I’m not dead. I just haven’t had the time or desire to update this site much. Mostly, my time’s been eaten up by my day job, my second freelance/part-time job, and Champions Online. I will leave it up to the reader to determine the exact percentages of my time eaten up by each item.

Finally got Master of Orion 2 to work, no thanks to Digital River and Atari. Instead, I requested a refund for the purchase, and ordered a used copy from Amazon. Add Dosbox, and the game’s working great!

I’m not a big fan of his in general, but kudos to President Obama for his support of new nuclear power plants. Granted, this isn’t so much an instance of his doing something right as an instance of his continuing a good policy that President Bush laid the groundwork for, but it’s still a good thing.

I’m also pretty pleased by recent moves to lift the stupid DADT policy. I may be pretty conservative and prudish personally, but I see no reason why an individual should be disqualified from serving one’s country simply because of their sexual orientation ^[a]

1. Incidentally, I also wouldn’t mind supporting homosexual marriages, if it’s a.) passed as an actual law, not forced into place by a judge with delusions of legislative power and b.) passed with language that explicitly states that a wedding officiant cannot be sued if he/she refuses to perform a homosexual marriage for whatever reason (I’m actually thinking of ethics/religious objections, but prefer to err on the side of freedom for the officiant here). [↩]

You can purchase Master of Orion 2 directly from Atari as a digital download for only $9.95. At the time of this writing, there’s even a 50% sale, meaning you can get a wonderful old game for a little less than five dollars.

I can’t tell you how badly I want to encourage people to do this. Unfortunately, I can’t actually do it in good conscience, since Atari (and their e-commerce vendor, Digital River) are apparently trying to sell games that are unplayable.

I anticipated problems playing the game – it came out in 1996, after all. It was intended to be played on Windows 95 (they don’t sell the DOS version, as far as I can tell, which means Dosbox won’t work). That’s six versions of Windows ago by my count. People have trouble getting software from Windows XP to run on Windows 7 – I never imagined that getting software intended for Windows 95 to play would be easy.

The problem is, I haven’t gotten that far.

I purchased both Master of Orion 2 and Master of Orion 3^[a]. I received a serial number for Master of Orion 3, but no such luck for Master of Orion 2. I contacted Atari technical support (as the confirmation e-mail from my order told me to do). Then, I waited. And I waited. And I waited.

The response? “Don’t bother us. This is a Digital River issue.”^[b]

So, I contacted Digital River, which led to another awesome round of waiting. Finally, I got an e-mail telling me that my order couldn’t be found, and that I’d need to provide several different pieces of information in order to help them find it before I could get a serial number.

In theory, confirming that I actually bought the game is reasonable, but are there really so many people trying to scam a free serial number for a thirteen year old game that was purchased for five dollars? This really doesn’t serve to combat piracy, it just serves to make reasonable people who actually respect the concepts of intellectual property think seriously about turning to piracy themselves.

In conclusion, I have to recommend that anyone who really feels the need to play Master of Orion II again just hit themselves in the head very hard. If you’re really, really lucky, you might have a dream in which you’re playing the game. At this point, that still puts your chances of being able to play this game again somewhere considerably above mine.

1. That makes the third time I’ve bought MoO3, and it still just isn’t really fun. I keep thinking that, this time, if I am patient with it, I will start enjoying it. It’s not worked yet. [↩]
2. Not a direct quote. [↩]

At one point, having spent the an hour or so staring at the Modern Warfare 2 party screen, one of our party members said, sarcastically, “This is the best sixty bucks I’ve ever spent.”

The response? “Yeah, if we’d wanted to wait this long just to get into a game, we could’ve played Gears of War 2.”

The problem was, it wasn’t just the waiting. This was a problem we’ve had before (With Call of Duty 4, I believe): we’re in a party, we join a game, all of us are in the pre-game lobby, and just before the game starts, one or two of us are kicked back to the party lobby. At that point, whoever’s in the game can’t quit without getting penalized, which means that the “leftover” team has to either find something else to do for a while or wait.

