Sale link (applies to physical stores too). The sale price is US$50 off, which means $49.99 for a single turntable kit, and applies to Wii, XBox 360 and PS3 models. Also not as well advertised is that the 2-turntable [...]]]> So yeah, I’m shilling, I guess, but this is an advisory for friends I know may be interested.

Sale link (applies to physical stores too). The sale price is US$50 off, which means $49.99 for a single turntable kit, and applies to Wii, XBox 360 and PS3 models. Also not as well advertised is that the 2-turntable kit is selling for $90 (instead of $120). Sale ends 4/17/2010.

Sorry, hit Post too soon.

Anyhow, I picked it up for the PS3 (they were out for the XBox version at the Toys R Us I went to) yesterday, and the quality of the kit I bought was a little refurb-y, but it was fine, and plays fine, so whatever.

I wanted to make you aware that while I am rather a rhythm game geek of the Rock Band variety, I had heard good things about DJ Hero and honestly even at the regular price it was tempting. Why? Because of the track list, including Ice Ice Baby vs. Can’t Touch This, and lots of Queen, Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, Daft Punk and other goodies all rolled up together.

On some of the (very few, honestly – maybe 5) tracks, there’s even a guitar-part so if you have a guitar you can play also with that alongside the turntable controller (2 player). So anyway

Non-work is also busy but certainly interesting and rewarding. Mostly I am helping out Hanne as she works on her cooking/catering side-business. Which is interesting, even if it doesn’t pay well.

Hanne’s Chinese “Double Happiness” brunch yesterday worked out well Sunday. Since the flow was different (last time [...]]]> Still busy at work, still responsible for things.

Non-work is also busy but certainly interesting and rewarding. Mostly I am helping out Hanne as she works on her cooking/catering side-business. Which is interesting, even if it doesn’t pay well.

Hanne’s Chinese “Double Happiness” brunch yesterday worked out well Sunday. Since the flow was different (last time we did this, we had a rush of folks show up at 11 a.m. – this time, it was a steady more moderate flow of diners), we thought we’d barely break even but we ended up doing about as well, orders-wise as we did last time. It was fun, but hard work. I was a buser, washer and gofer. By the end of the day, my dogs were barking!

It bears mentioning that (a) The Baltimore Sun Food Blog mentioned the event (b) A bunch of West coasters and some Asians showed up and they were effusive in their praise (c) One of the folks who showed up appears to have been the owner of a local notable restaurant, The Brewer’s Art and he commented positively on the Baltimore Sun Food Blog entry. Go find these things. Google is your Friend, and I have a meeting to attend!

Next up will be a Dumplings Take Over the World event, which will have reservations, so we’ll know how much to prepare, and we tweaked the menu from last time so the prep and on-side cooking will be less demanding. We also learned some things about storage of pre-folded dumplings that hadn’t yet been cooked that are valuable lessons going forward. Also, we have volunteer help in the form of a local cooking student who wants to learn Asian cooking/prep, which is something the local school doesn’t teach.

I have also (I think this is a stress management thing for me) been acquiring cheap video games or installing older ones on my laptop that I enjoyed. The most rewarding right now are the ones where it’s easy to improve your toolset (but the tools are unlockable through playing through levels), or simple exploration or resource management games. Also I’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band 2. One I got for $3 is PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies, which is an interesting resource management game with simple rules and lots of little geeky jokes.

This week at work will be more troubleshooting of existing environments and more organization of and enforcement of our extant store of documentation, as well as continuing to reintegrate our returning team-member J in to the team.

Next weekend there’ll be probably a lot of yardwork and maybe some resting (who knows? A man can dream).

Thanks to my wonderful parents (who had the good grace to give and receive such lovely things with grace and fun), to Hanne and Rob and also to Ushi, Fez and Mrs. Calabash.

Gifts given:

Anyway, I had [...]]]> I bought Borderlands on Wednesday after much soul-searching (I didn’t finish Fallout 3, which is in a similar market segment, probably because it was too creepy). Fallout 3 is Role Playing Game that is also a First Person Shooter. In contrast, Borderlands is a First Person Shooter that is also a Role Playing Game.

Anyway, I had some trepidation and finally ended up buying it used from GameStop (for $55) because I could return it in 7 days if I didn’t like it.

