I had a weird little flashback to childhood the other day, when I came across an odd button in the elevator at my doctor’s office. The button, instead of reading “STOP” or “Emergency”, read RUN STOP, kind of like the old Commodore 64 keyboards. I don’t think I’ve seen that command (outside of the fake keyboards programmed into some Virtual Console games) in 20+ years.
This time, I’m trying to figure out how to make my new iPhone Bluetooth Headset function with Ventrilo, the chat program our guild uses during WoW raids. (Yeah — tech geek meets gamer nerd, I know. But does anyone know the answer to this?)
I was told by a Best Buy employee with gamer cred that headsets with Bluetooth 2.0* capability would be able to pair with the PC and function as a microphone in Ventrilo. While I can get the pairing part to work just fine, I’m not able to get the mic in Vent working. At all. Ever.
But Grant procured me a free USB microphone/headset, so I may just give up on this whole Bluetooth-to-Vent thing. And besides, my Apple Bluetooth hotness is fabulous, whether I can raid with it or not.
Despite all the many reviews pooh-poohing its admittedly shitty audio quality and short battery life, I love having a headset that a) has a charge and pairing indicator on my phone, b) doesn’t painfully grip my ear like every other headset I’ve tried, and c) makes me look like much less of a tool than other Bluetooth headset wearers.
* And as an aside, Bluetooth 2.0 sounded totally made up, until I Googled it. What WILL these kids come up with next.
So in a nutshell, working at Nintendo has been lovely. According to company policy, however, I shall not be discussing anything remotely contentful relating to my work there.
Thus, Imaginary Readers, I leave you with this linguistic/gamer tidbit. On the fridge in the break room, there is a sign that asks employees to take home their food “nightly”. And of course, someone added an extra K.
Viva la nerd. I like this place. :)
For a recent World of Warcraft raid, I actually dug a cooler out of our storage closet and filled it with ice, beer, Mexican Coke for me, and Diet Pepsi for Grant.
You know, so we could enjoy our favorite beverages without having to get up in the middle of a boss fight.
We are such nerds.
So I must say, I’m pretty pleased with my latest innovation that allows Grant to enjoy his DDR like the King of Cosmos intended.
Ever since we moved into our new apartment he hasn’t been able to play, because something about the ’70s shag carpeting in here just doesn’t agree with the grippy bottom of the DDR pad. All grippiness seems to have disappeared, so the pad would slip and slide around while he was jumping, and it just wasn’t workable.
The thing is, the next level of quality in dance pads are the Cobalt Flux ones, that retail for $300 or so. So I started brainstorming ways we might apply some sort of fixit solution to our existing pads, at least until we win the lottery (or until we’re both gainfully employed again).
I couldn’t think of what might work well, but it came to me when I was cleaning out my closet and I came across an extra yoga mat. Perfect! Sticky, grippy, durable, but not so sticky that it has to actually get adhesive on our carpet. So I bought a hot glue gun, trimmed my extra yoga mat to fit the pad, and slapped it on there.
We tried it out the other day, and they seem to work just great!
ETA: Except that we’ve since discovered that the down arrow is broken. On both of our pads. So we were left with zero more dance pads and one fewer yoga mats. Ah well, we managed to borrow a Cobalt Flux pad from a pal to test it out, so maybe we’ll upgrade someday.
Dammit.
So this iPhone thing is pretty damn cool. But I have to say, I feel pretty damn slow on the whole “über-intuitive Apple interface” thing. Given that I’ve never owned an iPod, or even a decent MP3 player or a complicated phone, I feel pretty behind. I only even touched iTunes a few months ago, and I managed to royally screw up all libraries of all music in a few short hours.
That said, I’m damn proud of how well I’ve done so far! Apple’s pedantic but clear videos helped some, and fellow iPhone owners also weighed in with some good tips. I managed to get some great apps, like a Wikipedia button and of course Bejeweled. I’m bummed to learn that the iPod version of Peggle doesn’t work on my phone, but perhaps it will someday soon.
And OH MY GOD, I can listen to MUSIC and write EMAILS and TEXTS and NOTES and APPOINTMENTS and look up DIRECTIONS and take PICTURES, ALL WITH THE SAME DEVICE. I know this is old news for many, but it’s brand-spankin-new for me, and I friggin’ love it. I can’t get over how functional and efficient I am! Read the rest…
Grant and I started playing World of Warcraft a little over a year ago. 
And it’s no secret that I’ve gotten into it since then. But recently, that kind of escalated.
We finally hit level 70 with our respective characters, which (for you non-gamers) is the highest level achievable in the game. And ever since hitting level 70, the game changed significantly.
Now we’re totally hardcore in a way we never were before — Blizzard was so right on it with making satisfying end-game content that we never run out of cool stuff to do. And in fact, instead of feeling like we need to complete lame quest chains for the sake of XP, we can just abandon anything that annoys us and know there’s plenty else to do. Sure, some of it is repeats, so it can get dull — but you learn and hone your strategy and grouping techniques the whole time, so it stays pretty fresh (at least so far).
