Time for more Games!

A few days ago my old buddy Vince told me that his new game Tree World is out now in Australia (which I gather means it is out almost everywhere else too)! For all you apple I-device enthusiasts should check it out. That's the 3rd one out now from his company "The Playforge" (the first two being zombie farm and zombie life). At least one of us is doing something productive! :P

Also released recently is the Wing Commander Saga, which is the result of 10 years of hard work from loyal fans. My brother has downloaded it and from what I can see it's pretty close to the original series. It will be even more interesting once they have the co-op multiplayer side to it working. Apart from those I've recently been looking into the world of mods to reignite the *spark* in some of my previously won favourite games. I'll have to post more about that later on when I actually do it though, because currently I'm still in my saving Shadowcove mode. It seems my efforts from my last post have not been in vain (not yet anyway).

In between all that ofcourse I am still preparing for my own wedding! While searching for songs to play during the reception I did come across a few interesting and strange songs but this silly Eminem remix is really growing on me. The facial expressions on all the backup dudes is great, as is Marshall's reaction when the cat runs across the stage.

UO running out of HP?

I've recently been pulled back into the world of Ultima Online, and I must say from what I've seen and from what I hear it is in a sorry state of affairs. The birth and death of free shards has always been a common occurence ever since we began our adventures in UO many years ago. These days though it seems that the timespan between those two events is much shorter and even (what I thought were) the "stronger" shards seem to now be dying. From what I've heard, the same is true for the paid OSI shards, although they mostly are still standing simply because they had more HP (players) to start with than the rest (please correct me if I'm wrong). I'm not usually the type to save anything. I don't save the whales, the trees, the children, the environment, electricity, and the like but I am willing to try save one of these shards.

Often such a fate is completely out of my hands but this time I actually think I can save the damned thing. Or at the minimum, prolong its existence till someone comes along that can save it. Who knows, maybe -you- are that someone. Why not find out if you can make a difference before it's too late and join here - "Shadowcove: Prophecy". It's free to play and all the software is provided.

As a bonus, I'll even throw in links to some cool stuff such as The DragonBorn Comes (again), Ruin, and Snow White and the Huntsman. Is it wrong for me to look forward to that movie? It looks like just my sort of thing. :)

The leadership of Rick Grimes

Hey all! It's been quiet on here recently hasn't it? I am still alive and kicking and outside all the marraige prep stuff have been busy catching up on episodes of Supernatural (Castiel is awesome) and keeping pretty much upto date with The Walking Dead on which I wanted to share some thoughts. Obviously if you aren't up to speed you may want to zone out right now as there will be spoilers up ahead!

You'd better run!
So it's almost the end of season 2 and the rag tag band of survivors still finds itself led by Rick Grimes - a father, a husband and a generally nice guy. The only problem is good guys don't always make good leaders. I'll forgive him for his mistakes in season 1 as he was still new with the whole zombie thing (dropped gun bag in panic at first horde), and some things were really just out of his control (T-dog dropping keys, suicidal CDC survivor). I'm just surprised they let him be in charge though since Shane was doing a decent job of running the show till he showed up.

His lack in the skill department also may have contributed to this. For example, when he and Sophia are being chased by two walkers and he is unable to use his gun - he has to go run off somewhere to take them on one at a time. Had my favourite crossbow weilding hick been the one running the kid down instead of helping the unfortunate clutz T-dog, I'm sure he would have offed them both no problems. Hell, he did just that in a later episode where he is severely wounded, high on shrooms and starts off unconscious just to give the zombies a chance! There's even a specific part where someone says "I don't think anyone would have done different" to the girl's mom Carol and there's a shot a Daryl's face where he says nothing for Carol's sake but you can see in his eyes that he wouldn't have stuffed it up. Due to Rick's failure, the girl went missing and so began the long and ardous search phase which in the end Rick didn't help out much with anyway. This was ultimately solved by "bad guy" Shane, albeit accidentally.

Issue #2. A leader needs to be in control of his people. True, this is harder when you have hard headed idiots who don't listen to instructions (*cough* Andrea & Carl *cough*) but seriously - you let your own child wander around on his own into the swamp and don't even frigging notice? If you can't keep tabs on your own kid during a zombie apocalypse, I certainly don't think you should be trying to lead a whole group of people. Shane seemed to give more guidance to the kid than his own father did.

Issue #3: A leader shouldn't be inconsistent. Good old Rick though, finds some scum bags whom he doesn't trust and in perhaps his most awesome form this season blows them both away. Nice. Then suddenly after a twist of events he decides to save another scum bag who was just moments ago shooting at him and his friends? WTF. I would understand if he was doing a Jack Bauer (ie save him for torture) but his ultimate reasoning was the dude was young and should be let go, despite the real threat that he could go get his heavily armed buddies and come back for vengeance? Stupid. I swear sometimes he thinks he's Eddard Stark. Fortunately for him this problem was again solved by Shane, the only one with the balls to do what needed to be done.

It's a pretty big flaw for a leader who can't lead properly, but that also gives him room for improvement. I suspect he'll need to work on that really quickly now that his best buddy is double dead.