Transform and Roll Out

Now, some of us have seen the awesome/horrid/your opinion here Transformers 2 movie, I am one of those people, Matt on the other hand is not. Today, Saturday, we are taking a treak to the capital of our state to go watch said movie. I was going to put up a post about the movie earlier, but I decided to hold back what I thought about it until after Matt had seen it.

We will be seeing it with mostly our gaming group, two of which you have heard before. Guest Host Andrew will be there and the faint voice in the background called “Mike” is going to be there too. Before that though, as men, we will go get food. Since I am not driving I plan on consuming some adult beverages and hitting on the waitresses heavily.

In other news, I have read Mouse Guard and loved it, the art is what truly got my attention though. The idea of mice with swords is also awesome. A certain set of podcasting friends have recently done some actual play podcasts on the Mouse Guard RPG, which is awesome. Awesome because you can hear it before you buy it but also because there is a friggin RPG for Mouse Guard.

Remember, you can e-mail either of us or follow us on twitter. I’d list that info here but peh, we have a contacts page and twitter feeds/links right on the site and it’d take effort to link that stuff up. Much less effort than typing all this out, but well… I’m complicated like that.

Have fun kids.

Troubled Travels

Tuesday was my day off, and while I went to go pick up Prototype for the 360 and two books that came out last week, I left empty handed. I learned that Prototype actually comes out today, even though places had it on Tuesday. Games need a solid release date, period. Too often they bounce back and forth between Tuesday and Wednesday for the most part. Your other standard forms of digital entertainment have rock solid release dates, Tuesday. And I’m going mostly for CD’s and DVD’s on this one.

The books I went looking for aren’t widly known and didn’t sell out, they just never arrived. It’s taking over a week for books to hit the shelves now? Last book I wanted I was able to go in and buy on its release date rather than over a week later. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are horribly overpriced I’d just get a kindle and avoid all this shipping bullcrap in regards to my novels. And in all honesty, no, I wouldn’t even then, a book just isn’t a book unless it is on 100% real paper. Paper as in the kind we murder trees for.

My escapades weren’t a total wash out though, I did end up buying 25 pounds of rice and the 20 pound bag I bought is perfect rice for making onigiri. Now all I have to do is go get some stuff to fill them with. I do believe I have some tuna somewhere. And  yes, I already have the nori needed to make them complete. Although honestly I prefer them without the nori. Meh, to each their own. I already know I’ll be getting strange looks for eating them at work.

Besides that I spent a good portion of my day tearing through Infamous like a starving animal does food. I could have easily put the controller down at one or two points, but I really wanted to know the ending, and the ending was spectacular. The twist at the end is only hinted at a mere 4 seconds prior to it unraveling, and you have to have a quick mind to pick it up, and one that think up super weird twists quickly.  I most definately will be doing this game over again to see how it plays as an evil person, then choosing the good ending.

At the end, you get the ultimate decision of good and evil and even though I read the good one, and meant to hit the button for the good one, I sorta… instinctively hit th evil one. whoops. The bad thing about that though is that since you power up your abilities purely on the good or evil side, if you do the switch at the end, you are fighting the end boss with your powers at their lowest, unless you have some extra points to spend.

This isn’t a problem though, they foresaw this and made it very pausible to beat the boss as a guy with tons of powers at their lowest.

Infamous was far longer than I expected too, which was good. If you have a ps3, go get this game. It lets you throw lightning, nuff said.

-Jason-

Meet and Greet

This last Saturday myself and Matt headed over to an undisclosed location where an exchange was made. This exchange was not of money, drugs, or anything of material worth, it was just simple laughs. Okay, I did bring some booze and take some booze so I guess the material thing was a bit wrong.

We met up with Kevin and Jen from The Walking Eye Podcast and had some good times. There were others there who’s names I’ve mostly forgotten/didn’t learn properly. Okay, I walked away learning one name. I was slightly biased on learning that name though, it belonged to a female, and females are far more worth my time then hairy men. I know I know, I’m biased.

If you’re into indie games of the pen pencil and paper sort then you should definately check them out. Not only do they talk about them and interview the makers of some of them, you’ll actually get to listen to a lot of the play sessions.

Matt and me got to actually partake in an indie game called Wicked Age, and it was a glorious time. Even though there were A) Far to many people from what they told us for a good game and B) Too much booze in some of the people for a good game. Either way, it was entertaining to say the least. Even though I played a horribly comical character, I have become fond of him and plan to put him into our own games somehow.

Beyond that… I forgot. Seriously, I had stuff to put here. I opened up both this and facebook and that was the end of that. It seems my friends only wish to communicate with me when I’m attempting to get all of my thoughts together for you guys.

We had pointed out to us that episode 20 of our podcast was awfully quiet, and we do in fact apologize. The room/location we normaly record at was under some construction and we had to relocate, which was sadly to a room where there was some modest amount of background noise that just seemed a bit too loud if we tried to adjust anything. I am personally unaware of when we’ll be able to record in our normal dungeon again but until then, we’ll do our best to adjust things better.

I am looking forward to Tuesday myself. I get to go drop money on Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children Complete and Sims3. You heard me, I am getting Sims3.

Now if you’ll excuse me. I am going to go read my books for a good hour before bed.

