience. I know that the story becomes very intense. I know that the writing improves. A LOT! (The show actually won an award for Best Teleplay two years in a row.) I know that the actors "settle in" to their roles around season two... even Michael O\'Hare who comes back to play Jeffery Sinclair for one episode in Season 3.

I leafed through the informational paperwork in the box for season one this morning. It was fun remembering the different episodes, and even though some of them weren't exactly "strong" stories, pretty much all of them are entertaining.

I'm looking forward to watching them again.

On Easter Sunday (April 11, 2004) two cyclists were stuck by a car in Santa Rosa. Alan Liu of Mountain View was killed instantly and Jill Mason remains in critical condition. The driver was found to have a Blood Alcohol Level of 0.30, nearly four times the legal limit.

A mere eight days later, on April 19 2004, another Santa Rosa cyclist is dead. This last killing occurred on one of the roads that I ride regularly. The "Calistoga" ride that I use as my hill training route follows Mark West Springs Road and I cross the Riebli intersection about once every couple of weeks on my bike.

Scary stuff.

In other news, I updated the BIOS on the new Promise controller card and the Windows-based RAID utility now works like a charm. It was crapping out with a sever system error about version numbers. I'm still not impressed with the Promise software, but it works, so not too bad.

I made level 47 in Camelot this weekend. I've also worked my Aten's Shield up to level 8. Two more levels for the shield and then I'm back to Oceanus to work on Master Level 2 and try and get a Benthic Legendary weapon.... (Meanwhile, the New Frontiers beta test is calling my name....)

I've ordered the entire five-season DVD set of Babylon 5. It is supposed to arrive Friday of this week. Joy!

My new RAID controller actually arrived a day early, yesterday. I skipped out on my swim/bike workout -- I wasn't really sure how this week was going to work anyway, so it actually (sorta) simplified things -- and plugged in my three existing drives and one new drive to the new controller.

Promise makes a much nicer BIOS than Silicon Image. It was a lot easier to configure and set up. Of course the flip side is that the Windows-based utility for maintaining the array seems to crash every time I run it, but it seems pretty counter-intuitive to use so I might be doing something wrong. (By comparison, the Silicon Image utility was extremely user-friendly and very simple to use.)

In any case, I reinstalled XP last night. Spent a few hours downloading all of the "hotfixes" that MS has available. Reinstalled all my hardware drivers. Reinstalled OfficeXP. Reinstalled VirusScan. Reinstalled Camelot. I ended up going to bed around midnight and I'm only about 1/4 of the way done rebuilding my "essential" system tools. That's just the way it is with a clean OS install. I usually budget about a week to get everything dialed in, and that seems to work pretty well.

Now the big test will be seeing if the array explodes on me. For the next few months I'm treating the system as if the hard drives are 50% likely to fail at any given time. I just hope the coin-flip comes up a winner.

So this last week I was pretty busy between work and training. I really didn't have time to deal with the dead computer until Friday. I reconfigured the RAID 0+1 and reinstalled XP and started in on my applications.

On Saturday we did the Carneros Vineyard Run, a 10km race. I finished in just a few seconds over 50 minutes, which is decent. The course was pretty hilly (I think the proper term would be "rollers") and I was pretty satisfied with my finish time. It was helped by a very lovely lady in a blue jogging suit. She was wearing some spandex shorts that were 2 sizes too small, and no underclothes. By being stretched across her behind, and in full sunshine, the shorts became practically transparent. Suffice it to say that it was just the prefect amount of encouragement I needed to hold a nice 8-minute pace for the whole 10km. I ended up finishing 4 seconds faster than her (I didn't need the eye-candy in the finish chute, after all).

I did come home with some nasty shin splints though. No running for me for at least a full week. The timing is pretty bad, with only 3 training weeks until Wildflower.

On Sunday, I went for a ride on the new Ksyriums. After 26 miles, I hit -something- (I still don't know what it was) and blew out the back tire. Rather than use my emergency flat kit, I called Karen for a ride. Even though I hit something hard enough to blow out the tube, the rims are still as true as the day they were installed. Amazingly enough, despite spending over $700 on these things, my ride time was about the same as before. I finished the first 17 miles in about 2 minutes less than my prior test. In a 75 minute ride, that's such a small variance that it could be considered "noise".

Today, my reinstalled RAID array failed on me again. My computer is my primary form of entertainment at home. With it out of the picture I'm very unhappy. The fact that it is not only broken, but it doesn't seem to be reliable when it is working is extremely depressing to me. And of course, the beta test for Frontiers, the new Camelot expansion, started today. And the newest version of Wish is available. To say that I'm unhappy about this would be the understatement of the week. At this point, I'm almost ready to simply take out a small loan from VISA and buy a complete Dell system. I know it won't run very well, but at least it will RUN.

This sucks.

This last weekend was supposed to be the GGTC Wildflower Training Weekend. I did this last year and it was pretty fun and instructional. So I planned on going this year.

You know when you're driving on the freeway at 70MPH, if something is amiss mechanically, sometimes you don't notice it. Mostly because the billowing smoke that your car may be emitting is hidden in the haze behind you, and usually spread out by the speed so much that even if you are looking for it, sometimes you won't see it. Until you slow down.

So as traffic slowed in San Rafael on the approach to the Richmond Bridge, a huge cloud of smoke passed the truck. More smoke was coming from the seam around the hood. A quick check of the gauges and everything still seemed fine, but an ominous hissing sound was coming from the engine compartment. Since we were still in a pretty developed area, we pulled off at the next exit and found a service station after a short 2 block drive.

Opening the hood revealed that the top of the radiator had a 2-inch long crack in it and the hissing sound was the high-pressure steam in the engine cooling system being vented. After turning off the engine and letting it cool for a moment, I popped the radiator cap, had Karen re-start the engine and proceeded to refill the radiator. I suspect that the coolant had all but boiled off, because within 20 seconds of topping off the radiator, the timer on the water pump at the service station shut off.

The drive home was uneventful. I tend to think that the radiator has been cracked for some time and it simply took however long it took for the coolant level to boil down to a critical point this weekend. Regardless, I need to get it fixed. So over all, I missed the training camp, and I'm out $450-500 for a new radiator.

To make up for the lost training, I did an easy 10km run (three loops around Spring Lake) on Saturday, finishing in a bit under an hour. Then on Saturday, hopped on the bike and rode to the top of Mountain Home Road, the border of Napa county. This is a nice 17.3 mile climb, pretty much uphill the whole way out. I certainly noticed that i was stronger than in prior years. On some of the less intense uphill grades I was not only able to hold a good speed, but I was able to speed up. I was holding 21.9MPH on the flats, both into and with the wind.

On Monday, Karen called me at work and told me that my computer was "making a clicking sound." I had her do a soft reboot, but it did not respond. So I told her to hit the reset button. When I came home, I was greeted by a notice
SYSTEM DISK NOT FOUND, PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT
This is the THIRD time that my mirrored RAID system has crapped out. I'm no longer a happy camper. I have four freaking 80MB drives, which were configured as a striped-mirrored set. I used the striping because it speeds up the system, particularly for page faults. I used the mirror so that I wouldn't have to worry about disk crashes. But after three complete losses of my data, I'm thinking that something different is in order. I'm not sure what to do about this. I'm already $500 into drives and controller cards at this point.

I had hoped to have the new Ksyriums mounted and ready to roll for this weekend, but alas they did not arrive on Friday. Nor did they show up on Saturday. They did, however, show up on Monday. Last night, while Karen cooked a DEE-LISH-USS dinner, I mounted the new wheels on my bike. The chain was a problem, but I worked through it. I think I've got everything installed correctly, but I won't know for sure until I have a chance to spin it a bit. Of course, with the way things have been going lately, I'm almost certain that I'll blow up the chain, break something sharp and metallic and end up with a life-threatening gash in my leg as a result.

I actually got an email some time ago about online applications for Pacific Grove 2004. Because I had done the race a few times, I was given a chance to pre-register. Of course, this was during the week that my credit card was stolen, so I put it on the back burner and promptly forgot about it.

Well, today I looked, and PG2004 is completely sold out!!! I entered my name in the random drawing for a slot, but the chances are low. That kinda sucks. It's my favorite race and I'm not going to get to go because some idiot stole my credit card number.

In other news, I ordered my new cassette (finally) and with luck it will be here by the end of the week. I have a cassette tool and a new chain, tubes and tires, so as soon as the cassette shows up, I can be ready to ride the new wheels. I hope it gets here by Thursday so I have time to actually assemble everything prior to my ride at Lake San Antonio on Saturday.

I seem to have picked up a patch of poison oak during the trail run a couple weekends ago. It itches, but it hasn't spread (so far). I wish it would heal faster!

This last weekend was the second weekend this year when I did not have a full weekend planned. In fact, I had n-o-t-h-i-n-g planned. And that's just what I did.

On Saturday I got up around noon, plopped myself down in front of the computer and played Camelot for 14 hours. I got my newbie Animist character up to level 19 and played around in Abermenai (BG0). We took the Center Keep, which was interesting considering that BG0 is full of people completely new to the game, and getting them to realize the difference between a hole in the ground and their own butt was... challenging.

Then on Sunday, a nice slow trail run at Annadel, followed by sitting down again at 4:30pm. This time on my Reaver, my "real" character. This is the first time I've actually played that character since before we went to New Orleans. I logged in just in time to help some people on Master Level 1, then an artifact hunting adventure. When all was said and done, I had about an hour extra, so I teamed up with a guy to hunt the artifact that I've been looking for since the release of Atlantis, last fall.

This artifact involves opening "Treasure Chests". Most times, the chests contain some monsters, which you have to fight. About one in 20 is a "winner" and will have either nothing, a "sell gem" (loot), or the artifact. People have developed a strategy of simply running around popping chests until they get the item, but that leaves a ton of monsters for the next person to clean up. So it took about 20 minutes just to fight TO the island. After that, we were limited to which chests we could open. Since it was only two of us, we could not clear the really hard monsters that were "left over" and had to stay away from some areas. Eventually, my hour was up. It was 9:58pm and I had set a limit of 10pm. "One more chest," I said, "and then I really need to log off." I looked at the last chest. I thought to myself, "A real gambler would be going 'This is the one, I can feel it!'" And then I hit the chest. It was empty. I almost laughed, because it was time for me to go and I didn't want to die at the very end of the day. But I still had a minute, so I moved over and popped another. And won. I FINALLY GOT IT!! It only took -months- of trying, but I got it.

Now I get to play in Darkness Falls. Artifacts are different than normal loot in that they "level up" just like characters do. As you use them, they gain new abilities and effects. The item I got only gains experience when you fight Demons, and Darkness Falls is chock full of Demons. So while I fight in there, I will be gaining -real- exp for my character, leveling up my new toy and gaining gold coins to buy my next set of armor.

Sometimes it is the small things that really add joy to one's life.

I have GOT to stop going out on Thursdays. About two years ago, I started going out on Thursday nights with Heidi and Jenny. Being a mid-30s guy going out to bars with two attractive college-age girl was a lot of fun. And somehow, my body didn't really complain (much) despite that I was often out until 4AM, coming home more-than-a-little drunk, and still going to work on Fridays.

I'm not sure what has changed in the interim. This is the second week that I've gotten drunk on Thursday night. It's also the second week that Friday morning at work has been BRUTAL. Oddly enough, I seem to be more productive when I'm feeling like dog shit. It's an interesting trade off, but one that I'm not really looking forward to exploring.

