Category Archives: Entertainment

Windows Vista & the Ventrilo Overlay

Posted by on December 27, 2008 2 comments

I picked up a copy of Warhammer Online this past week, and have been quite enjoying it. Enjoying it enough that I’ve joined a guild. So far they seem to be a pretty decent, if somewhat sarcastic and crass, group of people; I should fit right in. They require the use of Ventrilo for voice chat, which is a pretty reasonable requirement for a guild that’s going to do PvP combat.

There are some quirks with Ventrilo and Vista, however, and I wanted to make mention of them here in the hopes that they might be useful to other people. Note that these tips were only tested with Warhammer Online and they may or may not apply to other games, and while this was done on 64-bit Vista, both Ventrilo and Warhammer Online were the 32-bit versions so they should behave the same on 32-bit Vista. Your mileage may vary.

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Why a PlayStation 3?

Posted by on March 11, 2008 No comments

This weekend I finally decided to throw my vote in to the next-generation console fight when I went and bought a PlayStation 3 (PS3). I picked up a pre-owned 40GB model from a local GameStop along with Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga and Burnout Paradise. I’d been thinking a while over which console interested me most, and which one offered the most compelling games, and here’s what it all boiled down to.

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The Gold Tier Tournament

Posted by on September 16, 2007 No comments

Earlier today — well, yesterday as of the time I’m writing this — I went to my Friendly Local Game Store and participated in the Gold Tier tournament they were running for Magic: The Gathering. I was running a rather inexpensive Sliver deck and didn’t expect to do so well but to have some fun anyway. I took first place, and had lots of fun. The big prize was a box of booster packs of the forthcoming Lorwyn set, but I also got three packs of Tenth Edition, a rather decent duffel bag, a nice plastic deck box, and a Magic: The Gathering toboggan hat.

I’ve been playing Magic on and off for over ten years, and I’ve only ever made it past the second round of a tournament once or twice in my life. I love the game, but I’ve never considered myself to be a top player, even amongst the local player base. Maybe I need to reconsider my position on that.

I just wanted to thank Sci-Fi Genre for hosting the tournament, Wizards for continuing to make the game so engaging and entertaining long after people thought the fad would die, and mostly to the other players in the tournament for throwing their best games and best decks at me. It was an exhilarating blast, folks, and I look forward to seeing what Lorwyn has in store for us.

My New Phone

Posted by on June 30, 2007 No comments

Like lots of people I got a new phone yesterday. It’s sleek, high-tech, and has lots of cool features. It’s also not an iPhone. No, I got myself a Cingular 3125, running Windows Mobile 5.0. In fact, I don’t even want an iPhone. I’ll tell you why, by way of talking about what I’ve been doing with my phone.

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Why I Like Guild Wars (So Far)

Posted by on December 30, 2006 2 comments

Updates:

  • 2007-01-10: Added another difference that I thought of — the game’s lack of different shards.
  • 2007-01-02: Corrected information about changing your secondary profession thanks to a comment from The Extremist.

Amanda bought me Guild Wars for Christmas, and it’s proving to be exceptionally fun. Some of my friends probably know that I’m an on-again-off-again EVE Online player and follow the evolution of virtual worlds with a keen interest. While I appreciate the number of things EVE is doing to advance the state of the art in online environments — large-scale, player-run corporations; freedom to follow your own course of action; minimization of restrictions on player activities — it’s a very hard game to get into. It’s alienating and distant, and that makes it hard to bring new players in. I pick it back up every so often, usually after major updates to see what’s new, but I have a hard time sticking with it despite how much I admire what they’re doing. Guild Wars, on the other hand, is much more approachable. It’s a fantasy-themed online role-playing game, and it takes a very different approach to the genre than anything else I’ve played.

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The Wii is Coming

Posted by on September 14, 2006 1 comment

Earlier today, Voodoo Extreme got word from several sources with the Nintendo Wii launch information. Sony and Microsoft can fight their little overpriced battle with hardware whose core interfaces and concepts haven’t changed in 20 years. I’m going with Nintendo. Read all the juicy bits here. Now I need to save up $300-400 by November 19th. Dang it.

D&D 3.5e Without Miniatures

Posted by on September 10, 2006 1 comment

One of the frequent complaints I hear about 3rd Edition (and 3.5) D&D is that you have to play it with miniatures. “It was designed to sell them,” a friend of mine bemoans, pointing to Attacks of Opportunity as the most damning evidence. I’ll admit that I did consider AoO to be so difficult without some sort of physical tactical gameplay aid that I’d generally not used them — they are an optional rule, after all, being labeled with such words as “can” and “may” in the Player’s Handbook. But I decided to see if there were other options.

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Going in Circles

Posted by on July 23, 2006 1 comment

I find myself suffering again from one of my many character flaws that’s plagued me my entire life: Indecision. I’m still thinking about the D&D campaign I’ve discussed before on this site. It was primarily brought about by my waning interest in reading and learning about the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting — the book had been sitting on my floor for a while, and every time I’ve tried to get back into it I’ve failed. This doesn’t give me much hope for the setting as a whole, as if there’s one person in a D&D group who needs to be invested heavily in liking the setting it’s the DM.

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Kingdoms of Kalamar (or, Campaign Settings Part II)

Posted by on May 8, 2006 No comments

In continuation of my discussing some of the different settings for the forthcoming D&D campaign, I’ve settled on Kingdoms of Kalamar. Read on to find out why. Read more »

Campaign Settings

Posted by on April 19, 2006 1 comment

So I’m starting up a new D&D 3.5e campaign and have been trying to determine which campaign setting I’d rather run. The choices have basically boiled down to:

Funny coincidence: Waterdeep and Geanavue were both created by the same man, Ed Greenwood, who is in my mind a towering genius of fantasy world design.

You may notice that all of the options I’m looking at are based in or around cities. I’ve found I tend to like urban campaigns a great deal, primarily for the wealth of options they offer the player. When any good you want or any service you require is readily available it means you can spend more time figuring out how to do what you want to do, rather than whether or not it’s feasible or possible. But, all three cities are positioned in areas designed to offer easy access to a wealth of other areas — subterranean, jungle, forest, water, etc. There’s also absolutely no reason other than convenience and roots to keep the players in any given place. If they find they dislike the city and want to go somewhere, then far be it from me to stop them. My job as the DM isn’t to restrict their choices so much as encourage them to make the right ones.

Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of each setting. Read more »