I am a sucker for new OSes. I bought ME, XP, Vista and now Windows 7 on they day they released. I have -always- done an “upgrade” install, keeping my data and installed programs. I know a lot of people have said you should just do a fresh install, but, seriously, I have never had a problem.

I got Windows 7 for both my home PC and my tablet PC. My home PC is running Vista Ultimate 32 bit and the tablet had Vista Home Premium 64 bit. I installed to my tablet first and had some issues right off the bat of programs running that were causing the install to fail (remember, I am doing an upgrade, not a wipe), eventually I get that remedied and the install to the tablet completes.

I install to my home PC, and I want to upgrade to Ultimate 64 bit at this point, as I want to put more memory in it eventually (have 4GB now). Problem. You can’t use an “upgrade” from Vista Ultimate 32 to Windows 7 Ultimate 64. Grumble. I consign myself to simply sticking to a 32 bit OS for the time being. The first install with that failed at the infamous “62%”, which I read needed a registry edit to get past, but a second try got it installed without crashing, no editing.

Back to the tablet, I immediately have problems with itunes. It just doesn’t seem to want to run, and since this is where I sync my phone to, this is a problem. I can get iTunes to run about 20% of the time. The other 80% it simply refuses to launch, but in the Task Manager you can clearly see it running… and when you “End Task” in the TM, it does nothing. I have never seen a program REFUSE to be forcibly shut down by task manager before. If I go to reboot at this point the tablet will hang on “Shutting down” and never actually shut off.

I did a lot of research on the subject and even asked the twitterverse for advice (advantage to having over 1000 followers!) I tried everything suggested EXCEPT “do a full wipe install”. I simply didn’t want to admit defeat. Finally after a day of trying to get iTunes started so I could sync, I decided that the full install was the last resort. I backed up my data, deauthorized iTunes (once I finally got it running) and did the full install. Everything went smoothly and a reinstall of iTunes messed up some of my settings, but at this point I have not had the problem I did previously. It’s been two days and all signs look good.

On my home PC I have a different problem. Media Player refuses to play MPEG files. It will lock up and sit in Task Manager eating an entire core of my quad-core until I forcibly shut it down (which, thankfully it does). Had this problem for a while now but its pretty minor so it wasn’t until this week I went on the crusade to fix it. In the end there was a corrupted MPEG codec left around from some program that was the issue. Once I deleted the value for it in the registry, Media Player worked fine.

This brings me to my biggest issue I am having with Windows 7. When something doesn’t work, it just doesn’t WORK. It doesn’t error out, it doesn’t crash, it doesn’t hang, it just doesn’t give any feedback at all. On the Media Player problem, if I didn’t know how to end a process in the Task Manager, I’d have no idea how to free up the processing power it was eating up. The iTunes problem was worse as there was NO solution that I could find that fixed the problem without a HD wipe.

For functionality, I must say Windows 7 has some neat bells and whistles, and it definitely feels faster than Vista did on my home PC. For the tablet, I find it hits the HD a LOT and that slows programs load times down to a point that I am looking at a Solid State Drive to improve performance.

A while back, I was asked to contribute to the third in a series of books on narratives. This book, Third Person, would contain a chapter by yours truly on how we handled storytelling in City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

Product Description
The ever-expanding capacities of computing offer new narrative possibilities for virtual worlds. Yet vast narratives—featuring an ongoing and intricately developed storyline, many characters, and multiple settings—did not originate with, and are not limited to, Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Marvel’s Spiderman, and the complex stories of such television shows as Dr. Who, The Sopranos, and Lost all present vast fictional worlds.

Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributors—media and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and others—investigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena.

Chapters examine a range of topics, including storytelling in a multiplayer environment; narrative techniques for a 3,000,000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in Doctor Who; managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the Final Fantasy role-playing games; World of Warcraft adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of The Wire.

Taken together, the multidisciplinary conversations in Third Person, along with Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin’s earlier collections First Person and Second Person, offer essential insights into how fictions are constructed and maintained in very different forms of media at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Contributors: Rafael Alvarez, Richard A. Bartle, Michael Bonesteel, Stanford Carpenter, Monte Cook, Paul Cornell, Anne Cranny-Francis, Sam Ford, Chaim Gingold, A. Scott Glancy, Richard Grossman, Pat Harrigan, Matt Hills, Kenneth Hite, William H. Huber, Adriene Jenik, Henry Jenkins, David Kalat, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Norman M. Klein, Tanya Krzywinska, David Lavery, Robin D. Laws, Sarah Lewison, Henry Lowood, William E. McDonald, Matthew P. Miller, Jason Mittell, Stuart Moulthrop, Kate Orman, Sean O’Sullivan, Lance Parkin, Robert M. Price, Ren Reynolds, Trina Robbins, Ken Rolston, Dave Sim, Greg Stafford, Tamiko Thiel, John Tulloch, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Walter Jon Williams

About the Author
Pat Harrigan is a writer and author of the novel Lost Clusters. He is also the co-editor, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, forthcoming from the MIT Press. He is also the co-editor, with Pat Harrigan, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

Yeah, I was bored, and found good photo reference

Spore users can drag and drop this into their game to get it.

