Gaming

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Mactastic

Saturday, September 16th, 2006

After a long week of work what better way to celebrate than to go celebrate with a little consumerism. In the last 24 hours I have managed to obtain both a 2nd generation iPod Nano as well as a new Core 2 Duo 24″ iMac.

I’m extremely happy with both (with a few minor exceptions) and find both to be pure engineering marvels. The Nano is small, sleek, and more responsive than it’s predecessor.

The iMac is simply stunning. The 64 bit Core 2 Duo chip keeps things brisk and the gorgeous 24″ 16:9 screen is easily replacing the ancient 27″ SDTV that I had in the bedroom. It’s a great media solution for the room, and provides the Mac desktop I’ve been missing so I can have an always on unix machine in the house for dev/network stuff.

I’m really impressed so far with every single feature of the new iMac save one: Frontrow has a fat ass and needs some work. It’s a great idea, and by far the best ipTV solution out there, but it’s sluggish, and forces you to import items into iTunes in order to properly browse or play them.

I’ll get some photos up of the iMac soon. For now here is some Nano Vs. Nano photo action!

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Lazy weekend of Enchanted Arms

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

I sit here on the couch, drinking iced coffee, and listening to some Panoptica while catching up on the blogosphere. Yesterday I did blessedly little - aside from going to Costco and EB Games with Brien to pick up food and Enchanted Arms I did practically nothing. I sat on my couch, played Enchanted Arms, and spent some quality time with Skype.

Today has been slightly more active. I woke up early to get working on laundry and catch up on other things around the house. I am rather proud of all the work I got done before noon. I managed to get a presentation ready for tomorrow and go for a decent little walk with skype while my laundry ran. Now I get to spend the rest of the day lounging around on the couch drinking my coffee and playing more Enchanted Arms.

Enchanted Arms: gay!!Enchanted Arms by the way is the first Japanese style RPG (aside from the MMORPG Final Fantasy Online) to come to the Xbox 360 and I have to say I’ve got some mixed feelings on it. The story gets good after a few hours, but the introduction is simply the gayest thing on the face of the planet. It starts off with three high-school boys learning magic who are gay, gay, GAY. I’m not sure but I would wager that the amount of gayness would manage to turn off all but the most hard-core gaymers. I mean I’m a gay man and I was offended - I can only imagine what the straight guys would say.

The other negative thing is the endless tutorials that the game seems to want me to jump through. There are an endless number of objects that you can interact with by pressing the A button. One might find this an intuitive interface, but they didn’t think so and are constantly interrupting gameplay to have another character guide you through the process of pressing A to interact with the container, swim, ride the elevator, pick up the flowerpot, etc.

Luckily after a few hours the gay and the gay tutorials tone down a bit and the rest of the characters get together and it becomes a really good game. It’s much more linear than the western style of RPG’s that I’ve been playing of late like Oblivion, but has a fantastic story to make up for it. The combat system is also really well evolved and plays very strategically. Every PC is put on a grid and you have to move them around and use very preset moves similar to chess.

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New 360 gamertag

Friday, September 1st, 2006

Changing the Windows Live ID associated with your gamertag on Xbox Live seems to be a sad impossibility. The only solution seems to be the creation of a new gamertag, which means losing all your save games, and associated profile data. I had switched primary Windows Live accounts shortly after I got my 360, so I’ve been digging for a solution to no avail.

Unfortunately because I’m a prissy bitch I demanded to switch gamertags and now am having to deal with getting all my Oblivion achievements again. It’s a hard life when you simply have to play another 200 hours of Oblivion to save face ;)

Add me as a friend if you interested - my new gamertag is Sparktography. Check out my new gamer badge and (hopefully) watch my achievements grow again!

Zelda on a Theremin

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

I’m in awe, both of the stunningly geektastic of a theremin in this video, and of Eliza’s commentary on it.

10 Simple pleasures

Friday, August 25th, 2006

My friend Jason has gone limp and let the meme-o-sphere make him it’s bitch. Luckily this involved putting up a post that’s all about his 10 favorite simple pleasures in life that I enjoyed reading quite a bit.

Why not follow suit? I’m sure my readers could come up with many reasons why not to follow suit, however I’ve decided to preemptively ignore them. Without further ado here is my list of simple things that make my life happy, and presented in no order whatsoever.

–Fatherhood - Skype has changed my life in more ways than I could possibly list here. There is just something fantastic to be said about having a rough day and being able to come home to 70 pounds of unconditional love.

–Caramel Apple Pie Ala Mode - The best comes from Charlies on Broadway, but I’ll take any and all CAP that I can get! Warm carmelly crust, sweet and sloppy apple innards, and that cool creamy ice cream melting into it all just tickles my fancy just fine!

–Technology that “just works” - I love technology, but when it’s not working I get more frustrated than I often care to admit. There is something magical (and highly elegant behind the scenes) of anything that just works.

Perfect examples are my iPod (for instance plugging it into my Powerbook or my Xbox 360 produces the exact results I’m looking for with no intervention), stereo equipment, land line phones, keyless entry for my car, and the 100’s of other little things that are so technically honed at this point we all take them for granted.

When technology works correctly it blends into the rest of your life and adds functionality without taking away from the experience. What more of a simple pleasure could you list?

– Watching movies on my couch - My life seems to revolve around this particular activity for long stretches of time. It’s not really the movies, the couch, or any one thing about the experience - but I would rather be curled up on the couch with Skype watching a good movie than just about anything else.

Heck - I even prefer watching movies at home to the theater 90% of the time. I’ll only go see the rarest of big blockbusters (or Snakes on a Plane) in the theater, but usually between the people, the distractions, and the noise I would rather be at home.

