As part of it’s promotional efforts surrounding the latest Raptr website functionality, the company is holding a contest called The Summer of Raptr, and they’re giving away over $25,000 worth of gaming related prizes.

Here’s the promo copy I was sent:

Enter to Win All the Hottest Games of E3 in the Summer of Raptr Promotion

Raptr is starting the Summer of Raptr Promotion to celebrate the launch of its new website. In the Summer of Raptr Promotion, users will be able to enter the giveaway promotion for a chance to win over $25,000 worth of prizes including the hottest games, consoles, and gear from E3 2011.
To enter, simply log into your Raptr account and “follow” the eligible topics for a chance to win. New topics will be posted every week from June 2nd to August 31st. Every topic you follow is another chance to WIN, so keep checking back with http://Raptr.com to find more topics to follow and more prizes to win!

Prizes include:
· Grand Prize: One copy of each of the 20 most talked about games of E3 2011 + 3 Consoles
· 1st Place Prize: Custom Built Ultimate Gaming Desktop PC
· Individual Prizes (Over 100 Winners): Multiple prizes around 20 of the hottest games of E3 2011, including Modern Warfare 3, Uncharted 3, Diablo 3, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Bioshock Infinite, Final Fantasy Versus XIII, Rage, Star Wars: The Old Republic, as well as gaming hardware like 3DS, NGP, Alienware PC, Astro Gaming headsets, Logitech, Gunnar shades, and free in-game items!
· Overall, more than $25,000 worth of total prizes

For more information, visit the Summer of Raptr event page at http://raptr.com/summerofraptr.

Speaking of the new Raptr, Dragonchasers is a topic you can follow, if you like. I could use some love over there!

So yeah, The 3rd Birthday is already starting to gather dust. Why? It isn’t you, Aya. It’s me.

I’ve discovered something about myself; I don’t want game developers challenging me.

Now wait! Hear me out. I don’t want them challenging me…I want them to give me ways to challenge myself.

Let me explain that.

About 1% of the way into The 3rd Birthday I hit a level where I have to avoid a monster. You’re told you can’t fight this thing: it’s all about evasion. The creature has 2 attacks. One of them knocks down about 1/3rd of your health with each hit, the other seems to 1 shot me. You have to dodge this baddie for some set amount of time, then you get warp out of the area.

I failed this mission the first time. And the 2nd. And the 3rd, at which point I headed to Gamefaqs to see if there was a trick. There wasn’t. Then I failed a 4th and 5th time, then I put the game down and haven’t gone back to it.

I’m not saying it’s a particularly difficult mission. But I’m old, my reflexes aren’t what they once were and the camera controls are awful so I can’t keep an eye on the beast. The difficulty, or lack thereof, of this mission isn’t the point of my rant today.

My point is, there’s nowhere to go in The 3rd Birthday except past this mission. The developers have challenged me to beat it, and I’m feeling resentment about that.

That doesn’t mean I want all my game playing to be easy, though. Consider a typical MMO. When I log in, I can decide “I’m going to try something really difficult tonight!” and head for some tough mobs or into a dungeon. Or I can decide “I’m feeling pretty mellow…I think I’ll just grind some low level mobs for coin and to feel mighty.” and do that. I can dial in my level of challenge on a minute-to-minute basis.

This isn’t limited to MMOs, either. Minecraft is in the news today because it has a launch date. I love Minecraft, buy y’know Notch hardly challenges us at all. Sure we can die but so what? The level of challenge in Minecraft is totally internal. Maybe you just hate to die but you’re determined to rid the world of creepers. Maybe you want to complete a structure before bed. Maybe you’re figuring out how to build a logic-switch in-game. Again, we dial in our own level of challenge.

Lots of (but not all) RPGs give us some leeway too. If an encounter is too difficult we often have the option of going somewhere else for a while, either to take on a different task or in order to level up our characters. This is that “grind” thing that MMO players hate but that lots of single player RPGs revel in. Particularly, it seems, lo-fidelity RPGs that run on handheld gaming consoles. Me, I don’t mind grinding, as long as it’s a choice, not my only option.