-Jason-

Rejoice

Well fellow PS3 owners, today is a day for joy, celebration, and possibly mass murder of the populace. Infamous hits shelvs today. I myself will be picking up a copy. This and prototype are righ tup my alley. I’ve been waiting for games like these ever since Second Sight and Psi-Ops came out. And while those were more about flinging people about with your mind, being crazy powerful in general will make up for that fact.

I’m pretty sure once I get my oil changed and I pick this game up I’ll make the drive back to my house to play for a few hours rather than getting some much needed sleep before my evening plans kick in.

I’m looking forward to my oil change purely because it’ll give me time to read my book since whenever I go to play a “single game” of Team Fortress 2 it turns into… well… not even “a single hour”, usually it’s confined to “a single couple of hours”. I got my first two item drops last night though, ignore the fact I think they’re both worthless. Give me medic drops! It’s rewarding to be a medic since no one else is, people tend to love you for it.

I’m out for now, gotta get dressed and ready for the day. Have fun kids.

-Jason-

Playtest: Monk

Those of us with DDI subscriptions got another playtest article the other day, the Monk.  The Monk will be released as part of the Player’s Handbook 3, and in a surprising change (at least for me), will not be part of the Ki power referenced in the first Player’s Handbook.

Instead, the Monk has become a Psionic character, a striker no less. My first thoughts were something along the lines of “Really?”, but once I thought about it more it started making sense.  To me the Monk was always about obtaining perfection in mind, body, and soul, which seems like a perfect fit for the Psionic power source.

Then I went through and read the Design and Development article about the creation of the Monk. It talked about how they thought the Ki power source seemed to be getting thin. They didn’t want to just dump all of the Asian themed classes into it, just to fill it out. As Jason put it, “We don’t need the Asian power source.”

We will talk more about some of the mechanics and powers of the Monk in our next episode of the podcast.

If you have a DDI subscription and haven’t looked at the Monk playtest yet, I would definitely check it out.

-Matt

DDI Character Builder update fix (maybe)

The reason I said (maybe) is because this may not work for everyone but it worked for me. Before installing the latest version of the Character Builder you should give this little tip a try, regardless of if you’re installing it for the first time or for the fifth time.

Do a search for “ddi” and delete those files, simple as that.

The character builder will toss files not just into the Wizards of the Coast main program folder, but also make folders in your “My Documents” and “My Pictures” folders as well. Uninstalling will get rid of the main Wizards of the Coast folder but the two DDI folders in your “my documents” and “my pictures” area will remain intact. From what I can tell if these folders stick around it’ll cause the character builder to grab it’s head and scream and cry a lot. If you just uninstalled the beta and find yourself not able to update, it’s probably due to some beta files left over in these folders.

I’ve got mine fully up and running now and I wish you all the luck, let me know how it goes for you all.

-Jason-

Character Builder, Jason’s experience

With Matt having pointed out that the fully unlocked character builder is out now for subscribers, I felt like I needed to point out that it is also buggy as hell. 

First upon downloading the file to download the actual setup file it told me that I did not have the downloaded file that my downloaded file downloaded in order to setup the actual program, which was odd since I was staring straight at it. I go to re-run the downloaded programs download program and then it works fine, not sure why it did this time but thats cool. 

After installing it tells me there is an update for it, umm… okay? I go to get the update and the updater screams and cries at me, insisting there was an error of sorts, then it crashes, but not fully. I close out and start it up again for it to do the exact same thing. I go and delete everything thinking maybe I just had a weird install, so I uninstall and do it all over again… and it all happens again.

As of right now even though the character builder is telling me there’s an update, it also won’t let me get it. 

So far I haven’t noticed anything major when actually using the program and am glad to see it out now. Personally this thing is going to be a friggin time saver.

-Jason-

Character Builder Goes Live

So the DnD Character Builder is now live and ready to build characters of any level. I won’t be able to check it out until I get home, but I am looking forward to giving it a try.

-Matt

An article for now

Hey everyone, it’ll be awhile before we’re back up and putting out podcasts for you since you have everything we’ve done and with all the holidays (and even a wedding) Matt and myself haven’t been able to get together for a recording session. I swear that’ll all change soon though. We will be back soon… I hope. Regardless, we will be back. 

In the meantime a new article has come out from Wizards regarding the next new class from the players hanbook 2. If you read carefully, you might have noticed this class listed in the minotaur article. That is now 3 out of 4 roles with the primal power source. In case you’ve forgotten you have the druid for controlling, barbarian for striking, and now this class for defending. There weren’t a lot of nature based classes before, back in the 3.5 ed days, and I really wonder exactly what they’ll use for the leader class role. Hmm… speculation time!

We talk a lot about TV shows and just in case you might have forgotten, a lot of them are finally in swing again after the holidays. Namely: House M.D., Dexter, Sanctuary, and the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Now these are really only the shows I watch heavily and almost religiously for some.

I’d talk about exactly what I’ve come to love and hate about the Clone Wars series, but I’ve been talking too long already.

Have fun kids.

-Jason-

Speaking of Star Wars…

Some of you may have heard about a certain game that is currently in development by Bioware. During my daily delves for gaming news, I came across a tiny tidbit of information on how the game will handle the “pay us” part of being an MMO.

I’m not sure if I should be happy about this or slightly sad. Maybe once we know more I will be able to have true feelings on it.

-Jason-