More Dead Rising 2

It looks like development on the much anticipated (at least by me) Dead Rising 2 is carrying on splendidly. To date it's the only game I've been looking forward to that hasn't pushed back it's release date until 2010, but that's most likely because it was originally slated for an early 2010 release anyway.

Thought I'd share a few pics today, first the art that will grace the cover of the box:

I kind of like what they did here with only showing Chuck Greene from the back, they've got a kind of "back to the wall" desperation thing going here. It also helps throw you into the game; being that it's a third person perspective and all your gameplay is going to be from this view you may as well get used to it now.

Then we've got this one, which in of itself is nothing groundbreaking, however it does have one key point that hits the mark home for me on quite a personal level, see if you can spot it before I clue you in:

Did you pick up on it? I bet you did, as a matter of fact I know you did. That's right, check out the rack on that zombie chick just past Chuck's left shoulder. Yup, looking forward to a lot of that view:

God I love video games!

It's Really Not Fair

When I was growing up the only people who had anything to do with gaming or fantasy, especially D&D fantasy were short dumpy dudes with bad complexions. Apparently Blizzard has managed to mainstream things enough to get the likes of these ladies to only involved, but actually excited about it.

and, probably may favorites, these:

I gotta get me to BlizzCon sometime.

The Legend of Neil is Funnier then The Guild

Bold statement in the title of this post but I have to say it's true. I like The Guild and find it humorous. However, you need to watch a few of The Guild episodes to get the characters and fully appreciate the humor. However, if you are looking for a Mel Brook's style of comedy The Legend of Neil will be of greater interest to you.

The background is Neil gets sucked into The Legend of Zelda game while drunk, masturbating, and asphyxiating himself. Of course everyone deems him Link and he is trying to finish the game so he can go home. If you like Mel Brook's movies and have played a few old Nintendo games you'll like this web series. It sounds stupid but so did Blazing Saddles and Space Balls.

Blackest Night: Early Comments

I finally worked my way through most of the Blackest Night comics that have been released so far.

There were 3 issues of "Blackest Night: Tales of the Green Lantern Corps" with these they are doing short background stories of different Lanterns (Green, Red, Blue, ...). Then I read "Green Lantern" #44, "Green Lantern Corps" #39, and "Blackest Night" #1 and #2.

All I can say is wow talk about shaking up the DC Universe: almost as much as what went down in the original Crisis of Infinite Earths.

So far the black lantern rings are finding every dead hero and bring them back as Undead Black Lanterns and I am thrilled to see Hank Hall the original Hawk in comics again: even if he is evil and undead. The undead Black Lanterns are using peoples hearts to charge the rings so this of coarse means ripping the heart out of the chest. Then said now heartless victim becomes a undead lantern them self. Big complex story but so far the death toll includes; Aqua-Lad, Hawkwoman, Hawkman, ... and others that I'm probably forgetting.

I'm just touching on this today as it's to early into a complex story to review it fully but so far I like it. I have heroes, zombies, and Hank Hall how can I not like.

Do You Want to Date My Avatar

OK, this was pointed out to me by Darcy, but since he isn't moving on it I will.

This may be the greatest music video I have ever seen and it's certainly sparked my interest in watching the show.

Cataclysm Announced ...

and just when I thought I was close to having my fill of Warcraft.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/

I'm so playing a Goblin!

However, having said that I like Rob am ready to start getting my WoW play under control. Since I got this game for Christmas I've gone from being able run a 1/2 marathon to struggling with 2km not to mention gaining close to 20 pounds. Plus I've been ignoring the wonderful world of comics. Lucky my family all plays WoW but I've actually got a bandwidth use warning from my isp thanks to 3 WoW accounts going during our crapy rainy summer.

Picked up my comic file today to find a ton of Blackest Night stuff in there. Next post will be all Blackest Night.

