I love my thumb too much

A strange thing happened last Thursday. At out local game shop, my little brother and I were playing in the FNM tournament. I was playing an original deck of my own design and he was playing a Jund deck, which I got from the internet. The deck was complete, save for the lands and the Maelstom Pulses. And still, he managed to end the night with a score of 2-2. One of his wins was in the mirror against a fully loaded Jund deck. He made some really good plays and he actually did well.

But now, I'm looking at an Elder Dragon Highlander deck of his and.... I've completed 3 decks for him in the past week, but this one is terrible. Plain horrible. I mean, he tried to make a burn/discard deck with Megrim and Burning Inquiry (which could make him lose his best cards) this week, but that is nothing compared to the mess he made with this deck.

His deck is based around Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund. Dragons are big, flashy and awesome to him, which I cannot deny. However, the deck is horrible. I count 16 Dragons, including his general, but there is no way for him to get things on the field quickly. Any form of reanimation is lacking, tons of proxied dragons and half of the deck isn't exactly synergistic. Now, I could fix the deck, scouring through all of my boxes, then through his boxes and then through a friend's boxes. But I won't.

You see, I read this article about a year ago and whenever I'm thumbing through collections, I make sure that I don't strain my thumb too much. I do everything with it and I somewhat dislike needles. Now, this week, I have thumbed through my collection (and my bro's and my friend's) atleast two times to make EDH decks work. I spent about three hours getting his Thraximundar EDH deck to work, finally finding one (!) damned Torrent of Souls at midnight. I did the same to build his Jund deck and my deck luckily formed from the cards I found while doing that.

Now, usually I would help people, it's what I usually do. But not if there is no gratitude to be found at all. And I don't want to be known in my family as "The Thumb". You see, my little bro once had an ingrown toenail. It was getting all green and infected. But he refused to simply go to the doctor, have it sedated and fixed. No, he had to be put under full sedation, just to get his toe fixed. Ofcourse, his toe became very sensitive and he managed to stub it against anything. Thus, he was called "the Toe".

P.S.: I'd watch the video in the link. Very entertaining.
P.P.S.: Wow, I avoided so many thumb jokes. As a rule of thumb, I usually make tons of them. See what I did there?

Rosheen Meanderer

General:

Creatures: Ant Queen Apocalypse Hydra Avatar of Fury Bloodbraid Elf Civic Wayfinder Dragon Broodmother Feral Hydra Great Sable Stag Ivy Elemental Magus of the Vineyard Master of the Wild Hunt Mossbridge Troll Plated Geopede Protean Hydra Rhox Vexing Shusher Viridian Shaman Wall of Blossoms Warbreak Trumpeter Wood Elves Sorceries: Banefire Creeping Mold Demonfire Detonate Earthquake Explosive Vegitation Firecat Blitz Harmonize Hurricane New Frontiers Rampant Growth Savage Twister Stream of Life Sylvan Scrying Titan's Revenge Vengeful Rebirth Instants: Artifact Mutation Guttural Response Harrow Inferno Pyroblast Molder Naturalize Red Elemental Blast Seedtime Shunt Smash Squall Line Turf Wound Windstorm

Enchantments: Abundance Elfhame Sanctuary Helix Pinnacle Primal Rage Upwelling Artifacts: Chalice of the Void Darksteel Ingot Firewild Borderpost Gruul Signet Sigil of Distinction Sisay's Ring Sol Grail Ur-Golem's Eye Planeswalkers: Garruk Wildspeaker Sarkhan Vol Lands: 13 Mountains 10 Forests Forgotten Cave Gruul Turf Hickory Woodlot Karplusan Forest Mogg Hollows Ravaged Highlands Rootbound Crag Temple of the False God Terramorphic Expanse Timberland Ruins Tranquil Thicket

Funnies and awesomes of the week (some NSFW)

Hawt Cammy from Street Fighter cosplay (a tad NSFW)

P.S.: There you have it, pancake, you asked for it.
P.P.S.: My local gaming store has its forums operational now :3

Raptr

Xfire used to be my instant messaging system of choice. This habit originated when I used to use other IM programs, which would minimize the game that I was playing, with all sorts of problems that would come with staying defenceless in one place for a while. Even worse, the trivial message could even take my computer 5 mins to recover, especially if the game came from Steam. But then I got Xfire and quickly convinced my friends to run Xfire aswell, mainly for playing with each other.

