Category Archives: Friends

Rock Band 2

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I finally got Rock Band 2 and I finally got Jacqui over to see it. She reacted much the same as anyone who has played Guitar Hero and gets to play guitar on Rock Band, which is to say that they always lament it as being just an “Ok” experience. She warmed up quickly to the experience though once we let her play drums. She claimed that she’d be an expert in 2 weeks if she could have a drum set, and while I doubt that, she did take to medium pretty quickly and even managed to play a fairly easy song on hard. It’s amazing how fast some people pick up on how to play drums. Kind of like Derek and “Maps”.

I know I didn’t mention getting Rock Band 2 here, but I am now. It’s a family gift for Christmas, and so everyone can enjoy it. Everyone has been enjoying it so far. I got an amazing deal on it, because the Toys-R-Us ad had it for $109, which is $80 off what it normally is.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

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Rick picked up his copy of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts on Saturday so on Sunday we actually got a chance to play the multiplayer. To be honest I was expecting a pretty mediocre experience. I know I’ve seen reviews that basically summarize the multiplayer portion of this game as something that feels tacked on and not fully developed. After spending a few hours winning and losing at it I feel I can safely say that the multiplayer is a full experience that everyone should try out.

First you all join a room. In this room you can run around and load up vehicles that you have created. Then if you don’t have it locked, which is a simple press of the A button on the main multiplayer screen to turn it on or off, other players can actually take pictures of your creation and those will be saved to their system as a blueprint. That way they can create the vehicles they see.

What is there to do? There are many different kinds of races. Races in the water, air, and land. There are also sports, and that’s where it would seem that vehicle creation is going to get awesome as you have to develop a vehicle that is good at catching a ball and holding it or pushing another vehicle off a ledge.

You get an appropriate vehicle for every race. The host decides whether everyone starts with a default vehicle or if everyone can bring in their own. Rick and I played with the default vehicles, because we have barely played enough to unlock the parts in the single player game to build our own awesome vehicles. I’m sure we’ll both remedy that soon.

One of the coolest things about the multiplayer is if you are having fun just playing around showing someone your vehicle and the host starts a match, well then you don’t have to join. You can just keep hanging out doing what you want until the match is over. Gives you some control over what game types you want to play as well.

This game is $40 new, so I imagine that a whole lot of people can afford this. With how cool the multiplayer is and how really social it is I am hoping that it’s the next Midtown Madness for this generation. It certainly seems like it, and I’ve already given the game to two other people, so I’m helping that cause along.

Enjoying Saturday

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Rick and Melissa came up from Columbus to spend the day with me. They brought a birthday card. The card was a Far Side comic that I think I might have seen before, but more interestingly was Rick’s choice of the word “DING” for my birthday. While I do not know whether or not they exist I am positive that they have to, because this seems to perfect. Simple yet sort of funny thinking about getting older in the same light as leveling.

They picked up their copy of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts that I bought them for Christmas. I know it’s early for that kind of thing, but I just thought it would be pretty cool. We plan on getting online some time and checking out the multiplayer. There is supposed to be racing and some other stuff to try.

Renee came over and we all went to have lunch at Dave’s Cosmic Subs in Hudson. It’s a pretty neat place, but a bit of a drive. Renee remarked that she thought the sub would have been better toasted, and honestly it probably would have been. I don’t even know if they do that there. I just sort of assume they would have asked if I wanted it prepared that way if they did.

Rick and Melissa started their characters on Balnazzar, and so I will have them in my Thursday WoW Update with their new characters names and all about what’s going on with that. They played for a few hours while I cleaned up. We ordered pizza for dinner, and that worked out.

Anthony and Andrew stopped over for a little bit, but they had to go. Derek came over and he had plans for later tonight as well, so he just got some time in with Mirror’s Edge. It’s a very frustrating and enjoyable game. I can’t wait to play it more.

WoW Thursday Update

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There isn’t a whole lot to say about the World of Warcraft today, except for you either have the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, or you don’t. That’s the big thing for this week, and probably the upcoming weeks, as now you can start a whole new class with the Death Knight. I’m not really sure what a Death Knight is, and that answer would probably be revealed to me if I spend more time playing the class.

The problem is Death Knights report to Arthas, who is basically the supreme evil guy in the World of Warcraft. The Death Knights are all swearing allegiance to him, and they start at level 55, and they apparently are in this to kill everyone. I don’t think it’s an Alliance vs. Horde thing so much as Blizzard not wanting to take the time to make a legitimate third team. From everything I’m seeing it should be Arthas vs. Alliance vs. Horde. It is sort of a shame they didn’t go that way.

Who has the expansion already? I know Tim and my brother waited in line for the midnight release. Dan had it shipped to him, and I only know this because he was making regular updates on Twitter concerning where the shipment was.