Enough about WoW

Since I've gotten involved with WoW I've noticed that our posts here at Geeky Blithering have gone from the occasional post by Darcy to a pretty much dedicated blog by both of us about the venerable World of Warcraft. At this rate we'll have to change our name to Geeky Blithering on WoW or even WoW Blithering! Well, enough is enough I say, and not just about WoW, today I'm doing a blog about all the other things going on in my life this summer.

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Well, lately my wife has been complaining I don't spend time with her, funny I never heard that before the end of June, probably some kind of unmentionable feminine issue, hope she feels better.

Um, my yard is kind of messy, it's almost as if the lawn hasn't been cut much since the end of June, probably the crumby weather this year.

What else? My garden was doing good for while, but man the weeds seem to have gotten out of control since the end of June, damned weather again I guess.

Oh ya, my boy is starting school again in another week or so, not sure which grade, he hasn't been around much this summer for me to ask. At least I haven't noticed him since, oh, I don't know, the end of June I guess. Wonder if the weather got to him too?

Oh, I know, books! Haven't had much time for reading lately, with work and such, but I started reading Moby Dick while fighting to get the last WoW patch in, although I haven't gotten back to finish it yet. Oh well, the story's focused on an all consuming, life altering obsession, I guess I just can't relate to the story in any way. I'll find something else to read, maybe in a few weeks when I'm not so busy.

Been having trouble sleeping, just not getting to bed as early as I should, and I've noticed a recent increase in my Cheeto consumption. Since both of these started around the end of June I would say it's a combination of the long days and lousy weather.

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I guess that's about it, pretty much life as normal for this summer, I mean other than having started playing World of Warcraft sometime around the end of June, but I'm going to stop right there as I promised I wasn't going to talk about anything involving WoW.

Guild Invites

I'm really getting sick of getting guild invitations thrust on me everywhere I go in Azeroth. I walk into Stormwind City, I've whispers; I quest in Westfall, I get whispers and a guild invitation thrust on my screen, I walk into the bank in Iron Forge and I've got whispers and general invites. I'm really kind of fed up about it.

I understand that some people can't envision doing anything without that feeling of "being a part of something bigger than myself", and that's what guilds are made for. I also understand the benefits of being in a guild, the banks, the access to high level members for runs, the cool tabards. Finally, I can understand why people want to get more individuals in their guilds, and, to be honest, I was rather intrigued by the concept of being in an all Dwarven guild with my hunter, but you know what? Enough!

Instead of doing dumb things like making a 1.5 second cast on my exorcism, maybe Blizzard should be doing something good, like giving guildies their own bulletin board where you can post you're wish to recruit members. You go into a capital city and see who's recruiting if you want and if not, oh well, your loss. Unsolicited invites should be a complete no-no!

Again, I have to say, I have no problem with guilds, however if I want to be in one I'll go looking for one. As I've said many times, I'm in the game for myself, not companionship. If I wanted to be hanging around with other people I'd be with my family, or at least someone I actually know. I don't have a problem with guilds, I'm actually in two of them, but I hate spam!

Long story short, not everyone wants to be in a guild so if you whisper and get ignored, take the hint.

Machinima Part II

After seeing Darcy's post on this, and thoroughly enjoying the videos he posted I figured I'd check out a couple more. I may have found some of the funniest stuff I've ever found in this one here:

Check it out, my favorite moments are the punchline at the end of the first sequence at about 1:30 and the Murlocs at about 3:30. Funny shit and both ideas I can agree with.

Slave Leia

Oh my god, I think somebody was actually reading my mind when I was 13. This my friends is what teenage dreams circa 1980's were all about.

If you haven't figured it out by now, click the pic.

And just in case that isn't enough for you, and I don't know how any of that could ever be enough, lo and behold there's a Yahoo group dedicated to this:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SlaveBikiniBuilders/

God I want to be in that group.

WoW Recruit a Friend Experient Update

Back near the end of June I decided to mess around with the World of Warcraft recruit a friend program to see if I could take advantage of it's many benefits. I did this two ways:

1) I actually recruited a friend (aka Rob)
2) I set up a 2nd account for myself to dual box

It's been over 50 days now so I thought I would share the results and offer my opinion.