I'm still waiting on my new cassette for the Ksyriums. I finally settled on a SRAM 9.0 Powerglide II cassette which is a MTB cassette with the same exact gears as I currently have now, 11-32. I'm pairing that with a SRAM PC-89r hollow-pin road bike specific chain. I tried to buy them from a single vendor, but the MTB shoppes don't typically carry road bike chains, and the road bike stores don't stock MTB cassettes. It ends up being an impossible combination, so I had to order things separately. I'm still hoping to get everything assembled before the Wildflower training weekend, but that's starting to look iffy.

I'm still tracking my weight and training. With the nice weather of the last two weeks, I've started riding my bike to work (with the exception of Fridays) and that helps a LOT.

Thursday night Karen and I went over to the hot tub. Karen took a sippy-cup with about 1/2 a bottle of wine and since we were out of vodka, I poured a cup of tequila into a plastic cup and mixed a tequila sour (1 part tequila, 2 parts sweet-n-sour, 1/2 part triple sec). Over the course of the evening I managed to drink most of that drink, but we didn't make it home until around 2:30AM, very intoxicated.

Friday morning at work was brutal. The day did not let up. I was able to take a short nap between 6PM and 8PM. Karen was great and made a wonderful dinner of pasta. I ate the first plate with gusto and asked for a "small" second serving. When I got a second full plate I was sure that it was too much, but to my own surprise, I ate the whole thing. And ended up going to bed at 10PM.

Saturday dawned bright and VERY early. We did the Bothe Trail Run in Napa county. First off, a trail run is a very different thing from a normal run. It uses a whole bunch of muscles that normally aren't used. There is a lot of side-to-side action since the trail is unstable, canted to one side or the other, and anything but flat.

The first mile wasn't too bad, running on flat ground. Some of it was paved, some of it wasn't. The second mile started to hurt me. Running uphill is fine, as long as you are ready for sky high heart rates. The real problem was my calves. For some reason, both legs were cramping up. I started walking on the uphills. The only real saving grace was that walking was no slower than running due to the incline (similar to the first Relay that I did). At about 2-1/2 miles, the uphill stopped and I breathed a sigh of relief... until I saw the cliff that we were supposed to run down. After a couple minutes of steep descent, it was back to uphill and the agony in my legs. At mile 4, there was a volunteer that was stationed on the trail who did nothing but say "Be careful! Steep downgrade ahead! Slow down!" She wasn't kidding. It was steep enough that if you fell, you would -slide- to the bottom. And this wasn't steep like a road, it was steep like the side of a mountain, complete with rocks, ruts, roots and all sorts of tripping hazards. Oh, and a couple of water crossings. Not just jumping across a puddle, or muddy ground (although there was a bit of that too) but full-blown crossing of two medium sized creeks, with mossy rocks and actual rapids. Luckily, I managed to not fall in to either one, but I did see a couple people who did. I know what it's like running in a squishy wet shoe from Icebreaker last year. I'm glad I did not have to repeat that experience.

Pretty much the next mile-and-a-half was downhill. Eventually it flattened out and I finished up the 10km run in 1:08:09. Considering the difficulty of the course, and the fact that I still had not completely recovered from Thursday night, I'm overjoyed with that time!

Following the run, I went home and went to sleep for 4 hours, got up, had dinner and a couple drinks, then back to bed and slept for another 12 hours. Thank God for Sundays.

I went home for lunch yesterday and sitting in front of the door was a 2-foot square box. I picked it up and the whole thing weighed maybe 5 pounds. Yes, my new sexy 2004 Kysrium SSC SL wheels finally arrived.

Despite sending nearly a dozen emails to the seller, I have yet to receive any email reply. I'm not happy about that. But I got my wheels, so I'm not upset with them. Now I have to buy a new cassette, chain, tubes and tires. I want to have the new wheels completely up and running by the time I go to the Wildflower Training Weekend the last weekend of March.

I'm happy.

Last weekend was the annual W&K ski trip. As usual, the weather was perfect. The temps were in the mid 50s and the snow (amazingly enough) was deep. Despite the warm temperature, the slopes did not turn into a giant slushball even late in the day. The skiing was not quite so epic as it could have been, but this was the first time I had clicked into snowskis in two years. In fact, I had to clip off the last lift pass from my skipants, and it was dated March 16, 2002.

Karen took her very first ever ski lesson and learned how to to turn and (sorta) stop.

Of course, with the sky being completely cloudless and the snow being well-groomed and pretty white, we came back looking like lobsters. As I type this, my face is peeling, and little flakes of dead dry skin are falling like snow. Ironic, isn't it?

Last night I did my first timed swim of the season. The swim coach had us do it a bit differently. We did a timed 30 minute swim rather than a timed mile. So it was a challenge to see how far one could go in the alloted time, instead of seeing how long it took one to swim the alloted distance. I kinda liked that strategy better. Amazingly enough, I was able to eek out 64 laps in the 30-minute time frame. That works out to 1463-meters, only two laps shy of a 1.5km swim. If that is indicative of my swim times for Wildflower, I'll be a happy happy camper! My best time there so far is 30:30 for the swim, and we still have 7 weeks to train.

I still have not received my new Ksyriums. Considering that I paid on March 1st, I'm getting a bit worried. I'd hate to lose $650 on a "bad" transaction. I did a little investigating and it looks like there aren't a whole heck of a lot of recourses for me if the guy simply never ships them to me. Paypal is only willing to go to bat if you purchase their "protection" (which I did not). eBay couldn't care less, and leaving negative feedback does nothing to get my money returned. I suppose I could dispute the charge on my VISA, which is probably what I will do if I do not see the wheels by the 15th. I really want to have these set up and ready to roll on the weekend of the 27-28, when I go to Lake San Antonio for the second time this year.

Work is going like gangbusters, but despite the heavy workload, I'm seeing threats to my continued employment. A new Senior Electrical Designer was just hired. Coupled with my abysmal performance last year and some of the things said at my review meeting in December and the general attitude I get from the ONE person who will be the strongest voice, I'm not getting a warm-fuzzy feeling. I don't think my neck is on the chopping block (yet), but I do see the potential for my employer to cut me loose if the workload were to slack off in the future. Up until now it would have been impossible to do so, since giving me the axe would have left the electrical department short some important skills. With the new hire, that is no longer the case.

In my favor, I'm a licensed Engineer; a "designer" is not licensed. That makes me a bit more valuable than this new guy. On the other hand, I know that we have staff in-house that would be willing to sign work with minimal involvement. On the same note, as a "Staff"-level engineer, I will probably be billed at about the same level as a "Senior" designer (and, I suspect, produce the same level of work). So, that all balances out. The real big question is: how will the new guy get along with the Senior Engineer. If they work well together, then I should probably update my resume.

There are a few things I can do make myself "indispensable" around here. One of them is to start working 60-hour workweeks, and "donate" a lot of time to the company. That would make me a much more valuable employee, since my projects will be completed for less money. The catch is that I'm not willing to do that. I have no problem working 45 hour weeks and coming in on the odd weekend day when it is crunch time. But I have too many things going on outside of work to willingly give up an extra 20 hours each week. Another possible tactic is to make sure that I become the "go to" guy for electrical support inside the company. I already have a few people that will come to me first, and other electrical staff second. (Partially because of "personality issues" with other electrical staff.) That's a good first step. But I pretty much have to expand that to encompass all of the Design Team leaders in order to fully entrench myself.

And of course, I have five major projects going full-steam ahead right now. To the point where I'm wondering if it is even -possible- to meet deadlines. So any "entrenching" I need to do is going to have to be over and above that workload. Which brings us back to that 60-hour workweek.... It just doesn't seem like a real happy place.

In other news, I purchased some new 2004 Mavic Ksyrium wheels. I've removed them from my "wish list". They should be here by next week. I need to buy a new cassette and some tires to put on them Real Soon now.

We are going on our first ski-trip this weekend, to Mt. Reba/Bear Valley. That is, provided that I can crank out the projects that need to be done this week before then. If not, then we will probably bail out on the ski-trip and I'll end up working this weekend. Right now, it is an even bet for either path.

This weekend I took the long drive down to Lake San Antonio and did 2/3 of the Wildflower course (I did not swim this time around).

First off, it was freaking COLD there. We arrived around midnight on Friday. Since we slept in the back of the Dakota, setting up camp was as simple as crawling into the back of the camper shell and spreading out some bedding. The back of the Dakota has carpet lining and about one-inch of padding on the bottom. On top of this went my 35F degree-rated sleeping bag and a flannel sheet set which we slept in. Above us was one Beiderlack brand polyester "fleece" blanket and one heavy, super-king-sized knit blanket folded in half. Despite the many layers, and having to sleep nearly on top of one another (not much room in a truck bed along with a bicycle, after all!) we both were very cold. Karen actually got out of the bed at one point during the night to put sweats on. It was really really annoyingly cold.

When the morning came, we stayed wrapped up until around 11AM. When we finally arose, it was still chilly. After a short breakfast of granola cereal, I did the Olympic bike course, while Karen ran some approximation of the 10km run course. It was a fairly windy day, and starting the ride at 1PM did not help that. It reminded me of the bike ride at last year's Wildflower. It was against the wind the whole way out (which is "mostly" uphill) and with the wind the whole way back (except for a few uphill spots which were against the wind BOTH ways). My overall time was somewhere "around" 1:40:00. I say "around" because I forgot to actually turn off the timer when I got back to the campground; I only noticed it after riding (very slowly - Karen was walking along with me) all the way up the hill from the transition area to the "E" loop where we were camping. I estimate that added 3-4 minutes to the time, which (when I finally stopped it) was registering 1:44:55. Amazingly enough, this is about on-par with my first (and slowest ever) Wildflower bike time: in 2001 I came in at 1:41:10 on the bike.

The moral of the story is that I really need to work on my STRENGTH on the bike. I'm going to be designing some new trainer workouts to push my legs power. Rather than spinning (fast) in low gears, it's time to crank up the resistance a LOT and push as hard as I can for short bursts. Interval training at it's worst. This isn't going to be fun.

After the bike ride I put on some running shorts and ran the 10k. This went pretty well. I've never considered myself a strong runner, but the more I train, the easier running gets for me. I'm still far from anyone's opinion of "fast", but I certainly can finish these races strong. I completed the run in 55:33 which is actually FASTER than my FASTEST Wildflower run, which was last year's at 58:07.

Based on these times, I think my training really needs to be BIKE-INTENSIVE for the next few weeks.

I have been slacking on the swim, but that really isn't going to make or break my race. My slowest swim there was (last year) 35:59 and my fastest was (the year prior) 30:30. Only a difference of 5:29. The swim won't kill me for time. I'm still aiming for a 30-minute swim this year and will be switching to the long-distance swim group this week.

The run seems to be well in hand. Going from a 9-minute mile to an 8-minute mile on a 10km run is only going to gain me 6:13 overall -- not a lot of gain for a lot of effort. So I'll just keep my run-training at keeping my speed right where it is.

The leaves the bike. If the rain would stop, I could start riding my bike to work again. That seems to help immensely. I guess it is going to be daily spinning for a few weeks. And strength work.

Ack, I've been busy! So busy that I keep putting off writing a blog entry.

Valentine's/President's Weekend was a lot of fun. On Saturday we ran the 1st annual Valentine's 10k in Concord. This was a very nice run. SUPER FLAT! The day was cool and clear. In fact, it was possibly the best conditions ever. The only bad thing about this race was that it was on city streets, so the road surface was asphalt and not a track. Other than that, it was perfect. Except for the fact that they did not have mile-markers, so it was impossible to split your miles. Perfect, except for those two things. And the last part of the run was TWO laps on the track at Concord High School... which was poorly communicated, so I only did one lap before finishing. So I ended up running 400 yards short of a "real" 10km. So three things were bad, but everything else was great.

