MichaelandChrissy.com

I was really excited to play “Fallout 3” when it first came out.  My friend Swavek is a huge fan of the series, so he bought it the day it was released in October.  I was busy feeding babies at the time, but I recently got a crack at it after he was done with his copy.  I’m really liking this game, especially since it plays almost exactly like “Elder Scrolls: Oblivion” (except with nuclear bomb shelters and guns).  I might be addicted.  I remember being disturbingly addicted to Oblivion, but I only had one baby at the time and that one slept most of the day.

Remember that commercial about the crack monkey that ran all the time during the late 80’s?  They got this monkey hooked on cocaine, and then gave it all the drugs that it wanted.  It took cocaine over food, sleep and even sex.  It took cocaine until it died.  That’s about how I feel about Fallout 3 right now.  I can’t seem to get enough, and I find myself thinking about game strategy all the time.  Sometimes I’ll play until three in the morning without even noticing the time.  And then I have dreams about it when I finally do go to bed…

I know that’s not healthy.  Unlike the crack monkey, I can see my problem and understand what consequences may come.  I’m making a conscious effort to only play the game while everyone else is asleep so that I’m not neglecting my family.  I occasionally get to play during naptime (noon to 3 PM) and then I go hardcore after Chrissy goes to bed (usually by 9 PM), depending on whether the baby is crying.  Don’t worry, I’ll beat it soon. In the meantime, I’ll be in the basement with the crack monkey, playing Oblivion-With-Guns until I die.

Diablo (1997) was the first PC game that I bought for myself. I had played other computer games, but they were either shareware or borrowed from my friend Swavek.  The interface was so intuitive, just point and click to do just about anything.  Although there were only sixteen levels, each one was randomized every time you played, so it never got old.  It was different from anything else that I had ever played before.  It was also the first PC game that I played online (not including Doom’s peer-to-peer cooperative mode). I would join a small team and defeat Diablo at least twice every night.

When Diablo 2 (2000) came out, I bought it on the day of release and played it day and night for months. More character classes, each with a unique skill tree, made gameplay very customizable. And it was BIG: four entire Acts of content that spanned many diverse environments.  And the loot was incredible, even allowing you to piece together rare sets of items for extra bonuses.  Diablo 2 was the only game that I ever bought items for outside of the game. People sold powerful weapons and armor on eBay; you would pay via PayPal and then the seller would give you the items online in a private game.

“Stay a while, and listen!”- Deckard Cain

So when Blizzard announced Diablo 3, my heart stopped.  Well, maybe not stopped, at least not until I actually say the preview site. Then I died.  Seeing Deckard Cain, the narrator for the first two games, again was like being greeted by an old friend. The new Diablo 3 site includes “The Journal of Deckard Cain“, with thirty pages voiced by the same guy who played Cain before.  The journal is illustrated with plenty of concept images from Diablo 3, as well as all of the cinematics from Diablo 2 (they still hold up very well after all these years). It serves as an excellent refresher for the Diablo mythology.

The new content introduced in Diablo 3 looks really good.  There is an excellent gameplay trailer that highlights the new environments, two of the five available character classes (and their abilities) and some of the new monsters that will appear.  The designers include enough of the familiar to make the game slightly nostalgic, but also include enough new stuff to push ahead of the copycat games that have come out before. There was even a “boss” battle at the end of the trailer that left me wanting to play the game right now. I’m pretty excited to see more from Blizzard’s Diablo 3 site.

In a completely unexpected move, Swavek got me a Logitech G5 gaming mouse and “Mass Effect” for my birthday. This is some pretty awesome hardware. It’s got a lot of features that my old Logitech mouse didn’t have, such as two thumb buttons and a wheel that tilts to the left and right. Even the cord is unique: it’s roped fabric, like a shoelace, instead of flexible plastic. What makes this a gaming mouse, though, is its more unusual features, like adjustable sensitivity and weight tuning.

Mouse sensitivity came be ramped up or down on the fly by the two buttons below the wheel (a plus and a minus). Crank it down, and you have minute control so that the mouse moves very little in comparison to your wrist. Crank it all the way up, and your cursor will jump across the screen with the slightest hand movement. You can even adjust the sensitivity to three separate levels in the software driver, setting each one to exactly what you want (from 200 dpi to 2000 dpi).

I noticed that this mouse is very light compared to my old mouse. That’s because you can set the weight yourself with a pop-out tuning tray. The mouse came with an assortment of 4.5g and 1.7g weights that you pop into the cartridge in various positions. Once the mouse feels good in your hand, then you pop the tray back into the bottom of the mouse and get going. I set it to feel like my old mouse in heft, but I’ll have to play with it until I get it weighted just right.

I hadn’t really thought of myself as a “gamer” until just recently, probably since Aiden was born. I used to only play Blizzard games and the occasional Elder Scrolls game, but I’ve been playing about six to ten games a year lately. The last few have been first person shooters like “Unreal Tournament 3″ and “FEAR”. So, this mouse’s nine programmable buttons of death will really help me step up my game. Thanks again, Swavek!

Chrissy and I went in for her ultrasound appointment yesterday to find out the gender of “Baby 2.0″.  After sitting in the waiting room for over an hour (or sleeping on my shoulder, in Chrissy’s case), we finally got in to take a look at things.  This, apparently, requires half a gallon of green goo, applied liberally by the technician.  She walked us through all of the baby’s body parts and internal organs, verifying that everything existed and seemed to be functioning properly.  But Chrissy was only interested in one particular part (or its lack thereof). 

