October 2008

The Archives

• Early Warhammer Impressions

  10.08.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  So we ran out and grabbed Warhammer a couple nights ago.  We’ve only put in a handful of hours, but here are a couple of very early impressions centered around the way Mara and I have been playing together:

  The Class, Race, and Gender Bugaboo: I’ll let Mara expand on this, but the core annoyance is that she can’t be a female Squig Herder.  In addition, most of the women avatars are not very appealing to her (either super thin, scary, tiny-armored hussies or dwarves.  Not much in between).

  XP Drift: This may be because we are new to the game and haven’t figured out the best way to stay together like we have in other games, but PvP seems to skew our XP far more than in, say, WoW.  Even though we’ve been playing together in a group for our 6ish hours, I’ve managed to get ahead by several tenths of a level.  This is a minor annoyance and one we’ll probably be able to get a handle on given some time in the game.

  Kinda Crappy on our Older Machines: We have 2 year old budget machines with decent video cards that are at or slightly above the minimum requirements.  We were expecting poor performance and/or needing to run on lower settings, but even on the lowest graphics settings, we get very, very choppy performance.  This could be due to our CPU being very close to the minimum requirement and WAR being a CPU heavy game - we have plenty of RAM and our video cards should be doing fine.  This is something we’ve been looking to address anyway, so we’ll see.

  Questing is Good: So far, questing is really fun and easy as a duo.  Objectives are clearly marked, quest items are automatically picked up, and public quests are fun and easy to do as a duo.  We miss some of our WoW mods that track both of our objectives and announce to each other when quests are complete, but hopefully these are possible with WAR mods (haven’t really looked into it yet).

  Crafting: We haven’t quite figured out what to do with crafting yet.  From what we can tell, each crafting profession requries materials from two gathering skills.  We will probably end up having me take Salvaging so I can provide Mara with the fragments she needs to makes talismans leaving me with a semi-worthless crafting slot (unless I want to buy all my mats which I really don’t).  Also, OMG bag space issues.

  So far, we’re having fun.  Although we also got our pre-ordered copy of World of Goo last night and the hour of playing that may have been more fun than our first few hours in Warhammer.  It could be because Goo is awesome.

• Anonymous Asynchronous Cooperative Competition (AACC)

  10.03.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  So, last night we stumbled upon something really quite compelling.  See the title for the full expansion of AACC.

  So, Rock Band 2 has the gameplay mode Battle of the Bands.  These are generally relatively simple little setlists with some constraints (e.g. play these 3 songs, you must have a guitarist, the battle is ranked by your score).  The contests are up for anywhere from a day to a week and you can play them over and over again, trying to beat your best score (though your last attempt is always the one used in the leaderboards).  When you start the competition and while you are playing, you see the score of the next highest band (I know some XBox Live Arcade games use a similar mechanic).  Pretty simple overall.

  It’s incredibly fun and very addictive.  It also handles a lot of issues that we run into when playing together: not wanting to compete against other people (don’t want to be bad at the game, don’t want to deal with people in our little world of two), being able to play cooperatively and having that cooperation make us better than playing on our own, and having an objective that is achievable (competing against the next best score, not the highest score).  We can also play on our time since we’re really only competing against the scoreboard, and not some live people on the other side.

  Last night we played one battle about half a dozen times (the Shooting Star battle, I believe).  Each time, we got slightly better at the song, went up in the rankings, and just had a blast.  In many ways, we were just competing against ourselves, but you get the illusion of competing against another band while in the song and you get the real overall competition of everyone playing that battle.

  Highly recommended, lots of fun.  We’ll talk more about this concept in the future, I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.

• Engaged, Etc

  10.02.08 | written by Dave | Permalink | Comment | General

  So we’re (finally) engaged.  I popped the question about a month ago and Mara said yes.  Might still need to get a ring for her (and one for myself as well to buck some trends), but the fact that intent is stated is the most important aspect of it all.

  Been super busy - our roommates finally got married at a gorgeous weekend in Montana, big project at work has been sucking up all my time, and the final planning for the wedding was taking up an inordinate amount of Mara’s time.  So we haven’t been up to much of anything relevant for this site.  Though we do keep thinking about it and trying to come up some plans and steps to actually get something done.

  Not sure if we’re going to hop into Warhammer before the new WoW expansion due to both time constraints and Mara’s aged computer.  We’re interested in hopping in pretty early in the game but it’s looking like we may not play WAR until later on, sadly.

  Rock Band 2 is awesome, however.   The new drums are an order of magnitude better than the first kit, the game interface is tighter, the music is very, very fun.  I’m on board with just about everything positive that’s been said about the game everywhere else.  One of the things I’ve noticed that I haven’t seen much commenting on is that Harmonix really keeps the song charting fresh - I’ve been playing on expert drums and they keep throwing new patterns and ideas at me.  The game seems so simple and I have a hard time imagining what else they can fit into 4 drum pads and a bass pedal, but they keep surprising me and making me learn new patterns with the new songs and new downloadable content.  Overall, super awesome.  We do need a new guitar/bass, so we’re trying to figure out if we spring for the new RB2 guitar or bass, get a second wireless Guitar Hero 3 guitar, or wait to try out the Guitar Hero: World Tour guitars - in general, we both like the guitars made by Red Octane for the Guitar Hero franchise, but we have been hearing a lot of good things about the new Rock Band 2 guitar, so we may give it a shot.  I think it often comes down to personal preference, so we’re hoping to get a chance to play around a display kit at a Best Buy or somewhere at some point.

  Also, things are maybe looking like they may slow down a little bit in our lives, so we’re tentatively and cautiously approaching the idea of a podcast again (oh noes I spilled the beans on our project).  I think it’s best if we sneak around the peripheral vision of the podcast so it doesn’t see us and run away like it did last time, so that’s all I’ll say for now.

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

recent

• Fallout 3, oh the agony
• Early Warhammer Impressions
• Anonymous Asynchronous Cooperative Competition (AACC)
• Engaged, Etc
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