I certainly complain when people don't live up their promises, but I also like to take the time to thank those who make my life easier. In this case, the kudos go out to Vais Technology, who make the SoundLinQ iPod adaptor I have in my '05 Lexus ES330. You'd think that a car of that vintage would have an easy way to incorporate an iPod, but no. Regardless, the cable that connects from the iPod to the adaptor started behaving erratically recently, with sound cutting out unless the cable was aligned just so. I thought for a while it was my nearly three year old iPod losing it's tightness around the data port, but when I used it in my wife's RAV (which has a Griffin adaptor that plugs into the same port), it was very tight and I had no problems at all.
Looking at the warranty for the SL1 unit I have, it told me to contact the manufacturer, which I did by e-mail (I like having a record of these sorts of conversations). I expected never to hear back from them again, as seems to be SOP for most companies, but they actually sent me a return mail, saying they didn't have me on record as having purchased from them, but that they were sending out a new cable per my request anyway.
I figure the cable probably costs them $10 max, plus the time and cost to package and ship, plus reading and responding. All in all, something a bit less than $50. All to make sure I was happy with my purchase. Well done, Vais Tech.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Finally, A Great War
I used to subscribe to Command Magazine back in the day. I was a grad student and the price seemed a bit high considering that this was well before the days of GMT's P500, but it was fun to get a completely new game in every issue, even if you occasionally got a game like Chaco that was more logistics exercise than combat. After being a subscriber for four years, I let my sub expire after issue 28, just in time to miss the high water mark in their publishing history, Ted Raicer's The Great War in Europe. Command went downhill soon after that, the nadir being a chess variant that caused many to pull their subs and the magazine to fold, but had my timing been just a little better I would have gotten one of the great magazine games of all time.
Fast forward to 2007, when GMT finally publishes the reprint of GWiE (along with it's sister game, also published in Command, The Great War in the Near East, in the box). What would seem to be a relatively easy task, republishing a game, became a nightmare for GMT when the developer disappeared (which also happened with their game Zero!), no electronic versions (or, apparently, unpunched) versions of the game were available, resulting in what seemed to be an inexcusable number of mistakes.
Ted himself exacerbated the situation by going on ConSimWorld and chastising the wargaming community by sounding remarkably like my father - "In my day, we didn't have Living Rules. You made replacement counters and got on with it. If the rules didn't work, you made up your own. You walked to the gaming store in a blizzard, 15 miles uphill each direction." Note - Not an actual quote from Ted, but he did say pretty much everything but the last sentence in one form or another. To his credit, with a game with this many counters you would expect a certain number of errors - it happens all the time. What made the errors so unpalatable was that GMT had delayed the game to add in a countersheet of corrected counters for the ones spread out all over the original countersheets. Many of the unfixed errors were cosmetic - few of us care much that the 3rd Greek Corps was actually the 36th, although I recall a certain Bill Ramsay complaining early and often that Paths of Glory was ruined for him and his friends because the aerial map Mark Simonitch used for that game had post-land reclamation coastline for Holland, a country that did not participate in WWI. I think he also called PoG "Candyland" at some point.
Anyway, one can hardly blame GMT for being embarrassed as well as really wanting to get this one right. And earlier this week, they more or less did it. They sent out a countersheet and a page of instructions (a very wise move) along with their P500 orders for their most recent games (and, I'm guessing, to everyone else who asked or had P500'd GWiE). The countersheet contained something like 80 replacement counters. That's right, 80. I have not done the math, but by my reckoning about 60% of those counters had actual game-related issues - incorrect values on the counters, starting codes, theater restrictions, or unit types. These were big issues in a game with no OOB sheets (there is a counter appearance manifest in the rules, but it is several pages long), and in some cases (like where the Provisional Government sides of Russian counters were missing) the problem became much more complicated.
So did GMT get it right? Almost completely. I have two *very* minor nits about what they did, although I also understand to some extent one of them. Perhaps the more confusing is that there was a Russian unit, SV, that had a different Russian unit, POV, printed on it's back originally. The new unit had the correct back, but the instructions were very confusing as to what to do with the old counter. Apparently, the old counter is still supposed to be used under some circumstances, at least the POV side. What I don't get is why they didn't just print a new POV counter on the countersheet - it's not like they had something like 60 blanks. Oh, they did. I may have misunderstood this issue, and admit to not having researched it, but it seems like this particular issue was one of those "we'll figure it out later' things that got kludged at the last minute.
