The Iraq Affair

Dr. Earl C. Carlson wrote this piece before the media hoopla about the upcoming Iraq war. I found it interesting, so I am posting it here.

Wooo Steve is back!

My real-life friend who goes by the handle "Nightwind" is back! I was worried he had died of a staff infection or something - turns out his ISP had cut him off two days early and his local Library didn't give access to MSN, which had all his contacts saved in it. He's been working, he did have some medical problems but hasn't died from them yet ;)

I'm just very happy because I've been pestering our mutual friend TJ about him for almost a year, sending Steve's e-mail address periodic e-mails. If I'd known his address I would have snail mailed him.

At any rate, it made my day that's he's alive and well and back and missed me too.

NEW 32" TV!

I got a Sharp 32” Standard-Definition Digital TV (32SC26B).

Some hyper-rich college student named Brianna was selling it because, she said, she's moving to Iowa to enroll in Law School. I found it on Craigslist, which is classifieds specific to the city you are in - if you don't use it try it out.

I say "hyper-rich" because she lived in a gated, passworded, ritzy condo complex. She was thin, blond and prissy, and had two or three girlfriends who were much the same, and one tall, skinny white guy with them.

I brought with me my daughter, Maria de Guadalupe, and my brother, Esteban.

First Test: WiiSports (Wii)
To test the TV we attached the Wii and its component cables and tried WiiSports. The women didn't want to touch it but the guy wanted to try bowling. Maria joined and the white guy was surprised he and I were not only being beaten, but trounced upon by a little girl. Esteban whispered to her in Spanish and they'd chuckle. "Who's winning? Lu-pi-ta!" emphasis on the "little girl beats grown men." She and Esteban giggled until she beat us 287 to 237 and 239, mine being the lowest score.

Second Test: Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii)
The birds in the distance, just a few pixels big, look blurry on my wife's 32" Sylvania (RCA inputs), and looked clearer, but shimmered on the Wal-Mart special, the 32" ILO (IWT3206) that I had to return. But the 32SC26B supports 480p, not just 480i. The birds no longer shimmered, and the picture was much clearer. MAN! What a difference between 480i "SDTV" and 480p "EDTV".

White People Are Funny
So it came time to pay $200 (for a $369 new) TV and take it home. The white guy offered to help carry it, and I said "Sure, I'll let Esteban take my place, he's stronger."

Well the white guy tries to heft this thing and mind you, he's only about as big as me, only taller, and with GAP clothes... so it's not long before he starts to lose it. His face turns red and he starts to slip, so Esteban, perplexed, just leans into it a bit and ends up hefting most of the TV across the street to Rafael, my wife's minivan.

By the time they get there, the white guy's face was about as red as Esteban's (brilliant red) shirt, and my brother and my daughter start laughing. I go back inside with the guy to pick up the TV stand and come back, and they're still laughing about something.

"What?" I asked. They made shushing noises.

"What? What's so funny?" They shook their heads and made motions to be quiet, while they kept chuckling.

"Okay, sirs, well I'm gunna go." the white guy said and left with one of the prissy girls. Then Esteban and Maria burst out laughing.

Esteban said "He looked like he was about to pop. He came up acting so strong and I'm thinking 'What's the matter? Pffft this isn't so heavy.' so I just carry more of it myself."

Maria pointed out "His ego was stronger than him." Esteban and I got a kick out of that observation.

Internet / Gmail on the Wii
Gmail is not only easy to read, the TV cuts off less at the top and bottom of the screen, which was a bad problem on the junky IWT3206. Maria is quite happy.

Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
The component cables I got for the Wii also has adapters for the XBOX 360 and PS2/PS3 (which appear to be the same).

Not only does the game look crystal clear (so clear, some textures shimmer, but overall I'd say the detail is more pleasing to the eye than a blurry picture with less apparent shimmer), but the TV allows you to arbitrarily set it to 16:9 format! The craptastic IWT3206 didn't - it supposedly recognized wide-aspect cable feeds and adjusted itself accordingly, but it had no idea if a videogame was using that resolution. The 32SC26B allows you to just set 16:9 anytime you want - so I can play Shadow of the Colossus in widescreen and see more area left to right if I want. I can probably do this with widescreen Wii games if there is a setting I can get to to make the game use that mode regardless of what it thinks the TV is.

