The Captain’s Blog

Just finished reading the first trade paperback (which was actually a hard cover) of Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born by Marvel. I loved it!

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Now that Warhammer Online’s subscriber base is starting to dwindle, they’ve started up a free 10 day trial program. Ever since WAR came out, I’ve said I would try it if they ever had a free trial so I signed up and installed it this weekend.

First of all, let me just say this:

You know whats the best thing World of Warcraft has going for it over every other MMO?

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For better or worse, all the venomous Watchmen reviews trickling in over the past few weeks was enough to get me Angry™ enough to start writing again. I don’t want to write a huge dissertation on why I liked the book and the movie so I’ll just respond to key points that I’ve been hearing over and over:

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I came home Wednesday looking forward to downloading the tracks from Blood Sugar Sex Magic and rocking out on RB2 for awhile when I was unfortunately greeted by this. The red ring of death! My launch day 360 has finally bit the dust. Considering it was one of the original units, I suppose it was long overdue. What was the failure rate on the launch day boxes? Like 45%? You could say surviving almost 3 years is something to be proud of.

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Just a quick note about Castle Crashers. Its been out Since the end of August and I’m pretty late to the party, but this is one of the best games you will find on XBLA. Four player beat-em-up action with some of the best irreverent and slapstick comedy I’ve seen since Earthworm Jim. I wish it was $10 but at $15 its still worth it for all the unlockable characters and replay value. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Microsoft Windows Vista has been out for almost two years now and I’ve been patiently watching from the sidelines for the right time to adopt. I’ve heard all the horror stories about how slow it is, and how much extra crap it puts on your PC, and how many people were shocked and annoyed by being forced to using it on any PC built after November 2006. I have to admit the only direct exposure I’ve had to it was helping a friend backup data to wipe it off his new PC to install XP pro.

That being said, I have a kick ass PC now; one that can take full advantage of a 64-bit OS and hopefully have enough power to handle the extra bloat and graphical overhead that comes with Vista. For the record, my current setup is a Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo @ 3.00Ghz / 4GB ram / 8800GT with a 150gb WD Raptor X system drive and 1TB WD slave drive. My computer runs fine with XP, and usually I’m of the mentality of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” but with 32bit XP, I’m not taking advantage of the 64 bit architecture, I can’t use DirectX 10 and my system only recognizes about 3.4GB of my ram. To top it off, I just recently cooked my system drive and need to install a fresh copy of windows anyway, so I decided to climb aboard Microsoft’s new flagship and see how she handles.

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I figured the obligatory “I’ve been busy with real life” post was a little past due, so here it is.

Real life has been real busy and I’ve barely had time to play anything much less write about it. My counterpart at work suddenly quit, and the company has been kindly asking me to pull double duty indefinitely since March. They still haven’t hired a replacement, but I’m finally starting to get caught up.

To rub salt in the wound they just hooked up a new ultra-tight anti-surfing proxy that blocks you from just about any website worth viewing. YouTube is blocked. Anything that has to do with gaming is blocked. Any site with a discussion forum is blocked. I can’t even look at rottentomatoes.com for crying out loud. I can look at my own blog but I apologize in advance if any of my links or images are dead, because I can’t check on them from here without seeing this:

I’m also trying to sell my house and move out of state, so thats sort of a big deal as I’m sure you can imagine. I’ve spent the last few months getting the house show-ready; making repairs, installing upgrades and cleaning up/throwing away/storing mass quantities of junk. We’ve been on the market for about two months now and usually doing a couple showings a week but still waiting for somebody to make an offer. With the housing market the way it is I’ll consider it lucky if I find a buyer before the holidays. For what its worth, if you’re planning on moving to the Washington DC area and you’re interested in a 2/1.5 suburban townhouse, my email is at the bottom of the page.

But it hasn’t been all work and no play. Here is some of the fun stuff that occurred that I probably would’a should’a could’a wrote about in my absence:

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This November, as an American citizen, I have a very important choice to make.

Obama VS McCain? No, RB2 VS GH4! Rock Band 2 will be going up against Guitar Hero 4, Activision’s knock off of Rock Band. When I first saw the drum set for Guitar Hero 4 I was immediately torn trying to decide if I was going to jump ship and buy that instead of remaining loyal to the Rock Band franchise. With its extra cymbal pads it looks like it would be a real blast to play:

I labored longly over which to pick. GH4’s sweet new drum set versus franchise loyalty and my dozens of songs already downloaded being backwards compatible with Rock Band 2. It was gonna be tough to decide, until I saw this monster:

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YES!!! The day has finally come. Oh how many years have I waited for D3?

The Diablo series has always made a strong contention for my favorite games of all time, and now the gameplay trailer looks utterly amazing. I won’t waste words trying to describe its awesomitivity:

Deckard Cain—alive. Destroyable environments. Gender customization. Improved interface. Fantastic 3d rendering of amazing and unique environments. Hordes of minions. Gigantic bosses. Piles and piles of loot!! Wheres my credit card? I need to pre-order NOW! Then I need to play through D1 and D2 again… No sleep tonight.

I thought this was pretty funny:

In case you never walked into an arcade during the early to mid 90s, see the explanation after the jump:
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