Game freeze

Posted on by Nimgimli

Has this ever happened to you?

You’ve had a long week with little to no free time, and you can’t indulge in your favorite hobby. Sometimes the only thing that gets you through the day is thinking about all the fun you’re going to have when you finally get some time.

And then you break through and find yourself standing in an open field of gaming potential, the sun streaming down around you, birds singing, a soft breeze caressing your face, and games, Games, GAMES beckoning to you from every direction. All you need do is pick one to play.

And you can’t. Instead you spin in place, looking from one to the other. Thinking about how much time you have before the work comes crashing back in, and how precious this time is, so you’d best use it wisely. Thinking Game A is great but if I play it now and can’t get back to in until next weekend, I’ll never remember what I was doing. And Game B works as a short term game, but I’ve already played it and I want something new. Game C is supposed to be fun, but I need to download and patch it and that wastes my precious time. Game D is great in multiplayer but by the time I find a good group to play with, my time will be over. And so on and so forth, and in the back of your mind you know that none of these ‘excuses’ is really all that legit — the real problem is, you have Game Freeze, the gamer’s equivalent to Writer’s Block!

Game Freeze is a very real disease the affects over 2 million gamers in the US alone. Most Game Freeze victims suffer alone, not seeing the disease for what it is. This is why we’ve formed Game Freeze Alliance Worldwide (GFAW), a non-profit institution devoted to researching a cure for Game Freeze as well as reaching out to those afflicted with the disease in order to bring them the tools they need to live with the disease.

If you, or someone you know, suffers from Game Freeze, contact GFAW today about getting a FREE Combat Game Freeze Kit, which includes a helpful 16 page pamphlet outlining the progressive steps of the ailment and how to recognize them, as well as the official Game Freeze hat, made of 100% recycled tweed, a year’s supply of slips of paper, and a GFAW ball-point pen, ideal for writing the names of games on the slips. This FREE kit is available now for $99.99; a small price to pay in order to ease your suffering. All proceeds go to furthering the search for a Game Freeze cure. So call today!!

Ever thought of trying EQ2?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Now could be a good time, because Sony has introduced a new “Invite a Friend” feature that can get you lots of bonus exp, and a cloak that gives you +25% run speed, and a lot of other goodies.

And why am I telling you this? Do I want to recruit you? Nope, I’m not playing. But Angela (my lady) is, and she’s looking for recruits! She’d be a great one to get this offer from, because she plays *all the time* and is extremely well versed in the game. She’s also running a level 50+ guild, which (if you join in — that’s optional) gets you all kinds of perks.

Check out her blog for details.

Moonlighting

Posted on by Nimgimli

A few people have asked, here and elsewhere, what this new freelance gig is, and I realize I was being unintentionally mysterious about it. Basically I wanted to get a couple of posts done before I shared much, just in case I totally botched something and made a fool of myself (which is bound to happen sooner or later).

The site is ITWorld.com. The ‘beat’ is pretty open…anything related to IT or tech that I feel comfortable writing about. My goal is 1-2 posts a day, and they know I have a 9-5er, so the expectation is (I hope!) pretty modest as far as length and so forth.

I think I said I was blogging, and I initially thought I was going to be, but that’s not really how the site is organized. Which kind of opens up a whole question of “What is a blog?” To me, a blog is a blog because of the organization of the posts as much as because of the content of those posts. Your definition may vary. But I feel like I’m writing blog posts, but not for a blog. Confused yet? LOL

You can, however, easily find all my posts here. Though I’m not sure they’ll be very interesting to most of my Dragonchasers readers.

Why I <3 my PSP

Posted on by Nimgimli

Let’s face it, the Sony PSP doesn’t get a lot of love out there in the blogosphere. And there are excellent reasons for this: game selection is fairly thin, having only one analog stick makes for some wonky controls, battery life could be better and it really isn’t quite as portable as a handheld should be.

But I still love mine. I just forget that I love it for long periods of time. Then I fire it up and swoon all over again. I forget how awesome the screen is, how light it is (mine is a PSP-2000) and how many cool things it can do besides play games. But most of all, I forget about its Suspend function.