First off for me I don't enjoy dual boxing at all. True I don't have the addons and software to control two warcraft sessions with single key assignments but I still don't think dual boxing is something I'll do much in the future. I find I'm to worried about controlling two characters and not enjoying the actual game. However, doing recruit a friend with a real life friend is loads of fun. Rob and I have had great fun running in circles and flirting with Night Elfs and Draenei. My little Gnome is a don juan.

I tend to play Alliance when I play with Rob because he doesn't care for playing Horde. Therefore, I'm trying to level Horde with my own 2nd account. So far I've accomplished the following thanks to the recruit a friend benefits. On my main account I've leveled a Night Elf Rogue to 49, a Gnome Warrior to 51, a Human Paladin to 34, a Human Mage to 26, a Draenei Hunter to 18, and a Gnome Warlock to 16. I literally have leveled the Warlock using the Grant a level feature on my 2nd account. For the Horde on my main account I now have a Tauren Warrior at 8, a Tauren Druid at 10, and an Undead Warlock at 16. For the Alliance on my 2nd account I have a Dwarf Hunter at 19, a Night Elf Druid at 18, and a Human Rogue at 10. For Horde on my 2nd account I have a Troll Hunter at 8. During this time more than a few characters have been created and deleted so this is my current standing. As you can tell I have spent a lot more time on the Alliance side and could be further along if I didn't spend so much time gearing up for Battlegrounds and trying to keep up on my professions (this I gave up on).

When using triple XP and Grant a Level benefits you fly through the levels so fast that if you don't have a high level main supplying your guys with money you won't be able to keep up on my training never mind gear. There is no way to earn money as fast as you can earn XP. I actually just created a Horde Death Knight purely for the purpose of earning money to hand down to my hordie characters.

The Triple XP and Grant a Level boast is sweet but the benefit I use the most is the Summon Friend ability. As you might have guess this benefit lets you summon your friend once an hour. I use this all the time with my 2nd account to cut back on the travel time on those annoying quests designed to force lower players to get flight paths. I hate running or flying for 10 minutes so the summon friend ability is sweet. Specially if you have a main in Dalaran who can port to any of the main cities.

All in all I think the cost of a 2nd account was worth it for 3 months. I'm hoping to have 4 level 60 Alliance characters and at least 2 level 60 Horde characters with a 19 and 29 twink for both factions when all is said and done. I'll comment more on the program when I'm done at the end of September.

Oh yeah the Zebra mount is huge and has a big ass. My Gnome looks a little goofy riding it.

PUG's (Pick Up Groups)

I have to say that my current lifestyle choice, playing WoW, has introduced me to a rich and often obscure lexicon. Not more than a week ago I was listening to a podcast where they mentioned a PUG; one Google search later I knew what it meant. Put quite simply, a pick up group, or pug, is when someone collects a bunch of more or less random people for a run, often through an instance, or sometimes just to a scary and dangerous place where it's good to have backup. This is opposed to doing a guild run, where a known group of people set out for the same purpose.

Well this past weekend I had the opportunity to get involved in no less than 2 pugs, and I thought I would briefly discuss my experiences. I think it's safe to say that I saw both the good and the bad, but I'll start with the bad one.

Pug # 1 was what I would define as bad, and mainly because of one individual. It was a pretty rough group, from what I could tell thrown together on a whim. I was hanging out in Southshore, smelting a bit of ore when all of a sudden I had group invitation pop up on my screen. I ignored it for a few minutes while I worked until finally someone came on and actually talked to me and asked if I was interested. There were two relatively low levels, a couple of 29's who wanted to be run through the Scarlett Monastery and they were looking for a tank. Being that me and Darcy had done this one a few weeks ago so I knew the terrain and was familiar with the drops I figured why not, it'll be good way to kill an hour or so.