The nit that I do to some extent understand is why they didn't take the time to add in old counter fixes for other GMT games. You have 50 slots for extra counters, why not put any errata counters for games published in the past two years on there as well? GMT usually provides these counters with their in-house magazine, C3i, but not everyone who buys GMT games buys C3i. Many, but not everyone. I could see GMT having to ship twice as many of these countersheets to customers who hadn't bought GWiE but wanted the corrected counters. I can also see that GMT just wanted this whole mess behind them. Here they have a very highly anticipated reprint coming out more than 10 years after the original, and it suffers from production issues that make the company look like it's run by the Bush administration. I'd want to be very sure that every problem I knew of was resolved, even the dumb "we used a black circle around the starting code instead of a blue one" issue resolved too, and I'd probably be so focused on that that it wouldn't occur to me that there could be some added value to the customer.
But really, both of those issues are so teeny as to only warrant a brief grumbling from this retired engineer who is always looking for ways to improve processes, so none of this should be taken so much as criticism as much as lessons learned. Despite Ted "Old Man" Raicer's grumblings about we as a hobby should shut up and buy the games as published, I for one am delighted that GMT *does* have such a strong commitment to customer satisfaction. While this game got bobbled pretty badly (and repeatedly, looking a bit like Reggie Bush having trouble holding onto the ball as he ran down the field with no one around him), they've done right by their customers. It is no surprise that my collection of wargames dating from 1990 contains as many GMT games as everything else combined (only the pre-1998 AH stock is bigger), and a very big part of that is the dedication to the hobby shown by every single member of that company, from Gene's constant presence at WBC asking me about how I liked their games and what they should publish next, to efforts like this.
Gentlefolk of GMT, there is a reason that I have more than 20 games on your P500 list preordered, and it isn't because I'm interested in convoy operations in the North Atlantic during WW2. It's because I trust you to, almost always and certainly more often than your competition, to deliver the game by hook or by crook, and - perhaps most importantly - to take responsibility for your work in a way that personal experience has shown is increasingly rare in our short-term and profit driven world.
Gentlefolk of GMT, I salute you.
Fast forward to 2007, when GMT finally publishes the reprint of GWiE (along with it's sister game, also published in Command, The Great War in the Near East, in the box). What would seem to be a relatively easy task, republishing a game, became a nightmare for GMT when the developer disappeared (which also happened with their game Zero!), no electronic versions (or, apparently, unpunched) versions of the game were available, resulting in what seemed to be an inexcusable number of mistakes.
Ted himself exacerbated the situation by going on ConSimWorld and chastising the wargaming community by sounding remarkably like my father - "In my day, we didn't have Living Rules. You made replacement counters and got on with it. If the rules didn't work, you made up your own. You walked to the gaming store in a blizzard, 15 miles uphill each direction." Note - Not an actual quote from Ted, but he did say pretty much everything but the last sentence in one form or another. To his credit, with a game with this many counters you would expect a certain number of errors - it happens all the time. What made the errors so unpalatable was that GMT had delayed the game to add in a countersheet of corrected counters for the ones spread out all over the original countersheets. Many of the unfixed errors were cosmetic - few of us care much that the 3rd Greek Corps was actually the 36th, although I recall a certain Bill Ramsay complaining early and often that Paths of Glory was ruined for him and his friends because the aerial map Mark Simonitch used for that game had post-land reclamation coastline for Holland, a country that did not participate in WWI. I think he also called PoG "Candyland" at some point.
Anyway, one can hardly blame GMT for being embarrassed as well as really wanting to get this one right. And earlier this week, they more or less did it. They sent out a countersheet and a page of instructions (a very wise move) along with their P500 orders for their most recent games (and, I'm guessing, to everyone else who asked or had P500'd GWiE). The countersheet contained something like 80 replacement counters. That's right, 80. I have not done the math, but by my reckoning about 60% of those counters had actual game-related issues - incorrect values on the counters, starting codes, theater restrictions, or unit types. These were big issues in a game with no OOB sheets (there is a counter appearance manifest in the rules, but it is several pages long), and in some cases (like where the Provisional Government sides of Russian counters were missing) the problem became much more complicated.
So did GMT get it right? Almost completely. I have two *very* minor nits about what they did, although I also understand to some extent one of them. Perhaps the more confusing is that there was a Russian unit, SV, that had a different Russian unit, POV, printed on it's back originally. The new unit had the correct back, but the instructions were very confusing as to what to do with the old counter. Apparently, the old counter is still supposed to be used under some circumstances, at least the POV side. What I don't get is why they didn't just print a new POV counter on the countersheet - it's not like they had something like 60 blanks. Oh, they did. I may have misunderstood this issue, and admit to not having researched it, but it seems like this particular issue was one of those "we'll figure it out later' things that got kludged at the last minute.
