Matthew Supert

So how is that D&D gaming thing going? Well, it is honestly going pretty well, at least for most of us. We have had a turnover in players recently. All of the new players in our group are really cool and easy going individuals. I believe everyone is having a good time, except for one guy who decided to leave. Not just leave our group. He left Meetup.com and I think left playing D&D. 

We had an instance during our game session where our players had the opportunity to help a hill giant they came across. The one player really wanted to help this giant, while the rest of the group was just sort of "meh" on the idea. It probably took our group an hour to discuss what they wanted to do. In the end they chose not to help the giant and the player who wanted to had a meltdown right there at the table. 

I was amazed to be honest. He got up and stormed out of the room after having a bit of a verbal tirade. 

So this resulted in him not only leaving our playing group, but he quite the Meetup entirely. Thing is he was the main oganizer for the entire Meetup.com page. I received an email the next day asking me to take over and what do you know, a couple of weeks later I am not the organizer of the entire Meetup.com group.

This past Christmas Megan bought me the Hyrule Historia for the Legend of Zelda series. LOZ has always been one of my favorite games series, but I am ashamed to say that I haven't played through all of the games in the series. While reading through the historia I found that there is now a timeline to the LOZ series. It happened at that same time that I also picked up a copy of Skyword Sword. My goal now is to play through all of the LOZ games tin "chronological" order.

I have been toying with the idea of potentially getting into Twitch streaming some games and this has also sparked my interest in doing this. I am in the process of looking at what sort of small PC box I can get that I can put in my entertainment center to capture and stream the video feed to twitch. The problem is I don't want to drop $500 on a small PC just to capture a non-HD stream. If anyone out there has some advice on a small box I can build for $200 or so, let me know. 

This past weekend we had the opportunity of having our niece spend the night and this gave Megan and I the perfect opportunity to go out and buy some more games from our favorite game shop, The Wandering Dragon. We of course ended up buying a lot more than we possibly could have played, but we bought the following games.

• Forbidden Island
• The Red Dragon Inn
• Zombie Dice
• Dragon Dice 
• Eye for an Eye

We started out the evening by playing Forbidden Island. I knew as a cooperative game that this would be easy for everyone to play and we ended up having a blast with it. We played two games and had a great time. The next day we also played some Zombie Dice while we ate lunch. 

Later on Saturday I tried to play Dragon Dice with Megan. We sort of got the gist of it, but the rules for the game were pretty terrible. I ended up having to go online the next day to watch some Youtube videos on how to play Dragon Dice. If you are looking for some good videos, these guys over at Youtube have made some really nice videos. In the the end I think the game can be a lot of fun. There is an incredible depth and scalability to this game that I really like. It can be as simple as the starter pack that I bought or much more complex. I find that intriguing. 

FInally I had to buy the Red Dragon Inn as it has become one of my favorite games as of late and I haven't been able to find the original game in many places. When the Wandering Dragon had four copies on their shelf, I had to pick it up. 

Lastly, Megan bought Eye for an Eye, which we unfortunately need at least five people to play. It looks like a cool party game though where it has a sorto f murder mystery aspect to it. 

Alright, so those who know me know that I am a gamer. Last year I was a backer of the kickstarter for the Ouya project. The Ouya is a small, very cheap open source gaming platform built on Android. The whole concept is actually pretty cool. This week I received my kickstarter Ouya and decided to take some photos. 

From a hardware perspective it is actually a pretty nice looking little box. The build quality seems pretty good and it is really easy to get access to the components. The control is nicely ergonomic and the face plates for the batters are held in place by magnets that attach to the screws on the chassis of the controller internals. A really interesting design choice which I think is brilliant. 

Overall the software at this point is still pretty rough. This is a beta of a v1.0 production. The Ouya interface is pretty bare bones and a bit laggy at times. You can see a lot of elements of the underlying android mobile interface if you delve too deep and there really aren't too many games for it at this point. I really hope it succeeds in the long run though. The idea of having the open platform that is cheap to develop on for students and whatever is really promising. It really connects with some of the DIY nature you see coming out of the Make people with the 3D printers and Arduino, etc. 

Music

The past couple weeks have been incredibly busy ones, but actually fairly productive for music production. I have a couple of songs sitting in the pipeline that I simply need to sit down and record. I hope to perhaps to get some of that this weekend since I had an opportunity to clean off my hard drive on my laptop to free up some recording room. I am very much due for a new computer, but times have just been busy and I am actually waiting for a re-fresh of the iMacs from Apple. 

I also need to sit down and finalize an album out of the faux 8-bit tracks that I recorded in most of 2010. They are all done, but just need some polishing before re-recording them. 

On a slightly related note I need to finalize the albums page here on the blog so people can once again find my albums on the net. That page has just been languishing over the past month as I worked out details for the new blog format. 

Reading

I am slowing working my way through A Game of Thrones, which I hope to have done within the next couple of weeks. It has been close to three months now on it and I have to say I am fully enjoying it. Not quite sure what book I want to read next, but I will definitely have to take a break from this series. I don’t think I can handle another 900 page book. 

Gaming

Over the past month I have enjoyed a few games and I worked through Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and Singularity. Both are fine enough, but Singularity took me a bit by surprise. I have also gone back to Halo: Reach for some multi-player action which has been quite a fun time. I have also had a really good time with Onlive and the micro-console. The service is by no means perfect, but there are some good games on there and I have really been working through Trine over the past couple of weeks. The game is quite fun, but a bit long for what it is.