I have been incredibly fortunate to have developed some cool and valuable side projects. Most notably, Spawning Tool went from an all-nighter hack to a much beloved and very significant resource in the StarCraft 2 community. However, most side projects don’t work out that way, and I too have a litany of failures. I usually […]
Category: video games
Categories
My 2019 Recommendations
2019 has been a very different year of likes from 2018. In 2018, I had a pile of video and tabletop games that I had to debate amongst to fit in. This year, I’m grasping at games. In 2018, I wasn’t totally happy with my book choices. Yes I liked Crucial Conversations, but it isn’t […]
Many bloggers write a “Books I Read Last Year” or “Recommended Movies” post at the end of the year. Frankly, I think most people do it because other people do it and because they’re really easy to write. It’s a total cop-out for generating content. In fact, it’s such a good cop-out that I’m going […]
Categories
Switching Up My Gaming
I play all of my video games on my 2012 MacBook Pro, but recently, it has been showing its age. The 100GB Windows partition is too small, so I actually didn’t have enough space to install new games. Over the past year, I saw a few games that my computer no longer met the minimum […]
In 1996, Deep Blue played competitive Chess against world champion Garry Kasparov. In 2011, Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. In 2016, AlphaGo played and beat Lee Sedol in Go. And in 2018, OpenAI Five played 2 games against professional Data 2 players, and the humans survived 2 very fun games. But in another year, I think […]
Despite having faithfully played PC games of many genres since I was 4, I never played an massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPGs or MMOs) until Julie and I picked up The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) at the recommendation of a friend. I could say that my self-restraint kept me away from extremely addictive MMOs, but in […]
When Julie and I got back from our road trip from Oregon, we still had a few chapters left on The Golden Compass audiobook. At first, I figured we could finish it inside while we were unpacking, but when we took out the CD, I immediately recognized a problem. It’s 2017, and the only CD drive that […]
Categories
Lessons in teaching a video game
This past week, my coworkers and I spun relived junior high with a Diablo 2 LAN party. To fit the stereotype, we got pizza for dinner and picked up Doritos and Mountain Dew to power us through 4 hours of gaming. Although Diablo 2 (D2) is mostly cooperative, we split into 2 teams and raced to […]
Categories
D&D is the player’s game
This past weekend, I ran my Dungeons & Dragons* (D&D) game like I do once a month. Unlike most months, however, I came out of the 2 1/2 hour session feeling like I had run a pretty good adventure. It helped that I was better prepared than usual. Over past sessions, I have wavered from […]
Categories
My first 2.5 hours of Overwatch
For quite awhile now, my Tuesday night gaming group has been playing Heroes of the Storm, but with the release of Overwatch a week ago and the excitement around that, we decided to give it a shot. We had briefly played Team Fortress 2 maybe a year ago, but it never really stuck, and I was […]