Summary
I am very happy with the TV and first and foremost grateful to God. It is so frequent that he blesses us on a special day (Father's Day, a Birthday, etcetera) by giving us something that seems bad (that TV I had to return) and ends up even better (a TV better than the one I bought if it had worked for less money).

I went without a 32" TV for two nights - returned it Tuesday, got the "new" one on Thursday evening and had time to play WiiSports at home, and show Esteban Shadow of the Colossus after Maria went to bed.

Abdication of Parenting part II

My friend Jessie sent out an e-mail to me and mutual friends:

JESSIE: This is probably one of the funniest Will Ferrell skits.....EVER!!!

It features a home-made skit wherein Will Ferrell faces off with his landlady, an 18 month old little girl who says "Where's my money, bitch?" and "You're an asshole."

I replied:

DAVE: That was horrendously unfunny. What's funny about a 3 year-old cursing? Ha ha. Oh my God. Wait, that's still not funny.

And what's with the afro?

Jessie pointed out she wasn't 3, and that my answer was typical of me, "not that that's a bad thing." At this point I realized everyone was missing the picture - so I illuminated the issue as best I could in the appropriate rant.

Abdication of Parenting
Oh she’s 18 months old? Ah ha ha ha! See? Now it’s funny.

Abdication of Parenting, I wrote about it in my blog. Now, apologies for being a wet blanket, but if anyone wonders why my daughters spontaneously clean the living room and kitchen without being asked, it’s because we pay a lot of attention to how we raise them.

Now the great thing is just about anyone’s kids can be like this, it all falls on the parent. Used to be a time when children worked – Kenny’s wife Jen asked as soon as she saw my daughters “Do you make them work?” (Jen is a very recent immigrant from China.)

Kim (the other David's wife) said something like “Goodness no, they’re children.”

But I knew what Jen meant and said “Yes, they do. They clean their room every morning, my oldest is the little mother for her baby brother, and my 7yo handles all of her older sister’s old chores now, like washing dishes, cleaning parts of the house…”

“Gooood!” Jen said.

What was magical about this encounter was that I found that there are parts of the world that still understand that children don’t grow up hard-working, successful and respectful unless you raise them that way – and the only way to teach it is to make them do it.

I made my 10yo burn her arm taking hot Pizza out of the oven. I knew it might happen, because she was scared. She’s done it five times since without a problem, and powdered vitamin C and later, liquid vitamin E in capsules has made the burn vanish.

Who here has those kind of huevos with their kids? (Mexican slang for balls, word means eggs but no one uses it for that.) I felt bad when she came running to me, because I predicted it – but I remember horseback riding, I remembered that, at the end of the day, it wasn’t my father or mother who taught me to ride, it was getting on that horse that did it.

So when she’s hungry at night, she doesn’t go asking Mom to make her something, nor snack on dried fruit or crackers – she busts out a frozen pizza and cooks it and gives her parents (only people still up past 8pm) some. I was sitting in my recliner working on my computer and she came up to me with Pizza. “You’re mother make that.” “No, me. I’m hungry. He he.”

10 years old.

So, no. Until Will Ferrell demonstrates that the Main Stream Media’s picture of “All children are terribly behaved, they hate their parents when they are teenagers and nobody gets along, so you might as well have fun with them when they’re little” is wrong, and only normal because folks either don’t know how to raise them or don’t care to, I don’t find it funny. I’m sure that any skits he does with teenagers will present just the picture I gave, and never include a respectful, hard working teenager who is funny because she’s ditzy or playful or smart.

And that’s sad.

Sorry for the morning rant – but I take it seriously – and so far I’ve gotten decent results.

Good Weekend

Connections
Well Maria's school took precedence over her watching Connections and answering more questions, but that's not for lack of trying on her part: her mother told her to wait for summer. She asked me if I would promise to work with her on it after school.

How many kids ask for that? Connections was made in the late 70's, right?

Maria's Weekend Out
My mom and dad kept Maria for most of the weekend and they had a fabulous time. Dulce got a chance to be the biggest daughter and boy did she have work to do, but she enjoyed it. Still, at the end of it all, when Sunday at 3pm came and Maria came home, Dulce was the first to run up and hug her sister, followed closely by me, then Alejandrita. Jose Francisco, who had been napping, stirred, and Maria ran off to greet him with as much enthusiasm as we greeted her with.

Mom took her to see a retired horse ranch in Alachua. The ranch isn't retired, the horses are... former Police horses, race horses... all kinds of horses and ponies.

