Mini-reviews forthcoming: Old Man’s Ghost Brigade

I ripped through John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades in a matter of just a couple of weeks – a bit of a triumph for myself, I should admit. I’m used to milking every page of a book for weeks, even months. It took me a year just to get through the first Song of Ice and Fire novel. So I don’t know if my voracious devouring of Scalzi’s novels is telling of the quality of his craft, or the changing nature of my reading habits. In either case, I’ll be attempting to get mini-reviews up of the books sometime within the next day or so.

I know. This would all be done already if I had a BrainPal installed.

The more things change…

I’ve finally altered the wave portion of the Nerdflood banner that I’ve used since the beginning of time. Or at least, since the beginning of this blog. It was done on my wife’s suggestion. She found the old one to be to rounded and messy — she considered it more of a ‘splat’ than a wave of any recognizable orientation. I begrudgingly agreed. So, after she and I played around with some more organic drawn designs, she happened upon a very simple, elegant wave design which I incorporated into the banner at the top of the site.

I’m in a very orange sort of mood these days, and so that explains the overall design of the March 2008 banner. The orange appears to clash with the green tabs quite a bit, so I might be changing it up again sometime in the next week. I was planning to just play with fonts and color combinations for most of 2008’s banners, but I already tire of the task and might just go right back to photos.

Urban Dead – still fun

It’s been a couple of weeks since I first starting playing the HTML-based survival horror game with a substantial group from Evil Avatar, but I have to admit, I’m still having fun. By this point with most games I play, I’ve already sucked all the entertainment value out of it and am ready to ditch it for something else. But not this.

I even logged in a few times over the past couple of days while in Phoenix. I would check the status of the building I was in, check the activity, stock up on FAKs, and then check out the status of our current squad operations on our private forums. If I had some AP available, I would run around to nearby squad HQs and see if anyone required any healing.

There are two qualities of this game that make it so appealing to me. One, the ability to come and go from the game at any point I choose. Unless our squad has a scheduled operation to accomplish, I am free to do what I want, at my own convenience. I can log in at any hour of the day and assist where needed. Log out, and then come back later and help out some more. It’s based entirely on my schedule and availability, and for a family gamer such as myself, that kind of passive timetable is not only refreshing, it’s a necessity.

The other quality is the community at EvAv that has gathered around this game. The EvAv user base is a fairly great community in and of itself, but the community of UD players is absolutely amazing. Torrefaction – the EvAv UD ringleader and instigator – is a phenomenal operations commander, setting achievable goals and making smart decisions about command structure and group objectives. The ability to corral any large group of disparate players into any semblance of order is commendable, but to herd this particular group of cats takes some godlike patience and understanding. Torrefaction may not have necessarily built the community, but he has definitely given the community a purpose. And that’s what makes playing the game so much fun.

The funny thing about this game is that it was designed to be played mostly away from the UD site itself. Sure, you perform your actions on the UD site. But performing actions is largely a result of spending a lot of time planning and coordinating with your teammates on another site. That’s what helps build the community. And it seems as though the logic of the game dictates that you do this in order to be successful.

So, if you haven’t tried it out yet, I suggest you give Urban Dead a go. But if you’re going to try it, you should definitely attempt to hook up with a larger group. That’s the aspect where this game truly shines.

Offline again (maybe…possibly…yeah, more than likely)

I’ll be out of town at a business conference down in sunny Phoenix, Arizona for the next three days. I might be able to make it online every now and then, especially since my hotel room is confirmed a hard-wired high-speed room. However, any time scavenged online is likely to be spent defending Malton.

It’s funny, though. Looking over at the update calendar, February 2008 has been one of my least-updated months in recent history. However, looking at my stats, for some reason, I’m on track to have February 2008 be my top month as far as traffic.

nerdflood_traffic.jpg

With another couple of days left in the month, I will easily surpass my previous top month, which was back in September 2007. I’m not sure exactly what it is I’m doing. Looking at my referral list, it appears as though a lot of various topics I’ve discussed in the past are getting discovered through Google searches. So, I guess my traffic is increasing simply through the consequence of me doing what I love: talking about things that interest me.

Of course, I’m not one to get too hung up on traffic numbers. If I had included the numbers on the far left-hand side of that graphic above, you would be squealing with laughter at my ridiculously low number of hits. But it’s no matter to me. As long as people are coming here and becoming interested in what I have to say, I don’t care if my traffic is ten people a day, or ten thousand. I will still talk about whatever the hell I want to.

I’ll just be including more ads.

Champions Online!

So, first they sold the City of Heroes/Villains franchise to NCSoft, and then they got the Marvel MMO pulled out from under their feet. Now what’s a studio like Cryptic that only knows superheroes supposed to do? Why, that’s easy! Create a brand new superhero MMORPG based on an ancient pen and paper game license!

