Pride and Zombies

Okay, a little while ago this book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, was released.

I would just like to point out that about three years ago, as an April Fool's joke, I made a suggestion on a message board about just such a thing. I called it "Pride and Zombies" and it was originally conceived as a setting for All Flesh Must Be Eaten, a zombie-themed RPG that has many, many different genre supplements (including a Wild West supplement written by Shane Hensley) but is sadly lacking in the 19th Century English Countryside genre.

(Also, a little later it was conceived as a possible crossover setting for the Cinematic Unisystem Games, with Elizabeth Bennet or one of her friends as a Slayer, Ash showing up via time travel and Angelus as a possible villain. This would have been dreadfully fanfictiony, however, and I decided to drop it.)

So then someone goes and essentially writes my original idea in novel form. I guess I should have gone for it myself. Oh well.

Steam Is Everything

Steam has recently added NCSoft games to their catalog. This includes Guild Wars, Lineage, and City of Heroes / Villains.

Other than a few quirky holdouts who refuse to put their games on Steam, and older PC games available via Good Old Games, there is very little reason to buy PC games any way other than on Steam. The only remaining major game developer to not have a presence on Steam is Blizzard. Seriously: World of Warcraft is the only major subscription MMO to not be on Steam now.

It's too bad my gaming laptop is currently exiled from the internet, or perhaps it's a good thing. I still need to get the bosses working for the Alpha of Steam City Chronicles, and CoH/V's new nifty mission builder would probably prove to be a bit of a distraction.

Anyway, it's interesting how Valve's serivice has basically become a serious alternative to every physical store. And soon there'll be Ep3 and Portal 2, and I'll probably have a new laptop by then anyway. It's such a good time to be a PC gamer.

P.S. Also, incidentally, it means I can finally buy a game that Shane Hensley worked on via Steam. Just a nice bit of serendipity there.

WoG Piano Medley

This is officially the current most awesome thing done with a piano and Youtube:

An XKCD Comic About Sheep

This is amusing if you know anything about different variable types. But it's hilarious if know anything about different variable types and you're sleep deprived.



Yeah, I know I need to fix the column width.

Laptop's On The Fritz

A big part of why I haven't been posting here is because my laptop is messed up. It's hard to tell exactly what's wrong, but I suspect that it at least needs a new fan. But the more serious issue is that XP suddenly is missing some drivers it needs for any browser to work.

Thus, as of a day or so after my last post here(EDIT: The one before the video of the singing turrets), I can't post from my laptop anymore. It's the very definition of "vexing".

Game Maker works, so at least I can still work on the game.

Steam, Excel, IE, Firefox, and Safari won't work even after I reinstalled some of them. I keep getting error messages about missing DLLs. McAfee seems to be able to update itself, so maybe it uses it's own proprietary drivers or something. Word is still working fine, but Excel isn't. I don't know what Steam and Excel have in common that Game Maker doesn't, and that worries me.

I am saving up for a new laptop anyway, but I'd prefer to figure out how to salvage this one both because I can't buy a new one yet and because I intend to eventually give it to my younger brother if it's still working.

Anyway, no promises about updates until this situation is resolved. I'll probably post something around presentation time, though.

We Work For GLaDOS Now

Vid:

Watch more videos of Portal

Soon: Presentation Day!

The Game Design Presentations are currently slated for:

May 12th
7 PM
CIM auditorium


Bring money for copies of the game as well as T shirts & stuff. Proceeds directly go to supporting the teams.

Mission 9 will be presenting their full complete, awesome, game Steam City Chronicles.

Team Omech will be there too, doing something or other.

P.S. Gordon Babcock is not welcome to attend, but pretty much everyone else is.