The problem is made worse by the absolutely idiotic decision to disallow party chat during some game types (where “some game types” means “every game type you have access to when you start playing the game”). So, the process now goes like this: the party’s in party chat, and we join a lobby. Immediately, we’re removed from party chat and kicked to the in game chat, where we are “treated” to a dozen or so immature frat boys (and their sixth grade counterparts, who are often more mature, but somewhat chattier). We tolerate this for a minute or two, the game starts, and two members find themselves back in the party lobby. We’re now unable to tell our party members that we were kicked out (because God forbid we should be able to talk to our friends… thanks, Infinity Ward!), which makes the fact that we were separated from the game that much worse.

There’s no evidence that the booting is related to anyone’s connections being bad – the person “booted” is usually not the same person, and we can almost always find our way into another game with a very good connection speed beside our names. If that is the issue, IW and Microsoft need to make that clearer – if there’s something wrong with our connections (something that, I might add, doesn’t seem to interfere with any other games), we can fix it.

Like I said, though, that’s an issue we’ve hit before, and we dealt with it. The breaking of the party chat, though, is nearly unforgivable, and it’s only because I’ve already spent the money (and it’s not like I can return it now) that I’ll continue to play this game.

I can think of no good reason to break party chat this way. There’s no way it can be used to cheat, to my knowledge, since it’s only effective in-game if you’re on the same team, in which case you can talk to each other anyway. Contrast that with a game like, say, Chromehounds, which would have a perfectly good reason to break party chat – the idea that you can go out of contact with one another is a major factor of the game’s atmosphere.

One could say that it promotes team play, but my immediate reaction whenever I have to join a game with chattering twelve-year-olds or drunken idiotic frat boys (Oops, I repeat myself) is to mute everyone in the game except for the people I want to talk to (i.e., my party). Listening to the people on my team won’t promote team play – it will promote team killing.

I’ve never friended anyone on Xbox Live except those people I knew outside of Xbox Live or people who joined our games because they knew people I knew outside of Xbox Live. I have no interest in trying to make new friends via Live – the signal-to-noise ratio there would make trying to find a halfway likable person nigh-impossible (especially since the likable people are either silent or in their own party chats) anyway.

I realize it’s probably too late to save anyone’s money (and even if it weren’t, 97% of the people who read this blog were in my party last night anyway), but if you value the party chat feature, save your money until Infinity Ward and Microsoft come to their senses and fix this issue.

I’m not as enthralled with the Halo games as a lot of gamers are. They’re perfectly fine games, but not so much so that they deserve the accolades that they seem to get from a lot of people. So, I had planned to pass on Halo 3: ODST. I’ve played plenty of Halo, and didn’t really see the need for more Halo 3. I know you’re playing as a different character and that’s supposed to mean different dynamics, but when I’m hiding behind a car waiting for my stamina to come back, I can’t help having a sense of déjà vu. I mean, is it really that different from hiding behind a rock waiting for my shields to come back?

So, I hadn’t planned to buy Halo 3: ODST. Until I heard that Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Adam Baldwin had done voices for the show. Since I’m highly unlikely to ever actually get a Firefly game, this might be as good as it gets. Until Bungie wants to make a prequel game about the war of Independence game, anyway. (Sure, we’d already know the outcome, but that’s the point of Halo: Reach, too, isn’t it?)

I just picked up Call of Duty: World At War today. I know it’s been out a while, I don’t really care that much for the Call of Duty games. I prefer my first person shooters to be a little less… real. Finally, though, two things convinced me. First, it was on sale for $30. Second, they’ve added zombies.

So, I don’t really have a lot to add to this takedown of a student group protesting the “animal cruelty” in the game:

See, running down the street shooting dogs willy-nilly is bad. You don’t pump them full of bullets for rolling over and wagging their tails. You give them hugs, and call them Mr. Snugglewuffkins, despite what their actual names might be. I think we can all get behind this idea.

Dogs trained to tear out your throat, on the other hand, you shoot. You shoot them quickly, and should they roll over on their backs and wag their little stumpy tails, you shoot them more, because that’s a trap. They don’t want belly rubs; they want to taste your innards.

Call me a monster or an extremist, but I think it’s perfectly fine to teach our children to defend themselves from wild animals that want to eat them.