Until We Meet Again, WoW

I made a decision yesterday afternoon that might come as a surprise to those who know me well. I decided to cancel my world of Warcraft subscription. Azeroth and I have had a long, torrid love affair. At this point though, I think it's time for us to start seeing other people.

I still love the game - I always will. (It's not you, WoW, it's me...) I just realized that I'm slogging away again and again at the same content. Basically, I've been running the same instances over and over with my sights set on one helmet and two swords. Is that reward along really worth 2 or 3 months of my video gaming life?

At this point in my WoW career, I've been most everywhere and experienced most everything. Barring the two Undead race starting zones, and several endgame dungeons, I've basically experienced everything that Blizzard has to offer, multiple times.

The problem with endgame content is that organizing a play session is not trivial. In general, I need to schedule a session at least a week in advance with my friends, and we're talking two weeks' advance notice for raids. My life is very busy, and this kind of rigidity is very inconvenient. I hate it when my wife comes in and I can't just hit "pause" to talk with her, because 39 other people are depending on me to pay close attention to the game. Or if my family wants to make spontaneous plans, and I have to say, "uh, sorry guys - I have a raid tonight."

I'm tired of the pressure to play that the $15 subscription places on me. I don't want to feel guilty for playing other games.

I've been playing this game for a year and a half straight, almost exclusively. My Xbox is covered in dust like some ancient Egyptian artifact, and the games that I have purchased since building my new gaming rig remain largely lonely and untouched.

I bought Oblivion and Battlefield 2, both outstanding games, and there they still sit in their boxes, barely used. I want to play Half Life 2. I want to play F.E.A.R. I want to try Crysis when it comes out, and Spore just looks yummy. I want something new.

That said, I'm sure I'll be back to WoW when the expansion come out. Content is really the only thing I'm missing right now. I still love the community and the camaraderie of a guild. I just need a change of pace.

So, for my friends that I've pulled into the game, especially Tarrek and Peric, I apologize for dropping out of the game that I pushed you so hard to join. Blizzard saves one's characters indefinitely though, so I know that Erilar will be waiting to join you in our climb to level 70 when Burning Crusade launches.

I'd also really like to figure out some other games to jump in to. I'd love us to all settle on a single shooter that we could occasionally play together like we did WoW. Maybe Half Life 2 or F.E.A.R or Battlefield 2?

I'm also planning on checking out Guild Wars (the original release subtitled "Prophesies", not the newer one called "Factions"). It's a "lite" MMO, with no monthly subscription fee. I figure it would be a sandbox we can jump into like we did with WoW, and my son and I could also play together without feeling like we're draining our bank account by wantonly paying for two subscriptions.

Anyway, farewell Azeroth, and sorry to those I recruited and am leaving behind. I'm sure we'll meet again in Outland.

Blogger Comments Hack Live - Dare I Say v1.6?

Keep your fingers crossed, but I think I have the Recent Comments functionality working in the sidebar now! I thought it would be a bit trickier, but it really wasn't that difficult to implement. I still probably have a few formatting tweaks to make, but the feature is functional.

A note about how this feature works. One first has to create a separate Blogger page to host the comments. Your original blog is then configured to email notifications of any comments to a Gmail account. Gmail then auto-forwards the comment email (via filter rules) to the comment blog, which then auto-posts them. Finally, a script pulls the comments from the RSS feed of the comment blog, and inserts them in the sidebar of your blog (or wherever). Pretty easy! (Seeing as I'm standing on the shoulders of giants and simply using scripts that others so generously coded and distributed, hehe!)

Many thanks again to Greg, John, and the rest of the crew over at Freshblog for their great tutorial and script!!! If you're using Blogger for your page and want to add more functionality, Freshblog is the place to visit!

Withdrawal from Ice and Fire

I recently finished A Feast for Crows, which is the latest volume in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels. Actually, I should clarify that it was the audiobooks that I'd been reading (or listening to - what's the correct terminology??).

In any case, I wanted to take a moment to highly recommend this series. A few buds in my gaming group had told me to check them out, and the books did not fall short of their praise. To date, there are four books in the series. The first, A Game of Thrones, is a little slower than the remainder, but is largely set-up and character introduction. The subsequent books are much more exciting and eventful, but I still very much enjoyed the first.

The books are based in a unique fantasy setting, but the presence of magic and things fantastical is very muted. In general, the books are more so an intricately-woven tale of the goings-on in a fictitious medieval world. The story centers largely on political intrigue, and even though that sort of novel wouldn't typically interest me much, these books have kept me firmly captivated.

Martin introduces a plethora of interesting characters, some of which will be very well developed, and others to be explored and revisited at a later date. Indeed, a large cast was almost entirely necessary, as the denizens of Martin's tale seem surprisingly short-lived. The world of Ice and Fire is not a Disney-esque one, but rather a gritty semblance of what medieval courtly life most likely entailed. The common folk are but playthings of the upper class, and absolutely none are safe from the mortal reality of lesser power struggles, war, and even the conflict for control of the crown.

