HD trailer here

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

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

One of the things which I think Harry and I had hoped would become self-evident on this blog, but which we have yet to figure out how to really do,  is sharing the reason that we really like gaming together. Which, quite simply, is the hours upon hours of chattering about games when we aren’t playing them.  In fact, I think for the two of us, often our time in-game is simply a vehicle for doing what we *really* like to do, which is talk and theory craft about them outside of game.   When we were helping run a guild and lead raids in WoW, that itself was fun but the actual enjoyment was the late night coffee runs with our laptops, sitting somewhere and devising loot rules, raid strategies, bitching about guild drama etc.  We could do this forever.  We really never get tired of it.    When we were driving our car back this last weekend from Madison we were listening to some Terry Pratchett on audiobook.  This inspired a three hour long thought excercise on our favorite idea yet:  World of Diskworld.  The Munchkin of MMOs.  It doesn’t matter that in the end no one is ever going to care what we have to say on a Diskworld MMO, it’s just great fun thinking about it.  And, even without knowing a lot about actual game development (limitations of technologies, marketing decisions, etc) it helps us think through the games we play, what we like about them, what we don’t, what we wish we could do in them and what the consequences of those game play choices might be.

We have a bad habit of going to bed late, already running on a sleep deficit and then blabbing for two hours every night about this and that, usually game thoughts.  The complexity of systems in MMOs gives us an almost unlimited amount of material to chew on, we both really like learning and perfecting the systems, everything from how to maximize DPS to pondering the social landscape.

Where we’re so far failing in this writing endeavor is figuring out how to take the inventiveness and spontaneity of those conversations and get that in to this blog.   We have a hard time figuring out how to have this space be a documentation, or an extension of our late-night gab fests, re-writing them feels redundant, and we always lose some of the depth that was present the first go-round.  We really want to capture the back-and-forth nature of our conversations, how we play off of each other’s ideas and take conversations in directions that are surprising and interesting (at least to us).

But, all of this said, I think we’re going to stick with this blog for a while.  I think, with enough time we can figure out how we want to use it so that it both provides something to the two of us and is hopefully interesting to others as well.   That probably means that the writing here is going to be awkward, unfocused and spotty at best for a while.  But hang in there with us.  We think we’re pretty neat.

Soon to come:

Our thoughts on World of Diskworld!

My senior paper!  And the dizzying prospect of going back to school!

Raiding!  Will we get back in to it?  Only time will tell!  Stay tuned…

We’re bad bloggers. We get all wrapped up in our little lives and forget about you, our public.

So, as seems to be Harry’s and my pattern, we give up WoW to search for greener pastures only to spend 6 months bored and disconsolate until, with heads hanging low, we crawl back to the sweet embrace of Azeroth.

We really, really tried to like LotRO, and, objectively speaking, it’s a great game. But it’s not quite our cup of tea, just not quite. The visual style doesn’t quite do it for us, and while we both like Tolkien it’s not our #1 most captivating imaginary world, and, in some ways, using the world of Tolkien keeps some visual, plot and game play choices fairly rigid. And, honestly, we’re min/maxers. We like mechanics, we like efficiency, we like information and lots of it. WoW gives us these things in spades whereas LotRO is much more about socialization, collecting, experiencing. It’s not bad, it’s different, but it doesn’t quite fill our particular OCD hole. I don’t want to put words in our roommate’s mouths, but they really enjoy LotRO and I think it’s because J like collections of any kind and T is often more immersed in character development, and crafting. They tend to explore virtual worlds more, at a slower pace, with more thoroughness. Harry and I are speed demons. The game we play is getting from point A to point B FASTER BETTER HARDER NOW NOW NOW.

ATM, we’re leveling 2 little mages, which is always fun. We’ve done matching mages before, and I have a 70 mage already, but damit, mages are just a hoot to level up. We’re going fire this time, since my 70 and our two previous ones were both frost, and things go asplody. We are also reveling in the luxury that is FINALLY having low level spell dmg gear available. THANKS BLIZ. Harry really wants a high lvl pure DPS class (having a mage and a hunter myself I can hardly blame him), so we might take these all the way to 70. However, I feel absurd having two 70 mages. I might swap out at 40 for my priest or my lock or at 50 for my war, but eh, we’ll see.

We have some interest in re-joining end game WoW activities, we certainly have people who’d let us raid with them in a heartbeat, so we’re giving that some thought. Especially since our gear isn’t too out of date yet and badge gear makes it easier to catch up. Mostly though it’s just been nice playing something that we’re so good at together. We’re a pretty fierce machine of two in WoW, we’ve been playing for long enough that we intuit what to do. We sort of fall in to almost a kind of shorthand communication, it’s really pretty satisfying.

We shall see what comes of it, especially when Harry’s new job starts up and we fall back in to some kind of pattern.

Been busy with life stuff, hence the lack of recent posts.  We have been playing some games in addition to handling the other aspects of Real Life, so we at least have something to talk about.

First off, I have a job!  Woohoo!  I start very soon and I’m really excited.  More on that in the future.

Sally and I have dusted off our WoW accounts and have been duoing two Blood Elf fire mages.  We’re up to level 26 and having a pretty good time.  Enemies go asplody, basically.  I can also kind of run 2 accounts on my machine and we actually have 3 accounts at the moment, so Sally uses her 70 hunter while I play the 2 mages and we go and demolish the low level isntances and get our phatty bluez (which, by the way, are way better since patch 2.3, I believe).  We always like levelling, so it’s been a good time so far.  We also know the areas and quests so well that we’ve been catching up on Battlestar Galactica while we play, so that’s a good time.

I’ve been waiting the last couple of weeks to actually start my new job, so I’ve been sitting around at home playing quite a bit of EVE.  One of my characters has gotten most of the exploration skills to a decent level, so I’ve been doing a lot of that.  I’ve actually made quite a lot of money doing it and am pretty much up to my first liquid billion in ISK, so that’s pretty exciting.  I left my old corp due to an over abundance of empire wars and started my own little corp to make things a little more convenient and am looking at joining one of the larger alliances out in 0.0 space which would be a pretty exciting endeavor.

Other than that, there’s been the little bit of Rock Band and LotRO, but not a ton.  It’s really been a lot of WoW and catching up on old shows.  Well, we also finally added HD capability to our cable but we actually haven’t watched as much of that as we’ve been intending.  Because lord knows we need to see How It’s Made in High Def.