Disk Space!
Jock gave me a SATA cable for my new 400GB Western Digital Hard Drive because frickingFrys.com / Outpost.com didn't label the item as OEM - Original Equipment Manufacturer, which often means "You get nothing but the bare unit, no cables, no box, no software." I couldn't use it. For three days it was very pretty, and utterly useless. Jock solved all that by bringing a SATA power adapter and controller cable.

2nd Hard Drive Cures Ills
Having my SWAP file on the 2ndary drive has made Supreme Commander imminently more playable, but far from smooth. I can now complete my 1v1 games with 500 units apiece without much problem, and a disastrous 4v4 game that was simply too stuttery to control on my $3,600 behemoth (PureXS) became choppy, but playable. I can't stand choppy, so I refuse to face more than 2 AI (no 2v2) which severely cripples the game still.

Armed Assault also runs a lot better in this configuration, and I have a feeling Oblivion would a well, if I could but run it - there's the Oblivion official patch, the new unofficial patch, and all the MODs that I needed to find new versions of, or find if the old ones worked with the newest patch(es). By the time I got all of that sorted out, I'd lost my motivation to play.

Marguerite
Billy came over with his son, Zach, and his daughter, Marguerite, who is Dulce's friend. They spent an hour here, which was all Billy had - poor guy has been so busy with the migration to Outlook (e-mail) at work. It was good of him to take what time he had and let us know he hadn't fallen off the face of the planet, his children screaming as he hurtles away at 1,700 kilometers per hour, being left in space a burnt husk as the planet careens away on it's orbit.

Betcha don't usually get that visual.

Wii Want to Play

My WiiSports outing and playing Zelda: Twilight Princess
My lovely Latina says I'm an open book. WiiSports, perhaps because I always have my children to play with, has been incredible for me. Yesterday my daughters let me borrow their Wii so Papa could take it to some friends' house. They had two computers, a PS2, (I brought my PS2 games as well) and the Wii.

We (myself, Christian & Jay) got onto WiiSports Bowling and Christian's teenage sister, Jossie, dominated us. All the guys had played bowling before, but the newb schooled us. She had the most spastic moves that ended up in strikes. Really it was because somehow she was curving the ball, but it only started to curve at the last possible second, right before drilling the pins. How she did that she didn't know, and we couldn't replicate it. A grudge match didn't help, because she still won 2nd place out of 4.

We then played some Tennis and Baseball. Jay figured out that the time to strike a ball was about two seconds, after which I was able to use my sense of timing (I remember beating teenagers on the Atari 2600 playing "Target" when I was 6 years old) which hasn't played into my success in videogames in, oh, 15 years (mattered, but not game-busting importance), suddenly I was the only one batting balls into the field or netting 3 home runs.

Then Christian fired up his copy of Zelda, even though he doesn't have his own Wii yet, and Jossie and Jay quickly went to the computers and played World of Warcraft and I tried to stay awake, but literally fell asleep (I'd tried to camp with them the night before for Christian's Wii but the store managers told us at 2AM that there were no Wiis - I've had friends who work at Best Buy/Worst Buy, I know they sell to their staff and pretend not to, so my guess is the tip was correct, they just didn't know the Wiis were "already accounted for").

Zelda is, of course, immaculate. The attention to detail in this game is incredible. Yes, it's got some small start areas and small areas with limited mobility like Fable. Yes, Oblivion's Radiant AI kills Zelda's NPCs. But when you see the cute pregnant girl holding her belly and breathing differently after a walk, you think "My God, that's actually what my wife did when she was pregnant." The game flowed beautifully and shined. I can see why it gets great reviews - it's not all nostalgia.

We disliked that you have to shake the Nunchuck left and right to do a swing attack, when we all wanted to wave the Wiimote around, but whatever. It was not a party game; Zelda is the Wii game for folks who have no friends living with them, and see their friends on weekends. Unlike the Nintendo President Iwata said, it's not a game folks will stick around and watch either. I would, if I wasn't so tired at the time, but I'm abnormal.

When we started playing Tennis again, Jay, who almost got a college scholarship playing Tennis, but wanted to leave Puerto Rico for the U.S. instead, couldn't believe he couldn't beat me. Everyone wanted to play me, and after five games my right arm started to give out. I got a break and played two more and then it was time to go home.

