Driving to games

People wanting to game but being too lazy to drive anywhere?

Its come up recently with me. Now I grew up in an area where it was largely 20-30 minutes to anything outside of a tiny downtown or groceries. You had to drive for anything else. Want comics? Drive. Want games? Drive. Want to go to a normal department store? Drive.

I still have to even with all the current expansion. The closest mall is 30 minutes away. Its 15 minutes to McDonald's or Wendy's. Its 20 to Burger King, Taco Bell, and KFC. The closest comic shop is 20 minutes way, the GOOD comics and game shop is 30-35.

Bear this in mind.

The last week has shown that I, a totally lazy slacker are willing to drive further to game than many. I am beginning a Call of Cthulhu campaign that started today. A friend tried to get some folks to play. One dude and his girlfriend live in an area I used to drive twice a week to play 40K. Its too far for them and they won't come and play. (I would also like to note that for many years my father drove down there 5 days a week to work, and he also had a part time job as well.) I also had my Cthulhu book with me at the good game shop mentioned above. Some folks showed some interest. Which immediately evaporated with a laugh when I mentioned my location.

Now both situations of NO WAYS may have honestly been due to other reasons (the first is just one of a metric shitload of people my friend tries to get to join us who never actually show up, or if we are lucky show up once than never come back...), but taken at face value that's some lazy old.. laziness. Slackers.

Is a half hour's drive REALLY that bad for people? I've driven twice that distance to play Uncharted Seas. (And made nearly 30 minutes worth of wrong turns I am embarrassed to say!) I work at a casino and know most of our customer base is driving 1-2 HOURS to come play. (I once had a customer proclaim he came down with his family for a few hours with a 3 hour drive. He then returned them. AND CAME BACK.)

Are people really that lazy, or are some folks too used to not having to go more than 15 minutes to anywhere to even want to get in a good game of something?

General Stuff and Updates

Its been a bit since I have updated. Some content I have for the blog is currently being used as a contest entry over at aliveandoutofprint.org so it and its follow up comics (yes me and my gaming comics again!) will be held off or delayed in creation till the contest is over. Ill probably start the follow up work next week though.

But I have been able to take advantage of some nice sales the last few weeks to get more gaming stuff cheap.

Sarge's had 3 books for 10 dollars so a rummage through their pile and came out with one must have, and 2 acceptable supplemental items to get.

The original Mongoose publishing update to Runequest core rulesbook was my must have. For 3.33 I can now cheaply see if Mongoose improved upon the first RPG I ever bought, though one I have never had the pleasure of actually playing. The two other products were Delta Green for Cthulhu Live, mostly bought because I like Delta Green and Cthulhu, and the rulebook for Reaper's Warlord miniatures game, more just for pretty miniatures pictures and maybe some ideas I can mine for other games and campaigns.

But the BIG game sale happened this week at Arkham Asylum. 50% off. EVERYTHING IN STORE. A 3 day anniversary sale. Sadly (or luckily for my ever growing fiscal responsibility..) I had to limit what I bought. For gaming related things I got The Battle for Black Reach Warhammer 40K 5th edition starter with its essential new rulesbook, and the current Heroscape starter set.

Both sets I have been hemming and hawing over buying, and it looks like my holding off has paid off for once to the tune of 50 dollars in savings. Nice! The Orks in the Black Reach set are really gorgeous to behold and will gladly join my existing army.

At Borders I took advantage of a 30% off coupon to get a 20 dollar boxed set of 5 11-13 dollar Dungeon Crawl Classics modules for 14 dollars. It has caused me to change my original plans for a Tunnels & Trolls campaign to one using these modules. Every day I write down what changes need to be made to fit my campaign and my original gameworld that I first came up with back in 88-89 or so. I don't have my original or later updated maps and information on it so I am rebuilding it from the top, taking these modules into mind for town and terrain placement.

I am using VMWare's Fusion which allows various old operating systems to be run as a virtual machine/hard drive on an Intel Mac without needing a partition or anything similar. This allows more of my old games to become playable once more, and allows me to use my favorite RPG mapping program which was on the old AD&D Core Rules 2.0 CDROM. In 30 minutes I had the basics of one of my world's continents made up:



Not too shabby for such a short amount of work! It needs some more naming and a touch more detail here and there, but its a good start.

Characters for the campaign have been created, with MagicDrew and Starfury both making a pair of characters. It looks like 9IN is probably done with Tuesdays though. It took a little more time to create characters than I thought it would, but I think they were overthinking the game a bit, though it started to click the more I explained.

