Mary Noble

About 3 weeks ago my grandmother passed away on her 88th birthday. It was very sudden. The night before we were all talking and laughing at dinner as normal. That morning she got up, got dressed, and made her bed. She never went anywhere without making her bed.

We all loved my grandmother very much, and we all miss her. She was an amazing woman who had an amazin life. She left home at 17 to get a job to help support the farm. She was working as a switchboard operator in LA on the day the Japanese bombed Perl Harbor. She ran a college bookstore that made a tremendous amount of money.

She saved everything. She had ration books from world war 2. She kept every card her husband ever gave her. She had my mother's Kindergarden report card.

We had a memorial service for her last week with just a few local friends and family. My sister made a great video using pictures from my grandmother's (extensive) collection. I hope to have it linked here at some point, but we're having some trouble getting it on the intarwebz.

I loved my grandmother very much, and I miss her.

Mr. T and Shatner vs. World of Warcraft

I didn't know you could fit that much awesome onto a web page

Goodbye old man

Yesterday we had to put our dachshund to sleep. His health had been deteriorating for some time.

Dachshunds make wonderful pets. They have a lot of personality. They're awfully cute. Due to the way they are built they also tend to sound a lot bigger than they are. You can even race them if you want to.

When they get older they tend to become grumpy old men.

I'll miss you old man.

When I get to be a criminal mastermind

I am totally hiding spreadsheets in videogames.

Autobots wage their battle...

...to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons.

In our microwave.

At least, that's what Frangelica told me. Last week our microwave broke. Today we had a repair guy in to look at it. He told Frangelica that the Megatron wasn't getting enough power from the Transformer, and we'd probably need a new microwave.

Stranglehold part 2

I've been trying to replay Stranglehold on the "normal" difficulty setting. I managed to make it to Chicago.

Stranglehold isn't the game in my head. It isn't the game that the demo promised. It appears to be a game about moving forward slowly and using cover. At least, that's what it is in the higher difficulty settings.

At this point I'm not really sure what it's trying to be. It's not the crazy stunt game I thought it was. It's certainly not Gears of War. It's trying to be more cinematic than that.

I think at this point it's a game I need a break from before I get frustrated enough to take it to EB and trade it in, or put it up on half.com.

Stranglehold

I recently finished playing through Stranglehold. I wanted to like it a lot. It reminded me of Max Payne, in that it was probably the best action movie I played through this year. However, Max Payne was a better game, even with the really annoying dream sequences. For those of you who haven't played it, Max Payne is an awesome shooter that makes you feel like you're playing through an action movie. Except when you're in one of the two dream sequence levels, where the game becomes a bad platformer and is about as much fun as getting a root canal.

Now then, when Stranglehold is good it's awesome. You get to play as hard boiled detective Tequila (voiced and modeled after Chow Yun-Fat). The slow motion effects are great. The game even gives you style points for effective kills. The environment is full of destructible objects, some of which you can use to kill bad guys (for crazy amounts of style points).

It also has more than it's share of bad points.

At it's core, Stranglehold is about killing hordes of bad guys while doing cool stunts. When Stranglehold focuses on that core it's a lot of fun. When it strays from that core it's frustrating and very not fun.

One of the most frustrating levels has trip lasers all over it. What's a trip laser? It's a laser that is attached to an explosive. If you cross one you die. Congratulations, restart the level. It's the first level where you really have to be careful about where you put Tequila. One misstep and boom, yer dead. Up to that point the game has trained you to be mobile. Slide on carts. Slide down banisters. Leap through the air. And then it kills you on the trip laser level.

After a while someone decided that Stranglehold needed to be more like splinter cell, in that you need to be sneaky and inch forward to live. Again, this goes against it's fun core. The level in the ruins towards the end of the game is particularly bad. The game puts you in what looks like it was an urban war zone before you got there. Most of the level looks the same, and the spaces are very confined, so not conducive to crazy cools stunts. It is conducive to having a ton of guys shoot you from cover, however.

Stranglehold also sometimes becomes a "hunt the foozle" game. The bad level here actually comes pretty early. The game drops you off on an island, and you have to hunt down and destroy several drug labs. Several hidden drug labs. In a large area that's hard to get around in, in part because every area looks like every other area.

So when the game is cool, it's very cool. And when you hit some of the more frustrating levels it makes you want to repeatedly punch the designers who are responsible.

If there's a lesson to be learned here it's this: Stick to the fun core. Get rid of anything that doesn't relate directly to the fun core of your game.

A second lesson might be: Chow Yun-Fat greatly raises anything's level of awesome.