So on Thursday I got the flu and spent most of Thursday sleeping it off and playing a little Borderlands. By Friday I was well enough to game a little and I’ve been playing it pretty hot and heavy for the weekend (in between housecleaning sessions).

Here’s what I said about it to a gaming buddy in IM today:

Malcolm: Dude. I got Borderlands on Wednesday and played it during my convalescence.
Malcolm: I think you might like it. Lots of Road Warrior. The occasional blowing heads off of bandits at range with sniper rifles.
Malcolm: Monsters.
Malcolm: Road kills (running enemies over) not only encouraged but rewarded. Stopping and getting out and looting corpses afterward also encouraged.
Malcolm: Sort of a Mad Max, sort of Grand Theft Auto, lots of FPS but Diablo-like grinding, looting, selling, buying new WMD, going back for more.
Malcolm: Missile launchers on dune buggies. I mean, come on!

It is a little grindy. A lot of people have compared it to an FPS Diablo. I think that’s fair. But the gameplay is a lot of fun. And it’s fun to take out targets even when you’re so much higher level than they are that you don’t get any experience for it.

I am enjoying it though. This is one of those 9 out of 10 type games that really makes me glad that video games keep getting better. When I was an early teen, just getting into computers and seeing what they could do, this kind of game was beyond my wildest dreams – games I could play where I would do things I would NEVER do in real life but that were fun all the same to do. And it’s fun, too. And challenging, but not too challenging. Just right. Mmm.

1) A PS3. Assuming household budget to cover it, I will probably buy a Playstation 3 this year. Partly for the Blu-ray, and partly for the games. In truth, it’s more about the Blu-ray. Those of you who’ve visited probably know about my giant TV (or [...]]]> Here are a couple of middle-term geeky purchases I am planning.

1) A PS3. Assuming household budget to cover it, I will probably buy a Playstation 3 this year. Partly for the Blu-ray, and partly for the games. In truth, it’s more about the Blu-ray. Those of you who’ve visited probably know about my giant TV (or giant for me – before this I’d owned a well-used 26″ conventional TV). The TV’s a Sony Bravia XBR5. It’s got modern specs but is about 1.5 years old. I’ve lately been noticing that the TV is way too finely detailed for my old, slightly crappy Toshiba 5-disc DVD changer. When I watch action movies on the DVD changer with the TV, I get wavefronts of distortion in front of anything that’s moving quickly across the screen. Compared to the few HD movies I’ve downloaded to my XBox 360 and viewed on the TV, the conventional DVDs look like poop. So the PS3 has a built-in Blu-Ray DVD player, and since the world’s settled on that format (HD-DVD died last year) and Netflix does some Blu-ray rentals, I think that’s an obvious choice. But it can wait. It’s not like anything’s dying because I’m not purchasing the thing.

2) A new laptop. The current one, which is a refurb that was shipped when my even older laptop hit the 13-service-call lemon policy at Dell (3.5 years through its 4 year warranty), was sent to me on 2/24/2006, 3 years ago. For my original purchase price of probably $3400 or so, I got almost 7 years of use! I use laptops hard, and this one’s starting to actually come apart around the hinge. Turns out that the display is extremely high resolution for today’s standards. It’s a 15.4″ WUXGA screen, which means its native resolution is 1920×1200. Comparatively, consider that the highest resolution Apple (reknown for its general hardware usability)  supports on 15.4″ displays is 1440×900. Honestly my 40 year old eyes are getting a little tired for a resolution (in my current laptop) that makes the fonts and other screen features as small as it does. Anyhow, I am considering the possibility of buying a lower resolution, smaller display (possibly a 13.3″ screen) laptop for a replacement. In fact, I am considering an Apple laptop. The primary problem here is cost. Apple makes high quality products but they are in general not known for cheapness. Not only would reducing the size and choosing lower than maximum specs of the package reduce overall cost, but the other thing I’m considering is buying via Apple’s special deals (i.e. refurbished products) store. I don’t think I need to move ahead with these plans either, at least until this laptop actually fails (at the hinge or elsewhere), but it’s good to know I’ve got options and good to know that the Apple refurbished store is there too.

