Teaching your kids

Are you a parent who wonders if playing games around kids is okay? are you a kid who's parents are worried about you playing games?

Then you might want to read some news. Scientific Research has shown that games can improve Kids' reasoning and and processing abilities. Not only that but the type of game you play will improve different types of skills and learning abilities, duh! Whether you're playing an action game or strategy game for instance makes a difference in developing a Kid's reaction speed and problem solving abilities. I'm not advocating that you should just let your kids playing anything, but you should let them play. Kids who can play video games learn better communication skills and hand eye skills. Myself, as a kid I was inspired to learn to read mostly so I could play Scott Adams' Adventure games. These text adventure games were a lot of fun as a kid and inspired my imagination and storytelling. Fond memories those are, the kids these days just don't have any appreciation for the classics right? (For that matter neither do the adults, we enjoy our fancy graphics!)

For parents stressed out at their kids educational-recreational activities, maybe they need to play some games of their own to de-stress? Then sit down and play some games with your family. My kids and myself have recently been rediscovering the Wii again and they're very enthusiastic about playing with Daddy right now. That family that plays together, stays together I say!

P.S. - This blog entry written while my 9 month old son fell asleep on top of me.

Just me playing games

Here is a video report of me playing a game of Anima Tactics at my Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS).

Time for a product review

I've posted a product review of the Anima Tactics rulebook on youtube



Should I do more product reviews?

Decyphering Cipher Studios

Cipher Studios is the manufacturer for miniature game lines Anima Tactics, Hell Dorado, and AE WW2. They really are a Cypher as first of all I thought they were still in the Seattle area but found they had relocated down to the Oregon/Washington border. Luckily I was invited to come tour the facilities by Cipher President Kai picture to the right. Otherwise, nobody would ever find the place as their facilities are completely hidden and unadvertised. Rabid stalker fans and Ninjas have their work totally cut out for themselves.

The Quality Proces Analyst in me liked the small, isolated seclusion of the facility. They clearly get a lot of work (and play) done without wasting space. Small warehouses mean that they're moving product rather than wasting rent storing product. Nice workspaces organized by process rather than "territory". Lean, but could use a little more 5S. :D

Okay, sorry for the distraction. You wanted to read something more about games right? I got a few spoilers including sneak peeks at the rule book which is now out and I snuck a look at some of the miniatures in process. Looks like Samael is getting a certain "Amazon" Jayan combat monster. Wissenschaft also has a nice combat monster they'll be seeing before too long as well.
Also, I got to see all the terrain pictured in the new rulebook. I hope their upcoming battle report was played on it because it looks totally awesome and was a big center of attention for our traveling party visiting the company. What is pictured is only one piece of a full tables worth of large terrain tiles that can be mixed and matched to make a fun table to play on. Hopefully one of these days at convention or if I'm lucky on another visit I'll get the opportunity to play a challenge game against them on it. Maybe if we're lucky Cipher will do some battle report games on their terrain as well.

Anyways to all at Cipher Studios thanks for the Christmas visit as all of us had a great time. Keep up the great work!

Move Complete - End Turn

So not only have I been working... I've been moving. With a family moving becomes a horrendous affair. Plus so many delicate minis and terrain that I don't have proper packaging for. Luckily we're only moving about 15 minutes drive so we've made a number of trips for delicate stuff we didn't feel good about packaging. Today is our last day of moving and then I look forward to being able to have fun again and enjoy our new place!

We've got a nice garage in the new place that we're going to use for storage, as an art shop, and for gaming. We'll have a gaming table out there so we can keep games of Arkham Horror or Runebound out without having to put it away from the kids every night.

Speaking of which, I had a very nice Christmas haul. Runebound Frozen Wastes expansion, Runebound Scepter of Kyros expansion, Anima Tactics Momiji, and a visit to Cipher Studios. Once we're a little more settled in you can expect to see some youtube reviews of things and a nice blog entry with pictures about our visit to Cipher Studios.

Until then look forward to a normal resumption of blogging come January!

Working yay!

So another reason I haven't blogged recently is because I'm working... and moving... and I've had friends and in-laws over.

In other good news if you're a VOR fan be sure to note that the MASHER Sneak peek is here! Merry Christmas to all the VOR the Maelstrom fans! Hopefully 2010 will be a good year for us.

Also of note is that my friend Kirara won the Samael agent painting contest for Anima Tactics.


