Biggs' Zone

A Geek's Cogitations, Conjectures and other Cortical Experiences

The MMO Times: First Contact

By

On April 10, 2012

In Gaming, MMO Times, MMORPG

Issue 30

Hey Gamers! How does another issue of The MMO Times sound? If any of you are confused by the name of this issue, April 5th was First Contact Day because April 5th, 2063 is when Zeframe Cochrane makes first contact with the Vulcans, so there is some useless nerd minutia for you.

So this issue we have more SWTOR news, including a launch date for Game Update 1.2 (WOOT!). There is also some more beta and pre-order information for Guild Wars 2 and TERA. Again, I didn’t really talk too much about Mists of Pandaria because there aren’t a lot of details that are unknown at this point. Contrary to what I have said in previous posts (and on Google+) I actually have been trying out the MoP beta, perhaps I will cover that in a blog post.

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What’s Your First Contact?

By

On April 5, 2012

In Gaming

I want to start off by saying Happy First Contact Day gamers, trekkies and sci-fi geeks! The second thing I want to say is that this post is not asking when you had a close encounter (sorry Fran Drescher). Instead, since this blog is predominately a gamer blog, I thought I would ask what your first gaming experience was. You can choose any platform (i.e. console, PC, MMO, etc). I just thought it would be fun to do something to commemorate this truly nerdy day.

Obviously I will start. The original Nintendo was my debut into gaming. Super Mario Brothers, FTW! I also played a lot of Blades of Steel with my dad, which was often entertaining because he didn’t like to lose. NES became Sega (which was the first gaming system I bought myself) where I played a lot of Mortal Kombat and Sonic, then Super NES and pretty much every iteration of Nintendo after that. I never bought a Playstation. I didn’t play XBox until I met my wife, she had the original XBox and we still have the XBox 360. We never got the Kinect and probably never will.

PC gaming didn’t really start until freshmen year in high school and it started off slow. It was my parents first computer and it was Windows 3.1 on an IBM Aptiva, it had a 4 MB hard drive, which was HUGE back then. I mostly played things like Descent and Sim-City. It wasn’t until college, when I got my own PC, that I really got into PC gaming. First Person Shooters were my primary gaming medium of choice. I think I played Half-Life my entire college career.

It wasn’t until a “Fuzzy” friend of mine convinced me to check out World of Warcraft that I tried out MMORPGs. The rest, as they say, is history.

Soapbox: Rioting is Irresponsible and Foolish

By

On April 3, 2012

In General Cogitation, Soapbox

First, congrats to UK for beating Kansas. I was happy to see Kansas lose since they were responsible for taking Purdue out of the tournament. However, I was sad to see the fan response in Lexington. Rioting is not celebrating! I don’t understand the rationale behind burning of public or private property to symbolize joy and euphoria (unfortunately the rioting in Lexington took a step for the worse when someone was shot – though not critically).

What the hell, people?!?

I was at Purdue in 1999 when the students rioted because the men’s basketball team advanced to the Elite Eight. The students ignited a bonfire that burned so hot it literally melted the blacktop; a scar remained until the university ripped up the road and repaved it. Our tuition went up 12% the year following that riot, and yet somehow everyone was alright with that because it happened twice the two years after that. I like to see my school do well just as much as the next guy, but I didn’t want a tuition increase to pay for the damage caused by the reckless and deviate behaviors of the other students.

Here’s an intelligent thought: how about we find a less destructive way of showing our pride in our school and athletes? I cannot fathom how looting fraternities to burn couches, or tipping over dumpsters to burn garbage demonstrates even a shred of school pride (or dignity). It’s disgraceful and unsportsmanlike.

/end soapbox

Best. Quote. Ever.

By

On April 1, 2012

In Uncategorized

“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy
and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection.
It means never having to play it cool about how much
you like something.
It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat
childish level rather that behave like a supposed adult.
Being a geek is extremely liberating.”
– Simon Pegg

App Spotlight: TurboScan (& NotesPlus)

By

On March 30, 2012

In App Spotlight

Perhaps this will be a new category on my blog because I have been playing around with various apps, some are free, some you have to pay for (I’m also starting to write a few of my own). Honestly I rarely pay for an app unless I am certain that I will get the appropriate use out of it for even the $0.99 that I pay for it. However, when an app comes around that really gets the geek tingling, I feel like I should share it with others. After all, I think the best way news of an app is spread is through word of mouth. I hope, one day, someone will do this with an app I write.

A co-worker encouraged me to download an app called TurboScan. It is an iPhone app for now, though I can see there being an iPad version for the new iPad. Basically this app “scans” a document using the phone’s camera (so you will probably have the best results with the iPhone 4 or 4S). If you use the Sure Scan 3x feature, you have better results with the scan. Sure Scan 3x takes three pictures of the document and essentially creates the best possible scan of the document using a merge of the three photos.

I think this app is great. The quality of the scan is almost undeniable and you can sync it with iTunes File Sharing, Dropbox, Evernote, or email it as a PDF. This app becomes an excellent business tool when coupled with NotesPlus (v3), which I use all the time at work. I can scan in a requirements document, e-mail it to my iPad and load the PDF into NotesPlus where I can add additional annotations just like I would to the printed document.

TurboScan should be available to download from the iTunes App Store and costs $1.99. As I mentioned above, it is only available for the iPhone (as of the date of this post).

Check it out!

The MMO Times: The Panda’s Are Coming!!

By

On March 29, 2012

In Gaming, MMORPG

Issue 29

Hello Again, Gamers! Despite the title, there won’t be a lot of Mists of Pandaria information in this issue, mainly because there is so much out there that I didn’t want to flood this post with articles just about the next WoW expansion. If you really want to check out all the upcoming features for MoP I would head over to MMO-Champion, they have quite a comprehensive collection of information.

Instead I tried to keep things more about other games because, despite Blizzard’s best efforts, there are other games out there to play then just WoW and after nearly eight years, the other games are just more interesting. I did include a couple of WoW-related posts but I think people might enjoy some new information about upcoming (new) MMOs like Pathfinder Online and World of Darkness.

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