I’m sure there are other examples of this. I’m trying to quantify the difference between a totally single-path game that forces you to bang your head against every obstacle the devs put in front of you, and games that have enough lee-way that they offer some other activity for when your frustration level rises. I personally like to feel that I’m making some kind of progress. Die/restart/die/restart/die/restart is the worst of all gaming worlds for me. I come out of those sessions annoyed to have wasted my time and wishing instead I’d read a book or scrubbed a toilet or something. But Die/Restart/LevelUp/Die/Restart/LevelUpSomeMore at least feels like I’m inching forward. Getting some more bits of story can also feel like progress.

Maybe gaming just isn’t a good activity for us old, slow people who feel the passage of time more keenly than you younger folk do. I’m very cognizant of the fact that I have a finite number of evenings left in my life. I don’t want to waste even one of them playing a game where I make no progress. Not when there are so many thousands of games, books and movies I want to experience before I take on my ghost form!

A few weeks ago Sony introduced Music Unlimited and gave PSN members a free month of the service (Music Unlimited appears on the XMB of the PS3, as well as on the web). A week or so later, Rdio & Roku announced a partnership that put a Rdio channel on the Roku. Rdio is also on the web as well as mobile devices.

Over the past few years I’d sort of gotten out of the habit of listening to music but I figured a free trial is a free trial and pretty soon my love of music was reborn. Now in the past I’d generally go to Pandora if I wanted some random tune to flood my ears, but both Rdio and Music Unlimited let you search for a specific song to play. Both cost about $10/month for the whole enchilada (and both offer a slightly crippled service for about half that).

I paid for a month of Rdio to test it, and I’m still on my free month of Music Unlimited. There’s no way I’ll subscribe to both services but I’m pretty sure I’ll do one or the other. And I’m having a hard time deciding which to go with.

Music Unlimited offers Channels which are pretty nice, if a bit similar to Pandora. So you can listen to a channel based on era (50s, 60s, 70s, etc) or mood (Energetic, Dance, Morning, etc) or Genre (Jazz, Rock, R&B, etc) or choose a Premium Station (not available on the $5/month plan). Premium channels are things like Hot Songs, Global Top 100 and so forth. I tend to stick to Era or Genre. The Top 100 lists are filled with songs I don’t like…

You can also create playlists or, as mentioned, search for a particular artist/song. If you search for an artist you can pick an album or a song to listen to.

You can Like/Dislike songs, or add them to your collection. It’s not clear to me what this accomplishes, if anything. On the home page there’s a “You might like” recommendation engine but it shows songs that I’ve Disliked, and the selections change infrequently. I wish this bit was a lot better because I’m open to finding new artists.

Rdio, on the other hand, is heavily social. The idea is that you Follow people and then Rdio composes a play list based on “heavy rotation” of your songs, your network’s songs, or all of Rdio’s songs. This is awesome in theory but in practice…I don’t have anyone to follow with musical tastes similar to mine. I know lots of folk on Twitter but generally speaking they’re from a different generation, assuming any of them are on Rdio (only 1 or 2 are).

Rdio doesn’t have any pre-generated play lists other than the heavy rotation stuff, so if I’m busy I can’t just click a button and start listening to music; I need to stop and think about what I want to hear. (Hmm, I just found a button to create a ‘radio station’ based on an artist. Will have to check that out.)

Rdio also offers artist or song search with the added benefit of offering you some data about the artist or a review of an album or something along those lines. Album liner notes for the internet, I guess.

But Rdio works on my Droid, and in fact you can download songs to your phone (Android and iPhone, at the least, are supported…maybe others too) so you can save on bandwidth. There’s also an Air desktop application that’ll run on Windows or Mac, and as mentioned Rdio plays through the Roku.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to explicitly Like or Dislike a song on Rdio.

Cost of the two services is a wash, music libraries seem about the same. Both do play lists, both will read your existing desktop music collection to jumpstart your streaming collection (neither uploads songs, they just pluck titles out of their overall collection and add them to your personal collection).