Karen beat her "best" 10km time by over five minutes. I've entered my finish time and pace on the training page. The reason I was going so slow was:

On Sunday we did the Valley Ford Relay Race. Rhonert Park is one of the clients of Winzler & Kelly. Somehow, one of the guys who works for RP "challenged" W&K to a race. So of course we took hem up on the offer. Each team was four people and we managed to find four people in the office who were willing (and able) to run. We ended up soundly beating the RP people and I turned in a nice 7-1/2 minute pace. I honestly think I could have pushed it up a notch if I had known the course a bit better. I'm sticking to that story (for now) because it looks like one of the runners on the team (Leslie) may be faster than me!!! I was happy being the fastest person in the company, but there may be a new contestant now. Time will tell.

Last Thursday, I gave blood again. Always a fun experience. They told me that I would probably not be able to give blood again next year. Apparently, if you are very fit, the body is "tuned" to a certain specific set point, and it does not handle losing blood in a good way. The cut off (or so I'm told) is if your resting heart rate is 50bpm or less. My heart rate was measured at 52bpm. So while I have a rare blood type that is in high demand, I may not be allowed to contribute for much longer.

I played Camelot a couple of days. With the new RvR expansion coming out soon, I should start devoting more time to that. I'm still not level 50, nor do I have good gear for RvR. Since I fully expect to be doing the Frontiers beta, I need to work on that. It is just a time investment. Of course I don't have much free time these days.

I did start a new character. I had been meaning to start an Animist for a while now, so I did this on Sunday. I played for 6 hours and worked it from brand new to level 10. It took a few hours to figure out how to play the class effectively. In fact I would say that I could probably cut that time in half, if I were to do it again.

Saturday I received my beta invitation from Mutable Realms. This is for the "real" beta. The last part of the beta was a "open" free-for-all and it went as "open" betas typically do. There were a lot of people complaining about how unfinished things were, how simplistic the game was, and how the devs were idiots. I'm always impressed by the short-sightedness of people and how they are willing to provide negative feedback with zero basis on how much effort is involved in what they are criticizing. Anyway, the next phase of beta will be starting in March sometime, so there goes more of that non-existent free time.

And of course, my wireless card for the Clie is broken and will not talk to any WiFi. Another $100 down the drain. I'll need to fix that before e3.....

Friday night was awesome. We had a friend over for drinks and dinner. There we were, imbibing copious amounts of alcohol, killing not one but TWO bottles of sweet-n-sour mix and one complete bottle of Rose's Sweetened Lime Juice, and very nearly all of the Tequila in the house. Conversation and fun for all, and after the "100 Naked Girls on a Chair" book was passed around, everyone went home to their respective bedrooms and did what people typically do in an alcoholic blur after a fun filled party.

Saturday was awesome. We loaded my bike into the Dakota and drove down to the Golden Gate bridge. I did the Paradise Loop while Karen went to a baby shower for a friend in the City. I can't speak for the shower, but I did Paradise in 2:03:56 -- last time it was closer to 3:35:00! Of course this time I actually did the actual loop, and didn't get lost and wander all over Corte Madera and Larkspur like a little puppy. The actual distance was 29.54 miles, which puts my average speed at a mere 14.30mph. That's slower than I'm shooting for (I want to average 18.64mph at Wildflower this year) but I felt strong for the whole ride.

Saturday night was awesome. We were both hungry, and wanted to try something different. Karen has a list of restaurants on the 'fridge from the local free tabloid. One of the places on there was an Italian restaurant on Hwy 12 out in Rincon Valley. We drove out and it looked pretty dicey from the outside. Just an unassuming putty colored stucco building, the kind you would expect to see as a roadside diner on any highway in suburban California. We go in, not sure what to expect, and it turned out to be the best Italian food I've had since I moved to Santa Rosa. This was a notch higher than the old San Mateo/Belmont standby of Viva la Pasta! (Affectionately known as "Pasta la Vista.") Of course the price was a notch higher as well, and the place was packed to gills by the time dinner hour came around -- they literally ran out of chairs for people to sit on! But it was a very nice atmosphere, the food was AWESOME and the service was pretty damn good considering the number of people they were dealing with. We WILL be going back.

Sunday was awesome. GGTC was having their first "trail run" of the season, in Marin. Since it was scheduled to start at noon, and did not involve a bridge crossing, I wanted to go. Karen did as well, since she wants to become a stronger runner. And as it turned out, two of the girls from the baby shower on Saturday also were interested. So we met in Mill Valley, drove to the Mountain Home Inn where we met the big group. The run was a 5.4 mile out-and-back on a beautiful trail in the Marin headlands. Since it is summer in SF right now, we were able to take in awesome views of both the ocean AND the bay at the same time from the top of the ridge. The day was gorgeous. Afterwards, Karen and I and her two friends sat on the balcony at the restaurant and shared a bottle of Champagne.

Sunday night was awesome. After coming home and cleaning up, we ordered a Pizza Gourmet special "Acapulco" pizza. Dee-lish-us!! After pizza we did some food shopping...hooray for food! I baked a lime-tequila cake (yeah, yeah) and then we went over to April's apartment to soak in the hot tub.

This is what weekends are all about!!

I completed my first "race" for the 2004 year. It was a pure running event so it doesn't really count as much more than a training checkpoint. I posted my total finish time and my mile splits on the training plan page.

The start was typical for a mass start event. The "gun" goes off (in this case it was a bunch of firecrackers), the seeded runners in the front take off, the people mid-way back start walking and the people in the back watch and wait for about a minute to start moving. Once you finally are moving, it takes a good couple of minutes for the crowd to thin enough for anyone to really get a good pace going. So the first mile is always crowded and slow.

The second mile I was basically free-wheeling downhill.

The third mile was mostly uphill, ending with a killer one-block incline. The race was held in San Francisco, and while there are some scary-steep hills in that city, this wasn't one of them. Still, it was an incline and it took a lot out of me. This is where I finally got clear of enough people to set my pace. The course was a 2-loop 5km course, so mile 4 and on was a repeat of the first three miles.

Mile 4 I was recovering from the hill at the end of mile 3 and was a bit off my pace. Somewhere near the end of mile 4 I finally remembered how to run and my pace picked up quite a bit with less effort on my part. I missed the mile marker at mile 5, so I had to use my 2-mile split from mile 4 to mile 6 and divide by two for the mile 5/6 splits; that's why those two are identical.

When I hit mile 6, I attacked the hill and sprinted in to the finish. Of course, the hill was bigger than I was and I ran out of gas one block before I got to the line. Still, I hammered it out and finished strong. Plus I got (another) new T-shirt! Not bad for so early in the season....

Tuesday night Track Training starts Feb 3, 2004.

I've updated both the training page and the rankings page. My late year performance fell off considerably last year at the end of the season. (Note to Zant: I told you so!) I've also deleted items from my Wish List to reflect things that I either received as gifts, or purchased for myself.

I've been playing online games for a long time now.

When Ultima Online was released way back in the early-1990s, a cottage industry sprang up with people buying and selling virtual in-game properties, magic items, and money. The benchmark sale was, of course, the Ultima Online account, complete with castle, well developed characters and complete sets of equipment for over $100,000 U.S. dollars. The trend has not changed.

Three years ago, when Camelot had just been released, my "main" character had just over 1000 gold coins. The cash value of that non-existent coinage was about $1 per gold, or $1000 cash money (on eBay). Since my account was (and still is) a "comp" (ie, free) account, I was bound by an agreement not to take advantage of that. But the fact remained that some people who did not have those limitations were starting to actually "farm" online games and make a real profit selling pretend items for real money.

Some years ago, online game publishers started to get into the act, selling real advertising space in their virtual worlds. One notable event was when one publisher was selling "billboard space" on the outside of a space-station in one space-based combat flight sim product.

Today, I just read this. Apparently, the Themis Group, who happen to be the publisher of Wish, the new MMO I'm currently testing, have formed an strategic alliance with a company which was formed solely to make money selling virtual goods.

What does this mean? Well, it means that our monthly fees for playing online games (which are much much lower than the hourly connection fees that were the standard prior to the explosion of the internet) are likely to get smaller. But the flip side of that is that our armor, spell components and in-game equipment will likely start to be purchased with dollars, and not in-game currency.

Oh sure, there will probably be the option to work for hours on end to "make" the in-game money. But when it boils down to spending hundreds of hours to make a few gold goins, when you can simply buy them from the publisher for $1 each... well, as anyone who has played an online game can tell you, these things are addictive, and most people will pony up the cash.

In a way it makes me sad.

The beginning of eternity
The end of time and space
The beginning of every end,
And the end of every place

This morning I recevied my invitation into Mutable Realm's WISH product. This is a new "ultra" MMORPG which stands to be the main competition for Camelot when it is released. Not that I'm unhappy with Camelot -- I certainly am not! But after 3+ years with the same game, it is getting a bit "tired".

Of course, the first thing on the agenda for a new beta program is downloading the installer. In this case, the download is 523MB in size, about one complete CD worth of data. The developers recommended a download accelerator called NetLeech. I've tried a few of these things before and have had bad results with them, so I immediately ignored the suggestion and started downloading the file normally. Using a nice happy leased T-1 line, and was seeing a download speed of around 11KB/sec, which works out to a nice 12 hour download. Obviously unacceptable.

So I installed NetLeech. All I can say is WOW!! Maybe this only works with the server that the wishinstaller file is stored on, but with a 5 segment download, the speed jumped to 40MB/sec and a 3.5 hour download. By pushing the segmentization up to 10 segments, the speed slid up a tiny bit and the estimated time dropped to 3.2 hours.

The way this works is by starting multiple FTP streams, each "starting" at a different point in the file. For example, if there were two streams, the first would start at byte count 0 (the file start) and the second would start at 50% of the file. If both streams come in at the same speed, you've basically doubled your download speed. Of course, this really only has an effect on sites that support multi-point transfers and when the total bandwidth between you and the server is not saturated already. So it isn't an overall win, but it certainly is a win for this case!

Now if Covad would fix my DSL!!!

This weekend I kicked off my Wildflower training program and realized just how far I've backslid during the holiday break.

On Saturday, I did the well-known "Paradise Loop". Well-known to everyone but me, it seems, since I got lost twice doing it, and instead of being a 35-mile social ride taking a bit under 2 hours, it ended up being a 50-mile ride from hell, that took just over 3 hours to complete. By the time I was done, both legs were cramping, with knots in my left hip and right knee. The really sad/scary part is that this ride is "about" as difficult as the Wildflower course (Olympic, natch). The only really good thing that came out of this experience is that I now know how much work I have to do to get "up to speed" for Wildflower. And it looks like a LOT!

On Sunday, I did two laps around Spring Lake for a total run of 4-1/2 miles. Had I been in good form, this run should have taken around 45 minutes. As it was, I stumbled to the end of the second loop in very nearly an hour (57 minutes) for an average pace of exactly 12-2/3 min/mi. Admittedly, I was running on "un-fresh" legs after the bike ride the day prior. And, admittedly, I was suffering some sort of stomach-thing which forced me to make frequent "pit stops" at the various restrooms around the lake. Still, I was running 10 min/mi a year ago and I was down to nearly 7:30min/mi.

Of course one of the very good things which came out of this is that I'm now very excited about getting my level of fitness back up to where it should be. The whole time I was riding and/or running, my mind was toying with possible workout schedules, and after nearly five hours of cogitation, I've come up with a Plan. Not necessarily a GOOD Plan, but a Plan nonetheless. Now I just need to make the time to sit down and write it up.

