Bunker Project Log

I?d ripped apart the Bunker infrastructure, and put it back together slightly sloppily. I wasn?t really sure how it would go, so I had a sort of limited release party to work the kinks out.

First to arrive was Timmah!, who came with a bag of grocery store cellophaned subs (my favorite kind!) He checked out Beatles Rock Band while I fretted over the loss of machine #7. D?OH!!

Believe it or not, I solved this by inserting my Windows CD, hitting ?R?, attempting to log in, realizing that I do not know my administrator password for that machine (which is odd), then frantically rebooting. It woke right back up. Booyah!

Next in were Vitamin Z heavy laden with beer, and SirKy, returning like the prodigal son from a 1+ year hiatus in the desert.

Thus began the endless playing of the third version of DOTA to hit the Bunker: Heroes of Newerth. SirKy slipped comfortably in to smacktalk mode, Z took it like a man, and I knew all was right with the world.

Eventually Pottse appeared and started up version two of DOTA: Demigod. I love Stardock and all, but it was obvious that Demigod has performance issues. I had chalked it up to my 100Mb LAN before, but we were now on Gigabit, with only two clients, and it ran poorly. At the same time HoN smoked along at a decent clip.

JayJian arrived, and with two fixed games underway, he was forced to experience a little Pain, Andy Dick style. I?m a sucker for Pain DLC, even if I don’t actually play the game, and earlier in the day I had downloaded all the new content. This included a new Museum environment. (Imagine every Smithsonian building kind of mushed together with the Mall of America and you?ll get the idea.) New characters included George Takei (whom I haven?t played yet), and Andy. He was funny enough.

Soon HMAN, Stub, Markus, and Banana showed up, and the LAN activated fully with HoN. Since I would rather take a hot acid bath than actually play any DOTA variant, I resumed the Pain chillout.

Then NatX arrived, and wanted to play? Resistance (??!)

I decided to just drink it in, spectating while he went through the single-player campaign from the beginning. This was all good until he started making frequent 180 degree turns, at which point I got violently ill. I spent the next 10 on the crapper, desperately craving Dramamine.

I escaped to the analog room, and was eventually joined for the only analog of the night, a five-player game of Tsuro. It looked like Banana was going to win, but she had chosen her cards unwisely. Somehow Markus took it, and for some reason this depressed me.

Then came the great Beatles Rock Band experience. I had been looking forward to this. Unlike the other Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and SingStar games, I was finally going to be singing to songs that I sort of knew the words too, and had listened to long enough to actually know how the words were supposed to sound. I also had managed to amass three Lips wireless mics for the harmonizing features of the game.

But this proved to be my undoing.

Somehow, the confluence of two wireless guitars, a wireless drum set, three wireless mics, two wireless access points, about 300 miles of Cat5 cable, 15 computers, three console systems, and the collected cell phone signals of the Bunker faithful in attendance wigged out the mics, and culminated in the message ?I can?t hear you!? Stopping each song from one to five times. It was a total drag, and really sucked the life out of the game. Pottse, who was in a DOTA-clone coma later said ?I didn?t even want to try after seeing that.?

There better be a patch, or I am going to boycott.

Once that was over, some sort of miracle happened. I don?t know what, but it was as if a veil had been lifted from the nerd?s eyes, and they decided? that they didn?t want to play a DOTA clone any more! I was dumbstruck. Even more strange was that somehow, by the grace of the almighty gods of Steam, I had convinced these nitwits that we should play? Dystopia!

Unfortunately, the map cycle I had set up (probably for a sense of variety) included maps that most of us had never tried before. On top of that, there were only two or three of us who had played the game at all. It started off pretty rocky, and none of the teams managed to complete a full assault. Hopefully we will play again now that we have a good cross-section of BP players who have at least two game rounds under their belts.

Finally Scotty arrived, and with him a big Bass Guitar Amp in tow. By now I was pretty exhausted so I went to see what the deal was. He explained that the speaker was dead, so I chilled out in the analog room with that and my multimeter and benched it while the party wound down with more Beatles Rock Band (this time with wired mics? boo!)

All told, it was a decent day, and all the things I was worried about breaking worked fine. The new guts are ready for primetime, and hopefully I can get clearance from Mrs. G for a fully populated festival. I?ll let you know.

My 360 Red-ringed last week, so I had to get a new one. (Guess who bought it 3 years and 1 day before?)

I replaced it with an Arcade, to make sure I got a Jasper and HDMI. This meant using the old hard drive, and the transferring of content. If anyone is interested, or I am bored, I will post the details of 360 DRM management.