What I really want is a service that will allow me to Like or Dislike songs and create recommendations based loosely on what I listen to, tempered by my explicit Likes and Dislikes. Which sounds suspiciously like Pandora, doesn’t it? But I also want to say, like I just did, “I want to listen to The Best of Herman’s Hermits” [wow were songs short back then!] and have just HH play, not songs similar in tonality or however Pandora does it.

Having the service on mobile devices is nice but not something I’d use very often. In the car I listen to podcasts, not music, and when I’m walking around I tend not to listen to anything. 99% of my music listeningis done in front of a computer or on the home stereo, so Music Unlimited on the PS3 or Rdio on the Roku are both really nice options.

Anyway…would welcome input. I know there are a lot of other services out there: is there something better/cheaper than these two?

Ah PAX 2011, I hardly knew ye and now you are gone… so sad.

We had a pretty short PAX day today, to be honest. The only panel we were really interested in was at 3 PM, but we had to be back home in time to pick up Lola from the Puppy Hotel by 6 and I was worried about cutting it so close (one good traffic snarl and she’d be stuck there for another night).

So we just wandered around the exhibit hall one last time. Angela made it a game to snag as much swag as possible today, so that was fun. I finally found Guild Wars 2 and watched some of that being played.

Overall seeing the “big games” at PAX wasn’t a huge deal for me. These games get so much coverage online, and I know I’m going to wind up playing them all anyway, so it’s nice to see them, get an idea of what they’re like, but I don’t hover much (plus those booths are always mega crowded).

I enjoy looking at all the rest. For instance I’m a huge hack & slash action-rpg fan so I’m stoked about LOTR: War in the North (developed by Snowblind Studios who are great at this kind of game, and published by WB) and Hunted: The Demon’s Forge by Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment (published by Bethesda).

FireFall still looks awesome but it’s a team-based shooter and sadly I don’t really do those. Unless they add bots.

Orcs Must Die from Robot Entertainment…think I mentioned this already…is a day 1 purchase. Oh and both Child of Eden and The Michael Jackson Experience may threaten us with actually using the Kinect. (CoE for both of us, MJE for Angela).

Anyway, we were pretty tired (hey PAX, next year don’t have the show on Daylight Savings Time weekend!) and anxious to get home so we left early. By the time I was unloading the car I was kinda wishing we were still there. Now I have post-PAX melancholy. It didn’t help that I opened the mailbox to find claim forms for my mother’s life insurance policy and emails in my inbox from family members about how we’re going to settle her estate.

Yeah, back to real life. In my head I was anxious to leave so I could come home and play games, but in practice I just came back to catching up. Oh well.

I did, in a moment of temporary insanity, buy a $250 set of headphones for my PS3. Set those up and wow do they sound great but..what was I thinking? They’re wireless RF for audio and bluetooth for voice, very comfortable and all that. But I tell you, a few days living in a conference environment and money starts to lose it’s value. (Two nights in the Westin Hotel, at their $179/night rate, managed to cost just about $500 once they added parking, internet, and a skillion taxes, and there’s nowhere near the center with cheap food, really.)

Oh well it’s once a year and now the “Pax credit card” goes in a drawer until next year, though I’ll be paying off the hotel and those silly headphones well into the summer!!

I’m already looking forward to next year, but between now and then I’m really looking forward to keeping in contact with all the folks I met via twitter and hopefully in-game.

PAX East 2011 gets a big thumbs up from us!

The sun came out in Boston this morning, both literally and figuratively.

All of my frustrations from yesterday kind of melted away. I found out that the lines I was bitching about yesterday were only really bad for 1 particular theater, and that was because the people running the convention center wouldn’t let the line stretch where the event planners had intended it (along an elevated section of hallway). So they had to really cram people in to make up for the lost space.

Other lines were long, but more relaxed. A good thing, though in the end I only went to one panel but it was a good one; a Q&A with a group of MMO big-wigs. At 1:30 in the morning I’m not even going to try to remember everyone’s name, but 38 Studios, Turbine, Trion, Bioware, ArenaNet and other MMO dev companies were represented. Most of the panel was Q&A and there were some pretty good questions and lots of good discussion among the panelists.

