The Save Spot

GAUGE VII Performance Report

Our gaming and entertainment extravaganza GAUGE VII is now in the books.  A fantastic five days in Seattle, we have all now returned to our ‘normal’ work and lives as busy gamers.  We wrote about our gaming goals previously, and since performance measurement and tracking is very important an update is warranted!  As you can see from this performance report, the overall success of the event can hardly be questioned.  We had base goals and stretch goals for each of our achievements, and scored ourselves up to 100% for accomplishing a goal and up to 150% for a strech goal.  Based on this scoring methodology, our GAUGE VII performance was 110.8% – in other words on average we accomplished all our goals and over 20% of our strech goals!  Considering the large quantity of goals we set for this year, we consider this a major success.  Some key performance highlights are noted below.

Rock Band:  Our band The Wutai Clan (guitar, bass, and drums) was formed and performing for just five days and achieved over 1.5 Million fans.  This met our stretch goal of beating the world tour mode on ‘hard’ difficulty.  You can bet we’ll be reuniting the band at GAUGE VII to play more on ‘expert’ difficulty.   

Futurama:  We successfully decoded the alien language in futurama over the first half-dozen episodes of the first season.  We overcame several obstacles in this project.  The first in-episode alien alphabet symbols, five of them forming one word, appeared on an advertisement for the beverage “Slurm“.  As a reasonable working hypothesis we tried to decypher other signs by assuming the alien word was also Slurm.  Several episodes in, however, this started to appear less likely.  A second obstacle, we watched several episodes with no alien alphabet appearing at all!  Finally, we caught a break when a sign on a shop door had the word “Open” in english and four alien alphabet characters below it.  Using these four characters as a key, we were able to puzzle out several other signs including “Venusians Go Home”, “Tasty Human Burgers”, and “Don’t Drink The Emperor”.  Looking back to that first sign, we see that the alien word was “drink” and not “Slurm” – doh!  With these signs translated, we feel confident that further signs in the game will be decypherable – we’ve got all the vowels and most of the common letters.  We’ll put it to the test in GAUGE VIII, no doubt!

A few points where we came up short are worth noting as well.

X-Men Legends II:  We had high hopes of finishing Act 5 of this game, which we started playing in GAUGE VI.  Unfortunately, we kept running into disk read errors on the Xbox I’ve had since launch in 2001!  We were almost able to cleverly circumvent the problem by booting up to the Xbox Media Center and loading the game to the hard drive, but unfortunately we couldn’t get the Media Center to boot again afterwards!  We had to pass on this goal after making it about 25% of the way through Act 5.

Gauntlet:  With so many other good games to play, we just didn’t sit down with this classic.  A failure of gaming or goal-setting?  Either way, we had to score ourselves 0% for this one.

You can expect more coverage of GAUGE VII in the days to come, and a facelift for the site as well.