But Xfire is rather stale, support for other IM systems used to be run by another program (and now by an alpha feature) and anything besides my PC doesn't exist according to Xfire. Which is a shame, because most of my gaming doesn't happen on my laptop anymore. That era ended a long time ago. All I play on it is MTGO and TF2.
When my little brother got a Razer Naga for his birthday, a small flyer for Raptr came with it. On the flyer they had the cheesiest comic ever, to show what Raptr can do. For the ones that don't know Raptr, it's an IM and community system built around the fact that gamers just might have more to play on than a PC. But at the time, I didn't feel any need to switch, so we threw it out.

But recently, I found one of my old friends using Raptr. A flyer isn't enough incentive, but that friend was. I was quickly sold. You see, I do not like any clutter on my computer. Mainly because I am far to lazy to clean up anyway, so less programs = less hassle. That's why I used programs such as Miranda to reduce the amount of IM programs.
Raptr does the same, accepting AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, Xfire and so on, while still keeping Xfire's greatest upside: In-game chat.

But that isn't all. Raptr also supports tracking for your games, just like Xfire. But again, it tracks more. Raptr tracks games played on PC, Xbox, Playstation and also tracks a wide array of flash games. And if you are a tad more retro than that, you can manually add your games from about all consoles, like the SNES or NES.
In short: Raptr watches you game.

Raptr also mimics Xfire by having a profile page for you, but extends this to a live feed, keeping people updated on what you play. And again, it does far more. All of the games you own or play can be added to your library, which quickly ends up being a gigantic list (over 125 games for me already, and haven't even added all of my games), neatly sorted by platform.
You can also write reviews for your games, in addition to a 5-star based ranking system. Unfortunately, it's hard not to be reminded that you are on the internet, where stupid people lurk. Apparently, Need for Speed started with street racing, there were no titles prior to NsF:Underground.

Still, that isn't all. Each platform has it's own features that come with them. Trophies on PS3, friend-codes on Wii and DS and Achievements on the 360 and Steam. There is place for all of them. Where xbox.com only compares two people, Raptr can compare 4 people, whether you want to see Steam, Xbox, PS3 or even WoW achievements. Raptr's great strength lies in the details. It simply packages lots of services and stores them in one convenient place.

But are there any downsides? Ofcourse there are. Raptr isn't exactly a velociraptr. It took about a week before it had found all of my achievements and games. It might have taken longer if I hadn't posted in the "Raptr can't find my XBL/PSN/Steam/underwear"-threads.
Another downside is that if you use MSN and Xfire, you might have duplicate friends. Bear in mind that Raptr only takes your contacts from each IM service and simply shows the online ones, grouped by service.

So yeah, it's a bit rough around the edges. But what do you expect from a beta?

P.S.: Have I mentioned it's Facebook/Twitter support? Even the 360 itself is compatible now.

Updatings

Just when I was writing a post detailing my FNM endeavors of last week, I get a call saying that tons of work have to be done. Joy. Happiness filled my heart...not. Atleast it made sure that this past week produced no posts, no gamerscore, no material for my D&D adventure or anything Magic-related. Well, some ideas, but nothing tangible.

For my very first D&D campaign, set in my own world, I have the idea of the players investigating kidnappings by a local barbarian tribe. Nothing special until you find out that they live in the nearby rainforest on a giant crocodile. Which one could have guessed by the barbarians' croc-themed attire. Ofcourse, this isn't a normal giant crocodile with a village on it's back.
Stangely, I got the idea from Banjo-Kazooie's swamp level, which has a giant statue of a croc's head in it.

Modern Warfare 2 was released this week and although I don't have the game, due to finances, I certainly feel the impact of it in my environment. People of which you thought they'd never have played a game, let alone own a console, suddenly cannot stop talking about their multiplayer 'fishing stories'. Seriously, my killing spree was this big! Really! And then I made three headshots in a row!
The tall tales never seem to end. I want to join in, dammit.

