I enjoy obsession. It heightens the experience, unlocks edge abilities and provides clarity of purpose. Like any state, it can be taken too far but with understanding it can be transformed from affliction to strength.

I started World of Warcraft in the beta, many years ago. Before that the strategy games and in one particular modem game even told my future wife I loved her for the first time. Warcraft as you see is very much a part of my history.

The game totally catered to my personality. Obsession with game mechanics, leveling, gearing up and endless side goals took their toll. With increasing focus came new levels of things to tweak, endless rewards for a brain that liked certain buttons pushed.

Even worse that the addiction to the game was the reliance on the game in order to socialize with my friends. It didn’t matter if I got bored of the game, how could I leave my friends? So I would stay a bit longer… maybe it would get better.

But it didn’t. My level of obsession meant overplaying and burning out. It happened many times. Enough that people would joke, “oh, when are you coming back” and “oh, when are you leaving again”.

The problem with “quitting” WoW was that I wasn’t. I was postponing, delaying and pausing. Like a reformed drunk who still keeps his liquor cabinet stocked, secured with the flimsiest of locks. Always there… waiting for that tiny moment of failure.

So after a time, I would feel good again. I could try World of Warcraft again but this time I’d be reasonable. Maybe only an hour a day.

A month later and I’d be raiding, grinding, dying in real life while my avatars gained everything. Seven to eight hours a day and more on the weekends. A horrible cycle I was deathly aware of yet powerless to break out of.

I’d improved so many aspect of my life. A tireless optimizer born from a dysfunctional past. Why couldn’t I break free of WoW? I had made such wonderful gains during my frequent excursions. I wanted to do more, so much more.

The revelation that followed was completely devastating.

After recovering from the initial concept everything became clear. A proper conclusion to WoW. The ending I never had before. Such a simple gesture would set me free.

Getting my virtual affairs in order was a calming. A wonderful time to reflect on all I had done. Soon after, I made sure everyone knew my plans. I would be deleting all my characters. I would not be coming back to World of Warcraft. Reactions were, as you might expect, mixed.

Some people were supportive, others baffled and a few were oddly quiet. I recognize the last state as a valid tactic for dealing with pain so no hard feelings.

It became an event. Come raid with Poof one last time. Come PvP with Foof to celebrate our time together. Come take a screenshot and say goodbye. It was a lovely time of talking, merriment and a celebration of adventures together.

Each one of my characters received their own special ending. Each one a part of my personality and deserving of their own finale. Screenshots of these moments bring me great joy when I reminisce.

Looking back no longer evokes a time wasted, it conjures pleasant memories, shared experiences and pride for all the people I met. So many things we did and so many good times we had.

Looking forward, my gaming experiences do not weaken like I had feared. In fact, they strengthen me.

When you see me coming, I could be Poof the Druid, Foof the Warrior, Old Snake, Commander Shepard or any number of personas that are part of me.

I am a hero, I always was and now that I know, I always will be.

Sincerely,

Poof · Foof · Soof · Daniel · Odn · Shepard · Spock · Sgt Dildo · ForestMist · Neptuna · Old Snake

Tali'Zorah knows that even in the future, corded headphones are the way to go.

I really enjoyed Mass Effect 2, so much so that I like to imagine talking to people with a choice selector near the bottom of my vision. I usually choose paragon options but I know the usefulness of a well placed renegade response. Be careful with the interrupts though!

Like many good games, I find myself drawn to the soundtrack as a way of reliving our times together. I went searching for it but unfortunately they only released it in MP3 and M4A formats so far.

Call me a snob but I think our future should be filled with upgrades and that means something better than or equal to the sound quality of a Compact Disc.

No worries though because with a bit of patience you too can…

Make your own Mass Effect 2 Soundtrack

These instructions assume you are using the PC version of the game.

• Download
  • Mass Effect 2 .AFC extractor | mirror
  • Audiokinetic Wwise RIFF/RIFX Vorbis to Ogg Vorbis converter | mirror
  • Extract, Convert and Rename scripts.
• Unzip everything into a new folder.
• Copy “C:\Games\Mass Effect 2\BioGame\CookedPC\*Music.afc ” to the new folder.
  • Your path may be slightly different depending on where you installed the game.
• Run “Extract, Convert.bat”
• Run “Rename.vbs”

Epilogue

Now you can enjoy 508 pieces of Ogg Vorbis encoded music while you wait for EA to release a proper Compact Disc.

Oh and special thanks to Extirpator for the original instructions on how to accomplish this.

There are too many good songs to choose from so here are some of my favorites.