Training has started. Yipeee!!!!

While every other blog in the known universe is posting year-end wrap-ups and/or Lists of Things I Would Like To Do, I thought I would not. I'll deal with New Year's later. Maybe around February. Instead, I'd like to comment on something which has changed recently.

Karen brought the cats in.

Yes, I now have two cats living in my home. One ("Bob the Cat") is a moderately well-behaved orange housecat that is taking to his new environment with the usual trepidation that a relocated feline normally experiences. I suspect there will be a few cases of remedial cat-lessons that will be doled out in the coming weeks ("No, Cats are not allowed on the dinner table", "No, your tail does not make a cool sound when it is stuck in the computer fan", etc.) but I'm confident that Bob will prove to be a fast learner and that such lessons will be few and far between.

On the other hand, the second cat (who goes by the unlikely moniker of "Little Girl") is an ex-outdoor cat. I've dealt with semi-feral outdoor-turned-indoor cats before (one of the two cats that Donna acquired was born feral and later tamed into being a housecat). I've only been able to interact with the Little Girl for about a total of 45 seconds so far, but I'm not getting a good feeling about her transition. The entire first night in my home, she spent stuffed into small dark places under counters, behind furniture and doors and basically trying to not be there. I recall one holiday season that Donna and I took the cats with us to my sister's home and the already housebroken-but-born-feral pet spent the entire week stuffed behind a bookcase, coming out only for water. This is much the same.

I expect it to take some time for her to figure out that being indoors will not cause her to spontaneously combust at the slightest provocation. But past experience has shown that if she is unable to make that transition in a few days, that it simply may never take. I'm actually concerned that if she doesn't settle in less than a week, there exists a definite possibility that she may hurt herself through starvation or urine retention (a very real problem in cats). And that would be bad.

Today I took the "little truck" to the junkyard. This was the first new vehicle I ever purchased, way back in 1987. It was actually a joint-purchase made by me and my then-girlfriend, later-to-be-wife, and current-ex. It was involved in an accident in the first two weeks of its life, and through some fineggling with the insurance company, ended up with a "free" rear bumper (which was an extra cost option that we elected not to get).

That little truck took me back and forth to work countless times, commuted me to school at College of San Mateo, San Francisco State University, and even got me around town in San Luis Obispo on the odd occasion. It made probably two or three dozen trips from San Mateo to R-Wild Horse Ranch (near Red Bluff). It drove back and forth between Santa Rosa and San Luis probably a dozen times, plus at least that many trips from Santa Rosa over the Santa Cruz mountains to go to Pacific Grove. It even took me to Las Vegas one Labor Day weekend.

It had a mesh tailgate at one time (which I found tucked behind the seat last night when I was taking everything out of it). It had the lock on the passenger door popped out with a screwdriver sometime in the early 1990's when I was attending CSM, and even though I got a $225 settlement from my insurance company, I put in a one-inch knock-out seal (est. value forty cents) in the opening and left it that way. It had a leather (well, cloth vinyl actually) bed cover that was stolen, paid for by insurance, replaced and then allowed to rot into shreds. (Cloth-backed vinyl is not terribly sunlight resistant, it seems.)

I met a girl while washing that truck at Apple Creek who was probably my first "one night stand". I got yelled at by a CHP officer for having my registration sticker in my glove box but NOT on the license plate while driving to Pacific Grove in it. I got my first seat-belt violation in that truck. Interestingly enough, I was cited as the driver, my ex-brother-in-law was cited as a passenger, but my young, blonde, newly-married wife who was sitting directly between us was NOT cited (even though there were three seatbelts installed in the vehicle).

As I took it to the junkyard, the little truck had a non-working battery (I had to jump-start it), the engine was so "tired" that it couldn't even climb a hill in a residential neighborhood, and oil hadn't been changed in 12,000 miles (around 3-1/2 years). On the other hand, the stereo still worked, it ran fine (as long as it didn't have to go uphill) and I just used it a few months ago to move the old entertainment center away. I found myself thinking that it was a shame to junk it (as I was driving to the junkyard). And over a half-tank of gas (probably around 7 gallons).

A lot of memories go with that little truck. But after three signatures and a 30 minute wait, Pick-a-Part gave me $99 cash money and I no longer have a semi-working little pickup truck in my garage. C'est la vie.

I've been meaning to sit down and write a blog entry for about a week and a half now, but I never seem to find the time. I think I probably need a remedial time management course.

Dec 5 was the Winzler & Kelly Holiday Party and the usual drunken intra-company debauchery occurred. As they say, what happens at a holiday party STAYS at the holiday party, and I'm not going to relate the gory details of the evening. I will, however, say that the Saturday following the party was not a good day for me. Important safety tip: do not drink 10 double Martinis in a single evening. Trust me on that.

Another interesting thing which I learned was that the Executive Vice President of W&K reads my blog. Apparently he found it while doing a web search on our company's name. I'm still undecided whether that's a good or a bad thing. On one hand, it it a bit worrisome that someone who has the power to more-or-less walk into the office and end my employment at the drop of a hat is (sort of) (virtually) watching me. On the other hand, this is my -personal- web space. While it may or may not always present my employer in an appropriate "marketable" fashion, I'm pretty sure that is an understood caveat in the mind of any potential client of ours that anything they read on some webpage written by a guy who calls himself "Stupid" is probably NOT "officially sanctioned" by the company and shouldn't be used in the decision making process. So, having said that...

Work has been hit-or-miss again. It used to be that I would be super busy for months, then have a couple weeks of slack time, and then a couple months of busy. Over the last year, with the slowing of the economy, work has cooled a bit and I found that trend reversing: I would be super busy for a couple weeks, followed by a couple slow months, and then a week or so of being busy again.

And then on the 12th I finally got to sit down with my bosses and discuss my yearly performance. Some things were pointed out to me that I thought were good hints on how to improve my performance as an engineer. I'm a big fan of self-improvement so this was a good thing in my mind. I like it when people tell me where I can improve myself.

BUT (and there always is a big "butt") I noticed that the little box that said "adequate performance" had been scratched out and the box that says "falls short" was selected instead. I got the impression that I was being given an ultimatum. The word "layoff" was dropped onto the table, where it was left gasping for air like a beached fish. I hope that there was no real or implied threat to my continued employ here, but it sure felt like there might have been. I prefer an up-front discussion and a lot of stuff that was discussed was along those lines but sorta semi-hidden meanings seemed to be lurking behind the spoken words. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. I sure hope so. I really really love my job and I'd hate to lose it. Suffice it to say that I'm working extra hard on the tings that were mentioned.

Enough work related news.

I'm working with an artist on a user-developed skin for Camelot. He does the pretty pictures, I do the XML. XML is pretty easy to work with, not even that time consuming and it is entertaining. I've (re)written a couple of windows for the interface already, adding a widget here, moving a widget there. Pretty basic stuff. But the artwork is AWESOME and the whole thing ends up being incredibly nice overall.

I reinstalled Dungeon Seige on TWEAK-II. It runs. This is amazing to me since it -never- ran on TWEAK, nor would it run on either of Coworker Chris' home systems. The only common thread was XP Pro, so I just assumed that it was busted under that OS. (For what it's worth, the game did, and still does, run just peachy on STUPID, the Win2K box.) I've managed to get to about the same point I was at the last time I played this game. I'm about 14 hours into it according to the game-time tracking system. It's an entertaining little diversion, but nothing special.

I also re-installed Agent newsreader. My DSL/ISP provider is mindspring.com and last year they had me using nntp.mindspring.com. This newsserver was spotty at best. I use a lot of the alt.binaries.* groups and getting a multipart posting was impossible. After a couple months of trying to get a single thing (and failing) I gave up on it. Well, they now use earthlink's newsservers and WOW!! The first thing I saw when Agent grabbed headers was a near perfect list of multipart messages. Agent automatically combines them and tells me which ones are missing sections and pretty much all of them are complete. Oh sure there was the odd incomplete one here and there, but those were very rare. so for the past few days, my DSL line has been working full-time downloading new and fun stuff.

Roommate Dave is moving out on Dec 20. He's an okay guy, but I can't say I'm going to miss him. He's too much the Drama Queen. He's neurotic about some things (leave a magazine on the kitchen table and he flips out about "clutter" but there is a pile dog hair an inch deep under the couch). And he likes to blast the heater at all hours of the day and night driving my power bills up to around ten times what I normally pay (really). But the worst of all is he's ALWAYS at home. One of the things I was looking forward to in a 3 bedroom house is NOT seeing my roommate occasionally. But for the last 12 months, Dave has been home 24/7 (with the exception of two nights when he went to Vallejo). Oh sure he had school, but that is typically when I'm at work, so I don't see him gone. As far as I know, he is home continuously and constantly. And I don't care if he is the nicest, most understanding human being on the planet, being around him for 12 months has been enough.

And interestingly enough, my good friend April (who happens to work in the word proccessing department in my office) is moving in to an apartment right around the corner from me. So I may be helping Dave move out on the same day that I'm helping April move across town.

I'm registered for Wildflower 2004 (Olympic distance) and the Icebreaker (sprint distance). I bought a long-course Wildflower registration for Kyle so he will be racing again. I should start training seriously again after New Year. I ran a bit this week and my legs and feet were hurting me. This is not a good sign and makes me a bit concerned. I hope it is not a sign of something serious. Time will tell.

I finished book 3 of the Wheel of Time series. I have the first half of book 4 on CD and just need to sit down and start listening. I'll be on vacation in New Orleans, Louisiana starts on the 23th and runs until the 2th. That will probably be a good time to start. I hope to blog a bit while I'm there, but we'll see how that goes.

Well, that's enough of a novel for now. Happy holidays!!

A lot happened this last week.

I finally got around to installing the two new 80G drives into TWEAK on Monday night. Actually, I installed them over the weekend, but I was missing an IDE cable and I ran out of power tees. So after a quick trip to Santa Rosa Computers at lunchtime on Monday and the drives were running. Sadly, I still had my existing (primary) RAID 0 (striped) set on the -secondary- IDE connector. It seems that the engineers at Silicon Image (the makers of the RAID controller I'm using) assumed that the main drives would be on the -primary- channel. So as soon as the whole thing powered up, it tried to mirror the primary (unformatted) drives onto the secondary (existing) drives. The net result was that I lost everything I had done since I installed XP on TWEAK in May.

Still, six months is better than six years. After two or three days of fighting with the machine, I gave in, reformatted the whole shebang and reinstalled XP. Stellar Phoenix re-ran and pulled all of my "old" data off of the still non-functional 20G Fujitsu drive that was previously in STUPID. Basically, I was back to where I was when TWEAK first was built, but six months later. I renamed TWEAK to TWEAK-II (since it is basicaly a rebuild).

As of this writing, TWEAK-II has a redundant RAID 0+1 (stripped/mirrored) set, and I'm going to be spending the next two weeks going through my old data and throwing away the trash and moving the good stuff into where it belongs.

The other exciting thing was that we went to the Shasta National Forest and got a "wild" Christmas tree. This is no farm grown, cultured and manicured tree. This is a real tree. The kind that you go out into the forest and see. Tree permits cost a kingly sum of $10 and allow the buyer to chop down pretty much any tree that a sane person could want within the National Forest. We ended up with a very nice pine tree that was about 10 feet tall, and very full of foliage. Of course, being a "wild" tree, the bottom of the trunk is only about 2-1/2" across. Trees in the wild grow UP before they grow OUT. We had to do some creative trimming of the branches to get it to fit into our 8-foot ceilinged home. All in all, getting a "wild" tree was quite an adventure. I heartily recommend it to anyone to do at least once in their lifetime. (I suspect that we will be getting a permit and doing a similar thing again next year.)