The nit that I do to some extent understand is why they didn't take the time to add in old counter fixes for other GMT games. You have 50 slots for extra counters, why not put any errata counters for games published in the past two years on there as well? GMT usually provides these counters with their in-house magazine, C3i, but not everyone who buys GMT games buys C3i. Many, but not everyone. I could see GMT having to ship twice as many of these countersheets to customers who hadn't bought GWiE but wanted the corrected counters. I can also see that GMT just wanted this whole mess behind them. Here they have a very highly anticipated reprint coming out more than 10 years after the original, and it suffers from production issues that make the company look like it's run by the Bush administration. I'd want to be very sure that every problem I knew of was resolved, even the dumb "we used a black circle around the starting code instead of a blue one" issue resolved too, and I'd probably be so focused on that that it wouldn't occur to me that there could be some added value to the customer.
But really, both of those issues are so teeny as to only warrant a brief grumbling from this retired engineer who is always looking for ways to improve processes, so none of this should be taken so much as criticism as much as lessons learned. Despite Ted "Old Man" Raicer's grumblings about we as a hobby should shut up and buy the games as published, I for one am delighted that GMT *does* have such a strong commitment to customer satisfaction. While this game got bobbled pretty badly (and repeatedly, looking a bit like Reggie Bush having trouble holding onto the ball as he ran down the field with no one around him), they've done right by their customers. It is no surprise that my collection of wargames dating from 1990 contains as many GMT games as everything else combined (only the pre-1998 AH stock is bigger), and a very big part of that is the dedication to the hobby shown by every single member of that company, from Gene's constant presence at WBC asking me about how I liked their games and what they should publish next, to efforts like this.
Gentlefolk of GMT, there is a reason that I have more than 20 games on your P500 list preordered, and it isn't because I'm interested in convoy operations in the North Atlantic during WW2. It's because I trust you to, almost always and certainly more often than your competition, to deliver the game by hook or by crook, and - perhaps most importantly - to take responsibility for your work in a way that personal experience has shown is increasingly rare in our short-term and profit driven world.
Gentlefolk of GMT, I salute you.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Gary Gygax, Demigod
Just learned that Gary Gygax, the guy who pretty much defined role-playing games in the 70's, died today after a long illness. He, more than perhaps anyone, is responsible for Convention Funk, but also for giving those of us with underdeveloped social skills in high school something to do on weekends. A very big part of my personality and ability to think on my feet comes from being a Dungeon Master, and despite the droll comments above I sincerely hope that there is a heaven and he gets to DM for the Big Guy.
Thank you, Gary. You'll be missed.
Thank you, Gary. You'll be missed.
Neuroshima Hex, or The Return of Roopert
Chris hosted our weekly Tuesday night gaming session. The sessions have been spottily attended recently, with this being the best attended in four weeks (with three of us, Mike included). Still, as Chris said, it doesn't matter who shows up, we'll have fun anyway. Well, everyone but Mike.
Chris had set up Neuroshima Hex, a tile placement game somewhat reminiscent (to me, anyway) of the Vortex collectible tile game that Fantasy Flight put out some years ago. Vortex was very popular with our group, with several of us collecting the tiles. I still have all of my sets, enough to field decent decks in all eight factions, and it was a favorite lunchtime game for Laurent and I before I foolishly retired from full time work at the end of 2001. As such, I was very interested in seeing how well NH played, and if it would be a good game for three. I'll note that Chris had *not* set the game up for us, but to play with his sons. Not that that stopped us.
In NH, you play one of four factions in a post-apocolyptic world - who am I kidding, this could be anything. It could be Killer Bunnies, but with an actual game attached. The point is that you have a deck of hexagonal tiles that you place on a five-hex-wide hexagonal map (hmm, could there be a reason the word "Hex" is in the title?), plus some extra tiles that allow you to perform various actions, the most important of which is to Battle. Each player has an HQ on the board that has 20 hit points, and when your HQ goes down, so do you. The various units can attack in different directions, or give extra mutant abilities to units in specific adjacent spaces. Each faction is tuned to a different strategy, so there are six different combinations of factions that you could face off against each other in a two player game.
Since I can't be bothered with a random back story, I took the red faction (Mordred? Morpheus? More More More?) which focuses on just being badass. They tend to have a lot of units that can take hits and do damage, but with only a single move token and four battle tokens you really want to be sure that what you put down is going to stay there. Most importantly, I had the Air Strike, which gives a single hit to every tile in a one hex radius of the target hex (including your own). Since it ignores HQs, I used it at a critical juncture to save my sorry red ass. Mike had the Blue faction, and Chris the Yellow.