I'm eagerly looking forward to next month and debating entering the next leg of the Cipher Studios painting contest for Church agents. My funds are going to be limited for a while so we'll see.

My friends and even random people on the internet keep telling me I need to play DragonAge. Is it really that good?

Capcom... demonizing the Religious?

An article from MCV about Capcom responding to Clergy criticizing the newest Resident Evil game has been making the rounds. Proof yet again that journalism is suffering these days because everywhere I've looked I've seen no more information than presented in the original article. It just isn't much.

"Bishop Bryant of Jarrow, Archdeacon Brian Smith and Rt Rev John Goddard have all accused the game of promoting such interests amongst the UK’s youth, with the latter stating: “If we dabble in this area we open ourselves to influences and put ourselves at risk. I would regard any encouragement for children to be drawn into this behaviour with extreme horror.”

You'd think after being totally had by EA with their fake controversy their might be a little more journalistic investigation before joining the angry mob with "Torch the Christians" hysteria.

The initial article leaves me with several questions:

• Who are these Bishop Bryant, Archdeacon Smith, and Rt Rev Goddard?
• What organizations do they belong to?
• Where did they originally say or write these quotes?
• Were the anti-Resident Evil quotes published?
• Why did Capcom feel the need to respond?
• Why do these news sites keep passing around stories without investigation when they've been had before?
  

Unfortunately I've not found anyone who has really tried to answer those questions. So I spent a couple hours today and worked on the first question. Who are these 3 guys. Archdeacon Brian Smith was the only one I could get to come up in a google search not related to the Capcom article as there appears to be or have been an Archdeacon Brian Smith on the Isle of Mann off the coast of Britain. Nothing came up providing any context. I've also found reports from a few other bloggers who've found as little or less than I have.

So let me be a cynic here and postulate a theory. Resident Evil 5 initially got loads and loads of free publicity because of the "racism controversy" because it was set in Africa and a lot of black zombies (Shooting White Zombies okay... shooting Black Zombies racist?). Capcom wasn't really sorry, they ate the press up and fanned the flames for free publicity. There were even flash games on the web where you could shoot black african zombies.

But now Resident Evil 5 is being released to not much fanfare. How many of you even knew that it released in the U.S. last week? There wasn't even a peep about it. It releases in Europe next week and surely Capcom wants people to know but the budget for advertising is low in this recession. I suspect after seeing all the publicity EA got for it Capcom is now giving it a try. How about another controversy for RE5? We've got a cult in our game so we can pick on a religious group... lets see Christians or Jews are always the modern favorites aren't they? (They don't have the brass ones to pick on Muslims).

I mean it wasn't a controversy before this, so why would Capcom create the corporate publicity blitz around a protest nobody had heard of?

Recession Time Lapse

Found an interesting time lapse of how the recession has swept across the U.S. Follow this link if you want the gory picture. Almost as bad as a slow motion picture of a smoker's lungs deteriorating.

Lessons not learned

Once upon a time there were more a lot of brands of PCs that were incompatible. IBM created the personal computer that almost all of us use today. How many competitors can you name though? Apple, Macintosh, Texas-Instruments, Radio Shack (Tandy), any more? There were a lot but the personal computer we have today won out... why? Because they had more than one company making components for them and were able to provide a better overall product because of it. IBM allowed anyone to make PC compatible parts and software, something their competitors didn't allow.

For most mainstream technology that people use all the time it is the same way. Competition was allowed instead of proprietorship and the technology caught on. However, in gaming platforms they're determined not to learn. Nintendo in Spain just lost a lawsuit to prevent 3rd party manufacturers from improving their product under the guise that it might sometimes be used for piracy. You know what the same argument has been used to try and stop VHS tapes, writable CDs, and MP3s. Why is industry frequently determined to fight an uphill battle against their own consumers demands for free use of the products they buy? Microsoft also just got slapped with yet another anti-trust suit for trying to block 3rd party development for the X-box by Datel. Yet, 3rd party development always seems to boost sales for any platform. Nobody would use windows if it wasn't for the 3rd party support of applications it gets. A lot of people prefer Linux but don't use it because of that very same lack of support from their party hardware and software developers. Being rich and powerful seems to always make one a control freak, even though being a control freak is detrimental to what made you rich and powerful in the first place.

