Quiet Blog

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Quietness of the blog due to:
1) Haven’t come upon any gaming news worth talking about, though I’m hunting down some Priest info.
2) Shadowbane wrapping its tendrils around my brain. Which is actually blog worthy, since the big server patch Friday does seem to have helped the game. Must write that bit..
3) Helping out with an apartment remodelling has been sucking the energy out of me. I can barely get up out of a chair I’m so stiff
4) My grandmother passed away so been dealing with family stuff a lot

I haven’t forgotten Dragonchasers, though! I shall return!

The Dead Zone

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Have I rambled about The Dead Zone yet? If not, I’ve done this show a great disservice. It’s on USA on Sunday nights at 10 pm et, currently. USA has a pretty nice website for it complete with the kind of ‘extras’ you’d get on a DVD. Very cool concept.

The show itself is based on the Stephen King book of the same name. The first few episodes followed the book pretty closely, and then things diverged. The protagonist is a guy that was in a coma for 6 years, and when he comes out, he has visions of people’s past and futures. It’s a concept that they could easily go cheese with, but they don’t…they keep it rather understated, really. The episode I watched tonight, Zion, was a kind of “It’s a Wonderful Life” kind of treatment that actually followed the book more closely than the series has done. Kinda clever, showing us both paths this way. Another episode put the protagonist in a place where he felt he had to choose between the lives of two of his friends. The episode title was Playing God and, well, it didn’t turn out like it would’ve on most TV shows.

Really a first rate show, and sadly not widely watched, at least among people I know. Do yourself a favor and Tivo a couple of eps. It’ll take 2-3 to get a feel of who is who since you haven’t seen it from the start, but its time well spent, trust me.

Shadowbane

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Bane is right. This game is killing me. It’s driving my blood pressure through the roof and making me all around angry and irritable. Why? Because the damn thing is BROKEN, that’s why! The servers are so sluggish and laggy as to be unplayable!!

But a glimmer of hope…there’s supposed to be a big patch tomorrow to address lag and such. We’ll see. For now, here’s my pro’s and cons of Shadowbane: Continue reading “Shadowbane”

Board games making a comeback

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The New York Times has an article about the come back of boardgaming (The PC Generation, Back to the Board (free registration possibly required) with the 30-something set. Call me an old softy, but any article that mentions The Compleat Strategist gets my thumbs up. I remember riding the LIRR from East Hampton to Penn Station (~3 hours) just to go to TCS to check out the latest wargames.

My personal nostalgia aside, it’s a pleasant read for board game fans (or wannabes).

Read this and weep

Posted on by Nimgimli

David Rocci of isonews.com (here’s the original site and here’s a working copy) was convicting of 5 months in jail, 5 months home detention, 3 years probation and a $28,500 fine for selling mod chips for the XBox. He was found in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. (Read the full story here.)

It’s a sad day for freedom in the U.S. Essentially this fellow took a piece of circuit board, soldered on a few chips, and sold the resulting doohickey and now he’s in jail for it. Yes, I’m overly simplifying, but the fact is, he wasn’t arrested for copyright infringement or anything…just for making the device that allows end users to modify the hardware that they own. That’s just plain wrong.

Speaker For the Dead

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Anyway, like I was saying, last night I finished Speaker For the Dead by Orson Scott Card. This is the sequel, I guess, to Endor’s Game. I say “I guess” because its a very different kind of story and it takes place 3000 years after EG, although thanks to lots of realitivistic planet-hopping, Endor Wiggin is still alive.

This was another Fantastic Audio production, and I got it from Audible.com and listened to it off my iPod. I can’t say enough about how much Audible and my iPod have improved my daily commute. A whole raft of people were in on the narration, making it at times feel as much like a play as a novel. I’ve been very happy with all of Fantastic Audio’s material, and this was no exception. Well worth listening to.

As for the novel itself, well, I’m not very good at reviewing books beyond saying “Wow, I really liked this.” or “Do yourself a favor and stay away.” This was clearly a case of the former. It was a complete suprise to me, since I expected it to be much like Ender’s Game.On the surface, its about humanity encountering a second intelligent alien species (the first being the Buggers of EG). This time, we’re the more advanced civilization. At a deeper level, though, its about, well, the power of truth, I suppose.

These aren’t new books and I don’t know how I missed them for so long, but I sure am glad I found them now. I just picked up Xenocide and its going very near the top of my ‘to read’ stack.

Silence

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Been pretty quiet around here, eh? Well, that’ll end soon. I’ve got a few rants germinating in my head, and I’m over the initial learning curve hump in Shadowbane so I should have some time to do something other than work or research SB. I finished listening to the audiobook version of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker For the Dead and I’ve been thinking about that a lot, too. Thoughts are swirling around in my head but nothing’s quite coalesced yet.

Trouble afoot

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So this weekend I dropped AC2 and started playing Shadowbane. This could be trouble, because when Shadowbane is behaving, its really very fun. My only hope is that it will continue to misbehave, as it has been doing from time to time (slow drawing in of terrain and monsters, leading to sudden deaths). Otherwise…I’ll be back into the 12-step program for MMRPGs!

To balance things out a bit, I started playing Zelda: The Wind Waker, too. I’m embarassed to say I’m in the first ‘real’ area and already hopelessly lost. *blush*

Gladius (PS2, XBox, Cube)

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Got a peek at a bit of Gladius gameplay footage on this week’s G4TV.COM. Gladius is an RPG focusing on gladitorial combat in a fantasy world. Combat is turn-based, but when doing an attack, there’s a little rhythm game that seems like it determines how effective an attack you pull off. This isn’t exactly a new concept, but it seems to be taken further than it has before. There’s a meter with icons for which button to press, very similar to Parappa the Rappa or DDR. Could be interesting.

Gladius was shown at E3 last year, iirc, and is scheduled for an August release date.

Official site
Gamespy preview
IGN Hand’s on preview