But they are ready to go for next week and the first module is mostly converted over, but given T&T's simplicity, its more a read through and some notes than anything I really HAVE to have done.

iPod Touch: A Gamer's Best Friend?

Yes, yes, we all know all the hipsters and insane people are buying iPhones with their 70 dollar a month contracts.
Provided you don't mind missing the phone and camera bit, the iPod Touch is the same machine, except you drop 230-400 at once and nobody bugs you.

I went with an 8 gigger. Why? The Application Store makes these overblown MP3 player/PDA hybrids into the pocket computer we all have wanted but nobody has bothered to give us.

I currently have an animated dice program capable of running 100 polygonal dice on screen at once, and it will add things up plus any other adds you put in. Good for games like D6 or Tunnels & Trolls! The developer is working on more seriously needed features (like holding dice, multicolored dice, ect) and so forth. And it was a buck! Some die rollers had more features currently in for a higher price, but a buck for a gamer die roller in my pocket is sure handy!

With the program DataCase my machine can now read locally stored PDFs, though the larger file sizes can bring the application to its knees if not outright CRASH it. But its got handy bookmarks, is easy to use, supports lots of various computer files, allows for easy deletion (more on the machine's god awful file system in a minute...) and so forth. Image and text quality is good. Now I can carry any PDF I need for gaming in my pocket, saving paper, ink, and materials carried. A simple binder to print out charts and game maps and character sheets, and everything else could just fit in this little device that is about as big as my small hands (1 hand) sideways not counting fingers. Want to play Basic Fantasy or OSRIC on the go? You can do that now! All those retro RPGs only available in PDF format are at your command. Public domain books to read, magazine and comic PDF collections... this program alone makes this a wonder machine.

The machine is solidly constructed, with a metal back and a glass front. The only button on the face is the wakeup and backout of apps button. The bottom of the machine has the headphone jack/speaker, and the dock connector most every iPod has. The left side has the volume buttons, and the top has the lock/sleep button. The image quality is great, being about 25% smaller than the PSP, but about 33% bigger than either DS screen. Depending on which way you hold it, many applications have a landscape or vertical layout. Its built in accelerometer that allows you to tilt and turn the machine like a Wii Wiimote sees this. This is very handy for PDF reading!

Built in applications include a notepad, a calendar, a contact list, Safari Web Browser, Weather, a basic calculator, the App Store, iPhone Youtube (These touch machines don't seem to like flash much, so it gets its own custom setup), an email client, stocks, a fancier clock than the top screen timer, a map program, the settings options, photo viewing, itunes store link, the iPod Music, and Video playback.

I moved most of the online required programs to the 2nd page. The Videos seem primarily designed for iTunes store purchasing, as does the music. (Though some file programs like the one I bought above circumvent this.) I converted a working mpg film into an iPod format and transferred it over via the usual iTunes requirements. The video came across and was nice, but the audio was missing. BOO. Its largely gonna be alright for pure Quicktime video, and probably squat else.

Conversion of the file on my 2.8 ghz 2 gig ram dual core iMac took a good 5-7 minutes for a 2 minute video. My second attempt involved a high res Quicktime movie of the Watchmen trailer. It converted in a MUCH quicker timeframe, and the sound was fine. Viewing it on the iPod I saw some missed frames (something I saw in Youtube as well), though this could also be attributed to the conversion removing them in the first place when I played it on the iMac before transferring it over.

The iPod interface got a massive overhaul from my 1st gen Nano with more bells and whistles. Nicely done, but it wasn't really a must need. It was pretty good to begin with! It also has a fairly ok sounding and ok powered speaker so you don't need to buy one or use headphones, though obviously the volume and quality takes a bit of a hit. Nice when you want to annoy people with Wesley Willis music though, or need to throw up a quick RPG background music playlist to get your players in the right mindframe. (Or because you are a bard. And the 2 main reasons to play that class involve getting chicks, and shoving your music down everyone else's throat. Its just the latter that actually works. The former is akin to being good at Guitar Hero or Rock Band.)

Now one thing I need to bring up is transferring files over. Unless its built into iTunes IT SUCKS EGGS. You have to sync files and folders to the machine and whatever is in said folder is shot over, and everything not in that folder is erased. For iTunes music and movies and apps this isn't too shabby. Delete on your computer (or on the machine for the new downloaded apps only) and drag and drop new stuff over and turn that sync malarkey off. This makes using the built in Photoviewer kind of annoying. But you can use those photos for your wallpaper with a flick of a finger.

Because you pretty much control it with your fingers, moving and flicking and pointing. Stylus control doesn't work, but a few companies are making ones that will, giving you more accurate control, which is handy for fat fingered folk, or anyone who wants to type or do any data entry on this thing. It could be a handy tool for writing down notes in RPGs, drawing quick maps.. lots of uses!

