June 2008

The Archives

• Hard At Work

  06.29.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  Despite appearances here, we’ve been hard at work on a new aspect to the site.  We’re gettin’ pretty close and are pretty excited about it.

  Otherwise, our priest/warlock duo in WoW just hit 53 tonight and we’re having a pretty good time just levelling in WoW again.  We’re on the server we’ve played on for a while so it’s nice to hang out with friends (both real and virtual), play some classes we haven’t played in a long time, and just generally destroy some monsters.

  Mara was also out of town for most of this week, so I putzed around in a few other places.  Played a little Team Fortress 2 which is always fun, finally got access to Heavy Assault Ships in EVE and bought my first Ishtar, and spent a little time in WoW.  While it was nice to have some of my own time, it really made me realize how much we do together and that’s it generally more fun when you’ve got someone to play with.

• New Name! New Domain! Same Lack of Content!

  06.14.08 | written by admin | Permalink | 3 Comments | General

  So, we’re now Gamers in Bed.  Got the domain, changed the blog, and we’ve got some plans.

  New URL (gamersinbed.com)should be DNS propogating over the next couple of days and hopefully this blog won’t be too broken while it’s transitioning (it might get broked if you visit the site).  I think all old links *should* still work but I’ll be putzing around and checking to make sure it all works.

  Keep an eye here for our new project that should be showing up relatively soon…

  PS - I may or may not go back through and change the text of the posts to have our real names.  We are doing away with our pseudonyms of Sally and Harry.  If you’re a first time reader and you go back in the archives, you should be able to figure it out.

• We Just Can’t Do EQ2

  06.11.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  So, Sally and I bought EQ2 over 2 years ago after we quit WoW the first time.  With the new Living Legacy promo going on, we decided to hop in and see what it looked like so many years later.  Patching and all that wasn’t too bad - we just let our clients download over night.  Character creation always takes us (read: Sally) some time, so we played around with that.  We went back and forth between good and evil, human-like chars or furry chars, and eventually settled on the evil fairies, because, c’mon: evil fairies.  So we logged in with visions of grandeur of toppling heroes and making lives for ourselves in Norrath.

  We quit about 5 minutes later.

  Now, we know EQ2 is a well-loved game by many.  We are just totally and absolutely unable to get past the UI and visual style.  And I mean totally.  We both logged in, ran around for a minute, picked up our first quest, killed a few monsters, went outside to take a break, and both agreed that we should immediately quit upon returning.  To us, almost everything about being in-game “feels” wrong.

  I actually have a lot of similar complaints about LotRO.  Things like floating names above NPCs, the style of the interface windows, the fonts used, and the size, shape, and design of the tooltips always bother me.  These games always tout the “immersion” factor as big selling points, but I find badly designed UIs one of the fastest ways to break immersion.  For me, immersion is more about not really thinking about the fact that I am playing a game so that I can just *play* the game.  Ornately decorated bag panels, floating names about NPCs that I don’t really care about, tooltip dialogs that are badly formatted and huge, and really ugly, badly rendered “fantasy” fonts all really put me off.

  We might be back to WoW… again.  We also briefly played with DDO and played a decent little bit of Mythos, so we’ll have more to say on that stuff.  For now, back to work.

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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• 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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