szaijan's blog

As of last night, I've finally seen all the Avengers movies.  I really liked Captain America, The First Avenger, but it was a bit less than the sum of its pieces and I put it on a par with The Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Thor.  I liked all of those movies, but all of them fell short of the standards set in Iron-Man, Batman Brgins, The Dark Night, and by Sam Raimi in Spiderman 1 & 2.  Frankly, the best superhero movie ever may be X-Men First Class.  We've finally got a trailer for the Jos Whedon directed Avengers movie, to be released next summer, and it looks fantastic.  I'm not sure how the disjointed, dysfunctional nature of Avengers stories will translate to the big screen, but I'm looking forward to it.  In the mean time, if you've missed any of the previous Avenger's films, go see them.  Here's my take on Cap:

I have long lamented the lack of a Character Builder-like tool for Pathfinder.  D&D character creation is greatly aided by this on-line tool that combines the contents of all of the character generation content from every book and magazine WotC has published.  Until recently, there was no such alternative for Pathfinder.  Most of us scraped by with a very good spreadsheet, but suffered with the limitations of that media, especially the need to transfer the character to a blank new version any time we wanted to take advantage of an update to the character sheet.  Some of us just did the work by hand.

Recently, Mel turned me on to a PC based character generation tool called Hero Lab.  It's $50 for the tool, one game content license (Pathfinder in this case), and the content from both optional books.  Licenses for Call of Cthulhu and other games are also available, and there is a way to download the Compendium and Character Builder data into the tool so it can be used for 4th Edition as well.  I haven't tried that last process yet.

With my Christmas gift from my mother-in-law, I picked up DCUO for the PS3 from Amazon.  It released yesterday and I received the disk right on time.  Still waiting for my pre-order reward code, but overall a happy experience.  It took about an hour and a half to download all the updates, but everything worked the way it was supposed to and I was able to make a character by mid-afternoon.  My overall experience is that this is a more than competent super hero MMO.  Get used to the idea that you're a side character, albeit a super powered one, in a pretty cool time-travel world crisis.  You're not Superman, you're Animal Man, or Frostfire, or some as yet unknown schmuck who just got super powers, doesn't yet know what he or she is capable of, and who does not yet have an iconic idiom they need to cleave to.  This flies in the face of what most RPGers ask for in a superhero RPG, but it seems to work.

EDIT: This eventually fell apart as it didn't hold the interest of Rick, Kirsten or Michael beyond a couple of months. Jason and Jacob were still playing, at least before RIFT launched.

Rick, Jason, Kirsten, and I are playing EQ2 again.  We're an evil bunch centered around the "new" Iksar starting area and have hit level 15 in ~5 hours of play.  Fun so far, and we have 1 each of the four archetypes, so we'll have the chance to work the Heroic Opportunity system and see how things go.

We play on Lucan D'Lere server, Tuesday nights from around 9 to 11 or midnight PST.  We have a Barb Shadowknight (Rick), a Dark Fae Assassin (Kirsten), a Dark Elf Inquisitor (Jason), and a Dark Fae Warlock (myself).  Should anyone else care to join us, we have room for two more.

Kirsten dug this up and sent it to me.  Nice work by the creator.

Not as addicting as "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?", but may be funnier for those who've ever sat at an Indian restraunt and watched the music videos they're spoofing here.  Great stuff!

http://www.watchtheguild.com/the-guild/the-guild-season-4-music-video-game-on/

The site was down for a few hours this morning.  Should be back up now.

I'm looking forward to seeing this game in November (or a bit later.)  I loved CoH, really wanted to love Champions Online (but so didn't), and am now looking forward to this title.  It will release on the PS3 and PC simultaneously, hopefully with users able to play together on the same servers, but I'm not holding my breath on that last front. The original article is here.

Mel and Stephanie have recently brought to my attention an author I knew nothing about a year ago, but who I currently hold a couple steps lower than Butcher on my list of active authors.  From me, that's high praise.  The first books I read were three of the Tales of the Nightside, which are novellas reminiscent of Harry Dresden as written by Clive Barker and/or Neil Gaiman.  Very entertaining.

What's really caught my imagination though are the Tales of Hawk and Fisher.  The books are collections of short stories which are reminiscent in all ways of Fritz Leiber's excellent Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.  I loved those books, and I like these no less.  The main characters are a husband and wife team who represent the only two honest city guard captains in a thoroughly corrupt and filthy city.  Most of the stories are mysteries, which are fun but nothing special, in and of themselves.  The excellent characters and lurid imagery of the city of Haven are what make these books and I'm absolutely loving them.

