LAN-SAKES!

You look at this picture and see a ballroom converted into a LAN party... Well, I was there and it was really more of a WAN party. Let me explain. While some people were playing locally against each other, there was also a strong contingency of people playing games like Warcraft. I don't see anything wrong with that, but I hadn't been to a true LAN party since around 2001, so things have changed a lot!

I actually really enjoyed being around a large group of people who were all so caught up in gaming. There was a definite sense of camaraderie and good natured joking. It was also refreshing to see so many girls there kicking ass at games and taking breaks to watch Invader Zim.


The gaming towers did not disappoint. My own equipment has suffered many setbacks this semester, which had cut down on my posting and internet use. Due to age some of my computer tech died, but it burned out with glory, believe me. It was nice to see some computers with cool lights glowing around the room. Meanwhile, I brought my netbook to the party and it tried its hardest to let me play League of Legends.

There was also plenty of console gaming, including a lounge with Xbox 360's and even some older systems. Some of my cohorts were also playing Pokemon on DS against each other.

All in all it was an excellent night! The event raised money for charity and everyone seemed to have a great time. I felt recharged being around all those fellow gamers. Oh, and hey! I also got some vegan take out sushi, so huzzah! With all the pizza being consumed I had to find some deliciously gluten free to nosh on.

Tell me about your favorite or least favorite LAN party experiences in the comments!

Legend of Gamers: Video Game Store

Tucked away off the interstate in O'Fallon Illinois is a video game store, that like the Tardis, is surprisingly big on the inside. On a trip to the St. Louis area I had a chance to visit this awesome store and speak with the very cool manager.

Legend of Gamers can be found at 511 W US 50 in O'Fallon. This area also sports several other stores worth checking out and is well worth the trip if you will be near St. Louis.

Inside you can find a variety of arcade machines and fun decorations.

The selection of video games range from Atari titles to Game Boy games, NES, Sega and all the way up to current titles. You can find a variety of peripherals. There is also a selection of anime DVDs.Want to compete against your friends? They have a comfy space to battle it out. Check out the systems they have set up.

I really enjoyed my visit and picked up Kirby for Gameboy. Next time I'm there I'll be picking out a NES cartridge to give away in a future contest!

Pulsar Arcade Refurb

As part of my experience in the IT department I've joined an organization that does everything from learning game design to working on arcade machines. This is a machine kindly donated to us by our Advisor. It's a 1981 Pulsar and this is the condition it was in when we all gathered one lovely Saturday to work on it. Our advisor has an awesome house with pinball and arcade machines everywhere. Paradise!

After some fun playing the LOTR and X-Files pinball machines and playing some guitar we got down to work!

First we took everything we could off of the cabinet. There were some surprises in how things were bolted in, but we got it taken apart fairly quickly.

Most of the electrical components are in fairly good shape and the monitor needed some tweaking to get it looking sharper. Many of the other pieces like the plastic components were incredibly filthy and scratched. They needed a lot of cleaning and polishing to remove as many surface scratches as possible.

Even the marquee was somewhat banged up and really dirty before I got to work on it. I soon discovered that the back needed as much work as the front. You can see how much improved it is from the first picture. I like the image on there. It reminds me of Tron!

Here's the front of the machine stripped down. The control panel needed cleaning and some work. Although the game was running it was not running very smoothly. The joystick had some issues and ultimately needs to be rebuilt.

You might be surprised to see how simple the parts are on the bottom of the control panel. They are even mounted on wooden blocks. Once the parts were clean and the control panel had been worked on we began to reassemble the pieces.

Look at that monitor! It's really in wonderful shape after it's been adjusted. So, what happened to Pulsar? Well, now it's in a temporary home in one of the computer labs. It looks shiny!


You can see more photos including the ORIGINAL manual with specs at my Photobucket.

T-Shirt Tuesday: GaMeRS

After a long weekend of travel and starting a new IT job I am happy to be back on campus working on projects. Sometime soon I have a new Pathfinder game that I'll be in as a swashbuckler and this weekend I will be in a very beautiful piratey/steampunky type wedding as a bridesmaid!

As for today I am sporting a shirt for the Game Mechanics Research Studio, a group that I will now represent as treasurer. Tomorrow we have a meeting about MMO's at 1 pm.

I like to kick it by the pinball machines in our small campus arcade on breaks. If you would like to check out our logo and help us raise funds to travel to game studios then check out our store. As treasurer this request is my first official act. Hehe.

Stay tuned for more! I hope to have a contest up and running next week.

Game Development

Today I attended the first meeting of a new professional development group on my campus dedicated to helping potential game developers learn and discuss many different aspects of the gaming industry.

We listened to a great presentation by Rob Craig who writes for Game Room Magazine, and restores and builds arcade cabinets.

He brought in this machine:

This mini-pin is a machine that runs pinball emulators. Rob took us through the history of arcade machines and the evolution of their boards, hacks, and emulation. Those of us in attendance discussed some of the games that we've played and Rob talked about what went into making them.