I joke about it, but I have to admit that Champions Online looks seriously cool. A more “action-oriented” MMO where I don’t have to wait for a power to recharge before being able to launch it again. I assume this is intended to make the game much more console friendly. In any case, it looks beautiful. Here’s hoping it’s just as much fun to play as it sounds like it will be.

Between this and the recently-announced Tales of Vesperia, I may have to find a way to pick up a 360 sometime in the next year or so.

Urban Dead: it’s like a text-based ‘Night of the Living Dead’…kinda

So, I’ve been hooked on Urban Dead since sometime last week. It’s essentially an HTML interface survival horror game, with emphasis on the “survival”, and not so much on the “horror”. You join hundreds thousands lots of people online in a persistent world that is one large, sprawling city. You gather up with a group of those people (such as the Evil Avatar-ians) and simply try to survive.

The best part of the game is that, as a group, you get to decide on your own established set of goals, just like if you were huddled together in a warehouse attempting to live out a REAL zombie apocalypse. For instance, our group is currently trying to keep a hospital secured to use as a field hospital for gathering before and after major raids on established zombie centers of activity. The overall goal of the group is to regain control of Scarletwood, one of the suburbs of the city.

You are given a portion of action points to use during the day, and these regain at the rate of 1 per half-hour, so you are expected to use them wisely. When you end your turn, you have to try to make sure you are within a barricaded building that is relatively safe from the next cataclysmic zombie uprising.

At the moment, I’m nothing more than a lowly level 1 doctor, trying desperately to scavenge enough materials to create some first-aid kits that I can use to heal fellow survivors. Healing others is the only way I can gain experience points and level up. It all probably sounds pretty confusing, but I was surprised at how quickly I understood the foundation and mechanics of the game after reading through the wiki and our own group’s threads at Evil Avatar.

So, yeah. That’s what I’m wasting my time on these days. That, and Battalion Wars 2, which I’ll talk about some other time.

Out for a while

I’m going to be away from the site for a few days. My wife’s grandmother passed away this weekend after a year-long battle with lung cancer. I don’t want to say she “lost” the battle, as so many people in these sorts of situations do. It’s always sounded so horrendously pessimistic to me. But she’s no longer with us, and while her passing is not necessarily something that will be reflected upon daily, there will be moments when its realization hits us suddenly and without warning. It’s for those moments that we walk away from our lives for a couple of days, and try hard to latch on to good memories that will carry us through as relatively painlessly as possible.

We’ll be traveling to eastern Iowa Tuesday and Wednesday for the visitation, funeral, and internment. I’ll probably pop my head back in here sometime before the end of the week.

Take care.

Talk about a shake up

screenshot211.jpgScott Kurtz appears to be true to his word when he said that he was planning to shake things up in the PvP universe, and that things might not be the same when all was said and done. This must be how it begins.

The way I figure it is that Skull must be some sort of manifestation of Brent’s childhood that he has carried with him all these years. For a while (presumably through his high school and college years) Skull took a backseat and remained generally ignored, but came back (for some reason) when Brent joined PvP.

The truly interesting aspect of this is the impending doom we feel as Brent’s mother confides in Skull the idea that once Brent gets married and “grows up”, he won’t need Skull (or, more appropriately, his childhood) anymore. The implication here is that Skull will potentially disappear.

What is really even more interesting (if at all possible) is that Skull appears to understand this. In the last panel, he’s helping himself to a speedy exit. Presumably it’s because he knows that Brent’s mother is right, and that he will eventually–for all intents and purposes–cease to exist, and he wants to get out before he has to deal with that reality. Either that, or Brent’s mom is just freaking him out, and he wants to bid a hasty retreat from the insanity.

In any case, Scott’s definitely got my attention. I love the dynamic that Skull brings to every situation at the PvP offices. Could Scott really do away with that? What would the strip become without Skull? I’m hoping that I’m way off base, and there’s an extremely large chance that I am. However, the signs are pointing towards the huge shake up Scott promised us. I have to say, whatever the outcome, I’m interested.

Ficlets has competition

I know that there are other entries in the short collaborative fiction space, namely Novlet and Portrayl (both of which were profiled along with Ficlets by ReadWriteWeb a while back). But they hadn’t gained the same amount of traction and their user bases are still relatively small.

However, a new challenger has appeared on the scene called Protagonize, and according to Alexa, it has enjoyed some fairly interesting traffic numbers over the past couple of months. It has nearly the same premise, and a heavy userbase that appears to be constantly creating. It’s a chore to sift through the content at this point, there’s so much of it. But, I have to say, the quality of the writing so far is truly amazing to witness. I’ve been planning to get some more Ficlets written lately, and I might just have to start cross-posting and seeing what kind of a community builds around the content on Protagonize.

I has a profile.