Meanwhile, beneath the surface currents of the so-called game of thrones, Martin is slowly building an exterior, fantastical threat. While the ruling class and their base-born pawns heedlessly struggle for power and the crown, a dark menace is inexorably gathering its strength to crush civilization beneath a tide of ice and encroaching death. It's fairly evident that elements of traditional fantasy and magic will become more pronounced as the books continue.

Therein lies my frustration. I've read all four of these (rather lengthy) novels back-to-back, and I'm thoroughly embroiled and not yet ready to stop! Unfortunately, Martin is still busy massaging his next installment, leaving me hanging. Even more frustrating, Martin decided to split up the events following the third book into two volumes, one dealing with a certain set of characters, and the other with the remainder. As many of my favorite characters' fates are still suspended in the limbo of the fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, I'm truly faced with a classic cliffhanger. Drat! (What's going on with Tyrion Lannister, dammit?!?)

For those of you who also read audiobooks, I particularly enjoyed the delivery provided by Roy Dotrice, who performed the first three books. He does a great job of creating a different voice for each character, such that one always knows exactly who's talking. John Lee, who reads the fourth book, also does a decent job, but I really missed the excellent voices provided by Dotrice.

Drivers! Start Your... Err... Throw Your Switches!

As a performance car enthusiast, I've managed to stay ambivalent to the electric and hybrid car buzz. That was before the Tesla Roadster. I like!

Strategic Caffeine Deployment

The idea for this post has been rolling around in my head for quite a while. It's so hard to find time to write sometimes!

Caffeine is a funny subject. Specifically, why is there such a link between caffeine-worship and the geek subculture? Is there some kind of predilection for the geek brain to crave a slow Mountain Dew buzz? Certainly, the average geek probably enjoys a certain level of cranial stimulation - video games, scifi and fantasy movies positively dripping with outlandish special effects and action scenes, and of course the short attention span theatrics of the web. So, does the caffeine hum also even us out, in the same fashion (but to a lesser extent) that Ritalin might a child with Attention Deficit Disorder?

There is also the possibility that we cherish the edge that caffeine provides when we've a controller or mouse in hand and we're looking to unleash virtual electric death on our opponents. Myself, I'm quite convinced that "doing the Dew", as it were, can bestow a boost to reaction time that truly gives on a leg up on one's iEnemies.

I remember a NukemCon (one of our home-grown weekend gaming fests) about a year back when we were all sitting around playing Halo 1 over a network of linked Xboxes. I'd been chugging Mountain Dew all afternoon while we were boardgaming - it had been a long weekend of gaming, with many a late night with dice in hand, and I was trying to perk up a bit. At the point when we sat down to take a break and play some Halo 1, my brain was humming like a turbocharged, 2-liter boxer engine at 6500 RPMs.

Long story short, I was in the zone - buzzing and unstoppable. There was about a 20 minute period where I got my hands on a rocket launcher, and was killing Ken and Bob over and over again, seemingly invulnerable and uncannily accurate. They eventually threw their hands up, and said, "OK - enough of that for a while!" It's not that I'm better than them - both of those guys usually play Halo a bit better than me. My reaction time simply felt hummingbird-quick and my senses preternaturally aware. Quake Shake, indeed! (Be sure to check out the preceding link - one of the funniest PvP strips EVER!)

I myself have been a bit of a caffeine worshipper over the years, so I suppose I play into the geek stereotype nicely. There is a half-kilo bag of pure, food-grade, 100% caffeine powder in my office cabinet at work. You see, I am a coatings chemist by trade, and I'd weaseled a sample of the geek ambrosia from one of the chemical distributor salesmen that call on me (he also calls on food companies).

I'm going to stress right here that this material is nothing to mess around with casually. Ingested, the lethal adult dose is reportedly only about 10 grams. I suppose one's heart might have a hard time handling a pick-me-up of that magnitude... As they say on TV, certainly a "do not try this at home kids - leave this to the experts" type situation. That said, I'm obviously well-versed in measuring and dilution techniques, and in handling hazardous substances, so I consider myself to fit that experts-only bill.

I've messed around with a few different interesting recipes. My caffeinated spring water beverage (active content equal to that of Mountain Dew) is as low-cal as a "soda" can get, and my personal favorite, caffeinated Jell-O Jigglers, is perfect for a snack during a late night table-top gaming session. :)

Back to the Deployment portion of the piece. A while back, I stopped drinking soda on a regular basis, mostly for health reasons. Coupled with a reasonable diet, I lost 10 pounds in a relatively short period. I was drinking one cup of tea in the morning when I got to work, and that was about it. (I'm now mostly on a coffee kick, and a 16-oz travel mug of java love is a permanent fixture in the dash cupholder of my WRX on my half-hour morning commutes.)

