May 2008

The Archives

• Beyond Good & Evil 2 Teaser

  05.28.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  HD trailer here

  Sally and I loved BG&E.  I’m excited to see what they’re doing with the new one.

• How Rock Band saved my marriage

  05.27.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | Links

  Linky
  
  

• Character Surnames

  05.21.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | 1 Comment | General

  So, Sally and I have both totally missed the boat on games that allow you or require you to have character surnames.  Almost all the games we’ve played just have a single name for your avatar.  Guild Wars threw us for a loop and we sat there for about 30 minutes trying to come up with surnames for our characters, trying to figure out if we should use the same one, if the surname should be our “primary” name that all our characters user, or something else entirely.

  So, open topic, how do you use surnames for your characters?  Same surname across all alts to make it easy to identify yourself on any character?  Same first name?  Ignore the subject altogether?

• Guitar Hero 3 impressions

  05.21.08 | written by Mara | Permalink | 1 Comment | General

  Harry and I picked up GH3 a few days ago.  The packaged guitar that comes with Rock Band has always kind of irritated us, the strum bar is too squashy and neither of us are smart enough monkeys to have wrapped our brains around using the small fret buttons for solos.  Whether this guitar is actually “worse” than any others is certainly open to debate, but maybe because we learned on the old PS2 and Xbox controllers we don’t like it much.   It also isn’t backwards compatible to  GH2 and we’ve been having a hankering for doing some duoing guitars or guitar/bass on that.

  Long story short, the simplest solution to all of this was to go out and buy GH3.  We had contemplated just buying the guitar, but if you’re spending 70 for the guitar alone you might as well spend the extra few and get the game.

  It’s not exactly news that GH3 doesn’t live up to the rest of the genre, so I’ll try not to beat a (now year or so old) dead horse too much.  Suffice it to say that the opinion of the general populace from when GH3 came out is a pretty accurate in my experience.  There’s nothing particularly WRONG with it, but they implemented a number of features that just get in the way of what you want to do, which, in my case, is namely rock out to goofy songs I know and love (or, in a lot of cases, songs I know and loathe, but then grow a sinking, private joy for because they are just SO DAMN FUN to play) and very little else.  A key example of the game getting in way of the game is the ‘boss battle’ that you have to pass to open up higher levels.  I find them to be gimmicky and well, pretty absurd.  I am a ROCK STAR.  I play GUITAR.  This is not Free Style Hero, I am not doing a DJ battle.  Nor am I dueling banjos.  It’s an awkward fit.   That said, it’s not a horrible mini-game, but it got in the way of me playing the game I want to play.

  Last gripe is for whatever reason, I’m just not as good at internalizing the visual info of GH3.  I don’t know quite what it is, if it’s simply that it’s a busier display and it takes that one or to nanoseconds more for my brain to read the notes and communicate info to my hands, but I’m just not as good at it.  I miss stuff that I know I can play, patterns and rhythms that I know are totally do-able I just boff, and I do it over and over again.  It’s very odd, not to mention frustrating.  I started playing through the solo campaign on my own last night and ended up playing a couple of songs over a few times rather than progressing on because it just galled me that I only got 3 stars when I knew I was technically capable of acing the song.  I also find the other UI features harder to see and digest the meaning of at a quick glance.  This, certainly is partially just conditioning, my brain just doesn’t have a GH3 auto-pilot wired in to be able to glance around and digest the meaning of the things I’m seeing, but I also think they are (at least for me) less intuitive.

  All that said, it’s still fun to play a new batch of songs, and it’s nice to see how far I’ve come from a skill perspective.  When I stopped playing GH2 I had kind of plateaued out, I could do the first couple of songs on Hard, but not much beyond that.  I was really struggling with getting the fifth button in to my repertoire, and adding that along side the increased difficulty level was just too much.   Since Rock Band’s difficulty curve is much more forgiving, playing that let me sneak in the fifth button and work that out, and then advance the difficulty once I’d got some technique.  So, now that I’ve bumped myself comfortably in to Rock Band Expert guitar, it more or less equates to GH2/3 high end of hard, low end of expert.

  Back to the orriginal issue of the physical guitar controler, while it’s much, MUCH better than the Rock Band packaged guitar, I still prefer it less to the old GH2 guitar, I like the snappy buttons and the snappy strum bar.   The GH3 guitar’s strum bar is much better, as is it’s whammy bar in comparison to the Rock Band guitar.  I like it’s weight, and I of course love that it’s wireless, but in terms of tactile response I sill prefer the older one.  Harry, thank goodness prefers this one, so we no longer have to play the “no, I’LL be nicer” game with who’s using what controller.

