The temperature outside the Eat My Bomb Chicago offices has reached 70 degrees during the day, signalling the end of Winter Games 2006. I’ve only officially completed one game out of five. It makes me wonder, what the hell happened? I had completed the wonderful Mary Kate and Ashley game, was making great progress in the addictive World of Warcraft, had made it 70% of the way through the classic Parasite Eve, and had made decent progress on the entertaining Stubbs the Zombie.

Now Winter Games is over, and I have only game completed on my list. Nutdogs.

I think I can attribute this to a few things. For one, I spent a little bit too much time playing World of Warcraft (no surprise), Ghost Recon, and Rainbox Six it’s distracted me from the other games. My goal was level 58 on WoW, and I should have just left it at that–instead, I went for level 60. I’ll write up a little more about level 60 on WoW later–but that reminds me, I never wrote about it, and so it never got updated on my list. Ugh. The new gaming rig I built also kept me from the console games.

Also, I think I could have spent more time on Parasite Eve to finish it, perhaps even sacrificing Stubbs to do it. That would have put me at three out of five games completed–a moderately acceptable result. And also a hypothetical reality.

Well, I guess it’s just like being a Cubs fan–there’s always next year.

If you haven’t seen this video demonstration of the game “Spore”, you must watch it right now. Basically you take a small spore and evolve it to an animal, then create a city, more cities, take over the world, and then explore and populate other hundreds of thousands of other worlds and galaxies that other gamers have created. Words can’t really fully explain how immense and crazy this game is. In the video Will Wright is the speaker at the Game Developer’s Conference.

Innovative games like this could completely change the future of gaming.

The site I’ve been working on the past few weeks is finally live! The site wheresmywow.com is way for players to report when they’re having problems connecting to a World of Warcraft server. The reports are compiled and are listed on the site, that way users can determine whether they are having a problem with their local connection or if there’s a server outage. Blizzard has their own official status page, but it’s been inaccurate—particularly when there’s a network or authentication server problem that keeps people from logging on.

Where’s My WoW is a learning system, so if more people are reporting outages it will learn and compensate for it with future reports. I have a few ads on the site, but I’m not planning on making a lot of money; I’m mostly worried about getting a big bandwidth bill, so hopefully the ads will help a bit.

Now the trick is to get some more people using the site; the more people that use it, the more accurate the server reports will be.

You’d better let me get to the next level, Stubbs! Don’t make me go Dodongo on your ass!

(Read on …)

Mary-Kate and Ashley bring along their cellphones when they drive

Indeed I’m reviewing the game that was forced upon me for the Secret Satan "gift" exchange. For those of you responsible for sending this to me, I wish bad things for you. Bad things of the bubbly female teenage type.

I apologize for really taking my time with this title, but I didn’t really feel motivated. I’ve finally played it, and thank goodness this game doesn’t take many hours to play. It’s basically a Mario Party ripoff, with up to four players moving around a game board and the occasional minigame where the players have to duke it out.

(Read on …)

We’re about a month into Winter Games 2006 and I wanted to post a quick update on my progress on the games. Unfortunately I haven’t made a whole lot of progress overall; my purchase of the gaming PC has slowed me down a bit.

That’s not to say I haven’t made any progress at all! I’ve now reached level 53 in World of Warcraft, only 5 levels away from my goal of level 58+. I’m finding making progress in the game is really easier than expected, unbelievably. Even though it takes much more work and experience points to get to the next level, there is enough content at the high levels that it just playing the game regularly allows leveling while keeping things interesting.

I really want to check out Stubbs the Zombie, and I have a copy of the game for the Mac. However, since my Mac is a bit outdated at this point (and doesn’t *quite* meet the system requirements to run the game), I’d like to play it on the new PC gaming machine. I may borrow a copy of the PC version to play it in all of its glory. Stay tuned.