One of the best features of the web is the ability to easily integrate images into stories and articles, making them more attractive, immersive, and often more informative.  There are tools for uploading and inserting images into content you create for the Guild Avatar website, and this Help entry is intended to tell you how to do it.  The tools are not particularly intuitive, so a brief tutorial was definitely in order.

A Few Caveats, Provisos, & Quid Pro Quos

The file extensions that are allowed to be uploaded are limited.  Currently these are limited to: jpg jpeg gif png txt html doc xls pdf ppt pps odt ods odp docx xlsx dnd4e.  If you need other extensions added, please let me know.

The maximum file size you can upload is 2MB, and a graphics resolution of 1024x768 for images.  You also have a single user limit of 100MB.  Please keep your uploads to a reasonable level and use smaller and lower resolution images where possible.

If you play in any of the D&D or Pathfinder campaigns managed on this site, you may want to add your own information to the "books" (a set of related web pages with links to one another) that have been set up for them.  The "book" for the Tremon campaign is at http://www.guildavatar.com/pathfinder/tremon, for instance.  That book and most of the pages under it belong to Bear, i.e. he has permission to edit or delete the content on those pages.  If you want to have your own page, you need to add it as a child page of one of the books.  If the page relates to your character, it should be added as a child page of the Characters page, at http://www.guildavatar.com/pathfinder/tremon/characters.  To do this, we'll use the fictitious character Sample as an example.  Go to the Characters page, and click on the 'Add child page' link at the bottom right hand corner, per the screenshot below:

I've been seriously contemplating development of an iPhone game for the last few weeks. Now I have an idea and have been playing a few iPhone "MMOs" to get a look at the competition. Mostly, games like Kingdoms Live, and other identical "click" games, suck. The strategy is so dirt simple that it amounts to get income first, by sitting around and buying it, then start playing when everyone is essentially in the same boat. Not for me. A few days ago, I downloaded a game some of the players claimed was a better experience. It is, but it's still very different with what us "real" gamers are used to. It's called Kingdoms at War. I find it quite addictive. Like all of the games, it's meant to be played for a few minutes at a time, possibly as many as 15-20, many times throughout the day. It's a capital building game, where you explore land to build buildings to build troops that allow you to attack other players to get more money to explore more land... you get the picture.

If you haven't seen the new Elmore Leonard crime drama Justified yet, do yourself a favor and check it out. I absolutely loved the first episode. Everyone in the cast was top notch, the production values were stellar, and both the hero and his first adversary were riveting. In wanted the villain dead and hoped he'd be around for future episodes in equal measure. Great new show.

I consider Ender's Game to be one of the best sci-fi books ever written. The follow-ons, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide... not so much. I haven't read the books about Peter and the Ender's Battle School compatriots, but I may do so now. I just finished reading Ender in Exile. Not so much a sequel as a fill-in for what happened between the time Ender won his battle and the time he found the Hive Queen. It's an odd sort of book in that it just ends, There's no discernible climax. It's just a few hundred pages of Ender as the main character in a story where I already new the beginning and the end. Apparently that's enough when the character in question is Andrew Wiggin. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, but it's really more like unearthing some lost sections of the end of the first book than reading something new.

I loved the first two seasons of the new BSG (hereafter jst BSG), even more than I detested the original. It was some of the best TV I've ever seen, not quite rivaling my beloved Firefly. The space battles were just incredible, the characters were compelling, the acting, directing, and writing first rate. Then the wheels started to come off and I lost interest most of the way through the third season. As you can imagine, I was not all that enthused at news of a new prequel series. When the the reviews were luke warm and my friends who have seen it had mixed feelings, I pretty much decided to skip the whole thing. Last night, not feeling like watching anything else, I decided to watch it with my family.

Amazon LInk

Please join me in welcoming Don and Felipe to Guild Avatar and the Avatars DDO guild. Along with Chris Brown, these are our first new members since Phil... so it's been a while. Welcome to the team, boys!

The NFL has fielded, without question, the worst group of playoff teams I've ever seen. Fortunately for them, the only legit contenders managed to not get upset at home last weekend, and what's left is almost a typical offering, sans any truly great team. I was 4 for 4 on my playoff predictions last week, but frankly I had no confidence in any of the teams I chose. They were just better than their heavily flawed opposition.

Jason is now the Proud father of Piper Rowan Stults. Add your congrats below. Huzzah, Jason!

Has anyone played Star Trek DAC or heard anything about it? Looks like a fun space combat sim game, available for $10 on Steam. I may pick it up, but I'd like to get some feedback first, if anyone knows anything relevant.