Tag Archives: Steve

And I am old.

Posted by Steve on May 19, 2014 No comments

Well, it happened. I never thought I would get this far but I have suddenly become that 40 year old guy that dresses like a bat.

This last week was my birthday. I have decided to take a friends advice and just celebrate the whole week instead of just the day, since the day was a Wednesday and it was pretty boring. The week on the other hand was pretty fun! We had a party at Bungalow Billiards (one of my old haunts) (ugh, saying haunt when I am old now seems a tad grim). One of our super awesome friends made the cake pictured and it was AMAZING! A lot of my my close friends came to hang out and we had a very cool time. As always some folks couldn’t make it for one reason or another and it’s always sad to miss them but they should know that they were there in spirit.

I guess when I get old I get more sentimental

Anyways. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you have probably seen that I am working on some new photography stuff. Project “Take whatever I want whenever I want” has slowly migrated into Project Nerd Prints. But I think I will do another post on that. (so I can cross post it to the Comic Page)

So thanks for all the birthday wishes! You guys are all awesome!

What I am playing

Posted by Steve on April 4, 2011 No comments

Wanted to toss up a quick “What I am playing” Since I haven’t done one in a long while. My gaming has been a lot sporadic and varied over the last few months. With the new job I, of course, lost a little bit of free time with the commute and new taskings so I have had to modify the gaming schedule to fit. Because of this, my iPad has become very valuable to me as a gaming platform. So I will break it down via platform….

iPad:

Angry Birds Seasons – Who doesn’t play this, really.
Carcassone – This is a great little board style game that we love playing while waiting for food at a restaurant or wherever. The scoring being done by the system is a huge plus.
Catan HD – Same as above, we recently wanted to try playing Settlers of Catan and I found the iPad version. It’s a great translation, but could use some updates.
Zombie Dice – It’s an iPad Version of Steve Jackson’s dice game about Zombies! what’s not to like! If you enjoy dice games, and playing with statistics, you should check it out.
Words With Friends – It’s Scrabble. Sarah loves playing and keeps getting mad at me because I am beating her.
Galactic Empires – GE is a iOS port of the classing O-Game which is a Space Based conquest game. It’s kind of addicting and fun in a weird project management kind of way. You get a planet and you mine for resources, but the tasks can take hours to complete. The draw is the investment that you put into it and climbing the ladders to research the best ships and build a great fleet. The downside is that it’s kind of an MMO. All of the other planets in the game are other players and they all can either help you…..or attack you. As with John Gabriel’s “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory”, there are internet assholes everywhere. If you can get past that, it’s a fun game.

Next up, XBOX 360!

Dead Space 2 – This is currently in the Tray and being played. It’s creepy as heck and I am still just starting. So far…. Love it!
Rock Band 3 – Picked this up at launch (of course) and managed to get teh MIDI adapter for the drum kit with it. No more swapping of cables, my drum brain is wired into the 360 now for real feel of rocking!
Kinect, Your Shape Fitness – So when my schedule got re-arranged, I kind of lost my workout time as well. I get down to use the Your Shape every now and then, When I do, I feel great, but I need to do it more.

Android Phone

CyanogenMod – ok, so it’s not a game so much as ROM replacement on my phone. I recently upgraded my rooted Droid to the latest CyanogenMod running Android’s Gingerbread. At first I was having all sorts of sluggish problems, then realized that I had some redundancy with SetCPU running. It was bogging my phone down a lot. After un-installing it, the phone runs amazingly now.

Lastly, PC.

StarCraft II – Working my way slowly through the campaign. I love the SC games, but only the Single player side of it. As a friend proved when we teamed up in a match, I suck at Multiplayer.
Civilization V – I haven’t really played many of the Civ games but I picked this one up as a fun game to start on my new laptop. I was so sucked into the first match that I think I lost a full weekend.
World Of Warcraft – Yeah yeah, I guess a lot of people could have seen this one coming. I have re-joined the collective and re-activated my WoW account. A number of my friends went back for Cataclysm and I caved to the peer pressure. I have been impressed in many of the changes. I like the phasing that happens on some of the quests too. It really makes you feel like you are doing something in the game and not just grinding out an area.

So there ya go. Now….what are you playing?

The PAX Post (Finally)

Posted by Steve on March 25, 2011 No comments

I figure I should write down my thoughts about PAXEast, it’s just been a little busy as of late to get around to doing it. I guess that’s the big problem as of late is that I just need to make the time to do these things. (And I should stop making posts that complain about not having the time to make posts). But I digress. Just over a week ago Andrew and I got to attend the Penny Arcade Expo East in lovely Boston MA. I have been yearning to attend a PAX event ever since they started. Last year was the first east coast event and I wasn’t able to go, but forced myself to take the time this year. for those who don’t know, PAX is a gaming convention. Kind of like E3 meets Gencon. Something that draws a lot of the big names and companies get to show off their wares, but it’s run by fans and gamers for other fans and gamers. This year, PAXEAST was the largest PAX event ever with upwards around 70,000 attendees. The downside to this was lines everywhere, but I’ll get to that.