As I mentioned in my last post, gaming time during the week has become very rare. Last night, it was after 11:30 by the time I felt like I’d done “enough” and could do some gaming. So already it was really past my reasonable bedtime, but the itch to game was strong. I figured I could play for 15 minutes and get away with it. That totally ruled out any MMO, of course. And for that matter, anything on the PS3 or 360. By the time I turned everything on and got settled, it’d be time to quit. Nothing I had on the PC really was fine-grained enough to offer 15 minutes of satisfying gameplay.

Then I remembered the PSP. And it isn’t that the games on it are satisfying in 15 minute chunks either, but it’s the fact that I can just hit the Suspend button at any point, and come back to it later, pretty much instantly. So I restarted Final Fantasy: Crisis Core based on the fact that a Twitter pal had just finished and really enjoyed it, plus I’d recently read an interesting article (Opinion: Crisis Core’s Quiet Redefining Of The Gameplay Narrative Divide) about it at Gamasutra.

I didn’t get very far before my 15 minutes were up; the opening FMV intro and the first training battle. And then, right in the middle of a dialog, I hit Suspend. And I know tonight if I have 15 minutes to play games, I’ll spend 14:40 of it actually playing the game, since it’ll take no more than 10 seconds to unsuspend and resuspend the title. Getting in and out of a suspended game is faster, even, than loading and saving a DS game (though granted, that’s pretty fast too, and I also love my DS).

I realize that to some extent, lauding the Suspend function of the PSP is damning with faint praise. But so be it. Last night, I was *really* happy that I’d invested in the PSP. And I suspect I will be again tonight.

Dragonchasers slows down even more…

Posted on by Nimgimli

I realize my posting has been getting pretty infrequent here at Dragonchasers. Sadly, it’s going to become even more so. As of today, I’m writing for ITworld.com, and I’m committed to a post a day for those good folks, which is going to leave even less time for personal blogging (and for that matter, less time for gaming).

For me personally, this is great news. My writing has been getting sloppier and sloppier over the past several years since I have no one to answer to. Now I have to start disciplining myself and sharpening up my skills again. And of course, the money never hurts!!

Hopefully people will still have room in their RSS feeds for those days when I can squeak out a DC post (or on weekends). Adding to the weird scheduling is my full-time job. I think I may have mentioned here that we had some layoffs in December, and at the same time all the survivors had their pay & hours cut by 10%. I opted to work 4×9 hour days, so Monday-Thursday I’m getting home pretty late. An extra hour doesn’t sound like much but it really has impacted my schedule quite a bit. So most of my gaming and consequently, personal blogging time is happening Friday-Sunday these days.

As always, thanks so much for reading Dragonchasers!

Koster, pinball & the weekend wrap-up

Posted on by Nimgimli

I spend an interesting hour+ this evening watching Raph Koster’s Keynote from the Living Game Worlds 2008 Symposium. Direct link to the video is here, but get comfortable because it does run 85 minutes or so (I’m so glad the PS3 has a robust enough web browser that I can watch stuff like this on it). He has a lot to stay about changes in the industry of virtual worlds and MMOs, and what was pretty interesting was that at the end, someone called him on his apparent pessimism, which was good because it gave him a chance to clarify that he didn’t really feel pessimistic about the future of virtual worlds.

I dunno, he sounded kind of — I wouldn’t even say pessimistic so much as dismissive — towards a lot of products that bring great joy to millions of people. But of course bloggers tend to be just as dismissive, so maybe that’s just part of the critical thinking and future speculation process. We almost have to knock the current products or else why think about changes. Maybe? Anyway, it was definitely an interesting talk and worth listening to. There are slides but you won’t miss a lot if you just listen.

As for me, this is the second weekend in a row where I spent more time reading and playing with guinea pigs than I did gaming. I get into these gaming slumps from time to time. I’m still struggling with feeding that urge to create rather than consume.

I did jump into Warhammer a couple of times, playing it as a pure PvE game. Got my Witchhunter to level 20. I picked Warhammer mostly because it’s still active for a few more weeks more than due to a burning desire to play it. Use it before I lose it and all that. Now that I’m using two pairings to level, it’s a much better PvE game (than when I tried to stick to one pairing) but it still isn’t $15/month good for me.

I also wandered around Middle Earth a bit, played some Valkyria Chronicles, and, laugh if you will, but I played that freebie Amazon casual game BuildALot for a long time. 🙂

Oh, and after reading an article about Bill Budge and Pinball Construction Set, someone linked in the comments to Future Pinball. This is a modern version of a Pinball Construction Set, totally free (though donations are accepted) and while I didn’t get around to trying to build anything yet, I did download some pretty amazing tables. Here’s a video of one of ’em in action (I picked this video because it best showed off the system, but this particular table is a bit seedy in theme.)

