Bennington Lake

December 20th, 2008

Sid wanted to try sledding at Bennington Lake Saturday afternoon.

It was crazy cold. I don’t think I have been sledding when it was that cold. We are guessing about 7 degrees without wind chill. Our protected outdoor thermometer read 10 degrees when we left the house.

The snow was too light and dry to make a good sled run. The run would not pack very well. The plastic sleds would just cut down to the rocks on the side of the dam, despite the snow being knee to thigh deep.

There was one tube and it worked pretty good. You could get a lot of speed going down the side of the dam. Maybe when it is not so cold and the snow packs better we will try it again.

Here are some shots from the top of the dam.

Best game of 2008

December 14th, 2008

Fallout 3 is a great game and my pick for the best title of 2008.

 

Fallout is very open ended. There is a main story line that you

can follow but you are free to explore and experience the world.

 

Your actions in the game will affect your karma. Karma is a sliding

scale that will rate your character toward evil or good. Different

characters in the game will treat you differently based on this

scale. The various factions will also treat you differently, some

may even dispatch bounty hunters to take you out.

 

The game really rewards exploration. Poking around will usual

reward with a nice new shiny… or  a hideous beast looking to

make a meal of you.

 

You can either play combat in FPS real time or use the turn

based VATS system. The combat in fallout is burtal, following

in the foot steps of the previous two games. There is a reason

this game was banned in a few countries.

 

The dialog system is fun as usual. Just like Fallout 1 and 2

you will have different dialog options depending on your

character stats.

 

The size of the map may not seem very large but Bethesda

really packed in a lot of content. You may find a whole new

area right next to a mission you did earlier.

 

Players can mod the game. Bethesda has released their editing

kit, the Geck.

 

Best of all the game keeps the same nuclear post apocalyptic feel

of Fallout 1 and 2.

 

Fallout 3 is my pick for best game of 2008.

Beach Sunset

December 14th, 2008

A few weeks back we spent some time at the beach.

I had a great time just relaxing. There were some

really nice sunsets.

sunset

Walla Walla Winter

December 14th, 2008

We have snow in Walla Walla! =)

RC18T

July 13th, 2008

Quite a few years ago I dabbled in RC Cars. I had a Team Associated RC10 buggy. The RC10 was a 1:10th scale car.

About a week ago I made the mistake of visiting a hobby store. There were a ton 1:18th scale cars and trucks on the shelves.  According to the store owner both 1:10 and 1:18 scale vehicles are pretty big now.

Anyhow, I ended up bring this home…

The CD in these pictures help give you an idea of the trucks size. The shop had some smaller scale vehicles as well, they were tiny.

This last friday Sid Foster and I used his backyard as a dirt track. We slapped together a little jump and plywood burm.

Just before we were finished running the truck around the track one of the front shocks threads broke off inside the ball cup that attaches to the front A-arm. DOH!

A disassembled shock.

You can see a little bit of the metal thread inside the ball cup joint.

Thankfully the hobby shop had the correct spare parts in stock and the little guy is happily zipping around.

Big Game

July 13th, 2008

It had to happen at some point. My old TV was turning yellow in the corners, no universal remote (lost the original) and the back ports were messed up.

I chose this particular LCD TV because it supports a ton of monitor resolutions up to 1920×1080. The color puts my old LCD monitor to shame.

Below is a shot of WoW. Any game with a chat window doesn’t lend itself very well to the big screen. The game may look great but it is hard to read any of the fonts. =p

Flagship Studio SOS

July 13th, 2008

It appears that Flagship Studio has sunk. Hellgate: London and Mythos IP were sent to separate investment companies. It sounds like both games may continue development in the Asian market.

Mythos may not see a North America release now. Too bad, I wanted to give it a shot at least.

Source: Voodoo Extreme

The blog lives

July 12th, 2008

What’s happening?

Still working for MCM Design Studio.

We started developing a few projects with Flex. I have really enjoyed developing in Flex. Adobe has a nice IDE for building applications, Acitionscript is pretty easy to pickup and you don’t have to worry about various browsers rendering content differently *cough* IE *cough*.

In the gaming world I have been playing a lot of Age of Conan and Boom Blox. There are few titles on my watch list.

Diablo 3

FINALLY, finally Blizzard gets around to the good stuff again.

Amazingly they have added much more color in this game. The first two diablo games were pretty dark. It is great to see some color in their new title.

Healing is done by random health globe drops. Anyone in the party can pick up the globe and it will heal everyone.  This is awesome and should add more to gameplay. There are still potions but you can’t mash through them like the previous games.

There is a skill bar now and they are trying to get the players to use more skills then before. You can still play the game with just the mouse however.

The develoeprs are focusing on co-operative gameplay. This game is going to ROCK!

Fallout 3

I am drawn to post apocalyptic games. Especially when they are based around the familiar. Maybe it is seeing a “what if” version of a world that is so interesting.

Fallout 3 follows suit with the first two games with the setting in a post apocalyptic North America.  The game may play a little more like a FPS but you can still pause gameplay and target specific areas on enemies like the previous games.

Bethesda is still using the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. rpg system and thankfully keeping the game open ended.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky

The STALKER games are FPS/RPGs based around the Chernobyl Disaster. In STALKER there are various faction that try to control “the zone”, which is the radiated area around the power plant.

What makes these games stand out from other FPS games is their dynamic world.

If you clear out a camp of rebels another faction may spawn on the out skirts of the map and start walking into the area.  If they find an empty camp they will take up residence, if not they may take a camp by force.

This leads to the player coming across two factions fighting each other or finding a friendly camp that is now full of hostiles.

I really enjoyed the first game and I hope the developers expand on their first title.

Picked up a little 1/18th scale RC car. The little bugger zips around like a mad hornet. I’ll post some images and maybe video of that a bit later. I managed to break a front shock on it the other day.