I'm shocked at how "fresh" the tree is. Having always had lot-type trees, I'm accustomed to the tree losing needles pretty much every time someone looks at it sternly. This is not the case with a fresh tree. Heck, we were laying it on the floor, cutting and snipping away at the limbs with a saw and trimming shears and not a single needle has come off of it. It even FEELS nicer than a lot-bought tree. When you touch it, it feels like a real tree, not like a tree that has been chopped, shipped and stood around for a couple weeks prior to moving into a heated and dry home.

After a trip or two to the loval K-Mart, the tree is now very happily lit and decorated.

I broke down and added my Christmas "wish list" link to the menu bar on the left. I said I wasn't going to do this until after Thanksgiving, but with the way things have been going this last couple of weeks, I thought it would be best to do this now.

Work has finally taken off... and how!! It seems like so long ago that I was worried about how to fill out a 40-hour work week. This last week, I worked six days and I'm still behind schedule on two projects. All of the stuff that was on "simmer" in the background has come to a nice boil and as we enter the "slow" holiday season, I find that I have more work to do than I can actually fit into my workday.

Trials of Atlantis is still sucking up a goodly portion of my free time. I'm online playing pretty much 2-3 hours a day. I have a couple of goals in there and having a concrete goal to work towards gives me incentive to play longer hours than I normally would. (Side note: I just made level 46, my highest ever! Topping out at level 50 before the end of the year -- one of my New Year's Resolutions for this year -- is still in question though... I don't play nearly enough for that.)

In other news, Karen and I watched the movie "Chasing Amy" on DVD this weekend. I think that this is probably one of my favorite all-time movies for several reasons:

1. Plauseable surrealism. There are several scenes/dialogs in the film that are borderline surreal, yet they are presented in a simplistic and very plausable manner. Say you got up one morning and discovered that while you were sleeping, someone had broken into your house and stolen all of your possessions. That would be a very surreal experience, but yet, it is plausible enough that one doesn't automatically dismiss it, saying "As if THAT could ever happen..."
2. Subject matter. This movie is about life. It is about how life is sometimes is very very good, sometimes very very bad, and how people just keep plodding along through it all, even if they are completely screwing things up in the process. And how, no matter how hard you try, sometimes life just plain sucks.
3. Timing. When I saw this movie for the first time, I could relate to it on a very personal level. I was going through some emotional upheaval. At the time, it seemed like it was a hard point in my life. Little did I know that was the easy part. It's like when you are falling down a mountainside, and you're bumping into rocks and getting cuts and bruises and you're thinking how much it hurts... and then you tumble off a precipice into nothingness and suddenly you realize just how screwed you really are. And how so much NOT bad the rolling down a hillside actually was. Luckily, in my case, I finally got smart and pulled the ripcord on my parachute and glided away to safety rather than crashing to my death. Upon rewatching it, I'm reminded that some people aren't so lucky and it makes me thankful to have friends that actually care about me. And reminded me that I need to make a few phonecalls this week.

We also watched "Kama Sutra", which was an interesting film based in India. I found it to be an uplifting film about a very beautiful woman dealing with a very bad situation, dealing with it as best she could and actually coming out of it okay. Not recommended for anyone who has even the slightest compunction about watching graphic sex, but if you can get past that, there's a really REALLY good movie there.

My training has been slacking off since Treasure Island. I ran three time last week, twice around The Box (3.0 miles) and once at Spring Lake (three laps, 6.75 miles). On my way home for lunch today I saw a couple people from a neighboring office heading out for a bike ride in full gear and it made me want to start riding my bike again. I think I might set up the trainer tonight and spin for an hour while Karen is at swim class.

One of the wierd things about blogs, is that they display in reverse chronological order. That is if you read things from top to bottom like most english-speaking humans, you'll be reading this article prior to the one below it. So you'll know the conclusion of the story before you hear about the disaster.

After running CHKDSK -five- times, my computer booted up and is now running fine and dandy.

I'm sure I lost some data. CHKDSK found a -lot- of lost clusters, missing files and basically the kind of stuff you expect to see when a drive fails. I'm sure that had effects on my system that will probably make themselves apparant over the next few months. In the meantime, things are smoothly running again.

In the meantime, I still have two 80GB drives on order. The place I ordered them from AirCup.com deserves major kudos for:
1. Having the drive in stock and ready to ship,
2. Having one of the lowest prices for the drives (they were third lowest on prcewatch.com,
3. Shipping the drive for FREE via UPS ground, and most importantly,
4. Shiping the drive within one hour of my order being placed. I placed the order at 1:24PM and I received a confirmation of shipping (complete with a tracking number) at 1:54PM. I expect to see the drives on Monday of next week.

I'll install them and do a mirror for my current striped set. That way if a drive fails in the future, I won't have to slash my wrists about losing all my data.

Yesterday as I drove home for lunch, I noticed that the radio faceplate in the Jeep finally died. The stereo in there has been acting "funny" for a few months already. First some of the buttons stopped working. Then some of the buttons moved around: for example, you would push the 'scan' button to turn the volume down. In order to eject a CD, you had to release the faceplate and then hit the eject button with the faceplate partially removed. The radio never worked, but even with the funky button scheme, it played CDs and it was livable. So I noticed that the faceplate was completely blank. No clock, no track display, no backlight, nothing. Completely blank. But the CD still played.

When I got home, the clock on the microwave was reset. I asked Karen if the power had gone out and she said that there had been a little "bump" that morning. So I set the clock. I needed to download my email (I had nearly 100 messages sitting on a server somewhere and wanted to bring them local) so we went up to the computer room. Karen amused herself by browsing Horrorscopes while I did my email. She noted amusingly that my Horrorscope mentioned that things would be "breaking" today, perhaps due to electricity. We got a little chuckle out of that.

The first thing I saw when I sat down was a little requester that claimed "Unknown Hard Error! (OK)" I clicked on it, and it popped right back. After a dozen clicks the machine just gave up the ghost and rebooted. Whether this is a testament to WinXP or simply the quality of machine I built, this was the first real BSOD experience this machine has had. Upon restart, CHKDSK ran (I didn't even know that was available in XP until then) and found a few lost clusters. While CHKDSK did it's thing I was jokingly telling Karen about what happens when one disk in a RAID-0 setup fails. Then XP loaded and away we went. I did my email housekeeping and went back to work.

At dinner I slashed my thumb open while cutting some of the scraps of meat from a porkchop bone. Nothing serious. Just a little insicion about 1/2" long on the side of my thumb. It was a pretty good cut, and it closed up almost immediately after I washed it out and put some pressure on it. I probably only lost about 10 drops of blood total. A band-aide and a little care and I was (almost) as good as new. After dinner I went up to play Camelot. And a drive failed.

A drive failed!

It made a horrible ka-click-ka-click-ka-click sound and the system locked up solid. I dinked with the computer until 12:30AM and I simply could not get it to run. Upon startup, sometimes one drive was not found. Sometimes NO drives were found. Sometimes it found both drives, but would lockup during bootup, or shortly thereafter. I finally got XP to boot up in "safe mode" (another surprise) and set it to do a complete scan of the system drive. While that ran, I used the other computer to order two more drives. (As a side note, I was surprised to see that the drives I bought for $107 each last October were now selling for around $70 each.) Maybe they will be replaced, maybe not.

My current theory is that the little 'blip' in the electricity blew up something in there. Whether it was a drive or the controller or something even more basic still remains to be seen. I'm not too concerned about the hardware, I've already solved that problem by ordering new parts. I can buy new parts. I -am- concerned about my data. I've got probably 10GB of irreplaceable data on those two drives. I can't reproduce that. Among which is my ONLY copy of Atlantis.

This sucks. First the CD player. Then my finger. Now my data. I guess the Horrorscope was right.

My 2003 triathlon season has come to a close. Last weekend I raced in the 2003 Treasure Island sprint-distance race.

Last year, this was the race that was a big eye-opener for me. After studying for my P.E. exam and doing NO exercise for four months, this race kicked my butt. This year, I was going into this race with three crushing failures in previous races. My finish time at the (half) Vineman in August was 45 minutes slower than I hoped. My finish time in the (half-marathon) Vineman Relay was 20 minutes slower than I had hoped. And then the humiliating defeat at the (olypmic distance tri) Pacific Grove race was my slowest time EVER; even my first Wildflower race was faster by over ten minutes!!

After Pacific Grove, I decided to make a training plan which I (mostly) stuck to. Some of this was due to Karen "keeping me honest" and providing encouragement. Some of it was due to the installation of new showers at my office, which allowed me to do workouts at lunchtime. And some of it was just plain old stubbornness. In any case, it seemed to have worked.

This race was a new Personal Record for a Sprint distance. This is the only sprint distance race I do each year. This was possibly my best race EVER. It was the first time I've felt like a "real" Triathlete during a race.

My swim was "long"; I went WAY wide on the course and probably swam an additional 100 yards making the 440 yard loop. But when I got out of the water (20th out!) I still felt fresh and not completely tapped like I normally am after a swim. I was swimming 100 yards in 1:50 during training, so I had budgeted 8:15 for the 450 yard swim. My swim time was significantly slower than this, coming in at a meandering 11:24.

T1 was amazingly fast (for me). I normally budget 5:00 for each transition. I know I'm slow in transition, and I account for that in my goals. This time around, however, I was out of transition in only 3:40 (22th fastest in my age group)! Maybe it was because I was not so out of breath while trying to put my bike shoes on. Maybe it was the flaming socks that Karen bought me. Maybe it was just that I've finally figured out how to do transitions. In any case, I got changed quickly and on the bike.

During the bike, I was passing people. I was still getting passed too, but almost all of them were from the next higher age group. Some people are just faster than me. I can accept that. And I have no problem with it, either. So when I'm passed by a guy that is 41, that's fine. Maybe he's the fastest guy in his age group. But the point is that I didn't see ANYONE pass me on the bike that was in my age-group. Looking at the results, there was one guy in my group - only ONE - that passed me on the bike leg. The people faster than me were already ahead of me. On the other hand, I passed quite a few people in my group on the bike. I stumbled a bit on both the mount and dismount; I probably could have made up 30 to 45 seconds between the two of them. While that may not seem like much, in a race this short, a fraction of a minute is a major difference. I was shooting for a average speed of 18MPH or 41:26 for the whole 20km ride. despite the lost time (which was ALL counted in the bike leg) I was pleased to turn in a time of 38:43, or 19.26MPH!!

T2 was similarly fast. Instead of the 5:00 that I had budgeted, I was in and out in a mere 2:19. Of course, this transition is supposed to be FASSST and I was ranked 39th in my age group for this one. I still thought it was fast (for me).

Usually when I'm doing the run, my body is running on fumes. As I'm watching people go past me, I look down at their calf and see way too many of them are in my age group and I falling back further and further... but that's all I can do. This time around, I felt strong during the whole race. I kept my pace the whole way and I was picking off people one by one. I would pick out someone a few hundred feet ahead of me and set my pace and in a few minutes I would pass them. Then I would pick out a new person and pass them. I was hoping for an 8 min/mile average or 24:51 overall for the run. I blew that away with a 7:35 pace and a run time of 23:31!!

After all was said and done, I still had enough energy for a sprinting charge across the finish line. My target finishing time of 1:30:00 was completely blown away. My prior times were 1:26:20 (2001) and 01:29:07 (2002). This year I rocked both of those times with a stunning 01:19:37 finish! (119th overall, out of 538 and 19th in my age group, out of 52)

Today is release day. After 5pm tonight, I'll be online probably around 12-16 hours a day for the next week. But I'll be "in" Atlantis. I typically do that every time a really exciting product comes out.