Since cutting out the frequent soda, I've had to really watch my intake of caffeinated beverages. If I drink a cup of coffee or glass of soda after 4 or 5 PM, I can expect to still be sitting in front of World of Warcraft at 2 AM - it really affects me strongly now. My one cup of coffee is all I really need anymore, and it lasts me throughout the morning, and on late gaming nights, a single glass of Dew will keep me going till my Subaru carries me to my front door.

Those of you that find yourself drinking soda or coffee all day might consider cutting back, if only as a temporary experiment and/or easy diet method. You may just find out that you don't really need all that go-juice, and that you're really just wiring yourself to the gills and guzzling empty calories needlessly.

That said, the next time I log on to Halo 2 or Battlefield 2, I'll probably still have a Dew handy in my coaster. Take that, Devilfish!

Ditlog 1.5

Well, how pretentious am I - a version number for my... blog?? Well, I'm no 1337 haxxor, and these kind of upgrades are not trivial for me, so allow me a little pride. :)

On the surface, I've done some reorganizing - mostly to the sidebar. It's now much more organized and I've prioritized the items there for ease of use.

OK, snore... Is that it? Nope. The big upgrade is the addition of a tagging system allowing me to catagorize my posts. The blog is relatively small (young) right now, but as time passes, without catagories it would be increasingly harder to find a specific post. So, catagories.

Again, what's the big deal? Well for starters, Blogger doesn't offer this function natively, so I had to do it the hard way. Many thanks out to the folks at Freshblog for the tutorials, and heaps more to Johan Sundstrom at Ecmanaut for his great catagorizer script!

As far as the nuts and bolts go, the script customizes the code of Blogger's posting page via Greasemonkey, and uses del.icio.us as a back end to host my tag database. Pretty damn cool. Del.icio.us also recently released a tagroll script that enables the nice sidebar tag navigation tool you see to the left.

I must caution those interested in implementing this Blogger hack that the del.icio.us script generator is slightly broken, at least under Firefox. The slider that is supposed to specify how may tags will display in your list was defaulting to 1. I think this may have been because my del.icious database was empty, because it works now. If you encounter the same problem, be sure to change the count=x variable to your desired list length. Otherwise, you'll only see the list title and no items underneath.

One more caution. Del.icio.us takes a while to refresh. After adding a list of bookmarks, del.icio.us will take a little while to populate your list of tags. Don't freak out - just keep adding bookmarks and the tag list will eventually populate.

Hopefully, one fringe benefit of tagging all my posts will be increased traffic. Johan's excellent script formats the tags to be compatible with both del.icio.us and Technorati, so folks should now be able to easily find my content contextually. Enjoy!

In the future, I'd really like to add a Recent Comments field in the sidebar. At this point, one has to dig and new comments referring to old posts will be very buried. If you thought the tags hack sounded convuluted, wait 'till you hear what the recent comments field will require...

Arkham Horror Audio Review

Just a quick note to check out the latest installment of the Radio Active podcast (#34) over at Ken Newquist's speculative fiction website, Nuketown. Ken kindly asked me to join him to collaborate on a review of one of our gaming group's newest obsessions, Arkham Horror.

Arkham Horror is published by Fantasy Flight Games, and is an engrossing cooperative board game based on the timless, creepy fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and the cult favorite (pun intended) Chaosium Games' RPG, Call of Cthulhu.

What? Video Games DON'T Cause Real-World Violence?!?

Just wanted to post a link to a great article debunking Big Media's "video games = violence" crapathon. Great Stuff. One amateur video game writer, using government-published statistics, easily and intelligently squashes all the combined blustering of the Far Right and the media. Precious! :)

Grand Theft Auto - embrace it, my children!

Fine print: Ditlog does not condone parents allowing their young children to play GTA. Lots and lots of soccer moms read Ditlog daily and I need to be careful to qualify this stuff...

Battle Planner - Check it Out!

After a long hiatus, I've recently gotten back into playing some HeroClix with friends, and wanted to give some props to a great program called Battle Planner. I've been using this great database for a few years now, and it really deserves a close look from any of you who play collectible miniatures and/or card games.

The program keeps an inventory of your collection, and empowers you to more easily and intelligently construct new armies/teams/decks. Via a variety of different tools - filters, sorting, statistics - it allows one to get a better top-down view of their collection, and best utilize all the strengths and combinations available from your inventory of game pieces.

Data modules are available for virtually all the major collectible games out there, and for quite a few of the more obscure ones as well. The site also maintains a link page for accessing player-compiled sets of playing-piece images. (The creators are not allowed to provide "official" images themselves due to copyright restrictions.)

Unless you have a photographic memory, you will be hard pressed to remember the exact details of every game piece when putting together a new deck or miniatures force. Battle Planner puts all this data at your fingertips, and will make you a more competitive player in the process (ast least from the standpoint of creating a deck or army).

I've used BP for HeroClix, Mechwarrior, VS cards, and most recently, WizKids' great constructible Pirates game.

