New World of Darkness

So I had Evil pick me up the new World of Darkness book and the new Vampire: the Requiem book.

Vampire: the Requiem? Don't you mean Vampire: the Masquerade?

Nope... for those of you not keeping score at home, White Wolf "killed off" their original WoD earlier this year. They published one final book for each of the core games, plus an additional book for all the other smaller bits. So the Vampires had their Gehenna, the Werewolves had their Apocolypse, and the Mages got to Ascend.

It was pretty neat actually...

Fast forward to present day... White Wolf has basically "rebooted" the WoD. New books, new history... starting from scratch.

I havn't read through the V:tR book, as I've just been going through the core WoD book... It's mostly the same... but there are some subtle, and not so subtle changes. Charaters still have physical, mental, and social stats.. but the names of some of them have changed, etc. They are still using the "dot" system on the character sheets and pools of 10-sided dice for all the dice rolling.

But... there's something about the system that just seems... different... and better that I havn't been able to put my finger on yet. I havn't sat down and compared the two rule sets yet, but I'm thinking it has to do more with the world itself.

It's still dark, obviously... but the basis for it seems better... Dunno. I'll talk mroe about it once I've read through both books.

I really am enjoying it so far, though...

.ungawa

Read more!

Mornings suck...

People give me crap about the difficulty I have getting up "early" fairly often. It's not unheard of of me sleeping in till after Noon on the first day I get to "sleep in" on the weekend.

It's not lack of sleep, it's not sleep apnea... it just *is*. You'd think after 30 years I'd be able to explain to someone how my body works and they'd beleive me instead of trying to blow it off as me not getting enough sleep or something...

I really wish those people could step into my shoes for a while to see how hard it really is for me to get up at any reasonable AM timeframe...

...then maybe they'd finally shut up with the jokes and the complaints about me being a walking zombie in the AM.

I doubt it, but you never know. It would be nice...

.ungawa

Read more!

ATI vs. nVidia - Round 293874239847

So remember all those Doom 3 benchmarks showing the various nVidia cards "owning" the ATI cards?

Well Valve has a Half-Life 2 video stress test program out that they released late last week. Let's just say the numbers are more in line with how they "should" be.

Everyone knows that ATI's implementation of OpenGL sucks. That's why the Doom 3 numbers ended up the way they did, and why they released their 4.9 beta drivers even before the 4.8 final drivers were out (which did help some, btw).

Bottom line, unless you're planning on only playing Doom 3 and City of Heroes (the only other OpenGL only game I know of nowadays) I'd still recommend an ATI card as you're going to be running a LOT more Direct3D games then OpenGL games for the lifetime of that video card...

...by a very large factor.

.ungawa

Read more!

July 4th Pictures

Okay... I *finally* got the frelling July 4th pictures edited and albumized.

Found a neat-o program that did a lot of the work for me.

Anywho, click on the link over on the right hand side under "Random Links" to peruse the pictures.

There are a couple more I need to get from Dwarf out there and add to the whole thing. But this is a good start.

The main images are pretty big, so I'd recommend maximizing your broswer if you don't want to have to scroll around to see each one. Most of them have little captions down at the bottom, too.

Enjoy!

.ungawa

Read more!

Disinfect the Core

Warning: This is a very addictive little game.

Kinda like othello, which a twist... Literally.

.ungawa

Read more!

Woot! no... seriously...

So I was over at Gizmodo and saw a link to THIS...

Which of course... talks about THIS.

The site just screams "fallen off of back of truck", but if you read the faq it makes sense:

woot.com is an online store and community run by the employees of a 10 year old consumer electronics distributor that focuses on close-outs and generally buying stuff cheap. Since the distributor doesn’t sell to end users, Woot, Inc provides us with an employee-store slash market-testing type of place. Hopefully the boss won’t take notice. We anticipate profitability by 2043 -- by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices.

It's not fallen off the back of the truck... it's just excess crap for this electronics distributor that they are selling out of the back of the store.

Simply brilliant.

They've had some good items to sell so far, too. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Oh... and anyone interested in making soda at home? Pretty interesting concept. Let's see how it costs out.

So barring the initial costs for the main gadgets and whatnot... It's $2.99 for one of their basic sodamix bottles (this is the stuff you pour into the carbonated water. Says you can make 12 1 liter bottles out of one of these. So that's 25 cents a liter.

Wow... if it actually works out like that... and doesn't taste like crap... That's better then even BJ's prices for liters of soda. Very interesting... I'm going to have to look into this more. Seems WAAAAAAAY to easy and cost effective.

Or.. it just shows you how much more the big soda companies are actually charging us for their products... heh. =)

.ungawa

Read more!

Party party party

While completely draining (probably mostly from the drive on the way back... it was just... weird for some reason), the party today that I went to was a lot of fun.

Good food, good drinks (albeit, being the DD I didn't drink but a single beer.. go me), and good conversations.

It's always good to interact with people from work outside of work every so often. Always helps make you realize that everyone else is normal (well... as normal as we can get), too.

It's always interesting hearing what topics of conversation happen at these types of parties, too. They range from the obviously geeky to the absolutely mundane.

Totally a hoot. =)

.ungawa

Read more!

Look... another Doom 3 post!

DUN DUN DUN

News just in! First reported co-op mod actually a cd-key collector.

I actually can't wait for someone to come up with a working co-op mod of some type. That'll be bad ass.

Is the game still keeping my attention? Oh yah. I am only giving myself 1-2 hours a night to play it just so I don't burn myself out too much on it.

But, the atmosphere in this game is just incredible. Without a doubt the best aspect of this game.

You know it's good when people keep referencing RE1 (we ALL know the scene from RE1 that had everyone jump when those damn dogs showed up the first time) as far as the atmosphere and the "horror" aspect.

I think the monster closets suck, though. Monsters teleporting in from hell... sure.. that works.

Me walking into a room, and a wall piece slides up into the ceiling letting out an imp behind me... as if.

Good to see the mario-esque jumping scenes are still in. At least it's not THAT difficult. YOU GOT SOME PLATFORM IN MY FPS! WELL YOU GOT SOME FPS IN MY PLATFORM!

It's good to see the community jumping into the fray with beginning to mod the game.. . barring the cd-key sniffer noted above, of course.

I just want Fox to buy this engine now and come out with a decent AvP3. That'd kick some serious ass.

.ungawa

Read more!

Doom 3

OMFG.

OMFG.

I don't think the *original* Doom scared me this much.

This is worse then the first time I saw Alien, or any other good horror flick.

Wow... Simply insane.

EDIT: Just a clarification. I did *NOT* pirate Doom3. The EB near work started selling them as of 7pm last night (monday night). My apologies if you are still waiting for your copy... your stores obviously aren't as cool. Nyah. =P

.ungawa

Read more!