Of course, one of the reasons I have so many diverse hobbies is because I can't stand to do the same thing for a really long time. So I'm sure that by the time I get to the end of this week, I'll be ready to move on to something else.

Or maybe Karen will have to learn strip-tease to lure me out of the computer room :-)

Well, it's only two more days until Trials of Atlantis is released and a little less than a week until Halloween.

I was reminded by several family members that it is time to start putting together the infamous Xmas Wish List. My goal was to add enough items to fill one complete screen. It was difficult, and it took several hours of brain wracking, but I was able to come up with a bevy of items that range in price from under $10 to over $20,000. (Note to any wealthy benefactors or family members that win the lottery before Christmas: If you need more detail, please don\'t hesitate to ask!)

Anyway, here's a link to the Wish List. I'll add it to the nav bar on the left after Thanksgiving.

No blog entries in a while. Mostly because nothing has been happening. I get up, go to work, swim/bike/run at lunchtime, come home, play Camelot, eat, sleep, repeat.

Then...

Last week on Monday, I reported in that I had 2 to 2-1/2 days of work. On Tuesday afternoon, I ran out of tasks to do at work. Wednesday I came in to the office in the morning and cleaned off my desk. Literally. Not only going through paperwork, but I got out a damp rag and dusted and wiped down everything. I stayed until 11AM and then went home. On Thursday, I came in and actually had a little work to do. some of my drawings had been drafted, so I did my backcheck and sent them out to the client. I ended up working about 3 hours and then went home. While I was home on Thursday night my cellphone rang, but I was in the middle of a beta test "event" for Camelot, so I let it go to voicemail.

Friday, I simply called in sick... sick of not doing anything. After swimming, Karen was asking me about weekend plans. She reminded me that this weekend was The Relay. I did the The Relay a couple years ago and it was a lot of fun. I was hoping to pick up a spot this year, but nothing had turned up, so I had pretty much given up on it. Then I checked my voicemail.

It was Sandy. Apparently she was on a Relay team, but due to workload, and she was planning on going to Kona to watch the race there, and bevy of other things, she was looking for someone to take her slot. Of course I agreed! I was going to be in Van #1 with five girls, running leg #2, the third easiest assignment!

By the time our 1PM start time rolled around, I had been shuffled off to Van #2, and swapped to leg #8, the fifth hardest leg.

My first run started out at dusk, on a dirt trail, through rolling hills and woods. Then I hit a monster hill. It was so steep that the dirt had been paved over so vehicles could climb it without spinning out. I walked that portion. Then it was a long gradual descent through a vineyard, out onto highway 12, across the Napa->Sonoma County line, take a right on Napa Road, and four miles to my hand-off. I felt nice and strong for the first 4-5 miles, passing a half-dozen people. After around the 10k mark, however, my legs started loading up with lactic acids and I could feel my running getting slower and slower and slower. I finished the 7.4 miles in 1:04:37. 8:44 minutes per mile average. Slow, slow, slow!!

After our van did our last hand-off, we went to Terry's apartment in SF, showered, and got about 2 hours of sleep. That was to be my only sleep for the whole weekend.

My second leg was much worse. It started in the early morning (5AM) at the intersection of Sloat and the Great Highway. Anyone who has ever lived in that area knows that this area is foggy 350 days a year. Sunday morning was no exception. As I took the "baton" (which was actually a plastic spring bracelet), the fog was just starting to get thick. As I ran south it got worse and worse. while I was on the Great Highway, I was fine. I had a headlamp (a very nice white LED lamp that had a range of about 25 feet) and I could see the white line on the side of the road. Just follow the line, thought I. Yeah, right. Within two miles, visibility was down to around 15 feet. My glasses were completely fogged up, limiting my range of sight to around 5 feet. I plodded along, uphill the whole way, cold, wet and blind.

At mile 4-ish, the course did a little one-block zig to the right. I would have missed it completely, if not for the van that someone had parked across my path. Despite being parked directly under a street light, I did not see the van until I was less than 10 feet away from it. I yelped, and the people in the van yelled "Turn RIGHT!" I'm sure that they were waiting for their runner (not me) but I am sooo glad they were there. I'm sure there was a neon green sign on a post somewhere, but I couldn't even see the ground, much less a signpost.

One short block later, another van was parked in the middle of the road. I asked these people if the course turned again, and was rewarded with a "Yes, it goes left here." Now I was in a residential area. No more white line to follow. As I ran along, a dark shape would suddenly appear in front of me, about 10 feet away. A Toyota Corolla. Or a Volkswagon Vanagon. Or a Seville. People park their cars in front of their houses. But in my limited visibility, these things were huge obstacles. I ran in the middle of the street to avoid parked cars, but whether it was due to me not running in a straight line, or the road turning, eventually I would almost hit a car and have to correct for it.

I caught up to another runner at one point. Having a car swim out of nothingness a few feet away was startling. Having a PERSON appear a couple of steps away was frightening!

At the next turn, there were a few vans parked around. I thought to myself "Self, these vans must be here for a reason." Just as the thought formed in my mind I saw a HUGE chalk arrow on the roadway telling me to turn left. That was mile 5-ish. I was only running through the residential section for a mile and a quarter, but it was so stressful that my upper body was clenched the whole time. I felt as if I had run twice that distance.

A short time after the last turn, the fog began to thin a tiny bit. I could see maybe 30-50 feet now. It was getting a little lighter too. I saw another runner ahead of me, crossing the street. I followed suit, hoping he knew where he was going. A car approached so I hopped up onto the sidewalk, nearly missing my step since the red-painted curb was nearly invisible in the fog. As I ran along the sidewalk, a rough-finish concrete wall was on my left shoulder. Like the outside of an office building, or a supermarket, or... AHA!!! I suddenly knew where I was. This was the back wall of Serramonte shopping center! My leading runner turned left at the corner, behind the building.

I turned left and there was someone standing there. I literally stopped in amazement. I quickly (and breathily) asked "Which way?" The reply was, "Right over there, that's the exchange." I was thinking "Where?" as I started off in the direction he indicated. It was diagonally across a 4-lane road. A well-lit gas-station. Which I couldn't see from 50 feet away. I ran in and handed off the "baton". Finally, I was able to relax. I was drenched. Not with sweat, but with condensation from the fog. I looked like someone had dumped a bucket of water over me. My clothes were literally dripping. Fun stuff.

I finished the 5.9 mile run in less than one hour, but my overall pace was well into the 9+ minute per mile range. Considering it was all uphill, and the condition, I was satisfied with my performance.

After our hand off, we drove down to Cañada College, showered in the gymnasium (no hot water, but at least it was a shower!) drove to Woodside and had a totally unhealthy breakfast of a giant cinnamon roll, bought a premade sandwich and then drove up Page Mill road to "sleep" at the next hand-off. Sadly, there were about 100 other vans there, plus it is a popular motorcycle route. Sleep was not possible. But I was able to doze off and on for about an hour and a half.

Before I even started my third and final run, my legs were sore and tired, my head was aching and I was looking longingly at the asphalt road thinking that it wouldn't be that hard or uncomfortable to sleep on.... As I started to get the pre-race jitters, the adrenaline smoothed out the headache and washed away my fatigue. By the time I was running, I actually was feeling pretty good again.

The run started with a steep downhill section. After that it was rolling up and down hills. It actually was pretty fun, despite the ever-present pain in both of my legs. As the distance crawled along, I could feel my leg muscles shutting down a bit at a time. It was not only a race against the clock, but I was also trying to finish my relay leg before my body stopped working. I had reached my endurance limit, and was pushing past it.

I ended up passing three people and was passed by three people. I finished about 1-2 seconds behind two others. My total elapsed time was 37:05 for 4.7 miles, an average speed of 7:53 minutes per mile! This was my fastest run, and it was when I was nearing total muscular breakdown. Way to push the limits!

I got home Sunday night around 10PM, 34 hours after I had left on Saturday. In that time, I had two deli-style sandwiches, one cinnamon roll, a LOT of water/gatorade/cytomax, a handful of energy bars, three hours sleep and two showers. And had run the equivalent of a full marathon.

Monday was spent lying on the couch.

It seems I'm back not making blog entries in a timely manner. I really need to schedule a week of NOTHING. Of course, my head might explode if I did not have ten things to finish by the end of the day.

Episode One
Thursday after work, I went for a nice 28 mile bike ride with Carolyn. She was on her road bike and I was on my mountain bike. The plan was for her to have a nice easy training ride and me to work a little harder and build some strength in my legs. Yeah, that was the plan anyway.

We started out at a brisk pace and as soon as we hit the flats, Carolyn spun up to 19 MPH and held there. For the next 15 miles, I had to WORK to keep the mountain bike moving at that blistering pace. When we hit the closest thing to a hill that the Gueneville route offers (50 feet of elevation gain, woot!) Carolyn powered right up the grade at 10 MPH. We had just done this same route the weekend prior and she was running about 15-16MPH in the flats and 6-8MPH on the climbs. That's why I thought it woud be "safe" riding the mountain bike; those are humanly possible speeds.

Anyway, after 18 gruelling miles of agony and pain and not being able to speak from the need for oxygen, I flatted out in the rear. (Thank goodness!) We stopped to examine the flat, and found what looked like a 1/8" long metal shaving sticking out of the center of the tread. It took a little effort to coax the metal piece out of the tire, but when it came out I was shocked to find this. No, not a dime -- the black object on the right. It was stabbed into the tire lengthwise so that only the short end was sticking out of the rubber. (This image also highlights how bad the focus is on my cheap-ass camera.)

I still need to get to the bike shoppe and buy a new "spare" tube for the mountain bike.

Episode Two
Friday night Karen dropped by. Supposedly with a DVD to watch. Sadly, no disc was in attendance. Delivery pizza appeared (Mary's Pizza Shack) but it wasn't very good. The evening ended at an early 10PM. Feh.

Episode Three
Saturday was Camelot day. I logged in at 11AM for a pickup group in Caledonia. Not only was there not a group in there, but there were no players either. Not even so

Sadly, this remainder of this blog entry was lost to the evil of database corruption and has returned its potential energy back to the universe.

Sept 10, 2003: My fun LBNL job may be canceled. The client has a budget of $1.1M and we estimated the cost to be $3.2M. That project is now in limbo.

Sept 11, 2003: Happy birthday to me! Karen brought home a nice bottle of champagne, some fresh strawberries and a huge block of chocolate. Much happiness ensued.

Sept 12, 2003: I lost access to the private Mythic developer forums for the first time since joining them in October of 2001.

Sept 13, 2003: Finished Pacific Grove olympic distance triathlon for the third time. Posted my worst EVER olympic distance race at 3:49:29. This is even worse than my first Wildflower race. Amazingly, this new "personal worst" comes less than three months after my personal best at Rancho Seco.

Sept 14, 2003: Visit to the Monterey Aquarium for the first time since I went to Monterey with Donna's family. It was nice, and all I could think about was seafood.

Sept 15, 2003: My office tells me that due to the slowdown in workload, I am going to a reduced workweek. I will be only working three days a week unless there is something for me to work on the requires more effort.

Sept 16, 2003: I'm told that I have a full week this week and that I will be working five days.

Sept 17, 2003: I'm told that I have additional work for next week which will be three days total. Added to the day and a half I already had, I'll be working all next week as well.

Sept 18, 2003: Karen stayed home from work sick, so I played Camelot. Relic raid style RvR. Playing with ToA client and getting -horrible- lag; almost unplayable.