On that topic I just set up an email list that’s all about movies, and watching them. If you know me, and live in Seattle then shoot me an email or leave a comment and I’d be happy to set you up on the announce list for “Le Cinema Sparks”.

– Getting stoned - What can I say, I truly appreciate being able to completely unwind once in a while and just get baked. The old (and more career-oriented) I get the less often I find myself able to do this, but it does not stop me from treasuring it whenever I do.

– Clinique skin care - I’m hooked. Brien got me into it, and as silly as the idea seems I just feel like a happier person when my skin is all soft and moisturized. I guess it’s the 45 year old women that lives in the back of my head and yells at kids to get off her lawn.

– Console gaming - If I spend too much time watching movies on my couch then I have two problems because I spend nearly as much time laying on my couch playing video games. Oblivion, Dead Rising, and The New Super Mario Bros are all current obsessions.

– An abundance of information in our society - I love information, and love to learn. I can’t count how many hours I spend on my couch just wandering around the internet absorbing all of it’s goodness. Skittering around on Wikipedia, jumping from RSS feed to RSS feed, and watching human knowledge slowly present and organize itself.

– Hanging out with good friends - The older I get the more I realize how valuable true friends are, and how precious they are to me. Even those friends I don’t see terribly often still add value and meaning to my life and I really enjoy spending time with them, particularly when I can combine spending time with a good friend with other simple pleasures on this list.

– Good Science Fiction - I don’t care if it’s written, audio only, or a full movie experience: I just love good sci-fi. Some personal favorites are Cory Doctorow, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Curling up with a convincing and innovative view of the future is the first step to towards thinking about and creating that future. Let’s get on it people!

Having had a rather stressful week I think I’ll be trying to indulge in a number (or quite possibly all) of these this weekend. I have my dad passing through town on Sunday, but I have pretty much all day on Saturday earmarked for the majority of this list.

Oh the pride

Sunday, June 25th, 2006

Today was Seattle’s Gay Pride Parade. I could have gone downtown to see the screaming gay masses but instead decided that a far more fitting way to celebrate my burgeoning homosexuality would be to watch the Silence of the Lambs trilogy today. After all: what better way to celebrate than to watch a series dedicated to eating the fleshy bits of men…

I figure I actually celebrated Pride plenty this year. I had forgotten it was this weekend and went out to the bars on Friday night. The horrors of gayness at it’s worst can be found at the Cuff and the Eagle on Pride weekend, and boy do I love it.

Aside from the horrors of pride I’ve been in radio silence for a short while. At Tres suggestion I picked up a copy of “Sword of Mana” and have been getting rather addicted. Sadly it’s meant juggling classic RPG goodness with my love of my Xbox 360 (now with more horrific storytelling) and the Oblivion it provides.

Sword of Mana manages to combine the best of the storytelling from the earlier Final Fantasy games, while bringing the action gameplay style from Zelda into the mix. I’m only about 8 hours in, but I’m hooked already.

Rest and other topics

Sunday, June 4th, 2006

After a 4 hour nap yesterday afternoon and a good 11 hours of sleep last night I’m feeling fit and feisty on this fine grey Sunday afternoon. It’s amazing what a good nights sleep can do for a young lad!

A couple of things:

Now for a nice relaxing afternoon with Skype, Scott, and some Xbox 360!

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Obliviation

Thursday, June 1st, 2006

My Oblivion addiction gets worse and worse – I’m now playing an average of 6 hours a day in addition to having a full time job and keeping up an active father role with Skype. It’s just such a good game! Given that my main character had done everything that made sense to do for a level 38 mage I restarted as an assassin/thief and am going through the thieves guild and dark brotherhood quests. It’s pretty exciting actually to play the dark side of the game – it reminds me a lot of KOTOR.

In other Xbox 360 news I’m pretty excited about a few new upcoming games including Two Worlds, and Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth. Hopefully they will both come out soon and be as good as the previews look.

On the personal front life is good. Keeping busy with work, and playing with Vista. Now if they could just iron out the bugs and get it out the door the world will be good enough!

Memorial for a day off

Sunday, May 28th, 2006

Well here I am, Sunday on Memorial Day weekend and I am pretty content with myself. Dom helped me do a deep clean on my place yesterday, I have two days left in the weekend to enjoy myself, and I am actually feeling pretty good aside from some minor gripes with my allergies.

On the work front things are still going rather well. I’m still frustrated with the politics surrounding one of the projects that I’m working on, but am having a lot of fun and learning tons about how to be a PM ninja!

Also on a somewhat work related topic I’m finally playing with Vista. It’s still only the beta2 and still has some bugs (mostly UI, UX, and performance), but I’m quite impressed with it. It will be interesting to see what Apple brings forth with Leopard in a few months to counteract some of the wow factor that Vista’s glass UI thunks down on the table.

I have Vista installed on my work laptop and am frustrated at times with it. I don’t have the best driver coverage yet so it’s slow and annoying. I’m impressed that it’s still stable enough that I can pretty much do my days work on that laptop.

I also installed it on my Media Center. It’s much more impressive on the MCE, and with the 128Mb graphics card I have in there I can actually get the glass UI. With only 512Mb of RAM the Media Center is a bit laggy, but I was able to help that by adding 1Gb of EMD memory via Readyboost to increase the RAM cache and improve indexing. The Media Center application itself still needs some polish, but I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen so far and can’t wait to see the finished product.

Aside from work I’ve been playing a lot of Oblivion, and spending a lot of quality time with Skype. He’s frustrated with how long I’m gone during the days at work, so I try to spend extra time playing with him at night and on the weekends. I wish it was sunnier outside today rather than drizzling because then it would be a lot more fun to go to the park with him.

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