This evening, while unlocking higher stakes games in Keystone (which is a lot [...]]]> So I downloaded Fable II Pub Games a few days ago and have been steadily accumulating inventory items and unlocking higher stakes games. (I probably will buy and play Fable II, probably with the birthday mad money my Mom sent me – Thanks Mom!)

This evening, while unlocking higher stakes games in Keystone (which is a lot like craps but with 3 dice) I had either a run of very good luck or i found something…

Update: Looks like it was blind luck after all – though it seems like I’m hitting triples of various types a lot more often than the less than 3% indicated by strict probability. Though that may just be a local variation in probability for that night, who knows.

(Note, the amounts are very rough estimates, as I stopped really paying attention to numbers when I racked up these huge jackpot amounts.)

To unlock higher stakes games, you bet gold. Lots of gold. The highest stakes Keystone game requires something like 150,000 gold bet over the course of your player’s play, in Keystone. It doesn’t matter if the bet wins, just that it is bet.

So I thought to myself, I’ll just bet on everything on the board (numbers, colors, suits, pairs, triples, etc.) just to bet them. I started with about 150,000 gold won in the Fortune’s Tower game (like solitaire) and the Spinnerbox game (like slots). So I put everything down (in the level I was playing, it was first about 4,000 gold and then about 8,000 gold, per die roll).

For the first game, the very first roll I made was 18. As this is one of the rarest rolls for 3 dice, I got about 30,000 gold total for the 4,000 I bet. So I said, “Huh” as I cashed out and moved on to the next higher stakes level I’d just unlocked.

The second game at the higher stakes level took 3 dice rolls to get an 18. Again I said “Huh”, cashed out and went downstairs to have dinner.

I shall have to experiment some more to see whether I can replicate this or whether it was really just blind luck.

misia had conspired with my friend Rob (and apparently half of my neighbors and about all of my friends) to surprise me with a Halo Edition XBox 360, a copy of Halo 3 and a copy of Beautiful Katamari (as yet, I have not tried it). I was taken [...]]]> Yesterday evening was a great deal of fun.

misia had conspired with my friend Rob (and apparently half of my neighbors and about all of my friends) to surprise me with a Halo Edition XBox 360, a copy of Halo 3 and a copy of Beautiful Katamari (as yet, I have not tried it). I was taken completely by surprise, first by the games (“Dude! I don’t even have an XBox 360 yet!”), then by the XBox 360 itself, which was out of sight and I didn’t see until well after I saw the games (“Oh!… Oh wow!… Thank you!”). misia really got me, and Rob had worked hard yesterday while I was doing all of that money/HDTV stuff to keep me from buying an XBox 360 myself (he was my ride to Tweeter to buy the HDTV).

I understand that a number of misia‘s friends knew this was in the works. For weeks I’d been getting bounced from private posts where misia was apparently asking opinions and gleefully plotting about what she should do on her journal, and she’d explained she wanted to keep me from having to see her kvetching about renovation, or something, put me off rather slyly. There were other incidents too, that were part of it, like when she asked me to show her how things were hooked up “so that she could reconnect if the housecleaners disconnected them”. I didn’t suspect a thing, but that question was really asked to make sure she could connect the XBox 360 and have it ready for me when I came home last night, so the controllers would be charged up, etc.

So after my shock wore off enough to settle down, misia had also already made homemade pizza and cookies and had uncapped some ciders and Rob and I played co-op Halo 3 all night long.

A great big thank you to misia and to all who participated in this surprise. It was really pleasurable and wonderful and I’m really glad you all plotted against me.

Oh! Also, I wanted to say that the choice of the Halo Edition XBox 360 was perfect, because I did secretly want it, but never would have bought that particular edition for myself, thinking myself too responsible to drop $$ on a themed XBox 360 when a plain one would do just fine.

Unrelated: Apparently my post on LJ about WordPress as an alternative to LJ is high-ranked on Google for such related searches. Good thing it’s on SUP’s bandwidth.

I’ve always loved the Worms francise, and a move back to 2D will probably be a good idea. I do have the 3D games, but they were harder to control and part of the joy of the Worms games is that they’re simple so you can get down to the business of wiping [...]]]> Worms: A Space Oddity

I’ve always loved the Worms francise, and a move back to 2D will probably be a good idea. I do have the 3D games, but they were harder to control and part of the joy of the Worms games is that they’re simple so you can get down to the business of wiping out your competitors.