I believe strongly that right now is a good time to be a gamer. I remember talking about all these things that would be super cool when the technology would catch up back some 3 console generations ago. In all those nerd conversations there were lists and lists of things that would be “totally awesome” in X game. Like great animations, and “graphics”, and being able to play as whatever character you liked most (from whatever other source material the conversation started from) and being able to do all the awesome things they did in whatever movie or TV show you initally saw them in. Well, I think to one degree or another they’ve done that with Transformers: War for Cybertron.

I’d read on Kotaku and Joystiq various things that hinted at this game how it might actually be good. As you see the Transformers games that came before this one didn’t get the best review scores. I was sold when I saw this video. All those conversations about “it would be cool if” just blazed by in that trailer and I wasn’t sure what to do past waiting for the game to come out. Well the aforemetioned game is out and I can tell you that it is freakin awesome! I mean they have Peter Cullen doing the vice of Optimus Prime! You want to play as Megatron? Sure you can do that, how about Starscream? Yeah, you can do that too. You wanna fight on Cybertron?! That’s where it takes place!!!

I’ve gone through the Decepticon campaign and am a bit into the Autobot Campaign and thus far I’m really enjoying the game. It has drop-in drop-out co-op and I’ve played a bit with some friends and it works pretty well. I’ve only played a little bit of the Multiplayer. They have the standard MP modes but have a “class” based system for the robots where you can level them up as you play Multi and learn new abilities and such. All in all I’m saying that if you like transformers even a little bit I highly suggest this game. I really hope that they continue with the franchise and not have this just be some one off game. I also hope that other developers look at how they did this and keep this game in mind when they look to take an established IP and want to make a game for it.

As you may or may not know I worked on the first Mass Effect. It was I think one of the most taxing projects I’ve ever worked on but in the end the game is in my top 10 of all time. At work I played through the game end to end 15 times and then once at home after ship. I feel pretty confident that I can speak on the virtues of the game and its ups and downs. You know doubt know what those are at this point and if you don’t I suggest you pick up a copy of Mass 1 and then we can talk. Moving forward I’m going to just assume that you also know what those ups and downs were of the game and I will then move on to talking about Mass 2.

I’m not into Spoilers of any kind in anything. I’m of the mind that some how me telling you whatever the “cool part” is regardless of if it will “give anything away or not” doesn’t really help anyone. I mean sure it was “funny” or “cool” or whatever but you (or in this case me) telling me (or in this case you) about the event in said “thing” always leaves this empty space. As once the person in question (you or me…I’m not sure at this point) experiences said event they already know about it and ultimately it has the same impact (figuratively) as a piece of cold pizza. Sure it tastes good and all but its cold and is a shadow of its former hotter self that would have burnt the roof of your mouth. So that’s why I’m not going to tell you spoiler related things as I want the game to burn your mouth.

What I will say is that I was floored immediately by the production value. After working on the first one (see above) it felt almost like a different game. The environments looked way better, the little things they did in various places to make the environments come to life was striking. There was diffinately more life to the “world” in this game. When I was on Mass 1 there was talk that they were going to take your game from Mass 1 and give you the ability to port it over to 2. Well they delivered and everything sticks with your character. To the degree where there will be things that you’ll experience (maybe through a conversation or some kind of message in game) that will come right from Mass 1. Oddly enough sometimes its like getting an email from someone you’d not talked to in quite a while and then the memories of your time with them come rushing back. Its pretty cool.

The voice acting is super cool too. I was surprised how many voice actors were in Mass Effect 2. I’m used to going through a game and maybe having one or two voices I recognize. Like having Liam Neeson in Fallout 3. In this case however its like a who’s who of Sci-fi nerd voices.

I’ve started my second play through and I was the “renegade” last time (read: “asshole”) but this time I’m going through as the “paragon” (read: “Nice guy”) and I’m enjoying it. I pulled down the DLC Stolen Memory and started it last night but it was too late and so I opted to sleep and I’ll more than likely start it up this evening if Alan Wake dosn’t take that spot in this evening’s gaming.

In closing, If you’ve not played Mass 2 you should check it out. You can have a pretty good experience if you just start from Mass 2 but I’d really suggest you play through 1 and import over your characer into Mass 2. Porting your character will diffinately give you a better experience.

So for those of you who have been playing from home you’ll notice I’d not updated in quite a while. That or you stopped coming here because I didn’t really update all that often and so it wasn’t a surprise to you that I’d not updated in a while. Ok so what REALLY happend was that some douche bag hacked my site and it took a while to fix things. There are still a couple of places I need to go to remove the links pointing you to some sort of “Male enhancement” drug of some kind. Just to be on the safe side I suggest that you avoid clicking on the aforementioned links and look elsewhere for your male enhancements…might I suggest your inbox.