The show floor was *packed* today but having got over our travel-induced grumpiness, Angela (@g33kg0dd3ss) and I dove right in. We saw a lot of interesting games; I’m now looking forward to Dungeons from Calypso, Swarm from Hothead Games, Smuggler Truck (??) an iPhone game, Orcs Must Die from Robot Entertainment, DragonNest from Nexon, Faxion (the last two being free-to-play MMOs) and Slam Bolt Scrappers from Firehose Games.

Yeah, there were a lot of “big name” games there too but their booths were still a bit too crowded for me to deal with. Specifically I didn’t play SW:TOR or Guild Wars 2. But in the end that didn’t matter.

In the evening was our Tweet-up, Jazz (@girl_vs_mmo) was there. She’d had the chance to play Guild Wars 2 and had gone to a panel on it as well. I’m not a fan of Guild Wars and have been turning my nose up at Guild Wars 2… but after hearing all about it, now I want to play! Ditto SW:TOR… @MMOGC had a chance to play that one, and now I’m excited about it, too. I think it might be more fun to listen to friends talk about a game than it is to test it your self.

We left PAX at 6, freshened up a bit then went out for a quick meal which took forever… really the eateries around the convention center were over-whelmed this weekend. We got back to the Tweet-up location right at 9 to find the bar we’d planned to have it in packed. We had to improvise and I was fretting about how lame the whole thing was turning out, but then everyone pitched in, we grabbed tables and scoured the lobby for chairs and pretty soon there we sat, a dozen gamers, most of whom only knew each other previously from twitter or reading blogs, having a few drinks and yammering on about the show and games and Star Wars and Star Trek and Munchkin and on and on… I had a great time (and remember, I can’t stand people) and I hope others did as well.

List of attendees of our first PAX East tweet-up: @Scopique, @adarel, @sera_brennan, @kylehorner, @girl_vs_mmo, @MMOGC, @Hawkinsa1, @_jwgoodson & of course @g33kg0dd3ss, plus some spouses/relatives/friends who aren’t on twitter. Thanks again to all of you for making the effort to fit this little sojourn into your packed PAX schedules!!

OK the clock just sprang forward an hour… I better get to bed. We’ve still got another day to get through!

So I guess day 1 of PAX is over for me. I’m back in our hotel room, rolling around the idea of prowling the halls to see what late night PAX is like, but while the mind is willing the flesh is weak and the idea of putting my shoes back on…not appealing.

We didn’t get to do a lot today. We started late because we were watching coverage of the horrific earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Then it took longer than expected to get Lola into her DoggieHotel, and then we hit traffic on the way into Boston. We arrived about noon, just when the first panel I wanted to go to was starting (38 Studios showing off their new RPG).

Since it was too late to catch that, we grabbed some lunch at the temporary food court and then headed off to our next panel on dialog in gaming. The panel itself was ok, but I was disappointed that Emily Short didn’t make it. But I was more disappointed with the experience of the panel. The lines were awful last year but the show is in a much bigger venue this year. But it seems a much larger number of people came, and the lines, or at least that line, was awful once again. It isn’t the duration of them that bugs me, it’s the way they cram you together while you wait. They want the lines as compact as possible so they’re constantly urging you to move forward, and they stack the lines side by side. So I’m standing there with my nose in the hair of the person in front of me, and if the guy behind me gets an erection he’s going to have to buy me dinner, and I’m rubbing shoulders with the people on either side. It’s hot and claustrophobic and terribly uncomfortable and you’re gonna be standing like that for 30-60 minutes.

Last year, before they got the system dialed in, they’d just let you stand in line. People would just sit on the floor and play cards or video games or chat and it was fine. Towards the end of PAX East 10 they got the cramming system perfected and they rolled it out on day 1 of PAX East 11. Boo! I say!