Picked it up yesterday, and have been fighting for time with it versus my son.

If you care to get easy access to stuff that I have made, and stuff made by Andre of course, you can add me as a buddy as “DeckOfManyThings”.

John did most of the research into this list, but he pointed out that if all these titles actually ship before the end of the year, there is a possibility of so much awesome, it wraps around on itself and begins to suck again.

Spore: Sept 7

Rock Band 2: Sept 14

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: Sept 19

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: Sept 19

Lego Batman: Sept. 23

Ghostbusters: Oct. 21

Little Big Planet: Oct. 21

Fable 2: Oct. 21

Guitar Hero: World Tour: Oct. 26

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Oct. 28

Fallout 3: Oct. 28

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King: Nov. 3

Resistance 2: Nov. 4

Gears of War 2: Nov. 7

Prince of Persia: Nov. 18

Got it for Christmas (had to stop buying stuff so people would have stuff to buy me).
 
I thought this game was great, if only for reasons that mean something to me.
 
First, I made a character and didn’t go back and remake them one or two hours into the game. This has NEVER happened to me in an RPG. I always find some flaw or some nbs thing I did that makes me want to reroll. In ME, the story pulled me in so much that I hadn’t even realized that I levelled past the point of no return.
 
Second, this is the first game I have played that actually made Sniper Rifles FUN. I found myself enjoying the combat more and more as I leveled up my trusty SR skill. When I pulled off the “Saving Private Ryan” scene (where a guy runs from one piece of cover to another and I picked him off mid stride, and his buddy, counting on my reload time and aim being off tries to make the same run, only to find that I wrote his name on the next bullet), I dropped my controller in my lap from sheer awesomeness. The fact is this. Combats have a tendancy to start at pretty long ranges, and the enemies tend to use cover a lot, which makes the sheer joy of kneecaping the three pixels of a guy’s leg that are sticking out from behind the crate all the much more enjoyable.
 
Third, I finished it. This is something I can NOT say for KOTOR, KOTOR II, NWN 2, or nearly all other RPGs. Usually there comes a point where I tire of the game, save and never pick it up again. That never happened. Well it almost did. After “going rogue” myself (and yet the alliance was more then willing to ask for my help a dozen or more times), I found myself tiring of exploring planet after planet, driving around in the Super Mario Bus (rocket jumping FTW). I was getting bored, fast. So I decided to put the end game into motion and head to Ilos. Had a blast with the Endgame. Loved making Saren suicide himself (omfg, I can skip a boss fight by Role-Playing? What is the world coming to?)
 
Finally, a game that does justice to Achievements. Getting the Sniper Rifle achievement allowed me to start a new character with Sniper Rifles, no matter what the class they were was. Now my second playthrough is an Adept with Sniper Rifles (and a total Renegade, as opposed to the total Paragon I played the first time through). Playing on Hardcore is making the game a lot more challenging.

As I grow older, with a wife and a 4 year old kid, I have a lot less “free time” than I had back when I was a bachelor living with a bunch of other guys on Easy Street (literally). Now my time has value, so my activities that I consume with that time need to give me something in return. I need validation from my hobbies.

Spending time with my wife and kid auto-validates itself. I get something out of it every second I am with them. Watching (good) television and movies also bring with them some sort of validation, because I can usually discuss the finer points of the media with others who have watched the same.

Videogames inherently had no validation. That was before MMOs. With an MMO, I get validation for every monster I kill or quest I complete in the form of XP and rewards. Those are (permanent) parts of my character, my character is the living embodiment of my time validated. When Microsoft included Gamerpoints as part of Xbox 360’s backbone at first I was non-plussed. But then I realized that Gamerpoints validate my time in non-MMO’s. I can show off the fact that I got 100% complete in Lego Star Wars II, or that I got 1000/1000 points in Oblivion. I love Gamerpoints.

Role-Playing Games semi-validate my time in the comradere factor, but in the RPGA I get reward points for playing and GMing games. That totally validates my time, as those points earn me rewards to use with future RPGA games.

So I guess what I am saying is that if you want me to partake in your hobby, make it worth my time by giving me back something in return.

I haven’t posted in a while, so I might as well diatribe a bit.

• I’ve had some stuff going on with Andre and his school that’s been weighing on my mind.
• I’ve found that most of my normal escape mechanisms to get away from the toils of the day are no longer appealing.

That said there are some bright points:

• My wife and I have a new methodology on doing the dishes that has kept the sink (mostly) clean for over a month now.
• 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was announced. This was pretty huge, as I really got into the info-drip that was the 2nd Ed to 3rd Ed change over. Now I get to relive the info drip all over again, only now I am older and more mature (yeah, right).
• Bioshock is cool. I played a bunch, but am still nowhere near the end. Everyone I know is finished or finishing. I will probably finish around December.
• Stranglehold is coming out today. I got the “now shipped” email from EBGames.com, so I have that to look forward to this weekend.
• Oh, and if you didn’t know the Xbox 360 kicks ass solely for the fact that they have Gamerpoints. I should write a blog entry about “validating my time”.