Couple that with the fact that we were crowned guild officers shortly after achieving 70 and, well, we’re pretty WoW-tastic these days. So for you non-gaming Imaginary Readers, I just want to warn you that there may be some more video game drivel coming up. In fact, I’m so WoW-focused that I’m even creating a tag specifically for WoW.
Just thought I’d warn you all, since there’s something of an anti-WoW stigma out there — even within the video game industry. Just the other day, an old high school classmate I randomly added on Facebook messaged me to say I’d better stay away from WoW and that it was a huge waste of time. Not that I can argue, but… hell no! We have so much FUN wasting our time like this. And I feel like my learning curve in the past month has more than quadrupled.
ETA, since Grant was jealous that he didn’t get a screen shot too:
Cute how he had to awkwardly crop in part of the WoW logo in order to fit his GINORMOUS BLAZING SWORD, eh? That’s my man.
Now I don’t mean to claim that we’re the first, nor the best, of the Rock Band mockery centers. Certainly, there are a plethora of superior attempts* at mocking the most breakable hardware ever shipped. But alas, we don’t just Photoshop here — we show you the real thing. Apparently Grant and a couple of our drummer pals are just a little too rockin’ for the game’s max tolerance level.
The pedal smashup happened a few weeks into our ownership of this magnificent game, and we got a new one shipped to us pretty quickly. Then, we broke the drumsticks (although there’s no real photographic evidence — you can feel the crack but you can’t really see it too well).
And then, of course, we broke through the actual PAD. We didn’t even notice for several weeks, because Grant tried to do some Rock Band arts & crafts to quiet the rat-tat-tat sound of the cheap plastic drumsmacks.**
And mind you, this is AFTER we already broke the guitar, and dealt with a USB hub that arrived broken. Yep, the mic is the only component so far that hasn’t kicked it, and we’re just counting. Let’s just say I’m glad they have as liberal a return policy as they do — although the “2nd Day Air” promises are still unfulfilled over a week later. Come on, EA, you owe us some instruments!
* H/T Something Awful
** Note to Imaginary Readers: Don’t bother attempting to do this. The end result is bits of felt all over your apartment, super-sore wrists from reduced springback while drumming, and the possibility of not even realizing when you crack your drum set. While they help a little with the noise, it’s not worth the tradeoff.
Trumpet is just not a fan of our favorite new video game. When we rock out, he seems to think we’re in distress and need his help. This is especially true when there’s singing involved, and even more so when one of us is singing while playing guitar or bass. In fact, just this evening he jumped on the table in front of Grant (while G was belting out Creep by Radiohead) and started licking Grant’s fingers during his Expert fretwork. Thanks, kitty!
In fact, the very first week we got our microphone stand, Trumpet expressed his displeasure at Grant singing while playing even more strongly, as evidenced by the following incredibly shitty cell phone pic, taken hastily before he descended:
Sometimes when I’m crooning particularly enthusiastically (and not so melodiously), I’ll feel him hugging my leg and pawing at my knee (no claws), sort of pseudo-mounting it in distress (and not horniness, trust me. His feline amorous advances come in another form, which caused me to sleep with a spray bottle of water in bed with me the whole time Grant was in Japan, so I could deter him from humping my leg without fully having to wake up.)
He only seems to really freak out like this during the long, drawn-out, higher-pitched stretches, like that whole “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeee’s ruuuuuuuuuunin oooooooout the dooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooor…” bit, and the entire 30 Seconds to Mars song. And thankfully, Grant and I are the only people he’s comfortable mounting/licking/etc. When guests come over to rock out, he just contents himself to sit there and yowl along. I wish I could upload audio for that, I really do.
Okay, so I’m not really a videogame fan like dear Grant is, but this is just too good not to blog about. A friend of ours who’s at Valve worked on a very cool game called Portal, which was released last week. Now obviously, not being a hardcore gamer, I’m not of the same caliber as Penny Arcade or even less official gamer blogs, but I still enjoyed it so much that I felt like I had to provide you Imaginary Readers with my input, particularly after I heard the theme song that airs during the final credits after you beat the game.
They just do so many great little touches throughout this puzzle game — I don’t want to spoil it by being too explicit in the details, but it was a lot of fun for me, even as a spectator/backseat gamer. The game includes delightfully funny VO and really interesting gameplay/puzzles that sort of made my head hurt, but in a good way, like trying to do integrals after not even balancing your check manually in seven years. And it’s damn fun to look at, which is even more exciting since our friend apparently was responsible for a bunch of the cool portal effects. Woo!
And the name of the creepy company in which you play the awesome funny entertaining game is Aperture. COME on! This is quality stuff. I’m pretty sure if I actually tried to play, I’d be crying out begging for Tetris within ten minutes — but hey, as spectator gaming goes, this one gets a ten for me. Way to go, Valve.