• Angel Witch
  • Angel Witch
• Anvil
  • Tag Team
• Black Sabbath
  • Children of the Grave
  • Symptom of the Universe
• Brocas Helm
  • Cry of the Banshee
• Budgie
  • Zoom Club
• Crimson Glory
  • Queen of the Masquerade
• Dragonforce
  • Through the Fire and Flames
• Judas Priest
  • The Hellion, Electric Eye
• Manowar
  • Die For Metal
• Motley Crue
  • Dr. Feelgood
  • Kickstart My Heart
• Nitro
  • Machine Gunn Eddie
• Ozzy Osbourne
  • Mr. Crowley
• Scorpions
  • Blackout
• Tenacious D
  • Master Exploder

Seems like a long list until you realize that there are 107 songs which when played end to end will shred your soul for up to 8 hours and 40 minutes! I haven’t experienced such an epic soundtrack since the seven disc Grand Theft Auto: Vice City OST.

The problem is… you can’t really buy the Brütal Legend soundtrack.

With a bit of patience, equipment and software you can however, make your own.

How to roll your own Brütal Legend Soundtrack

I’m going to be very specific about my own hardware here but the concept is certainly applicable to a very wide range of setups.

PlayStation 3

Plug in an optical audio cable to your PS3.

Settings >Sound Settings > Audio Output Settings

Choose Optical Digital, use the defaults for Linear PCM and save your settings.

Load Brütal Legend.

Change your sound sliders so everything is muted except for music.

Load your latest save, summon the druid plow and then press up on the direction pad to get to the built-in music player.

Computer

Plug in the optical audio cable from your PS3.

I’m using an Audigy Platinum eX since it has a nice breakout box with all sorts of connectors.

Change your recording source to Optical In, S/PDIF or some other similar terminology.

The official Creative drivers would only allow me to listen to the optical in so I had to switch to the kX Audio Driver for recording. Bit of a hassle but the kX software does unlock a lot of special abilities.

Fire up Audacity or your favorite audio editor.

Make sure you recording device is set to the optical port and then change your default sample rate to 48000 Hz.

Hit record and then play whatever song you want to capture on the PS3.

Export your recording to your favorite audio format like FLAC, AAC or MP3.

Bonus Tips

Make sure to unlock all the songs you want to capture before starting this endeavor. The Brutal Legend Item Map by Achievement Hunter makes this task bearable.

Make sure to stay in the druid plow when recording otherwise your audio will become positional to the vehicle.

Recording level too low? Try normalizing to -1.5 dB before you save.

Epilogue

Video game music can be infectious, repetitious, evocative or just plain fun. No matter your reaction, listening to game music can be the best link to your memories of playing them.

Like that one time in Seventh Saga at 3am when I kept dying and that @#$%^ battle music was drilling a hole through my skull and … *EXPLOSION*

Audio

Boagworld
Good all around podcast for those in the web industry.

Games

World of Warcarft
For more hours than I care to admit.

Looking forward to Bayoneta, Bioshock 2 and Brutal Legend on the PS3.

Music

Luxury by Tiga

Memory Gospel by Moby

She’s Got Me Dancing by Tommy Sparks

Video

Hulu
Great for keeping up with various shows on my timetable. Yes, 3am showings of Inspector Gadget is exactly how I roll. Currently hopeful that Warehouse 13 and Defying Gravity will continue to be interesting.

Netflix
Love the Blu-ray and wide selection. Sci-fi and Comedy dominate the rental lists.

Pixel Perfect
Bert Monroy’s excellent show on Photoshop and related topics. Excellent for learning new techniques and reinforcing current skills.

TED
My late night sleep aid and all around mind stimulator. Love the fact that I can watch these on my iPhone from the comfort of bed.

Tekzilla
Patrick and Veronica do a great job of hosting this show about all things tech. The bloopers at the end of each episode are the perfect icing to an entertainly educational show.

Websites

Authentic Jobs
I visit a lot of job sites regularly but I really enjoy their layout and consistent quality of postings the best. Strong contenders include  Krop and the 37signals Job Board.

deviantART
Wonderful site for sampling a wide range of art, photography and design. I don’t think my mom would approve of some of the material but perhaps that is why I like it so much.  ;)

Twitter
I really enjoy the exercise of distilling an idea down to it’s essentials so it will remain true despite the 140 character limit. It’s a really great way to improve your writing skills.

Come for the gameplay but stay for the full motion video!

Electronic Arts (EA) is doing a wonderful job of promoting the upcoming Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 game with some amusing, star studded and obviously blue screened videos. I particularly recommend the Cinematic Trailer which will tease you with Tim Curry, George Takei and many other easy to recognize faces.

Adding to the media cornucopia is the option to download the original Red Alert for free. It dates back to a time when you could appreciate all those wonderfully thick pixels.