At home I played against my 9yo daughter, Maria, who enjoys competition with me. She's my tiger - we play wrestle, play fight (she knows about hooking out eyeballs) whereas my 2nd daughter, Dulce Maria (Sweet Maria), is a tender sensitive girl who yelps at any mild pain. Every child is different, and you can guess which one cuddles dad when he's sick, so they all have their strengths. Anyway...

Maria couldn't beat me at tennis anymore. She'd beaten me twice, but now I was impossible. Far from disheartened, she just wanted to know what she should do to learn to beat me again, so I told her to play the computer more often than her sisters, and to make a new Mii to start her score over because the computer (seeing her score), was owning her little sisters when they played together against the AI.

I can say that the Wii is the most fun I have had with a game console since my Nintendo Entertainment System. Remember when you'd get together with your friends and play NES games all evening? All day was a bit much for my outdoorsy self but all evening was fair game.

I bought an XBOX in Christmas of 2004 and got four controllers and as many four-player non-sports games as I could, since most of my friends aren't into football, soccer, etcetera. That left us with Gauntlet clones like the Dungeons & Dragons romp. After the initial party bash, there was no other. When my friends came over they were more interested in computer games.

Since my kids have gotten their Wii, plenty of friends of mine have come by more than once to play it again, all in a two week period, not two year.

The gamepad is dead. Finally. Nintendo brought it into the world, and it's taking it out as well.

I called All American Computers

The LAN Party is a Go
The bottom line is good: My PC will be with me in time for the LAN Party on Saturday, September 16th!

Kyle says if the LIAN LI side-panel doesn't arrive by Tuesday he'll ship the case with the default panel and ship the clear side-panel later.

The RAM issue hasn't been resolved, it's still running at 677MHz, however, a BIOS revision will probably fix that later, and as he put it "The motherboard is built to have RAM at this speed. When folks overclock their RAM they can actually mess up their timings and slow their system down. I don't think that would happen here but the point is the benefit is negligible and probably not worth waiting for (with an update down the road)."

So I'm a stickler and I want that 800MHz - at the very least I want to try it out and see my 3dMark 2006 scores to check for what difference it makes - but I'm content to do that on my own and not let it hold up my system any longer.

One More Weekend with Mrs. Chop-Fest
I guess I have one more weekend with Clara, my 4yo gaming rig, humdrumming around, trying to find games made between 2001-2003 that I might actually like to play. I'm so sick of low-frame rates.

I tried Star Wars: Empire at War, which is actually a fun little RTS due to its "conquer the galaxy" mode where you collect planets, have them build stuff and send those fleets places to invade other planets. Super keen. As an RTS it's very bland, standard "overwhelm the enemy" and "watch out for air power" when on the ground, instead of space. Anyway, it was running all right on Clara, until I had a lot of planets pumping out stuff, and then just the UNIVERSE map was slow, never mind once I got big fleets of ships going, even with a unit cap. Talk about stupid! So I stopped playing it.

Future Gaming
I got Call of Juarez but I can't play it on Clara - so I'll have to wait for my PureXS, and when I get that I'm pretty sure all I'll be doing is playing Oblivion, so I'm not sure why I got it. It looked Western.

I also want to try out X3, Rise of Legends, F.E.A.R. multiplayer and... a bunch of other stuff.

In the mean time, I have the Soundtrack to Oblivion (awards), and I listen to that almost daily at work. I dream not of Oblivion, but of Draco, Shila and the lands of the Ancient Dragon, not dissimilar in setting and genre.

Hearing my Baby Humm...
I had a very odd sensation while on the phone with Kyle. He asked me to listen and then he said "I'm turning on your (PureXS)." I heard the switch and then her jump to life, all fans ablaze. One immediately died down a bit, and the other waited longer - X1900's in Crossfire, only one will immediately slow down, the other waits for Windows to post back to it. I heard her quiet way down once Windows was at the login prompt.

It struck that cord in me, not nearly as sharply, as when I've seen my children in ultrasounds, or heard them thumping and felt them moving about. It was oddly surreal, and I was kind of disappointed in myself for feeling that way - but there it is. Granted, my children made me cry with joy when hearing them - this did not. But I did feel the pangs. It struck the same cord.

Wierd, huh? He was just trying to demonstrate the minor differences between the X1950's and the X1900's (in Crossfire, both X1950's slow down immediately, whoopdiedoo).