Turned out they didn't really need me, they already had a 65 Death Knight and a 69 Warrior along for the ride. Now that in itself wasn't bad, made the combat a little short, but at least there was very little danger. The problem came in the fact that the organizer, a 29 Druid couldn't keep out of the way and kept killing herself in fights she should have stayed away from; by the end of the third hour of this I was getting very sick of seeing her typing 'HLP', 'HLP ME', HLP' 'ME PLZ', followed by 'Rez plz'. Turns out my Paladin was mainly along as a mobile Resurrection machine, and although I like to help I wasn't getting much to pay for the mana I was burning through. She also made a habit of needing all the higher level items, whether she could use them or not. Then there was the constant bitching, ordering buffs, telling people how to play, and cranking at the Gnome wizard because he was disenchanting the few things he did actually get to greed; if it gets in your bags it's your stuff and you do what you want with it. The final straw for me was at 3:00 in the morning when she was not only telling me which aura to use, but telling me I had the wrong seal open. I said "I gotta go." and hearthed home.

After that I was leery when I got another request the next night. However this one got off on the right foot by whispering to me, asking if I was busy and wondering if I'd be interested in some tanking as they were putting together a group to go to Zul'Farrak. I don't like to discount anything on one bad experience so I said yes, good choice it turned out. I was in the upper end of this group but not by much, there was a 52 rogue my 50 Paladin, along with a Hunter, Rogue, and a Druid all in the high 40's. My job was simple, go pick fights and keep the bad guys busy while the rogue and the hunter did them dirt, Tanking in it's purest form, and this time it worked. The Druid stayed in the back and healed me, leaving me open to agro and hit. At the end of the battle, the high items were greeded and no complaints about anyone getting anything; if I didn't need it I passed on it and I saw the others doing the same thing. When the run was finished and all quest items were had and the Hydra was dead we all said thanks and parted our ways, better for the experience, both real and virtual.

As a result I don't think there's anything wrong with pug's, however it boils down to is this:

1. Be respectful. Ask people to join, don't shove stuff in their faces.

2. Be considerate. Need should only be a last resort for agreed upon items. Don't wait until it's over and say "Sorry, I needed that, thanks."

3. Be helpful. Give a heal or a buff, don't tell people when to do it or how.

4. Just be nice. Don't yell at the party or tell them how or when to do stuff.

That's about it, the stuff they used to teach us in Kindergarden, that's all it takes. I've been invited on another instance with the second group and I'm hoping to be able to make it. I guess it's much the same with most things in life, it isn't the item or even the action that's bad, it's the people that cause the problems.

Let it never be said that I have a problem with pug's.

WoW Patch 3.2 Installation Problem

So I sat down last night to play a wee bit of WoW and lo and behold I was told that I needed to apply the newest patch before I could start my game. So, I figured, OK, this patch is supposed to have some good stuff going for it, I may as well get down to it.

So the patch started downloading and installing and I occupied myself for the next twenty minutes, not bad considering how long some patches take to download and apply, with reading the release notes. I won't go in to great detail on them, mainly since I still haven't been able to play the game with the new patch (foresahdowing anyone?), but some stuff looks cool, such as the new mount system; a mount at 20 instead of 30 and an epic at 40, cool, and a 1.5 second cast for a mount instead of 3, even cooler. On the other side of the coin I can now use my Paladins Exorcism in PVP, but the cast time has gone up to 1.5 seconds; that's a pisser since I don't really care all that much for PVP and the instant cast on that powerful spell has made it a mainstay of my heavy artillery, but whatever. Like I said, I still haven't had the chance to try it out.

So 20 minutes later the process fails, gives me a message about being unable to delete and rename files in the update process. No problem, I know what the problem is, since I'm on Windows 7 all I need to do is right click the application, select "Run as administrator', and away we go, so I quit the application and do just that. Another 20 minutes of reading release notes pass, and another failure occurs.

