Bunker Project Log

The Abstract Apocalypse game night started with Pottse and I playing “Ricochet Robots”. Mrs. G was putting Prince Thud to bed. The three-year old DemonPop was tearing ass all over the place, and father-in-law wasn’t yet back from his galavanting. It was a perfect time to learn rules whilst everything settled around us.

Ricochet Robots is a game that can be played by as many people as can see the board. There are no “turns”. There is only a problem that must be solved. This problem is to get a single robot from its current position, to a specified position on the playing surface.

Mrs. G’s entire family, and their family’s families are here from across the pond. This is a lot of people. A lot of… ahem… older people.

So… of course I wanted to have a Bunker Party for them. I really want to test out the Wii on a group of unsuspecting Sexa and Septuagenarians.

Things were going pretty well. Everything was clean, powered up and ready to go. Then the second the first group arrived, the sky broke open. We?were in the middle of some sort of freak, instantaneous, in-land hurricane thingy. The house shook, the roof plinked and popped with the sound of hail, and to my horror, the lights browned for a minute, and finally went out entirely.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bD4_nSK2Mc]

I’ve been really slacking on this, and pretty much every other project in the log, so I figured I better do something.

I pulled the guitar open again to fix the mistakes I mentioned in the last installment, and Pottse helped take some footage of the guitar in action. You’ll notice a few things:

1) The pedal is really loud.
2) I’m not very good at playing with it.
3) I use the Star Power switch at the head of the guitar by pressing it against my cheek at 0:54 and 1:23.
4) I still haven’t figured out the whammy, but I’ve got a bunch of ideas.

I’ll let you make your own caption for this one:

This weekend, I was cruising around boardgamegeek, and found a bargain thread that I couldn’t pass up. I bought a lot of games, but don’t tell Mrs. G how many, she hasn’t figured it out yet.

For some reason, I keep buying the resource management/settling/development/trading games because they are highly rated on the geek, but we never end up playing them. I guess it’s good for my games list/sex appeal, but I’d play Can’t Stop, Blokus, or Quoridor, before Puerto Rico, any day.

It’s early Summer, and I’m just chillin’ with Mrs. G, and she says “isn’t it weird that we’ll be married seven years tomorrow?”

And, because I’m a total blockhead, I say “our anniversary isn’t until Saturday!”

Remember that thing about a land war in Asia? That is like arguing with your wife about when your anniversary is, when her birthday is, where your first date was, when your kids were born, when your kids were conceived, where your kids were conceived, etc. Don’t do it.

One of my favorite games in the whole wide world is Unreal 2 eXpanded Multiplayer, or XMP for short. It’s a class-based game of capture the flag/football that totally encourages teamplay and strategy, and allows old fogeys like me to compete with overamped, reflex-having, newly graduated college-aged punks. When Mrs. G was pregnant with mouth to feed #1, I played this game a lot. When mouth to feed #1 was in her cute little car-seat contraption doo-dad, I played even more XMP, and paused to feed her every once in a while.

Dateline: Game Developers Conference, March 9, 2005 – Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. I’m sitting in the Grand Ballroom, waiting for the Microsoft keynote, titled “The HD Era”. J. Allard looked tragically hip, with his suited hoodie and preaching the MS game gospel. I, being a corporate droid, fell hook line and sinker for the endless possibilities of micro-payments and downloadable content and the this and the that and the other.

Then, J shows us Forza Motorsport. For the unwashed, this was the moment when Microsoft gave away 1000 HD TVs to anyone wearing the badge colored the same as the winning car. I had blue, Mrs. G had yellow. Or was it the other way around?

The Cobalt Flux pads in their Bunker habitat:

Back in the day, I got Mrs. G a copy of Dance Dance Revolution for the Playstation, and she was hooked. This was a game should could beat my ass on consistently. In fact, I couldn’t even make it through a single song.

This of course, made her happy. So I, being “best husband evar” went out and bought her as much DDR crap as I could find. At the time, this included Konamix, and Disney Mix. Once she got tired of that, I stepped it up a notch and hit all the import shops in town. I bought 3, 4th, and 5th mixes, all at a hefty markup, and invested in a hard pad.

I have a massive woody for Singstar. It has done what the majority of all other rhythm games have not… real songs, by the real artists!

For as brilliant as Guitar Hero is, that final piece would make it better. For a game like “Get on Da Mic”, which has possibly the worst fake artists imaginable, it’s a death warrant. Those of you stuck on the Karaoke Revolution series owe it to yourself to try Singstar. Who needs animated bobble-headed avatars? Not you, and definitely not me! I wan’t to sing Sk8er Boi with Avril on the screen, in all her video goodness!

I’ve been pretty excited about Zombie Master. It’s a Source Mod that combines FPS and RTS elements, and requires teamplay. In it, one player assumes the role of the Zombie Master, while everyone else spawns in as a defenseless human.

The Zombie Master has the typical RTS perspective and controls, and can spend points to spawn in different varieties of zombies at particular places on the map. The Zombie Master’s job is to eliminate all of the human players via manipulation of the zombie horde.