  It would be extremely remiss of me to not mention the one very nice thing about GH3, which is that you can play the campaign through in multi-player mode.  Granted, one person has to be lead guitar and the other person is forced to be bass or rhythm, but you can swap up who plays what easily, and you can also play through at different difficulty levels.  We’ve both been annoyed recently at how many games require you to play as a solo player in order to unlock multi-player content, and mercifully, although GH3 trips and falls in to any number of murky pits, it avoids this one.

• Flotsam and Jetsam

  05.21.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | 3 Comments | General

  Been busy with new job and trying to get Sally a new job as well, blah blah blah we should write more.  We’re bad at keeping schedules, so it goes.

  MMO trials: I love trials that you can download.  I only recently learned that Guild Wars only has trial accounts available at retail stores for a couple of bucks.  We’ve been interested in GW for a while but never could find an online trial and never stumbled across the whole “buy a CD at a store” deal.  I believe WoW has the same kind of trial deal (aside from buddy codes and the like).  It’s annoying that this information isn’t clear on their websites, especially since the main websites are primarily there to get potential new players interested in the game.  We would have tried GW out a long time ago had we known that CDs were available.

  And on that note, Guild Wars: we’ve putzed around the trial for a few hours and have enjoyed what we’ve seen so far.  It’s far less MMO-y than the other stuff we’ve played and tried out, but that’s fine since we knew that going in.  To us, it’s far more visually appealing than a lot of the other more “realistic” fantasy games out there given that it’s more stylized and just a little more fun.  The avatar dances are amazing.  We may play this some more before our trial runs out, but we also got Guitar Hero 3 and might be playing around in WoW again a little bit more.  We shall see.

  On Avatar Gender: As I was making my first character in GW, I realized that I had just about no interest in playing any of the male avatars.  The female avatars are more interesting in just about every aspect - better clothes, better looks, more style, more attitude.  All of my recent character choices have been female and I find it funny and a little odd.  It’s not the “I want to check out their sweet ass” syndrome that I feel often gets attached to this kind of thing.  It’s just that the male avatars are so boring and stereotypical - almost all of the males in GW are either biggish muscly men or sort of weeny, effeminate dudes.  They all strike me as very douchy and none of them speak to me at all.  I’ve always disliked the human and elf races in most MMOs (WoW, LotRO, EQ2) and tended towards the more animalistic or “grungy” races (I do like the Undead in WoW, for example, mostly because they remind me more of the people I know and like, oddly enough - that’s not to say I know too many reincarnated dead, it’s more the hair styles and body types look like actual, fun people).  I’ve never felt “at home” in the prototypical male fantasy hero body/image - it’s not who I am nor is anyone or anything I want to be.  I suppose the only way I could get into that is if those avatars sort of went over the top and became like the huge, idiotic hero in the first Discworld book by Terry Pratchett.  I have no idea what this says about me, just interesting things to notice.

  I also have some thoughts on role playing stirred up by an episode of Witty Ranter that I need to write down at some point as well as a conversation Sally and I had on the relative merits of the UIs in Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3.  There’s more as well that’s totally disappeared from my brain.  Ah well.  If nothing else, a tiny update which feels like a huge achievement!

• Follow Up

  05.07.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  Figured out a better method to get the effect I wanted.  To get a decent glow/outline effect, I pretty much just wrote the same text in the shadow color 1 pixel in each direction away from the original text at a configurable opacity.  In addition, this doesn’t require using a separate image as a scratch area so I don’t have to overlay the temporary image back onto the original canvas (which I’ll actually get around to fixing tomorrow).  This results in a pretty decent outlined/shadowed text and I’m much happier.

  In other news more related to this site, it’s still been pretty busy around.  I’ve been working and getting the new car registered, inspected, and whatnot which has taken quite a bit of time.  We continue rocking out hard to Rock Band and have been playing a little bit of WoW getting our mages up over 30.  Oh, and GTA IV.  Which is good though sadly has little ability to be played as a duo on the same Xbox (excepting the backseat driver approach which is somewhat satisfying).

  Not much else to report at this time.  We’re still trying to figure out how to translate the conversations we have about gaming together and gaming in general onto the site in a way that’s interesting for you and us.  As of yet we have no magic solutions.  But we’ll keep working on it!  Because all 3 of you deserve better.

• PHP/GD Can Go DIAF

  05.07.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | 1 Comment | General

  That’s a little harsh.  Really, trying to get nice Photoshop-like text effects using GD can go die in a fire.  I’m having some major issues with using filters/convolutions and retaining alpha channel information.  All the built-in PHP functions basically don’t pay attention to alpha at all, so I lose a lot of information and stuff gets all wonky when I actually use the effects and then overlay the layer back onto the original image.

  Blech.

  Just wanted to vent.  I’ll have more later.

Gamers in Bed

Gamers that play together, stay together

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

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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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