We’d planned to go to another couple of panels today but I just couldn’t face that experience again. Instead we finished checking in (the hotel had stored our bags until 3 pm check in time) and got the laptops and stuff set up (internet: $12.95/day for the slow package) and then went for an early dinner in one of the pubs in the hotel (hamburger: $14)

Then we kicked around the exhibit hall for a while. I watched a lot of SW:TOR being played, peered over someone’s shoulders as they messed with a 3DS, snooped around Bethesda’s booth looking for new Skyrim info (nope, but lots of workstations running Brink and Hunted) and loitered around a few smaller or indie dev booths. Orcs Must Die looks real fun, and Slam Bolt Scrappers is pretty as hell but still confuses me.

I didn’t actually play anything. Waiting in line for half an hour to play a game demo for 15 minutes just isn’t me, really. I like to savor my first moments with a game and would rather just watch now and play when I have time to explore at my own speed.

PAX East 2011 Day 1 was feeling a bit melancholy. And then we hit the Rift party that Trion was throwing. Great shindig. Open bar, free buffet, hot apps being passed around by friendly waitstaff. And then we started meeting people. People we’ve only known from twitter & people we didn’t previously know and really should have. And we started talking about the show and the game and this and that and finally it clicked.

PAX isn’t about games. PAX is about gamers.

Now I can’t wait for tomorrow night’s TweetUp. Currently the plan is to meet at 9 pm at The City Bar which is right in the lobby of the Westin Waterfront. The City Bar itself is pretty small but essentially the entire Westin lobby is a bar of sorts, or at least it is this weekend. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding a spot to gather, have some drinks and put faces to names. We’re using the hash tag #paxeasttweetup11 or you can just follow me (@pasmith) or @Scopique and we’ll guide you to us.

If you’re at PAX East and have some time tomorrow evening, I hope you can stop by.

OK, it’s time to turn the tone of the blog around once again.

PAX East #2 starts on Friday and against all odds, we’re going. I’d all but written it off this year what with everything happening with my mom. Once she passed I thought funeral plans would conflict with PAX. Well, my brother suggested to me that rather than have a funeral, we’d wait until a bit later in the spring and have a memorial for her. A kind of celebration of her life, at her house…everyone together probably for the last time. Since my mom wanted to be cremated, and that actual process happened yesterday, there’s no time pressure for when we honor her. And this makes it easier on people who have to come from far away. She has a sister in the DC area, and one of my step-sisters lives down in Alabama and wants to drive up.

Anyway, long story short, nothing having to do with my mom’s death is going to conflict with PAX. At first I still wasn’t going to go because it didn’t seem ‘proper’ but then people told me I was being silly, and besides ‘losing myself’ in PAX for a few days seems like great therapy. So, plans were back on!

Then Monday I bent down to pet the dog…something I do probably 50 or more times every day because she’s so darned cute. But this time… *crunch* my back went out in a bad way. No idea why. (Stress maybe?) I shambled, bent over, to the bedroom and collapsed on the bed and there I lay for most of Monday. I could barely roll over on my own, the pain was so intense. So I wrote off going to PAX once again.

Luckily I had taken some days off from work anyway, and through lots of heat, muscle relaxers and anti-inflammatories and just laying there like a sack of meat for the remainder of Monday and all of Tuesday, I seem to have more or less cured myself. I’m still twingy and I’m worried about those long lines and sitting on the floor while waiting in them (I still don’t think I could manage to get down onto the floor or up off it) but we still have tonight and all of tomorrow.

So PAX is back on again!

As soon as I remember where I put the badges. /facepalm

They’ve got to be around here somewhere. And we’ve got hotel reservations at the Weston for Friday and Saturday nights, and doggie-hotel reservations for Lola (who is going to be spoiled to death I think…this place offers doggie ice-cream)!

I still haven’t had time to really look at the schedule but last year, when PAX East was smaller, the problem was more about what to give up rather than what to do, so I’m pretty confident we’ll find plenty to occupy our time.

Of course Saturday night at 9 is the PAX East Tweet-Up at MJ O’Connors. Assuming Irrational gets the heck out by 9 pm. We’re using hashtag #paxeasttweetup11 to communicate about that.