I was actually getting a little concerned by this point as I've been at my computer for over a half hour and I still can't log in to WoW; did I mention that you can't access the servers until you apply the patch? 'Cause yeah, you need to get the patch applied before they'll let you play. No biggie though, I've done tech support for a living, and I'm currently working in QA for a software developer, I can work through this. I went straight to the .exe and launched it with a right click and 'Run As....' directly, confident in the success to come.

By this time I had read all the release notes and was bored by them so I picked up my book to pass the time, I started reading Moby Dick recently if you care, interesting read. I was approaching the church service by the time I got the error message again. Well, now it was time to get serious and do what no man likes to do, read the message and possible take the advice of others. They suggested a Repair using the built in tool, so away we go. It ran and checked the previous patches and said everything was good. To save time I'll now just detail the next steps, each ending with a "Unable to apply patch" message:

- Google search, they recommended what i tried already.

- Delete the existing Patch.mpq and run repair. This was my favorite step of the evening as it required me to re-download all the previously downloaded and working patches to get back to the point of failure.

- Download 3.2 patch files separately, drop in containing folder and attempt start up again.

- Run Background loader as administrator.

- Another Google search, nothing new in the last hour.

- Run WoW.exe instead of Launcher.exe (as admin).

- Tracked down temp patch files and ran installer as admin.

- Copy WoW installation folder from second partition onto main partition, hoping that it was a rights issue.

- Rinse and repeat all steps above with new installation.

By this time 4 hours had passed, and I had done nothing but curse the name Blizzard and read the first 100 pages of Moby Dick. So I figured fine, I'll go to bed, get my 6 hours sleep and start again tomorrow.

Lying in bed, grinding my teeth, contemplating failure points in this process I came up with an idea, is it my AV? Side note here, I've been using ESET NOD32 for several years and have loved it up until I started working in Windows 7. 7 required a new version, which has plagued me with firewall issues, prompting me to reconsider my choice in personal AV, but nothing I had acted on yet. Further contemplation reminded me of another issue I had not mentioned as yet: during my first attempt I got a message from ESET stating that they didn't trust the files I was downloading. I clicked past the message, turned off the AV and proceeded with my evening. Could this be the root of the problems? I though no, how could it? I even rebooted the computer and turned off the firewall and main process before continuing the update, so how could it?

The next morning I thought, lets put this to rest. I turned off all start up processes, using the good old msconfig and 'Disable start up items' option. After the reboot I started the process again and went for my shower. Later, all shiny, clean, and optimistic, I checked again and was unsure if I should feel vindicated in my initial instincts or contemplate swearing a little louder and harsher (not an easy thing to accomplish at this point) as I found the same error message waiting for me, 'Unable to apply patch'. Obvioulsy the AV wasn't at fault.

As I got dressed, yes I was naked in the last part of the story, stick that in your pipe and smoke it, I considered things a bit more. True, I hadn't allowed the process to start, but maybe it's sneakier than that. I went back in my fort, now fully dressed, and decided to remove the AV software altogether. Hell, I wanted a new one anyway! Half way through the uninstall I received an error stating that the process was locked and would need to be closed before removal could continue. I opened the Task Manager and saw nothing, what the hell? I clicked the 'Show all processes" button and what do I see running? Nothing less than ekern.exe, the ESET core process! Those bastards got it in anyway. Stopped it, finished the uninstall, and ran the patch one last time.

Let me tell you, I've never been a strong man when it comes to the necessities in life, things like Video Games, Boobies, and Potato Chips , so how I was able to walk away from that glowing 'PLAY' button after the patch installed I'll never know; all I know is I did.

That's right, it was the the AV, keeping the process from finishing by quarantining and locking down the patch files ,even after i told it not too. Not Blizzard, god bless 'em, not Microsoft, thanks Bill, and not even my outdated hardware, running at specs it was never meant to, yay me, it was some 3rd party piece of shit software I should have cleaned out months ago.

I still don't know if I should give a war cry in triumph or cry in frustration at all of it. Maybe I'll give it some thought tonight while riding my epic mount in WoW.