Gameplay is pretty simple - you draw enough tiles from your original deck of 36 to end up with three face up tiles in front of you (no hidden info in this game other than the draw order). You must then ditch one of these three tiles out of the game, which I frankly think is one of the two brilliant elements. The other two tiles you can then play to the board, or if it's an action, as that action. Or, you can hang onto them. There may be a point to hanging onto tiles, but seeing as the game is probably about getting the most tiles in play over the course of the game, I suspect that in most cases it's better to play 'em when you got 'em. The exceptions would be things like an Air Burst or a Battle action, which can be key.
The other brilliant element is the Battle. Battles happen when someone plays a (wait for it...) Battle action, or else when someone fills the last space on the board. Believe me, you want to take a few seconds and figure out how the battle will play out, because if you don't you can end up hurting yourself much more than anyone else if you play these at the wrong time. I think all of us made at least one dumb play during the game, but none more than Chris filling that last space and taking more damage than anyone else.
During the battle, you look at every combat unit on the board and figure it's initiative, expressed as a number between 1 and 3. Some non-combat units on the board will improve your initiative if you are next to them and they have an arrow pointing to it. Mike's HQ also gave adjacent units extra initiative, so that at some points he had units with initiative of 4 or 5! That's important, because like the Old West Gunfights, it's the person who votes early and often who wins. Various units have things like the ability to absorb multiple hits, or to even shrug off the first point of damage. What's interesting is that each hexside of a unit has different abilities. For example, I might have a unit that attacks with strength two facing north, one facing NW and NE, and has armor on all three sides, but has no protection or attack on the other three sides. Some units can also fire ranged, hitting the first enemy unit in that direction. Again, some non-com units will boost these values, or sometimes allow you to treat melee strengths as ranged strengths (or vice versa).
From there the battle is simple. All of the units with the highest initiative fire simultaneously. Once units are hit and/or removed, you do the same with the next level down. Battles tend to be fairly bloody, which is good because there are only 19 spaces on the board and everyone has 36 tiles to get through. Once someone runs out of tiles, everyone else gets a chance to play one more turn (with no battles allowed), then you do one last battle. Whoever's HQ has the most hits remaining, if any, wins.
I had borrowed Jesse's copy of the game a couple of weeks ago, and was looking forward to giving it a try. While I've already stated why I'm not convinced that strategic thinking helps out much here, I *do* think that despite the luck of the draw being a huge part of the game it's still a fun exercise in figuring out how to best use the resources you do have. In one sense, you are choosing which third of the deck you *won't* use as you go through the discard mechanism, and you are also getting to decide if you are ready to have a battle or not, at least when it's your turn. It's not ASL, but it's a fun little game that I would be playing at lunchtime were I crazy enough to have kept working for the Man. With three there was a small amount of downtime, but with four it might have become too much. Not to mention that it took us about 85 minutes to play the game, and it does *not* scale - you just get more hexes with four and another 36 tiles that will get played. Chris said he'd heard it shines with two players, and I suspect that's true.
One last note: the board is much larger than the area you'd need even for four players, with the apparent and optimistic intent of adding expansions. Hey, I'd buy one. Of course, I ended up winning - did I mention that the Air Burst I played happened to take out two units threatening my HQ? Oh yeah. Boosh. Boosh boosh. Thakka thakka thakka. Fwoom. BOOM. Good fun. I ended up scooping up a one point win over Chris at the end, with Mike not far behind. Oh, if you don't like foul language the flavor story at the beginning of the rulebook is perhaps more appropriate for adults than the 10 year olds the box mentions, although I'm pretty sure your kids are aware of those words by the time they're eight. Good luck with that.
With it almost 9pm, we decided on a light card game as I needed to get up early the next morning (if you're looking at the time stamp, you'll notice that "early" came about seven hours ahead of time for me), so we pulled out Sieben Siegel, AKA Zing!, still one of my favorite trick taking games. Out of three hands, I managed to go perfect in two, marred only by having a hand from hell (all 9's in balanced suits with mid-level cards below them, a sure recipe for disaster). Fortunately, I took Roopert to minimize the damage and ended up with the four points I took in that hand as the only points I had all game. In the third hand, Mike ended up with one extra token he couldn't redeem and I nosed past him in the score to win the game by a point. Sweep!
BTW, we call the Grim Reaper "Roopert" (I'm sure they spell it Rupert, but it's my story and my joke so I'll spell it however the hell I want to) thanks to a particularly dim drummer I used to know. Dim, as I'll call him, was the kind of guy who didn't want to go into a bookstore when we were in high school because, and I quote, "someone might see us." Ack. Anyway, when he got an NES system and the Paperboy game, which features the Grim Reaper, he didn't know who that was. The Reaper, I mean. Really. Worse, he thought I said "Rooper" and called it that for the rest of the night. Some people deserve to be allowed to continue to embarrass themselves for hours, and Dim was one of those people. When RCG first played SS at Sunriver years ago, I introduced the name, but it was quickly converted to Roopert to get my goat, and Roopert he shall remain. I dunno, the Grim Rooper still has a certain something, but I know when to shut up. Occasionally.