We started the trip a little early, the convention started on Friday but I wanted to get the chance to explore Boston, so we arrived on Thursday. Our hotel was the Midtown Hotel on Harrington, which is not really Mid-Town at all. It was a nice enough hotel, but I would have rather had something closer. We new Thursday was going to be a walking day so we started off early and headed to our first stop, Cheers. It wasn’t until a friend reminded me about Cheers being there that I added it to the list. (and he got a shot glass out of it.) After lunch we went on the Freedom trail and hit almost everything. I have a great gallery of the Boston side of the trip on my site here. I’ll save you the step by step, but some highlights were the Northend of Boston, which I found to be amazing. That area of the city has such history. I could spend a week there just touring things and taking pictures. That night we decided to eat in the Northend. We wanted to try a good Italian place but instead, I think we found the worst one there. I normally wouldn’t out a place but La Famiglia Spagnuolo had to be one of the worst places I have ever eaten. The sauce on the dish I had tasted like it was straight from a can, and not a good can. Seriously, avoid it. Sadly we didn’t get a chance the rest of the trip to go back for a decent Northend dinner. All totalled we walked about 15 miles on Thursday. And this was all before the Con!!

Friday through Sunday was all PAXEast. Some highlights were:

Meeting the infamous Major Nelson, Stepto, E, and Lollipop. We are huge fans of the Podcast and everyone knows how much of an Xbox fan-boy I am, so this was a big one for me. I even got Lollipop to do the Robot at the live Podcast panel. (Thanks again Laura!)
Seeing all the amazing demo’s on the expo floor, including Star Wars Old Republic, Duke Nukem, Portal 2, L.A. Noir, etc. etc. etc.
Spending time with Andrew in the table top game room playing just about anything we could get our hands on. We bought Munchkin Zombies and just popped down a sign that said “come play with us!” and within Minutes we had a full table. I loved that about PAX, just random people saying “I would love to play that!”
Andrew got to meet Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games) while playing Ninja Burger!
I got to meet many of the Developers and Writers for Portal 2 and have them sign my iPad which will be making it’s way to a new good home soon.
The PAXEast concert was, of course, epic. We saw Johnathan Coulton, VGO, and Paul and Storm. This led into the DST switch where we were robbed of an hour of PAX. Went to bed that night at 4am! (worth it!)
Playing in an Arcade room with 80s music blasting took me back to when I was 12 years old and my sister took me to the free play night she won access to from the local radio station.
We tried to learn at least 1 to 2 new games per day of the convention. We got Zombie Dice, Ninja Burger, Munchkin Zombies, MTG cards, and a few other smallish games. We even saw a couple playing rock paper scissors. (in trek costumes!!)

Over all I was just constantly amazed with how friendly everyone was and how awesome it was to be there and surrounded by others who enjoyed games the way I do. If you love games, I highly suggest PAX! Either one! You can view my PAX pictures in my gallery here.

Bob and Steve Ride Again

Posted by Steve on April 29, 2010 1 comment

When America needs a hero, when Freedom stands alone, Americas top agents will defend our liberty from those who wish us harm. Let is join Special Agent Bob and Secret Agent Steve, two of the finest official unofficial splinter cells.

That’s right, Splinter Cell is back and it’s awesome. (Sometimes I wonder if I use the word awesome too much…hmmm) Splinter Cell Conviction came out this month and I finally got around to focusing on it. (it’s been a rough few weeks with travel and such) I managed to finish the outstanding single player campaign last night and was very impressed with the story. The story for this episode of “Sam Fisher kills everyone” is that Sam discovers that his Daughter is still alive and vows to do anything it takes to get her back! Oh and something about saving the President and such too. For the first time in a SC story I felt genuinely involved in the story! There was an actual level of attachment where I cared about the characters that I haven’t gotten in other SC games. Most of them before just seemed like puzzle games where I can see how I can get from one side of the map to the other without killing anyone or annihilating everyone. So this was a nice change of pace. Finishing up the single player game meant that I unlocked all the weapons I would need for Multi-player.

Before I get into Multi-player, I feel I should mention the Bob and Steve thing. So a few years ago a couple of guys did a little machinima called “Splinter Cell Co-Op Theater” and the stars were Bob and Steve.

There are actually 11 total episodes and they are hilarious. So, when I heard that Splinter Cell Conviction would have Co-Op multi-player, I talked with my friend Lee and we decided that it was game on for Bob and Steve. Not so much with the making of Videos and such, but honestly, that’s how we play. If you watch these videos you will see EXACTLY how Lee and I play SC. Last night was a great example. We joined up to start working on the Co-Op campaign and ended nearly in tears as we tried to extract on the helicopter. (GET DOWN HERE AND REVIVE ME YOU BASTARD!! NO I Do NOT want to Jump over the RAIL!)

I will work on getting to more of the other side stuff like Deniable Ops and such, but in the meantime, Splinter Cell Conviction gets an 8 Donald Sutherland’s out of 10. (watch episode 11)