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Lol. I just got back from World Cyber Games Championships at a convention center down town. Well, they had competition but the main attraction today was a Warcraft 3 tournament, which I wasn't really interested in. But there were some cool things.

 

First of all, tons of shwag, not super awesome shwag, but it is fun shwag. Tons of pens, stickers, 3 Games for Windows blinking yo-yos, lanyards, 4 T-shirts, a deck of cards, and 3 copies of Day of Defeat: Source (!).

 

But anyway, I saw some total kick-ass Gears of War players from Italy playing, and some Korean dude squaring off with a Ukrainian guy in Warcraft 3. Then I got to play Portal for a couple minutes and play a very laggy Crysis for 10 minutes.

 

Crysis was like FarCry on super steroids, but the settings were clearly on max and it was a pain to play because of all the motion blur and the 15-20 fps. They even had a disclaimer under the screen: "Playing on Alpha code with unoptimized drivers. Drivers will be optimized by launch." But the graphics were bad-assed. You can pick up pretty much anything and you're characters hands show if holding it. The best parts was when I was using a tree to hide from a .50 cal which promptly was shredded in two. And another was when a baddie threw a grenade at me when I was next to a building, blowing half of it away- a total "Oh Snap!" moment. It was kind of funny because I was expecting it to happen. And lastly, I made a few guys watching me laugh when I found a chicken and picked it up and threw it at a soldier. :D

 

I also played Guitar Hero 3, but I didn't like the song I played, I couldn't hear my music, and I played like ****, the guitar felt mushy and you have to select your difficulty BEFORE you select a song! Rock Band was a bigger thing and I couldn't play it, you had to form a "group" before playing it on-stage.

 

Anyway, it wasn't as big as I had thought, there was only a dozen or so stands but a lot of demo units. Also, I was approached by a dude named Erik Chan, the leader of BP Games and I bought a copy of Harmotion for $2. Sure, it's a free game, but I felt good supporting an Indie game studio. I haven't played it yet, but it looks fun. It's a multiplayer Shump, which sounds interesting.

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The good news is, I got a job. About ****in' time too. It's nothing special, and it's not great.

 

I work at a movie theatre. I start off at $8.75/hr and get payed commission for each combo, upsize, or adding butter to popcorn I sell.

 

So, once I get my first paycheck (or second), I might splurge and get Halo 3, Xbox Live, and a router.

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How on Earth do you guys do dnd over skype?

 

It seems like it would be very difficult...

 

I actually just got back from a session. We started low level and so far I'm just a straightfoward level 2 Druid.

 

But it's quite difficult to plan gaming sessions during the school year, so I'm quite curious about this concept of dnd via skype.

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How on Earth do you guys do dnd over skype?

 

It seems like it would be very difficult...

 

I actually just got back from a session. We started low level and so far I'm just a straightfoward level 2 Druid.

 

But it's quite difficult to plan gaming sessions during the school year, so I'm quite curious about this concept of dnd via skype.

 

I bought a program called Screen Monkey (so I can tie it in to a purchase for purposes of this thread. :D ). There are several tabletop RPG/DnD programs available, both free and paid, that can be used online--that one happened to be the one that worked best for all of us and didn't cost an arm and a leg. There is a free version that you can use to try out to see if it works on your system.

The program has a chat feature and an online dice roller (everyone's on their honor if you don't use it), and you can use their maps or upload yours. You can even draw your own if you like. I'm starting the Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde published campaign which has maps already. I just scanned and cropped each part of the map and saved as a jpg to upload. There are little icons that each person can use as their miniature to move around the map. I host the game and my computer is the 'server' for everyone else to log in via a browser. It works pretty quickly for me, but I have DSL. The maps I've used so far worked OK except for one that was fairly high res and slowed down the load times for some people. Anyway, once everyone has logged in, they pick one of the icons to serve as their miniature and place it on the map, and move it around as needed on their turn. We use PDF files for the character sheets, so I always have a copy of everyone's character, and we Skype during the game (someone else hosts the call) to say what our characters/monsters are all doing. It works pretty well. :) PM me if you'd like more info.

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