Next step for me, is to talk myself down from bringing every piece of hardware that can play a game with me. I really don’t need a laptop and iPad and PSP and Nintendo DS and Android phone to keep me occupied. In particular it’s hard to resist installing a boot-camped Windows partition on my work laptop and installing Rift on there. If last year is any indication by the time we get back to the hotel room at night we’ll have just enough energy to flop into bed, and Saturday and Sunday mornings will be about showering and getting back to the show floor ASAP.

I think I’ll just bring my iPad and phone and call it a day.

So one day back to work tomorrow and then Friday morning we’re off to PAX East! Woot!

So who else is gonna be there?

Note: Not a gaming related post.

My mom, who was born in 1928, didn’t even really understand what the internet is, yet it was the source of so many good thoughts and kind wishes directed her way.

Her struggle ended this morning at 10:20. Unfortunately she was alone at the time (or maybe she planned it that way) but the nurse on duty said it was very quiet, very peaceful. She just slipped away. Yesterday she was lucid, or at least semi-lucid, and insisting that we not hook her to any machines or take any further action to prolong her life. She was ready to go and just wished it would all be over. And now she has her wish and I’m refusing to look at this as bad news for her, even if it’s bad news for us. But we knew it was coming…

It’s always awkward knowing what to say in times like these, so I’m closing comments on this post. So many of you have already sent along prayers, vibes, good wishes and just a general wave of positive thoughts. I really appreciate them and I still have them; there’s no need to reiterate and they get me all choked up anyway.

So I’ll just say thank you one more time. You’ve all meant a lot.

Now I’m going to lose myself in virtual worlds for a while. The arrangements are such that we can still attend PAX and I’m looking forward to that escape/distraction.

Note: Not a game-related post.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about getting old and the ordeals my elderly mother is going through due to illness. It has obviously been a difficult and painful process for her, and it’s been a confusing, frustrating and sad process for the family. Since then I’ve sent a few updates via Twitter.

In response to the post and the tweets I’ve received a lot of support and advise from established blog readers, twitter friends and complete strangers. A lot of it has been carried out through private channels. People I really don’t know have contacted me and offered professional advice that has been very helpful. Other people have offered support and sympathy which has also been very helpful.

I’ve been moved more than I can say by these responses. You’ve renewed my faith in people, a faith that has really taken a beating over the years. Granted I generally lose faith over silly things, like trolling in MMO message boards, but I’d started to assume that was just how people are. But now I am reminded that when the topic turns serious people are inherently good.

For all the advice, support, positive vibes and restoring my faith in people, I thank you all.

Yesterday we put my mom on Roxinal, which is what they call an end-of-life tranquilizer. Its purpose is to take away her pain and distress during her last few days. On Thursday the hospital discharged her to the care center she’d been at since they couldn’t do anything for her the care center couldn’t do, and she’d be more comfortable there. Unfortunately we took that as a good sign, not understanding what they meant was that she was dying. Friday afternoon the nurse at the care center called to tell us she was in a very bad way. They could send her back to the hospital for “aggressive treatment” but the chances of a recovery were very slim. In the meanwhile my mom’s mental state had deteriorated to a point where she was terrified, not knowing where she was, crying and screaming in fear. Her physical state was continuing to deteriorate as well. My brother made the call to go with the Roxinal, supported by myself and my mom’s younger sister. The process my mom is going through is very similar to the process her mom went through and she made the same call in her mother’s case.

So now we wait. She isn’t on feeding tubes or anything of that nature (she always told us she didn’t want to be kept alive via machines) so I don’t expect it will take long. I can only hope that her end comes quickly, but if it doesn’t we at least know her fear and pain has ended.

PAX East is almost here and strangers from around the globe are looking for ways to meet up face to face.

If you’re a morning person, Sypster is arranging a Blogger’s Breakfast.

If you’re more into the evening bar scene, Scopique, Adarel and I are trying to pull together a casual bar gathering Tweet-up thing.

Either way, I hope to meet lots of my virtual friends at PAX!