Anyway, so yeah…It appears all things are unhacked (for the moment) and I’ll be making sure to try to do whatever it is I need to to so that doesn’t happen again. I’m pretty sure its been like a million years since I posted last so instead of bringing everyone up to speed I’m going to talk about something else.

I’ve been thinking about a way to do some different stuff with this site as its something I pay for and I suppose that since its here that I should do something with it. So the current ideas are as follows.

1. Start reviewing games (specifically). Or at the very least games that I’ve finished which as of late has been more than before.
2. Start reviewing things (games, movies, food, beer…whatever) Ive got a movie review system that I’ve been using for years that I suppose I could translate over but I’m not sure about that either.
3. Get other people to post on the site as well. I’m not sure where I stand with this option as ultimately it feels like it might just be a way to get other posts up here because apparently I’ve got a horrible track record of posting. If you think this is a good idea send me an e-mail and we can talk about it. If you don’t know my e-mail by this point…really…its not difficult to figure out.

I’d like to get a new site design but I don’t really have any money and I’m not good at that stuff…so yet again, I’m going to try to fiure out how to do that. I’ve got no ideas about that stuff either.

Anyway, so here’s to not being hacked! (for the moment).

Pork

So Steph and I were looking to get new phones as mine pretty much sucked and hers was beter than mine however still not super awesome. In looking over the budget and such it looked like we were able to upgrade with no problems. Our current agreement with Verizon, or was it T-mobile…I’m not sure anyway it was done and so we were free to do whatever we wanted. All signs were pointing to AT&T mainly because of said iPhone. So after some leg work on Steph’s part we decided we were going to go to the AT&T store and get it there, kind of one stop shopping. As the last time we went and got the aforementioned crappy phones we went through a 3rd party retailer and we didn’t get screwed over perse more that things just didn’t measure up as we had expected and thus wanted to make sure we went right to the source.

At the AT&T store we learned that all the things she was told over the phone about any kind of deals we could get by going through the AT&T store weren’t actually true, which led to us being frustrated with the whole deal. Not to mention it was getting late and we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to get the phones in time and get the kids fed and such. Not to mention the fact that we would have to order the phones through AT&T which would have taken 7 to 10 days. The manager assured us that no one had the phones and that we should really go through them. I asked steph to call the Apple store and see how many phones they had…the result was quite a few. We shrugged it off went out for food and then went to the Apple store near our house. They had the phones we craved and we got the process underway.

It ended up taking much longer than we would have liked to get the whole process started, I mean you’d think that they would have jumped at a couple who wanted to drop some cash on their new phones. Ivy was (as any 3 year old would be) all over the place and it was getting close to the time to feed Ben. The dude that was helping us was clearly new as he was constantly asking questions to this lady that was also an employee standing next to us (not a good sign). So he starts the sign up process and asks us for our information a few times blaming the need to re-ask on his little info tracking device. Then something happened, the manager came up to him and asked what was wrong, only to find out that the little device didn’t give him the option to transfer our current phone number over and as such assigned us a new number with our new AT&T account (Epic FAIL!). At this point Steph and I were done with that place. I was committed as it was easier for me to hang out and finish it up. So steph went home to put Ivy to bed and to feed Ben, and the manager assured me that it would be fine. The original helper person said he was sorry a few times and then went off to “help” other people, or clean ipods or something.

The Manager lady called up AT&T and spoke with some person there who was going to fix the situation. In looking over the reciept it listed my actual phone number as the one it was changed to. This made no sense to me as I never gave him my phone number. So we talked back and forth a bit and it seemed that there wasn’t really a problem. She hung up with the AT&T person and called her phone from my new phone to make sure that the number was right…it wasn’t. The number that came up was for some dude named Paul Smith or something. With this new hitch in the road I learned something about iphones.

If you go to the Apple store and say you want an iphone and get all through the process of signing up and getting your name and such associated with a phone and then you decide that you don’t want the phone you are still tied to it. Standard opperating procedure is that the sim card is removed and a new one is placed in the phone. I noticed that a sim card was taped to the box but me not living in the Apple world had no idea what that meant. Clearly helper guy didn’t either. So with another call to the AT&T guy (who got the number of the manger I guess they’re going to “hook up” or something…which was a little weird) and an hour and a half later, the phones were all set and I was on my way to being another one of those people with an iPhone. I can say thus far I really like the phone and I’m still not completely sure what it all does but hey…its got a compass…so that’s cool…cialis brands, Cealis And Lopressor cialis pdr
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ok so yeah, whatever. a little over a week now my son was born. His name is Ben Archer. He was 9.1 lbs and 21 inches. He’s totally awesome. I’ve still not really wrapped my head around this whole two kid thing yet. Right now it just feels like we’ve got one kid mainly because Ivy actually does stuff…like walk around and talk to us. The boy however, well, yeah so he does the normal baby stuff that you would do when you’re a little over a week old.