Update:
The Fate of AAC Direct / All American Computers

Benchmarks comparison with AMD versus Conroe in Crossfire

These two benchmarks from GotFrag disturb me:

Billy's Core 2 Duo "Conroe" E6700 with a 975XBX motherboard, 2GB OCZ DDR2 RAM and a single X1900 XTX ATI videocard gets better frame rates than the E6800 listed here on ultra high quality. True, his max FPS was less, and his average was 53, not 57 (but then, he wasn't doing the exact same things) but his minimum was 38! Not 18!

I took one look at this and I thought "This is because of Nvidia gayness." and I was right. Nvidia Videocards are behind this travesty of justice, this misuse of CPU powerhouses.

Bah! I spit in their general direction.

I'm being Stalked!

My good friend, Chris Brown, found me. Actually he already knew everything - he had seen www.GamersGoneBad.com, my Blog (which is linked from there) and Google Home Page (with pictures of me & mine).

Drastically cool to be back in contact with him.

Darn it, he lives all the way down in Kissimmee though.

Great Sunday

Dungeons and Dragons
My friend Dove proved again his ability to run a D&D game. He's not much on the creative side - he leaves an author's descriptions at the door, but he plays his NPCs accurately and well, complete with voices. Where he really shines is continuity and organization. His world always seems real because it is completely consistent. He has a perfect image of what's going on (even if he doesn't try to mimmick some Dickens and describe it all) and it shows when we play. He manages combat better than any DM I've played with, even Stan Lowman.

Stan's theory of combat was "when it gets so big I can't fit it all in my brain, I'll gloss over it." He'd use homebrew rules to "approximate" what happens when 40 enemies, en mass, do something. It'd be in keeping with the rules so we all went with it, besides which Stan was not a DM you questioned needlessly. He'd listen, but he was always in charge.

Dove, on the other hand, can handle 40 enemies in split groups coming at us from different angles, and keeps track of every single creature's stats & hitpoints - in part thanks to DM Genie (google that), a difficult program to use at first.

So Sunday was good.

GP2X
A GGB fan and Guild Wars fan-forum moderator, LordFu, found me on the GP2X forums I frequent. At the D&D game, my GP2X proved an able MP3 player, if not portable (no way to easily carry it while moving about), and two D&D players fell in love with it. Decker liked Neo Geo (Metal Slug) while Jakob liked the Genesis emulation.

On this handheld, there's something for everyone.

Oh, neat post I found: Visual Comparison of the GP2X and it's predacessor, the GP32.

MySpace is Stupid

Well at Brandon's behest, I started up a MySpace account just so he can add me as a friend. I'm not sure if he'll want to, now. [see blog post]

My Great Weekend

D&D that Wasn't
Well I came this close ][ to having fun at the big D&D game. I avoided the County Picnic because my wife backed out on attending it, and I didn't want to drive all the way there with four children alone, so I thought "Great, I can get to D&D on time."

Then 12:40 PM comes, and as I ready myself, my 13-month old walking, abstract-thinking baby boy latches onto me. I try to pawn him off on my lovely lady. He struggles to be free of her and cries. I try to sit down with him and distract him. He's onto my plot before I get halfway through it, and throws the toys down and latches onto me again. Every time I try to leave, Jose Francisco makes it abundantly apparent that - for whatever reason - he wants his Papa today.

My wife pushes me to go, but finally I tell her "What can I say? Sorry, 13-month old baby boy, daddy has a D&D game? This is why parents have no life." She chuckled, and told me to call the restaurant where the game was held to tell everyone I couldn't make it.

Jose & Diablo 2
So Jose Francisco had a Saturday full of Papa. Around 2 PM my wife told me to call my cousin, Paul, and and hour and a half later he was at my place, and we played Diablo 2 until 12:30 AM, with breaks for dinner and a baby boy, who sat with me or around me for a long time. It was odd, as much as he wanted me, he didn't seem to want me to be doing anything other than being at home with him in my lap. This was easily accomplished. Sometimes I let him have my mouse while I was in town.

Sunday was a lazy day. We went to Publix, I rediscovered the joys of Day of Defeat: Source (running on the Half-Life 2 engine), as well as how much I fail to understand what I'm supposed to do in Dystopia (same engine).

Jose Francisco, The Strong
That's a nickname his sisters gave him, independantly.

Jose Francisco and I spent time bashing things on both days. He has a will to conquer everything - whereas I don't care if someone else is better at something than me, I'm happy for them - Jose Francisco behaves more like my cousin, Paul, and his grandfather in Mexico (retired gynecologist and military commendant, separately), in that he has a will to dominate all things around him. Anything that presents itself saying "Ha ha, Jose Francisco, you can't climb me!" or "Look, I'm a toy soldier! Quick! Bash me with your other soldiers!"