(If you're interested in Pirates, be sure to check out the cool new Pirates of Davy Jones' Curse expansion. WizKids' new expansion has introduced a bunch of cool fantasy elements to the game - ghost ships, sea monsters, and the spooky Cursed faction, which really give this great, very affordable, fast-paced game a supernatural shot in the arm.)

In closing, Battle Planner is very affordable, and in dealing with the creators Shawn and Todd over the years, I have learned that they are very nice guys and support their product thoroughly. Pay their site a visit!

Booo - Scary!!!

Think Count Floyd, folks... :)

OK, you want to be scared? I'll scare you. Guys like Senator Ted Stevens (R - Alaska) are making choices about your internet. Who's that? Why should you be scared?

Here's a transcript of ol' Teddy explaining why he voted the way he did about net neutrality. Better yet, listen to this sound byte of his actual delivery, but I'm warning you - it's scary. About a third of the way through the clip, he explains his understanding of this Internet thingie. Leave the lights on.

He's not a-feared about technology, and don't need no expert to learn him about it neither. He even plugged in one of them there computers one time - shoot...

Sometimes when I send an internet, it gets all tangled up too, Ted. I hate that.

Berin and the Big Bandwidth Bill

For a few months now, I've been toying with the idea of starting a new podcast. I love the technology, and I'm a huge weekly consumer of a long list of gaming, geek, and techie podcasts.

Podcasting is just such a beautiful thing. It's an illustration of what makes a free internet great, and is an iconic showpiece of why Net Neutrality is so incredibly vital. Anyone can record their musings on any topic of their choice, upload them, and share their mind with any who care to listen.

What's the alternative? When was the last time you caught a radio show catered to your particular interests? Fishing, skating, geek life, needlepoint - how far and wide would you have to search to find a commercial radio show giving even a few minutes to any of these esoteric topics? Yet, all one needs is a PC and an internet connection to enjoy an incredibly broad selection of podcasts catering to each of our individual personal interests. That is freedom, my friends - that is the sharing of minds across all geographical (international even!), cultural, and lifestyle borders. What a time we live in!

Back to my ephemeral podcast musings though. I've been mulling over an idea for a World of Warcraft podcast for some time. There are several great ones out there, but seeing as WoW is one of my biggest interests now, I still wanted to contribute to the community. So, I've been considering unique angles on the topic, and came up with the idea of a "WoW-101" show, designed to help new players along.

I imagine addressing topics such as effective soloing and questing techniques, proper group dynamics, the different class roles within a group, etc. I envision my local gaming friends co-hosting regularly, and occasional guest spots by members of my WoW guild appearing in focus pieces on particular classes or professions.

So what's stopping me, you ask? Fear of success and the Big Bandwidth Bill. WoW is a popular phenomenon, and I worry that if the project were of sufficient quality and posted on iTunes,
the podcast might gain enough popularity to make the bandwidth unaffordable to me. I'm not an expert on the particulars, but from comments mentioned on several of my favorite podcasts, even a moderate following can quickly turn into a car payment-sized byte bill.

Perhaps if the site were built with growth in mind, and a donation button in place from the get-go, everything would work out fine. At this point, it's still too scary to me.

Enter my RL buddy Ken over at Nuketown. He's been mentioning a desire to attempt an occasional collaboration on his Radio Active podcast, and it seemed like a great opportunity for me to at least give the physical recording process a whirl. We haven't even discussed any details as of yet, as Ken's been busy getting his life ready for a new baby. Ken's son is a few weeks old now though, and a specific opportunity has perhaps reared its head.

Berin from Uncle Bear has also been making plans to embrace the podcasting medium, and has put out a call for submissions from the gamer community. He's looking for pieces that examine the gaming culture - the gamer/non-gamer dynamic, as well as discussions from the viewpoints of different types of gamers (video vs. paper RPG vs. CCG, etc.).

Ken has proposed the two of us discussing the topics of gaming and geek life as parents, perhaps even bringing Mur Lafferty from Geek Fu Action Grip into the mix. (That would be a particular treat, as Mur's podcast has been a frequent listen for me.) It all sounds like a great opportunity for me to test drive a mic and see if it's for me. We shall see. :)

USB Headsets: What You May Not Know

I frequently play WoW with a headset for voice communication, and I think most of our spouses get tired of the endless gunfire and explosions when we're playing FPS's. So, most of us find the need to play with headphones on at some point or another.

While recently building my new PC (see previous posts on that project starting in April '06), I found out something very interesting: a USB headset bypasses your sound card entirely.

I had specced in a nice Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card for my new rig, specifically because of their well-received CMSS-3D headphone technology, which was supposed to be the best simulated surround sound technology for a headset ever.

Upon getting my new system assembled, I was very surprised and a little bummed out to discover that the nice $50 Logitech USB 350 headset that I'd been using for over a year would not make use of my powerful new sound card in any fashion. So, I wanted to put the word out.