Baby 2.0 was not being cooperative in the least.  We kept getting slight glimpses of what may or may not be proof of gender, but Chrissy would stand for nothing less than concrete evidence.  Even the doctor who sat in on the examination couldn’t give us a 100% certainty.  He said that he would give it 70% odds on being a boy.  Chrissy was not having it.  So, she was rolled over on her side for fifteen minutes to cause the baby to change position.  Now the technician got a clear view of the package, and the doctor then confirmed it.  So, we’re officially having another boy on July 22nd, 2008. 

Now we just need to decide on a name.  We had chosen “Addison Riley” as a girl’s name, but now we don’t need that one.  Chrissy has liked “Jacob Anthony” since before Aiden came along, but I don’t like either name.  I’m currently partial to “Charles Montgomery”, but Chrissy says no to both.  We both like the name “Lucas”, but Swavek has given us a multitude of reasons why we should not bestow that curse upon our child (playgrounds swirling with insults such as “Lucas Mucus,” “Lucas Puke-us,” “Luke Skywalker,” etc.).  So the baby is still “Baby 2.0″ for now.

I beat BioShock last Friday. I’m already playing it again, since there is a high replay value and you notice a lot more detail the second time around. It occurred to me that I have been playing it alot over the last two weeks, which may explain why I haven’t done much updating of my blog. My good friend Swavek got a copy about a day before I did, so we exchanged notes almost daily about our progress.

In retrospect, I wrote a small book on the subject via email. I meant to put the more interesting bits of it here and there in my blog, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the game to do it. So, I’ve compiled the emails that I sent out below, along with hindsight commentary in brackets. If you’re at all interested in information about BioShock gameplay or links to cool BioShock stuff, then read on. Beware of spoilers!

On Swavek’s recommendation, I downloaded the demo for the PC version of Overlord. It has an interesting premise, not unlike Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper from 1997, where the plot revolves around destroying everything that is good so that your evil influence may grow. The difference is that Dungeon Keeper was a realtime strategy game (like Starcraft), Overlord is more of an action game. I really liked Dungeon Keeper, back in the day, so I decided to give this game a try.

You play as the “Overlord” and you progress in the game by earning better and more simultaneous minions. For example, the demo starts with five brown goblins following you around. You can command them to do your bidding as you wander through the 3D game terrain. As a reward for finishing level one, I got an additional five goblins to command. This comes in handy when you need ten simultaneous goblins to overcome a particular barrier. Later, you also get more powerful minions, since the brown goblins are the weakest type. Different types of minion allow for different abilities and immunities, but only the browns were available during the demo.

The problems I had are with the controls. The game engine seems to be based on the Fable engine (which was a fun game that I played until the end), but I didn’t have any trouble controlling my character in Fable. For the most part, your goblin horde does most of your actions for you, but they seem to have some path-finding and obstacle-avoidance issues. A tree trunk in your way will spell your doom. There are plenty of things to destroy in the terrain, but you can’t target them individually, so you have to “sweep” your goblins around the countryside and they act accordingly (breaking urns, smashing pumpkins, etc.). You do this by pointing in a given direction, and your horde rushes off that way like a flock of birds.

Sweeping seems to be the way to go when controlling your goblins, but they often miss things and there is no way to directly control their behavior (”this one goes here, that one goes there!”). To make matters worse, you can only sweep in one direction at a time. The camera angle seems to freeze when you start sweeping, so you have to let go of the sweep command for a moment, then move your character to see in another direction, and then resweep and hope that your goblins didn’t get stuck behind a log in the meantime. Personally, I think that I’d rather have that micromanagement ability that Dungeon Keeper allowed for.

Swavek and I went to see Frank Miller’s 300 today. We saw it at the IMAX in Portage, and I was blown away by the sound system. We got there early, so the previews and commercials were cycling through on the upper half of the screen with the audio on a regular sound system. We saw the Spiderman 3 trailer and the Harry Porter trailer — neat, but nothing that I hadn’t seen before.

Then the lights turned down, and the Spiderman 3 trailer started playing on the full screen. The screen was so huge that I couldn’t see anything around me except the movie. Then the IMAX speakers kicked in, and suddenly I couldn’t hear anything around me except the movie. It was awesome. Kerasotes should have built an IMAX in Schererville.

The movie was great, but I felt a little guilty afterwards because it was the first time that I had left Chrissy alone with Aiden (aside from business trips). Here I was, enjoying myself with my friend, eating Culvers (the best fast-food burger ever), and Chrissy was at home with the boy. I bought her a “love you” card and some Dove chocolate eggs on the way home.

I made the trip out to Fort Wayne for the Iacon One convention today. I was far from impressed. I think that there might have been a hundred people there, and that would include vendors and staff. About a dozen vendors were there, but by the time I got there (at noon), two of them were packing up to leave and a third was about to bail out.

The day would have been a total waste if not for the voice actor panel. Scott McNeil, David Sobolov and Venus Torzo were there. David Sobolov had never been to a convention before, and I wondered if he was disappointed. Scott McNeil once again entertained everybody (especially Venus, who couldn’t stop laughing at him). Even Swavek was laughing.

I met David Willis for the first time. I’ve seen him at conventions before, but he always looked busy. I talked to him a little and bought a t-shirt. He doesn’t so much talk as much as spill out mumbled, half-finished thoughts that the listener is left to interpret. He seemed annoyed that I had no clue what he said or meant, and moreso when I asked him to explain what he was talking about, but he seemed like a nice enough guy.

I got a Takara re-issue Starconvoy for only $55 from TFSource. When these first came out, they were $90 online, but I was tempted to get one even then. I also got the Robot Masters RM-17 Black Victory Leo set from TFSource. I bought an Energon Shockblast and an Energon Slugslinger (both loose) from another vendor. Not a bad haul for such a small vendor turnout — I plan to visit TFSource at Botcon (when they’ll be set up for credit cards!).