A Banner Day For Boathammer

About a year ago they started blocking the internet at work. No big deal, I thought, as it wouldn't interfere with my lunchtime browsings.

I was wrong, of course. The blocking software in use evidently assigns categories to domain names. Work blocked only sites I wouldn't visit anyway, with one major hitch -- it also blocked "uncategorized" sites. Which meant that every Warhammer blog on a unique domain (including my own) was uncategorized and blocked accordingly.

I haven't checked in a month or so, but today I ran short of lunchtime reading fodder and happened back across boathammer.com, which promptly loaded.

Five Short Game Reviews

What have I been playing lately? Not WAR.

WAR just never clicked for me and that has kind of killed the whole MMORPG genre for me at the moment. Since I'm always aimless without MMORPG's I've been playing a billion games ...

You'd think I'd feel guilty about posting not about WAR on my WAR blog. You'd think ...

Left 4 Dead

This is Valve's Co-op zombie shooter. When I get in a good game I have a lot of fun. But that's always my issue with multi-player FPS games -- it's fun when it's fun. Other nights you can spend two hours just trying to get in a good active game and only spend like 20 minutes playing.

Tonight was the latter, which is why I'm blogging instead of playing games.

Incidentally, if you play my SteamID is "Boat".

Company of Heroes

I really, really like Dawn of War. Not enough to buy Soulstorm, mind you, but I do own the game and the other two expansions. I bought CoH a while back and just finished the campaign this weekend.

Company of Heroes doesn't really do it for me. The WWII setting and the units just aren't as exciting as Warhammer 40k. Which is funny because I'm a much bigger WWII buff than 40k buff.

Sometimes while I'm playing Company of Heroes I close my eyes and imagine I'm really playing Dawn of War 2.

Gears of War 2

Is Awesome. The first night I got it I stayed up about three and a half hours past bedtime playing it. Just as a relative comparison, I would usually go to bed half an hour early when I was playing WAR.

The NXE (New Xbox Experience) has been a double-edged sword. It has Netflix if you have a Gold subscription, so I finally can justify getting a Gold subscription so I can play online. On the other hand it has Netflix so my wife has been watching movies almost every night and I haven't been able to play much. I beat Gears 2 in a few days. My average time to beat a game is never, since usually I get bored.

X-COM : Apocalypse

This has always been my favorite X-COM game because it allows you to dispense with that irritating turn-based combat that takes forever. After ten years of trying I've finally beat it (yaaay).

It never fixed the problems of the first two X-COM's though. Nothing but random levels get extremely boring after a while. Also, your guys get experience (which is cool) but can pretty much be arbitrarily killed (which is not cool) which inevitably leads to a ton of saved-game reloading.

Disgaea DS

I'm not sure why I bought this. But it is a tactical Japanese RPG. In fact, it is like a caricature of a Japanese RPG. I kid you not, this paragraph is in the manual :

Suggest a Topic for the Dark Assembly

You will have more topics to choose from as you level up. The voting of the members will begin if the topic needs to be approved by the Dark Assembly. The topic will be approved when the difference between the agreeing points and disagreeing points exceeds the required Mana to suggest the topic. You can always force the topic to be approved, but it is not recommended while you're still at a low level.

I once had an idea for a video game called "Newt Gingrich's Pro Congress Challenge". I didn't develop the idea much in my head, except that I knew you would move the N64 joystick in a circle continuously to filibuster.

But that insane idea I had as a joke looks like Pac-Man next to the crazy crap in any random JRPG.