March 2010 Archives

At the fertility clinic, there is a special room that the men go to "do their part." It's called the Library. I am, ahem, intimately familiar with this room at this point, having been to the fertility clinic on and off for over a year now. ( And even twice a few years back because of the cancer treatment.) I noticed that there was a second room in the other part of the clinic called the "Endocrine Library" I asked the lab tech yesterday about that room, not imagining why they would need a second kind of library. She told me it was the same thing, they just had 2 rooms, and she didn't know why it had a different name. Now, I have rarely seen a lot of men in the clinic so I asked her if it ever got so busy that they needed 2 libraries. She said, with a straight non-nonsense look, "No, but some men take a long time in the library."

I've been reading a lot latley about Role playing game design, both computer and table top. Specifically, how games change, almost have to change when a new edition or sequel is created. The publishers must keep publishing, else they go out of business. When a new edition or sequel is made it almost has to be different than what came before. There's an article over at Mob United, that talks about this, mostly from the tabletop perspective. Basically, when a publisher makes a new game they can either:

• Make is just like the old one, which pleases the fans but almost guarantees no new fans and therefore less customers.
• Make something completely new, which alienates the fans but hopefully creates new ones.
• Try to "move the ball forward" and do something in-between.

Mass Effect 2 and Final Fantasy 13 came out recently and both look to have chosen the third option. Mass Effect moved away from being an RPG and towards a 3-D shooter. Final Fantasy 13 removed a lot of the "game" and has moved toward a kind of interactive anime movie. 1UP has a good article on this trend. I can why see they did this but that doesn't mean I really like it. Of course it's possible to go to far the other way as well. Dragon Age is a serious old-school RPG, sometimes frustratingly so, some combats are so difficult you either have to set the difficulty to "I'm so bad I can't hold the controller" or just replay it over and over and hope you get lucky.

That being said, I really like all three of those games, probably Mass Effect 2 the most. They changed a lot from Mass Effect 1, but still managed to make a really good game.

Okay rant over, I should probably spend more time thinking and writing about things like Network Security and IP Networks than RPG theroycraft. I probably won't.

I updated the sidebars today too, and then I realized that you can't actually see them on an individual entry only on the homepage. I'm not sure why that it is. Moveable type is such a pain anymore. I wonder what will take longer, installing wordpress, or fixing the individual entries page.

Ninsianna is putting me to shame, with her almost daily posts. I should get on the ball. Hey Ninsi, remember when we had a blog-ring, the blogstopo, and we used to post about who was driving the most traffic to each other's sites? I know that's so 2004.... Curse you social media sites!

Speaking of Ninsi, she is coaching/organizing the softball team that Nikki and I are on. We have a 1-3 record but its a lot of fun. I think we do pretty well for the fact the some of us have never played team sports before. Now if it would just stop being cold at the games.

It snowed again this Saturday not a lot but enough that Nikki and I got caught in a huge traffic jam coming back from a friends house Saturday evening.

We were supposed to work around the house this weekend, but that didn't really happen. The snow and cold canceled our plans to work outside and well we didn't really get around to putting in the shelves that we planned to do about 2 months ago. All the stuff is sitting on the game room floor. I had a ceiling fan that set there for a year and half before I put it up, hopefully the shelves won't take that long.

Doh! Somehow I let a month slip by without an entry. I have been keeping myself busy though. I write a lot on my RPG campaigns so sometimes the blog itself falls by the way side. Oh btw, this entry is sure to be rife with typos. I started using a new keyboard and while its very nice I'm not quite used to typing on it yet.

My project for work that had me traveling back and forth to New York every other week has come to an end, so work is sorta slow right now, till the next project gets going.

I noticed I haven't updated my side panel in a while either. I finished reading Hawkmoon, and playing Arkham Asylum quite a while ago. Nikki got me a Nook for Christmas so I've been reading a lot more lately, since it makes it so convenient. I've read Titanicus by Dan Abnett, Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold, and I just started Dauntless by Jack Campbell.

Small side note, if you have a Nook or a Kindle or some other kind of E-reader, you can get almost all the Baen Sci-Fi novels as an Ebook. Check it out here, a lot of them are even free.

There has been a huge number of cool games released lately. I can barley keep up: Dragon Age, Boderlands, Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy 13, and I even downloaded Torchlight which is a fun time waster. I just started Final Fantasy 13 so I don't have much to say about it. Dragon Age and Mass Effect were great, though Mass Effect has moved away from its RPG roots. Borderlands is what Fallout 3 should have been and Bioshock 2 was cool but got a little boring and repetitive toward the end.

This past weekend, Nikki and I went too Allcon here in Dallas. It's a cool but somewhat small convention. The only panel we made it to was the Steampunk panel, which was awesome, and standing room only of course. I bought some new steampunk goggles, and because I'm a huge nerd, a set of Stargate coasters that look like the Stargate.

If you want to check out some of my RPG games here are the links:

Ptolus - A D&D 4E game set in Monte Cook's Ptolus.

Veterans of the Last War - An 4E Eberron campaign.

Serenity - Sci-gi game set in the Firefly 'verse