The Bunker was a disaster, mainly because I had vomited little styrene spaceships all over the place. Details on those later. You are on pins and needles, I can tell.

The Wii needed to be retrieved from the family room, since Mrs. G has decided to Karaoke on it with the rodents. Disappointing note: T-Bird has decided that she hates Wii Music. This was going to be my entr?e into turning her into a gamer. Boo.

Steam started their gigantic sale, which meant I could finally buy the remaining copies of Counter-Strike Source that I needed. Luckily they unfroze my credit cards in their system. Unluckily no one cares about this game, including me.

Savage 2 was installed on all the machines, but needed to be patched. I did this while T-Bird played games at Sprout Online. Unfortunately, the intro screen scared the crap out of her, possibly scarring her (more) forever.

Finally, all the junk that had accumulated in the Analog room was shoved into the Storage room. That place is a deathtrap again. Anyone want some computer stuff?

Due to the holiday season and other foibles, I was forced to have the latest BP on a Sunday. Although unnerving and possibly unholy, it happened with new hotness. 19 brave souls entered and 2 stayed behind. Excruciating detail to follow.

One of my resolutions… plog more… plog less. In other words, more often, and short. The way it should be.

I’ve been here before, we’ll see how it plays out. Yay 2009.

I love Days of Wonder games. In fact, I think I have opened several posts with exactly those words several times in the past.

However, they haven’t put anything new out in a while, and that has really bummed me out. I don’t know if this is true, but I have been blaming BattleLore.

Sure, the game has lots of cool bits, and if it is anything like Memoir 44, (which I enjoyed my one brief play of) it should be fun.

However, I’m sick of going to the DOW website and being bombarded with news of up and coming Battlelore expansion packs, and no new games!

So… I was quite surprised, and endlessly pleased when I saw this bizarre press release on Fantasy Flight’s website titled: “FFG to Produce, Distribute BattleLore“.

Here’s hoping that DOW will get back to work making great themey games with great bits, and that FFG will use that Battlelore money to speed up the production of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: THE BOARD GAME!!!! OMGZ!!!111one)

Thanks to Scott Burkett at Pothole on the Infobahn, I’ve finally solved my theme changing issue. Hopefully my two loyal readers will never again be shellshocked by the constant theme switching.

Also, for my one mobile reader (possibly Dangerkitty), the site now actually shows up and works well in a mobile browser. Thanks to Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition for that one. (Of course, I’ve had this thing installed since about day one, but I was too stupid to install it correctly.)

One more thing off the list. Now to review the 10 or 20 games that have been waiting!

I’ve spent the last three months tearing apart the Bunker and putting it back together again. (at least three times in fact.) I’ve upgraded a lot, both for the sake of fun, and for my own sanity (no more cable bundle!)

Unfortunately, all this change has resulted in having no time to do anything on the blog, and I’ve gotten out of habit.

However, there’s been a lot of gameplaying to tell about, and a bunch of games that I hope will make it to the table on the next Bunker Party. So, watch this spot!

For the attendees, make sure to comment about the ones that look good so I know which to push when the next BP actually happens!

Tonight was TF2 install night for me, while Pottse rebuilt the game server. The xcopy is still running from the old partially whacked drive, and hopefully I can scrape a few minutes together to get the software running again.

And… what’s a Bunker post without everyone’s favorite attention whore?

Tonight… you.

This is what happened to me during the install of the Team Fortress 2 dedicated server. This is so friggin typical, and basically what drove me to buy new hardware in the first place. (But not a new server, genius that I am.)

We’ll see how this plays out, but as usual, this has happened a day before the dizzle, so I will be scrambling.

So, the Ship is installed, I won’t go into much detail, since you can find out all about it at this Gamerankings link.

I will however, answer the questions that I remember.

1) After the first person is killed, you have a configurable amount of time (currently set at 90 seconds) to kill your target before the round ends.

2) When you start a new round, you are only given a new target. You stay exactly where you were when the round ended, and your status stays the same (if you had to pee, you still have to pee!)

3) You must examine each person in order to get their name (and thus determine who you are supposed to kill.)

4) The boats are pretty big, and there are 8 of them. Some of them include dock areas as well.

5) You don’t seem to be able to configure your character (probably adding to the general difficulty of finding your opponent.)

6) You will be fined heavily for doing “bad” things, and ultimately, the one with the most money at the end wins, so it is in your best interest to stay “clean.”

I will add more to the comments if/when I remember.