Anti-aliasing? No thanks, I like my sprites like I like my women… simple and with low hardware requirements!

The download takes a bit of effort to install on Windows XP and Vista but come on… its free! Definitely worth the price of admission.

Every once in awhile, I worry that cheesy full motion video (ala Wing Commander style) is a dying art. Thanks to EA my fears are aswayed for another year.

“Shake it baby!” -Tanya

All troops be on the lookout, we have reports of an enemy named Snake disguising himself as a PS3 box and hanging out on doorsteps.

My god… it was too late. I had already retrieved said box and had brought in in through our security net.

There was only one thing I could possibly do under these circumstances.

{ incoming video transmission }

Yes, that’s right. I had to go accessorize! In fact, I may have gone a little bit overboard…

<3 new hardware.

One of the better demos that actually has me thinking about whipping out ye olde plastic is Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War. Not a perfect game really, strategy is pretty simple, standard tech tree stuff and oh yeah… you get to run around in third person during the battles. Not constantly of course since you have stamina that acts as your health and energy but plenty enough to have lots of fun shooting people with bows or cutting wide swaths through enemy troops as if you were a minor god of war.

Low on stamina? No problem, jump back to RTS mode and let your hero rest up for when you need them the most. Luckily its not a race for resources and massive base building (which I loved in Total Annihilation) so you have plenty of time to size up your enemy and plan an attack.

Complaints? Well, Cleopatra in the demo is kinda the typical overly sexy female with one tweak… she has the chest size of a man. I mean, she could probably inflate a hippity-hop to explode with air handlers like that.

Other annoyances were paths that you just couldn’t walk through in third person mode. Felt like I was still an AI unit how couldn’t figure out how to go around a boulder or something. Oh and don’t ever attack a building with your melee weapon in hero mode. Once the building falls it triggers some logic to automatically kill anyone who was in it… and touching it, including you! Doh! Thanks for not including a save function, had to start that map over a few times.

Anyway, complaints aside, its a really fun demo and a possible by… if you don’t play WoW all day that is.

The first is the multiplayer browser. You have your standard features such as no empty servers, map size preference and sortable columns but the game frequently locks up as it tries to ping servers. Sometimes it will clear up in a few seconds and sometimes the game will just hang. When it hangs I was shocked to see that the game was eating up 500+ megs of memory and I was just in the menu systems, ridiculous!

Oh and once you do find a server with low ping that look interesting, prepare to wait. Loading, loading, loading. By the time the game is ready you are already having second thoughts about what you are doing with your life.

Once you are in it can be quite fun. All sorts of different classes are available to suit your individual playing style and its rather easy to complement other players instead of going lone wolf. The problems during normal game play are sadly the same that plagued the first game. Really bad vehicle controls, especially for the helicopters and planes which fall prey to bad networking code which causes short teleports when you least suspect it. This is really most evident in vehicles vs. running around on foot.

If this game was a home brew project I would have to laud it, unfortunately its a EA behemoth so I have to sadly shake my head and wonder were they put all the development money. A 500 meg menu system maybe?

Sorry folks, its time to uninstall this monstrosity as I won’t be wasting any more time on it. I learned that lesson the hard way with promises in the first game.

You probably should try out the Battlefield 2 Demo for yourself. I can be highly biased when hurt before.

I won’t even talk about the generic oil driven story line in the demo. Bleah!

Framerates in general are much better in City of Heroes and Tribes Vengeance even with various effects turned on. Tribes especially has that nice Prince of Persia style glow that makes me all giddy inside. Soo shiny! Oooh, Ahh!

Of course pictures are so much more telling than words yes?

The older card (left) reveals the original textures in the moon quite nicely. The glow effects, particularly on the engines for the newer card (right) make for a nicer overall effect though.

The older card (top)really makes for bleak landscape. Vehicles and other distance objects are much harder to make out then they should be. The newer card (bottom) really shines, litterly. Check out that turret station, absolutely brimming with activity. Nice fogging envelops the distance with a soft realistic glow. Lights, reflections and other goodies can be seen throughout.

Now what is even better than pictures? Hmm, well playing the game! Check out the multi or single player demo for yourself.

Thanks again Solar and Angel.

It’s nice to be home this weekend instead of in Texas. I’m catching up on a lot of stuff and playing a bit of the Tribes Vengeance Multiplayer demo. It’s a lot of fun although very different from Tribes 2 which I loved with a vengeance.

I think they tried to make the whole game a lot easier to pickup, faster and with less complications. That’s good in a sense but I think the depth of the game may be hurt with the new style. Perhaps someone will make a Tribes 2 mod for the new engine. Now that would be fun indeed.

Shazbot!