Certainly, there are positive features to a USB headset. If you're playing on a laptop, or another system with a less-than-stellar soundcard or integrated sound, then you'll most likely benefit from the digital signal processing chip that is a component of most USB headsets. Moreover, if your system is not the most powerful, a USB set will reduce some of the system burden by processing its own sound.

If you're a gaming enthusiast with a nice, turbo-charged sound card though, buyer beware. The USB headsets are typically about $20 more than the normal analog type, and if you've got a decent sound board, you're getting nothing for your extra cash.

As far as the X-Fi and its fancy 3D surround processing for headsets goes, I got to test it out last night. I'd ordered a new Plantronics Gamecom 1 headset (not the Gamecom Pro 1 - that one is USB), along with Plantronics' very handy headset/speaker switch. (Without this switch, if you alternately uses an analog headset and speakers, you must crawl under your desk to swap jacks when you change between headset and speakers - annoying and inconvenient.)

Short story, Creative's CMSS-3D processing is not hype - it sounds great. There is a very clear distinction between sounds that are in front of you and those that are behind you. I've no idea how they do this, but the positional audio is as effective as a set of 5.1 surround speakers - quite impressive.

In summary, as the saying goes, usually you get what you pay for. If you're a gaming enthusiast with a powerful dedicated sound card though, the extra $20 or more for a USB headset won't get you the added value you might be anticipating. Get yourself the analog version of the headset you like and continue to enjoy all the whiz-bangs that you expected from your cool sound card.

Making Money in World of Warcraft

As a busy gaming parent, the acquisition of prestigious, expensive items such as Epic mounts in World of Warcraft seems like an unattainable goal. If you're like me, you might get to raid Molten Core or Zul'Gurub a few times per week (if you're lucky), but raiding has never made anyone much cash, has it...

Seeing as a raid here and there is pretty much the only WoW playing time I get, the normal (but time-intensive) money-making methods such as running the 5- and 10-man endgame instances, soloing Scarlet Monastery, or farming for crafting raw materials, are just not an option.

So, how else can an enterprising Night Elf make a quick gold piece? No, I'm not referring to dancing nude for tips on top of the mailbox outside the Ironforge bank! Instead, I have discovered that the Auction House is the answer to my gold flow problems. Just like playing the stock market, it is possible to make a considerable sum of money on the AH by the time-honored approach of buying low and selling high.

Normally, one does not give away their most precious money-making schemes for fear of losing their edge to bandwagon-jumpers. Seeing as how 90% of WoW players play on servers other than mine, perhaps I won't lose out too badly by being a nice guy.

Before you run off in a lather to log on to your favorite toon, be warned. An unprepared AH prospector will walk away with only moths in his pockets if he is not careful. Read on, Sir Warbucks.

I use several tools to help me quickly identify good deals and verify that they should be a "safe" purchase. The first is a fairly hefty WoW addon called Auctioneer. This handy tool performs scans of the Auction House, cataloging price info about each item. One merely has to mouse over a particular item, whether in one's inventory or in the AH itself, and an enhanced tooltip appears describing such useful data as the average price that the item goes for on the AH, how many times it's been scanned by Auctioneer, and how much an NPC vendor would buy the item for.

Each time you scan, another snapshot of the AH prices is processed by Auctioneer's statistical algorithms, and the more accurate Auctioneer's prices become. Auctioneer can certainly be fooled by instances of outrageously-priced items, but in general, it is fairly good at identifying good deals.

But, you say, I don't want to spend all day pouring over every item on the AH looking for a good buy. Fear not, faithful financier. Auctioneer includes a Search Auctions function that does most of the work for you. This search function is even implemented as an added tab within the AH screen itself - how convenient! Simply specify whether you're looking for sweet deals on auctions soon to expire, or juicy low buyout prices. By changing several filter options, one can literally say, "hey Auctioneer - find me all Blue or rarer items with buyouts that should, upon resale, net me 10 gold or more per transaction". Viola, this great addon spits out a sortable list.

Now, as I'd mentioned earlier, Auctioneer can be temporarily fooled by crazy-high prices. Example: let's assume an overzealous seller places several extra-high 50g buyouts on a Nightraven crossbow, and that you had scanned a few times during that period. The following day, when a more reasonable seller puts a Nightraven up for the typical 25g price, Auctioneer might consider that "normal" buyout price for the crossbow a sweet deal. In reality though, if you jumped on that 25g buyout, you'd be lucky to sell it for that and break even.

So how do we make sure that Auctioneer isn't feeding us bad tips? I use two simple cross-checks:

My primary cross-check is a web site called Allakhazam. Using this site's search tool, one can peruse long-term pricing of one's target item. Allakhazam's excellent item price database shows all kinds of great AH statistics - median, average, and most common prices, and even a histogram. The only downfall to Allakhazam is that the data has been gathered across all servers and server types. Still, I have found it to be largely accurate, which isn't suprising considering that the sample size is typically very large. Allakhazam's data is typically based on thousands of sales of the target item, over a period anywhere from around a month to as short as only a few days!