Sept 19, 2003: Karen is still sick, so I'm playing more. This time the relic raid succeeds and we lose a Power Relic. I'm still over 1000 RPs short of my goal.

Sept 20, 2003: Bought a new tube for the MTB (about time!), and new running shoes. After trying on about six different shoes, I settled on the same shoe I already own, but a 1/2 size larger. A close second was the Adidas shoe. After shopping, we drove to Pacheco to visit with Yvonne. Had a nice time catching up with them, and got to introduce Karen.

Sept 21, 2003: The travel yesterday hurt Karen. She's resting today, so more Camelot for me. I ended the day about 2 bubbles from level 44, and still 1000 RPs shy of the Merchant Keep 2 quest (which awards a full level).

Sept 22, 2003: Started training again. I biked for 50 minutes on the rollers at 80+ RPM. I was supposed to go for 60 minutes but I simply had to stop due to fatigue. I'm incredibly out of shape. I'm thinking I may have to adjust my training plan. I'll see how the rest of the week goes.

Sept 23, 2003: Regained access to the Mythic developer forum. It will take me ages to catch up with the messages, I'm sure. Also made a blog entry (about freaking time!!) trying to catch up on the last couple weeks.

There are people who would kill to have my problems.

At home, I have a lot of things that I would like to do and not enough time to do them all. I shouldn't complain because it is all "fun" stuff. It's like I have a lot of ice cream and a lot of chocolate and only one small bowl... and it makes me unhappy letting some of it go to waste.

For example, I haven't done any training in over a month. I looked at my bicycle the other day and was mildly surprised to see that I still had not taken the 1/2 Vineman number off of it. In other words, since the at race I haven't ridden my bike at all! I've gone running maybe a handful of times, but not for very far, and not fast. I can't even recall the last time I went swimming.

I'm still only level 43 in Camelot and the upcoming expansion is geared towards 40+. Translation, if you ain't level 50, don't buy it. Trying to grind out levels, test new encounters, and gain RPs all at the same time is practically a full-time job. One I don't have time for.

I want to spend more time with Karen. Yesterday we spent all-day long in San Francisco. Baseball at Pac Bell park followed by a yummy noodle dinner. A very VERY nice day. I'd like to have more days like that.

The point is that I simply do not have enough time in a day to accomplish all three of these things. Add in all of the various and sundry tasks a person has to accomplish to stay alive and healthy (sleeping, eating, bathing, etc) and I think I might have time to do ONE of these things, but not all three.

Then, work. There the problem is NOT ENOUGH work, not too much. I took a whole week off already because there was nothing for me to do. The week before that I spent three whole days moving boxes, because there was nothing for me to do. Last week (a short week) I was billable for 30 out of 32 hours. This week I have one, maybe two days worth of work to do.

I would just take more time off, but I'm starting to run out of vacation time and I am going to be taking practically a whole month off next May. I already have two and a half weeks worth of "stuff" planned for that month which will prevent me from coming in to the office.

There are people who would kill to have my problems. But they're making me depressed and grumpy.

Well well well.

The entire month of August was pretty much a relaxing one for me. Work was abysmally slow. In fact, for one week of August I only put in 8 hours; the other four days I was able to stay home and sleep in. Another week, I had no "billable" work, so I spent three days of that week moving file boxes from one storage location to another. Add in a couple of 6-hour long trips to a meeting in Berkeley and you've pretty much summed up my month at work.

Life at home has been equally calm. Karen seems to enjoy letting me do my own thing and puts very limited demand on my time. She won tickets to a local concert, so we went and saw Los Lobos and Buddy Guy at the LBC. (Los Lobos was "okay", but Buddy Guy was a lot of fun!) We went for a hike at Montgomery Woods, a small state park that is well off-the-beaten-track outside of Ukiah. We had lunch/dinner at the Mendocino Brewing Company's restaurant (they of the "Eye of the Hawk" beer). We went and saw a Zydigo band play in Courthouse Square downtown and then had some pretty good sushi afterwards. Even though she seems to make a big deal out of me agreeing to do this type of thing, I find it pretty easy to acquiesce. Plus it gives me opportunity to do things that I normally wouldn't do, left to my own devices.

I finally got my new monitor on August 25th. As it turns out, I was able to get a $50 credit on my original purchase. Dell has back-ordered the original monitor, and then a few days prior to the "expected" ship date, ran a special on them for a lower price than I had paid. Since mine was backordered, I ordered a new one (at the lower price) and then called to cancel the original order. Amazingly enough, they had shipped my original (more expensive) order (earlier than expected). After a short conversation with the Customer Support Representative, she canceled the second (cheaper) order and credited me the difference. Net result: I got the monitor sooner, for less money.

It has a 25ms refresh time. I do notice a little bit of smearing when I'm aggressively panning in games. It's not unbearable, but I do tend to be annoyed by it after some time. But the advantages of the LCD (less space, less heat, sharper image) far outweigh that disadvantage. I'm up to level 43 in Camelot. I got my über shield built and I'm working on my weapon now. I may have to bail out and test Atlantis for a while.

Anyway, I'm back to work now. Life should be returning to normal this month. I've been goofing off long enough.

I detest public politicing, but in this case I can't resist. My friend Mike wrote a wonderful essay on the current state of California politics. Despite my different feelings on the matter, I have to agree with this essay completely. This deserves to be spread around, so I'm doing my small part.

Read it here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/allanorn/120964.html

This last weekend, my aging 21" CRT finally decided that it was tired of being used as a monitor. After an "on" time of between 5 and 30 minutes, the screen shrinks to a 3/8" high strip in the center of the screen. It doesn't compress, but rather everything outside of that thin strip gets smashed into a very bright single line at the top and bottom the the tiny viewable area. After turning off the monitor for 10 to 30 minutes, it works again (for a short while).

The last two days, I've taken a crash course in LCD technology and the (dis)advantages with respect to gaming.

The big problem with LCDs and games is the refresh rate. Rather than a scanning electron gun which uses a fixed frequency to refresh the screen, LCD screens are updated on a "per pixel" basis. Thus the speed limit is based on how fast each individual pixel can turn on and off.

I've settled on a Planar PL190M from Dell. Using a couple of easily found Dell coupon codes, I was able to get this for $550, shipped. Not a bad price for what is essentially a 21" CRT, but with lower power consumption and a much smaller footprint.

This screen has a 25ms (15 ms rise, 10 ms fall) refresh, which isn't BAD as far as games go, but not good either. It works out to a maximum screen refresh rate of 40FPS. Decent, but certainly not great. The sad part is that I can't even bump the resolution up to make up for the low framerate since the native (max) resolution is only 1280x1024. I'm still not sure how it will handle FPS games like Savage or the upcoming Half-Life 2, but we'll see about that in a couple months. I'm sure it will be fine for stuff like Camelot, though.

Still, it's hard to argue with that kind of price for a 19" LCD. The other option was to buy another 22" CRT (i.e. 250-Watt heater). Between just the monitors, I have about 1000-Watts of waste heat in my home office. Add in the CPU exhaust and that room is NEVER cold, even in the deep of winter when the outside temperature drops into the "freezeing" range (well, freezing for this area... around 50 degrees)

The long and short of it is that until the new screen gets here, I'm not going to be able to play anything. Heck, I can barely use the computer for anything at all, since it is only usable about 40% of the time, and never for more than 30 minutes at a stretch. This really sucks, since I have a shiney new Trials of Atlantis beta disc that is just screaming to be played with. Expected delivery date is August 19.

The results are in. I'm half an Ironman. While I did finish, it wasn't pretty. I more-or-less staggered across the finish line. It was a more of a testament to my stubbornness than my athleticism (or lack thereof).

I always go into a race with multiple goals. This time around my goals were:
1. To finish in 6 hours -- FAILED
The "expected" times are the ACTUAL times I put in on the SAME course in prior attempts. I did the swim and the bike in 2001 and the run in 2002. My performance this year was worse than before.

	Target	Actual
swim	0:39:46	0:41:10
bike	3:34:52	3:20:01
run	2:07:05	2:37:13

2. To finish no slower than one hour behind Kyle -- SUCCESS!
My finish time was EXACTLY 59 minutes and 56 seconds slower than him, which is less than one hour. Four seconds less than one hour, but still less.
3. To finish faster than Sandy -- FAILURE
Sandy was faster than me on both the bike and the run, with a total finish time of 6:25:02. In our prior races, Sandy has always beaten me by a matter of seconds, so either she was having a really good race, or (more likely) I simply fell apart.
4. To NOT finish in the lower 25% -- MIXED
My finish was 250/262 in my age group, or 1065/1688. So I was faster than 4.5% of my age group, or 36.9% of all finishers.

In short, I sucked. Out loud.

Maybe you've heard of or seen the video arcade game Dance Dance Revolution. If not, this game is a huge stand-up monstrosity with a colored, lit "dance floor" in front of it. The object of the game is to step on the correctly colored squares in time with loud music. Thus, the better you "dance", the better you do.

If you are the least bit obsessive-compusive, or if you enjoy music -- not like "background music", but if you can't help but tap your feet or fingers in time to music you don't even like... if this describes you at all, no matter what you do, do NOT click on this link! I warned you.

Flash Flash Revolution

The Past

Lance calls her "Ezekial", Kyle calls her "psycho-slut", I call her "my Ex-Girlfriend Who Wasn't". Looking back on the experience, I can appreciate what I learned from the experience. It was painful, but growth is never easy. I'm sure that without her entering my life, I would still be stuck where I was before and not have been able to move on and develop as a person.

In January, she invited me to France to watch the last week of The Tour. When the invitation was made, she more or less offered to pay my way, if I couldn't swing it myself. Gwen advised me to go to France with her; the reasoning was that people often act differently in a different situation and that maybe, just maybe, I would get a bite of the proverbial golden plum.

The Tour is coming to a close this week, so she has been popping into my mind. Mostly because of the association with The Tour. Regardless, if the stars aligned just so, and the gravity of the planets caused her to have a flash of inspiration and call me and invite me to come see her today, I honestly don't think it would be all that difficult to say "no".

The last time I was in SLO, I said I was "Finally Free" (I actually chose that as my little saying when I finished my second Spike's card). I really am. And I'm glad.

The Present

Dredging up memories and feelings which should remain undisturbed is relevant for another reason as well.

Over the last couple of months I have been training with a recent divorcée. She was older than me, not unattractive, and she obviously was attracted to me. As we trained together, things did develop and we spent a few nights together. It was fun and enjoyable (for both of us). Had things been different, it could have been a long-term semi-serious relationship.

The problem is, I treated her much in the same way that Kristen treated me. I was disrespectful of her feelings, uncaring of her expectations and generally a Bad Person™. She was not willing nor interested in a semi-casual relationship, and I was not forthcoming with her that I was. Instead, I remained silent and allowed her to draw incorrect conclusions.

In the end, she was hurt. Last Friday she sent an email to me which paraphrased down to "You're a jerk; I never want to see you again." I'm not going to say that I didn't deserve that, because I certainly did. I lost someone who could have been a good friend, not because I was unable or unwilling to deal with her situation, but because I created a situation that was impossible for her to deal with. I know that she also lost a friend, but I lost far more than she did.

I'm sorry about that.

It was no less painful than the lesson I learned the first part of this year. I know now that when I said goodbye to Kristen, what effect it had on her. I can only hope that she was able to learn from that experience as I have. But I strongly doubt it.

The Future

Like the song says, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades. Karen is completely a part of my life now. She has been living in my home for the past ten days, and I have no regrets at all. She makes me insanely happy without all of the self-immolation that I went through in the past. She is kind, caring and seems to genuinely enjoy being around me.