Just in case you are worried that Dim might stumble across this blog and become angry with me for mocking him, don't worry. I don't, and even then I doubt he knows how to spell Google. Or could figure out that this was about him. He probably still thinks it's the Grim Rooper. Dumb as a post.
Anyway, that's it for this week. Next week we're up north at Matt's, where I actually plan to attend. Stop the presses.
Chris had set up Neuroshima Hex, a tile placement game somewhat reminiscent (to me, anyway) of the Vortex collectible tile game that Fantasy Flight put out some years ago. Vortex was very popular with our group, with several of us collecting the tiles. I still have all of my sets, enough to field decent decks in all eight factions, and it was a favorite lunchtime game for Laurent and I before I foolishly retired from full time work at the end of 2001. As such, I was very interested in seeing how well NH played, and if it would be a good game for three. I'll note that Chris had *not* set the game up for us, but to play with his sons. Not that that stopped us.
In NH, you play one of four factions in a post-apocolyptic world - who am I kidding, this could be anything. It could be Killer Bunnies, but with an actual game attached. The point is that you have a deck of hexagonal tiles that you place on a five-hex-wide hexagonal map (hmm, could there be a reason the word "Hex" is in the title?), plus some extra tiles that allow you to perform various actions, the most important of which is to Battle. Each player has an HQ on the board that has 20 hit points, and when your HQ goes down, so do you. The various units can attack in different directions, or give extra mutant abilities to units in specific adjacent spaces. Each faction is tuned to a different strategy, so there are six different combinations of factions that you could face off against each other in a two player game.
Since I can't be bothered with a random back story, I took the red faction (Mordred? Morpheus? More More More?) which focuses on just being badass. They tend to have a lot of units that can take hits and do damage, but with only a single move token and four battle tokens you really want to be sure that what you put down is going to stay there. Most importantly, I had the Air Strike, which gives a single hit to every tile in a one hex radius of the target hex (including your own). Since it ignores HQs, I used it at a critical juncture to save my sorry red ass. Mike had the Blue faction, and Chris the Yellow.
Gameplay is pretty simple - you draw enough tiles from your original deck of 36 to end up with three face up tiles in front of you (no hidden info in this game other than the draw order). You must then ditch one of these three tiles out of the game, which I frankly think is one of the two brilliant elements. The other two tiles you can then play to the board, or if it's an action, as that action. Or, you can hang onto them. There may be a point to hanging onto tiles, but seeing as the game is probably about getting the most tiles in play over the course of the game, I suspect that in most cases it's better to play 'em when you got 'em. The exceptions would be things like an Air Burst or a Battle action, which can be key.
The other brilliant element is the Battle. Battles happen when someone plays a (wait for it...) Battle action, or else when someone fills the last space on the board. Believe me, you want to take a few seconds and figure out how the battle will play out, because if you don't you can end up hurting yourself much more than anyone else if you play these at the wrong time. I think all of us made at least one dumb play during the game, but none more than Chris filling that last space and taking more damage than anyone else.
During the battle, you look at every combat unit on the board and figure it's initiative, expressed as a number between 1 and 3. Some non-combat units on the board will improve your initiative if you are next to them and they have an arrow pointing to it. Mike's HQ also gave adjacent units extra initiative, so that at some points he had units with initiative of 4 or 5! That's important, because like the Old West Gunfights, it's the person who votes early and often who wins. Various units have things like the ability to absorb multiple hits, or to even shrug off the first point of damage. What's interesting is that each hexside of a unit has different abilities. For example, I might have a unit that attacks with strength two facing north, one facing NW and NE, and has armor on all three sides, but has no protection or attack on the other three sides. Some units can also fire ranged, hitting the first enemy unit in that direction. Again, some non-com units will boost these values, or sometimes allow you to treat melee strengths as ranged strengths (or vice versa).
From there the battle is simple. All of the units with the highest initiative fire simultaneously. Once units are hit and/or removed, you do the same with the next level down. Battles tend to be fairly bloody, which is good because there are only 19 spaces on the board and everyone has 36 tiles to get through. Once someone runs out of tiles, everyone else gets a chance to play one more turn (with no battles allowed), then you do one last battle. Whoever's HQ has the most hits remaining, if any, wins.
