Twilight Imperium

I don't know if my last post counted or not, so here's another. I played Twilight Imperium today for roughly eight hours. It's a giant German-style board game. Originally, the rules were used for a Dune board game, but rights move around and blah blah blah people made a new, better game using the original rules as a starting point.

Anyway, so every game, the board, which makes up the galaxy, is set up differently. The pieces that make up the board are distributed and placed by the players. There are a bunch of different races with different abilities. Then you go through phases which involve moving and building and fighting.

I don't know. There is so much to this game. The fact that it took eight hours speaks to that. I thought it was pretty good, even though I got beat up on because I was the new guy.

HOLY SWEET BABY JESUS

http://kotaku.com/5548672/ncaa-hockey-might-join-eas-nhl-title

If the above happens, I will be beyond happy. I would probably explode waiting for it.

R-I-T! R-I-T!

Busters

Not enough gaming has been going to make a good post, so instead I am telling a story about the adventure I went on this weekend.

the pillows. They rocked out so hard. These guys are almost fifty and still have so much energy. It was pretty great. They came on after three openers of other Japanese bands who had never played in the US before. They were Pop Chocolat, Monofuko and Noodles. Both Pop Chocolat and Noodles were made up of all females. I think Pop Chocolat had some good songs, but Monofuko had all the energy. Noodles didn't do it for me. It was cool to see these bands, but it was a little too long of a wait for the pillows to come on.

The only complaint I had about the pillows is sort of strange. I didn't like that 90% of their songs were from flcl. Yes, I like those songs and they are the ones I know best, but they are at least 10 years old. the pillows have been together for 20 years now. I don't think they should have limited themselves to only those songs just because 99.99% of the people there found out about them due to the anime. They are artists... they don't need to play something because it is popular. I'm not saying they should avoided those songs, but some more non flcl songs definitely should have been thrown into the mix.

One last thing that annoyed me, though this happens at all concerts: People shouting song requests. They have a set list. They aren't going to listen to you. You don't go see the Berlin Philharmonic and shout "BEETHOVEN'S 9TH!", do you?

Robots

Somebody awesome told me to write about robots. It also looks like I have found a way to talk about games as well.

Somewhere in my massive list of purchases I would like to make in the near to distant future is an item that says "mindstorms of the lego variety". While I don't know how to build a robot, I think I could certainly make something with mindstorms. I wouldn't need to build the moving parts and figure out how they are controlled. I would just need to put the parts together correctly and then write the proper code for the controller that it comes with. I believe that there are ways to write to the controller using C rather than the simplified language it normally uses.

The robot I want to make would be semi capable of playing Street Fighter. That is, I want it to be able to input moves using my arcade stick. A PS3 controller is also possible, but the arcade stick is quite a bit larger, so it would be simpler to get the correct clearances and such for the various parts. Regardless, I would want this robot to accept inputs in the form of 214P and it would then move the control stick in a quarter circle forward and then press a punch button. Pressing the buttons shouldn't be too difficult. If I gave it six fingers, and simple down-up motion of it would suffice. Giving the other "hand" 360 motion might be slightly trickier, especially making it smooth enough and quick enough to do a move correctly.

Since I don't have mindstorms nor have I ever used it, I do not know how difficult it would be to create the robot and give it the proper degrees of motion. If I could do it though, the next grand part of it would be the ability to react to on screen actions. I'm pretty sure mindstorms has a webcam, but computer vision is not trivial, the webcam is at 30 fps, street fighter is at 60fps and nyquist.

Maybe someday.

Falling Behind

I'm two posts behind. Things are getting harder and harder to post about. I'm not playing many video games these days, and when I do, they are the same old game. Obviously I am not making the posts I originally thought I would, the ones about my quest to not suck at street fighter, but since I'm not playing, I'm not getting better, nobody likes the my posts about really heavy street fighter talk. Pretend I whined some more here.

Anyway, I mentioned a video game I wanted to make in another post.
It's going to be an RPG set in a steam punk world. But of course there is also magic. In the game, you control a character, whose name I haven't figured out yet. She becomes an orphan in the beginning of the game and moves to the city. There, she encounters the four factions that the story revolves around. There is the techno-mages, the government, the robokin and the sky pirates. The sky pirates and the government are directly opposed to each other, where the techno-mages and the robokin don't get along. The relationships between any group and another who isn't their direct enemy is less well defined. They don't trust each other, but work together when needed.

The interesting part of this game is that events are time sensitive. The player can do whatever they want to, but don't expect to go off into the woods for days on end and expect the state of the city to be the same as you left it. The four factions will being fighting against each other and all that, so things change. This system would require a massive amount of content to pull off, but would be pretty awesome in the end.

Pointless Short Post

Street Fighter. I need to practice. I should probably do what I said I would do in my post about execution because I can never get the moves I want to come out.

I also want to make my own RPG. It would be massive and cool. I have some ideas. Maybe I will pretend to work on it one day.