You know how Miis can mingle?  Is there a way to hook a Wii up to a website so that we can have a social network kind of website with Miis and stats and stuff?  Or does that exist already?  I don’t have a Wii.

Bloodspell is a 14-part film made using a game engine (AKA machinima), in this case Neverwinter Nights.

The full length film (which features some reshot and revoiced footage) is now ready to download and watch in its entirety (DivX or QuickTime)!

Top 7 WTF? endings written by Charlie Barratt at Games Radar

Hilarious!

Robin kept asking me why I was playing Bioshock last week (after Grey had left and I repartitioned my hard drive and all that stuff so I could play it).

Well, the art was amazing (you can get a sense of it at the Cult of Rapture downloads section. Also scroll down the Updates page for download links for the soundtrack and the artbook.). The enemy AI was pretty good. Hacking is always cool (and done in Bioshock through a neat mini-game which is probably what caught Robin’s eye).

But at the same time, I didn’t really have a good answer for Robin… It was engaging but still felt a little lacking in something. I don’t know what. System Shock 2 and Deus Ex seemed at the time to be more fully engaging (though I probably can’t go back to those graphics these days, sadly). I wonder if it has to do with Bioshock being released on a console (Xbox 360) at the same time–whether that caused the team to “dumb down” the game mechanics at all?

Continue reading Bioshock: why is it so engaging? →

So, while I was uncharacteristically sick earlier this week I played a relatively unknown game called Gods: Lands of Infinity Special Edition by Cypron Studios. It is a strange mix between Western themes and Japanese style turn-based combat with a dose of space flight-sim style trading thrown in. Maybe a love child from the marriage of Betrayal at Krondor or Final Fantasy and Elite. But then cover it up with the always slightly odd aesthetics of Eastern European developers.

Ok, if that sounds rather esoteric, well… yeah. I’m guessing no one who actually reads my blog will have any idea what I just said. 😛 Kudos if you do. For the rest of you (all 2 of you), I’ll try to tease that out a bit.

Continue reading Gods: Lands of Infinity Special Edition Review →

So GwenCon (the mini-games convention to celebrate the birthday of a friend of mine who I met through the college of ed) was last weekend and Grey came up to visit and attend with me and Brian H. Fun was had by all! We also got together with the regular Seattle folk for even more gaming.

At GwenCon, I got a chance to play Battletech (yes, Battletech!) on Heroscape hexes (ran by Mike Mearls… I think…). Apparently, the collectable miniatures game made by WizKids (the HeroClix folk) did well enough that they are re-releasing the original board game. Battletech is possibly the first game of the “geeky gamer” variety I ever owned. It’s either Battletech or Dungeons & Dragons (which btw is going to have a 4th edition coming soon) way back when I was 10 or 11. Except that when I bought it, it was so new that it was called Battledroids which I guess was infringement on George Lucas stuff. I should see if I have that lying around somewhere; maybe it’s worth a lot! If only I hadn’t sat on the box one day…

The board and miniatures really added to the game, I have to admit, so much so that, on Tuesday, Grey and I went to Target to buy a copy of Heroscape. Turns out that the game itself is pretty fun, too, and comes with a bunch of minis also.

Also at GwenCon, I played a new game called Tannhauser (also ran by Mike… thanks Mike!). It’s set in an alternate timeline 1940s where WW1 never ended. The Germans got a hold of arcane demonic powers of some sort while the Allies developed cool future tech stuff from Roswell. The artwork is insanely awesome (like most Fantasy Flight games–they also did World of Warcraft, the re-release of Arkham Horror, and A Game of Thrones, for example) but the game mechanics–well, mostly the smoke grenade mechanics–seemed kind of not good. But it was fun enough that I’ll probably end up buying it a few months from now after someone’s made some alternate rules for it. Or maybe Grey will convince Chris or someone down in the Bay Area to get it and I’ll get a chance to play when I visit next.

As last year, I also played live-action RoboRally except this time we had too many players so I just programmed Brian. We tied for the win. 😛 Later on, I played a couple rounds of Unspeakable Words while watching The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.

The next day we got together with Paly folk and played two rounds of Long Live the King. We sort of coerced Robin into playing since without we wouldn’t have had enough people but cut it short since it was obvious she wasn’t into it. Ah well. From what I could tell, the game has a lot of potential. I was worried there might be too much role-playing or too much negotiating like in Diplomacy, but the cards and turn orders and abilities each of us could do gave it enough of a structure that it wasn’t too freeform.

When not playing board games (oh, btw, for my birthday the weekend before we played Quao and Quelf which were both fun, but I think could use some tweaking–Quao needs more variation and Quelf needs more cards that are affected by the different characters–I got them both for cheap from Tanga), Grey, Robin, and I played some Sam & Max Season 1, and when Robin was not available Grey and I played Bioshock. Well, we tried to, anyway. Bioshock really doesn’t like Windows Vista and had some weird sound stuttering issues. I tried all the advice I could find and eventually decided to make a new partition and install Windows XP on it.

The only problem was that my Vista partition was pretty full and hidden page files and system restore points prevented me from making a new partition immediately. I had to do some system maintenance and defragging… thus the extra time we had on Tuesday in which Grey and I used to buy Heroscape… so it all worked out really. (As a side note, I finally got Bioshock working on Win XP but it took forever because I initially didn’t make the new partition big enough for all the auto-updates to happen (SP2, really) (damn the Bioshock user who posted you only need 3 gigs… try more like 5).

Chore Wars :: Earning Experience Points for Housework

The previous post reminded me of this… 🙂

More or less what it is now. I’ve replaced CT with Bartender3 and KHThreatMeter with Omen. I also don’t use Natur’s Enemy CastBar anymore…

• Unitframes: PitBull
• thing up top: FuBar (with QuestFu, LocationFu, etc.)
• buff icons: Buffalo2
• tank windows and other raid stuff: oRA2
• what you can’t see: Cartographer, Auctioneer, SWStats, ItemRack

To get most of these, use the WoWAce Updater tool for ease… 🙂 See my previous post about Ace.

I heard earlier that Bethesda (the folks who made Oblivion) would be making Fallout 3, which of course is great news, but it didn’t sink in until I finally saw the trailer.  Oh, man…