OK, so Allakhazam says that my target item (say, our Nightraven crossbow) sells for a median price of 25 gold. How do I double-check that my server follows suit? Simple - my second price cross-check is to consult the AH itself. Once you find a potential deal, switch to the AH Scan tab (the built-in Blizzard AH scan that you've always used when looking for items). Check to see if any other instances of your item are for sale. This method will catch several potential problems:

First, if there are lots of other auctions for the same item, and several foolish sellers are unloading their swag for less-than-typical prices, you'd have a hard time selling your item.

Finally, it is possible that your server's market is simply a bit different than the "average" market predicted by Allakhazam's data. Perhaps one guild has been running UBRS non-stop and the AH is saturated with drops from that dungeon. Supply and demand will drive local prices down temporarily, etc.

The only other reality check that you need will be common sense. For example, this morning, I found a piece of mail armor that seemed to be a great potential buy. Upon second glance however, I noticed that the stats were basically Int and Spirit. No hunter is going to be very interested in that piece - it's actually a shaman item, hence the extra-low price. I never would have sold it for the attractive Allakhazam median price, which also takes into account Horde-side pricing.

Good luck, and strike gold!

Live Anywhere - the Next Big Step

It's funny that my gaming buddy Ken and I were just talking about this topic Tuesday night while playing WoW. Since building my new XP gaming rig, I've been listening to PC Gamer magazine's exceptionally well-done podcast. This morning, they posted the first of several special installments covering E3.

The biggest news, in my mind, was Live Anywhere. Big Bill himself showed up to discuss Microsoft's gameplan for the Xbox 360 and Windows gaming. One of the announcements introduced Live Anywhere, which will be a shared incarnation of Xbox Live, tying together the Xbox, Vista PC's, and mobile phones. OK, fine, Gamertags are cool and all, but that's not the extent of it.

The big surprise is totally integrated cross-platform gaming. That's right, PC and Xbox gamers will be able to play together for the first time, sharing all the great stat data, content distribution, and communication tools that are Xbox Live. Very, very cool. I'm feeling just a little better about dropping all this money on a new PC. :) Perhaps I won't even need to buy a 360? Except it looks like Forza Motorsport and Halo 3 are 360-only. Or maybe they are 360-only for now due to the Vista delay? Hmm...

Board Game Friday: the Horror!!!

Well, I'm quite excited. This Friday night is board game week!

See, I've been gaming weekly with a great bunch of guys for the past six years or so. Here's a link to our campaign website. The main focus of our weekly Friday night game is several ongoing Dungeons and Dragons (d20 3.5 ed.) campaigns set in the world of Greyhawk. I've not been playing with them as of late, as my D&D jonze waxes and wanes, and I was looking for an opportunity to carve out a little more family time. (Note that the group is actually looking for another regular player if you're located in the Lehigh Valley and are so inclined.)

That said, I'm still meeting with them when they take a week off of D&D to play board games, my true tabletop gaming love.

Up this week - a game that I've been drooling over for some time, Arkham Horror by Fantasy Flight Games.



Now, I'm a huge fan of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. If you aren't familiar with his writings, Lovecraft is the author of a collection of deliciously, disturbingly macabre 1920's and 30's sci fi / horror stories, including the famous Cthulhu mythos works.

Arkham Horror is a board game set in Lovecraft's 1920's fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts. The game is cooperative, and the players take on the roles of various investigative Arkham citizens braving the horrors of the night. The investigators must strive to close off a variety of gates to otherworldly realms before too much eldritch mojo has built up, allowing one of several Ancient Ones - insane elder gods hailing from the blackest recesses of time and space - to slip into our world and destroy existence as we know it.

Now come on, that just sounds like a fun Friday night, doesn't it?

I picked up the game last night, and I must say, like most of Fantasy Flight's fine games, it's a brick. Serious fart-factor, as the boys from Pulp Gamer podcast would say. (Fart-factor is a phrase the Pulp Gamer fellows coined to describe the vacuum-induced burping noise that a substantial, heavy new game makes when one picks it up by the lid and allows the inner box to drop to the table.)

Seriously - I popped open the box this morning to grab the rulebook to read over breakfast. The game box is about 12 inches square by perhaps 4 inches deep, and when one opens it up, the thing is literally packed to the top with contents - there is absolutely no airspace in the box whatsoever. Now that's a game, baby! Components galore, a large, beautifully detailed game board, and 24 page, 11" x 11" rulebook. Mmm, now that's good eatin'!



I've just finished reading the rules over lunch at work, and this really looks to be a well-designed game - can't wait to try it out! More to come after our first go at the Ancient Ones on Friday night.

/excited!

Eureka!!!

Ahh, sweet victory (hopefully)!! After consulting with a more experienced mad scientist (read: the kind Asus phone tech), I think I've sorted out my RAID 0 problem.

