Had a very good weekend but not much overall going on. Couple of updates all around.

I’m a little late on the ball of this one, but I wanted to give a moment to honor the passing of Gary Gygax, one of the founding fathers of D&D. I have read many others speak to his life and achievements far more elegantly than I could express so I will only say that his works changed my life in a very real way and his spirit for the game will be missed.

In some happier news, my cousin Blair and his wife Andrea are going to have a baby! This is the first of my cousins to have a kid so this is kind of cool. Of course, my wife’s side of the family has been doing this for years.

From the Ashes has some new stuff up as of last week. Dustin and DJ have both added some pictures to the gallery. Also, we now have After Action Reports for the Halo 3 statistics section. I’m pretty proud of that little setup (full of Bungie website graphics for the weapons and medals too).

The more I play of Lost Odyssey the more I am convinced it is the best RPG for the 360, period. It’s also good proof that a Japanese RPG can be done well on the American platform. A few things I have noticed that I like:

-The story is good.
-The plot is pretty standard but more than acceptable.
-The characters have pre-existing relationships.
-The love story is not some sappy teenage affair (big plus).
-What I thought was going to be a series of depressing events has turned into an uplifting experience.

In sum the game is fucking fantastic and I recommend you play it now if you are even a partial fan of RPGs. I think it is probably better than FFXII but it’s a close call.

The rumors and release material for 4e continues to impress. I’ve seen some pre-release character sheets and I am very eager to see more. Were I a rich man (which I am definitely not) I’d consider purchasing the developer’s OGL SRD which runs about $5,000 but will allow developers to put out material for 4e faster. A good idea for a publisher. The rest of us will have to chomp at the bit until June 6th.

That’s about it for now. Have a good week!

Back up and running. My wife tells me I’ve been neglecting my blog, which I have so I figured it was time to get back up and running. A few things have happened since then. I’m really proud of all the Halo modifications to the FTA site. The video capture and movie presentation of our Warthog run through the Ark is fantastic, but took about 4 hours of editing to accomplish. I’ve got a lot of respect for those guys that can put together high quality machinima films.

In other news, I’m working on my first SSL ASP.Net application for work. This will be an interesting trial run because it is a high priority project and I don’t have the skills I need to do it, yet… But every challenge is a good opportunity to learn so we’ll see if I can’t get some good web knowledge out of this.

I’ve been playing with a lot of graphical editing stuff lately. I might post some of the first attempts but I think I might have a good way of doing a new style RPG intro.

More to come, soon.

Happy Birthday to my lovely wife, Carly! 

Video Games: Well some bad news for Halo 3, sort of. Bungie announced that there will not be clan support shipping with the game. However, that isn’t the whole story. Most of what I have read is that Bungie basically pioneered a better friends list in Halo 2. This friends list UI (user interface) is now part of the 360.

So what I have been hearing is that they are pushing Microsoft to step up their cross-game clan support feature. I’ve seen some screen shots of this and it looks pretty cool. In essence you would have an XBOX 360 Clan. I think you could be a part of multiple clans and have ranks within each (but you can probably only run one). The question is, when will this dashboard update be coming? It looks like the ball is back in Microsoft’s court now. Though my dreams of a Chromehounds clan interface in Halo 3 are now dead, this could be a much cooler alternative when up and running. I’ll post more updates as I get them. 

From the Ashes: I am working diligently to get the Clan Page up and running full with profiles, gamer tags, and maybe some reviews. The front page looks awesome. Even though Halo 3 won’t say it – From the Ashes will be gathering for a renaissance in multiplayer.