An unexpected evening of “me-time” and an invitation to play Civ:Rev led to my first (complete) multiplayer Civ:Rev game.  While I had tried to play multiplayer last Saturday with Aaron, Chuck, and Carl, those games had ended quite abruptly due to a misunderstanding.  In addition to a few stories from Aaron’s success in other single player games he’s played, I had reservations about how much success I would have in our two player game.  In a turn of events, I had probably my best game yet and the Japanese Shogunate rose to even higher glory than ever before.

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I recently worked on a document that was to be published and needed a pretty thorough editorial review before I could publish it.  Not having an editorial staff on-hand, I sent it off as a first draft to several friends and family members.  I felt a little more confident when the “early” reviews came in as they all affirmed that I was in good shape.  A couple had one or two tiny recommendations but even my mother-in-law thought it was solid.

I’m a fairly critical person, in general, and of no one more so than myself.  I’m constantly striving for self-improvement and, often erroneously, assume all others are as well.  I tend to keep most criticism to myself but when asked, I generally try to provide constructive criticism to help people out.  I genuinely enjoy helping people out with my observations.  Occasionally, I’m sure my criticism comes out even when I don’t intend it to be as such — I’m sure Christina would agree with that.

Reaffirming what I knew already, my mom sent me her suggestions on my work.  I most certainly got both my critical nature and desire to be helpful from her as I glanced through the several pages worth of suggestions that she had for me!  Unsatisfied, she then sent me a rewritten alternative version.  Let the writer beware (when he asks his mom for help!)

Despite a brutal beat-down of my dream of multiplayer Civ:Rev on Saturday night, a pressing need to figure out what I’m going to do with myself in the next few weeks, and an electrical storm that zapped my router dead Sunday afternoon, I pushed onward with my quest to turn Christina into a Civ:Rev widow.

I tend toward the Civilizations that I find the most interesting from a military history perspective - Mongols, Japanese, French, Greeks, and Romans.  The one notable exception is the Chinese: I find their Three Kingdoms period to be one of the most intriguing of all but, for whatever reason I don’t care, for them in Civilization.  Having already dominated the world as Genghis and as Napoleon, I decided to try my hand as Tokugawa of the Japanese.

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Good fences make good neighbors, or so they say.  As a frequent host for various get-togethers, there have been a number of times where one group of friends encounters a different group of friends.  Your high school friends come to the same party as your college friends, your work colleagues attend the same event as your family, etc.  While it’s always a challenge and a concern on their compatibility, typically things work out well.  Granted, that is not always the case or else wedding planning seating would be easy — Don’t want to sit your boss next to your mom who might just tell him what she thinks of her son’s position in the company!

As a frequest participant in an ever-growing group of friends who get together and play regularly on XBox Live, I’ve been a spectator in many clashes of personalities or disagreements on how to play the game “right”.  Particularly as friend of friends, relatives of those friends, and work colleagues of those relatives join our group, certain personalities start to grate on others.  We have our own version of the The Guy Who Never Stops Trash-Talking and the Silent Types.  We have Whiners as well as Winners.  We have Guys Who Take Games Too Seriously and even a girl who believes a pink chainsaw is the answer to most questions … and quite often, she’s right.

I do not play online against random strangers very often and with a fairly large regular group of friends online, I don’t have to.  There is a greater sense of fulfillment of beating my friends in a well-fought match or even losing to a friend in a brilliant unexpected move than there would be against random people I don’t know.  While some were unknown at first (e.g. a friend of a friend), most have assimilated into the greater group and form strong friendships.  Just as important, playing with my friends doesn’t allow the gameplay to degrade — everyone is friends with everyone else for a reason and eventually, people will come around and resolve their differences.

Christina had a surprise waiting for me when I got home on Friday with the warning that she knew it was going to “turn into a disaster”. While it didn’t quite live up to its billing, her surprise also didn’t work out quite as well as she thought it would.

While Argo and Beta are both inside cats, they are very curious of the outdoors and like to sniff around the front stoop area when given the chance. While Beta is usually much to scared to wander out, Argo will occasionally make a beeline for the front door when presented with an opportunity. Along those lines, Christina’s surprise was a cat harness so that we could take Argo for a walk.

After essentially dragging her around for several minutes, we determined she wasn’t really a fan of the harness. Who would have guessed?

I had to run an errand out in Reston yesterday and saw that Mongol was playing in theaters.  Other than Wall-E, this is the movie I’m most looking forward to this year.  It’s an independent movie about the rise of Genghis Khan — my favorite military historical figure.  Though I will probably wait to Netflix the movie, I did finally pick up Civilization:Revolution.  As a huge Civilization fan since #1, I actually turned up my nose a bit at the concept behind Civ:Rev as it was designed for the consoles, instead of the PC, and meant to be played in “quick” sessions as opposed to the marathon games Civilization typically is known for.  The Civilization series created the whole meme of “just one more turn” as they were the earliest of the hyper-addictive video games.  The “dumbed-down” console-focused Civ:Rev went against what I considered the purity of the series.  On the other hand, the quick nature lends itself to multiplayer more easily so this past weekend my friends (thanks Frank!) talked me into it.

I can say I was a little harsh in my first impression of the game when I played the demo.  I played through a full game last night and found myself enjoying it significantly more than I expected to.  I played as the Mongols of course and completely dominated my game.  On King difficulty, it seemed a lot easier than the equivalent difficulty in other Civ games.  There are numerous things I miss from the “real” Civ games but I enjoyed Civ:Rev quite a bit.  I’m really looking forward to the multiplayer.

If you’re interested in the background story for my first game…

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My blog “traffic” mainly consists of the four or so people I’ve actually told about my blog…  or so I thought.  The built-in stat collection for the blog software is very rudimentary and having heard good things about Google Analytics, I dropped them in and have been fascinated by the results.  You can drill down into through any number of layers of data.  For instance, it’s not very surprising that the largest number of my readers are from Virgina with all but one coming from NoVa — and most of those from the Alexandria area.  While the geography is a bit of a guessing game, it still remains fairly accurate.  Those Alexandrians currently view 2.29 pages/visit and spend an average of just under 6 minutes on the site.  Of even more interest is how the folks from Nigeria, India, and South Korea found my blog!

I finally decided it was time to pull the plug on my Gamefly subscription.  As much as I like the idea of the service (Netflix for games), it just wasn’t living up to my expectations.  I used to be a huge proponent of the service and even recommended it to a number of friends.  As time went on, I became more and more disappointed until I finally decided to give up on my Gamefly experiment.

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Apple sold 1 million iPhone 3Gs last weekend. As I mentioned before, the lines were extraordinary with the wait time in the hours. Curious about how long the iPhone-mania would last, I decided I would check out the Apple Store at Tysons during my lunch hour.

If anything, it seems the lines have been getting longer. At Tysons, the line stretched from the store all the way down the hall into an anchor department store and had somewhere in the ballpark of 250 people in line. This was on a Wednesday workday at 11:30am. I asked one guy about 15 people from the front of the line how long he had been in line - He had been in line since 8:30 and when I left the mall at noon, he was at the front of the line.

If they continue to have these lines, they are going to put out several more million of these things by the end of the week. That’s simply insane.

Somehow, someone somewhere decided “E3 Media and Business Summit” was a better name for a conference about video games than “Electronic Entertainment Expo”. What used to be a great source of information about the gaming industry has been turned into more of a stodgy business event — a dangerous move in an industry that is driven by the new and greatest. Despite their worst efforts, a few newsworthy items came out during the press conferences of the big 3: Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony.

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