Today I Smiled: The Revenge of Blaugust!

Heads up everyone! Bel is running his Blaugust event again and once more I am participating. Seems I've been posting daily for a fair bit anyway. Hopefully this will also refill some of the "bleed" (aka blogs that I've been culling due to inactivity) which is currently on 15 this month (34 total since the last NBI). Be advised - I plan to be hitting my Nameless "Creative Writing Experiment" pretty hard during Blaugust. I know it's probably not everyone's cup of tea so just giving you advance warning that there might be large slabs of it coming up. I'll still try break it up with movie reviews though. :P

In other news, lumber jacking and getting wood from trees is pretty common in MMOs right? Well I had my first taste of it recently and it is definitely different in real life! While it definitely takes time (doesn't help that I'm a novice) it's also much louder than say... the sound file in Ultima Online. Way bloody louder. Also, vertical cuts are much easier than horizontal cuts which is great for branches but since trees generally stand upright I'm not getting any joy there.

Also doing the "wedge" cut is pretty tough! Doesn't help that my accuracy with the axe is not the best so I was ending up with deep "U" shaped things. Cutting half way into the target with the wedge cut is not enough. At least not with the things I'm trying to cut. It almost needs to be broken right through before things start to give. Next time I think I'm going to try a saw!

Today I Smiled: All Play and No Work

Making games is tough. Well, no it's pretty easy - but making a good game is tough as I'm discovering with my forays into board game design. Just to recap for you on my attempts:

Game 1: Messy, too many cards and off balance
Game 2: Bad Mechanics / Dumb
Game 3: Design getting complicated / non challenging
Game 4: Design way too complicated to get mystery function working
Game 5: Too much like Pandemic, didn't make sense theme wise
Game 6: Too much dice rolling
Game 7: Too boring.
Game 8: Too much like Mission: Red Planet
Game 9: Still needs testing, unconvinced of mechanics though
Game 10: Passable but pretty mundane

Not really putting a lot of time in there at the moment though, as currently it's just that extra hobby you do on the side. Gaming wise I've been playing a Tale in the Desert  (Tale 6, which is ending in a few months and is now F2P) recently, which is surprisingly interesting. I'll be doing a photo story of that too, later on. Blog wise "The Bleed" from the NBI has officially begun, and I am now down 19 links culled due to inactivity. I am quite curious to see how many will survive the year.

Anywho, I've also got a truck load of movie reviews in-bound, which I'm probably going to up the appearance of to every two days, but one that you should certainly watch now is Kung Fury. It is a hilarious action/comedy that only goes for 30 minutes which is less time than a single episode of most current series. Also if you happen to like hamsters, Hamsterzilla might be of interest to you. Lastly, if you want a video with me in it - here's a clip of one mission in Alien Swarm that my brother recorded. I'm the guy in yellow with the flamethrower. :P