Random Thoughts for the past week (3/11/2008):

Random Gaming Stuff

Picked up Super Smash Bros: Brawl last night from Best Buy. Haven’t played it yet. Definitely need to at least check it out to see if my Wii is going to crap out on me. :/ At least Nintendo (again) is being highly proactive by addressing the issue quickly.

Been playing Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War: Soulstorm recently (hence why I didn’t play Smash Bros yet). I’m a big fan of Real Time Strategy and Turn Based Strategy games. The new races focus a lot on a new resource (Faith for the Sisters) that allows them to use specific powers. The Dark Eldar have abilities that aren’t even tied to units, which seems to counter-balance the lack of defensive emplacements.
I’m playing through the single player campaign with the Sisters of Battle. My main complaint with the single player campaign is that on “Normal” difficulty the AI is decent for Annihilate objectives, but for “Take and Hold” objectives (which are set for any world with an Ancient Gate) it’s crippled. I’ve been able to easily win those maps by building a handful of basic units and immediately sending them out to capture the points. You have to hold a majority of the critical points for 6 minutes – which is easy as the AI doesn’t send forth more than a token effort until the time is nearly up. The AI definitely needs tweaking there, since those maps are fairly strategically important, and should be more of a struggle. Other than that, it’s been fun, and I look forward to checking out the new units for the other races and finding unique ways to use them to torment my foes.

Video Update

My “Potential Energy” video should be out this week. Weather this weekend didn’t allow me to catch up as I had planned, so hopefully I can get the rest done tomorrow or Thursday. After that, I have a demonstration of Magnesium which will be a lot more interesting that you might think.

COOKIE!!!

I was surprised to find out that they made a “Tickle Me Extreme” version of the Cookie Monster and Ernie. I was trying to find a Cookie Monster hand puppet at the time (yes, it’s for a video…just nod and smile), and ran across it on Amazon. And yes, I bought it.

Weird Dream

Last night I had a dream that involved a dwarf named Moradin, who was around during a great war with the Orcs (think Lord of the Rings kinda thing). He wants to fight valiantly, but he’s a bit more skittish than the average dwarf. He is unwilling to fight unless he has a full suit of plate mail. Problem is, he lost all of his posessions and money during an early raid in the war, so he has no weapons, and no armor. wanting to help, but fearing to fight, he spends a fair amount of time avoiding getting involved in major conflicts, but venturing onto the battlefield afterwards to try to help the wounded and scavenging pieces of armor from those who can no longer use them. For some reason he refuses to scavenge a weapon, and wishes to earn it through honest fighting. Towards the end of the dream he’s managed to gather a decent amount of armor, but he’s missing the breastplate. However, he decides to confront a party of orcs that have separated from a main battle group to raid a poorly defended monastery. He lies in wait therin, waiting to bash the first orc who comes through the door with a giant candlestick holder (they have those in monasteries, doncha know?). At which point my dog Jack got startled by a noise and jumped into the bed – waking me up.

Much nicer than an orc, but still shouldn’t fall on you in the middle of the night.

Upset stomachs and a couple Pomegranate Smirnoff Ices apparently make for strange dreams.