I had borrowed Jesse's copy of the game a couple of weeks ago, and was looking forward to giving it a try. While I've already stated why I'm not convinced that strategic thinking helps out much here, I *do* think that despite the luck of the draw being a huge part of the game it's still a fun exercise in figuring out how to best use the resources you do have. In one sense, you are choosing which third of the deck you *won't* use as you go through the discard mechanism, and you are also getting to decide if you are ready to have a battle or not, at least when it's your turn. It's not ASL, but it's a fun little game that I would be playing at lunchtime were I crazy enough to have kept working for the Man. With three there was a small amount of downtime, but with four it might have become too much. Not to mention that it took us about 85 minutes to play the game, and it does *not* scale - you just get more hexes with four and another 36 tiles that will get played. Chris said he'd heard it shines with two players, and I suspect that's true.
One last note: the board is much larger than the area you'd need even for four players, with the apparent and optimistic intent of adding expansions. Hey, I'd buy one. Of course, I ended up winning - did I mention that the Air Burst I played happened to take out two units threatening my HQ? Oh yeah. Boosh. Boosh boosh. Thakka thakka thakka. Fwoom. BOOM. Good fun. I ended up scooping up a one point win over Chris at the end, with Mike not far behind. Oh, if you don't like foul language the flavor story at the beginning of the rulebook is perhaps more appropriate for adults than the 10 year olds the box mentions, although I'm pretty sure your kids are aware of those words by the time they're eight. Good luck with that.
With it almost 9pm, we decided on a light card game as I needed to get up early the next morning (if you're looking at the time stamp, you'll notice that "early" came about seven hours ahead of time for me), so we pulled out Sieben Siegel, AKA Zing!, still one of my favorite trick taking games. Out of three hands, I managed to go perfect in two, marred only by having a hand from hell (all 9's in balanced suits with mid-level cards below them, a sure recipe for disaster). Fortunately, I took Roopert to minimize the damage and ended up with the four points I took in that hand as the only points I had all game. In the third hand, Mike ended up with one extra token he couldn't redeem and I nosed past him in the score to win the game by a point. Sweep!
BTW, we call the Grim Reaper "Roopert" (I'm sure they spell it Rupert, but it's my story and my joke so I'll spell it however the hell I want to) thanks to a particularly dim drummer I used to know. Dim, as I'll call him, was the kind of guy who didn't want to go into a bookstore when we were in high school because, and I quote, "someone might see us." Ack. Anyway, when he got an NES system and the Paperboy game, which features the Grim Reaper, he didn't know who that was. The Reaper, I mean. Really. Worse, he thought I said "Rooper" and called it that for the rest of the night. Some people deserve to be allowed to continue to embarrass themselves for hours, and Dim was one of those people. When RCG first played SS at Sunriver years ago, I introduced the name, but it was quickly converted to Roopert to get my goat, and Roopert he shall remain. I dunno, the Grim Rooper still has a certain something, but I know when to shut up. Occasionally.
Just in case you are worried that Dim might stumble across this blog and become angry with me for mocking him, don't worry. I don't, and even then I doubt he knows how to spell Google. Or could figure out that this was about him. He probably still thinks it's the Grim Rooper. Dumb as a post.
Anyway, that's it for this week. Next week we're up north at Matt's, where I actually plan to attend. Stop the presses.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
WoW Update
It's been quite a while since i've updated you on my World of Warcraft activities.
First of all, the move in October pretty much killed any play for a good month, and even then it's rare that I get more than about 10 hours of play in any given week. That may seem like quite a bit, but it's less than 2 hours a day. Considering that WoW is pretty much the *only* computer/video game I play at all anymore (other than a few social things on the Wii and Guitar Hero), that's not a huge surprise.
However, my numbers went way up in February, mostly because I finally have the office together, along with a new Mac Pro tower (just four cores, though), and thus a place to use a computer. The laptop has become my keyboard of choice for the band I'm in (more on that later), and it's nice to have a big screen and decent horsepower (and a passable graphics card, although the ATI 2600XT has some problems - wish I'd sprung for the NVidia 8800GT now).
The other big difference is that I haven't touched any of my alt characters since the move. Not once, not even my orc shammy Chanya (languishing, I believe, around level 40). Part of that is the faster leveling that characters do under an update from Blizzard, but mostly it's just that once I got my ride it's very hard to just walk anywhere. That, and I really wanted to see what Outland was like. It's like everything else, only on drugs.