The many talents of ninjas

It turns out that not only do ninjas flip out and kill people, they answer questions and even rob gas stations.

Iron man movie

I just tracked down the trailer for the Iron Man movie (due out next May). It looks pretty cool. Not as cool as transformers, but still pretty cool.

Ptolus Evolved updates

I just posted a mountain of information to the Ptolus DMing messageboards.

We'll see if I'm laughed off the intarwebz.

Back again

Well, that went quickly. I just noticed I haven't blogged in two months. I'm clearly not doing too well with those resolutions.

In the last two month I have (in no particular order)

• Worked like crazy to hit a deadline
• Missed that deadline anyway
• Gone to Gen Con
• Caught a case of the creeping con crud
• Played a few XBox 360 demos
• Started my Ptolus Evolved campaign --we made up characters last week!
• Seen the movie Stardust
• Seen Transformers for the 2nd time
• Bought a copy of HeroLab and started modifiying it for use with Arcana Evolved
• Read some of the stuff I got at Gen Con (mostly the free adventures from Goodman Games)
• Starting reading the last Harry Potter book
• Finished it by listening to it on CD

Also, for the record, the Stranglehold demo is awesome. The game looks to be so awesome as to be unfair to other games. You're playing through a John Woo action movie as Chow Yun-Fat. How can that not be awesome?

Transformers: The Movie

I just got back from seeing Transformers.

This movie is so awesome it's unfair to all the other summer blockbusters.

Seriously.

On a scale of 1 to awesome

The self destruct button ranks right up there with the USB Missle Launcher.

Our Domestic Explorer

Harley strikes again!

Frangelica and I have our own space --we've taken over the basement of the new place. The basement has acoustic tiles in the ceiling. We put Cinnamon's litter box in a closet. The closet doesn't have a ceiling.

See where this is going?

Yesterday I pulled Harley out of the ceiling.

So awesome.

The Martian Has Landed

We're in our new place in Kansas. We have all of our stuff. We still have 2 rooms left to paint.

Also, Live Free Or Die Hard is awesome. It's exactly what it needed to be --nothing more, nothing less.

Welcome to Kansas

Recently we've allowed evolution to be taught again!

So far I have seen a giant inflatable ape, a giant inflatable dinosaur, and a giant inflatable toilet.

Yes, a giant inflatable toilet.

So awesome.

Game collection

I just sold a big chunk of my RPG collection. The deal worked out to $1.78 per pound cash, or $2.32 per pound if you include the store credit I'm getting for the shipping costs. If I had taken the store credit only deal it would have been $3.24 per pound (including the extra credit from shipping).

For the record, I'm happy with it. Everything I sold is stuff that I haven't used in quite a while, if ever. I'd rather the games go to someone who will use and enjoy them.

Computer opposites

We're lucky we weren't sucked into some kind of PC/Mac vortex.

Dire Boar

Or possibly something out of Princess Mononoke.

Regardless, I vote that we give Alabama back to the animals before they take it back en masse.

Here's the story.

And now for the hard part

I really wanted to title this post, "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb" for no good reason, other than that batman quote has been one of many random things running through my head for the past few weeks.

A lot has happened since my last entry. We've sold the house in Illinois and bought a new one in Kansas. The block is finally lifted and we can start working on the impending doom that's been, um, impending for a while. That is, we finally get to start packing.

Naturally, we sold the house as soon as I left to go back to Virginia for a couple of days. When I got on the plane the house had not sold. When I stepped off the plane it had. Had I known that in order to sell the house I would have to leave the state I would have left long ago.

Otherwise Frangelica had a birthday. We threw a party for her a few weeks after the fact. By "we" I mean "I paid for a chunk of it and Frangelica made all the arrangements, including getting the decorations, setting up the decorations, and inviting everyone."

In the meantime I've been reading a ton of books. I've chewed through at least 6 in as many weeks. I recently started on the Dresden Files series. I picked them up because of the show on the sci-fi channel. While I like the TV show, the books are better. That's not a surprise. I haven't seen the whole series, though, just a few episodes. I'm up to book 4.

Oh yeah, apparently there's going to be a RPG.

I've also been chewing through various Warhammer books (the fiction kind, not the gaming kind).

Anyway, I haven't been posting because my stress level has been high, and I just haven't felt like being on the PC much.

At least now we can get started with moving. As of mid June I'll be a Kansas resident once again. I'm looking forward to it.

Oh yeah, in a couple of weeks I'll turn 4 years past unemployable.

This also means that I need to get to work on a new Ptolus game.

Off to pack!