The mini-pin was set up at the side of the room and we all got to see it in action. It's pretty impressive. Something that I have not written about on this blog yet is that I'm actually a huge fan of pinball. I play it whenever I can, but I do not play it on the computer. I wouldn't necessarily call myself a purist, but pretty close to it.

That said Rob's machine was a joy to play. You got the benefit of arcade style sound, buttons, and the machine having a tilt feature (which personally won me over) and the fact that you can play such a wide variety of machines on this single device.
Here's a shot of the mini-pin in action. It's a neat marriage of traditional pinball and electronic gaming that proved to be very innovative and fun. Both the top screen and the bottom screen change according to the game that you load up.

There's a lot more cool stuff to come with this group. Rob invited those of us who want to help restore an old arcade machine to join him and I certainly want to do it. If I had more room in my apartment I would have already bought a beat-up, old cabinet and be working on it as one of my many projects.

Hacked!

It's a beautiful weekend for hacking someone's WoW account and going wild on EVERY realm in Azeroth.

Last week we ordered an authenticator for the account. Looking back I should have just ordered the one that you can put on your iPod, but I was worried about the security of that. It takes up to three weeks for the authenticator to arrive. In the meantime I continued playing. I have a secure home computer and I don't click on links in the forums, etc, so I thought I was safe. In five and a half years we've had no trouble with the account. However, recently various people I know have been hacked including my ARCH-ENEMY, so I became concerned about the reality of hacking.

Friday our account got flagged and suspended for suspicious behaviour. Mr. Chronic Geek deleted some characters Thursday and sent the gold to another character on the same account. At first I thought that this was why we got suspended. When that lifted and I logged on the gold was gone and I thought Blizzard had taken it for suspicious activity.

Saturday we received notice that our account had been closed. I was so angry that I called my dear girl Absolute Anne (of Distilled Geek Commentary) and had a good long discussion that contained many instances of the F-word. I knew the next day that I would have to call Blizzard if I wanted to get this sorted out.

Calling Blizzard is a dreary prospect that no one wants to have to face. It's a nearly impossible task just to get into the hold queue. However, after a few tries today I was finally on hold and I ended up talking to a really nice guy. I have a philosophy of being very nice to call center people and service people in general. I've worked in a call center. It can be horrifying. After you have been viciously yelled at by an elderly woman for a one cent state tax on a bill something happens to your brain that can never be undone.

So, Blizzard Guy and I had a nice chat. We discovered that my account had been hacked. Some hacker or hackers started 180 random level one characters and spammed every realm on the game and deleted our other characters. Oh you know, hacking the account isn't enough, they really have to take a piss on you and delete your characters too! Ouch! It will take 5 to 6 days to fix. Hopefully the authenticator arrives soon. Hopefully some of my characters and gear will be restored. I am happy Blizzard is going to help, but damn it sucks.

I can't really close with any parting advice but to tell you that if you play WoW and don't have an authenticator you should get one to avoid my fate.

Oh Please

Take this with a grain of salt, since it is a humour site, but Cracked.com has an article that Captain Osmotic pointed out to me which states video gaming is dead. Why is it dead oh wise Cracked? It's dead because of Project Natal, now Kinect.

Here's a gem of a quote from the piece:

"The problem is that video game players simply won't keep playing without a new gimmick every five years or so. Where people have been happy watching celluloid movies for like 80 straight years, for whatever reason gamers won't keep playing games unless given a completely new format every half decade."

There is so much fail in this one little snippet that surely the whole thing is a bunch of mocking hyperbole, right?

The movie industry has not been static. In fact movies went through many radical phases that have given us what we have today from the inclusion of sound, censorship in the 1930's, the development of economically feasible colorization, the death of the studio system (here I mean the basically indentured servitude status of many early stars), the rise and fall of early 3-D, the return of adult subject matter, the rating system, surround sound, CGI, digital, and the return of 3-D.

When television became widely commercially available in the 1950's many thought it would be the total death of the film industry. Yet, here we continue on today thanks to the MANY innovations in film-making. This is not even counting the home market of Beta, VHS, Laser Disc, DVD, Blu-Ray. Oh no! How terrible. Watching movies at home must be dying due to all these changes. Oh, and netflix. Kill it. Kill it with fire!

Now, what about the second half of that quote? "...for whatever reason gamers won't keep playing games unless given a completely new format every half decade."

Let's look at the facts. People have NEVER stopped playing the older generations of games and they NEVER will. Side-scrolling games have continued and you only need look to the popularity of games like Braid and Super Mario Wii to understand why game developers make the decision now to release side-scrollers like the upcoming Batman game. Meanwhile, innovations in gaming are welcome and gamers buy the titles that come out that look playable and fun.

It's not gamers that stop playing and demand new forms of entertainment. Video game companies, console companies, and the like develop new products to MAKE MONEY. It's a pretty simple fact of living in our society that I'm not sure how anyone could have missed. The competition to get our money means that we gamers win because the market kills off most bad ideas. (Hello, virtual boy. Good-bye Virtual Boy!)