Friday, February 25, 2011

The Elder Scrolls V - First Movie of Trilogy Announced


My brother sends me a lot of images he has created with Photoshop. Most of them stem from conversations we have over AIM while he is sleep deprived. You might have seen the Fruity Pueblos cereal he made previously. Here is the chat log that caused this latest one:





Tuesday, February 22, 2011

World of Warcraft - A Giraffe Is Born



When Blackwing Lair was still a big deal in World of Warcraft, my guild and I spent a lot of time there. So much time, in fact, that we saw many weird bugs and glitches, but this one was the best. The final boss in the raid instance, Nefarian, has a crowd control ability like polymorph that changes players into random wild animals. Normally debuffs get removed when you die, but our guildy Cassanova was lucky enough to remain a wild giraffe even after being resurrected.

After defeating Nefarian with Runehammer, Cassanova went on to roam the Barrens for many happy years until he was killed by a lion on stilts. And lost his giraffe buff. He was last seen selling dairy products for commission at Trias' Cheese in Stormwind.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Counter-Strike 1.6 - Romeo and Juliet


Back around 2002 I made this short video from clips of Counter-Strike 1.6, clips from the movie, and photo-shopped images. Oh yeah, I guess the entire audio is from the movie as well. I really wanted to make a longer complete version of it. At that time though, my computer's processing capabilities and hard drive size made it impossible. So I ended it after the intro and tried to make it look like a trailer.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Idea To Make Driving Through Yellow Lights More Exciting

Star Wars License PlateI usually drive my car when there are several of us at work going out for lunch. Near our work is this short length of road with 3 traffic lights. If you hit the first light while it is turning yellow and maintain your speed, you'll probably make it through all 3 traffic lights while they are yellow.

This past weekend I bought a gadget to play music from my phone through my car stereo. Though for the music to have a good effect, I'm going to have to start the music before the first yellow light even shows up. So I'm using the crosswalk timers as my early indicator of a potential yellow streak.

If I do end up timing it correctly, the music should hit the build ups, pauses, and traffic lights at just the right times. And the end of the music should be playing while I cruise through the last traffic light to my epic lunch.

I will not be speeding or driving recklessly. Safety is not guaranteed. I have only done this once.

This is the music I will blare out of my speakers:

Monday, February 7, 2011

All Points Bulletin - Crazy Times

All Points Bulletin was so effing fun when I played it. The customization was (and still is?) phenomenal. My brother and his friends started out as a hot dog vendor crew, but they eventually switched over to an unofficial Domino's delivery gang. While it might not have been very original, there was just something fun about role playing pizza delivery guys on a mission. "Papa John's is selling pizza on our turf.  Let's go f them up!"

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Ultima Online - Pianos in UO!?

Back before they had all these crazy ass items in UO, you had to be creative if you wanted to decorate your house. I don't remember what I was looking for, but one day I came across a website with a walk through on how to build a piano out of random items you could get in game. The process the author described wasn't too complicated but was written in Chinese. I barely understood Pig Latin, so it took me awhile to decipher the few screenshots and Chinese words to figure out what was going on.

It ended up being quite profitable for me though.  I was charging people 20,000 gold a piano.  This was before we were millionaires in game, so it was very exciting.

And damn if that roasted pig doesn't still look delicious to me.

Ultima Online - Monster Wrangler

We had a freshly placed cabin in the very North-Eastern part of Yew woods that we had been hanging out around. There was a guild next door that we always ended up fighting with (I don't remember why).

One day they thought it would be funny to block us from our house with a load of wooden tables. Well we just had to repay the favor.

Just below their tower was a very dense forest with that always had tons of mobs spawned in it. So Belgarath would spend about 20 minutes wrangling them into a huge aggro train. Once they were in a tightly packed group, he would make his way to their tower. He would run inside it to the very back wall and wait for them to mass around the entrance, and then he would hide or recall out.

The mobs in that area were not hard to kill or anything. Although, when you've got 100 or more in the first floor of your house, they can be quite a hassle. One guy recalled to the front of the building and just ran in without even thinking or realizing what was going on. He was quickly boxed in by the monsters and killed. This happened to several of them, and become a nightly event to entertain us.

They would get so pissed off, and I don't blame them.  Eventually they started calling GMs, and we were threatened with account suspensions or bannings if we continued to wrangle up mobs.  Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Ultima Online - Pervy Neighbors

We were the pervy neighbors.

One night while running around our guild town, we noticed that our neighbor had locked himself in his small tower with a female player we knew.

Well it didn't take us long to switch from war mode to perv mode.

Belgarath killed me so I would become a ghost and be able to run through the locked door. I wish I hadn't. It was like clicking a bad link on an already fishy website.

I finally understood the importance of emotes in UO.

Ultima Online - Stolen Plants

This is Belgarath and I (Aubrius) on top of our tower next to the Yew moongate on Catskills. I want to say this was around 2002 or 2003. We had just found our almost forgotten cache of Christmas plants from years earlier.

I think it was Christmas day 2000.  Every character that logged in within a certain window of days would get a deed in their pack to a Christmas gift.  One of those choices was a potted plant.  At the time I thought it was pretty lame.

Then we realized that when players selected potted plant as their gift, instead of going into their packs, it would just drop to the ground.  At first people weren't very aware of this.  So we started out just running around Brit bank snatching up plants before they realized what had happened.  Eventually people had caught on to the problem with the plants, and we had to work on a different approach.

Most players in UO were cautious, and always banked their valuables.  So we started convincing people to claim their plants at the inn near Brit bank - where one of us would have a character hidden and ready to stealth to pick up plants.  Towards the end of Christmas, I believe we had to rely on chasing people down and boxing them in to just plain steal the plants off of them.

Several years later we were selling them in sets of 5 for around $120.  We were in college and broke at this point.  So the extra money really helped.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Ultima Online - Burn Baby Burn!

I thought it'd be fun to share some screen shots from my gaming past.

This one features a red that lost connection in our guild town. We could have easily just ebolted him to death, but that is no fun. Luckily Paul had been working on his carpentry and had tons of desks just lying around in bags.

The red reconnected and was buried in a sea of wooden desks. We lit them on fire and watched him panic as he was burned alive (it was just fire field).

Ultima Online - Macro Room

This was our macro room. Imagine skill gains as far as the eye can see. It was glorious.

This also allowed us to coordinate attacks and other logistical needs with ease since we were sitting right next to each other.

The basement of this house did not have  heating and air running to it though. So at certain points during the year we had to endure some horrible temperatures.