I spent pretty much the whole day playing the War Chiefs expansion pack for Age 3 today.  As games get close to finishing up pretty much the whole company pitches in to beat on the game, find any last minute bugs and make sure we think it's up to our quality bar.  I haven't played a solid day of any RTS in quite a while, and it was a lot of fun.  Of course, it didn't hurt that I was on a winning streak...

We were all using max-level home cities, which is something I've never even come close to reaching in actual retail Age 3, so that was also an interesting twist for me.  It is a bit daunting when you are just suddenly faced with a complete card set rather than incrementally building it up!  Actually I find I really enjoy the HC leveling process in Age 3 so it was missing a bit of a spark to just start at max level.

Some really good meetings with folks from the Redmond arm of things today.  Yeah, I know, all this process stuff is boring but what can I say, I'm a process geek!  As an organization we're definitely learning better how to use the knowledge and resources of the folks up there to augment our process here at Ensemble.  In this particular case it was figuring out ways to tap some of the resources that are very useful to the MGS third-party publishing arm to share that same knowledge with first-party houses like Ensemble.

It's kind of weird thinking of ourselves as first party for platforms like XP and Vista -- our culture is still really different from the typical internal MS team.  But it's really not a bad way of looking at it.  My brain always associates first party with folks like Miyamoto or Team Sonic (back in the day), so not too bad company to be in...

Saint's Row release is imminent!  Once again I am bedeviled by street dates, however.  My local EB has had my copy in since last Friday.

However, Walmart is selling them at midnight tonight, and I'm headed out there in an hour or so.  One lost sale for EB!  I always feel mildly bad about not following through with a pre-order, but hey, if they wanted my money I would have happily bought a copy from them when they got them in stock...

I powered through the final missions of both campaigns in CivCity: Rome last night.  While mostly my framerate was nice, those end missions were able to bring it down still.  Most notably, I discovered that they have a serious pathing problem with their woodchoppers -- if there is no more wood available they must be doing a brute force path through the whole world every tick or something.  I was getting about 5 fps on the scenario, then deleting my woodchoppers immediately brought it back up to 20-ish.  Still not great, considering, but at least playable.

I guess I'm a bit biased, as we spend tons and tons of time on the Age games making sure to avoid problem cases exactly like that one.  It's not rocket science, you can easily do the path checking on a delayed interval or even take into account special knowledge of the problem -- in their case, wood never comes back so you can use that data.

Anyways, with CivCity now behind me, I fired up Children of the Nile again today.  I'm hopeful that this time the framerate problems I had with it before are long gone, and I'll enjoy it much more.  Of course, in a few days time Saints Row will take up much of my free time...

Woo!  I am posting this from my new machine, at long last.  Once I was in the realm of software, I was sure things were going to shape up better -- I'm much more familiar in that realm than one of hardware.  Elise and I finished up the wiring and such tonight.  I can barely hear the machine and it is right next to me... these silent PCs are realy quite nice.

Meanwhile at the office today we had a fun sort of internal social event... we've recently expanded to even more space and so everyone piled into the new offices for Mexican food, beer / soda, and lots of random hanging out.  A good time was had by all, though my favorite was watching a crowd of people who had never seen Dead Rising before take it in for the first time on the 360 set up in the common area...

After much stress and gnashing of teeth, I determined that my Core 2 Duo CPU was not compatible with my motherboard.  Apparently only the P5N32SLI SE supports it.  Sigh.  Anyways, a quick trip to Fry's later and my new motherboard is installed.  Lo and behold, all my other components appear to actually be working!

So I quickly start up a format of the large-ish hard drive I bought to go with it.  It is merrily grinding away, a few hours in, when my two boys wander into the study, and quicker than I can respond beeline over to the new PC and press the reset button.  Ah, well... as my wife often says, "Good thing they're cute.".  Indeed.  My re-format is going on currently, but this may delay me actually getting the thing running until tomorrow.

The comments on yesterday's post make some good points about building your own machine.  I decided to try it this time because not only was it a decent cost savings, but I decided that as a computer professional it was silly that I felt so out of touch with the state of hardware and wanted to get my hands dirty.  So in that regard, I consider the extra cost of the duplicate components I bought a sort of "tuition fee"... though I'm still hoping to get my money back on returns from them once things sort out.  :)

I do have to say, it's a huge boon having lots of good friends at work and around the 'net who have done the whole PC building thing before and could offer great advice. 

I've now stripped down my entire machine to a motherboard, naked with its guts hanging out, connected minimally to a power supply and a speaker.  According to ASUS this is supposed to be able to post and give me a "no CPU" or "no memory" error.  I can't even get that.  I'm so frustrated.  I guess this is why professionals deal with this sort of stuff usually.  Well, at least now I can focus my ire on the motherboard.  I will naively attempt to get tech support from ASUS on it tomorrow but I'm expecting to have to get a new one...

All the parts for my new gaming rig finally arrived, and my wife and I had a fun evening putting everything together.  Then we finally power it up, and ... nothing.  No response at all out of the machine on the monitor, though the motherboard LED lights up and the fans spin.  I double checked that the monitor itself was working fine, but now I'm stuck at square 1...

/cry

 

I'm getting close to completing my second playthrough of Dead Rising.  I don't play through games multiple times very often (GTA excepted) but the structure of DR makes that the "real" way to play it.  My first playthrough was just to explore the game, complete the regular plot lines, and learn the ins and outs of the Willamette Mall.  Freeing myself from the need to do a perfect playthrough really helped keep it much more enjoyable and atmospheric than I was fearing it might be with the 1-save structure.

So now I have my next few playthroughs planned out.  My current one is just really to screw around and get a lot of the "collectable" Achievements in the game, like eating all the food, using certain weapons for kills, etc.  I wish there were more of those, they are so much fun to do!  I hadn't planned to do the plot through again but I pretty much need to in order to catch a few Achievements I missed in my first spoiler-free attempt.

I can already see at least another 2-3 ahead of me... one to get the perfect "rescue everyone" missions completed, another 1 or 2 to collect things like the PP photos and the massive kill counts.  I doubt I'll really have the energy to get the 5 and 7 day survival Achivements though.

On the whole, I think Dead Rising has one of the better Achivement structures I've seen.  While a few are really out of reach most of them are quite doable and there is a great balance of ones you can get for just playing the game normally and ones you need to go out of your way to achieve.  Of course, it wouldn't matter at all if it weren't so darn fun to just wander the mall and kill zombies...

The final piece of my new rig shipped today.  I've had a devil of a time getting the E6700 Core 2 Duo part that I want.   First I can't find it anywhere (online or local).   Then the first place I order it at online mysteriously never processes my order.  Finally order it from someplace with it in stock, rush overnight shipping... and they take well over a day before they process my order, causing my overnight shipping to run into the weekend.

Ah well, Monday I can put together my new rig...

Ironically, some of the games I'm most looking forward to playing are a little older, games that I was having framerate problems with before.  Most notable are the city builders like Stronghold 2 and Children of the Nile, where I couldn't just turn down the graphics to get the frame rate up to a nice playable level.  Even recent ones like Glory of the Roman Empire and CivCity: Rome get pokey on me.  I'm just a stickler for a good framerate, if the framerate drops below 20-30, I just start having less fun no matter what the game mechanics are.