The reason I’ve never mentioned Dan before is simply that he doesn’t play on the same server as any of my characters. He plays Alliance, which I don’t play at all, and if I’m not mistaken he plays on a PvE server. While I’ve often considered moving to such a server to get away from the whole hours of getting ganked fun, I have yet to actually commit to that. I have more of a chance running in to him at a Jonathan Coulton concert in Cleveland.

Jo said he would be picking it up today. He had it preordered and paid off, but weighed standing in line at midnight to be far more trouble than waiting till the next day. I had to run to Wal-Mart at 5 AM in order for a certain member of the US Armed Forces to have the game last night.

Renee, Rick, and Melissa might not have picked it up, but then again they don’t have any real immediate use for it. I could include Jo into this demographic as well, but he can at least see the finish line now. None of them are necessarily close to being 70 to take advantage of the new content in that respect. They could start Death Knights, but they still have the aforementioned characters to take from whatever level they are to 70.

Expansions cause so much activity!

Thursday WoW Update

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First thing is that it doesn’t look like I’ll be adding that many names this week, but I will be soon. I guess Rick and Melissa did not start their characters on Balnazzar and while they have plans to do so in the future I don’t see it happening any time soon.

The names that I expect to have in the future are those of all the people coming back to World of Warcraft. Blizzard is reporting that 46% of the people who listed that they were quitting to play Warhammer Online are reactivating their WoW subscription. I think I mentioned that the guild we were previously in, before we started The Holiday Loggers, was PK who went from quite a few members to none. I honestly expect most, if not all, of those people to return, and then I’ll be adding them to my update.

Umori and Tsugutoshi have been playing together and they’ve been gaining a few levels. They are getting closer and closer to 70, just in time for the expansion to have to go to 80. I might get the expansion.

Remana is level 29 already, so that means that I have at least one person to pal around with my alts. I really should play them a little more often.

Basically in the upcoming weeks we will be adding more names and have more to talk about in these updates.

Thursday WoW Update

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This is kind of a fun update! My brother is out of the hospital now and the first thing he decides we should do is to go get ourselves Devilsaurs. My Devilsaur is the orangish one and my brother has the brownish one. Yes, these elite mobs from the depths of Ungaro Crater used to be untamable by the hunter, and now look at them. Large T-Rex looking monstrosities that are ours to control. They have completely changed the way pets work in the latest patch as well, but that’s a story for another update when I’ve explored it and know a little more about the abilities in the skill tree for pets. I need to get my brother’s characters names so that I can add them to this update.

We have a new member on the server and probably two. Melissa apparently started playing WoW and so Rick will be starting a new character just to play with her. I don’t have either of their new character names, so that’s one for the next update. I got an IM from a friend letting me know that they were entitled to a free character transfer, which is the process by which you take a character from one server and put it on another, but I am not sure how they managed to get a free one. The cost of this move is usually about $20.

Warhammer Online is taking it’s toll on WarCraft and I have a feeling things are going to change, for the better I hope. Seems that the guild that I was in is down to 3 members. I hope this is the pressure Blizzard needed to get off their collective asses and do something about this constant end game grind. It’s not fun, and they have about a month and a half to fix it before my subscription runs out.

My next update should be littered with players names.

Thursday WoW Update

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It’s not really Thursday, and it’s been a few weeks coming, but here’s your update for what’s been going on in the World of Warcraft.

Well, Nothing has been going on with either Grotesk or Tsugutoshi. Neither character has moved an inch from my last update. Am I surprised? No, I’m not. There are times when people can’t get around to their characters and some of us don’t use those sparing free hours in the day to get anywhere on our characters.

If I listed all my characters they would have made the same amount of progress. Honestly most of the time that I get spurred on to play it’s by my brother or this guy, so it’s no wonder there’s been so much inactivity as of late.

Next is Steakems who I know is still playing the game, especially when the expansion is mentioned but this character has been absolutely stagnant…

So stagnant in fact that even though at one point I am sure there was a 20 level difference between characters Rombus actually passed him up. Sure it’s only by one level, but it’s still the first time. He’s also passed up all my alts, and he’s kind of in his own territory now.

Finally, Remana has been steadily gaining levels, but due to a really cheap DSL package it took something like 2 or 3 days to download the patch. Sure the latest patch was a big one weighing in at 1.2 GB’s, but that’s some cheap DSL. It usually takes me about 4 hours to download the same patch, and that’s with some sort of problem with the Blizzard Downloader telling me I’m behind a firewall.

I’ll try and be a little more consistent and maybe play myself so I have something to talk about.

