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My good friend at Weekend Gamer asked me to start writing a weekly post about my exploits in Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning.  I was glad to pick up the challenge.  So head on over to WG and read the post if you are interested:

http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/the-weekend-warhammer-wrapup

This year for my Mother’s Birthday we (meaning my siblings) decided to take her out to the Medieval Feast at the Riverside Inn.  I have to give the credit to my Brother Brian for the idea.–not only the credit, but the thanks. I don’t get to do this kind of stuff enough.

The show starts out with your bar wench or knave introducing her/himself.  These guys were the boon of the show.  Everything is done in the setting of medieval England, hosted by the Queen herself, and the knave we had did an excellent job of making that setting come alive for us.  After the drink orders are taken care of, they start the intro act.

The acting and singing were great.  Hilarious.  Then the first course is served.  Soup, salad and bread.  But one twist,  No Silverware.  The first rule of the Riverside Medieval Feast is no silverware.  What a hoot!

The meal was excelent, the show was hillarious, and I’m really glad we went.  Add to all that the beautiful setting at the Riverside, and you got yourself one heck of a night.  I would greatly recommend anyone interesting in this kind of thing to check it out next year.  They even have a few shows left for this year if you can get tickets:  http://www.theriversideinn.com/theater/Feast_2008.html

Today will start what is for me the most anticipated opening of the past 2 years.  I have been waiting for Warhammer Online, Age of Reconing to come online for quite some time now.  In truth, I have actually been playing the game in beta for about 6 months now.

WAR has everything the casual to hardcore MMO player wants in game, minus a few things (A little about that later).  They really do a lot for the “I’d kill my grandmother just to get 1 more hit point” peeps while keeping the game fun and engaging for the casual to mid-core gammers.  Let me go over a few of the features:

Read the rest of this entry »

Blue Dragon Box Art

I just started Disc 2 of Blue Dragon. So far I really like the game. Perhaps it is because I have not played a jRPG in quite a while. Nothing new or groundbreaking in this title despite the hype they put into it, in fact I don’t think you’ll find much here that hasn’t been done over and over. However, I still find myself more than eager to get to the next part of the story.

One thing I definitely do not like so far is the “Examine Everything” aspect to the game. I don’t mind do a little digging here and there to find some cool stuff, but in Blue Dragon you literally have to check every single rock, tree stump, pot, drawer, and piece of junk lying on the ground to make sure that you don’t miss that high level spell or awesome accessory that you would’ve otherwise missed.

I also thought the beginning of the game was a little too easy for my liking. Though, don’t worry, the game quickly picks up in difficulty as you go along. There was a couple boss fights in the beginning that left me feeling cheated. Then, as I got toward the end of the first disc there was some normal monster fights that I thought would take me out. But, for the most part, I haven’t had to do a lot of grinding to play along with the story line.

So that Brings me to the story line.  I think it is the game’s selling point.  Sakaguci has always been one of my favorite game writers and he delivered another good one with this title.  The story is enough to play the game for.  To add to that Uematsu’s scores are always exceptional.

All in all, I still think it is a good enough game for the $20 you’ll plunk down on it at GameStop.

Well, it looks like they finally took my advice and put up a youtube video.  Check it out below:

But not only that. Much to my surprise, they have also created an entire website for Homecoming. And I didn’t have to do anything. Kudos to whomever set it all up, it looks great.

Wait, is it bad that the webmaster of the University doesn’t know about these things?
Anyway, see you at Homecoming.

Upgraded my wordpress to 2.6.1 today.

I seem to get a lot of questions on how to start with velocity coding. What is available? What is the Syntax? I think it’s a good question so it’s time to write up a quick post about it.

First off, I would start with actually building your site. Come up with a need. Start with something simple and something that you already have data for. I found that trial and error on real problems is the best way for me to learn a new language.

Most likely, if you’re trying to do something simple, there is already an example of how to do it in DotCMS’s Demo Site. The username/password is: test@dotcms.org/test. Remeber to put a /c after the host to get to the login page. I’ve found that most of my questions can be answered just by looking a good example.

From there my next stop is the documentation that DotCMS has on velocity:

1. Velocity and the dotCMS: This is a great file to find out what API’s or ViewTools that are avilable in your Velocity code. For example: If you wanted to use the EscapeTool, you would use the variable $esc in your code. I show you in a bit how to find out what is available in each tool.
2. Velocity Cheat Sheet: This file has several nice examples on how to use the various Macros and ViewTools available in DotCMS. I find a lot of my answers about how to do something in DotCMS here.
3. Macros Tips and Tricks: The nice thing about velocity coding is that you don’t really have to know how to do it to take advantage of it. That’s where macros come in to play. Macros take a whole ball of velocity code and wrap it up into one nice little line of code. (Just noting here that you can get some good examples of velocity coding in the macros file: /dotCMS/WEB-INF/velocity/*.vm)

If you really cannot find what you are looking for in that, the next step would be to look in the API docs. Now, if you’ve never looked at Javadocs before this might be a little overwhelming at first. But, I find it extremely useful when I am trying to do something out of the box. Browse to http://dotcms.org/api. From there scroll down the list and click on the “View Tools” class (com.dotmarketing.viewtools). From there you will get a list of all the api’s that DotMarketing has created.

That’s nice if what you want is a list of DotCMS’s View Tools, but if you are looking for the built in stuff, head over to Apache’s Velocity Site and click on the Tools link. From there click on Generic Tools and then the specific tool that want to look up.

I hope that helps to get new users up and going with velocity. If you still feel very confused, here is a lit of other resources that you might find handy:

• Apache has a nice Velocity user’s guide.
• If you want to start developing your own ViewTools, check out the Developer’s guide.
• Velocity Template Language Reference Guide.
• (more to come as I find them).

Update: 1:12 PM, July 23, 2008:

Jim S. over in the DotCMS IRC group pointed out a velocity mailing list: http://www.nabble.com/Velocity—User-f347.html. Thanks Jim!

Also, that brings up a good point. We have a core group of DotCMS-er’s over in the #dotcms IRC chatroom. Feel free to jump on board and ask us your questions! We are on freenode.