SW:TOR Dev Diary

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m going to admit to being a blasphemer in the geek world…I’m not really that huge of a Star Wars fan. And blaspheme number 2…I’m not a big Bioware fan, either. I didn’t think much of KOTOR, never finished a Baldur’s Gate (except that action-rpg variant), haven’t played Mass Effect yet.

So all the fuss about Star Wars: The Old Republic has kind of washed over me. Until tonight when I sat down and watched this “Developer Dispatch”:
(I can’t figure a way to turn off the autoplay on Bioware’s player, so I’m putting the rest of this post after a More link)
Continue reading “SW:TOR Dev Diary”

A Life at Work (Book Review)

Posted on by Nimgimli
A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do
Rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do by Thomas Moore

This wasn’t the book I was looking for. That’s not the book’s fault, really, but it was a disappointment to me because it wasn’t what I was expecting.

Before I dive into the review, I have to do a bit of soul-baring. I have a decent job, and honestly in this economic climate, I’m grateful for that. I know plenty of people who don’t. But even though its a good job, I don’t love it, and I don’t make enough money to feel economically secure. I live paycheck to paycheck and that makes me really nervous. I have this fantasy where I’ll find a job that a) I look forward to going to or b) pays well enough that I have left over income to put towards making my life secure, or ideally, c) both.

So back to the review. This isn’t the book I was looking for. I was expecting a self-help book that would give me tools to try to decide what the “right” job for me would be. To find a job that I would genuinely enjoy doing, and that would support my lifestyle. Instead, this is more a spiritual book that uses Alchemy as an analogy for life and work. In the same way Alchemists gathered all kinds of materials and distilled them down (according to the author) during our lives we gather all kinds of experiences and distill them down until we find our purpose. And in fact, this is a book about “work” rather than “jobs” — the author suggests your life work might have nothing to do with that place you spend 8+ hours every day.

[Snarky aside: We know that most alchemists were charlatans. Not a metaphor I would use to inspire confidence in a reader.]

If the author ever gives us concrete tools to help us determine what we were “born” to do, I missed them. Which is possible because my mind kept wandering as I was reading. I did keep reading, though, because its such a seductive idea, isn’t it? Close your eyes and picture yourself springing out of bed every morning, eager to go to work and make a difference in the world, free of worrying about whether you’re going to be able to make the rent this month.

Had my head been in a different place I might have appreciated it more, and I’m going to keep it on my shelf in case I want to give it another read at another time, but at this point in my life, when I’m not thrilled with my job, not making enough money, and looking for concrete, pragmatic help, this just felt like a touchy-feely book for people who have more freedom to do as they please than I do.

View all my reviews.

* * *

Note: I joined GoodReads the other day. This is an expanded version of the review I wrote over there, and I’m tweaking their “export to blog” format for use here. I’ve dropped the Amazon.com link (no one, as far as I can tell, has ever clicked on one of them, and Google penalizes the page ranking for Dragonchasers because of them) in favor of a GoodReads link that’ll give you quick access to reviews from other people.

I’m always looking for new friends on social networks, so if you’re on GoodReads, send me a friend request!

Big worlds (EQ2)

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m sitting here doing my thing, and Angela is doing hers. Of course, her thing on a lazy Saturday is EQ2. And I hear her say “Hmm, I’ve never been here before.”

It took a few moments for that to sink it. She just went somewhere she has never been.

Now, this girl is a walking, talking EQ2 encyclopedia. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve asked her where to find something in EQ2 and she’s not been able to answer without a second thought. She’s been playing the game since it launched, and she plays a LOT. It is rare indeed that a day goes by without her logging in.  The /played on her main character is over 160 days. Think about that. That’s 3,840 hours spent playing that character. (Frightening, no?) And she has 12 characters, about 5 of which she plays very regularly.

Point being, she spends an incredible amount of time exploring the world.

And she’s still discovering places she hasn’t been to.

I just think that’s pretty astounding. Now granted, Sony keeps putting out expansions and new content, but still… I just find it really cool that a virtual world can be so expansive. The Explorer in me rejoices.

That is all. No real point. Just a ‘celebration of gaming’ post. 🙂