So this little gadget plays music, videogames, does most PDA functions, web browsing and other net functions, plus whatever features developers make and hopefully only charge a small fee for.

As a gamer's handy friend I would say it might be one of the better investments you can make. Outside of having a cellphone functionality that I could use with a pay as you go plan like AT&T's Go Phone (which I use for my current phone), its the all in one pocket computer we have all dreamed of!

Its not perfect though. Apple's distrust of the end user, the amount of horrible drek on the App Store, and a few minor quibbles keep it from being a must have.

Its more a REALLY COOL TO HAVE sort of device, especially if you are as nerdy as I am!

My score? Is it Good? Is it Ok? Is it Bad?

It is Good.

With more and better apps to buy and more OS updates this thing should just get better and better though!

Welcoming new folks to my blog!

With Connecticon over and my various attempts at promoting my blog I might as well make this a new hello sort of thing!

If anyone wants to see my collected photocomics, http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/transformers-funnies/136375-toyniverse-plot.html has them as they currently are. Forgive the odd errors in grammar or spelling you find. The earlier strips were done and the original Comic Life Deluxe files were deleted, meaning I would have to redo entire pages to fix one spelling error or expand a single text bubble. These days I try to keep the original files so if I see any serious mistakes I can fix them.

I try to edit myself better too.

On this here blog you will find reposts of various forum postings I make, reposts from my old 1up.com blog, various bits of semi emo whining, reports of what hobby games I played recently, along with musings on games, game design, and nerd topics in general.

I don't take gaming seriously. I take having FUN serious however. By that I mean playing a game and having a good time is the alpha, omega, and epsilon (or the Larry, Moe, and Curly if you will..) of why I game. Winning or losing isn't the point. Gaming let's me use my imagination and do things I could never do in reality.

For those of you into comic books, remember the old Sam Keith comic, "The Maxx"? There was a rather well loved section where our hero is doing some epic pose that goes into some way cool attack with the comment "For her, I can be.. A HERO!!".

Its kind of like that.

I also say nobody should be offended if I make fun of someone's favorite game or favorite creator or whatnot. I don't generally do it to be mean, its just my opinion. Hell, it would blow my mind if someone took my loser ass opinions and actually cared about them! Even in the niche interests I have, I tend to be the misfit.

The misfit of misfits!

It is what happens when you mostly grow up by yourself and spend a lot of time getting into things because you want to, and nobody else you know does all that much. Or you become the guy who gets everyone else to try whatever dumb ass new game you saw this week.

I turned quite a few people on my ship in the Navy on to Magic. I remember one guy told me "I thought Magic was just going to be ANOTHER stupid game you were showing off". He then became the type to buy 100 dollar rares.

I am like that. I get people turned on to games. I try to promote gaming. I spend entirely too much money on gaming. Even if by RPG.net's standards I am a cheap bastard who is TAKING MONEY FROM CREATOR'S POCKETS by refusing to buy new editions or complaining about 50 dollar full color hardbacks even though a 30 dollar black and white softback is all I need. (Though I would be happy to pay 35 for a nice spiral bound book. Too bad my only choices in that category is Basic Fantasy and Aeon/Trinity.)

But I love this stuff and I love promoting it. (Even if my dreams of getting gamers in Southeastern Connecticut to game and network and communicate with each other has proven to be an utter failure.) I got Rackham's AT-43 started at Sarge's Comics and I am already pimping Asmodee's Hell Dorado even if Asmodee itself doesn't want to release it in English. DUDES. ITS 14-15th CENTURY SPANISH CONQUISTADORS INVADING HELL FOR JESUS.

The concept sells itself. And the miniatures just add to it. Trust me. Go to the Hell Dorado website. Even in French its easy to find your way around. Go look at the miniatures and the preview figures. The monsters and demons are the stuff nightmares are made of. The Saracens are the Arabian Nights come to life. Their versions of historical figures both real and legendary are amazing.

See? There I go again. So many good games to play. And so many good ones to buy! I really can't write all that well. I really can't draw. I don't exactly have a movie star's looks. I don't have a golden tongue for talking. I don't have musical talent. But I can let some of the ideas in my head flow forth instead of just being dreams that don't get to be shared. I can use my imagination for something at least. Even if few people see it.

So you fine readers can expect to see house rules, musings on games, and even the odd photocomic story. Everything I come up with is mine, though if credit is provided I would love to see it used and spread around. Or hell, even turned to something that does not suck.

Feel free to post comments on my stuff. Feel free to contact me.