Trip to Columbus

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I took a trip to Columbus to see Rick and Melissa. Tim and Renee came with. I drove and was getting about 36 mpg according to my car, so it’s really a good car to take on trips. Traffic wasn’t too bad, but then again it’s no where close to being a holiday and I don’t believe shopping season is really in swing yet.

We went to BD’s Mongolian Barbeque. That place is always good. Found out that Tim likes things a bit hotter than everyone else. How hot? Hot enough that you can feel it in your sinuses. Rick and Melissa paid for Tim’s dinner and Renee and I pitched in for a card to GameStop, so Tim got a bit of a surprise, since his birthday was a week ago. We didn’t forget, we just had to postpone it.

We went to Damon Busters next, which is kind of fun. I mean, it’s usually a lot of fun, but the basketball game was busted for most of the night, so we didn’t all get to play. When we did get to play I did well, but Tim beat me twice by one basket. We all played the trivia game, this game where you have to roll tokens down a ramp and get points, and skeet ball, it was fun. We won a bunch of tickets, but there wasn’t anything really that interesting to get, so we just had them put the tickets on a card and we left.

We went back and played Rock Band for a bit, but I was feeling a bit under the weather so we decided to head home a bit earlier than we had originally intended.

Another Bike Ride

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I decided to take a bike ride on Saturday and Renee decided she would come along. We started in North Akron, as I always do with the kids, and we went all the way to Peninsula. I forgot my camera, because I guess I don’t associate needing the camera when I go on these trips with anyone other than the kids. I should have brought it.

This was supposed to be the first time that I’d have a tracklog of the trip. I decided, and wrote about it in another post, that I had decided to use MyMotion in order to track the trip. There is one major problem and one small problem.

The major problem is that the trip goes all over the place. You are supposed to allow for some deviation from the trip you actually took since GPS is constantly trying to figure out where you are within something in the neighborhood of 300 to 500 meters at every ping. The problem is that the trip actually went across rivers and all over the place. The distance marked is totaling 19 miles for the trip to Peninsula, when really the round trip is only 19 miles. I don’t know if this is a problem with the GPS unit or the software. Further testing is going to be necessary.

The secondary problem is that all the information, such as speed, were not recorded. Jo informed me that I was doing it wrong. I’m supposed to save the trip as a .trk file and then convert it using a web page that he linked me to. This should fix the problem with information not being retained.

I’m not going to show you the GPS data, because I really feel like it’s worthless.

The trip was a lot of fun. It was supposed to get up to 80 degrees, but to be honest it never really felt that warm. I took plenty of water bottles, but we didn’t finish them all. We saw a bunch of woolly bear caterpillars on the trail. I was supposed to look it up, but I haven’t found any information on why it would appear that they were crossing the trail. Seems really dangerous and unnecessary.

We ate at the Winking Lizard in Peninsula. It was packed, because of the college football games. We ended up walking around Peninsula while we were waiting for a seat and we saw two snakes. They were pretty cool. It’s always so weird what nature you see when you go for these trips.

I hope that I can get some clothes that will make these bike trips possible as the weather gets colder. I don’t think they close the Towpath, but I guess I should grab a pamphlet next time and find out if they have dates for that sort of thing.

Thursday WoW Update

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I said I’d bring them back, so here they are. There has been some moving around and some other things going on. Some day this section might be larger, because more people might move here. I know that Andrew and Anthony have been being prodded to at least start new characters on this server. Some day this section might be for an entirely different game, since there seems to be a lot of interest in the Warhammer game. For now this is where we are.

I’ll start with Remana who hasn’t changed a great deal since I stopped doing these updates about a month ago. I’m sure there will be a renewed interest now that I’m coming back.

Grotesk should be seeing some sort of play, but he never liked the character so it’s going to be pretty stagnant. I don’t know if I can convince him to play it anymore, but it would be nice to have a priest in the group. As part of a compromise, and since you can move characters from PvE servers to PvP now, he moved Tsugutoshi and he’ll actually play this character.

Steakems shot up to level 36, and I really thought after he passed my two alts that he was going to climb all the way to 60. Now he’s having car trouble and some other not so fun stuff is going on and I don’t know what’s going to happen with this character. I’ve even heard him say that he might be putting WoW on hold for awhile until he gets it all straightened out. Who knows. Have to wait and see I suppose.

Rombus has actually been playing ever since they convinced me not to go. I know this, because when I had that get together he was playing this character and had Tsugutoshi run him through Scarlet Monastery. I think when I stopped the updates he was only in the 20’s, so this is of course an improvement. I can actually run through the stuff he’s doing with my alts. Just as soon as I find time to be on when he is.

Well that was a heck of an update. Maybe some day I’ll figure out how to get a page going for just these updates or something. I don’t know. Lot of ideas.