Sorry for a few days of missed updates -- I've been traveling for business the past few days.  Being on a plane every day for even just 3 days has totally exhausted me.  I don't know how people who travel constantly for their jobs manage to not go insane.

The flight back was pretty fun though... our lead designer, Ian Fischer, and I spent the whole flight playing a hotseat game of Dominions 3.  Good stuff!  What impressed me most was how the game on a small map is pretty playable in the duration of a flight back from the West coast.  We didn't finish it off, though my Tien Chi army had just decimated his main vast undead Ermorian host...

I remember the days of playing Master of Orion (the original) and being able to start and finish a game in one night.  There really aren't a lot of epic strategy games you can play in that time window any more...

Usually a late night at work is a very good thing in my book, I manage to get so much done without the important but distracting hubbub and constant flow of communication that tends to occupy my day otherwise.  I was expecting tonight to be productive along those lines (yeah, Friday night at the office, coding away -- how horribly stereotypical, eh?). 

Instead I've spent the past 3 hours uninstalling and reinstalling the numerous versions of Visual Studio on my machine trying to track down a mysterious problem that was rending all my VS addins inoperable.  At least I finally appear (fingers crossed, knock on wood) to have solved it.

Sadly that doesn't get me any closer to the in-depth code delving I had planned...

I'm really surprised at how much I'm enjoying DOOM on the Xbox 360.  I downloaded it on a bit of a lark, expecting I would mostly find it way too retro and poorly aged to keep my interest.  But much to my pleasant surprise, that "geez, these graphics are old" feeling goes away almost instantly and I'm sucked back in.  The sounds effects, music, the level layouts -- all pushing my nostalgia buttons hard.  I spent a lot of time playing DOOM back in the day and it all just comes rushing back.

One thing that really struck me was how simple, in a good way, the game is.  You are just powerful and mow down hordes of enemies.  The sound effects, the graphics, the controls, all tuned towards just providing that core experience.  Quite compelling.

I've been playing around with my copy of Dominions 3, which arrived over the weekend.  Good stuff.  If you like super hardcore fantasy wargames, they don't come more hardcore than Dominions, really.  The 3rd iteration is basically the same game as Dominions 2, but with a somewhat nicer interface and a variety of tweaks and polish that bring it from "great gameplay in an almost unbearable wrapper" to "great gameplay in a minimally tolerable wrapper". 

Highly recommended for the turn-based strategy buffs.  Order a copy or get more info here.

I find it amazing that the Illwinter guys (who make Dominions) all have day jobs.  I mean, I guess that's the situation I would be in if I had to work a regular day job (making games in my spare time), but I hope they find the success from the series to be able to do this full time.  I'd really love to see what their level of attention to detail and depth of gameplay could provide on something that had production values from the 10 years ago instead of 20 years ago. 

One throwback to the past in a very very good way -- the manual is amazing.  It's a huge, spiral bound manual, the kind no one seems to make any more.  Except that they did.  Very well written and chock full of useful information.  Good stuff.

I am now in possession of one of the coveted preorders of the Playstation 3!  Conveniently this morning I happened to be at home, on kid duty, when I was reading online that the very scarce preorders were being made available at Gamestop stores.  I had talked myself out of getting one because I assumed there was no way I'd snag a preorder and I didn't feel like waiting in line all night.  But there I was, with a perfect opportunity... so the 2 yr old and I set out to the local Gamestop.  While he toddled about absorbed in the various Star Wars materials to be found around the store, I snagged a PS3 preorder and a Resistance: Fall of Man preorder.  Just in time too... there were only 8 alloted to this store and I grabbed the 7th.

Really, I'm still not convinced that the value proposition is there at all for the PS3 in the general case, at least at launch.  $600 is pretty steep for a game machine with very few exclusive games.  But one of those games is Resistance, and I am a dyed-in-the-wool Insomniac fanboy.  I know I'll eventually want the box for FF13 as well.  This is how I justify it to myself anyways...

The raid alliance that I play with on Earthen Ring (SASU) has downed Nefarian!  It was a lot of fun, and is probably one of my favorite boss fights in World of Warcraft.  This was our 3rd week of getting to Nefarian, and only our second week of reliably getting him into his dragon form.  Amazingly we dropped him on our second try tonight, and came very close to getting him on the first! Sometimes things are just firing on all cylinders. 

I have a number of complaints with the game design of the 40 man raids, and the over-emphasis that Blizzard has put on them in the game.  But I do have to say, it's a rush to finally topple one of the end-game bosses like that for the first time... 

This past week on the project started out full of meetings -- which is all important stuff, of course, but I was looking forward to some good old fashioned "keyboard time" by the end of the week.  Fortunately, today didn't disappoint, and I got a chance to really crank through a bunch of bugs and added in a few UI screens that have been on my plate for a while. 

What was really exciting, though, was the vibe across the team as a whole.  Several large systems or features came online today, and some critical bugs were fixed.  The afternoon was one long procession of going to people's offices and seeing one new cool thing after another.  I love those kinds of days.

I also picked up a distraction for myself, a copy of Dragon Quest Rocket Slime for the DS.  Just the thing for the airline trip I have to take over the weekend.  Despite the crazy name it's been getting solid reviews, and I'm looking forward to delving into it a little, though I imagine that Valkyrie Profile on the PSP will still garner the majority of my hotel-bound handheld gaming time.

Now that it's October, we're moving into prime game release season.  Games like Vice City Stories and Final Fantasy XII will dominate my game playing for a while, so I want to try and tie off some of the games I'm currently playing.  Of course, as always I don't have a whole lot of luck with that, but I'm sort of splitting my time between The Godfather, Titan Quest, Company of Heroes, Caesar IV, and Okami, and probably not going to beat any of them anytime soon -- but enjoying them all.

Lately (and for the first time in a long, long while) my gameplay time is being seriously cut into by television time.  Shows like Heroes and Lost are really capturing my attention, much more so than in previous years.  There have always been good shows on TV, but usually not so many at one time!

In an attempt to see more content in City of Heroes, I'm trying to organize a regular session with other folks from work on Wednesday evenings.  Our first "run" was tonight, and it was a lot of fun.  My Scrapper, "Fist of Sun Tzu" was dishing out the kicks and punches like mad.  We had 8 folks for most of the night and doing low level missions with 8 is just insane.  Good times.

Of course, it wasn't so good that in order to get in we had to use a hack to bypass the auto-updater which was apparently failing for everyone, causing a massive service interruption.  You'd think 2+ years in these sort of problems would be well understood by now...

Just watched the second episode of Heroes.

Wow.

I was just blown away, and I thought the first episode had set a pretty high bar for quality.  I'll certainly admit that I'm the target audience -- Rising Stars and Wild Cards are among my favorites, and the very very basic setup here is the same.

But Heroes is just incredibly well executed, a pretty complex narrative with interesting characters -- the super powers stuff just adds an extra dimension to it all.  If you like interesting alternate-reality or super hero stuff (and lets face it, if you're reading my blog you're probably in the target audience) -- you absolutely owe it to yourself to watch this series.

It's hardly news, but I am sometimes taken aback by how immersive a good TV show can be.  It makes me very, very excited to think about what video games are going to be like when they've had 50-60 years to mature like television has.