I hope everyone (in the US, anyways) voted today.  I don't care who you voted for, but exercising the right to vote is the most essential civic duty.  Hey, it's the only way to really play the greatest massively multiplayer game of all time....

Elise and I went to vote this morning, with our 2 yr old in tow.  He was thrilled to get a sticker, but was completely convinced we were going to go ride on a boat, and kept wanting to know where it was.  That's probably about as exciting as politics will get for him for quite a while...

Ah, Firefly... how I miss your glory days of Space Colony and Stronghold Crusader.  Back when everything was in vivid, attractive, high performance 2d and your game design was solid and addicticve.  I mean, don't get me totally wrong, I played CivCity all the way through.  Stronghold Legends at least runs at a reasonable frame rate on my new machine. 

I may not be a super twitchy expert at RTS games, but I've been around the block a few times.  When it takes me 4-5 tries to beat the first few missions of the so-called 'easy' campaign, and get stuck outright after maybe 20 tries on the 5th mission of the easy campaign... well, I think the problem may lie more with the campaign than with me.  Seriously, who thought that attacking the player with wave after wave of units that are invulnerable to everything except a small subset of troops (archers), who can kill archers unless they are pre-placed, who run around out of the range of your archers to kill your economy, and start coming almost immediately in the scenario, and quickly ramp up to levels that are almost impossible to weather.  Oh, and there's a large traditional army that attacks halfway through the scenario too so you can't just focus on archers. 

It's crazy.  Though, on the upside, I was enjoying the core game mechanics enough that perhaps the skirmish style gameplay is worth a second look.  Though with FF12 just released and Anno 1701 about to steal some of my "ant farm" strategy gaming time, I'm not yet sure whether I'll give Legends another shot.

I haven't gotten too deep into Vice City Stories so far, but I'm always glad to fire up another GTA game.  The story seems even less coherent than Liberty City Stories, which is kind of saying something, but the core driving around Vice City is still quite compelling.  The soundtrack is pretty good too ... 80s music is an easy but effective way to push my nostalgia button. 

I do think it's pretty interesting that Phil Collins is digitally in the game.  I wonder if we are going to see that kind of celebrity placement become more common.

Overall it's clear that the GTA Stories team is the second stringers.  But they've still got a lot of good material to work with, and I'm sure I'll come back again for the inevitable San Andreas Stories.

The new Magic Online set, Time Spiral starts release events today, and came out earlier in the week.  As if I didn't have enough things to play, there's a cool new Magic set!  The design of Time Spiral is quite interesting, as one of its major themes is nostalgia for the game, reaching back to older mechanics and storylines.  That a game can have such a long and varied history that such an exploration of it is worth game material in and of itself is very cool to me.  I hope that someday I could make a game with that kind of longevity and depth.

One of the neat little aspects of Time Spiral is that each pack comes with a "timeshifted" card that looks like it came directly out of a previous set (using the old style borders, card art, and game mechanics).  It's quite a compelling illusion, though I imagine the effect is a little out of place online only...

World of Warcraft CCG mania is sweeping through my part of the office.  A bunch of us split a couple of cases of boosters, and I'm having a lot of fun with it.  It's been a while since I've played a paper card game, but WoW CCG is really quite similar to Magic in many, many respects.  That certainly keeps the learning curve easy.  There's something just fundamentally neat about bringing some of the iconic concepts from the MMO into the card game... using my Warlock to cast Soul Tap is way more fun than it really ought to be.  The Warcraft element is absolutely what is drawing most of the folks in -- if this were just Generic Fantasy CCG there is no way it would be on their radar.

It was pretty stupidly fun to open about 16 boosters and get two "epics" and an actual rare item I can use ingame (the turtle mount).  I don't know if those are more common than I was expecting, or I just got really lucky...