Now Microsoft is trying to pay Newscorp (owner of Fox News) to take their news articles off of Google so that they're only found on Bing. I wonder who will lose out from that deal? I really doubt it will be Google. If I was one of Fox News' few conservative competitors (i.e. Pajamas TV) I would be praying that Fox took MS up on the offer so that I could get my articles promoted on Google without Fox competition.

Big business will just never learn. People like to customize things and make it theirs, even if sometimes piracy happens. It is coutner intuitive to the control freak nature But but but... Piracy can happen! is the objection. Yes, it can... Piracy can ALWAYS happen. Are you going to discourage Piracy by making it more beneficial to be a Pirate than a customer? No. You have to discourage Piracy and make it difficult while at the same time making it being more rewarding to be a customer than a Pirate. The stick will never work if the other side has ALL the carrots.

Slothing to 2010

I can't believe another decade is around the corner. Sigh. Where did this last one go? I graduated from college in 2000 and suddenly... zoom it is 2010 almost already. Meanwhile I had a big job interview last week. I'm in the final 3 for a company that is actually determined to hire someone. It sure would be nice to be collecting a paycheck again! I'm trying to ebay stuff I don't use so I can have some sort of Christmas on my own money. Doubly so since we're moving by the end of December with a job or not. So excuse me if my posting is very infrequent until then.

I'm playing a pen and paper game of Elemental that can be viewed over at their website. It is going about as slow as my blog posting these days though. The others are too afraid that I'm going to win that they can't even make their moves is the way I look at it.

If ebay goes well I'll be buying a new Wii Nunchuk for playing games with my daughters and maybe some cheap Wii games as well. Meanwhile if you want some good reviews of Wii games, check out the Wiiviewer channel on youtube!

EA, owner of the Ethical Low bar among video game companies

This just in:

EA "restructures" people's jobs to save $100 million a year.
and can therefore spend $300 million to buy Playfish, a facebook app developer.

Because you know it isn't like people can be retrained to write java for less than $200 million. Oh wait, we can train people and don't have to treat them as disposable!

Story courtesy of Broken Toys

I'm slow

I was writing a post the other day to go with a video but I couldn't get the video to load. Meanwhile I ran across this powerful video that I wanted to post even though it has nothing to do with games.

Be warned this is a somewhat graphic video that doesn't pull its punches about what is going on in Sudan. You may have a visceral response to watching it.

What I've been doing

I'm still unemployed and my family has to move out of our apartment by the end of December so real life is becoming more of a focus and this blog less so. Posting will probably be sporadic and sparse until next year at least unfortunately. Got a job or a cheap family residence? I'm in desperate need of one of the two.

Meanwhile to keep at the QA thing and keep having fun I've been working on this:



Elemental Beta baby! One of the most primitive early betas I've been a part of and I've done a lot of betas. But playtesters are getting much earlier input than normal into a game's development which I think is going to make this a totally awesome game by release time.

Still here.. Activision hasn't censored me

I know it has been a while hasn't it? I'm a lot faster than updates on the development of VOR though!

Still unemployed, the economy is oppressing me and honestly there just hasn't been much to right about. VOR is in limbo, there isn't any local Anima Tactics action because the local game store doesn't want to support it, Elemental has been a few weeks without significant updates. So when I play games I've been playing more free DDO which is a great game and you can't beat the price! Unfortunately nobody I know is playing it which makes it not quite as fun as other games I could be playing.

So why Activision? Well it appears those who are protesting their latest Guitar Hero game are facing a lot of censorship for unknown reasons. Activision isn't talking much about their Nirvana critics, but their critics are being silenced by someone one after another. People say now that they've gotten huge from the merger with Blizzard they're trying on the scruples of their large competitor... EA. I say they still have a long ways to catch up but I hope they never get there. I don't have a significant reason to avoid Activision games yet (other than Quality) and I hope not to despise them like I do EA.

But if my blog does suddenly go silent, they're the ones you should blame!

Video editing isn't easy to learn

So I've been working on video editing skills with my latest video for Anima Tactics. I've been working on it for a few weeks off and on. My biggest issues all seem to be software/budget related. Basically as an amateur I can't afford real software that will do what I want it to. So I got stuck first with a video that was way longer and larger than it should be. Then using another program I found and installed to fix it, the quality got reduced slightly and a "unregistered product" notice added to my whole video.

So I guess the moral of my story is: "We are all still learning, I'm just proving it".



The plan is to keep getting better at it from here on out.