Neverwinter Nights 2 to ship WITHOUT a DM client

Read it and weep.

Acronyms in this article:

• NWN = Neverwinter Nights
  
• DM = Dungeon Master
• OE = Obsidian Entertainment (the developer)
• OC = Original Content, as in NWN OC
• MCA & JE = initials of people who work at Obsidian
  
• NPC = Non-Player Character
  
• PW/DW = Persistent World / Dynamic World - types of multiplayer games for NWN; one runs continuously, the other keeps getting added onto but isn't "live" 24/7.
• FUD = Fucked Up Doctrine
• FALB = Fucking Acronym-Loving Blogger

Telnarius: Yep, but we're looking at the possiblity of the DM client not shipping with the game
David Beoulve: *minces lips*
David Beoulve: So, Kevin.
David Beoulve: Want to build Draco, release it and then... wander around wondering WTF people are doing?
David Beoulve: How about we cheat first, level up our chars, so's we can at least get around? How's that?
Telnarius: Man, Velas without a DM client. Velas: "Click 1 to get a snide remark" "Click 2 to get me to cast Death Touch on you"
David Beoulve: HA HA HA HA
Telnarius: Yeah now this player hit it
Telnarius: "With the DM Client's release postponed until after the game comes out, many single player gamers may breeze through the included campaign and then move on before NWN2 DMed gaming ever gets started. Without capturing a new player base early, DMed gaming for NWN2 may not be successful as NWN1"
David Beoulve: Sad but rather true.
Telnarius: I mean compare jumping into a NPC and playing it to scripting that NPC..not only in time but useability
David Beoulve: Well basically the whole world becomes static. Not only that, when things go wrong as people play -- and they will -- you can't do anything about it but log off and mess with the module, shut down the server, re-upload, restart the module, and hope a few people come back on. Or you can live with it.
Telnarius: Single-player folks in a game like this are like the extreme power guilds in MMOs. Play it, beat it, move on, who cares what happens to the game afterewards.
Telnarius: I mean without the DM client, it makes NWN2, not much above the idea of Oblivion, can play it, can use a toolset, but umm..what else?
David Beoulve: Ouch. That cuts, bud... but things generally do when they are true. True, it has multiplayer -- but you basically have an easy editor with MP and... nothing to do but beat on mobiles or each other.
Telnarius: Very much so, to delay the DM client, for what could be a couple months, would really hurt things. Download and play modules aren't going to hold attention, even with multiplayer. OC, well that's only good really one time through.
Telnarius: "Nice. One guy posted...
Cost of NWN2: $60.
Finding out that upgrades are need to play it: $250.
Realizing upgrades still are not enough, and buying a new computer: $2000.
Sitting back and watching it get played just as intended, then shelved after a month, priceless."

Galactic Civilization II is still good

[copy of an e-mail to my friend, Sean]
The perpetual refinement is what is so awesome - check out Brad's blog - he's the lead designer who has worked on the game for the last 15 years. Why doesn't he get bored? Because he loves coding AI - and that always evolves.
http://draginol.joeuser.com/

Brad loves to make us cry. He trolls the fan forums for their strategies and then adjusts the AI, releases a beta patch, (most gamers never see them unless they choose to) and we eagerly try it out and whimper that our "strategies" aren't so clever anymore.

There are some strategy Gods out there who aren't phased but for those of us who find "tricks" and such -- we cry a lot. I remember when using a GIGANTIC galaxy was good because the AI didn't understand using bigger engines and less defense in that great expanse. Yep. Those were the days. Last two games I've played I've lost, so I had to completely change my strategy and concentrate on economy more than flanking unfairly. I can still flank - come from where he can't see me - but it's more on even footing.

I still play the game weekly. It's not an every day thing but, because it's turn based, I can just put it down, go do other stuff, and come back to it on my Saturdays. I have no other game quite like that.

Kevin sayz: Matrix Online is all right

My friend Kevin gives The Matrix: Online a thumbs up, though he notes that he bought it on a lark for $30, and if he isn't enjoying himself after 30 days, he's letting his account lapse.

While I concede that, often, Kevin is right about games, he's also been known to enjoy eating rat poison.

I told him that, because Rise of Legends is coming out - oh - tomorrow... I'll have to pass on the Matrix: Online.