OK, not exactly. I will say one thing - the gear totally rocks compared to what's in the original game. I doubled my armor value in about three days. After struggling to get to 100 gold for my mount, with not much better luck up to around level 58, I have gone through something like 700 gold in the last six levels, much of it spent on getting my rogue's Darkshadow armor set. There's a gnome rogue in the CCG who has this kit on, and it looks *really* cool. Hard to believe that I'm doing quests just to look good. The thing is that you spend a lot more time running around in the "old" world getting this stuff, and it's kind of a drag to have to come back from Outland, run to Gadgetzan on one end of one continent, then run to three different places all over the world to kill 24 mobs, then come back to Gadgetzan, just to find that you're heading back to Winterspring to spend 40 gold on a reagent, then back to Gadgetzan, then back to Ironforge.
That's a lot of running around. Makes me consider getting that extra 40% speed boost for an epic mount, although that costs around 500 gold. It won't take more than a level or two for me to get that much, but I suspect I'll be spending it just as fast. The other bummer is that I have to do group quests and raids for some of the stuff for my armor set, something I've never really enjoyed as much. I have friends trying to get me to try out EvE, but it's clear that you don't get very far in that game unless you are part of a large group, something that I don't want to have to deal with.
Anyway, Leonadril is at level 64 (just dinged today), and is doing a ton of questing in Zagaramarsh and Terokkar Forest in Outlands, along with the low-XP/gold armor set quests. Even though you get the swamp critters on acid effect of Zagramarsh, in fact you're still dealing with ogres and naga, plus a few other things. The graphics *are* very cool, and the quest design is pretty good, but so far the long quest chains that feel like you're roleplaying aren't there so much. I've skipped almost all of the dungeons in the game so far, just a couple that went to completion, and so far haven't done Hellfire Citadel. Here's hoping that I can get the Shadow armor from Blackrock Mountain without having to actually enter the instance, as rogues can usually get a lot further into heavily-mobbed areas through use of stealth, and can generally slide in, knock someone out, blind the other, shrink your target, throw a few other tricks their way, get him killed, get the loot, and vanish before dying.
I know a lot of people say that the best thing about MMORPGs is the fact that you *are* playing with others, but in WoW (at least) my experience has been that most people act like complete assh*les when they're in groups. I've had some luck with single players I've teamed up with for quick group quests, but the instances have, bar none, been complete failures other than the one I did in NW Tanaris (troll city), and even that we had to bail and wait for a few more players when three people decided it was taking too long after a whopping 15 minutes.
I can see that the luster is coming off of WoW, but at the same time I'm starting to consider what other MMORPG I'll pick up after. I would *love* a Lovecraftian horror MMORPG, but I don't think one is out there. I know there's a Conan RPG coming out soon, but I'm not sure I want to be in at the beginning of something like that. The one that looks good right now is Guild Wars, which doesn't require a monthly fee. It's PC only, but the Mac Pro can boot into XP (once I finally get an activated copy - I just don't think that $300 for an OS is a fair price, and the Mac-based emulators that don't require Windows itself don't support the level of graphics I'll need). Regardless, I'm a good two months away from dinging level 70 with Leonadril (he's a rogue gnome engineer/miner on the Drenden server, if anyone cares), and then the raid play doesn't really appeal to me, at least not at this point. By then I'll probably shift to GW and see how I like it, although I may try out a bunch of different "trial" acccounts at that point just to see what I'm missing.
At the same time, I consider WoW to have been by huge leaps and bound the most bang for the buck that I have ever gotten from a video/computer game. There are problems, sure, but in general the experience has been exactly the sort of thing that I enjoy/obsess over. I love the exploration element, the mission-based play, the ability to go in a variety of paths, the variety of areas and mobs, the way your character gains abilities and how that changes the way you play. It's really been a blast, and I'm remembering with great fondness and nostalgia for just one year ago when I spent three hours (!) loading the elebenty-hundred patchs for WoW, all of which was mostly forgotten when I stepped into Dun Mordan and heard the snow crunch under my feet. There are still some challenges left for Leonadril, and I'm sure I'll come back to Chanya at some point, but I'm feeling a little like I'm at the last 15 minutes of what has been a really good movie, one that I've been an active participant in, and the last bits will hopefully be the best ones.
First of all, the move in October pretty much killed any play for a good month, and even then it's rare that I get more than about 10 hours of play in any given week. That may seem like quite a bit, but it's less than 2 hours a day. Considering that WoW is pretty much the *only* computer/video game I play at all anymore (other than a few social things on the Wii and Guitar Hero), that's not a huge surprise.
However, my numbers went way up in February, mostly because I finally have the office together, along with a new Mac Pro tower (just four cores, though), and thus a place to use a computer. The laptop has become my keyboard of choice for the band I'm in (more on that later), and it's nice to have a big screen and decent horsepower (and a passable graphics card, although the ATI 2600XT has some problems - wish I'd sprung for the NVidia 8800GT now).