After creating the RAID 0 array, I had tried to install XP, but after clunking away for a few minutes, the installer responded that it couldn't find any hard disks. Hmmm...

So, I went back and checked the Nvidia RAID summary screen. It showed a status of "N/A" in the Boot column. "So", says I, "something's busted."

Not true, apparently. My friendly tech believes that the status currently reads as "N/A" because my boot priority puts the CD drive first.

In reality, Windows couldn't load because XP doesn't have native SATA drivers. Hence: "Hard drive? What hard drive?" One has to first create a floppy containing the SATA drivers and then hit F6 to apply them while the XP installer is doing its thing.

Small problem - I don't have a floppy drive. Never even ordered one. Who uses floppies anymore?!? Me, it seems!

So, a victory, but a hollow one to be sure. Why, you ask? Because I now have to sully my lovely radioactive creature with some crummy old-school tech - that's why! It's like retrofitting the cockpit of the Space Shuttle with a wringer washer and galvanized washtub, I tell you!!!

[Reluctantly makes note to stop at Circuit City on way home...]

Creature Sighted in Bethlehem! Citizens Panic! News at Eleven.

The horror! The creature stirs!!



Now if I can just get the damn Raid 0 array to be bootable... Calling Asus at lunchtime. :)

It's Aliiive!!!

Thank the silicon gods - it booted! First try! You've got to see the inside of this case - total hawt sex.

I've just started configuring the Raid 0 array. Too excited - got to get back to it! Pics tomorrow.

Massster, the Body Parts Have Arrived!

Egor, my faithful hunchback minion (by this I mean the Fed Ex guy, of course) arrived yesterday bearing multiple boxes of smexy new hardware. So... psyched!

I started putting stuff together last night. Man, a computer case used to be sooo much less complicated. Fans have been breeding like horny bunnies in there, and it seems like every single componant needs its own special power cable these days. It used to be that you just plugged the dang cards in the slots. Now there's temperature sensors, extra fans, heat sinks ad nauseum, umpteen special cables, heat pipes, and lots and lots more power.

I think my 3-4 year old Dell shipped with like a 250 watt power supply. This baby needs 600 watts, and I'm hoping even that will be sufficient if I add anything in the future (can you say physics processor, kiddies? I knew you could!).

I'm getting there, though. Power supply, mobo, and cpu all installed. Just need to attach a few temp sensors and then on to the drives, ram, and add-on cards. I just received the finishing touch - a Soundblaster X-Fi - so I should hopefully be at least to the OS install phase by tonight. (Barring the sparking, spitting, and billowing smoke...)

I love the smell of ozone in the evening! (What am I saying?!?)

Dr. Stein and the Forbidden Lure of Oblivion

I've been feeling the age of my Wintel PC for some time - at least as far as gaming horsepower goes. With Windows Vista supposedly just around the corner though, I'd made the decision to wait and see what was going to happen regarding emerging DirectX 10.0 hardware and the new OS system requirements before making an investment in a new machine.

Enter Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Back when Morrowind launched, I had taken the Elder Scrolls red pill - big time. It was an amazing, liberatingly open-ended game, and I had lost many an hour of sleep in pursuit of one quest or another. As a result, I've obviously been watching the development progress of Oblivion closely.

Fast forward to Oblivion's launch - it was decision time. I had held off buying a Xbox 360 because I simply wasn't enamored enough with any of the titles to blow my $400. In addition, the 360 is a mixed blessing. Sure, it's 8.8 lbs of next-gen console on nitrous oxide, but what's the point if one only owns a regular-def TV? On an old-school TV, the 360 is basically just an Xbox, in my mind. So, we're not just talking the $500 for the 360 plus accessories, we also need to figure on at least another $500 for an HDTV.

Thing is though, I do own a nice PC monitor. With an adapter cable (and probably a switch box, for convenience), one can play a 360 on one's monitor. So, 360 or PC? I finally figured that the cheapest route was to buy Oblivion for my PC and see whether it would run it.

It did, but not well. Here's what I'm running:

Dell Dimension 8200
Pentium 4 2.66 Mhz
1 Gb RAM
Nvidia GeForce 6800 (128Mb) video card (AGP)
Soundblaster Live! 24-bit audio
etc.

This system detected as "medium range", and Oblivion set itself up as such. In the end, I think the GeForce 6800 bumped me into the "medium" range, being of the 6800 chipset family, but it shouldn't have. If you don't have a 256 Mb vidio card, Oblivion isn't going to run acceptably (at least, by my standards).

In any case, at Oblivion's autodetected "medium" settings, the game looked gorgeous. Unfortunately though, the framerates were pretty choppy - say 10-15 FPS. Some people are putting up with this kind of speed, but it simply makes my eyes tired too fast and distracts me from the gameplay. Plus, my FPS dipped even further in combat, and I began to realize that in the more difficult upcoming fights, I wasn't going to be able to compete. It's like trying to get by in a boxing ring while blinking one's eyes rapidly - pretty soon both eyes are going to be swelled shut. (Cut me, Rocco! Adriaaan!)

