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February 2008

The Archives

• EVE Alliance Tournament Live Stream

  02.29.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | Links

  Linky
  

  For any EVE nerds out there, the alliance tournament is going on right now.  Check out the live video coverage of the tournament.

• On Rock Band and Competition

  02.28.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | 2 Comments | General

  I’ve had the itch to play some more Rock Band recently, and so I’ve been harassing Sally to play me.  She’s been attacking lead guitar on hard and I vacillate between medium and hard on the drums.  Limb independence cannot be learned in a night it seems.  Sally doesn’t quite share my unquenchable desire for Rock Band, but we’ve been getting in a dozen or so songs a night.  Also, my foot gets tired.

  Rock Band is pretty fun as a duo.  I mean, the game itself is still simple and brilliant, and the ability to save your partner should they fall is fantastic.  It allows one to play on a higher difficulty level than normal if one person is confident they can manage theirs, you get the fun of both achieving the high score on a song, and you can just jam out together.  The only shortcoming from our perspective is that there really isn’t a ton of interaction with each other while playing.  Sure, we get the feeling of rocking out together and being a band and we don’t have to trade the guitar and just watch every other song (we never had 2 guitars for GH2), but it’s only fulfilling for so long at a time.

  So, it’s great fun, especially when our roommates get involved or we have some more folks over.  Although, I’m sad to say that most of our friends are a little skittish of the microphone.  We need to make some new friends in the hope that we’ll find a natural singer.

  There is another “issue” with Rock Band that we have, and it’s one that exists for a lot of other co-op games.   I tend to just be able to “get it” faster than Sally and this gets her somewhat frustrated.  This is another one of those nice things that was never a huge problem in WoW since we’ve almost always played a DPS/support combo - there’s no obvious comparison of skill in a duo like that.  TF2, while fun, also puts us in a similar boat.  When we are on the same team we do obviously work together for the team, but we’re also both scored on how well we’re doing.  I’ve been playing FPSes for a long time now so I generally do pretty well.  In Rock Band, the fact that I play on expert guitar and bass and am working on hard drums.  Anyway, what I’m getting at is that Sally is quite competitive and any quantification of our skills can make her grumpy if I’m too far ahead, so we get a little bit of that from Rock Band.  It’s certainly not a deal breaker, just something that holds Rock Band back a little bit for us.

  Quick Explication: If you haven’t played multiplayer Rock Band, a note about playing as a co-op group.  When multiple people are playing, anyone who uses their overdrive energy (aka Star Power in the Guitar Hero series) will help boost everyone else’s performance.  So if someone is having a problem and you have have enough energy to go into overdrive, you can do so and hopefully get them away from failing out of the song.  If a person does drop out by missing too many notes, you can use overdrive to “revive” them and get them back in, up to 3 times per player.  The vocalist and drummer don’t have quite so much control over when they can use overdrive, so they usually just use it when they have it to boost everyone and increase the score multiplier.  Lead guitar and bassists can use it any time it’s available, so you can choose to boost a failing player or wait for them to fail and then revive them.

• Epic Dolls

  02.28.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | Links

  Linky
  

  Women-run blog and podcast about WoW.

• Women & MMOs Panel on Witty Ranter Podcast

  02.28.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | Links

  Linky
  

  Roundtable discussion of gender issues by an all woman panel on witty ranter.  Worth a listen.

• New Domain

  02.27.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | Administrativa

  Went ahead and registered a new domain and set it all up, or so I hope.  All old URLs should still work and just redirect to the correct page on the new domain.  Let me know if you run into any problems.

• Laptop sleeves!

  02.27.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment | Links

  Linky
  

  Of insane monster cuteness. Lookit! It has a mouth! I’m so easily amused.

• existential crisis

  02.27.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | 2 Comments | General

  Harry posted the useful facts one post down. Read that for context.

