Well it was bound to happen. The economic meltdown has finally hit us close to home - one of the GAUGE staples (animal cookies) are no longer going to be made. The company that baked them is going out of business due to increased costs and an inability to get loans from the bank.
This is truly a sad day for all…
Sometimes I’m in an adventurous mood, eager to zip out to an unproven restauraunt or willing to (gasp) try a new dish at a favorite spot. Other times, I just want to sit at home with a beer and some salty snackage. I was in the latter frame of mind on a recent family vacation (yes, I know I’m too old for a National Lampoons-style family vacation. No, that didn’t stop me!) Naturally, there was much beer and salty snacking involved but I also indulged in a different kind of comfort food, video game comfort food for my PSP in the form of Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
MUA is a fantastic game, a great example of a dungeon crawl that gets almost everything right and also leverages a genre-appropriate license quite well. It is a lengthy game (30ish hours), a replayable game (there are many hero combinations you could play again with), a richly deep and customizable game (stats, powers, equipment, and hero teams can all be customized), and a game filled with interesting optional sidequests and colletion goals. So, when I say this game is comfort food I certainly don’t mean to suggest that it isn’t deep or is not enrossing. It’s a pleasant romp, a nice way to kill some time, a game that doesn’t require too much thinking, and a well-balanced game that is neither too easy nor too difficult or frustrating.
For me, it’s a game that I’ve now played through substantial portions three times (the first three acts are well-traveled territory for me, most enjoyably as a core event of GAUGE VII). It walks a fine line between button-mashing gameplay and a need to sometimes play with more strategy and on my recent trip it provided a pleasant escape that didn’t require too much mental overhead or engagement. I even let Marvel make an important decision for me, and played as the Fantastic Four.
MUA is one of those games that came out on almost every game system - you can purchase a copy for Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, or PSP. If you enjoy Diablo-style gameplay and have even a passing interest in Marvel superheros, go get yourself a greatest-hits copy right away. I recommend the 360 version since you’ll get access to exclusive playable characters including the Hulk and Dr. Doom, and because nerd points are fun. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 has also been announced, and I’m expecting good things!
What’s your video game comfort food?
Anyone who followed our GAUGE exploits knows that one of our major goals was to play through Hard on Rock Band. Well this was almost derailed by our inability to come up with a name for our band. Naming things is NOT our strong suit. After many weeks and approximately eleventy billion emails, we finally settled on The Wutai Clan.
That’s why I was glad to see this xkcd comic. It’s nice to know we aren’t the only ones to struggle with this…
The Save Spot Comic is published semi-occasionally and is widely perceived to be semi-humorous.
One of the most interesting things that came out of this year’s GAUGE was the most prolific Rock Band performance I have had the pleasure of being a part of. This is not to say that I have not had fun playing the game up until now, but it’s a whole lot different when you play with two other people on the hardest difficulty level and begin to make headway. This not only sets up next’s years event but also shows that we have the potential to excel in any potential sequels (e.g. Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero 4).
For my own experience, warming up the week before became frustrating. I had made plenty of progress during the past month and I was starting to crack the songs in the final set on Expert. I’m far from being considered an elite player in the game, and odds are I will never achieve that distinction, but it’s still fun to work on techniques and improve my ability to handle the 5-button plastic guitar. The frustration wasn’t that I was one song away from completing lead guitar before the trip started, but that my scores were not improving the final two days before GAUGE.
Please understand that I wasn’t nervous about being able to play the lead once we started playing as a group, but I did not feel as though I was ready to carry the band if and when it was needed. This turned out to be far from the truth, but there is this disturbing thought in the back of my head that I’m on a rather large plateau before being able to make a noticeable bump in my fan count again. 6.3 million fans isn’t anything to be unhappy with, but until I crack 9 million I’m probably not going to be satisfied with my abilities.
“Say It Ain’t So”
Early e-mail discussions were flying around to identify our band name. Most suggestions weren’t sitting right with everyone and the tide turned from gaming into coming up with many ways of making a negative commentary on everyone’s favorite FFVII character - Yuffie. Most people enjoy making disparaging remarks about her, but our goal of forming a band name was still incomplete after two weeks of fighting over e-mail. On the plus side, once we finally gathered together we came up with our band name - The Wutai Clan. Sure, it didn’t insult our favorite character, but it was a delicious pun that proved too hard to resist.
“In Bloom”
As we started with the earliest of songs we were all a little nervous about whether we could handle this game as a band on Hard. We (not everyone, but more than none) chickened out on even the easiest songs before things starting rolling. Song failures didn’t happen once, and when our scores consistently ranged between 92 and 100 percent on songs we knew we were ready for everything else.
“Learn to Fly”
Most songs were easy to get through on Hard. In fact, consistently sticking to the first 20 or so songs in the game (as ordered in career mode) was a good recipe for gaining confidence and executing almost every section of every song. Like any good team, we were starting to gain an almost purely instinctive timing on when to activate Star Power to gain a ton of points or insure that a difficult section of a song wouldn’t sink one of the band mates.