So, I spent the next week or so on the Bethesda message boards, taking notes and tweaking out my settings and .ini file. I ended up with some decent framerates, but the game was no longer beautiful. The world was now kind of flat and less interesting, and I wanted shiny, blazing beauty, dammit!

What to do? I could spend ~$500 on a 360 and yet another copy of the game, and hook the 360 up to my PC monitor. Or, I could buy a new graphics card to put one last-ditch band-aid on my aging PC. Or, I could spring for a new system, which I'd been thinking I needed anyway.

As far as upgrading my current system goes, it is an old AGP-format motherboard, and it only takes the incredibly expensive and ill-conceived RDRAM. I'd added another 512 Mb about a year ago to give WoW a bit of a boost, and it had cost almost $300- youch. The new graphics cards are all PCI Express, not AGP, except for the new GeForce 7800 GS boards. Still, even though those cards are fast, the aging AGP bus simply holds them back.

The bonus to a new PC, on the other hand, is that my 10-year-old son is now getting old enough that he uses my PC all the time for school, and likes to play a bit of WoW himself. (Well, let's be honest here. I've addicted my OWN son to the digital equivalent of crack cocaine...) My current system is still just fine for office apps, surfing, and playing WoW. So, a fine candidate for a hand-me-down PC for Zack (and he was predictably all for that idea).

Finally, Microsoft's announcement about a week back, that Vista has been pushed back to at least early 2007, was the mosquito that landed on the other side of my precariously-balanced teeter-totter. The expensive side of the teeter totter. (At least it will be, if I ever pay it off...)

The last decision was whether to buy a pre-built system, or build a rig from scratch. I was sorely tempted by Alienware's Aurora 7500 systems, which are priced very competitively in the gaming PC sector. In the end though, I just couldn't see paying another $500 for a warranty, some (questionable) phone support, and for them to build it.

I decided to build my own. I had done so several times in the past, and am no stranger to the gorey innards of a PC. That said, I'm not too up on some of the current high-end technology - stuff like SLI-linked video cards and Raid 0 performance hard disk arrays. Damn the torpedoes, though - I specced out the system last week and ordered it all over the weekend.

Here's what's in transit to my door:

The Guts
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Processor (dual core)
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 mobo
2 Gb Corsair 3500LL PRO RAM
(2) eVGA GeForce 7900 GT CO (256 Mb) video cards (to be SLI-linked)
(2) Seagate Barracuda 80GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200RPM hard drives (for a Raid 0 array)
Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card
NEC ND-3550A 16X Double Layer DVD±RW Drive
Enermax Noisetaker II 600W Power Supply
NZXT Lexa case

The Peripherals
Viewsonic VX922 19in LCD Monitor (badass 2ms response time)
Saitek Eclipse keyboard
Razer Copperhead Gaming Mouse
Wolfking Warrior gaming keypad
Altec Lansing GT5051 Dolby 5.1 (3.1?) speaker system

In the end, I went a little nutty on the peripherals to match my case. The Lexa case has a clear acrylic side panel, and the fans light up via LED's so that the inside of the case glows blue and shows off my sexy new hardware. I'll probably add a few supplementary blue light sticks inside the case, and underneath to give it that Streetglow modified import hot rod car look:

I actually chose the case for the quality and the cooling efficiency - the crazy glow was just an added attraction. That said, I couldn't resist the Eclipse keyboard and Razer mouse though. They both also glow blue, and will simply look hawt and compliment the case. The knobs on my speaker system even glow blue... Here's a pic of the KB in all its radioactive glory:




One final note to cap off my setup. I've been reading about Wolfking's cool new gaming keyboards, and I just couldn't pass those up anymore. The hot new Wolfking peripherals are simply gaming keyboards made by gamers for gamers. Check out the Warrior's layout:




The Wolfking folks decided to help all us gamers out by creating comfortable input devices based around the WASD configuration. I opted to get the standalone Warrior pad rather than the Timberwolf, which has the gaming pad built right into the left side of a normal keyboard. I wanted to make sure I was comfortable typing when not gaming. Plus, I didn't want to give up my num pad.

Back in the day, PC's were called "clones", short for "IBM clone". Nowadays, unless you're looking for a cool laptop, IBM is pretty much a non-player. In any case, my old pre-Dell machine had been dubbed the Frankenclone, due to its piecemeal incarnations and upgrades. So, I think we're looking at the specs for Son of Frankenclone above. Hence, the titular reference. That, and I'm a huge fan of the Helloween song... :P Only this time, as I scream "it's alive!!", I will be bathed in an unholy, eerie electric blue glow. Muuahahaha!

I can't wait to get Oblivion cranking on this new rig. Mmmmm... FPS-y....