December 27, 2007

My Vacation = Laziness

Well, it's been a while since my last post (gee, how many times have I said that in the last month?) and this is going to be a relatively short one. Blame it on Christmas or the fact that my brother is home from work all this week or that I simply don't feel like doing anything that even mildly resembles work and there you have it.

Lately I've been hanging out with Rick primarily and occasionally with the rest of my family and friends over the holidays. We played a game of Starcraft: The Boardgame which I got for Christmas (yeah, I'm that big a nerd, moving on...) and we've been playing a lot of Rock Band at least when it's not too late for the other guests in the house. Rick is our drummer (surprisingly good at it no less), Sharon is our singer (also surprisingly proficient) and I am the mildly handicapped lead guitarist. Still, the Novi Ninjas (our band) are quickly gaining fans, and I must say I've been pretty impressed with how fun the game is despite myself. The music/rhythm games aren't typically my style, but the cooperative aspect is really well done, and makes all the players really support each other instead of tearing each other down.

Starcraft: The Boardgame is also really solid, and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes reasonably complex/strategic boardgames. It manages to maintain much of the strategic complexity of games like Twilight Imperium while avoiding overly-complex rules and decisions. The things you can do are limited and relatively simple when you think about it which helps keep things flowing, even in your first game. Also, combat is designed to heavily favor attackers which keeps players moving and keeps the game from stagnating like Twilight Imperium often does. Seriously, if you like strategic boardgames, and have any interest at all in the Starcraft mythos I highly recommend it. I should add, by the way, that the game doesn't use any dice, which I whole-heartedly approve of.

Anyway, that's all I've been up to. I spent most of today "fixing" my computer as I needed to update my laptop drivers in order to use Crysis (which I purchased with some holiday cash) and neither Dell nor nVidia really supports their mobile cards. Anyway, I finally managed to fix it, but it took much more time than I would like, and my 7950 GTX just isn't powerful enough for Crysis as I pretty much knew, but it'll certainly look nice on my next computer :). Alright, well, I've been writing for long enough, and I'd actually like to play some games before I need to hit the hay. Night all, I hope you all are having a very happy holiday, wherever you are.

2 comments:

  1. So, using the standard-issue "Tom's starting diffculty chart," I would assume that you were playing on the Hard setting?

    I'm going to go ahead and assume that the answer to that question is "no" and chastise you.

    What a wuss! So, basically, you're willing to start any FPS or RTS under the sun on a harder difficulty and die 100 times, but you can't handle failing out on the intro of "Wanted Dead or Alive?" You sicken me. What happened to your scruples? IF YOU'RE NOT FAILING HOW CAN I LAUGH AT YOU?!

    Oh wait, I can laugh because you're playing it in an easy difficulty. HAHAHAHAHAHA! Hmm, I've never laughed at you for that before. It's kind of invigorating.

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  2. Okay, seriously, seek help.

    That being said, I've been playing on medium which was originally a stretch for me (I'm usually pretty bad at these kind of games). We've recently been trying hard as we had maxed out our fan base, but I don't think we (read: I) can do it on anything that is even relatively difficult. Take that for what it's worth.

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