“Go With the Flow”
In a solid effort to easily garner cash and fans we kept plowing through the smaller song sets and easier songs. Most of our set lists didn’t change over a long period of time. This aided our efforts in achieving our goal of maxing out fans on Hard difficulty but also not getting a dismal amount of stars on multiple song sets. With rare exception all songs were 5-starred over days two and three of the event. The coasting proved to be a good thing because having a relaxed demeanor while switching games every couple of hours proved beneficial for all goals on our docket.
“Enter Sandman”
Late into night number 3 we started hitting some of the harder songs, and my inability to make quick movements between end notes began to become exposed on the Metallica song. Still, this was the night we finally hit our fan limit on Hard. This was a golden moment for us because it was probably our biggest achievement for GAUGE. Unfortunately it was short-lived.
“Flirtin’ With Disaster”
In an attempt to push for permanent glory in the game I decided that we needed to go after our Hall of Fame Induction on Hard. The song set we went through wasn’t all that surprising, but on song #6 we hit a brick wall on the Molly Hatchet song. It wasn’t a surprise that we failed that one because it is a nasty song on Hard, especially if you have never seen it before (which our bassist had not). Not only was the failure spectacular, but we lost a ton of fans that put us back under the Hard fan limit. My band mates did not let me forget this fact for a while.
“Won’t Get Fooled Again”
We decided that rather than slamming our heads into a wall trying to get into the Hall of Fame that we should start playing the easier songs on Expert to see how many fans we could get back on the hardest difficulty level. A couple thousands fans here and there were not helping much. After switching to the later cities that still provided easy songs we started getting fans in chunks of 100,000+. This proved to everyone present that the better we did at the highest level the more fans we would get. Ending the Wutai Clan experience for GAUGE VII on this note proved to be the absolute right thing to do.
There will be plenty of off-season training involved, and it looks like Rock Band 2 might be out before our next event. Even if it is not we still have plenty of time to enjoy the downloadable content to keep this game giving us fresh and fun experiences.
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.
Twas the day before Gauge VII
and all through the day
My thoughts had been racing
through the games we’d soon play.
The drum set was placed
in the living room with care
with hopes that Rock Band tunes
would soon fill the air.
The beer fridge is stocked
and our goals have been set
My DS is charged and
the steaks will be a hit!
Everything is in place
or so I had thought
as I spring bolt upright
realizing one thing I’d forgot!
Tournament prizes!
How could this be?
I meant to go get them
last week don’t you see?
Good thing I remembered
today not tomorrow
I thought as I went out
to buy, beg, or borrow.
I strolled down the isles
noting several nice items
and finally picked out
two prizes - I’ll buy them.
Crisis averted!
I returned to my day
and tried to hold thoughts
of GAUGE VII at bay.
It was no avail, though
I couldn’t stop thinking
of all the fun games
the food, and the drinking
We’ve X-men, and DS,
and MUA to play
There’s Rock Band, and Iron Man
and Indy’s latest crusade!
Good thing that only
twenty four hours remain
until we kick off
GAUGE once again!
In previous posts we’ve talked about our (roughly) annual gaming binge and mini-reunion we call GAUGE. With the start of GAUGE VII just two days away, we have finally locked down our gaming, entertainment, and food and beverage consumption goals for the event. Yes, you read that correctly. Starting with GAUGE VI we took our nerd factor up by an order of magnitude by establishing a set of specific, measurable goals around the major GAUGE activities.
Why? Mostly because it’s been a fun way to plan together, and to build excitement for the event. Also, though, we are busy gamers and we don’t have this kind of chance regularly to set aside large blocks of time for tackling challenging gaming goals like these. Plus, we have performance metrics and stretch goals in our mundane, real-world lives at work - why shouldn’t we treat our recreation with as much respect!
Some of our goals are straightforward, for example to beat X-Men Legends II (a game we started playing last year), others are a little more unique (like making it to level 30 in Gauntlet, while enjoying a beverage whenever “Warrior needs food badly!”). We’ll share our full suite of GAUGE goals in a future post, but a few of our other goals for this year are:
If you’ve set interesting gaming or entertainment goals with your friends, let us know in the comments.
Some of my best gaming moments came surrounded by friends.
Sometimes they involved finally winning a deathmatch (Quake). Or the thrill of destroying a hoard of rampaging Orcs (Warcraft II). Other times it was a successful alliance to control the world (Civ IV).
But whatever they were, it was always more exciting with a friend. And that’s really the heart of GAUGE.
As you can see, we have an extensive supply list. We use everything from movies to video games. This year we’re actually planning on using no less than six different gaming systems. Why? Because we can!
But even if we only had an Atari (which would be sweet), we would still have a blast. Because as much as we love playing with new toys, trying out new games, and over eating, what really counts is that we do it as a group.
Look at it this way – we all eat, we all play games, we all watch movies. But there’s something about GAUGE that draws us in, and makes us look forward to it. There’s a reason we take a week of our vacation time to hold GAUGE - and it’s not because we can’t play video games at home!
Now don’t get me wrong, there are lots of cool features in any GAUGE experience. But the one essential to creating a GAUGE experience is to have friends that you want to spend some time with. Cheesy? Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And deep down, I think we all know gaming is more fun with friends.
GAUGE VII is just fifteen days away, and we’re having fun pulling together our plans and preparing supplies. Here’s some of the supplies we’ll be putting to use over Memorial Day weekend:
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