It's a very odd experience for me. In ALL of my past relationships, I have been in the situation where I provided support to the other person. Either emotionally, physically, mentally or otherwise, I have always been in a "giving" role in my past relationships. I've never been involved with someone who not only isn't "needy", but seems to provide more to me than she asks for in return. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking advantage of her since she asks for so little from me. And when I do find a chance to provide some support for her, she acts like I'm the best thing since sliced bread.

It's really odd. I'm certainly not going to complain, though. It's a sweet deal for me. I hope that she stays a part of my life for a reasonably long time. My biggest fear at this point is that she will move on and leave me with impossibly high expectations for The Next Girl™ to meet.

That would suck. In a big way.

Work has been rough, and it doesn't seem to be lightening up anytime soon. Friday night I was up until 12:30AM reading specifications for this hellish project I'm working on.

Saturday I finally finished painting the townhouse I've been living in for the last year. I still have three door casings to replace, and one additional casing that needs to be stripped, stained and rehung. That's about two hours work, maybe less. I'm holding off on any additional home improvement type projects until I spend those two hours though.

Saturday night, we drove to Sacramento and had a yummy meal at The Old Spaghetti Factory. Sunday morning, we got up bright and went to race at the TBF Tri 4 Real #2. Karen impressed the hell out of me by volunteering. We were standing around pre-race and the announcer asked if any spectators wanted to volunteer, and she just went right over to the volunteer booth and asked what she could do to help. I'm still in awe.

The race was fun. I set a new Olympic distance PR for myself. The preliminary results have me finishing in 2:47:57, nearly 15 minutes faster than my prior record for that distance. We'll see if this improvement streak continues on to Pacific Grove (which was my prior PR race, and also my first and favorite Olympic course). I'll do a full writeup of the race and course as time permits (hopefully before Vineman in 3 weeks). Regardless, it's pretty cool that I have a new Olympic PR.

After the race, we came home and I spent another half-dozen hours reading more specs, this time until 1:30AM. I'll be so happy when this blasted project goes out to the client. At least then I know I won't have to work on it any more.

I used to laugh at people who would meet someone and get married in only a few months, or move in together after a few weeks. I guess I shouldn't do that. It has been exactly fifteen days since our first real "date", and I'm deliriously happy. I'm both frightened and excited about how quickly my life is changing to make room for her.

Friday the 4th I took a 56 mile bike ride with Sandy. The plan was to start in Guerneville (success!), ride the Vineman route (success!) and then warm-down with the 18-mile ride back to Guerneville (oops!); that would have been a total of 74 miles. As expected, we pooped out at the end of the 56 mile route. Luckily, Karen was at my home, so I called for a ride. After a shower, quick food, sending Sandy on her way back to SF and a couple hours of much needed rest (which included a VERY relaxing massage), there were fireworks. Both literally (it was the 4th of July) and figuratively. I've never had so much fun watching things blow up before. I think it had something to do with the company.

Saturday the 5th. After getting out of bed (late) we went to Six Flags Marine World. After a bit of a rocky start, a fun filled day was had by all. There were many roller coasters, squeals of delight, laughter, and a lot of public displays of affection. After nine hours of amusement park fun, there were more fireworks. I never realized the variety in explosives before, but seeing two different shows on subsequent nights was pretty illuminating. Of course, the company was the same, as were the feelings.

Sunday the 6th. Another late morning start led to a champagne luncheon at the Mountain Home Inn, followed by a scenic hike down to Muir Woods National Monument. On the drive home, we stopped for an early dinner at Moylan\'s.

To say that it was a great weekend would be the understatement of the year. The weekend was good in much the same way that the Pacific Ocean is a bit of water or that the sun is a little hot. The last couple of days, I've been going home from work and basically immersing myself in Camelot. Partly to ignore that I don't have anyone around. Which is kinda weird since it was only a few days, and I'm already accustomed to having someone in my life, full-time. It's both frightening and exciting.

I think I like it.

Last night, after work I went home, put in my contact lenses and ran off to the Monticito Heights Health and Racket Club to go swim for the Wednesday night "masters" workout. I felt super fast. After the swim, I sat in the hot tub and chatted for about a half hour. That was nice and relaxing.

I was running horribly late, but I was not in a big hurry because no one was waiting on me... or so I thought. I went home again with the intent of ordering take-out Chinese, eating and then going for a 3-mile run. Unfortunately, I had to stop in at the office to pick up my cellphone; I had accidentally left it there in my hurry to get to the pool.

When I got home, I was looking for the menu for the Chinese delivery place when my cellphone rang. I looked at the caller ID and answered. Since roommate Dave was watching TV, I started to walk upstairs for both a little privacy and to not be talking over the TV. A sexy voice asked me what I was doing. "I'm walking up the stairs," I answered. A question was asked what I was doing for dinner. I replied that I was planning on ordering Chinese delivery. "Wouldn't you rather have a burrito?" she asked as I opened my bedroom door.

The first thing I noticed was several bags and boxes on the floor in front of my closet doors. The one that sticks in my mind was the Teva box and the green plastic bag next to it. I thought, "Well, that's wierd. Why did Dave put this stuff in my room and where did it come from?" And then I realized that I wasn't alone in my room. She was calling me from my own bedroom! What's more, she was calling me from my own BED!! It sounds cliché, but the words I uttered at that point were a simple "OH. MY. GOD!"

This was definitely the single best surprise I have ever had in my entire life.

This is a multi-blog entry.

Babysitting

The last couple of weeks have been a new experience for me. I've been placed into a new role at work: as a Project Manager. This is a good thing for my career, but a bad thing for my life. In a normal situation this would have been all good, but the person who I would rely upon to "help" me with the new role is the same person who -gave- me the role. And is now on vacation. That makes it hard to ask for advice.

All together, this would not be a horrible thing, but I'm expected to do my normal design effort on top of this. So in the 40 hours last week, I spent 3 days (out of 5) doing nothing but "hand-holding" the various engineers working on the project. I would literally sit down at 8:30AM intending to do electrical design, and someone would come to me with an "issue", which I would help solve and then someone else would show up, and so on, and so on. And then when it finally would calm down I would start with my design and it was 4:30PM. I burned entire DAYS just running around keeping people happy and fed.

All well and good, like I said, except that I still have 40 hours of design effort to do at the same time. So, I end up either not doing it, or working 16 hour days. Joy.

The Pattern

I'm reading Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. In these books, the Wheel makes time pass, and the Pattern is the way that the world goes, similar to the Fates in Greco/Roman mythos. The quotes which apply to my life right now are (and this will only make sense to someone who has read the books):

"The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills." and "Everything has a place in the Pattern."

That's a very obscure way of saying that I met someone this weekend. Someone who I hope is going to be a very special part of my life. So far, things are off to a very good start. At least I think so. "Met" isn't really the right word since we were actually introduced in January. That's why the Wheel of Time quotes seem so relevant. Even though we've been spending time together (in a non-intimate way) we never really "connected" until this weekend.

I keep trying to figure out why we waited so long, if we could have met much sooner (like YEARS sooner). There was no good answer. It just wasn't "right" until now. The Pattern put us in the right places at the right time. When you try to move against the weaving of the Pattern, the weaving changes to put you back in the place where you were intended to be. And it sure looks like we were intended to be together this weekend. I hope that the weaving allows us to stay together for a while.

I'm deliriously happy about this. Of course, I'm expecting a crushing loss as a result, but I really don't care about that. I'm simply far too happy to even think about worrying about the future right now.

Linkage

I just checked my activity reports and the most popular referrer is http://suicidegirls.com/girls/Hel. 102 links from that site. Strange. Maybe I should buy a digital camera.

Last night I went home from work and went directly to bed. I did not pass "Go" nor did I collect $200. Flat, soft, comfy bed. And sleep. Precious sleep.

It was only 102-degrees in my house (according to the wall thermometer) but I had no problems sleeping from 6pm until around 8:30pm. I woke up then, being hot and overheated. So I got up and made some dinner. Around 9-ish, I opened ALL the windows and by 10, I was back in bed.

Of course, since I'd had a couple hours of rest, I couldn't ignore the heat any longer. Even though it was cooler, I could not sleep. So I resorted to a blanket on the floor in front of the wide-open sliding glass door in my bedroom. With the cool outside air cascading down onto me, I finally dozed off.

I was awakened at 4:15AM by some bloke across the street trying to open his car door with a claw hammer. Or at least that's what it sounded like. Bang, bang bang, CRASH! [Pause] Repeat. I closed the slider and crawled onto my bed.

Which brings me to my point. When I lived in the Bay Area proper, on a cool night after a calm, hot day, all of the smog in the SF Bay basin would "settle" into a concentrated airmass that was only about 200 feet deep. Above that was cool, crisp and clean air. I'm told this was an "inversion layer", where the hot air falls down and the cool air rises to the top. When I was getting up to go to work in construction at 7AM, I would often see this effect in section view. Working outside gave me an opportunity to see this sort of thing.

So last night when I crawled into bed at 4:15AM I noticed that the temperature at the elevation of my mattress (about 2 feet) was markedly warmer than the temperature at floor level. Being of an experimental mind, I stood up on my bed and raised my hand. The temperature just below the ceiling was uncomfortably warm. There was, essentially, a major temperature stratification effect going on in my bedroom.

I wonder how much an attic fan would help to alleviate that issue.

I was forwarded a pretty cool link this morning. Of course I forwarded it to half my office, which resulted in comments ranging from "WTF are you doing on company time?" to "Why are you sending me this?" to "Who the hell cares?", and even one who asked "Why is my CD open?"

April (the word processor) launched into a tirade about the word "pwned"... after she asked four or five people what it meant and finally resorted to doing a web search. After that discussion, I was reminded of a TweetyRant.

I need sleep.

Saturday night I went down to SF for Heidi's 24th birthday party. In attendance were Marci (which is short for Marcella), Mariah, Jenny, Marcia (which is pronounced "Marsha"), Phil, and myself. Marci works for Doubletree, so she got us two comp'ed rooms at the SF Hilton. Nice place.

Marcia is Heidi's new roommate, and epitomizes everything evil and bad about the female gender. She's young, blonde and very attractive. She's also a a very bad driver, a pathological liar, a drama queen, and an emotionally abusive person, and incredibly manipulative. As the result of a fairly innocuous chain of events, I ended up sharing a room with this individual. I don't know exactly how far things went in the bed next to mine, but let's just say that both of the people who were in that bed were very sleep deprived the next day and that the sounds I heard when I was awakened at 4AM were a bit more than "R-rated". An uncomfortable experience, to say the least.

But more uncomfortable for Marcia, I think. In exchange for being an unwitting audience for her nocturnal symphony, I relayed my experience to her friends the next day. (All women are evil. I -know- that information will get used eventually.) And during a friendly chat with Karen on Sunday night, we discovered, much to the amazement of us both, that Marcia is Karen's "student assistant". So, of course, I was obligated to tell my story once again. To her (sorta) employer.

Marcia is going to hate me, I think. Too bad. I'm still going to go to Heidi's Birthday Party, part 2 (which should be this coming weekend-ish).

Sometimes, life is soo much fun.

I need to spread things out a bit more. Last night between 5PM and 10PM, I went for a 29 mile bike ride, ran a mile and a half and swam 1600 yards. I then followed that up with cooking dinner (Chicken Parmesana, yummy!) and then getting only 4-1/2 hours of sleep.

Someday I won't feel like I'm going to fall over in a strong wind. Maybe next week I'll get more rest. Maybe.