For my birthday I got Fallout 3 I’ve really been enjoying it. I’ve been told and looked at as if I’m some lepar when I tell people I’d not played the first two and that I’d only played Fallout Tactics (which I enjoyed). At the time I was a serious console gamer and a computer was something people had that I didn’t have. I find it interesting now that in a way, fallout came to me on the console. Anywho, yeah so its pretty good. I’m going the way of the good person. I’m “very good” in that I’m not an asshole to people in the game or I don’t just shoot helpless people so I can have their stuff. I have a real problem with “morality” games in playing any way but good. I just feel dirty if I try to play the “bad” person. Its just not me. I got into a big conversation about it with a dude I work with and his idea is that its just a game so why does it matter? Yeah, I understand that point but I guess, that’s not normally how I’d be so why would I want to just start being a prick who ruthlessly kills people or backstabs them just because its a bunch of 1s and 0s. We’ve come a long way since pong I’ll tell you that.

I picked up “Broken Steel” which is one of the expansion packs for Fallout. That one raises the level cap to 30 so its been kind of cool going around and seeing what some of the other skills and abilities are like that I couldn’t have leveled up in one playthrough. I mainly go into places I’ve not been, pop into “hidden” mode and move move around and kill badguys with my silenced pistol…or Lincoln’s Repeater which is areal cool gun…and it was Abe Lincoln’s so…that makes the game educational! See I learned stuff! All in all Fallout feels like an MMO in scope. The game is freakin huge and with every decission you make it directly impacts the game as a whole. So if you should decide to leave the nuclear bomb that hasn’t detonated yet in the center of the town alone…the town stays there. If you want to be a prick you can detonate it and the town is as you’d expect it if a nuclear bomb went off in the center. Help the zombies..don’t help the zombies, whatever you decide the end result shapes the game. Since I canceled my wow account (again) I find this is a nice distraction without the need to go raiding all the time. Oh and Liam Neeson is the voice of one of the characters in the game, so that’s pretty cool!

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You no doubt heard about the layoffs at Microsoft, yeah well that’s what has been keeping me from updating. I didn’t lose my job or anything, but it’s just been tough emotionally and I’ve not really been doing anything. I don’t want to get into it all here but yeah…that’s the excuse.

In other news: I’m still workign on the PAX 08 DVD and its really coming along. I’ve reviewed the first run of proofs of the “main theater” (non-concert) stuff. That would be stuff like the Gabe and Tycho panels, the Key Note, The Omegathon, etc… I’ve given feedback and now am waiting on round 2 of the main theater segments and then the concerts. All in all I can tell you that I’m really excited for the DVD this year. Its turning out real REAL good and I can’t wait for people to see it. I can’t tell you dates or cost or any of that, I don’t deal with that stuff.

Hopefully I’ll have a better write up for you about the coming up D&D game. I’ve got all my own dice this time and I’m wearing my 12 sided die shirt. If it dosn’t work well for me, I’m gonna have to sacrifice the 3 legged cat on the altar of evil

“How did the D&D game go?”

Well i’m glad you asked, why don’t I tell you. Ok so, all it went good. Everyone else did what they were supposed to while I seemed to stand around and attempt to cast spells and such only to find that I wasn’t able to…why you ask? Mainly because all my dice rolls sucked ass! I mean really they were bad. The character I play is an elf. Elves get this “re-roll” ability once per encounter. First time..I rolled a 5. I decide, ok I think I should use my re-roll…Roll the dice…5. The same thing happened the second time I attempted to use it. As for the other things I was attempting to do, it must have looked like I was putting on some kind of non-threatening light show as everything failed…I mean everything. There were a couple times I was able to do damage to things and I did kill a “bug bear”. However the rest of the party didn’t seem to remember that and mocked me because of my lack luster “first day”.

I wouldn’t consider myself a supersticious person however when it comes to dice, that all goes out the door.One of the major issues (which I was yelled at for by another guy I know who plays D&D) is that I didn’t use MY dice, but I used community dice that were provided. I replied that it didn’t break any rule as they were provided by the DM and as such the dice were under his jurisdiction and thus, neutral when it came to a positive or negative effect that could come from rolling dice that were not your own. Either way, I stated that I was going to bring my own dice to the next game. So in keeping with that I found my dice bag and this morning I went through the dice. With my past history of playing shadowrun and Necromunda I had quite a few D6 as such I cleaned out a bunch but then I noticed something. I was putting the dice into different groups based on color and type, then I was pulling out dice that I deemed to be bad dice. I sat and looked at the good dice and then as previously mentioned came to the realization and stopped for a second and wondered what the hell I was doing but also…if the decission I was making was right and some of the “bad dice” might actually roll me some good numbers. I feel good about these dice though…gonna get some good rolls out of them…If not I’m going to do what a friend of mine told me about last night.

