| Dig until it hurts

I have been digging a good bit here and there on my wing. Someone laid some serious time down on the other wing, but that has been stagnant for the past week or so. I tried to play some this week, but didn't get much traction because MC 1.5 caused my frame rate to drop precipitously (60-120fps pre / 8-11fps post). Even 'Nilla MC 16x was pulling 16fps max. I got a fix in the newest HD patcher. Seems good now at mid 90s for 128x Sphax.

eLzar, that hockey quote was a rad merging of two hockey and hardcore.

Damn! I logged in to the Minecraft server for the first time in a couple weeks and holy shit, someone's been busy. enr0n, is that all you?

Edit: best band name ever?

| Hockey Fan Quote

The Phoenix Coyotes have been shutout in 3 straight games, which means they have not scored a goal in three games.  A fan on their site posted the following which seemed funny to me:

"They haven't scored in so long it's like they've gone straight edge."

Tee-Hee.

Yo'z Shizzle, anytime you are back in the good ol, Sbay, bring down Eclipse so we can get a crack at it.  I don't think Rudy has a copy.  Now he's more into family games like Twister! The game mechanics sounds like a game that I'd probably like.  Strategy elements (most important) / customized ships (Reach for the stars?).  All elements of a weinner.

If Eclipse doesn't work, we can play Wowarcraft.  I'm quite possibly thinking about joining up for a month of Mist of Pandario for the hell of it.  Mostly because, I just bought a whole bunch of (antiquated) high end parts and built my own system, GTX 470 1gb, E8500 dual core, upgradable to Q94~'s, 6gb ddr2, Intel G45 chipset, all for under 180 bucks.  I haven't built a game system in years (edit: decades?), so this was fun. I also wanted a dedicated game system and see how cheap/good I can do it.  Actually, I started off just wanting to upgrade the cpu, but then realized, I needed a new mofo mobo because the old one didn't fit a full length GC, then needed a new power supply, memory, etc etc, until my "upgrade" actually turned into a whole new system save the chassis!  

I liked Eclipse! The mechanics are really interesting. You want to get out there and colonize as much space as you can because the more people you have out, the more you can research and build. On the other hand, the more actions you take during a turn, then the more upkeep it takes to maintain your empire. You are always trying to push yourself as much as you can without going overboard. The mechanics for researching and upgrading your ships are really cool. You get to customize each ship type's blueprint to a pretty high degree, so my little crap ships might be speedy, yours might be slower but heavily armored.

It is pretty quick. It took Matt and I about 2 hours to go through with rules, but everyone swears that after you've played a couple games it gets close to 30 min/player. I can see it because everything resolves pretty quickly.

The way Matt (and Keith, who'd played it before) felt was that it was too luck-dependent in that when you explore new hexes, sometimes you find awesome shit, sometimes you get crap, but I don't know if I agree. Admittedly I might just be too invested because it's my game, but I felt like even though Matt had a few great ship upgrades that he found through luck, that with better play I could've tied or won the game. I also think that having some luck dependency isn't as much of a big deal when you get the game time down.

Anyway, it was fun and I'd like to play again. Five-six might be a little painful with rules, but I think four would be totally doable.

Looks like you/Ja-el won't be making it up to Kubla this year (why, Ja-el!? I'll protect you from Rich) but I am gonna be down in LA several times this summer, so hopefully we can get together for a game day at least once.

OK, so a question for Aeryk, fArt or Ryan if anyone got through all that. Who came up with the name Torch the Toilet? I was assuming it was a Rich-ism, enr0n wasn't sure.

No Kubla for me this year. It sucks too because there were/are some cheap ass flights via Virgin to SFO. The bigger obstacle this year is work - I need to work a bunch of holidays to earn time off for bonding later in the year. Maybe next time! How was Eclipse?

Watched Jackass 3 last night. Not as good as the others, but definitely had some moments. Lots of ass stuff. Maybe I just haven't seen Jackass in a while but it seemed a little over the top.

Anyway, this one made me laugh.

I bet he'll love Disneyland in a couple years. Especially with all the stuff Disney owns now, pretty soon it'll be Star Wars/Marvel Comics land.

Had a good gaming day yesterday in SF. The original plan was to run the Iron Kingdoms RPG, but I totally flubbed the prep so it turned into open gaming (don't plan on childproofing and session planning on the same day, kids). Somehow Matt P. had never played Space Hulk, so I broke out my 3rd ed copy and we played a couple rounds of Torch the Toilet. That game still holds up. Also got in a two-player game of Eclipse, which was a good time. I think I'm going to do some conversions to the player sheets, which are quite fiddly and easy to knock over. The other guys played some game with a theme like Brewster's Millions, which had little top hat meeples.

Then I went home and got a really bad sore throat. So, uh, enr0n, if you get sick, sorry dude.

So who is planning on going to Kubla? I don't think anyone responded to my last post about it. I think I'd be willing to do a Thursday night start this time around if people are interested.

Glad you guys had an easy day at Disney! Last time I was there around January kids still had a few days left of winter break, so the place was bananas. Sorry that Wy wasn't crazy about the place, but that's probably good for you guys. One less ridiculous expense to worry about. I don't know what your take on that Minecraft Generation was gonna be, but I don't think amusement parks are a dying breed. There is still a ton of kids and adults who are into those types of activities.