The other big difference is that I haven't touched any of my alt characters since the move. Not once, not even my orc shammy Chanya (languishing, I believe, around level 40). Part of that is the faster leveling that characters do under an update from Blizzard, but mostly it's just that once I got my ride it's very hard to just walk anywhere. That, and I really wanted to see what Outland was like. It's like everything else, only on drugs.
OK, not exactly. I will say one thing - the gear totally rocks compared to what's in the original game. I doubled my armor value in about three days. After struggling to get to 100 gold for my mount, with not much better luck up to around level 58, I have gone through something like 700 gold in the last six levels, much of it spent on getting my rogue's Darkshadow armor set. There's a gnome rogue in the CCG who has this kit on, and it looks *really* cool. Hard to believe that I'm doing quests just to look good. The thing is that you spend a lot more time running around in the "old" world getting this stuff, and it's kind of a drag to have to come back from Outland, run to Gadgetzan on one end of one continent, then run to three different places all over the world to kill 24 mobs, then come back to Gadgetzan, just to find that you're heading back to Winterspring to spend 40 gold on a reagent, then back to Gadgetzan, then back to Ironforge.
That's a lot of running around. Makes me consider getting that extra 40% speed boost for an epic mount, although that costs around 500 gold. It won't take more than a level or two for me to get that much, but I suspect I'll be spending it just as fast. The other bummer is that I have to do group quests and raids for some of the stuff for my armor set, something I've never really enjoyed as much. I have friends trying to get me to try out EvE, but it's clear that you don't get very far in that game unless you are part of a large group, something that I don't want to have to deal with.
Anyway, Leonadril is at level 64 (just dinged today), and is doing a ton of questing in Zagaramarsh and Terokkar Forest in Outlands, along with the low-XP/gold armor set quests. Even though you get the swamp critters on acid effect of Zagramarsh, in fact you're still dealing with ogres and naga, plus a few other things. The graphics *are* very cool, and the quest design is pretty good, but so far the long quest chains that feel like you're roleplaying aren't there so much. I've skipped almost all of the dungeons in the game so far, just a couple that went to completion, and so far haven't done Hellfire Citadel. Here's hoping that I can get the Shadow armor from Blackrock Mountain without having to actually enter the instance, as rogues can usually get a lot further into heavily-mobbed areas through use of stealth, and can generally slide in, knock someone out, blind the other, shrink your target, throw a few other tricks their way, get him killed, get the loot, and vanish before dying.
I know a lot of people say that the best thing about MMORPGs is the fact that you *are* playing with others, but in WoW (at least) my experience has been that most people act like complete assh*les when they're in groups. I've had some luck with single players I've teamed up with for quick group quests, but the instances have, bar none, been complete failures other than the one I did in NW Tanaris (troll city), and even that we had to bail and wait for a few more players when three people decided it was taking too long after a whopping 15 minutes.
I can see that the luster is coming off of WoW, but at the same time I'm starting to consider what other MMORPG I'll pick up after. I would *love* a Lovecraftian horror MMORPG, but I don't think one is out there. I know there's a Conan RPG coming out soon, but I'm not sure I want to be in at the beginning of something like that. The one that looks good right now is Guild Wars, which doesn't require a monthly fee. It's PC only, but the Mac Pro can boot into XP (once I finally get an activated copy - I just don't think that $300 for an OS is a fair price, and the Mac-based emulators that don't require Windows itself don't support the level of graphics I'll need). Regardless, I'm a good two months away from dinging level 70 with Leonadril (he's a rogue gnome engineer/miner on the Drenden server, if anyone cares), and then the raid play doesn't really appeal to me, at least not at this point. By then I'll probably shift to GW and see how I like it, although I may try out a bunch of different "trial" acccounts at that point just to see what I'm missing.
At the same time, I consider WoW to have been by huge leaps and bound the most bang for the buck that I have ever gotten from a video/computer game. There are problems, sure, but in general the experience has been exactly the sort of thing that I enjoy/obsess over. I love the exploration element, the mission-based play, the ability to go in a variety of paths, the variety of areas and mobs, the way your character gains abilities and how that changes the way you play. It's really been a blast, and I'm remembering with great fondness and nostalgia for just one year ago when I spent three hours (!) loading the elebenty-hundred patchs for WoW, all of which was mostly forgotten when I stepped into Dun Mordan and heard the snow crunch under my feet. There are still some challenges left for Leonadril, and I'm sure I'll come back to Chanya at some point, but I'm feeling a little like I'm at the last 15 minutes of what has been a really good movie, one that I've been an active participant in, and the last bits will hopefully be the best ones.
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