The main reason for not having Modern Warfare 2 is the fact that I picked up Tekken 6 two weeks ago. It's a great game, especially now that the series is on my platform of choice aswell. the achievements aren't hard and it's tons of fun when playing with friends. Do note that the co-op version of the Scenario Campaign is not in yet. That has to be patched in in December. Unfortunately, a friend of mine threw a mattress at the Xbox yesterday (by mistake), which made the Xbox churn out a sound that is best described as twenty cats clawing on a chalkboard.
After shutting down the console, we found out that my Tekken 6 disk now has a beautiful circle engraved in it. Yay! So now I can only access the main menu, all other parts are giving me black screens.
Oh, and my headset broke this week.

tl;dr version: long week, no gaming, broke a headset and a perfectly fine game.

P.S.: I am used to a compact laptop keyboard. The many errors made when using a friend's normal cheap crap keyboard (crapboard?) are a tad frustrating. Which is only a mild understatement.

P.P.S.: Throwing, hurling, tossing, catapulting or any other word somewhat synonymous with launching an object through the air is not recommended to preform on an Xbox with a mattress. Just a heads up. An FYI.

P.P.P.S.: I want a photocamera, I dislike using replacement images for my broken items.

I just realised something. I just hit 100 posts on the new version of this blog the other day. Nice.

I almost forgot the 'F' in Shift.

When someone mentioned Need for Speed, I would usually start to think about the terrible things EA did to the franchise. Like the urban tuning streetracing thing. Underground, Most Wanted, Carbon, ProStreet. Horrid. I'm not saying that I'm a race-game connoisseur, but I do know what I like.
When Race Driver: GRID came out, over a year ago, I immediately rushed out to the stores to buy it. A friend of mine persuaded me to download the demo onto my 360. I loved the raw style, the fact that it's about racing and not about nonsense. I loved that it wasn't NfS. Ofcourse, Codemasters is a bit less likely to ruin a racing game than EA, but still.

The racing madness continued when the same friend showed me Forza Motorsport 2. I was still working on GRID, so a knack for cornering and general driving was still there. Nevertheless, I found myself next to the track often, simply because of it's simulative nature, as opposed to GRID's arcade-y approach. Having met such different games, I automatically built some sort of gradient in gameplay for them. NfS far on the arcade side, Forza at the simulation side and GRID in the middle.

And this is where NfS: Shift comes in. A few weeks ago, a friend handed me the game, mainly for the gamerscore. So I jammed the disc in my console and started playing. My first reaction was "Pretty." My second reaction was "Where the ... is my car going?". For the ones that haven't played the latest incarnation; Shift is set in an alternate reality. It's a big claim, okay, but I has proof.
Usually, cars prefer the track over the gravel next to the track. Also, cars usually manage to be handled. Each car feels like you're walking a 7-ton rabid poodle with ADD and a sugar rush. One slight tap from an opponent sends your car skidding all over the track, often taking more than ten seconds to recover. That is, if you don't have to take your car out of the boarding with a spatula. In retrospect, a spatula would make a nice pre-order gift.
But that is nothing compared to another strange phenomenon. Apparently, a cheap car costing about €40.000 can be taken far into the highest tiers (you need heavy-duty leashes though) with a few adjustments, making a total of around half a million. However, a car that costs (when upgraded) about as much as the CEO of a bank gets as a bonus (let's say 1.2 million) is more likely to crash in the first corner. EA has managed to make the cost of a car directly proportional to the inability to win a race with it. An astounding feat, I have to say.

Ofcourse, the above paragraph needs to be taken with a small grain of salt. Just a tiny bit. The poodle only weighs 6 tons. The game also has it's good sides aswell. The game looks great. Just beautiful. Okay, the damage is nothing compared to the way GRID has shown it to us, but hey, it's EA. There is a fine array of cars, mostly European and the amount of shopping carts is kept to a minimum. You have proper cars and then you have shopping carts BMWs.
The tracks are great too and form a mostly complete set of circuits all over the world. It even has the 'real' Nürburgring (take that, GRID)! Still, no love for Zandvoort.
But the best part is that this actually is hope for the people that enjoyed the old NfS titles. Let's just hope that EA does continue down this path.

Oh, and the title? Atleast it got your attention.

P.S.: EA and gnomes are the bane of my existence. In other news: Water is wet. Full report at 5.
P.P.S.: Horrible Photoshop is horrible.