Coming at you fast and furious - Sunday nights on MN Pikachu!

That’s right, starting this Sunday night at 8 pm CST LIVE - from Minneapolis, the MN Pikachu Counter-Strike: Source server will be going full throttle with fragging.

Be there or be square!

Need the server info? Look here!

A few of us jumped on the server last night, and we had some 2v2 and 3v2 action going on. It was good to confirm the server works outside of the LAN, and there didn’t appear to be any lag or complaints.

Stats are working, and update after every map load. You can find stats at http://www.silwenae.net/psychostats. (Real time stats and updates in-game aren’t working yet).

We’ll pick a night to play every week, athen it’s time to get a-fraggin’.

I’ve been working on the server the last few nights, and have been making good progress.

The server is up and running, with a number of Admin mods installed. I’m having issues getting Psychostats installed as the Mysql server won’t connect remotely. HLStats has crappy documentation, but I may try them again if I can’t get Psychostats working.

I’m home for the holiday weekend with the family, so I should find some time to finish it off.

Who’s up for some play testing Monday night, at 9:00 p.m. CST? I’ll update the wiki with the IP information when everything is up and running.

If you took the survey in my last post, the results are after the jump. My comments in parentheses. Stay tuned, more to come!

Many, many years ago we used to have LAN parties.  And then we all got broadband.

Then came along a little game called Everquest, and all our FPS skills suffered as we became addicted to MMOs.  After some of us stopped playing EQ, or wanted a change of pace, we came back to FPS games, and I ran a Linux server out of Bizet’s house.  This was still very early on in my Linux days, but it did teach me a few things.

And now we’re old, and as Bizet put it:

Many years ago, back when Cy and Lev were still learning how to play with blocks, a group of friends spent some quality time playing Counterstrike on a homegrown server that resided in the living room/bedroom of my studio apartment. This server was an endless source of entertainment that lived until Verant sold us their crack and pulled us away. Years have passed, waist lines have expanded, wives and children have appeared, and riding lawn mowers have replaced the Coors Party Ball as a source of entertainment.

We have put together a brief survey to gauge interest and we’ll consult with the magic 8 ball to see what happens.

Survey is after the jump.

Since I quit Warhammer (twice) in the last few months, this blog has been horribly under-used.

But something may be a-brewing, check back soon.

It’s been way too long since my last post - but anyway…

John Walker at Eurogamer has started a series of articles, called Bastard of the Old Republic, that recap his efforts to play the Bioware classic Knight of the Old Republic, well, let’s use his words:

The task I set myself was to play the original Knights of the Old Republic, making the worst, cruellest, most spiteful, murderous and downright evil choices available at every choice.

If you’ve ever played KOTOR, or any roleplaying game, take the 20 minutes and read the articles.  You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp, you’ll just shake your head, but it’s worth it.

Here is part one, and here is part two.

Although my impressions of Warhammer Online are positive overall, I’m surprised by some of the depth that turns up at times.  Overall, I think the game is fun, but a bit easy.  The developers continue to surprise me - at first it was Tome Tactics, and now it’s Lairs.

Alendale and I hooked up with the Templars guild last night, after a few hours of Bastion Stairs and trying to take a keep, we went off seeking new advernture by visiting Lairs.  From the Hammerwiki:

A lair is a type of secret area in the Warhammer Online world. It could possibly be a cave, a dungeon, a mountaintop; somewhere in the zone that is far off the beaten path, and generally disregarded. What makes lairs special, is that there are no quests or directions leading you there, so they are stumbled upon by explorers who enjoy seeing every nook and cranny of the world. Lairs generally, even when discovered, require the player to solve a puzzle or figure out some indirect way of obtaining access to the lair - they also usually contain a powerful boss monster who is many times more powerful than is appropriate for the zone they are in (with a few exceptions of weaker boss monsters).

There appears to be a Lair in each store, manned by at least one level 40 Hero (who also drops a nice piece of blue loot).  Getting to each one is the trick - they’re hidden away in the mountains or down a river, and as mentioned above involve a puzzle.  Two of the ones we visited were jumping puzzles - it was almost like some weird Super Mario experience you’d expect in a Nintendo game.  Far more amusing was watching other members of the group trying to do the jumps.  (I gave up on the jumping tree puzzle in Norsca, and Al did it for me after much swearing on my part).

Frostshard Prison, one of the few Lairs not named Lair of xxx, was an interesting one, with up to eight Heros.  Spawn times are unknown, but we were able to down three of the mobs, who, either by chance or design, all dropped loot only usable by Dwarves.

The night was a blast, and it wasn’t just discovering the puzzle and Hero of each Lair - hanging with Templars was fun.  A casual guild of adults, we spent the night making fun of each other in Ventrilo trying to navigate the jump puzzles to discussing old games.  Overall, a good bunch of folks.

Kudos to Mythic - tucking these away in each zone with a well thought out plan of how the players would have to get to each one (let alone find it) is quite the pleasant surpise in the game.  It was’s a nice touch and breaks up some of the monotony of the game.

Here is a screenshot of one of the mobs, the hydra, in Migliod’s Menagerie:

From screenshots

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Valve releasing Half-Life.

10 years?!  Where does the time go…

Half-Life, made from a mish mash of the Quake 1 and 2 engines, and Valve’s own customizations was a revolutionary gaming experience.  After years of development, the single player experience was top notch.  This was the first game that ever made me literally jump out of my seat in fear.  Sure, I had played games that made me uncomforatable, with the feeling of dread or now knowing what came next, but the first time a head crab jumped at me, I jumped 2 feet in the air.

Additionally, Valve took the mod community to the next level.  While id’s Quake-engine games were open, Valve embraced the mod community, and arguably the best mod (or 2nd best after Team Fortress, who they would later buy anyway) was developed using the Half-Life engine:  Counter-Strike.

And until tomorrow at noon, you can pick up Half-Life for 90% off (about $1) on Steam. Happy Birthday Gordon!

I’ve had a few days to play with the NXE, and I love it.

It feels like the Xbox boots faster, and it goes straight to the Dashboard, which I like (ala the Wii).

The avatar creation process is slick as well.  With more customization than the Wii, and higher resolution characters, it’s fun to try and put together an avatar that takes after you.  There could be more clothing options, and the hats are terrible, but I like having an avatar.  (Ala the Wii as well).

The Dashboard feels faster, and snappier.   It’s more intuitive, and easier to find things.  I can’t give kudos to Microsoft enough for releasing the NXE.  Two years into the Xbox 360’s lifecycle, and they invested and spent the manpower to re-do the dashboard top to bottom.

The best part remains the ability to stream Netflix movies.  The only catch is you have to add streaming movies to your queue on the PC, but they show up immediately in the Dashboard after adding them.  Streaming is quick, and the joystick has basic controls, and best of all, if you stop a movie, it remembers where you left off and picks up there.  The only thing I can’t find is what movies are in HD, as Xbox 360 users are the first to have access to HD streaming from Netflix.

And what is Sony’s reaction?  To yank all Columbia Pictures (a Sony subsidiary) from being able to stream on Netflix via the 360.  Talk about petty.

It’s not often I say this, but well done, Microsoft.