  Today on IRC:

  seth> The Official Answer: Get whatever you feel like getting.  Like, seriously, FEEL like getting.
  mara> but I feel like both 
  mara> and I’m not sure which gives me more street cred
  mara> like, MBP:  urban, hip, in-the-know with the art kids
  mara> gaming rig:  nerdy, nerd-girl sex appeal, PC hardcore factors
  dave> MB: cute cooking bloggers
  dave> WHO DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH, MARA?
  mara> BOTH
  mara> I STRADDLE TWO WORLDS
  dave> the MB+G gives you cute *and* hardcore
  dave> but not artsy
  mara> and less sexymara> well, kinda.  I”m still hot to the nerds
  dave> MBP is artsy hardcore, but not gaming hardcore
  dave> and it is not cute
  mara> you know, this really is the crux of the issue.  it’s totally an identity crisis.
  seth> hehe
  dave> it really is

• Conundrum

  02.27.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  Apple has finally announced/released their new speed-bumped MacBooks and MacBook Pros.  We’ve been waiting for this for a while now since Sally’s laptop died shortly before our move and we didn’t have funds at the time to replace it.  We’ve budgeted for a MacBook Pro for a while now and wanted to make sure we were getting one when it was relatively new, so now is the time to buy.

  Here’s the issue we recently came up with, and it has surprised and confounded both of us.

  MacBook Pro (MPB) OR MacBook and a gaming PC (MB+G)?

  It’d come out to about the same price in the end.  MBP allows for a certain amount of mobile gaming, MB+G does not.  MB+G is more sustainable for gaming in the long run.  Right now, MBP and a gaming PC would be of similar power (probably an edge to the gaming PC) but MBP would not hold up in a couple of years for gaming, probably.  MBP is sexier, MB is cuter, gaming PC is more hardcore.

  There’s a number of issues going on here and we’re trying to sort them all out without much success at the moment.  If you have any thoughts, please do share.

• Co-Optimus

  02.26.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | Links

  Linky
  

  New site focused on co-op gaming. Worth keeping an eye on.

• Zack and Wiki

  02.26.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | Comment | General

  I’m thinking about making us get the absurdly named Zack and Wiki: Search for Barbaros’ Treasure for the Wii. It’s the fifth highest rated game on Metacritic and rumor has it that it’s good problem solving puzzly fun for two people without being too easy. Although I worry about it being too silly. Because we live in middle of a Big City, it makes perfect sense that we have exactly NO STORES from which to rent this game from within easy striking distance. Grrrrr. So we’re looking at buying it. Does anyone have any experience with it? Would you recommend it or not for any particular reason? My gut feeling is that it probably doesn’t have a lot of replay value and really should be a renter over a buyer, but unless dissuaded I might have my heart set on it enough to order it from somewhere.

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Gamers in Bed

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Dave and Mara share their experiences and thoughts about gaming as a couple.

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• About

omglinkblog

Jul 18, 2008
•  » das tweets :: my twitter feed, if anyone doth care -Dave
May 27, 2008
•  » How Rock Band saved my marriage :: -Dave
Mar 12, 2008
•  » Gamers With Jobs Podcast with a couple guys from Turbine :: Really interesting podcast with two developers from Turbine talking about LotRO and more stuff.  This podcast is always good, but the guys from Turbine are really, really good in this one. -Dave
Mar 7, 2008
•  » I’m that asshole… ::  ...who's giggling out loud in a quiet room full of cubes at work.  Finally got around to watching Jonathan Coulton performing "Still Alive" in Rock Band.  Awww, they tried so hard. -Mara
Mar 4, 2008
•  » Walk, Don’t Run :: Escapist article on Grim Fandango, one of the best adventure games ever made. -Dave
•  » Fighting with Monsters :: Escapist article on Beyond Good & Evil, one of our favorites we've played in the last few years.  Article contains some spoilers about the plot of the game. -Dave
Mar 1, 2008
•  » Ms. Constance :: The incredibly hip, ultra hot, super savvy Constance Steinkuehler. She's a prof. at the U of Madison and is doing really interesting research on gaming and culture and community. I want to be this woman. She heads the conference linked in the next post down. -Mara
•  » You should go… :: to this awesome conference. I went two summers ago and it was seriously one of the coolest things I've ever done. Take game devs, community developers and academics all in one space and get them jabbering about why games are not only neat but what they can be used to do for society. Awesome stuff. -Mara
Feb 29, 2008
•  » EVE Alliance Tournament Live Stream :: For any EVE nerds out there, the alliance tournament is going on right now.  Check out the live video coverage of the tournament. -Dave
Feb 28, 2008
•  » Epic Dolls :: Women-run blog and podcast about WoW. -Dave

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