He was playing D&D with this guy who was getting really bad rolls with his dice. So he took the bad dice and smashed them with a hammer. Then took the bits of broken “bad dice” and placed them in a little container. After that any time he was rolling poorly with the remaining dice he would pull out the little container and shake it at the remaining dice to intimidate them. I’m not sure if that will work but I’m starting to notice that table top gamers are much like those ladies who go and play Bingo with all the fuzzy trolls and trinkets and lucky rocks and such. Ultimately it dosn’t matter because God not only plays dice but decides the outcome. Proverbs 16:33.

So as of tomorrow I’m going to be playing D&D again. I was mainly a Shadowrun guy all through Junior High and highschool and then for quite a few years after that. I always felt like D&D was the starting point that other table top games started from. I have no idea if it was the first I just remember it being the game that devil worshipers played before they sacrificed kittens and put razor blades in candy for kids during halloween. When I played in the 6th grade it was more my circle of other nerd friends creating these super awesome characters and then rolling dice as a friend read from an instruction book or something about a dungeon or whatever. I can say that I don’t think we actually really ever “played” but the game we were playing was super sweet!

I’ve got a few small things I need to do to wrap up my character and then once thats all set I’ll be ready to go! I’m not quite sure what to expect tomorrow as before when I was playing table top games it was in some strange wacked out future seattle. Now I’m going to be in places where people drink mead and fight with swords…like real swords, not jacked up blades that have a monofilament edge. Either way it’ll be good. My plan is to gauge how into the roles of the characters the other players are before I set some kind of over the top precedent and get a one way trip to “oh no it’s a cave in you’re fucking dead” town.

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Ok so I guess there are lots of people who read my site and also not only do you read my site but you get angry and acutally come and tell me to update my site when I don’t as I haven’t given you the aformentioned “Daily Allowance of Pork”. So I’m here to tell you that I’m changing that all now. Just like all the other times when I said I was going to write more but (before) I didn’t, I’m going to start now! And If I don’t I’ll pay you all *5 dollars for every day that I don’t update on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For now I’m just writing this to put a new post up that dosn’t talk about how I’m all “upset” and “not happy” that Barockstar is our new President.

I hope Barockstar rocks the proverbial house and all that, < scathing sarcasm >I’m really looking forward to all the great things he’s going to do for our country< /scathing scarcasm >! Ok look, Daddy has been busy and tomorrow…well…maybe the next day I’ll write more and tell you all what the F I’ve been doing since the last time I posted.

For now…Happy New year! And Read the Bible! Start In Matthew, and if you really want a kick in the chops…start in Romans.

Hugs and kisses

Ok so I don’t get it. How the hell is everyone saying that Barockstar won the debate? From where I was sitting McCain walked all over him. He pointed out the lack of experience Barockstar has, the fact that everything he’s saying looks good on paper but should Barockstar become Pres, then we’re all going to effectively take it in the shorts.

What so because he said “I agree with what McCain just said, and let me add this other thing” that means he wins? That really dosn’t tell us anythign about Barockstar other than he’s real good at agreeing with things but I didn’t hear anything new from him that wasn’t “Change, Energy Independance, affordable healthcare, blah, blah, blah…” No real substance.

Personally I feel that people just want to say he won so that those that didn’t see the debate (which had lower numbers than the VP debate) will think that he some how came out swinging. Dude, he sat there and took punches left and right, and had nothing to back it up. He didn’t put up a fight, he didn’t even show any signs of having a leadership bone in his body. He really came off as being startled that he was being asked a question, and then you could see the gears in his head scrolling through the talking points looking for something that was a non-threatening middle of the road answer.

I love how he glazed over the fact that Barockstar got the 2nd highest contributions from Freddy and Fanny. Yeah, its totally the republicans fault. Dude, if you take money from them its your fucking fault too!

As if you couldn’t tell I’m not a fan of Barockstar, I completely disagree with his ideas (read the “Blue print for change” on his website). Even though he keeps talking about all the people he’s not going to tax. Dude, he’s going to tax the hell out of everyone. Under his model that he keep talking about there isn’t enough money coming in and that’s what they’re going to find out. So the logical conclusion for that is to tax more, and it will be framed as everyone sacrificing and such, but really, its been the plan all along.